3.16.2022 Special Fall River School Committee Meeting

like to call to order the special meeting of the farva school committee for march 16th uh deb would you please call the role mr again here mr bailey mr harp here miss laravey here miss pereira mr rodriguez mayor coopen here uh i just want to make people aware of one thing dr taylor is joining us virtually tonight um salute to the flag please to the flag of the united states of

america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice

pursuant to the open meeting law any person who 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 we have a few citizens inputs tonight on first johnny cadavid saxon street fall river

dear school committee i am ready to ask about why this body feels it is not necessary to provide the residents of fall river with the budget there is a lot of talk about transparency and openness around election season but as soon as the ballot boxes close it's back to business as usual it is very foolish to think the good times will never end we need good sound management of the

budget budget and more than the typical smiles and handshakes that everyone will be okay just trust me these are abnormal times for our youth and while i will cut use some slack in affirmation that this is the first time anyone has handles handled these challenges it only underscores the need to have open and regular dialogue with families who are looking to grow their children's potential

we need to give these children every chance to succeed in having a closed for policy during budget session is an affront to the directive you serve while being a member of the school committee to the families you serve as residents of far river and to the futures of the very children that are relying on you to do the right thing to set them up for success johnny david uh next gabriel amaral indian town road forever

good afternoon school member school committee members my name is gabriel emeril address 901 indian town road far river mass i am sending this email in regards to the school budget i agree with mr agya and miss rodricks on the fact that this budget should be made public prior to being voted on the citizens of this great city should be able to address their concerns prior to being on the hook for any bill i think

lack of transparency has been a daunting issue in this city for quite some time now and it's time we correct that thank you very much for your time and all that you do for the youth of our city respectfully gabriel boomer emerald cj ferry buffington street members of the school committee it has come to my attention that the fall river school department and the florida school committee refused to provide draft

copies of the proposed fy 23 budget as you may be aware any document reviewed received or used by the follower of a school committee whether in draft or final form becomes a public document and is available to the public upon request the executive session rule would not apply to keep this budget away from the public eyes as nothing in the budget is covered under any of the exceptions for executive session

to promote transparency in the budget process and within the far of the school department availability of these documents would go a long way to show that the fall river school department is not trying to slip things by the general public i hope to see that the proposed f y twenty three budget is made available to the public in draft form as it is common practice with all other city departments

whereas the school department budget makes up fifty percent of the city budget we the people have the right to know i thank you for your opportunity to present my position to the school committee respectfully cj ferry next up sheila diaz ray street forwarder good afternoon school committee members my name is sheila dyas and i am a mom with a son who attends gerfe high school as a parent i want to see all the funds

the school department receives go towards the students receiving the best possible education that this district can possibly give the school department should publish the budget before the budget hearings so parents like me can have the opportunity to weigh in that's the right thing to do that would be the option that is most transparent to the residents of this great community thank you to kevin

aguiar and sarah rodriguez for sticking up for transparency we the parents love and respect that i hope that we see changes by the school department to correct this issue the taxpayers of this community deserve it thank you to everyone for allowing me the opportunity to write this letter sheila dice jeffrey goodro palmer street forwarder hello to the members of the honorable fall river school committee i am writing

today because i heard they are not releasing the fy 23 budget ahead of the budget deliberations that doesn't make any sense to me this community deserves full transparency and the public should see where its tax dollars are being used again we need full transparency of school department dollars we shouldn't take any steps to sugarcoat that we should see how the school department is using dollars to

support our followers students and we should be able to see the budget and to offer an opinion during the budget deliberation meetings i hope the fall river school committee takes steps to fix this transparency issue thank you jeffrey gondro next is robert tyres ray street forwarder hello fall river school committee i would like to see the school department publish the budget before school

committee budget deliberation stock it would give an opportunity to the entire public to weigh in and be able to give a fully informed opinion during budget meetings thank you robert dyess jr i'm colin dyas ray street florida good afternoon members of the barber school committee um first of all i think the letters from other city residents speak for themselves um again i am disappointed the school department will

not publish its fiscal year 23 budget on the city's website allow the opportunity for the public to see where his taxpayer dollars are going dollars that are meant to give support to the students of our public schools and to see that they are going before budget deliberations again the school committee school department should make every effort possible towards full transparency to the public

and with and we need to restore especially everything that's happened we need to restore the public's trust in city government and to be frank i think if the administration wanted to snap their fingers you would see the public budget published in five minutes and i respectfully ask you as a resident of this community to commit fully commit to the transparency we all talk about on the campaign trail

why don't we want to see this public budget published i asked that the school committee take a vote supporting the publishing of the budget or to look at updating our policy mandating that the budget and the budget summary be published on the city's website before budget meetings begin and the fact that this school department has not already published a budget shows that something

it's no common sense towards trans this is common sense towards transparency and it shows that we have a long way to go for this this school district fully and the city fully commits towards transparency and again i want to thank you to um mr aguiar and miss rodericks for your dialogue on this very important issue and to the other school committee members please step it up and work hard for full transparency and

accountability in our in our government involved thank you very much committee of the whole um we're going to start our budget presentations tonight with uh finance uh mr almeida good to see you i'm sorry to interrupt i'm sorry i mean ncmsa i was um we've gotten a couple of complaints and suggestions from the public related to the budget i don't find any reason to to think i don't think mrs ponce is hiding anything

i don't think mr omit is hiding anything i don't think the committee's hiding anything so i would recommend i don't think it needs to be taken in a vote because now is not the right time but i believe it just is good transparent practice just to post it on on the website so i think it would solve a lot of this issue if we just had the administration say yes we're going to post this on the

website when we when we do the draft it's just a draft we're going to work through it over the next several months collaboratively and then we're going to have a final i i really don't think it's the best thing to do is just be up front of this and just we're not hiding anything so i'd recommend the superintendent just commit that she's going to post this and let's just move on and

there will be more discussion i think she's listening thank you i want to let miss pereira so i'd like to address that citizen's input as well because of course the concerns of the citizens are important to me i was elected to serve them um i appreciate that you guys were applauded on speaking towards transparency i maybe i need to go back and watch the meeting i don't believe i

ever sat here and said i don't think it should be shown matter of fact my recollection mr aggia you can tell me if i'm wrong but the first day we sat down to discuss finance you wanted to adjourn and i spoke up and said that no the taxpayers of fall river deserve to hear this conversation they deserve to see where their money's going and they're watching so i appreciate that the two of you are

champions of transparency so am i and i think it's un you know unfair and untruthful more to the point to say that the rest of us are not what we'd spoken with kevin he told us that's not the way they usually do it i actually looked into it after that meeting because i wasn't sure myself found out they don't really do that on the city side they haven't done it on the school

committee side until we're putting forth a budget that is has been approved i don't have an issue with things being posted ahead of time if kevin tells me that it's inappropriate because it interferes with the way he does work then i have to listen to that because that's part of my job as well no one up here is hiding a thing which is why i advocated for continuing to have these finance meetings as well

as the administration to continue to have these meetings that the public is aware of what's going on and can hear the discussions that are happening so i really need the public to know that certainly kevin and and sarah as well as myself and i think i can speak for for bobby and mimi we want to be fully transparent and we're not hiding a thing and i think that's important that the public know and i respect the

superintendent um i think we all do because we voted to have her so i think we'll leave that decision up to her and with that i yield i do think going forward um i do want to make one quick announcement kevin going forward uh obviously this ran into some questions so next year next year it will be up online as a draft and a draft form as uh we talked about briefly before the meeting that

that's that's what i believe we should do i talked to the superintendent and she's in favor of it so hopefully this won't won't happen again and moving forward this is why we have a committee with people offering different opinions to get changed in the right places so that's as far as i'm concerned this is uh the last time of uh a bygone practice mister just just so if i can comment there's

nothing being hidden here i'm gonna i'm gonna make that very loud and clear and this is a process we've followed i've been here in the school school district since fiscal 2011 and we followed the same practice over and over again and if if the committee so chooses and they and it's they will and improve you and they want everything posted online i will do it tomorrow but the real the

reality of the situation is is that once a vote is taken by the school committee to make the the budget available to the public the budget is released immediately thereafter it's available to the public for a minimum of two weeks we give you until the public hearing and at that time the public can address the budget so i you know that's as transparent as i can be we've followed that process for years and

years and years if the process requires a change and that's something that the school committee would like to make and request is a change i have no issue doing that thank you mr aguiar since i was called out by another colleague i do want to respond the the transparency that i'm talking about i don't think it's that big a deal mrs ponce can say right now to mr almeida can you please post this online tomorrow

morning will be done in 15 minutes this document says annual budget submitted by the superintendent of schools okay whether it happened in the past or not there is zero reason why the budget that the superintendent gives to this committee for us to deliberate before we approve a draft budget should be given to the public it should be given so that the public can weigh in the public can call us the

public can come to citizen input time i'm not saying you're stealing anything or doing anything illegal mr almeida what i'm suggest suggesting is the public brought a concern that said we'd like to look at this valid point all i'm asking for is that you take 15 minutes tomorrow half an hour whatever it is or have somebody do it and we just post this online so they can look at the line items there's a lot

of things in here that people might want to weigh in on before they wait to hear the presentation so that when we're going to approve this next week or whenever the deadline is how do we get a chance to even change anything the transparent point that i was making at the beginning of the year wanting to dismiss this was because i still believe that this school committee is giving away a fiduciary responsibility as

elected officials to have line items that's why i suggest that this is actually like a waste of time other than the fact that mrs ponce is actually doing a good job of listening and is going to collaboratively work with us but we have a responsibility and that's why i said we wanted to leave because i think this is wasting everybody's time if we're not going to have a true solid

discussion now mrs ponce has made truth to this that she is listening and there is going to be some changes but that's because of her character not because of the rules and the regulations of the school department so when i say i want to be transparent i'm not just talking about it we're not hiding anything so let's put it out there i think we're being foolish to sit here

and say we're not going to do it or whatever it is we're just going to protest or we'll kick it down as the mayor just said to next year this can happen tomorrow morning enough with the nonsense already this is very simple it can be solved we can let people weigh in people have valid concerns they bring them to us well i think they're doing a fine job mrs ponce but the one thing i think

we're not doing is just listening to people and say why don't we just post it two weeks from now when we finish the draft then we'll post the draft but the draft should be a little different from this because we're going to talk about it so it's not paying uh pendant to anybody i'm just saying like i see it we're not being transparent we should be transparent and at the same time

if people on this board want to say that they're going to do their jobs we cannot have just one line item i think that's been proven already that we need to have more than one line item because we're not doing the job that we were elected to do and have some line items with that i yield thank you i agree this is going to be the end of it i agree i agree with you kevin that's

my point i agree with you i say post it let everybody see is that something we could accomplish this year or no yeah beautiful okay as long as everybody knows that there will be changes it's a draft it's a draft okay committee of the whole the budget presentation for the departments we're going to start off with mr almeida finance good evening we in the finance department are requesting an additional fte to the

department uh we're requesting a payroll manager position the justification for the payroll manager position is the fact that the city finances uh school finances have grown tremendously over the last several years five years ago we were at 150 million dollars in in our net school spending budget in fy 23 our budget is going to be just under 205 million dollars in addition to that we have

about nine million dollars that we spend in revolving funds every year and we have grants currently that total uh about 17 million that we get on an annual basis in addition to that we're currently going through the easter stage here and we've got between the easter funds and the arpa funds funds that we've received we've got just over about 63 million dollars in total so with that in my rationale i provided you with

documentation as to support to support the request showing you comparison to new bedford inland both districts are a little bigger than we are but you can see that we are significantly understaffed compared to those districts so with that i am uh requesting your support any questions uh mr aguiar just the letter that was written i i'm confused by a few of the comments in it because it makes it seem like as if

we're not doing well at the present time and i'm not sure what that means so it says this position will help us move in the right direction allowing us to have the ability to move to be more proactive versus reactive can you explain just that's absolutely just exactly as it reads i don't have enough we in in the office don't have enough time to do you know the best job we possibly can

and with this additional support we'll have we'll be proactive we'll be doing the things that we need to do going forward but this is payroll right like it's not yeah this and that's going to enhance the finance department so it's additional additional stuff that comes off my plate additional stuff that comes off other staff members plates and we're able to focus our attention on to the

bigger picture and worrying about the bigger picture of the city finding the school finances so the payroll is is not getting done at the present time oh it's absolutely getting done everybody's being paid appropriately and you know things are happening the way it's supposed to be but but it can be much better but that's what i'm just saying i'm just i'm not being wise here i'm being honest that i think that

the payroll is getting done when i'm looking at it it looks like oh there's a couple of payroll clerks like that are doing the work and maybe it's just that the explanation of what the department does for for payroll isn't necessarily articulated but i'm looking at this as we had three payroll clerks the payroll is all getting done you know if we add another x amount of employees i'm not so sure that um

automatically yields to have another person then i look at the second column but last year we had essa funds we added a position already so the needs keep growing mistake yeah it's a lot of money to spend a lot's going on is it the wording of the position when i see the word payroll manager maybe that's what i'm stuck on yeah is i'm looking at that as they're in charge of the payroll

not that they're like a an assistant finance manager or something like that so so if you look so if you look at you know i'll just give you the example if you look into bedford for example they have a payroll man they have a payroll supervisor they have an ap supervisor they have a grant supervisor and they have a budget analyst we have a finance manager and that's all we have so

what i'm saying to you about the fact the way that i wrote the the rationale and the reason i wrote the rationale that way is due to the fact that my office is not proactive we're doing what we need to do and that's it and we need to move in the right direction so there are things that we need to do in the office that we cannot focus our attention on to make the office better so

if the position is going to get paid seventy thousand dollars like and that's new that's not a like it's not just an increase i guess it's a whole new position it's a new new fte so i just i i guess i'm just stuck on the fact that it's a payroll the rationale is like that you need assistance maybe at a supervisory level across the whole department but i when i see

payroll manager i think that that person is going to be in a silo of payroll only and i i'm not sure that that's that's that is what i'm requesting and a big piece of my job and i focus a lot of my time is on the payroll piece so by adding this position is going to take away much of that responsibility and i can focus my time and efforts on what is important important in city finances

what did what is the other position there we used to be grants now is it called something different from now so when i when i first started here in this in the fall river school system we that was when we were going through the turnaround with the state and the state was here and at that time they recommended that we have a cfo and two quote quote unquote assistant business manager and a grants manager that our

financial manager and at the time that's what we had when i was hired as the cfo for the school system the position went away my second supervisory reposition one away and that's what i can say so now you're dealing with only two yeah so you used to have a grants like the side grants person and then an assistant basically assistant to you yes in a higher position yes just speaking for myself i think that model

would probably be a better model but you know the other one's got to work with it but when i see i just looked at the thing it said 70 000 and i look at what the financial manager you know what i mean is it it to me i want to support you but at the same time i think it internally you guys must have had that discussion that said the payroll is rather than this or

i personally think that the old structure that you just talked about gave you a better uh handle over the whole um the whole place so i just raised it as to me that's what i would do but you guys do whatever you got to do i'm not giving you a hard time just i do think that if we had a structure like you just talked about the grant said you know

that makes sense you almost have like two principles and two vice principles in the department that would make more sense to me than this with that i yield anything further for kevin you're all set thank you okay next up instructional um dr curley good evening mayor coogan superintendent ponce and members of the school committee it's my pleasure to be here tonight representing the office of

teaching and learning in the district we are not requesting any additional positions specific to that department um but i will take this opportunity to offer some context for what you will hear from other department leaders as you may know over the last few years our district has used turnaround planning guidance from the department of elementary and secondary education to develop school in district sustainable

improvement plans but in response to a changed landscape for learning and teaching in school year 20 and 21 we looked to updated and more relevant guidance from the department in the form of the acceleration roadmap as we drafted our plan for the current year using new guidance we identified and we doubled down on priorities that were consistent with those identified in the acceleration roadmap

these priorities included fostering a sense of belonging and partnership among students and families continuously monitoring students understanding of standards-based grade level content and ensuring strong appropriate instruction with just-in-time scaffolds when needed we believe that work focused on these priorities is the right work in this district at this time and these priorities will continue to be

at the forefront as we plan forward to accelerate learning in school year 23.

