all right good evening everybody i'd like to call the school committee meeting of november twenty eighth to order at seven o'clock and we begin every meeting with our pledge of allegiance so  right so it's our first official meeting after our thanksgiving three hundred friends family collecting thoughts our first item on the agenda is always an opportunity for citizens to voice any concerns or raise any we've got numerous concerts coming up so i'm noting a few of them the information is on the website so you can find it at your fingertips we've got the even we try to go in chronological order the belmont high school winter concert actually the main back up chamber singers chamber orchestra and jazz ensemble in chennai wins the honors concert this thursday two days from now here at the chinnery middle school in the auditorium at seven pm then the belmont high school winter concert which is scheduled for december sixth and there are snow days on the calendar for each of these events because hope we don't have to utilize them the winter concert at the high school teachers the orchestras the wind ensemble and the jazz ensemble and that is scheduled for the six back here at the auditorium on the seventh of december next thursday we have the grade seven and eight band concert and that features or will feature the feature in the auditorium from seven to eight thirty p and then the grade six fans and chorus concert is scheduled for ten days before our next school committee meeting on december eleventh here at chancery from seven to nine pm in the auditorium so there are at least four opportunities to hear and see our students perform decided to choose the foundation for belmont education as one of the recipients of generous funds so the subaru share the love fund raising campaign over the last four years has provided over forty five thousand dollars to the foundation for belmont education which is really quite amazing so we are ever grateful to both the foundation for governor education as a wonderful partner and supportive contributor to our efforts in the school district and also  students with us today but we have a good a lot of young people here today as part of a community service observation from our boy scouts troop or troop the high school or student or two we might have a middle school or high school students so we're very very thankful that you're here observing our community work and i hope we can live up to the expectations tonight of having a very good meeting and being good role models faces thank you very much for being here i have a couple of that flight a cup dates for the high school and then a couple of elementary school updates as well jim davis our product director announced today that senior girl soccer player carrie allard was named s mark all american by the boston herald that's a very very high distinction it's a national distinction we congratulate kerry also belmont high school boosters athletics month of october out athletes of the month for sophie s talk from the volleyball team and zach saying from the track and friday december one we have boys varsity basketball in g b basketball at bedford high these are all scrimmages so good luck to all of our with the teams boys and girls and congratulations to all of our fall teams nov twenty chinnery a worthy cause on december third from four to six we have our belmont boston partnership parent group friends meeting at esther's in lower  neighborhood we encourage all to come out to the parents can be from belmont in boston and begin to create great relationships while we continue the good work we do with our medical field was and students so again that's december third from four to six at dorchester on december fifth we have done one high school junior future planning night if you want to market counter for our parents and juniors and on december eighth we have a burbank book fear as well so thank you very much those are some of the updates and as chairperson furie said there's lots of dates going on and lots of activities on one of which is the second lecture series that we are monitoring with with basic our public schools in our basic afterschool program for parent lectures this will take place on december fifth at six thirty pm here at the middle school and we have a wonderful speaker for support our parents his name is jason all today regarding the english language education program or what used to be known as yourself many iterations ago first pople talk about our community our students the achievement of our students and our program as well as our challenges so a few have the updates about our growing community of families that includes not only the families of our english learners students but also in one of our elementary schools a family mentor program which brings families of other students in belmont who may or may not share some of the same linguistic or cultural background as  partner with some of our newcomer families who are still learning how to be one tony the students and parents in the film school district so this is one of the activities the flags on this map represent all the different countries that are english learners students come from this of course does not represent the national diversity overall in the whole distributers there are many students in our district from other countries who are not part of the english they are already exited or because they already arrived with academic full academic proficiency in english so you can see that we are really an international program  an international town as well i was in eighth grade english language arts class so that's one of my other hats today and the students were studying they were doing the  novel or the memoir unit night by the cell about the holocaust and they were studying the topic of emigration and why didn't he sells family before the holocaust  parents who are immigrants and at that point half the hands in the room were up and when i talked to her later on she said it was the same in every class that day so this is really this is who we are as a district where our population  international and by lingual community and the students in our classrooms have a lot of very rich background knowledge to contribute to a unit on the holocaust and emigration but to other students are born here speak another language at home and come