3.7.2022 Fall River School Committee

um i'd like to call to order the special meeting of the pharma school committee for monday march 7.

um deb please call the roll mr again here mr bailey here mr hart here miss laravey here miss pereira here miss rodricks here mayor coogan here salute to the flag i pledge allegiance 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 for all pursuant to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video

recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible do we have any citizens input

item number three committee of the whole these are the budget presentations for our elementary schools um i guess we'll start superintendent parts so if i could just open up for a minute we have our elementary schools presenting today all of the positions that were last week's at last week's presentation all those positions were directly requested by principals and what they're going to do today is they will share

what their needs are as well as you know the rationales so principal cobb will kick us off mr chairman um mr again please before we begin with the presentations i'd like to i'm sorry i'm sorry we might have gotten an email related to the policies i haven't had a chance to review it but i think we need to i'll be on the same page about what we're here for what is the role of the

school committee each individual member and um i would like to hear from the superintendent on what her impression is on what our role is what are we actually voting on as i said at the last meeting if the presentation is going to be that the budget is one line item and it's already been basically approved then i think we should vote on that and know whether that's the case and not

waste these fine people's time coming before us for something that we don't have a say in personally i think we need to have some more line items and some cost centers so i'd like to get the superintendent's opinion on that and then discuss it with a committee well mr aguiar as we spoke last week during my at the end of my presentation that was the initial meeting where we brought forth the budget and

requested all the additional positions historically the next step would be that we would bring forth our principles so that they could share their rationale for the positions that they're requesting and how the addition of those positions would move forward on the committee certainly nothing's been approved yet so i think that the committee certainly can listen and certainly we are open to feedback from the committee

and then we will make whatever adjustments need to be made but these i i just want to say that the committee is hearing from directly from principals in regards to what they feel their needs are in order to move their schools so i request that the committee um you know certainly give us feedback and then we will bring the budget forth for um approval so more specifically i guess since i think it needs to be addressed

what exactly would you be submitting to us for approval the budget the budget including all the line items right so total budget including all the line items i don't disagree um what the policy that we currently operate under is contrary to that would anybody want to disagree that that's the case what uh mr again when was that policy written what policy the policy you're saying is contrary to that just if you know

current so so the current policy that we have in the district you know there was a meeting held on december 21st of 2020 a special finance committee meeting to discuss what at the middle of the year to say what are we going to do in the subsequent budgets this was over a year and a half ago so at the meeting i highlighted one section of of the minutes of the meeting it states

mr aguiar asked when the district put together a budget what was the committee approving mr almeda chief financial officer stated when the committee approved the budget they were approving the appropriation and the line items that's what was stated on december twenty first of two thousand and twenty that's the practice that mr almeda follows dr malone followed i think that's what the practice that mrs ponce

is saying that she's going to follow my only concern is that the actual policy which i think the superintendent sent some emails relative to the policies that is not what happens so all i'm asking for is that as we move forward we do what mr almeida suggested he stated the committee approved the budget that we're approving the appropriation and the line items so when we go through this process they all the

principles advocate for what they would like school committee members weigh in i think we need to add another line item here we need to take a line item out there i think that's in the preview and the actual fiduciary responsibility of each committee member to present that forward we vote on it and that's what would become the budget so the budget would show at the end of this process we have a thousand employees

line items for instance whatever it is that's what we vote on as we proceed forward we want to add 10 more we have to make a motion we want to cut 10 more we have to make a motion so all i'm asking for is that we have a policy that actually follows the practice that what we've been implementing here and they shouldn't conflict with all due respect i disagree with that mr aguiar for the simple reason

that i don't think we should be adding positions i think the principals or the people that work in the buildings they're on the front lines every day i believe they know what they want they relay that to the superintendent who then checks with finance and make sure we're able to do it i just think that for us as uh who i mean i've been in the schools this year already but i just

know that it's not enough time to evaluate who should be doing what where and when it's up to the principles and i think that if if they ask the superintendent for a position that they don't get then we'll move forward and adjust it down the road but i believe our job is to get to know exactly what's going on in the schools from the principals today what they asked for what they got and move the

debate forward but i think adding positions is not our role i think that's micromanaging i think that's one of the things that came out of that 2009 report i think as a whole right now the committee is functioning in a professional thoughtful manner and i think allowing the principals and the superintendent to set the budgets for their building and the district are the way to go with our support

so with all due respect the comment from mr almeida that stated the committee approved the budget they were proving the appropriation then on light item are you saying that he's wrong and he's telling wrong information uh i i don't know what that was an answer to um what was the question the question was mr aguiar asked when the district put together a budget what was the committee approving at this

point this was a meeting on december 21st of 2020 you were there this was a question that was asked an entire fiscal policy meeting mr aguiar asked when the district put together a budget what was the committee approving mr almeida stated when the committee approved the budget they were approving the appropriation and the line items are you saying that he was wrong no i think that's accurate i think when you approve

a budget of any kind you're proving what's in the budget i think if i get a budget from kevin aguiar and it's five pages and i look at the bottom line and i say kevin good job we're gonna spend another hundred dollars i'm approving what you put in there now if down the road if i see something that you don't like as mr almeida does every month when he comes

back to us then we have to adjust i support that but at the same time i have com confidence in our principles i have confidence in our superintendent and i have confidence in mr almeida if they're presenting the budget and at a time as you've done mr aguiar and i i might disagree with you but if you have the votes i'm going to be with you if you see adjustments and things we

should be doing you and i have kicked around a few of them i'm not against that but at the same time if you approve a budget i think you're approving all the lines in it yeah just i guess what you're telling us is that we're approving a line item a one the bottom line number the superintendent and her principals are going to decide where those line items are that's what yes in

i'm just paraphrasing but i think that's what you're saying you're in favor of one number and so if the budget is 130 million dollars i disagree with it i will challenge you and i'll challenge mr almeida i'll challenge anybody in the public you present to me a budget that adds up exactly to that 132 million dollars you can't do it he can't do it because it it actually leads to like some people make

more or less there has to be some flexibility in working with the finance people it doesn't tie out to exactly what you're saying but if that's the case i just want to take a vote on it because if that's the case we're only improving the bottom line i'm going to make a motion that we adjourn these fine people can go home and have dinner with their families there's no reason for us to be

here for eight more meetings well again i i obviously respect your opinion and i think um i think that's one way of looking at it but at the same point um the will of the committee will override you and i or maybe support you so if you made it i'll i'll yield and i'll allow my colleagues to see what they say something okay hold on a second okay i yield

colleague so we can hear what they say thank you thank you um i i respect everybody's opinion down there and up here um and i've heard committee member aguero say several times when he'll ask a question or make a point often you've said for clarification for the people at home so i think that our taxpayers and our parents deserve to listen to these wonderful principles and the rationale in why we're spending money

where we're spending it so i don't think it's a waste of time it's a waste of time if we sit here and ask you know questions that we should have the answers to or questions that maybe aren't valid that's a waste of time but i don't think it's a waste of time for the community and people who are you know using their tax dollars to fund our schools to have an understanding of why the

money is being spent you know where it is that's one second is i understand what you're saying um committee member agia that you want to go line by line i understand that that is not what i got from reading the policy personally i got something a little different um and also when we had the meeting with the massachusetts association of school committees this came up and i'm pretty

somebody can correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure that that gentleman made it clear that our job here is to approve a budget not to tell the superintendent necessarily where the money is to be spent now that's not to say that we can't give opinions we absolutely should and can um but to say that i know more about the in and outs of running uh spencer borden than uh you know than principal cobb i

think is absurd um so obviously you know i think it's important in my opinion maybe because i'm new here that i hear the rationale behind these things i think it can be pretty quick we can get the information out from the principals we can get them home quickly people in in fall river can understand what's going on here um i think it can be an easy process but we're spending time right now on this

so with that i yield thank you anything further uh miss rogers um so i i don't disagree with the notion that what's being said in one area is different from what the policy reads right so if a policy is open to interpretation then that means that we've got to clarify that policy so for the sake of somebody who's new like i need to understand what i'm doing i'm not suggesting ever that i know better

than what a principal knows in their building i i wouldn't want somebody coming into my place of business and telling me how to spend my money because i know my staff i know my kids i know what's going to work better in in that realm but i need to know on this end what i'm doing right and so if the policy and then what's happening in practice are two different things i think that's what

just has to be clarified um oh um uh are you done uh mr hart yeah i'll just be real quick i mean i agree with uh what um council uh committee woman uh pereira said uh as well as the chairman i mean i i look forward to these nights that the principals come here and talk to us about what their plans are for the following for the next year upcoming

year this year um in all the programs that are going on i mean i think too that the community the community looks forward to that uh because you know we're going with right now for miss cobb at spencer borden i'm sure there's got a lot of the parents that spence boarding they're gonna be watching tonight and uh and what you're gonna be saying and what the you know what the culture is at the

school the environment at the school the pr how everything's working out there so i think that um these are good to to have um i don't know about anyone seconding mr aguiar's motion but i look forward to this and i hope we do hear from you tonight so thank you uh miss ragia i'll defer if anyone else has any my colleagues have anything to say i'd defer to them before i get a

chance to talk again you'd raise the hands if they did paul somebody mumbling something i can't hear no i said they would raise their hands if they did yeah i'm offering it up does anybo if anybody would like i'm being respectful mr aguilar would anybody else like to say anything other than me that's all you have the floor mr bailey's raising his hand just for the record okay no i was just saying um

you know the same as some of my colleagues are saying um you know i figure you guys uh know best as far as what goes on in your school um for me personally i would love to to hear you guys you know listen listen to some of the people on the stage um i think the biggest thing is obviously yeah things matching up um when we look at the policy and stuff um you know like uh

you know miss pereira was saying here um you know the biggest thing for us is is staying accord um but for me you know after hearing this it is for me for me one of the biggest things is like digesting this and seeing what goes on um you know we will have our opinions and things to say like that i mean you guys run your show but for me personally um you know

i i would like to listen and see where that goes but from there um you know i would like time to digest this i don't for me personally i don't like making decisions um just based upon what i hear so i'm not sure i mean you know if we're voting today or whatever the case may be but that's where i stand on that you're done you done mr bailey yeah miss larabee

just quickly i i agree especially with mr mr heart i look forward to listening to all of you um especially in the times that we just kind of went through together as a committee as a district as principals i look forward to hearing what's going on in these schools especially right now i don't ever feel that we should have any say in in what positions you need in your schools

i um i respect every single one of you the work you've done and i know there's been a lot of hard work that went into these these uh presentations and i would never i would think it would be such disrespect shown if we would hit that gavel today and adjourn and not listen to some of the good things that are going on in your schools the positive things that are going on in your schools

and that's what i look forward to hearing uh why i look forward to hearing from you tonight um i yield anything further mr again yeah let me just make something very clear to the public to the people that are sitting here i'm happy to listen to exactly what you're doing and all that but i got elected as a school committee member to do a job and part of that job is approving a budget

part of a job of a school committee member is the proof of budget including the various line items within so that we can look at the strategies and to say well we'd like to go down this road we'd like to go down a different road that's all i'm suggesting so you're i value your opinion i'm going to enjoy listening to this stuff but when i when i listen am i listening as a school committee

member to say am i just hearing it like i could watch it at home or is it a participation type thing are we going to take your information and then try to glean from it where are you at what are you trying to do what can we what kind of uh systems can we put in place to hold the superintendent accountable to make sure that we're getting the things that we need to get

done for our children to get those things done it's more than just listening being elected to the school committee is more than just listening to you it's participating in the process when we look at a budget we should be approving a budget with more line items than just one bottom line number that's what i'm trying to say so i'm going to make a motion that we approve a budget with more than one bottom line

number that's in the form of a motion that we definitely should have more than one number so my my motion is that we approve a budget with more than one bottom line number

not hearing a second anything else going to clarification mr chairman if a member says makes a motion whoever it is they make a motion the chairman's duty and responsibility is therefore to say we have a motion by mr so-and-so is there a second to the motion that's the typical practice of how we would go about it if nobody then seconds it so be it but as chairman that's where the first basic duty if

somebody makes a motion you say does anybody second the motion my emotion is very clear well my motion was very clear right we should have more than one if nobody seconds it so be it then that means everybody that didn't second it thinks that we should have one bottom line number that's all i'm trying to clarify okay mr aggie i really can't thank you enough i appreciate your help i've never

said that but i'm glad you chose this time to tell me i will try to do it going forward anything further than i say i guess that that doesn't apply person makes a motion chairman says person x made a motion is there a second on the motion at this point if nobody says anything there is no second to the motion we'll move on any seconds moving on thank you very much

thank you for helping us i appreciate it um okay so now we'll get down to the good part of the meeting and i agree with my colleagues it's nice to hear from you guys um i hope i hope uh i hope things are going well in all the schools and i'm gonna follow it right off the order you have here ms cobb spencer borden bring us up to date i will good evening

good evening everybody i want to thank the committee for hearing my budget requests tonight i've been the proud principal of spencer board in elementary school for the last nine years and i am here tonight to present my budget request on behalf of my school community spencer borden has 588 students in grades pre-k through 5 we have 29 classrooms which include nine substantially separate classes with our

