i would like to call the regular meeting of the foxboro school committee of facts to order it's seven o five our agenda this evening will be visitors approval of minutes teaching and learning highlights foxborough high school congress faces twenty twelve twenty thirteen awards approval of the two thousand and thirteen two thousand and fourteen school calendar results and analysis of the twenty twelve bullying survey for middle and high school students ask update why fourteen budget other matters and then we will be going into executive session for the purpose of discussing negotiating strategies with nonunion person now extended day services employees and to discuss school security the committee will not return to open session after that executive session happy new year everyone do we have any visitors who would like to speak to approval of minutes any additions or corrections on the teaching learning highlights for this for this particular need is because it was recent and i had the great pleasure to show up at the high school in the congress was going on i had been there on one of the few years that when they were in the congress i've always been impressed by it kids to step forward and take leadership in terms of what they know about government how it works and how bills move forward is so impressive and as i said it was also with a touch of humor in there such as it unbelievably worthwhile activity that i  i'm away from a lot of the lecture big courses themselves instead of that we do a lot of hands on learning we use a lot of curriculum from history alive in our teachers have the opportunity to really bring history to life for our students this is a very this is an incredibly interactive activity i had the pleasure to teach was awesome teachers ok and that was very well to do for our students here of course we're always cool he's amazing i'm a turn it over to kristen and she's going to talk about this particular program  of the way in which we introduce this and front load of this activity was the students for and just the constitutional information so they were started by what article one says article two all the way through to the amendments and what the bill of rights means and what all these areas are going to do for our government from there they take a bar exam a fake bar exam and they have to prove their competency in the constitution and how well they've mastered that material looking at the constitutional information once they've passed the bar exam they are given scenarios how as lawyers would they then be able to give information to a client so we take a couple days looking at these various scenarios where they have to prove where it comes from in the constitution and then from there say why what what in the constitution does it where is it sort of shown in the constitution that the culminates in the congressional simulation and i think that you may have the material from that we get the rules we could have procedures they are assigned various roles they're either in the house of representatives or in there they're in the senate and we tried to make it mathematically legitimate so there were fewer students in the senate and more students in the house of representatives wes served at the at the house minority leader and was assisting with the speaker of the house they were broken down into committees we created four committees  and as we do the congressional simulation it's relevant to their class it's not the society it's the laws that they create and make within that simulation are those that we will grant them as privileges or as you know addendums to our class rules so they were able to create bills and laws and then debate them discuss them and bring them hopefully to fruition mr delaney served as our president and he was able to veto the laws  it was for me it was it was great fun to watch them at the beginning of the segment they were very enthusiastic they were all getting up there talking and after the two hours that we afforded them time to work on this you could see them intellectually  but i thought it was great was how some of the students when they were it was obvious how hard they worked to get their bills passed like you said getting people's attention getting the floor listen when you were you know proposing the argument but then when the when some of the bills would be done some were not you know when they were able to pass or yeah generally were pretty happy i mean a lot of people since they wrote their own bills they're trying to get their own in and so their people are coming out trying to like push you to get their own bill  passed but the bills we got passed were that we probably got three or four passed and especially in the beginning so that made everyone happy even though some got rejected and everyone was still overall pretty happy about it  it's kind of grown a little bit and so this year i figured i'm done i did last year on my own one twenty two and figured the more people the better so i decided to call him kristen her class are periods kind of measured up  getting people's voices heard i think that  just i think the hardest part was building the build up the lead up to it so something's so complex that many people don't even today really quite have a grasp on we could bring it down to a tenth grade level so i would have you in that's what was so excited exciting about at the end of it the pretty tough questions that we gave that related to it the bridges question we asked you know what do you think what was your impression along the process you know we don't have to go get the answers but i do sidebars a group small groups trying to get support for the bill that people are paying attention to something else that was two minute warning that we only twelve minutes which translates on times of the government's two weeks you know together we still have one or two  bill for nurses an expanded role and it was amazing we we all went into the state house to listen to forums and speeches and then it it just it wasn't unnerving to you because you knew but you understood it and i think i can remember my mother my youngest son frank used to sit down and have discussions about politics all the time and my mom used to say it's so nice to hear someone who understands politics and how did you learn about this i said well his love of it started when he was in high school and they would sit and have great conversations on both sides so i think you know what we often hear folks who was incredible and it just has grown and grown over the years and this is just another example of that and you know you're all credit to us because this is where they get their on doing and that was great because i saw it kind of kind of grow from the last few years i've done it yet in my head it was like oh wow this could be or thing we can you know make this something bigger and better keep getting to it so i know i for one would love to see a political science as we need here in college and i'm a time to sort of committee work and work on the bills and the revisions of the bills because of the time that was allotted to them so we talked about maybe next year before that they get a little bit so that they have more small group work and then come into the larger group and if we're able to collaborate or classes thank you all it's great to be here happy new year everyone it's wonderful to be amongst friends and colleagues again my name's angela davis and here with a few of our colleagues kathleen murphy and christina i go freeman and jimmy freeman and it's our pleasure to be here once again and be able to do this work for the children in the fox for public schools i wanted to just go through who the other members of faces are that are with us yet i think they're headed here will be great if they can join us debbie kind of we also have diana griffin and just stevenson and my better half michael davis so just to reintroduce the mission of faces it continues to be dedicated to the enhancement of student achievement  student development in the foxboro public schools by funding seed money to educational initiatives and innovative methods of learning put forward by the faculty in our school system in the five years that we've spent reviewing grant applications faces remains dedicated to innovative cutting edge proposals that more deeply engaged student learning versus funding the rollout of widely accepted standards and technology on the things that already exist within the current structure the faculty applications have been very thoughtful and have certainly done straighted the caliber of teachers we have here once again in foxborough  y continue to display the caring and the investment that they have in the community we also wanted to take this time before christine reads off the grants to acknowledge and thank all the people who live in town that continually a generous and supportive of their time and open their wallets to help faces do this work we don't do this work on our own it's we but it's a larger more community oriented organization and through that the sponsors through the years that we've had have worked very hard to support us financially making these events and fundraisers a huge success so we know that we have a very special davis and that's thank you angela happy new year everybody i think believing your packets you do have the actual grants that