this group of board members present works that just a large group of volunteers is doing and how important it is for the common public school of the money that they are he's asked for that's all i have and is so that's a great thing that's going on about what i write now and also international economic summit is starting up again which is something that one has hosted for the past two or three years i'm pretty sure it would be like to say that we have a great national waters society give it to the high school last week i told bravo oh what the night was great words to the audience the students were fantastic for their guest speaker was fantastic as well district wide music event that will happen in december this is going to choose from our we are always working to ensure that we can provide the community with the world blends into the belmont public schools in the good things that go on at each level of the district and when the year started  one of our september meetings the surgeries and i was our system one of our assistant principals at the high school talked about this petrie program and i really thought it was something that the entire community should know about did how it's supporting our tradition all full truth here we both have th graders coming to th grade this year and so let me get in the forefront of our minds to think even more about this transition from here and i think grades and of course there's research out there too that talks about how students need support when they go from one creed plus we have you know a lot of data from our current students we talk to some of our th and t already had a program have shown his school called the class connectors and so as you'll see and one of the slides coming up that part was a summer night where students would come th grade students for college and get a tour of the school and meet some of the saudi members of the high school so we took what was already there and then we just kind of tried to build on it and we had some ideas for hopefully continuing to build on it  and i'll just go ahead and show you some other things that we did so this is just a photo from that night in the summer i think it was artist twenty four where we had i think we had about forty five w had the forty five seniors come for a night of leadership training and so she and i was a leadership training up of those students and we went through some ideas about how to connect with th graders some what kinds of questions they might have and how you would talk about your experience of the high school and how that might help them feel more comfortable in coming to the high school and being incidents there we also have from the seniors some orange t shirts which they were twice they were the summer night and that's how they could be identified and then also the real idea of a behind the orange because i know it's not a  dinner which i think was the highlight of the night so this just kind of gives a little bit of background why do we need the class collectors program and the scope of what i already said is that we know that you know some th graders struggle when they school and so this is just kind of an overview of what happened what we actually did so this is the august night i was trying on thursday august th this was kind of what we already had and a  science going was you know with an open house where integrators would sorry th graders would come to get a tour of the school we set up a bed because we have those senior connectors be the leaders of the whole thing i mean they led the tours they facilitated the meetings with the guidance counselor and they had prepared ahead of time questions that they could ask the guidance counselors and talk about with the kinds counselors so they really were the leaders of that night and then they sat with their group they had groups of i think three inch assigned to me two or three seniors and they stayed with them the whole time and then at dinner together so they got to know each other a little bit that way and that on the st day of school the something mr brough was really helpful with to give us time on the st day of school for those same class connectors to really stop and take the leadership role and basically run orientation for the th graders so they prepared ahead of time they prepared workshops and topics and these were the topics they had academics extracurriculars and a quick guy you know how to be a what we've done in the past the step in the right direction but as he's talking about there are still a ways to go to some of the other the kinds that this process were that the night we were stressed out the st day that they weren't going following their schedule and going to it's very difficult to schedule time now for the connectors to continue to connect to our and original hope was that they would we would find time and twice of work which is really what we were hoping for for those connectors to get back with their group of th graders and  we tried to do a breakfast the late star after teacher conferences that thursday morning when school starts at one thousand and thirty so we were trying to do a breakfast at one hundred and thirty but we were we were struggling with the idea of whether or not we could if the night because we show up at nine  students student leaders can meet with underclassman or teachers to me was students it's really really hard to find time and what we want to come there to us is that that's really needed that those kids need a group they need an anchor and so potentially thinking about whether or not there are times that can easily be worked into the schedule or periodically throughout the year where kids can eat when they're when you think student advisory or student leaders commune with their groups  possibilities you know in addition to what jamie was just saying these are just some ideas really but i also went to a recent professional development at the n s a and we were talking with other school districts about what they do for the time great transition and so some of these ideas came out of that professional development as well but to have the assistant principal be a