students with disabilities being our largest subgroup at around 30 percent we've had a strong focus this year on both accelerating improvements with academics while also supporting social emotional needs and attendance the positions i am presenting support these improvement efforts my first request is changing our 0.5 l teacher to a full-time l teacher the service delivery times have increased due to the language

level of students in the increased service hours required to meet their needs a full-time l teacher would allow us to fully meet the services of our learners within our building i'm asking for two additional grade one paraprofessionals which will provide each grade one classroom with a full-time para data has shown us that since march 2020 our younger students have struggled both

with academic and social emotional needs these powers would allow us to provide more interventions run small groups help students complete independent tasks while the teacher runs groups and also implement behavior supports such as taking breaks or visiting visiting the sensory room i'm asking for three teacher lead positions which is the stipend positions currently we have three lead teachers

with a structure of a k through two lead a three through five lead and a special education lead which the committee granted last year adding three additional lead teachers would allow us to have six lead teachers one at each grade level this directly supports our school improvement efforts of building leadership capacity and these teacher leaders are great supports to other teachers in the

building and assist with planning and providing professional development this year i'm asking for a community facilitator this person would fill the role of support and outreach to families for things such as parent outreach events and attendance the ideal candidate for this position would be bilingual in order to help support the needs of our spanish and portuguese families i'm asking for another school adjustment

counselor currently we have two school adjustment counselors who oversee around 300 students each and service around 40 students for pull-out services the addition of another sac will increase the ability to provide preventative services such as increased social skills groups and also strengthen our attendance outreach i'm asking for an instructional support liaison as a strategy within our school

improvement plan we have created intervention blocks across grade levels an additional isl position would allow us to expand our ability to provide support to our lowest 25 percent of students and lastly i have one conversion of a grade for teacher to a grade 5 teacher this conversion is based on class size we currently have an additional fourth grade class and this will become a fifth

grade class for next year so those are my requests and i open up to the committee for questions thank you miss cobb any question uh ms larry so why are there so many fourth graders this year at spencer boarding several years ago we opened additional kindergarten classroom when the district needed um we had an open classroom they needed additional k-class based on school numbers so every year we've been

rolling up that position okay and then next year it's going to roll into the fifth and then be done with that okay i yield thank you miss pereira hi thank you principal cobb welcome um just a quick question i noticed an alarming increase in chronically absent rate yes what could you what do you think that is yeah i can speak to that so we have been looking at that data um that is based on

current number of absences so far so when this data was produced it was around 10 absences we have an attendance team that meets every week that consists of myself and and the school adjustment counselors attendance officer etc when we look at those more than half of those absences are based on either covert related or medically excluded medically excused absences so i think we've seen a big increase because of that

we also have seen that rightfully so parents have been more cautious about sending kids to school when there's sniffles and this thing and that thing so you know i think that that definitely uh speaks to the big increase at our school in most schools thank you thank you that's what i failed anything further from his carpet spencer borden one question mr against a comment on the last piece this is going to be a theme

throughout when we started off the budget uh the school year we talked about setting goals on attendance and the like we also had information from probably the spring where we were given stuff that was not accurate everyone said oh those aren't accurate because of covet and all this at that time many members of the committee had asked for updated information on relative to that including desegregated out

covet not covered this and that i haven't personally seen that from any of the schools so i'd like to get an update at not obviously right now but relative to where the attendance is at across all of our schools because i think we made that a goal of the superintendent therefore i think she made it a goal with her principals so i think that's valid uh information to go the piece about the school adjustment counselor

i don't have it in front of me but the analysis that was done relative to when we added a few was this part of that no this was actually after the fact when when you initially had uh when that vote was taken um ms costa and i sat down and went through the needs of the district and allocated the the uh sacks at that time this was after the fact um as miss cobb was

creating her budget okay so and this might also not be related to spencer water but across the board so the way that i look at it is we need those services for the kids now and obviously everybody's going to probably say similar things because i think there's not that many counselors that aren't enough counselors quite frankly in here but if we're hearing from principals now or we're going to hear from principals now

that we need more school adjustment counselors based on the needs of our children i'm having a hard time uh balancing that with the fact that this committee voted to hire 10 adjustment counselors and they weren't one of them at that time so i'm having a hard time of like how does it the the need that you're referring to doesn't exist july 1 of next year of this year i think the need you're talking about is

based on experience of what's happening in your building now so i'm having a hard time figuring out why not you personally but by any principle would be bringing us forward something to say they need another adjustment council for services but we didn't hire up to the ten that this committee uh requested that's what i'm having a hard time i if i can just speak to that mr agyar those positions are posted um like

everybody else was struggling to get people to fill all of those positions certainly um i have absolutely no problem swapping out one of those at the time we said seven sacks three guidance i have absolutely no problem saying it's gonna be eight sacks two guidance or even making uh an adjustment for those three guidance we are struggling to get them all filled i can totally respect that all i would ask then is

and i don't believe there's many in here i think ms cobb might be one of the few that are in the new editions what i would suggest just thinking about it is that if there's a need at spencer boarding for a councillor and we're going to approve that counselor in july i'd rather we approve that counselor now as part of the ten miss cobb her team her teachers her staff might be able to recruit some

people might be able to line somebody up now rather than july one obviously it's principal's prerogative of who they hire so i just think front loading it makes more sense to me than waiting until july one and i want to say that same thing about a few other things as the budget year goes on if why wait till july 1 because the need is here now not then so whatever you can do

to you have the authority to change that i would just suggest that sooner rather than later make sense with that i yield anything further on spencer wooden i did want to piggyback on what um miss pereira said is your attendance going up now or was it weaker at the beginning of the year you know i mean that's that's a yearly stat i'm wondering if it it's doing what i think a lot of the schools are doing

they're kind of working their way back the attendance has been much better actually our rate for last week was 92.5 so we're seeing um definite increases good in kids coming to school i think taking the mass off may help a little bit too so again i appreciate it and thank you miss cobb next up uh miss witty from vavares hi good evening everyone i just wanted to begin by thanking you for the

opportunity to present and advocate for the vivarius school i'll take a moment and just to give you a brief overview of some of the work we have done this year i think this look of a picture of where we are heading and what our efforts have been directed toward this year at the viv we have rolled out the dual language program and our kindergarten have been working to make it a strong program an option for

families interest interested in promoting bilingualism in their children this will continue next year adding a first grade and welcoming in a new cohort for kindergarten the vivera school also services australia special education classrooms focusing on students with emotional and behavioral impairments this year we have worked to strengthen this program through the addition of our cluster coordinator

and instituting programs to grow students socially such as the student internship opportunities for our scholars last year we converted our coach positions to department heads and we have truly established an academic leadership team that is focused on achievement and providing quality instruction and curriculum to our school the work has targeted the creation and growth of a shared vision among staff

and students we are building capacity of our teacher leads and educators to promote engagement strong instruction and high expectations in every single thing that we do we have been excited to see the fruition of our work throughout this year and we're very confident that progress and our state assessment data will show as well on the scl front we have established a solid rti system that provides staff

with support and structure through collaboration when struggling with challenging behavior emotional concerns we have also put into place some great leadership opportunities for our upper grade students with a student council and a peer mediation mentorship program it has been about sharing the responsibility with our students to have a climate of support and inclusion i can never say this work correctly inclusivity

all of the programs above have an underlying push to engage our students and make being present at school a priority and a source of pride in addition to those programs our sel team has been working feverishly to connect with families and provide students the support needed to make it to school every day we have recently seen a drastic uptick in our attendance and we are hoping to leverage this uptick to improve on

chronically abstinent attendance rate we're hopeful that for the rest of the year we'll continue to see improvement in this area and to continue the work that we've embarked on this year and to further see our vision progress we have some new positions at our school that we're going to advocate for the first one is the conversion of our instructional support liaison to a pair of professional interventionists

the isl position just has not proven to be effective for our school and we like to convert it to a power professional to aid our interventionists in their work a math interventionist we currently do not have an interventionist to work with students that are falling beh below grade level in mathematics we have a large student population and our math scores in the past few years have shown a steady decline

only 10 percent of our mcas students were meeting or exceeding expectations in 2021 we are working to fill the learning gaps and they've just been exasperated by the pandemic and we need a qualified staff to address that critical need we're asking for a health and wellness teacher given the size of our school we are currently i believe the largest k-5 school in the district with 724 students

it has proven challenging to provide students with quality curriculum and learning experiences during their specials period once a day a health educator would provide a once a week opportunity for students to be exposed to explicit teaching of health and wellness we envision this addressing many of the social emotional issues that our students are facing with sel learning on the forefront of

the curriculum being provided we're asking for a bilingual community facilitator the community facilitator position is essential to the veris school in the past five years that i've been at vivaris our population of students whose first language is not english has increased from 16 to 39 the enormous growth just dictates that we have staff members to effectively communicate and increase the sense of

community within our families in our school we're asking for an additional l mainstream teacher the growth of our l population the addition of a dual language program and an increase in the newcomer population has stretched our l staff very thin the state mandate of service time and based on proficiency levels it's very difficult to meet the car with the current staffing levels an additional teacher would provide the

school with flexibility of scheduling and offer an opportunity for true co-teaching in our mainstream dle classrooms we're converting two of our first grade classrooms into the dla dle language program our foundational classroom as well as one of the main streams will be converted since our kindergarten store will be rolling up to first grade and we're asking for a sped paraprofessional this is a float position

our self-contained special education classrooms provides provide services for social emotional disabilities the structures and systems in place are highly effective but require trained staff if a staff member is absent assisting in crisis in a meeting or simply having lunch we need to have fully trained staff that are familiar with the structure of the program and available to fill in and keep a consistent

environment for our students these are the positions we're advocating for this year and i'll open it up to any questions you may have miss laravey if i can talk and stop coughing for one second thank you miss whitney um the isl position thank you for uh being honest with that just doesn't fit in the school could you tell me why that position isn't really we've had the position now for two years and to be

quite honest we've only been able to fill it maybe three months out of those two years the two people that we had put into the position stepped up and moved into teaching positions and we just haven't been able to keep it filled or effective is there a need for the position though or i mean you're fine i think that we can meet the with a paraprofessional interventionist we can meet the needs

that we're using the position for okay thank you um also how's the dual language program going it's wonderful update on that it's great um we invite you to come in and visit uh shortly just recently had a writing um celebration in spanish which was very exciting so yes it's going very well enjoying it teachers are enjoying it they are the children are enjoying it even more beautiful so my last question the

bilingual community facilitator any responsibilities on them for the attendance aspect to help with that absolutely they'd be a part of the attendance team and be communicating and connecting with those families thank you i yield mr bailey um correct me if i'm wrong did you say the spanish-speaking population went from 16 to 39 are students whose first language is not english so that could be spanish it

could be portuguese okay um how many educators do we have um in your school that speak multiple languages are we saying teachers or including oh geez um off the top of my head i'd say we have about five or six within my building um and then the next question was kind of just to follow up um in regards to the um community advocate person how would that position look is that like

like an after school like a dual role or like the community facilitator correct that somebody would be stationed in our building full-time um that person would be communicating with any family you know that has an issue communicating in english obviously and really working to engage those families so getting them in for meetings getting them in for events really communicating their child's students progress

um just keeping them in the loop and feeling a part of our school community like in terms of like hours is that just like during school hours or it is it's a full-time school position yes okay are you i'm miss pereira you have three adjustment counselors currently do you know how many students they serve one of those positions is not currently filled it was a bilingual student adjustment counselor position that we

had added last budget and we just have unfortunately not been able to fill that position but i mean if we are you asking how many they service for pull-out services or for iep services yes we have like what does a case load or amount of students look like for one of those school adjustment counselors well i hesitate to answer that because it could look very different from week to

week our student adjustment counselors take social skills groups as needed whenever a problem arises they're they're pulling students for counseling services or so we have on their iep caseload they might have 30 each i'm approximating um but that's not to say that those are the only 30 students that they see in the course of a day that's for sure sure and my next question was which you might

have just answered are any of them bilingual oh absolutely okay so all they all are oh no my student adjustment culture i thought that meant the students oh no no no no no no i currently do not have a bilingual student adjustment okay and what do you think and obviously this is just your opinion but what do you think the challenges of finding somebody for that position that's that's bilingual i

wish i could tell you to be honest i've been searching and searching um literally almost every other day looking to see if we have new applicants that can be called and interviewed i just i had two people in line and they had accepted positions in other districts so did they express to you why they chose to go to another district not particularly no they just had said that they had you know taken another position

okay okay thank you i yield mr hart thank you mr chairman um what what uh mr bailey was talking about as far as the uh hispanic language how many teachers we have that are speaking that language it just sparked my interest a little bit with superintendent when we had that community engagement subcommittee meeting i asked you about the population of the hispanic community in our district and he said that it was very

high and that you're trying to um hire as many uh people as we can uh but and i know it's a high priority it's a front burner on the front burner but how are we doing with that because i think that's a very that's a very important piece to the budget here and to the also to the students that are in the hispanic community i think there's not a principle that's

in this room or in our schools that doesn't look for um bilingual staff or staff that actually looks like the students that we serve right um we you know it's it's a matter of who is applying for our jobs where we were trying to recruit do a better job with recruiting and bringing people into the city but it is a challenge could not agree more we need more bilingual people in the district we need