we accepted this year and then that sheet that we just handed out to you is just kind of an example of the grants that we've awarded since the beginning so that total dollar amount of one hundred eighty eight thousand eight hundred ninety six dollars and two cents that is how many that's the sum total of grants that has been awarded through the years and i believe was it two thousand and eight that we started so since our inception  pieces has been able to award that amount of grants and as angela said we are a committee but this is there's a lot of people behind us so we thank them for that i just kind of want to paint a picture just give you an idea of some of the things faces has supported the past a lot of it is technology as you know such as white boards document cameras document camera projectors quizzed them sets all kinds of technology based materials however we do support our whole idea like in july said is to kind of creative in unusual ways of learning so other things we have kind of non technology grants you see they are things like professional storytellers children's authors looking at lincoln a group northeastern university marine science center trip so a group went out to northeastern and in did some science there so as you can see our goal too is to try to include include sorry across the curriculum all different kinds of activities that students might not have access to another example that is with  the english language arts with the shakespeare performances here at the high school and then finally at the bottom of the sheet you can see the breakdown of the number of grants awarded to each school  they're all about they're around pretty much the same with i find this interesting number of grants wanted to f h s has been a dozen number of grants awarded to the ahern is twenty two number of grants to the i go has been six to the barrel has been eight into the taylor also six and that makes for a grand total of fifty four grants awarded to all those girls and we're very happy with that and unlike angela said we'd like to support the students and give them hopefully in the teachers as well a little something different a little extra that they might not normally have school grades one through three five hover cam t three s and basically it's my understanding and jim might help me out with this they had originally asked for like an elmo projector which is something that the schools have right now and the team at the ahern school actually found these other kind of hover cams they're called in there they do the same thing and so we ended up you know buy more of that so so the barrel school once again grades one through three will be have five brand new hover camps at the high school here in the science department they will be getting a flipped classroom video pilot the her and school grade six math will also be receiving however cams they asked for six have opinions so they'll be receiving those and back up here at the high school on the social studies department we're very excited about this particular one they will be receiving a whole video production lab which will include ten editing computers so that's that jim do you want to add anything remember we had two new courses approved at the high school communication arts one in v b video production that we were that you approved for next year's programme studies and we said at the time that unless we can get grant funding for the equipment it would wait and we could be one of the course approved is that the first step so without them the course would those courses would not be happening and i think it's we talked last month about how we used to have so i just was i just thought that this is such a i would call this a legacy move on the part of the faces organization because this is not anything near anything we can do and i give them so much credit because they're so thoughtful every year about balancing but with all the grants that come in and how do they view them and does it fit with their mission and they're really very thoughtful about it i'm always impressed by the questions that they ask before they undertake their private deliberations as it would be  sometimes even if you remember in the beginning we didn't have any interactive whiteboards until they seated us with a few and then it caught on but in every document camera slee seated us with a few so they really do do exactly what they hoped they would do which is to see us with innovative ideas that we may not have the money right now to try but if we try them then well you know with this it will there's a way that's what happens after that but i was really i'm thrilled that you're running a video production because i just tell you how much my son got  showed the video about being a student of h s that was part of the neons visit and it was so impressive what those students did on their own without of course without instruction without put me here they actually did it on their own so when i in his small team that did that video to say that their video having taken upon themselves illustrate the breadth and depth of how much for high schools made a positive impact on our students in the community at large and he went on to talk about how they took their own time and effort to create it however they had very little technical support folks were high school kids the lack of such technology to produce a video and in the he goes on to say in addition if the students were interested in creating such work how many more students would take an interest in that kind of learning as well and and that's really the essential question and i think there are many more out there and who knows what they can do if we we reinstate this so honestly without down this would not be so i could knowing that these are challenging times and like every community organization i think the fiscal challenges been there and it's really heightened since two thousand and eight and i think this year it's particularly accentuated i know that going forward these people are really dedicated and passionate about doing this work so i think with this a desire and a parish and to continue the vision and the commitment we will continue to be there and we just need to be in the bowl and innovative and respond to opportunities may be collaborative measures so we're going to get back to the table and think about ways in which we can  you had over ninety two thousand dollars worth of requests for this year call so people and if they are provided the way they will innovate you know his thought process and his growth through the firsthand experience of being in that student congress that is what gives us fuel i mean there's nothing greater than that and so you know i would simply say you know it's  scouts and you have an opportunity of bringing children to the table still i mean that is just that's wonderful to hear  you because it's very clear and no thoughtful and time consuming this process says you have a lot of requests and it's a lot you know and and so must be a real challenge for all of you to make decisions about what you choose  so thank you and i think if i can just say to the teachers too out there they could continue sending us your grants you know please don't you know we would if we could we would under every single one but we can't so please don't ever get discouraged do especially in the tough economic times over the last you know several years it can be really tempting to just rely on that private organization too for things we should be going to just go to them to buy stuff that we don't want to we never done that's been it's really been truly there the inspiration for the innovation aspect of education and we haven't come to that temptation to rely on them for what we should be providing data down so there's i think it's great on we could but one of the things that the face was ation does most of the time still ask for it into the year you know reports them but i think when they fill out the grant application it says which obligation would be so there are you know we do have staff members who want to apply for a grant but if it says you would also have to piers with me in you would have to file a report and we have to be true to what they were to what their faces because some years they have not asked me to do what and sometimes they have impact on student learning so i wouldn't want to know you know or somewhere  it is it's something we want to continue because now it's probably how i would you know most people most of them we have to i mean if you remember i think it was last year the year before i can't remember if we had a report that said how many they originally purchased and how many we are now wit about the impact is that they were awarded so many different reasons that i don't know if that's you know what i think i think if you look down the list you'll see that most of the stuff you after could be successful no no i'm talking about what the smart technologies so you'll see some of it we are going to try to do that is on i think for one of the february movies or it could be the next one i mean i made a list of the next couple of months of what the teaching so you will see those kinds of things and we'll have teachers talking with the impact of that because it's something we've mentioned a lot but not really explain what is it and why is it so magic so it's also good