aligned with these three priorities two of which are predicated on the use of high quality instructional materials we have already made significant significant investments in curriculum resources and the professional development of our teachers and support staff in an effort to ensure accelerated learning for all students these investments have included the wonders reading and illustrative math

curricula at the elementary level in the carnegie math and open syed curricula at the secondary level additionally we have committed funding to specialized resources for substantially separate classrooms for students with disabilities for our multilingual learners in foundational classrooms and our new dual language program as we plan forward into school year 23 we will continue to commit resources to

support the implementation of these and other high quality resources as well as the related professional development opportunities all with a goal of accelerating learning for all students in the district moving forward investments will include online learning platforms like st math mathia learn zillion mystery science gizmos and lexia to be used district-wide in all classrooms touch

math imagine learning to be used in support of students in specialized classrooms instructional materials like wreck and wreck math racks unifix cubes and other manipulatives as well as consumable science materials to support core instruction at the elementary and secondary levels we will continue a partnership with anet to provide valid and reliable district-wide assessments a partnership with lynch leadership to

support principals in school-based teams in their work around providing excellent and equitable instruction research for better teaching to support administrators in the supervision and development of staff the new teacher project in supporting school and district teams strategically planned for accelerated learning and various curriculum-based partnerships to support the effective implementation of our new materials

we will also continue to fund our summer teacher institute providing for facilitation alongside outside partners and for monetary compensation for staff participation i know this sounds like a lot and i think that it probably sounds familiar we did have an opportunity recently to speak at length with the instructional subcommittee about our new initiatives and in school year 23 we continue to

continue on the implementation journey we see the coming year as an opportunity to deepen our collective understanding around the importance and the power of district-wide use of high-quality instructional materials for all students to further develop teachers and support staff around effective implementation and to provide equitable opportunities for all students and so at this time i would welcome any questions

about this information or i'm happy to answer them as we go as other departments um step up okay uh oh mr aggio i don't think we have that what you just read but could we just get that sent by email sure the uh the question i had was uh i know you said that this department's not adding one i'm assuming the job that you're in isn't in here it's in another part

the your position now interim assistant superintendent is under a different part of the budget it's not this i think it's probably in the superintendent's budget and then what's here is all a lot of the positions all of the director positions are in this department and there aren't any additions i think there are just some in there that are um open or you know yeah that position is not a new position that's

a position that was vacated by me um dr curley is filling in as an interim and as soon as um i think that uh we're going to be posting my posi but that's not as a new position it's an already an existing i'm just what i'm talking about is in the budget itself it's budgeted under yes okay so it's under the superintendent when i'm looking just in transparency as we see it i see the

curriculum department as the head of the curriculum department is the assistant superintendent for curriculum in my mind so when i look at this i'm trying to figure out like and we've asked i've asked for this before and i think you said you're working on it still about uh an org chat so we can kind of see where everything is because if you not haven't been around this there's a lot of positions all over the place

so i would say that um at some point we should get something that looks like that but what is telling to me on here is that we have the social studies at a 0.5 and i don't know if that means it's just paid out of the when i'm looking at the budget it it used to say like the whole the whole budget number and then half and half half is paid one way half as another

does this mean half just a half time person and a half time they're doing something else yes half our responsibilities are as the social studies director and half is as the program director for title title one suggest just my own suggestion because that's what the point of this is we have four major subjects in the in the city english math social studies and science we look at this document we have a

hundred percent of a person in charge of each of those three departments but in social studies we have it as a half at the same time as we have title one as a half there is no way even the best person in the world can do both of those jobs correctly half and half kevin edgar's opinion let's take it take it as what it is we have money when we when we used to have to like

people had to do three jobs because we had no money and these are the types of things as far as i'm concerned that we should correct once we get the proper funding social studies k to 12 should be a full person in my opinion the title one director should get be a full person so that they can dedicate their time to it that's just my opinion and i do think after we look at the

if we put all the curriculum in one place we're going to be able to see either we're spending the proper amount on curriculum and instruction or we're not this is the most important department in learning in the district is curriculum and instruction so i for one would add money to this but we haven't seen the it's hard to see the whole picture once we get that it might make sense but my

last question is on the green program improvements it looks like uh text materials and stuff why is that how is that just because it's paid for on grants that we just approved but we approved them prospectively going forward we increased the materials a little bit and for the curriculum okay eight hundred thousand is that what it says yes so we're increasing by eight hundred thousand no no no no we're not

increasing by eight hundred thousand that's what that's what it is for this year in the as far as the curriculum piece goes just associated with the curriculum department so last year we might have spent seven years or something yeah it only went up about a hundred thousand is what i went up by yeah and the things that we just approved at the subcommittee and then the full committee

that's not included here because that was paid for on grants or with funds that were already the one-time funds so i think that most recently what was approved did not come out of this year's operating budget i think it was grant funded so i'm not being overly critical sure but this this department has what we have in front of us is these two pages so it has a green thing that says we're

spending 800 and some thousand on additional curriculum but there's nothing else to go with it so if we can get like uh either something to say this is what that 800 000 gets because we should know and maybe we want to add to it or maybe we want to suggest subtracting to it so that's why i asked it seemed like it was confusing 850 000 is not a small amount of money but it's probably

not enough money in my opinion thank you i yield anything further for ms crowley thank you next up is health and physical education

good evening thank you very much for having me here to speak about the health and the physical education program in fall river i'm here advocating as you see on my budget for student leaders that is the positions that i'm looking forward to add for our elementary for our middle and our high school and my overall goal in doing so is to support the overall teaching and learning and achievement of our students

to also have teacher leaders that have the expectation of fostering teamwork shared responsibility decision making and also best learning practices for our teachers and also to build a professional community among teachers though i support in the elementary the middle and the high school i think it's very important for them to have a colleague that they can see the best practices and

having that person to go to and be the person that can work with them in their professional learning sometimes when they're with me they may not be as open as they would with one of their colleagues and i really want to foster that professionalism among my department anything else um i think that was just the only the other pieces that are there are pretty much the budget that i've had before

this is only the only additional piece that i was asking for for this year okay any questions for health mr again so the the only question i had was the teacher leader positions is this the it's a typical so this is already agreed to by the union in other places so it's the same type of uh situation can you just tell me what that am i to assume that that's for time

after the normal day so if i'm a teacher and i teach a full cost load this is for this uh lead stipend would be for work in addition to my regular duties not during the school day is that safe to say yeah it would be an addition so it would be working with me to provide uh support for professional development within our plc's um being basically shared leadership with me work with the

different grade levels says we have 43 teachers in the department we have an elementary middle and high school and i also have the adapted pe teachers also so i want to make sure that each level in each department is getting the appropriate attention that it deserves and you didn't make any requests for additional adapted pe or any other district-wide pe staff so that would imply to me that um you're

sufficient and the kids are getting serviced appropriately or or better yes thank you from our last budget um you had approved for me to add the additional ape teacher and when we had our budget meeting i had uh spoken with uh superintendent losch to see are basically what are our numbers and what is coming in because i don't know the programming at every school for the next year and as it stands right now

we've been assured that all the needs of the students are being met and that this time we don't feel that we need additional positions but if for some reason that number was to grow we may need to come back to the school committee and discuss that but i will say the position that we added last year has been phenomenal in meeting those needs so i really appreciate that support last year and i didn't want to

i'm not singling you well for asking that question so i asked the superintendent for any to send to the committee anybody that requested something that wasn't and he went on it so that's i wasn't being presumptuous but that's your name wasn't on it so no idea that's why i assumed that the um when we talked about the curriculums for uh drug and alcohol awareness and all of that stuff i think

that we need to have a focus on what we're doing k-12 on that and i think that falls under your domain yes yes what i would ask for the superintendent is that the committee gets a report of what we're actually doing k-12 as well as maybe some recommendations on what your recommendation would be or the superintendent's recommendation to be so that we can take this issue to the next level if there's a

curriculum that needs to be purchased and whatever else needs to happen i think it's an important issue k-12 that we need to tackle so now as a budget time would be um the time to to ask for that but i would and i'm not asking it for it now because i'm not putting you on the spot but that issue has to rise to the forefront absolutely and we need to know

what it is and what it's not i think we can do a lot better than what we're doing but i don't think we're doing nothing at the same time so if we articulate what you're doing what you'd recommend we can have a vote or even at the subcommittee but i'd like to get that in the next couple of months so that we can plan for next year and do something much greater than what we're currently doing

that would be fantastic we currently have a curriculum that we use for our drugs and alcohol the state requires that you file for having a drug and alcohol education from grade six to twelve but as you stated it's not a six to twelve issue it goes much lower so that's when we had done the grant and had brought in the health education from grades three and up so we are addressing that within our third

fourth and fifth grade um age-appropriately obviously with drugs and alcohol is it is an enormous problem and it is something that is the forefront of our curriculum yeah and i'm not certainly an expert on any of it but what i would suggest is talk to the people that are in the field let's come up with the best plans and then we can provide better services for our kids yeah we have excellent community

partners and i'm very happy to have that support from them and we work hand in hand to make sure that there's a programming and extra support when needed but we can always do better yeah and like i said we do have resources now so the resources used to be the reason why we didn't do a lot of things that's off the table now in my opinion so please bring forward whatever you can with that are

you thank you thank you anything further uh mrs rogers i was just trying to get my my thoughts together um this is just coming from my ignorance how many um how many students do we have with adaptive pe in their ieps okay so and i'm not expecting you to have that answer off the top of your head no i'm just i was just going through the um reports the other day and

right now and then thinking of all the case loads that i have right now i have up to 85 that we have with ieps we also have some of our classes that are asd classes that will have students that have ape needs we will take all the students together so we're meeting the needs of the ape students but we're also having that socialization piece our goal is always to try to integrate as much as

possible and so when we're able to do that we want to do that so there's that piece but it's not just the iep's like it's kind of hard you don't want to look just at the number but you want to look at what is the need within that number so it might say oh there's you know this many but this child has this much need or this child in a wheelchair or

medically fragile so we have we run the gamut from children that don't have any ability to be out of a wheelchair to children that actually just might need work on that core of strength overall i appreciate that you said that you needed to look at the need and not just the number right because you know when we're looking at adaptive pe like that is a great opportunity for all kids to learn how to

engage with one another like that's a great social opportunity for our neurotypical kids and our disabled kids like that is just it's a wonderful opportunity for that so if we can't that's why i was trying to understand like how many kids do we have pulled out for ap so that helps me understand that a little bit better and then my other question was about health curriculum how much sel work do we have embedded in our

health curriculum all our health curriculum has it with embedded so it's all part of our lessons like it's very important that when we do our sclps it's not in isolation because it doesn't have the same effect and it needs to be an ongoing and it needs to be within the lessons so that's all embedded it's all aligned with our national frameworks and we also have sel frameworks and that all comes

together and just to add just i don't know if you're aware at the high school we have a program it's called our ape best buddies and so we have students that for credit they come and they work with our ape teachers in our ape students so we're trying to continue to build upon that within our school so i'm very proud to have that program and it's been really great for kids because i've

had kids that have come down and said you know i think i think i want to be a special ed teacher i think i want to work with and it's just it's fantastic and they it's such a relationship building between the students so i really love it i've worked with a few kids that have been on the on the buddy side of that and they've they've reiterated that that that's kind of made

them look at other careers um kind of given them an opportunity to be like hey you know these these are kids that are going through the same things that we are as teens and so you know there's a piece of understanding there and a piece of connection there that becomes genuine when our kids don't have that ability to engage with one another you know it becomes like oh that's you know the

disabled classroom this is where the rest of us go and so that obviously is something that i feel really strongly about um but i appreciate you answering those those questions again it's coming from my own ignorance about how some of that piece works so i just wanted to know i appreciate that with that i yield thank you anything further okay thank you next up athletics

mr boston good evening and uh thank you for this opportunity to speak on behalf of the athletic department i'm in my sixth year as athletic director and 27th year involved in durfee athletics i would like to start out by thanking our past and current administration and school committee members for their continued support of our athletic programs with your support we have been able to build an athletic department team

members of this team include two positions that have been consistent over the years the athletic training position which has been kelly mahoney for the last 13 years and the athletic clerk position i had the pleasure of starting my tenure with blythe eagan then nicole henrique and now vanessa pilar these positions have been instrumental in running an athletic program of our size again with the support of upper

administration and school committee members we have added two positions that have taken us to the next level and a true division one program assistant athletic director kristen garvin and strength and conditioning coach ed matanus have done exceptional work i feel like the head coach of a great team this team has navigated brilliantly through what we have called the two seas covet and construction to say that the

last two years have been challenging would be an understatement between constantly changing venues and transportation pickups along with creating kovid 19 binders and hand sanitizer stations our team worked tirelessly to make sure our student athletes had an opportunity to play and be safe i believe the covet 19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact on the social emotional well-being of our student

athletes keeping them on the floor field track ice course and in the pool safely has been our top priority because we knew that they needed it all of our coaches have done a tremendous job not only working with our student athletes on their skills but more importantly their mental and social well-being we will never be able to measure the positive impact that our coaches have had on the lives of our student athletes

over the last two years we have embraced the slogan top or tough in the athletic department this message is for our student athletes to become the best they can be academically mentally physically and social emotionally the programs that we have in place are meant to address all these areas one of mrs garvin's task is coordinating our middle and elementary school sports programs after a year off due to covert