more people of color we need we need our our adult population to mirror our children right is there anything else that i mean that you the leadership team has has met and is there any other um maybe steps to take that you may not have taken so far well mr coogan is working on uh creating some recruitment doing some active recruiting um we're gonna host a recruitment fair and we're

actually reaching out to some of the um colleges um to to try to get a jump on uh the recruitment okay and what miss pereira was saying about the uh you mentioned the teachers uh leaving the league employees leaving the district mr coogan mr do we are we doing those uh when people when the teachers are leaving the district are we doing that uh interview how now do we get are we getting any

copies of those can we get okay and can you maybe uh update us on every time so you know when there's a big like maybe if there's 10 people leaving or in how are they are they filling out the interview are they taking part in it okay all right thank you we can include that information regularly okay thank you uh miss rogers uh so this is a little bit unrelated to that but do we ever use

student adjustment counselor interns so that way they're in here and then primed potentially okay because i know that the the field of um sac interns is actually a lot smaller than what it used to be too those programs are actually um they're struggling to find folks that are going directly into them so you know i i always go to interns it's my my first we have interns at several of our schools but you're right um

the few interns are my favorite um so i just want to understand so right now your sacs are running at about 350 kids if you split the school in two they're running at about 350 kids right and in addition to that though we do have a social worker that services just our special education classrooms so there was a social worker who's okay who services just our special education classrooms okay but that person's

specific to your special ed classrooms um are there other duties that the sacs are currently doing that can be filtered out no our our sacs work primarily with students all day long they each have one lunch which is 20 minutes long that's their only duty um and i think they enjoy that time to connect with kids to be honest uh so i think there's a lot of value in that and having sex it just can't be

their obviously their overall responsibility no that's kind of that's their only one yeah just trying to brainstorm for you that's all because 350 kids per sack you know really you can't do anything with that and i have to say um they do an amazing job oh i'm sure every uh they're they're working constantly with children so but if we want to retain folks then we've got to work on that number and i

know that that's not an easy fix right now but with that i yield mr aguiar a couple questions as i'm looking at the budget you had said you want to convert a isl position to a paraprofessional position yes when i look at the amount i think that the isl gets paid more than the power paraprofessional and i'm wondering why wouldn't the isl be allowed to do intervention is that the isl was doing intervention we just

can't find the person to fill the iisl position we've had it for two years and as i said we've only been able to fill it for maybe three or four months so you've had a vacancy for two years in a position and with the exception of four months yes i could i can't hear you with the exception of those four months it was filled yes yep so what's the issue with

i just don't understand why you can't get anybody the first person nobody applying or just nobody that meets your we've had the first person that we had in the position moved on to teaching position within our building um and then the second person that we had found a position at another school in our district as a therapist a behavioral therapist so i was like from two years ago uh that was this year

and and since then you've been trying to fill just you can't find anybody to apply correct all right the um it just to me it would make sense to get paid more like i'd want to get paid more not less but maybe you're gonna have a hard time finding your power interventions too i don't know but that's just the first thing that popped out are there any position cuts in your school no

so you're keeping everybody that's currently working working correct with the exception of the conversions and the conversion it says conversion right like the yes the um talk about the sax i guess i'm going to be a broken record on this you had mentioned something about a grant person is working in your school as a social worker or something or is that what you just said about um i i

have a social worker who's been with us for um we have this the social emotional um classroom strand uh four classrooms and she services those classrooms and that's so that's not on your page your page of of uh the overviews yeah the overview page that's is that because it's a grant and it's separate it's because it's a social worker it's not i'm not sure if she's on in mr lotion's budget or if she's in our

she's i believe on my budget under title one title one okay one budget okay so previously multiple years i've asked that truth in advertising we get when we get something from a school we get everything including grants and everything else to be included on these lists i specif not to you this is not meant for the principles this is meant for the administration that i've asked continually

we need to know what the whole thing is for each of the people at a school looking back at the number so we had a bilingual sac that couldn't get filled for the entire school year correct so madam superintendent that's about 80 000 in the budget i would assume that couldn't be filled what has happened what happens when that happens it's it's like she's been actively recruiting so if she found somebody

tomorrow we would hire her so that that money's still there and allocated for so the position do principals get the flexibility to say okay i can't find a sac but i'm going to find three other people that are going to do permanent sub para any uh like if we can't find them rather than just say let's leave that 80 grand blank what other children of vavaris getting for 80 000 services in that budget if that's

just a zero and then at the end of the year we'll transfer it to heat you understand what i'm saying like when is the point of that we say okay we're trying to find we can't find so now we need an extra power an extra this uh create a position create an isl like it just seems to me watching this that we the needs at this school are greater than the school we just talked about in

a lot of ways in my opinion just the south end it's a different type of demographic not saying pennsylvania doesn't have the needs but we're going to lower the case load to 195 for this access spencer board i agree with that let me be clear i agree with that that's what the number should be but 350 or 357 you know to one or take out the couple of kids from the the social worker services

that's just too high rivera school needs another council whether it's another school adjustment council whether it's a bilingual speaking or not but mr agyar the reason why it's 350 to one is because she has an open position she has three sac positions allotted to her so it would be a lower ratio it's only because she hasn't found the position it it certainly i agree with you that's way too high what i'm saying

is double i guess i wasn't very clear so you're saying that 714 divided by 3 is 238. so even at the if she was able to hire the bilingual person she still had almost 50 more kids on the caseload per counselor than a spencer board what i'm suggesting is she needs both so you say okay we need the bilingual we're trying to find it but in lieu of that we need

to either a hire an additional one so that for the year maybe we should have changed it from bilingual we can't find anybody after a month or two then we need to pull the trigger on a on a non-bilingual speaking one to get the services in for the children then we go from there but right now it seems like in my opinion on top of these other things we should be looking at and

another school adjustment counselor for uh the rivera school when i say needs i just if you look at the high needs i mean that spencer bottom was high too so it's 90 something 80 something we have all of our children have needs but when i look at and some of the children that are at that are at the rivera school have some serious needs and they're trying to do

the best they can with them i think we should give them more uh school adjustment counselor or some other if we can't find the counselors let's come up with some other way to get other folks in to help with those run groups different level stuff but it just pains me to see these numbers that they're way too high and i don't think we're going to get we're not going to get the results that

we need to get if we don't unless we make a change like that would that i yield if i could just clarify miss dagger you mentioned about the social worker it is in um miss uh principal witty's budget it's at the the last page it all the positions that are in in the grant are listed there so i want in in her in the budget folder the reason why i say it i mean

if i'm looking i don't have my glasses that i now need we have on this sheet that looks like this across the district that i've been hopping on for the last two years if i look under there i'm trying to see and i can't whether it shows up but i think we've talked about this i shared a thing with you i think this committee would be very well served to have one that says

counseling services because we're calling them social worker we're calling them student support coordinator i think we need to really see that in a clear picture so we don't have the debate i think it's just going to be clear i'm hoping that it's not here i just can't read it right now it's too small but that i yield thanks okay thanks miss witty good luck at vavares mr lens at sylvia thank you

thank the committee for letting me speak tonight and represent sylvia elementary school this is my fourth year as principal at sylvia our enrollment is around 700 and we house the sub-separate language-based strand we have seven language based classrooms we also have a pre-kindergarten program as well a big part of our work at sylvia since i came on four years ago was providing systems

that would allow our students and staff to operate effectively and efficiently and we are we've had a lot of success in structuring those outlets for students and teachers as well this school year we have three main areas of focus the first being fostering a sense of belonging for our students and families this is very important coming off of a year and a half of a very unstable school setting from hybrid models to

fully being at home and then coming back into a school year with some of our students not being in person for quite a long time within that area of focus we did a lot of work at welcoming back families and really taking that time at the beginning of the school year to make food students feel welcome and families feel welcome going over expectations high expectations and setting a clear

path for success for our students also under that area of focus we've been focusing on our social emotional learning and really providing professional development for our teachers so that they can provide those opportunities for students within the classroom things such as academic choice student goals student reflection that allows a student to have a voice in their learning our second area of focus has been on

monitoring students understanding and achievement one of the systems that we have in place that is operating this school year is our teacher assistance team that allows our teachers to come together and support each other and talk about students needs and under that system as well we've been developing our balance assessment system which allows teachers to have not only horizontally aligned

data points but also vertically aligned data points so that we can chart not only achievement but growth and success with our students and our third area of focus has been assuring great appropriate instruction but also adjusting our practice as needed we've been very fortunate as the other elementary schools in the district to have fully implemented the wonders reading program literacy program and

also illustrative math so with those wonderful resources we've had the opportunity to have discussions around our approach to teaching reading and writing and our approach to teaching mathematics and we've also had a stem team come together this school year and develop stem units of study that have been implemented in our classrooms as we move forward we're asking for a few new positions at sylvia's school

the first being the addition of a special ed inclusion teacher currently we have five special ed inclusion teachers we actually added one a few years ago we're asking for a sixth for a few reasons one it would benefit schedules and the ability for teachers special ed teachers and for regular ed teachers to really co-teach together the second would be it would allow for a special ed liaison at each grade level

that liaison would really be able to become a content expert for that grade level again just adding additional expertise when it comes to a collaborative teaching model the second position that we're asking an additional support with is language based classroom paraprofessionals currently we have one language based paraprofessional in each language-based classroom and we also have a floating

paraprofessional we're asking for the additional paraprofessionals because it would help immensely with pushing students into the inclusion setting our goal is always to have students in the inclusion setting when it is appropriate so the additional para would allow for one paraprofessional to go with a student or group of students and then still leave another paraprofessional in the classroom to

support the classroom teacher we are also asking for the addition of early childhood paraprofessionals we have seen a lot of success with the addition of a pre-k paraprofessional and we've also seen a lot of success with our kindergarten paraprofessionals we know that early childhood one of the main goals is to build independence in our students so by adding that additional paraprofessional it it allows for a lot

more targeted small group instruction in those very formative early childhood years and the last position that we're asking for to be added is the community facilitator similar to ms cobb and miss witty we believe this position would allow for a greater connection between home and school and also bridge that gap that sometimes exists when we have attendance problems so that person would also play a vital role

in our attendance goal and on our attendance team thank you any questions for mr lenz mr aguiar yeah just uh the paper that we get in front of us for budget positions i think you mentioned like a liaison and whatever that last one was it's not on our sheet here so i'm not sure if i'm missing something or is it a conversion is this sure so the special ed inclusion teacher

would serve as a liaison at each grade level the community facilitator is not on the okay rationale sheet okay but is that just this an oversight but it's an oversight from yes all schools are going to be asking for community facilitator across all those schools that don't have currently have one okay so i think when we when we do get those if they're in the future it would be helpful for us to get that

explanation ahead of time so that it's not one school asking for it like it sounds like that what sounds like that's a district initiative that you came up with with your team to say that each school should have a community facilitator exactly so talked about at the budget thing and um they all put them in there except for this one is omitted but um yes yeah i'm not suggesting that i against that

what i'm suggesting though i've looked at some of these documents and some of the things that people are asking for are not necessarily that principled asking for it's that yourself we've asked for things to demand that you know classrooms have that so it would just help to know that it doesn't look like he's asking for an extra thing that's really not it's you're trying to get uniformity across the district with

all that so i don't necessarily disagree when i look at the uh chart here it looks like you have three adjustment councils and one behavior therapist correct for 700 students so i personally i count those as for um okay social emotional professionals that's what i think they should be so you're at a 175 to one ratio but then at one point i read in here that you have seven substantially separate classrooms correct

and who services those uh classrooms so a special ed classroom teacher and then there is also a paraprofessional within that classroom how about all of our like support i meant like do you have a cluster coordinator no do you have anybody um as the other school did relative to a and it might be there's different needs in the classroom but you don't have anybody other than these

four folks that are going to cover those substantially separate classrooms so if i had a school with 700 students without seven substantially separate classrooms the 175 to one might seem different than one that does have seven classrooms of substantially separate correct needs i get what i'm saying that yes and so so i think that that number sounds good i think we should personally tease out

what supports are needed amongst those classrooms what you had mentioned about you'd have a power in and then one can go to the classroom i totally support that i'm hoping that it would be maybe one to two because technically it could be one to one if the person's output when i see that kind of number i think we need to have a and we'll have a subcommittee meeting to kind of go over

making sure that we're supporting the classrooms that have the most need as well it's not all about numbers i'm going to keep asking about numbers but there's also backstory to different needs and that's why i was mentioning the 171 figure your chronically absent rate is again 51 already so that's part of the same discussion these numbers are just they're just they're just too high

so i think they need further explanation so when we look at this if i'm like this is a public document so this all of these forms are going to go out to the public right if anybody gets a hold of these forms and they're going to see every one of our schools has kids has more than 50 or close to 50 percent of our children are chronically absent at that point without a further

explanation we have some serious problems with absenteeism the way i'm reading this so that's just not necessarily meant for you sir but i think across the district we've got to get we've got to get real on some of these things with that i yield questions miss projects so i just have a question about how we were managing this before so you're asking for three additional language-based classroom

