to be forthcoming and when superintendent failings returns at our next meeting i believe he will be addressing that please correct me if i miss and speaking but there has been a process involving principals and families and other family members etc involving the space task force chairs report i actually did not prepare a report knowing that we have the budget and if you think our presentation is going to make time for the news just want to wish everyone well during this past season and thank everyone for all the accommodations that you make literally to allow the time and space in the classrooms and to the families for helping children and families it sounds corny but they sleep in the food they need to come energize you so thanks to everyone and you know worked with the f b i and the foundation for about one education and the if you can go to their website and read all about the teachers the six teachers one from each school where making clout from the well into an elementary school grade three teacher katherine and also with instrumental music in the elementary schools and for everyone to know there will be a ceremony a reception at the ceremony weeks from today tuesday may second from six thirty to eight pm right here at the cherry middle school lots of delightful treats to eat and and time to meet all of the teacher is beforehand and then to the auditorium for free so we hope people will come to that it's a wonderful event an update a quick  update on the high school building project we're in a phase now where we're working with a consultant frank locker to think about visioning teaching and learning for the next fifty years or so and what how that might impact the building itself we had our first meeting with a group of educators i think brokered and the next two days are may fourth and fifth that's next thursday and friday and that will include parents proximately thirty parents educators and students who will continue to think together about teaching and learning and the different possible configurations for the new school and the facility itself and how that the ideas about teaching and learning might might impact the design of the building those will take place all day thursday and friday to three thirty and on thursday evening there is a meeting for all of the school committee the board of selectmen and also the high school building committee it's at six pm at the beach street center and heart that consultant frank locker will be joining us and sharing with all of all of you updated on the work so far and then when all of it is done we'll be putting together port then also share with the owner manager and the architect and continuing to help us think about the work that we have ahead so that we are doing it in a very thoughtful and deliberate way so that's coming up and then lastly do you have a your tables the invitation if this is coming up on wednesday may seventeenth and if you've never been there i highly recommend it it's in honor of lilly and black berry who was very active in the belmont community and served as the editor of the belmont citizen herald three students receive award letter award in they read excerpts from their papers and talk about their research and it is extraordinary what they are they share and then following that is  equally wonderful as hearing a group of seniors talk about their process and many juniors attentive to glean some ideas and insights and and seniors inevitably share what not to do like don't leave your note cards to the like night before they're due when i read your books in the summer back so our first item of business is the budget hearing and vote so this is our annual budget hearing when members can come and ask specific questions about the budget we will take a vote to approve the budget we've already had several to it's a difference of one hundred sixty seven thousand dollars i'll speak to that will be more than deficit will through the presentation there's a change this fifty two million nine hundred sixty nine thousand plus dollars budget is a change over the f y seventeen budget of two million eight hundred forty two thousand and one dollars which represents a five point seven percent to the fifty the journal fun numbers the number that tommy will vote on will be asking the school community and i to vote we'll be adding five positions professional positions as provided for in year three of the town financial task force committee budget health insurance premiums budgeted an increase of nine percent  special education not just your tuition is in the general fund budget represent actually zero percent increase of the f y seventeen current year general fund budget and to drill down a little bit more on that school department for thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you tonight about the social studies more members of our group are here tonight thank you jim davis for joining us and our show is actually having a wonderful concert over at the high school which we can't be in two places at one time so but all of them have contributed greatly to this work they are really an amazing group who has worked tirelessly last year under superintendent failing and this year with me to understand and address this very important issue in our district i'm so grateful for their work on this very important topic and especially proud to be so to explain how this group came to be we need to go back in time to march and april twenty fifth t i when i went back to my files i was actually a little surprised that it was only two years ago feels like a little bit during that time we were considering our strategic plan focus serious for the fifteen sixteen school year we spent time as a leadership council reviewing student learning data and we asked ourselves some hard questions our mission statement speaks about nurturing the knowledge skills and emotional development when we asked ourselves if we were meeting these goals for all students we had to answer no and that is when we decided that our top two focus areas for the fifteen sixteen school year would be social and emotional learning and  in that order for that year in twenty fifteen sixteen many of the people who were who are currently on the work group were on the task force working with superintendent failing fail and he spent a significant amount of time reviewing subgroup data as you grows the gap between the english learner suddenly and all learners is very small there's also either a small gap or no gap between the economically disadvantaged and all the others it is larger for the place we chose not to use that as one of our so groups that focus on right now and then although the department of elementary secondary secondary education does not include