19 our programs are back this past fall season we had 264 students participate in our middle school program and in our first season of elementary school cross country we had 172 students participate the winter season is coming to an end next week with middle and elementary school finals being held at durfee high school we have 219 middle school students participating and 211 elementary school students participating

the addition of strength conditioning coach position has been overwhelming success mostly due to the leadership of edmontanus coach matanis has developed relationships with our student athletes that make them want to work out every day between 3 p.m and 7 p.m we will have upwards of 75 to 100 student athletes in the weight room not only is this benefiting our athletes physically they

are creating team bond which will lead to a better team culture the emotional benefits the social emotional benefits to this program are immeasurable another program that has been a huge success is unified sports we have unified basketball coach we have unified basketball with coach jared polisher and unified track and field with coach rebecca marshall we also have added unified strength

conditioning this winter with coach mattinus these programs are amazing the unified sports slogan is choose to include and durfee is doing just that durfee has been recognized by the special olympics as a champion school for the implementation of these programs now that many covet 19 restrictions have been lifted and construction is close to being completed our renovated indoor athletic facilities are the best around

the construction of the new turf baseball field and softball field is set to begin in june this along with the eight new tennis courts and a multi-purpose field will give us the best athletic facilities in the area if not the state i am extremely excited about where our athletic department is headed in the future with that what i'm asking for is a part-time athletic trainer to go along with head trainer kelly mahoney

that's the only addition you got okay anybody have any um miss pereira just a quick question as i was reading over this if you could fill in the hole on the second page so i'm assuming you might be talking about athletic trainers um it says surrounding communities with the second athletic trainer on your bed fit in taunton high then if you flip the page it says new bedford has the luxury

of having five teachers in the building who have their and then it doesn't say anything after i don't know why it got cut off that's okay yeah so um you're not the english teacher so we'll let you we'll let it slide yeah well i think i had the whole thing there i don't know why i got cut off um yeah talking to the new bedford athletic director he's very lucky they have

teachers in the building that teach all day long and they're certified in athletic training okay so i mean that would be ideal if we could find somebody like that got you they don't have five no uh athletic trainers in there they just happen to have five teachers who have that experience in education correct they have too yeah and it's it's great because if somebody if the head athletic trainer is um absent or you

know not feeling well or whatever they have to have somebody to fill in and right now for us that's a struggle okay understand thank you miss laravey hi thank you mr bustin um how many hours right now approximately or as close as you can get as kelly putting in as our only athletic trainer during the fall season uh with football and every we have a lot of sports in the fall

i would say she probably puts in 50 to 60 hours a week okay spring winter is um you know we try to flex it with her so if she has a long night with basketball like basketball game will get over at 8 30 at night or whatever she'll come in at like noon or whatever but she has a lot of paperwork to do um i would say most seasons she's putting in

definitely over 40 hours a week okay on a consistent basis not on on a consistent basis yeah right so you think a a 0.5 position not a full we ideally meet somebody three o'clock three o'clock to seven o'clock uh during the week yeah that's that's ideally what we what we need try that first and see if that help okay all right thank you i yield anything further mr buster mr maggie so

i'm assuming that you must have an analysis of those hours that in order to come up with this number you must have done some research so if we could get copies of any of those hours it would just help us to understand what it what it like you know what the requirements are and all that yeah i want to say that when you were talking about the number of hours i believe in the last negotiation we

increased the overtime rate as well yeah it's i guess it's something that she doesn't keep track of we don't keep track of i mean she'll again she'll flex every once in a while she'll come in a little bit later but there's so much paperwork to do that she'll end up coming in anyway and um and then she'll stay for the for what she needs to stay for so she's only getting paid for 40 hours

she's on she's she's on salary and there's no provision in the contract for overtime uh on holidays yep holidays um any data that you would get kind of would make sense to have us figure that out yeah i think the contract says that she has to fulfill her duty as needed that's that's what it says yeah the um and you talked about new bedford having a second trainer plus the five people

that that work so are they just over over at um compensating or so the second trainer is a teacher in the building that is specific to after school the other four that they have are they they don't fill in as needed you know absolutely not necessarily exactly i don't say they they must have trainers all over the place very very lucky yeah we have no idea of the requirements and uh

when you when you ask for another one you know it looks like well you're asking for another one but there's you got to have them at certain sports but analysis of that like how many this means so she's got to be here she's going to be there i know a little but if you could send us anything like that it would just help us to there are certain sports i put in

there that they have to be at you have to like by the mia rule you have to have an athletic trainer at it the other sports you don't but for instance in the fall if there's a football game going on and uh volleyball game going on at the same time she's you know she's outside has to come inside if there's an injury what i'm referring to and when i'm saying data is

how many home games are there so that she's there for x amount of hours over a week of 40 hours let's say you look at the games and you would do an analysis to say she's already half of her time is already used on mandatory games that's kind of the thing that i was asking for but i've always been of the belief that the high school like the athletic uh trainer uh the athletic director

works for the high school principal under the high school and i see like you got derpy here as the heading and so i don't see an excuse my ignorance but i'm assuming that matt damaris does the evaluation like your evaluation yes as the high school principal so i was asking this if when durfee was here because i thought it naturally was a department within durfee when i look at it if it's a if it's a

district-wide thing personally i'm in favor of a district-wide so if you're at the high school athletic director 9-12 i think we need a director of athletics and activities k-8 so that they can put the time in and create the opportunities for kids and different programming and and you said that kristen garvin is doing a lot of that work in there but it's via the durfee piece my opinion i think we need to look going

forward at a k-8 you know running these programs running the athletic programs after school on the saturdays season after season after season to get these kids doing something so kevin aguirre's opinion would be that we should have durfee you're part of durfee and then we should have some other entity that's going to be k-8 to coordinate with all of them and it shouldn't necessarily fall on your

lap as the durfee folks you've got plenty to do with 2 500 kids in all those sports and fields and the likes so just my editorial would be i think that we should look at that madam superintendent with that i yield i i do have one question brad i remember the old days you used to sub people out for hockey you still doing that we're still doing that will the half timer eliminate that for you

oh yeah absolutely okay all right that's all i got anything further thank you mr bustin next up art jackie francisco

good evening everyone thank you for having me here tonight i would like to thank you also on behalf of our 49 teachers in the fine and performing arts department as well as our thousands of fine and performing arts students across the district k through 12. my name is jackie francisco for some of you who haven't personally met me yet welcome and i run the department for all of our fine and performing arts teachers

so tonight i am coming to you to advocate for a music tech itinerant and i had put in the rationale the description around that but i'm just going to kind of go through a few little bullets for you first so we have approximately 700 students currently in the performing arts department so that means anyone in band chorus orchestra or theater right now we're at about 700 we used to be right around 980

pre-covered our goal is to get back to that ratio so that we can say that about one in every 10 students in our schools is participating in some sort of performance art we also have every student in k through 8 involved in either general music or art they can also participate in theater now at the middle school thanks to our recently adopted theater budget so thank you for that we do have great theater

programming going on right now at talbot and morton and ready to start it up at cuss the one thing that we do need is someone that teaches music technology at rpa so currently there is no music teacher at rpa we have an art teacher there and we have a pe teacher there but there is no opportunity for students to have music at rpa so my thought is and as i i

am constantly kind of reflecting on what engages kids especially at that level and an alternative setting uh music technology is a really great avenue for kids to be able to develop personal narratives through lyrics through songwriting and when they have a tangible when they have something that they can complete and make themselves using garageband or foundation they are more likely to be engaged especially our boys

so thinking about the position you have about 192 kids at rpa right now 120 something of them are boys so that alone tells me that a program like music technology could really engage our kids um to do some writing through music and to be a little bit more literate in music and be able to reflect and and on their own identity and sense of self through music so the reason why i think it should be

an itinerant and not an fte that falls under the umbrella of the personnel at rpa is that i feel like this person could cover the student body in three days and i've discussed this with a principal at rpa and she's in agreement so i would love to use those two other days to supplement programming at schools that need additional uh music so at this time i can take questions or comments

miss pereira hi thank you nice to meet you i'm a very big fan of music i use it as therapy and there's no doubt in my mind countless studies have shown that not only does it let children express themselves it helps them also reflect and certainly those are those are skills that are very important across the district but especially at rpa so you had mentioned that currently there's no

in-house music instruction that leads me to believe in the past we've had someone come in or there literally is no music instruction at rpa currently okay obviously i strongly support this i think it's a huge hole that i didn't even realize was there until this process so thank you for your time that's all i have miss laravey just quickly to reiterate there's never been a music teacher at rpa so i've been

doing this job since 2015 and there was no music teacher there since 2015. i had discussed it with the prior principle and the principle before that but they were i was sort of advocating for it to be held under their ftes and it just never came to fruition in their budget requests fully going to support this thank you i think it's needed at rpa thank you there's a program that i'm familiar with it's called lyricism

with some of the teens that are using it now in the city and it's it's blowing up so yeah fully supporting this kudos to you for recognizing the need for for this at rpa and thank you and yeah and new bedford guide published an article today that whaling city alternative in new bedford is outsourcing a programming for music tech they're using an outside community partner to come in and teach the kids so

i'd like to one-up that and have our own there you go i yield mr bailey it's just an agreeance um i would fully support too um i think if we didn't do this we'd be missing a boat um it's a conversation that i've had a long time how important arts are in general not just music visual arts um you know arts in all forms so more of a comment i fully support it

you know i'm around the kids i think it's a great way to connect i'm surprised that we didn't already have this position um to be quite honest with you um it's definitely a way that kids connect um you know podcasting writing self-expression you know we can go on and on um how important this is but you know you you have my full support with this thank you appreciate that anything further mrs rogers um mr bailey

i think you might be mistaken the cool kids no longer podcast so you might have to like you know get up to speed with that um but i video any opportunity right um but there's such a huge piece there this is just a comment this isn't even a question but there's such a huge connection there between music and social emotional learning so to not have that you know it really surprises me um

i don't know how we didn't have a music teacher i'm wondering though how long have we had an art teacher there has that been from that the beginning there's okay yeah so we always had an art teacher but we just never okay but we just never had a music teacher we've got to give and preach into the choir here but we've got to give kids every opportunity to be able to express themselves because not every

kid is going to play sports and not every kid is going to do theater so whatever opportunities that we can create for them to be able to build those skills you know we're going to win in the long run so with that i yield thank you anything further mr just a technical question i don't see this on this sheet am i missing it when i go under art this uh miss francisco it might be under music

because they did put two bullets in the agenda tonight art and music yeah maybe that's one it's in music it's representing music too that's me it's all me no i'm saying now this is one presentation are you going to come back for music i am not going to do any kind of costume change or anything this is it just one right yeah i would just say you have open lead teacher okay to eight on the budget

is that new or is that just you can't feel that was granted to us last year we have lead teachers in k through eight for art and music that was last year yeah but it says open so i'm wondering is it not filled is that the problem it's filled it's filled they're filled that's stipended after school position so it's not an fte it's just it's a stipend for someone that currently works for us yeah just the

words open are there so i was just going to ask you you know it is important to get somebody but you have oh yeah we have we have people yeah was there any requests i don't think your name was on it either for anything other than this position so you haven't requested anything of the administration that is not you don't need uh musical instruments you don't need supplies you don't need no we actually

supply joe we've been very very lucky to have been granted uh quite a few grants to supplement our musical instrument supply and uh we are we are cooking with gas we're solid right now so thank you with that ill thank you anything further okay thanks uh miss francisco next up is uh nurses we i just want to say nurse long whedon she's not adding any positions because she's been before this committee

throughout the year so uh as needed and we okay so that does that any questions for the nurses oh mr again for the superintendent so well for the superintendent we had mentioned this about uh obviously in covet we had to increase drastically our nursing staff and cnas and all of that stuff and um i think if knock on wood if covet is gone at some point we're gonna hopefully be getting something to say we have a

reduction so just because you know right that's all i'm asking is it are we going to see any analysis moving forward of we we thought we needed uh we proved the cnas i don't think you're probably using them as much as so where when does when do we see that that's coming off we actually there are some retirements that uh attrition is taking care of some of that but nurse along can certainly speak to that so

um i'm very happy to be here again to see you in person in faces this time which is really awesome i think over the past two years school nursing has kind of switched from individualized health to community and school nursing public health nursing to keep the environment safe for our students disease prevention so the staff that i have now is adequate um it's it's actually awesome um we have

started now that the masks have come off to start doing uh 25 000 screenings that we do annually that we have not started yet actually we have we started last week but we were unable to do that with the way the covet issues were so this extra staff actually is coming in very handy right now to catch up i think that's the main thing now that we have to catch up and

set the focus back to the individual child not so much the community public health and everyone here i mean the committee has been awesome definitely vested in the nursing department you've always been um very kind when i've come to ask for help so mr one of the things that we need to clarify is that the cnas they were contracted oh yeah so we just discontinued that and and haven't hired any you know through that

uh service so we didn't actually hire them we just called them as needed yeah and we have we don't we haven't had them for what we haven't had them for a while the cnas yeah you understand my question though like yes and and i've had um a retirement of an lpn so that will you know take care of one and then i've got another retirement coming up so and i think as things

progress see how things go um i'd hate to go backwards you know but i think hopefully things get better and the needs of the children are not quite the way they were two years ago you know they need more right now there's been two years where they haven't had screenings they haven't seen their doctors they're just going back to the doctors now um so i think the need is there um especially to get these screenings done

because we lost 25 000 screenings last year so like the kindergarten students last year of first grade we're catching them this year but the first grade kids there's different screenings for each grade level so to try to catch up it's going to take a little while yeah so part of the i think it's more for the superintendent so i've advocated obviously for ftes so we have no we have no idea

so i'm i'm trying to i'm tearing up my binder here by mistake but does the retirements through attrition are those cost containments in the beginning of this budget that's what i'm trying to find in it to screwed up my budget so how would we know if we're a school committee that you have an lpn that's retiring that's no going longer to be filled by attrition how would we know that

mr aggie i think what you're asking us to do is and certainly we'll do that you want us to assess all the people that we brought on assess what our needs are and if there are positions that we no longer need that we need to act accordingly just like we came to you for additional positions if we have to reduce then we'll do what we need to do so we will create a list of

who we have on staff what they're doing and if there are retirements if we're going to repurpose people etc so that you know exactly where those positions are being filled and what the needs are when i'm looking at the budget so if i'm looking at it and i say okay i'm looking at the line items if the position cost fifty thousand dollars you know you just said that you have somebody that's retiring let's say they

retired fifty percent through the year if i look through this budget and see that line item it's going to say 50 000 it's not going to say 25 000 with a comment that says retirement going to be unfilled halfway through the year that's what i'm saying i don't see that so we see 50 you internally the person leaves the superintendent school committee doesn't know that that person was meant the schedule to be half

time so that's all not giving you a hard time you could come to us and say i need more and i'd probably vote for it because i trust what you're saying all i was asking was if we're right now just just so just so i can comment there's no there's no plan to reduce right now you know if what we have what we have for staffing is indicated here the number of positions that we have if

we come we'll come back to you if you know once we assess and we do whatever we need to do uh and come back to you with a staffing plan to reduce if that's what's required but that would have to come from nurse long but maybe i maybe i got a bad memory it must be just me because i swear i just heard somebody at one of these tables say that one of the lpns is

going to retire and then we're going to get rid of that via attrition maybe i'm just not making maybe i'm making it up there there is no plan to reduce what we have here in the body you're saying i didn't hear that what i heard i heard i heard what you i i hear what you heard okay but we have that's not true well we have for staffing here on the budget we

have according to this budget we have 29 positions in the operating one is karen's position and we have five five positions currently funded through esser that's how many positions we have in the nursing budget in the nursing home i get it i think that i okay so i'm the one who said that we use the term attrition i think that you were eight what your aim was we added positions throughout the year

we added positions for the nursing department so you were asking us so we added these positions as kovit slows down as we need less are we going to see a reduction what i said was we're going to look at all of our positions some of those may be absorbed through attrition so if somebody retires and we have that position instead of cutting somebody we might use them and repurpose them and they might

fill a slot that's what i was getting at we're going to look at our positions with right now if somebody's retiring that position is not vacant until they actually retire because somebody can withdraw their retirement up until the end i was just simply saying that yes we did add positions they are they were extra positions throughout the year we may have positions where we're going to have some vacancies whether it's