little bit more a part of things we already have guidance counselors come to to talk to the th graders in april about what kinds of classes they might take and things and so to have this will be part of that as well so that they get to know the administrators a little bit more and then this idea really like know it's a fun day we welcome them there they get to know the school but we can even have an ice cream social maybe they have a short tour and maybe they need some guidance counselors a lot of possibilities but even started back in june i think would be great  you know just to kind of get them to look forward to it instead of being afraid of it you know another possibility would be to include parents or guardians all of them or to have those parents and to be working with  so as well to have a night or an afternoon when parents and guardians of the incoming leaders come to the high school and meet with some stuff members that can could be guidance counselors could be administration and  each other chilling can talk about you know there are so their heads their students and well what to expect and this is something we've touched on a little bit earlier but just to have more time for those connectors especially that my that my workshop we've talked a lot about the some time or through december time was a time when the th graders still need that continued support so it's great to have in the beginning of the school year but if they can go all the way through the st semester that's ideal because that's the they're just staying in their you know realizing who they are as bowman high school students and to have a little bit more support and you know all kids need sort of different kinds of support but we could offer academic social emotional th type of support to really make that st semester really successful so that was one of our it is it's just it's yeah yeah so we thank you very much for your time and we've been really excited to work on this and we'd like to continue to work on it so thank you i think you have questions or comments  i have a comment as a parent of a mother and i think reader i can tell you the mark mark of difference between my th grader and th graders experience and they're different kids so they have different temperaments but  daughter the group that led her around it must have been on the st day of school the th she was tickled because i think the class president was one of the people and she felt like a big so and i think it it really helped it was a big difference tommy in the group of folks in the connectors because we as we talked about auditioning work over the last few years we realize that transitions are important between every great the children are leaving one space to go to the next in jamie had mentioned that it's a double hit sometimes if you have to leave a building in you go to a new instructional environment or a team are also trying to be really thoughtful as a district about that but in the end it does come down to trying to make students be aware of the landscape need some people have a friendly face that they can go to whether it's an adult or hopefully a child so i would love to be able to support the growth of this kind of transition work  orientation or celebration of the high school for the students to get ready because they really think it's important for all the students to feel as safe and as comfortable to ask questions and get to know of just the dynamics of the building number of what is it you know community service hours is it something that we can provide that may put them into the in the in the more born to help out there are starting football field hockey volleyball sark or so we know they're all busy idea how to get around the school i mean like one or two people so yeah that i think and we do that you're in a year or two only to be comparing the same moment in time from year to year and that's also i'm sure you already know that the date that the state collects the official attendance data on which many other things are based every year so that is why we use october one it is not the end of rolling new students for us it happens slowly but it is a moment in time that will get so just to get us started here's their chart that we've been showing you for the last few years that list in increase we see from year to year you'll note here in students at the elementary school two more students at the high school and four students at the middle school left so a total of three more students since october one and that's really not uncommon that kind of fluctuation a student is an hour out of district students they're all belmont students this number here only includes the k through twelve students the four thousand five hundred and sixty eight students that we currently have only includes the key for twelve students to is our students who are non english speaking english learners as well as students and i p's and particularly students who are placed in placements outside of the district and  will start with our english learners in and this is the reason we wanted to has this report before the report that quincy will give us so you have a framework of how many we have we have seen an increase of twenty nine dollars students from them but we did nothing services and did not include them in the count and now we do all of those things so that's part of the increase but not all of the increase our pre k program is housed at the wellington so we do see an increase in the number of students at the wellington that's up from seventy four from last year and we have for the last couple of years seen smaller number  you can see here compares to our english learners high school from last year to this year and we did add on the wellington line to show you that in fact there were thirteen pre k students last year  this year they're included in the count of eighty nine there are fifteen of them but aside from that we see an increase in butler district with ten more students than last year and the other numbers are relatively similar  we do continue to see an increase of our english learner population as a percent of the total enrollment with