the african american blacks i believe it or not ability rating  they do provide the data and we believe this is very important all students means all students after a third of the group thorough review of many data points the task force members concluded that as a district we needed to focus on our processes for concentration reflection and synthesis the data listed on the slide illustrate that we have not created a safe and supportive learning environment for african american black students and later in the presentation to kathy and lindsey talk more about that data and what we learn from it improving their learning environment their experience in our schools is a necessary and foundational step to ensuring that they can in chief at levels comparable to their peers may have heard the term implicit bias there's been a lot of research on it it has been in the news quite a bit lately the research on implicit plot bias explains integrate part why our environment is less well for me to those not from the dominant culture implicit bias consists of unconscious and tunes that shape our responses to certain groups it operates involuntary and violent terribly often without one's awareness or intentional control it is different from explicit racism and he uses the brain short on his stereotyping to process large amounts of incoming data to shift our climate in culture all educators administrator need to learn to recognize group population including two hundred five students whose parents indicated their students were black or african american or combination of black african american and other races these two hundred five students compared to our table for the district which is four thousand one hundred fifty nine students representing about five percent of the student population it is important to recognize that one hundred thirty five or sixty four percent of this group are belmont residents while seventy five or thirty six percent of the students are part of the neck of the program will refer to this group through our presentation as a sub group as we discussed the data we viewed in some cases will be sharing statewide data and that does not include the mixed race students and we will let you know when that is the case we looked at all the grades at each grade level between green six and twelve we found that the seven students had three to four times as many cs d s or apps as in to similar results were found in each of the grade level that was alarming we also looked at the high school at the high school we offer courses at three levels college prep honors advanced placement well all courses prepare students for college and career the degree of challenge depth of knowledge and ability to synthesize and transfer the understanding from the course content increases as the level increases we looked at the data for grade eleven and twelve students comparing the course levels of all students to the course levels of the subgroup students the percentage of a p courses taken by all students is seven times higher than the percentage of a p courses taken by the students the percentage of honors courses taken by students is one point seven times higher and the percentage of  course is taken by the students the percentage of college prep courses taken by the group students is two point five times higher than the percentage of c p courses taken by austin's we increase the number of students going to advance from proficiency or whether we've cut the number of students in mourning in failure they also look at the growth rate in the performance of the students dropout rate in those sort of things  when you look at the performance over the last three years i'm all students in relation to our african american black students you can see there is a significant gap there thank you so in the winter of two thousand and sixteen a group of educators that are going to surveyed almost all fifth eighth ninth and eleventh grade students about their social notional experiences in school also a little over eleven hundred students and what we found in that survey is that students who reported being black or african american saltier in part were much more likely t report negative social and emotional experiences and sometimes some occasions that the gap was considerable we did find that the most striking differences were around issues of fairness and respect and i'll share a few more details with you in a minute i want to note that one positive finding that we had was that african american and black students were more likely to report positive self  image than students in the other subgroups the white and asian separates the we have noticed in other surveys and in our focus group conversations that other assets are emerging as well including being more likely to stand up to bullying being more likely to act to protect friends or friendships and being more practicing more self restraint in difficult social situation so we'll look at three key measures of social emotional experiences from our survey and see how they're connected to the research that janice mentioned at the beginning about implicit bias and brain based learning in this slide you can see there a fifteen to twenty point gap around perceptions of fairness between the black or african american subgroup and the white and asian subgroups i think it's particularly striking that almost half of the black an african american students were surveyed felt that teachers punished them without really knowing what happened we also have a fifteen to twenty point gap in the overall feelings of fairness in their interactions with teachers in focus group conversations we noticed that students were feeling that they had to be twice as compliant as other students in order to avoid punishment and there were one or two very skilled students who went out of their way to introduce themselves to assistant principals and other authority figures at the beginning to make sure and start off on a positive basis or footing before there could be any questions complaints or  or discipline so that was a very mature strategy for high school students to be using forty two percent of african american or black students feel that adults in school don't often listen to them which is another fifteen to twenty point gap when compared to our other subgroup students and again you know figure approaching half of all of our african american african american and black students who feel that adults don't listen to them at school and finally i think the most concerning is that over a quarter of our african american and black students reported that they don't trust or disagreed that they trusted teachers and other adults at school and that's a another twenty to fifteen point gap between