October 21, 2025 – HRDEI Committee – Video & Transcript
October 21, 2025 - HRDEI Committee
Good evening. I'm Karen Blumenfeld, chair of the Wayland Human Rights, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, and it is 6.02, and we're starting our meeting of the Human Rights, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.
Oh, sorry, it's October 21st, and let's take attendance, and then Maya is going to read the land acknowledgement.
So, I will just go across the screen as I see you, and just say your full name, and that you're here.
Janot?
Janot Mendert-Esuarez here.
Marianne?
Here.
Janot?
Marianne here, sorry.
Denise Fortin here.
Heather?
Heather Pino here.
Sophie?
Sophie Chen here.
Maya?
Maya Raj here.
Kevin?
Here.
Thank you, and Yawu.
Yawu is here.
Okay, I'm going to ask you a favor.
Those of you who haven't changed the name in your square yet, if you could do that using the three dots in the top right corner of your square, that'll help me.
We're getting a lot of Karen today.
Exactly, and there were more of us before you got here.
I don't find any dots on my, in the upper right-hand corner.
Of your square, the upper right-hand corner of your own square.
Oh, okay.
Thank you.
Um, and it'll save me.
I've only got a hand there.
Come on.
Well, if you can't, if you can't do it, but at least there's only one.
The blue button on top of your square, right, Krakula.
I got lost.
Where am I?
If you roll your cursor over your little tiny picture up at the, in the top banner, roll it over the right top corner, and a little blue box with three dots should pop up.
Um, no, I lost, um, I'm not with you people.
I mean, I don't have a.
We see you.
Click on your Zoom, click on your Zoom icon on the bottom of your computer.
And, um, thank you, Mariam, for changing your name.
So, Mariam has joined us at 6.04, and we're just trying to get everybody with their own names in their space.
Right, I gotta leave.
Oh, she's gonna leave and come back.
All right.
I think it's important because the transcript is going to recognize your name.
Yeah, I know.
It is confusing.
Okay.
Um, Maya, would you please read, uh, the line, the preliminary language and the land acknowledgement?
Um, okay. Is it, is the first part, is it? The first part you gotta read, yeah. Thank you. This meeting may be recorded, recorded, which will be made available to the public on WICAM as soon as, after the meeting, as practicable. Items in our agenda may not be discussed in the order listed or at the specific time estimated. Times are approximate. All topics may be subject to deliberation and vote. When required by law or allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so by in-person attendance or by accessing the meeting remotely. We request public comment be limited to two minutes per person. And then the land acknowledgement. Today, as we begin, we would like to acknowledge the following indigenous peoples on whose traditional homelands we live, work, and gather today. The Massachusetts, the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag, and the Pawtucket. We acknowledge their ancestors, particularly the Cardo of the Massachusetts tribe, who was steward of much of the land now encompassing Sudbury and Weyland, when European settlers arrived to colonize this place in 1638. We seek to understand, acknowledge, and remember the painful, ongoing history of war, genocide, and forced removal of indigenous peoples by European settlers. And we offer a living celebration of the indigenous communities who are not just part of the past, but who continue to live and make new history here today. May we all commit to deepening our relationships with indigenous communities and to being their allies and working for justice. Thank you so much, Maya. I don't see anyone here for public comment, so let's move on to introductions with our newest committee member, Sophie Chan. Welcome, Sophie. We're so glad you're here.
I think now that we all have our proper names in our squares, why don't we just go around and say your name and a few words of welcome to Sophie. Sophie Chan. So I'll start. Sophie. Sophie. Welcome. We're so glad you're here. We love having student members. We're really excited that you joined us. We're appreciative to Maya for bringing you into the fold and look forward to having you. We hope you'll feel comfortable speaking up when when you need to and your opinion is always welcome and and we'll be grateful for it. So thank you, Heather. Hi, Sophie. I'm Heather Pino. We exchanged some texts when you first got on the board. So on the committee, welcome. I'm eager to work with you and get to know you. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Marianne.
No, you're muted.
Hi, Sophie. I'm Marianne Burkowski, and I also welcome you and look forward to working with you and all the things that we work on. Thank you, Jano. Hi, Sophie. This is Jano. This is Ippolito, who likes to get paws on the keyboard. I'm just delighted to have you join us, and I know it's going to be, it'll take a little bit of time to feel like you know all of us, but I hope you just know that your ideas and your perspectives, all the student ideas and perspectives are so important. And don't hold back in participating. Thanks for joining. Thank you. Yawu? Hi. Hi, Sophie. I'm Tang Yawu. Welcome to our committee. Looking forward to working with you. Thank you. Denise? Hi, Sophie. It's so good to have you with us. And don't be afraid. Although I'm not a student, I think I was the newest member before you came. It's very painless. Thank you. Mariam? Hi, Sophie. My name is Mariam Libdi. I met you when you had your select board meeting. It's good to see you again. Thank you. And Sophie, if you'd like to say anything, please feel welcome to. And if you're not ready to say anything, that's okay, too. Well, I think you missed Kevin. Oh, gosh. I'm sorry. Y'all are going to have to remind me that because I can't see Kevin's face. Thank you, Kevin. Sophie, I mean, even though I'm on the phone, glad, glad to meet you. And, you know, look forward to working with you on several projects we have going. And, you know, glad you could join our committee. Thank you, all of you, for your words of welcome. I'm also looking forward to making decisions for the better. Thank you. I wonder if other men can change Kevin's phone number to his name. I don't know if that's really hard to do on a phone. I think the committee can. I mean, I don't mean who is the other. Robbie, can you change that phone number to Kevin Goodwin's name? Sure. If you can, that'd be great. And, Maya, did I skip you also? Oh, no. Yeah. I know Sophie, so. That's why I always correct me when I do things wrong here, folks. It's okay. All right. So can we. One thing I noticed, because I was just on the website. Can we ask the powers that be that Sophie's name get added since she's officially on the committee? Yes. And yes, add Sophie to website. And also, I'm trying to sort out some problems with our listserv, which includes people who are no longer with us on the committee, and which doesn't include people who are with us. So we will get this all sorted out. Okay. So let's take a look. And for the benefit of those who may not have it in front of them, I'm going to try to share my screen. So let's take a look at our meeting minute draft. And does anybody have any? Now I can't see all of you, unfortunately. So let me know if somebody, if someone wants to talk to us, let me know. Is there any comments on the September 16th, 2025 meeting minutes? All right. Then would anybody like to move to approve the September 16th, 2025 meeting minutes? Karen, I move approval. Thank you, Kevin. Is there a second? Second. Denise. Denise. Thank you. So Denise seconded. Thank you. Okay. So let's vote. I think it's going to help me to stop sharing so I can see all of you. Okay. Geno. Abstain. I wasn't at the meeting. Oh, gosh. Thank you for doing that. Yes. So who else needs to abstain? What's reminders? Denise does. Denise abstains, Geno, and me. So thank you for that reminder. Okay. Marianne. You're muted. Marianne approves. Thank you. Heather. Yes. Sophie. Well, you weren't here. So you have to abstain. Well, actually, you were here, but you weren't a member. Maya. Yes. Okay. Yahoo. Are you there? Yes. Yahoo. Yahoo. Yes. Thank you. Denise. I had to abstain. You're abstaining. Okay. Mariam. Yes. And Kevin. Yes. Great. Okay. Was he at the September 15th meeting? It said so, I believe. Oh, okay. He left after. Okay. Yeah. He was there. Sorry, Kevin. That's okay. So it's unanimous with abstentions from Denise, Geno, and me, Karen. Thank you, everybody. All righty. Let us move on to the Weyland Festival debrief. I thought it might be good to talk about lessons learned. What went well? What can we do differently next year? And I thought we might start with the Geno, and Yahoo, and Marianne, and then others can also chime in. Okay. Starting with what went well. I think the biggest success of the festival was really the incredible partnership that came together and really embraced the multicultural theme underlying the entire festival. And that wasn't exactly a given in the beginning. So I just wanted to highlight how important the process is and how important both the intention and the perseverance in figuring out how to work as an incredibly diverse team with many, many different town departments and groups and organizations in the community all participating together. And of course, there are many things that we can do better next time, but I felt as though we had really achieved an extraordinary unity of purpose and the way that it was expressed was really just like pure joy on that day. So that's my starting big, big success. And I'll hand over to Yahoo. Okay. I feel the big success is so many people can enjoy the festival together. It's really never happened before. It's so many people from so many groups, so many ethnic groups as well. And this is number one. Number two is, I'm so happy that Egyptian Coptic Church getting involved. So this is really another organization within the Weyland. It's become more actively participating. Also the WCAA, Weyland Chinese American Association is very much deeply involved this year. So, plus with the collaboration with the Recreation Department, they are incredible. They have so much resource and then they really help a lot. Also because of us, Weyland, all the performers, and the Western culture, bringing a lot of Western culture to the festival. That's really great. So I think it's really everyone excited. And I know nobody wants to go next year. So we definitely will do, the town will definitely make us to continue. Marianne? Marianne? So I had to leave early for personal reasons, but I think that this was a fabulous and kind of the first town-wide event of this nature, of so many organizations working together. And it felt very celebratory. I was there. I think we should thank the sun. It's always nice to have sun instead of rain. And so it was a beautiful day. And yes, our Recreation Department was so helpful. And I think all of us, Arts Weyland and Recreation and all the organizations could really see the benefit of doing this together. And it, you know, bodes well for a continuation about this festival and a celebration of our town together. So it was exciting to be a part of it. And we had an estimated 6,000 people there. Is that about what you all understood? That was the police chief's estimate. Unbelievable. Other people want to comment? Yes, Maya. So I was there because, and so I was in the parade and I was like walking with the parade. And I just thought it was so like interesting to see how many people there were. Like I've never seen that from Weyland personally. Like I've never seen an event so big. And I just thought it was really cool to see all like the table set up. And I got to see like all that while I was like walking out. So I was really surprised by all the people and kind of the crowd, I guess. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Yuri, one thing I want to say is when I walked down the, all the tents for the, for the tables. It's made me remember like I was walking in Taipei in the night market. That's how exactly look like. So, but we're in Taipei, we have it every day. It's really enjoyable. Anyone else want to say anything? I mean, I, I'll say something, but if, but I want to make sure others get to speak. Yeah. Heather. I also got positive feedback from people who were there, who stopped by our table and said how great it was. And also feedback that was very positive, doing it as one big festival rather than the separate festivals we've done in the past, or separate events we've had in the past. Yes. I heard a number of people saying, I actually, one person said to me, I've lived here for 50 plus years and have never seen anything like this happening in Weyland. That was actually the best thing I heard. I was really excited to hear that. Yeah. And, and we did it in partnership with all these other wonderful groups. And I think, you know, had we not been doing the multicultural festival the last few years, this wouldn't have happened the way it happened. So, you know, just bringing us together with arts Weyland, with the rec department and touch a truck and the parade and all of it is just an incredible accomplishment. And especially for such a small town, you know, you might expect something like this in Newton, right. And, you know, or Framingham, like these much larger communities, but we're a tiny community and we pulled off this really extraordinary event. And just huge kudos to the, all the people who here and outside this zoom room who, who helped make this happen. It's, it's really an amazing thing. And I'm excited to see what we can, what we can do next year. Um, based on, based on how well it went this year and any lessons learned for how, how we'll do it differently next year. So exciting. I'll just chip in. Please. Any ideas that you have, um, of things that we could do better, um, while they're still fresh in your mind, share them with us either now in the meeting or later. Yeah, I think we'll learn how to work together a lot. We also know who can do what better this year, um, for next year. I think it will be much more easier in that way. There's a lot of technical issues that, uh, we will talk about in our debriefing. And, uh, this is just how we improve, make this better. And, uh, financially we are, we think we are doing okay. Yeah. We're glad that, uh, we, as a, our community was committed to, to raise $5,000 for it. And we're lucky to raise $6,000 so much. So a little bit more than $6,000. And the plus times, uh, we should be okay, but I'm still waiting for Chris to give his part. And so we will have, uh, uh, a final scenes. But I'll just talk to Chanel. We will let our performers know how much they can get to, to show our appreciation. Yeah. Do you want to say something, Shona? Um, yeah, just that, you know, the, the fundraising, um, is also, um, pretty amazing. They're just extraordinary generosity in the community. And I would say that, I mean, it wasn't an enormous amount of outreach and effort to raise really a significant amount of money. And even, um, when we were getting very close to the festival and we had this idea of having the harmony tent, the big tent on the green, um, with some tables and chairs so that there would be a place. We were thinking for older people, especially to, you know, be able to sit during and watch performances and have some activities in there and that it wasn't really budgeted for. But that also stimulated some late, you know, late coming contributions because people were aware, um, that there was a great idea that hadn't been. In the original, you know, budget projections. So I, I feel as though the participation of the, um, the business community and a lot of groups and organizations and individuals that, um, that were just. Inspired to make a financial contribution to be sure that this festival could cover all of its expenses is another, um, community building dimension that, um, it's different kind of participation. But everybody who did participate in that way, um, knows how much they were appreciated and, um, can just feel great that, you know, that they were part of it, that they were listed in all the publicity. And hopefully, you know, we'll, you know, we'll want to continue to support financially. In particular, Sora, a seafood buffet place in Atlantic, they donated a big, uh, grand prize of $2,500. So that's really make everybody excited. Fantastic. Um, quick, quick question, Karen, I mean, I, or anybody on the committee. Committee. Was there any coverage in the women post after the, after the, was there any coverage in the women post about. Oh, yeah. Yes. And, uh, front page bottom of the fold and, uh, quite a few pictures later on with more text about the event. So they did do a follow-up. Yes. Good question. Thank you. Well, one observation is, uh, really, because I'm old and I think more looking at old age needs and then young people's needs, kids' needs. And then in this festival, I think we make, we meet all their needs, especially in the performance with a tent. So a lot of your old people can sit in the tent to enjoy. And I saw the young people. And, uh, this, they were sitting in the grass and enjoy it, including Shona. So relax from the grass. Yeah. And also Marianne had a brilliant idea and had these hula hoops that you could take apart and make different shapes, but the kids just loved playing with those hula hoops. So, I mean, there's lots of ideas for things that worked well that we can go forward with. Marianne thinks of everything, every detail, also for the HRDEIC table. I mean, everything you could imagine and everything you can't imagine, Marianne has thought of. Um, we're just, we're very lucky for that. Thank you, Marianne. Yes, Heather. Um, I was wondering if the committee would consider sending out a survey to the community, like through Michael McCall's, um, newsletter, just to gather feedback. And also it's a way to promote the event and try to include more people in it. Maybe one of the questions is, would you like to be involved next year? Um, so that was just a thought to the planning committee. That's a great idea. I was thinking after you went and said, hmm, we forgot to give, put a survey right at the festival to help them fill out the feedback. Yeah. Not too late. And if you put it in a newsletter with a QR code, you know, then they could just, and with like three questions, you know, I mean, just really short. So people would be willing to do it. Well, they could just put the link right in the, in the newsletter and then maybe Wayland post would be willing to put a QR code. Hmm. Yeah. That's a very good idea. We can, we can work with, uh, recreation department. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's even, that's a great idea. I did team to support this. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great idea. Thanks Heather. That's really great. Um, let's take a quick look. I'm going to share my screen again. Oh, there it is. Um, at the, um, budget. So the select board approved 9,500 to support this effort. And we have a budget here, uh, from Chris showing receipts that we're going to get for basically for infrastructure. So you have the, um, audio equipment, uh, the sound equipment and the tent, the harmony hall tent, um, which add up to a little bit over 9,500, but this is, um, this is this, these receipts will go to the town for reimbursement. So I just wanted to share that. Um, and, uh, and then of course there's other expenses, which the planning team will work it all out afterwards, but this is the part that the, that the town is going to pay. Um, so we will let Kelsey know that when these receipts come in, she should go ahead and pay them. Cause that's what we agreed to, uh, at a previous meeting. And our justification for making such a large request of the town was really because we were shouldering the risk of running the event outdoors, um, at the town green. Um, you know, as I think Marianne mentioned, um, you know, we were very lucky that we had good weather. The fall is generally, um, uh, less risky than the spring. Um, but the, you know, the need for a tent and the stage and, uh, additional infrastructure. Um, I think is going to give a little bit more impetus also to the town, which, um, for a couple of years now has had a budget that was approved to purchase a portable stage. And it's really just a matter of, um, there's not enough money to buy a new one. So it's, it's keeping a finger on the pulse of the national sort of market. And when a used stage that would be appropriate for Wayland's needs comes on the market, somebody has to really pounce on it and actually get on a plane and grab the thing. Um, but we, we think that this will help to, um, give a little bit of impetus to make that happen. Um, and that would be wonderful going forward if we have at least one stage that the town can deploy. Where does that get stored? Just a stupid question, but. Um, DPW would figure that out probably, you know, at their facility on river road somehow. Um, we really not thought that we have this ring stone before and the ring stone after, and then we'll get it the best day in between. Yeah. And there's another issue, which is at the town center, the, the, the green, where we had the stage set up and the harmony tent. Um, that is what did they call it? The municipal pad that was given to the town under an agreement with the developer back in the beginning when the town center was developed. And there was originally a plan for there to be power, um, to that green, which was never realized. And it's gone through subsequent changes in ownership. But this gives a little bit of impetus both to the town and potentially to the new owner to make good, um, on putting power access in, um, to the town green. Fantastic. That's what it has been called. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be, we try to make it on the Google map next year before next year. Oh yeah. That that's another excellent point. Yeah. When, when you, when you Google and put in whale in town green, nothing comes up, but, um, we're, we are in the process of addressing that. So that when people Google in the future, whale in town green, it will direct you to the actual whale in town green. But actually it, it, it sometimes was the old, uh, um, whole, uh, food, the store, the grocery store. Well, just an amazing, amazing show of, of community building of planning of collaboration of pulling off just an incredible program. And I just want to, again, thank the people in this room and the people outside the room who, who work together to make this program such an incredible success. Yeah. Really just, we really appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. We tried to say yes to everybody who wanted to participate in any way and facilitate their being able to be part of making it a success. And I think, um, we, we've kind of created a culture of inclusivity and collaboration around this festival and the planning, uh, modeled that as well as the event itself. Yes. A lot of people put a lot of time. Looks those performers, they spent a lot of time to get ready. The Chinese association has spent so much time to get that dragon and be able to move the dragon that took to manipulate it, drag in to perform it and the bring back to bring the force. And this everyone is so excited and so much involved. you all yeah i think we can feel very proud and and excited about this amazing accomplishment just fantastic i do i do have a quick question what um i know i know it was covered in the women post does anybody remember the date that it was in the women post this last issue um i don't have it with me but does anybody have the date on it because i don't the only issue i have is oh we just received a couple days ago let's see i'm just looking to see if i can find it it was oh online it's hard to see the date october 17. um it's okay does anybody happen to have a copy a copy yeah do you get it it was the one that looks like this in the festival i was in the cup i mean not a copy but a photo actually i have the photo already taken no but does anybody have a copy of the women post that came out probably on october 17 yeah kevin can you kevin can you look at it online because the whole newspaper is online is that an option for you um i could probably look at it online yeah because the article will be there all right all right thanks do you usually get it i i do get it it's just i i was away and i right oh i think i i think i may have passed on the october 17th issue out by accident so yeah that happens okay all right um i think we may be done with this topic we're not done with the festival we will continue to move forward for planning next year's festival but unless anybody has anything else to add um i would suggest we move to the next topic anyone else have anything they want to add okay thank you again everybody um let's move to agenda item number six uh discussion of wayland community life and engagement executive report um and possible vote on recommendations to the select board so heather and dr eden renee hayes and i were invited to the select board meeting last night to talk about to to advise them about how to move forward um with the recommendations in the community life and engagement study so in order to prepare for that uh heather and i put together some comments which and suggestions which um you will have received in your packet and the timing was such that we had to do that before being able to consult with all of you because our meeting is tonight and the select board meeting was last night um so i ask your forgiveness for that uh and also your willingness to take a look at this document together um i guess i should mention that the select board we presented this actually you might if you want just you can watch the select board meeting from last night uh and see we made kind of a longish introduction trying to put the study in the in the context of that the town is facing financial problems but there are data upon data showing that investment in inclusion and belonging is economically beneficial to communities and that you know it's not only the right thing to do it's a smart thing to do strategically for a town because the more people feel they belong in a town the more they care about how things happen in town the more they contribute the more they start businesses um you know the more people want to come here and raise their families here so we tried to make that case in the beginning before diving into some of the details of this document um and you can you can see that or if you're interested i can send you the written remarks or you can watch it on the on the select board meeting but let me share my screen um with the document that we shared with them um and you got this in your packet and basically what we did was um we we suggested a a criterion which you can see right here for that because there's so many recommendations in the report it can be so overwhelming and we said here's a criterion to help us make priorities it's when you look at all those initiatives that the consultant recommended we can ask ourselves will this initiative lead to meaningful improvements in people's lives and we think that that's a really nice organizing principle for helping us make priorities among the many many many recommendations and then we named specific we pulled out specific bullets that we thought um meet this criterion um and so we we had i don't know three four bullet three bullets i guess for each um theme area so wanted to get your thoughts um i don't know if you all had a chance to look at this before the meeting um welcoming your thoughts and then we can talk about next steps do i should i leave this up here or do you have access to it and i should take it down please let me know what you'd like keep it up okay um okay so can we ask how did the select board respond yeah so not surprisingly they are very concerned about finances um they have 10 years of perspective um proposition two and a half overrides ahead uh and so you know the budgets for town the town are extremely tight and and we know that they basically um encouraged us to look for grants to do this work and then they you know they talked about different possibilities uh michael mccall mentioned that the town the insurance company the town uses does have some kind of risk management training um that related to belonging and inclusion we don't know we don't have a way of knowing anything about that content um one one uh select board member suggested uh you know how in businesses they use videos and actually we do too in the town the state makes us watch a bunch of videos about all sorts of training things um what we said in response to the idea of using training videos is this work is relational this belonging and inclusion work is relational and you and you don't get it from a video you need to be working with other human beings to to do this work and forming relationships and learning in the context of you know mistakes we make and learning from our mistakes and and and and you know figuring out how to have relationships across cultures across differences it's a skill set and you you don't it's not easy to learn that just from videos so i agree with you 100 i'm glad you said i heard you say that yesterday i said wonderful thank you um and so they encouraged us to look for grants they asked us to come up with budgets for all these different bullets because they noticed that all the bullets under the how section all of the bullets say we you know you need to hire or assign a qualified person or hire a consultant um and they said well that costs money so um they fairly fairly asked us can you so can you tell us what the budget range might be for each of these items and so i do think that's a worthwhile thing and dr hayes rightfully you know responded and said well it depends on you know are you doing a training every week or a training every month or you know it kind of depends but i do think we can come up with some proposed um budget ranges with assumptions showing what the assumptions are um and that that'll be important to give them a sense of orders of magnitude i feel as though um you know the select board is receiving similar requests from many different departments that want another you know full-time equivalent or part-time person that you know just feel overloaded overburdened and we need to be able to show the value add which i think you guys did a great job of um you know kind of demonstrating the larger uh value and equating it to an economic um benefit or incentive for participation more participation in the town but this um need for i mean it's basically a knowledge manager who um has to have a finger on the pulse and be doing the coordinating and the tracking uh keeping track of you know the performance metrics um for the town to know whether or not the investment is driving any kind of results and that doesn't mean that we need an enormous budget for a lot of activities i think you know the the fundraising looking for grants for you know activities part of that can be done you know by that full-time equivalent but that person could also work with um people in different town departments could have you know for example join the you know town managers meetings and keep other people apprised of what needs are and also could be um supported by you know volunteers you know from the community who could be writing grants or you know pursuing fundraising for specific programs and activities but i i don't i don't um i don't want to let us back off on the need for a knowledge manager um because we know that there's a lot of competition for those scarce resources to actually fund the position yeah i think they were leaning if if anything they were leaning more toward hiring consultants rather than you know staff because they have a hiring freeze so yeah that was kind of a non-starter but that's the whole thing with the consultants you don't have the continuity you don't have that finger on the pulse and you don't really have a way to be working towards a roll-up of indicators that give you performance metrics that that justify the expenditure in the end marianne i saw your hand up and i can't see everybody at once so if any after marianne if anybody else wants to talk give a holler um well i have a couple of comments um first um i know it's a tough first of all i want to thank you for doing this um and doing it you know for the meeting last night um when you didn't have a chance to talk to all of us and really appreciate that and i think you did a great job and um the uh um i was at a meeting another non-profit meeting last night and they they said you know there's uh um you know groups uh non-profit groups need to stand up and say this is important and um just kind of what what you made the points you made at the beginning of the meeting last night um thank you so much for doing that also and i think we should just look for opportunities to read to repeat that um over the next um over the next year um and uh so i don't know how we can think about that but we um that you know even if it's just to show up at the select board and um or write a letter to the select board saying reiterating that we feel this is important and that when money is tight that's not a time to um to pull back on this and you you just said why it really helps our community if they don't pull back on that um but one specific um idea i have is that um uh in um in books i've read um uh like bowling alone um bowling uh uh yeah anyhow uh by sociologists is that people who were working together to create something um working on a specific thing um then that helps them you know feel a community like they're building community and we have lots of lots of committees and um to be honest um you know and and uh for i'll just i've been here 20 years and um granted i'm in hrdic um but you know many times it looked like it was an exclusive club out there and all the same people were in all these organizations and and each of the committees which actually having said that everybody who volunteers in town and there's a lot of volunteers in town they work very very hard and really appreciate their work and but if you know maybe there's an opportunity that every committee would um put out a notice and say you know we're inviting people to come and um participate uh hear what we're doing and um and they might even actually have a role for people so you know and you know you might ask people to each of those committees to see if there's some way that um some outreach to the community to help them work on something that they're doing yeah at the bottom of this page that um i have highlighted here that's exactly what this item is here that i just highlighted exactly what it is it's for equitable selection processes for um hiring but also it's getting more people involved uh with volunteering so that um so that our committees and boards look like the town as they say look like the the the population in the town just say one more thing um at one point we were um i was interviewing the town planner and i was shocked to find out that the town planning department is the town planner one person he doesn't even have an administrative helper so you know that's you know we're lean and mean in town and um but you know so that it needs us and and we need it so anyhow just thought i'd say that yeah anybody else want to add thoughts about um this document or the presentation or the select boards response heather i'm wondering um it does anybody want to give feedback in terms of the priorities uh is there anything missing from this document i i agree with karen i was able to listen to the meeting um today that if we want to keep this moving forward we need to go back with some more specific examples of of how much things would cost um you know i completely agree for all the reasons you said the money would be better spent up front and in the long term to hire a person um and i'm from what i heard at the meeting i i don't know if there's a chance of that we can keep asking um and i think in the long term that would be better spent money than doing this piece mail hiring consultants to do things um but at a minimum if we could give them a budget and the other piece is if anybody on our committee has ideas for grants and um i think that would be helpful if we could give that information so do people agree with the recommendations did we miss anything um before we move forward with the next piece and when you say miss anything i mean there might be stuff that people in this room might think of that wasn't in the report but all of this comes out of the report so i think you know tell us if we missed anything that was in the report yes that we forgot to prioritize yeah yeah that's what i'm sorry that's what i'm thank you for clarifying yes within from the report that we missed i wonder instead of cover many areas can we pick up one area one small specific area to focus on and which we know we can have a results because a lot of things very hard to do
especially when talking about the time employees the way is that the piece we want to get involved now which piece which piece yo the town employees oh town employees it's more of the time manager will be so like this piece here is this what you're talking about the one highlighted yeah yeah time employee no i mean the two get involved with volunteer opportunities yes and the two whether whether it's within the time employee whether it's uh uh dei or not and i think that's the time manager they seem so i suppose doing that now anyhow so i i'm more looking i'm looking for is uh yes get the volunteers opportunity more involved okay that's the goal that's a small specific goal yeah you think that solid will be good so we can make sure that our results yes very good point marianne um actually um the item in number two the last item might be um you know the time communication translations and things um personally um as a as a white um uh woman uh the i think it's uh um that only speaks english it's an excellent reminder to me when i see other languages that there are lots of other people with other languages around and i think it's um and i think it's doable you know there's lots of translation services online and it would just be you know if we would just at least make a priority so that um not only would we make um whatever town communications like it's a town manager letter um granted people who um who actually um have you know can actually have on their own computer translation into a language that they speak but a reminder on this um on the town manager um newsletter for example a reminder that you know translation is available blah blah blah blah blah and um if we would think about that in many of our communications and let's get some few more signs um uh you know think about signage um yeah i know anyhow we think we could might be able to do something that is impactful and visible and probably doesn't cost money that doesn't cost a lot of money you know translation reminding people we somehow um and maybe maybe we actually have you know some um anyhow i i think well and the schools do it the schools actually have um a a little handheld um uh piece of equipment that in case of a family member who speaks who only speaks other well and you might be talking to them on an emergency basis you need you need to have them hear it in their own language so that you're not guessing that they are interpreting what you're saying or that you're trying to um how you're communicating this and they have something that communicates that and um you know that'll translate for um parents that come in so you know there's that is there and it's in our town so let's see if there's ways to make it more visible um and and bring it up as a fact that we are doing it because all that you know advertises that we are diverse and we are embracing diversity we're supporting diversity and we want all you know anyhow thank you uh heather um i totally agree with you and as i was listening to it made me realize we could lead by example and all of our statements that we're only posting in english we could you know use we could we could do better ourselves can't we link to i mean this is a whole nother conversation wait okay how about if a couple of people um offline do some exploration of this and see what the options are um marianne i feel like you've already started doing that because this has been on your mind for a long while um is there somebody who would be willing to work with marianne and and explore this and come back and talk to us about what the options are okay i can try i can help okay yeah i probably i may not have exactly the same view because i more look at like it's uh at least from chinese point of view i don't see the need to really need for because all the every family will have someone be able to speak english well okay let me suggest that the two of you have this conversation and and bring it back and brainstorm it together and then come back to us with some ideas um denise aaron i just want to say that uh most people that don't understand english that well um now bring their phone and it has an app on it so whatever we say translates into their language and then they can say in their own language and it comes back to us in english yep i know google translate is like an amazing an amazing tool yes agreed all right so um as a kind of next steps uh if marianne and yahoo will come back to us with some suggest concrete suggestions for that that we can then bring to the uh select board well or the town manager or both um but in turn and and in terms of this larger document um suppose heather and i and and hopefully dr hayes eden renee hayes can work together on a sort of an a la carte menu of uh uh budgets for these maybe not all of them but maybe some selection of these bullets um is there any so i'm i'm willing to do that and i'm volunteering you heather to work with me and hoping um that dr eden renee hayes will work with us on that what i want to know is does anyone here have grant writing experience like does any i'm thinking the town might have a database of grants that they might be able to search for us and figure out some grants that might be relevant do any of you have grant writing experience who would be willing to uh take a shot at um at doing a grant application if what once we identify appropriate ones i can help with that wonderful i have something to add i know um like we just talked about this but for the accessibility for like the translation to other languages i know that at some point um the school would send out these weekly emails to like parents and stuff like that and at the bottom it'd be like to access this language click this link to access this one click this link so i feel like that could be really helpful exactly and marianne also noticed that and so i think that's exactly the kind of thing we ought to be able to concretely then come to the select board with and say look look look what they do at the schools let's do the same thing yeah thank you maya that is that's great and maya if you want to uh send an example of one of those to um either directly to marianne or send it to me and i'll send it to marianne and yahoo whatever whatever works but i'd love i'd love to see that myself so if you could send me a copy i'd like to see that too thank you um okay so i think we have a plan for following up um i don't know if we need to do we need to vote that that or is it the sense okay so is it the sense of this committee that the recommended the proposed priorities that we suggested in this document um are representative of the hrdeic do you all feel comfortable saying that or agreeing to that i see a nod i can't see all of you um do we need to vote or maybe we bring back the information to the next meeting and then we can vote on presenting whatever we've found to the select board the next time sounds great okay okay good um i know this the report is so overwhelming and and it when you go through it by yourself i think it's really hard to figure out what the priorities are but but together you know we were able to to kind of try to try to wade through it and figure it out especially having a criterion for evaluating um so hopefully i think i i think this is a a pretty good shot at it but if if anybody notices anything from the report that's that would have um uh would lead to meaningful improvements in people's lives that we missed of course let me know um and we'll go from there that sounds great any any other anything else about this topic or the meeting with the select board uh karen marianne wanted to um i just wanted to say that um when denise and i um made a presentation about the spirit council so i most people would know you know the spirit council uh that that workshop we had a year and a half ago or two years ago now and yeah i just want to say even though we're in this budget tough budget time um the select board was very receptive they were excited to hear about these ideas um and uh and wanted to be inclusive so we have to help them do what they want to do and have any comments on the multicultural festivals i'm sorry is that a quite what questions yeah when you guys develop this is a multicultural festival is one of way they are thinking it's that type of things they are looking at or they are looking at what's it we're all looking for one way to to achieve our goal i think some it sounded like some members of the committee are looking at things like events so yes yahoo some i think some people are supportive of events i have no idea it didn't come up in terms of supporting that event next year um support i mean it's will this to say this kind of activity is is that fit into this uh uh the code they try to determine or uh could be one of the things they want to do oh it's in addition to oh it's totally different directions so um is there something there i think there was something in the community i know there was something in there about um doing joyful things in the community um and so i think you're asking should we be adding a bullet in here about doing those joyful things so it doesn't fall off the select board's radar is that what you're saying is that what you're suggesting i just mean i try to figure out this uh the difference i try to differentiate okay since we've already been doing and what additional things we try to do and um so one thing we're doing okay we're doing a couple of things we try to encourage the people to join uh join uh join uh join the punk committee yes a little bit of progress and the way we do this uh first of all try to get the people interact yes they don't know each other better yeah let me let me look let heather and i look at the yeah we'll look at this so it's 705 and i want to get to the next topic because we have a guest coming at 7 15 actually i should look at see what i'm keeping an eye to see if she comes okay um so let heather and uh heather and i will we'll look at that and see whether we ought to put that in here or whether we ought to be dealing with events separately i don't know the answer to that let us give that we'll have to do this yeah i just try to to call you the integrate thank you thank you i want to talk for a minute before our guest comes uh about um human rights day in december um asma is not here unfortunately tonight she um had something come up um she said she is willing to work on it again mariam did she talk to you about it no we didn't have a chance to connect okay um she was going to talk to you about it and explore your interest in working with her on it did you by any chance come to last year's human rights day i did not uh remind me what day would it be yeah it's i don't last year it was december 10th is it always marianne is it always the same day each year it's yeah the same day okay um so so i think it's december 10th and um marianne do you want to speak for a moment about um what you did last year what we did last year and it was so well attended um we had uh people come and read i think there's i can't remember now i'm embarrassed to say there are 25 or 30 um uh statements human rights that are are listed and people came and read them and many read them in a different language um that was actually a kind of last minute thought so it was it was very meaningful in that way and um and we didn't unfortunately we didn't get a recording of it because we just had trouble with um uh the um sound machine um so but it was really powerful and i cannot i think i think in today in today's environment we need that even again you need it again are you were willing to work on it again marianne yes and actually um but when i had talked to the village bank because they invited them to come and talk at it and they had even offered you know a little money last year so i'm thinking that if we go to them again you know we could get a few hundred dollars to do to support if there's something else we want to do we didn't i didn't actually ask them for money because we kind of brought some snacks and and i thought we had enough for our displays but anyhow um we can reinvent the wheel though and uh and we just need to make sure we get it would be nice to be in the new co coa building and yes so can i ask if you would so the coa building um you'll have to it's all an in-person event you're not zooming it you're not live streaming it right we could no we could do that um i don't think it just didn't work out so well on with through way cam so great activity that uh marianne that you and asma did with building the wreath out of hands and um which i mean in and of itself it just is fun makes you feel like you're part of something and in the event you've quickly created something that is meaningful we could maybe think about doing a w out of hands like you know in alyssa's wayland festival logo yeah and and now we could do it a little we could plan to do it earlier we even could get you know some in prep so that way it's like advertising because you know we're really thinking about it now yeah so yeah so