three hundred and sixty nine dollars students of our total one hundred and four thousand five hundred and sixty eight when you look at it from when we started tracking this data with one hundred and eighteen students in two thousand and ten to three hundred and sixty nine students currently we have two hundred and fifty one more english learners students now than we had eight years see that compared to last year our number of students placed in out of district placements has come down and i believe that's a factor of students aging out of the program but i'm not one hundred percent sure on that  year where a number was over a one hundred is low or do we have to do those changes in student placements and then just some big picture look at well what does all of what do all of these in roman increases mean for us in terms of how we we the classroom space and other factors that are impacted by enrollment we have for the last several years had the modular classrooms at the high school and the middle school  six classrooms in each of those spaces at the elementary is you know this year the four modular classrooms at the berman school went on line and those leave the th grade teachers are housed in that building  years ago we had seventy six so that's a big increase we added this year to grade five teachers and when we get to the middle school class sizes you'll see the benefits of that addition and  then in addition to the people providing the direct instruction to teachers when you increase to the extent that we have we really need to add additional administrative support so and the middle school where we have a total of four hundred and twenty eight students we really felt the need to add another assistant principal and and we have and that's been a great addition to support the work of the school we did at another english l teacher in this year and we've added additional partial art music p e spared other related services across the district k through twelve to meet the the increases particularly in schools where all of that so you'll see a future slide the different cohort sizes we have per grade the range currently is from our smallest grade is three hundred and four dollars our largest create is three hundred and ninety students who attended kindergarten elsewhere then enrolled as st graders and that's not uncommon to see an increase that increases slightly larger than we traditionally see but it's not uncommon to xen increase from kindergarten to st grade so we'll have to see how our decreases in almost every grade after that with the exception of our th grade that went up by one we did graduate a fairly large class in june th scene of three hundred and thirty but the days of any class net new and it's spread pretty evenly across that three levels elementary middle and high and then it will take a little bit closer look starting with the elementary in addition to following a cohort in seen how it goes up or down from year to year following looking at well how many students in a grade because then so and and just this afternoon looking at some class size numbers with our energy and they were management meeting noting that that th grade that's about to come up to the middle school is going to be a big increase for next year so i made a mistake on the next slide i had on your handout it says that all classes are within their guidelines but in fact there are five i misread the guide that range the top of the range for nd grade actually twenty three dollars not twenty four dollars so an october one we did have six of our nd grade classrooms that were above that were at twenty four dollars instead of twenty three dollars so that counts as being outside of the class size guidelines  so we were we were close to being one hundred percent but but not there and in fact if looking at the december one we have one additional class a grade two that is now it at twenty four dollars as well so that seven classes that are twenty for just one student over the cap of the other guideline of twenty but in the other grades all of the classes are within the guidelines so that puts us at a total on the bottom in the summaries statement that seven percent exceed the class size guidelines but ninety three percent are within the class size guidelines seventy six dollars of the two classes so certainly that's a big improvement over previous years last year thirty five percent of our classes were outside of the guidelines and the year before that forty two percent so we're definitely making great progress the additional classroom spaces and classroom teachers that this has afforded us have really way to improve the learning experience for our students and the teachers working with them the previous slide rule when you put together all the different strategies that the school committee the school department have put in place regarding adding space and having teachers those three sentences of the bar really speaks volumes years exceeding guidelines might have been as many as three or four students about the guideline correct and the other thing that has helped is the change in how we play students you know we having them queue up and then saying you're not guaranteed to go to your history assigned school and balance in the class sizes and if you look at that december one enrollment data that you have in front of you you really can see that the classes are balanced across across the  district very nicely it's not and when i can remember in the not too distant past when one school would have a much larger class sizes then another school so so i think you know as  challenging as that might be at times and how it might feel to a particular family or student overall i think it is a benefit to experience equity across the across the district for i continued to to break out looking at the class sizes from last year only in foreign language math reading science and social studies verses the specials there was a period of time when we were making progress on one area and we still had challenges in the other so that was why we would we broke it out separately now i would say we're you know it's actually pretty even as