the other subgroups that we surveyed and this group of students are feeling that adults punish them unfairly that teachers don't listen to them and that they cannot be trusted and there isn't an emotional barrier that's been erected that hinders them from learning as janet said beginning when we are monitoring our environment for threats we're not able to learn  well so that brings us we've now talked about sort of our group and what we have been working on sort of larger frame we've given you some information specific to belmont and again like i did see we're talking about it was really just almost like a little taste created an achievement gap task force and we went through some of the similar process there kind of trying to model it for you here tonight we really looked into our local data and if you recall the number of people who were on this committee we had a lot of different access points middle school high school different subject areas extracurricular opportunities for a lot of different ways that we could try to gather our local data so we did that local data review and edition we also did a literature review looking at what is the best practice and what's been working in other communities around the country and also  other communities local to us we set our short term goals which will talk a little bit more about how we do that this year and then we thought about our long term goal which is really around how do we shift our culture to enable all african american or black students to achieve results comparable to their peers so one of our first action steps for this school year was to educate our staff about our achievement gap is to talk to teachers and their staff members about what is it look like  able to offer as a series on s c l and the achievement gap both to teachers and to the entire leadership group we've been able to offer a class called engaging culturally and linguistically diverse students and families in secondary schools this was to teachers at the middle school and his schools are fully in role of course about twenty five teachers there we've had the able to bring in a grant to bring it all to pay for it how do you have courageous conversations training again to gather data to begin to look at our local information and to start  we also know the in addition to supporting our staff we need to support our students and we need to support them both from the angle of students who are not achieving and even though it's a learning institutions that we knew that they can and then i'll talk to me about kids who are she been well who want to continue to support them in advance in further so to support our african american black students who are struggling to meet our learning expectations we've been able to put a math r t i pilot program in it generally in grade five which involves increasing math instruction for students have peals he is working at the middle school and the high school level and also individual consumers are again through their smart goals gathering data and implementing what we know to be best practices among students in the famil representatives from historically back black colleges and universities to belden has got to provide students with opportunities for ways to look at their life and opportunities beyond the high school process it's on for example we have been conducting focus groups of students staff and parents to gather more local data to really drill down into the numbers and facts and figures we harvested from other areas so we can get more of a personal story behind these things and ask questions as to why th might be happening and we're doing some research into how similar school systems are working to end the achievement gap and to share some successful initiatives and see what we can take from them to help move ourselves forward and they were planning an october or early release professional development more a part actis for all teachers because what we need to do is really shift our culture again we're looking to create professional development opportunities both as a mandatory but also more voluntary and options as well for staff as we continue to move forward we need to provide improved academic support for students we need to take the work from our p l t s that they're doing this year learn from them and to continue to expand their opportunities that they should demonstrate and the programs that they're supporting we do need to continue gathering our local deal and we want to make sure that we're involving families and older african american or black students in this problem solving process and we have had tremendous success  use and focus groups are really getting information from students about what's working well for them and we've noticed a real strong sense of community and advocacy in that we're excited about tapping into it and moving forward to help us with this process down because we think it's impressed with all this work but it's hard to have very good conversation i wonder in terms of the achievement gap it's or there's some subject areas where the achievement gap is wider one of against i'm concerned about relays the difference between the number of students testing here so i think and we know more about this from the m cas tests and subjects but i i think that the gap is always there but sometimes it looks different i can speak for english language arts and the gap that i'm looking at there is between the number of students testing proficient on them cast and the number of students testing advanced and there's very considerable get right i can say that i don't we i have it begins steve why you can see the gap show up in where we get to the middle school because we have a large enough cohort to get that  but that's encouraging because i think that the staff and the faculty as a whole cares a great deal to try to close the gap and when you have that support you can make things happen so i think that we can do it and i'm she said has been focusing on this ng and helping us move forward as a as a leadership team where it's sort of like we're mina orange yet we don't always move as quickly as as we'd like to but she's been a tremendous help in that and furthermore it looking at the elementary data as it does come to us from the city from the four different schools my hand candy has but the data together in magnificent spreadsheets so that we can see what it is that the state doesn't show us that's in their first year last year they did servings and then this year started with a small focus group thing grew into a large group amazing young people who came weekly to talk with trying for a year and a half to do this work is hard talking about race is hard looking at ourselves hard and to a certain