so as we do every school committee meeting we have an item on the agenda that's titled citizens concerns and so the way we're going to proceed this evening is similar to the way we proceeded last time when we also had citizens of the audience which is always truly a bit of a thrill because as i say show the people are are encouraged to come so we'll allow approximately three minutes per speaker and the way the policies are the way we function at our meetings is if there's an item on the agenda we do not have a discussion and engage in the question an swer about that particular item and i imagine that there are some folks based on visuals who are going to speak to the start time issue and that is a discussion on the agenda and since we did buy time at our last meeting now with that item on the agenda will be the same time this is going to be long the process of conversations and engaging many parts of the community so we want to give time as well i'd like to first invite folks who are speaking about other issues she's an opportunity to send her something other  younger students and there is a benefit to these students whether or not they continue to play the same ones all the way through i think they've learned something very valuable in the program and on  use that a half or more than half the students but there is a spark and the child when you're young and you can catch them in the right time and get in the musical experience hands on experience it can live  education in music in the lower levels especially and give them better instruction more in the you have experiences and a chance to feel instruments and try them out so that they're distance and i have a third grader on as well seven and i have to be in year one year old who will eventually be in the system so a few things i would like to point out so one of the main reason same here is because when i found out about student members that have no idea what discussion is going on and i went back and watched the video from the school department meeting the presentation the other day and there were lots and lots of people who don't know and even though they did go out to roman numbers for mr asteroid and so we don't want to get these directly from him but i will share on the t v he shared with need we have a very eager third and fourth graders and third fourth grade there is a lot of positive care pressure among students and among parents and it's very much more easy for me to say to my third grader would you like to do cello or clarinet easy for me to say to make the grade my fifth grader you know going to do better work or start chorus what instrument do you want to do fifth graders come much more of a mind of their own and you want them to be able to do that in fifth grade but those third fourth graders are impression so impressionable me have two hundred and thirty third graders doing series out of the three hundred and fifty students we have two hundred and twenty fourth graders doing their out of three hundred sixty five now there are some retention issues only fifty percent of those bastions continue on the next year in van so i see the reason for improvement in the program but i do not see any reason that we need to kill the fourth grade on the number of students eligible for saturday morning the school drops from six hundred to the little one that's taking out these fifth graders who will now have four days a week during their sixty's cycle and not and fifth because this jump to china is huge as a third fourth grader my kids maybe do a sport and they're when i go to the website to pay a fee the only field it bill is in use there is no fee for bus there's no fee s after school activities there's no fee for athletics that is one thing that we have available to our third and fourth graders when we don't have all the other things they're going to buy for their time as they get older i would like to see the money which seems not to be an issue is being able to fit in the schedule of the elementary schools and so the last thing i'll add is that when my seventh grader was in fourth grade they did you mean terribly so he wants to read an instrument at the time so he started profession in fifth and sixth be on an even keel but when he was in fourth grade kids went to one generally as a class a week with their regular classroom is third or fourth graders go off to instrumental music and not instruction time is happening you can't teach anything valuable to those kids because the other kids will miss a lesson so we need to be aware of what's going on with  to go outside and pay a private teacher for a thirty minute lesson a week all year long that i don't know whether it's two thousand dollars or so and there is a to other schools because of the music program julie made a great point there aren't that many fees associated with other things but with music and that's such an important skill for children to learn even though they don't continue you know later kill a sense of camaraderie that they actually get to having chance to actually meet with the whole town not just their little slices of school they have this bridge into january because the com happens like that but i would like to be able to preserve that for for you know for kids who will actually have a chance to be so proud and tell all mom so to ted i need to be because mom you know my guys are coming i'm going to have to show him something that i great and i'd be very sad to see the opportunity to thank you you know pleasure and the power to pass on to their younger ones saying hey music is really something that you we can work together i can pass you in the knowledge that what i learned the two years or two years ago or three years ago and he program i just have to say i'm so appreciative of the supper today that we have on the agenda because i i've been listening to her all listening hearing what other people hear and the so hearing it back again is extremely helpful and do you want to  glad but some folks met with argo this morning and i think maybe a good next step would be for me to get the contact information of julie you julie you have the most questions and maybe we could get up a cohort of folks that are going i could be together with and then say i almost wrote every question down read don't think i wrote down all of them so that we can have the conversation in person and then we can report back to the school