good evening everybody and welcome to the regular meeting of the foxboro school committee today september twenty ninth two thousand and fourteen urgent of the ceiling is to recognize any visitors to review our minutes from prior meeting we have as always a teaching and learning highlight one i'm very excited about tonight we will conduct a wellness curriculum review followed by a review of the superintendents propose goals for twenty fourteen twenty fifteen school year the  agreement for the bike county educational collaborative an update on fiscal year fifteen budget acceptance of donations and then any other matters that i would like to bring up  our highlight is yes i'm trying to if i had known that he was going to wear his shirt i definitely would have known it was ok to wear mine ok we'll get to him in one minute so do we have any visitors who want to be recognized yes sir please state your name i'm my name's joe garrity how my student from far from high you just want to let the committee know that the all the parents by today or saturday have received their child and calf results in just saying that the next mean will do a he always keeps us on our toes yes he does any other visitors would like to be recognized tonight if not we'll take a look at the minutes from september fifteenth when the minutes of september fifteenth under the heading back to school that day bottom line of the paragraph i wondered if we want to put in the minutes that we were going to look into a met code tutor with or without the funding that we showing i don't know i just didn't know if we were going to look into that and the merits of it i thought i'd mention that in the state oh remember we had it up tick in the meco money and we're going to use some of it for tutoring and yes right of all i want to get if i misunderstood but i i assumed that if if you want to have a discussion about that it would be during our budget season oh ok that's right i just didn't committee just for a potential at it relates to of the plaque and then i noted the consensus of the committee is to move forward with the project i'd just like to propose we have a clause there at the end of that sounds that says subject to approval by ms miers paklin mr you know because ok so we're going to move moving along efficiently tonight but this next item we're going to spend as much time as we can on because we're very proud of this young gentleman and i'm going to turn it over to the superintendent to introduce the teaching and learning highlights yes so i would love to invite me that his older sister actually won so this seems to run in a family so that's quite a point that i want to make so that we can remember that this is the second student we've had that's earned a thousand dollars for his school along with quite a wonderful recognition for myself through a lot of hard work and effort so i'm going to turn it over to mrs edwards to explain it dr burroughs has a video of the math moves you project so we can go  just taking a moment today's basketball game i scored five points from two back and forth about jobs which brought me up to a total of thirty two points after the game and i want to  what yours may not know jack is one of hundred fifty students across the nation who have won just math moves to competition and not only did he demonstrate how math moves him morning noon and night he also used technology beautifully had wonderful transitions he demonstrated how technology is important and also how math facts his life  fantasy football league perhaps and all the other aspects of it so he has done a fabulous job and in doing such a fabulous job he also contributed to this school and we decided that we're going to get to i pads to help other students through math apps on the i pad two like math and work as hard at it as jack does so now it's your turn  oh really no much i need to say said oh yeah worked hard on it and how did you find out you won they sent me a letter so you won this is a six credit yeah that average how long did it take you to put the video together and do this but took me a few days for i really liked how you did integrate the math into your lot when you think about it it's a lot but i think that you know your family is also kind of a family and so they have a lot of support for you and encouragement he sort of said that his mother made him do it jackie is you know a very special individual and you can see how important it is and all the little pieces of mail and if this helps other students understand amanda's and i read it like then you have done your job along with a select group of very dedicated academic students you know in the middle school and you've done exactly what raytheon was by making us understandable to kids who might not  to share with your classmates though because some of the kids you go to school with might not think they like math but they might be doing numbers every single day for their fantasy football leagues or to figure out how many points they want to average per game to get to a certain  that's ok it's your work whatever you choose this is all good maybe later absolutely so nice job jack i have just two questions number one where does math rank in your list of favorite subjects one are too much what's the other one science sons thanks for the second question yeah is it true that your sister taught you everything you know about ma i would like to disagree with that ah but you know what good for you graduation you did a great job we're all very proud of you thank appreciate your time commitment and even more importantly we would appreciate your opinion and like we told mackell at the last meeting and the time you want to chime in on something all you have to do is just raise your hand and we recognize you and your opinion is very very valuable to us ok so you don't have to just sit there you participate feel all right and so just to give you a little background which sometimes i forget to do and we both forget so the voting board members of the five school committee members if you could three chances she can see who that is in might we might actually want to give her things ok so do you want to have a go around with names for melissa say sure i'm right when i start mrs lord sure i'm i'm barry lord and i was a teacher i retired from parks for high school and i am excited because the spanish exchange program i started in nineteen ninety six i get to be that chapter on and their field trip tomorrow so the rains are going to come until three o'clock after we get back and the craft thank you and recognition is going on right i am dean bellenger this is my third year on the committee i have a son who's a freshman at hofstra high school and another son who's in seventh grade here nice to comprehensive health are nineteen ninety nine so they're a little dated and ninety jams and they're not anywhere close to being changed so one of the things that was interesting and it was really went to the national standards and they really just want to point out how thorough her team was with the number of tools that they used to really look to see the consistency how comprehensive our curriculum for physics and health is and really to get a complete picture of not just the facilities but instruction curriculum for the high quality teachers that we have in this district and really exciting with the stuff that's happened that the high school and the recommendations that came out really are more when i left on my maternity leave so they did a great job doing extra work and things at home and really helping move the process along so we could do a great job but get it done in time all the tools that we started with since the massachusetts remarks are very dated were created by the department of health and human services and they're called the p k in the he cat so health education curriculum analysis tool and physical education curriculum and now this is a tool so they took  step by step through the each standard in the curriculum in assessments and facilities and staffing and everything that you could imagine to a good