3.9.2022 Fall River School Committee

um i'd like to call this special meeting of the fall of the school committee together for wednesday march 9th uh roll call deb please mr aguero here mr bailey mr jahar here ms laravey here ms pereira here miss rodriguez 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

i do have it in front of me i'm sorry uh we have one from colin dyas of ray street in fall river good afternoon members of the school committee again i thank you for your time i am submitting this in case i do not arrive at the beginning of the meeting i am speaking today about the fy 23 budget first of all for the sake of public transparency when is the fy 23

budget and budget summary going to be posted online so citizens like me can see how taxpayer dollars are being spent again i will reiterate on my sentiments from the last meeting the 23 million dollar increase in chapter 70 funds is not bad for this district however it is coming at a major cost to the fall river taxpayers and it is it is this topic deserves more of conversation if if i were on the school committee i

would send a letter to the state delegation asking them to consider and research some sort of reform allowing our community to receive chapter 70 funds and in turn not bankrupt our cities this city already has a three million dollar deficit and with the additional two million dollar burden on the taxpayers to reimburse the chapter 70 funds this city now potentially has over a 5 million dollar

deficit for fy twenty three i am certain the administration will make up this deficit however it will come at the cost of the taxpayers the city is going to make up this deficit by raising property taxes all the way to two and a half percent they want to include the debt exclusion they are already trying to raise water and sewer rates by eight percent per cubic foot this is terrible for fall river families

i think the administration is not preparing for the future and i believe this budget session when the public sees all of the increases the administration is proposing the public will respond ferociously we need to unite as a city and respond with fierce opposition to the increases on multiple levels that just burden the taxpayers while we refuse to look elsewhere for revenues and cuts fall

river school committee please help the taxpayers thank you very much for your time respectfully submitted colin diaz tonight mr aguiar i think at the beginning of that i said that the budget's not out for the public is that is that an accurate statement the city budget no the budget no the school budget yes when the budget would be posted the school budget yes but when so we approved it as a draft that should

already be posted it has not been approved so the budget doesn't get released until you got until you officially take a vote to put it out to advertise so we'll put it out at the end of the month in march that's one that's when it gets put out because it'll get put out for 10 days or so after that the only thing that we we've put out today is the budget presentation and we

made that available online right but the presentation includes this that's posted that's what i'm saying like this whole thing is no it's not that no it's not just the presentation as possible we've we followed this process for the last several years since i've been here yep but if it's a public document and this the presentation from the superintendent for the budget was this along with the other thing this is a

public document this needs to be posted it'll get posted once we make it available to the public if we we take a vote to make it available to the public it is available but it's not it's not this has been the process that we've had in place unless you want to take a vote tonight if you want to take a vote tonight to make it available to the public i'll do it tomorrow it's

available to the public okay so mr chairman any documents that are given to us like a three-ring binder of the budget along with the uh package of stuff whether it's happened like this or not in the past just because it's been done wrong in the past if it's a public document anything that comes out like this is a public document should be eligible for the public how are they going to read it

to see we just had this debate about whether we what our role is but i think it's a valid point if if the public doesn't see all of these things then it's a public document so i guess my question and if somebody can weigh in what is so what is the purpose of making taking a vote on currently we have a schedule for march 23rd what is the purpose of taking a vote to

make the the public the budget available to the public it's been past practice it's what we've done this last several several years so that would it would mr again i have no issue being transparent with everybody but that has been in place and in practice for the last so many years i can tell you that i'm just saying it's a public document i i get it but it's not officially public until

a vote is taken by this by the committee mr again mr assad wants to weigh in on this if i might be able to help a little bit on this please uh the i think what uh kevin you're referring to is when the vote is taken for the budget to go out to the public it's advertised and it's put out there that's separate from the documents that are presented at a school

committee meeting uh that would be subject to the open meeting law in terms of they would be able to request a copy of it through a four-year request because all documents that are presented to the committee would be a public document however with respect to the budget itself uh there is a specific statutory scheme that we've been following for for as long as i've been here in terms of putting it out so what mr

aggie i was saying is correct if it's a document that's presented to the committee it is a public document the actual publication of that document and the obligation of the community to publish publicize that is a statutory scheme that's hap happens down the road and i'm just correct in that thank you okay thank you mr so in essence so in essence if the public wants to see this document they got to put a minute they

have to put in a freedom of information request to get it is that what basically oh that could contain the committee take a request of the committee if it's not provided to them that we could put a foia request in sure yeah i mean i would say just personally nobody's hiding and i'm not accusing miss almeida hiding anything or the superintendent of hiding anything but it's a public document we should put it

out on the public just as a good transparent move that would be my opinion thank you um the school's up tonight uh stone school doran community school and henry lloyd's school could you come could you guys please join us down at the table

thank you miss shaw from the stone day school you're up first am i supposed to do something yeah just tell us what your what your news going like and what you're looking for okay it's going great actually so for um glad to be here to be able to present to all of you my name is mary ellen shaw i am the principal of the proud principal of stone school this is my 11th year as

a principal at stone and for those of you who don't know who we are stone is a therapeutic day school and what that means is that our students come to us with a set of very specific needs for therapeutic supports so when they come to us we spend a lot of time learning about those therapeutic supports the things that have led them to the point where they real need those therapeutic supports and we

start providing those to them a lot of ways that we do that and i'd love to talk to anybody at lund about that at some time but uh for the purposes of today right now at stone we have 11 classrooms we started 11 years ago we started with three classrooms and we are now at 11. we have three elementary schools four middle schools four high schools and i have one

this year this is a new class that we started it's a mixed middle and high school and we call it our readiness class so this is the class that those students have worked really hard and are showing readiness to be moved to a less restrictive environment and that's our goal when our kids come to us do we have some students who will stay with us but we also try from the day they get

there we're talking to them about what their goals are and where they would like to go and if they want to move on actually this year already we have transitioned four students through the school year back to their less restrictive schools and if you don't mind me making a little prideful statement for a second one of my students that i had in kindergarten just went back to just went to durfee

two months ago and he is a senior and he is doing phenomenally well and we just couldn't be more proud of him um and he is one that we always felt would probably stay but came to me a couple of years ago and said mrs shaw i don't want to graduate from here i want to graduate from durfee what do i have to do and we made a list and he ticked him off and he

did it so that's what stone is just for those of you who don't know us um our enrollment right now on our roster are 87 children we have served 100 students so far this year that is a jump from last year was we were serving just under 90 students six of our students are fee-for-service students so they come from outside districts outside districts are looking for additional support need some help with

some of their students fortunately we've been able to build a reputation and people will call us and ask us if we will take their students in so we have six right now um i recently got some referrals but we're filling up honestly is is kind of where we are of our students eight percent of our students are ell students 98 of our students are currently on individualized education plans so they've come to us with an iep

two percent of our students are in the midst of initial testing that's a very unusual thing but i feel like i have to address it because it's a huge necessary service that we provide we've had quite a few very little guys come into the district this year some who went through some difficult times during the the pandemic and they didn't get to kindergarten the two that we have didn't get to kindergarten came into

school and just really struggled so we have taken them in and we are working with them to see what their real needs are and what the best next step is for them so that's what we're doing during this year we've been working on as always on sel this year has been a very different kind of year um we've had to really ramp up some of our skills i was just talking to mr

michonne and uh we've been presented with new things that we've never experienced before we're also working this year we got we're very blessed that um the district provides us with all the same curriculum that the other students get so we are really very hard at work learning all of the new curriculums because we are a pre-k to 12 school um we are always of course working on attendance our attendance i i do have to

point out right now we are at 55 percent it looks as if 55 of our students are chronically absent however when i pulled those numbers apart 29 of those students have only been chronically absent as a result of covid exposures we have a large population of students from group care and so those students have been out quite a bit this year so i just think it's important to point that out because

that it's not through no fault of their own that they've not been able to be in school um and in it you know i really hate that it's it's going to look like they're chronically absent um this year we are requesting um one to convert one instructional support liaison position into an ela interventionist and coast coach position one of the things about a school like stone is that the the social emotional

focus is so huge that it's difficult sometimes it's difficult all the time really for people for myself to get into classes and really build my teachers the way that i need to into really excellent ela teachers and really excellent math teachers and i think that we have had a couple of teachers who signed on as teacher leads and we've gotten a lot of traction from that so i feel that this

is the next most reasonable step so we're also asking to add one math interventionist and coach position we are also asking to open one more classroom which would bring us to 12 classrooms and that would be an elementary classroom so we would need a new teacher and a new para and the reason i want to open a new elementary classroom is that we are finding that our referrals are primarily

elementary students and what happens in an elementary classroom when you have students who already have difficulty with their social emotional progress is that when you add a new student into the room it kind of mixes everything up with the big stick and so if we had a classroom that we could treat as a classroom that could have different data recording systems that we use to get a

better picture of the student that we could spend more time really observing and and getting the best picture that we can of our kids then we feel that we would be able to service them a little bit better and then if they need to go back to their regular school which has happened a number of times this year then we haven't disrupted a class that's already set up so i've asked to

kind of pilot that for next year we'd also like to add a community facilitator um and that position i feel would be dedicated to really being out in the community with our students we are out in the community all the time i have called maria several times and said okay i just want to let you know i'm on my way to this student's house and it's you know eight o'clock at night because

this thing is happening and i feel like a dedicated person not that i will stop doing that because i won't but a dedicated person who could go to those houses get those students ready for school find out what the what the problems are that are keeping them out of school would be very beneficial and finally we are asking for we have um on our budget we have a 0.5 ell teacher

and we would like to make that a full-time position so i am happy to answer any questions that anybody has any questions for ms shaw i have a question sure mr rogers how many kids do we currently have placed in other settings for testing or are they all going to stone right now that's a good question it depends on what this the needs of the student are right our students come to us because

they have some sort of significant social emotional issue that is precluding their ability to be to be successful in a regular setting so a lot of times they will come to us we can kind of get a sense of what they need we can put things in place that can be carried back to the school and they'll go back to their other schools so we just have that kind of niche crew you

know right because i know in the past um individual schools have had like sylvia for example years ago we would send kids over there for like a 45 day placement determine what their needs were so i was just wondering what those numbers looked like um you're saying you have two percent of the kids in your placement right now but i'm wondering how many more are out there in in the district or all of our industry kids

going to stone for that kind of placement right now let me clarify when i said two percent that's only two percent who are there for initial testing right so we started our year just to give you kind of a a picture we started our year with 67 full-time students since that time we have in intake uh for want of a better word i i'm giving you just kind of rounded numbers

but we've intake so we've intake 30 something children and i would say 75 of those students have been in for evaluations so for 45 day evals so if they are in the district and they're struggling with social emotional needs and we're trying to get a really clear picture of what those needs are they would come together okay so that's what i was wondering about if you're still not using other

classrooms um and then my other question was really um not about what you're asking for but is there any update on a sack for stone oh gosh i know that's been i know that's been a heartbreaker we actually are interviewing somebody tomorrow we actually got a couple of uh of people in this week so we just for everybody who doesn't know we have hired three sacks one sack two sacks at the beginning of

the summer what we learned over the summer was that um people were kind of holding out to the very end and going to the highest bidder which you can blame them right so we lost two sacks for that and then we did have one sack start with us and i will say that you either love our work or it's just not for you you know and she just found it was very honest and i have

a lot of respect and appreciation for that it just wasn't for her and now trying to find somebody through the year has just been we have probably interviewed 30 people and everybody's taking you know other positions or whatever but we do have a hot lead that i'm really hoping will you know pan out i have a soft spot for that i have a soft spot for that population that's where i started my career oh

really well come visit us not at stone but in that realm with that population of you so that's that's kind of my wheelhouse so okay with that i yield uh miss larabee then mr egger i was sure hi mister thank you for all you do thank you appreciate it thank you for all you do too you're always helping us out well i just i just want to get a little more clarity and better understanding of

the readiness aspect could you just give me a little more information absolutely so we've always our policy has always been when a student says our students are very good about coming to us and saying okay look i think i'm done here i think i've done what i need to do and i'm ready to move on so what we've always done is i do a deep i call it my deep data dive with them so they know

it's really official and important and we go through everything that they've done we talk about their ups and their downs and how they're doing and then i sit with them and their parents and we talk about what's the best plan to move you forward the readiness room is a little bit different so any student in any room can come to me and say i'm ready to move on the readiness room we

have a certain group of students who need to move on but are so nervous about it that we put them in a special environment that slowly removes support so that they can start to see oh yeah i can do that by myself i don't need this i don't need that so that they can start to feel more success because if you've never experienced success you don't know what that feels like so we try to engineer

success for them so that they can start to feel like maybe they are ready okay now is this one class it's one it's one class with different age yes it's just two great it's eight in nine we have eight graders and ninth graders okay thank you for that explanation i yield mr so you had mentioned about uh a sack like that you had the sax come in what is the process for like orientation

if i was to get hired as a sackler what would happen when your school is because you're just talking about a different population right is there a much greater uh orientation support like to get them ready to i'm going to be really honest with you this was our first year with the sac so we worked with the person that we hired we worked i spent some time with her before she came but we also worked

with her i had her work with our psychologist so she got a picture of what that's like she tracked our behavior therapist we met with she participated in our wellness meetings which we have every week she participated in our team meetings so we tried to just gently bring her into all the aspects of the school i'm not sure if that was the best job that we could do so we are looking at you know what are

