good evening everyone and welcome to the regular meeting of the school committee the town of foxborough tonight february twenty second two thousand and sixteen like to welcome her body back from school vacation we have a full agenda tonight we're going to start with visitors approval of minutes then we're going to get an update on the opioid challenge in the community selectman jim developes is joining us to help us with that we're going to look at substance abuse prevention and intervention in the schools and some of the programs we have going on currently we're  going to receive a mid year technology progress report followed by an update on enrichment and challenge and then around that time we'll be joined by our deca team to have our teaching and learning highlight tonight real exciting with the first year club the  is with regard to physical restraint of students we are then going into executive session tonight for the purpose of discussing strategies with the union personnel and specifically tonight we're looking at the contract for the foxboro maintenance workers association and we will return to open session at which time we anticipate voting on the proposed two thousand and fifteen to twenty eighteen foxborough maintenance workers association collective bargaining agreement will take up other matters and then we will seeing none we will take up approval of minutes we have i think a couple of sets of minutes will start with the regular meeting minutes from january twenty fifth minutes i second ok just under discussion before we vote then i just also had a quick comment at the end mr you announced he will not be running for reelection to the school committee that bothers me janet that stood alone so i think we should just have a sentence minutes from the meeting we had with the advisory committee that was february third those in favor great moving to welcoming selectman developers to the table i suspect the superintendent has some comments you'd like to make i just want to thank jim in advance for his leadership once again in the community and that of all the select really and i know they stated up front that they'd be coming around to the different groups and tonight started to come talk to us which i appreciate so jim if you don't mind coming to the table of honor and a comment you'd like to add well said i just want to make sure i update and then our next agenda item is related and then hopefully this develops to stay for that and then what we'd like to do is and by asking what the school can do in partnership with them i think that if we could take the two items it to the table to get some feedback and then give some guidance to town manager bill keegan on the people called the drug crisis of the heroin crisis so over as you know over the last year or so  throughout state news and local news has been a lot of discussion starting with opioids in what is you know you may know what opioids are painkillers that are prescribed from doctors dentists and what have you it starts off that way and amps don't just begin in general terms so a patient starts on the opioids and then when the prescription and it's a very very very addictive drug and they start to beg borrow and steal to try to stay on the opioids percocet biking and what have you when that ends and they can no longer get that off the street or become very expensive the next step in their minds is they go to heroin and nobody wakes up and says i'm going to try heroin it's just that it's such a disease or an addiction that they can't help themselves and they end up on heroin in this case is starting in the early teens or younger and going all the way up to the sky's the limit on the age some but we're kind of right in the middle on the statistics so within a short time how the states dealing with that they've pumped in about twenty seven million dollars on a task force and studies and they have focused on prevention intervention treatment and recovery and sat whole cycle and if you look around at the different towns in the cities how they're dealing with it on the local level i'll give you a for instance if you go to the town of mansfield you know a mile south from here a bordering town  they just had a meeting in january a forum and that was put together by the quaters middle school parent association that brought it forward in i didn't go to that but i read some of the quotes so that the police chief there said in this is his quote in twenty years of police work i've never seen anything like this the overdoses due to heroin and other at opioids are on the rise and no family is immune last wednesday the town to the north walpole i was invited to a session that they had the governor came and spoke and the police chief put that one on and it was interesting because i was looking at the and i slideshow power point i was looking at all the pictures it showed a drug addict jumping over the counter of dunkin donuts and you know the surveillance cameras robbing somebody at an a t m stealing from the credit union and then they had bags in needles and all the paraphernalia and then what he said was shocking all of these pictures are from walpole and the reason and what stuck in my mind was he said we've run out of handcuffs a long time ago to address this it's you know the old you know scarface with the cocaine in those machine guns in the war on drugs that those days are over in his opinion the best way to handle this is education in awareness so in if you consider walpole on one side and mansfield were directly in the middle so even if you think it's not here and you have young kids or even if you don't have young kids you know you think you're not affected to get awareness to keep it out anyways it is one way to look at it in your lives i'm sure you've seen the local news of the cars getting broken into and so it it whether we want to realize it or not it's affecting all of us so why am i here so on january twenty second i prepare a letter so in a nutshell what that letter is it says draft on it was brought to the january twenty second and that meeting that we had last month was not a meeting to invite department had scored to invite the school committee or any of that it was to sit with the selectmen and say this letter is addressed to department heads and it says look there is an issue in the state it's in our town let's send a representative from each department board of health social services rec department vs all the veteran service officer the police the fire the first responders in the school to put our heads together and what i'm finding is if i speak to a teacher they have one perception of i speak to michael johns over the v s o he's got his perception and he's dealing with the veterans in that issue i talk to the rec department and you say well you know those kids are a little at camp how are they involved well the parent is an addict that's dropping off the kids so they're dealing with so everyone has a little bit of a different perception they're all doing their part if you ask the police and i completely agree with them they can't arrest their way out of this they need a community input in awareness so what i'm asking the committee in all you do and i'm looking forward to i know you guys have it in the schools not their own but you're the advocacy in the awareness and stuff share with the town your perception your the way that you handle it so we can learn from you similar to deb when we put together the group for the sexual abuse awareness it was accept people from all different towns we learned a tremendous amount from your superintendent on how you do stuff how you track stuff how you train and that brought the whole group up a different level in spinelli walked into the group not knowing how social services deal with that and i'm sure you learned something so that's what i'm looking for if you could either sign somebody obviously not tonight or no votes or anything but think about it the town departments after the january twenty second meeting got together they had a representative from the attorney general's office that spoke to the department heads and i didn't go intentionally because i wanted a discussion without selectman involvement but the feedback i got was very positive our police chief is very forward thinking he's got some ideas that have to do with the school in it was a very positive first step so what i guess what i'm asking is moving forward could the schools get involved with the town side and then collectively work towards some type of a and awareness program throughout the whole town great i'm sure we'd be happy to do that you learn from a lot of things it takes a village for just about everything bush lead this i think it takes even even bigger village  say yes because we're preparing for the eventuality i would say but we do without saying much more we do have students affected by this in their homes so i can't say this as it touched us yet we just haven't yet had a student opioid problem from that student that we know but we have had we do have students who are faced with challenges related to addiction in their or the board of health may have or social services might not be the director but somebody that's more aware and more so i'm not looking for any title or specific person somebody that has ambition that can share information back and forth and kind of keep it going and hopefully come back to your group and give public updates once in a while to join you linda is our nurse leader for the district also behind you but the more yes so she's a nurse leadership oversees our nursing department and i would say compliments to linda we had one update with her already this year but she took a very proactive approach at this right the beginning of the year when she took over that role and i'm going to turn over to her to talk about the nursing role in what you've done right nice to be here and like to share with you how the facts pro school nurses have prepared themselves in the event of a life threatening  overdose in the schools the department of public health did recommend last year that each school district in the state have a protocol written by this their school physician authorizing the school to administer narcan in the schools that's nasal the school nurses we have a monthly meeting with dr giuliano who is our school physician so we had a meeting with him along with the wrentham school nurses and we received a training by ian klber she's the department of public health southeastern regional nurse consultant in administration we were taught to recognize symptoms of opiate overdose demonstrate how to give narking and care of the individual before and after the emergency medical services arrived it's given internees really and it reverses the effect of an opiate joyce over to of it's now stocked in all the schools we all the nurses have it in their offices and it's available for use by the nurses for anyone who needs it including students staff members visitors any guest in the school who needs it also another thing that we're doing is in order to address unhealthy substance use in the schools were participating in the expert program which is a screening program that will be mandated for two grades in the future one in the school and one in the high school sports dance or screening brief intervention and referral for treatment and i did apply for a grant recently and i was awarded a grant for this initiative by the department of public health on march third as the program coordinator i'll be attending training along with sharon kelly our high school nurse also attending will be the high school principal the social worker and a member of the wellness staff these people are all involved with all the students and referring if you refer them for treatment and they they know all the students in the school and what's going on with them screening will take place in the fall for the tenth graders so we will we're already signed up now for the this day wolf which will be march third and the screening will take place in the fall for the tenth graders letters are going to be sent out to all the parents are going to be informing the parents of the screenings and the screening the parents can opt out if they want to and letters will also be going out to all the students so they will know that they're going to be screened in the fall our goal is to identify students who have any substance abuse alcohol or drug abuse and then refer them for treatment if needed her department of public health regulations the nurses already do a lot of screenings in the school we do with hearing a vision screenings heights and weights and postur screening so this is a new screening that will be done along with the other screenings for the students and as one more tool that will help us to assess the health and wellbeing of our students and provide treatment where needed so we have all this come just possibly because that is that's new so congratulations on securing the grant for us in the timing couldn't be better really with all of the things that were going on and i think the state's been really trying to put a lot of things in place for all of us to deal with this so they came up yes substance abuse alcohol and drugs like we have a question a comment behind what exactly how said they want people who know the students so the students be more likely to open up to them so it's going to be done in the nurse's office you know a private office and they're going to talk to students and there's going to be multiple questions we're going to ask a student