physical education and health program we need and kind of ranked how we felt along with everything and then it helped us identify gaps strengths and weaknesses other in cricket line and it helped us show how we aligned to the nationals how well we aligned to the national standards so that was the first thing that we started we did fizz ad and then we did health and it gave us a lot of really good data to look at in areas where we were successful in areas where we also maybe were a little bit behind or needed improvement then we reviewed data from the wellness investigations that johnson and i had done when we applied for grants for all of the buildings for n f l play sixty which also gave us some statistics and data about minutes in physical education and topics that our curriculum covered and things like that and then we use another evaluation tool for physical education by nasty which is the national association for us for in physical education which kind of gave us just a more of the same information but kind of reassured us that we were going in the right direction we looked at b m i and fitness testing data that we have collected and we created a staff survey with questions about how helpful they thought the curriculum was and how thorough they thought it was  area what types of different assessments they use on a daily basis for things that intel just to get some more information after completing all the evaluations and gathering data we identified what our strengths are  water weaknesses are a face and then we did the same for health and compile just a big list of everything we put those into recommendations and actions that needed actions that we needed to implement each of our recommendations that we put in the report  our overall findings were very positive in the last four years we've done a ton of curriculum mark we started four years ago with redoing the physical education curriculum three years ago we redid the high school health curriculum so we did did the high school physics three years ago high school health curriculum and then two years ago we did the middle school health curriculum so really all that was left at the end was middle school physics and elementary health safety so most of our weaknesses that we found were related to having a written documented curriculum for middle school health and elementary you know not that we weren't doing great things in the curriculum we just didn't have it written down on paper aligned with standards so this summer we had three curriculum teams that we set up and we finished sue and i just looked at it today and we highlighted all the needs that we had already in the finished already i just that you know you've got to you know what you want to do you've got to the work that goes on much of it done we had we had three teams this summer so we had a team from each building and we just went through the list and fixed what needed to be fixed and added what needed to be added  and it's going it's going well on all levels so i think everyone's just nice to see something now in the written form it's really nice to have that in your hands and it's very impressive i think i think as a team we did an amazing we worked so that we had a comprehensive health and p t curriculum with detailed common pacing guides in lesson plans for all teachers to use fitness testing data that shows significant student improvement with district attorney measures coming out and with baseline and our teacher goals we've centered around fitness testing and using the data that we collect to see what types of improvements students are making from the fall to the spring and i think last year don't quote me on this but it was i think about eighty six percent of students improved by five percent or more in the mile run from the fall to the spring eighty percent in the it was in the eight that they improved because that was one of our goal was to meet eighty percent improvement by a five percent time and we modeled fitness focus days with cardio component improvement and we snuck in cardio cancel the last two weeks of their fitness focused days if they if they improve if eighty of them are present improved by five percent and they worked really hard and i wasn't here but they told me that  at the middle school strengths were a comprehensive health education curriculum a new fitness room that we were able to create through an n f l play sixty grant that helps us link some training principles and fitness concepts that they're learning in the health education classroom into real life settings so when they're learning about heart rate and pulses in b m i and all kinds of fitness concepts in the health classroom they learn about concepts and then they go down into the fitness center and they actually do a workout using things that they learned in help in their health classes so that's been great in assessing data from the middle school as well and then last year we and past years of collaborating with b u and bringing in the newest  curriculums involved with nutrition we just had kicking kitchen last year which went really well it was it's t v based health curriculum kind of like are based on i carly where the kids watch t v shows about cooking and nutrition our positive things that we focused on of the elementary before and after school programs that we have been consistently offering now square dance club running club nutrition detectives comes in with our collaboration with the wife for third grade which is really exciting and fun to do box which is in the third year the early morning before school program that is of no cost to the students with that well attended i have forty two third and fourth graders this session which will be eleven week sessions twice a week monday mornings and thursday morning to eight o'clock it's very well received and well attended i know there's and taylor the kids are just so excited to be there and one of the nice things we do about box is i collaborate with the grade level teachers one of the big things we try to help them learn to understand for me and in the school you are role models so when you leave box how you go down the hall and how you went to the classroom and one of the things that box relaxer promote is that this will hopefully improve a child's ability to be attentive in learning and i've gotten several positive comments back teach is that they come in and they're so focused and i always survey the children and the comments are funny like i didn't you know under an pledge allegiance i was closing their eyes during math time so it's you know it's kid right filtered comments but they're so realistic so the bark i think has really been a nice add on so much and just quickly explain what the b o stands for sure box is building our kids success and it's founded by reebok and it's a free program in the training is free and you go up to their location in canton which is absolutely beautiful and their premises active bodies equals active mines so i really is one of the things i really like that will cause the literature right now is just explo benefits of being physically active and ability to improve learning has been really nice to see so that's really some nice things are going on and i feel like our curriculum is really varied at the elementary and laugh that it doesn't focus solely on the competitive aspects of being active we really promote what is it you like to do what's fun for you if it's focused sticking as a jumping rope you know is it is it just running around for three or four minutes to get moving but then we do focus in the whole fitness component is also focused at the elementary level why is it warm up good for you when you stretch whether it's a strengthening we do a hand held how your heart rate how is your breathing you know why is your heart rate increased so we take them through more of an oral basis for their learning for us as assessment ally do word boards a lot of the in the class write down one or two things that you learnt today so it's more of an oral or written but it's not a specific data driven assessment