we look at the data through those two different lenses the average class size in twent across the subject areas is a very nice twenty three the only place where it wasn't so nice last year was that grade five it twenty six and we did address that but by bringing in that additional team of two th grade teachers  looking at the range for those classes you can see on the next slide that how many of the many sections in each of those areas are above class size guidelines for grade five only two of them are both class size guidelines last year that number was forty nine dollars grade five classes were above class size guidelines only one for grade six and last year was nine  four for grade seven in greed and last year we had eight classes above guidelines so again making progress when we look at the averages for art music p e and our library media specialist at the middle school has kids is working on some really exciting media classes filmmaking classes at the students get to create so we see class sizes again the biggest improvement in grade five but also something grade six and then looking at the number of sections that are about class size guidelines each of these is is reduced as well  the last year in grade five we had twenty four classes that were above class size guidelines and grade six we had twenty eight classes that were above the guidelines grade seven we had twenty four and grade eight we had thirty courses and the way the schedule gets built and so overall i would say that when you look at the averages by department they are very similar last year to this year and you know all the averages  one area that was improved is in math for our honors however an increase in advanced placement i know is the high school ministration the directors are figuring out there's the students sign up for the classes and they get the registration numbers and then trying to figure out how many sections of each class to offer and they do think great carefully about if they need to make choices for larger classes it's generally for the honors classes or the advanced placement and keeping the college prep classes a little bit smaller and that plays out in the end what you see on the screen you can do this is one choice like field a tree where we buried staff so we have been fortunate support of additional staff to put in for the students to have favorable class sizes were appropriate class sizes throughout the different but it's nice that we were able to allocate different levels of f t c each department to support the co included the next line about ranges they don't tell you not there's not a lot to see there you might be surprised at some of the lower numbers and sometimes that's a factor of it's a nd semester course that more kids will get added to as they work through their schedules for a nd semester and sometimes it's just a factor of the way the schedule plays our and a lot of students are scheduled in other things and but you still have some students who need a physical education class during that particular period so you might have a smaller class and that they do their best to schedule and make decisions that they result in more even class sizes sometimes it's just not possible and you can't have a student not have the class of things i just did one last slice of the data i had to say well how many a classes are there at sort of different class sizes and and what's to percent of the total so you can see that the largest number of classes fifty percent of them are in the to twenty six dollars range which i think is a healthy appropriate range for a school classes we do have a similar numbers in the upper and lower ands and keeping in a separate category are performance classes which are many of them are well over thirty students bander course are erst and that is the class size report thank you very much and thank you for having me it's always nice to come every year and update you on our students in our program and with the landscape looks like going to last year and looking ahead it's been nice to have a little bit quieter every year in terms of renewal many especially because we have some other challenges in in which i will tell you about at the end of the presentation there we go so just a quick piece of information that you may not know that we thanks to the title three grant that we received from the federal government run an extended year as well as extended day programming for english learners students in the summer we run three classrooms of sort of like a crash course for our newest students to help them improve not only their basic communication skills but their academic english as well and get ready for the next school year and some of that involves some excursions this is to the museum of natural history here with our secondary camp and it's a nice way for kids to get to know each other better to get to know this community but also to really work on academics english learners learn all the same great killer that every other student does but they also have to learn i couldn't make english so they're really asked to do more than other students but with the same you know standard number of hours in the school day so we're lucky that we have some federal support to be able to extend our programming so who are who  are students are else come from all the countries you see here they speak over forty languages the most common language is mandarin and about a rd of our english learners and that even even as our program has grown over the years that proportion has stayed constant or near nearly consistent every year the nd most common language is spanish followed very closely by french and japanese each of those three languages are spoken by seven to eight percent of our english learners most of our english learners just over half were born in the united states and you can see some of the other countries the next most common birth country would be china and then japan spanish our spanish speaking students come from all over many different spanish speaking countries as well as the united states so that doesn't register in the list of birth countries but we're happy to have such