say a little bit about the process you are to take your plate and go and get some of those delectable things over there and then we'll eat and the or we will hear from our superintendent john balan of the belmont schools continue to enjoy lunch while we start our guest speaker  he is speaking i will take out dessert and it will be on the table with the coffee and hot water but if you can take some time to get there i thought that that way we can get started with the speaker and our program for today i want to thank belmont media for coming and filming today it's nice that the last couple of years they've been able to join us and if anybody wants to tell friends afterwards because it was a great presentation we had a really interesting discussion whatever i'm sure they will put it on their website as well one of the reasons we chose our superintendent john fallon this year is because of course he's new to the school system but another is because we've been having a lot of units the league of women voters units on education and we've been finding a lot of issues that are coming up and that we'll be seeing very prevalent in our local news in the next year or two and you've heard about the high school and that they want to expand or redo the high school election this year ok have big city is here dave rogers our state representative is we're fortunate to have with us today he just got reelected and we were hearing at our table about the new session beginning and thank you for system for many years and for the ten years he was assistant superintendent and before that he was principal he also worked in transportation and summer programs so he had quite a background in different aspects of the school system before he came to belmont and he obviously knew a lot less about us and i think that he's got pretty well he grows to the belmont town and getting to meet people because during the summer he offered that people could come and just do one on ones with him and many of us from the league were nice found the time to go and it was a really nice conversation and i want to thank him for that and now he's been with us for half a semester center half the year and belmont and probably has a lot more insight into what's going on and where we're going to so i'd like to thank john allen for coming and joining us i don't know if you hold your interest good afternoon everyone thank you for having me here i think i'll use my cafeteria voice i hope that that's not enough can everybody hear me all right i'd like to think bonnie in jeanne for having me here  today they did come out and meet over the summer when we had summer coffee hours which was one way of introducing myself to the community and everybody in the community not just parents and not just teachers but the goal was to meet with department heads and and local officials in parents and community members to make sure that i got a good feel for what don't want hadassah as a priority as for superintendent but i want to start a little bit by talking a little bit about myself and then bit about transitioning to belmont and then i think the big question will be how's the budget how are the schools and what's going on with the schools because that's something that i believe bonnie and and jeanne were just sit in early on and the timing of this is pretty good because we just had a big meeting today it's interesting that the timing of the snow is here as well because my phone will start to be buzzing are you going to cancel snow them are you going to cancel snow so you know school be cancelled tomorrow so now you have to wake up tomorrow just stay in bed and i got to tell you in my former district i was the assistant superintendent i was in charge of calling school for whether it was going to be snow days or not and i have five children and at one point all five children were in the schools and so the older children all had phones so we today this these everybody today communicates very very quickly with the texting and the the different things they do so all of a sudden when it cited the snow all the phones would start the bugs and fill in house gas the dad is going to school tomorrow could you ask it out it is going to be school tomorrow so so i'm used to the pressure of canceling school i'd like to say that i am a father of five children i've been married for over twenty five years i live in milton massachusetts i decided living in milton about sixteen seventeen years ago i feel very fortunate to live in a nice community the size of belmont in terms of how big it is and how many schools and how many  residents in one of the things that attracted me to belmont was that it it was that type of town that made sure that all parts of a student's education were important arts performing arts taking care of all children making sure that we address the needs of all children was very important and also had still high high regard for student outcomes for student achievement and so i feel fortunate to be able to come here every day and work in a district like delmon the hiring process was very interested  d laurie put me through a lot of tests last fall i think the process started in november and the night that laurie called i was out shoveling with my son a night similar it's a night it was a snowy night and people were probably debating canceling school and i knew and laurie asked me to come to belmont and as soon as i said yes mace my twelve year old son side of the cry because i was leaving the district that he was still going to school and so we had the whole family dilemma he's surely going to go dad that's far away  but once i said yes to laurie i never look back this is been one of the best experiences that i could actually hope for in my work as being a superintendent to bonnie's point during the entry process i met with a whole bunch of folks i actually presented an entry plan to in and laurie and the rest of the school committee and described who i'd meet with had open office hours and summer coffee hours that people attended and it was really a nice way for me to get to know the district  on top of reading the budgets and reading the program of studies and doing all those things as superintendent it was a very