have you had let me just interrupt and make a comment i think it's hard for our public audience probably to hear some of the discussion coming out of the back so we want to entertain the questions and thoughts as well but linda is it safe to say that some of the types of questions i think are fair questions are that schools do so they haven't been trained yet in how to administer the assessment this is all just happened in the last couple of weeks so i think i think it's fair to say let's let our staff go and get the training in how these  conducted and come back but we're not making this up this is a department of public health it's a recommendation as to what they want us to do in schools and when display in a society the high school which makes sense and that eventually the same type of screening in assessment will also be in place at one grade at the middle school so that's where we are now and i don't i don't think we know enough to answer the detail to the questions i think people should and i think the the questions are you know give an indication of really things that will need to address like process like student privacy concerns i think they're fair questions i think to to misspell his point you know we're going to we're going to figure this out and publicize what the process will be but i think you give us some sense of some of the questions are out there and i think that's to know some of them might want to reach out for help and this might be their opportunity and that's why we want people to do it who know the students so they might feel comfortable opening up to them ok there's no other way we can really get the information out of them unless we just in case we have all high all you have here whatever the question is the appropriate answer weigh in could talk about what do we do for substance abuse education and prevention at the high school because that's where our fits have been for quite a number of years i would have to say that we are fortunate to have our health curriculum in place and so one tenth grade curriculum is really the basis of where the education comes in and all of our ninth graders and all of our tenth graders do participate in the program so the ninth grade curriculum is very brief and talking about marijuana alcohol can be gateways to other drugs that can possibly come along and that's in the ninth grade curriculum and then once we move into the tenth grade curriculum they have a whole unit on substance abuse of which they do a project they do research on it additional information to come out entering questions eccentric cetera so that's probably the core of the high school where we are working with students but i was thinking about this is a couple of other things that come to mind  we have a social worker and our students are very open to talking to all of the social workers that we have here in the building we are guiding staff as well and through guidance the social worker the nurse and a variety of other individuals we meet every other every other week or about every third week for or what we call mental health meetings which are really meetings about how are the kids doing and what's happening and so often that is not just the student who has an issue but the issue isn't with them personally it is with the family as we've mentioned  it you know it's a wide variety of different things that can come out at that meeting and what we can do then to put a plan into place or what we need to do for next steps for that particular individual if there are those next steps sometimes it's just awareness and then we also participate in the rest of the survey that we're now doing every two years with our students in similar to this we might say well the questions are going to be asked and who's really going to say who's going to be honest but what we found from the data that's come from the risk surveys are that students are really pretty open and honest and what we have found and what i really believe that we need to focus on is the positive end of it because our students there is a belief that more students are participating in certain activities when the reality is if you take a look at who says i am of those numbers are very low so it's what is the norm and we really need to do that social norm in a lot more i think i mean bringing that out because of course it's like the news what comes out it's always the negative when you've got ninety five percent of kids doing really good things it's that five percent that you know it 's all of a sudden blown up and then it becomes everybody so it's really that focus we're also fortunate enough to to have frank on staff with us as well and being able to help on his end of it and luckily in the schools and fire we've been we've learned how to treat someone who's had an overdose we've had training and now can we carry knocking in all our cruisers all offices at least five have been trained in that for us to be able to deal with situations like that like i said luckily nothing prevalent in the high school as of yet we did discuss with the chief of my all possible program coming in which mr smith only mentioned earlier so as far as that prevention is still working on a program to get that out to the kids to the elementary school and yes we do you know we get red ribbon week and there are things that we're starting with age appropriate discussions because it is important to have this conversation begin early on right and not just for you know the little kids i mean for little kids who might be feeling the effects of addiction in their homes or might be seeing it with older siblings or cousins or other loved ones or parents who don't know to get it in there packet to see but it does start early and developmentally appropriate as as we as the children learn to grow it does sort of cycle back and we do clear and we all know sometimes that sticks sometimes if it doesn't speak to them at the moment it may fall by the wayside which is why we pick it up in another group level and keep that spiral going but i think it's important to know that our we are trying to teach our kids not just not to use it i'm not going back to just say no incidents reagan that we're teaching them about what drugs can do to your body what the dangers of addiction are including you know gambling we talked about that often years ago in a how to recognize in other people someone who might need help particularly i mean there are elementary school students are getting some education but are middle school students are becoming much more aware of what's going on around them with their friends with older siblings and other loved ones and you know those those children and students might be more inclined to reach out to our school psychologists and guide was department in which i think it's just another area where the education of our students can spill over and help an entire family and therefore a whole community him he just finished health he did his whole semester of health in first and second term so he's answered a lot of my questions and and you know some that i got a lot more detail from the actual curriculum  subject as they grow right there with more depth and more purpose is what really sustains resistance skills or develops resistance skills and it really isn't the one time only you know an event is so that's what we're working toward have always worked toward because let's face it this is a new type of crisis but we've always had substance abuse issues to address and to work toward education and prevention so this definitely puts a different spin on it and has a whole different set of concerns because as this develops points out it often starts with a legal medical perception so it just adds another dimension of of a of an issue but that's what we have felt works better towards prevention is ongoing and sustained education  just to let you know we did have a conversation with our trainer as well because again when you mention injuries and so often it is a prescription that's given and then from there it leads on and just as the question and she said no there hasn't been a conversation that she's had in all the time that she's been here with the kids with the injuries that that has come up to her and of course she would have reported but it was just it was an interesting dialogue that she and i were having too but i mean even there is an opportunity perhaps for even more education even if they has a conversation ok your child's just had this surgery you know these are some signs you should look for as a tear at a student who is taking painkillers for their either sports related injury or their wi so how many people at home still have that script up there in the medicine cabinet and you're either waiting for the day to turn it in or whatever it might be and you know it's it's kind of an open place for anybody to go to and i think sometimes we forget about that part ones that are the been around longer and that in that you know you never know which layer is going to either surface the problem or address the problem or that's going to send a message you know which which of us or which program is the layer that puts a thought in somebody's brain that women i need to think this or maybe i should talk of this so as everything else the more layers we have the more sick chance we have of of a positive approach and in prevention at least in the team and we have them because i think what the two franks point in jem's and so many other people if this is becoming more prevalent in the i'll just say in the post high school age th could this filter down to us and it has another place and so if we can just keep them safe while they're here and in that would be help and maybe maybe have people go on with a healthier understanding of it that's the whole we provide parent education in so many areas and cyberbullying and that like that just comes to mind as you know and we have p r experts come in and talk to us about how to talk to your teen about virtually anything and  we have technology night that helps seen how the techno and techno savvy people like me understand what our kids are doing at school this seems to be another way that we can help educate not just our students but our parents about what is going on in the schools and in our society could be framed as a question i think what i've heard is that we have an excellent administrative program we're noticing and observing these types of things and we at least extending that program that we have now that we just presented into further discussion with what jim was talking about might be play ok because you know this is you know he said you can't police our way know hear more about programs that he has in mind so i'm just not ready yet for that tonight but there's certainly a lot more going on  remember concussion training i remember bullying i don't remember anything on opioids and maybe i missed it but i to be honest with the december of two thousand and fourteen as we had a resident that came in talking about the knockin at the question was you know when is when is your first responders going to have knocking on for opioids and pretty bad over my head and i had no idea what she was talking about so maybe i missed it but you know there's a gap between when the kids leave school and the fact that the parents aren't sitting in a classroom so whatever you're teaching to the kids doesn't always get back to the adults but it said that gray area of how do you educate the adults of what's going on with the kids so we can be advocates for them so a parent education would yeah we could jointly sponsor yeah because it is unless you you know you can read in a book you can unless you sit down with the situation if you if you know you know not to phrase it but if you know an addict you learn tons from that so because it is change this last year is like no other year the last two years is what i'm hearing from everybody that's doing and with the fact that we have never seen this before so times take a second look at getting that information out just melissa like like you say what the learn more about it so that's another thing that we that we can do and then in the end i think liaison to find out was going to the community bring information back to us or if i search for it both feel it were you thinking it would be more a staff member or a community school committee member or i think it's your best and brightest the most ambitious that doesn't have to be a got involved not knowing anything i went to social services and i said we need a place for this person dead end because that's not what they do they said try the police police or try the courts the court says we're all booked up i did a circle for two months it would have been nice to have a place in town where you can go that says i've got this issue maybe they gave me a pamphlet or something but it's shared information that's available to the public from a bunch of different sources ok so maybe meet  monthly it's it's it's basically awareness and if if that awareness comes from someone from each department it's just stronger ok so if maybe we should think because we do actually have a district wellness committee which linda co ch s right now so i don't know i think we need to think about what's the best avenue to come back and actually have action and maybe it's somebody from are already existing on this committee because they would be more aware of everything we're doing around the area of health and wellness  nurses on it their food there is the people there wellness teachers that i hear