a global student population not only among our english learners of course but our other students as well often have roots in other countries this is a very international community so if we look at our english learners this year that should be a family night and if you look at our english learners this year by grade level you can see that the great majority of our students are in the elementary at rd grade you see the drop off there many students have exited our program by rd grade and then it gets smaller and smaller so while english learners make up thirteen to nineteen percent of each of our elementary schools they make up five percent of the middle school and only one percent of the high school so a trend that has been constant as well over the past five years is a decrease  the number of english learners at the high school level five years ago there were thirty five english learners at the high school which was nineteen percent of the english learner population overall in the district now there are eighteen students which is five percent of the overall population something that we've noticed at the same time is that as the number of high school english learners has decreased the number of english learners arriving with significant learning disabilities with interrupted or limited formal education in their home countries or with past trauma experiences that have or are adversely impacting their ability to learn  those numbers have all increased so we are still keeping very busy so our rate of increase is still growing not as high as last year we do see that same fluctuation you know of course follow the overall trends for in rome and in the district as well but we're still growing so our proportion our size in proportion to the student body is growing slowly but steadily over  time we do see in the past five years that our population has increased overall by fifty eight percent and and some years it comes like a fire hose and some years it's not so much and we're happy to have the not so much  when we get them let's us sort of take a breath but that doesn't accurately represent how much work goes in to registering and screening and placing new english learners every year so this is  the last five years of students entering that you know the program so even though we only had a net gain of twenty nine dollars students from october one of last year we still had one hundred and sixty one dollars students who are new to us so sixty nine dollars of those students are kindergartners in kindergarten english learners and there's a small handful that are new former english learners so they came to us you know marked as english learners from their previous districts but actually had met criteria and ended exiting but unless they had been identified as english learners in ascending massachusetts district we do have to screen and then usually assess all students coming in who have experienced a language other than english in their homes so here this means that one hundred and sixty one dollars of those students that we screened assessed and it up being english learners this year of course that's not the net gain because at the end of the year last year over one hundred in the us learners in our program exited because they met not only state but also local criteria for accessing the curriculum in the medium of english so we're very proud of those numbers and that we exit some of these students each year but it's you know it's quite a job to work for all of the teachers to screen assess all of our new students meet with families you know communicate results and all of that so it's still keeping us busy all right so talking a little bit about the program so oftentimes some people think of english language education they think st of grammar or vocabulary and that is of course some of what we do but it's not all we really focus on making sure that students are able to use academic language for different functions so here we talk about recounting or narrating explaining arguing and discussing we're very proud this year that we have finished our scope and sequence for  k twelve l l program at two levels so we have a separate curriculum for students who are beginning to learn english from the students who are more advanced and that at the secondary level it splits keep in more we have more levels of curriculum we're teaching academic language to all students and when we talk about academic language we describe it at different levels so at the word level we have we vocabulary at the sentence level we talk about language forms and conventions grammar is part of that but so is usage syntax phonetic accuracy things like that and then at the discourse or text level so that's linguistic complexity and our work there focuses on helping students build coherence in their spoken written expression also in their comprehension our students in our program are performing between levels one and level five by the time they are at level six they have exited the program so we're teaching all of these levels of language and we've organized the scope and sequence that we just finished writing and all of the units that we've been writing over the many years we've been doing this work together at the discourse level the sentence level in the word level and so you see here in this unit secondary students are learning some of the language of social studies in doing a project writing persuasive letters advocating for some human rights issue which they have researched and chosen and they learn some some of that traditional grammar so you see here a reference to the present perfect to the passive voice but we always make sure that we're teaching these language forms and conventions in the context of authentic communication so that students are working on their communicative competence and not just on correctness we also teach language functions so academic language serving many different purposes so students are learning to categorize their learning to evaluate you know for instance their learning to sequence and by the end of their time with us in our program we want to them to demonstrate that communicative competence