committee that might be the best way to move forward if that's ok with the group so julie if you could i have a just your neighbor if you could leave  an e mail or set up a meeting and you can contact the others as well thank you and then preserving whatever we can of our skeletal agenda of tough and opportunity to anyone else who has citizens concerns to share to come up and try to keep things to hardest that's why i joined us out and so i'm petition the petition currently has three hundred sixty nine signers and there's now going to post a petition to which i think is a good sign our best chance of finding solutions to problems is all stakeholders speak up about their hopes and concerns and they're doing it so this is the perfect time for the school committee to try to taskforce that's going to listen to everybody and come up with proposals that we don't want students and their parents there are resources available for the national school later  you courage everybody to tune in and i believe so early purchasing your ticket early deadline for the f b i annual event is the deadline is today so you still have a few hours if you wish to save a few dollars on those tickets and i encourage everyone to try and go and if you can't you can find other ways to donate to that organization as well and then the student representative report seven different times i will also cut my report short i want everybody to check the website we do have a lot of great high school activities going on between concerts in all of our winter season teams between our girls ice hockey boys ice hockey boys basketball girls basketball  drop wrestling we have a lot of good things happening for post tournament play and we congratulate all of our student athletes i know usually leaser is the these are the music events coming up and i'm usually the sports reporter but we have a lot of good things challenge that kind of project eventually revert to it's a lot about giving groups challenges where they need to work through and come and go late all to develop characteristics like trust and you know we're looking at now is a lot more science going into the development teenage brain and how we can teach them these skills our younger age how to actually proactively deal with stress i make sure they're understanding to take care of their mind to their body and it really helps you can have amazing benefits for kids in the classroom so it's not only just helping them when they're in that particular course for them when a kid goes to you know not a science but they go to the s a t s and they can actually know how to support a student who may have a limitation at the time we found that to be a really powerful skill they were learning business move you're going to hold hands and put your feet together in the air and you're going to be countering the power between your feet and your hands in order to keep you up this movie enables you and your best friend to share power to meet each other and str your relationship and trust between each other the first partner lies on the ground with their feet extended towards their along with their eyes the second partner walks over by their hand in the back on to their feet good partner grabs their feet and got they got affirmation from their from their peers as well which was a real powerful powerful piece so when you start i'm so proud of the work that these four have done and we continue to out to refine and refocus on as we go through the courses i know that they've actually asked for some more time from a planning see a point to really kind of hone their skills what they have to offer and so we're trying to carve some of that time out during our our planning process but i can only  close to a city and being able to learn how to write in time not all those things really matter and i'm really excited that the program studies are starting to build more and more of these i think there was a couple props for this year for next year to be included and we're really  and i get worried when the girl had the yoga pose and they were in the classroom over there so it's not exactly so we're so thankful that we're getting into high school so they can actually have classrooms or stuff for students to have that kind of activity thank you for your patience  fifty four students are eligible for equal services and twenty six of them are recently arrived which means they've come to the united states in the last year but their students speak thirty two different primary language is one which is amazing and one hundred twenty of our students which is thirty three percent they speak a language other than english which is gives us such a richness in our community their new one percent of thirty one students have i p's or five of your plans  we added a second grade class this year that was carry on from having our first grade class of first grade last year's ed up fifty percent of our classrooms right now have twenty five or more students and twenty four or more students and  this graph shows students who come into our school either they're brand new or they're brand new in first to fourth grade or they come sometime in the middle of the year so what that means is the blue is for the school year thirteen fourteen  the red is fourteen fifteen green is fifteen sixteen and purple is this year the reason that significant is this is how many students who are brand new to our school in first through fourth grade it doesn't even include kindergartners who are brand new and they might come in september brand new or they come middle of the year like our friends are coming today what's significant about this is the purple is february of two thousand six hundred seventeen so that's right now we can't project yet how where that number is going to go how much it's going to much more it's going to climb the next set of columns is how many students left at work and at the end of the year and not the typical four three moving on to the next school but how many students are leaving middle of the year for all different reasons they've moved back to move to another country another state another programming setting the third set of data is how many students have been a stay in our school for one year or less and what that means the reason that's significant is we might have students who come in november of one year and leave november the next year or they might come for one full school year