to our schools by lingo or at least a dual language learner on the road to bilingualism which is wonderful a little over a third of our students speeches at home of our english learners students and the next two most common languages this year are japanese and spanish with about thirty speakers each in those that second and third position that usually varies from year to year chinese has been are not majority but most and in language for the last so we are experiencing a population increase which we do every year the rate changes this this year is a big one so it's picked up last year our population of only in so from f y sixteen today are quite seventeen school year our population of als only increased by eight percent this year it increased by twenty one percent so you can see from the numbers up here at white thirteen or white fourteen we have had larger populations before but because our overall size is so large i checked our numbers right before i came in here we are as of the day three hundred in the district if the absolute number of students being added each year is growing we are also growing as a proportion of the overall student population so  change in the criteria you use oh no there has not been and there has not been a change in the screen or there was a change last year in the in both the test and the benchmark for exiting the program but they accounted for that when considering how to set the execrated area so i do not believe that this is because of any and   and the rates of increase are so that there is an increase every year in the state in the country in neighboring districts our rate of increase is steeper then in district farther away from boston and i think i don't know exactly the rate of increase from you know a cambridge or in our poor a somerville but i can see for instance that winchester there's there's a so i'm fifty five so of course in grades k and one all of our students are in their master's second year of us schooling but in grades two through twelve fifty five percent of our students are in their first or second year of u this graphic represents the proficiency levels or the amount of a good english that our students peak and i can tell you how it compares you can see that there's quite a number of intermedia and intermediate advanced ells at the level three level four columns this does represent an increase in level one and level two students and a significant decrease in level five students however i believe speaking of achievement so here are two two big numbers and healthy numbers so the first number eighty five percent of our students last year made progress as calculated by the state in english acquisition that's a good number that compares favorably with those compas describing before seventy three percent that's the aggregate as g p s so if you remember from janice's earlier presentations as g p s  student growth percentile and that measures how much our students grew in terms of english acquisition when compared with peers across the state who were at a comparable level last year so this is their rate of growth not their absolute performance and our students grew more than seventy three percent of their peers across state so that's that's a number that we can be really proud of how does this compare with the year before so we did about the same eighty four percent last year in terms of students making progress but we went down about ten points in our s g p now our rate of growth last year that was really astronomical we were really please content very achievement so this is measured by performance on m cats and i have here some numbers which i'm only going to explain a little bit they don't need that much explanation so the first chart is for is to compare the performance of all students in the district grades three through eight on m katz and the l's in the district grades three through eight on m cas in the l a in math grade ten is not included simply because the number of l's by that point is so small that it isn't statistically meaningful at all it might be four or five or seven so you can see that there is quite a gap seventy five percent of students met or exceeded expectations on him catching elaine seventy nine percent in math overall but when we only look at the l's performance which is still a small number it's fifty nine students in grades three through eight and that's because so many l's in those grades were in their first year of us schooling when they are not held accountable for their performance or we are not held accountable for their  organs on those tests but that's quite a gap now it's not surprising that when you give an assessment in english to a student who is still learning english that there's going to be a gap however we're going to watch it this state as i think  who has changed the way they measure our students performance the way they measure as they have changed the way they desegregate the groups or pull out the data so this year we were given the data just for english learners whereas in the past it is usually our english learners and our formerly english learners students or fell's together or another category called ever else meaning that they had ever been in an english learner education program and so it's a little bit hard to track so the second chart gives a more historical trend it's not really important exactly what those numbers mean i can tell you they are as you see they're measuring narrowing gaps measuring student growth and then some graduation indicators as well as just some achievement indicators in that second row in the important thing to notice about these numbers is that they are getting bigger over time and that is a good thing also that we don't have numbers for two thousand and seven just because we are not being held accountable on the next generation m cas so we'll have to wait and see  see how the state feels that we are measuring up these are all things that we watch nothing that we are worried about right now and i would just add there as a reminder on november fourteenth when i shared the results you'll recall that chart that listed the history of the testing for the last several years and going forward and all of the changes so it it is very challenging when the when both the data set that they are putting together and the assessment  that we ask ourselves not