as well as correctness across different language functions so here's just a quick quick slide from this is huge this is quite often in a way the last unit that students do in their time in our program because it's the end of our rd grade the biggest shark that ever lived the mega mega don and so when the eggs in the program we want to make sure that they are performing at grade level so that we know they're going to be able to access the curriculum in the mainstream passion without support so you can see a big list of all the different ways the students are using language so the rd graders in this unit are making predictions they're really reading for a different purpose they're taking notes using active listening strategies to take those notes using annotation to take those notes they're locating resources through research and then writing informational texts and even making video presentations to work on their speaking skills so it's these really robust units that our teachers have worked so hard to develop they write all of our units in order to make sure that our kids are really at grade level before they leave us and they're doing a great job so these numbers reflect our achievement and growth on the assessment of english language in save massachusetts which is called the access test  standardized test of reading writing speaking and listening that all english learners take from kindergarten upward and we're very proud that eighty six dollars students eighty six percent of our students met the benchmarks for making progress so those to be students who have taken access twice have to be here for two years in a row to see that they've made progress and we have a really quite impressive average rate of student growth at the th percentile when compared with other students other english learners across the state of massachusetts those are on our access those numbers reflect our results from last winter we are gearing up to start access testing again right as soon as we come back from the winter break cas is another way that we look at our english learners achievement this is of course their understanding of the content areas here we have l a and matthew year on year comparison two thousand and seventeen results for all students and for english learners at the top and then the two thousand eighteen results we see a little bit of gap narrowing year on year but as you can see the gap is still quite pronounced between what our english learners are able to do on on both of these assessments and what our non english learners are able to  do and this is why this is why we need our program this is why we need to spend this time with them in our classrooms working to make sure that they are able to use language in its many different functions at grade level before they leave us so we have  a couple you know continued challenges are in roman is still rising we are very very grateful to all of you in the town of belmont for the ability to add new teachers you know as we gain students every year  r student to l teacher ratio is among the highest of not the highest among the districts so i assure you that our staff is not wasted and they are doing a great job and we're very grateful to have  them but we're still running a pretty lean machine and they also have increasingly complex needs which have resulted in a number of our students needing more than more than the ordinary amount of specialist services but that means  district placement or you know simply consultant and other special education services we also have the opportunity thanks to state of massachusetts to expand our program so the bill was passed last year language opportunities for our kids act the look act and went into a fact almost all of the provisions went into effect this september and some of them are  you know a bit arcane or about data collection or other things that sort of happen in our back rooms some of them that will be more apparent to families as well as our teachers and students we will now be providing some english learner education services to our three and four year old l students in collaboration with their preschool teachers and likely as a pushin model rather than a pull out model we're still working out the details we're going  through math all of massachusetts in teachers of nd other languages to work on writing bylaws that districts can you know adopt or adapt for their individual contacts but it should be similar to the c pack which of course is a strong and healthy organization here in belmont belmont and finally as you saw eighty six percent of our students met benchmarks on the access test of course that means that fourteen percent did not meet benchmarks and that represents a significant amount of work for all of us yell teacher and classroom teacher to do to make sure that those students are making adequate progress so as part of the look act we will be writing individual language plans that include parent input so so in the same way that to write an ip apparent comes in and you know helps the team set goals and decide appropriate accommodations or month kitchens for especially education student in the same way will be involving  parents in our individualized language plan meetings and goal setting will be writing measurable language goals for the students in carrying out progress monitoring to assess their progress for all of those else who were not meeting access this lindsay has other responsibilities and this will go a long way to supporting the english learner teachers as well as the ministers in the building particularly the elementary level where we have the majority of our students and we're in the needs and  expectations of what you are are quite large so that we have selected a teacher to fill that role and are now working to fill her direct instruction hours so that she can be released from that to be able to begin the work but that is a work in progress and we're very grateful to that and looking forward would know that we need to continue to expand that role to  really best meet the needs of this program as well as e l a program other question so i think it's really important to