or they might come in february and leave me and so we have this number as you can see so far this year we have to we've had twenty students who have left before completing one year or less last set of data is how many students have had an interrupt interrupted arrival or departure and what that means is how many students came not at the beginning of this we're but sometime in the middle and how many students left before the end of the school year why is this important having so many new students who come at these different times we put a lot of resources we care about every single student who comes to our school and we want to make their transition as seamless and as welcoming as possible but it takes a lot of you know staff resources and time to make sure we're meeting all of their needs and i just wanted to have this other table to kind of paint it in another way which is in each of those years these are two thousand and thirteen fourteen fifteen and sixteen that's our population of the top on october first those are the new students who came in in grades one through four and then those are our new case to you so the bottom line revenue growth represents how many new students every year are we having to help in a transition to our school and it's quite a lot it's a roughly average about thirty percent ok so with that backdrop we are doing some fantastic things that of other school even with you know having to help acclimate lots of different kids all the time with their different languages so that to air things i wanted to really focus on even though there are so many things i as i sat in reflected on what i wanted to present today i had to have most of the things that were really spending a lot of  energy on are continuing the important social motional learning work that we that has been started it's a district initiative it's super important to our staff and we know it's important to our students growth and our technology  them last year we had there were three important areas of social emotional learning that our staff decided was important for kids to learn for all kids to learn one of those was a growth mindset one of them was in it another was inclusive schooling and the third was mindfulness this year so last year what happened was in staff wide meetings each of these topics were explored were explored with the whole staff to kind of help give everyone a familiarity with growth mindset mindfulness and inclusive schooling this year we wanted to dig a little bit deeper and help give our staff tools so that they not only understood it themselves but will be teaching students about this so one of our staff meetings we took some time to think about all the ways that our students i don't do verse because it's not just about speaking different languages or coming from another country and so we kind of took some private time to independent time to think of ways our students could be diverse and then we share them as a staff and so it could be that they're different because of religion but it also might be nutrition it can be processing time there are so many layers to how our students are different and we really want to meet their needs so the area because of schooling we have this statement that each time we kind of we refer back to inclusive schooling we think about this statement which is when someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it there's a moment of psychic disequilibrium as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing and we don't want that to happen so we reflect on this statement as a lens through which to evaluate  practices i mean tiriel structures and our use of language and we really want to have an awareness about all the choices we make and how they impact all the different ways that our students are diverse growth mindset is the concept of understanding that we can be intelligent in many different ways and we can always get smarter so this statement is something we brought up at the at a staff meeting which way do you believe and this was the question we asked our staff deep down where beliefs live that every learner is capable of learning and growing at high levels with enough effort beat back and coaching and we do and so we have to continuously think about our practices and make sure we're using language that helps kids believe that as well about themselves and what you're seeing here this is a wall that's display and one of the most important phrases from growth mindset is not get so into when a child says any time or even a grown up i can't i have not yet because that empowers them so deeply and so this was a just a random display from one of our classrooms because we're explicitly teaching our children that it's important to believe that you're not there yet what do you need to do to help yourself get there and so they did you can't read them it's really tiny meeting to help help our parents understand growth mindset a little bit better students fill out daily in africa checklist to self assess their performance during lessons every few weeks we provide students with a motivational mindset normal these colorful and creative messages are posted and discussed within our classrooms then retire to a bulletin board posted in the hallway for all students to see lastly we've created this bulletin so the last part of our tripod that we're focusing on for social emotional learning is mindfulness which you heard about in the high school we're also doing that work at the elementary school our guidance counselor christine romans had took the time and did some training herself to become an educator of my fullest techniques and so she has taught me and she's at least thirteen of sixteen classrooms in the last two years she's gone and taught learning units for mindfulness and she's also there's a group of staff members that she's teaching mindfulness techniques and giving them ideas for head lessons how to teach students and in one case there is a cool teaching model so what you see up here this is student work there's a bulletin board in our school for mindfulness and what is a question to the kids was what is mindfulness so if you look up here this little person here said mindful eating mindful breathing mindful seeing mindful hearing and mindful movement and had a little illustration for each and he said mindful noticing what is going on right now and that's the way that we're teaching that