tell the rest of your story will give me a few minutes and then open it up for questions and thank you so much for coming and i will take your arm at the end but evening everyone thank you very much for being here tonight my name is john fail and and i want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to visit your school district today meet with high school students high school teachers the leadership team elementary middle school teachers in a wonderful kindergarten class that i actually jumped in on and an impromptu site i appreciate you considering me as a candidate for the superintendent of schools for belmont i come to you from the milton public schools where i am currently the assistant superintendent and have been for six years milton is very similar in some ways to the town of belmont we have a similar budget we have a similar sized town we have parents who have very high expectations and we have budget worries each year that we try to bring all these great things to our students and our families and to the constraints of trying to work with other town numbers to support the other town departments and move the whole town forward the milton public school parents as well i have five children and i live in milton three of whom are in college and two are still in the milton public schools and private in the public schools i was a teacher in administrator in the boston public school s very happy to say that i have ten years of experience in boston and sixteen years of experience in milton and i i believe that that long tenure of service to each of those districts is very important when you think about the long term impact that the position of superintendent can have on schools when they have someone who can be there for a long time and i think this town experienced that a few years back where they had a longstanding superintendent and i would like to say and commit that if i had the opportunity to be considered for this position that i would like to continue my track record of staying with the community and building relationships not only within the public schools in the school teachers and administrators and parents and students but also equally as important with other town administrator is within sure that we're working together to provide the services to the entire town you can't do much by yourself in the schools if you don't have the support of the to you out in the winter in the fire department to check your building to make sure it's safe and the work that you can do with the police in the park and right department all those departments are very important and i look forward to being a member of that team  make sure that belmont continues to be a great place to live and raise a family and stay beyond that community so i look forward to your questions i met today with the leadership team and students and teachers and we met with the school committee earlier and i look forward to any and all questions about my experience my background in and how i see the work in this in the world of education as it fits in the belmont public schools yes so the question is what sets me apart from the other two candidates and i'm only repeating the question on behalf of the viewers at home i believe and i don't know much about the other two candidates other than what was in the bio in the belmont patch other than to say that my experience as an assistant superintendent in a central office person in a in a similar size district with similar high expectations with a similar tax base with a high school that has great student outcomes with middle school and elementary schools that have great programming and great teachers that have to be coordinated and planned and supervised and supported with families that come every day to send their children to safe schools i have done that work in a similar district just you know twelve miles away i have done it and the position of assistant superintendent in charge of person on curriculum so i do all the hiring i do all the curriculum work and all the students working on the professional development in this district  the set up is almost the same so i believe my direct experience for the last six years is a central office assistant superintendent in a town that has a budget that looks almost the same with the constraints that they have around the financial revenue that they can provide in making those decisions and those hard decisions about how to move forward in hard times fiscal hard times and also knowing that when you do say that we might have to cut something that you're going to make sure you have to satisfy the parent base in the community she is still going to be able to maintain that high level of expectation for the students so what sets me apart as i believe i'm the only candidate that has that central office experience that's remaining in this pool of candidates that's a that's a great question i have benefited by several great mentors in my time as a teacher an educator and administrator in when i moved from boston public schools to build public schools the superintendent at the time in my career in a different manner the first number i call is dr neal and she has been very instrumental in advising me and coaching me through options and when to make these decisions and ask the hard questions like why and what's good about belmont and why would you want to be there and what makes you a good fit for that community and she makes me ask myself the tough questions that i have to answer on behalf of my career my family to get ready to move i'm very fortunate that i'm in a job that i really enjoy and i have don't have a very big urgency to leave other than i would like to have my superintendency and move a district in be in charge of the district but i have to decide as in what i think that the community has to decide is am i the right fit for this community but i do want to be a superintendent i do believe my experience base gives me a really sound foundation to be a very good candidate for that position and really what we're where i'm trying to figure out and today was a big day to do so and i think what the community needs to figure out is who's a good fit to do that because i'm sure the other two folks are qualified as well but dr neil is a highly regarded friend in c when i went from someone someone asked me today or to repeat the question why would i like to go into the role of superintendency and what drives me to take that kind of a job when i was a teacher in the classroom someone said to me today why did you ever want to leave the classroom and when i was teaching i always wondered what's going on out there what are they all doing while i'm doing the hard work in this classroom of teaching these children and so my attention would go to how is this building organized how is this curriculum working in other rooms and what kind of assessment their using an m i used in the same one and so i always was thinking in a more global manner so that forced me into being a principal i wanted to be in charge of that kind of thing and i decided that i'd go into that role so i went and got my degree and became a principal when i was principal i had a lot of autonomy i was the leader of my thousand students and my eighty five staff and i had great parents and a great p t o when we did a lot of great things and in middle school as you know especially in a town like milton or in belmont people are making the decision where they're going to stay in the public schools or maybe go private and middle schools to elementary parents is a pretty scary place until they get there and they like it and they enjoy it and they realize that middle school is just a great time for the child so i had great experience with all those aspects of the job being a leader being an academic leader we built a new middle school in a high school at the time i was involved in that project so when i went to central office because i was asked to go to be a come assistant superintendent i salute he said yes and was thrilled to have the job  after doing it and learning the job i miss the components of being in charge and being a leader and being the one to make the decisions and create the work plan to get the work done in creating the team and i think  that one of the things that i take a lot of pride in is that we've built a very good team in milton of math curriculum coordinators english language arts and science folks and by building that team and leading that team is something that i would like to do for myself and on my own with a group of folks and so that's what drives me to be the superintendent i enjoy that type of leadership opportunity and although i get a lot of exposure to a lot of those decisions and in