some better ways that we can bring them up to speed um but we thought my feeling was let's bring them in slowly and then they can help us determine what their role should be and um it like i said it just for this person it just didn't work out i thought you would mention there was three you you didn't hire three there's only one we hired two who just never stepped in

the building i see and it was one who came in and just you know yeah it is a tough uh it's different you know so i would say like whatever orientation you can do ahead of time might make sense so that when they come in they're ready for it uh you just the clarification you said that i think the thing says ela here but you said ell elf yes thank you for yes

that's that's you have a few ell students or we have um right now we have eight and we have eight of them and this um it's it's difficult to get an ell teacher to work with such a small population but they need it so very much yeah i mean it sounds like the needs and i'm not passing judgment on that at all but when you have a full person you're only going to have 10 students

and when you look at all the other schools like that i think that's why it was a half was right absolutely volume of numbers so it just looks a little bit when you make that position whole i know it's hard to hire a half you got to put the other half somewhere right but um i'm not sure that's going to be easy to easy to come up with you had mentioned about this classroom

with the testing and i've been on this committee for a while and i know you've been at that school for a while is there an increased use of 45-day testing in your building than in the past let's say going back 10 years ago till now i'm going to answer that in two ways i don't i don't feel i feel as if this year we're seeing a different population of kids who require testing right because

we have children who as i said their first graders i let me give you an example i have a kindergartner who should be a first grader lots of things happened in his life when the pandemic came he wasn't living with a fan with his um with his mother the person who took him in was so well intentioned but really wasn't sure what to do with him he had so much

trauma he was supposed to come and he did come in as a as a first grader very quickly it became obvious that he was not up to um that level that he had a lot of just even self-care needs things like that so this is a very rare kind of referral that we would get because we don't we didn't even know was he it turns out that he's a very bright

little boy will not need to be with us for very long at all but needed some basic toileting skills um basic social skills how to have a conversation with somebody that's a different kind of referral this year than we usually get usually the referrals that we get are students who are already in special ed are not being successful where they are and maybe we will do a referral i mean a

45 day to make sure that we are the appropriate place for them and sometimes they are and sometimes they're not so it's it's a hard yes or no question because we're seeing different referrals but i wouldn't say we're seeing more of the kind we usually get yeah so i thank you for that the what i'm asking though is about students that don't have a day school therapeutic day school iep it seems that

every meeting that we have subcommittee or anything and going back yes as you know it seems like there's many more children that do not have a therapeutic day school iep that are in your building all of our students except for our two that are being evaluated and the students that come to us from a self-contained classroom so the next step would be a therapeutic day school all of our students have a therapeutic

day school placement the only ones that don't are the ones that are there in a referral and they come from for the most part they come from self-contained classrooms social emotional classrooms and they're not being successful right so that so then in those cases why would they not just be a a team meeting to determine that they need a greater level of care and then they're actually on like that that

window of time is where i'm i'm just having a hard time with it and i know we've talked about it before but when you mentioned that this you're going to add a teacher for this i don't think it's what i'm talking about and what you're talking about two different types of things okay uh so i just think it's sweet um if those students are coming from a sub-separate environment they don't have

a day school iep it's done through a legal agreement there is generally a team meeting that proceeds that process but it's what we need to have in place to legally have them attend there and receive their services so that we're in compliance with the state and the day school application when you say legal agreement can you send that to us i never i've been asking that question for

several years now and that's the first i've heard that a legal agreement is how i guess that's to supersede the iep that's not a therapeutic day school iep so exactly you say like you got a legal agreement but never heard that before and i don't really know what that that's just so that we can justify that that person's not on that so that yep basically it allows us to place that student there through

their legal means for them to receive their services and typically like what we said that's paired with an evaluation to determine if they need that level of service we could definitely send a heavily redacted one because it contains a lot of personal student information but i'd be more than happy to yeah i don't know any personal information but i ask this question all the time so

sorry for being a pain but it doesn't no problem i just don't like the idea sometimes of that i've always heard that you needed to have that level of on your iep and i think that we've watered down the level of what's needed to get into that school into your school over the years so it's become sort of a different uh different type of situation and then when we tell people from outside this is

a true therapeutic day school and we're going to charge tuition right i'm not so sure that that all of the children meet that criteria that um i think we're bending it a little bit and putting more kids in that we could have so this is filling up and then we say now we've got no space because our specialty school is filled up and that's why i'm you know trying to

just figure it out but i appreciate the information the um the last question on the you said 29 was on covet uh yes when i look at the these uh charts that are in here and it's not only your school i think they're all the numbers are all over the place so i'm not sure when one gets uh you know the page that looks like uh the heading the numbers are not the same as on all

multiple pieces i do appreciate your info but at some point like it's on here at 68.2 chronically absent and partially 50.

right so no i said 50.

it was in the 50. it wasn't that number that's what i'm so part of it is i pulled the data today so i sat down today and i went through every single student data and i looked at which students were out primarily due to covert reasons i have a lot of kids like i said who were who were out because of repeated exposures so i pulled that data today that can look different from week to

week because you may last week so if we're at day you know this but if you're a day 180 18 days is 10 percent but if i'm at day 100 10 days is 10 right but if i go to 120 and i'm still at 10 days now i'm not at 10 does that make sense so the numbers switch yeah i'm of just of the belief that we got this last week and there's not a lot of

time in the middle so it might just be a timing thing of when you had to turn this stuff in way back but right it just is definitely confusing when we're looking at the numbers but exactly what we talked about yesterday if it's 29 it's 29 you document it you try your best with all of the uh right and to me that that's just important to know because um

and marie knows how i feel about this i feel very badly for kids who are going to be called chronically absent and it's was out of their control madam superintendent my last comment is just i said this i think every year too on the main sheet for the school we need to put the behavior therapists at the school on it because it makes it look like as if this district is not supporting

the needs of the children with only one school adjustment council which just happened last week so i think looking at it if i was a public the public and looked at this i'd say we have a therapeutic day school with one guidance counselor one adjustment counselor in essence we got five or six uh behavior therapists which are support and resources that we put in but it doesn't show up here and it just truth

and advertising i think we should put it without you thank you if i could just clarify the piece about the sheets were created during break which is why the numbers if somebody's reporting numbers in real time they're going to be different but we do have to give us some time to prepare all the documents and they were created during february vacation thank you okay anything further for stone

thanks marianne appreciate it next up on our list is dorman community school eric bradley uh good evening mr mayor madam superintendent members of the school committee my name is eric bradley i'm the principal at the doran school this is my seventh year leading the doran school thank you very much for the opportunity to talk with you a little bit this evening about our school and about our hopes for next school year

as of today we have 515 students at the door in school we are a pre-k to eight school uh we're a two unit school so we just have two classrooms or two home rooms per grade um so because of this we have sort of a broad span but we're small within each grade and so there's sort of a big and a small feeling to our school our two pre-k classrooms are full day

pre-k classrooms that are inclusion classrooms we are departmentalized in grades three through eight so our third and fourth graders are departmentalized in math and ela in fifth grade we add science to that mix and then when students move to the middle school we also add social studies so they have math ela science and social studies as departmentalized classes we do have four substantially separate

classrooms at doran these are social emotional behavioral classrooms that have up to 12 students in each classroom that is k through 8. we added a six through eight uh social emotional classroom this school year uh just a couple highlights that i wanted to share just since we last met we have a renewed focus on academic student discourse this year uh prior to the pandemic that was a heavy focus for

us at the door in school and as we all know we lost some of our discourse skills over the course of the pandemic as adults and kids so we've really been working hard with that over this past year to up our level of student-to-student discourse and engagement we've also put a renewed focus on our multi-tier systems of support model our mtss model at the doran school that also is a fully k-8 model that we practice

daily also just another real great highlight is that we've started the coaching for change program for our middle school students this year this was in place at the traditional middles over the last couple years you know henry lord of course that's been very successful so far we've doubled our enrollment this second semester and are getting some great results in terms of student engagement and participation

and that mirrors our 21st century after school program which is for students in first through fifth grades um and mostly i just like to say that we are i feel at the dorian school kind of finding our rhythm as we come out of some of the haze of this start of the school year we've been welcoming a lot of folks into the building over the last couple weeks for our i love literacy month over the

month of march here we're getting back to some of our vertical community building that's always been one of our strengths where we have our younger students mentor older students mentoring our youngers buddy rooms all those great things that you can do in a pre-k to eight and it's felt great over the last few weeks to get those things back in place much like michelle i definitely wanted

to acknowledge on our attendance challenges this year just to give a little bit of a context going back to pre pandemic in 2018 our chronic attendance rate was at 23 percent we then in 2019 dropped to about 13 so we've been reflecting quite a bit over the last few weeks about what was it that we were doing during that 2018-19 school year to see that 10 percentage point drop which we felt

really good about at that time so we've tried to recreate all of those pieces this year that were successful back then so everything from regular data monitoring with our student support team and our attendance officer engaging students through family calls both sort of all school messaging as well as individual family calls we have a lot of positive reinforcements for students particularly around

dress down day passes and dress down activities extra recess for homerooms that have the best attendance some of those things to get kids excited about being here at school and then of course we do have that outreach for students that fall into that chronic category um ranging from home views at home visits to the community referrals et cetera things that were successful again for several years for us

that we've hit back at quite well this year our goal as in terms of closing that gap before the end of the school year is our goal is to bring our chronic rate down to 31 which is our target rate for the end of the school year i absolutely recognize that we have a lot of work to do on that front um one thing that's a little bit similar to mary ellen's case is that as

a pre-k to age school we do have quite a few sibling groups that span those 10 grades i know dr braunhar can speak to this as well and so sometimes when we have a student out with a positive case it could be three or four students from our school who are also out for that entire time so that is a little bit unique to the pre-ka8 model in terms of the new positions that we're

requesting for next year the first one on our list as a teacher would be for a new l teacher we currently have one l teacher at the door in school we do serve the nine grade levels k through eight for our l students in part because of just the challenges of a nine grade schedule it's been very challenging to meet some of the minutes that we want to meet with our

students that have l services and so the additional person would be able to help us not only improve that scheduling but also really target some of our students in the lowest 25 percent as well as many of whom have special education services as well we are also asking to add a specialist teacher currently we have five specialist teachers our entire school kind of runs on the sort of what we call

sort of an elementary model for specialist time so we have two pe teachers a music teacher an art teacher and a technology teacher by adding a additional specialist would provide us some more flexibility and more direct instruction time for our students and in particular as i mentioned with our four substantially separate classrooms during uh specialist time is for some of those students is

one of their prime opportunities for inclusion with general education students and who are not in a sub-separate environment and so we want to make sure that our schedule is aligned in a way that we can have those students as included as possible yet stay within contract limits of course with class size also on requesting an intervention teacher for the fifth through eighth grades we currently have two

intervention teachers that work primarily with kindergarten through fourth graders through our mtss model our middle school classroom teachers do provide intervention as well as our special education teachers at the middle school level but in order to fully flesh out our mtss model we are requesting an additional intervention teacher to meet some of those needs at the middle school level

special education paraprofessionals we are requesting two of those positions we currently do not have any inclusion paraprofessionals for special education these paraprofessionals would work in directly with students in our general at inclusion settings uh particularly in the areas of social studies and science where oftentimes the inclusion teachers are not do not have the time and their

schedule to support as much as they might in math and ela and additionally the students that are in our substantially separate classrooms as soon as they are ready to push out into core content classes whether it be math or ela science or social studies we want to get them out into those grade level content areas so these para professionals would also be able to support the students from our

sub-separate classrooms when they do those inclusion opportunities similarly we're requesting an l paraprofessional this individual would work across the school with students in their classrooms so the l teacher pushes in as much as she can currently she of course does some small group work but this paraprofessional would provide that direct service to students in the general education classrooms

additionally requesting two first grade classroom paraprofessionals like other schools in the district we currently have kindergarten paraprofessionals but we have noticed that there's a significant drop in the support of course for students when they go from a class of 25 with two adults and now they're a class of 25 with an adult as they move into first grade and so our hope would be that these

paraprofessionals would support students with that transition particularly in that first sort of four or five months of the year during those important first days of first grade we're also requesting a community facilitator as i think about some of our attendance challenges this year i am fortunate to have a uh excuse me a family support or i um excuse me a student support coordinator

who heads up our attendance team uh this person would work very closely with our attendance team and work on that outreach piece as well as to increase some of our family engagement opportunities and kind of be a focal point for that communication pattern there um in terms of the teacher leads the remaining positions that we're requesting we currently have a teacher leader that

stipend in position at the middle school level in ela we would request two in ela for the younger grades that would be split k2 and 35 and those folks would in addition to their regular duties be helping to lead some of our professional learning communities manage some of our data dashboards specific to student data and ela and math as well as provide team lead as well as professional

development for our teachers at the elementary level similarly at the middle school level we would look at that and for the math position and the science position as well uh the science physician we would love to see kind of push down into the lower elementary grades at the doran school we do have project lead the way in k1 and then with the open syed curriculum at our middle school level our goal is to kind of

bridge those two so that we become pltw and open syed k through eight and this teacher lead would sort of be that liaison to help with that transition over the next few years and then just lastly one conversion that we have is that i do have a paraprofessional currently who works in first in our first and second grade classroom so across those four rooms our hope would be that with the addition