so that there's more participation um and people don't have to read there's something everybody can do yeah is it possible for us to get this in the um november newsletter from michael so a save the date i think we've already missed can't remember if i saw that i don't remember what date they send it out on yes we can get it in the november one if we can get a save the day yes for um human rights day that that's a great idea in the newsletter um and so we need to reserve a space so marianne would you be willing to work with asma and um mariam i know oops is mariam here oh there she is yeah yes sorry you changed places um you could chat with them separately and see if this is something you'd be interested in working on too but we need to get a reservation for a room and a flyer um with a save the date yes that we could get in the newsletter we could get in the newspaper um and all of that so that would be just brilliant if if y'all are willing to do that again and so mark your calendars december 10th is a wednesday um so let's do it we have november 10th the da coming um anyway we'll get to our other events but yes it's it's another it's a month away but yes let's let's do that that's fantastic um thank you so much you marianne you you you have brought so much creativity to these things i don't have a creative bone in my body so i just really love the the creativity you bring to these um and mariam i'm sure you're you also have a ton of creativity so um if it's something that you want to be involved with it'll be another amazing event um so thank you and yeah and you don't have to decide now i don't want to put you on the spot mariam no i i was going to say yes i will work with them hey thank you you put yourself on the spot thank you so much um okay so our guest who should be here soon is um caroline han who from the wayland public schools she's the director of diversity equity and belonging and the metco academic dean uh and she's going to talk to us about um the hate crimes grant that uh that the schools got and also her current work with educators um so we're a couple minutes oh wait there you are caroline that's you that's you with with my name so if you could go three dots oh my gosh i'm i'm also called karen blumenfeld on my screen everybody came with that because i sent the link out because nobody got the link for reasons i don't oh okay hi karen so i'd be happy to be you so everybody's karen blumenfeld tonight so yeah thank you okay we were carefully watching the attendees and forgot that you got the link just like we did are you here perfect timing so i was just introducing you and i'm so glad that it's so funny thank you for joining us of course yeah um so we know you're here tonight to uh tell us about the um uh wayland public schools hate crime prevention grant and your work with educators and we have about a half hour for this discussion we're really excited may i share my screen so i can we think so i i i created a presentation oh yay okay so what i want to do is just give you an overview and then leave plan hopefully at least 15 minutes of at least half the time for questions okay so just to frame it we have a district goal around belonging and equity and our the hate crime prevention grant is part of our work just to ensure that all students and staff especially those with marginalized identities feel a sense of belonging in the district very similar kind of in parallel to the work of this commission actually so just to give you the context um in november of 23 the administration governor healy the healy just driscoll administration um created not just for schools but a statewide initiative to combat and prevent hate crimes and this is a quote from the director of the secretary of education who also is a for i see janelle nodding the former wayland high school principal so look at what hat can happen once you leave ls i mean wayland all right so happy to say that wayland has been awarded this grant a very competitive grant for three consecutive years and so this is fy 24 we got fifty thousand dollars fy 25 another 50 and then this year because we were awarded it in the past we could apply for only half of the money half of the funding and they reserve a certain percentage for uh low income districts so it's even it's even greater that wayland um has received this grant right so there are two main areas of the where the funding has gone and one i'd like to put in the bucket of student programming and curriculum and the second bucket is really a building the capacity of adults to combat and also hopefully prevent hate crimes acts of hate and bias hate crimes is an extreme but more acts of bias and hate which are more similar to what you would see more consistent with what you would see in schools okay so here just the some examples of how the how we've used the money so one is with curriculum work so um since i came five years ago we have used the learning for justice formerly teaching for tolerance social justice standards in the k-5 curriculum to try to anchor our units in one of the four pillars that they have that are listed there and so that last two summers ago teachers from each of the grade levels worked on one or more units to strengthen the integration of those standards in the scope and sequence okay we also funded a group based in boston it's also been called urban improv if you're familiar with that name and read they've been rebranded as rehearsal for life they did they i don't know performed is the right word because it was so interactive they led assemblies for middle school students for all three grade levels about identity bias and belonging and there were skits they were skits that then they invited students to come up on stage and re reenact the scene how could this have been handled differently so i went to a bunch of them and they were the students really responded positively and the feedback was really positive we also funded tickets for the eighth grade field trips um for all eighth graders on one of their field trip days into boston to go see the auschwitz exhibit which is actually a traveling exhibit so it's no longer in boston but if you want to go to cincinnati i believe it's there okay we also funded summer work for ninth grade modern world history teachers to work on their unit on the holocaust genocide and hate they wanted more consistency across teachers right and also to make sure that there was um emphasis on the vocabulary and terminology around what is a genocide what happened during the holocaust etc okay we also hired someone who you may recognize her name danica manza brown she was used by wayland can or hired by wayland can a few years ago to do some workshops with k-5 parents and then parents of middle school and high school students some of you may have gone to it so we um hired her as a consultant to help us develop a survey for all high school students that they did during advisory block around their sense of belonging and then also we followed up with what we call listening sessions sessions where students were invited um to attend a session facilitated by her and i was there as the wayland person and also the transcriber of the really was like a focus group to talk about what are their experiences at the high school right so so that's the social that's excuse me that's a student programming curriculum and i'm going to leave plenty of time if you'll follow up questions as i'm sure you do okay the second piece is building the adult capacity to prevent and respond to acts of hate and bias so we hired a hr consultant to assist us because we realized we had a big hole we don't we didn't have a non-discrimination protocol and it's so important for any person to any student teacher staff member community member parent etc to have a mechanism to submit either anonymously or with their name a way to say this thing happened so we hired someone to help us write it and then we also she provided trainings last year which was the first year of the implementation for all staff obviously all administrators um and i was i i helped assist with those as well a huge chunk of our funding has gone towards restorative justice trainings excuse me if there's it's missing the t it sounds like it's rain it looks like rainings but it's trainings for whalen staff and it's a voluntary um on a voluntary basis so far it's been in the summers of 2024 and 25. i really like the word of restorative practices more than restorative justice because justice has this connotation of love the you know punishment but really what we were learning was the circle practice the tier one circle practice which is all about community because oftentimes when students um say things that cause harm right they target a person's identity an identity marker and when they lack empathy it is often because they feel no connection to the group or the person or people harmed so the purpose of circles with students and with adults is to before something happens to have a strong sense of community so that when harm occurs they feel like i am i have i have a vested interest in repairing the harm because i am a member of this community and so is this other person or people does that make sense okay the money also went for my capacity building as the director of d diversity equity and belonging and sort of administrator of this program that's district-wide so starting last summer and all the way through june i was involved in an intensive professional certification for restorative justice run through suffolk university happy to say i graduated successfully i also wanted to build capacity within each building so i am 0.7 and i go to i'm spread i mean i visit all the schools but i'm only one person and i'm not even one person i'm i'm a fraction of a person in terms of this role so one piece that was really important to me was building the capacity of school-based staff so that teachers would have a leader within their school that they could go to that same day right with a question or if something happened in their classroom so we um we developed a program called the deb diversity equity and belonging lead teachers that are under my they work with me i don't wouldn't say under but they i collaborate with them there are one or two in every school and they do a ton of amazing work and if you want to hear more about the work they're doing i can explain that later but we needed to be able to pay them for their time we also purchased a hundred copies of the book accountable by dashka slater and then we invited all the community to participate in a community book discussion there were i think two of them last year okay and so then i just thought i'd end with some photos and so one here's one of the assemblies and there's some of the middle school students who came up on stage okay this is so it was important in our conception of it that all building leaders and central office staff who work directly with students be trained so if you look around the room and you know people you'll notice that almost all of the people in this circle are either central office or building administrators because if and our goal is to eventually extend this practice of looking at um acts of hate and bias as a violation of community norms you we can't expect teachers and or students to do this work unless the administrators are trained so that was my my framing and so we we were all trained in it this was the summer of 2024 there are some staff as well because we filled it to 24. okay and this is one from this is a tier one circle training from just this past summer look how happy they are all right and our deb lead teachers for this school year and i listed them all they are presenting every month they call we call the deb lt 10 so in those 10 minutes they present whatever we've either we've decided as a group we want to be communicated across all five schools sometimes that's a teaching strategy around warm demand how to be a warm demander sometimes that's an update or reminder about the non-discrimination protocol sometimes it's something unique to that building but they work they they're doing an incredible job especially because we're creating something that has never existed before and this is our second year so we feel like pros but we're but we're figuring it out as we go along and then i wanted to leave time for questions and discussion what a great presentation wow thank you so much um i'm just so happy to see all that you're doing it's it's really impressive what an investment the town uh the excuse me the schools are making in this work that is incredibly exciting um any comments questions that people have uh jenno nope you're muted sorry sorry so i mean it's just so fantastic that um you're able to secure those grants and initiate all this amazing grant supported work so i guess what i'm wondering is um how you're addressing the kind of you know sustainability issues and fall forward and to what extent will this be kind of rolled into um you know normalization of in-service training to to really solidify this new which isn't like cast in stone either it's more like participating in a process how how can how can you eventually get like majority of staff um really involved are you looking back from the beginning this kind of sustaining and fall forward strategy yeah it is very important uh it's restorative justice training is very it is expensive so what has held us back from doing it has been the cost and so we've been fortunate that the governor's office has funded you know whatever it is however many hundreds of thousands of dollars every year specifically for k-12 public schools um and where and that has gone that actually we didn't know about the grant until for the last but we've been awarded it for three years but it's been in existence for four but however some of what we have learned especially in tight fiscal times is that we do need to be really creative about finding sources outside of what i call the operating budget which is not my lane actually the operating budget uh however this year for example in terms of sustainability we have been offering the restorative justice trainings in the summer and there are teachers it's hard to get teachers together during the summer and sometimes people rightfully want their summers off so this year because we awarded the grant again we're going to run them in january and we're providing sub coverage so that teachers don't have to take time away from their families to be able to take the training and there's a lot of interest in doing the training what suffolk has told us though is that making it mandatory when they've done mandatory staff trainings it doesn't work well and it can build um almost a resistance from staff so so we're we're working with the willing and we're trying to train more and more building leaders in addition to like um not building leaders but i mean teacher leaders within each building and then people have started integrating them in the meetings they run so at the middle school in a cluster meeting for example or in a in a curriculum meeting and things like that so people even people who haven't been formally trained are being brought into the process in that way i hope that answers your question thank you and i just want to state one piece my focus because of our time was really on the hate crime prevention grant so there are other wonderful things happening in the district outside of just this grant and but i and there's so much richness within the grant that i want to be able to answer your questions about it i have a question um and you you might have said this so forgive me if you did but what i think about is you know you you're so wisely making sure that all the people and the the administrators you know teachers students did you talk about parents if you did i'm sorry i missed it we have not talked you mean parent training no we have not talked about parent training um and and and that is something for us to think about and consider i i would hope that if the town had funding that there would be community-wide training around restorative justice uh because it's so expensive to run and we're also hoping to build the capacity so that staff who have tier two and three once we go through all can start to do or co-facilitate with suffix some of the trainings to lower the cost um marianne what's happening with the freedom team and the freedom team coalition and restorative justice um well actually um we have on our website november 10th there's a restorative training presentation oh that's the same night the da is coming okay da that's that's what they're coming she's coming to talk about restorative justice oh right you're right she's not talking about restorative justice no you all had some there's some other initiative there is the freedom collaborative which is um made up of freedom teams in a bunch of different towns are they have they are providing restorative justice training and i don't know the dates because i didn't sign up for it and so up to two members from each one of the teams can join that so i don't know who our team people are from our wayland but but they have access to that yeah who's going from wayland do we know anybody i'm going good yeah and we have a lot of our officers uh from our local police department that are going to be there as well fantastic the wayland police department has done i i don't know if all their staff but they have had extensive restorative justice training i've got a grant from the sudbury foundation for that and maybe other yeah other questions i have a couple uh thank you for the presentation caroline i'm going to throw these three questions at you um first of all about the deb um teachers are they advertised to the students as the deb representative in that school do the students know that they're a resource they're they're really a teacher-facing resource to build the capacity of the adults usually students when they when something happens they go to a trusted adult so really having these people i don't know that i don't know that they would be utilized by students um but it's it's something to think about but that's not their current con that's not in within their responsibilities currently and what's your second question um other question was about the upcoming plan this is last year's plan so you know this is this is the past i combined fy 24 through 26 in one presentation okay so it's some of the stuff is in the past but for example the restorative justice trainings are all like we only got half the money right so we have 25 000 and that's going to towards expanding our rj trainings to offer it to more staff okay i'll go to you uh my third question is can you speak more about the curriculum update that was done to the ninth grade curriculum so i don't know i can't really go in depth about it because um that was really the social studies department head and his team i do know though because we funded it we funded it because because ninth grade modern world history has a unit um which they were originally they did some summer work with facing history and and they wanted to as a result of october 7th and events in the world they wanted to reevaluate their curriculum make sure there was more alignment across sections and also um make sure that they they wanted to take a look at the materials they were using so as a as the public school deb director your input was not taken in those changes no i i don't i i am very much like if you if you would like me to help you please reach out to me that is sort of my role i'm not i don't go in i don't i don't make decisions about curriculum however having said that k-5 really wanted a more robust deb element to their k-5 curriculum so i suggested this framework of using the learning for justice social justice standards which i think are excellent and then i ran a couple of summer workshops worked with teachers helped them develop units they changed their fifth grade biography project to a change makers project to be more in alignment with desi's new social studies standards for fifth grade and so all of the people that they they they research now are people who have in some way fought for change fought for social justice fought for the rights of people who have historically marginalized identities and the fifth grade has done an incredible job of finding the live with the