that work in my c because my superintendent is very generous with how the position works and we share a lot of the work together i still believe at some point in time it's time to move into your own role and that's why i would like to pursue this new position so the way in which i lead a team or my leadership philosophy is very much collaborative a lot of the work that we do in milton that i believe is the right way to do it is by committee and by team so when we want to change the curriculum in science or math we have to get folks that are teaching that in doing that work every day together in a room to ask what we need to do what we want where we want to and and how how can we get there we look at best practices we look at research and that whole group of people not just the assistant superintendent for curriculum but a couple of principals some teachers the people that are doing the real work are the ones that can make those suggestions so an example would be when we needed see do unit assessments across the whole district in every grade level at the elementary level in math so how do you get teachers in four buildings across maybe thirteen second grade classrooms to use the same assessment at the same week to measure the same standard because they all like to do their own thing they might do it their own pace but when you really think about it from an educational perspective if we're going to move second graders to know and be able to do all these standards by the in a second grade they have to be benchmarks that exist throughout the school year they have to be assessed on the same question so we know that they're learning and we can compare apples to apples for all students across the district so no one can say to me oh in school x they learn it really well but in school why they didn't even do that curriculum so we really speak to curriculum we re speak to assessment and we got that work done because we asked elementary teachers to sit in on those committees that actually develop the assessments i didn't create the second grade math assessment and i don't know if i'd know where to start to create a second grade math assessment but the teachers who were doing it every day with the right people as the people to ask that question and they actually made those assessments as a group so after that group of eight teachers made that decision for what the sessions would look like then we had to sell it to the whole second grade stuff across the district and it was much easier to put in place when we said that the assessments were produced by and drawn up by their peers across the second grade teaching corps and that's how i would i see my work as a leader so we ran into that when we felt the young cast didn't necessarily go far enough and i'll give you a very clear example the every day math program that we use in milton teaches above the and cast standard the former massachusetts standards now they've changed with the common core and we decided to go with the every day mouth curriculum because it was one slice or two slices above the expectation so our curriculum was a little off the standard when it came to what i'm cast was actually asking us to do to demonstrate their ability on because we were actually teaching more skills in each grade which by the time they got to eighth grade we were having students learn more of the algebra and geometry standards but the assessment was testing them on just the algebra and some algebra so we were teaching beyond the standard and at the time when you're feeling the pressure of standardized testing you want to say well let's just like come back and let's just teach what they ask us to teach so we can get that good score in that assessment but the reality is we believe that every single eighth grader should be a part of an algebra experience because that's the key the mathematical success as you go further on so we held that line as a district that may contrary or slightly off what the state says we should be doing but we decided to teach above that standard so there are times where you might not be fully in line and it usually would be because you're actually asking more students as you try to work your curriculum through i will say with the common core and with parker on the horizon mark is going to be i think a little more rigorous of an exam and students going to be asked to think right problem solved at a very early age so we'll see where that park exam actually finishes in what they asked students to know and be able to do and we'll find out if we feel like we should stay in line with that but we should again go above that standard in certain subject areas  or because we want to both of but there have been some exams expression the eighth grade math that we maybe didn't do as well on maybe were we doing what we thought was the right thing which was giving those students that extra push to make sure that they were finishing algebra one in eighth grade so they could access higher that high school that was worth it to the district and that's how we approached it sorry could you repeat  that i think i have so the question is how do i feel about student morale teacher morale being related to high student achievement i think that directly related one of the questions that i was asked earlier is what makes a great teacher when you walk into a classroom what does that look like in the first thing i think it looks like it is a teacher who can make a child feel like they're the best and when that child walks into that room they feel like they're the only child there amongst twenty four and when that child feels like that and is engaged in that manner i think that that's when the teacher can start to do the content area instruction engaging kids in put themselves into the instructional model of teaching and learning but teachers to dedicate that amount of interest  time and commitment into their preparation and their students you have to have high morale we have to treat teachers well we said it earlier today that everybody in the district works for the classroom teacher but the one focus area of the bull's eye that exists in a public school system is the classroom that's where everything happens john failing doesn't teach math there are math teachers that teach math so john failing a superintendent or principal or assistant superintendent needs to focus their attention their resources and their support ones that classroom teacher so that means support with professional development instructional practices resources but it also means valuing teachers providing them an environment where they want to come to work every day all those things that professional collegial environment where they feel respected and professional we talked about how that is in twined and professional development teachers come in feeling professional every day and valued that definitely that alex who translates right into that child feeling happy in school and then we can engage those children to school and so i see that as a direct line to my morale definitely connected to high student achievement yes the question is what is a good teacher feedback system to increase teacher performance the new evaluation tool that is actually in in place right now in belmont public schools in milton is about to take it on which is the state model provides i believe opportunity for teachers to set their goals in line with what their best practices are and allows those conversations to take place with administrator in tinge both smart goals are put in place to see if they've actually met those goals in that process and that dialogue between administrator and teacher is the best way to i believe increase teacher skill and instructional value in and how another adults i e the administrator can go in and observe what's going on in that classroom so what we do in milton is we have actually have learning walks where the administrative team district wide will go into one school a month and will walk into four classrooms and will view but the principal wants us to investigate at this school it could be inclusion it could be questioning techniques it could be a student engagement and so we don't go interview the teacher we go interview the this is happening in this classroom do we think that good question techniques is important if we do is it happening so let's go in and find out if it's happening that feedback goes back to the principal that the whole team will sit and talk with and then that principal sits down with all of the teachers not just the ones observed and said hey listen we think that we do a really good job on questioning techniques and including all students and engaging all students but you know what we just went around and