of the first grade peras that can could be converted to a second grade para position who would work between our two second grade classrooms so with that i'm happy to take any questions or comments thank you mr bradley any questions mr bradley i i do have one i i was uh obviously down there for the uh green eggs and ham breakfast and i do you know a lot a lot of uh of the

conversation over the first few days has been about the social emotional aspects of the schools in the city of forever but when you go to an event like that you realize that the therapeutic requirements that a sac may have to work with are different than a para a cafeteria worker a security guard a teacher leader but the work is the same all those pieces have to fit together to make the kid feel comfortable in the

building and i saw that at doran um for the green eggs breakfast i didn't eat any green eggs because i'm irish and we don't experiment a lot but at the same time all those pieces and i've seen it at a number of schools across the district when i worked at durfee we had a sack some were better than others but at the same time the pieces that make a kid comfortable in the school could be a

para it could be a cafeteria lady it could be the security guard putting a mask on a kid in the morning that takes the edge off him for the day and i think that when you know we talk about social emotional um training or teaching across our district all components in the school have to fit together to make it work in the sax or a key piece the guidance of a pp's the

principles are a key piece but if the school works like a wheel then everything will roll along to the betterment of all of our kids and i i uh just because i hate to tell you you were the last school i've been in but it was last week so i i did see that there and i did like that i liked the way the team came together to make those kids all comfortable at breakfast while

we were reading and i appreciate that and i i do like the climate endurance so thank you mr bradley thank you with that i'm sorry guys anybody have any questions for dawn um mr bailey you mentioned a coaching for change program and being successful can you tell me a little bit more about that and show the things you guys are doing yeah so um so we started a little small middle school is small we only have

about 150 students in our middle school and so in the fall we started with roughly about 30 35 students and the coaching for change and we worked off of teacher referral for that initial round and so we had a facilitator who's a doran teacher as well as two of our dorne teachers worked with college mentor teachers and so that come into the building and so that first little bit was sort of

uh you know they spend the first half of each session doing some sort of a collaborative physical activity uh each so we met on mondays and went mondays and wednesdays and then the second half would be more of an academic project-based learning opportunity so that was sort of our first start was in the fall kind of getting some of those kinks out and now we've doubled the size of the

program both staffing and students similar models up and running and we're really working on some sort of building enhancement ideas so talking about some sort of murals that we can work on together as well as i do have technology specialists now working with the students uh to help students kind of create some portfolios that they'll be sharing at the end of the year it's been very it's been a great program

i know the other middle school principals can speak to it as well that's awesome that's all right that's all thank you anything further miss mr aguiar thank you for the presentation so uh i see you have 515 students in there k-8 and i'm just trying to look at and i don't have all of the other info but yeah you're staffed pretty well with administration and curriculum folks relative to the numbers you have three

what i see is three principle two vice principles five curriculum people four counselors when i jump i i lump all those into support coordinators and that together sure so that's a pretty good number when you look at the 515 to to those ratios do you find that it's sufficient for for you in a in a k to a invite k to eight environment with those kind of numbers uh like

yeah so two things i mentioned so on our department heads there so there's three listed um so one is a an ela department head one is a math department head and one is new to us this year as the cluster coordinator for a substantially separate program so that's also listed under the department heads that position we filled earlier this winter and that's been a huge a huge piece of support for us to sort of

work with some of the academic content within our substantially separate classrooms what is a challenge with the department head position so while yes when you look at the number of students and our structure it is it is appropriate but um you know conversation that we have daily with our department heads is uh being a department head for nine grades is a challenge if you think of

the content knowledge that you need to both teach at a kindergarten level ela or math as well as what they're doing in 8th grade math for example so that is part of the request for the teacher lead positions so that some of that sort of data coordination internal in-house kind of professional development that my department heads can sort of train up those teacher leads to provide some of that support so we feel

that with that combination that we we do have what we need to keep moving forward and how do your numbers uh of staff stack up against other schools in the district are you overstaffed with uh paraprofessionals compared to other schools or are you well so two paraprofessionals are attached to each of the sub-separate classrooms and so those are sort of district-based programs that are at

dorne of course so there are programs so i believe that matches what other substantially separate classrooms have currently we have you know the kindergarten pairs which is similar to other schools uh one for classroom and then right now we have the three sort of what i would call sort of general ed peras and so i honestly don't know how that compares to others but i know that you know they're running

all day so yeah but you're adding in here three four you're adding a few extras that's why i asked the question was that there is additions here yeah i guess i would so okay so you're referencing in particular like the special education and the l para professionals the inclusion pera's um yes those would be new new for us um but as i mentioned with sort of the sub separate inclusion

opportunities we're really looking to support students when they go into the inclusion classrooms with those positions yeah and just recognizing that there is it's a small smaller school and that's how i look at budgets when you try to compare them across the various areas um i didn't ask this question before to other people but maybe through uh if i may ask the superintendent if you could

get us disciplined data for all of the schools just summary summary discipline data not anything overwhelming just so we had a discussion at the last meeting about the need for an iss position in some schools and then what is the discipline so i in my mind i was as i'm looking at this and thinking that's one of the missing missing links the cluster coordinator that you said you have so

do they do the discipline for the for those children no so i the cluster coordinator at the doran school i'm looking more as sort of an academic liaison between our department heads and our substantially separate teachers in some of our substantially separate classrooms actually in all they're teaching more than one grade just because of the nature of the classroom and so those teachers go to aplc a week

so for example it might be a third grade math plc contractually that's sort of the one plc that they attend but they may have third and fourth graders in their classroom and they're not able to go to a math plc every week as so they kind of rotate so part of what we're looking at with the cluster coordinator is to kind of academically support those teachers in addition to what they can get through their plc time

as well as to better sort of systematize some of our classroom structures across the four rooms so that things like all schools we're trying to think make things as vertically predictable as for students as we can so that when students transition from one room to another maybe mid-year maybe at the end of the year things kind of look and feel the same for that student and so that's part of

the role of the cluster coordinator as well to systematize some of our procedures so i assume they're doing the evaluations for those teachers that they work yes and they must be certified therefore yes i mean in a small school you do have the resource that i think that's a valid position i think some of these numbers should probably be the equivalent of that around the district because i think you

benefit from having a good quality number of staff there so with that ill thank you very much sir thank you anything further thank you mr bradley thank you up next henry lloyd community school amy brown welcome just like that thanks guys don't worry don't worry i got i got this i got this don't worry don't worry mr bradley i got it i sat in the middle by accident but i guess it worked out just fine

um so hello to everybody uh mayors madam superintendent and school committee good to see everybody um i come to you loud and proud from the south end at the henry lord community school where we are working hard to work ourselves out of that turn around label we are still very bitter that at 2020 we did not get a chance to take mcas because we truly felt that was going to

be our opportunity to show how we have grown so we have been working relentlessly since that time to really be able to improve teaching and learning as a core value of the work that we do every day but also to build up our social emotional supports for kids so that school is a safe and predictable place for them to want to come to school and be a part of our school community

and then obviously working with families day in and day out so that they too feel safe and comfortable with their kids in our care and custody so that our attendance can can continue to to rise and our kids can continue to achieve so at henry lord we are also a pre-k through eight setting we have 12 substantially separate classrooms servicing our students diagnosed with autism the severe spectrum is in henry lord our

pre-k program is predominantly servicing our special education program we don't have a general education pre-k program we have 27 general education classrooms at henry lord we are now fully a three-unit school we had a couple of grades in between over the years but we have now fully grown to a three-unit school if we remember last year we also had three foundational newcomer classrooms and they were split

classrooms so we had a k1 a 2-3 and a 4-5 when we talk about standards and academic instruction that is a very heavy lift to expect our teachers to be able to teach at grade level across two grade levels and we also felt we were disservicing our kids by not giving them that inclusive environment so in partnership with our ell department last year began in the summer and we've been

working with the ml department all year by creating an inclusive environment so our newcomer students are fully included in our general education classrooms we have essentially one cohort of the three that is a newcomer room that is also supported with general education students and then the other two cohorts typically have our special education inclusion students across them so there is that

fluidity where our special populations are fully included at lord k to five and we have a couple of students in our middle school this year just because of all over enrollment across the district who are also sprinkled within our middle school classrooms within henry lord this year attendance as well actually getting our kids to school has been a lot easier since january so i want to give a big

shout out and thank you for the access road um because the access road has just brought the temperature in the south end down in case you haven't picked up on that um parents are leaving and access to lord during the school day is drive in and drive out um and it's it's not this one-way experience trying to come up and down laurel street that was a nightmare for everybody who was trying

to come and go from lord so the access road has been absolutely instrumental in just keeping the traffic flowing and keeping people coming and going with much much happier attitudes so that's been great and we have also been able to leverage our attendance car so the attendance car has been parked in the south end we use it regularly interestingly enough we've used it quite a bit to support some of our

substantially separate families where kids are having a real difficult time getting on or off the bus and because of whatever reason we're able to support families and use the attendance car with staff to bring kiddos back and forth home as well as transporting kids who don't make it into school we know that south end the south end neighborhood for henry lord we pull from the corky row area that's not quite a

neighborhood for walking safely to and from so as some of our kids whose families don't have transportation we have been able to utilize the attendance car our truant officer has been instrumental in helping us leverage that but our adjustment council is partner up and support staff partner up and use the car to go out and pick up kids and do whatever's needed to ensure that kids

are getting to school with whatever pops up in the morning to make them help support them and just not getting to school our attendance rate similarly to ms shaw i think it's you know one of the things that lord that we started last year during the pandemic is we had to have a system to track live bodies um i can't rely on how we're navigating covet and who is covert related absence especially with

hipaa there's only certain ways you can document that in a system so from the very beginning we have been tracking at lord our our attendance rate based on everybody who's absent and that rate right now year to date is 43 percent chronic however when we peel that number back um we're looking at a 92 percent attendance rate for our kids who have been cleared to come to school i can't chase kids in the building to be

there if the nurse says they can't come in so our attendance rate for our cleared kids since october 1 has been at 92 percent our chronically absent rate has been at 43 with our attendance rate currently hovering at 89 um so we are seeing improvements um and we are being we are also able to kind of peel that back by grade level and so we are seeing a trend that our early

elementary grades are our highest rates of chronic absenteeism our middle school kids and our upper elementary school kiddos we've really seen improvements in their attendance and then maintaining higher levels of attendance versus our other grade levels so we're working with our support staff to really personalize the experience bringing in families meeting families doing home visits as most of our schools do

to figure out what are those barriers to get kids into school and really personalize their experience at henry lord when we're looking at right now how many kids in general have 18 or plus absences we have about 176 students that have already met that chronic for the year number and as far as we're concerned everybody else is out for gravy right we're out to go get them get them in

school and hold them and support them to be accountable our truant officer meets with our attendance crew so we have a pretty tight system for attendance with upwards of eight different support staff involved in attendance just so that every grade level gets that personalized individual look every single day so our attendance officer meets with my support staff and goes over all of each

individual grade levels really focusing on kids that are at 16 and 17 absences so for those kids that are right at the tip of the scale my attendance officer takes the lead on those kiddos um and then my support staff navigate every other student with with the varying levels of attendance but we are working hard to get that number to our target which is 36 chronic by the end of the year based on desi's

targets for this year so we know it's a lofty goal but we're already seeing some big improvements just throughout the month of you know getting back to school in february uh the month of february or just attendance was a lot better as we saw the pandemic rates dropped we've seen that increase across the board for student attendance and so we expect that to continue to rise um so thinking about how our school is set

up at henry lord we we really function like a mini school model to make the smaller school feel a lot smaller for kids so we function k to two three to five six to eight uh we have two vice principals and one administrative intern who started with us back in november and that has been a huge help to help support really just responding to classroom needs day in and day out and

being there to help support our teachers as well with whatever's going on to get in the way of instruction because we want to make sure that teaching and learning is sacred and that the time in the classroom is well spent so whatever kiddos need help to take a break and get back into class we have we have a wide range of supports helping helping across the board we've really focused in on our

instructional supports as well um we have a department head so the department head i'm noticing on the cover sheet it says four i want to be you know clear that that includes our cluster coordinator and one of our bcbas so we have a bc two bcbas at henry lord and one of them is a cluster coordinator who oversees our substantially separate program as well as an ela department head

and then we have a dean of teaching and learning and two instructional coaches that provide coaching and modeling for our teachers we currently have two teacher leaders at henry lord and that has been helping us to really disperse our distributed leadership model and really putting our teachers in charge and working with our leadership but so that teacher voice is loud and proud across all things

instruction and all things really across our school in our we and again we have three adjustment counselors a student support coordinator and a behavior therapist who really focus in on our sel supports at henry lord um as we think about and get into and kind of to discuss you know we've we've had a really strong emphasis on our social emotional team building at lord in the last few years last year we

emphasized speaking and writing as our main instructional foci along with high expect meeting diverse needs and high expectations we continue to see that our special education inclusion students perform at lower rates than our regular education students as well as our ell students so creating a co-teaching model this year has been a big part of our instructional push at henry lord so that

we are seeing two highly qualified and certified teachers in the classrooms working side by side with their kids and with our kids to ensure that kids are not sitting idle and not getting the help that they need to be able to attend to the task at hand and focus and to ensure that grade level tasks are put in front of kids and that they have the supports in place to help me meet those demands academically and