to do right this point in angeles as well to hear from the students i think because i like to hear how they're experiencing the different technologies and in the things that they take away from the congress or from having a document cameron class versus not having one i think it's very instructive to us in the public to hear from the kids as well that the board does either january or february used to be a traditional culture national february activity but i think the last couple years we moved up to the end of january or even this might be the earliest we've done it  it does help us with scheduling and rolling students forward to when the high school students start doing the course selection it is helpful if we have the calendar with the end of the term date already approved so if it's ok with me just custom built tonight that's fine if you want more time to think about it that 's also fine so what you see for next year's calendar i think that the one thing that we would like to point out is we're staying with what you typically have seen over the last many years the most of the discussion with our affiliate so ca sion partners and with our administrators and with something for the teachers here and there is what do we do about december twenty third so it's an awkward calendar next year christmas falls into women's day so monday the twenty third we could actually be in session if we wanted to in our discussions we don't really haven't really had a feeling that it would be a particularly useful day but knowing that knowing it it does put the last two years ago to the june eighteenth rather than seventeenth so it's my win day i'd also reach out to a lot of other communities to see what they're thinking of doing and  no one is coming back on december thirty and thirty one monday and tuesday smack in the least that that's a consideration but no no one's going to go nor do i think that's going to go and i would say it's about fifty fifty right now whether they are going to have school on monday the twenty third  we decided to put forward a draft to you that said once we leave school on friday the twentieth let's stay out of families that travel to relatives of the state probably appreciate that or of having family and and we just weren't sure it was going to be a real useful day so that's the draft we put forward is not to come to school to once we're out of the twentieth to stay on until january second today after years and we look back several years and the span is seven days to nine days and i remember having a couple of presidents vacations with nine days so this is right in the middle it's eight it's eight so we look back and waiting i don't think in alice in the last ten years so we stay out any anywhere between seven and nine days of school plus five to six percent so it's a message we have to constantly deliver to both parents and staff to you have to reserve any plans you have through say june twenty fifth next year or so and that so that you everything the objectives for this survey were slightly different from the original one where we're looking here at assessing types of aggression across grades and years and one of the things that also were very interested in using the survey as a basis for judging whether any kind of interventions are effective and the most important one was the care and school community program which are already started so just let me show you what i mean  by assessing that so we have the fifth graders in two thousand and eleven actually move to sixth grade in two thousand and twelve the fifth grade is in two thousand and eleven had experienced the caring school community so that one of the big  differences that becomes important is for the sixth graders two thousand and eleven two thousand and twelve they really different or did we get an improvement from those fifth graders having experienced the caring school community and then moving on to sixth  grade and having a different experience from the prior sixth graders we also have to carry school community fourth graders from two thousand and eleven have now moved into two thousand and twelve we would hypothesize that they would be very much a quibble into the fifth graders and we'll be looking at that as we go through as we did with the initial survey we were very interested in ensuring the validity of the instrument so one of the things that's built into the software is that the student answers to quickly that it's faster than they could actually read the question they're wanted and then if they don't comply then they are excluded we also have yet we also have a reading test so the instructions for the inventory have a reading test that is geared at the they were overly positive about their lives we have this positive deceptive in the scale which is things like i'm always polite when people are you know people are rude or you know i never litter or things like that that are if you are really extreme in your defensiveness you will score very very high and we exclude ten middle schools and pretty high schools for that and this is comparable to the first year as well we also had the probability scale which is a couple of items  correctly what we did is ask the students sixty eight questions about each type of aggression and i was told that the types of progression again and we had parallel questions from being asked about aggressors and about being a target so this is an example of an aggressive question i grabbed how someone against their will and the peril question the target question would be someone has grabbed me or help me against my will that so that the there are five different kinds of aggression that we did assess non physical aggression is when it's not there's no physical contact but the property of the individual is a cost and by the by the aggressor relational aggression is aggression that occurs within a social context cyber aggression is aggression that occurs on the internet essentially and then both last year in the first survey in the second survey we had sexual harassment questions and these were given only in the high school to students who are sixteen years or older and example here as i talk about sex at polls suggested stories when it made someone uncomfortable so these are the five kinds of aggression that we're looking at we also were interested not only in assessing the aggression but the computer program if someone is a dead a fight as an aggressor or attend a fight as a target goes into a sub routine and asked specific questions that can get that information that's important for understanding the nature of the aggression also we got questions is going to see later on that has to do with the targets asking where it occurred what they did in those kinds of things so these particular measures the proactive reactive aggression assess the nature of aggression is not being able to control your emotions that well the night i'm on that when it's my moods are constantly up and down for a whole lot with my anxiety kinds of questions so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to look at the effect of the two thousand and twelve versus two thousand and eleven levels of aggression and then the second part we're going to look at the specific aspects  of the targets and the addresses on their motivation and the social context in which it occurred so here is we're going to do it separately as we did last time from middle school and high school so you see and in this one we're going to present to you the data each of the items is a six point scale that goes from never through to almost daily so this particular level of it indicates at least once the person indicated that they had been physically aggressive here it's almost daily so you can see forty eight percent in middle school over the entire middle school indicated that they had been aggressive at least once during the last year and here almost fairly poor point five percent so the good news on these asterisk these because the asterisk seas are significance levels and this is our way of trying to determine the differences that we find can they be attributed to chance or they do they seem to be real differences and so what we do in statistics is we use this peak was zero five but that means which is this little missing the last of us is that the chances of this the difference between two thousand and twelve and two thousand and eleven  being by chance alone would be five in a hundred so the nonphysical is one in a thousand or the chances that that difference would occur so what is it so the really really good news is that between two thousand and eleven and two thousand and twelve over the entire middle school in all four domains of aggression that persists in the middle school a significant decreases ok which is very good news it's always nice to be the care so i agree it's moving in the right direction but are you saying that forty eight percent of our students in middle school said that they had been physical aggressors a year ago the whole notion of how it is you define something that is a physical aggressor what they said is that they had done at least one aggressive act forty eight percent of our students right had said it said yes and dropped out of forty two percent at and a single incidence is not something that you know i would be as concerned about as i would do the constant repetition of aggression