format it's so i think our needs were one of the areas that we've discussed is now with really having that nice health curriculum in a written form is having the resources to provide a quality health curriculum so we don't always have a located dedicated area to do our curriculum or nor do we always have the resources like a smart board or things like that to present so what we've tried to do is we tweaked it in the sense that we can make their health lessons as active as possible so that active learning which is always isn't always possible and there are videos and things like that in written work that we do like to pursue and in the gym may not always be the vessel caijing because they think if i'm in the gym i should be moving so i think one of the areas that we would like to see how we feel a need for is if we can maybe pursue at some point in time even if it's a shared location where we can do our health classes so that it's in their mind that we're going down to do help in a certain area and that's where we go to do help like typical other curriculum driven things like computer or music or art so you have that focus so i think that's one of the areas we would like to see or maybe i'm pursue in and i think for a quick talk about the summer that we did on the curriculum to make it more active i just it was just to the tate taylor because of the way it situated the classrooms are all around the outside of the gym or sometimes i think for your instruction i don't teach there on i go but i have been a tailor and i tend to be loud teacher so i probably do very well over there but your instruction we use a lot of music so i think sometimes you may have to tone down awarded down some of the things that you might build a lot of the kids to be a lot more creative or involved with you know i think at some point in the future after we move the barrel project along and then go to the tailor somewhere in line somewhere in that line you know out of the room i think i think that certainly the gym is something that everybody acknowledges is not an ideal classroom and everybody heard this story before and you can imagine how loud challenging that is are not just a tough environment you know just from a design standpoint and i think it has really relation to the nutrition component of bungled every film and we have this really great set of a clip made that has the my plate mats in the has a bean bag and it has the all the food groups and their color coded so we do a lot of interactive game playing and through playing and matching you know your nutrition and your portion control so different games like you know tooth brush and tag for dental we have dental come in also this year we're going to try to get safe routes to school come in do a bike safety which is a component within our curriculum now so we use as many outside resources that are free as possible space to do so i think to make our curriculum from the health nutritional standpoint  added lessons that allow students to understand leadership concepts was one area that kept coming up in peek at that we looked at that was something that we were lacking so it actually worked out perfectly that we now have eleventh and twelfth grade required phase and so we have some of the older kids in the gym now with the younger kids so this summer we worked on finding ways to use them as leaders in the classroom and we started off the year by communicating to them that we expected them to be leaders and that the younger kids were going to look to them to follow and set the tone for the class and that's been going great it's been such a smooth transition from the eleventh and twelfth graders not being required at all now the eleventh graders are required we didn't know how they were going to respond to that with a study being taken away from them but we've had hardly any complaints about our students here at all and we want to complement the high school well the spartan because i think you have handled really really well and i think it's one of those things that seems you know at first glance it seems like well wait a minute but once as part of what we do it just goes away and everybody realizes the benefits and the necessity and why that's a law in our state so but i'm sure it's not always you know extra class and i think a lot of classes i don't personally don't have a study i think they would fill that up with the class and what i really liked about the program was that we were worried oh gosh i can't ta i don't remember if you were here on maternity when we were going through that state requirement to have physical education every grade and we really struggled with that as a committee especially for the kids were playing fall sports or spring sports and so i'm really pleased actually mccoll to hear that one of the things we talked about that i think convinced us to vote in favor of that implementation was the notion of having a morning program something a little outside the box so the kids who didn't want to commit a class period to that would have another way to fulfill that requirement and the majority of the students in the morning session are music students and students who are taking multiple a p classes or electives like if they're going to want to be an art if they know they want to be an art student they're taking multiple left so they don't have the free period to take that like the others and i think one of the other things that really convinced us back then to support it was also the notion that it wouldn't just be you know throwing a football or it would be life skills have you been able to put that into the curriculum yet or is that work in progress we've made it a let's do in two ways so within the physic curriculum it's elective so they have two or three choices depending on what else is going on in the gym like some of our some of our units at the badminton unit takes up the entire gym so there's not enough space to offer three or four things for them to do but they're allowed to do what the ninth and tenth grade curriculum is have choices so there's some kind of some large group choices or group game choices and some personal fitness choices yes and we started the year with they designed their own workout plan for the weight room so every student has a weight plan that they designed on their own at the beginning of the year with fitness goals that's on file in the weight room so if they go into if they choose to go into the fitness center they can pull out their personalized workout and do their own workout in the fitness center with a staff member supervising next door i like what  they did for the wellness center about fitness like mine so rather than us being like told what to do like we can like stick to what we need to work on for like our own body and i like that or if you're playing a sport you can work on whatever kind of workout would tenth grader introducing them to a lot of different activities where unfitness focus days we lead the work out and show them every possible way that you could be fit and get fit in every piece of equipment that you can use and supervise them in how to use it safely and give them a variety of skills and then when they're in the eleventh and twelfth grade they have all the skills they need to choose what they enjoy and what they'd like to do so that when they leave school they can find something that they're going to enjoy for  personal responsibility as they exist is more which you know about the morning jim opportunities that also just junior senior and i am yes i think it's amazing i mean you hear talk about all the options they have and again giving them these skills that they're going to be able to take with them when they leave or if they go to would jim let's say you know after high school or when they if they decide to go to college and i mean it's i just think it's such it's so great i really do i mean it's just it's so great too that the juniors and seniors can like you said have the choices and you know that's going to fit into you know what's right for them and right to you steve i do