at the elementary level and at the bottom of my phone this is where you can feel relaxed or being aware of your surroundings and if you can see there's a if there's two minutes one second five minutes because they're challenging each other to to have this get and every great teaches lessons weekly in kindergarten this is what you're seeing here they're taught in the whole great so all the kindergartners come together once a week and the kindergarten teachers takes turns teaching a lesson and the scope and sequence for the units that go across kindergarten through fourth grade are skills for learning and the emotion management and problem solving and so they're kind of there are lessons invented for each of those topics over time that happen in each of our grades so it's a spiraling curr on to some fun stuff as well technology a butler this is been an exciting year we have devices this year and i can see that officially today this is true that we have devices for students in every grade and what that means we have pads in kindergarten first grade second grade and fourth grade in kindergarten there are three per class and that's useful for small group work so the students can work it was instruction with some children while other children work on differentiated tasks which can include something on the i pad first small group of students in first grade there are eight per class and again this helps to for students to be able to get a really good small group instruction with their classroom teacher while the other kids are engaged in different sort of literacy activit practice with the i pads and in second grade they share a car there are twenty nine per grade and in fourth grade there are eight per class you're going to see some student work in it but in third grade it's very exciting thank you so much f b r awesome a and the i t department who has worked tremendously to help we got a grant and we have one two one from books in third grade and they the last one was installed and plugged in and set up today which is fantastic i got  great email from our third grade teacher they're thrilled because their work this year has been learning how to set up and use google classroom to help creativity and collaboration in the third grade this is also a help for us as we consider helping kids learn the skills for digital literacy and keyboarding and all of those different things and so we're excited to get started finally now that we have the devices to get started on getting google chrome classrooms before we played some of the cool programs so it's not just we use these devices to both get content and learn and practice but also to create and collaborate and what you're about to see is a small project was a big project but it is using a program called telling on and it is w classrooms they explore different topics related to immigration because i was there unit study and so this particular you'll see his introduction but this was done completely i kept watch them going by in their little spots all around their classroom or in the hallway as they did research so all the graphics you see were researched found chose it and decided on it and then the explanation that you hear and see and how you see it all unfold was all  so in addition it's important to not just just having devices isn't enough we have to provide a national development to help our teachers use them in a way to productive so i actually read and there's another program called recount and this is what you're seeing here this is an image we were able to do things and apparently organize a professional development for our staff on a with a couple with a group call and text and what they did was in small groups of teachers they were trained to use different collaborative learning a s for i pads and our third grade teachers got their own to our learning time to use google classroom so it was actually it was differentiated and it was an entire day in space learning how to use different tools and later that very next day you put in a program and then you see where you make your mistakes and then you oh wait i have to do this a different way and instead of giving up you just keep learning from your mistakes until you get it right thank you so much these are just some images of wonderful things that we do in the community and ways that we lift each other up in as a community thank you so much number that added on for something net but it's not the gross number of used to say the district so we have folks leaving so we have more than one hundred new students to our school family every year which in turn is a lot of work for teachers to be able to assimilate them into what the expectations are each of the schools in the district and then when you combine that with difficulty of language and culture that that's that's a great it's a great amount of work and obviously the butler does it very well i think you should stay for the presentation that's to presentations from now on the space because you'll just see what the class restrictions are all the schools in that with there is a really great need for additional space and a man just ask you and not to  use of each one of those faucets to find out whether we should try to fix them or just leave them off but i haven't put the results out yet because there are some of the whitefield house and some of the ice rink that they wanted to include as well so the last school committee meeting i know is that we'll be putting those faucets some of them should just remain off because they just weren't used period that much of a regular basis to maybe some that were used enough to be worth changing though it's whopping it's a new for balance for the general fund at this time is actually a negative a deficit of partially thirty one thousand dollars that doesn't mean that we're a deficit today that means if everything breaks the way that we think that it may as reflected on this report  it's likely that other things being equal without implementing some stopgap measures that the school department general fund accounts with in deficit by approximately thirty one thousand dollars that's a change from the initial first quarter budget update back in september and that kind of made quarter update that we did in mid november when at the time in mid november we were then projecting a positive in the balance of approximately fifty two thousand dollars and the big driver