it's so maybe i don't know these all the things that went to my mind maybe somebody from that committee is a good avenue i don't know yeah and by all means i was not asking for a name because we're just setting it up as well and we i want to thank diana and officer s read in the chief and mr heinrich or chris long island sharon all for coming i know that shows the support the commitment that the community feels that the schools need to take as part of this community discussion so thank you and i most especially want to thank chairman of the selectmen jim develops who's been a good partner of ours for a long time for once again taking the lead on an important issue and jim it's our pleasure to work with you on this and we'll be back to the representative thank you represented and thank you for your openness and it's an uncomfortable topic but i felt comfortable talking to you guys about appreciate it that's great and thank  progress since the last time we updated you in june and just focus on the things that have happened that are new and different for updated not feel the need to revisit the entire plan and just go with what's what's changing what's new since the last update thank you debbie and i was just going to offer aaron we have the opportunity to have your report in our packet so thank you for preparing that and i would offer i don't think you have to read every both but if you want to highlight certain ones that you feel strongly about or and  doesn't have to be all the good news it can be that here's where we still have to progress or here's or any help or any of us so we want to we have the five goals in the technology plan and when you look at the first three of those goals they really are looking at teaching and learning and looking at our curriculum i'll just pull it up just to give them an overview of those goals so the first one is is engaging and empowering learners and that's with the instruction that's taking place in the classroom and so highlighting some of the things that have taken place this year we've really been focusing on the learning supports to office three sixty five the collaboration of predictive any tools that are the looking at how can we meet just in time on to me end professional development and professional development that's differentiated for our teachers by proficiency level if you will because just as  students are at different places so we're teachers there at different places too so one of our goals you heard about the end of last school year was really assessing the level of need and the supports that are necessary for teachers so on our three professional development days this school year we've done just that it was a matter of selecting different professional development technology workshops based on level of need and then at the same time having another mechanism in place to support them and one of those that's new this year bless you thank you is that you see there on one of the bullets is brain honey it's the second bullet there it's an online learning platform to deliver just in time professional development so what we thought we would do is give you an example to show you this is and this is something that we've struggled with for the last three years in that if we have someone come in and whether it's one of our teachers or an outside  to do professional development maybe they're modeling a lesson and we want to videotape that lesson and have that for later on discussions for follow up or maybe it's a new teacher that's on board and they missed that and it was a great p t opportunity that's in line with our curriculum being able to record that it's not so much that speakers would allow us to do that but to be able to have it where we have security in place to where it cannot be shared because you can imagine they're not wanting that shared we also want the confidentiality of our own staff and for not to be shared so this online learning platform is under our faculty tab on our website brain honey is our vendor so as if i were a teacher here i would log in and we are designing our own modules here right now we have more nuts and bolts types of things that are here so as an example with office three sixty five and all of the tools that are there were wanting teachers to use these collaborative tools with their students to make it engaging and inspiring so how do i go about really applying this and what does that look like i've had a professional development workshop on this but i still need to kind of practice on my own so they can log in from home they can go to these courses and if i were to go to the one on creating a notebook i'm not going to play the whole thing but just to give you an idea of  will based on what we need in order to be in line with our curriculum it's not something that's commercialized because we want to be very specific i can go back to the sitting time if i forget how to do this i can watch it as many times  want the other things that are built into it our task to where i can practice and get immediate feedback on creating these notebooks and how does that look like for me in my class so right now it's nuts and bolts tomorrow we have dr nancy boyle's coming in and doing some modern lessons on close reading we're going to be videotaping those portions of those lessons and then taking the instructional piece from our curriculum and then putting those courses here so we can revisit those and then ones that we're going to be able to have this library professional development so that really is hitting a number of the action steps within our technology plan one other example to show you is so that's a one note note but what does that look like in the classroom for a teacher to give you an example so if you open it up what you see here is an online notebook that a group of us are sharing with each other right now and you've heard about the flipped classroom and what does that look like so if i'm in this case i'm going to show you an example of a high school english teacher she can't she has taken office mix which is pretty much powerpoint on steroids if you will it's a new add on that's within office three sixty five it allows teachers to take a power point that they had before provide voice to it to be able to give structures to students they can embed questions and it to where they can get assessment students can get immediate feedback through this at the same time the teacher can to see how long do they spend on this do they spend do they do they does it break through it do they go through and watch and listen so there's so many different ways to use some of these tools but just to play a minute here of one this is one of this is actually shannon was lucy at the high school this is what one of the videos that she's taken for her students on a rhetorical analysis so this can be done ahead of time students watch this before coming into class and then have in the classroom more instruction on this and then really working with this or it can be said i can go back to if i need a refresher in it's my own teacher listening to my teacher in the way  it was presented in the classroom triangle so what do we need to figure out or we write a rhetorical we need to identify the purpose what the writer wants to do we need to identify the audience oh it is the target audience and we have to look at the strategies centering the audience and knowing the purpose what would be the most effective strategy the exam students are presented with a text from a well known and or published author the writer has a purpose and a target audience the writer is also chosen strategy that he or she believes will be the most effective and job is to write an essay that discusses the purpose the audience and the strategies employed by the writer and the intended that of those strategies so what do we do i'm so glad you're as soon as you can see first thing to do if i'm at home and i need a refresher i want to go back to this i have my teacher that i'm able to listen to again and go back and have that as an additional support and i could invent questions in here where there are multiple choice students could answer have direct feedback there's so many opportunities so w show those as two examples here when you look at the first goal there we're talking about what are some of the learning supports we're putting him play providing the professional development and all of these applications has been a huge piece it's a it's a journey that we're all on we're supporting people at different levels one of the other ways that we're wanting to make sure that we're supporting people is we've put together with the technology steering committee a survey that's both for staff and that's for students so we can look at how perceptions from the student perspective and the staff perspective go together that's being launched tomorrow we're working with k twelve and site to do that that's asking questions all the way from r b y o d initiative this year why students are bringing in certain devices why they're not what's keeping them from bringing those and how were they using them how often are they using technology in their classrooms from a student perspective from the staff perspective so we can look at that data and again better support from our technology instruction assist the teachers in our buildings to help continue to move these initiatives forward so those are i think three big things that speak to that first goal and it also falls in line with our second goal when we look at assessing what matters that survey that we're launching tomorrow from the teacher's perspective as well as the student perspective that's going to give us a lot of rich data many things are hard to measure we're measuring dark days which are looking at our labs are standing labs like the one behind us our mobile labs with our laptop carts how often are they being used where are they being used are the mobile labs being used more than the standalone labs those are things where we can measure more specifically and we're starting that kind of baseline data this year but when we look at measuring other pieces we needed reception data as well so that's going to happen the other piece here is test which is is a data analysis tool that we have used in the past we're expanding the use of that and looking at assessing students we know we're going to more on line testing so we want more opportunities where becomes just very natural so as an example on midterms here at the high school the social studies department was able to use tests with with the help of julia greenstein to take the questions embed pictures and graphs and those things and then create the t that way so it's an environment of what they're going to be expected to do so the technology doesn't end up getting in the way it's a critical one that that matters most and the other piece there is pearson and form which you've heard a lot about in the past the data warehouse to different levels bless you there's been a lot of work there of moving that park data into pearson in form so that has been something to because we want to make sure that even as it changes in the future that we still have it's really exciting to be here to present this information because so much has happened in such a short time as dr burgess is already highlighted and infill well been able to give you examples our virtual learning program and our our exploration into high bred course content has by far been one of the most interesting things that's happened this year and that's happened with the implementation of great ford still szell studies a live program which allows students to work in centers and have content reinforced through interactive materials that are that are provided online to them also the differentiation of our professional development this year was broken down so it was it was delivered by by level by level of skill and by teacher grade level to better meet our current curricular nee the expanded on line assessment of the tests with the use of office three sixty five tools such as office max to allow for online assessment in in real time on the spot data analysis and this really is preparing students to to take online exams and assessments and again to to make it so the technology isn't standing in the way of students from accessing curriculum or performing on assessments as well lastly one of the things that we've spent quite a bit of time on is talking about how do we assess our progress with technology whether that's introduction only or whether that's with students in terms of learning so both with teaching and learning and that's been the development working with the velleman of an assessment tool i mean in him into or a survey where we can and can compare data perception data from both staff and students in terms of the use of technology  it benefits students accessing to create them and in terms of engagement and as well as lowering students to access tools at their own pace whether it's it's through tools like brain honey or office m the things that to in those discussions is your strategic plan is a three year plan this technology plan is a five year plan so we're three years in for this and technology changes very quickly and some of the things that we had in the plan before are five years down the road we're seeing that more a little bit so we're looking at you know how are the teaching tools here and out changing some of the things that we're now using didn't exist when we started this plan before so it really has been a very interesting dialogue as far as where