library finding books that the students can research finding a whole range of people to research um in all different areas and really helping students understand that um in terms of race for example it's really important to acknowledge and research and know your white allies and up standards people throughout history who for example without president johnson we would not have our civil rights act of 1964 right so like the the importance of white people who are in positions of power and influence um doing the right thing sometimes at great risk to their personal and professional um i don't know what to call it life if you will they've taken those risks and so it's important for white students for all students but especially for white students to know that there are a lot of white people who have stood alongside and sacrificed a lot so this list is is very broad and i'm really proud of the fifth grade team for what they have done may i ask as a follow-up question um one more and then and then i want to give other people a chance sure generally how does the process of people asking for part of the this grant work uh come again can you ask it another way so the grant the grant is given to the director specifically or to the school no no no no so i'm the one who gets the fun of spending hours and hours and hours writing the grant collecting the evidence making a case for why whalen deserves the grant there are many requirements uh there you need to prevent present that this it's just a so i'm the one who submitted it okay and then i work in collaboration with the principals but especially with david with the superintendent david fleishman and assistant superintendent betsy gavarin i don't decide what the funding is or where the money's going to go that is a collaborative effort and then we submit it and wait and hope and then when the grants have come through and it's up to like who's going to be responsible for administering this who's going to be responsible contacting rehearsal for life and suffolk university i have done that and then brought in the principals and whoever else to help me with um or for me to support them in administering it so no i'm not i'm not um it's not in my i don't even have a budget but if it were it's not in my budget yes heather do you know if the middle school and high school use the learning for justice standards as well they do not they do not um i think i am not sure but from my understanding they go k through five but that could be wrong about that i know that they it's not that they don't teach about justice and such but they don't use that frame thanks you're welcome jenna good to see you um so we um as a committee um were a couple years ago we were making more of an effort to sort of uh build relationships with different parts of the town and um a couple of us heather and i actually were delegated to meet with a couple of members of the school committee and honestly we didn't really get very far um there were a lot of difficult things going on and it was as though well because things are difficult we can't talk about those things so i mean that was what we needed to talk about but i recently was um uh a participant in um a fantastic presentation that was made by a member of the local mormon community to share with the west and wayland interfaith action group their process of trying to educate the high school um his specifically history department to counteract in a constructive way i think there were five families that collaborated on making this approach and trying to do it in a constructive way so that they could be both highlighting um specific legal and human rights um infractions that have had become um perpetuated within the wayland high school uh specifically about mormon history and the way that mormon students were for example asked to self-identify and if they were in the room that certain presentations weren't used and students are being targeted and called racist and you know expected to represent a whole community so that there were a lot of levels to what was going on but i felt that the mormon community had approached it um in a really reasoned and really constructive way and the great outcome was that um you know so the conclusion the presentation that they were quite satisfied with the understanding that had been enlarged um and that there was a you know kind of a positive way forward and i was just wondering if you had been part of that at all um and and also whether maybe kind of sharing that story i was thinking of inviting her to come do that presentation you know with our committee to just share that story to give us both an example of a great way to you know approach a very difficult situation constructively but also to kind of give us um moral courage that when other things come up there there is a way through and i guess one of my um questions is were you aware that that was going on were you involved do you get informed by school administration when these kinds of things waves come through i did not know about this uh and i'm i i'm curious and i'm happy to follow up with dave it would be if they worked with the social studies department to be dave schmier and to find out more about it um so thank you for sharing that and the answer to your question is that there is no formal process where people have to tell me anything really or schools really it's really depends on honestly like if they tell me that then i know and if i if they don't tell me that i don't know like it really is um i i will say this though the non-discrimination protocol every time someone submits one of those forms um betsy gavin and i are the two people in the district who receive those so in that way when people fill them out i'm certainly more aware than i was two years ago of incidents of alleged hate bias or discrimination so i found that really helpful and sometimes like a teacher may say this new spirit council along those lines i'm a member of the spirit council yes chief burman recruited me and so i said of course i will because i you know but it doesn't have like we don't really have an official capacity so it's kind of a little tricky but um there's some high school students on the committee as well so i think you're talking about the freedom team oh yeah oh oh oh i am i'm talking about the freedom team thank you karen the spirit i then the spirit i was part of the spirit committee that that led to the spirit workshop but i'm not still on the spirit if there is a spirit committee i'm not oh it finished its war it finished its work but you guys are doing ongoing work gotcha so um why don't we take one more question and then um i think we'll probably wrap wrap up this part of the meeting is there is there a last question from someone who hasn't spoken yet is there a last question from someone who has spoken yet heather i was just wondering um if you have any ways i heard you talk earlier about restorative circles in the community are there other things that we can be doing given that we're theoretically on the town side of the town schools to support the schools you know i think that so the schools are part of the community it's like a microcosm of the town and the schools also represent people who i mean the the the school communities also have people who have a different zip code right they don't reside in wayland although they are members of the wayland community and so one one thing i think is means a lot is inclusivity of people who are members of the wayland school community but who do not have the same zip code so when there are these big public events like for example our wayland festival is it was it called the wayland festival was that okay so the fact that there was transportation provided to boston students and families who wanted to attend the wayland festival that is like just thinking of it's just it's a it's a forward-thinking move that means a lot even if people don't get on the bus like even if people can't go just the offering of it so for example this year um the de blts worked with the principals and the metco directors and we offered transportation and free child care for a boston resident families to attend back to school night or curriculum night whatever they call it right and so the participate the percentage of boston parents who attended back to school night went through the roof it was and people who even couldn't go said thank you for thinking of us right and so i think that's one one small it's not small because it's not small however i would just say that that's one piece and i think the wayland has done a lot like through wayland can through the hrdeic through forming this freedom team so a lot of good is happening in wayland i think that engaging community members especially parents who aren't really thinking about issues of privilege or of the experiences of people who are not in the dominant group could be really helpful so that they're having conversations with their children and there's so much um through like an organization like embrace race so parents have access to incredibly sound quality content through an organization such as that that can help them navigate so um what kind of questions to ask your kid right not just how was your school day what did you learn right but there and the books that they choose and the restaurants they choose to go to and where they who their dentist and doctor and like all these ways that we can have our children come into genuine authentic contact with people who look different than them and are come from different backgrounds it's really important because white people are the most racially excluded i mean racially isolated of any of the groups right so and and i think that is true for any of the isms who really parents especially when their kids are younger they control who i mean sometimes to some extent who their play dates are with and things but just to expand kids exposure to um people who are different from them i think that's like yeah it's really important carolyn i wanted to let you know that that we're very careful in our written materials that when we're talking about the wayland community we don't say wayland residents we say people who live work yes yeah live work worship study in town or send their kids to school here i've noticed that that's yeah i've really noticed that and and thank you for highlighting that because i think that i've i have i've appreciated that and noticed it so i'm and i'm sure i'm not alone good good well listen thank you so much for coming i don't know what you all are seeing on your zoom screens but i'm going to tell you what i'm seeing caroline you in this and with your beautiful background there you are in the middle of all of our schools and it's so beautiful and that's how i feel i feel like we want to envelop you with our love and appreciation oh thank you so so much and i'm happy you know to come and talk to this group individually or as as a whole group anytime thank you so much for coming really appreciate it and we're welcome we're continuing conversations with you keep on keeping on thank you you as well bye bye all right um excellent so we're kind of more or less running on time here um i just wanted to let's see uh item number nine discussion of just quickly acknowledge that the first library program of conversations for change um facilitated by dr reed and renee hayes took place last week it was fabulous there was a quite a good turnout i don't know i didn't count but maybe 30 people there um and hopefully we can get even more people the next time as always she did a wonderful job of facilitating um a discussion about george washington which you might think would be kind of dull but it was really interesting um really really well done and the next one is coming up on november 13th uh and that one is um uh titled equity is not a zero sum game reflecting on the book the sum of us uh by heather mcgee um chapter four so i hope uh everybody here can try to plan to be there if you or if your schedule allows um if uh was anyone i don't anyway i don't need to put you on the spot but anyway it was it was a great program yeah marianne is that about the program because i looked around almost everyone in that room made a comment all of them participated in it i thought that was very exciting sorry guys i smell something burning and i hope it's not this light so i'm just going to turn the light off um yes it was it was amazing so um i wanted to just mention we have a lot we're we're very programming heavy this fall we have the um that conversation for change on november 13th but going backwards we have the da on november 10th we have the program on um accessory dwelling units we're co-sponsoring with the housing groups uh on november 12th and now we have human rights day on december 10th so we have a lot going on after having just completed the festival so it's a really busy fall for us um i don't know why it smells like something's burning sorry it's very distracting
uh most available on zoom conversations for change is in person only the da will be available on zoom the adus is available on zoom and human rights day will be is to be determined um so really actually looking for help with publicity the um wayland post can put these events on their web page but they look to us to post the events on their web page i am going to give that a shot myself but if i need some help i'm going to ask for it um because we got to get all these up on the web page um and marianne's been doing an amazing job of getting all this stuff up on the um hrdeic web page and asma is getting everything up on the facebook page yeah it's really really great so please tell your friends share the uh flyers if you need me to send you a copy of any of the flyers i can do that but we want to get great turnout for all of these events okay yeah uh so uh any announcements or topics not anticipated 24 hours i mean 48 hours in advance yes denise um i found this interesting native voted on and was accepted i guess a couple of years ago yesterday was a holiday from school for um i forget what indian yeah yeah and sudberry i sent you all but since now i know that people aren't getting everything through our listserv i did send everyone a but and maybe none of you got it a link to so sudbury the the sudbury district and lincoln sudbury high school sent out a questionnaire to sudbury and lincoln residents uh about to prioritize which holiday which um holidays do they think should be school holidays uh and i thought that was really interesting and i don't know where actually that would have been a good question for caroline i don't know where the whalen schools are on that but i know that there's been talk about about creating other holidays and the trade-offs and do you drop a holiday if you create a holiday and all of that um but yes i i mean i think that's wonderful that natick has done that and a bunch of other school districts have as well yes thank you for that um um and happy diwali to any anyone who celebrates it yes marianne um i was just wondering if our students um have any thoughts about um whether our events could be posted in their the student newsletter and the student newspaper i don't know their rules sophie do you happen to know how they decide whether stuff can get posted i'm like you mean through the newsletter are you thinking marianna student newsletter or the parent newsletter yeah yeah no not not that not that it comes out of the schools but that the students write their own newspaper oh there's the wayland student press whatever it's called wspn yeah uh wait wait what are you asking relating to wspn well we have these three events coming up that you know students could participate in and it's just uh you know some of our things are um most all of our things students could participate in and so just didn't know if um we should um well just thought i we'd ask and uh maybe they'd make a choice i don't know um but so you're considering getting coverage or these events into wspn i mean i do have some i could actually reach out to wspn because i am affiliated with or i know some people there and i think that would be a good opportunity as a lot of people do look at the newspapers but out there so if i sent you uh links to the we have flyers for three of them we don't have a flyer yet for human rights day but that's a month another month away if i sent you the three flyers could you see if there might be interest in posting links to them in the newspaper yeah i mean yeah that means they would probably have to write an article about the entire thing they don't post events they don't post events oh do so could they post it as an event like do they have an event listing they post like they have to do it like the link to these events of you know virtual participation but also it's kind of two asks could they do that but also would they want to you know student reporters attend and write up their perspectives on it okay um yeah i think for a lot of events that happen as a town like for chinese new year i think i assume that's what you're talking about they have students come in and interview people to make an article about it while it's happening i feel like if you want me to have a more in-depth answer probably talk like message me and then i could talk to my friends who do wspn and then get like a more solid answer back for you or the teachers like if you look at the wspn website they don't really have a like it's not like a newspaper where they have upcoming events it would be more um like like sophie was saying if they wrote a whole story about something then it would go in there so we could share the ideas and see if anybody's interested in writing a story about something that's coming up yeah mariam did you want to respond or ask a question yes different issue uh concerning the school holidays um we do have uh initiatives locally from the hindu community and the muslim community to recognize holidays on the school calendar uh so i'm wondering if we as an hrdic uh team can help by testifying maybe to the school council uh this is a hrdic issue um i'm also thinking if the report will be the criteria that was inspired from the report that we had could include something like that uh this is a very small effort i think that will give big results could we should not on the agenda for next time is there a time uh no i'm i'm just i just feel like this is the kind of uh initiative that we need to be supporting no i'm not disagreeing with you i'm just saying we're on the part of the agenda right now talking about it's not anticipated 24 hours yeah no i jumped yeah so so i'm just asking can we put it on next time or is there a deadline yes please no no holidays on the agenda okay great um thank you we'll do that we'll follow up um with sophie to get those questions answered i wanted to mention um when we were at the library for um the conversations for change program i picked up a flyer for uh it's called in the roundhouse a celebration of indigenous music sunday november 2nd at 3 pm um and so that's going to be on the library's website and that might be the kind of thing we would want to attend and and you know bring friends to so i want to mention that um i also this is like administrative but i wanted to say because we're having these problems with our listserv i want you to know that no later than friday of the week before our meeting we have a meeting on a tuesday i always send you materials and the agenda no later than the friday before so if you don't get that stuff from me please let me know um because now i know we are having problems with our listserv um and i always ask if you'll let me know whether you're planning to attend and you you all are the most fabulous fabulous committee because you always show up at meetings and you do always tell me if you can't attend but i get a little bit anxious when nobody tells me that they can attend and so i'd really love it if you would tell me can you attend or can't you attend just so i know we're going to have a quorum we've always had a quorum i'm so proud of us we've never had a problem being able to meet because of quorum problems but still i get a little anxious so let me know if if you remember um you know whether you can come or not to each meeting but do know i always send stuff out by friday um so if you don't get it then there's been a listserv problem and i need to know that um okay um also just wanted to let you know mariam and i are going to be meeting with uh someone from the historical commission and um the person who works on the indigenous archaeology collection in weyland to see if we can do some kind of joint programming at some point maybe not this november but maybe some other time um something to do with those indigenous artifacts and educating people um it's kind of to mariam's point of can we do something beyond our indigenous land acknowledgement you know what else can we do um so we're going to explore that and bring bring something back to you all um hopefully that at the next meeting okay anything else for stuff not anticipated 48 hours in advance if not um i think we're ready to adjourn um this has been a really productive meeting thank you everybody for just being here for bringing your your whole selves to this meeting for sharing your ideas so openly um would anybody like to move that we adjourn we move for your denise denise denise moved is there a second second who's that kevin kevin second thank you uh okay let's vote mariam yes marianne yes heather yes i know yes yahoo yahoo sorry i can't hear you yes thank you sophie yes there we go thank you denise yes and kevin yes and karen yes meeting adjourned thank you everybody we'll see you next month which is the next month is the 18th of november yes all right thank you thank you thanks everyone bye bye bye
Um, okay. Is it, is the first part, is it? The first part you gotta read, yeah. Thank you. This meeting may be recorded, recorded, which will be made available to the public on WICAM as soon as, after the meeting, as practicable. Items in our agenda may not be discussed in the order listed or at the specific time estimated. Times are approximate. All topics may be subject to deliberation and vote. When required by law or allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so by in-person attendance or by accessing the meeting remotely. We request public comment be limited to two minutes per person. And then the land acknowledgement. Today, as we begin, we would like to acknowledge the following indigenous peoples on whose traditional homelands we live, work, and gather today. The Massachusetts, the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag, and the Pawtucket. We acknowledge their ancestors, particularly the Cardo of the Massachusetts tribe, who was steward of much of the land now encompassing Sudbury and Weyland, when European settlers arrived to colonize this place in 1638. We seek to understand, acknowledge, and remember the painful, ongoing history of war, genocide, and forced removal of indigenous peoples by European settlers. And we offer a living celebration of the indigenous communities who are not just part of the past, but who continue to live and make new history here today. May we all commit to deepening our relationships with indigenous communities and to being their allies and working for justice. Thank you so much, Maya. I don't see anyone here for public comment, so let's move on to introductions with our newest committee member, Sophie Chan. Welcome, Sophie. We're so glad you're here.