emphasize that so the last few slides as relates to being in compliance with the look act that we not only are have been adding staff to be able to keep the ratios of students and teachers in the appropriate level along with addressing the learning needs of each wobble of the l student that we put provide services for but then there's that whole level of work to make sure that we're  compliance with the state for the testing the recording and writing student plans in meeting with parents and organizing a package this has become the nd special education type of programming from the d s these lines that has required not only now are direct service support allocation of funds and staff and now more dedication to someone who can actually direct the program so the point for support that we asked for this year in the budget we thank you for will now turn into a request for the next year's budget of of a full director this is a three hundred and sixty s so students that is largest the butler school there requires a full time person to interact with families lead a program support the curriculum interact with the state state and keep the district in compliance with the legal mandates that accompany all this work and that in and of itself is a substantial amount of work and it finance committee that we had a few weeks back we actually showed you where other districts were providing for leadership in teacher support for the varsity they had in their district and we were well so keep it alive with some of the information actually that was communicated by lindsay and her work that she does as it as it relates to  done that transitions us into what does it look like when you actually register students how many deregister a year it's not just kindergarten students that register every year it's actually it's the three hundred  process your families go online to register for school and then they just the event have been giving the impact of severe individual schools and we've been working with families kind of hype the hybrid model of using the schools the place to provide that information but also centralizing it so we can work with families and they can get a consistent message with the goal of coming to a point where we would have centralized registration for all of our students and try to rising families to come to a kindergarten night to a meet the district give the folks find out what the process looks like and discover some detail about what child and we really think it's important for them to know who the faces are who are the people of that we're working with who do you call when you have a question about kindergarten tuition on the bus or after school programs or what school they've actually go to when one of the assignment process works so over time as we've been growing this online registration process in the central as registration process we have saved many hours of clerical work and administrative assistant work out of the schools we've automated a lot of work to save the district time and created so efficiencies and i think having the kindergarten night continues that good economic model of efficiency but also it's a good p r moral it's ok to show our for the st time we meet our kindergarten parents we will be with them for thirteen years we want this to start off right we want them to have a very much a relationship starter to know what superintendent is everybody wants to be cheered a star is the superintendent and and just know the faces of the f so so what are the goals and why are we doing it i'm only going to give you two sides tonight for what you have in your packets which we didn't show tonight purposefully it is about thirty or so slides it will be showing that night with the devil still in draft form two   to let them know how to pay their tuition for kindergarten remember maybe some of these parents work in the garden students when you don't have to pay for kindergarten it's kind of a business transaction now which we really want to explain and make more in this last bullet is really a part of that short term goal we had for our school programming concerts washee where parents were really clear to us that why can't you register the students in a lined up process with how we pick our after school program so we listen to that and we actually realigned the whole process and not just because of that one aspect of a shift that needed but because of a lot of different families who will be placed in april will be placed at their school  so their kindergarten intake days at the schools will be the ones that they actually attended and last year if you remember the last few years there were folks who went to those intake sessions but were formally assigned yet so they would go to the school get attached and  before our registration for kindergarten so this kind of lines up all of that work in the right water it provides a friendly atmosphere for parents to meet our staff it gives them a lot of information we continue to one role folks online but we have some brochures that night thought to know about our school and lastly it's a great p r move for us to show off all the good things that are happening not only for a kindergarten parent to think about what next year means for my child and my family to go to kindergarten which is a big step for a lot is but also gives us a chance to grow our ability to share what's going on in the district this is the kind of district you're coming into this is the building program that ready we have this is potentially some of the outcomes that high school graduates have been and we're proud of and things that offer not only in kindergarten but k twelve and so will balance that messaging over the next couple years to get that nice not overburdened with information by giving them the real highlights and getting them excited about being about one parent which i think happens when they go to the individual schools which will be nice to do as a district so we're looking forward to this work i want to thank our st murphy who works at central office who does all our instructions all of our school secretaries who work in conjunction with in the entire