behind the changes in special education out of district which ns there's been some increases in expenses and increases in the number of students in of this replacement since the beginning of the year and the projected costs on this report reflect not only students w i can't creamer director of student services that oversees special education and if there was in any given year at any given point here there are some number of students that are kind of teed up that may be going out and these projections include an estimate of those students and what those cost may be if they were to the law in order to address that measure this report reflects use of additional circuit breaker friends funds for anyone that may not on expanding a certain amount of the circuit breaker funds with some of being carried over into f y e teens and based on the most recent information we have with the projected deficit within that category  to a positive ending balance of about sixty nine thousand dollars so sort of a available in this projection would be a negative thirty one thousand but we can plug that with circuit breaker a two hundred thousand again that number is a place where the based on how many students actually do go out between now and the end of the year and if we were to do that based on what our estimates are at this time that would end up being a positive  the the bottom line literally is that we're projecting a deficit but not to worry it will be because we have circuit breaker friends were able to plug that hole to the extent that we need to for this year so that the classrooms are held harmless there's no need for a budget circuit breaker allocation this year as i've indicated we're in position to be able to go to that allocation to shift for an additional two thousand dollars we're also projecting to end that account with a healthy balance this year which would then  hundred sixty seven thousand dollars less than what the town task force financial model of ours would have been we already took a reduction one hundred sixty seven thousand this draft to represents a reduction of an additional one hundred sixty seven thousand below committee to talk about space and the need for additional cost to space the district in felt the need to pick a time in the school committee calendar to bring all this information one more time and for the problem we have show we have demonstrated and presented some of these slides in various forms but this slide show we created for our ridgeley for the bone one high school building committee we then put it in front of the space task force in we have a steering committee of teachers that we meet with the both states of class size and they thought that this was a great presentation to show in front of all the teachers go to each school so i have been to three of the four elementary schools i was at the burbank today at wellington yesterday and i was at the butler right before the february break and i will be at the wynn brook next week in the high school the middle school of deciding whether or not they would like to have this staff have this information i believe that this is the foundational presentation that we should also be given to get out in front of parents especially at some of the elementary schools that may be involved in the discussion around modulars so i asked the school kids patience because some of these slides  familiar but again for the purposes of making sure that we're communicating all that we have around these two issues in this important work to the public and then putting an online as well correspondingly i was in touch with the  folks in jeff today we are looking to do a more comprehensive public schools now episode that really focuses on space and the impact that it's having a classroom teachers and on schools as it relates for us to answer some of those questions and let you know if this recognition of a room in the class and space issues this was actually a subset of the conversation we had in the budget presentation the budget that we are proposing for f eighteen is largely impacted by the increase class sizes that we have in the space issues that we have at all three levels to this this is a familiar chart to the audience we have a growing population some of the gator i'll show you is the actual data from the last five years it will show you projections for the next seven to eight years and each one of our levels of the district this graph shows you that we have  kindergarten through twenty nine in first grade and you work your way down the hall and it projects with those class sizes will be in the next five years the highlight in yellow cells are all the classes in grades that will be three we are averaging now between three forty three hundred sixty students from what you see below that is the ability for us to kind of predict our class size by adjusting how many students we have in each grade which is the left h column on the bottom grid with how many teachers we have to divide them up into the middle word says fifteen standard that's what the school system is built for fifteen sections of each grade five into well into  down to that twenty three range which is where they should be for addition of our quality at the middle school we have increasing roman the middle school is the biggest challenge the district we have thirteen hundred fifty nine students as of october one of the school year we projected fifteen hundred forty six in the next seven or eight years right now we are squeezing through the school even with the six marshals that we put on line in january and the middle school didn't seem to be a challenge the high school has similar escalating numbers right now in october they had twelve hundred sixty four and they will go up to fifteen hundred twenty two at the twenty four twenty five school  we are in be and this be a building project which we hope will be a vehicle to solve some or all of our problems we have completed the eligibility period we are in the forming of the project team are working very hard to do the district work in between each marginal because at the end of each one we have to go to be in this before approval and then set a timeline for those waters so we hope that in june of two thousand and seventeen we will  level of the district is facing present how each option kid impact each other level of the district on the left to call the m s p a configurations