too and i'm ninety percent thrilled with everything but ten percent of me that's struggling a little bit is if you've got the freshman or sophomore who's a football player to spend an hour in flag football i struggle with but maybe i could not i don't want to spend time on it tonight but awful i mean we can but you can help me get smarter on that kind of thing about having i mean as long as you guys were smarter than i am fine that's a good use of a student's time but i'm ok with that i just appreciate you guys examining that  yeah i mean right i mean just very briefly they're not just learning football skills when they're playing flag football they're learning social skills and competitiveness and fair play and sportsmanship and they're learning things but couldn't you ever get i'm not going to  you couldn't you argue that learning that in the football sport as well as maintain yeah yeah i think what's a healthy thing is one of the things i work hard on in elementary curriculum is not everybody has had an opportunity to be involved in sports or have that opportunity so for someone who is a good peer be a helper and take what you have that's a gift for you and point b a college with either not those skills were jamming everything in or not really instructing them or they hadn't been in a gym for two years and then they go to college and there are other kids who are used to being in the gym and knowing how to develop their own personal going to be horrible and not be comfortable with and we're challenging you to do the best that you can and bring a good attitude to every activity that we're doing in hopes that you'll learn something about yourself and from others about what it is to be successful at things and learn new things and try things that maybe you're not comfortable with because that's a skill that's going to be good for you for your life i appreciate the thoughtful response much really what i'm looking for and i think great we migrate that up from elementary on find something you're going to enjoy you know ask the two volleyball players right so if you if you were in his ed class and there were a couple of classes where they were offering volleyball would it be a bad thing if you participated maybe offer tips to other kids who don't have the same skills i mean i think it works out well i mean doing like the volleyball stuff for you they offer also different courts so they offer like in the dance court engineer court like a beginner court and coming from someone like i don't really understand football  really get that and even doing it in the morning generally you don't have like a fitness focused day and playing with someone who is on the football team it kind of helps to move along with the class along because if you have sixteen kids who can't throw a ball talking to the ground like i do everything for you have you know someone who can you know toss a ball that i can see behind me to catch it and how to move the game along and everyone is running around having fun participating in not worrying about you know oh gosh i'm going to miss this terribly or something so i think it works out having the advanced people in the class and also those who are beginners and they also works out when you kind of look for it like i'll say oh i can't wait to hold the ball well you know or the softball you know so i can you know have a little imagine that the students in the class want to do as far as your backs are sized personal training so they go into the fitness center and work on a workout that they create by themselves basketball and team sports so they could have at some of the things you talked about where leadership skills are going to be you know taught encouraged and i'm also impressed by what you have coming up in october that's the alcohol literacy literacy challenge for  so i'd love to see more of that and then what i also saw was that for more professional development i don't know if we can accelerate it or you're the subject matter experts but for special ed or adaptive sports  is there a possibility of a quick many services subject matter expertise those sorts of things for students that might have limitations kind of wheelchair or type of activities or whatever those i i wouldn't change a thing and whatever she needs she knows people will get for her whatever the students need but we don't we don't expand it and see who comes is developed by their individual education program and i wasn't implying that we w say within this community it's a luxury to be able to have a dad to physically be the instructor in this community because they're so resourceful and having our connection with the y is an amazing thing for our students and the fitness center here is another  avenue for that they have access to on a daily basis which is amazing and i think to just give a lot of credit to jenelle and how much the curriculum has changed when she referenced to the students who have some emotional social anxiety those are the students i think in the past have gotten lost in the mix and this is an amazing amazing thing when i heard this i just about jumped out of my seat because there are a lot of these students too it's difficult to excel in a group of other individuals who may be gifted in a certain area of being physically talented and it's very intimidating so now that we have this opportunity i think it's just amazing and i'm so excited i keep telling her how much amazing it they provide for students is probably above you on almost every other school system you know and while we would always love more time in physical education so would every other career choice but i  know we get that we talk about that all the time but they're pretty good maximising the time that they have all the really more i think reading your report couple things struck me and then and then i had a motional reaction to my when i first came back seven years ago but what struck me in reports in your department probably has the strongest connections in community partnerships of any whether it's the y m c a the partnerships would be used to research studies done view the health curriculum and the y grants that you pursue to stop and shop partnerships you have so many different types of partnerships within the community so all departments they probably are the most known in the community and people want to come forward  and assist with people with even more so i want to give you credit for that because that outreach that you do is is really skilled i love that you don't want to purchase anything and i thought this really i'm not knocking our budgetary viewpoint but this speaks to the kind of things we've been talking about here at this table which is that curriculum is sort of it's in this transition to online resources and you know maybe history doesn't change very much unless you want to look at it backwards in a different way but i think health and wellness certainly changes all the time and i think that that speaks to where you are that you are so current in what you do and what you want to offer kids in terms of information that they've now realised that too many years ago we were looking for a middle school health textbook and now they're realizing that it changes so much that which we currently become and they have to constantly online resources and that's what they're doing so i give you a lot of credit for that and and that you are is data driven as any department and i don't think people realize that about health and physical education and i thought back to when i arrived seven years ago and there was no help at all to high school help and did in grade eight i saw that on the school committee  were joint school district goals that you had to cite you had a real focus on wellness around the time i came back that has since you know morphed into other things because so much work was done at this level and was school ministration but i remember coming back and seeing that and realize it's no health of the high school which i took very personally because i know there's a lot of health curriculum at high school that kids