extent we were falling over on feel a little bit and it and finally i think just through you sticking together and doing this hard work together and you know serving students talking with individual or couple students at a time we finally came to this point and so we had about twenty students together and they've not all twenty come every time but they've met weekly ever sense sometimes we're there and sometimes we're not they're very self sufficient and our biggest meeting was over forty students  that's been fantastic and then the two russians when we are there when we are sort of shaping the conversation a little bit more than the two questions we ask them are tell us about your experiences in our schools and if you had a magic wand that worked on all the adults in the building what would you do with the magic wand and that's been really we have a giant notes document that we share you know the kids can see writing and  we have you know building administration has been involved other teachers have come so it's been a really phenomenal experience and we're hoping next year you know ask my boss for permission right now to include some of the students in  members and that our presentation on the thirty first about ten students are going to come and some of them are going to speak as well and we have some video to share from them as well so that's really exciting and for me the biggest piece of personal and professional learning that i've had from this experience is is that i need to listen i need to let them drive and they know much better than i do what this is like i really don't know what it's like to be a black or african american student in our schools and they also they have the best ideas and also sometimes i need to just get out of the way and let them execute too and that sometimes conflicts with my courage to plan and in foresee in advance that it has turned out really really well thank you for asking about  personal stories are you looking at the state on an individual level in terms of how they may be progressing i guess partly i'm wondering what the turnover is like for this population in the school and you know if we're g how many students we had from k through twelve that has changed we have some input as the grades get higher but but we're not just were we are trying to look at that to see how we can  better integrated new student into our system we have that issue with all of our new students coming from different parts of the world or different parts of the state so those are our data to get in yeah yeah and i would add one of the things that yet we have come to understand from our work i mean in the literature in our work around social learning is that we've been focusing on the african american black students and there are students other students who experience our schools less favorably because of other differences that that may or may not be as a parent looking at them whether they are gay or transgender whether they are going to have a learning disability whether they come from an economically disadvantaged home whether they are a religion that is different from the majority religion there are lots of reasons why students might feel different in other and wh critically important is that all students again feel safe and supported and now it's incumbent upon us the adults in the schools to build a strong positive relationship with all of our students and make sure that they know that they are valued  welcomed in validated for who they are as they go through our schools k through twelve so that's really our mission our strongest desire and probably pretty boring at cocktail parties these a long way and relatively short amount of time and we very excited to to bring this were to all of the teachers in the district in october and are hoping right now to be able to offer a workshop in each school through an organization that's actually partners with and co it's called ideas initiatives for developing educational achievement for all students i think and  they they have conducted a couple over shops that i've attended that we've attended this year and doing an outstanding job of of helping educators develop a stronger awareness understanding of the experience of our particular and how we can work with them to design how we want instead of those three hours with our educators and our our plan right now is to be able to offer one in each school so that each school community will have their own session for elementary schools the middle school and high school and then subsequent to that offer of hands as deb mentioned volunteer more voluntary professional development opportunities throughout the year to continue this work and we also hope of course that people will learn from the p l t conference that people will have more people will embrace the goals of the n t even writing the goals was to help people and to write a really good smart always is hard and to read about a topic that is as frightening as i'm sorry in your mind standing firm or so thinking over the last few years in various presentations different books have replaced other books you know old dead white men you know authors you know we knew more contemporary authors who represent different racial groups and different cultural backgrounds and i connect a lot with the book we read a couple years ago or i read at least from my choice about  yes and being known and feeling known and i just think i remember my son this year was choosing or was chosen for him but there was a list of historical famous historical figures such a diverse range ones had never heard of that i was so grateful to see progress made you know having more curricular opportunities available for students to connect you know than the traditional for  and they have fantastic ideas and i want to say to a lot of their ideas are not about making things better for themselves they're very interested in educating the rest of the school and and i want them to do that work because so frequently what we read about whether it's in history class or in english class is about times of oppression and struggle slavery and civil rights and that's really difficult for students to keep being reminded of over and over again hands this summer reading that you mentioned it reminds me of that coming to an inbox near you soon it's a selection of summer reading choices that will all be all around this issue of race and educate all students and i have a little i have three articles for you there i found particularly found really compelling and the writing is very clear and really provided some for insights i recommend all of the articles here  the only other comment was thinking about the focus groups and the data about students of his curious