watched us for a day and we only saw four students on average being called on in a class of twenty so we as a professionals need to work on that skill we start we did it well but when we did a data check and we dipstick whether or not that was happening it didn't seem to be happening so let's talk about that so those are not direct supervision and evaluation  conversations but they're global instructional conversations in all of those are collegial professional conversations so when you have that with a teacher that's a much more receptive and professional conversation than i was in your room today and you call them to me and sally and if i come back tomorrow and you keep calling on to me and sally and we have a problem that's really not the professional growth model that we'd like to see in place it's that collegial model i think that that always covers about ninety nine percent of our teachers because i think we hire good folks and have good folks is there one percent or other teachers out there that need a different type of model in terms of evaluation supervision that may be more toward the terms of being a prescription and you have to go through a process that they may not be doing the job that's a whole different component of supervision evaluation the majority of the work that we need to do with it on behalf of teachers is opening dialogue between what's working what's not and how come and having some peer observation in some people you know the makeup of the public schools is we have or had a five schools and then we have one middle school which is six to eight and then our high school is nine to  twelve the question is what is my view on elementary education as a middle school principal when i went to central office i said to myself that's the best gig go and what is the what is going on at the elementary level that's so hard this is just like come on middle school students a busy that  busy day high school students have big high school issues what could be hard about going down to elementary school and then you're down and you watch a third grade teacher prepare math science social studies probably a bullying intervention  lesson make sure students have what they need have one thousand boxes of kleenex because someone's going to be upset that day make sure buddy has what they have going home and assess look at data reviews data and try to differentiate instruction the next day in four or five subjects that is a lot of work so i am totally bought into the fact that elementary teachers are the hardest working people in america the most important position in a public school is to first grade teacher so kindergarten we have full day kindergarten and milton you have in belmont has done a great job of preparing our first graders to now be at a higher level of i call they have the sea legs they're ready for a full day they're ready to learn they're coming in ready to learn but the responsibility of teaching a child to read when they're all coming from different places and now you have twenty three or eighteen or twenty one fresh faces i mean canvases and trying to teach them to read and understand and multiply an ad  that is a substantial task and i believe quite frankly that early literacy is the key just like we think eighth grade algebra is the key to the math world literacy by the time you hit their grade everybody in third grade at the end of that you need to be proficiency in reading because everything after that becomes reading to learn not learning to read and so early literacy is the cornerstone in that pre k kindergarten and first and second grade work that expands every student to be able to know the code in read and understand then they can see that the research will say and this i believe her name is carolyn lyons and she's involved in a reading program that's a nonprofit agency in the city boston that does state work or work online if you google her we use her as our reference point that we believe in her data that says that if students can read at a proficiency level by third grade in their achievement level at high school is off the charts so i believe it's super important and i don't think that elementary schools are run themselves and then does a lot of work there and if it's done well it's work well it's work well worth  so the question is what do what i have experienced i've been a part of that involves green initiatives and my experience of milton we have six schools that are ten years or younger and even with that we have made some green initiatives to our facilities that have i believe not only been very cost effective but good for the environment we have solar panels on every single roof of every single building we have  reduced our electricity and utility bill district wide from one point two million dollars five years ago or four years ago to a budget i presented last night with a superintendent to our school committee of about seven hundred seventy five thousand dollars so star at a fraction of the rate it didn't cost us any money our our utility bills went down the next day and soon as we went online and that is three hundred thousand dollars that we're getting back to t even with brand new schools the lights that we had in our field house and an oratorio in our gymnasiums and cafeterias we're using too much energy so we got grants from and star in replace those bulbs over three years so the amount of energy we're saving just on a new lighting fixtures has been really really beneficial in the community wasn't too happy that we had just built bridges schools and we had to replace lighting bulbs and lighting fixtures but in the end it was worth the effort to do obviously we recycle we only use green chemicals in our schools the cleaning of the cafeteria and all of a custodial supplies are all green supplies we are a town i think that were green tower where we have been designated for the whole a green can unity in our facilities director has been a big part of that process our facilities director has now become a consolidated so he's director so our school facilities in our town facilities merged to one department and he has been  the one in charge of making the town a green town in relation to cleaning chemicals a lot of chemicals solar panels and we did also try to put a windmill in place but it didn't really catch fire the the golf course next door to the wind cited to say that that was going to happen so i think we're green minded it's a very nice town they're very very much involved in the schools will partner with them when those things come across our plate yes did the contract on the monday before thanksgiving which is good news in the question was how do we keep up morale in situations where you may have an extended contract negotiation or other circumstances that create bad morale by the nature of the issue what we try to do when we may have budget concerns that may require us to put on paper that we might have to lay off folks while we go through this negotiation with the town of the w have full staff meetings and we tell the staff exactly what's happening exactly what's going on where they fit into this and what we're trying to advocate for so that the budget as an example when we get ready to present our budget before we go out to every p t o we have staff meetings especially if it involves teachers potentially being laid off if in fact state revenue doesn't meet a certain limit or the town's limit of revenue doesn't commit so i think communication is a big piece of keeping morale high in times that may be hard honesty is very very much the policy and transparency in click communication when i was principal as an example you know we used to have  a yoga teacher come in and we had free yoga lessons in the library for two years because people were stressed about moving from the old building in the new building so that created nice morale believe it or not in the brand new middle school that we opened up they had multiple teachers rooms so we we were used to being all in the same room at the old middle school and we had great morale and when the teachers rooms were decentralised in four different spots no one talked to each other so my remedy for that was well let's get some teachers in on a saturday and let them paint a room and we took all the computers out of it and we made one centralized teacher's room because we were missing community in our school so i believe that you have to be vigilant inattentive to morale a a component of how you run your organization all the time in budget discussions make that difficult budget seasons make that difficult to go to contract negotiations make that difficult but i i know that when we walked away from our successful negotiation monday night