sure but if but i'm still surprised that even forty eight percent of our students aggression is quite common in our society yes thing or it could be doing it every day the four point five percent is included in the forty eight percent so it's a whole range of rebels and all i'm doing is giving the extreme so you can see what the us levels are and get an appreciation of it but it did drop by six percent and i so that's that's indeed the direction that we have to have to move it so there's a decline if you look at the entire middle school and you try to find out what of our scales indicate what changed the proactive in the reactive aggression over the entire middle school went down significantly ok still if you look at the worst kinds of aggression the nonphysical in the relation which is the ones that improve the best you still got now if you average between them sixty percent to have at least once and you have approximately here over five percent who are doing it almost daily that's better than six and sixty five percent but it's still  groups that for which area of the school is the most significant which is which subset of the middle school and in the middle school we broke it down both by grade and by sex and what you see is it's the seventh grade boys who win the award for the greatest amount of aggression and you can see like a rich relational eighty percent of the time at least once and fifteen percent of the time almost daily for that group this is to compare it to last year so you see there are some similarities in physical aggression in that it was the seventh grade boys but last year we had the eighth grade boys and we had a theory that means boys and girls were equal could be dismissed statistically discriminated and that eighth grade boys were the subgroup with the most aggressive so the highest group is the seventh grade boys and relational aggression is the worst part that when we moved down to physical doesn't remember that we did have a significant oh five level but when you individual grade that we're doing right now here looking at the aggressors not targets these are people who have admitted the aggression themselves as perpetrators we don't get any significant differences within each of the  grades what we do get is a very interesting pattern that the fifth graders moving into sixth grade stayed the same the sixth graders moving into seventh grade and we just looked at the seventh grade boys being a problem increase sightings read to indicate it's twelve non physical aggression here we get this amazing finding which is going to be repeated in a number of different ways of this significant effect for the sixth grade year remember the caring school community is essentially saying that the fifth graders from two thousand and eleven moved into the sixth grade they didn't change but they were significantly better than the prior sixth graders suggesting that something about their experience in a caring school community carried over into their sixth grade experience there's also this little finding here of a significant effect in the eighth grade i'm going to see this both here and we're going to see it in the targets there are a number of different explanations that you could you could say there was an incredible amount of community support to go to to deal with aggression there were a number of things that we did it also was the case however that sue abrams did focus on the eighth graders and  intervention in the school itself and she got a group of eighth graders who were working with her to change that so this might be some of the it that the of her program we don't know we'll have to look you know follow it throughout the of that yes we had this same pattern of the white red blue sixth graders got worse and they want the seventh the seventh graders got better as they went to this pattern we're going to see as a kind of consistent pattern that goes across the board again with relational aggression we get now the sixth graders have are significantly better than the in two thousand and twelve than the sixth graders in two thousand and eleven again it's a caring school community effect and we get the same effect the difference here i made a dull read because it was only a small thing but again you see that kind of same pattern the same the same getting worse and getting better cyber aggression also in cyber aggression we didn't get any effects we did get the pattern of the fifth graders staying the same into sixth grade and sixth graders getting worse and seventh graders getting getting better ok so now we're going to move not from the aggressors but now we're asking those individuals who were targets so the data that i just presented were individuals admitting that they were aggressive what's very interesting is if you compare the rates of aggress that aggressive report to bigger rates that the targets report they're very very comparable and this is very important because we have to have checked with in our data to determine whether we're getting a consistent picture of what's going on which indicates that the data really giving us a valid assessment of the aggression that's occurring and what you see if you look at it is that the aggression is the same and the aggression is the same basically across years so we're getting force year and pro us sample the aggressors are completely different people from the from the targets clearly have the targets admitting that the aggression has gone down o entire middle school in non physical and relational so it's not in physical but it is in and cyber but there was a significant drop in aggression from the perspective of the targets between two thousand theory got about seventy five percent which is indeed better than eighty and you got here about eight percent which is better than nine percent but still it's a very high level in the relational aggression indicating we still have a lot of work to do here we're looking now at the subgroups of targets who are the most targeted and you see the seventh grade boys again occupy the physical and the cyber the seventh grade girls are the highest in relational and the sixth grades of this indicate you can't differentiate significantly between females and males for that if we look at two thousand and eleven what you see is that sixth grade girls carry their relational aggression into the seventh grade  so the highest group is the seventh grade girls who were relational targets and that you can see is that relational is is very high eighty five percent and twelve percent almost daily now we're going to break it down into each type of aggression by the targets and this is the one finding that we have that goes somewhat against the kerry school community because what happened here is we got a significant increase and these are they the fourth graders in two thousand and eleven moved into the fifth grade in two thousand and twelve and they are significantly higher than the fifth graders in two thousand and eleven and now here it's as targets so it's fourth rate is moving in and a reporting that they are targeted more aggressively physically and then were the prior fifth graders and there are lots of hypotheses that we can generate about this in the changes but it's certainly something we should look at and consider about that as to how we can ameliorate that effect we have the same pattern this is now in targets rather than aggressive if you get exactly the same pattern of the fifth graders remaining the same at the six the sixth grade is getting worthless seventh grade is getting better as they move into a grade again these are consistent patterns that you get both the first targets and aggressors are very convincing that the data are really picking up something that's real there that we can depend on reporting that they are less aggression that the fifth graders are being less targeted through aggression than where the sixth graders and these again are the individuals who are on the caring school community  two percent that's the fifth graders the current it's baiters it had the can school community in fourth grade historic grade to do you think and i know you can get to this at the end but you think you're better at identifying when me and being targeted that's one that's definitely that's a good that's a that's a good possibility and we don't know there are there again that coming into new school it's a new situation they're changing from in the fire i meant in which the entire community is thinking about how we work as a community and thinking about how it is we resolve conflict and then moving into a situation in which that's a different game when you're going from being the oldest children and the being young are also in one classroom right now they're in really don't know we can't always do our two hundred percent conclusion on what that means and you know sushma working a lot but she may have time to talk about with helping kids to understand the definitions of the differences amongst simple harassment or mean comment versus bullying versus aggression so we don't know if as they understand the terms better although this isn't really about terms this is actually what actions and didn't happen to them or not so that's why this survey gives us valuable information is that it really doesn't  understand the definition or not they can you know give reliable information