I think now that we all have our proper names in our squares, why don't we just go around and say your name and a few words of welcome to Sophie. Sophie Chan. So I'll start. Sophie. Sophie. Welcome. We're so glad you're here. We love having student members. We're really excited that you joined us. We're appreciative to Maya for bringing you into the fold and look forward to having you. We hope you'll feel comfortable speaking up when when you need to and your opinion is always welcome and and we'll be grateful for it. So thank you, Heather. Hi, Sophie. I'm Heather Pino. We exchanged some texts when you first got on the board. So on the committee, welcome. I'm eager to work with you and get to know you. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Marianne.
No, you're muted.
Hi, Sophie. I'm Marianne Burkowski, and I also welcome you and look forward to working with you and all the things that we work on. Thank you, Jano. Hi, Sophie. This is Jano. This is Ippolito, who likes to get paws on the keyboard. I'm just delighted to have you join us, and I know it's going to be, it'll take a little bit of time to feel like you know all of us, but I hope you just know that your ideas and your perspectives, all the student ideas and perspectives are so important. And don't hold back in participating. Thanks for joining. Thank you. Yawu? Hi. Hi, Sophie. I'm Tang Yawu. Welcome to our committee. Looking forward to working with you. Thank you. Denise? Hi, Sophie. It's so good to have you with us. And don't be afraid. Although I'm not a student, I think I was the newest member before you came. It's very painless. Thank you. Mariam? Hi, Sophie. My name is Mariam Libdi. I met you when you had your select board meeting. It's good to see you again. Thank you. And Sophie, if you'd like to say anything, please feel welcome to. And if you're not ready to say anything, that's okay, too. Well, I think you missed Kevin. Oh, gosh. I'm sorry. Y'all are going to have to remind me that because I can't see Kevin's face. Thank you, Kevin. Sophie, I mean, even though I'm on the phone, glad, glad to meet you. And, you know, look forward to working with you on several projects we have going. And, you know, glad you could join our committee. Thank you, all of you, for your words of welcome. I'm also looking forward to making decisions for the better. Thank you. I wonder if other men can change Kevin's phone number to his name. I don't know if that's really hard to do on a phone. I think the committee can. I mean, I don't mean who is the other. Robbie, can you change that phone number to Kevin Goodwin's name? Sure. If you can, that'd be great. And, Maya, did I skip you also? Oh, no. Yeah. I know Sophie, so. That's why I always correct me when I do things wrong here, folks. It's okay. All right. So can we. One thing I noticed, because I was just on the website. Can we ask the powers that be that Sophie's name get added since she's officially on the committee? Yes. And yes, add Sophie to website. And also, I'm trying to sort out some problems with our listserv, which includes people who are no longer with us on the committee, and which doesn't include people who are with us. So we will get this all sorted out. Okay. So let's take a look. And for the benefit of those who may not have it in front of them, I'm going to try to share my screen. So let's take a look at our meeting minute draft. And does anybody have any? Now I can't see all of you, unfortunately. So let me know if somebody, if someone wants to talk to us, let me know. Is there any comments on the September 16th, 2025 meeting minutes? All right. Then would anybody like to move to approve the September 16th, 2025 meeting minutes? Karen, I move approval. Thank you, Kevin. Is there a second? Second. Denise. Denise. Thank you. So Denise seconded. Thank you. Okay. So let's vote. I think it's going to help me to stop sharing so I can see all of you. Okay. Geno. Abstain. I wasn't at the meeting. Oh, gosh. Thank you for doing that. Yes. So who else needs to abstain? What's reminders? Denise does. Denise abstains, Geno, and me. So thank you for that reminder. Okay. Marianne. You're muted. Marianne approves. Thank you. Heather. Yes. Sophie. Well, you weren't here. So you have to abstain. Well, actually, you were here, but you weren't a member. Maya. Yes. Okay. Yahoo. Are you there? Yes. Yahoo. Yahoo. Yes. Thank you. Denise. I had to abstain. You're abstaining. Okay. Mariam. Yes. And Kevin. Yes. Great. Okay. Was he at the September 15th meeting? It said so, I believe. Oh, okay. He left after. Okay. Yeah. He was there. Sorry, Kevin. That's okay. So it's unanimous with abstentions from Denise, Geno, and me, Karen. Thank you, everybody. All righty. Let us move on to the Weyland Festival debrief. I thought it might be good to talk about lessons learned. What went well? What can we do differently next year? And I thought we might start with the Geno, and Yahoo, and Marianne, and then others can also chime in. Okay. Starting with what went well. I think the biggest success of the festival was really the incredible partnership that came together and really embraced the multicultural theme underlying the entire festival. And that wasn't exactly a given in the beginning. So I just wanted to highlight how important the process is and how important both the intention and the perseverance in figuring out how to work as an incredibly diverse team with many, many different town departments and groups and organizations in the community all participating together. And of course, there are many things that we can do better next time, but I felt as though we had really achieved an extraordinary unity of purpose and the way that it was expressed was really just like pure joy on that day. So that's my starting big, big success. And I'll hand over to Yahoo. Okay. I feel the big success is so many people can enjoy the festival together. It's really never happened before. It's so many people from so many groups, so many ethnic groups as well. And this is number one. Number two is, I'm so happy that Egyptian Coptic Church getting involved. So this is really another organization within the Weyland. It's become more actively participating. Also the WCAA, Weyland Chinese American Association is very much deeply involved this year. So, plus with the collaboration with the Recreation Department, they are incredible. They have so much resource and then they really help a lot. Also because of us, Weyland, all the performers, and the Western culture, bringing a lot of Western culture to the festival. That's really great. So I think it's really everyone excited. And I know nobody wants to go next year. So we definitely will do, the town will definitely make us to continue. Marianne? Marianne? So I had to leave early for personal reasons, but I think that this was a fabulous and kind of the first town-wide event of this nature, of so many organizations working together. And it felt very celebratory. I was there. I think we should thank the sun. It's always nice to have sun instead of rain. And so it was a beautiful day. And yes, our Recreation Department was so helpful. And I think all of us, Arts Weyland and Recreation and all the organizations could really see the benefit of doing this together. And it, you know, bodes well for a continuation about this festival and a celebration of our town together. So it was exciting to be a part of it. And we had an estimated 6,000 people there. Is that about what you all understood? That was the police chief's estimate. Unbelievable. Other people want to comment? Yes, Maya. So I was there because, and so I was in the parade and I was like walking with the parade. And I just thought it was so like interesting to see how many people there were. Like I've never seen that from Weyland personally. Like I've never seen an event so big. And I just thought it was really cool to see all like the table set up. And I got to see like all that while I was like walking out. So I was really surprised by all the people and kind of the crowd, I guess. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Yuri, one thing I want to say is when I walked down the, all the tents for the, for the tables. It's made me remember like I was walking in Taipei in the night market. That's how exactly look like. So, but we're in Taipei, we have it every day. It's really enjoyable. Anyone else want to say anything? I mean, I, I'll say something, but if, but I want to make sure others get to speak. Yeah. Heather. I also got positive feedback from people who were there, who stopped by our table and said how great it was. And also feedback that was very positive, doing it as one big festival rather than the separate festivals we've done in the past, or separate events we've had in the past. Yes. I heard a number of people saying, I actually, one person said to me, I've lived here for 50 plus years and have never seen anything like this happening in Weyland. That was actually the best thing I heard. I was really excited to hear that. Yeah. And, and we did it in partnership with all these other wonderful groups. And I think, you know, had we not been doing the multicultural festival the last few years, this wouldn't have happened the way it happened. So, you know, just bringing us together with arts Weyland, with the rec department and touch a truck and the parade and all of it is just an incredible accomplishment. And especially for such a small town, you know, you might expect something like this in Newton, right. And, you know, or Framingham, like these much larger communities, but we're a tiny community and we pulled off this really extraordinary event. And just huge kudos to the, all the people who here and outside this zoom room who, who helped make this happen. It's, it's really an amazing thing. And I'm excited to see what we can, what we can do next year. Um, based on, based on how well it went this year and any lessons learned for how, how we'll do it differently next year. So exciting. I'll just chip in. Please. Any ideas that you have, um, of things that we could do better, um, while they're still fresh in your mind, share them with us either now in the meeting or later. Yeah, I think we'll learn how to work together a lot. We also know who can do what better this year, um, for next year. I think it will be much more easier in that way. There's a lot of technical issues that, uh, we will talk about in our debriefing. And, uh, this is just how we improve, make this better. And, uh, financially we are, we think we are doing okay. Yeah. We're glad that, uh, we, as a, our community was committed to, to raise $5,000 for it. And we're lucky to raise $6,000 so much. So a little bit more than $6,000. And the plus times, uh, we should be okay, but I'm still waiting for Chris to give his part. And so we will have, uh, uh, a final scenes. But I'll just talk to Chanel. We will let our performers know how much they can get to, to show our appreciation. Yeah. Do you want to say something, Shona? Um, yeah, just that, you know, the, the fundraising, um, is also, um, pretty amazing. They're just extraordinary generosity in the community. And I would say that, I mean, it wasn't an enormous amount of outreach and effort to raise really a significant amount of money. And even, um, when we were getting very close to the festival and we had this idea of having the harmony tent, the big tent on the green, um, with some tables and chairs so that there would be a place. We were thinking for older people, especially to, you know, be able to sit during and watch performances and have some activities in there and that it wasn't really budgeted for. But that also stimulated some late, you know, late coming contributions because people were aware, um, that there was a great idea that hadn't been. In the original, you know, budget projections. So I, I feel as though the participation of the, um, the business community and a lot of groups and organizations and individuals that, um, that were just. Inspired to make a financial contribution to be sure that this festival could cover all of its expenses is another, um, community building dimension that, um, it's different kind of participation. But everybody who did participate in that way, um, knows how much they were appreciated and, um, can just feel great that, you know, that they were part of it, that they were listed in all the publicity. And hopefully, you know, we'll, you know, we'll want to continue to support financially. In particular, Sora, a seafood buffet place in Atlantic, they donated a big, uh, grand prize of $2,500. So that's really make everybody excited. Fantastic. Um, quick, quick question, Karen, I mean, I, or anybody on the committee. Committee. Was there any coverage in the women post after the, after the, was there any coverage in the women post about. Oh, yeah. Yes. And, uh, front page bottom of the fold and, uh, quite a few pictures later on with more text about the event. So they did do a follow-up. Yes. Good question. Thank you. Well, one observation is, uh, really, because I'm old and I think more looking at old age needs and then young people's needs, kids' needs. And then in this festival, I think we make, we meet all their needs, especially in the performance with a tent. So a lot of your old people can sit in the tent to enjoy. And I saw the young people. And, uh, this, they were sitting in the grass and enjoy it, including Shona. So relax from the grass. Yeah. And also Marianne had a brilliant idea and had these hula hoops that you could take apart and make different shapes, but the kids just loved playing with those hula hoops. So, I mean, there's lots of ideas for things that worked well that we can go forward with. Marianne thinks of everything, every detail, also for the HRDEIC table. I mean, everything you could imagine and everything you can't imagine, Marianne has thought of. Um, we're just, we're very lucky for that. Thank you, Marianne. Yes, Heather. Um, I was wondering if the committee would consider sending out a survey to the community, like through Michael McCall's, um, newsletter, just to gather feedback. And also it's a way to promote the event and try to include more people in it. Maybe one of the questions is, would you like to be involved next year? Um, so that was just a thought to the planning committee. That's a great idea. I was thinking after you went and said, hmm, we forgot to give, put a survey right at the festival to help them fill out the feedback. Yeah. Not too late. And if you put it in a newsletter with a QR code, you know, then they could just, and with like three questions, you know, I mean, just really short. So people would be willing to do it. Well, they could just put the link right in the, in the newsletter and then maybe Wayland post would be willing to put a QR code. Hmm. Yeah. That's a very good idea. We can, we can work with, uh, recreation department. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's even, that's a great idea. I did team to support this. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great idea. Thanks Heather. That's really great. Um, let's take a quick look. I'm going to share my screen again. Oh, there it is. Um, at the, um, budget. So the select board approved 9,500 to support this effort. And we have a budget here, uh, from Chris showing receipts that we're going to get for basically for infrastructure. So you have the, um, audio equipment, uh, the sound equipment and the tent, the harmony hall tent, um, which add up to a little bit over 9,500, but this is, um, this is this, these receipts will go to the town for reimbursement. So I just wanted to share that. Um, and, uh, and then of course there's other expenses, which the planning team will work it all out afterwards, but this is the part that the, that the town is going to pay. Um, so we will let Kelsey know that when these receipts come in, she should go ahead and pay them. Cause that's what we agreed to, uh, at a previous meeting. And our justification for making such a large request of the town was really because we were shouldering the risk of running the event outdoors, um, at the town green. Um, you know, as I think Marianne mentioned, um, you know, we were very lucky that we had good weather. The fall is generally, um, uh, less risky than the spring. Um, but the, you know, the need for a tent and the stage and, uh, additional infrastructure. Um, I think is going to give a little bit more impetus also to the town, which, um, for a couple of years now has had a budget that was approved to purchase a portable stage. And it's really just a matter of, um, there's not enough money to buy a new one. So it's, it's keeping a finger on the pulse of the national sort of market. And when a used stage that would be appropriate for Wayland's needs comes on the market, somebody has to really pounce on it and actually get on a plane and grab the thing. Um, but we, we think that this will help to, um, give a little bit of impetus to make that happen. Um, and that would be wonderful going forward if we have at least one stage that the town can deploy. Where does that get stored? Just a stupid question, but. Um, DPW would figure that out probably, you know, at their facility on river road somehow. Um, we really not thought that we have this ring stone before and the ring stone after, and then we'll get it the best day in between. Yeah. And there's another issue, which is at the town center, the, the, the green, where we had the stage set up and the harmony tent. Um, that is what did they call it? The municipal pad that was given to the town under an agreement with the developer back in the beginning when the town center was developed. And there was originally a plan for there to be power, um, to that green, which was never realized. And it's gone through subsequent changes in ownership. But this gives a little bit of impetus both to the town and potentially to the new owner to make good, um, on putting power access in, um, to the town green. Fantastic. That's what it has been called. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be, we try to make it on the Google map next year before next year. Oh yeah. That that's another excellent point. Yeah. When, when you, when you Google and put in whale in town green, nothing comes up, but, um, we're, we are in the process of addressing that. So that when people Google in the future, whale in town green, it will direct you to the actual whale in town green. But actually it, it, it sometimes was the old, uh, um, whole, uh, food, the store, the grocery store. Well, just an amazing, amazing show of, of community building of planning of collaboration of pulling off just an incredible program. And I just want to, again, thank the people in this room and the people outside the room who, who work together to make this program such an incredible success. Yeah. Really just, we really appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. We tried to say yes to everybody who wanted to participate in any way and facilitate their being able to be part of making it a success. And I think, um, we, we've kind of created a culture of inclusivity and collaboration around this festival and the planning, uh, modeled that as well as the event itself. Yes. A lot of people put a lot of time. Looks those performers, they spent a lot of time to get ready. The Chinese association has spent so much time to get that dragon and be able to move the dragon that took to manipulate it, drag in to perform it and the bring back to bring the force. And this everyone is so excited and so much involved. you all yeah i think we can feel very proud and and excited about this amazing accomplishment just fantastic i do i do have a quick question what um i know i know it was covered in the women post does anybody remember the date that it was in the women post this last issue um i don't have it with me but does anybody have the date on it because i don't the only issue i have is oh we just received a couple days ago let's see i'm just looking to see if i can find it it was oh online it's hard to see the date october 17. um it's okay does anybody happen to have a copy a copy yeah do you get it it was the one that looks like this in the festival i was in the cup i mean not a copy but a photo actually i have the photo already taken no but does anybody have a copy of the women post that came out probably on october 17 yeah kevin can you kevin can you look at it online because the whole newspaper is online is that an option for you um i could probably look at it online yeah because the article will be there all right all right thanks do you usually get it i i do get it it's just i i was away and i right oh i think i i think i may have passed on the october 17th issue out by accident so yeah that happens okay all right um i think we may be done with this topic we're not done with the festival we will continue to move forward for planning next year's festival but unless anybody has anything else to add um i would suggest we move to the next topic anyone else have anything they want to add okay thank you again everybody um let's move to agenda item number six uh discussion of wayland community life and engagement executive report um and possible vote on recommendations to the select board so heather and dr eden renee hayes and i were invited to the select board meeting last night to talk about to to advise them about how to move forward um with the recommendations in the community life and engagement study so in order to prepare for that uh heather and i put together some comments which and suggestions which um you will have received in your packet and the timing was such that we had to do that before being able to consult with all of you because our meeting is tonight and the select board meeting was last night um so i ask your forgiveness for that uh and also your willingness to take a look at this document together um i guess i should mention that the select board we presented this actually you might if you want just you can watch the select board meeting from last night uh and see we made kind