paris so that way we can work on you know better getting our kids out into the general ed settings how are we doing that now with only one para it was challenging for sure but what we do is we we have coverages from other paraprofessionals who would go into that classroom and support so that the pair that's in the classroom who has the relationship with the student is either go is allowed to go into that inclusion

setting okay so right now do is that how we're managing paris across the building i'm just asking to understand that this isn't a criticism are they all floating so at any point a power from grade one could end up in grade five no we actually added a floating para last year whose main responsibility is for that sub-separate setting so that we can schedule those times for inclusion and pushing

but we need but we need more it's not the most effective system right because based on what you're saying what i'm hearing is that whether or not the kids are able to go out to inclusion depends on how much time they have from the para it does it does it it depends on their needs and their goals and where their present level of performance is then we make sure the staffing is provided so

that's really what drives it okay that just sounds a little bit different and so that's why is three enough well the three and then the floater would give us two almost two in every single sub-separate setting almost two yes so i think this is an area just that we've looked to increase more capacity across the district so that we can facilitate inclusion more effectively but also

not have to take away from the classroom itself we want to maintain the levels we support within that room because that's what those children deserve but then also make sure we have the increased capacity to do this and this year that we really made this a priority across schools with the budget and i think that was even looking at the same along the same lines of adding another special education teacher over

to sylvia they had some higher numbers that would make this more challenging so i think this was really our opportunity to increase our really just the capacity at sylvia to make sure that we're able to do this more effectively across the board and that's again i want to reiterate that's not a criticism i'm asking is three enough to make sure that that can happen effectively i think it's a great starting place to

assess to see where we can go from there um i think three you know gives them the four total right um across the grade spans uh so that we're going to really have you know triple the capacity we had this year and we need to assess year to year to see if that really is enough okay with that no i yield

thank you mr chairman thank you for the presentation i appreciate it appreciate you coming um you know i i did last year talk about the chronic absenteeism rate as well and i see here for prior priority one increasing our student attendance rate from 90 uh 0.5 to 93 percent um first how are you going to how are you going to go about doing that and in the years prior since you've been there

have you have you taken on the attendance rate at the school and if you have how what kind of improvements did you see from the prior years sure so um just in speaking of the current time that we're in i can speak similarly to miss cobb that our numbers are affected by medical excuse absences that definitely is playing a role but heading into the school year we broadened our attendance team to include

an additional sac our behavior therapist and then the entire leadership team with one of the main goals being to build relationships with our families who are hovering around that that chronic absentee level we found that a big part of it is is being proactive in our education of families um a lot of them are surprised when you say to them you're hovering around that chronic absentee number because it can sneak up

on you quickly so as in our main goal of fostering a sense of belonging we found that that has gone a long way um in terms of our chronic absenteeism and then what was the second part of your question i'm sorry well i just you know you know what what the actual steps are uh to improve it and in the past years that you've been there um i'm sure because every

every school's got it's not just sylvia it's every school has that most of the it's chronic in every school i'm assuming because i've seen every since the presentation it's been chronic absenteeism rates been high it's higher to some other schools than others but what what steps do you are you taking for this time and in the past what have you done uh to to increase the attendance and has it worked

in the past years so i will say the the big shift from previous years of this year's is that more proactive approach at sylvia's school anyways beyond what i what i speak to that in terms of that proactive approach we do have a tiered approach um that is similar to the other schools in fall river as well where tier one is really this this classroom teacher is reaching out to that family making connection

with that family informing them of attendance policy in numbers if that tier one approach isn't successful our tier two approach is our adjustment counselors get involved um and myself and one of the vice principals and then at a tier three level we're talking about an attendance officer getting involved so we do operate under that under that tiered approach that tiered system i have found success we have found

success especially with the proactive approach and the educational approach um that's kind of existed at sylvia which is new this year versus previous years okay that that's all i had mr jim thank you very much you're welcome um mr aguiar thanks larry so uh the um when you look at it says early childhood paraprofessionals are those is there a separate job description for that or is a

paraprofessional a paraprofessional we may ask that as mr coogan but as my understanding is it's a paraprofessional right right because i see this throughout the budget a lot of power is a like another school has a they're converting a regular power to a k2 power and i'm not sure how that makes any sense of i thought a para professional is a paraprofessional it is it's um i think it's where they're

targeting the support so he's targeting we as i think that last week we talked about how our goal is to have paris in every pre-k and one so early childhood years i think if someone has uh in their budget to have a pair to service grades k to two span that would be but it's a paraprofessional it's it's really where the support is being targeted yeah because then you also get

people can move within exactly you know just because it says one thing doesn't mean they can't move uh so i think that's one of the issues to go back to uh the additional language-based uh classroom that mr rogers is talking about so you wrote here something along providing equity across programming found within the florida public schools when i read that i read that as implying that it's not currently

equitable it says by adding additional powers to our language-based programming comma we would be providing equity across programming found within the four of the public schools correct so the language based strand is the only sub-separate strand that doesn't have two paraprofessionals within the classrooms yep so you would therefore thinking that we are not providing equity across programming from

within the fall of public schools i don't know i would say that i'm assuming that you wrote this so i'm just saying and i kind of agree with you but if by providing by adding additional powers to our language-based programming we would be providing equity across programming program pro-gramming found within the florida public schools and your answer was that all the other sub-separate classes have two

and they have one the other that's an equitable the other strands so there are language-based trans classrooms and other school buildings besides sylvia yep and they all have one or two one correct that's basically what i agree with you so madam superintendent if this is based on what this gentleman just said and based on the fact that if we have other schools that don't have two why is

it that we don't have two in all schools all sub-separate rooms across the entire district well all sub-separate classrooms are not the same language-based classroom the needs were different and at the time they only had one pair assigned to them what we're seeing is the needs have increased and which has um you know which is why we're adding an additional professional i mean i don't

we can't just unilaterally say the need is the exact same in every single classroom the social-emotional classrooms dictated that we had two pairs in every room um our language base have had one with the increased need kids are coming in with a lot more needs and mr loesch has requested that we added a second power to the room and i think also as we noted earlier this is our our opportunity to really

push inclusion for these students um you know we want to be able to provide more opportunities for these kids for pushing and as well as as ms ponce noted this is based on need in looking at classroom structure across the district and you know for us to put out one model for all students we know that wouldn't be an individualized model looking at you know we have classrooms all over the district who some have

three three paraprofessionals looking at the need some have their typical classroom paraprofessionals plus one-to-ones as well so really we look at it as a more needs-based instead of just a typical kind of across-the-board format so the room the classrooms that mr lens is talking about at his school how many other classes are similar to that across the district across the district

from k to eight we have uh there's five over at green there's seven at sylvia and then there are another four at the middle school level um that we're really looking at students census wise excuse me price probably expect six at the middle school level uh so right there we have about 18. um i thought durfee does their model a little bit differently and looking at just a really more of a sub-separate classroom

to meet uh kids needs across core content areas and providing them that small group instruction um so you know as a whole we could say we have anywhere as maybe as high as like 28 yep so how many out of those 28 rooms how many have one power previously how many have more than one power i got a question right now at both green and silvery they have floaters to help cover with inclusion

and absences but as of right now that would be all like i just sorry as of right now that would be all just sylvia and green have one floater each one which is the nature of the question so if the premise is that in a situation as mr lentz described based on miss roderick's questioning that if we want to improve inclusion opportunities for those children we need almost the one almost two paris and every one

one floater the students shouldn't be in inclusion only when a float is available or when he can pull magic to figure out how to get another person in that's not a district-wide thing that we should be doing so my question is are all the other schools asking for additional powers that are going to make their language-based classrooms also have at least a minimum of two we've went back and

looked at most and we've added quite a few across the district i would have to double check each school's individual budget sheet to see where exactly we've had it all but we've added quite a bit of power capacity across the board throughout all programs um as we know that you know one of the other pieces that they noted was absence coverage is a becomes a huge deal within a lot of these classrooms

and that was one of the priorities as well so i i just i'm having a hard time with the with the answer so if the premise is that we're gonna give sylvia school almost one to one or two pairs in each of their rooms except for one so they're going to be like 90 or 80 except for three they'll have four floaters who can help cover absences the inclusion piece right so i'll have four

out of the seven so out of the seven classes he's gonna have two and four of the rooms is that what he said yeah i've currently have a schedule and as needed yes four out of the seven right so all right the other school is going to have that same equivalent uh we've added additional floaters over at green looking at three out of the five uh looking at the the middle school

level um you know as we would hope our students are maturing and really you know needing less support as time goes on that's the way the model should be um but i have to go back and actually look at their budget lines to see how many floaters if we added them to there yeah i think this is a valuable discussion but i also think it's a district discussion that if we're going

to say that we're going to have at least whatever four out of seven is more than 50 we should have that in all those type of classrooms it shouldn't be a principal has to feel like i gotta ask for this and then the other principal that might not know that this principal asked for that then is going to get it we had the same exact thing happen with the ell uh

paris in a foundational room i believe last year where it was said that at certain schools they count on certain schools they don't right from the floor this school committee said we have the money we're going to mandate one additional power for each of those rooms across the board so anybody's coming to us now with a foundational room and i might be off on the wedding but they're going to automatically get a power

because that's the district policy is that's what we do i just think that we're by doing it this way it's like this school might he might ask her somebody else might not but these those kids still deserve to get fully included just like everybody else and he should they're entitled to it yeah exactly so we i just don't see why we don't do this some of these things as a as an upper level uh administrative

function rather than have it be this gentleman has to come before us and get questioned i'm not questioning you i agree with what you said sir but this is the type of thing of why we need to tweak this process so that we know exactly what we have before us um i just don't i just don't like the way that that particular piece goes i do support this but i also support it across the

whole district and i'm gonna have to remember that in each of the other ones but i'd like to get a report or something from the superintendent saying what are we doing across all these type of classrooms because this same issue is going to happen with a different thing and to take it one step further to the middle school we talk about inclusion in the middle school do we still have the program where the kids only get

inclusion in math in english under the current situation i know we've added capacity up there um there's an additional middle uh teacher to cover history in english throughout i like there's something wrong with this thing i can't hear what you're saying no we we have we're able to prioritize support within history and science for our students at the middle school level um and looking to really meet those

needs as well because we have students who do have services across all four core contents okay so typical inclusion student we've had this discussion in the past has inclusion on their iep they get services by a special education teacher in english and math has that changed is that what you said no they get services in english and math because when we look at the core content areas typically

the skills they're using in english are the same as history and science i would expect to respectfully disagree with that a child that needs inclusion in my opinion if we're going to do inclusion right that has the need and they get a special education teacher in math and english they need it their disabilities don't go away in history in science so when we look at district initiatives as

we're talking about here this is what we should be spending extra money on adding teachers so that this happens across all grade levels similar to this gentleman for trying to get kids into inclusion we need to do it as a district we need to increase our inclusion inclusion teachers across the entire district including jeffrey high school because that same issue is going to happen

all across the board with that i yield uh thank you miss laravey thank you mr lens um just a question i'm going to kind of switch the focus to curriculum a second um but you said on priority three reestablishing a focus on stem could you just elaborate on that a little bit what you do now what you want to reestablish moving forward sure so we had the opportunity to have teachers come together

this summer as a as a stem community committee excuse me they looked at our current stem programming and resources and the current units of study that were already in place and in some instances they redesigned the units of study in other instances they just elevated them we then have been rolling out those units of study over the course of the school year and taking grade level meeting time to introduce

those units of study to the entire grade level talk about let the how the lessons will roll out talk about the resources that we have in place and also talk about the assessment system aligned with them we do have a stem coach this year and she's played a vital role in the rollout of these units of study as well and she's also supported teachers with not only her expertise in the content

but also supporting them with doing hands-on labs both in our stem lab and in the classrooms as well is it part of uh project lead the way at all project lead the way is a part of it yes yes okay i just recently learned the effectiveness of project lead the lead the way it just kind of caught my eye when you said reestablishing so i was a little thank you appreciate it i would i would

exchange reestablishing with like bringing more excitement around the study of stem right is it every age is it every grade i should say every grade yes thank you i yield you're welcome miss rodricks uh mr i just want to clarify something because i don't i'm having a hard time hearing you so i just want to make sure i understood correctly did you say that the same special ed teacher that the same special ed inclusion

teacher for ela is doing social studies and the same one for math is doing science no i was saying the skills across the core content areas in order to access those those areas are typically the same per student's iep so we wouldn't necessarily like if you looked at a student's iep you wouldn't necessarily see goals typically in the areas of history and science just because we know those are skills that

that span and cross content areas okay okay i yield mr again madam superintendent i just had a question based on the absence rate and you can get me this answer ask this answer all schools following the same attendance protocol with fidelity 100 100 they're supposed to i mean do you want me to say that every i i would expect that i know you don't even need to answer today i'm not trying to put you

on the screen you want me to so i've asked and we've talked about this before in public meetings so if this protocol is in place we have a policy that certain things are supposed to happen if it's students out and what happens it means a phone call it means this it means that there's a specific thing my question is is it being done with fidelity across all schools all attendance officers and

a hundred percent fidelity that's what i would that's what the question is i'm not looking for you to answer it now i'm not trying to put you on the spot the second question i have is i need to know the number of cras that have been filed across the entire district sorted by both school and by attendance officer not looking for that information now yep thank you i yield anything further