the administrative and school committee team shook hands with the entire milton teachers association and we all ended in a in a very positive way in the back serve it with so i'm assuming that is probably a twenty or thirty minute lunch followed by a twenty or thirty minute recess period fifteen minutes to eat so  things that we struggled with in milton was not only time to eat but also what's going on in the playground as the playgrounds have to be monitored and it's kind of open time so that whole lunch and recess time at the elementary school i think is something that can always be energy on the playground then they ate and then we could walk them back to class so that was one way of kind of being more efficient with the time and not losing instructional time i think that the at the elementary level because they don't have bells i always worry that is their time in an elementary time with it it turns into grade like in middle school in high school the bell rings you get up you walk out you had forty five minutes of math you walk for two minutes and i have forty five minutes of science in elementary school we have you know teachers can use that day differently and they can make sure that they can go back and reteach and all those are good things but i worry about instructional time in general the middles at the elementary school not relation to lunch but just in general but i and i think that teachers are always wary today that they don't have enough time to get all those mandates in that principals and administrators in the state is asking them to do so maybe being creative with scheduling and have an elective b before lunch or after lunch so we can manipulate that a little bit maybe having recess first might be ways to start to look at it but unfortunately the school day a school day unless we extend it which would be nice if we could extend sure so i have a bachelor's degree from suffolk university i have a master's degree from bridgewater state i did tag's work which is a second master's degree at bridgewater i'm sorry the question was my educational background i did kagame in a straight of work but i didn't complete the whole i just got certified in administration from bridgewater state and then i pursued a doctorate at u mass boston where i have finished all the programming but right now i am what they call all but does the taishan i have not defended my dissertation i currently also teaches an adjunct professor at u mass boston i have done several semesters a few years ago and i'll be doing a semester this january yeah the topic is what we've been being asked about all day is where do you find the balance between the question was what is my dissertation topic it's the balance between resources in providing a well rounded education so where do you do you prioritize your reductions when you're trying to provide that with limited resources and we had as financial education finance come into play with student achievement in state mandates and so if you're asking me to make sure everybody has a math score that is proficiency or advanced by eighth grade how much am i going to be forced to allocate limited resources to math at the expense of what art science music so that's a question that i think that that i very much wanted to explore because it was happening to me at my middle school when i was asked to cut two or three or four teachers and i wanted to save music in art but i had to state so the question is do i believe that some student achievement the lack of success in some for some students at any one of those schools would be related to resources  so why are their students at the needs improvement level look at a superintendent do about it in the question prior to that was can resources curdle so so the answer to the first question is no resources can't cure it all that throwing money at a school system or a school or a district is not the sole answer to student achievement issues in my in my opinion at a new level however time in resources and time actually costing you money because you want teachers to have time to get together and collaborate i believe that student achievement is positively impacted by additional resources that they would be more than we may have to work with or belmont to milton in time for teachers to collaborate and to talk about students interest talk about student work and maybe to lower a little bit of that class size ratio so we can get a little more small group work going that i believe would solve most of your student achievement issues at any school level  there's no doubt that being in a class of twenty five versus being in the class of eighteen is a huge advantage to the student with a class of eighteen there's no doubt that a team of teachers who can collaborate daily on what they're going to work on and how they're going to assess it and how they're going to look at that student work are better informed educators and better practitioners when they go into the clash in the next day to support that child to go from sed needs improvement to profession or advance so there are studies out there that say that in some districts in the mainly urban research studies that say that all they through fifty million dollars or twenty million dollars that indianapolis public schools the chicago public schools in the su now comes in change well what are you doing with that money those resources and how you actually what other things you're doing that are important that impact student achievement there are a lot of layers to what impacts student achievement and there are a lara lay as to why a child might not be moving out of that category that are individual to that child as well so children are unique and individual in everyone that walks in the door has a different way being engaged i think that every school is better served by putting out as many hooks in as many way to engage students as possible to get them excited about being in school and learning so when we talk about classroom and there was questions about this today i believe fully that is much of the math score that we want to have is based on that teacher in that math classroom it's also based on the fact whether that student is willing and happy about coming to school to potentially be on the chess club or to be on the debate team want to be on the basketball team or to be on the field hockey team or be in the drama play or play an instrument so all of these things are all moving parts that i think need to be all moving in the same direction for us to lift student achievement for all students and i believe that resources play a piece i believe that teacher collaboration and professional development play a piece and i believe in how we engage students around outside the area of the core academics in art and music also play a piece yes describe the curriculum in all grades oh in the music sure we have a great music program in milton that we're very very proud of in the every class starting in kindergarten gets music class  once a week they are introduced to chorus in third or fourth grade in their introduce two instruments and they're in fourth or fifth grade so every child has music once a week  and then when they get into the higher elementary grades they get into instruments in chorus when they get to the middle school we have banned jazz band chorus advance chorus gospel choir before school singers jazz jazz band amid a large offering of music we also offer drama at the middle school during the day as well as after school so our performing arts program is very when the students get to high school we have all of those things combined with marching band in some different configurations of course boys choir girls choir morning choir in the students do quite well in the competitions that all of our schools but dissipate in each year in i would say that the brand of the milton public schools is performing arts and world language that's what we would be known for yes so we do we have string we have band in string starting in fourth and fifth grade and then the students who are in those programs have that during the day all the way through senior year in high school so we have quartet string ensemble  the elementary middle and high school and believe it or not we had one teacher the target for a long long time and she taught every level and she retired last year i thought the whole town was going to move because she was the most impactful teacher that ever hit the town for the last twenty years the whole place i think it was like oh it was like a wake in milton massachusetts when this teacher decided to retire yes sure the question is how my a fit in the aspect of the increasing role meant in the challenges that imposes on the