technology department and christine should keita who is working all of these online intake procedures have all been custom designed by our tech department we could have gone out and bought a software that had interact with registration here at this children community room in march will all come through with a scripted date in time for their put me to register person and they'll meet again the school nurses the school secretaries and the personnel that will read the and make that st impression on many parents so we're excited about this shift we think it's it's good business it's good p r it's a great way to start a relationship and it's effective efficient with the limited resources we have with a growing population of can students that move into our district and have over the course of the last five years so i welcome you to read through the the slide stead that we have a draft form the letters in the information has already been published  website we are putting things in our local media so people know that this is how you can register for in a garden and and believe it or not there are going to shrink students people are actually already asking and inquiring and so we're but there is a place that every family has to request to attend a school other than their home school and that would be whether you're coming in as a kindergarten child or coming in as a new th grader or you could write us a letter right now if i was a rd grader in burbank and i want to a th grader next year at the wellington you always have the right to request a transfer and that that vehicles on the website currently right now so it's really not an opt out as much as it is there's a process for you to communicate that to the centralized registration  where i think she is not to request a transfer but to just say that they're open to options if need be we can look to see how we can kind of articulate that and where it would belong  and if it needs to be shifted or not i i think when kate nice spoke about this there were this year we transferred up to thirteen public students to either win book or burbank and we did not ask for volunteers three surveys that were sent out one to parents guardians one to students in the most recent to staff have been tabulated reviewed we've had several meetings to take a look at that data and some of the comments  entry was at our last meeting several of the high school staff that were a part of that process and will be presenting that information in somewhat of an executive summary form to the policy committee with a recommendation of ensures that we're working to the right process through the contract and we believe that we have general agreement that what we'd like to move forward works with a couple of conversations that we still need to have but we look forward to having this discussion of policy next year that could help inform what that larger conversation that we're bound to have in the next year or so about start times for the whole district you know be nice to be able to get some feedback from teachers if students are more alert and ready to engage with that extra half hour of sleep that we make again with a new pilot we can monitor how the teachers ability to get into school and have the stitches committed one time when the student come in a little later what that looks like for traffic and for safety in students getting to and from school  and also that larger conversation that's part of the middlesex week how does this impact how the students are accessing the sports in the at the after school events but most importantly you know keeping this back to were hoping to see even though this is not exactly the amount of time that is recommended we have some somewhere around eighty three thousand eight hundred and forty five dollars is that is that time but getting it a half hour later to eight o five is a good st step and we're hoping to see some results that we can really say gives us good reason to continue the efforts to to continue this conversation about start times for the high school even as we get ready to reconfigure the district over the next three or five years the injury you were on the group  there so you know i think we have to be very aware when we're deciding whether to carry on with the pilot and you know how this feeds into the complicated settling in the new great configuration let we've not we will not have  and then how do you work around that to make sure that you can operationalise all that so that will be a longer conversation for the entire district in addicted that this data that we hope we get over the next year will give us which mission about that as well question just wondering if there will be an opportunity to consider other factors not related to start times that could help students stress levels overall wellness you know whether it's less homework or longer periods between classes to transition or things things that could help students general sense of well being during and after school that could then help them have more relaxed time in spite of that less you know it might not be the perfect start time but it could help if they didn't have as much homework they could perhaps relax a little more in the evening and  not feel stressed that i don't know what those are but perhaps the wellness group or other there might be other feedback that we've gotten over the years that could help  at the school level in terms of staffing as well as in terms of resources and asks and how and how transparent it is and how  everything gets built from sort of ground zero each year so it's sort of a general overview of how the budgets are the very beginning of the budget process school by school building but we have to access from the east and we'll be taking over the west so a lot of that operational as well operational work is is being discussed right now with the phasing will be discussed at the full committee meeting tomorrow which is very very exciting in the community path update we just had our liaison to pretend they believe they had a meeting on thursday so i think that was just their initial organizational meeting follow up with her to get some