awkward feeling to come in be the only new person and some would say so what are you going to do on your first day how does it work you don't know anything of what they do and don't want in and they know everything and you don't have any information so how does that work in your field and basically how it works is you listen a lot and i think dave is he have representing the state house but tip o'neill is a famous speaker of the house and he said be seen and not heard so i spent the first six months listening in listening and listening again it's been very helpful to hear what people feel are important topics in the town and how i can help move those forward but in those in those discussions we talked a lot about what's already in place how the belmont public schools is a great place to go to work and to learn and how do we move all that stuff forward into the future in terms of a strategic plan and that's been a very exciting piece of work to do it's done with the school committee it's done with the leadership team and basically we looked at all the things that we've been doing well we looked at some things that we think a pressure points on the district i think that if you go on the web or you look at the school committee minutes or you go on belmont cable you can look at the school committee meetings where we did and in roman projection where we're three hundred eighty cities bigger than we were just three years ago  the group of students that left belmont high last year is seen is that was only about two hundred seventy students who graduated but there are almost three hundred sixty kindergartners that replace those students that class so we're really seeing a big wave of of students coming into the district in the smaller classes are leaving the district so that's creating absolutely a wave of enrollment that is causing the district to need to address those issues how many more teachers does that mean what kind of resources that we need to put in place do we have enough room in our schools to even put those students in those teachers are all the really big issues so those are the things that we're working through with the school committee in the administrative staff and and at times with  parents and will will go out to every p t o i'm putting out dates that i will be at every p t o meeting between now and march i'll speak at all six schools to give parents a chance to ask questions about our budget in the budget process i'll also go to i met kofi and we've done a roxbury in boston to have a meeting and in their neighborhood to make sure that they feel they have access to this information and i'll also be talking about the budget to our staff to make sure they're aware of what's going on so those are the big pieces of who i am and what the work's been like up to this point and i think other than a snowstorm other than needing an override and other than having three hundred more since we did last week everything else is ok it's all working out well i think there's going to be locust coming next year to replace these challenges with some of the ones we haven't done one so the good news is is that the wisdom of the town last year was to put together a financial taskforce and what i do at the can i raise a hand if you heard of the financial task force can you raise your hand great just to give me a little information so that group is i had a charge from the the board of selectmen to investigate what are the revenue projections for the next three to five years in one of the expenditure projections over the next three to five years and they separated into five groups education town services revenue opportunities and those five subgroups went out and did their work and brought back their concerns needs and recommendations to the task force and that body has been meeting for almost a year so i came on in july and i've represented the education piece in we present d our final presentation two weeks ago it was presented again last friday and we actually went to the board of selectmen today with the recommendations of the financial taskforce the the meeting this morning the board of selectmen meeting  was videotapes will be on cable for you to watch i can't say enough times and lot enough that the cooperation in the the town of belmont between the town government in the schools and the board of selectmen the school committee and the warrick committee it is just exceptional all these groups representing the major pieces of the town are all working together setting goals rowing in the same direction in trying to plan as one town as we move forward and i find that refreshing because usually in towns this size there's a lot of there's a little bit more of a competitive battling going on between the different departments because money is usually scarce and it's refreshing to be a part of a community we have people work together so  that how that is how it's been happening david kill a town administrator doesn't exceptional job and mark polow who is the board of selectmen who ran the financial taskforce a facilitator they did a great job so what happened today today we got in front of the board of selectmen and we said that the financial task force given all the different things that are going on in the schools and across the town the d p w the police here the need for an operational scenario over the next four or five years or three years in here the capital needs for the time the capital needs are i think a big concern for the town we're fortunate enough to to just build the wellington school they replace one of the the turf field  fire stations are relatively new so there's been an investment in capital spending and i think that should continue on behalf of the the assets that are in any any town or i think belmont is working towards getting here those assets and the other parts where one of the operational revenue needs and one of the operational expenditure projections in and so on behalf of the schools i recommended that the schools could use more funding to support special education of district services more teachers to address the enrollment that we have an increase of at every level teachers at the middle and high schools that could provide additional