we're going and the pieces that are falling into place now and then that part's been exciting to we have through it's ends up being a grant it's something that i learned about at the international society for technology education conference last summer through the ranks of the learning academy and the picture that was up on the screen before there's a leaven of us that represent from administrators to teachers the technology integration special somewhere in this ten week course to where we're getting credit through johns hopkins university and it's taking our mobile initiative forward and it really has been what we're seeing is the catalyst have surviving a framework for us and what we are really doing worse and we're with people from all across the country and honestly we're finding that we're pretty far ahead then so many other schools we've had one of the districts that one other when that happens to be in massachusetts contact us and ask us about the brain honey how are you doing that can you go through it and share with us we're not sharing our content because that's all developed in house for here but the process of that so that part's been really encouraging to see that we're much we have really high expectations but we're making a lot of progress very quickly who are looking at the engagement factor do we have a lot of work to do absolutely but i feel like we're getting really good traction if you want to take questions you want to wait on him i just wanted to check one thing that he mentioned about this strategically if that's ok i don't want to interrupt your flow but you said strategically and it was something that i was planning process we talked about increasing opportunities for communication and collaboration and it's all right there i mean it's just amazing what you're doing so as not to burst and we have to like these first three night so many other concrete examples of what this looks like a different levels will be highlighted in showcased that evening too so questions on the first three goals questions and i want i have general comments and thoughts but i'll wait till you finish the last two are really getting more into more the end for structure and hardware so to politics i'm running a cold so i'm trying to cough and sneez here so so covering all three is the gap analysis and this was really instrumental in making sure that to both students and teachers have access to the technologies they need to facilitate high quality teaching and learning and through our gap analysis that we conducted this past year we've we've done things we've been able to move initiatives that really should take priority for us to accomplish our goals around technology so i'm pleased to report that now all school buildings have one hundred percent wireless coverage and in now we're into the second phase of our wireless build which which is building capacity so the first phase is to build coverage is to get every square inch of the building covered and then the second phase to make sure that our capacity is in line with the number of wireless devices and things that are in any given area of the building and we actually have a pretty good capacity right now and we're able to to  meet most of our demands but this is something we know that moving for will continue to work on mobile media labs have been deployed to all schools so so assessing where technology is being used and where it's not being used in and how we can improve the use of technology in those areas so we were able to deploy multimedia labs these are essentially labs on wheels that provide audio visual support whether it's you know projector proviron the they integrate with you with a computer to provide and deliver multimedia content so these were installed or made available at all schools and then there were also systems made available to our health and wellness programs to be used in the in the gymnasiums and in the health and and wellness classrooms as well also these programs compliment new curriculum that's being developed for health and  wellness talk about the flipped classroom where students can can from home review lessons take assessments and then as well maybe access information for instance about nutrition  then coming into to the school and continue to those last two hundred additional mobile devices were deployed throughout the district so the district has been fortunate to be in a replacement  been able to keep our technology fairly current what we're able to do through the gap analysis is is understand better how to meet the needs of our current instructional program and with that decision is made this year to continue our development implementation of phased one to one computing to provide every student with throughout the school year with opportunities to have authentic one to one computing experiences one hundred percent of the aca our academic classrooms are now quipped with interactive technology finishing up the last couple classrooms here at the go this coming week these are the interactive boards and projector similar to the one that we use time  which which are used both with students by students and teachers i'm developing standards around the installation of this equipment to make that more accessible so for instance in an elementary classroom you know grades k through three the board is installed twenty twenty four to thirty inches from the floor so that they were accessible for students to use not just a teaching tool but a learning tool also for  students the software self service portal so in terms of assess ability five you say something about that i just that was such a it seems so simple and obvious that was such a huge piece when aaron came in and looked at the instructional environment and looked at where the board was place teachers have mentioned before when i have children that are this tall and for them to be the interactive piece and they can't reach it the first thing you notice why is that up there when you have first graders that are this tall and so taking those boards and doing what needs to do to bring it down to have the access they are it makes all the difference in the world and it's because of all the technology pieces but the instructional design of a classroom to that i guess i just it's just huge draw something made a big difference when we moved to the interactive whiteboards which again aaron brought into the district where we didn't have that before so really there was a lot of interaction with the younger children we're going to do now they virtually have the ability go up to the board and touch the board just like you were on a touchscreen  computer and it interacts back and i think that's again now it's obviously the court has to be down and usable for them to be able to deal with that so to developing a plan to deploy appropriate technology so those talking about the interactive boards are also piling interactive table technology in the pre k level as well so that it is accessible by students so it's not just about the hardware and i think that one of the things we we've learned is about the cloud right it's the new buzz in technology software as a surface as a service or software in the cloud continuing our office three sixty five deployment focus on that and through our new licensing agreement with microsoft being able to provide students in their families with home use and personal use licenses for office three sixty five at home really creates a level playing field for students that are  so for instance the district may or own thirty license of specialized software for a computer automated design or graphic arts the zine we can take him into the software where it's being used and we can deploy it in a manner that's that's add gyal and we can also reclaim it so so allow students if they need to use graphic arts design software here in the media center they can go to the software self service portal and it can be installed and then after the portal notices that the software is no longer in use they can take it back so that someone else can use it in somewhere else in the district so we're typically only that software accessible and specialized labs are in certain places it makes it more accessible for people  lot of this again is a lot of synergy between the so i won't i'll try not to continually cover the same things again but in terms of of infrastructure you know really conducting that gap analysis and continually looking at what meets our needs and not just moving forward with what's been in the past has a has allowed us to have a big impact this is less progress today if credible i mean it's it really is the hard work of many in the district you know there's a lot of passion and fortune to be sitting next to her assistants who pretends very passionate about technology as well so it's it really is the work of many and you want to just cover goal five for a couple minutes absolutely so this is a this is this is also some great things i'd like to highlight here so our productivity redesign and to transform so one of the things in terms of technology that we're always conscious of is doing it in a way that's fish fiscally responsible i'm not succumbing to fad technology in doing in a way that's backed by research and is and is shown to be  in to do this we're currently we're continually reviewing our technology policies and our hardware where inventory in terms of as evidenced by the gap analysis that we just spoke about but two of the things that i'm particularly proud about are there are implementation of our automated helpdesk this year which is allowed us to augment our death side support with remote assistance so so it along with being able have desktops that's the side support to be able to remotely assist teachers in doing so in a way that can be more efficient in terms of time and can can get them the support they need in a more timely manner through the use of our automated helpdesk we've seen decreased response rates and we've also seen seen a higher satisfaction level from from teachers in those that are requesting s our service task that it's something we can fix remotely often we can just from our end it's often within fifteen minutes of the request being received in a sit in assist that user and resolve that issue you know saving time in terms of travel writing teachers or things that they needed that are quicker the other thing too is also with our software self service that's there's a number of things that can be deployed in the background degrees of updates and things that that take us away often take us away from being able to provide direct desktop support or remote assistance so for instance deploying a security update in the past because some of the security updates were deployed required a technician to go desk top the desktop to desktop to deploy them able to automate those tasks things leveraging things like power management and powering down computers in the evening is has allowed us to spend more time at the desk side or supporting technology department in terms of roles and responsibilities unfortunately we've had some people move on to to other new positions that used to relocate their family still to warmer weather it's unfortunate for us not necessarily for them says opportunity to evaluate what we're doing we're doing in terms of personnel and roles and responsibilities in the office and making really really making the most of what we have and the way we utilize our resources  gratian specialists and i think we're seeing the fruits of that here and so it is working to advance our strategic plan our technology plan and our school system so thank you is it is  amy addressed earlier the technology does it changes so quickly that we really do need to stay on top of technology and and if we are really are fortunate in terms of the support received from both this community and the town to to be able to do that because you can fall behind so very very quickly as we've seen it seems like you're doing such a great job of harnessing what we have and using it to its fullest potential and teaching our people how to use it to best serve our students and we it from that that's true that's a huge help in trying to see what works and what works for us moving forward in this in this group here i was taking the picture so i'm not in the picture but the part that's been the most exciting for me with this group is yes we have our nation and we want to move forward but to see from colleague to colleague the art of each other in the to see a high school teacher versus elementary teacher and for them to be so impressed with each other and what they're doing with kids and that that just motivates them even more to go and to share more so that's exciting you'll hear more about in the future where we're right in the middle of this course right now where you know i have an eighth grader in a tenth grader and i know steve just two and i'm sure you can see the same you know might what my eighth graders doing with the same teacher is technology wise they're just using what they have in so many different ways and you can tell they're excited and  stic and they are really putting this right into their classroom instruction and and you know they were equally wonderful in my tenth grade i had them but they're using this stuff and in new and different ways and it's really exciting to see our comments the i'll just sum up as i often do you know i'm very impressed with a lot of this you know when i first read the report i said ok another technology report where i'm going to be the bad cop