not unravel emotionally so we've seen it's been it has certainly been a challenge with all of the competing demands this year and just getting back to a sense of normalcy but we are committed to the work and our teachers are committed to the work and certainly the new curriculum has helped assist with having the curriculum drive all of the work with which everyone is collaborating around so as we look to to

see where you know our hopes are for next year as you look at our budget rationale a lot of what we are requesting is really in the line of additional supports for teaching and learning so that we can continue to stay the course close the gaps that were already present before the pandemic hit and be able to meet the needs and close those additional gaps that has surfaced as a result of the pandemic

so as across the district we are the district is looking to support grade one classrooms with paraprofessionals um that's going to be a huge huge support as we know once kids get to third grade they need to be able to read and to ensure that our kids from from a literacy perspective we need to be sure that small group instruction is happening in our kindergarten in our first grade

classrooms and our second grade for that matter but by putting these first grade paraprofessionals in that will free up other resources right now that we've deployed to first grade just to ensure that our kids are coming out of second grade ready to learn because we all know what the data and research says when kids get to third grade and they are not ready to read and be able to learn they read to learn

from third grade on and they need to learn how to read from kindergarten to second grade and so that becomes our charge with the support of the additional grade one paraprofessionals in our substantially separate program we are really excited to get back to pushing our inclusion model so before covid we did have a number of our substantially separate students pushing in to be able to push in for all sorts of

different inclusion opportunities whether it's morning meetings social skills some specials and then even content areas for for many of our kids but when we pull from the substantially separate classrooms to bring adults to support we're leaving our substantially separate classrooms hanging without the other supports that they need as well as at lord because of the number of classrooms

that we service we have upwards of 40 paraprofessionals just in our substantially separate program alone in some cases it feels like it's running a mini school within the school so staff absenteeism becomes a bit of a concern and struggle and when we have kiddos with different learning needs and behavioral needs when we're down paraprofessionals in some cases it puts classrooms in in different

situations that we may or may not be able to meet the needs as we intend to so having three para professionals as floaters across the program will really be able to help us plug the needs on a day-to-day basis but also be able to plan for long-term needs and inclusion opportunities to be more regularly happening we are looking to add an additional steam teacher at lord we currently have

two steam teachers that cover the project lead the way as an additional science time on learning and science right now project lead the way is a k-8 experience at lord but in addition through the verizon innovative learning program henry lord was chosen as one of the immersive lab grants so we will be bringing in the 3d technology expanding upon our virtual reality technology that was something that we added in last

year we received the verizon arizona state grant with the virtual reality program and virtual reality has really taken off at henry lord we are pushing in with our goggles and taking kids all places we've been to the suez the different canals different landmarks taking kids to zoos we've had field trips to all different places when cobit wouldn't allow us to go physically anywhere and it really does set the

stage differently when we take kids to places they've only dreamed of or or read about and so by leveraging the technology we're hoping to create another pipeline for elective opportunities in our middle school because right now it's pretty lock and step there's not much to voice and choice around what kids can take so the plan is to have this curriculum for the immersive media lab and 3d

printing and 3d technology to come in as an 8th grade as an upper elementary upper middle school elective but then also turn this space into a place that can be for field trips with other classrooms opportunities for other disciplines to come together and work collaboratively and we're really excited for the 21st century experiences that we're setting ourselves our kids up to have and the

connections that those experiences can have with the high school where we're trying to work deliberately to build pipelines between durfee henry lord and durfee specifically to really show our kids what all the different opportunities are at the high school beginning as early as fifth grade and so we see this steam teacher as being part of the recipe for really broadening access and leveraging

technology at henry lord for all kids pre-k through eight we are requesting four additional teacher leaders this year through our turn around grant we have funded an additional four teacher leader position so that we have a total of six teacher leaders at henry lord that has been really instrumental for all things distributed leadership it's really important to get our teachers

voices involved and all of the decisions that are made from instruction to teaching and learning and just climate and culture when people feel like their voices are heard and they've got a stake in the game we all know what that feels like and how much harder we work because we feel like we're part of that mission and so our teacher leader positions we need to be sustainable because i'm not trying to rely on a

turnaround grant for anything moving out of this year if all goes according to plan but it's hopefully to be a short-term experience to for us to be in that turnaround bucket and so hopefully the funds will go away but we need to be able to to sustain the work that we've done to get us out of turn around so the four teacher leaders are simply to become part of our operating budget for

something that right now we're using grant money to be able to fund and so when we look to specific positions to increase teaching and learning um over the course of the last few years and i've i've had some really intense conversations with my staff about this but we wanted to ensure that as we worked hard at henry lord that we did not make our turnaround efforts a special education issue or an english

language learner issue meaning it's because of specific populations that we're not growing our tier one instruction needed to be jolted it needed to be developed and our teachers needed to be supported so in the last three four three years four years we have worked diligently to really develop the toolboxes of our teachers so that they are really getting at the meeting the needs of all of our kids but it doesn't

leave us separate to meet the needs of our special education and our esl teachers as needed our special education numbers have continued to rise and so we are asking for two additional special education teachers which will bring us to a total of seven special educators across a kindergarten through eighth grade um schedule and let me also just make note that we're not just talking about one special education

inclusion class per grade the numbers of kids at each grade level in some cases in most cases force us to put our special education kids across two cohorts so that they're not a large population in one so in order for a teacher to service two cohorts of kids we need the extra adults in the program in the building to be able to meet the time requirements for our kids and still give them the most inclusive

and most inclusive opportunity possible and the same thing goes with our esl teachers the one and a half right now we have five and a half and so in order to get to a place to support the foundation our newcomers who require more time with an esl teacher as well as our sei mainstream students we need the additional bodies to meet the demands for time on learning and create environments that are rich for kids with

language development all day long because language development is not just an english language experience we know that there's content language in math we know that there's content language and science and we need to provide our kids and teachers with those supports so that our kids can get the most robust experience with the core curriculum and when we look at intervention henry lord

has worked really hard to be able to respond to the needs of intervention specifically in the last couple of years we've attempted our best to do it with paraprofessionals but all of our strong paraprofessionals grow to be teachers and so we have found ourselves always in the development phase of our paraprofessionals and so we are asking to convert two instructional paraprofessionals to that

of a teacher interventionist and that will put us in a place at lord to have a lane two lanes one for ela and one for math that will be supported with a teacher interventionist and or coach a department head yes a department head and dean and then we have interventionists and coaches that are already in the building and this interventionist will put us in a place where we will have one person

solely dedicated to coaching and modeling and pushing in supporting teachers directly and these other two positions will be running student interventions all day as they are scheduled to meet those developing needs of kids as time goes on over the course of the year so that is henry lord thank you amy ms laravey hi dr barnard thank you for your presentation so you you mentioned earlier uh on

about your support staff and the attendance aspect can you give me a little uh a better understanding of who the support staff are that are out there uh in the car uh making the phone calls like what support staff are you referring to my adjustment counselors my guidance my guidance counselors my student support coordinator behavior therapist student administrative manager my office para in some cases

okay i just wasn't sure like so some of them are out of the building when are they in the car are they or in the office making phone calls so everybody's on board splitting up the time everybody owns their grade levels and then we have we have a pretty strict protocol on when myself and my vice principals are on the floor managing calls to rooms responding to need so that my support

staff can be off the floor in their cubby holes directly connected to the work because this is important work and if we don't carve out the time and put the supports in so that people can do this work every other part of the day is going to roll right over them so we had to put systems in place that put other folks in charge responding to what these folks otherwise would while they are

every day making phone calls reaching out to families and leveraging you know every way to figure out where kids are and what do we need to do right perfect uh just a um as i go through this uh this this bible this budget bible uh what i did notice in in going through your stuff is your your lack of open positions and i think that's a it kind of goes it has a lot to do with

your leadership style and i just want to put that out there that i i think you're doing amazing things henry lord i'm not saying anybody else isn't but that's something that stuck out to me in your uh your budget proposal in your numbers here that you don't have a lot of open positions where some schools unfortunately do for i mean the reasons that we kind of all understand uh but it does go to uh

i thank you well you know i i i cannot take ownership to that alone you know i think it all comes to building a team and you know not that anyone doesn't have a great team but i would put my team up against any team um we've worked together for five years right i've had stability on my team there's trusting relationships among the adults and teachers on our teams

and we work hard day in and day out to hold each other accountable to that as humans first and as educators second because when we can all be recognized and supported as as the humans we are first we've been able to see that work get the traction that it needs and people stick around for the work right i just wanted to acknowledge that i appreciate that and we do too you know

so on behalf of my team i say thank you um but it's not a one-man show down there i know yeah i know i yield thank you further from miss barnhart mr aguiar so thank you for the presentation you have uh 807 which i think is actually down or according to the chat last year you were a little higher but when i look at the numbers i see 800 as a real large school with uh

obviously there's you have more staff than some places but when i look at the comparisons across the district you're at four curriculum people for eight hundred five councillors so i i think that we've helped over the last several years by adding a council i think you received one of the ones that we did you know last month but when i look at that i just if i'm looking at just a skeleton of a school

a principal and two vice principals and 800 students i think what i what's staring at me is that i think you're lacking another vice principle we've had some middle schools where we've added a vice principle when there's only 600 students for good reason you know that you need that structure so that they can people can do whatever they have to do otherwise so i for one would support

additional an additional vice principle whether it's this year or next year uh to your team because you're not gonna i don't think your numbers are gonna go down i i don't think that at all so i personally will would support something like that the one of the other schools came to us adding a position called student support specialist teacher and this is a position that i believe was at durfee high and hasn't been in

the younger grades do you know anything about that has that did anyone ever ask would you be have a need for such a position and i'm not sorry to put you on the spot but that was just yesterday's you know i mean i i feel like when we're fully staffed to be completely honest you know adding the admin intern this year to lord which superintendent ponce and i had that discussion back in

september october um that has had a tremendous impact simultaneously my vice principal went out on maternity leave so it hasn't had quite the impact i was expecting it to have but it has served you know the void um and i also brought it up even at my budget meeting you know assuming i get this admin intern position again back next year this would be my shuffling of the cards um without a doubt i think the additional

support is needed for leadership and presence but right now what we've been able to do with the admin intern has certainly solved that that piece and with bringing in the additional um guidance counselor excuse me adjustment counselor from that december i think december or january meeting where they were posed um we've had a few interviews we're not quite at the point of bringing someone

in but i'd like to be able to see how that position factors in before i would make a request to say i need anybody else um we have we have a strong mtss sel system at lord this has been built over the course really that was the central work we did on the turnaround when i got to lord five years ago now um so i don't know that it's necessarily another body i want to ensure that

coming out of covid we don't overreact to it because we have seen the discipline come down we have seen attendance rise culture and climate in the building among kids is in a much better place than it was i think everyone can speak to that from where we were in the beginning of the year so um yeah no i appreciate that so the when you mention that the admin intent is a good person good fit like it's

working out well when i think to the future that position is gone like it's an admin intern only and then now what do we do with that so that person is providing valuable service as you said across the school and and the like what i'm looking at is now this budget's the one to start next year now that person let's say is gone that regardless of what the name is now if you have a

person working in your building that's got good skills good team player exactly what we need i'm looking at is there ways to when i say add a vice principle or a position like that now you have a person that's doing a valuable service i'm looking at that we should be adding a position so that that person could potentially stay working with the children that he's comfortable with and all that so reminder can just add

willy-nilly but then maybe somebody else would need an admin intern in the subsequent year and do that same thing train them up and get them into the to the school so you i think you're doing fine with everything i think the answer that you gave to to the attendance question was the best answer i've heard yet and i've asked the superintendent to provide us data and information on

protocols and i think some of the things you are talking about are in the protocol like you have to do this you have to do that so i'm looking forward to that you're the first person that said you used the vehicles i hope other people are taking advantage of those but i'm not saying they're not you just happen to be the first one to mention it i think we need more vehicles i think

every school should have a vehicle they should have a van they should have other access to to do exactly what you're doing in a safe environment with multiple adults taking care of the kids so i think that's a good use of money when i looked in the budget it said there was a cost containment looks like cuts from the school and it was said district and henry lord so it says two paraprofessional

interventionists as a cost containment but you're not losing people right she's converting she's taking two pair of professionals but instead of that she wants a an interventionist a teacher so she's asking to convert those two positions to a teacher position okay so that's a conversion it's under the budget and the cost containment and that's why i'm asking if it was a it looks like it makes it look like as

if you're losing two positions which i certainly wouldn't be voting for it's actually and i don't think there's a line there might be but i left my book at home the um we should have a list of all the conversions is this a sheet but this one happens to be potentially just in the wrong place my last question is on the inclusion you had talked about helping to have the inclusion

improved in the in the school what is do you still operate under the same theory i guess at the high school that it's only in english and math that the special education teacher goes in that's the same it's everywhere it's everywhere so i'll say again like a broken record if we're going to be serious about it we need to do it across all grades because the children don't have their needs only in english and

math people can agree or disagree but i'm going to say that every single time if we have 20 million dollars of extra money we're adding 155 positions if we don't have those teachers in all grades and all subjects then we're not doing right by our kids so with that i yield anything further from miss bronhard i have a question oh miss rogers um so when we're looking at the asd paraprofessionals and you have 30 across