retirements people leave etc so some of those extra positions that we added maybe those people may be able to fill in to those open spots yeah i i think it sounds like that's what you're saying but i'm not crazy i definitely heard that so that's why i'm just asking it's a budgetary issue so as you all are talking in your budgets we can only assume that you are planning ahead so when you plan ahead

you say well we might be losing somebody at that point if we know it like you know to me it's not that big a deal but we it's almost too early to tell too what's going to happen i mean we're only in two weeks without masks i wouldn't want to say you know um let's reduce it by one or two people and then have something happen you know so i think

we will continue to look at it and look at you know whether or not the ftes will continue to be at the level that we have now i understand totally and i understand your point about the needs i'm not suggesting otherwise all i was asking was are we looking at if we added good responsible budgeting would be if we added due to something that something may be gone we should go back to a

normal i think that's a fair question ask and i'm sure we're going to get it so we gotta yield ms pereira hi nurse long um i just have one just a quick question regarding screenings because obviously you mentioned that of course while our while our scholars weren't in school those screenings were impossible right for you to conduct are there any plans like let's say scoliosis for example are

there any plans to not just it's seventh grade right that that's five through nine okay so are there any plans that maybe someone like we're going to go back and and make sure everyone got them if maybe they missed it and that's just one example but hearing vis whatever right so they were waived for last year yep which doesn't really you know help the child right and so this year we have to we're conducting what

we are supposed to conduct for this year however with that being said even a nurse today did sixth grade vision where we don't do vision in sixth grade anymore but it was fifth grade who'd have a gut vision last year so there were a couple schools that did that but that's what i was asking yeah i mean we're gonna do the best we can to get what's done this year done because usually we start kindergarten in

october they're usually done by october right and then but we haven't even started but you're you're along the same train of thought that i am where we need to try to go back and get the kids we missed right okay right thank you thank you okay thank you nurse long i appreciate it next up is the um multilingual learners

all right thank you miss fair crews thank you good evening bonnoit mayor coogan superintendent parents school committee members welcome to the new board members and happy international women's month my name is fernando veracruz the proud director of the multilingual department and a former english learner myself thank you for the opportunity to present the department's budget before i present the budget request

please allow me to provide a brief history of the department as well as students we serve of utmost importance in this role is the responsibility to foster collaboration that ultimately changes our educational approaches approaches that have reinforced a deficit narrative about english learners and immigrant origin groups implicitly and explicitly from the historical policies in the united states

i'm happy to report that with the district support we have made substantial progress i joined the district six years ago with the goal to primarily structure and systematize the department in five key areas initial identification and placement program design instruction teacher development and family engagement when it comes to student identification and placement in 2016 975 students or 9 9.7 of students were

identified as english learners far river is a gateway city so we quickly realized that the number of identified english learners was not representative of students with limited english proficiency in our classrooms dsl english assessment specially positioned at pace was one of the first positions that the department advocated for this position allowed us to structure and systematize the initial intake

process and create procedures protocols that allow us to correctly identify and place students in the appropriate programs at the time the department also advocated for the district to create the community relations facilitator role the crf role is central to this work by law and to the extent possible we must communicate with families in the language that they understand best establishing the

these crf positions and also contracting with lion bridge has strengthened family engagement and enables the district to do an excellent job communicating with families in the three main languages that we serve in terms of family engagement i am happy to share that we now six years later we have a well-established lpac that meets at least five times in the year we also offer adult esl classes and

we actually about to start classes and hopefully to cohorts our current numbers of identified students reflect the improvements to the initial identification and placement procedures as well as family communication networks as of this afternoon at one o'clock we serve 2149 english learners or 20 k-12 the main languages are spanish at 50.6 percent portuguese at 34.5 percent and very recently cavern creole at six

point thirty one percent preceded by khmer at seven percent and then uh and now at two point three percent and i actually haven't visited or been to any cambodian restaurants and i definitely need to connect with that community uh before they leave because at least they're not in our schools these scholars are placed in either in the sei mainstream and currently we have 1130 mainstream or

fifty two point six percent of our else our sci mainstream or they are placed in the sci foundational and currently we have one thousand one hundred i'm sorry one thousand nineteen students or forty seven uh percent according to the english according to the english development so in the foundational classrooms we keep them until they are at a weeder level or english proficiency level of 3.0 and

then we exit them to mainstream classrooms the sci foundational strand is in five of our elementary schools and also in our middle schools as you know english learners are the fastest growing student population in this country's education system it is a diverse group arriving at our schools from all corners of the globe bringing their rich languages and cultures which in my opinion can only

strengthen our own communities however most of our english learners in foreign public schools as we know uh across the united states are in fact born in the united states and that is definitely a misconception that if they are born in the united states they're not english letters and of course if they are in households where we don't speak english they are they are coming to our schools

with limited in english so we do assess them it it does happen that that's the the largest group our students born in the united states as the l numbers continue to increase across the district program design quality instruction and teaching improve development became the department's major priorities more essential positions were advocated for a k-8 esl coordinator a k-5 foundation and dual language coordinator

a high school esl department head elementary middle school and high school language acquisition coaches now i am happy to share that six years later students benefit from these highly qualified staff with high levels of education and extensive experience in the field of second language education second language acquisition i should say i have my team is off the chain really truly and

my team and i work closely with school leaders and teachers on how to more effectively support english learners using research-based methods two examples that highlight this work include the opening of our brand new spanish dual language program at faveras which we are very proud of and i invite you to visit if you haven't had the opportunity and also the piloting work of a co-teaching model at henry lord and i

certainly want to thank dr dr bronhard for reaching out to the department for the support and it has been great work and and we hope that it's something that we will model across the district we do understand it's an expensive model tons of planning but i myself strongly support a co-teacher model in order to continue improving outcomes for students the is requesting the following a ft clerk

for the department the position will alleviate the ml department administrators from time spent on clinical work and allow more time from the district team to dedicate to curriculum design and instruction programmatic compliance etc as the number of english learners continues to steadily increase in the district from 9.5 percent in 2016 to now 20 percent a full-time office clerk will

assist the director and the team in maintaining all state and or district record keeping and the documentation for compliance the major tasks would include work with bookkeeping to process all purchase orders any voices for the ml department maintain excellent records of family involvement activities surveys funding annual program evaluations and communications to families ensure compliance of districts family

engagement program without state and federal guidelines this person would also this individual would contact families through phone calls emails in order to encourage participation in schools and districts activities and events and we do know that culturally not that our families don't that the education is not important to our families but we do understand there's a cultural difference

that sometimes keeps our families away from schools so this person will be in constant contact with families and informing them of these events i am happy to answer any questions you may have so thank you so much any questions mr rodriguez with the home language surveys it on this sheet it says that this person would help make the survey process more valid and reliable so is there an issue with the way that

the the surveys are are being conducted that's what that says to me so that's why i'm trying to understand so uh yes so the position i'm actually advocating for is not a position to be at pace as i understood we only had one position in the budget which would be the fd uh clerk for the department so what you're asking me for it's something i think it's on the wish list

we're not asking for that currently what i have in front of me that's your rationale i did i yes so you want me to go through no i'm confused ml clerk so we did initially i was actually asking so because we have had some issues with the hls i had asked for someone that would be there working in collaboration of course with pace and sarah our esl assessment specialist there and

and this person would really be fully involved engaged and would have the knowledge understanding of guidance and regulations that this department follows but i don't think that was put on the budget which was put in the budget it's the one that i just asked for right the one we agreed upon was the ml clerk yes and that's what i just asked for we have here exactly yes i think we add them together so

i guess i'm confused because i'm going i'm i'm asking based on what's in front of me which is the mll clerk that says that this person would work closely i'm sorry that um this person would streamline the connection between intake and the school placement by being the one person to conduct home language surveys with multilingual families thus making the survey process more valid and reliable i

think what happened when i sent my rationale i had a rationale for a clerk a system collector that would work with me and my team i also had at some point requested uh this person to be at pace and we're not looking at that right now we're just looking at the full-time position we are looking at is the mll clerk that is going to be based out of pace to help that's what's in the rationale

that's what we had discussed we didn't discuss that's what is in the rationale we can have another discussion i'm i'm going to yield yeah miss mr i'm certainly i guess i was confused but i'm not confused anymore the superintendent said that we're going to have a mll clerk at pace and as far as i'm concerned superintendent is the boss and the superintendent says that's what we're getting and that's what we're

going to have that's what we're going to have whether i get it but if the superintendent just told this school committee that she put in the budget an mll position at the pace center that's what she's putting in you going like this saying no she's the boss so i don't understand why you're going back and forth she's the boss she just said this is what's in the budget so as far as i'm concerned

i'm looking at this saying why are we even having this discussion this is what's before us so mrs rodriguez asked the question making the survey process more valid and reliable this is at some point i'm superintendent this came from mrs cruz right right so the question is what is it what does that mean more valid and reliable that implies that it's not valid and reliable can you expound on that so let me uh

mr again without due respect one i was not shaking my head disagreed as i would never do that when i was asked the question when i came in front of the superintendent and the team talking about the budget i had given a few a couple of positions including the one that i've been asked the question for what the department we department also asked for a full-time position correct position with the department in the ml

department which is in huge need and so in making those decisions fernando which one you rather right now it looked like it feels like we in need of a full-time mll department clerk if we were to also get a pace clerk that would work and that would be great but if we have to choose one or the other i thought on the budget when it said mll clerk it was the position for the ml

department not doing the second one for base i understand but i can also definitely no i understand so when i asked earlier i asked another i think it was the nurse or somebody i asked what are the positions that were denied that somebody requested on that list is the mlo clerk that you're speaking of so to everybody on the team superintendent whoever the finance folks were it would

seem very clear that that was denied and this was going to go forward so that being said what i'm just trying to get to is this position is going to now be but that question is is needs to be addressed absolutely please i'm sorry can you ask the question again yeah so it says here thus making the survey process more valid and reliable and this is let me read the whole thing so that you

know an mll intake click at pace would streamline the connection between intake and school ele program placement by being the one person to conduct home language surveys with multilingual families parentheses thus making the survey process more valid and reliable i'm just asking you to expound on what that means sure because i'm thinking it implies that the current process is unreliable and unvalid sure

so yes so for the last few years since i came to the district again trying to anyway so what's happening currently is that various clerks at pace conduct the hls which is the home language process now that has been a problematic because it is supposed to be conducted first by a near cell by a licensed esl person and secondly it is supposed to be a survey a questionnaire and what we've noticed is

the way it's being done or has been done in the past it's been handled to parents and many times without the translation so we have parents and we know there's some some level of um stigma still in this country uh around bilingualism multiculturalism so the parents get that message and when they see does your what language do your child first learn to speak what language do you speak to your child what child

does what language does your child speak with siblings blah blah blah they write english english english english english because they think the answer that we want is english we we just want the truth so we can best serve as the students so with that so what i'm so that's the issue we say we're seeing is that it is handled it's not in the in the native language they just fill it in they put english because

they think that's what we want and so we're missing kids so kids then we enabled so if the hls says all english we cannot assess students and okay so you said something about it has to be a certified esl teacher to do the survey is that the law i think it was the the the guidance was the guidance so either that or trained by an a licensed person because of linguistic uh questions that are there

yeah so i just heard you say that it had to be so had and suggested is two different things so that's where we get i'm looking at i've gotten some it's ironic that we're talking about this because i've for about a year now or more than a year a couple of years now i've had parents tell me can you explain to me what this letter is yes and they send they say this

letter and it says the lady feels like what in the heck they sending this to me for i speak english i've spoke with portuguese descent but i speak english my husband speaks english my mother speaks english my child speaks english everybody speaks english why are they like asking me this or kind of and they felt they felt to me like the district was forcing them to take the services and i said to them

you know let me try to find out and this was when dr malone was here and it wasn't you know the ideal time to get the info but that's always bothered me and i've always wondered are we over identifying our children for these services i don't know that answer yeah when i get people that say that thing to me that i just explained that lends itself to maybe we are over identifying our students and i don't

think that i think you're saying the opposite we're under identifying so yes it could go one way or the other but the the good thing is that actually we have uh so the issue comes when we don't conduct it actually as a questionnaire a survey to have probing questions and and so we see a last name we automatically assume that perhaps this parent needs information in portuguese and that should not be so

so if we conduct if we actually ask the questions and i'm speaking with a family with the portuguese name but with probing questions i am going to realize this is a second generation family this is a third generation family this family doesn't need a lot in portuguese so what would you do in that case that would they be identified or they not if i'm talking so let me give you an example

at one point there was one hls not necessary not not here another district where the hls was handled it to the parent the parents in philly enders your child speak any other language the parent said yes and said spanish did some investigation come to find out if the the parent answered yes because the daughter watched daughter of the explorer and because there's another language indicated in the hls right we

automatically assess we don't have in this case parent we don't need parents approval and because this child was kindergarten and there was develop also language development right they just starting to learn and this child actually came through the assessment as an english learner and that's that's unacceptable because now we're identifying a student because the parent made that mistake in

answering spanish because she was watching uh daughter the explorer the child of lap developmentally came as an english learner and now we have a kid that shouldn't have been identified and what ended up happening it's very difficult once they identified to get rid of that label and so they have to take this assessment as that you probably are familiar with which is called the er access

where we assess for language development until they meet a criteria 4.2 uh and uh of overall 4.2 or a literacy of 3.9 so that's very problematic we have in these kids that shouldn't have been identified and because of that error which could have been taken care of by asking questions and not giving the parent this paper to fill it in now we've created this whole issue for this family so i am absolutely uh with you in

saying that we have to be extremely careful so we are not either over identifying or under identifying and it all starts with that form the english language survey that's why i've created a lot i hear what you're saying my gut tells me that we're over identifying that's based on what i hear in the community for people like the story that i told you i think that we're over identifying but in any event in my

opinion we have trained people we train them up through the pace center they do the the work here and that should be valid and reliable say it again i'm sorry if we did it at the pace center like you know with a trained person i don't understand why it's problematic it shouldn't be problematic let's just say so let's figure out a way that it doesn't would be my personal suggestion so we have the department has

done two trainings at pace on how to conduct these hls so it's not a lack of information and so i am and you're still saying it's problematic it's getting better i guess yeah well i'm sure i'm sure the superintendent can try to get that done but the the question that i my last question mrs rodricks does have a question but i'll just finish so she can take over if need be

the um when you came here six years ago i always like to do a historical perspective on what we're doing what we're spending money on what it looked like so if i'm not asking for the answer now but via the superintendent if you could send something out to say what did the what did the fall river public schools in your department look like six years ago before you came what did it look like for budget and

what did it look like for ftes and then what does it look like now because i think it would be i've said this before that the money that we're spending and resources are needed but it's tremendous the difference in my opinion from where we were to where we are now like financially budgetarily is not even it's way up there so if you could get something you know like that and i think the

superintendent can send that to us in a couple weeks or a month or whatever but i do think it's valid but please take my what i that's story that i told you as serious as you have to because i've had that same story has been told by a number of people and they keep getting these letters that look like as if this that you know we're trying to like force them so i can

always try to find it and send it to mrs potts to send to you but you probably know what i'm talking about uh so uh we have to so after the excess that i just mentioned the assessment assessment of communication and so it's an assessment of i'll give you the uh uh the acronym in a second missing uh let's see after that we we receive the the scores there's an annual letter that