of a longish introduction trying to put the study in the in the context of that the town is facing financial problems but there are data upon data showing that investment in inclusion and belonging is economically beneficial to communities and that you know it's not only the right thing to do it's a smart thing to do strategically for a town because the more people feel they belong in a town the more they care about how things happen in town the more they contribute the more they start businesses um you know the more people want to come here and raise their families here so we tried to make that case in the beginning before diving into some of the details of this document um and you can you can see that or if you're interested i can send you the written remarks or you can watch it on the on the select board meeting but let me share my screen um with the document that we shared with them um and you got this in your packet and basically what we did was um we we suggested a a criterion which you can see right here for that because there's so many recommendations in the report it can be so overwhelming and we said here's a criterion to help us make priorities it's when you look at all those initiatives that the consultant recommended we can ask ourselves will this initiative lead to meaningful improvements in people's lives and we think that that's a really nice organizing principle for helping us make priorities among the many many many recommendations and then we named specific we pulled out specific bullets that we thought um meet this criterion um and so we we had i don't know three four bullet three bullets i guess for each um theme area so wanted to get your thoughts um i don't know if you all had a chance to look at this before the meeting um welcoming your thoughts and then we can talk about next steps do i should i leave this up here or do you have access to it and i should take it down please let me know what you'd like keep it up okay um okay so can we ask how did the select board respond yeah so not surprisingly they are very concerned about finances um they have 10 years of perspective um proposition two and a half overrides ahead uh and so you know the budgets for town the town are extremely tight and and we know that they basically um encouraged us to look for grants to do this work and then they you know they talked about different possibilities uh michael mccall mentioned that the town the insurance company the town uses does have some kind of risk management training um that related to belonging and inclusion we don't know we don't have a way of knowing anything about that content um one one uh select board member suggested uh you know how in businesses they use videos and actually we do too in the town the state makes us watch a bunch of videos about all sorts of training things um what we said in response to the idea of using training videos is this work is relational this belonging and inclusion work is relational and you and you don't get it from a video you need to be working with other human beings to to do this work and forming relationships and learning in the context of you know mistakes we make and learning from our mistakes and and and and you know figuring out how to have relationships across cultures across differences it's a skill set and you you don't it's not easy to learn that just from videos so i agree with you 100 i'm glad you said i heard you say that yesterday i said wonderful thank you um and so they encouraged us to look for grants they asked us to come up with budgets for all these different bullets because they noticed that all the bullets under the how section all of the bullets say we you know you need to hire or assign a qualified person or hire a consultant um and they said well that costs money so um they fairly fairly asked us can you so can you tell us what the budget range might be for each of these items and so i do think that's a worthwhile thing and dr hayes rightfully you know responded and said well it depends on you know are you doing a training every week or a training every month or you know it kind of depends but i do think we can come up with some proposed um budget ranges with assumptions showing what the assumptions are um and that that'll be important to give them a sense of orders of magnitude i feel as though um you know the select board is receiving similar requests from many different departments that want another you know full-time equivalent or part-time person that you know just feel overloaded overburdened and we need to be able to show the value add which i think you guys did a great job of um you know kind of demonstrating the larger uh value and equating it to an economic um benefit or incentive for participation more participation in the town but this um need for i mean it's basically a knowledge manager who um has to have a finger on the pulse and be doing the coordinating and the tracking uh keeping track of you know the performance metrics um for the town to know whether or not the investment is driving any kind of results and that doesn't mean that we need an enormous budget for a lot of activities i think you know the the fundraising looking for grants for you know activities part of that can be done you know by that full-time equivalent but that person could also work with um people in different town departments could have you know for example join the you know town managers meetings and keep other people apprised of what needs are and also could be um supported by you know volunteers you know from the community who could be writing grants or you know pursuing fundraising for specific programs and activities but i i don't i don't um i don't want to let us back off on the need for a knowledge manager um because we know that there's a lot of competition for those scarce resources to actually fund the position yeah i think they were leaning if if anything they were leaning more toward hiring consultants rather than you know staff because they have a hiring freeze so yeah that was kind of a non-starter but that's the whole thing with the consultants you don't have the continuity you don't have that finger on the pulse and you don't really have a way to be working towards a roll-up of indicators that give you performance metrics that that justify the expenditure in the end marianne i saw your hand up and i can't see everybody at once so if any after marianne if anybody else wants to talk give a holler um well i have a couple of comments um first um i know it's a tough first of all i want to thank you for doing this um and doing it you know for the meeting last night um when you didn't have a chance to talk to all of us and really appreciate that and i think you did a great job and um the uh um i was at a meeting another non-profit meeting last night and they they said you know there's uh um you know groups uh non-profit groups need to stand up and say this is important and um just kind of what what you made the points you made at the beginning of the meeting last night um thank you so much for doing that also and i think we should just look for opportunities to read to repeat that um over the next um over the next year um and uh so i don't know how we can think about that but we um that you know even if it's just to show up at the select board and um or write a letter to the select board saying reiterating that we feel this is important and that when money is tight that's not a time to um to pull back on this and you you just said why it really helps our community if they don't pull back on that um but one specific um idea i have is that um uh in um in books i've read um uh like bowling alone um bowling uh uh yeah anyhow uh by sociologists is that people who were working together to create something um working on a specific thing um then that helps them you know feel a community like they're building community and we have lots of lots of committees and um to be honest um you know and and uh for i'll just i've been here 20 years and um granted i'm in hrdic um but you know many times it looked like it was an exclusive club out there and all the same people were in all these organizations and and each of the committees which actually having said that everybody who volunteers in town and there's a lot of volunteers in town they work very very hard and really appreciate their work and but if you know maybe there's an opportunity that every committee would um put out a notice and say you know we're inviting people to come and um participate uh hear what we're doing and um and they might even actually have a role for people so you know and you know you might ask people to each of those committees to see if there's some way that um some outreach to the community to help them work on something that they're doing yeah at the bottom of this page that um i have highlighted here that's exactly what this item is here that i just highlighted exactly what it is it's for equitable selection processes for um hiring but also it's getting more people involved uh with volunteering so that um so that our committees and boards look like the town as they say look like the the the population in the town just say one more thing um at one point we were um i was interviewing the town planner and i was shocked to find out that the town planning department is the town planner one person he doesn't even have an administrative helper so you know that's you know we're lean and mean in town and um but you know so that it needs us and and we need it so anyhow just thought i'd say that yeah anybody else want to add thoughts about um this document or the presentation or the select boards response heather i'm wondering um it does anybody want to give feedback in terms of the priorities uh is there anything missing from this document i i agree with karen i was able to listen to the meeting um today that if we want to keep this moving forward we need to go back with some more specific examples of of how much things would cost um you know i completely agree for all the reasons you said the money would be better spent up front and in the long term to hire a person um and i'm from what i heard at the meeting i i don't know if there's a chance of that we can keep asking um and i think in the long term that would be better spent money than doing this piece mail hiring consultants to do things um but at a minimum if we could give them a budget and the other piece is if anybody on our committee has ideas for grants and um i think that would be helpful if we could give that information so do people agree with the recommendations did we miss anything um before we move forward with the next piece and when you say miss anything i mean there might be stuff that people in this room might think of that wasn't in the report but all of this comes out of the report so i think you know tell us if we missed anything that was in the report yes that we forgot to prioritize yeah yeah that's what i'm sorry that's what i'm thank you for clarifying yes within from the report that we missed i wonder instead of cover many areas can we pick up one area one small specific area to focus on and which we know we can have a results because a lot of things very hard to do
especially when talking about the time employees the way is that the piece we want to get involved now which piece which piece yo the town employees oh town employees it's more of the time manager will be so like this piece here is this what you're talking about the one highlighted yeah yeah time employee no i mean the two get involved with volunteer opportunities yes and the two whether whether it's within the time employee whether it's uh uh dei or not and i think that's the time manager they seem so i suppose doing that now anyhow so i i'm more looking i'm looking for is uh yes get the volunteers opportunity more involved okay that's the goal that's a small specific goal yeah you think that solid will be good so we can make sure that our results yes very good point marianne um actually um the item in number two the last item might be um you know the time communication translations and things um personally um as a as a white um uh woman uh the i think it's uh um that only speaks english it's an excellent reminder to me when i see other languages that there are lots of other people with other languages around and i think it's um and i think it's doable you know there's lots of translation services online and it would just be you know if we would just at least make a priority so that um not only would we make um whatever town communications like it's a town manager letter um granted people who um who actually um have you know can actually have on their own computer translation into a language that they speak but a reminder on this um on the town manager um newsletter for example a reminder that you know translation is available blah blah blah blah blah and um if we would think about that in many of our communications and let's get some few more signs um uh you know think about signage um yeah i know anyhow we think we could might be able to do something that is impactful and visible and probably doesn't cost money that doesn't cost a lot of money you know translation reminding people we somehow um and maybe maybe we actually have you know some um anyhow i i think well and the schools do it the schools actually have um a a little handheld um uh piece of equipment that in case of a family member who speaks who only speaks other well and you might be talking to them on an emergency basis you need you need to have them hear it in their own language so that you're not guessing that they are interpreting what you're saying or that you're trying to um how you're communicating this and they have something that communicates that and um you know that'll translate for um parents that come in so you know there's that is there and it's in our town so let's see if there's ways to make it more visible um and and bring it up as a fact that we are doing it because all that you know advertises that we are diverse and we are embracing diversity we're supporting diversity and we want all you know anyhow thank you uh heather um i totally agree with you and as i was listening to it made me realize we could lead by example and all of our statements that we're only posting in english we could you know use we could we could do better ourselves can't we link to i mean this is a whole nother conversation wait okay how about if a couple of people um offline do some exploration of this and see what the options are um marianne i feel like you've already started doing that because this has been on your mind for a long while um is there somebody who would be willing to work with marianne and and explore this and come back and talk to us about what the options are okay i can try i can help okay yeah i probably i may not have exactly the same view because i more look at like it's uh at least from chinese point of view i don't see the need to really need for because all the every family will have someone be able to speak english well okay let me suggest that the two of you have this conversation and and bring it back and brainstorm it together and then come back to us with some ideas um denise aaron i just want to say that uh most people that don't understand english that well um now bring their phone and it has an app on it so whatever we say translates into their language and then they can say in their own language and it comes back to us in english yep i know google translate is like an amazing an amazing tool yes agreed all right so um as a kind of next steps uh if marianne and yahoo will come back to us with some suggest concrete suggestions for that that we can then bring to the uh select board well or the town manager or both um but in turn and and in terms of this larger document um suppose heather and i and and hopefully dr hayes eden renee hayes can work together on a sort of an a la carte menu of uh uh budgets for these maybe not all of them but maybe some selection of these bullets um is there any so i'm i'm willing to do that and i'm volunteering you heather to work with me and hoping um that dr eden renee hayes will work with us on that what i want to know is does anyone here have grant writing experience like does any i'm thinking the town might have a database of grants that they might be able to search for us and figure out some grants that might be relevant do any of you have grant writing experience who would be willing to uh take a shot at um at doing a grant application if what once we identify appropriate ones i can help with that wonderful i have something to add i know um like we just talked about this but for the accessibility for like the translation to other languages i know that at some point um the school would send out these weekly emails to like parents and stuff like that and at the bottom it'd be like to access this language click this link to access this one click this link so i feel like that could be really helpful exactly and marianne also noticed that and so i think that's exactly the kind of thing we ought to be able to concretely then come to the select board with and say look look look what they do at the schools let's do the same thing yeah thank you maya that is that's great and maya if you want to uh send an example of one of those to um either directly to marianne or send it to me and i'll send it to marianne and yahoo whatever whatever works but i'd love i'd love to see that myself so if you could send me a copy i'd like to see that too thank you um okay so i think we have a plan for following up um i don't know if we need to do we need to vote that that or is it the sense okay so is it the sense of this committee that the recommended the proposed priorities that we suggested in this document um are representative of the hrdeic do you all feel comfortable saying that or agreeing to that i see a nod i can't see all of you um do we need to vote or maybe we bring back the information to the next meeting and then we can vote on presenting whatever we've found to the select board the next time sounds great okay okay good um i know this the report is so overwhelming and and it when you go through it by yourself i think it's really hard to figure out what the priorities are but but together you know we were able to to kind of try to try to wade through it and figure it out especially having a criterion for evaluating um so hopefully i think i i think this is a a pretty good shot at it but if if anybody notices anything from the report that's that would have um uh would lead to meaningful improvements in people's lives that we missed of course let me know um and we'll go from there that sounds great any any other anything else about this topic or the meeting with the select board uh karen marianne wanted to um i just wanted to say that um when denise and i um made a presentation about the spirit council so i most people would know you know the spirit council uh that that workshop we had a year and a half ago or two years ago now and yeah i just want to say even though we're in this budget tough budget time um the select board was very receptive they were excited to hear about these ideas um and uh and wanted to be inclusive so we have to help them do what they want to do and have any comments on the multicultural festivals i'm sorry is that a quite what questions yeah when you guys develop this is a multicultural festival is one of way they are thinking it's that type of things they are looking at or they are looking at what's it we're all looking for one way to to achieve our goal i think some it sounded like some members of the committee are looking at things like events so yes yahoo some i think some people are supportive of events i have no idea it didn't come up in terms of supporting that event next year um support i mean it's will this to say this kind of activity is is that fit into this uh uh the code they try to determine or uh could be one of the things they want to do oh it's in addition to oh it's totally different directions so um is there something there i think there was something in the community i know there was something in there about um doing joyful things in the community um and so i think you're asking should we be adding a bullet in here about doing those joyful things so it doesn't fall off the select board's radar is that what you're saying is that what you're suggesting i just mean i try to figure out this uh the difference i try to differentiate okay since we've already been doing and what additional things we try to do and um so one thing we're doing okay we're doing a couple of things we try to encourage the people to join uh join uh join uh join the punk committee yes a little bit of progress and the way we do this uh first of all try to get the people interact yes they don't know each other better yeah let me let me look let heather and i look at the yeah we'll look at this so it's 705 and i want to get to the next topic because we have a guest coming at 7 15 actually i should look at see what i'm keeping an eye to see if she comes okay um so let heather and uh heather and i will we'll look at that and see whether we ought to put that in here or whether we ought to be dealing with events separately i don't know the answer to that let us give that we'll have to do this yeah i just try to to call you the integrate thank you thank you i want to talk for a minute before our guest comes uh about um human rights day in december um asma is not here unfortunately tonight she um had something come up um she said she is willing to work on it again mariam did she talk to you about it no we didn't have a chance to connect okay um she was going to talk to you about it and explore your interest in working with her on it did you by any chance come to last year's human rights day i did not uh remind me what day would it be yeah it's i don't last year it was december 10th is it always marianne is it always the same day each year it's yeah the same day okay um so so i think it's december 10th and um marianne do you want to speak for a moment about um what you did last year what we did last year and it was so well attended um we had uh people come and read i think there's i can't remember now i'm embarrassed to say there are 25 or 30 um uh statements human rights that are are listed and people came and read them and many read them in a different language um that was actually a kind of last minute thought so it was it was very meaningful in that way and um and we didn't unfortunately we didn't get a recording of it because we just had trouble with um uh the um sound machine um so but it was really powerful and i cannot i think i think in today in today's environment we need that even again you need it again are you were willing to work on it again marianne yes and actually um but when i had talked to the village bank because they invited them to come and talk at it and they had even offered you know a little money last year so i'm thinking that if we go to them again you know we could get a few hundred dollars to do to support if there's something else we want to do we didn't i didn't actually ask them for money because we kind of brought some snacks and and i thought we had enough for our displays but anyhow um we can reinvent the wheel though and uh and we just need to make sure we get it would be nice to be in the new co coa building and yes so can i ask if you would so the coa building um you'll have to it's all an in-person event you're not zooming it you're not live streaming it right we could no we could do that um i don't think it just didn't work out so well on with through way cam so great activity that uh marianne that you and asma did with building the wreath out of hands and um which i mean in and of itself it just is fun makes you feel like you're part of something and in the event you've quickly created something that is meaningful we could maybe think about doing a w out of hands like you know in alyssa's wayland festival logo yeah and and now we could do it a little we could plan to do it earlier we even could get you know some in prep so that way it's like advertising because you know we're really thinking about it now yeah so yeah so