and say i want more details right but there is an awful lot of detail in here and there's an awful lot of work in here and amy as i think and it was you who said this is a hard area to measure right this is a hard and i face that in my my job every day you know convincing school districts to implement technology you can't see an immediate are a why maybe you see improve student how comes at some point and how much of that you can attribute to technology is tough to measure but i think you're starting to give us the level of detail that i was hoping for and  i know how how or how hard you're working and i want to echo tina's thanks and i want i always feel the need to prove to the parents in the community you know what is behind all these bullet points that you've raised because it's an investment we're making we're consciously making in the school system but i see a lot of things just for example the way you presented first the district or the teacher faculty adoption topics before you then presented the infrastructure topics i think makes a lot of sense i think we're at that point where we can make that shift away from just getting more units to now how are we really using them in the classroom and the more that you can continue to provide us detail or examples or comments behind that i think would be really beneficial and helpful for the committee and the community to see what the the return on this investment really is so i just want to applaud you just as one example thought comes to mind a you mention the professional development a couple times and how we put that into three different groupings just off the top your head rough numbers how did our staff split up across the three different levels at this stage many of them like for instance if you take the one no one no one versus the one no to a one a lot of teachers thought well i'm a want to one and really they were two and they were giving themself enough credit but then you had some that were zero one you know honestly we needed some extra support for them but i think that that's where the technology integration specialists they are so patient taking someone at where they are and supporting them so they're willing to take that risk and to learn to move forward which is huge because it is a learning curve for so many as far as this last p d day when we offered a number of different things and it was based on curricular needs we didn't see as many people looking for the smart interactive software because that's something that i think that they're doing more on their own and not needing to collaborate it's more the the office mix these collaborative tools and how they're using it with their students and from colleagues to colleague and there's some really exciting things go on even particularly at the middle school too so i would say that the one no one no one not the smart the but they had such when no ninja i mean the the titles of these were and were unbelievable but i think more of the collaboration tools we saw the majority of people looking towards those so put you on the spot of our faculty and i wouldn't expect high numbers yet this is a process like we all understand that one percent had more people in one no one no one then we did into a feeling of well they were here nerds more at one o one versus two zero one and part of that honestly is that students have email addresses at middle school and high school so what they're able to do versus the elementary level is very different so it's hard to measure it because of the access from the student level they're having to think about it very differently and i also think that in terms of where people are it's a continuum it's not that they're neatly in one category or another it's definitely a continuum of of where you are and when you might be proficiency some areas of that particular tool and not others as you haven't used it as much so i think it's hard to put people in the care of everybody sort of on that journey and it can be a little a little gray along the road so i think i just want to say it wasn't too many years ago that we were here saying we're behind we're behind we're really behind and so here we are saying we're actually a little bit ahead when it comes the utilization and getting the power in the leverage of the tools that we have in technology not that there aren't more places to go because there certainly are so what i like about what these people are doing in the technology steering committee and how they were leading our district is this they don't just keep doing things they stop every once in awhile as they are now and they collect more information and more data through there's two surveys through meeting with people so we don't just keep going with our thoughts like we are we know what we need so it's really very thoughtful and it's it's really hard work so i just i'm thrilled that we're sitting here saying we're not only where we want to be but we're a little bit ahead in this idea of utilization and and depth of yes to that point when you mention that other massachusetts districts are calling us to say how are we doing things that's a need but so many things to experience i'm sure we're fortunate we're in a size district where we can probably implement some things across much of the school system that other districts might struggle with and certainly with the community software changes are required to your computer i'm going to have some self service options so thank you six of the very large deca competition team for being here the way it wasn't that long ago that we were here approving this is a new club or activity misting keep it was here with students explaining what you want to do seriously committed we wanted with twenty six kids going to districts which is the first level competition and then at that we had we had nine nine students placing your first second and basically either they write a paper like a presentation type paper or they compete on what they call a case study or role play situation so they don't know what those are until they actually get there that day they also take one hun question test in that particular area and then their scores are average based on their their test scores and their performance scores their to produce their competition type score and all of these competition different facets of it are in the areas of marketing rubric going around the two sides that one's a real competition and one's like a roleplay competition that just shows you what they're basically being assessed on and as you can see right there they're talking twenty first century skills so it's your experience and then we're going to announce like exactly who took what but we had nine students who are under spot to the state competitions so well and with that so why don't we start by introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about why did you join this club and what did you think of the competition or anything else you'd like to say hi i'm courtney seeley and i join the club because mackenzie anderson told me about it originally and said that her friends were having a really good time at other schools in the club and it had to do with business and competition it just sounded like a really interested me and so mckenzie united side we were going to be a team and we picked travel and tourism to work under and we're doing a case study so at the last competition we were given a problem which was actually about like a shopping center and seventy percent of their clientele was international but the international economy was failing and one percent was local of clientele so we had to figure out how to how to really incorporate the local clientele and draw them in so we create a marketing mix imprint presented to a judge and we ended up doing really well and explaining it through all the uses of marketing really and it helped i really enjoyed it i thought it was a really fun experience and we had a really good time at the competition overall and you were and what place we got second place in our competition pretty good is graduations to you  participate in marketing management the original competition but i will be participating in a trivia business at states which will cover a broad amount of categories  and mackenzie kind of like gave me the idea of joining the club because we've been friends and she kind of mentioned to rain so i thought why not try it out and i'd actually like to major in accounting so i thought i'd be cool to do a competition based on accounting and me and matter going to be in trivia for the  i'm my name is tim and i'm interested in pursuing a business career so i decided to join decca and attack i pretty straight in the marketing category and in that category had to work with giving loans to schools to buy band equipment and how to explain why we should give a loan how it's how it's processed and how the school would get the money to pay back the loan and with that i our project was actually a little different i was a governor in project and it was based around not in promotion so beforehand we got before we got to the competition we had to write a love and page paper like the details of our promotion like everything about it write i think we should point out that caitlin and bailey are sophomores so i expect to see all good things your junior and senior year here in dec as well sober second place and principles of finance and underage are barry third place in business finance so i i was reading the messages that night that you were when all of this was going on and i will say really exciting to see something that students started that you were passionate about that you wanted to do and that you went there and just got the job done so it's amazing and i'm moving back to late molly sorry mackenzie's not here i know she was such a recommend we keep track of for next year yeah ok yeah ok what about when you have one more official duty actually i don't have diana's recommends but i know we talked about this we just got back but the state competition is march tenth to twelve in boston and it isn't overnight i was going to ask a question get is when i saw the agenda for the pac and they would love for you to entertain approval of their overnight trip to the state dec a competition march tenth twelve in boston motion  once we're cautious about students and canning and putting kids in certain however i will say on your so let's discuss that further but what i will say if there's any business minded people watching from home or that just want to celebrate this these kids wonderful achievement you can just make a donation you don't have to wait for chinese fruit or fundraiser you can just call my office and see what the high school and say i would love to contribute to those awesome students who are going to the state decker competition and this is how much i like them to be thinking toss how many students are  we approve these electives and don't really know how it's going to turn out but i would say this one's turned out with flying colors so do you write to mr mccabe to mackenzie and the rest of the group really great story  shared with that much ok moving right along update on richmond and challenge yes so i think wow hopefully this will this will wrap up to something we've been talking about for many many years in richmond challenger as you know the school committee it had this honors plan but we've also had it on the joint school district goals of the past several years and it was also one of my goals so we've had dates in the past about expanding our richmond challenge opportunities before school after school summers we've done awful lot with that actually clubs good science programming in the summer joined p c c and in clubs and activities the middle and high school so we've had a millions myriad of ways i can't possibly say them all but just for people watching at home i'll try to give a few examples of this war page report so at the elementary level there are opportunities for enrichment challenge in the for poor subject areas he'll let me lis language arts math science social studies examples being that we now have a guided reading and writing guided writing group model where there is hope last instruction is individualized instruction but there are also flexible groups in the middle that we do our level or read general curriculum but there's so many different ways that kids who are able to be challenged can go beyond this level problem solving number talk stretch students thinking in the number talk to actually we should have a that would be good teaching where you highlight as well as a number talk know that i'm saying it so that you can see what kids do with that's pretty amazing to watch their kids share their thinking and stretch each other is a monthly math challenge so all of those things are very similar to english language arts in science we have new engineering units that provide new opportunity for challenge the design the engineering design process is quite open and inflexible and kids can go as far with it as they can they can extend their knowledge through further research research or explore other resources that may be of the whole class does in social studies we actually have different reading levels of articles on the same topic now available to us through the wonders of technology that you've heard about that's right the end and the reading level the article is on there so if we you know about where student is able to perform for independent reading they can be guided to an article on that particular content area that is at