of nine through twelve eight through twelve and seven through twelve are what's being considered what we will i'm packing work our way through the spring and next fall is identifying exactly what each one of those options means correspondingly if we do go with anywhere of those two options there are there will be an impact on the other parts of our district so an example would if we are going to need through twelve morrow maybe that schools in eight nine school built in connected to a nine through twelve school or eight grade eight building connected to or attached to ninety twelve school we would not ready our elementary level but you would really be our middle school challenge that we have if we were to explore a seven through twelve school project that could look like a seventy eight school connected to a nine through twelve school are even  future so how are we going to go about this work we have hired education facilitator who's met with a group of teachers on two occasions next conference call us tomorrow morning to set up two community meetings and one more educator meeting that will be full day meetings to get feedback and input on all three of these arches and what we see is the great teaching you learning moral that we would like to bring to dhawan we will take all that information we'll give it to the older project manager  elementary staff and i will also volunteer to do the middle school and high school the reason we're really get your attention is that the next phase of this work is a talk about what can we do to relieve the pressure on elementary schools and we have been building this was part of our budget proposal we are going to each school to do this for our staff and i want to give this full of data even though parts of these slides are redundant to some of the work that we've already there was a school committee  school for those reasons as well citizens concerns at our meeting tonight it's well as the prior meeting this is an opportunity for us to have a committee discussion about anything that's on our mind i started to think one of the things that's been brought up is possibility of forming a task force to look into the issue and i think that that's something that we can do now and do it with sort of an open mind to that we're going to listen to everybody within the community and as elise sat in our last meeting there are lessons learned from other communities that we can that that group would look at and question i just like to say you know as an advocate to starting school later i'd like to thank the students who are still here very much for their presentation i think they've raised some very valid concerns that are being raised in many districts priory many districts have made the transition maybe many are in the process and these are all the same concerns and they're valid ok starting school early has you know huge numbers of advantages and if students would only have a sleep button that we could press nine pm so they would go to sleep early would be perfect but unfortunately kids don't have a sleep and i think the you know the medical consensus at least now is such that we can't ignore it and setting up a task force susan says to look into this with a very open mind and taking listening to all voices especially students and especially students who are concerned is the way forward so you know in planning for the agenda this evening superintendent dale and i were discussing the fact that this is already something we've been talking want to put to a task force i think that would be a great next step and to underscore the part about learning lessons from other communities there's such a wealth of information online if i'm trying to do a little taking a little and just noticing west so i'm glad that we've approached it and perhaps with guidance from the superintendent we can think about how to make it meaningful moving forward in this academic year and thinking about strategic points in time when we could be informed as a committee moving into the next john just moved forward with that as part of the google course planted question so so if if i would i think that when we had been engaging in this conversation at the realistic time i would be to form a team between now and june and have that team come forward to the group before we leave the school year to say to the group is in with the perimeters of what they would like to do or what their work would look like and then have that work take place in the fall with the hope of presenting to this  the late fall and i think that there's some parts of this that can move quickly and people can make their way through an executive summary of the literature and the best practices of some of the comparable districts and then some of the b variables would be one of the local logistic issues that would come about whether or not this is just a high school in fact in project or k to twelve impact the project which could extend the timeline of needed feedback input from many people  k twelve or is it just a smaller simpler folk so with those variables being said i i dedicate being able to come in front of you by june with a group of folks then we will solicit to be part of this group with kind of a game plan an appropriate course of work here so just out of curiosity in terms of the composition of the task force or you but maybe you haven't really thought it through yet since we're just discussing it but are you imagining a student or two students and i would think it would involve focus groups and surveys to include a wider audience of folks but i can put a proposal together in the next few weeks as they give that she will form just so i would it looks like things you need to take up and discover them for us to think about partners in the community who can perhaps share some of the link obviously much will be revealed with the task force but perhaps even in advance of the task force we can think collectively about what already exists that could help lighten some of that initial lift it as we had said earlier this is a working group inside the wellness committee that it's already working  constructed with them so there we went through the vetting process there is a particular firm that has been identified they were in the contract in discussions with right now and once that is concluded we'll start the process of selecting a design architect to participate in the feasibility