but could it could it be that they are more aware because there's more discussion and so there could be you know you know really i'm sure that the wonderful thing about having a survey that goes over the years is that once you analyze it and everyone looks at it then we develop the survey for the next year so we can see if we're going to be present a little bit later on the issues of gee we really need to know more about targeting where things are happening we need to know more about motivation we change the survey to answer the very questions that you have so that's something that could be addressed in a survey in the next year to see whether that's true and that's the beauty of day that you can actually find out what's going on to answer the questions hormones emotions that the nature of the the pre adolescent student so we don't know if we get the exact let's say fifth grade silty elementary school because many just because i'm the one i used to work it isn't don't let me tell you those things happen in this day then so is it is it a function of the fact that they're in that building or is it really that as the everything kicks in the minds of the developmental nature of that period in development is that what it is because you see higher numbers as they get a little bit older a little school and i can assure you  have one the liable i mean the numbers that they might look big but the only reliable finding we have is the physical aggression in a way that's really the only one that says that they're really different from the prior situation and really basically what you try to do statistically is you try to only believe the things that are statistically reliable you know could have occurred simply by chance in those of the things you have to work on first what you would want to do though is again try in effect that the sixth graders and you have here the fifth grade is actually improved as they went into sixth grade and relational targets the sixth grade is contrary to the previous ones did improve going the seventh grade and so we got overall improvement in relational targets as they each moved up but the only significant difference with in a grade was the sixth graders who are now  trier fifth graders are now significantly lower than the two thousand and eleven again the carol school community effect here we have the cyber targets and again we get that kind of consistent result the fifth graders improve the sixth graders got worse as they went in and here the seventh graders stayed the same as they went to a great job again we're having an increase is we'll see in cyber aggression as you move up in the world that will be evident in some of the slides that are later on so one of the overall results in the middle school significant decline in all four aggressor types between two thousand and eleven and two thousand and twelve which is just great news nonphysical relational aggression still remain the highest aggressive types most problematic group or the seventh grade boys there's a consistent pattern of results which is the fifth graders moving into sixth grade being less aggressive which very strongly supports the kerry school community as having an effect and a back only say with the aggressors and with the targets the majority of the overall effect in the middle school is due to this particular single of it now case in targets a significant decline in non physical relational targets between two thousand and two thousand and twelve the seventh grade boys are joined by the seventh grade girls and by the sixth graders both boys and girls and being the most targeted the increased physical aggressive the one fifth graders in two thousand and eleven other target improvements and non physical relational the cyber targets all can be explained by that caring school community so potential explanation so we wanted to look a little bit closer overall remember i said the proactive in the reactive aggression meant that when we target specifically what was going on related to the care of a school community effect what we found was not proactive proactive is not didn't change at all it's not the that the instrumental kind of gets but it's the emotional component the reactive aggression the emotional dysregulation and the social isolation kids feeling much more part and being involved in something in the community that is really working out which is it's nice to know that the aims of the kerry school community are really being carried out we also looked at bystander results there was a little bit of that reduction in not just standing by but that other results were at the house there so it didn't seem that there are two effects in the high school this is from the aggressors relational aggression and cyber aggression declined between two thousand and eleven and two thousand and twelve overall in the high school reasons for this this is one that you must think the community effort and the involvement in all of the various programs that the task force that in the administration has been doing and the kind of focus on this has really helped this that that would be your best in physical nonphysical and sexual we didn't find any differences they all declined but not statistically since they're very significant right when you look at the most aggressive now here we're not going by great we're just a male female so no surprise the males are my physically nonphysical and sexually aggressive individuals are more so than the females in relation and in cyber aggression males and females are equal and you can see that they in the nonphysical the males are the males are quite high here again seventy percent at least once and ten percent of killers so there are no great differences cyber aggression is higher than in the middle school which is not surprising as we're going to see it really starts to ra up in the seventh and eighth grade as it goes into high school and sexual harassment was its highest cyber aggression and you remember from last year we did analyses on the relation among the various kinds of aggression and so one of the findings was that if you have one kind of aggression you're highly likely to have other kinds of aggression and so the sexual harassment is something that might be addressed by dealing with the other kinds of aggression because eighty percent of those people  sexually harassing have at least one of a kind of a aggression as we did last year and i think you know it's funny because you know we do a lot of supposing and you know as you were saying maybe it's because they should be middle school we actually thought i remember discussing this but we actually thought that kids students who were physical aggressors probably were mostly physically aggressive and the kids who are almost like specialists you know like i'm good at cyber aggression that's what i'm going to do and or i would never be seen pushing or shoving in a hallway but i can i am one of the relational aggressors where i'm going to exclude people from a cafeteria table and those kinds of things so i think that was an assumption that we were making day that there were there be some kids who did one type but not all the types and the first round completely debunked that theory if you will it said really kids who aggress progress in lots of different ways and and that that was a true so that's one of the good things about real data is we can't just make up things we think are n so now we're looking at target frequency and here we only had one significant effect of this target's did not report as much to perceive b crease in being targeted with high school as aggressors reported decreasing their aggression so the in cyber aggression we got it we got a significant effect but nothing in the other once we did get trend of everything moving down as you can see but the only one that really significant was the  aggression you think it's because the students realize that there are some legal ramifications to going after people on the internet with the use or whatever that people can track it so that it's not he said she writing so that we you know somebody said you're doing it on the phone and i think you're attributing more intelligence one would be doing now about half seriously that have been the consequences are not impressive consequences so here we're now looking at targeted differences and what we find is that the males are the most targeted in physical aggression and what's interesting is the males in the high school are targeted physically as much as the middle school males which again that they know some people that are high school males and really don't have it it goes away it's only most school playing doesn't seem to be the case and not surprisingly females era significantly more targeted with sexual harassment that doesn't surprise anyone and boys and girls are equally likely to be targeted in non physical relational and cyber ways so the overall result as a result of the high school then significant decline but only significant in relational and cyber there was a decline it was only significant in relation to the cyber aggression most problematic of the males in the high school that the most aggressive overall decreases in both proactive and reactive aggression accounted for the decline that we family in that relational the cyber aggression in the high school bullies and the way the program works is