their level so everybody has as we call access to the content curriculum ended questions social studies alive that program comes to challenge cards so there are that's only a few examples of what we do at the elementary level for kids who can be challenged at the middle school you'll see very similar things where grades five and six actually look quite similar feel look at the at the boys they tend to be similar in approach to enrichment challenge or differentiate instruction that in mathematics separates five and six we do group kids for enrichment remediation on grade level work we group them let's say even if it's on grade level groups and a certain group needs to work more in this particular skill and this group needs to work on developing another type of concept that they they have flexible groupings i'm at all levels challenge remedial  in between and it's all based on their assessment data that they use quite on in a ongoing fashion to form those groups we have a lot of new tech tools so it does tales with what aaron amy just told you things called front row product  for challenge in sixth grade you'll see other things like solve me yummy math illustrate of math and so all those things provide more challenge than we've had and so i couldn't be happier with the progress technology has made because we don't even have enough infrastructure for a lot of these a few years ago and now we we have the capacity because of aaron's complete rebuilding our infrastructure we have the capacity to have with everything we want and that is something i didn't think i'd be able to say well there are different projects of mathematics there are a challenge activities built in so you'll see that grades five and six is so much to do in math in english language arts we follow readers writers workshop model at those levels as well similar challenge entry score but they also we have more s different choices of activities to demonstrate mastery so there is the choice for challenge exists prior to the teaching of a unit during a unit more than the literature circle or the literature group and then also at the end demonstrate assessment in science in grades five and six we now have the stem scope program starting in grade six but they have stems go p t o in grade five that's used for extension activities that students can try in school on their own home there's a different levels of reasoning model activities which are tiered going into the level of challenge that they can handle their own level readers and level math activities utilize within the science programs in different extension activities that go with the program for social studies particularly great six year project based assessments allow differentiation and then just in the process right now based on the more recent sources his review looking at additional challenge work that before the line with content that is in the program seventh and eighth grade look a little bit similar in that in math in seventh grade in eighth grade while it's just a six seven grades these actually are different so in seventh grade we do offer a challenge class which is grade seven eight together when the assessment data indicates the need that doesn't happen every year we've had the occasional year we don't offer it but if we if our assessment data indicates that we have students who can do that we do it we don't just offer it to you know every single year though it's it's definitely w do to meet the needs of students when it's that that that we have groups of students that are that are capable of doing that we have heart problems in the tax those are considered a little challenging students can test out of have choice of materials and texts in terms of literature and there are alternate research activities for kids who are more capable and want to be challenging can try something within the stem scopes program for science there are three reading levels imbedded in the online content so similar to as they're doing their hands on experiments and they're reading about content or going to gather more information they can go to a text that after reading levels that we're not they can access that without difficulty question curricular activities are available in science in terms of science and math and there are projects at three different levels within the program so everybody gets to demonstrate what they know one can do but at their level of challenge there are also leveled articles and social studies  assessments grade eight becomes a little bit different because this is the first grade in math that we do offer regular and it honors math class for eighth grade and we've talked about that at times over the years here at this table and there there is research that shows that if you start offering a more advanced math class in middle school toward the end a middle school that that is a developmental appropriate it actually research doesn't pan out in other areas that more heterogeneous grouping is really the way to go which most people do but in math we do offer regular honest classes grade eight and again both of those courses where they were in regular honors comes with different groupings more difficult work given to some students challenge problems for those who can and differentiated projects and you'll see the same type of thing in english with lots of differentiation about writing about assessment and in choice of topics for argument writing same thing for science challenging opportunities are bedded in then in social studies that assessment and this extra credit work if students want to research it and fight off it i stuck with their questions about elementary and middle how some of the high school i don't want to say how amazingly of them twenty three and eighteen year old and how much is more off it now than it was then i just it's amazing and some of these things were always present but not as obvious perhaps correct but were is now there a little bit more explicit right and a little bit more called out  unknown to everyone cracked but not all of these to your point right just before you write or maybe have to i will say i found this very helpful because this is all stuff that i i know you are doing but when asked so how do they within the classroom like ok but this is a concrete way of explaining and i found this very helpful as a parent and as a school committee member but mostly as a parent because i have been asked that question and i have you know having now had my kids go through elementary school and got one who's in eighth grade one is in tenth grade i can see this i'm like ok i didn't see this as i know how this happened but this was just such a great way to explain the other thing i wanted to just i guess point out in the elementary school math you talk about the math that you want to implementing the math challenge correct and you know again that's an area that we have tried very hard to get a jayjay they do or director directly with art so i did want to mention that now we don't have one person who has to travel to all three school you have one person at each school so that there are your direct opportunities for recall of course that we have this discussion about focus on the scroope of students in richmond challenge you know many years ago and a request that we really improve this and i think to maryland's point we have and i think the te point this is a nice way to present it has been like i read it and i get very and all the same i'll take it you know not personally but i'll make a point i guess a pointed observation i think we lose some students from foxborough during the middle school years because of their experience because they want to differentiate more because they don't see didn't see that opportunity i think sometimes and i know personal examples where we've lost kids i think we've got to figure out a way to publicize this and i don't know what the right way or appropriate way is but i think you're you and your team of done a nice job both expanding the number of opportunities to tina's point but also more in marilyn's point but also you know presenting it together well yes everyone needs to see th watching it together and you know editing and weeding out and saying how much is too much how much and i thought this really did capture all muslims in one time because i think that one of the differences is not only in the number of methods we use to differentiate and to challenge tunes but it's now become more of a regular part of what's offered right up front do you agree with yeah i think that's that's it no more become just a regular way of business in a way of being and doing and i think that's how i feel i think that might be a little bit of a hidden secret sauce that we need to do a better job explaining just how hard you guys have worked to as you said not all that you know we've done a lot of this but i think you've done but i think you have added some things i think having a third technology integration specialist as an example helps differentiation morrison well what the other thing i thought about as i read this particularly with the elementary and the middle school was the opportunity for just student growth that kids aren't being  into one particular as they grow as readers they're going to be continually challenge within the classroom as they are doing that on a bell i think right well general as i mean as their abilities roll they're going to be provided with increasing amounts of challenges a student that that as their math skills develop they're going to be given you know more gifts calls you know and you work to do and say with reading and seeing the social studies that it's it's a continuum and you're going to always be you know adapting to y label children you either are or you aren't whatever and what we said that we fully believed in and we still do is that every child at some point or in some subject area or because there has been growth personal growth could be the student who's ready to be in richer challenging a particular subject you're already a particular moment in time so this doesn't leave anybody out and i think that's why i'm happy that it's comprehensive and better because then we're ready for any time a student is ready to be in richer child you might just be a unit in social studies that really gets them on fire that they want to do a little extra work so i think that philosophy of not saying we're going to label children to decide too early on that you either are a challenge to know you're not or you'll never that that does not exist is not in our vocabulary here that we're prepared to enrich and challenge any student is ready any time i remember in an elementary because i have a five school years when juliet was there they would pull the kids out and if they didn't well what some of our departments put in several of those things even i took those things out because you know how i interpreted this works i mean if you will is that i just kept it to enrichment challenge opportunities in the corps in during the day and academic so otherwise your report would have been super super long but i also wanted to just be succinct about how do we enrich and challenge kids in the core and not try to put in every club activity that we've added to that we had x is there were some athletic things in there too so i didn't want to do that so the these are just in the core during the school day and high school is easy to sum up you know we have we have honors classes in addition to college prep we  to all of those enriching challenge kids and in many of the department store assessment choices there are sign choices there are different problems that are presented different levels and you can tackle some or more all we have new courses that are challenging like the computer science courses going in this differentiated hands on work like labs projects and freebase learning across the subject areas many of the core curriculum here is to have competitions not we just heard about decker which is extra curricular but you everybody knows our music program comes imbedded with competitions sectionals student leadership art has competitions embedded in every student who is in our class and just competition so that's a core curriculum challenge opportunity and we have many types of independent projects with many teachers and we all know that we have a virtual high school which can reach and challenge students they choose senior project as that and last but not least every high school in massachusetts does is i think we're pleased to be with you know this review and focus on the richmond challenge you think that's the consensus i get anyway and i do think you know it's important and i like the way you sort of you know we were ready to challenge all students at any time right when they're ready  i think that's good now you made a comment the beginning i mean mr heard you where you said that this was the end of a focus or this was a so no what was your thought and i felt it was the one area that we hadn't addressed over the years where i had a personal goal to expand enrichment challenge opportunities you know extracurricular where we've had reports about how many clubs if you met was a volt we'd have received percentage of high percentage and this last piece we had addressed or answered fully was how do we do it with and so i felt that was the last piece that needed to wrap up this whole picture of how do we provide a richmond challenge obviously goes without saying it's an ongoing right but they have to also i think it was a very good decision to put it