okay thank you first three for the panel next up we have tansy green laterno

um mr audet from tansy hi yeah good evening everyone i'm chris audette the principal at james tanzi elementary school and um just to give you a little background on on tansy we are one of the smaller elementary schools in fall river so we're a two unit school k to five so two classrooms at each grade level we do have special ed and english learners included in all classrooms our high needs population of students

many of our students fall into this category at 67.6 our mission and vision we're all about joyful learning creating a culture of positivity for our students and our students love school that's what being a teensy tiger is all about coming to school learning and having a joyful learning experience throughout the day um in terms of our big priorities um we we try um i sort of bucketed things in in terms of building

and strengthening our professional learning community as a staff as team tansy in terms of trying to personalize learning for all students that's a goal of ours to really look at our students as individuals and we're small enough that we can do that well um and strengthening community and family partnerships are sort of our three big bucket areas in terms of um what we try to do we

we do have a successful intervention program to support struggling students at tenzi but currently our capacity is is limited we have one intervention teacher and her responsibilities um are run the gamut across k to five all content areas so we're looking to add an additional position of another interventionist just to build our capacity with that model so we currently have students who

might need intervention in both english language arts as well as in mathematics and they can't always get it um as as quickly as i'd like them to get it um so in adding another interventionist we'll just build our capacity in that area so that is um the my big request my other request would be adding a community facilitator position just to help us um with community outreach um our attendance initiatives um

supporting social emotional learning and just academic outreach to families getting families to come to school for different events and meetings as needed so those are my two requests we are a small school but that will definitely help us move forward thank you for your time and i'm happy to answer your questions any questions from mr audet mr objects of all the questions it's going to be

the same question that i've asked everybody else is the one interventionist enough and is the halftime community facilitator enough yeah i think the one interventionist so yeah the interventionist doesn't work alone in isolation we have an i we have an intervention team um which consists of an isl um the isl model has been really effective at tnz so we want to keep that we also have para interventionists who

are part of that intervention team as well as our special educators our special educators service students during those intervention blocks as well so it's all hands on deck we make it work but another interventionist i think would meet our needs at this time okay um yeah at the halftime community facilitator i um we are a small school so we do share positions with other place places we currently share an l

teacher with sylvia we share elective teachers with watson um so yeah working across multiple campuses is part of our culture so we always make that work so i think that would meet our needs at this time okay i just always go back to the question of just because that's how we've done it doesn't mean that that's necessarily happening no i understand you have to continue yeah i appreciate that perspective um it is

something that's worked in the past so um no i'm just throwing it out there as something to consider and i just want to ask the question to make sure that people are getting enough of what they need you know your school best you know your students best so it is a new position so i think we'll be trying it on like a lot we have a very active pto we have

parent volunteers who do a lot of this this stuff so being able to bring someone on board i think will be a great opportunity okay i yield anything for uh miss pereira um thank you mr odat um obviously you've noticed clearly the huge increase in chronically absent children um so my first question would be why do you think that is right now is this all coveted related because i mean you went from

13 which is probably from what i've seen here one of the best in the district to a whopping 47 which we could say 48. it hurts it really does hurt and yeah i do attest a lot a lot of it to covet we do um a lot of proactive things at tnz to promote positive attendance and like i said kids our kids love school so our kids really do want to

come i do believe that um but we um we do a lot to like celebrate perfect attendance and um doing like here and on time shout outs for students um so we tried we didn't do a lot of those things during covid just the nature of the time but we've brought a lot of those traditions back and it is having an impact and we are getting our attendance back up there

we are typically around 95 percent every day yeah so i am i am confident that we're going to remedy it so the community uh facilitated position the part time that you're asking for you currently don't have one is that correct because that's correct we don't have one see it there okay so who is doing the initial reach out to parents with students who were you know let's say how many how many

days do you go without hearing from a student before yeah no we call students every day we're small enough that we're able to do that um so yeah that's uh my team and i make those calls daily um and reach out to families to find out why and that's um yeah that's so currently it's you're you're you yourself are making some of those phone calls myself lee yeah our office manager i'm the vice

principal school adjustment counselors the nurse helps us it's all hands on deck and in general how long is a student out before we go to the next level of service for that student more than a phone call let's say oh i at we with a a phone call we we make contact so we always make sure that we we know what's going on if a student's out even one day

um so you're saying every time you call parents answer well not everything we don't always get an answer but we try to make contact so after after three days that's the red flag for us we'd get like the attendance officer involved and we would do like a safety check okay thank you yeah that's what i was asking thank you so much anything further um mr aguiar so you had mentioned a couple times that

yeah school is small which yes sir i can read we know that the school is small the um when you look at the interventionists slash coach like it's one slash two i'm assuming that means one interventionist two coaches when i look at it if i'm looking at the equity across the whole school district yes if we approve this budget that has a second interventionist so that's two unit two interventionists do you have

how many units of each grade do you have at your school we're a two unit school so two units at each grade level so k to five yep so if a lot if i'm just speaking logically now if you have a two unit school with two interventionists and two coaches and a different school that has 600 students under that same theory should have double double students they should double so they should have four interventionists

and four coaches if you know logic speaks that's the part where i look at it's difficult with a small school and as i mentioned before we don't we're not approving the these line items but the this type of discussion i think is important to have because if we had a a school with a certain number i could go to the school adjustment council as the same so 281 you says you have two you have two

adjustment counselors yes you're going to have two next year that's our intent yes they're staying right nobody's cutting any no no yeah so you're at 140 to one correct that's a good case load yes in my opinion um that's probably where i think we should be across the district and stuff so at a one 140 to one school adjustment counselor two coaches two interventionists for the resources that we have in a

smaller school with lesser needs kevin's saying that just my opinion you don't have the same needs as another school in another part of the district if i say yes this is what makes sense for your school to keep it going well and doing the right by the children in the school and providing those services i the way i look at it is i have to take that number and multiply it out when the schools get

bigger and the results need to you know be tougher when there's tougher kids so i'm not trying to pit you against somebody else i'm just trying to make the point that when we have a small school we have to there's other small schools that are going to have the same type of questions but it's it's really hard to for me to to look at this and say well why aren't we doing not to do less for

tansy but if we're used doing x amount for tansy we need to do the requisite amount or more for other schools that have greater needs would be my thing so i'm not looking to cut your position but i think we as an administration need to justify why we're adding we should be adding more um to that the last point is every single person that's coming up here keeps on saying that the

chronically absentee was 47 48 50.

for the life of me i can't figure out why we allowed this to go in to this budget document because it's not truth in advertising if that's the case if there's facts and information that all of you have relative to its covet it's this that it's excused then we should be reporting that we shouldn't be putting out this stuff that's not accurate in my opinion what we're doing here is because that's the

way we always do it this is the way we always do the budget so we do the same thing well it's not truth in advertising right now because every single person said the same exact thing and i'm getting frustrated with it because it's not necessarily accurate you could be doing great work like we need the info to say my real number's not 47.

i have x amount of kids that did this i like just be truth in advertising and you weren't asked that i'm not criticizing the principles but we as an administration shouldn't have been asking you to report these numbers we did this already in the spring and everybody on this committee kept saying we got to do this different we have to be able to take the data from here and not there

you know it doesn't make sense but somebody asked a question about what who's calling and what with the when the kids are out are you following yes go following the protocols that are in the absolutely yes we do calls um we do do letters at different intervals um the only reason why i'm asking is it sounded like you knew what you were talking about like you yep we were on it

can you just tell me so just refresh my memory of what that means so the protocol for this district is what happens when the kids out yeah no we we do have an attendance team that meets daily um and we look at the students who are out we make calls daily we have letters the district provides letters that we can customize and use um and and send out at different intervals as an intervention

we have meetings we call families in and have meetings about attendance at different intervals we also partner with the truancy officer um who's a great resource um in making home visits and and things of the sort um i know during covid it was just a big priority to make sure that we have our eyes on kids like when the schools were closed um and that we were able to make contact with students

um so working together as a team we made those things let me ask you just a more targeted question so the first step is we've got to identify who's out on a given day do you have data and records every day of everybody that's out somebody called automated call went in you have that system in place of of somebody documented not just get a team together it's kevin's responsibility to call these kids that

go out and then if that doesn't happen this person like you have that system and is that the district system that's helping to align how you handle that we do have the auto the automated calls that go out um but we make additional calls um to if we don't hear from the protocol is that families let us know if children are going to be out if we don't hear from families

we make a point to call them to find out yeah i was just trying to see like if you knew exactly what the i don't have the district policy in front of me but i know it was very detailed like this this this this so that's what i was asking so with that i yield thank you very much sir anything further um yes just quickly uh it's kind of for you madam superintendent is

this situation would the new student information systems be uh helping with this situation with the the chronic absenteeism is don't they have a better way to tackle this is it wasn't that presented to us in some way i think that um the system will produce reports for us but we have to have internal systems in place to account for our students who are absent we do have some systems in place and

i'll get you that information i just want to clarify these numbers whether they're covert related or not they get reported the the absentee rate gets reported the chronic absentee rate gets calculated and reported certainly what we need to own our data we need to look at it and we need to disaggregate and pull it apart and say yes and we've had these conversations with principals if the data if

for instance if it says they are at 47 chronic absenteeism they should be able to look at that data and say of those forty seven percent within the school in their teens as they're looking at it oh we know that these students are were that was covert related we know that their uh average is going to improve because this is the mid-year average and our attendance has gotten much better as the

year has progressed but we do need to have a handle on the number we need to look at those numbers good bad and ugly and we need to set goals to reduce those numbers and make sure we put systems in place to reduce those numbers because at the end of the day when we get to the end of the year if we haven't used those numbers to make adjustments then we're going to have

high chronic absenteeism numbers at the end of the year so i i totally understand that internally we need to pull it apart but those are those are real numbers at the mid-year obviously those numbers will shift we're not going to deny that quote we didn't have an impact and i think that's statewide that's not only us but the fact of the matter is so if our numbers are our decree our attendance is increasing now

let's look at our numbers and let how are we going to reduce those numbers more significantly from between now and the end of the year so those projected are those real those those the real numbers that were that were that are projected or so they're real absolutely it was it was at that that's the percentage time students tracking toward chronic absenteeism but then schools identify those students so some students

have been asked nine times if they're not absent for the rest of the year or they don't get to that magic you know 18 then they're not chronically absent so we'll see as the year goes on you'll see that percentage of students dropping because students are falling off track for chronic absenteeism but that was as at half year

yeah so it's projected is all i'm saying so in truth in when i'm looking at this or the public looks at it they're not going to see that as projected it doesn't say projected chronically absent rate it says chronically absent rate 47 percent so that says

correct and all i'm looking for is i'm sure you're doing it but we just don't get it like i i can't tell you i didn't read it it just doesn't come in so we should be looking at it to say any principal can tell me who had the 10 days already so they're already locked in that they're going to be targeted as chronically absent for the for the year no matter what happens

right if they've missed or 18 whatever the number comes out to right so there's students that are already at that number yes that's all i'm suggesting is that we don't have that perspective on this is what it is but we're getting a document that keeps saying we've got 50 chronically absent here 48 it's not necessarily telling the whole picture that's this is in support of the principles this isn't to go against the

principles but at some point we need to be we as the school committee can't make decisions unless we get the real data with the real information and that's that's the only point i want to make i yield anything further i'm sorry just just to clarify you know we've talked with everybody about what these numbers are and yes we need to have clarification about what that is but i think we also have to pay

attention to what that absentee rate looks like for the last school year because we only had our kids in half the time so they were physically present only half of the time so when we're thinking about absenteeism that plays a role we also know that our kindergarten numbers were a lot lower and as the parent of a kindergarten kid kindergarteners are kind of a disaster when it comes to getting sick right so

all of those things play into what those numbers look like so it's hard to compare what the the year end for the last school year was with the what this school year looks like because we're not comparing apples to apples that just it looks very different it will look very different anyway because we we had attendance virtually present or you know kids that were in hybrid mood or kids that were fully um in person so

that data from last year is going to be very hard to have any sort of um good comparison um to this year but i agree we use the year before or like we have to go to the last year that we had an actual um typical year and even that to do that to exactly it changes all the time i i i mean i understand what mr aguirre is

trying to get at i think that there are some students that we already know already chronic and that's what he's saying so if the students already reached that number what is that percentage but you know it's not um we don't know that that's the data that you we will get that data also but we also this is how we track our chronic absenteeism and this is how we project where we're going to be by year's end

and i agree with miss agner just for that that point i agree with him it's just so that has to be clear but we also can't compare the two which is the other point that i'm meeting so when people are looking at that they're not saying last school year we only had an absentee rate of 13 and oh my gosh what is happening now because now we have 47 but you can't

compare because you're not looking at the same same data points they're very very different so with that i yield uh mr aggia so along with that miss madam superintendent if we could get so a bunch of students in a school once they get to that number so we have the district protocols to be sure they're being followed along with that what happens to kevin aguiazz out halfway through the end i'm already out 18 days

what trigger what services what something gets triggered to say this child needs further intervention documented without having them fall through the cracks because everybody has hundreds of people so i'm not looking for an answer now but i think that's very valid to say what are we going to do it's one thing to just report the numbers and say it it's a second thing to do how are we going to change it how