programming to enhance content courses that we already have i don't know if you know we're not but at the middle school we have students who are not in a class during the day they're in what you would used to call study halls but there might be ninety students in the auditorium not engaged during the day at the high school they have what they call freeze which are free periods that in most high schools there are usually elective courses or content enhanced in courses that students would take you know that's where you take your finance want to whine or your economics class or maybe even maybe even a home economics course or speech and debate and so we have some we have some holes that we could absolutely need support whether they could be academically enriching courses that we could offer students that they aren't offered right now oh and we could keep them out of the hallways instead of being where they are not engaged in productive enriching content being delivered by our school teachers so we asked for those things today and it was a big ask and it was a lot of money they asked me what we needed and i very probably said what we needed and it was in a lot of hard work with our leadership committee over the course of the summer in the fall to come up with those projections but when you look at all the items that we were looking to to solve with some funding they were all related to the increase in romans that we have over three hundred eighty new students to the district net new students in the district in the lottery as in a projected additional three hundred in the next three to five years so we should be going from a thirty seven hundred student school district to a forty six hundred school district in just for us so we see the trending as we look back and we're trying to predict in the projections moving forward the town under dr kingston and david kill hired an engineering firm to look at the enrollment growth to try to have experts kind of make that prediction as you sit with those experts you realize that you know if they knew how to project that then they would also project the winning mega bucks ticket we we all would need to have an over we could just all play that number and we could donate it back so it is a kind of a it's a it's a prediction rooted in what the trends are and then what we look for what we see moving forward and there are agencies that do that work for us and so when we can contract them to do it they do it on the birth rate of how many students were born in the town five years ago and that's how many kindergartners you have the problem with that is that in a town like belmont we receive calls from beijing portugal wisconsin wellesley the state of california people are moving all over the place to live in this town so just counting the people who are having children here and projecting it forward five years isn't really a formula in a successful well located district like belmont and a great place to live like belmont that formula doesn't really work in terms of projecting projecting student roman so we indexed out a little bit we think that we are what they say plus about thirty and that seems to be what the trend is so where we're fortunate district to have so much success we're fortunate district to be a level one district which means that we have exceeded in all areas that the state has asked us to and we are at the highest levels of district only a handful of k to twelve school systems in the whole state our level one district that believe one of eight don't want is that has that designation and it's very hard to achieve it it's very hard to maintain and i think that we're right on the verge of being able to maintain that kind of success given the enroll me going like this but our staffing staying like that that might need to be a give there and we're hoping that the projections that we made with the task force in the the recommendations we made for staffing over this next three years and we made a three year  t this happens here first but we are fortunate to be able to have this conversation today because those were the concerns and and i i appreciate in value that the league of women voters came in august and then in october to talk numbers which are really interesting to look at and we have belmont sits with that information and our in rome and information in how the budget works it's really it's really starting to come to one of those points where i think we're at a mini breaking point where  the community will be faced with having to decide whether they're going to make a financial injection into their towns health and maintain the services not just in schools but in fire and police in all the different services they provide i think the police chief could come up here and say that this needs that he has i think the d p w the new d p w had in the people who work over the highway department have valid valid concerns about what they need in their department so i'm fully for supporting the entire town budget in working with my town department heads to make sure body has what they need there's a lot of other services that the town provides that could need some help as well so the good news is the goals are to organize this work this financial work in this space work where we're going to find more space and in while doing so maintain these great programs that we have to maintain and increase the quality of these kind of programs that we have so our students have the ability to create a great portfolio of learning experiences not just in math and science in english and in social studies but in art in world language and in music these are the things that are of value in this town that attracted me to the  you open up the globe in the spring and you see all the students who won the odd awards belmont always has the most students of the entire state that kind of work that students get to take part in the mental gymnastics that go with doing art and not just it's not just fun those are actually absolutely the mental gymnastics that build strong and creative thinkers will learn the world langley age is part of being a creative thinker sitting in a science class or in a programming  class we had the day of code and at