within the corps so that the op if it isn't under time outside not into transportation it's there for every student and might this be a nice little time to slip in congratulations to the jazz band for being invited back it's never going to be the be all and end all the period at the end of the sentence like this is what we do period in this what we're going to be doing because we're not those people anyway but i have the opposite i felt that this is a great way to collect everything we do and how many different ways that we do it and i felt very proud that we have so many ways to enrich and challenge kids in the park and so i i don't see this we have a need to add more other then there could be better and there will discover them tomorrow so by by september they may say you know when we're doing this i think i'd like rather do that that's a better way to challenge them in my subject area so it probably will always be added to and maybe edited a little bit but i think overall there were there was more on here than i expected to get when you really write them all down i had a moment of this is great to summarize office i found it really helpful i don't know of anyone that doesn't provide original challenge in the classroom no matter what the teacher would have greedily teach i don't know of anyone here that doesn't so i don't see that other than i would say everything we ask people to do they do and they do it well and they embrace it so i don't think there's a single any student who's ready for a challenge we will find a way and i think that's a good guy i think that's a good ability if we can deliver on that i think that's the right philosophy i think is being played out i mean the second year in a row on the  r roll and largely because that opportunity has been increased to a wider amount of students right and we're not we're never sending the message that you can't write in which we used to make those judgments in the in the old days we're we had whenever formular and it was like you you can if you want and you were often offered then i think that philosophy that you see so concretely for a p entrance to diana's you ship you also see right down in  kindergarten we don't assume that and i think those of us who've been teachers all can remember that student who was plugging along doing fine and all the suddenly they came on fire about something and then they became the you're in the area and that's what we want to be ready for that we by us with your view on your progress would be to center this of your your thoughts around three hundred questions what am i really proud of what am i working really hard on which doesn't mean i've accom and allowed me to also work with other is to summarize where you think you are because pretty much anything you want to say about your work as an education as an educator education leadership really whether whether you think it's something you're really struggling with or something you really have done well with they are going to fall into those three questions so i just want to say it's worked pretty well for me so as you know the purpose of the formative mid year cycle cycle review which for me is mid year is to foster productive dialogue between me and between you as a committee and individually regarding how i'm coming along in my role so this year in the last year i had it in my summary that i was really proud of very specific student initiatives think so but i kept coming back to what i what really struck me the most and so i sort of took everything else out and went back to my first thought which is that that i really i'm so proud of the positive culture in climate in every one of our schools and across the district because that cannot be taken for granted and it doesn't come likely without lot of work and you know amy and i and you know built networks of people in other districts and we them all the time and i know you do as committee and that is so rare of you know people that we know work with that are really struggling with some climate issues with the culture not being able to change a culture or challenge by the culture or not fitting with the culture all of these things that really what a lot of us spend a lot of time on so i would say that sustaining the positive culture that that started before me and sustaining that in a fairly large organization for us i mean five schools isn't for but if you say an organization employees or the front of fifty people that has five separate buildings or plants that requires all those people to stay in the same page with the same philosophy and coming together and working together that is no easy task and so i'm very grateful for our ministers our faculty and our departments because everybody contributes to that effort but i think that every single thing we do and i said every effort every communication matters whether something small or something large every daily interaction every long term planning thing that we do here at this table that we do administer a team so whether it's a huge multi year planning initiative where are we going what's our umbrella or whether it's a conversation i had with somebody this morning every single thing i think matters in sustaining a positive culture and climate and the even if we are all together been on the same page pretty much like we are now there's still such a large variety of needs of our staff of our students of our parents in the community and it's quite complex understanding the the greater needs the myriad of needs the individual needs in i try to keep that in mind so even if i'm talking to one parent on the phone about an issue they have it's  the context of who we are as an organization and how we go about solving those problems and maintaining that positive relationship even if even if there's a concern so i that's why i put that in this what i'm most proud of because for me being  five years in at this point to sustain a positive culture i know it's taken a lot of work i certainly feel that i've put a lot of effort into it but so too is every single person that works in our organization and i hearken back to my opening day speech which is the book that i have read of good me and by mark shriver and he talked about his dad feeling that you have to be great in the small stuff every single day and i think that's so true of educators we have to be great every single day in those small moments never mind the big stuff so that's so in summary of that whole concept we have i think very high standards of professional practice and height for kids and sometimes when we're talking to people in other a standard has become part of our professional lingo is my source of pride because that is how we look at everything and not just what would be acceptable today in public education or most people doing it's whether it's i'm so proud that we have a box for a standard that really guides or decisions it's fine tunes a team in the guides everything we do for children terms of quality but specifically i did want to mention that as you start tonight our technology initiatives continue to a und that's the only word i could think of and it wouldn't be possible without that reinvented infrastructure that can now support everything and we have a full complement of a very talented tech team including our integration specialists that can support teachers such exciting things are happening is that every single day it's amazing i already mentioned the new exploring computer science course that's been a personal goal of mine for two years it's taken us two years to find the high school curriculum and to get things set up and we're now already starting to talk about how we're going to plan for the second course and will it be a second course or will will they be able to after this one go right into a p computer science actually both avenues are possible we're not sure yet which one is the better option for  kids we may offer it here ok thank you well we'll see we'll see how many enroll this year and then we were where we're going i heard some really positive from karaite one of the mistakes that with a lot of high schools do because that's been the only deliverable curriculum is they just say this is what we offer and we know that if you're a student who's maybe the child of a computer scientist or people who are in that field you maybe can do that but most of our kids are so weak they need that introductory prerequisite another long term project as you know we've been working on our program to bring international students here in foxboro and nothing to do with us we had to wait for homeland security to clear our city of a certification that didn't happen until the fall so we did finally get  certification in the fall we have completed our marketing materials and we are now so we all that's ready they have started recruiting and now we're doing communication materials and we do expect to welcome our first student or students in september definitely have one is there a possibility we don't know yet it's early all come all know by probably july around the month of july when they confirm this we'll have at least one student who's expressed preference for foxborough but they haven't that our town school relationships continue to be strong and collegial and collaborative and they are built on trust and communication and began you can't really underestimate the importance of that and i think that actually our recent  advisory committee hearing for a school budget i think that's a classic example of that because they think it was a really good exchange back and forth they have good questions we learn from when we're there and i say that that showed the type of relationship that we have that you might not be in the know about everything but we should be able to answer that with transparency and honesty and have people come away having their questions answered i got a lot of good feedback from the  so second question what am i working really hard on so this year i'm working really hard in my professional practice school which is about targeted leadership development so while i did a lot of reflecting the summer felt we're doing a lot of informal things that i certainly work very directly with over people so often does a meet and what are we doing for developing our educational leaders in the district whether it's i mean we're not talking really about we're talking about teacher leaders but we're also talking about our minist news directors of department heads and would have been doing for them a better than what we do every year in the summer so because i've been given that a lot of thought i think that's a that's a huge responsibility in education now it's probably our most important role is that what we leave behind  job so so that's what we've been working on it that's what i've been working on so what i did was set up a more formal instruction approach called structural rounds i think i talked about that when i shared my goals back in the fall it's a structured approach to inquiry about practices wrote the district so i didn't start by introducing here's what i want to find out about do you want to join what i really said was here's an opportunity here's what instructional rounds are you can be displayed if you want you don't have to participate if you don't want in what is it you'd like to know more about in the district so we had such great brainstorming if you remember back in the fall such great brainstorming about what is it they were curious about if they only are high schools the department head what do they want to know about what goes on before or is there a practice we've been doing and where we're saying we we really do that to the extent that we want to with it we think we should or that we need to and so they basically brainstorm all these different theories they were curious about that i think we ended up with about twelve or thirteen then they picked their top  best practices to share in the future so we're studying the things we want to know more about so that we can turn around share and hopefully grow it with more of a wider audience so we need every six weeks and each group reports out what have they seen what have they observed and what they were still wondering about and then what is it to be a focus for the next six weeks with this topic so far everything we've picked is sort of meaty and they not changing topics so they didn't pick something so small that they could go maybe a couple of times around together and say to facilitate a broader understanding not just of what we do but why we do it and that's what's going to sustain us is understanding the why so just to give you the topics i won't do the questions we all focus questions and one of them is not the first group is a document based questions which is certain a structural technique is used in social studies english language arts we've got a group looking it was look like in the middle school in high school and of the do it the same or they do have different technique we learn from each other what is the progression of our inclusion practices look like pre k to twelve and often you'll see where the difference is and where there are commonalities we're looking at levels of expectation and that is a very complicated topic and if you're thinking about rigor and just so you know that we're very reflective in it it's it doesn't always say let's just find good things and celebrate it our are questions  do the levels of expectation rigor compare across all levels in regards to both regular and special education is there a difference between