goes home to inform the parents of of their scores as well as what will happen once they meet a certain score then they become former english language learners so we have to inform the parents i do understand that parents sometimes may say oh my kid doesn't speak english you know he's here we need to really understand that again going to that stigma and that's what english only has created for

this country you know where we not and i think you know it's changing where we don't value uh uh bilingualism right so that's the history and so with that we have parents who actually the kids need the support but refuse to support say i don't speak english i don't speak another language please don't send me that letter home and yet when the student is in the classroom and in front of the teacher and the teacher said

come on fernando look at the skit so there's a distinguished it's a distinction between language the types of language right and we understand there's a social language and there's an academic language so i i think uh most times the parents are looking at the social language he speaks english what are you talking about look at him he's at recess you look at his friends they only speak english there's a huge

difference between those two types of language and what the language the kids need in the classroom is academic language and then when they come and donate the social language they cannot access text yeah is there any requirements beyond the uh like a form letter going home to contact parents to talk about changes programs anything on an annual basis is there regulations about that yes so before so when we when

we assess the students and they qualify and we identify them we meet with the parent right then and there and explain the programs and the parents can either accept or decline we don't force the program to with any parents what we need to show the state is that we've had that conversation what we need to show the department of justice is that we've had this conversation and offered these

opportunities annual let's make was it is it one child or is it annual it's one yes annual so you have to call every parent so if you have a thousand students we're not calling parents no what's the regulations was that the regulation that you have to call them are you supposed to no we mailed the letter the regulations just the letter is sufficient that's what you're saying yeah we have to make and

the regulation is that we don't send them in the backpack they have to be melt all right thank you i do support this position for the pace center thank you i yield i just have just a comment about that so um that actually happened to my daughter my daughter is if english is our first language she's fluent in english um there's no question about that she was brought in for and i

had discussed this before but she was brought in for a screening despite having a phone call three phone calls with folks that were going to assess her and me explaining repeatedly that she does in fact speak english and there are zero concerns they still brought her in and assessed her and said oh there are no concerns obviously i had already shared that multiple times in order for her not to

come in i was told that i needed to write a letter and decline the assessment formally which seems problematic for a family who really doesn't need to do that like she was misidentified um maybe based on our last name i don't know um you know does she understand and speak some portuguese absolutely she does but english is her first language right i'm a first generation she's a second generation um

but we still receive letters asking when when would be a good time to reassess her as if she were not already in kindergarten that's the problem yeah so that's why i'm bringing this absolutely i have to hence my my question about the home language survey because i have a kindergartener this year and this is the experience that we've had yeah and obviously she should have never been even screened

can i just ask you a question on the do you remember noting another language on the home language survey i remember there's a question that says is she exposed to any other language right but being exposed to another language doesn't mean that it did not ask the question that i answered did not say does she speak another language no she doesn't speak another language you know she can do her

colors and she can do her numbers in portuguese but she is not fluent in portuguese by any means it says is she exposed is she exposed absolutely she is yes but that doesn't mean that she's a and when i my concern is is that i had two or three conversations with folks over the phone that process that you were just explaining but still had to bring her in for this assessment or i had to do this

whole process of like writing a letter now i have the luxury i live very close to the pace center so it wasn't really a problem in that sense except i also had to bring my other child with me who's disabled yeah it's frowned upon to leave them at home we don't do that right so i'm just saying like that can create a barrier and already create a sense of like what's happening here if a kid like

mine who is not bilingual and by all means i would love for her to be bilingual right that is something that we feel very strongly about we are very supportive of multilingual um learners my parents are immigrants right like this is the background i come from and so absolutely that's an important piece of my personal identity that i think should be shared but it also takes away resources from

kids who actually need them especially when we've had that conversation already multiple times before she came through the door i i am sorry that you had to go through that your child had to go through that if i was conducting that that hls which at one time in my life i did i would ask for the questions or that's growing questions because the word exposed right is broad so who is she speaking with because what we

find many a times when we say they're exposed is oh she visits grandma every two weeks no she's with me i'm not going to assess a student i say it again she's with vivo and vavu every day but who both speak english right so but i'm saying in some cases i could ask that question for the question and i would find out oh no she she's exposed to her because she visits volvo every two weeks

sora and i am absolutely not going to assess that's that's that student so this has been my issue since i came to this district where i have asked multiple times have had various meetings for us to take the look at this hls and how it's being conducted because it can create these issues of over identifying mid or under identifying or having you come in and bring your child who is disabled and so those are the

conversations that i've had at the district level that you know we are trying to clean up so when i ask for this position which i got confused i thought there was another position that was on the on the budget and i apologize for that but i also asked for this position for these reasons and this person would be actually trained by the mln department would be fully you know i would make sure this person

is aware and knows the guidance right so with this direct contact with the ml department so these things are not happening because it is problematic and i don't agree with that i absolutely would never want to over identify a student who shouldn't be identified i understand the job i know how to do the job i've been doing the job for 20 years and those were some of the things that we've cleaned up along the way

former down the district that i was trying to clean up here that these that's our number one formula form and folks need to understand it's a federal state form and once these students are identified it takes close to four years for them to be get out of that labor so it is very problematic for families and i'm with the families that are coming to the mistake yeah and complaining absolutely

so it's about and i so if we've been given this position i'm very happy that i think we can definitely continue to clean up the process yeah so that was where my question was coming from and so again like you know i want to look at how we are appropriating services and make sure that we're doing them um with fidelity because you know when staff are telling me you know you have to bring your child in

and i spoke to my boss about this and yes you still need to bring her in you know and my boss said you need to write this letter and that's the only way like you abdicating that evaluation that's the only way to get around that i have the luxury of being able to do that i have the privilege of being able to do that but not every family does and

so not to make it more difficult on a family you know this is where i agree that we need to do a better job with this i think there's too many people doing the hls from my experience that would be this one person this one person will do the hls and then if it's all english you'd go to the clerk set pace and then if it indicates another language it goes

to the ml clerk who does the assassins nice and clean when we have too many pots on you know 20 hands on the pot and that's when we're going to start finding these issues that i yield thank you sorry i'm going to be i'm going to be really quick first of all thank you for the work you do and your time here tonight um i'm trying to understand this maybe you guys can help me

when students are enrolled in our forever public schools initial enrollment whether it's kindergarten pre-k eighth grade whatever isn't there some form that indicates what the child's language is on that form is that what is so is that what you're going by so if if let's say a parent does put english in portuguese you're assuming okay now we have to evaluate this student to determine if

their you know english is their second language right okay and as far as talking about streamlining the services better than they are now that's basically correct me if i'm wrong i'm just trying to you know make sure i understand what you're saying right now we have a lot of hands in the pot and when you're completing these surveys some people because some of this can be you know somewhat subjective when having

these conversations that everyone even though they're following the same rule book quote unquote they're understanding the information differently and so it's kind of going all over the place as opposed to one person so it's getting done now but it could be done better if we had won one person and then my last question or if you can clarify with me um miss aggie i was talking about letters

being mailed to parents and you said that there's some regulation that requires you to mail letters but then you mentioned handing to a parent so is there one form is there two forms and is there a form that that if we feel that the child you know is may have english as a second language is that um a phone call to review to go over that form with the parent to get more

information or is it literally just we send it to them and they send it back so hopefully we're not sending it to them so if we begin with this hls the parents should be in front of us and we should be conducting an interview from there we either say don't all english we're not going to assess all uh if there's other languages indicated we do then you go forward with assessments

to see so the parent came in if the parent has the child right they will say we'll if the parent at that moment even after asking this question answering this question i don't want my child assess the parent has the right as a parent to decline sure the assessment in their for services that this child could have been and then right there there's a notification letter so we know the

parent decline that's the letter i was talking so that's the letter you're talking about that's getting better and after they received the excess scores in may then we produce this letter that has to go home by august to let the parents know of their scores and program that they will be placed in action so again if a student if a family indicates more than like one language on an enrollment form or that type of form

automatically somebody is going to either meet with the parent or have a conversation with the parent to determine if this is in fact real or if they're just watching dora they explore a kind of situation and if it is in fact a situation that they're a multi-lingual household then it would go on to have a further conversation and an assessment with the child is that accurate yes

ma'am and am i accurate with also saying we cleared up this is going to be at pace yes this is this is the priority this is the priority at pace but you're looking for in the future having a position like this also in your department is that very much i would very much appreciate it right now we are being supported that's what i meant the superintendent yes that that right now

that is not um part of the plan i think that we have to assess and see what our needs are absolutely and prioritize okay but i was just asking okay and again thank you for your time thank you so much mr aguiar i want to be as brief as i can i think that um when we look at positions we talk budget july 1 but we're i think we're in the

heat right now of enrollments and stuff so what i would like to have the superintendent do is either spend some money if need be ahead of like sooner than later rather than wait till july it sounds to me like we have the pace center is in charge of all the registration all across the whole district which we're trying to streamline which i agree with to me when that happens the director of

the pace center should be in charge of all of these things certifications the home language surveys the nursing thing everything so that we have one person that's actually doing uh you know making those decisions would be my personal opinion but if we need another person why wait till july 1 if we could get i i don't know who's doing the services now whether they're good bad or indifferent it says that

what we talked about before it could be more valid and reliable whatever so all i'd ask the superintendent to do is not wait if need be but maybe in 30 days report back to the committee about what the status is of all this stuff and then we can i mean i could ask a million questions on this but i'd rather you 30 days just come back and you let us know how wonderful it's going up there

thank you i yield i i do have one question or one comment on kevin's six years numbers could we see the enrollment with that you know what i mean as it goes because i think that that's also a key factor thank you miss veracruz um next up is technology now a lot of this we did go over the other night right i was i was just gonna say that uh mr um cabral presented all these positions

when he did his plan so i'm not sure if you want him to go through every single one again or if you just want to ask him questions about that anybody have any questions about mr not a question just the comment uh based on the vote uh the last meeting a couple days ago that we're going to have a technology subcommittee that's formed i promise you that we're going to have

that as soon as possible once we get through this process the only comment i would make and i think this is important basically the one i just made before mr cabral had a bunch of positions some of those positions are needed in my opinion now because we're in the middle of all this stuff so i don't want to necessarily wait for july 1 to say let's do all of these positions but i would personally be fine

with the superintendent saying based on the budget based on mr cabral's opinion i think we need to do this now this now this now we end up in this district usually training everybody we do what we got to do and then they go somewhere else so if there's urgent need i would say let's not even wait but i'm guessing early april mid-april we'll have the uh the first technology meeting but i'm

going to speak for myself i think that we do have needs tremendous needs that we could fill or take some time and if we can't fill them with the right person then don't hire them but i for one would support that going forward with that i yield anything further okay thank you mr cabral facilities and operations i'm assuming that's going to be mr pachico first first first area is custodial

there you are mr mia madam superintendent um we have a few needs in facilities and operations um mr pacheco i'm not sorry to interrupt but you've got a gentleman sitting next to you that i'm not sure anybody knows maybe we could just get an introduction of who that's exactly that is about to happen okay sorry i just that's okay thank you that's okay um so at the table with me is emmanuel monas

he is the new director of maintenance services and we are very pleased that he stepped up i know i know mr monas for quite some time i'm not going to tell you why but i'm going to tell you that it'll make me feel old if i do so he is going to bring that department to another level that i know he will and there's a lot that he has on his plate and actually

i might as well have him do the maintenance piece we have a couple of positions in maintenance and i will let him speak on those items good evening and thank you for having me here um basically uh as ken stated the last time we're looking for a new member of the division as far as for plumbing hvac and in labor very much needed a labor in our department to be able to

get things started get things moving basically just to be ahead of all our licensees um in all our departments as far as maintenance goes the biggest thing needed is an additional plumber hvc and strongly maintenance laborer for sure questions on the maintenance piece with uh mr moans mr aguirre uh the only question that i would have is the uh and i we referred this to the facility subcommittee so just looking to the

future i i understand what you're saying you need somebody because we have the bunch of trades we have a bunch of work orders you have basically a system so you're new to the job one of the things that um i'm looking at is were we maximizing our resources so we spend x amount of dollars just like in the school we have x amount of resources are we getting a good bang for our buck

relative to the work so one thing that i would ask for regardless of whether you have this new position is to do some sort of analysis of what happened before so before you get hired i'm a licensed plumber whatever and then i would do ex work orders some kind of analysis of how much a work is done by a plumber or by a carpenter by some sort of system and then so we

can proceed to see in the future like what are we getting are we doing it differently so now we add up if we add this position we can say okay we were able to do this like 100 jobs a week or something now we can do 150 some data relative to the work orders would be my only request from you and the in the department and i'm sure the facility subcommittee will scrutinize that position but

i personally sat in on the interview you did an excellent job welcome to the district and i think you're going to do great things so happy to support this thank you anything further i just have a comment this is rodricks i just want to point out i know it's really hard to come and speak before a group of people that you don't really know haven't worked with repo before so i just want to say thank you

for coming and doing that i speaking for myself it's really hard to do that um so again i just want to say thank you for coming up and doing it thank you so much especially when we're looking down on you i know it's like such an awkward dynamic i don't know if this is his question but the maintenance uh like equipment and stuff is that going to be under your presentation mr pachico maintenance

yes okay so i'll hold my questions i just thank you okay are you thank you um so the one thing about this maintenance position um and we we will be going to subcommittee over it um we think that it might be a great idea and again my opinion um is that we try and bring someone in from the construction craft group one of those students um a senior and put them in the role that they've

been trained for for the last three years at durfee i think it's it's perfect it's a perfect fit it will also allow that student to be um in the trade i in my former life at the other school that i will not mention i there's nothing nothing better than hands-on training for anybody in the trade or any kind of work school to work situation and it can't be substituted we can't

teach it in a in an environment in a classroom in a shop setting you do the best you can to get basics but the actual hands-on cannot be duplicated and the more that particular experience is authentic the better okay i can teach kids how to solder but when they're live and there's water sweating in their face because they didn't do a good job that's a lesson um unlike practice practice practice so i

think this opportunity for us to bring in um a student into a ground level position so this is this is not a a high paying position but it is a very good job at a good pay for this kind of work it might be an avenue and we'll discuss that in depth with the with the committee when the time comes so as part of um of the maintenance group um they will be adding some equipment

some um not necessarily hand tools but some power equipment for the individuals who are are going to be taking some of these new roles um the plumbing position that we're asking for is to put us in a position to have four plumbers we will have four electricians we'll have four carpenters two painters and um the laboring position and it'll allow us to have that group um and also two hvc uh

mechanics um and in the future hoping for more hvac mechanics the the goal is is to stop um subcontracting all of this workout and to bring it in house there's a lot of reasons for that familiar faces with the students uh someone who they're comfortable with is what we like to do as opposed to strangers um people that we have to um have all of the quarry checks and everything done before they come into

our buildings that's all time consuming items in the case of an emergency we don't have that time to wait so they're supervised so we have someone watching someone work and it's not an ideal situation so bringing our own people in is the best way to handle this maintenance work and that is the goal of building this department into um something that can handle two million square feet of of space on a daily basis

uh the equipment again is not high priced equipment that we're looking for it may be pipe machines for the plumbers the equipment that the electricians need where we're going to start doing some different testing of all of our equipment in the newer but older buildings that requires them to suit up to do flash tests and different things to see if our equipment is going to react the way we want it to react or