need to hear about that certainly we don't want to talk to about a middle school we only had two years of p t at the high school and the  curriculum in both areas wasn't current or developed at all and what's happened in seven years to me is quite an achievement and i give all the credit to the entire department and to to nose leadership so it just hit me like we have far we've come in seven years  and with this is really saying about how current they are and how they stay on top of things so i want i just want to mention all that while i know i personally support that i mean i think we are very forward thinking and what you guys present and i love the professionalism in attitude i think that serves our kids well so thank you thank you and other comments from many great job done thank you thank you i want to thank you to it we're very lucky that we have the support of the school committee and administration and i work in districts that that wasn't the case  superintendent school so ask the school committee you know each year after the superintendent's public evaluation within a few weeks or a month i come back with you with my new goals for this coming year and the goals are year to year although you will see that some of them do continue or change up a little bit but as you know there are some goals that can be achieved in the year and there are other goals that really are a long term effort and because it's a really complex issue so you will see in my draft of goals and these are available for your public discussion tonight and then you can finalize them tonight if you want or i can take your comments under advisement and work with you and change them up a little bit and come back for approval at the next meeting it's really up to you but you can see that when i was thinking about how do i work with the committee what are our joint looked at our joint school district goals that we share with you and i looked at  all of the data that we've collected recently both through the tech program evaluation report our new strategic plan and what's really going on and thought no way where is my focus going to be my personal energy and effort going to be directed and as you can see at least three of them really are around technology so if i'm going to group those together so my professional practice goal is as the educational leader in the district to utilize the tools and features of the office three sixty five platform which is new to us in april to enhance our internal communication and collaboration among even a suit team so that's something that i'm going to use model and we've already started all of our m documents are in a shared drive folder now and we're trying to go as much people this is weekend preparation as meetings and to store them in places where people can collaborate and work on things together and secondly around technology we've discussed at length  at this table where we're trying to go with educational technology and its role in teaching and learning and i think we've gone through that in quite a number of detail so in terms of how i was thinking about my goals it certainly is our collective goal to implement all the recommendations  that report as a team and personally so you can see under discipline prove meant it says to monitor and publicly report progress to the goals of recommendations in the tech programme evaluation report which was publicly shared this table in june two thousand fourteen in the fox will hold schools five year technology plan and that we will update you with a committee twice a year and include detailed information about our progress under those four major indicators in the evaluation board so if the public's interested in the both of us reports on our district web site and you can find them feel easily so that's one of the most important things we're doing in the next couple of years is implementing all the recommendations in that report and so we want to make sure i want to make sure that my attention on that is constant  in terms of where we're trying to go with technology though it really occurred to me that the students will is critical i think we've all joked about how you are you are native makers of the technology and we are trying to catch up but probably never make it immigrants yet so we are there you are a digital immigrants and you are reading natives and we laugh about it but it is really very true and so i thought you know somebody that i heard speak keynote speaker almost two years ago at the mass q conference which is that you let the statewide superintendent and technology peoples conference they had a keynote speaker who was i think the best i've ever heard in any conference ever and his name was travis allen and he said something almost two years ago that i couldn't get out of my head that i since decided i'm either going to say that's one of the best things they ever heard or i'm going to do something about it so he said you know that school districts don't do i they don't leverage the power of the students to move the use of technology along that if you're going to wait till the adults acquire enough of the skill set to then bring down to the students who are already using it in ways that we really don't know anything about then it's never going to happen you're always going to be behind you're never going to catch up so this idea of involving students has been in my mind for almost two years so i'm making it a goal this year and we are going to this year we're going to implement a program called high school advocates so sometime this month the high school students going to see a video little intro for me a video but what the icicle advocates program is and then a little follow up for me that if students interested they can apply we advocate and we're hoping to get fifteen students more one through eleventh grade so because by the time the seniors are trained they'll be waiting for graduation at that point so we're going to have students by the end of this month designated as i school advocates and it's only september i mean by the end of october there this month is tomorrow what i meant was by the end of october and we are actually having the keynote speaker that i saw travis allen who is a very young twenty something me on stilts like a kid to me he created his he created his own company because the way he learned in high school digitally was not being met just wasn't being knowledge and he's only about ten years out of high school but he had to find his own path of learning because all of the wave that he learned was not reflected in his high school education so he did go to college and  started this own company called i school initiative and he's the one that really inspired me to say you know we're not leveraging the power of the talent of students who are it head of us so he and in a coworker arvin ross are going to actually come to foxboro and spend three days in foxborough high school went to over twenty seven twenty twenty nine and they're going to train those fifteen or so students in how do they become school advocates in their own school and how do they they have they got to come up with a project that they think could change the world kind of thing so how do they use their knowledge of technology to inspire the world to change the world and how to help their own school so they will have advisors who are going to work through the year see how that goes so i'm pretty excited about that so this is this is my idea i am going to be involved in it and we're hoping to have our secondary integration specials julie greenstein has  about it involved in a teacher advisor as well so we do in the three of us we're going to monitor this program and see see what students can bring to the table so that's my student learning goal because i really took that to heart when he said that and i happen to hear him again speak back in june and i thought you know i talked to him almost two years ago and was so inspired by the he said now he's the conference again in june and i went to and i spoke to me afterwards and i said ok this is the