if a person at mit's to doing physical nonphysical relational target more than once they're given this sub routine of aggressor we're going to look most have some aggressor information in that targets are identified by having more than one not time on physical nonphysical relational targets once they get into the subgroup team they're asked a question about it the characteristics of their aggressor and a number of people who go in that particular time then say well no it really wasn't a real thing so we're on not going to continue want so we have thirty the thirty eight percent of the middle schoolers who are targets are people who really only being targeted that are aggression and interestingly it's the same percentage in the high school so the first thing is about aggressor type the first question they're asked is who aggressed one of the very interesting things about the aggression if you look at it is about a third of the incidences are more than one person being a perpetrator at one time the other thing that's very important about this particular table is that we have ten percent in middle school and twelve point seven percent of high school who are adults who are perceived to be bullies and so one of the things we want to do in the current survey is to try and track down which is the nature of that progression it could be someone outside of the school  of things that they could give us frequencies on and these are all the ones that we had that applied in the first it was a joke i was angry i want revenge my friends pressured me no reason just something to do and you see what i ordered them is by the middle school that's the frequency going from the most sixty seven percent and sixty three percent again students are very nice they tell us what we don't know what's going on i did not mean at fifty three and forty six percent and then the issues around trying to take boy and girl friend this was comparable in both  middle school and the high school about twenty percent of the up to the sample we also asked motivation from targets we weren't as good with targets we had three items thought it was funny they disliked me and they were showing at how often they produced a whole bunch of other ones for us i have no idea they wanted to be popular they were boring they were jealous getting back to me and this interesting one they liked me so some in the attracting any attention is better than no attention at all the location of the aggression so now we're asking and you'll notice at the bottom here we have percent of targets and multiple locations are possible so what we did here is we broke down the fifth  sixth graders as different from the seventh and eighth because it was the belief that they really are different things going on indeed that turned out to be true and then the high schoolers and what we did is i we ordered them by the sixth grade what you'll notice is that for the highest in the seventh and eighth grade outside of school becomes very much higher so it's thirty two point eight percent in the input and six in that it jumps and it kind of either stay steady or moves this in the same way into the high school one as i indicated before it's also the case that we get this increase in cyber aggression and in cyberspace and you see that it's really in the seventh and eighth grade that that's first starting and it maintains a consistency to into high school we did another item that asked people where they were most scared and this went to the entire group of the sample so from fifth right through so now we're not asking targets where the incidents occurred we're asking students in general where do you feel graders it's something that's also in the seventh and eighth graders but declined to pay for the high schools but the boss is a place where people or grade it's also the case that the highest for the high school  place is that the entire school is afraid is the band room we have put the band room in because people have written it in and so we got this percentage we'd like to know various things about why the band room has some problems in the high school will ask questions about that in the survey just to find out what it is that stuart you know a lot of these cases where some students and those whose get student groups asking other students to get the data we have talked about this civil war actually going to ask the students like what do you why why do you think progression is happening the few very few or if it was six down the list of out of eight or nine things the right of where it's actually happening is they know there's a lot for years ago that they were the perception was most everything's happening about you know where th but in actuality it's not on the back seat where the frequent incidents are happening but when you get to the next slide just because a few incidents are happening on the bus kids still feel less safe on the bus probably because the fact that it's moving this one bus reassuring thing is there aren't that many incidents happening in the us so i think those are the things we always ask ourselves to try to just of conclusions based on two data points about what's bits really happening versus what we think ok social contact so this is a very important or intervention slide that two thirds of the instances for about sixty percent or more accurate are done with a witness basis so it's only it's only a small percent there are no witnesses and the same percent basically in the middle school in the high school suggesting that one of the ways in which one can deal with that is to get bystanders to stand up and not accept as a community the kind of aggression that's occurring when we asked them what the bystanders did fifty four percent did nothing in the middle school sixty six percent in the high school did nothing i've tried to stop about a third in the middle school and it went down in the high school watched in the last that actually went up in the high school slightly from the middle school so this is an area where an intervention of trying to get people to take responsibility as a community for not taking on aggression is very important the aftermath  here who did the person who was targeted tell and what you see in this particular slide is that the middle school is tell the parents and a friend the high schools tend to tell mostly  friend the other part of this is that if you look down at the bottom here which is teacher guidance counselor principal or assistant principal they are not told very frequent ok so they do not go to be the authorities within the school when they as a parent and when they were asked what their parents did the data were quite consistent with both the middle school and the high school seventy five percent gave advice they listened sympathetically told to be strong pep talks noticed that they didn't call the parents the aggressor and they didn't go to the principal there either when the aggression was no so again the school is being kept out of it as far as the information is concerned this is a wonderful question because they're asked now when you told your parents what was the effect seventy one percent of the middle school and seventy percent of high school said that this situation got better either a little better or significantly better only five point four percent in the middle school said that it got worse and only one percent in the high school so telling parents is a very good thing for students to do and that's the message we have to get out to the students this is the teacher adults what did they d what's interesting is the same or rather what the parents did also interesting is they don't call the parents and they don't tell the principal either but they do the same kind of giving advice listen sympathetically now when you tell the people in authority in the school what happens and again the overwhelming percentage say that it got somewhat or significantly better again students need to know that if they go to the authorities  have a good chance of having things get better the only part really high was the middle school is saying that if and when they told in the middle school thirteen percent perceive that the government or some i guess that's something we have to think about what what it is that is it three things we have targeted areas we have the issue of bystanders not standing up and protecting the community and seeing aggression as something that is not acceptable within our community and not something that is done and not something that we can with that we can can tolerate we have to also realize that a lot of the aggression is outside of the schools and the school can't do anything but we have the community the parents the same kind of information very wonderful time we developed a school climate taskforce so we had five seventh and eighth grade students we had a teacher leader group who went into classrooms in fifth and sixth grade and then gave  a survey once they saw how difficult it was to get information by hand in the middle of the fifth and sixth grade data collection we got a result of this which i shared with the students on the on the school climate task force and they thought it was extremely interesting and that helped them gather their thoughts and they got information from seventh and eighth grade they didn't go into every single classroom but they gave  a single page sheet