so that there's more participation um and people don't have to read there's something everybody can do yeah is it possible for us to get this in the um november newsletter from michael so a save the date i think we've already missed can't remember if i saw that i don't remember what date they send it out on yes we can get it in the november one if we can get a save the day yes for um human rights day that that's a great idea in the newsletter um and so we need to reserve a space so marianne would you be willing to work with asma and um mariam i know oops is mariam here oh there she is yeah yes sorry you changed places um you could chat with them separately and see if this is something you'd be interested in working on too but we need to get a reservation for a room and a flyer um with a save the date yes that we could get in the newsletter we could get in the newspaper um and all of that so that would be just brilliant if if y'all are willing to do that again and so mark your calendars december 10th is a wednesday um so let's do it we have november 10th the da coming um anyway we'll get to our other events but yes it's it's another it's a month away but yes let's let's do that that's fantastic um thank you so much you marianne you you you have brought so much creativity to these things i don't have a creative bone in my body so i just really love the the creativity you bring to these um and mariam i'm sure you're you also have a ton of creativity so um if it's something that you want to be involved with it'll be another amazing event um so thank you and yeah and you don't have to decide now i don't want to put you on the spot mariam no i i was going to say yes i will work with them hey thank you you put yourself on the spot thank you so much um okay so our guest who should be here soon is um caroline han who from the wayland public schools she's the director of diversity equity and belonging and the metco academic dean uh and she's going to talk to us about um the hate crimes grant that uh that the schools got and also her current work with educators um so we're a couple minutes oh wait there you are caroline that's you that's you with with my name so if you could go three dots oh my gosh i'm i'm also called karen blumenfeld on my screen everybody came with that because i sent the link out because nobody got the link for reasons i don't oh okay hi karen so i'd be happy to be you so everybody's karen blumenfeld tonight so yeah thank you okay we were carefully watching the attendees and forgot that you got the link just like we did are you here perfect timing so i was just introducing you and i'm so glad that it's so funny thank you for joining us of course yeah um so we know you're here tonight to uh tell us about the um uh wayland public schools hate crime prevention grant and your work with educators and we have about a half hour for this discussion we're really excited may i share my screen so i can we think so i i i created a presentation oh yay okay so what i want to do is just give you an overview and then leave plan hopefully at least 15 minutes of at least half the time for questions okay so just to frame it we have a district goal around belonging and equity and our the hate crime prevention grant is part of our work just to ensure that all students and staff especially those with marginalized identities feel a sense of belonging in the district very similar kind of in parallel to the work of this commission actually so just to give you the context um in november of 23 the administration governor healy the healy just driscoll administration um created not just for schools but a statewide initiative to combat and prevent hate crimes and this is a quote from the director of the secretary of education who also is a for i see janelle nodding the former wayland high school principal so look at what hat can happen once you leave ls i mean wayland all right so happy to say that wayland has been awarded this grant a very competitive grant for three consecutive years and so this is fy 24 we got fifty thousand dollars fy 25 another 50 and then this year because we were awarded it in the past we could apply for only half of the money half of the funding and they reserve a certain percentage for uh low income districts so it's even it's even greater that wayland um has received this grant right so there are two main areas of the where the funding has gone and one i'd like to put in the bucket of student programming and curriculum and the second bucket is really a building the capacity of adults to combat and also hopefully prevent hate crimes acts of hate and bias hate crimes is an extreme but more acts of bias and hate which are more similar to what you would see more consistent with what you would see in schools okay so here just the some examples of how the how we've used the money so one is with curriculum work so um since i came five years ago we have used the learning for justice formerly teaching for tolerance social justice standards in the k-5 curriculum to try to anchor our units in one of the four pillars that they have that are listed there and so that last two summers ago teachers from each of the grade levels worked on one or more units to strengthen the integration of those standards in the scope and sequence okay we also funded a group based in boston it's also been called urban improv if you're familiar with that name and read they've been rebranded as rehearsal for life they did they i don't know performed is the right word because it was so interactive they led assemblies for middle school students for all three grade levels about identity bias and belonging and there were skits they were skits that then they invited students to come up on stage and re reenact the scene how could this have been handled differently so i went to a bunch of them and they were the students really responded positively and the feedback was really positive we also funded tickets for the eighth grade field trips um for all eighth graders on one of their field trip days into boston to go see the auschwitz exhibit which is actually a traveling exhibit so it's no longer in boston but if you want to go to cincinnati i believe it's there okay we also funded summer work for ninth grade modern world history teachers to work on their unit on the holocaust genocide and hate they wanted more consistency across teachers right and also to make sure that there was um emphasis on the vocabulary and terminology around what is a genocide what happened during the holocaust etc okay we also hired someone who you may recognize her name danica manza brown she was used by wayland can or hired by wayland can a few years ago to do some workshops with k-5 parents and then parents of middle school and high school students some of you may have gone to it so we um hired her as a consultant to help us develop a survey for all high school students that they did during advisory block around their sense of belonging and then also we followed up with what we call listening sessions sessions where students were invited um to attend a session facilitated by her and i was there as the wayland person and also the transcriber of the really was like a focus group to talk about what are their experiences at the high school right so so that's the social that's excuse me that's a student programming curriculum and i'm going to leave plenty of time if you'll follow up questions as i'm sure you do okay the second piece is building the adult capacity to prevent and respond to acts of hate and bias so we hired a hr consultant to assist us because we realized we had a big hole we don't we didn't have a non-discrimination protocol and it's so important for any person to any student teacher staff member community member parent etc to have a mechanism to submit either anonymously or with their name a way to say this thing happened so we hired someone to help us write it and then we also she provided trainings last year which was the first year of the implementation for all staff obviously all administrators um and i was i i helped assist with those as well a huge chunk of our funding has gone towards restorative justice trainings excuse me if there's it's missing the t it sounds like it's rain it looks like rainings but it's trainings for whalen staff and it's a voluntary um on a voluntary basis so far it's been in the summers of 2024 and 25. i really like the word of restorative practices more than restorative justice because justice has this connotation of love the you know punishment but really what we were learning was the circle practice the tier one circle practice which is all about community because oftentimes when students um say things that cause harm right they target a person's identity an identity marker and when they lack empathy it is often because they feel no connection to the group or the person or people harmed so the purpose of circles with students and with adults is to before something happens to have a strong sense of community so that when harm occurs they feel like i am i have i have a vested interest in repairing the harm because i am a member of this community and so is this other person or people does that make sense okay the money also went for my capacity building as the director of d diversity equity and belonging and sort of administrator of this program that's district-wide so starting last summer and all the way through june i was involved in an intensive professional certification for restorative justice run through suffolk university happy to say i graduated successfully i also wanted to build capacity within each building so i am 0.7 and i go to i'm spread i mean i visit all the schools but i'm only one person and i'm not even one person i'm i'm a fraction of a person in terms of this role so one piece that was really important to me was building the capacity of school-based staff so that teachers would have a leader within their school that they could go to that same day right with a question or if something happened in their classroom so we um we developed a program called the deb diversity equity and belonging lead teachers that are under my they work with me i don't wouldn't say under but they i collaborate with them there are one or two in every school and they do a ton of amazing work and if you want to hear more about the work they're doing i can explain that later but we needed to be able to pay them for their time we also purchased a hundred copies of the book accountable by dashka slater and then we invited all the community to participate in a community book discussion there were i think two of them last year okay and so then i just thought i'd end with some photos and so one here's one of the assemblies and there's some of the middle school students who came up on stage okay this is so it was important in our conception of it that all building leaders and central office staff who work directly with students be trained so if you look around the room and you know people you'll notice that almost all of the people in this circle are either central office or building administrators because if and our goal is to eventually extend this practice of looking at um acts of hate and bias as a violation of community norms you we can't expect teachers and or students to do this work unless the administrators are trained so that was my my framing and so we we were all trained in it this was the summer of 2024 there are some staff as well because we filled it to 24. okay and this is one from this is a tier one circle training from just this past summer look how happy they are all right and our deb lead teachers for this school year and i listed them all they are presenting every month they call we call the deb lt 10 so in those 10 minutes they present whatever we've either we've decided as a group we want to be communicated across all five schools sometimes that's a teaching strategy around warm demand how to be a warm demander sometimes that's an update or reminder about the non-discrimination protocol sometimes it's something unique to that building but they work they they're doing an incredible job especially because we're creating something that has never existed before and this is our second year so we feel like pros but we're but we're figuring it out as we go along and then i wanted to leave time for questions and discussion what a great presentation wow thank you so much um i'm just so happy to see all that you're doing it's it's really impressive what an investment the town uh the excuse me the schools are making in this work that is incredibly exciting um any comments questions that people have uh jenno nope you're muted sorry sorry so i mean it's just so fantastic that um you're able to secure those grants and initiate all this amazing grant supported work so i guess what i'm wondering is um how you're addressing the kind of you know sustainability issues and fall forward and to what extent will this be kind of rolled into um you know normalization of in-service training to to really solidify this new which isn't like cast in stone either it's more like participating in a process how how can how can you eventually get like majority of staff um really involved are you looking back from the beginning this kind of sustaining and fall forward strategy yeah it is very important uh it's restorative justice training is very it is expensive so what has held us back from doing it has been the cost and so we've been fortunate that the governor's office has funded you know whatever it is however many hundreds of thousands of dollars every year specifically for k-12 public schools um and where and that has gone that actually we didn't know about the grant until for the last but we've been awarded it for three years but it's been in existence for four but however some of what we have learned especially in tight fiscal times is that we do need to be really creative about finding sources outside of what i call the operating budget which is not my lane actually the operating budget uh however this year for example in terms of sustainability we have been offering the restorative justice trainings in the summer and there are teachers it's hard to get teachers together during the summer and sometimes people rightfully want their summers off so this year because we awarded the grant again we're going to run them in january and we're providing sub coverage so that teachers don't have to take time away from their families to be able to take the training and there's a lot of interest in doing the training what suffolk has told us though is that making it mandatory when they've done mandatory staff trainings it doesn't work well and it can build um almost a resistance from staff so so we're we're working with the willing and we're trying to train more and more building leaders in addition to like um not building leaders but i mean teacher leaders within each building and then people have started integrating them in the meetings they run so at the middle school in a cluster meeting for example or in a in a curriculum meeting and things like that so people even people who haven't been formally trained are being brought into the process in that way i hope that answers your question thank you and i just want to state one piece my focus because of our time was really on the hate crime prevention grant so there are other wonderful things happening in the district outside of just this grant and but i and there's so much richness within the grant that i want to be able to answer your questions about it i have a question um and you you might have said this so forgive me if you did but what i think about is you know you you're so wisely making sure that all the people and the the administrators you know teachers students did you talk about parents if you did i'm sorry i missed it we have not talked you mean parent training no we have not talked about parent training um and and and that is something for us to think about and consider i i would hope that if the town had funding that there would be community-wide training around restorative justice uh because it's so expensive to run and we're also hoping to build the capacity so that staff who have tier two and three once we go through all can start to do or co-facilitate with suffix some of the trainings to lower the cost um marianne what's happening with the freedom team and the freedom team coalition and restorative justice um well actually um we have on our website november 10th there's a restorative training presentation oh that's the same night the da is coming okay da that's that's what they're coming she's coming to talk about restorative justice oh right you're right she's not talking about restorative justice no you all had some there's some other initiative there is the freedom collaborative which is um made up of freedom teams in a bunch of different towns are they have they are providing restorative justice training and i don't know the dates because i didn't sign up for it and so up to two members from each one of the teams can join that so i don't know who our team people are from our wayland but but they have access to that yeah who's going from wayland do we know anybody i'm going good yeah and we have a lot of our officers uh from our local police department that are going to be there as well fantastic the wayland police department has done i i don't know if all their staff but they have had extensive restorative justice training i've got a grant from the sudbury foundation for that and maybe other yeah other questions i have a couple uh thank you for the presentation caroline i'm going to throw these three questions at you um first of all about the deb um teachers are they advertised to the students as the deb representative in that school do the students know that they're a resource they're they're really a teacher-facing resource to build the capacity of the adults usually students when they when something happens they go to a trusted adult so really having these people i don't know that i don't know that they would be utilized by students um but it's it's something to think about but that's not their current con that's not in within their responsibilities currently and what's your second question um other question was about the upcoming plan this is last year's plan so you know this is this is the past i combined fy 24 through 26 in one presentation okay so it's some of the stuff is in the past but for example the restorative justice trainings are all like we only got half the money right so we have 25 000 and that's going to towards expanding our rj trainings to offer it to more staff okay i'll go to you uh my third question is can you speak more about the curriculum update that was done to the ninth grade curriculum so i don't know i can't really go in depth about it because um that was really the social studies department head and his team i do know though because we funded it we funded it because because ninth grade modern world history has a unit um which they were originally they did some summer work with facing history and and they wanted to as a result of october 7th and events in the world they wanted to reevaluate their curriculum make sure there was more alignment across sections and also um make sure that they they wanted to take a look at the materials they were using so as a as the public school deb director your input was not taken in those changes no i i don't i i am very much like if you if you would like me to help you please reach out to me that is sort of my role i'm not i don't go in i don't i don't make decisions about curriculum however having said that k-5 really wanted a more robust deb element to their k-5 curriculum so i suggested this framework of using the learning for justice social justice standards which i think are excellent and then i ran a couple of summer workshops worked with teachers helped them develop units they changed their fifth grade biography project to a change makers project to be more in alignment with desi's new social