belmont high where the kids can code different things and learn how to do that work and these are all really great ways to get our students thinking and learning collaboratively and that's the type of programming that we need to offer us students the type of quality education that the students deserve and need so when they're competing and they are competing worldwide they have everything that they need to go out and be good citizens to be good thinkers to be good community members to learn how to give back a little  bit but also the going to have some problems to solve and they're not just problems of the going to have to solve in belmont or in the neighborhood they are they're going to have some big problems to help solve and so we hope to be able to produce those big thinkers and those capable young people to go out and solve those problems so other that it's an easy job it's working out it's going well these kids are good but i would like to actually just take any questions i just wanted to kind of give you that update the board of selectmen will be meeting next monday night i think that they're going to meet maybe once or twice to consider what was presented to them today and hopefully they'll think about putting a ballot question that asked for an override and then an amount is chosen that is fitting the needs of what  the town could use the entire town could use and we could start doing some nice forward planning if you knew you had a three year plan of funding to match it and i think part of the of the inability to plan is not having matching resources in an organized way at least three years so this this financial taskforce amount of money would allow the school department and other departments to start to plan for the next three years and i think the community deserves that type of thought in planning on behalf of their  do i think it's a priority to keep every single student in the district it lives in belmont to go to belmont public schools because we always want to keep all of our first of all it in the mix the families feel invested in the town but we do always have to address the needs of all the students in this year in particular not only what we do we struggle to offer those types of math offerings to a cohort of students who have come through the school and we also had to cancel french advanced placement classes this year and so we had students who again up to it's taking that course is in the air and we weren't able to find it because we didn't have the funding and we couldn't staff that period of class so there's two groups of folks on that end of needing good enrichments programming and offerings that we were not to to satisfy this year i think that the hope would be that we have i believe five positions going towards the high school in this three year plan just to address this over in romans in programming issue of where can we put classes in their day that they could take they could be those types of classes as i had mentioned earlier a speech debate or an extension of an english class would be speech a debate an extension of social studies could be model un and an extension of math could be a stem are high level math class so those are the types of things that we would like to put in not just to get students out of the hallway and be supervised in front of a teacher but also to get a two for it which is to also provide that engaging extended enrichment type of offering that we have been losing or are not being able to provide in recent years so we think that those positions will go a long way to solving some of that i don't know if we'll ever be able to stretch ourselves to meet the needs of every single learner as but that would be the goal of what we would try to do because those those students at all levels are the kids that you want to keep in the town and you want them to graduate from belmont hikers you'll see them somewhere else later on doing great things and it will be really nice to see that there are belmont high graduate so it's always an effort to to to make sure you provide those who are sitting in a school right now that has a beautiful campus is a private school and there's lots of competition that belmont public schools has with belmont hill or anywhere from i grew up in working previously in milton we had not the cademy in our backyard i can consider these organizations and institutions good competition i think that we need to compete in make sure that we are offering things that that maintain a level of competition the schools are different they have different outcomes and they have different types of environments because private schools are different from public but it's ok to have a healthy competition to want to keep all your students in your in your home schools and and that's one of our goals we still have open campus for seniors and then for juniors the second half of the year that their spring semester if they academically qualified should do we have open campus at belmont high and the answer is yes for seniors and juniors during the second half of the year if they qualify yes what was the big company that he ran g m getting great outcomes for low low resources but in education that's really not how it should work yeah you know the the teacher student ratio is a concern and also the per pupil expenditure so the while we were sitting at the meeting in the financial task force this past friday the numbers came out for the fiscal year that we just left fiscal fourteen in the state averages fourteen dollars i think those are so per student in belmont pays about twelve or so dollars per student twelve thousand so it's fourteen thousand per student average statewide i'm using general numbers and we pay about twelve yeah at the new numbers came out which was seventy seven and fourteen seventy seven so if you multiply the difference of say two thousand dollars per student times the four thousand eight hundred of four thousand three hundred eighty seven s have that's a big that's a big sum of money and so you know you try to use those apples to apples comparisons and everything's different different urban systems have a larger student for people  expenditures and so forth but i think that i can or to see say