second time i've heard you i'm going to do something about it so we're going to do it so it's going to be really fascinating i'm really excited about it and i think that we'll learn so much from our own students in terms of how else can we leverage them outside of this formal program so how can we leverage them to help us along with where we're trying to go with technology because we shouldn't be waiting for ourselves quick question i school it sounds like an apple stores but it's not he actually what you can choose to do in addition to the students each doing a project of their own choice we actually we've had several conference calls with them we get to pick what it is that we want students to help us out with so for example if we were about to roll out a one to one initiative which could be any device at all of any device which we're not the students would help teachers learn how to use that device they be trained first in the features of the device whether it's a chromebook whatever it is  and they would help but we're not there so when they said what would be the student focus we honestly said based on where we are we're going to start slowly so in office three sixty five there's a lot of tools collaboration tools that students will be able to use we hope to roll out middle and high school student e mail this year and you know that we host so there's a lot with an officer to see five that we already have that if students could learn what those tools are they could help other students use them they could help their teachers use them in ways that maybe we don't exactly imagine so we're going to actually start small so it has absolutely nothing to do with apple products at all it doesn't have to do with apple it's own independent company w so those are the three things that really speak to technology in addition to that under district improvement i'm continuing to go around our growth plan for stem subjects which as you know i've had last year  a little more tailored so we would had in the past how we're planning to grow those are what we're offering for science technology engineering math education we are looking at hoping i'm going to say to develop a computer science course for a year from now as we did last year with the engineering course so we're hoping for a computer science course at the high school year from now it is certainly challenging because if you think health and wellness changes computer science changes daily so i think that's going to be a real challenge to us to find a curriculum that can evolve in short like that and to get that going so but it's important but another just improvement goal is to continue to expand our reach and communication to compete in the community groups and other constituents so that's a different version of the same goal i had i'm going to try those superintending coffee's in the evening at the public library throughout the year so that people in town here to work in the day  opportunity for face to face conversation with me and we're going to plan another outreach event with the clergy association which was very successful last year and this year we're actually going to focus on social media use of social media and how faith groups and schools approach that with the youth they serve and what we have in common what do they know that we don't know what do we know that they could use and then last under other this is an optional practice for superintendence in the state of massachusetts we must have at least one professional practice school at least one student learning all least one district improvement goal and then the other is optional but the other is my sixty four which is to develop a plan which you've heard the beginnings of for the completion of the outdoor dick complex at fox for high school towards a goal of having a full campus at the high school i think personally that's very important and i think that's something that i want to see happen over the course of the next several years is that kids i think have a right to go on out of their school after school and be able to watch friends practice to be able to participate in their team events in their practices without having to travel to another location and i think that's part of high school life and it's still a surprise to me that we've had this current high school for for fifty forty one hundred fifty years sixty for the fifty fifty years in its present state of making a strategy to have that whatever you know part of the process here it is anything you foresee as superintendent is an obstacle in your way that you need help with right away from the school committee training money corporate involvement community bush to revolve anything in the you know like it was travis allen sounds like a remarkable you resource and ignites passion so anything i need right away would be a no because right now it seems like a black hole to me but i will know we're actually not going to start meeting about this until around thanksgiving because we want to have it in the program of studies for your review and approval in january but so we're going to basically spend the month of december working on that i don't know yet but i will be very quick during the budget process to come to speak up and say what we need i think the challenge will i think there are two challenges one is finding a dynamic curriculum that can evolve and change the way the engineering one does which was a great surprise that this people who are updating it and keeping current based on subscription for example so i'm hoping to find the same thing but we're not going to start until right around the end of november working with a couple of teachers here diane my spackle and a new director of  is in terms of being present during the three days i'm not sure because it sort of flies against their philosophy which is young people empower young people and then see what happens so we're going to actually try to stay out of the students way a little bit during the training and it's going to be personally difficult for me but i'm going to try to be there some of the time but not all maybe but so i i don't know because empowerment me and i i don't yet know what their experience will be but i certainly know i don't want to get in the way of their experience sure i'm not sure but i think this is certainly could you do maybe create winning so the during the school day training is for the students because that's what we did ask him if he would stay for an hour after school monday so the high school fats and going to be moved to high school faculty meeting them so that the high school faculty has the benefit of hearing him for because it's a high school program but there are many people at other levels that want to hear it so it's going to be so either either the monday or the tuesday i'll let you know what the time frame is and certainly any or all of you could come to those because that part is adult only where you get to hear his philosophy was reading your calls about how i wasn't surprised but i was struck i wasn't at all surprised how you just you hit upon everything that we discussed during our strategic planning process every single thing that you read the whole agreement which is quite lengthy as you as you can see educational collaboratives began decades ago in the state of massachusetts so that towns could get together or collaborate hence the word and create programs for special education and students with disabilities that maybe the districts themselves and have either enough of a population of the right kinds of services so it's basically a year and so what happened with this agreement is that if you look back at the at the page it said it was originally created the original agreements in the state of massachusetts for education collaborative the collaborative agreements across the state and certainly by go did at the time as you probably know from reading the newspapers over the about five years ago there was a problem in a few educational collaboratives in the state of massachusetts not ours but  on the north shore and there were