district we build six prendre schools in milton and we built them for about three hundred ten per grade and were already starting to see our class size grow to about three hundred  thirty three hundred twenty five so we're feeling with brand new schools the space launch as we as we move forward we're experiencing the same in rome an increase i believe that my tax would be and some of which is probably already in places to look at the future births which we i think that nasdaq is the group that everybody uses in the state to look at the projected a roman so you can look down i think with districts like belmont but you actually have to add students to that number because people move in they don't have children when here and that's not an accurate number it should be inflated by more than a few students because that's been our experience and i think you have to take a long view and you have to take a short field i think the long view is you have to look at the capacity of each of your schools and i know that you've just built two schools relatively close together i was at one of them today the green school which at the which is beautiful and you have to start to think about what part of this in a long range plan involves any renovation indoor new buildings and then in the medium stretch what great configurations and what scheduling configurations can you start to review and analyze to see if you can make the best with the space that you have so when arash in our case one of our schools when i was principal of the old school all the our teachers had a car and all the spanish teachers had a car and they had to move their belongings from space to space we were fortunate to build new schools and they had their own classrooms and they should now that our roman deciding to increase unfortunate one of the elementary schools the teacher has to share the room with the music teacher in one of the spanish teachers at the other elementary school might have to stop the travel so we're starting to feel that so we're starting to look at programatic and scheduling changes we can do to accommodate but you're going to see a class size that the creep up while all this is happening and  other towns have experienced it on the so sure that i've watched we were fortunate to get out and build six schools in a six year period so we kind of got ahead of the curve but i watched towns in the social that we're familiar with accelerating building programs using marginal classrooms r figuring grades all those things are really difficult for communities to have to grapple with as they cause a lot of anxiety with where my child is going to be next year and i really want my fourth grader at the middle school with those fifteen eighth graders of that was a scenario so they definitely take planning and review and thought and they take input from the public to find out what the what the temperature is of the community for certain strategies or certain options that may be eventually used and that takes someone who can get up and tell the truth and get up and be transparent about the facts that the district is in in rally people together to come up with options and then have groups of people decide and one of the questions earlier was well how do you say no like how do you how do you know the reporter asked me after the school committee view where you know those parents who would like certain things and those other parents or want certain things how do you say no in a district that has a very very high level of participation of volunteerism by its community and parents you really have to communicate all the time you really have to be genuine with what you're hoping to do you have to be transparent about why you're doing it and you have to hear and value the feedback and the input that people have but in the end you have to do what's best for students so if you can explain why you're doing something and it's rooted in research and in some data in what's good for children then you're always going to you're always going to be on the right side of that decision despite the fact that some people might not like that answer or not might not be happy with that choice yes i'm sorry so the most painful cost issue that we have in milton recently has been the increase in fees for students to be able to participate in music and sports and athletics and clubs because a public school should be a public school and in milton we have a low socio economic number of about eighteen percent so that means that some students are participating and that's that's very very disappointing to be part of an organization that may have some students despite the fact that if people are on free or reduced lunch they can do all those things for free but not many high school kids say oh by the way you know we have money issues and i want something for free no one no sixteen year old is going to volunteer that information all the time so we recruit we made a loud orms we make sure we try to put the word out that you can do that so that's been one very very difficult incremental increase in fees that i felt was budgetary related when i was principal of the middle school i always tried to save programs so i may have lost an art teacher when i had two and a half i lost a half but i always kept the two because i always want to keep a program alive so i've been fortunate enough to weather some storms where i kept programs in place and didn't take away something because it's very hard to put it back as soon as that our program goes a teacher is going to fill that room and something's going to happen and then when you ask the next year we want to put something back and we need another sixty five thousand dollars for art but we have a hard enough time doing what we're doing we can't put that out and so all of sudden it's gone it never going to get back so pick keeping the programs alive music art world language those those things if you can snip away and i'm  survive the hard year too and then make sure that this still there you can put the water back on and watch him grow that's been my philosophy in terms of reductions yes  i do almost everything by consensus and as a district wide administrator the question becomes how do i make hard decisions that may be that consensus has not been brought together by a group so first of all i do look for consensus in most of the time you get it because smart people get around a table they grapple with an issue and they come up with a plan and it makes sense and you look at it again and you measure twice and you cut once and you say this is the best plan we can go for with so most of the time being collaborative and being a person who makes decisions by committee works but there are times when i tell people all the time that in the end if it's my decision it's my decision so i would be the one to say we're at we're at loggerheads we have six principals in the room and we have budget cuts to make and three principles want to make the cut in we're language in the other three want to make the cut in science it's my decision to make i appreciate all and value your input and value your view and value your stake in this decision in this debate but the decision is mine in the end and someone has to be in charge and someone has to make decisions and as superintendent i would be the person who would make some of those decisions a lot and in ultimately you are responsible for how the district runs and what it looks like and how it progresses or how it doesn't and i believe that making those decisions is part of why there is only can be one person in charge in or around certain decisions there can't be consensus on everything all the time and someone has to step up and say this is the way i think it should be thank you very much everybody for all your input we're going to move forward in this is the deciding factor in the decision is made i don't have a problem doing that so i used this example in a couple of the sessions and i'll use it generally again but you have a program of french immersion that's very popular and children get taught in totally the language of french and it became so popular that we had to kap in what we did before we did that work was we sat as a committee and i got together parents and teachers school committee member and administrators it was about fifteen or so of us in for about four months we looked at the data we looked at the research we looked at  different methods of trying to moderate this program so we could have them both be successful the french program an english program and it was very very heated it was very very passionate on both sides that people did not want any restrictions if i want to take that program i should be able to take it i'm a