only because we're required to buy the steeper because porton question to ask and to answer and so that that's partly what i'm i'm telling you about here today so challenges that was the last  section in the agenda for this presentation we have some challenges they are not new they are continuing and in some cases increasing rather sharply so our enrollment is rising quickly is as you already saw that was something that we saw coming in our enrollment has been picking up quite steadily the sense last october and so we added the teacher this year we have added one teacher each year for the last six years our group sizes are still going up and we will probably still need to continue expanding because our rate of increase is not slowing our students have increasingly complex needs that require a lot of coordination collaboration between from teachers these really teachers and specialists special education teachers to examples of some of that some of those challenges would be students with limited for interrupted formal education that would have greatly over the never saw until the last year or two and now those numbers are picking up they're picking up across massachusetts it's a category the state has only really got measuring but it looks  students who not only had interrupted schooling or very limited formal schooling but also are still learning english and are at least two years below grade level in math and or literacy so we do have students some as many as six years below grade level and that's a very challenging for a small district like ours a big district like chelsea or even want him would have a program to meet those students we don't and  we have been trying to figure out how we can best educate them and keep them integrated with the overall student body we also are finding that we have more l's who have very  significant medical and or learning disabilities and this number has has increased sharply this past year so the number of students students with disabilities as indicated by a five will for an i p plan has increased by fifty percent just in the last twelve months i i felt that i didn't really realize how high that number was and tell i did the math i consulted with our mary jane weinstein or assistant director of special education to ask if that was an increase she was seeing in the overall population if there was if not which which she does not think it's nearly that high in the overall population and if not is there a chance that we are over identifying our l students as having disabilities and she did not feel that that was what was happening at all both she and i had independently felt that what's going on is that we have more families who are seeking out maybe are just rick but i think maybe for them in their home countries to the extent that sometimes families are reporting you know my child can't leave the house not an let alone go to school my child you know doesn't have a place in the society i came from and of course we're very glad that they are here and that we are able to spring we will begin the two thousand and eighteen coronated program review process that process is a state audit every six years which looks at the program as well as special education and civil rights during this process we will need as an elite program to defend the service levels so the hours of the instruction that students are receiving from a certified teacher to the state we'll do that by presenting our curriculum something i have a lot of faith in him fact very proud of our instructional practices the same and our student achievement so that's part of the reason that we're keeping such a close eye on our student achievement and watching trends over time last year when i came before us shared that based on achievement data the yearly staff had made the decision to reduce the hours of service that we were providing at the elementary level but keep them studying grades five through twelve well when we look at the data there was  additional or a distinct decline in the growth rate at the elementary that was not present at the secondary level so that's something that we are going to continue to watch but to wait and see if that's a trend we may need to reconsider our level of service weighted against that of course is the desire to protect content area and structural time in the core classroom which is hard to do in a six hour elementary day it's much easier to do in the longer secondary day and in the secondary schedule so we will also continue with our partners in special education to try to look for ways to support students who have limited prior schooling and or students with disabilities are there any other questions i something we will have to continue to keep thinking about and keep watching that on the other question it's for the special education for the programs with in our district and we have a seven year career and huge cycle and i'm here today because the english in reading departments are at the end of that seven year cycle and i'll be presenting our plan of action for the next seven years as well as telling the story of the work that we did to assess our curriculum and program over the last few years so we'll talk about the preparation our internal self  evaluation our extra review and then writing the plan of action so the curriculum review cycle as i said is seven years long the beginning the new plan of action is introduced the next phase focuses on implementing the plan of action really over the next five years and then the data collection internal review process begins again until in the last year we create as you see a new plan of action so that read text represents where we are it is language english language arts and reading departments right now so in the two thousand and fourteen fifteen school year we began preparing for review the l a teachers and the reading teachers met to formulate our focus questions what were our greatest concerns what increased questions did we want to structure our research around it was difficult to find a way to get the elementary teachers who have four subject areas participate to get all of those teachers will to contribute so we  offered after school meeting that they could attend if they want to and we also gather teacher input over e mail of course there are also elementary teachers on our steering committee