some investigations about how collaborative finances work how their governments worked how all of that works so a few things were revealed and so the state of massachusetts passed newer laws about how collaborative should operate legally ethically financially and as a result all of the educational collaboratives in the state are now required to come up with the  september eleventh a few weeks ago so the next step is school committee approval at a public school in each of the eighteen member districts or regional schools so guidelines and the massachusetts law are now governed so the collaboratives are not coming up with all this language originally there is a hearing to the suggested language and then customizing to their own particular situation so we have gone over this twice at the so obviously this is something done for years and will continue to do my only question can you offer a statement or sometimes on cost to us by agreeing to this how you view that's built in floor budget the services that we contribute to we pay for the students who attend so there is no current membership dues to buy go although you saw the agreement they reserve the right to do that sort of but that won't happen you know bills the the eighteen member finance directors meet once a month at by go to the board of directors which is the superintendent's of another meeting a month so this is quite a level of oversight now that maybe you can use to be in the past but we don't what we do is we pay for services so we pay for the students that we send by go because that's the best program for them and it's something we can offer here and that's how they that's how they're financial that's how they find it's come in that's how the funding comes in is by member districts paying tuition for their students so just similarly we would pay tuition at a private special education school we pay tuition to the by county collaborative and usually their tuition rates are somewhere in between the c us running the program ourselves and a private days for for example usually it's somewhere in between and just in terms of safeguarding the public's interest in this cost potential cost to us as taxpayers citizens we can feel comfortable that with you on the board something you get over say yes and as i think i would say it's a double checking mechanism at this point because they they have to come to the board with any tuition increases they're asking for and this is always a rousing debate if anything involves you know increase in finances because none of us want to see that and i would say you know probably of the districts maybe even feel all that more strength strenuous about that but we really only pay for the services that we're accessing so that's good news if a decision is made in night meeting that that's a program that the student should go to then yes we will pay the tuition to that but we don't pay for services not rendered so it's a pretty good situation ok debbie could you almost say that this this new  agreement is actually a protective measure i mean in the sas to monitor that districts are doing what they're supposed to be doing and also that we're protecting i mean because at the end of the day this collaborative is  protecting the students right the students who were seeking every school district belongs to a collaborative so that we can access services that we can't otherwise provide the extent to which you access it really depends on the strength of the internal programs we probably don't send as students as many districts to be as we have a lot of strong programs within our own district and that's always our first sharp choice right but we do need to belong to a collaborative so that we can access other types of programs that we may not be able to provide if we have one student with particular diagnosis or particular special needs that we cannot provide for that's right for that student in terms of this agreement it's really more about governance how is this collaborative going to be governed and it's got it you can read a thousand pages of checks and balances so that nothing ethically legally or financially improper can happen in the governance of this collaborative so it's a protective agreement that is meeting the current law so that it can't happen what happened before which was a little bit of you know funding i'm just got caught funding a regularities so if you remember five is quite in the universe is made up of a collaborative elsewhere in the state so as a from the position point of view actually when we went back and did a little bit more looking at the one other change that was made so the position changes actually were favorable to zero point two five position versus unfavorable two point two five so so what i did was i counted for the salary changes happened throughout the budget right now so you'll see if there was a half a kindergarten teacher removed  you know teachers it assistant in one school added what the actual financial differences so that this has changed a little bit from what you've seen before as far as i am that was just me and he expects the nation whose side the one of the positive things obvious even with that point two five that really isn't the real story where the major thing was that that removed me a teaching position which is i a salary level and adding at assistance in there actually was a some significant pay will savings in the overall net here  which was actually in on the payroll side over one hundred thousand dollars we did put back obviously the grant funded twenty eight thousand dollars for the mass specialist and so you know basically you're you do have an offset there but put your overall savings on just payroll side it would've been about one hundred one thousand the all the changes that we've had to make in and as you know we've been an aggressive program with the buildings and with technology so when we got to the summer time to be the idle playground actually pointed out a couple of big problems at the high go and that was from a safety point of view of the curving and pavement around now we still have to come back with much bigger program on the paving side of things so what we did do was address all the curbing where the buses were coming off and stuff like that and again it wasn't something we had budgeted for really didn't have an option at the time so we've offset some of the savings we've had in the payroll by doing all that curbing and redoing the sidewalks both up front to where the new playground is and across the entire front of the building and so that that really kind of gave us a pretty good size hit of about fifty eight thousand between that and o other at the turn again with all the technology that we're looking at we found that almost every one of our closets the whole of our switch here stuff now being twelve thirteen years old almost all of the h b c systems th the split systems that are when it was all done and fortune they all died they all died they were all you know now playing out any cooler at all and what happens is that switch gears very hot in its operation that's in a closed room and the switch gears worth tens of thousands of dollars in each one so we were burning out switch here because we couldn't keep it cool enough so we went through and upgraded all of them in one shot again something we really weren't planning on but we had to be an investment not to do that and you know we're putting in now the new ten gig switch gear which is even more expensive so we didn't want to have a chance of a kind of glowing and ever go through here so we ended up doing that that was about twenty one thousand for the five closets to get done and we also had a small again with our far wall operator was a little bit more expensive the way into space there was about four thousand so our net effect between the payroll changes and the the few cost expenses that we've gone up right now was about thirty four thousand again very early in the  issues that you know you being the quarter position that were down exactly which yeah so i think when you when you