the students talked about what listening looks like or fields like that that come up so i'm just curious i know there have been efforts to go in depth telling with the s c l work greeting students more and so i'm just wondering if there are some conscious levels of listening subtle shifts that people can make like creating students at the door that helps students feel listened to so yeah those aren't really the things that the students are targeting about actually this one so useful to talk to them because what they're experiencing some frustration around is when they are trying to explain their side or their side of so there are there we're learning there are some phrases and some word uses that have said it but in african american students that maybe we as w and brings up an issue about race and says you know i don't like that you just said that to me i can imagine my first instinct might be to get very scared defensive and really worry over my goodness did i just say something raises no no i can't possibly have just said something race and all this is happening is head and i don't know this for sure but all of this is happening in the teacher's head and what happens is not a good conversation between the teacher and the student and one of the nice things that's happened recently is can point to at least one example where another dog in the building was able to go back with the student and help have a better conversation later after some time had passed and and the outcome was much better i don't know for sure that that's what the forty two percent of students were thinking about but when we ask about that in the focus groups that's what we hear and one point of clarity when you're talking about these focus groups are talking about five great five and up or you're including the twelve so if you are so far just happening with the high school students so the discussion kind of feedback you're getting for the lower levels really going so we have the survey there and we have some additional survey data from the climate survey that happened this year and and one of the things that we are worried about is that just because the students are and we didn't survey elementary students it's really as i'm sure you know not best practice to surveil many students but we're quite confident that the data that we have from from all these  of the analysis of that climate survey data this is work that's going on through the s c l work as well in the schools so each of the principals is working with their staff and we're working with their s p l steering committee to think ok so based on what we're learning from this da the council to bring forward proposals sooner so that because they really shouldn't be advertising them to students until they've been approved by this body so so that's why we have to hear tonight and these are the only international students who attend to go on this trip it is for students who are either taking one of our advanced chinese classes level four or five thirty eight or modern history either language use a history teacher and you ching who is one of our high school chinese teachers so we have a language expert and historian with the students and if we were depending on the size of the group or maybe one additional chaperones well  trip to prove it's very important for us to work through agencies such as these for the all of the and i know many in congress support that we get it does make it a little bit more costly but it's really important to us for the safety of the students and i'm always grateful as someone who used to travel with students on foreign language trips it is a tremendous amount of work before during and after you are kind of exhausted but you're always happy to hand the children back to their parents  and i'm so grateful for our teachers who volunteered to do this they either give up their people became or their you know right after school gets out and it's so tremendous an experience for our students to be able to travel in this way  with their teachers and with their peers for both trips there is scholarship money available and this is the students who are interested in it and just be in the trip and who have a financial need are able to work confidentially with the principal to be able to have the support that they might need to be able to attend and i'm happy to answer any questions y the companies yes we work with both of these companies in the past years i know i kind of want to go to the who maybe i'll sneak on board and say you need a spanish language person except perhaps another shop i know although i'm usually running leadership council retreats at that time of year fund projected year a deficit of approximately thirty one thousand dollars much of that was due to projected deficits in special education of district tuitions and that time we were proposing to use up to an additional hundred thousand dollars out of state circuit breaker fund enough for seventy to cover that so with that backdrop also the third quarter budget update which is through the end of march of this year we have a dollars of it additionally in circuit breaker funds that we're receiving this year to offset that deficit if we were to do that we would end up with a positive seventy nine thousand dollars or so so again we we have a just west of charge anything additionally to circuit breaker just yet that's our placeholder as really get closer to the end of the year number of other factors could impact the budget and we'll make those adjustments and  that our last day of school barring any other unforseen circumstances would be june twenty first that's a wednesday it is a full day for staff i have to  of families calling the office to check in and so we will post that on our website and make sure that people know if anyone has any questions or comments ok so then we will someone please make a motion and discuss any potential changes teachers have been considering changes to the senior thesis project and would like to come and update the subcommittee on that i don't anticipate that it would then come to the school committee as a presentation but really more as an information all that we could share at the next update sex long range planning unless anyone else has heard anything i have not heard anything ok so then going through our other business we've got minutes from our last meeting which was if he l all those in favor say aye great all right so our next meeting will be may ninth same place same time we have an executive session scheduled for this evening just kicking around being pro active in the need for the instance we will need one and they don't need to have one so we will not be transitioning into executive session so therefore is their motion to