committee and i should make clear that this is not just me doing this work thompson school level and martha bloom and chris comment at the high school level i'm very very grateful for all the time and effort they put into this work so we as a steering committee compiled and edited the questions that teachers suggested we identify data sources that might help us investigate those questions and we wrote survey questions to send out to students parents and staff so that we could get more information one of the increase questions is focused on our response to intervention model so let me just take a moment to explain what response to intervention or r t i means if you read this pyramid from the bottom up the bottom tier one represents as it says their core instruction for all that is the main way that we teach literacy that we language arts and reading to all students and eighty to eighty five percent of the estimate eighty eight to eighty five percent of students are able to learn and meet the outcomes that we expect just through tear one instruction in the core another ten to fifteen percent might need additional small group  additional scaffolding provided there is another five to ten percent of students who need intensive intervention tier three intervention that really requires additional minutes outside of the core content area so all of this together is the response to intervention model and you'll see in a minute a question about them so you have these in a larger font in your packets that might be easier to review them there but i'll just go over the highlights the five focus questions that we settled on after getting input from teachers and consulting with them again first of all is our k twelve and program aligned and we need vertically aligned as well as is our core curriculum aligned with state standards the second question is how can we reflect the diversity of our community what how can we represent the experiences that our students have as well as the many different voices in our community within our classrooms the third question is about the response to intervention system is the elementary r t i system effective as implemented then the fourth question follows up what need is there for intervention r t i services in the secondary  grade levels finally are all students at the moment public schools prepared for grade level writing writing was a more overriding concern among the teachers than reading so we had one more question devoted surveys and mentioned from teachers and parents and then finally this past year we hosted a team of visiting educators for our external review we were very fortunate to have council connection with him who is also teaching at harvard and is a high school educator as well those for visiting team members came to our schools for two days they carried out classroom visits they conducted interviews and they spent quite a lot of time on a date and document review to help us answer those five focus questions that i already outlined so in response to the review which was carried out in the fall in the winter and spring of last year the steering committee reviewed and prioritize the recommendations that the team made they wrote improvement outcomes for students what would it look like for students if we made some of the changes that  felt were necessary that the visiting team recommended and then consulted with the district principals as well as assistant superintendent carious to revise the draft we had written so that it had input from all of our key stakeholders workshop model which basically means the workshop model means to students are actively reading and writing in the classroom and going through a workshop process which means that sometimes they're interacting directly and getting feedback from the in the middle school the first goal is it's pretty exciting it is about our nonfictions studies curriculum so this is something that popped up in some of our it turned all internal data  uses and then through some choice books some more like memoirs some more like informational tax in the second quarter and that gives students know more rich engaging  engage with it also gives them some opportunities to differentiate for really strong readers because for all the books that we're looking at choosing there is an adult version as well which you know scary adult content but it's just that  lot of different ways so all of our students are the high high majority of our peer to the high level to and to that next level of reading and writing and it's scholarly work that will require them to have those skills so pausing in sixth grade and having everybody take part in that is a huge advantage i think to all the students that we have the district so i truly appreciate that that that about how the middle school how you in the middle school administration over time have come to place value and actually get really is doing and gauging students in different ways and then i'm really excited about the readers writers workshop the p l t last year in may of the high school when the little critter had probably eight or ten percent or so people on the team and ha moving forward of good stuff for students in the classroom so this is somebody good pieces of this work that i value but the consistency across our schools you know all students should know and be able to do price at the various different options this is the other part of that we think about based upon our selection of great configurations but a high school where that mean for the rest of the district hopefully our vendor estimate as i may or partner can help us flush out that discussed i guess a little bit more about the upcoming belmont high school building committee communicating forum and how that works with the upcoming schedule of school committee meeting i think we'll talk about that a little bit more  have a series of meetings planned to talk about the design options that will take place over the next few weeks as well and what we're trying to do is come up with a calendar of meetings in workshops that the community can be aware of that they can attend to make sure they're fully aware of what the details are of our discussion around reconfigurations which will be a decision that this body of school degree folks will make and also now the building committee wants to make sure the public has a