taxpayer how you just say that i can't put my child in french and the people on the other side were passionate that if that number became too high what would become of the english classes how does that in balance work when you're trying to organize a district of you know forty million dollars and four thousand children it doesn't seem like it makes sense so we've got those people in the same room and ironically i just got a good luck email our text from the foundation president saying john as you know good luck tonight i remember those days in the world language committee the world language committee was like a death sentence no one wanted to be on the world language committee because no one wanted to be the one to make that decision so we got in the room and people on both sides eventual you have to for months decided that there were three ways to do it and that we would put those three options in front of the school committee and then they would have to decide and that was a lot of work so that's an example of the community worrying that their house values are going to go down if we kept it but if you kept it in my neighborhood my school only had twenty five slots by my house might not be worth as much because it's only one section of my school so there was really community concern about this this decision and it had been done in a way that everybody got what they wanted for a long time and it was just not sustainable and standing up and having that committee take place and having those hard conversations and coming to the decision to make three options out of all the things that we could have done was a lot of work in the end we chose at the beginning a moderate step and it didn't prove to be enough so we ultimately had to capitalize chair which was another whole series of being in meetings with oratorios like this the three hundred people would show up and they come to microphones and we'd all sit at the table and they were upset and they were giving their opinion and they were voicing their concern and when we sat down and weighed what was right for children and what was right for educational opportunities for all children the district the superintendent and school committee made a decision and i think they made the right one but communicating having teams of people make decisions making sure that those teams represented all aspects of the community that had a say in that issue so no one could say you boxed me out of that conversation how could the community can take exception with the fact that everybody there was part of that choice and everybody knew whoever body was you know they had the of the people who are pro french and they had the people th the question is what parts of the music programs in milton have fees the students who take the lessons or instruments take them after school even though they have a class during the day a violin or b and they enhance their traffic by goin tutoring in the afternoon and that's a fee based program one of the things that we try to do to offset that is we bought a donation of instruments so we have a closet full of instruments in every school that we give to children and we try to help with a sliding scale for the fees but that's that's where students pay for music these is the afterschool piece yes sorry  we have just embarked on a security plan since newtown connecticut that involved putting in different doors different walks and different mechanisms an access codes for every single school and we have changed our protocol for how we do lock downs and how would you fire drills slightly we had a full day training and we took one of our full professional days and our middle school high school teachers went through a professional development workshop on lock downs in safety and currently where very fortunate to be able to say that if you go into any milton public school you have to ring a bell to get in the first door and then your face is on camera that we just put in on a screen in every office and then you have to go to a second door and ring a bell where we can see you in person so before anybody enters any one of our schools during the school day they have to enter into t security venues that combined with staff having i d s similar to the ones that i see in belmont today and having the access pads outside and we also just received funding for the second s officer to be able to be in our high school after hours from one o'clock to nine o'clock because our high school is basically the hub of the community music lessons sports community basketball adult education so we wanted to make sure that that was a safe place we didn't want to restrict access to it so we have someone who's in the building as a community officer during that time so it's been a considerable financial investment for the cameras in the locks in the access codes  in the badges in all the things that make a school safe but i believe it's well worth it so we spent a lot of time it was led by one of our school committee members it was supported by the police chief and we feel very grateful that we have this level of some of safety support in place in the mill in public schools could it get better i think it could but again we're a public place and so we're trying to weigh our public school should feel versus keeping it safe and i think that that's a balance and i think everybody's trying to figure out yes  i think it's in a nice testing is a great way to assess i'm sorry sure how does what is the value of standardized testing in public schools so standardized testing gives us a chance to find out how students to doing in relation to what we've been engaging them in all year and i believe that there are laws and some of the standardized testing components to the exam or may be skewed one way or another but i have no problem with having all of our students be accountable and having all of our teachers be accountable to meet a standard if you don't have a goal to meet and you just might not get there so i fight the urge to teach to the test that's why we keep music in art and believe that that's important but we pay attention to the fact that if we all believe that knowing and being able to do algebra the and the great great is important then we have to assess the students to find out if they know how to do algebra the end of eighth grade so i might not agree with every aspect of no child left behind in every aspect of standardized testing but i do believe in the accountability that it puts on schools superintendents principals and teachers  students to be able to come up with a product in a learning plan that all students and no one be able to do a standard in math the l a history or science and we can measure that as we get the results of that we can go back and get better it doesn't mean it's perfect every time it doesn't mean that everybody's exemplary what it means is it's always a work in progress because the students change every year we're not testing the same students at the same grade with the same test every year so i really enjoyed that we get a lot of data from the state we get what we call cohort data that student growth data that shows how did tommy do last year and then how did he do this year that's measuring students rowing from one you know another which we never got before which i really think is good data and then it also measures that c p i model that model it how did all your fifth graders do this year versus the next group of fifth graders the next year so you can use that data to enhance your curriculum to analyze whether or not you're on the right path so i think that account but yeah i think in some instances it will be a measure of whether teachers ability or instructional practices are best practices are there engaging in curriculum in the best way or engaging students in the best way  my thought on how to remedy that is after you have standardized exams or you have even internal assessments the dialogue between the three history teachers who just gave the same final and had the students experience the same world culture course need to get together and talk about those results and that will support teachers getting better at their craft and better at what they do so i don't necessarily see it in a penalize a way as much as i see it as a danger is a great conversation object to move forward that discussion about what's good practices and and how teaching learning can get better in every room yes so the question is adolescence sleep in soccer in school start time as a relates to student performance as the assistant superintendent i get given these tasks like we're a language task force and math task force one of my task force that i was responsible for was start times so we had a