in my first six and a half months in the job walking through all the schools in a regular basis being in classrooms i can say that that the kids the children are well served by the teachers the teachers work super hard  but the dish you could use an infusion of support in relation to student to teacher ratio class size in additional programming that would serve students at a middle and high school for sure because a lot of the mandates that we have to work around we have a high population of students who come who don't speak the language and when that happens we have to make sure that we can support them in that work that's a state mandate that we have to take on but the state is telling us right away that we have to hire more teachers for next year because that population is increase in that's not a question that you get to say yes or no to that's a that's a that's a directive that you just have to comply with so we we value the diversity of the student body that we have b comes with expenses that we have to make sure we match to support all students yes has provided on a regular basis incredibly you know generous donations towards programs i don't have the exact amount that they have donated in ten years but the biggest one has been the i pad initiative at the high school supporting technology in our schools all the students in freshman and sophomore year have i pads and supporting the technology and innovation at the high school in conjunction with principal dan richards chris  who is with the foundation and jamie shea will meeting with next week actually do a phenomenal job of not only raising money and awareness but matching it with the needs of the district and those types of supports combined with amazing dedication and and then you have those smaller groups a network of the grassroots level of the school and i believe that that's why belmont in most school systems like public schools a successful it's the parents it's the community members it's those volunteers that provide that type of funding so we're very very fortunate to have that group in time yes for the net culturist potations fund and we have students and i live in milton and sometimes i take the red line from ashmore to harvard square and i take the seventy four from harvard square right outside my office and it's perfect but i take the school i take the bus on the train with all our medco students and it's great i get i got to know them on the train and and they were like oh that's us that guy and i'm like i'm not i'm that guy but think about those guys going home and they give it lip how it is if they're late if they were a cheerleader or they were on the debate the sport so i think the the immediate answer that would be to provide some support to belmont against racism and the human rights human rights commission that are acting as the overarching group to raise money for those students i think it's great i think the meco program it's new to me my previous district we were we were a district that was diverse and did not take part medico and so i'm really trying to wrap my hands around how we can enhance the program to make sure that all the students feel supported i think the district does a great job there's a lot of support from parents in the town the grant that we get almost covers all the costs i think this year there were some nine c cuts that that had to be committed at the state level and it did cost a couple of dollars for the medical program wasn't much but it was a little something that i think that we feel it's important to make sure the program stays intact and that our families and they are our families continue to be able to access a school so i think keeping in keeping the conversation alive by talking about it and supporting the transportation front would be a great way to help those are doing so in maybe two or three years stays they might be on a fellowship at one of the local universities and but they are coming as families there is the dumb one does participate when they do get reimbursed by certain a certain visa type of student who will come over they do get reimbursed for that there is a process by which is a certain protocol for students to to exchange into an american public school and this is an amount of money  transfer and then there may be students who are staying with other family members and they are there tending to schools so there's probably i would say that does a mix of all three of those components that make up that the population of students who are international district and i learned a lot when i had that study really facilitated that study i always thought because i have five children three of whom are twenty two twenty one and twenty i thought if i just said go to bed they could go to bed  and it wasn't that they just didn't want to go to bed it was actually that inside chemically at that age that their bodies clock is staying awake a little later but they still need eight hours of sleep so if there are saying i can't go to bed at nine or ten or eleven and i'm staying awake till twelve not because they feel like it because actually that's how my biological insides are working that i still need it i was asleep to be productive so there's definitely an open conversation that we probably should have about whether or not changing the start time is feasible  usually revolves around transportation funding in the star times of the other schools and there's also other pieces to what can make a child's day start off well that we should address as well which is nutrition breakfast in every school just because we live in a school i mean a town that has a high social economic background i consider myself a middle class guy my son runs out with a pop tart every morning and that's not a good breakfast and he's probably not getting the best start in the morning so i think star times is in port to think about i think nutrition in the morning is important to think about i think activity for us students either in the morning before school all right certain points in the school day in school week is important so all those things i think  very important so the district used to have a health wellness and safety and security team that met and i think it