empower our power outages and in other situations so that work can be brought in-house those are expensive tests that have to be done if we have to bring that service out so that we we just need to provide the equipment for our employees to do some of that work and that's um that's about it in a nutshell on the maintenance department again another question that came up the other night was the cost of the uh

the additional work at the pace center so the additional work at the pace center that's being handled in-house is a major savings on the district side i would say it's in the 350 range after doing some of that work today and taking a good look at the project that is the kind of savings we're looking to to basically have looking forward in all of in the buildings as we do some major

renovations some work we can handle and some will always have to be subbed out but the goal is to try and handle as much as we can in the house all right you want to go back to custodial i can do custodial right now mr man oh i'm sorry i'm starving just a question um i just want to back up a little bit when you you spoke of the durfee student uh possibly you know working and

as a craftsman is that with lizzie craftsman it's it's a crowd it's it's amazing i'm not up on that lingo but um i know uh cte director sylvia and mr damaris also were talking about the the uh the co-op teacher that they're looking for is that something that could be cohesive with um a co with like co-op students at durfee maybe doing that co-op in our district is that sure so this

would be so we would be looking co-op is normally a process before graduation right that um this process would be because we're looking for it in july this would already be a graduate okay but in the future we could yeah no i understood that right right right because there are certain most of the cte programs at durfee would lend itself well to co-op education right um it's just a matter of trying to

coordinate um all of that the paper side of that all of that work side that would need to be done ahead of time and that that person that that mr damaris is asking for um and and um and the director sylvia is very very important yeah i just didn't know if that would be an opportunity for our district to have some of the kids on co-op now coming out of our cte program to be working with

somebody like mr monas with all his experience you know is that going to be an opportunity okay thank you i yield mr again the uh related to that i thought there was a rule in the school system maybe it's just an unwritten rule that you had to be out of school for several years before you came back to work like as a sub or something as that i'm not sure

uh i'm if that is the case then obviously we would eliminate our ability to bring in any any uh students and cte programs i'm not i'm not sure that could well exist maybe it's the maybe it's the high like the age bracket you know like if you're out of high school like instead of going but that when you were saying that i was thinking you know you you have obviously you need

two years to sell but you just can't come you can't graduate from different then apply to be a security guard with the kids you just were with a year earlier i think but the question on the lease rental 150 000 for building rentals and leases that must be a building that i'm not aware of that's our rental of that's our rental for uh storage for just the storage that is the rental

building for um the the um that we the mill that we rented for our uh logistics all of our supplies just recent like that yes and that's 150 000 for the year that's just the increase that's that's brand new there is some other items in that rental but that there is an increase um i want to say that contract and i don't have it in front of me i apologize uh was in the mid

mid to upper eighties if not 90.

so that's so the remainder is is a rental of possibly um uh the uh valtran storage units that we have at the different schools but so i'll speak to that so the the jefferson realty the store the storage uh facility is for next year slated for 115 000 that's how much that is and the rest is slated for the valtron stuff that ken's referring to so this but this is only 150 total i think

yep that's all it is the the the total is 115 000 for 1158 for the facility next year sorry sorry i'm not speaking loud enough i thought it said 158 so it's it's within this 150 line items those things it's not yeah the only other one i i notice it it's a big number 500 thousand dollars for water sewer and cso so that's because we like everybody else

you got to pay you got to pay right like that's so we're not getting free we have to pay that's a pretty good every department pays their pays their share that's that's our share for next year yep and you had said mr pacheco you don't have many um um expenses for material you know equipment and stuff or equipment on them on the main on the uh the maintenance side as far as

as uh not like custodial yeah the big number i think on this was you're also in asking to increase i think durfee security by eight by twelve twelve by twelve you know or was eight for a shift or something like that eight first shift two seconds shift and two floating and obviously you must have recommendations on why that is i do it just seems like a lot just

on the face of it but it's a big build in i get all that so if we could get even a one pager just to verify like what it is i looked in here there's some part timers the part time is not you know if they go up full do we not need them anymore you don't need to answer that now but i think if we get a an explanation we also are funding the

um equipment that to come in so that's an additional piece so that was part of the the rationale but right well the the equipment the equipment piece for the security the the new system um is it has to be manned okay that's not being manned by school personnel that's being manned by security so there are no administrators actually working on those there are administrators available there are

administrators at the entrances however the equipment is being operated by security personnel so there are three maybe four but depending on if it's a double lane or a single lane that we have set up and um they are bag checking when the alarms goes off that there may be something in in a on a particular student so it requires extra people in the morning to do that when that work is done now these people

are going to hopefully replace some of the administrators who have acquired duties through the size of the building and the configuration of the building um that uh principal demaris has been using uh his people for so these additional security guards will help with that particular piece also the second shift this would allow for after-school events after-school programming to have

security guards throughout that building and the floaters are going to be used to augment the services we provide at the uh the other schools in the district yeah if you can just get something that you told me things today that i wasn't aware of but i think if we know what it is that we have those then we have 600 000 nsros you know we should get a game plan of the and i'm

sure you already have that while we're asking from sure with that are you thank you so are you going to go back to custodial now i can do custodial now we got maintenance and security done national security no yes i've got custodial um so there's uh we're requesting two junior custodians for durfee one junior's a custodian floater for the district so it's three custodial positions um that we're adding to our current

roster we do have some custodians some custodial positions that are not filled as we do with security and other items now mind you those positions we've been trying to film as we go along but it's very difficult to you know to fill some of these positions um as quickly as we would like to uh the need for durfee high school is that the square footage is extremely high on each individual person so there were

a lot of areas in the old building that didn't require daily cleaning the uh the penthouse above uh the uh the storage unit uh near the kitchen so that area was storage of light bulbs different items that are not used on a daily basis so that area was in a custodial area so to speak the storage area underneath it was a nutrition area that was used for storage another area

so all of that square footage in the old building as it slid over to the new building um these areas in the new building are all needing to be cleaned so there are no areas that we don't have custodians cuffs custodial coverage in them so we try to keep that custodial number um to about 28 000 square feet per person however at durfee that number creeps up into the into the 38 000 in some areas

also with that custodial position on the on the um at durfee we have the um autonomous floor machines so what that will do is a custodian who has the hallways at durfee may not have of their full square footage classroom cleanup with the autonomous machines this will allow those machines to work simultaneously with that custodian as that he or she are cleaning rooms that machine will be cleaning the

hallways at the same time and then the the the work would would be would be duplicated on the other side of the building when that custodian needed that floor machine it would go over and work with the other side but the floor machine um has conversation with that custodian so if there's an issue it it texts the custodian to let them know that there's an issue with in the area

it couldn't get by there's uh there's uh something wrong with the machine it would let that person know so it's not like that machine is running without monitor being monitored it is being monitored by the person who that machine is assigned to for that particular day durfee is um is a a building that had that is easier to clean in the matter that it doesn't have a lot of nooks and crannies in the hallways

and things so it allows these machines to do a great job in that particular building we've tested out a few of them in the old building and um it's quite something to watch it uh operate without a person once it learns the route so to speak so that is the major equipment purchase for the custodial side however we do upgrades yearly we have some material in stock and we do have lists

i know there may have been a request and i can get these over to everyone via email but the shape of the equipment that we have if it's in poor condition then that material then that is scheduled to be replaced and each school will receive anything that has been mocked poor but it is rated excellent good fair poor and the equipment is also rated whether it's commercial or

or a lower grade a lot of times in the past um because of money uh shortages some of our older equipment that we have was not necessarily commercial all the equipment that we're purchasing now is all commercial rated uh snow blowers are designed for what we asked them to design for so we have a particu particular model um that we use it also allows us to keep all the parts on hand

so we're not trying to mix match a bunch of pieces of equipment so all of that stuff is is in place and um we do have a small list of of supplies uh that'll run about ten thousand dollars of things that we will be upgrading uh items i did say that the custodians we do have one junior custodian that's going to float across the district so attendance vacations um hand in hand but we also have a

situation we may have an open area that we can't fill this person would be able to give some time to that area also we do have some part-time positions that are not filled part-time positions or how we would really function on a on a regular basis and we would want to have that ability to have someone to go over there we don't we don't want to lock someone into a position but we may

want to put someone there for two hours four hours depending on on the need any questions on the custodial positions mr again when you talk about the i'm reading something that says senior custodian floater yeah what do they do so do they fill in if they're if it says floater so it's not a new position no i'm just saying there's a general rule right so they would but the senior the senior custodian floater

in by contractual language is only used during the day that's the language that was adopted when these seniors um what i'm saying is can they clean an area so i'm a junior at this school and i and i'm out and the senior if you've got nobody else the senior floater can actually come in and take my area during the day during the day yes the um not take it but they would do it for

that for the day yeah yes so you have in here it looks like an assistant director of custodial services that's been a position that's been a position that's been around um jim adaris who held that position retired over a year ago uh and uh that position has been in in the uh in the budget but then we we filled a position so at some point jimmy was doing you know he was doing some of my work

and still doing some of work for custodials so on me i thought that when mr mccluskey retired who was the engineering manuals role before um before we changed it so he did a lot more than just that he also wrote the specs for a lot of the work in in the buildings when he retired we took that position on i took that position on gave some of the work

to joe correa gave some of the work to jim jim did the day-to-day triage and joe did the other work and i took on the procurement side that position when when jim left i didn't want that position to exist as a dual role so we created this role to take care of maintenance maintenance in itself is enough work for one person custodial the maintenance piece this piece is what remains so the

what the custodial side has is a supervisor of personnel totally different from an assistant director an assistant administrator the position we have um that is held um is a kind of a split shift second shift first shift that person is strictly after personnel making sure that everyone is doing what they need to do going from school to school uh does some work on the first shift but not many days and

then some work on the second yep but it's vacant it is vacant and it will be filled i'm hoping it's funded and i'd like it to be filled that's my that's not my point yes it's been open for a while we've been hearing about there's this open position and it hasn't been filled but jim retired a long time ago so this has been this is the new gym i'm saying this position when he was

doing it way back when has been vacant in my opinion for far too long the supervisor i think is doing a good job of holding people accountable doing what she needs to do and we have a vacancy then at one point i believe we were told about a day shift custodial supervisor getting hired right i'm trying to find the mix i'm actually trying to find what formula works i don't i did not believe

that the old formula worked with the new buildings and the technology in the buildings and the amount of of new equipment um that is stretched across across the district and the process cleaning that is across the district so my experiment over the last two three years um has come to the conclusion that the personnel wasn't the problem as much as the amount of duties that each person had

and some people were overloaded with duties and others didn't have enough so this piece of adding this director of maintenance is a lesser position than mr mccluskey held way back when he's been gone i think for four years if i'm not mistaken and the current position that um is vacant is going to be just a little different than mr medeiros yeah so given just my opinion of what i and i've

been here for a long time to see a lot of the stuff that goes on the way i look at it is we have a director of custodial services yes we have an assistant director of custodial services and then a supervisor the bottom line is is that those folks need to hold accountable the custodial services to make sure we're getting a good bang for our buck and they're holding people accountable to do their

work yes that's what i personally feel and then we we have a vacancy during the day i think it just needs to be filled would be my opinion it should have been phil pryor already but when i look at the structure in my view we have mr monas is going to be the maintenance guy and everything's going to fall on him if he if the maintenance department's a mess and the people

aren't doing what they need to do or whatever it is they're not efficient it's on him when i look at the custodial side it's mr korea it's on him yes so it's very simple for us to see we're not doing the day-to-day operations but when we see the structure the the org chart which i also asked for we should see it that it says this is who we hold accountable to so i'm

supportive of the position don't get me wrong i'm just thinking we got to fill it if if need be and people need to be held accountable to do what they need to do sure would be my thing if i could just right on that on that note um the um in fairness to mr carrera he also is doing security so there is a big difference between the security force that you see today

and the security force that you've seen when maybe four years ago i know it's a different security force and i've only been here getting close to six years so it's it's not even close to to what's happening in the schools and the amount of issues that we try to you know keep under control so i think that that job on that security role is is much larger and much more responsibility than it

ever was and therefore now more than ever that other position needs to be put in place and after securing the maintenance side of the house we're going to start working on that piece or just thinking outside the box we have silos where we hold people accountable to manage departments and what they do there's a logic to what you just said to say then fine then mr carrera can stay in as the director of security and

if he needs to put on a security guard out for some time to go help out why don't we just put him as this head of security and upgrade this position to a director of custodians so we have it when you have positions that uh oh this is my job that's my job to me just organizationally one person person's in charge you know who to go to we know to go to mr monas if it's not

working so there's some thought to if we got a vacant position why not re-org the department to say here's the group of this and here's the group of that because but i don't think there's a backup that way that's the issue that i have i couldn't i don't think there's a backup i'm sorry i don't think there's a backup that way so by having an assistant to the director there is a backup

joe's been in the district a long time i don't know how many weeks vacation he has but i'm sure it's a few when joe's not here that work can't go to a supervisor it's way too much work for a supervisor the paper side of it alone is too big for a supervisor and then we don't have a security person that's in charge of all the security people we do have head security people but they are

located in buildings they don't have the ability to get up and go somewhere so i think that on the maintenance side i believe that i can take care of of mr monas stuff when he's not in i have been but on the other side of the house i believe that the assistant and the director is the right model and the supervisor beneath those two keeps the um the immediate back and forth to the schools

under a different realm yeah i i understand i just wanted to give you my opinion i know i thank you i think it does make sense the uh you said you had something that was requested i think that was from me so i have some documents that i will send over and basically it's going to list uh the equipment and to the shape that the equipment is in and also listed by

building so overall yep that's fine but you said there was some things that are rated as poor that are going to get replaced so is that in the budget this is this is some of the equipment is what we have and some are small there are no large items here so some of the equipment has already been replaced in some of the schools for instance if there's a bad snow blower in the school all the snow

all the schools have received new snow blowers so i think there's some items within this budget uh in the uh in the supply chain here that we may have replacements already for yeah so when that when we see it i can weigh in my own opinion my is my last comment on it is that now that we have the money if it's poor it's not up to standard we need to replace it because

the custodians need the best equipment too yes so absolutely if you need more money come back to us for more money because that that's why i asked for that document we saw we're spending 150 000 on an unmanned uh wash and wax thing whatever you said instead it's going to work well if we're paying 150 000 for that we certainly should spend 500 800 on something for each school to whatever

you know what i mean vacuums all that stuff like spend the money get them the right equipment thank you anything further last piece you have mr patico transportation um so there are no no changes in transportation as far as personnel we do have our two clerks in the office we have donna who continues to threaten me that she's retiring however we're not accepting that so she she runs a very tight ship and

has the transportation under control she's constantly working on the routes to be sure that they're as efficient as possible she has a good relationship with the bus companies i would say it can turn into love-hate relationship on a daily basis but there is there's a lot of knowledge that she has and a lot of respect for the bus companies that we do use and they do go out of their way for

for us on the we are holding the um the cost of transportation we've been steady for a few years uh considering that most of these contracts have um built-in escalation clauses but we are holding the line by changing some of the things that we do and by mr ramita doing some fantastic math so we appreciate that um anything further from mr pacheco mr hagio i mentioned the last month that

i'm not a big fan of the serta because of safety because of equity and the like can you look into that and get back to us via the superintendent on if there is any other options you know related to it it just doesn't sit well with me the type of transportation i think it's unsafe unfair and i know it's going to cost more money or would but would it be something to look at because