specialist from tufts university come we had a group of parents and administrators and teachers and we actually started it and it goes against the research to start high school between seven and seven thirty but actually the amount of hours at a high school student starting at like thirteen or fourteen to eighteen is there's a biological thing going on in every one of those children that keep them up later at night whether the their whether you tell them to go to bed or not they biologically still are staying up because that's how their body works and therefore don't get that eight hours because they can't really go to sleep until eleven twelve at night so they're not doing it to irritate all the parents in the world out there they're actually doing it because it's the biological process by which they move through adolescence so with that we did not move our start times despite the fact that the report to describe said we really should move our high school to eight o'clock or eight fifteen and move our elementary students early because you know the elementary students up at six thirty and you know sesame street song and he's like got the bag on and he's ready to go it doesn't seem to make sense to have that child stay in wait we can go in a few minutes honey the bus will be here and a half hour  but i think some of it has to do with the culture of how schools work transportation in how you are trying to make transportation work across the district and the cost of it would be great to start everybody at age fifteen but that's not a logistical or feasible solution when you only have eleven buses that have to carry four thousand students so i do believe that that research is accurate i found it amazing to go through there was great work to do i learned so much from it and as a parent of five children in was the parent that said shut your light off what are you doing out there is it's time to go to bed i now realize that that was really that's how their bodies were working at that time so it is something to bring up but it has a lot of layers to it in the sense that there's a lot of practical things that get in the way unfortunately yes so the question is what do i look for to see what a healthy district looks like i would i would look at test scores but we'll count that as something that is a given that our student outcomes for all students not just for some students but for all students  in place i would look for program implementation that allows students to meet with success i would look for teachers that were happy i would look for students that were happy that these are kind of soft indicators i would look at parent involvement i would look at attendance i would look at who comes out for any event in the belmont public schools from the school play to a sporting event to the spelling bee that they having right next door to see how people are invested into the schools i would look at who's sending their children to the schools and who's not i would look at support financial support from the town and from the schools and how well they work together and how willing people are in town government to work together on behalf of schools when i walk to them the public schools today and i think i said to somebody tonight on the school committee that you could if you put your thumb on the ground you can feel a good vibe in a school you can feel right before for every vacation in the middle school that you know the kids are ready to go and you can feel a good vibe in a school building and i felt a good vibe in every school building i was there that was out today teachers were on their feet working with students they were caring adults working with children they were parents coming in for parent conferences that were happy to be there they were teachers greeting them with data and reports about their children's performance in so those intangible climate indoor culture pieces to what makes a school district a great plays are not data driven points they might be if you did a survey but they are definitely ones you can feel when you walk into a school or organization so when i look at someone who we're all looking for a fit you walk in and you want to see are people working together are people happier people glad to be there are people genuinely working with children caring about their they're learning in their their success and you c see that happening in classrooms so that's how i would measure a healthy school district so that the question is what would buy be a passion about changing in belmont schools and one of my passion about in general so i won't say what i'm passionate about changing because i'm not here to find out exactly what's working on the on the day to day work of what teachers and parents and administr are doing every day i wouldn't want to think that i could actually comment on that when i'm actually not here that would be the work of me transitioning into the district in a listening about what's working what's not working what i am passionate about is equity in access  high achievement high rigor for every single child and i'm passionate about safe schools with invested in motivated and happy teachers working with children who leave happy and tired and with homework every day so parents say wow he's happy he's got a bunch of homework and he's complaining and he's going to bed tired and i'm going to get him up and put them right back and then tomorrow so i can find very i find great  joy in walking into an art of touring with us a play going on i find great joy in watching kids explore and exercise different parts of their school day whether it be the chess club or the speech and debate i really find it  satisfying to be able to walk through the district in which i work now where classrooms a busy and and students a learning in kids or on the rug figure and stuff out in students or on computers in students or in labs with microscopes and  saying look at this let's go look what's going on in my microscope and so that's all very very gratifying to me so i i feel in general passionate about students having the ability to have multiple ways to find success in find who they are so when they leave belmont public schools they look back and they say that there i told the kids this today when i met the high school students you might think that you're not going to miss this place but you're go this place you're going to miss the teachers that you had you going to miss the coach that you had you're going to miss the drama and structure that you had so we want them prepared but we also want them happy in knowing that this was a good experience for them and not just a good academic experience but a good life experience for them but i think that that's what i would want everybody to walk away with so i i believe strongly that with the right classroom structure team taught teaching one special educator one regular eagle educator special educator scaffolding learning for special education students in classrooms universal approaches to instruction that all students benefit by so why are we hiding the notes why don't we put the notes in the smart board why does just one student get the notes home because it's in their educational plan but all the kids get to know  what it does not just make sense so there are universal approaches to ensuring that all students have access to the curriculum and i are working inclusionary efforts in milton have been around in the big expensive in there we're starting to have to reflect on whether or not we can continue to provide this model but the co top model i feel strongly about because if a child on an ip is in a sub separate room or an academic support room and they're getting math in a special educator because it's in the ip that they get small group instruction for math that math lesson is based on their ip which might be two or three grades below grade level and that child never gets to see what the standard or the grade level expectation is so a child at the end of the year in may like everybody else takes the m cas and then he or she doesn't do well because we haven't even shown them the standard or the work or the rigor that is expected on that exam so we all look at the students and say well you know what are we going to do with those kids that aren't really making the standard for the first thing going to do is put them in a classroom where the content certified math teacher and even though they may struggle with that work the special educator can help scaffold that so they can reach at that goal every yes so they can make gains each year and slowly cut that divide in that skill set they may never reach a complete skill set because of their disability but they'll make a lot more gains if