look at it it's it's a good position to be and we're not on the wrong side of it even though we had to hit some pretty big things up front here at the beginning of the year  but again you've also got all your events on your payroll from here to it's you know without any big surprises here i think we're pretty well protected in utilities we've got contracts in the long term so i'm not expecting any any big things that weigh in and i think we will run into as an f y i think we will run into a little bit more on the technology side this year again we're doing so much it's a full forklift upgrade everywhere that we're fighting you know whether it's additional switchgear additional wiring whatever you know we're just trying to do it right so i'll be coming back to you as those old things come up the commitment we made on the wireless to have the urn fully wireless by the end the year it looks like what we're actually going to be trying to do is have the entire district fully the and in aron's working very hard on that we just got some funny you know some great pricing that what we're looking at is if we do the adage wireless right now when we're getting almost a fifty percent discount because of the amount we have to do it makes sense to try to grab a little bit more generally i'm assuming that's something that you guys are all kind of back me on as well so i think that's what aaron's kind of pushing right now for us and at that point which will really help us on the testing and other things down the road because our one of our weaknesses is the amount of computers on the elementary level to do larger scale testing or things but with wireless we have a lot more capability so it's you know we're trying to get a lot of different things at the same time kind of planning for the future here as far as where we're going to need really had to read a lot more than i think when we did the budget last year and unfortunately as you know it will be starting to budget again very shortly for next year when you start it a lot of these things don't condition wise don't exist right and you start to watch them just kind of curious when you're already  you the second one i am remiss i forgot to bring my copy of the check so i can't tell you the exact amount so after explain what it is you can decide to wait to accept at the next meeting with the exact number or you can  play sixty intergenerational event happened at the i go school we had a senior citizens or students in the patriot players in the craft organization of mr kraft was here back in the spring to move to where they announced their  sixty thirty thousand dollars grant and then on the spot mr kraft donated his own thirty thousand to double it for a total of sixty thousand which was going to the i go school playground which you have already accepted and the dedication of that playground i'll just move right into other matters is tomorrow at two o'clock ish you know you're all invited so mr craft and a few other invitees will be there and we'll have the official dedication the ribbon cutting of the i go play sixty kids zone community playground and will be a wonderful event tomorrow to whether it will be wonderful to say at that event if you remember the high school course students were with mr piper and yes we're doing a fabulous job and their voices were incredible and on the spot mr kraft noted that he had seen a tweet from one of the high school students about wanting some portable equipment so as they go around the community to perform they have better equipment and that it was a surprise to us that mr kraft and seen that and he magnanimously at that on the spot it said that he said to the student in the vocal programming i'm going to pay for the equipment you want we were sure was up with that equipment was but he said he would pay for it so since then there's been some back and forth between the patriots charitable foundation and the craft group and our music mr piper who didn't have a really wonderful job putting together a three tiered proposal so that the the total if they were to have everything they would want and need was one thousand four hundred fifty seven dollars and then the change i can't remember and i forgot my copy of it i'm so i'm so sorry in th but he also offered three tiers so that they could support your one two two two three or any two out of the three years at all any combination yes so after a lot of you know discussion he decided to  support the entire project i think we feel comfortable proving that tonight if you could email you tomorrow with the exact amount i apologize so i thought mr piper did a great job and bill i'm sure you can speak to that he really outlined in other matters you mention the i go to the cation tomorrow yes so anyone who is welcome it's a community playground come and all that i go students will participate in the assembly in like stand in some incredible job  just with the whole process of what booth is p t o going to credit again i go p t o they raise the first almost thirty thousand dollars toward the playground which inspired more and i have to give them the peer group a lot of credit because that really started with them occurred next week and i was able to go to five out of the seven to some school split one hundred five and six and seven and went to five of the seven open houses and i just thought of teachers did such great job explaining the curriculum and the students at the high school always there to help out but i thought they really did a really nice job at every single school showing what's being used how we're supposed to use technology what we're trying and i thought they put a lot of thought and effort into their presentations and i just  everything else that not that i can think of we really had but welcome bettors tina i had noticed in my many trips up and down south street that we have some changes to our high school signs and wonders if we could talk about that for a minute maybe know we put in a new digital sign that will go live basically it's to replace the ad hoc signs that would go up all the time where there was for music or for sports events  we were very fortunate and the company that we've been doing all of our school boards with ironically when i just off the cuff asked him you know there are dabbled with that type of stuff basically had gotten one that somebody  into to regular mode on it but it's very similar to what they have of a charter school i think it basically when you get to the high school level it's much different than it is when you're dealing with the elementary and the middle school as far as the amount of  it's yeah people listening at home and you're not sure the high school had no as we all know no one ounce mechanism whatsoever so it just said folks were high school and then people would put the little sawhorses out that said that was a drama truly that action really looked a strictly meant to be effectively thing when people are going to see it yet it's not meant to be something that's only night you know description it's going to be much better communicating our message it's much much more effective living what will try to do is actually unfortunately most of those run by basically confirm the sizing itself so that's all been done so i'm expecting probably within the next week or so deb saw the the rendering of it i think it's just it was very well done as far as really show up so but again we couldn't do it until we actually ha so the group is doing it right now and i think i think the school committee should kind of look towards bill's guidance and that he's guidance with this because we have a november third meeting then you know  little shorter plus thanksgiving our very next meeting would be december one if we decided not to have the nov seventeenth meeting because of the special so we  mean welcome to our spanish it state change students yes see because we don't have a meeting it's a little bit later knocked over october tenth of the next national now i'm looking forward to that we have a number of technology sessions that are being run by our