i just don't care for the way that sure they can do some analysis for you my last question is on the 70s everybody i've asked this a couple years now everybody in the office is eligible to drive a career van everybody in my office like they need success transportation folks the clerks no they're not they're not no so i i don't know when i would have them drive if they if they want to drive they can

drive after hours but as far as during the day there is there is not enough personnel to do the work that they have um on a daily basis so i i just recall several years ago now when i got back on this committee that when we were asked to do a new position it was put in the job description that said the person would be all the people in the offices would be 70 license eligible

in case of an emergency or something else that they could drive the van so i will check on that um and um i will it's just the case i don't think it's a regular thing i just think it's i think it's a good thing to have as a backup we have the vans they should all be utilized but you know and we can check it out i just think it's something to

look at and it's a good system if we need to okay but that'll thank you okay thank you mr monis welcome mr pacheco thank you guys appreciate it thanks next up is student services special education leads off that and pace center

welcome welcome welcome good evening mayor coogan superintendent ponds and school committee members first i want to thank you for your time over the past few weeks and your thoughtful reflection it's impossible to create a budget that is one fiscally responsible that also meets student needs without it i come to you today representing the special education department currently we service over seven hundred

students in the district throughout full inclusion and some separate programs and service only students currently we have some separate programs for students with social emotional learning disabilities autism spectrum disorder and intellectual impairments as for those members who are new to the committee last year our budget requests were very administrative focus in order to support schools

we ordered we added 10 positions to schools in the form of cluster coordinators at vcbas as well as some of those work conversions as well as a supervisor for our offices to increase administrative support schools across the board to promote program growth and overall student support um this year we're definitely seeing the dividends of those positions um they've really had us a tremendous impact um we have some

principal surveys that will be getting out to you in the near future on the impact of those positions this year we're taking a much different approach and that we're really looking to increase the level of service we provide students and the comprehensiveness across the district with that our department is requesting six positions and one conversion along with a few other curriculum items

the first of those positions is a district-based bcba as you noted earlier in the year we converted this position or technically moved it over to the turnover school due to the level of need and a new program over there that wasn't previously anticipated this position would service all the consults that are located at schools that don't have a bcba as a part of their staffing teams as well as really support district

schools for students who are experiencing challenges and supporting those students to keep them in a less restrictive environment this the really scientific approach behind applied behavioral analysis will really complement our school adjustment counselors nicely in order to support those students and like as i noted before keep them in a less restrictive environment next on our list here is one speech and

language pathologist and two slpas two assistants uh as we're reviewing caseloads and looking at our projections for next year as you can see we've definitely had an increase in the amount of students on services which is only a natural result in those pieces currently case loads are averaging around the high 40s to low 50s we want to be able to have these folks to have the necessary preparation time

as well as provide comprehensive services and in addition at times when when applicable be able to co-treat with our codas as well as we'll get to that portion later on in addition next up on our list is a certified occupational fit occupational assistant uh we're in similarly to our slpas our code case loads are in the low 50s this person would probably be very centrally located at henry lord school

which has a large occupational therapy caseload in order to really provide a comprehensive level of services to those students in addition we want to continue to cut down on the travel and shared schools our coders have between them as well but this would make eight codes in the district which uh would look at two per school however we definitely have high levels of caseload and demand at spencer board and henry lord

in those same lines we're also requesting one team chair position as we have looked at an increase in number of students and particularly that is at durfee durfee this year started out when the high 390s for students with disabilities at next year we're projecting them as high as 572 to start the year this is attributed to a large enrollment increase in durfee and as a part of that with student with

disabilities as long as well we have a large eighth grade bubble transitioning up into the high school that is going to require a higher level of service as you saw with the teacher request they made on monday night this is just so that we can support those plans in meetings and have a manageable caseload up at the high school and really kind of make sure that we're providing you know comprehensive meetings and

services to students along those same lines and looking at our last piece we're looking to convert our lead school psychologist to a director of school psychological services this person does uh go because it goes above beyond our typical lead roles and then she evaluates 14 school psychologists and really does their professional development plans as well as really looks at and evaluates the district

caseload to ensure that we're remaining in compliance and that our school sites are well supported within their processes on a curriculum side of things we're looking to bring in learning ally which is an audio book service for i know here great it says grades two through twelve we're going to really amend that to seven through 12 which is going to bring down the cost uh we can we collaborated with our

folks from our teaching and learning department for the preview and they said that really kind of the wonders piece has a audio component to it already that we determined we could adjust this to the grades 7 through 12. learning ally will provide additional access for our students who have reading difficulties to further access the curriculum along with those who really struggle with

comprehension and provide greater access across the board in terms of grade level curriculum for our students in addition our last piece uh is our professional development platform for our paraprofessionals looking to make a shift from what we currently use as the exceptional child by front line to the master teacher master teacher provides a a library of professional development that

i think is about two to three times the size of what exceptional child uh really comes with as we know our parents really do an amazing job we need to provide them a more higher level of support and also with that we need to really get them exposure to different uh disabilities and aspects of education across the board uh so we're looking to make shift on that piece also uh to note on that we

said it's for all power professionals uh master teacher also has an extensive mll library as well to support our powers in those classrooms in addition so with that those are our requests for this budget school year and i open it up to questions and feedback mrs rodricks how many kids right now are receiving ot services um for their iep because i see that we have we're we currently have five quotas

and we're asking for a sixth one no we currently have seven right well we have a lead ot two ots and then five code is on this and we have one grant funded uh through the esr grant for an ot as well okay so in terms of the specific caseload numbers i don't have those in front of me right now or off the top of my head we can certainly get those two

like we said you know we are really hovering close to their case load capacity of what they can service on a weekly basis and much like all of our assistants they all have to do their progress notes they have to really keep track of what they're doing with each and every student to make sure that they're progressing within their goals and objectives we need to make sure that they have the

comprehensive planning time necessary for them to move along in addition to meet with their supervising either ot or slp so that's part of the reason we're really looking to move this forward and really just so that we give them the adequate time necessary to perform their jobs you don't have to convince me that you need another ot i want to make that very clear what i'm really asking about is is that enough

because if we have such a high caseload at schools like henry lloyd and spencer borden where we have most of our asd classrooms and that's a topic of conversation for another day but if we have such a high case load there then is adding one going to be sufficient to make sure that our kids are getting the services and the potential for co-treating as much as possible because we know that

a co-treat model actually is best practice exactly and it's more engaging for our students and really in consulting with our lead ot you know and really breaking down the numbers and looking at them she thought this was going to be more than enough um you know and also to give our folks to make sure they have like we said that planning and preparation time necessary to provide effective services and getting the

supervision that they need and exactly all of those pieces and so i asked the same question about speech is that enough yes to support the needs because we know we've got lots of kids with speech oh without a doubt um and i feel like the number one somewhat grows every day um it's one of the pieces that i'm sorry i forgot to mention within this too we're also uh requesting

an allotment to look at an evaluation of speech services by an external party in our previous walker report they did you know interview our speech people they took feedback but nobody on that team actually had any expertise in the area and we want to really ensure that we're providing best practices in terms of treatment allotment of services evaluation and to really kind of get an external

view on that piece to make sure we're doing the best and giving the best to our students here in fall river um so that's just an accompanying portion to it i'm sure they would definitely weigh in on that that portion but looking at and once again in consultation with our lead slp looking at caseloads and looking at just the needs across the district excuse me i'm battling at gold

but also making sure that our folks have that adequate prep time that we don't have them traveling across too many schools we thought this number was going to be more than comprehensive how many we used to contract out through futures how many currently how many slpas are we currently contracting out for so i will get you definitives through the superintendent's email but i want to say off the top of my head

we're looking at about six slps and i think six to eight slpas some of those folks are part-time just because of the way it works for them and that's the way they meet our level of need but you know as part of our process that's an evolving piece we're always looking to kind of reduce that and replace with our own folks you know we've seen um that it's been productive to do that

for them right so that's why i'm asking that question because we know that in the past that's been sort of a disjointed process a little bit like they don't work for the district so even attending iep meetings you know that the person's um the child's slpa or slp may not be at an iep meeting and someone is standing in their place and that doesn't give you the first hand information about what's

going on for that kid because they're the person that has that relationship agreed and that's why we're looking to really continue that process we're going to really start as soon as this this portion ends we're going to start to really uh advertise for both positions um usually as we've done pretty much every spring for this through this portion we've posted um for that and really kept it within

mind that we're also looking to really move in more of our own folks into some of these contracted positions as well how many kids are we servicing in the catholic schools and i i don't know that folks are really aware of that kids in catholic schools can still receive special ed services through their district um so that's part of the reason why i'm asking that question so the number definitely fluctuates uh

was reported in the uh october number i believe was 73 off the top of my head and and to clarify that we have 73 students on um ieps within the catholic and private schools in the area for speech services i want to say it's it's probably in the range of 30 to 35.

okay are we providing any school based ot for those kids as well not at this time i that was an area in that you know we have regular consultation with all the private schools as part of our our proportionate share responsibilities um one of the this has been the primary request um you know we've kind of opened up that question with them each and every time of is this working for your schools is

this what is this meeting the need um and you know that they have been a resounding yes they've been very happy with the delivery of services um that's also another position that we shifted over to one of our internal folks instead of futures which it's been a seamless transition so that becomes the other piece to that that question so when we're providing services to the catholic

schools or if we have a kid who is on an iep in a catholic school setting what is the the district's responsibility in terms of oversight of that iep certainly so if they are a fall river public schools resident or responsible for really holding their annual reviews and re-evaluation within state and federal guidelines if they have speech services we're also responsible for developing them a

service plan really that service plan just details how we're going to deliver the service where we're going to do it in the duration if they are a non-fall river public school student but they attend a private school in fall river we're solely responsible for developing them a service plan of how we deliver those services the way the funding works in terms of proportion and share that's allocated through idea

we get those students count in our account so we get they we have funds that need to go to them as well and that's why we deliver those services with through a service plan so that's the service delivery part but in terms of a kid who say has an iep there are these recommendations the placement remains at a private school is there any oversight of the catholic school i'm just trying

to understand because they're taking they have a portion of the funding that comes through for those kids so i want to understand like what's our responsibility to make sure that those kids are receiving whatever academic services are on there that are identified for that student so as in the current agreement with our catholic schools we provide speech and language services we don't currently

provide any academic services we do a lot for any of those students to have walk-in services at their neighborhood school and we do have parents who access those we do have parents who access walk-in ot pt some of them also choose not to have speech at their school and they would choose to have it at their local local elementary school why i'm not really sure because we do offer it at

those programs but we leave it up to their choice we want to be as flexible and work with those parents you know as much as we would any other student so we do offer those on those pieces you know that's pretty much what our consultation piece has has resulted in over time it works out that really kind of what is allotted for those schools really falls uh almost perfectly in what they need in

terms of speech and language as well so that really is the key to that question so is it that really what they're getting in terms of their share of that those funds is it really just for the speech and language services and the evaluation piece and the annual review piece or are there additional funds that go to them in order to carry out pieces of that iep so in looking at that

we're responsible in terms of holding those meetings no matter what the proportionate share funds are what covers the speech and language portion of those services delivered we have to we have to run their meetings that's our responsibility those proportionate share funds don't get applied to holding those meetings they don't get applied to the staff that attend those and run those pieces that solely is part of our

responsibility as those are students and and you know citizens of fall river okay i've got to think it's the proportionate share process in terms of how it works it is extremely complicated i'd be more than happy to sit down and discuss it out because it is a very elaborate and complicated process i believe it took me a solid amount of time to really understand it and the state unfortunately in their

presentation doesn't necessarily make it any easier right and so part of the reason i'm asking those questions is i get lots of questions from parents about what their rights are in a catholic school to access services within the public school and so then you know it becomes kind of this push pull with some of the catholic schools about you know their place there and that's the parent's choice but they do have this

iep that the school is receiving funds for and so those are some of the questions that keep coming up because a child may be placed in a catholic school they're included in that account they're receiving funds for the student and yet no services are being provided and so that's sort of the the crux of that so and and i think one of the the misinterpretations sometimes that happens with that is that

the funds are ours and then for us to spend at that school right so they're not necessarily at the discretion of the catholic school to spend that's why we have those collaborative consultation meetings and determine how we would deliver those those funds or services at that school i mean we have we have districts we'll say in the commonwealth who don't actually spend any of their proportionate share funds at those

schools they don't provide any services they may say all right we're gonna excuse me they're going to provide professional development and those teachers could could come to it right so what you just explained is i think where families get caught up and get sort of frustrated by that because the message that they may be receiving not from fall river public schools but from their private school is different

right and so that's why i and i'm asking that question publicly so that way families do have some of that information that this is the process that we go by and i know that doesn't answer all of the questions but again like if we're looking at how we're spending special ed funds i want to make sure that that includes those kids and they're getting the services that they require and we'll be having a

consultation meeting in the spring that's going to be open to parents it'll probably be at one of the local catholic schools just because you know that's their home base and i think you know maybe we'll look at providing them some more kind of professional development in terms of what the process looks like just so that they're informed as well what their rights are and we used to

have a liaison to the catholic schools and now i'm going back a couple of years because i think this was even possibly before your time we do have a team chair currently who oversees all of the ieps that were within the catholic schools yeah this was different than a team chair there was a separate person that used to be i guess sort of a liaison to to the catholic schools and there were

monthly meetings that were held for families at the catholic schools is any of that still happening i know with kovid that's not necessary it hasn't since um i entered the district and i i wasn't aware of it happening previously um and that wasn't that something that the catholic schools have never brought up either yeah it was it absolutely was happening um i'm sure and i can't remember who it was but it

was definitely before your time but um when that was in place i found that that communication seemed to go a lot smoother with families but now it seems like we're getting more and more of those questions so when we sit here you know it's all of our kids receiving services not just you know the kids in this district you know i think um superintendent had said before that there are really no boundaries there are

kits right so we take care of our kids no certainly and that's really the approach we've taken in collaboration with our private schools that these are these are all of our students no matter where they attend okay i'll i'll be quiet for now high yields just one one question i think at the subcommittee we can discuss these two because it's for next year a little more depth but there's a position in here

that i think is part of negotiations with the admin union and there's a few of these that are keep coming up and i think that we got to be careful about putting them in public documents that we're going to convert somebody to a different position because we they're subject to negotiations so i won't go into detail on it but i just think to everybody as we're going forward if it's subject to negotiations i don't

think it should be in in these documents but with that i yield if i could just clarify that one mr again if you recall that was a position that we talked about during negotiations and i said i wanted to wait until budget time because i didn't want to just slip that conversion in at that time yeah but i'm just saying that you shouldn't we had that discussion in the executive session so

we haven't done that on this to say this is the this is the end result of it but there's a few other positions that are coming up that i'm going to have the same question on that if it's admin positions we just have to be careful of putting the copy before the horse that's all exactly but that i yield thank you anything further mr loesch okay uh student services who's handling that uh mr woodward

dr dr taylor dr taylor okay welcome on

school video it's a pleasure to be with you although virtually and i'm excited to share the work that we've been doing and to share our needs of who our capacity goes forward our school adjusted counselors school battery counselors and attendance officers have been on the prep line when it comes to support of the social emotional and mental health needs of the approximately 10 000 students who serve