which went a little more deeply into the question and that we have here and it it's remarkably consistent over the when break we had i had the secretaries coley the information and put it in data form and i meeting with the school climate taskforce tomorrow to take what they received from the students which itemizes some of these areas so that they can develop the task that the strategy that they want to have and work with the student leaders group in the student council to gather the whole school on the actions that will affect change because if we have the individual result that students understand better and can report better but what do they do we have to take the whole community and gather the whole community together to put that power for the whole over the whole structure as opposed to the individual so that's moving it out you know it doesn't happen in a day but as you change you know people's attitudes towards wearing seatbelts and smoking etc some of the difficult times that we've all faced in that ten to fourteen age group where you're trying to figure out who you are and sometimes you might one time be mean to another because you're preserving your own self esteem perhaps we can do away with that and be kinder to each other with our words and our deeds and you know get to that zero point of aggression and zero point you know that zero percent of the students are mean to each other or grass in any form whether it's relational or  physical so we're looking at the data and taking action on it refining it and bringing it to the students because they're the ones who have to change their community and i think they're interested in doing that so i the problems or was no they just them and didn't say the parents called it i think that if you look at this is what the teachers only fifteen and ten percent actually called the parents only a porter went to the should delve deeper into this issue i think that you know the kind of action plan that she talks about it's probably a better strategy strategy asking questions  go this is reasons why they didn't tell i and i think the most telling thing in this one is that high school students and you know it's not a big deal and not the school's problem and again i think that this is the change in the bystander that in the middle schools are more worried about titling and the parental reaction which the high schools don't seem to have as much but that again that's so summary of the incident characteristics the motivations for aggression vary the locus of aggression most frequent is outside of the school in a school recess for the middle school is and the whole of the middle schools the high schools the highest the highest hot spots within the school aggressive acts tend to have a substantial number of witnesses the witnesses in both middle school and high school are likely to do nothing and then middle school targets most likely tell their parents and a friend whereas in high school they just tell a friend and both middle school high schoolers are less likely to tell school officials which is something that we have to work on great telling parents and school officials dabo three see the positive outcomes that's a really important one so the survey appears that be a viable method for monitoring aggression and healing consistent data appears to provide the center of a sensitive metric for assessing the advocacy of our interventions the evidence  that's coming up during this current year that we're looking at right now are you telling you about that next year we can and it's important to think about ways in which the caring could school community can be supported and extended into the middle school we want these are just points that we discussed next expanding aspects the caring school community through the school the bystander intervention providing an environment which could feel comfortable going to school officials and then making the scary areas less scary so we thank you very much for listening to us think you know very often when something comes into the sphere it's very public to be rallies around it it can be so much else going on that we kind of fall off a little bit but we have not so we're still collecting good information and plan to continue to it informs us that allows us to tweak things or start things or create better mechanisms for the support and we'll continue to do so and i think you know parents in the community want that means surance that we're still paying as much of town you live in that's we school and i've always been adamant that we have to make sure the academic school has what it needs do you think part of that is when you take three schools and you put  in one place not the sudden you have kids isn't going to be together since kindergarten through fourth grade who are now put in an environment in the fifth grade and i was suddenly kids that might have been friends with kids find new friends and i actually think there'd sudden they're venturing out they're finding new friends and it's going to be a lot of her and a lot of you know inner anger i should think do you think does that possibly contribute to some of what goes on in the fifth grade when you take the schools and put them together well you've never been actually getting good data for fifth grade just that that one little that one little thing is the only one in a myriad of data points actually getting really good you know information that we can feel confident that their needs are being met but i think any getting really good data about how they're transitioning an apple meeting to the school and that's what we're seeing it's in seventh grade which suggests because this whole middle school working with suggests you know developmental growth factors where they are  and the guidance office specifically because i wanted to see who was willing to walk down the stairs and put a piece of paper not just give it to their home room teacher and to demonstrate you know some  willingness to work and some initiative and i thought how are we going to sort out from all these applicants who are going to get and so we got a total of six and we took all six i originally started you know thinking that we would have four because there were four teachers on the teacher task force and the teacher to teacher leader the teacher leader group is a group for teachers but now working with the students they become the school climate task force for the task force equalling up the number of students i added crew and shank my guidance counselor who's arm our community educator mark trained community educator so we have an equal number of  fit so we're taking the smaller group to gather the data sorted out and then we'll share it with the larger group in we have that twenty minutes it's recess around much sometimes in inclement weather rain or snow a perfect time for sharing this information and for the high school musical assemblies they do one in the winter so things like that will share it with and the student leaders and student council will be working out so we're taking a little group spreading it out a little or we have some you know wonderfully creative students and teachers so i'm sure that our marketing campaign will just get the seventh confirmation i also think it's going to be the reaction of our parent community to ask more questions about this and not just say ok i'm going to great report someone or if there are more things we can do maybe sort out some of these ideas and take some more tactical ones and then report back you know for example what are we doing for the seventh grade and so has given us some examples where she's doing but i don't to target that group specifically and see what else we can do in terms of these scary areas that are in the buildings i'd like to know what our plans could be what marvin strainers my think we could do that to me sounds like it's something we might be able to knock off versus you know just saying we're going to expand the schools community you know that's a bigger effort and some of these might be smaller knock offs that we c he started something you know i'm sure you have so i i think you know anticipating what we might hear from the community you know when i'm sure sue hears regular you know maybe we can just revisit some of the tactical actions and see what we can do as a committee to support and share what we're going to do because some of the information that they got on in their data supports that data and as the kids know some of the actions are for the students and some of them are for the teachers and the teachers have already been apprised of some of the actions that you know there will be taking for some of those areas that are problematic and i can share that with you later on but i don't hear that much because you see that the parents don't tell the  but it's something that in the ten to fourteen each group is a challenge that something was great to see that there has been some afact getting better but again zero is our goal you know is  for all the hard work over the last many years preparing one of the things i did want to point out is that frequently they will credit you but ask for an interim report before the two year mark so there might be some things they were concerned about that they want you to address a little bit quicker and filing of the report before the two years and they are not asking