was a response to the security needs after newtown and i decided this year to split that off into two committees one which was safety and one which was health and health and wellness and we have a group of about laurie graham sits on that committee i'd say about fourteen folks that represent you know the the ability for us to do the ability for the district to accommodate the needs of the health and wellness of this students and that could probably be a community that that kind of subject would rest in how do we provide good lunches how do we provide an environment where students are in a healthy environment eating sleeping and ready to go so i do have background on that topic i agree with that it's a real subject that we should pay attention to i think that every district struggles with making it logistically happen  necessarily drive it for me i think it would be looking at the k to twelve transportation patterns to see how this would also impact the third grader a kindergartener and that and that culture of how we get all our students to school would be part of  as i understand the subject and we do have a few parents of younger students who are actually asking about that subject and a lot of schools are starting to pile them for advanced placement courses that they might not have enough students to run a whole class but they run it online in a different fashion but someone is at the building for students to talk to right now regionalize and in a couple of different ways we regionalize with ed koch which is a collaborative where we share professional development and some transportation costs in our lab collaborative we share special education expenses in transportation costs in our ed koch group is looking at that type of offering right now they book x amount of seats at harvard extension for the eco districts to try to take advantage of but i think the next level of that may be what they were calling now is flipping the classroom how can we give information to new experiences to students via technology but you still have to have somebody that's not just take a course online you know that teachers are important engagement is important relationships are important but i think it could fill the gap in some ways for some of these things that we offer to some to some degree that i think it will be now that we have the i pad initiative going on the thanks of the foundation i think that those are the types of things it teaches starting to look at we really think the schools are funded at a level that we are really addressing all the needs i do i don't think that that we are at that point right now and i think and that's my worry for the district moving forward and the high school tie stakes stuff is this this things  experience is that we want to make sure we offer us students so they have that portfolio of experiences to demonstrate to the university that the hard part is that you know we will have folks go back and say well east still had ten students who were accepted early action to drug i think it's important to point out and thank you for doing so in chris koch i'm similarly that without these external funds that support the the budget it would be very difficult to maintain the status quo system so if i'm an average parent maybe i have an a kindergartner and i have to pay for kindergarten because that's a cost and i have to put my children on the bus it costs money to put your child in the bus three hundred dollars twenty four hundred to go to kindergarten at thirty six hundred and then i have to maybe have children who play sports  at the same time i had three high school students myself and they all played three sports congratulations but the bill was six hundred or seven hundred dollars per season for the families so the families are supplementing the general that's what it takes to run the bubble in public schools not just the thirty six million seven hundred thousand that we have on paper but actually the other funds in also the funds and grants that we are able to get in we get grants from the foundation but we apply for grants otherwise right and you know the reverse of not providing this funding a potential funding it through a read through an override so that the other question is so what happens if you don't happen override what happens if that financial task force plan is not accepted by  the voters as something that that they believe they want to find and i think that that will be a very very difficult conversation to have i think the vijayan would look very in the offerings that we have for students would look very different and we'll be talking about that  in the next few weeks as well the school committee through the of the finance subcommittee is starting to break out what that would look like as well so you know that this is definitely a this to pitches of of of the work in the financial taskforce budget that we have in place as you notice and you'll see on the on the t v and it will be reported out only addresses in romans in the social emotional xc kind of concerns we have for us students that there are no shiny new programs in that and that it might be some good in creative coursework at the middle and high to get the students out of the study halls but you know we are trying to maintain the good things we have first and try to add to the quality of what we offer students and push that forward as well so it's going to be an interesting process that will go the the the budget that we have right now does not address the world language at the middle school so when you when you really think about so if we had ten positions this is an interesting fact in we have one that will go to the wellington because they have a third grade of  five classes but they only have a fourth grade of four classes so we need to add a teacher for that we need to add teachers to support our students who are limited english proficiency because the state says we should so there is this three of the ten right there the could be open could be a potential use of one of those f t even though one of those positions that that could be one potential use we look we left them we left them at a at a plug number and not dedicated to a certain discipline yet because