these school and district-based staff work diligently to support students in crisis connect student to families community-based resources deliver meals and academic resources from families in need of responsibility support team this month and thank them personally for the work that they do i also want to take this time to the challenge i have a social worker myself

so to share with you some of the work that we've done so in terms of social emotional learning at the district level we continue to support the implementation of our fbl correctly and choose love and grant k-8 we're also in the process of reviewing a variety of curricula specifically helping to respect our secondary schools because we've learned that we need a curriculum that is more culturally

relevant and responsive to the issues that aren't done we've also begun to build seo libraries in each of our schools these libraries consist of children's books therapeutic activity books and professional learning crafts and professional practice books including guys with hundreds of strategies distracted by their core and iup planning each school has received 17 books to these books are kind of in my own

personal professional library so i know they work we also in the process of building the digital libraries we intend to grow these resources

several of our schools have participated in professional development by external partners focused on the positive relationship between students and staff some of these changes include reports by charlottesville we also have done a lot of work in 2002

gender sexual orientation religion ethnicity and disability the goals of this task force include what happened to one designing the engagement and a vision process to support the district diversity belonging inclusion and equity goals two strategically communicate a new vision for inclusive and equitable practice and positions and three create an emerging roadmap for diversity belonging inclusion

along with activities company's recommendations that work will end april and the committee looks forward to sharing the recommendations and upcoming schools with regards to the tournament the students are working diligently to support schools in improving student daily attendance positions every school has an attendance goal every student supports the chinese regularly where my accountants and procedures have

been developed

if we looked at our already climate rating which includes both excuses excellences where 28 percent if we remove the excuse rates and only lost it that would be 12 percent and as

we've also

expanding the use of those report updated the attendance files and procedures for prospective absences to ensure the safety of students and to promote attendance this is the first language for the district policy or procedure to ensure consistency for all schools regarding formalized interventions at specific basements we've also expanded the d4 policy to exclude middle schools as well

and have made a full shift away from the form of that policy to decor policy being more stringent together

our attendance

we review attendance data capture trends in the field and again and exchange compromises among the teams we have also launched our emergency vehicle pickup program the goal of this initiative of transportation for our students and families we have three partners that are used by attendance officers and school adventures these cards are used to pick up students and some places parents who cannot make a campaign

concerning the struggle of students or

100 times by 10 schools so as i've said this is all this is just a snapshot of what a day looks like in the world of student support and right now so when i joined that party a year ago so monday was my one year anniversary i was met by a team of three who worked an incredible amount of hours to provide much-needed support and finance to our 16 schools after one year in this role it's

overwhelmingly clear to me that this team needs to be admitted in order to facilitate the transformation needed today i'm asking for one position conversion three

is

for managing the integration of seo because of curriculum and the reason we want to have someone specifically focused on it is to address the teacher mandate to be able to provide engaging environment if you look at examples too the teacher evaluation group there are three standards there are three substandards that call for teachers to be able to engage their students effectively to

manage their classrooms appropriately

so in an effort to provide more direct services to students we intend to use the position of the launch pad to increase the number of resolved professionals that are trained to offer special preservation the third position we're asking for is this new position would focus on providing support and professional development for the 16 community facilitators district-wide family engagement

so despite the opportunity that they're asking for

that model so that we're asking for stipends for an elementary a middle school league and a high school so we would like that we would like to be able to choose from our team

any questions for um miss laravey hi dr taylor how are you good good so question can you give me a little more information on the movement therapist little more please yes

is

um

okay are you district-wide are you uh okay not a specific grade level or okay um so i'm actually excited about this when i first was elected to school committee it was basically because i i was really looking into sel in in the services the kids were getting or their lack of and then covet happened and it kind of all you know i kind of stepped back and let the professionals do what they

needed to do before i started jumping in at first but this is exactly what i was thinking that getting the lead sacs in each at each grade level at um i mean at each school level you know what i mean and then a director of sel i mean as soon as i i was elected i was like we need a director of seo we need to so this is exactly

what i am envisioned and more so i hope this is just the beginning of the and more so i'm excited i thank you i want to send a big thank you to the people that have had the boots on the ground this past two years and i'm excited about these positions because i think they're needed that's all i yield mr aguiar the uh the lead sacks that you have here that's after hours

would they be doing additional time like the other ones for stipends yeah the um i think the positions you know make sense um to the last point that was made about uh having a need and spending resources on this type of topic that's why we hired the assistant superintendent specifically for these departments so i'm in favor of some of these moves subject to sub contract stuff because

some of this is admin union related you know but i think we need to make sure that from yourself dr taylor under the superintendent we put that into one department because we expected big things out of having an assistant superintendent solely for that the sel stuff and counseling and attendance and all that stuff so it's you've only been here for one year but i'm i for one i'm looking for

results based on that so we we give positions and then we look and say okay what are the what is the result of this we should be running in my opinion a well-oiled machine between yourself and the people that you have under you now having systems in place so that we're doing the right thing like we've spent the resources already i'm in favor of these additional resources but i don't want to let the public

think that we haven't spent resources we have we made it the prior committee made this a priority i for one am looking for the results of how did this work so i'm not looking for an answer just for me telling you and the superintendent i expect we're going to get some good solid results out of what we're investing here the integration specialist is that is that going to be a teacher is that a

teacher union job is that what do you envision that want that uh to have teacher experience because as the research and professional practices to be able to manage smaller

yeah so i guess to be determined right is that yeah then the lead family engagement specialist this is i think we we're adding a whole bunch of the community facilitators and i think that's under um maybe some changes or whatever on the on the timing so i i think these are all valid positions i just want to see that when we create the position if i planned out a year ahead what is the

result going to be of these positions because we get criticized all the time we just keep on throwing money at it and we're going to hope things change we can't do that in this we're making solid major investments but a year from now the results need to be this if i'm we're doing all the stuff and then we can't figure out we don't know what every kid's going through we don't have

the data on this we you know it really makes us look stupid that we're spending all this money we don't have the uh you know the whole piece um the only question i had was i said mr woodward here the it says here yeah six to twelve mr woodward i support um school guidance counselors from six through twelve uh we currently don't have any uh school guidance counselors in the elementary schools yep i'm just

i'm not being critical trust me what i'm what i'm looking for is i've had some historical perspective on being on the on the committee and we've gone as a district from not a lot of guidance counselors at the high school to plenty of them then we went quickly to now we got a director full time then the numbers went up to 13 then the numbers go here and then now you're 6 to 12. so

it's not a reflection on you sir it's just in my mind we went pretty quick on heavy on guidance and to that same point what are we getting for that i'm not looking for the answer but you can get that the superintendent but we have made a tremendous investment in guidance counselors at admin guidance administrators as you know what are we getting for that that's you know in the future what are we going to

what are we going to see and and that's where i want to before i we keep on approving more administrative positions it gets to be like when are we when do we get a return on our investment in that one pager some documentation and some data to say that was a good investment absolutely because if it's not then we should take out the investment and move it into something that's going to work

absolutely absolutely and thank you um to you and your colleagues for being so supportive in years past we can definitely get your one pager to talk about the tremendous impact that counselors have had both on academics social emotional learning and college and career and post-secondary readiness so we'll get that to you and my last comments are just for the other two young ladies that are sitting

here i think you're doing a great job of of holding everything together crisis happens you're all there to help the children uh i think you're doing a great job so keep up the good work we need to give you more resources but i also would ask the superintendent that we have when we have the um next subcommittee meeting that we get some some face time and some questions to all of the players that are actually in

the trenches because we a lot of times talk above every you know want to see what's really happening so we'll put that on the agenda in the future with that i yield and thank you anything further i have a question miss rodricks um you said the movement therapist oh hi dr taylor you said the movement therapist was going to be district-wide okay so i see that it's a specialty therapeutic um

service that's being provided so how are we identifying who's getting that service

other kinds

we know

because

they definitely do have other specialties i'm just thinking you know the capacity to have kids referred i think it's a great thing i mean you don't have to convince me that we have alternative forms of therapy because you're right not every kid is a talk therapy kid we know that but i'm just thinking how is that going to be identified because that is such a new model for the districts like what

systems do we have in place or will we have in place before this person comes on to be able to make sure that we're identifying kids appropriately and using them using this person appropriately you know are they going into the sel classrooms is that where we're going to start that now are we going into the special ed classrooms what are we looking at if i could answer that

if i could just piggyback off what dr taylor is saying as well too so our another vision that we have is that movement specialist would go into some of our sel classrooms for our kids who need that extra support who talk therapy doesn't work but just maybe doing the movement therapy as another means to to work with our students and and to support them so that that's also another way that we're looking to have

this movement therapy start at those two schools that have the classrooms um that the students that need those extra supports in because the way that i'm conceptualizing it as a clinician is just what you said was that we focus on those sel classrooms and maybe doing a group model or we focus on rpa or we focus on stone where we know that the kids could benefit from additional supports not

that the rest of the kids in the district can't but we clarify what we're doing there first and then build out to the rest of the community like we know that these services work well we've got a big district and so i'm just thinking one movement therapist that hopefully we add on to with different expressive therapies we got to make sure that we do it right from the get-go because otherwise we're

just going to have it's going to be chaotic and that's not going to be good for anybody um i had another question and it's gone it happened again if it comes to me i'll come back so for now i yield just on in the budget it says uh school adjustment counselor and on the literature it says movement therapist so i think we just need to be cognizant of if we are going to create a new position

called movement therapist without the school adjustment counselor license per se we need to have that job description sent to us yesterday so it's just a process situation but and you might have a person that is currently a as dr taylor said a school adjustment council but if you think in the future you might not so you might not want to pigeonhole this situation to say that person has to have

a school adjustment council license which is in the union but you know you get the idea but thinking ahead if we want more we should have a separate job description that they might just require a different type of license with that are you anything further let me come back to you ms rogers gone join the club anything further okay our last one on that group is the pace center miss kudo

that was part of it oh that was part of it oh how's the pace center going amazing everything's functioning like a well-oiled machine we have a lot of construction going on right now so that's a little bit chaotic but families continue to come in we are also launching a new registration system through powerschool that's been launched this week so lots of new learning but very excited about

this new system it's going to be so much more family-friendly parent-friendly and user-friendly at the school level to really get our schools you know the data they that they need at enrollment and be much more efficient well any problems you let us know any questions mr aguiar we had talked earlier about uh kate you're doing everything now right all registration is on one site yes high

school yep pre-k through uh 12th grade now all at pace and when they register i know we not that we rehash a conversation we had earlier but currently do you feel it's okay the way it's going with the home language survey the registration do you have enough staffing to make it through the year yep so during the school year we we do have enough staff where we we do get some extra staff in

is during the summer months which is our busiest time especially in august but just to clarify the process of that when a family comes in and registers with one of our clerks they are trained in asking the survey it's a survey survey questions with the families once another language is identified that information is sent to the ml department who will then schedule meet appointments with the

family to do the assessment so at that point further clarification can be made by that mll staff which is a licensed esl teacher but you feel that you're in good shape now as far as yes doing everything that needs to be yes be done the mll clerk would be amazing i'm situated at the pace center because i think that person would really add to the parent engagement as far as making those phone calls and answering

those questions that many families do have around those services you know are you the administrator of the on site at the pace center yes so just my own personal opinion would be when we have an administrator like having a principal of a school everybody that works in that school works for the principal when we have a person that's under a different principle that works at one school it

really doesn't make sense but that's for the superintendent to figure out who reports to who but because when we call it one thing if we call it an ml clerk in some ways that implies it's an ml clerk what i envision as reading this and talking about it here would be that it's a pace clerk that's going to do those services that's just my own opinion regardless of what it says but

superintendent can handle that i'm sure with that are you thank you anything further okay thank you guys next up human resources oh there are no more positions right tom nothing yep okay human resources there's no additional positions there question it's gonna come to the table though not necessarily uh budget related but i believe that i saw somebody's leaving your department under one of the meetings yes

is that just a straight um so they're leaving and then now you have a vacancy so at budget time sometimes if a person's leaving it might be the time to say well my department needs to do things a little differently or whatever convert and create are you looking at the same just i don't foresee converting the position what i do see is is perhaps revising the job description a little bit i think we face some

some pretty difficult challenges over the last uh 18 to 24 months and i think a little bit different skill set might be uh more beneficial to the person who replaces that person but if his revisions the job description we would bring it forward i still see the need for the position however i do have two very very capable admin assistants um over the last 12 to 14 months we've processed over 700 personnel changes

between people leaving the district and people hiring uh and coming on board um so um you know there is quite a bit of work in the in the in the office and i do see see the need for the position i just i do think we need to change the job description just a little bit otherwise you budgetarily you're not you didn't ask for anything that was denied or anything like that you're not looking

that you need another person no the only thing i did request was a little bit of additional funding for advertising because i think we do need to go to market a little bit differently facing some of the challenges we're facing right now and one other thing that i do foresee us bringing to the committee is the possibility of updating some software for the onboarding process currently there's still a great deal of

paper involved in what we do in terms of personnel files and everything else and i think we need to move uh and shift away from that to do something that we can electronically exchange a lot of the debt documents before they come in and i think that will give us some efficiencies not only in the onboarding process but as well as uh cutting down on the volume of paper that actually has to travel

from place to place in order for you know people to be you know paid properly etc so that makes sense i just wanted to give you an opportunity to be here thank you anything further thank you the last two departments of the school committee we were talking about extensive cuts only kitten no there's nothing there's no change in our budget at all and the superintendent has told me there's no change in her budget at all

um anybody have any questions before we wrap mr anger the uh the money that we're paying for the computer the the board docs can we have a review of that uh and and possibly look at whether that's actually a good use of funds or not i have my own opinion i'll save that for talking to the superintendent but i don't know if that's a yearly thing is it

you know so if you can get back to us and see if thank you i yield anything further i am going to make a comment on making cuts uh to be clear i didn't know that school committee members got paid when i ran neither so i had so you know miss larabee and i are on the same page mr i like i'd like to know your definition of paid yeah well yeah

yeah but we had no idea to be clear like there's a few of us that didn't even know that was a thing so you could say we're gonna make cuts and we'd be like we didn't know we were getting anything in the first place i don't want the public thinking that um that mrs rodricks is getting rich off of her few hundred dollars a month no uh i'll entertain a motion to adjourn

to a church i'm sorry mr i had another question i'm sorry the um is this all of the departments yes so the only question i had and i don't know where it actually fit in was and it might have been through special ed or your budget was for michael joyce the contract for the attorney michael joyce so my concern and i've asked this in the past i i feel that we don't have a solid

contract well i don't feel i know that we don't have a solid contract i know that we don't know exactly when we hire when we don't there's no parameters there's no checks and balances on that contract whatsoever so i'm not saying i'm opposed to it but there is no checks and balances so if you could look at that and to mr rodrick's point about not getting paid i cannot and i can say this with sincerity that

i find no reason why the work that we do here on the school committee is as difficult as long and tiresome and as important as a city council to be quite honest and for the city council to get paid twice as much based on the charter is not fair and it's not right so as far as nobody's getting rich on it but but we if we have school committee members that are busting their butts

they should get at least equal amount of money as a city council in my opinion so maybe mr mayor can take care of that when however that process is but i appreciate it i yield all right thank you guys i'll take a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn do you have a second deb please call the rule mr aguiar here mr bailey here oh mr harp yes miss laravey yes miss pereira yes miss

rodricks yes mayor coogan yes