few meetings to take part of the workshop model type activities and discussions and presentations on but the wind design selection of so right now the way that's that's being slowly marked out is that we as a school committee have a meeting on december twelfth which we will have a presentation from assistant superintendent chitta stars and myself regarding grey configurations we have provided this exercise in the vision in workshops that we did back in the spring with frank locker in our educators in our community members in our students and we replicated it with leadership council we met with john sullivan our president to talk about having a survey what the staff that we also want to get their feedback on this as a collective logic group not just that small sample who attended the visioning and give you an update of what that that data looks like  of the internal conversations about reconfigurations what we feel are the pros and cons of each one of the scenarios and provide that on the twelfth and then on january ninth we're going to invite the public to an open forum type meeting with the school committee so they can ask questions about the configurations we'll do our best to answer every question at that point in time to remember computer point we hope to have estaminet providing us what some of the  options may be for the non belmont high school building community creates could be so what i mean by that is that if we go with a nine to twelve school what would it mean for a middle school and elementary school level to be able models we can also look at what the alternative impact will be to the town so that that is a the data set that we're really looking forward to exploring with us in the may we have our initial meeting with dialogue about the different types of spaces that we have available the uses of those spaces and given the continued growth in the projections how will we see us being able to utilize those buildings forward and if grades from the middle school  grades in the elementary school and not involved in the high school project what types of modifications to our buildings or to our schools would we need to make it at what cost generally and that will really give us hopefully on the ninth that ability to do a little bit of a comparison of if we choose this option in some the has some of the work that will have to do as a town to support the a level so this is been a long road of work to try to take these parallel courses these this work with us in a maze not part of the high school building project so we're kind of doing two separate parallel studies regarding space in a romantic center and they'll come together so december twelfth will have the conversation what we present the information on on configurations on january nine will have an updated presentation it will have a form where people can actually ask questions and we'll have dialogue with the community and on the twenty third of january we'll have invite the public and have this group meet in deciding vote on that configuration option harold so that you know last two weeks ago when i last building community meeting was most of you were present for we started to look at pictures of schools in terms of what the configuration of the school could look like and if it was on the east side of the clay put ponder if we renovated some of the high school and reap and build new or if we build totally new and knock down the high school the building committee is going to have a series of meetings to talk about that with the public in those meetings for the bill the committee will have right now temporarily be december fourteenth for the initial discussion january eleven to talk about traffic january sixteenth to have an updated conversation about design options and then they will meet with us here on the twenty third when we're deciding our configuration decision they will be deciding their site design options so that can happen at one meeting with us present we thought we could share that meeting together instead of having us all out three separate nights we're trying to consolidate some of those meetings together so we will be presenting this flyer to the community so they can take a long view of all the states on one sheet of paper so they can know when they can get involved how they can get informed they can mark to count as a quarterly for december  january and the goal is to really say out loud we we were able to provide this information over a period of two months and people had opportunities to get involved over those two months and also get educated over those two months about this  so we were thinking today that we might need to hold our december twelve meeting along with the belmont high school building committee but they have agreed to move immediate to the fourteenth so that really is great news because it gives us a chance to have our configurations meeting here i don't know what time and also attend the fourteenth meeting where we're going to learn about the design options as well and it doesn't force the community members to decide which one to go to so we have this p point i will make is that this thursday night we have a joint meeting of the four selectman the school committee and the building committee and at this meeting we will we have been sharing of the building please and sharing different components of sections chair of the board of selectmen so that meeting will be one more chance to kind of look at the materials get updates from the professional design folks in the on a project managers that we have working on this big project and then ultimately feeling comfortable with the document that what we're signing on thursday night or really friday morning is just stating that we've been apprised of the materials that have been going into this process and that we believe that that would put together by the high school building c the pac and forward so the only signature really needed as is leases in mine but it's good to have the whole committee there to endorse or to do a vote if we wanted to vote the intuition of them the materials moving on access or gain access to these conversations so if anyone feels that they're not being or here's a conversation or someone voices gosh i wish my voice had been added whether it's half community members building meeting time that we're trying to find