we're going to make it better we've done initiatives here we've gone bought cars to take to the house and have people picked up we need data on that like what are we doing that is for that child that's out for that many days and how do you make that up at certain point you know so i think we need systems in place to say if this reaches i ask you

for the cra numbers not because i want to take everybody to court the fact of the matter is is that cra's are meant to get services for children services for families get them into the court system if need be get them into the counseling that's needed a trigger so this should happen so we're going to get the data i'll predict that we're going to get the data the data is

going to indicate that we've got a whole slew of kids that have been out more than the days that we should have and the other data that i asked for about the cras is gonna you're gonna report to us i'll predict that we haven't filed a requisite amount of cras to get these children in court just a prediction i yield thank you thank you mr odette um dunn from green good evening everyone thank you for

having me here today it's my first year as the proud principal at green elementary school i am not new to fall river this is my 17th year in the district i was an ela teacher at durfee high school for many years um and then i came to cass middle school for one year as an ela teacher and then i went to fonsica um right as the turnaround efforts began five years ago

so i have experience as the redesign coach and i left fonseca as the vice principal so i am about to advocate for our 680 scholars at green elementary school our school is currently in year turn uh year three of a turnaround we're currently designated in need of focused targeted support for me stepping into this role is about putting structures into place right now i believe i'm the seventh principal

possibly in the last 10 years at green elementary school so we need to move our school forward so right now we're really working on building our school community and our capacity of our staff to accelerate the learning for all of our students in a safe supportive learning environment particularly our data shows that our english language learners and our special ed students data is pretty

static and is not moving so we really just need to put things into place of that accelerated progress that is really needed and building the capacity of our staff will help move the data for those subgroups so currently we have an instructional model which includes four units at each grade level from kindergarten through grade five we have two pre-k classrooms one is a full-day integrated classroom

and the other pre-k classroom is split into two half-day programs one is an integrated class and the other is a substantially separate class we have a strand of language-based classrooms currently five kindergarten through grade five as well as a foundational strand for our multi-language learners that's also currently at four classrooms and so when i get into talking about the different

positions that we need i'm gonna talk specifically about those two populations of our kids so first we are going to convert we currently have a k1 foundational classroom we're going to split that into two specific classrooms a kindergarten foundational class and a first grade foundational class right now we're at like maximum i believe we have 28 students in that classroom so we in order to best meet the needs of the

kids we are proposing splitting that and having a kindergarten foundational class as well as a first grade foundational class likewise we have a we're up to a fourth grade foundational class right now in our strand so we're going to add a fifth grade foundational teacher in classroom as well in addition to that our language based classrooms we currently have two fifth grade language based classrooms but our

student census would not indicate that we would need a second fifth grade classroom next year so we're going to convert that position and that position will move to talbot middle school as a special ed teacher instead of having a language-based classroom at green we also are advocating for three teacher leader positions we currently have no teacher leaders at green elementary school and because of the data

set we are proposing that those teacher leaders are working with are substantially separate or our special ed teachers so we have a special ed teacher leader a multi-language learner special teacher leader and then also a math teacher leader we also would like to expand our stem program so we're proposing that we add a stem teacher for that will service k-2 students so we are a project lead the way school

and in doing that we'd like to um we'd like to have a stem teacher that services the two sets of students i believe that before i came to green the stem teacher that we the 70 the stem position that we currently had only serviced students in grades three to five and so the students in the lower grades did not have stem this year we changed that so that all students have stem but we

we really need to have two separate teachers i'd like to build the capacity of those two teachers also and add a um a strand of a professional learning community to support all of our teachers in rolling out the project lead the way curriculum and one more position that we teaching position we'd like to have a student support specialist teacher and that teacher would really be supporting the sel needs of our building

we currently have three school adjustment counselors but we have built a student support center that was one of the initiatives that i brought to green when i arrived last july and we really would like this this teacher we envision that this teacher is going to support the um the social skills of our students so they would also be doing social skills groups and lunch bunches and helping

with the implementation of different curriculum such as the zones of regulation because we're adding the two uh the two foundational classrooms we would also be adding two foundational para professional positions to support those classrooms so we would be looking to have a grade one foundational paraprofessional as well as a grade five foundational paraprofessional and much like my colleagues we are also going to

advocate for adding three paraprofessionals at the grade one level so that they would be able to better support the academics in those primary grades and also adding one special ed language floating paraprofessional position to help with those language-based classrooms and much like we have heard from all of the principals we are proposing adding a community facilitator so at green we

have a very large population i think it's 38 percent of first language learners we actually have more portuguese speaking students than um spanish-speaking students by very a very small margin but regardless more portuguese speaking and we really envision that this community facilitator would help with our attendance initiatives and family engagement as well as helping families obtain community resources that

they need so i'm really looking forward if if it is approved to having this this person come on board to help with these initiatives and i believe that concludes the positions that i'm looking for if you have any questions i'm happy to answer them any questions um miss pereira hi so i have a question regarding the community facilitator i'm glad you have it because i see you were one of the

schools that did it previously right yes i don't think i don't think most of us have a community yeah most of you and i'm it's looking to me that most of you are getting that position um going back to attendance i i definitely want everybody to all the principals to understand i'm not bringing up the increase to try to you know point fingers or what have you clearly comparing this year

with the last two years of craziness um doesn't always make sense but i went back and looked at the budget um from 2018 2019 2020 2021 um looking at differences in attendance and let's face it we can never really covet or not we can never really compare one year to the previous year because you're dealing with different families right you have a group of students leaving a new group of students coming

in which presents you with new families who may have their own individual barriers to getting their children to school whether it be medical behavioral transportation you know what have you so i want you to know the only reason i'm making that comparison is first of all the numbers are in front of me and second of all to look at it and say what we're doing is it the best we can do is it working

you know and i think the fact that i'm seeing most of you um get these community facilitators in is great because i think that's going to help engage families and figure out what those barriers are because we can you know fill our schools with the best educators in the world but if we don't have you know all of our students sitting in a chair um so my question is you said your facilitator is

is portuguese speaking or you're looking for someone portuguese speaking i mean in a perfect world that would be fantastic i i don't know that we can necessarily market ourselves that way we need we need to have a community facilitator we do have some we do have some um staff members that are portuguese speaking and spanish speaking which is fantastic and they do help we do use lionbridge

the translation service all the time i think it's a fantastic it's a fantastic resource for all of us but i mean in a perfect world yes it would be fantastic if our community facilitator could speak another language yes absolutely you actually answered my question by talking about linebridge okay because i was thinking to myself is there a way if there's a you know a community facilitator at you know tansy

school who speaks spanish but the one you know at green school speaks portuguese is there a way to allow you know for maybe help with um communicating with parents um but you answered that question with the language online service it's it's a great service it really is thank you you're welcome with that i yield mr again the uh madam superintendent can we get some i think the community facilitated position

has been at some schools can we get any data around how that's been successful and what it what it was what it wasn't the other thing is that i'm not sure what the job description reads for for the hours for such a position but i think we have an issue in this district that we only think the problems exist during the school day and we don't have wraparound services at night and when other things

are going on so we need to find some whether it's these positions or other positions to service after hours is my thing but i think we since we're going with it i would assume that you have the data that indicates these are very well received but i've never seen that yet the question on uh this for the five units of the language base that we talked about so are you going to be full

one per each of grade are you going to be so i think it really depends so um right currently we have a k1 language based classroom we have a two three language-based classroom we have a grade four language-based classroom and we have two fifth grade language-based classrooms so i think it really depends on the student census basically as to how those numbers might change the makeup of the classrooms for example

if we have a large population of grade two that we might have just a standalone grade two language based classroom next year i don't know what that's going to look like as we move forward it might be a first grade and a second grade language-based classroom but i'm sure michael can so in short looking at the projections for next year we've made sure that there's room for growth at each grade level

green had a major uh bubble at grade five so that's why we were able to really move that classroom on to another school but we do have room for growth at each grade level for start of next year i was asking about the paris oh well so like the addition of the para to the so i we have a a paraflope one para position so this is um an additional paraflow position so that they can help

along with um in the language-based classroom yes so yeah so you'll have five rooms with seven pairs yes yes no yes we have we have five well no we're gonna have four sorry i'm sorry we're gonna have four next four rooms with seven pairs four with six looks like a budget four with six right you see with uh you know if we need more we need more like so she's got four rooms with six powers

the other guy had seven rooms with whatever that was it wasn't the same percentage basically so it sounds to me like you're going to need if we if we're doing what everybody's saying is the rationale you need more powers for those rooms which i'm sure you'll take whatever extras we give you but i i just think that's one of the issues that we definitely have to keep looking at so in

comparison looking at both schools it's one flow para per every two two classrooms which is consistent among both there's four over at sylvia for seven classrooms and two over at green for four classrooms right and hopefully they don't need to go into inclusion at the same time

let's hope that they don't need that inclusion support yep and then with collaborating with the principals that's what we looked at was the level of requested need yeah no i hear you i hear what you're saying you can only go by what they request i think it's valid to push you on that because and quite frankly if they the need is going to exist it's not if we only got

half the rooms covered and all of the children need to have a service i know you can do scheduling and the like but let's call it like it is with let's hope that they don't all need that service at the same time because they can't provide it with only half the people that's my only point and i if we would give you more we have plenty of money we have we need so when i'm

saying this it's with the knowledge that we we have the money to do some of these initiatives that's all i'm not trying to give you a hard time mr i just want to make the point as we're trying to figure out these classes we're seeing these documents we've got to get to like okay what is it that's all the grade one positions that you it looks like you have three so i assume

you have two grade one paras i have i have one so i have four first grade classrooms i have a k1 foundational classroom that has a paraprofessional i have a k1 language based classroom that has a paraprofessional so i have three first grade class i have four first regular first grade classrooms and i have one paraprofessional that floats around all four classrooms currently right so you don't have five

units of one i have four units and then you have five units of two i have four units of two i have a i have a um foundational classroom at grade two and i have a two three language based classroom yeah i was just basing it on the when you had said that you're a five unit school that's in my mind that's what i was i was reading it as

five of these five of these five of these that's it's it's it's four regular classrooms and then those outliers the um foundational classroom is one strand and the language-based classroom is the other and they all have the same support they all have extra powers in each of those the l classroom in the foundational classroom yes when we look at the other schools said they were going to have one

which i think is a district initiative to provide each grade one classroom with a full-time power yes you you meet that is what you're saying yes and all schools meet that well that's what we're that's what we're proposing to meet that so everyone's going to be equal each grade one class will have the you know i think that's that's totally fine the um the numbers on the counselor and you know you have a high

needs school and when i look at the student support specialist teacher position some of the not some i mean most of the duties that are in there are related to mental health type of support so if i had my opinion would be to make that an extra school adjustment counselor that has those skills to lower your caseload um but provide the services such as social skills groups uh lunch bunches zones of regulation

support those type of things as i'm reading that i'm saying to myself why is this particular thing called a teacher because and sometimes teachers have those skills i'm not suggesting otherwise but all of those the details of the position will support sel needs is to me pointing to a professional in the counseling field it's just my opinion i think you need it you need a position but i'm not sure why

it would have to be a teacher versus an extra council so our school adjustment council well this teacher would not be um supporting grid c services for um our iep students but our school adjustment counselors do i don't think that we have the need i think that mrs cobb was saying that she had like 40 students on grid c i think we have about 30 perhaps spread among three school adjustment counselors

currently of course we don't know what next year will look like but that's i think that was the rationale for having a teacher versus an actual school adjustment counselor because they're not providing those grid c services but they're helping with the sal needs of the building yeah i guess um my belief is that school adjustment counselors jobs job descriptions is not just the service to see grid services on an iep i

guess that's just a different opinion of what i think that school adjustment counselors should be doing versus what they may be only doing on the secret services i find the skill set of a mental health counselor should be doing all of the things that you have listed here and we need to provide the opportunities for them to do those things but everything that you're saying other than the piece of the

the secret services shouldn't have any bearing in my opinion on what these kids need and if that you lower the caseloads lower then if i'm a counselor and i had only 20 students that have secret services doesn't mean my job ends i just you know obviously you know that but the secret services shouldn't come into the equation when we're looking at sel needs for the school there is seo needs

they should be done by a mental health professional whenever possible i don't see the need for it to be a teacher sometimes in situations like this there's an identified person like i know i have you know johnny jones that is a very good teacher that can do some of these things he can do like almost like an iss type of position as i'm reading just reading through this that's kind of what i

maybe happen i don't know i don't i'm not privy to that information but everything that you wrote here is basically a school adjustment counselor in my mind thank you for the presentation who that i yield mr agyar if i can just clarify we have summon student support specialists in the district and i think that the intent was to have um they're they're they would function more like a therapeutic mentor type of thing

where they would push into classrooms or do small groups offer support not to the level of a school adjustment counselor but do that in between level of support in classrooms yeah i would say if that's the case she probably will need more than one but um that's what the intent of the student support specialist uh position was for to do some of that mid-level work and do we have those in