us to do that so there are a good two comments on the high school and the good situation that we're in thanks to everyone's work here getting high school in of the commendations you heard about at the meeting where this is my script that was present about how many of the programs and services they were impressed with in english to come and they also acknowledged many other things that they found  lot of things that i think were probably just a sense of pride throughout the building students and staff and all of which results in a positive school culture climate and environment so if you're already working on the away if you notice on the third page begin the lists some highlighted recommendations that we talked about at length one smiles back with us here and the last one it says to complete the site where to place the partner is in the walkways and some of the things they mention in the report like of the additional priorities that we would like to keep on the table for the committee consideration you have them there in the memo last year at this time we have a list of four items that were we called informally the wish list rather than additional but your priorities and one of the things we were able to accomplish three out of the four of the things on the wish list through one way or another the one that we didn't last year is now you see back at the top of this list not just because it was on last year we actually went through the process again with the administrative team of looking at all the needs in the district in picking the four things that that we thought would be our next steps if more revenue were to become available in the next month or so so we're not there too so the first thing is that so it would be wonderful if someday we could to spread across the face schools we would like a middle school mass beschloss we do have one of the changes in the common core you for me and if you want to go back over them again or because the changes in the think the three things are speaks for itself you have one point six assistant principals at the middle school for nine hundred students you just saw a whole bunch of data that says all kinds of things going on at the middle school with you know with incidents that require attention so eventually we would really like to get to the point where we have to assume principals at the middle school as we do with the high school to full time i mean i should know this being a parent of middle school student but remind me why is the one point six as opposed to t evaluations all of that is and that's one of the things we put the sheer logistics of providing enough in ministry years in any district in massachusetts right now to be able to successfully complete the requirements of to the new evaluation system is quite challenging so with they are the largest school they have the largest staff population and they have in student five ratio wise yes and the largest student so ratio wise they need to i think people have a false impression of what the system principals do they don't just walk around the building and keep the kids they have all these other responsibilities and i think if we're going to have a strong school system we have to have a strong and ministration that oversees these things because it's not like when we went to school and the demands and expectations on administration are you can expect them to be watching the students and still be able to get their jobs done during the day so i public understands the ramifications of the people in these positions well just me further to that point martha i mean for people who haven't been in the school in a while or can't get their parents who can't get there it it's amazing what three individuals do there on the size of their campus the size of a building the size and i assume population it's somewhat mind boggling so you know i look at that and look at what we need for administering that look at what we have for issues and part of me says we need more guidance counselors we need people who have more one to one contact with these kids because the more familiar the students are with the ministers and the people who are in authority the guidance cultures whatever the more comfortable they're going to be bruce going to them and telling them what's going on and it's like anything else you know and people always will talk about doing away with the physio department and i have to tell you i think most of the kids will consult with the physic people they feel very comfortable with them because they're associated with the sports and probably their best here because far as the strain of going to something sometimes because they trust them so i think you know trust is a huge issue with the kids especially in the middle school and we need to build on that and you know when i look at these problems i can't help but wonder in their day to day so i'm going to be surprised if next wishless made a big out but it doesn't this year because we said we need most critically and these are the four things and similar to your point at the high school week our school psychologist is only point eight and students who are social emotional they just do you really want to question you have the issues because right he's going home and we need more time for assessment of their risk because we have students who are at best either something going on themselves or others and we need to do more risk assessments and that takes time so there are a lot of reasons why we need a full time psychologists at the high school i'm sure you can just imagine what those might be so these really are tough for if we were to able to which was that you know these are wishlist items should additional revenues become available and i think that's a responsible way to to say it undermine the public because i know after the i support we got the turf field i know there's some question about our spending what we're doing and i always like to just reiterate we're being smart and prudent and so i like a young bill frame that these are not huge cost items to me to an annual budget the way i see them and what they'd be very meaningful i know so ye you said you can't you can't go up but you can always go down so you there will have a solid piece of information by the end of month as we did last year that there is the revenue available to do so or that may not be in which case you could still choose to do it and reduce later it's  really is a really lot of ways to go but we are very transparent this has lots of things a list these are our next things we'd like to see addressed and in that order is the way we kind of order them and we'll see i think if you know when you look at the justification of the more these things are needed i think we have to incorporate them into the budget line and in these would be the first four that we would probably cut if we had to or we are like some other concessions but we sit there and you know we don't continue to tell the public of the parents of the kids in the system or the taxpayers but we need to run the school system now we're not doing our job either so i think by putting it out there they need to see where  bringing up that point as well we don't want to you know focus too much on recent tragic tragic news across the nation we we i think there's been general agreement based on the newtown tragedy that we have to do a better job in society in school addressing mental health issues and interim deal you know some some of the some of the challenges our students face and we do need a lot more in there so the bottom  two to address that in the middle school going to house you mentioned they did say was on our list just didn't make it into the top four but your priorities would be in the same being and it would be surprised to see that in the future there because we all know how important critical it is clarifications from last month's presentation or any particular areas of the budget that you would like us to come back or care to address or report we could agree on we don't seem to need to have another and anywhere we  our original project and the town site has come in above it and as it stands right know at least the last draft i saw was that weird that the town is about just under two hundred thousand in the negative so what they want to know know in the town gives us the budget timeline and we have once again been able to graduate and met all of their all of their timelines and i know you were born into january and we have once again been able to remember w pipes are ok so i'm very happy with that and i am happy with that situation right now but it's all good so i thank you office for because it is a monstrous task for together but nothing like a little timeline meetings talking about the budget process and what they need to do for the process and they also don't have to be with their timeline so and they didn't have a big timeline this year because we started late with the  other matters the i go had a lovely artist in residence there today while the gentleman are never sick member's name right now but he has a studio in so fast and he does a lot with them a lot of the schools he's coming back to paint a mural and i think t procedure at a glance so i'm going to leave this comp be along with our robert's rules and if ever you know we have chosen for years just to use our guideline as roberts rules