the 12 sub-separate classrooms right so each one has two and then you have a few floaters no uh these the step-up classrooms have two and the severe classrooms have three and then any additional one-to-ones for students with one-to-one so that's where the additional like 40 total that i gave came from okay so that's where that number comes from how many kids are how many students do

we have capped at in each room 12 we're at 12 in each room and are those all maxed out not every classroom but most okay how often are those kids getting out for inclusion and i know it's going to be different depending on what their iep calls for but i do want to reiterate you know inclusion is not just in math and ela and this isn't just about henry lord this is about all of our schools

right like inclusion can't just happen because we have the staff in math or in ela to do it we've got to be able to do it across all of our subjects right so i'm just wondering like how often are those kids getting out for inclusion well up until covid they haven't been getting out because we couldn't cross kids and specifically our special asd kids they don't wear their masks so that has also been a barrier because

most of them don't wear the masks and so that became an issue we have already begun to create inclusive opportunities we have about i think it's two kiddos right now that are pushing out um and all of those opportunities are out there for all kids we were well on our way with upwards of about 10 kids pushing that's what that's what i'm asking i want to take it out of that equation

and again that goes back to the 19 year but we had upwards of 10 kiddos at that point in time and not just because it was written into an iep but because we saw the kids developing and we wanted to continue to push um inclusively and it's not just ela or math to your point too specials morning meeting in some cases recess in lunch in other cases um so we we do create and you know our

asd kiddos are included in lunch they come out of that you know everybody comes to the cafeteria by grade level intermix with each other um so now that we're in a place of even bringing reading buddies back and the literacy month activities all of those experiences will become to go live with kiddos right now teachers are really honing in on mcas alt because that's due by april 1st

but i've already spoken with our cluster coordinator and our bcba and teacher leader in special education about taking the spring to really begin creating these inclusive opportunities so that we can get back in in the fold and then be able to launch the year right out the gate like we like we closed the year in 2020 uh where we did have more kids accessing all things henry lord okay

those are my my questions are always going to be about inclusion so i love it with that i yield thank you mr aguiar uh not over a budget request because i didn't see it here but certainly a need in your school i had the uh unfortunate well it turned out unfortunate because your basketball team beat mine pretty well but we went to the gym and that gym floor and the gym itself needs an over

overhaul something fierce so when we look at one time monies and stuff you it's basically cement it was you know it's tight it's like i said i was making a joke about we lost the game he has a kid kids played great it was a great environment that you had but i went into the locker room there was leaks it was it just was a mess so i know you that's not on you i think i'm

just mentioning that to the superintendent that when we're looking at something that should be the school's not going anywhere we're investing in all the other pieces of the outdoor the indoor that jim could do an overhaul and i'd vote for that in a hobby but that i yield just so you know i have been in touch um ken and i have had discussions about a few parts to the gym so it

hasn't been off our radar either um so i agree thank you okay thank you ms brown hard our next three schools up uh morton cuss and talbot okay

all right this group will open up with morton middle school mrs patterson you're up good evening hello my name is cheryl patterson i am the principal at moore middle school i'm happy to say that i've been there for six years as you know we are a six through eight elt school and we are we are in our final year of the grant we're also in the turnaround process we have a population of

688 students we have seven self-contained classrooms and two foundational strands in grades six and seven this is our second year working with the foundational students we've opened up the year focusing on building community and relationships through our advisory time we've spent some time celebrating individual students in grade level teams developing team expectations participating in team building activities

college career readiness lessons and social skill development most of our professional learning time has focused on effectively analyzing our data to plan for small group instruction and interventions technology integration and strategies to support inclusive instruction in terms of attendance we work together as a team to increase attendance and decrease our chronic percentages a few strategies include small group

interventions with counselors grade level assemblies educating families and students and meeting one-to-one with students as dr braun had mentioned i house the car for the south end and we've used it for multiple reasons not just attendance but really also if kids need to stay after school to work with the teacher or for other issues we're transporting daily we've used our priorities to guide us

when identifying the following new positions that would support our growth as a community so for academic year 2223 the first request was for an additional esl educator we currently have three full-time esl educators that support both the foundational students and the sei mainstream this year we added grade added grade seven and next year we will add grade eight increasing the number of full-time

positions will enable support for intervention co-teaching within the core classrooms for all content areas and placing a teacher at each grade level so next year we'll have 6th 7th and 8th for the foundational group to support this educator we're asking for an additional esl paraprofessional morton currently has two esl power professional positions in order to effectively support these

classrooms the new position aligns with the new esl educator the paraprofessional support in the esl classes which replaces what's that name which replaces ela that's two hours a day but this paraprofessional would push into math social studies science and unified arts classes by grade level the next request is for a special educator who will focus on literacy and provide content instruction to the

self-contained currently morton does not have a special educator who's specifically assigned to provide reading instruction to students we've seen an increase from the elementary to the middle school this year who have this identified in their ieps which requires additional instructional hours in addition to ela it's important that our current full inclusion teachers remain co-teaching in ela and

math and also continue providing weekly intervention to students this new position will allow them to continue with the current level of support and provide specialized instruction to this population who requires the reading instruction we're also asking for a full inclusion special education teacher so morton currently has two educators at each grade level they support they departmentalize those

special educators push into math and ela due to the expected increase in our full inclusion numbers next year we are requesting an additional position to support these students students which allow us to create additional cohorts so we currently we currently have eight cohorts at each grade level but this will allow us instead of having four cohorts that allow the students to push in

there we can expand that which means we will have a balance in each classroom the next request is to add an additional paraprofessional as a floater we have students from the four language-based cohorts that push into full inclusion classrooms where they need the support of an additional paraprofessional so this new position will support them to push out and provide more specific and targeted support in the

self-contained classrooms currently students already push out consistently but this just allows for more flexibility in the schedule just as other schools have discussed we're requesting a community facilitator the new position will help us more effectively engage with the growing number of families in our foundational program and build stronger relationships with all of our families this person will work together

with sacs guidance counselors our grade level teams to help organize and facilitate parent activities and events a last request is for an additional technology educator morton currently has one technology teacher who services all students in the building it's very difficult for that teacher to pro to provide support to everyone this year we had our department heads who had to pick up some classes because we will

not we weren't able to cover that so with the addition of this person we'll be able to provide technology instruction to every cohort in the building and also have this person teach project lead the way courses in terms of conversions we're asking to convert the social emotional educator to a language language based educator and one of the paraprofessionals to a floater position currently we have four

they work in a team so we have three asd programs and the four remaining are three language based and one social emotional they function just like a regular middle school team where they're departmentalized each teacher teaches their own content area and the students go from class to class like a regular middle school experience so the social emotional program is transitioning out of our building by

just converting this position it allows us to maintain that team so students still get to experience a traditional middle school schedule we feel that these additions to the staff will be able to continue to move forward and if you have any questions at this time i'd be happy to answer them any questions for miss patterson mr ago thank you for the presentation you just mentioned that technology teacher

when you look at the other um middle schools do they have more than one or is it everyone have one it seems to me like that's a sort of a basic um we have three middle schools they should all have the same you know everybody needs the technology so i'm just curious how because you said you only had one this year so i'm guessing that right so i believe

i believe they all have one we've had an increase in students this year so when we opened up the building we normally have around 617 students we opened up with over 700 students so that was an increase for us um as far as i believe every every school in the district has a technology teacher but i can ask them i'm just curious how that goes the uh when i look at the as i've asked in other

meetings here the it looks like you only have three department heads so if i'm looking at curriculum and instruction you've got 700 students roughly and there's only three department heads no interventions no coaches no teacher leaders is that intentional or at the same time it looks like you have seven combination between guidance and adjustment councils which is more so is that an intentional

so we do we have two content department heads and we have one bcba so that was added in this year and we have three instructional support liaisons but we don't have any interventionists or coaches so the three instructional support liaisons were new positions last year um it is intentional on my part yes so i i think with we're okay with what we have in terms of support of academics yeah it

it just is glaring when i look at it that other places are adding interventionists and i know we've heard from only the elementary so far or the k to eights but when i look at three and then the other one's a zero zero it just you know you must have your reasons and i'm sure the data bears out that that's working so if it does i'm assuming i when all positions are filled

i think that we have enough coverage the three instructional support liaisons push in support the literacy piece are intended to support the literacy piece in social studies and science um in a year we should be looking to add more but i think we have to grow the people that we have in the building right now intentionally and with those new positions they were filled for a little while and now they're not filled so i

think we need time to make sure that everyone's on the same page and has consistency with the expectations for academics we can keep adding positions but if they don't know what they're supposed to be doing in the building and they're not properly trained then we'll lose them yeah so when you said they push into the to provide literacy to the history and science is that way so the intention for the instructional

support liaisons were to support social studies and science one for each grade level so they were working with the department head for ela and they were making sure that they had consistent expectations for literacy so they would go in and support students on ieps in those content areas yeah i would just i said the last time i'll say it again we should have more special education

teachers to provide those services and i think the kids would be better off you know in the end when you had seven councils does that include new ones did you just get some new ones or has it always been seven no so we just received a new sac position and a new guidance counselor position so both are posted and we're looking this was in the round of ten from december yes

the um my last question is on the scl teacher program that you said was transferring and i i know you mentioned what it's what your intention is to replace it with but can you explain is that just a is there a different name for that that makes it more clear what that exactly is the social emotional room is that what you're doing yeah is that sort of uh i i've never heard of it before so

is it an alternative class is it a like it's a behavioral classroom yes so i i'm not sure what term they used to describe it before but we all in the middle schools have social emotional and which the intention is to be more consistent within schools so i have three classrooms with asc population and language based and i think the intention is for cuss to have language based community

based and then talbot to have social emotional team and the language based also so who is who is currently in there in more at martin what is it what does the student profile look like that's in the social emotional class is it a six through set all grades mix is it what does it look like so we've integrated we've spent um the past couple of years transitioning those students into language-based classrooms so

they it is not a mix of kids they are all by grade level so they work as a team i have four teachers that work as a team there's one sixth grade classroom one seventh grade classroom and two eighth grade classrooms so if you go to the eighth grade they have one with just language based students and then the other eighth grade cohort is a mix of language based with some social

emotional but you but you said you're getting rid of it it's trans transitioning out so right now i don't have any students who are social emotional in sixth grade in seventh grade i only have two students and in eighth grade i believe we have three so those students are getting transferred to talbot they're not moving they'll stay with me until they go to the high school i must i'm missing something we just

won't continue to add a classroom to morton they're going to have a language-based classroom and morton and talbot will house the social emotional rooms so we're going to phase them out for social emotional rooms at morton so the sixth grade we didn't add any seventh that she'll have a seventh and eighth and then the following year she'll only have the eighth grade until they're ready to

go so you currently have three rooms i currently have three social emotional rooms and if that's true i currently have four classes that function in that unit just like you would if you went into um a sixth grade team by house and the students i have no students who are social emotional in sixth grade at all and then i have two students in the seventh grade and three or four in the

eighth grade a couple of years ago we spent time with mr losch and drew to try and develop a model to help decrease the behaviors right part of the part of the difficulty was they were isolated all the time they were in a classroom where it was sixth seventh and eighth grade and we wanted them to have an easier transition into the high school so we merged the two groups together gradually

and created a team and we've seen the behaviors decrease i have almost no suspensions for students who are social emotional so you have three if you're getting rid of one as mrs pond said in the sixth grade we're phasing out so then we can move that would imply that we have three two other ones now so you had three now you're going to two so that position the name is changing of that person i

guess maybe that's a better way to explain it and the number of students in the language based program will increase so i still need that body i still need that position in the building their title is just changing yeah it is what it is i'm just a little confused though but all that what that what that tells me is it appears like what you're saying is that there's the behavior issues at your school are very

very low your suspensions are very low and that there's not much um i only have a small group of students who are social emotional and i think part of the reason because they were integrated we've seen a decrease in their behaviors because they have a traditional experience in the middle school they're not in a classroom with multiple grade levels yeah and so would you characterize your school as

having very few discipline problems and suspensions no i would say within that group of students those four classrooms i have less than we have had in previous years in that cohort yes so i think part of my my struggle is when i look at it if i look at it and say that we need to have a behavior room which i know we philosophically we can differ on opinions or whatever but in a

school we used to have in the old days a behavior room with kids that just couldn't behave properly that's not what this is but i'm in my mind i'm saying how do we handle making sure that the school is run very efficiently without discipline problems problems throughout and that we control behaviors and this isn't necessarily addressing that issue it's a totally this is more special education yes in

that population what i what i'm saying i'm having a hard time is separate from that i don't think there's much going on in our schools as much for controlling behaviors as much as i would personally like in call whatever you want behavior settings alternative settings or something else so that's i think part of my confusion on this it has nothing to it's not personal just i think that

the wording is is what's getting to us so with that i yield thank you okay anything further from one thank you thank you let's go to the cuss middle school welcome um miss rouette it's your first time here it is i hope everything was working out for you down at cuss well thank you so much mr mayor um madam superintendent and the school committee my name is melissa rouette and this is my first

year as the principal of cost middle school i was a proud henry lord bulldog vice principal and now am a very proud cuss cougar and thank you for allowing me to speak to you this evening and to advocate for my cougars we are a school of 717 students in grades six through eight that attend school each day in this beautiful building 244 are 6th graders 233 are 7th graders and 240 are 8th graders