other schools in the elementary schools we well in elementary no we do not and principal dunn is requesting that but we currently have some uh successful models of student support specialists at the high school yeah maybe may i request some data on that because i think i would like to see whether that's the case or not i do think it's a valid position if it's utilized properly but

what you're explaining is things also that could be done by somebody that's not going to require as much uh of a salary a therapeutic mentor type person i think we need those in the district they don't go for 70 some grand whatever's in here so when we're looking at a finite amount of money going forward some of those positions should be done by folks like that so we get two

we get three we get more bang for our buck rather than less so i'm not saying i'm opposed to this the other reason why i think we should all the principals should watch these meetings they should listen i'm assuming that you all talk about what your positions are if the green school needs a student support specialist to do the following things and they're listed and we as a school feel like that's an important piece

then every school should have one if it's something that we we want to do and have an initiative or we say everyone should need a therapeutic mentor whatever it is but the point i'm making is these are the things that everybody should get if they don't happen to talk in the past i've asked if people see this shot and it was like hidden uh you know if one school asked for something the

other school should know yeah that makes sense green school is asking for that makes all sense in the world i want one of those too or like you know that's where i think some of the the problem has to come in but i support the need of this i would just like to weigh in on like especially even with our district counselors and the like to say what is the position that we're

looking for and if we can't find people what do we do uh so i do think it's valid but i did have a note here do we have these in all schools eight grade eight and under because i thought it was a high school position and what do they do at the high school so there's a job description um i'd like to see the job description what you're describing here isn't gonna

fit in that job description probably it's probably gonna have to be tweaked towards an elementary position like i said before this sounds like a a temporary placement an iss type of position try to get the kids to you know if they're dysregulated to get them regulated back in the class that's what this sounds like um i just think we we if we're going to do it let's do it across all schools if

it's that good of an idea let's do it in all schools with that i yield let me think further i have a question about that so i'm going to go kind of wild and go rogue here so i would argue that it's probably gonna be a whole lot easier to fill a position like that than it is to fill a sac position because right now we already talked about that there's a shortage of sex acros there's

a shortage of mental health counselors period across the state so if we're looking at those positions the word teacher is throwing me off um but that could just be me because i'm looking at that almost as like in the in-home therapy world there's a mental health clinician and then there's a bachelor's level person that helps support what the mental health clinician is doing and it sounds to me that's what

you're asking for so am i yeah i i mean that's that is what we're asking for that is what we're asking for yeah the current job description for the student support specialist uh requires them to have a teaching license that's why okay but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have the mental health or the social emotional right experience to be able to do that piece they're not providing therapy they're

working with small group they're pushing into classrooms to support um class and students they're not their role is not to provide um therapy right no i'm not thinking of a therapist so a therapist would have to be a master's level position right that's a totally different ball game but i'm thinking of this more along the lines of like a bachelor's of social work person or somebody with a bachelor's in psychology

that has that when you're thinking therapeutic mentor i'm thinking like one step above that that kind of takes on that role of being able to not necessarily like iss issues but we're talking a proactive approach absolutely yeah we're not talking iss right and so i'm thinking more of this is the person that's going to go in and facilitate your lunch bunches that acts almost as the second chair to your sac

that's right and so my my vision um for this position is that they are in service you know with the socks so they're working as a team yep right so when i look at that my my big wild idea goes along with what mr aggar said that makes sense for all of the schools to have them because if we're talking about and i know we're not making that decision tonight but if we're talking

about how there's such a need for support for our kids and we have such a hard time filling sac positions then maybe that's the route that we need to go except that role just has to be very clearly defined for the elementary and middle school levels because it's going to look different than it does at the high school level and i think miss costa has this is something she's passionate about that

she's had many conversations with me about is having that in-between uh level of service and care for students i'm right there with you and with that i yield thank you okay mr chairman mr mr so based on the conversation i think it's with exploring the look of a position called student support specialist and not calling it a teacher because i think it you could create something here that is very valid

across all of the schools so i think you use this because that's currently kind of what it is that we use and i understand that but if we're looking at it to be more specific to what ms costa has obviously recommended to and i haven't spoken to miscosta about this but based on what the superintendent just said this is a position that elite sac would really like to have i think her and her team

should be looking at it and say what what would a job description for a student support specialist look like what's the salary range where we could get the person and not have to pigeonhole ourselves to be a teacher so i think that's something that we definitely could look at going forward when i talked about the iss position there is a need in our district for students that act up

and sometimes we need them to go to a place rather than suspend them out of school so whether we put our heads in the sand and say that we don't need an iss across the district i would ask people to be realistic we have students that get dysregulated make poor choices and they need a consequence i think that's part of the problem is that we don't have that going on across

all of the schools so when you say social skills groups lunch punches zones of regulation support and the like i read that as students making a poor choice he acted up he acted out he did something else they need to go to a place where they can get regulated or face a consequence and then get regulated there is a place for that across the district so when we're looking at positions like this

running a school you need a place for a student that is acted up made a poor choice so that they can be removed from the classroom whether it's temporarily or not but we need to start addressing these behaviors in solid ways documented so when i mentioned iss i'm not necessarily only talking about this position there is a need for such a type of position to be able to issue some consequences because from what i hear

in a lot of places we're not issuing the proper consequence so that's food for a whole other discussion but i would implore the superintendent to work with ms costa and come up with something that meets this student support type of position across the district with that i yield okay um next letourneau mr simpson hey thanks for joining us good evening my my name is sean simpson uh and i'm honored to be the principal

of the alfred s laterno elementary school on behalf of my staff school site council and parent-teacher organization i would like to thank the central office team for supporting our school in this year's budget process i would like to thank my school leadership team the instructional leadership team and my formal and informal principal mentors your support is appreciated i would like to thank the school

committee for all of your support and want to welcome new members and of course i want to thank the laterno student and parent community together we can and we will this is my second year as principal of laterno prior to this i spent the majority of my career in chelsea massachusetts as an ell or ml teacher an ml director and then principal i have two young children and an amazing wife who would love attending the

laterno athletic events our enrollment as of today is 634 students we are a four cohort school from grades k through 5.

we are proud to house the foundational english learner program for grades k-5 we currently have 242 mll students which is roughly 38 of our population this year we were proud to welcome a third pre-k classroom in two new step-up classrooms for grades two through five with these new classes we have welcomed three new teachers six new paraprofessionals and a bcba board certified behavior analyst

this year for context we shifted from an academic dean and added an ela and math department head to support content instruction we are also in the process of hiring a third school adjustment counselor to strengthen our social emotional support and family partnerships lieterno currently has extended learning time which provides an additional one hour per day that is funded by a 21st century grant in fall river public

schools letourneau is enrolled in the mtss multi-tiered systems of support inclusive practice academy we are excited to leverage this academy to improve our capacity to universally design instruction and improve our tiered systems of support for social emotional learning behavior and academics i wanted to share with the committee and my colleagues in the city of fall river the joy i felt this morning during arrival

to see our students smiles as they came in the building it was a huge lift today just wanted to note that it was an emotional experience i was not prepared for but felt very grateful to to experience this budget year we are requesting uh paraprofessional supports for grade one pre-k and for our step up program as my colleagues have already stated power professionals are an essential

part of our schools including laterno our power support students one-to-one and small groups also in tier one are whole group instruction the powers not only support instruction they support and reinforce behavior and social emotional learning so i'd like to connect uh adding paris to the support of mental health and social emotional learning with these uh three sorry we're requesting three first

grade paras so that we would have one for each classroom we have a four cohort school we currently have one paraprofessional we're requesting one para for a our step up program that would float between our two classrooms this would allow us to have uh flexible supports as previous colleagues had stated for their their own subset for programs and then one pre-k paraprofessional so each of our power

each pre-k classroom would have two at this time i'm happy to answer any questions about these position requests anything for the turnout thank you for the presentation the um when i look at the first grade paris so you had the four unit school and you said these will support students in the um one-to-one support do you not have any hit current is that so we have one in um with our four

cohorts one is a foundational classroom and we have a foundational para in that room so we're hoping to add three more so that each of our first grade classrooms would have a paraprofessional okay so is that the same as all the other ones my am i so in all the other schools that if they had in one of their units be a foundational class did they not get a actual one yes

so the foundational classrooms have a para right so in other schools that have a a foundational classroom as part of their units so before unit school he's saying one is a foundational class so one of his four units if another school has five units one of which is a foundational class are they still only having one every every uh first grade classroom will have a full-time para that's our goal

regardless of whether i mean the foundation if he already has one foundational class with a pair in there and he's a four unit school then that means he needs three others for his yeah yeah so the reason why i'm asking that is there's a rationale for why we put why we suggested rightfully so educationally that a foundation room needs a power in it separate from that we are now making a

determination that all first grade classrooms deserve a power right what i'm suggesting is when you have a one of your four be a foundational he needs an extra power because that that classroom of 15 how many kids in your foundational grade one uh 27 what 27 27 and can you explain what a foundational uh classroom means yeah this is a classroom that's designed for new arrivals so students that have

english language proficiency of one or two in the wida scale or or low threes so students that are multilingual learners that um are learning english very similar in their language is it safe to say they're very needy and they have a lot of needs so the reason why i'm asking that is so you have one grade with 27 of those children foundational classroom has one power in your other classrooms i bet you don't

have 27 or what are the other three grades grade ones um they are not not as high as 27. right so we have a a foundational room with 27 and one power we have a regular class or three regular classes with let's say 22 23.

they're going to be 22 to 1 but you go a teacher in a par in a foundational room with 27 to 1 with tremendous amount of knees in comparison to the other ones that's the reason why i'm asking the question and i believe that if we're gonna say all grade ones need it then you need two in the foundational room or whatever other principles have the same because there's no comparison to the needs in

those two classrooms what you just uh suggested in my opinion you did mention a bcba or a cluster coordinator yeah a bcba yeah so madam superintendent on the mat the front sheets uh of each of the that's not listed here so unless it's listed as like a department head or something else but i do think it's important for those positions but if we list them at least we know that's another administrative support at

least it's supposed to be an administrative support for the needy strands in your building so i'm not sure where that fits in if do you have three department heads um one of them is the bcba so we have two department heads and one bcba just not listed as such um yeah yeah so like when you said vcb i'm i'm not seeing it here uh i always thought those positions were meant to be

created in the likeness of a vice principle so they didn't have to be a bcba per say they could have been a vice principal um they would have i guess been they must have the credential to do the evaluations i would assume because that was part of the requirement i'm assuming this particular um vcba does not evaluate in our school i don't know so i thought that was part of the job

description book for our autism uh programs we have strategically put bcba's tied to them due to the service needs per student service delivery grid in their ieps as part of the preparation for a bcba they don't typically go through the evaluation process we actually have the majority of them going through it now to learn the process so they can effectively evaluate at a minimum all the paras that support

these programs but the majority of them don't have teaching backgrounds so that's not a connected piece to it the cluster coordinator position does have the evaluative piece for programs so this is not a cluster coordinator then no it's not a bcba so two separate right no i just asked if it was that's why i'm trying to figure out what the position is this is not a no it's a bbc this is a

like an autism special what used to be the autism specialist that got converted correct is that that's what i'm saying so the um just truth in whatever we can do to clarify i do think the point of the needs of the children in those foundation classrooms is tremendous so i think that's something food for thought and if we are going to add some things i think that we need to do it and

and you had a paris step up one would float between our step-up rooms that is correct how many how many of them are now how many rooms and how many we have two rooms each have two paras within them so the ask is for another power that could float between the only two classrooms correct so you have two in each plus one floater between the two so you have five to correct to rotate

and how many children are in there roughly um 12 in each class yeah all right thank you for your presentation i yield if i could just bring something up letourneau and morton are both elt schools if you recall for those members who were on the committee a few years ago we eliminated elt at the three schools that had 90 minutes 90 more minutes of instruction daily and on the committee at that time opted to wait

for letourneau and it was a different grant for later morton's grant to expire so that they wouldn't cut it midstream that is going to go before the committee next at next week because we're going to have to make some decisions i think the intention of the committee was that we were going to build equity into all schools by providing extra time we've negotiated an additional 15 minutes of time for every single school

um and the intention was that um the laterno and um morton that would be eliminated also i don't know uh the committee will have to to vote on whether to have them reapply or whether to let um to to also to eliminate now that their um grants are at the end that'll come up the next meeting got mr aggie just on that issue based on what you had mentioned i i do recall that that

when the grant runs out the grant runs out and we were going to do it across the district so exactly i would say that if that was the case and unless you're proposing otherwise i wouldn't even know why we'd need to bring it up uh well you know just speaking as one member like we made that decision it was a tough decision to get rid of it across the district but in them

you said it quite well it was for equity across the district we were going to negotiate additional time across all the schools so i just don't understand why we would even start to determine again where we have you know winners and loses or so my feeling is is we we made the decision just let it let it be but that's i'm just giving you my opinion as one member of the committee thank you

it's just it's just because it's a new committee and we have to they have to plan for next year so it would be good for us to let staff know etc okay anything further oh miss larry good thank you thank you for your presentation tonight um just a question on your uh you mentioned in the belong a sense of belonging in partnership and just give me a little information on your responsive classroom strategies