studies standards for fifth grade and so all of the people that they they they research now are people who have in some way fought for change fought for social justice fought for the rights of people who have historically marginalized identities and the fifth grade has done an incredible job of finding the live with the library finding books that the students can research finding a whole range of people to research um in all different areas and really helping students understand that um in terms of race for example it's really important to acknowledge and research and know your white allies and up standards people throughout history who for example without president johnson we would not have our civil rights act of 1964 right so like the the importance of white people who are in positions of power and influence um doing the right thing sometimes at great risk to their personal and professional um i don't know what to call it life if you will they've taken those risks and so it's important for white students for all students but especially for white students to know that there are a lot of white people who have stood alongside and sacrificed a lot so this list is is very broad and i'm really proud of the fifth grade team for what they have done may i ask as a follow-up question um one more and then and then i want to give other people a chance sure generally how does the process of people asking for part of the this grant work uh come again can you ask it another way so the grant the grant is given to the director specifically or to the school no no no no so i'm the one who gets the fun of spending hours and hours and hours writing the grant collecting the evidence making a case for why whalen deserves the grant there are many requirements uh there you need to prevent present that this it's just a so i'm the one who submitted it okay and then i work in collaboration with the principals but especially with david with the superintendent david fleishman and assistant superintendent betsy gavarin i don't decide what the funding is or where the money's going to go that is a collaborative effort and then we submit it and wait and hope and then when the grants have come through and it's up to like who's going to be responsible for administering this who's going to be responsible contacting rehearsal for life and suffolk university i have done that and then brought in the principals and whoever else to help me with um or for me to support them in administering it so no i'm not i'm not um it's not in my i don't even have a budget but if it were it's not in my budget yes heather do you know if the middle school and high school use the learning for justice standards as well they do not they do not um i think i am not sure but from my understanding they go k through five but that could be wrong about that i know that they it's not that they don't teach about justice and such but they don't use that frame thanks you're welcome jenna good to see you um so we um as a committee um were a couple years ago we were making more of an effort to sort of uh build relationships with different parts of the town and um a couple of us heather and i actually were delegated to meet with a couple of members of the school committee and honestly we didn't really get very far um there were a lot of difficult things going on and it was as though well because things are difficult we can't talk about those things so i mean that was what we needed to talk about but i recently was um uh a participant in um a fantastic presentation that was made by a member of the local mormon community to share with the west and wayland interfaith action group their process of trying to educate the high school um his specifically history department to counteract in a constructive way i think there were five families that collaborated on making this approach and trying to do it in a constructive way so that they could be both highlighting um specific legal and human rights um infractions that have had become um perpetuated within the wayland high school uh specifically about mormon history and the way that mormon students were for example asked to self-identify and if they were in the room that certain presentations weren't used and students are being targeted and called racist and you know expected to represent a whole community so that there were a lot of levels to what was going on but i felt that the mormon community had approached it um in a really reasoned and really constructive way and the great outcome was that um you know so the conclusion the presentation that they were quite satisfied with the understanding that had been enlarged um and that there was a you know kind of a positive way forward and i was just wondering if you had been part of that at all um and and also whether maybe kind of sharing that story i was thinking of inviting her to come do that presentation you know with our committee to just share that story to give us both an example of a great way to you know approach a very difficult situation constructively but also to kind of give us um moral courage that when other things come up there there is a way through and i guess one of my um questions is were you aware that that was going on were you involved do you get informed by school administration when these kinds of things waves come through i did not know about this uh and i'm i i'm curious and i'm happy to follow up with dave it would be if they worked with the social studies department to be dave schmier and to find out more about it um so thank you for sharing that and the answer to your question is that there is no formal process where people have to tell me anything really or schools really it's really depends on honestly like if they tell me that then i know and if i if they don't tell me that i don't know like it really is um i i will say this though the non-discrimination protocol every time someone submits one of those forms um betsy gavin and i are the two people in the district who receive those so in that way when people fill them out i'm certainly more aware than i was two years ago of incidents of alleged hate bias or discrimination so i found that really helpful and sometimes like a teacher may say this new spirit council along those lines i'm a member of the spirit council yes chief burman recruited me and so i said of course i will because i you know but it doesn't have like we don't really have an official capacity so it's kind of a little tricky but um there's some high school students on the committee as well so i think you're talking about the freedom team oh yeah oh oh oh i am i'm talking about the freedom team thank you karen the spirit i then the spirit i was part of the spirit committee that that led to the spirit workshop but i'm not still on the spirit if there is a spirit committee i'm not oh it finished its war it finished its work but you guys are doing ongoing work gotcha so um why don't we take one more question and then um i think we'll probably wrap wrap up this part of the meeting is there is there a last question from someone who hasn't spoken yet is there a last question from someone who has spoken yet heather i was just wondering um if you have any ways i heard you talk earlier about restorative circles in the community are there other things that we can be doing given that we're theoretically on the town side of the town schools to support the schools you know i think that so the schools are part of the community it's like a microcosm of the town and the schools also represent people who i mean the the the school communities also have people who have a different zip code right they don't reside in wayland although they are members of the wayland community and so one one thing i think is means a lot is inclusivity of people who are members of the wayland school community but who do not have the same zip code so when there are these big public events like for example our wayland festival is it was it called the wayland festival was that okay so the fact that there was transportation provided to boston students and families who wanted to attend the wayland festival that is like just thinking of it's just it's a it's a forward-thinking move that means a lot even if people don't get on the bus like even if people can't go just the offering of it so for example this year um the de blts worked with the principals and the metco directors and we offered transportation and free child care for a boston resident families to attend back to school night or curriculum night whatever they call it right and so the participate the percentage of boston parents who attended back to school night went through the roof it was and people who even couldn't go said thank you for thinking of us right and so i think that's one one small it's not small because it's not small however i would just say that that's one piece and i think the wayland has done a lot like through wayland can through the hrdeic through forming this freedom team so a lot of good is happening in wayland i think that engaging community members especially parents who aren't really thinking about issues of privilege or of the experiences of people who are not in the dominant group could be really helpful so that they're having conversations with their children and there's so much um through like an organization like embrace race so parents have access to incredibly sound quality content through an organization such as that that can help them navigate so um what kind of questions to ask your kid right not just how was your school day what did you learn right but there and the books that they choose and the restaurants they choose to go to and where they who their dentist and doctor and like all these ways that we can have our children come into genuine authentic contact with people who look different than them and are come from different backgrounds it's really important because white people are the most racially excluded i mean racially isolated of any of the groups right so and and i think that is true for any of the isms who really parents especially when their kids are younger they control who i mean sometimes to some extent who their play dates are with and things but just to expand kids exposure to um people who are different from them i think that's like yeah it's really important carolyn i wanted to let you know that that we're very careful in our written materials that when we're talking about the wayland community we don't say wayland residents we say people who live work yes yeah live work worship study in town or send their kids to school here i've noticed that that's yeah i've really noticed that and and thank you for highlighting that because i think that i've i have i've appreciated that and noticed it so i'm and i'm sure i'm not alone good good well listen thank you so much for coming i don't know what you all are seeing on your zoom screens but i'm going to tell you what i'm seeing caroline you in this and with your beautiful background there you are in the middle of all of our schools and it's so beautiful and that's how i feel i feel like we want to envelop you with our love and appreciation oh thank you so so much and i'm happy you know to come and talk to this group individually or as as a whole group anytime thank you so much for coming really appreciate it and we're welcome we're continuing conversations with you keep on keeping on thank you you as well bye bye all right um excellent so we're kind of more or less running on time here um i just wanted to let's see uh item number nine discussion of just quickly acknowledge that the first library program of conversations for change um facilitated by dr reed and renee hayes took place last week it was fabulous there was a quite a good turnout i don't know i didn't count but maybe 30 people there um and hopefully we can get even more people the next time as always she did a wonderful job of facilitating um a discussion about george washington which you might think would be kind of dull but it was really interesting um really really well done and the next one is coming up on november 13th uh and that one is um uh titled equity is not a zero sum game reflecting on the book the sum of us uh by heather mcgee um chapter four so i hope uh everybody here can try to plan to be there if you or if your schedule allows um if uh was anyone i don't anyway i don't need to put you on the spot but anyway it was it was a great program yeah marianne is that about the program because i looked around almost everyone in that room made a comment all of them participated in it i thought that was very exciting sorry guys i smell something burning and i hope it's not this light so i'm just going to turn the light off um yes it was it was amazing so um i wanted to just mention we have a lot we're we're very programming heavy this fall we have the um that conversation for change on november 13th but going backwards we have the da on november 10th we have the program on um accessory dwelling units we're co-sponsoring with the housing groups uh on november 12th and now we have human rights day on december 10th so we have a lot going on after having just completed the festival so it's a really busy fall for us um i don't know why it smells like something's burning sorry it's very distracting
uh most available on zoom conversations for change is in person only the da will be available on zoom the adus is available on zoom and human rights day will be is to be determined um so really actually looking for help with publicity the um wayland post can put these events on their web page but they look to us to post the events on their web page i am going to give that a shot myself but if i need some help i'm going to ask for it um because we got to get all these up on the web page um and marianne's been doing an amazing job of getting all this stuff up on the um hrdeic web page and asma is getting everything up on the facebook page yeah it's really really great so please tell your friends share the uh flyers if you need me to send you a copy of any of the flyers i can do that but we want to get great turnout for all of these events okay yeah uh so uh any announcements or topics not anticipated 24 hours i mean 48 hours in advance yes denise um i found this interesting native voted on and was accepted i guess a couple of years ago yesterday was a holiday from school for um i forget what indian yeah yeah and sudberry i sent you all but since now i know that people aren't getting everything through our listserv i did send everyone a but and maybe none of you got it a link to so sudbury the the sudbury district and lincoln sudbury high school sent out a questionnaire to sudbury and lincoln residents uh about to prioritize which holiday which um holidays do they think should be school holidays uh and i thought that was really interesting and i don't know where actually that would have been a good question for caroline i don't know where the whalen schools are on that but i know that there's been talk about about creating other holidays and the trade-offs and do you drop a holiday if you create a holiday and all of that um but yes i i mean i think that's wonderful that natick has done that and a bunch of other school districts have as well yes thank you for that um um and happy diwali to any anyone who celebrates it yes marianne um i was just wondering if our students um have any thoughts about um whether our events could be posted in their the student newsletter and the student newspaper i don't know their rules sophie do you happen to know how they decide whether stuff can get posted i'm like you mean through the newsletter are you thinking marianna student newsletter or the parent newsletter yeah yeah no not not that not that it comes out of the schools but that the students write their own newspaper oh there's the wayland student press whatever it's called wspn yeah uh wait wait what are you asking relating to wspn well we have these three events coming up that you know students could participate in and it's just uh you know some of our things are um most all of our things students could participate in and so just didn't know if um we should um well just thought i we'd ask and uh maybe they'd make a choice i don't know um but so you're considering getting coverage or these events into wspn i mean i do have some i could actually reach out to wspn because i am affiliated with or i know some people there and i think that would be a good opportunity as a lot of people do look at the newspapers but out there so if i sent you uh links to the we have flyers for three of them we don't have a flyer yet for human rights day but that's a month another month away if i sent you the three flyers could you see if there might be interest in posting links to them in the newspaper yeah i mean yeah that means they would probably have to write an article about the entire thing they don't post events they don't post events oh do so could they post it as an event like do they have an event listing they post like they have to do it like the link to these events of you know virtual participation but also it's kind of two asks could they do that but also would they want to you know student reporters attend and write up their perspectives on it okay um yeah i think for a lot of events that happen as a town like for chinese new year i think i assume that's what you're talking about they have students come in and interview people to make an article about it while it's happening i feel like if you want me to have a more in-depth answer probably talk like message me and then i could talk to my friends who do wspn and then get like a more solid answer back for you or the teachers like if you look at the wspn website they don't really have a like it's not like a newspaper where they have upcoming events it would be more um like like sophie was saying if they wrote a whole story about something then it would go in there so we could share the ideas and see if anybody's interested in writing a story about something that's coming up yeah mariam did you want to respond or ask a question yes different issue uh concerning the school holidays um we do have uh initiatives locally from the hindu community and the muslim community to recognize holidays on the school calendar uh so i'm wondering if we as an hrdic uh team can help by testifying maybe to the school council uh this is a hrdic issue um i'm also thinking if the report will be the criteria that was inspired from the report that we had could include something like that uh this is a very small effort i think that will give big results could we should not on the agenda for next time is there a time uh no i'm i'm just i just feel like this is the kind of uh initiative that we need to be supporting no i'm not disagreeing with you i'm just saying we're on the part of the agenda right now talking about it's not anticipated 24 hours yeah no i jumped yeah so so i'm just asking can we put it on next time or is there a deadline yes please no no holidays on the agenda okay great um thank you we'll do that we'll follow up um with sophie to get those questions answered i wanted to mention um when we were at the library for um the conversations for change program i picked up a flyer for uh it's called in the roundhouse a celebration of indigenous music sunday november 2nd at 3 pm um and so that's going to be on the library's website and that might be the kind of thing we would want to attend and and you know bring friends to so i want to mention that um i also this is like administrative but i wanted to say because we're having these problems with our listserv i want you to know that no later than friday of the week before our meeting we have a meeting on a tuesday i always send you materials and the agenda no later than the friday before so if you don't get that stuff from me please let me know um because now i know we are having problems with our listserv um and i always ask if you'll let me know whether you're planning to attend and you you all are the most fabulous fabulous committee because you always show up at meetings and you do always tell me if you can't attend but i get a little bit anxious when nobody tells me that they can attend and so i'd really love it if you would tell me can you attend or can't you attend just so i know we're going to have a quorum we've always had a quorum i'm so proud of us we've never had a problem being able to meet because of quorum problems but still i get a little anxious so let me know if if you remember um you know whether you can come or not to each meeting but do know i always send stuff out by friday um so if you don't get it then there's been a listserv problem and i need to know that um okay um also just wanted to let you know mariam and i are going to be meeting with uh someone from the historical commission and um the person who works on the indigenous archaeology collection in weyland to see if we can do some kind of joint programming at some point maybe not this november but maybe some other time um something to do with those indigenous artifacts and educating people um it's kind of to mariam's point of can we do something beyond our indigenous land acknowledgement you know what else can we do um so we're going to explore that and bring bring something back to you all um hopefully that at the next meeting okay anything else for stuff not anticipated 48 hours in advance if not um i think we're ready to adjourn um this has been a really productive meeting thank you everybody for just being here for bringing your your whole selves to this meeting for sharing your ideas so openly um would anybody like to move that we adjourn we move for your denise denise denise moved is there a second second who's that kevin kevin second thank you uh okay let's vote mariam yes marianne yes heather yes i know yes yahoo yahoo sorry i can't hear you yes thank you sophie yes there we go thank you denise yes and kevin yes and karen yes meeting adjourned thank you everybody we'll see you next month which is the next month is the 18th of november yes all right thank you thank you thanks everyone bye bye bye