20 of our students are students with ieps including 64 students in our seven sub-separate language-based community-based or social-emotional classrooms 15 are english language learners 42 of those in foundational classrooms 42 students in foundational classrooms and 69 in mainstream esl classrooms we are still in the beginning stages of integrating a foundational strand of english language learners throughout our

building we began with a sixth grade foundational class last year grew to both sixth and seventh grade this year and we'll have foundational classes at all grade levels next year cuss has been through three consecutive years of leadership change with a different principle each year as well as a different vice principle at the seventh grade level each year and additionally we have been through a

pretty dramatic staffing shift um as two administrators and 22 teachers left cuss at the end of last year so that was 37 of the teaching staff at the end of the last academic year 39 of our teachers this year are in their first three years of teaching of 61 teaching positions we have 14 first-year teachers five second-year teachers five third-year teachers and we do currently have five vacancies

with a teaching staff that is so young in their teaching careers our department heads are working extremely hard to build the knowledge skills and capacity of our staff and i'm very proud of the work that our department heads do on the administrative side 5 out of 12 administrators are new to cuss this year and a big focus has been on us coming together as a team working toward our priorities and

i am extremely proud of the work that my team does um i want to thank all of you because two of the positions on our administrative team are investments that were made over the past year in our school the addition of a third vice principal as well as a cluster coordinator for our sub-separate special education program these positions have added critical capacity to our school especially at a time when we're coming

back from 18 months of disrupted schooling and there's obviously so much new for our students here at cuss our chronic absenteeism like other schools is also high far too high um at 43 and our year to date attendance rate at 89 percent um but similar to what you've heard from others we know that covid has had a huge hand in that and when we look at our students who are

already at 18 plus absences for the year we have 162 students about 23 percent that are already there when we take out the excused absences which were mainly due to covid that number goes down to 48 students or 7 percent so there's a dramatic decrease in that number when we account for covid we too have used the attendance car to support families who need to get their students to school

we work closely with our incredible attendance officer miss racine and we have a system that leverages multiple members of our student wellness team to get students in school to be communicating with parents about attendance to be having attendance meetings to be tracking attendance and getting kids here and that system leverages yes our attendance officer for those really high flyers around absenteeism

but also our guidance counselors our vice principals and our school adjustment counselors our overarching priorities for the school year were to foster a sense of belonging community and partnership among students families and staff in order to raise student achievement increase our student attendance and decrease our suspensions to deliver strong rigorous standards-based grade level content with

just-in-time scaffolds and academic interventions when they're needed and to increase the capacity to provide all students with targeted student specific instruction especially our growing population of special education students and english language learners so while i won't go into all of the specific initiatives i think you have many of them in my budget rationale and cover sheet i did want to highlight

a few of our specific interventions or initiatives within those priority areas we had a focus on designing structures for tier two and tier three social emotional and behavioral success planning support and counseling to our students led by our school adjustment counselors for our students with intensive social emotional needs our sacs are doing an incredible job with this working with individual students

on a day-by-day basis and also with with groups we've had at least eight different sel groups either happen or happening now this year on a variety of topics whether it be mindfulness peer mediation anger management conflict resolution our sacks have been hard at work on these groups as well as their individual work we also have been focused on designing structures for tier two and tier three

academic success planning support and counseling which is being led by our guidance counselors in partnership with our vice principals and our students homeroom advisors and so these are multi-tiered systems of support for both sel and academics that have been a focus in our school this year we've also had a focus on dramatically reducing the number of african-american students suspended at cuss middle school

as that was an initiative that we had to take on last year as a result of corrective action by deci due to a historical trend of african american students being suspended at higher higher rates we also within that just generally wanted to focus on in decreasing suspensions across the board at cuss middle school and really focusing on recognizing our students positive behaviors and their demonstration of

safe respectful responsible and ready to learn skills and behavior we have implemented a cougar of the week program where every cluster of teachers every week nominates and votes on a student who has demonstrated excellence across the week in safe respectful responsible and ready to learn behavior those students are announced each week on my video morning announcements and they are rewarded with really cool cuss

merchandise and certificates sent home to their families we also have our cot being great initiative where every day as many times a day as they want when a staff member catches a student being great and demonstrating our core values they receive a cougar paw that goes into a raffle with 10 students drawn as winners every week another initiative was to structure weekly plc's and our

school-based professional development to deepen our teachers especially with so many of them being new understanding of our core curriculum and in particular new core curriculum as well as working with our bills coach to integrate technology powerfully into the classroom and i guess one uh final initiative that i'll that i will mention it was the um implementation um of our foundational

english classes and the growth of that program and really being able to do that powerfully with our uh foundational english teachers and the paras that support them in their classrooms and they're co-teaching with content area teachers too such as math and science um i am excited to tell you that as of our mid-year math i ready diagnostic at our 7th grade foundational classroom 90

of our 7th grade foundational students made what the iready program considers to be significant growth in math so that was really exciting to see and currently our seventh grade foundational students are preparing for and working on a theater performance that they will put on for their families right here on this stage later this spring in order to continue our progress and make gains in

our priority areas we are respectfully requesting the following investments which are heavily focused on direct service to students and growing our programs for our special populations in order to close gaps first request like you've heard from a number of schools is for a community facilitator so this position will help us more effectively engage with the growing number of families of our multilingual

learners both foundational and mainstream students and help us to build stronger relationships with those families this position will be a part of our wellness and attendance team will join our wellness and attendance meetings every week and will help strengthen our home and school connection with our families that speak other languages so we anticipate that next year our multilingual learners will make up

approximately 20 of our student population and that's up from 15 this year our next request is for an additional foundational esl teacher so as i mentioned next year we will have our full strand of foundational english language learner classrooms so that will be at the sixth seventh and eighth grade level this year we have 44 foundational students here at cuss we are projected to have 78

foundational students next year and so in order to support that growth we need an additional esl educator that will service our foundational classroom at the eighth grade level in partnership with that i am requesting a foundational esl paraprofessional and that will be a position that partners with that esl teacher i mentioned before that paraprofessional will support both in the esl to our daily classes that

those students have as well as in the math social studies science and unified arts classes we also are anticipating growth in our inclusion special education population we currently have two special educators placed at each grade level so right now we have six inclusion positions we are anticipating 44 inclusion students coming up into sixth grade next year so our inclusion population will go from

the 76 students we have now to 95 students next year so with that increase we do need an additional inclusion teacher in order to be able to service the iep needs and provide the supports needed to all of our special ed inclusion students across the school next year i'm also requesting two floating paraprofessionals so these will serve our language-based cohorts of students and so we do have a language-based

sub-separate program right now that is 36 students total and as students show that they are ready to push into inclusion classrooms during the day for one or more content areas we want them to have the support of a paraprofessional to be able to go with them from the sub-separate setting they're used to into the mainstream inclusion setting they're used to for that class and so these new positions will support

students who are ready to move into inclusion for a portion of the day and provide students with specific and targeted support both in their sub-separate self-contained classrooms as well as in the inclusion setting

my next request is for two teacher interventionists one focused on ela and one focused on math cuss currently has no teacher interventionist and with so many staff that are very young in their teaching careers these positions are going to both help to provide intensive direct academic support to targeted students where the data shows they need it as well as providing teacher coaching and modeling

that is deeply needed with 56 percent of our math and english teachers being new for to support our social emotional needs i am requesting three student support specialists one at each grade level we have seen our student sel needs dramatically increase as they have come back to school this year this can be seen in a variety of different sel data points that we look at regularly as a school

including our crisis response data conflict mediation numbers conduct data and our dramatic increase this year in the number of students who are needing daily check-ins and checkouts or social emotional success plans with our sacs and so one student support specialist at each grade level will allow our sacs to stay focused on the intensive needs of tier two and tier 3 students while the student support specialist can

provide the support to tier 1 students they can be in the classroom directly with students helping students who may need social emotional support in the moment and also helping to strengthen relationships between teachers and students they can run sel groups lead on attendance outreach to families and also something that i am very excited about integrating much more next year support

restorative practices across the school i really also envision them partnering with community organizations and agencies to bring in outside speakers think about field trips to support social emotional learning and also work with our sacs to help grow our students as leaders my goal here is to free up our sax time for more direct clinical and sel needs and also allow our vice principals to be spending

more time focused on instructional leadership and the support especially of new teachers finally um i do have one conversion it is the same conversion that uh principal patterson mentioned before which is that um like at morin we currently have a social emotional program a special education program here at cuss but it has been being phased out we did not bring in any sixth grade students

for the social emotional program this year and we have very few students left in that program at the seventh or eighth grade level this year only one in seventh grade and 2 or 3 at 8th grade right now any future social emotional students with with that as their special education program will be going to talbot while we were we will still house a language-based and community-based special education

program here at cuss with that said we need to maintain our opportunity for our language-based students to move through four core content classes have the expertise of those four content area teachers one in each subject and have that regular middle school experience and a team with all content areas as we work to close gaps and prepare our students for high school so our current special education um

position that is both a language-based and sel position is i'm requesting that it be converted to a full language-based position we feel these investments will allow us to meet the needs of our growing populations of special education and foundational english language learners and build our capacity to better support all students at cuss in terms of academics but also social emotional and mental health needs

and at this time i welcome your questions thank you mr um does anybody have any questions um miss pereira let me slap bill thank you for being here principal rouette am i pronouncing that correctly you are yes okay um you had mentioned uh losing 34 of your teaching staff i'm hoping that you're going to tell me 30 of them retired i wish i was um so one percent i i have some hypotheses around um the

the departure of staff at the end of last year and of course i was not the principal here until this year but i do know that i think cuss had recently lost being an elt school right and so um i know that a number of people when i came on board here did mention to me that with the departure of elt um that was also a pretty significant reduction in some staff members salaries quite frankly

so that was that was quite a large loss for a number of people um so that's one thing um also in my looking into the departures another thing that i heard a lot was that cuss is a staff that had been many staff members here for a long long time um 12 13 14 17 plus years and so i do think that some of that is people who were ready to move on and really ready

to experience something different because this had been a faculty that had been for the most part uh really here for for a very long time um and then i'll be real there was there was a lot of covid burnout um at the end of last year and so i think that those are some of the three top reasons that really rose as trends in what i was hearing when i came in around staff departures

and it is my hope that we do not see anything like that coming at the end of this year so i know it must be a combination of daunting to almost start something from not from scratch but you have a lot of new teachers but also probably a little bit exciting that you can create something even more special you know within the walls of this building and i know you mentioned having um

requesting teacher interventionist what other than that are you doing to support um the new teachers we have here so that we can hopefully i mean i think the mayor alluded to the fact that of course our sacks are extremely important but relationships with students can be built with you know any any faculty or any educator here so of course keeping them here is extremely beneficial you know to our to our scholars

absolutely um and i think i think that's critical for sure so i think something that is provided across the district is that teachers who are in their first year of teaching do get a mentor from the district um and so i think those in many cases are very powerful relationships and we have tried to we have tried to place our new teachers whenever possible with a certified mentor right here at cuss so

that they have that like day-to-day interaction um and engagement with each other um something else that we have in place here for our new teachers is that our department heads our department heads are meeting with them regularly and for any teachers who have been coming in mid-year they're not coming in on the first day and just being placed right in their classroom on the first day we have been

providing an onboarding like on-ramp for them where they are spending um a few days where they are observing in other teachers classrooms both within their content area to start to understand the content as well as in other content areas maybe observing a teacher who is really strong with leading morning advisory and morning meeting to get a sense of how how is that teacher managing it how

does that teacher use that time in the morning to build relationships um and then also having the opportunity to see the students that they're going to have in that they're going to be teaching in their cluster in their science classes let's say spending time in that first week just sitting in on all the different content area classes to just see those students and see different teachers engaging with them and

interacting with them so that they're starting to get ideas what works with this student what works with that student and how do i want to set up my routines my procedures in my classroom working with this group of students um to be most successful so we're trying to provide that onboarding that on-ramp as well as their regular engagement with their department heads with their vice principals who are

popping into classrooms checking in providing support when any teacher needs support in a classroom with a classroom management issue during the day and then those mentors that they're provided through the school district we do have weekly team meetings per cluster so the groups of teachers who teach the same students they get together once a week and they meet with the vice principal school adjustment counselor and

sometimes the guidance counselors are joining those meetings too depending on the topic that's being covered um and at the uh and often um the guidance counselors are there um even facilitating uh some of those cluster meetings and so that's a time too for those new teachers to be just problem solving with their team that has all the same students to really talk through common challenges they might be facing and get

ideas and advice from each other thank you so much that all sounded great i know you came working with a good principal so i'm excited to see what you can do here hopefully i see you here next year that is my plan okay i don't plan to go anywhere best of luck on your first year thank you for your time thank you i'm miss larabee hi mr wet over here hi thank you for your presentation i

appreciate it just a question i'm noticing that you're asking for three student support specialists i do see you have two current adjustment counselors so we have we have two school adjustment counselors we have a student support coordinator who the bulk of his work currently is really operating in the same capacities as a school adjustment counselor we thank you we were granted

one of the additional school adjustment counselors that this group voted to approve back in december so we will be bringing on a third school adjustment counselor very soon okay therefore i don't have any more questions okay i was just wondering what because right now i mean i understand the student support coordinator is helping with a lot of those duties but it would be one to like 350 kids and