that you speak of in your absolutely so um this foundation was brought into la torno by brian raposo a former principal and we thank him for that and it's been there for a while now and so i think for us as an rc school the the things that you i would hope that you would see when you come in you're going to see a really clear morning meeting every day that's going to welcome students

have students share out have students be greeted have a morning message you're going to have teachers using reinforcing language you're gonna you're gonna see hopefully logical consequences in the school this could be something that's in um in the classroom in a tier one or even a tier two or if a student needs to be outside of the classroom you see a closing circle at the end of the day

and the idea is that you know we're our goal is to be uniform where all of our teachers are using similar language and similar routines so that our students are pretty clear on the expectations and they're able to meet them you know minute example is that you know everyone in our building uses a chime to gain attention right so that's just a small like you know example of what you

would see as it relates to a responsive classroom i like it thank you well okay thank you guys next up watson and fonziga all right who's next

okay we'll start with uh miss hogue first from watson welcome thank you um first of all thank you inviting inviting me here to present about watson elementary school my name is celeste togg and i'm the proud principal at watson for the past few years i'd like to talk tonight quickly about our priorities this year the budget request to help us keep moving our work forward we're a two-unit school of about 245 students

this school year our academic focus has been on academic discourse and rigorous tasks to help our students complete any unfinished learning and that they have and to increase their academic achievement additionally we have strived as a school community to create an inclusive environment for all members to thrive with the specific focused on seo learning and outreach to our parents

we too have seen a positive uptick in attendance specifically over february with 94 percent overall attendance for the month of february which has been a drastic improvement so far this year we have seen positive results with regard to our targeted interventions in tier 2 and tier 3 instruction and our overall tier 1 core instruction those results have come in the form of recent a-net tests that

we've take intermittently throughout the year to keep moving the work forward we're only asking for a couple of positions the first position is an ela lead teacher with a stipend of six thousand dollars we believe that this lead teacher can help us by implementing our after-school programming that we've had up and running for the past few years in implementing literacy based family engagement activities

also like the other schools we are asking for a community facilitator we believe that this will help our outreach to families not only with attendance but also with strengthening that connection and helping to meet the needs of our families and getting resources to our families we are looking to request a cater to sel paraprofessional to work directly with our school adjustment counselor and in implementing in class

so keeping the students in class scl intervention so that their needs are met while still participating in academic learning and then there's just one conversion we do have an sel para in the building we're looking to specifically convert that to a grade three to five sel para again to work with the sac in implementing in-class sel interventions for the upper grades i'd be happy to answer any questions

that the committee has miss rodricks i'm just looking at um the request so there's only a halftime community facilitator i'm just wondering why not a full-time one we'd love a full-time one okay yeah yep so so then i'm just wondering why not if you could use a full-time one and i'm just looking at you've got 90 almost 94 of your kids are high needs students again we've already talked

about the absentee rate but yours is higher so if i'm looking at that i would kind of i would lean towards it makes sense for me if there was more support i agree okay i guess i'm just uh mr again did you yield it oh i'm sorry it's fine i yield so it's okay it's okay no it's not a mistake mr aguiar so i think i guess it's not my place to

i'm not on the administrative side but if i had to speak for them i would assume that the reason why that's a half is because the enrollment's only 241 students even though they're high needs i don't think that it necessarily would support such a position being full time correct and right now i thought he i thought he cut you off but i'm not going to no no it wasn't it wasn't i said okay

it wasn't done no problem and right now we do have systems in place like the other principles talked about where um attendance calls are made daily by our student adjustment counselor and our student support coordinator if by 11 30 i sit down to cover the clerk's lunch and those any calls are missing that you can see on x2 i make the remainder of those calls so we do have very good systems in place

just like Tansey our nurse is hands on so our families are contacted and a lot of times i know somebody asked the question do the parents pick up sometimes we text them we have google voice there were good learnings that came out of kobit we have google voice and things like that so we have lots of ways to connect with families i would say that the personally the student support kuwait

coordinator in the school adjustment comp we should get rid of the student support coordinator title my own personal opinion and call it like it is so that we're all knowing what's happening because that's really the different roles but they're very similar roles i'm not looking for you to answer just that's just my opinion i think we've talked about this in the past and the way that we have defined those roles and

every summer we've sat down as a as an administrative team at school we've talked about where the overlap is because there is overlap but there's very specific differences the student support coordinator does not serve as students on ieps she handles very much community-based family based resources so it's two different roles um i'm i wouldn't be in favor of getting rid of the title yeah it sounds like it sounds

to me like that's exactly what's in the community facilitator description doing a lot of those things that that person might do might actually be a need for not having a half a community facilitator because with only 240 students and a student support coordinator there'd be an argument to be made for that the 0.5 is not needed but i'm not going to gonna gonna go down that road but the the request to convert a

position it just looks to me like you're requesting to add one instead of converting like i don't when it when i see a conversion i think of it as a position that's going away and another one's starting it this just looks like you're a resident it's more of a renaming to be honest there is an sel para on the budget sheet um so we're just looking to rename that rather than

just a general sel power or we looking to rename it scl para for grades three to five sir right but we have we don't need to we just talked about the fact that a power is a power so right as far as we're concerned that person doesn't need to be renamed because we don't have a position called three to five seo power we can assign the paris to whatever grade level we need them

so it makes it look like as if you're adding an additional one so like in essence i don't think you're adding you're adding the third one not the fourth one so with that i yield anything further for watson miss larabee yeah just a quick is it fair to say that the 0.5 are going to be shared the community facilitator between tanzi and most likely one position for both of these schools

will be shared by that one it'd be nice because we have similar systems in place with our united arts teachers that we share and we have a good relationship so okay i yield thank you okay thank you thank you miss hogue thank you last but not least miss lisey from fonsica thank you and good evening i want to first thank the committee for having me here to represent the fonseca elementary school for the sixth year

tonight's budget will be speaking in regards to some of the turnaround work and continuing the turnaround work that we've been doing over the last six years at fonsica as well as some of the new initiatives that we need to continue to look at the current data of what the need is of the fonsica students and see what we need to put in place one of the things that i would like to

focus on attendance has definitely been one of the areas of concern at the fonsica school since the beginning of the turnaround both for teachers as well as students we do have an active attendance team that meets weekly we do have a parent outreach worker a student support coordinator two school adjustment counselors an attendance officer an office paraprofessional who is bilingual our school nurse as well as

myself and the redesign coach the sit upon this team we do follow the district protocol but at the school level we do have different systems in place that is tiered based on the student need so when we're looking at students we are looking at it sort of tiered as students that have been habitually chronic prior to covid and those students that are hitting that chronic mark now due to the covet pandemic

and with those medical absences so one of our focused priority areas has been on the student attendance and so a lot of the supports that we've had built within the past few years at fonsica have been able to contribute to our ongoing progress with attendance and reducing the number of chronically absent students while increasing the daily attendance rate so i do as my fellow colleagues do anticipate that

when we do look at the numbers sometimes we're looking at numbers of students that are unexcused at the school level where at the state level they don't always look at the unexcus the excused absences so we do look at it at the school level to make sure that we are tiering the targets very specifically based on the student need other areas of priorities at fonsica have been to really build independent

learners for our students really getting them to speak speak about their thinking ask questions but also now turning it over into the written communication form and that's across all content areas social emotional as well as behavioral priorities have been just as important to fonsica as the academic needs of our students we've built a lot of supports in place along with the student support system and

support team at the fonseca elementary school with the real focus on being able to have students being able to identify communicate and regulate their regulate their emotions and needs in the tier one setting so over the last few years of turnaround we've put a lot of supports in place with professional development so now it's really taking it to the next level and supporting the students in the

individual classrooms with that i'll discuss some of the positions that i'll be requesting for this budget so for this budget we are looking at entering a year that will finally bring us to a full four unit building when i started the turnaround at fonseca it was five units of each grade level k to five we need we knew that we needed to have a pre-k program for our fonsica population of students so that was one

of the turnaround efforts so this upcoming school year we will now roll out our last bubble class in fifth grade which would allow us to convert one of those fifth grade mainstream classrooms to a fifth grade foundational english language learner sci teacher to support that full four unit model that means it would be three units k to five of mainstream classrooms with one of the

four units being a foundational english language learner classroom with the addition of that foundational classroom in grade five that would also include the request of a paraprofessional for that grade five classroom we have finally been able to have our four full day pre-ks fully enrolled and right now we have one full-time pre-k para for each of those classrooms and one that floats amongst the four

that has been very helpful with absences we are requesting three additional paraprofessionals so that would add a total that would have a total of two paraprofessionals and one teacher per pre-k classroom those pre-k classrooms are full-day classrooms with up to 20 students in each of those classrooms 15 of those seats are regular red five of those seats would be for students that receive academic special education

services and some of those other 15 students would receive maybe non-academic services physical therapy occupational therapy or speech in order to increase planning time for teachers which was something that has been an ongoing identified area is developing to help build the capacity of our teachers and to help really put an emphasis on the stem and hands-on teaching and learning that we really

have been working towards building at fonsica one of the things that we've noticed is that in the k-3 classrooms where we have not deep departmentalized those classrooms we're not necessarily seeing as much of an increase of the students being able to come up with that set of knowledge that they would need in third fourth and fifth grade to then be able to carry it over into the content area of science and

where they're being asked to apply some of those previous grade level skills or concepts to more complex strategies and as we're kind of experiencing this phenomena phenomenon sort of approach to learning science we want to make sure that we are providing all students k-3 with science classes that would also allow their classroom teacher to meet with the departmentalized teachers for additional

support around the content areas this person would also support all classroom teachers with hands-on support in looking at trying to get all learning to be able to be hands-on learning for our students because we know that students when they are able to work kinesthetically as well as auditory and have things provided to them in a multiple multitude of ways that they are um their needs are best met

so this would be an addition uh i'm sorry a conversion of one grade five classroom teacher because right now we have five fifth grade classrooms so the second fifth grade mainstream classroom would convert to a one full-time full-time stem teacher for grades k to three in addition to that we are looking at increasing the levels of supports for our students that are in the rti process

right now in our school we have two ela interventionists and so we are looking at adding one additional math interventionist to meet the needs of those students that are currently within the lowest 25 percent that are not showing that same adequate progress as their peers at this time that concludes all of the uh requests for the budget for the 23 school year and i'm open to any questions from the committee

mr aguiar yeah you had said how many fifth grade classes do you currently have i have five fifth grade classes all of them are mainstream classrooms so there's no foundational students in fifth grade right now in fourth grade i have four fourth grade classes three of them are mainstream one of them is a foundational so as it has been since the beginning of the turnaround it's just taking that group

of students and rolling them up so it would be a true four-unit school three units of mainstream k-5 one unit of foundational k to five with four pre-k programs yeah just when you have two bullets that say you're gonna take the conversion of a fifth grade class teacher so in my mind i'm trying to figure that out of how if yeah so one of the one of them is and so

you're still going to end up with four units so you're still gonna have five i'll still have four units it's just one of the teachers would have to then instead of teaching let's say regular red mainstream special ed students or mainstream sci english language learners they would be responsible for the foundational english language learner strand right that's that's i think the part of why

i believe that that's not necessarily even something that we need to have in a budget because you have five teachers in fifth grade as the principal you're gonna just choose four of them to teach fifth grade one of which is a foundational class and you're gonna move another one so you in essence you're not having any teachers you're just asking them to do a different task is you're converting to a different

position though she's converting to a stem teacher which is different position specialist teacher and then the grade 5 foundational teacher has different qualifications than the grade 5 mainstream classroom teachers right so that's like for bumping purposes or like where who's going to fill that role if they don't have the credential i guess correct and so this only is asking for one additional

frea position and that's the math interventionist yeah i see that the one that you put up the four pre full day pre-case with the paris this is a district question are all the other uh pre-k classes gonna have that same yeah that's what we're doing with all the pre-k's they um a lot of most of them had only one para and we've been adding as they've we've added classes we've been adding two pairs to the pre-case

but she's going to have two plus i'll have two i'll have two children in the pre-k so i i currently have four pre-k paris i'm looking for an additional three so i have four pre-k classrooms it would be two paras in each pre-k so you have four now are you asking for three i have five pre-k paras and we have five now yep i'd say so it's you have more than one

yeah so when it bounces around currently so you're going to end up with the same that's just an equality question i think it's important to to put um that in perspective the i'd be curious when we see the data from about the attendance and all that because i think looking at that is gonna as i'm seeing your numbers i'd be curious to see all of the schools but very in particular your school based on

the history of being on the underperforming list and that's us to see because i think if i recall back there was positions and uh tasks plans whatever you want to call them for fonsica that were not necessarily being done in other places so as the years go on and we've tried these additional um interventions and positions and the like at some point we get to be like what was the result of that and i think that's

what i'm looking forward to seeing so with that i yield well anything further for fonzaker thank you miss i see thank you and i appreciate it um with that thank you i appreciate all this principles coming out to now and uh tonight and uh making their presentations i thought it went very well um with that i'll entertain a motion to adjourn oh i'm sorry i'm sorry mister uh any new business come for the committee

i missed one hearing none i'll entertain a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn second um i have a motion a second deb please call the role mr account yes mr bailey yes mr ahara yes ms larabee yes miss pereira yes miss rodricks yes mayor coogan yes

you