you challenge them at a higher level so i believe that those students deserve and are capable of that kind of rigor and challenge and that does not mean in a code talk class with this other students who are not and i get anything less rigorous because the standard is the standard the expectation is the same and i would say that the students who are in the middle of that kind of twenty four students in that math class are benefiting by that special education teacher even though they are an ip because they are getting that work done in a universal manner that they're accessing it in ways that are helpful to them as well so i think it's a win win i think it's very difficult to transition to financially but i you know i think i believe in those students can reach that high level of expectation and it does not diminish the expectation of anybody else in that class and sometimes that's the worry of parents of children who are not on i p's that somewhere in there that is going to be a watering down effect and i'll give you a very specific example that i used before we in the last ten years have doubled the amount of students taking a p classes and doubled the amount of test takers and increased students who are minority in nontraditional a p takers because we opened it up to everybody and when we did that we were nervous that the average score on an a p exam would would go down as more students are taking it and that would seem to be the formula that may happen we've been able to hold that average score in we've doubled the amount of students taking it so i believe if you set that bar for as many students as possible and you make that that high expectation that more kids will reach far more kids will get it than you think and i also think by putting it out there like that that is the expectation so not all students will take nine a p exams but even the student who wasn't going to do and one took one or two the data shows that if you actually just take the a p class your success of completing college not getting into college completing call it goes up in percentage because you're been exposed to that level of rigor and your high school grades and that you're prepared for it so you're not walking into freshman math the freshman english and you don't have that blank stare in your face so we try to push as many students as possible into those high level classes yes yeah it's what the question is how do you connect with parents who might not think that that type of accessing those types of high level classes is important or are aware of it we have an a p night we're invite everybody we have a robo call that we do we have e mail that we use and you know from a very hand to hand contact way teaches a talking to students guidance counselors to of our asking students i'll give you a personal example my daughter is in nine at the high school and i somehow let her not take an honest class she got by it was regular it's you know english college prep and i said all right you know you'll do great there that's great for you could for you if that's where you want to land we'll start there it's a it's a long high school career but plan on i want you to do well and i think i might be able to move you up well in november the teacher brought her aside and said i think you might be one of those kids that might want to think about going into artisan turned to so you know teachers are having those conversations with students that i think is really where it should be so in a child comes home and says hey mama i want to take and i'm i want to take that honors class i want to take that a p class i don't think anybody at home is not going to say yes to that so if you work on the child a little bit and you work on the parents and inform them  we have to do a better job of in eighth grade talking to people about a p s a t because it's great parents especially parents of first children even if they're college educated they they sometimes don't make the connections all the time and what it looks like so hitting them in seventh and eighth grade with this is the bar at the high school as many kids as possible are going to be taken a p and you can do it and it's good for you and here's why when we do the tees in school during the day for all freshmen and sophomores twice during their career so the bar is set that everybody takes the s a t so we have a high level of participation and aid in our s a t s as well because that's the expectation that's the culture that we are trying to set for all students so a combination of those things will hopefully bring more people in but i would say aloud that are we missing some students absolutely so the question is is there any differences in how suffolk norfolk county would be educationally different policy or rules or than than the county that belmont is in which is middlesex i'm not aware of any difference between any county policies  rules that would impact teaching and learning are public schools  is a great question so the question is how does a superintendent get a good and accurate picture of what's going on in each of the schools so we're all professional people and i got in front of the leadership team today we have our middle school principal in attendance tonight in one of the statements i made today was that the principals are in charge of their building you have to trust that when you hire good they're going to do a good job and the principals have to hire and we have to hire good people that will do the good work and you have to hire good teachers so there's a level of professional trust that has to be in place that we all have to believe is present  at that's the norm and not the exception after that point you have to be you have to inspect what you expect so administrator should be walking through classrooms people should be doing learning walks it should be dialogue between teachers  administrators should be in classrooms and teachers shouldn't flinch or freeze up in the ministry of walks in the classroom so we do learning walks where or district level people walk into a kindergarten class or it's grade math class and no one stops teaching because they know that we're going to be walking in and looking at you know teaching practices or what's going on in that room not for any other reason to get a dipstick of what's going on in that building or in that department or in that level of teaching or in that program so you have to be present you have to trust the folks that you hire and work with and you have to have hard conversations when you feel like folks are not doing that day to day grind work of being in classrooms and asking those hard questions or are speaking with teachers so  you are responsible for over four thousand students responsible for over five hundred fifty employees you're responsible for a forty million dollar budget and that's a lot of responsibility and i take it very seriously but i also am confident enough in the folks that i work with now with the people that i met today that you have to be confident enough and professional enough to give the work to those folks who do it well because nobody can run  school system of six schools in one office and that brand new nice in a library that you have is a superintendent's office that you have to be in the school you have to trust the people to do the work you have to inspect who you xpect and you have to have accountability measures but you've got to let the so the sad part is that i was there building principal so that was the big one so i have five children and they only know me as the guy in charge of the school so it's this is going to be different for the failing family but when my children entered the middle school when i was  principal i was also called the travel basketball coach and i also coach soccer so i was trying to do all that and then by the time they got like in the middle of middle school seventh grade i stopped coach and i said i think your friends have had enough for me you know i mean they don't want to see me on the weekend so i'll stay in the background and i'll have the pizza party but i'm not going to coach any more but i'm fortunate to be able to live in a community that my children truly enjoy their time i think there was awkward at times but when i moved up to the high school where the assistant superintendent offices my children move with me so not only did i have my children middle school i had my three graduates in high school so we all got our peanut butter sandwiches and walked up to school together it was they didn't walk with me every day excited want to be seen with me every day but i so it was it was interesting and i can tell you that it was a very unique experience that i'm glad that i was able to have