that concerns me absolutely a little bit so a lot of it actually but um okay so there's one on the horizon another absolutely coming in april and it can't come fast enough thank you so much i yield miss rodricks um sorry i'm trying to gather my thoughts here so i have a couple of questions and i guess these are more district-wide questions not necessarily specific to cuss but around the student support specialists

and the community facilitator positions it looks like when they've been proposed that each school plans on using them a little bit differently and i'm wondering how cuz because if we're getting these positions right off the bat and these are relatively new positions to the district how can we create some uniformity about what those responsibilities are because i'm afraid that what's what it's kind of

looking like right now is that a lot of those positions are being solely focused on attendance and i don't know that that's really the intent of having those positions so attendance is a huge issue we know this but i don't want to right out of the gate create these positions have these folks solely focused on attendance and then afterwards it's going to be so much harder to get them to be able to dive

into other roles yeah so i i can speak to that for cuss so um i did mention attendance in each of those positions because i think over the last couple years across the board we've seen that attendance has i mean attendance rates are are terrible right and so that is such a huge priority we can't achieve anything with our kiddos if they're not here in the building and so lots of people are going to have some

sort of a hand in that it's a team-wide effort however when i should have mentioned when i think about other uh when i think about some of the bulk of the work of the community facilitator our members of our admin team vice principal sax guidance counselors myself we're meeting with families a number of families on a daily basis we have families in here all the time um whether it be for

attendance reasons academic reasons um a social emotional crisis that has happened or conduct reasons and we do use a translation service right now but there is nothing that can take the place of that human interaction and so i think that's going to be a large part of the job also though our parent-teacher conference nights our orientations that we have school-wide events that now that the covid

restrictions are easing up we have a vision um for all sorts of family and community events um and so to be able to have someone who can both communicate about all of those events but can be here to help build that community and to be able to engage through the language with our various families i think that's going to be extremely powerful in terms of that key priority of sense of belonging it's

belonging for our kids it's belonging for their families as well and so i think that human touch is going to be critical so when i see your description of community facilitator um honestly that's kind of how i envision the position just from talking with other folks that have been talking about this for a long time and i've been really excited about it that's kind of how i see what that would play out like and sure

they're going to have a hand in attendance right because attendance is not going to be just you're the attendance person and you're the only one that's going to touch that but i just want to make sure that if we're using these positions and again this is not a specific issue that when we're creating these positions that there's some uniformity about what those responsibilities are and they're not

just attendants because that is going to be huge obviously right we can't reach kids if they're not here but that's not the only need right and so i just want to be conscious of that as we move forward in developing some of these things absolutely i appreciate you bringing that up thank you and giving me the chance to clarify and then i am going to go on my soapbox for a moment so indulge me um

lots of be nice about it so lots of folks in this again is not a cuss specific issue lots of folks are talking about having inclusion classrooms right we have inclusion classrooms and we're i see the superintendent's kind of laughing because she probably knows where i'm going with this the way we talk about inclusion we have to be very mindful of what that sounds like right so we talk about an inclusion

classroom that's not a thing right inclusion has to be the culture that we are that we have in this district right that has to every kid is entitled to inclusion and so that has to be the baseline from where we're moving from so it can't be we've got our some separate kids here and when they're ready to go into inclusion classroom that's when they're going to go it's more like when we have set up the structures

of the classrooms they're all inclusion classrooms we should never see you know room 3a is the inclusion room they should all be inclusion rooms and so when we're getting our kids ready right it's really about getting the environment ready for the kid not the kid ready for the environment does that make sense it's gonna be the way we do things is what you're saying that's what i'm

saying and so i i'll step down for my soapbox but i just feel we need to put that up there as a parent of a disabled kid yes i i have to be on my soapbox so i'll step down from that and i appreciate it i appreciate you saying that thank you and thank you and i yield anything for mr again so uh do you still have gifted and talented kids at this school so we do

this year we have six seventh and eighth grade um but that program is being phased out so next year there will be no new sixth grade strand of gifted and talented coming in um so and then obviously as the seventh and eighth grade phase out so idea 717 you have 105 is it 50 per 50 per grade in gifted and talented yeah no it's not um so it's roughly roughly 30 per grade at this point

those numbers have decreased considering it used to be 25. yes two times 50 to make so so you get 90 of the kids at the school gifted roughly yep the piggyback on what my colleague just mentioned about the student support specialist teachers i think that we as a body need to look at it and the administration needs to do a better job of explaining what this is and what it's not

where we have job descriptions in place we have positions that are being called certain things that the description of what we're getting doesn't match up with what that position does in other schools uh we talked about it the other day that it sounds like almost like a mini counselor or whatever to do some of the duties of the person and i get the idea of it but when you start to just add well

we're going to have three so i look at a student support specialist by what's the description here i don't see this as a teacher per se i see this when you put language in here sel groups and supports and different types of things i see it almost like a maybe a rookie counselor or like a lower level council or something but when i look at that and then add to your 717 how many people you have

you had indicated which i agree with that the student support away coordinator is really like a sac i've been told for two years now three years four years we were going to get rid of that and call them all the same thing it's paid the same thing that's not coming to fruition makes it even more confusing to me personally but when i added those three positions to the others you would have eight equivalent

counseling type positions for only 717 students when i look at that across the board and you look at equity i'm not so sure i could make an argument and you've probably heard me keep banging this drum about what mental health counselors but i don't feel comfortable with passing a budget that has one school at eight of those equivalent type positions for you know your numbers are going to be a lot greater a lot lower

you know than other places so that's not really your issue you can ask for whatever you want and the superintendent and her team allows it so be it but i just think that that's a a big number and i think we got to get a handle on what that position is going to be and not be because it's really it is truly confusing they call different things and the descriptions are different across

each person that comes up before us wanting one of these it's a different description it's different grade levels it's so i i don't know i just think it's a lack of information in my opinion you had mentioned the corrective action relative to suspensions or something like that yep madam superintendent can we get a copy of that just to take a look at it sure you probably might have gotten it but

um you had mentioned it and it triggers my mind to um you know suspensions having control of a building making those decisions without uh without the building being under control whether jubilant or the next one you're not going to educate the kids if they don't have expectations behaviorally that's basically the biggest piece in my opinion of how to get a school on track is you create that culture of

that you need it structured you need a discipline so when you talk about dirty new teacherism my advice to you would be that to come in hard regardless of the suspensions and i'll say publicly i have no problem with it but i think that we need to control the building so as one member i'm telling you you'll never get a complaint from me if you're trying to make an effort to control the kids

control the place so that the other kids can learn you will never get an argument for me related to that the um recently though we've heard a lot i think in my gut tells me that it's unfair uh to get some criticisms of your school that your school has a bullying problem yep and we're here at a budget in a public meeting and i want to give you the opportunity to answer this question because i think

it's something that needs to be said does cost middle school have a bullying problem in fall river and i think you when i ask you that i'm not trying to spot you yeah but people have to understand that we don't necessarily get the opportunities to respond to some things right here we're at a budget thing i'm worried about the school i'm asking a question related to the school so i think i think it's in

bounds at the current time but i want to give you an opportunity to say do you have a bullying problem at cuss middle school so i do think that um a number of things that have been put out recently over social media um have been unfair remarks i will say that um and i will say that any instance that comes in front of us of a student saying that they feel they're being bullied or

a parent coming to us saying that they feel that their student is being bullied any instance of that we follow the laws of massachusetts and the protocols and procedures set forth in the fall river public schools policies and procedures and so are there students at cuss who feel that they are being bullied yeah there have been those students there are those students every year and

those there are those students in every school and when that happens our school adjustment counselors and our vice principals are on top of that and doing the investigations as those investigations have to play out per the law and per the policies of fall river public schools and what we know is right by kids absolutely i do not believe we have a bullying problem i do believe we have students who have

come back to school this year who have not been around other kids in some cases for 18 months i believe we have students who have not been in a school of 720 students in some cases ever in their lives and i think for some of our students they are really navigating that and we are seeing the realities of that in front of us i believe that our team is handling any sorts of conflict

or in the rare cases bullying that are brought before us in the professional ways that they are expected to handle it and per um our laws and policies thank you i think that's important to say and i i get it exactly what you're saying every school has some bullying complaints and the like we just in education we don't have an opportunity to just respond to every single time to say that so by basing it

on your question if someone was to ask me they have a middle school aged child would my child be safe to come to cuss middle school and i think by basing their answer to say you have a team around you and yourself that it is safe for your child to come to cause safe to say i believe that it is safe to come to cass yeah thank you very much i you thank you anything further

miss rodriguez i'm going to go on my bullying soap box for a second i'm just full of soap boxes tonight um just so that way we clarify for for families right there's bullying in the legal sense right what we are required to respond to and then there's what our kids come home and tell us every day so do our kids come home and talk to us about how they're being picked on by

other kids you know do they talk to us about these things yeah they do and and some of that is is child development right some of these take place within the realm of typical child development it is never okay but i to your point we have kids that haven't been around other kids and haven't practiced those skills in 18 months right in two years right and now they're coming back into the

building we have thrown them all together where for 18 months they could kind of hide behind screens as they're texting each other and they're online and they're doing all that kind of stuff and now they're coming face to face with those same people that they were kind of you know going at it with online this is a new development for everybody right as an adult you know that it would not be okay to bully mr raposa

right you would know that but our kids don't always make that connection right so i'm just making the point for families to understand that there's a legal definition of what bullying is and i think sometimes that gets convoluted with what our kids come and they talk to us about so you might hear no parent wants to hear that their kids are having a hard time because some other kids are

being mean to them right that's never okay but there's a difference between that legal definition and what the kids might perceive as bullying and what rightfully so is probably happening so i think to your point you've got a team of people that are trying to address both sides of that both sides and i think that's a great point because um we care deeply about the anything that's happening that is

meets the legal definition of bullying but we also care very deeply about our students feeling like they are part of a community that they are welcome here and that even if it's not bullying but it's a conflict with peers that they have people they can go to here at our school who will support them through that um and every member of our team um is working with kids um on conflict resolution or even i was with

one of our school adjustment counselors the other day and a girl came into the office crying and she said i just have a friend that i haven't talked to in a long time and i feel like she doesn't want to talk to me and so our counselor helped her with well let's talk through the first steps of going back to your friend and like starting that starting that conversation again like let's walk through what that could

look like and so it's even things like that where it's important to us to take the time to support that child through that because otherwise that student's going to be sitting in the classroom just thinking about that but if we can help them build the skills to have that conversation then they're going to be able to do that and focus on their academics and feel like they are socially able to be connected again

i think it's hard for families if they do go through the process of a bullying investigation because you know as soon as we say that word it sort of triggers this investigation the end of that if the results of that is like okay well it wasn't bullying you know families rightfully so are really upset about that that's why i'm just trying to stress that there's a difference between the

legal definition and what you know our kids are coming to the table with every day but that doesn't mean that we we disregard one over the other that doesn't mean at the end of an investigation if it's oh well that isn't that doesn't constitute bullying that we're just gonna ignore the issue and go away so i just i again feel really strongly about that and so when i go on

a soapbox this is the stuff i go on a soapbox about um and i'll step off my soapbox now and i yield thank you anything further next up last but not least talbot middle school brian raposa thank you brian thank you um so brian raposo principal of talbot middle school uh pleasure to be here representing our staff families and students from talbot so just to sort of go through a little bit of

the demographics at talbot currently our enrollment is about 620 students 30 of our students are designated as english language learners um and a little over 20 of our students are students with disabilities um you'll see on the sheet there as well about 90 of our students are designated as high needs um in terms of our our racial demographics you know at talbot as you know we've been really focusing on

a lot of work around equity um culturally responsive teaching just under 40 of our students are white we have just over 60 of our students are students of color talbot currently in terms of the attendance our rate is was 89.2 last year our daily rate is now 88.1 our rate of chronically absent students is you know very high at 52.3 um i did run just some numbers of students that are already chronically

absent 18 or more um we have 140 of those students um as i sort of looked at excused versus unexcused we're thinking about covid related um we're down to 27 students you know with unexcused absences um so we know those numbers you know are what they are right now we do have um a system in place that we started uh during covid that we actually um you know for all of the negative things that

happened there were some systems that we started during kova that we realized were things that we actually could continue with into the school year so we do have daily phone calls that go out to families we do have a community facilitator when we you know what was mentioned earlier was sort of what that role looks like when i first arrived at talbot there were not as many staff that spoke another language and we were

serving an incredibly diverse population i want to say we have kids from about 17 or 18 different countries at our school and so this community facilitator is fluent in spanish primarily her work was really around meetings with families you know phone calls i think our vision is for her work to evolve we've staffed the building with quite a few folks who speak another language now and so she's not

the only person that folks will rely on although she is super helpful to many of our staff and so we're thinking about you know how to really um enrich that work with families kind of moving forward with that position um we in addition to those phone calls every administrator is assigned a group of advisory classes homerooms and so that's another layer of support and so you might have

an administrator a counselor might have let's say four or five home rooms that they are sort of assigned to and then there's a line of communication with the teacher there if they notice the student's been out two or three days um we know that we have one person that's another tier another layer um that can uh support reaching out to that family as well um in terms of our goals