what we state versus what we do or what we accept as a media question and how our expectations and high levels of rigor communicated to our students and how are those executed in the classroom so that's pretty neat to operate there we're looking at the role of educational assistance these are people we rely on tremendously and i just like to meet students needs and they have their own feelings and i've asked them recently how when do you feel you're well served in your role and when do you feel you are not asked to do as much that you have the power of doing more so they actually have weighed in a little bit of where they feel when they feel they're they're used effectively when they feel they don't and we have people studying how our educational systems are used to effectively supports to parting when it comes to world language would be expectations and use of the target language and world language classes across all grades one through subject so they're actually collecting data on how many and how many minutes for instances so the teachers use the target language and getting some actually encouraging results into there is that you know as you know from improving the budget as far as the textbook adoption and really looking at how is that playing out in the washroom across the district at all levels should help with the vertical integration to total that in there that is it is an issue for students if they go from civility groups how different departments are teachers accommodating that classroom and they were already discovering a lot like lots of new ideas like this to say wow i teach this subject i thought my core subject doesn't really matter which was sort of unique in its own animal now i'm seeing you're doing something in a class that's completely different and wow i could do that so that's that has been pretty excited about what they've been seeing across the high school a group that i mean as a starting flipped learning of the classroom model how i being used where is it being used has it changed the learning dynamic and what are some breast best practices what are some things that have worked or things have not worked and last but not least what tools the strategies do teachers use to effect student collaboration twelve so you want students to collaborate with each other as a twenty first century skill so they want to college and career knowing how to work together but what are the tools the strategies teachers using and what's working what's not so we can say people have tried this so much so i  got really exciting topics and we're going to come back in june at the end of our year with a full report on what we've learnt from each group and one of the things that i'm going to ask them to do when we meet next time is as a summary to write a vision statement for that area so what is our vision stigma for folks learning is that will help guide us in the future so that's going to be actually it sounds like writing a summary statement it is but now given everything you've learned and seen what your vision what is a vision statement you could come up with for the area that you've looked at that should be the umbrella we'll see whatever from most challenging so this is not news to you because we discussed it thoroughly during the budget process but it has been quite challenging reacting to the growing needs  students in the areas of mental health social emotional behavioral disparate i don't need to go into that we've covered it but it's challenging for me not only in terms of worrying about students and their families and what do we need to be doing but how do you how do you require i put it requires and flexible and a number of respond and within the confines of a fiscal year budget it's not always easy to be nimble or to be flexible so what do we do when students move in in the middle year how we comedy how do we find the money to have a staff member to care what can we do without so you don't want to say we just we're done you know the stores closed we have to be able to respond to the needs but being nimble and responding to it and responding quickly and not letting a child who has additional needs sort of disintegrate in front of us is is definitely challenging and you can see through the budget that those needs have trumped budget forecast as as to make sure that we follow through with providing the extra point five yellow teacher that we have in the budget so they are sort of waiting for that period in the sense to show that we are sincere about supporting that but as you know that comes with the  town meeting in the budget so we plan to provide that for them at that time but we are summarized by the end of the year again we've learned through that computer science significant progress in that we have a curriculum in the course identified and we are going to run the computer science clubs again in the summer and we've been running for about the year in the schools and my communication goal for district improvement is to expand every year i try to figure something new to expand our reach agreement kitchen so what we have is i did create the twitter account it was launched on october nineteenth and i will say i'm enjoying it more than i thought i would i learn a lot in it's not hard to find things to share or to post or  celebrate and while i had i would say at this point i would say me your goals the time i am running my along with my but that the active r s s feed on the main website we have we are hoping when we get a better platform which i can't do anything about right now but when aaron switches to a different platform which he's investigating for our main website will be able to have an r s s feed for ongoing things videos up or whatever it is and we are still working as you know on the outdoor thought a complex of fox for high school specifically for this year we want to finish the concession stand so i put some progress because we have a plan it's on c a p it has to go through several steps as you right i mean that that really helps you helps you get to the heart of the problem and and one of the things i remember every year over your presentation just know that you're a collaboration machine not if they choose not to participate you get a good crowd in there and there's that saying where you you have my hands but now you have my head too and that's how an organizational work an organization  that must in some way come into you know value for the taxpayer with retention of staff and the money we invest in research and development and the way we hire people we don't just go for the lowest bidder if you will  we we hire to you as you said that works for a student and there's a lot of value to that i think through these you know this school committee member and probably everybody else here on the board but you know i think that collaboration is think funny sometimes but you know and i made a funny but i think i but i'm sure what he said i know you are and i appreciate that because what i hope to get out of this is we have so many talented people here in my goal is if we continue to yeah i was just adamant i think this is very thoughtfully done and i was sitting here thinking i know how you spent your february school vacation this committee fact there is no good but i think you put a lot of thought into this  and how you word it and what you focus on and i think it's reflective of the style and strong skillset you bring so you know things that mention a lot or meant a lot to me you know you still talk about great to greater which we've had since day one with you and you sustain that high standards of professional practice and high expectations for student achievement just been a focus for us steve mentioned collaboration you've got ongoing communication hiring strong of told you i think that will be your legacy is you know all of this the facts are a standard is started and led by you but has a lot to do as we've often said at this table with absolute with the people that you surround yourself with so as betty said just last time it was twenty five thousand were about fifty and what what we've used those funds for really is to address a few extraordinary items from i mean it's point of view typically things that we try to we to the end of the in ways people always felt that it was a substance coming through on healthy stuff but actually it was just the glue that never dry or really dried because of the way the flooring was done so we took two classrooms during the christmas break and stripped them totally out and tried this new product which basically sealed the concrete and then rebuilt it all we back up a new tile floors and so far it's working well but we really need to get to the spring when we get the real moisture change to dirt that's what it is is wet dirt that the sealant needs to be a little stronger so that if the damp dirt moves up it stops so it's wet dirt that's what it is it's not more you can you can literally in some of these root well into it we did you could pull an individual can pull the tile up because the glue never dried and that's what we've been pushing back up with the glue with obviously any materials like out on the floor and that's why it looks like a dark surface area but as i said those look actually very good right now and we're not seeing any more sure coming through the product we've bought in this thing which has a ten year warranty from the manufacturer they did the testing they designed the specs for the actual product we installed in which they do area by area so very comfortable we've got a solution the only other thing that i'm really hoping for is and in the end i really want to better a view on this for probably another thirty days which really is within our utility areas  equipment maintenance side is that we have two more vehicles that our garage has been pushing us to say that we have to take them off the road as soon as possible so and ones on the the main inside and  so again as soon as i have the resources from the house i can mine internally just in utilities i don't touch anything else but that's one of the things i will be going after  second reading of policy j k a physical restraint of students changes the state law has changed went into effect on january first of this year to ensure that restraints were not being used throughout the state in any way that was unreasonable or unsafe to students this is consistent with what we were doing in our district anyway it does make the language of the policy more specific i think someone who was concerned about this practice would get a very good sense of when it is appropriate and when it is not appropriate to use this kind of restrain in that it is only for safety purposes as dr and to explain to us all explained in the meetings with me and marilyn actually sat in on the policy subcommittee meeting i don't know if there's anything else you want to and marilyn really was very thorough and when we had our first reading the only change we made was actually for magical one on the first page changing state statue in the states that shoot and also a practice in the district of trying to prevent the use of restraints except in the most necessary set of circumstances so now i would entertain a motion to go into executive session for the purpose of discussion discussing negotiation strategies with the union personnel specifically foxborough maintenance workers association i'll make that motion the second test and the discussion roll call vote hi i'm i chair says i we will return to open session i guess in about ten to fifteen minutes the maine and workers and thank them as well and their representatives for putting together what i think the committee thought was a fair and reasonable and good contract for the period is that twenty fifteen to twenty eighteen bills that right  those in favor of unanimous approval with thanks to the maintenance workers association to the many other matters but for a few things in your package but the most and one of the important eligibility and then feasibility and they we are on schedule as you can see me for a march thirtieth vote to move us forward to our two hundred seventy day window started that window so that was nice here and then this really means something to me as both a parent of two way in the past for middle school students and currently as a colleague but our very own  don't think it's a secret he's retiring this year so i keep telling you to just mine but anyhow he deserves it and i'm really thrilled for him i have that highlighted under my name really through do you think there's any way we could get ted to come here and we and by our folks moche child sexual abuse awareness committee of which i am one of the seven members and i think that's really something that could really change our community for the better and i hope people show up to listen to what that's about school students on broadway so that's exciting and a nice continuity getting some of our middle school students who are interested in drama to continue and and continue to improve our drama club which is exciting you know we talked about the essentially up ellington competition but you know looking at the list you just want to point out that a fox rose i don't know all of the towns on here but some of the cities on here are seattle i mean lexington massachusetts is a  and she got it right she always does oh oh oh well hoping for a winter without any well don't look at the forecast for tomorrow night people but it's all right snowing it's going to be greener i see and then maybe maybe a little rainy