we our target is to get to 38.7 in terms of chronic absenteeism um i also have some other priorities related to student discipline specifically decreasing out of school suspensions for students with disabilities uh by by three points is one of our uh goals down to from thirteen to ten percent um we um are also looking at continuing to develop a multi-tiered system of support for academics and social emotional

learning i thought it's important to mention um specifically the things we are working on is sort of this universal screening piece whether it's through an intake process when a new student comes in or universal screening in terms of academics progress monitoring differentiated tier 1 supports interventions and then really framing out and carving out entrance and exit criteria and i would argue

that's an important piece for all kids and then also particularly students with disabilities sometimes we have different programs and it's really important to think about what's the profile of a student that enters a program why are they entering that specific program what are they going to get in that program that's different and specialized and then how does the student sort of exit that program

and then finally you know we've been part of a udl academy and we're in year one of a culturally universal design for learning academy and we're in year one of a culturally responsive teaching academy and so consistently designing units um that include those components is is another area of focus for us in terms of um our requests so i do have one conversion here of a behavior therapist to a student support

specialist this position has been mentioned at previous schools as well and then one additional position of a student support specialist i we would envision using those individuals to provide direct response to classrooms uh manage case loads of case loads of students as those arise so if we're noticing that um we have a group of students that might be struggling pretty consistently uh they'd

be working hand in hand with the school counselor maybe doing trackers you know facilitating um check-ins with those students on a daily basis we're also adding as was mentioned previously by my colleagues a sub-separate teacher special education sub teacher to talbot along with two special education sub-separate special education paraprofessionals currently i house excuse me uh three classrooms that are designated

as uh substantially set separate and typically the profile of students with language based needs and we have currently two classrooms two additional classrooms that are sub separate typically with a profile of students that are that have social emotional needs we would be adding a third classroom um to serve students with social emotional needs we've also put on here sort of thinking ahead there's an

anticipated uh potential retirement um and so um i met with the superintendent about uh adding a uh position which would just be a transition position of an assistant principal to sort of train someone um before that uh individual retires and then when that individual retires that would sort of collapse it would it would take over that position of the person that retired um talbot is in uh year three of a school

redesign grant um and so uh the other piece is the extended learning time stipends for staff we actually have a longer school day by 30 minutes and so um you know the district has taken this piece on in terms of maintaining um that school day as you know we're a school that's a turnaround school in the second percentile so we still have um lots of work to do in terms of um you know increasing student

achievement um and then i uh we will be um getting uh an additional you know i know that the the committee voted on some additional counseling positions as well i know talbot is going to add um a school counselor um as well from um from that set of positions those are all of our requests thank you mr opposed any questions for mr poser mr again thank you the um just referring to the stipends that you

talked about is that the one you mentioned yesterday no we actually have morton and letourneau are part of a grant a state grant that they have an additional hour during the school year and then they have a summer programming that grant was it that was supposed to sunset at the end of the thing and principal patterson talked about that the only other two schools that have any extra time are

fonsica because of their level 4 status they have an additional 20 minutes i believe and talbot that's in the second percentile they have an additional 30 minutes which they have had money from the state but their grants are up and we've um we're paying for that we're um taking on that cost for the additional time those are because of their status so there's no nobody else under those that status no

you know i guess that's the lowest status yes you know but there's um trying to be consistent and i mentioned this the other day that we said we were going to sunset all of these when there was no more grants available now we're making an investment of 288 000 or whatever the number is in the vessel for this school well the um talbot and fonsica were not were not part of those grants that were sun

setting that was never that was part of their turnaround and though that extra time was intended to be part of getting them out of i get it i know i agree i don't think that i don't know i mean obviously that was before me but i'm not sure that that i know that it was those grants because the formula changes right no i you you said it clearly right

i totally i get it that the old school extended day that cost us three million dollars and all this other stuff like that was unfair in my opinion across the district those are gone right my vote would be to that we don't bring those back what i'm saying in this case is we have schools that i looked in the budget and i think it's 288 thousand dollars for this school to get from esser funds for

extra time so if we're making a determination to say that schools that are in need and that extra 30 minutes is going to be allow mr proposal to do x y and z which he's articulated before as part of the plan when does that end in my opinion and i think we need to have a tough look as a district to say do we need that type of investment across all schools especially

whether it's the lowest only because in this district what we do and what we've traditionally done is a school is quote unquote on fire there's all kinds of problems and we figure out we're going to have turnaround plans this that and the other thing we put all kinds of stuff into it they get a little better because we put all those resources in the school gets better we take the resources out the school goes down we

put the resources somewhere else so when i'm asking about this that the 288 000 in essa funds is there something to be said for i know we have contract negotiations and all that but there's schools like on the next tier that might be in the 10th percentile not the second percentile is there is there a good educational value in saying let's use these funds over the next two or three years to say increase those

schools by an extra period of time i don't think we talk like that i don't think we offer that service to other schools so i'm not saying i'm opposed to this at all it's your prerogative to do but i think we're being a little bit short-sighted sometimes and not just saying okay he he's going to do this but let's say this works out great over the next two years even with lesser funds or not if he's

got a system at his school that's going to give the 30 minutes a day allows them to one block allows them this does all this stuff and they get better are we then faced with okay now we're going to just cut it back to 288 000. so i'm just raising it because i think it's an equity issue across the schools but there's also schools that are in more need but i don't think we should just

if something's going to work we just cut it back i just so i think that's something that we need to uh to look at related to that if i can just sure add on that uh because i was in a school that wasn't turn around and we added an hour and then it was decreased to 30 minutes part of turnaround work is once the school so let's say fonseca that that's in the operating budget

we've been funding that and now talbot would be adopted into the operating budget but let's say fonseca exits is online and is going to exit level 4 status the state would require us to create a sustainability plan for two years three years and you would have to keep certain systems in place that you had that got you there and then wean them off i think the intention at the time when

we eliminated the 90-minute model and then said we would sunset the um the current two schools was because we uh and mr michonne is here he was on that committee uh with me and a whole bunch of other folks i think that um and the intention was to maybe increase the day by a half hour obviously we we went to to we did the collective bargaining etc we landed at 15 minutes um

i mean i think that you bring up a good point does 30 minutes for everybody makes sense i don't know but we'd have to that would have to be part of negotiations for the next time but the intention was to land in a sweet spot so to speak of additional time recognizing that additional time does help move a school i mean i can say that firsthand we just i don't know if 90 minutes is the what

we need but we do need it is an equity issue and that's why we said we're going to eliminate those schools the five schools these are schools that are in fragile state we need to support them but we do need to think of a long term okay so what do we do next how do we support them when we wean them off 15 extra minutes for everybody is that enough or

do we need to say let's try to get another 15 minutes for everybody so that everybody has 30 extra minutes yeah no i i agree i think that's just food for thought the other thing is not only the elt but there's also positions there's also job titles it's uh we've gone from a certain school that was underperforming or had a plan and they come up with all this stuff and it was like we're going

to pay extra for this we're going to pay extra for that this person's going to get a stipend this person's going to get this this person's going to get that so they get all that other school it might be just a little bit above them or whatever they get nothing and that that to me is not fair so then what ends up happening is they get all this stuff whether it's right wrong or

different the other person then says well they got it then i get it and that's so you get it you've been around long enough to know but i i just think it's a food for a thought at another time the vice principal transition is that a retirement in the in the fiscal year is that why and the only thing i would say to that is we have to i think it's it's not really um

i don't know if it's illegal but i i don't think that we can hold people to to definitely retiring so if i'm with the person let's say i'm going to retire in in june and then in march i say hey you know what i'm not retiring it's hard to like if we hire an actual body you know personally if they don't i hope they don't retire or maybe so

but you get what i'm saying so yes i think maybe i understand what you're saying maybe in a situation like this utilizing an admin intern as we talked about with dr branhas jones you know they could train up and then if you see that they're ready and but it wouldn't lock us in that would be my yeah the intent really was that point of sort of you know where uh a school that

um you know i've had a turnover of staff you know i have some newer administrators and so the intent really was to say if someone knew was going to come on board it would be great to have this opportunity to train someone so that they're not just walking in you know and sort of having to pick up where the last person was you know so in the theory i agree exactly what you're

saying i think we should do it for principles quite frankly if a principal we know is leaving we hire one it makes sense to overlap mostly every position as long as we wouldn't get stuck potentially with sure having uh having two of them the um you you would uh i think last year was about uh after school or utilizing the kitchen and and doing some cooking or something with the vocational is that

so we was that already funded so we have so you'll notice that there's a position on there that um is open it was the construction craft so we had added that position um unfortunately um we did have someone in that role who has since left and so um we have not been able to fill that position right now the goal is we would um fill that you know we're keeping that there

looking for candidates and looking to fill that next year so we would add that strand the construction craft laborer similar to dr bronhard we're getting an immersive media lab as well at um at talbot which we're excited about in terms of the culinary we have added a lot of different enrichment specialized program particularly for um some of my special populations at talbot so we are

utilizing there's actually a culinary space there um it's not a dedicated position where we're saying but we are actually using that space quite a bit and we are utilizing some of our kitchen staff that actually work with our kids and you know which is pretty cool you know during the school day and as part of our after school programming as well which is great madam superintendent the only this is

more of a when i look at equity looking at the amount of uh department heads interventionist teacher leaders and stuff this is also glaring when i look at the talbots that they have you know three department heads four um intervention coaches and five teacher leaders not passing judgment on either either way it just when you look at uniformity you know we have three middle schools right here and we have

three different sets of what that looks like so i'm not passing judgment on it probably somewhere in the middle might be the best way i don't know but we need to accept i just think it makes yeah it gives me a little headache when i'm looking at a budget and say how do i know that this is the basic skeleton structure of what it should look like and i think the the other piece of

because this is the last middle school i think we also have to take a hard look at is the middle school model actually working to our benefit because it's very difficult the tough grades and all that stuff but food for a thought moving forward if we want to be bold if we want to make some some changes that things aren't working we have to look at it and i've said this

12 15 years ago when i was first done here if the k-8 model is the model we should be doing that model rather than that and then if we have difficult kids we should have alternative schools we shouldn't just say this is just the way we do it because if we keep doing it the same thing is going to happen so really i'd like to have that as maybe an instructional

subcommittee topic so that we can all dig in and and and look at it because we i think you're all trying your best and i just think sometimes if we don't change the structure it's never going to change so with that i yield thank you anything further i just said i promise i won't go on a soapbox what that's right i promise no i actually just wanted to point out two things um and they're both good

things so the student support specialist when i look at that description that's kind of how from a mental health social emotional standpoint that's kind of how i've conceptualized that position um so i i appreciate that and then i've said this before to other folks whenever we're doing transitions i fully support the idea legally and you know there's a whole other realm behind having those positions and then what do

we do if somebody doesn't retire but that's really a best practice model right like we have somebody work hand in hand with the person who's doing the job so that way they can then slip into it with that with minimal disruption to our kids so i just wanted to point those two good things out and i yield mr aggie so i agree like i had said that before but

at the same time as what ms rodriguez is talking about we have to do that with children as well so we should not we should not especially to our special populations put somebody in a position where they're working with someone and then tomorrow they're gone and we don't do the proper transition to me that's damaging to the kid that's damaging to the situation and if it's happening in this district it needs to stop

i yield okay thank you and i want to thank the middle schools that was great everybody did a nice job i appreciate it and all the schools tonight any new business to come before the committee tonight mr aguilar it's not necessarily a new business but we when i came in tonight i see the resiliency prep enroll form now it's filled out we have the total enrollment on this is 109.

we have another budget item that said it was 180 another one said it was 170. the first one i got said zero so for whatever it's it's probably clerical or something like that it's just come on you know just let's check this stuff before they throw it out here because there's i don't think there's 109 there this is unfair to put in front of us but maybe there is and if there is then that would affect

some decisions on we need to know what the real number is so with that ideal we actually probably need to do the cover sheets again because we have to separate the bcba's cluster coordinators behavior therapists need to be added so we'll look at those sure thank you make adjustments okay is there a reason to go into executive session there would be mr chairman can i get a motion in a second

just read out oh mr uh mr assad will i mean bruce will read the uh announcements first national launch chapter 38 section 2183 to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining relative to all professional teaching employees of the forward school system including coaches title 1 teachers nurses occupational physical therapists and specialists the teaching profession represented by the forward

educators association as the chair has determined that no concession may have a detrimental impact on the bargaining position of the committee national law chapter 38 section 21a1 to review the open meeting law complaint dated february 15 2022 filed by colin dyess regarding january 25th 2022 open meeting law request for instructional subcommittee meeting minutes mr dyes alleges a violation of the meeting law

and mr diocese alleges that he did not receive a response within the allotted time frame national laws chapter 38 section 2183 to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiation with non-union personnel and or to conduct a contract negotiation with non-union personnel including maria ponce superintendent of schools we would reconvene the main monopoly statements at that time i need a motion in a second

i have a motion a second uh dead please call the world miss dragon yes mr bailey yes mr harp yes miss laravey yes miss pereira yes mr rodriguez yes yes

back from executive session that please call the roll miss drag here mr bailey here mr hart here miss laravey here miss pereira here miss rodriguez here mayor coogan yeah anything further to come before the committee motion return second deb please call the woman mr again yes mr bailey yes what's your heart yes ms larabee yes miss pereira yes mrs rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes