March 25, 2026 – School Committee – Video & Transcript
March 25, 2026 - School Committee
Okay, welcome to the Whalen School Committee meeting. It is 6.04 on March 25th.
We have Erin Muller, Erin Gibbons, and Betsy Cullen present for the school committee.
We have our administrators that typically join us, and Christina Rodrigo and Kate Sambuco are absent.
We are being recorded by WACAM, and okay.
So I believe the answer is no, but is anyone here for public comment?
And we will go right into superintendent's update. First up is National Honor Society update, so are we inviting some folks up to our table? We have a lot of folks. Love it! So I'll just give brief context. First, this was an item on the agenda a couple months ago, and we said we would get back to you with an update based on some questions that the school committee had. And so tonight we have a panel of folks who will share. We have two of our staff members, Principal Allison Taguchi and Amy Lima, who work at the National Honor Society, among many other hats at the high school, and a group of students, just to follow up on some of the work that they've been doing to address some of the questions that you've had in planning, and to address some community questions. So we have a short presentation, and I'm sure there will be questions. Come on up to the table. Bring some chairs. David, do you want to move one down since Christina's not here? And then Becky can you. We like to include everybody around the table.
Yeah.
Unless you don't think we have this, right? I didn't think. I didn't think you were fresh. This one's like, oh, hello. If you have me, just put one on here. Yeah. Not like, ooh, okay. Yes, that works so much. It really does when I'm like turning this way, and I'm like, am I on the right slide? We just have to have more chairs than we need.
All right, so why don't we start with some introductions, if that's okay. You all know me. Hi, I'm Amy Lima. As Dr. Fletchman said, I have been advising National Honor Society, I think, since 2009, I'm a co-advisor, and more recently, by myself. My official role at New England High School is academic support coordinator. Hi, I'm Sebastian Guzman. I'm a junior in high school, and I've been present to most, if not all, the meetings regarding planning the National Honor Society. I'm Katie Stillman. I'm also a junior, and I've also been involved at the meetings and planning new jobs. Hi, my name's Audrey. I'm the president of National Honor Society, so I'm a senior in high school, and I've been working with these guys to kind of talk about the new Honor Society that we're hoping to implement, but I've also been on the organization for the last two years, so I have a little bit of experience. Hi, I'm Helena Anson, and I'm a junior, and along with Sebastian and Judy, I've also been president in, I think, all of the meetings of planning this new chapter. Hi, I'm Mackenzie Moran. I'm also a junior, and yeah, we've just been working to create this new sort of honor society. Hi, I'm Renee. I'm also a junior, and I'm really excited to present our vision for the new society. Can I ask one question? Totally. Is your sister Thea? My sister is Thea, yeah. She's really good friends with my daughter, Holly, so I'm like, she looks just like you. Yeah, they're like on FaceTime all the time. All the time. That's definitely, yeah, that's my little sister. Okay, you can proceed. Okay. Important, important question. It's very important. Yeah, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. So tonight we wanted to update the committee and interested folks on where we're at with our NHS process. The last time we had a conversation was right after I sent a message, as you recall, announcing that we were going to be replacing the NHS chapter with something new, and that there were some concerns about misalignment of values. And as it turns out, that message was premature. But it did start a really good conversation, which we had wholly intended, which was to sort of evaluate what it is that we think would be a really meaningful experience for students when it comes to the pillars of NHS. What is NHS offering students, and what isn't it offering students, and can we have some good conversation about the vision, and really providing our students with something sort of custom designed, right, that really reflects what they care about. So tonight we're going to sort of update you on our process and our direction, and see what kinds of questions that you have. So for our next slide, Betsy, I want to talk a little bit about where we've been since the end of December. Actually, since October, which is really when Ms. Lima and I met with the current NHS officers, including Audrey, to talk about our own sort of observations and concerns about NHS and to get their input. And they were open and reflective and supportive of having a conversation about something, about having something new. And so in early January, a group of juniors and the current senior officers gathered to begin discussing, reflecting on NHS, and then also thinking about what else do we crave when it comes to a student experience that's like an honor society, but that's a Wayland High School honor society. A core group of students met seven times. Many of these guys were active participants in those exciting conversations. And so we've generated some real vision and momentum around offering something new. And what we'd like to do is to continue offering NHS to eligible juniors. So at this point, and we can go to the next slide, Betsy, thank you. We'd like to propose that both offerings are available to students. We recognize, I personally recognize, the sense of kind of loss and distress that some families and students felt with the announcement that sort of a national chapter of NHS would no longer be a part of Wayland High School. So we want to continue offering NHS. At this point, it would be a spring induction for eligible juniors. We are on track to offer that to our eligible juniors this year, where they would then actively sort of participate as NHS members their senior year, which was back to a model that we had not too, too long ago, while continuing to develop this new group, because there is such excitement and a really emerging vision that we'll talk about when it comes to this new opportunity for students. So our proposal is to do both. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Audrey, who's going to talk a little bit more about sort of the nature of the conversations during our process and discussions, and then bring a little bit more specificity and vision to kind of what we're thinking about. Oh, sorry. You can go to the next slide. Perfect. Yeah. So I have been a part of National Honor Society for two years, and I've really loved my time there. You know, we do a lot. We do a lot of community service, and that's kind of the main goal of the organization in the chapter, is to kind of fulfill it with people who are really excited to help our community. So I think the conversation really started by looking at all the aspects of National Honor Society that we wanted to keep. So there's four pillars. Can you remind me of the pillars? There's character, community, service. Yeah. Good to know this. Yeah. So we each kind of sat down and looked into the pillars more specifically, and talked about what we loved about each of them, what we wanted to keep in place. We looked through the handbook and everything. And then we also talked a lot about what new things we wanted to add to an honor society, maybe some things that the current society lacks, and that we're really excited about potentially implementing. I think that this conversation has shown that we, National Honor Society is a really awesome organization that we have at the high school, and everyone who is a part of it does love it. But there's some room for expansion as well, and some people who might be looking for a little bit more in terms of an honor society at the high school. So yeah, I think we want to dive into a little bit more specific. Yeah, that's neat. So as we've been having these conversations, the thought that's occurred to, honestly, it started from some of our officers, our current NHS officers, and I've really held on to this idea, is that there's a difference in National Honor Society really feels like a celebration or a recognition of what students have accomplished when you look at sort of the selection criteria. And then this additional group that we're hoping to start is more about what students can build and do during their time at Whelan High School, as opposed to sort of celebrating these four characteristics that students have already demonstrated and built. So this new group that we're hoping to begin takes a look at, we ended up with these core values, I would say, rather than the four pillars. And so when we've had these discussions, we've sort of ended up with the idea of community. Like we kept coming back to community, whether it's like community service or serving our student body in the school or building a community within the group. So this is where this graphic sort of came from with community at the center and then sort of other values that feed into the idea of community or can build from community. So now I'm going to turn it over to our students who are going to talk about some of these values and sort of why they've come up as we've been discussing what an Honor Society could be.
So I'm going to be talking about community. Throughout the past few months at the high school, we've talked a lot about community as a whole school and a few goals that we have as a new Will and Honor Society kind of emerges is to expand our sense of community throughout, out of just our schools and into like the greater town. One approach we've talked about is volunteering as a bigger group. Currently, the NHS does most of their volunteer work individually, except for those two chapter projects, which I don't know how many people are in those chapters. Yeah, the whole chapter is involved in the chapter project. Those are the only things we kind of do as a group. Right. And so we're trying to make it not seem like a checkbox that these students and members of NHS are just completing and instead making an impact on our community and how they're positively impacting our community and what parts of... I feel like I'm using the word community a lot. But what parts of our community need our help and what are we taking away from it? And by doing that and kind of asking members of the new chapter, what have you learned? What have you taken out of this is really important to know and like interpret what you're doing So building on to Molina, I'm going to be talking about impact. And as you already mentioned, we kind of thought that the current NHS is kind of focused on the meeting requirements. Again, that checkbox idea. So our vision for this new society is really going to be centered around meaningful impact. So we want to really invite students to have this passion and this drive to create impact in the community that's very personally significant to them and to the community. So instead of doing like a few service projects here and there or something that's short lasting, we really encourage students to present ideas that are more long term and meaningful to them and the community around them. So we're looking to really emphasize not just participation, but impact in general.
So I'll be talking about the commitment. This is more of just like a character aspect of the students we want to kind of draw into this group. We're really looking for students who are like not only like academically very strong, but like very committed and dedicated to like bettering the community. We really want just like consistency over like not impactful stuff, as I've already mentioned. And we're hoping that this like smaller group will sort of be maybe a little bit more active than the big chapter like of NHS. So just really committed to helping. So I'm going to be talking about intentionality. This kind of builds off of impact a little bit as the two are a little bit related. But intentionality runs a little bit deeper. I think intentionality at NHS is really about understanding who, which kind of groups we're helping, who is our target groups, how can we defend them, protect them, or support them, or build them up in some way. I think it's all about the personal connection doesn't have to be in person. You don't really necessarily need to go and meet them. But as long as you do some research or meet them, it provides a more personal connection, which I think offers greater intent and purpose for doing a certain thing that might be helpful for them.
And so for curiosity, we wanted to take the idea of scholarship that was advised in the NHS chapter and kind of turn that more into looking at the student as a whole. Because with the NHS, a lot of that scholarship is very focused on just a GPA component. Whereas with this new organization, if we can focus on curiosity, that will allow us to look at the student more as a whole and see, are they curious about what they're doing, are they doing things individually, such as interest projects, and how can we have that curiosity go into more community, go into more community aspects and things that they're doing. This will connect a bit more to that impact portion, where students are more curious about what they're doing, and they will learn more about what different groups they can help and how they can do these things. And this will also help with the community in that these students will be learning more and sharing that with everyone else who will be equally curious and equally wanting to learn more. And that will just help students as a whole learn more and grow from the experience of being in this organization.
So you probably just got a taste of how awesome these conversations have been. And I want to just applaud wholeheartedly, not just what our students are offering this evening, but their participation and active engagement in this process from start to now. I'm sure you have questions about, okay, so now what, and different timelines and specifics. So we'll try to hit on those as best as we can, knowing that, and I know you appreciate this, that this is sort of, this is under construction. And we're creating this new group with as much clarity and being as true as we can to what has risen in our conversations, but also mindful of a time frame and making sure that students who want to be participating are aware of it and have the opportunity to sort of become a part of it. Even the process of what that looks like has been an interesting conversation in wanting to create sort of a process for inclusion in this new group that reflects actually what we're describing tonight about how we value holistic curiosity, commitment, how do we measure commitment, how do we measure intentionality, those kinds of things. So that's been really exciting as well. What kinds of questions do you folks have?
Well, I'm just going to start with thank you for being curious and committed to this. And you know the way to our hearts put students here.
Absolutely. You guys are amazing. And I just, extraordinary to be able to sit at this table and talk. I think it took me a year to feel okay about doing that. So bravo. And certainly coming from you, I have a very clear picture of why you want to explore an additional option. And I think it was very gracious to maybe run these two parallel, knowing that there might be a little bit of divide until, you know, there's kind of a clear path forward with this. But you guys are very actively taking the lessons learned from National Honor Society and building on it. So it sounds like a beautiful start to me. It's more of a comment than a question, I think. And it takes time, I would assume. So I don't think I'll press you that hard for a timeline yet. Maybe they will. I'm still formulating, so if you already... Oh, I can ask one question, and then you can... Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. I can ask one. Good. I guess, how long do you plan to run the two simultaneously?
I guess... Just next year or to be determined? Yeah, to be determined. Okay. Right. There isn't sort of... I guess with the new group, and I'm sorry we don't have the name of the new group, if that's a question, we're working on that. But there's no intent to have the new group eventually take over NHS. Or there may just be... There may be... Right with the new group, yeah. Right? And I love what Amy said as far as NHS. One difference is the sort of the NHS as being sort of, in many ways, the culmination of achievements that have happened up until then. Right? Of sort of being a part of the chapter and an inductive member reflects accomplishments up to that moment. And then a commitment to do certain things to continue that eligibility. This is building that and creating and achieving while you're in it and contributing as part of the group. So, and they may just find a complimentary place in the Whelan High School community forever and ever. Yeah, I liked that distinction, too. I wrote that down. That resonated with me, too. Thank you. Go ahead. Sorry. That's fine.
I'm assuming that the idea would be that this would be available for, like, 2020... Class of 2027, but probably participation in senior year versus getting involved this year. Because it seems like there's still a lot of work to do. I think what we're imagining is that this spring we can probably get a core group of current juniors, next year's seniors, started. I'm imagining some of these students who have already been involved in the process would be going all right from the start. And then maybe do an additional round of, you know, member selection and induction next school year in the fall as well. That could include current seniors if it's in the fall and then underclassmen as well. Juniors, maybe, and sophomores. Depends on how we put this together. But in the near future, we're going to reconvene this group to sort of think through some of those pieces. But we're hoping to at least gather a group who already knows they're interested in this at the end of the school year so we can, like, hit the ground running in the fall with them. Got it.
One of the questions that I had was you kind of touched on the scholarship piece. Is there an idea that there will be some form of scholarship tied to this or no? I would say what we've been thinking of is a different idea of scholarship. So NHS, one of the, like, most strict components in National Honor Society is the scholarship pillar is specifically identified only by GBA. Like, in fact, in the selection process, if a student has the GPA, like, you're not supposed to consider scholarship beyond that. Like, it's a yes-no checkbox. Whereas in this group, in the selection side of things, we're thinking about how do we measure a student's sort of desire to grow and learn? Students on the panel here have been talking about is it students who have shown improvements? Students who, I don't know, receive a teacher recommendation? Like, whatever it might be, some other way to show that. And then we're thinking that it ties into the work of the group in terms of students maybe researching different topics that they then want to do service-related to. And potentially also researching things that they feel like our school community or the greater community needs to learn more about to become better, like, members of the community or the world. So sort of taking that scholarship piece and instead of having it be a yes-no checkbox, having it be something about the work of the group as we go. Like, do students show that desire to learn and share information or to develop their plans based on the information that they've learned? If I could actually say one more thing about that, that would relate more to the curiosity component. So we would have you having an idea of their studentship from that teacher recommendation portion of it. And then also taking a look at academic curiosity instead of just a numerical how well they've been doing. So we could look at student improvement or what they're doing outside of school that shows a vivid academic curiosity, what sorts of classes they're taking, etc. Things such as that, as opposed to the very rigid and singular GPA requirement of the NHS. Yeah, the other thing is the national organization does require you to make that choice based on the GPA system that we use at our high school. So since we use an unweighted GPA, we're looking at it not really considering the classes that the student is enrolled in. So someone who is maybe taking all college regular classes that has a 3.5 would be considered. But someone who takes all honors classes and has a 3.0 would be considered, even though their weighted GPAs would be a little bit more similar. Maybe the honors student would usually be higher. So I think that maybe with this new honors society, we'd kind of consider a wider range of students, take into consideration course load, but also things like that they did outside of school as well. Yeah, one more thing I'd like to add. We're in a very experimental stage in our design process of rebuilding NHS. And I think there's a lot of observations we still have to, there's a lot of things we still have to observe and figure out moving forward. And I think course load, but also effort, plays a very important role. Oh, yeah. If we see students who are actively trying to increase their grades or show improvement, and they're really pushing themselves through everything with all they've got, maybe the best they can get is a 3.5. But if they're putting that extra time in outside of school and in school to really show and grow, I think that is a very important aspect that we will consider. And a lot of it right now is just going to be observatory, seeing what the students are capable of. Do you see this as being student-led that participate in the acceptance process? We actually were talking about that a little bit. One idea that I brought up a little while ago was potentially doing student interviews, because I think that you can really get to know someone through having a conversation with them. And I think it takes a little bit of pressure off of it when you're kind of face-to-face with someone that's your own age or of similar age to you. So I think that that's a place where students can potentially help. We haven't really talked beyond that. I think maybe. I think some things like grades and GPA and stuff like that can be private to students, and I'm not sure that other people would want that publicized to even just other people on the committee. But it's definitely something that I think we're all open to talking about, and it's a cool idea. I think another aspect that we've been talking about a little bit is ask maybe if we end up asking teachers for recommendations to this new society, that could help us while we're asking for teacher recommendations in our college application process. And with the interview process, that would help us in our later life. Definitely. Thank you all so much. It's really exciting for us to have you here, and thank you for sharing what really has clearly been a thoughtful and deliberative process. A couple of things. I love the idea of underclassmen. I mean, if you're really going to capture that notion that this is something that's ongoing and active and that you're striving for as much as you've already achieved, I think giving you a longer runway to participate can matter. I also love the possible mentorship opportunities that exist in that organically. One thought on selection may be a personal statement of some kind that sort of demonstrates the why and which of your new values resonate. You know, diligence is another way of measuring scholarship. I love the concept of curiosity as well. So thank you all. I have sort of similar questions about where you land, but want to give grace to the process that clearly has been very formative since we last had an update. They're all much nicer than me. They say thank you. They smile. No, this is great. There was a question, though, that I had, and now I got sidetracked because you guys are always nicer than me.
Underclassmen timing.
Oh, no. And I guess this is just kind of like feedback more than question, but I'm getting a little bit caught up on with impact and community and service. Like, is it going to be group-focused service each year, or is it going to be – I'm hearing, like, some seems more individual, but some seems more group. So just feedback, not – and I'm sure that will all get worked out. But that was just, like, something that kept, like, resonating. I think right now, just to give you some context, we do a leadership project. So all of the members are required to do a five- to ten-hour service project that reflects something they're interested in. And we write about it. We talk about kind of what we – how we've grown, et cetera. But then we also do chapter-wide projects. So the officers, myself, and then we have four other officers, we work together to plan this project that kind of benefits the community. That includes all of the members, and all of the members are required to participate. But it winds up being mostly the officers doing kind of the majority of the workload, and then the other members are kind of just jumping in and doing, like, how – anything that we need them to do to kind of facilitate the process. I think that I personally like the initiative of the leadership project, but I think that we could expand a little bit more on the chapter project and talk more about how are some ways that we can get together as a group and volunteer more. How can we kind of make this more of a group effort rather than just an officer's effort. So I think that that's where the group versus individual thing comes in. I think we probably still have to work out some kinks on if we'll keep the leadership project. Maybe that's something that remains in the regular National Honor Society, and that we do something different with the regular Honor Society. But those definitely are still some things that we need to have conversations about. Hopefully it'll be more community-based things, I would say, but we don't know anything for sure yet. And I think – oh, sorry. One more thing that we've mentioned is that each individual member of this new group is going to be doing individual service throughout the year, and this group is going to be a place where they can pull from as a resource, where if they have something that they're very passionate about, that they want to have more of an impact in, such as organizing a slightly larger-scale community service event, they could grab from that group to have more members who are also interested in that thing, help them with pulling. And I think one distinction between the two levels, because like we've said, we're going to run two parallel groups. The smaller groups or the more new underclassmen that may join, we might prioritize more individualistic approaches to community service to really hone in on their skills and really develop them so that by the time they're old enough to compete and join in the higher, more elite Honor Society of our school, they'll be ready to contribute massively to the larger-scale group projects that are really about connecting all members of the community together. Yeah, and also like, like with this group we're trying to sort of take, like what you're saying, like the weight off of just like the few officers for like making a community service project and really putting it back into the hands of like dedicated students instead of just like making them just volunteer for whatever project they're talking about. Just one last thing to add, as I already mentioned, like the current projects, they're like five to ten hours. Our goal is to do something more long-lasting, maybe throughout the school year, that the students can continuously contribute to throughout the different months to create this bigger impact on the day. Yeah. I'm just going to throw in, we do have a semester, we have community service requirements individually, so we do 20 hours a semester, and I believe 60, 50 or 60 hours are required to actually be eligible to join the National Honor Society. So it is a lot of individual work, but I guess the hope would be to focus it more holistically on the group, but still keeping those requirements because I think it's important to ensure that the members are actively motivated towards getting those hours in because, you know, that's a big part of the Honor Society. I think another thing to go off of what Wernay said was if you're doing something so long-lasting, you want to reflect back and really make sure you know what you're doing is something that's good and how it's positively affecting the community. And, you know, maybe it becomes something bigger, like somewhere down the line in your later life, but, you know, I feel like it's really valuable to circle back and find out why. Why are you doing this? What impact does it have? I love the way you all are talking so much about impact. That's often not something that's talked about with high school community service. You know, sometimes it tends to be about resume padding in the college applications. I've never heard students talk so much about impact. And, you know, so much of, before I came back to education, I was the CEO of a large non-profit. And most of our discussion was about impact and how do we measure impact. And it's such a good skill to think about how do you measure impact. And that could really change the nature of the service of Wayland High School, just thinking about impact and getting that in students' minds. It's not about the hours. It's actually about how you impact people and communities. That's thought number one. Thought number two, you know, Betsy, we've been talking with a bunch of teachers and administrators about the portrait of a learner, and we'll talk about that in an upcoming school committee, in terms of what kind of qualities do we want in Wayland graduates. And so much of the discussion today is you're talking about the qualities that we want in our graduates, in terms of commitment, curiosity, exploration. I feel like we could take this language and put our vision of a graduate together. And by creating this organization, you're going to allow more students to achieve some of the portraits that we will want in the future.
I think that the result of this process is hopefully that we're going to get a larger group of people who really want to be present in this community, and who love helping, you know, Wayland residents or people surrounding people, and who are really interested in what they're actually doing, rather than the people who are just adding it to their resume because they think that they need to to get into a good school, which is absolutely not true. But I really, I'm very, very excited about this. And I think that we're going to get a lot of people who, like, are really excited about this too. I think it's probably going to be a little bit of a shock at first, and people are going to take some time to adjust to it. But I think that once it is implemented and everyone has the opportunity to be a part of it, you're going to get a lot of people who are really passionate about what they're doing, which is awesome. Audrey's sad that she's graduating. I know. Who is this is here for me? Thea can do it. Yeah. William, I have a brother. Yeah, there is one that falls in between. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, but that's your impact, right? Yeah. Is that you see something that you would like to change, and you get to leave it for your siblings. Yeah. And everybody else in the community. Like, that's awesome. It's been a really fun process. That's great. And really fun for us. I mean, Amy and I have just enjoyed so much these conversations, and really getting at the heart of who are we as learners, who are we as a community, what do we want to create, what do we want our impact to be? So it's been just absolutely all so very much. And thank you all for your thoughtful questions and support of this new venture. Thank you. Thanks for coming back and coming to visit us, so thank you. I need to give you guys an update soon. Yeah, that would be awesome when you really start to roll it out or something. We welcome alums and students. We do. We do. We do. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. I don't think I can share it, but I'm sorry to submit to a request. Got it, got it, got it. Okay. Okay. Allison. She sent a request so that it could be shared with us. Just the presentation, so I can just pop it in the folder for everybody. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, guys. Thank you. Can you share it with... Oh, can you give the... If you just give it to me, I can put it in the folder and everybody can access it. I requested access to share it with Erin. That's all. But it had to go through you, which is why she kept having to turn it. I know. I'm like, all right, forget it. I'm just going to... It's okay. We have talked about turning this table and flipping the whole room. I know. But... Um... It does. It does. Spring cleaning. Absolutely. Bye, everyone. Thank you. Bye, Amy. Bye, Amy. Have you. Accountable Talk update. Yes. And this is not an easy task, following. I know. You know? Well, if they can do it, we can. You're all just as engaging. I like that answer. Just as engaging. These are the educators who shake these students. That's the connection. That's the same way we'll use. There you go. Uh... In this one, we're just clicking from the agenda, right? So, it's a pleasure. Last year, you had an update on Accountable Talk. And there's work continuing. Principal Deborah Romeo, Curriculum Leaders, Rebecca Polo in Science. So, it's great to have this team here for the updates. Thank you. Um, I'm going to actually pass it directly to Rebecca and to Stacy. Um, for just a really brief introduction, the reason Rebecca and Stacy, out of all the curriculum leaders right here, is because they've done just a lot of work within their subject areas as well as the general work that we did last year. And there are many teachers in both of their departments that have dedicated their professional practice goals to elevating student talks. And so, um, they're going to give you kind of the math version and the science version. You'll see how they're similar, but you'll also see how they're used to their discipline. And so, um, I am so grateful for their leadership and hard work and their presence here this evening because, um, I know they're just going to bring this all to life for you. So. Thank you. Um, I just want to start by saying that this Elevating Student Talk in Math and Science really comes from a lot of the hard work that we've done as a full curriculum team. Um, and the work prior to that that we've done on engagement and our work in our departments the year after that and Elevating Student Talk and now incorporating executive functioning and we're all trying to, um, really build off of each consecutive year of professional development. But a lot of the work, um, that we're bringing to you is a part of our, our greater, um, collective. Yeah, I can see some, do you want to explain the students? Um, sure, yeah, these are, um, math graphics. So, a lot of the Elevating Student Talk are one of the, one of the pillars, I guess, is doing, um, card sorts. So, we put magnets on these card sorts to just get kids up at the boards and they are, I can't even tell what this is. I think these are graphs in situations. So, they're matching, right, the graph with the, with the, uh, description. And then in the bottom corner is just some sentence stems that we hang on our whiteboards. So, that they're prompts, right, for students to, who sometimes might not want to be talking, or might not know what to say, or how to interject into a conversation. So, they're just reminders. Have that academic talk. Yes. Yeah. Um, I think the next slide. Yeah. Okay. So, our history is, um, this is the work that we did collectively, um, where in the summer, prior to our Elevating Student Talk, professional development, the curriculum leaders, um, took on a bit of a book study, um, with Unlocking the Power of Student Talk, Teaching Kids to Talk with Clarity and Purpose, by, sorry, Rosent and Winchow. And we had the four themes that we built into each session, which was talking to build relationships, talking to play with ideas, talking to report, and talking to analyze and argue. And each session was built, not only to emphasize each of the four, we focused on one at a time, but we were building in each one as we went. And we did it in a way that really, um, embodied and had the participants engaged in each of these as we went along. So, we practiced what we preached. We really tried to model it. And I think the next slide, this is sort of the summary, and it has links to all the different activities that we had teachers engage in for each of the different types of talks. And this resource was really useful for our, um, teachers to look back on in previous, uh, in subsequent years to be able to build their portfolio of accountable talk strategies. So that's the history. That's where we've been. Um, but here we are now. And here we are now. So, in math, we've been doing a lot of Building Thinking Classroom. I'm not sure how familiar the committee is with this. But this is a, um, a student-centered pedagogy. There are 14 pillars. The main thing that everybody knows about when they think of Building Thinking Classroom is students out of their seats and up at the boards, um, working and collaborating in random groups that are constantly changing, right? Sounds like you know. Well, aren't you just a know-it-all? It's awesome. Um, so it's a change, right? And we are, um, continuing to create, um, activities that, that make sense at the board, right? It's not just worksheets. I mean, sometimes there are worksheets, but we're trying to get kids up at the board. And it's, it's fun, and I think that they like it. So we're trying to connect that, what we've been doing specifically in math, to the elevating student talk and trying to interweave them. In science, we've been working on CERs or ERCs, which is a way of writing or speaking an evidence-based argument, um, as part of our practice standards, um, so it's claim, evidence, reasoning, and then our conclusion as well, um, which are very important to create an evidence-based discussion. And one way that, um, we talk about CERs and CERTs is through, um, the way we have students build on those is through discussion, through things like matching cards together about what great claims, evidence, and reasoning are, playing with evidence, um, and then being able to speak your reasoning before you can write it. But both are focused on the student constructive knowledge that's really key to what we're, um, pushing for our pedagogy in both subjects.
So, we're in our exploration phase right now. We've got lots of energy, lots of people coming up to us saying, oh, I got an idea for this, and oh, can you help me make, um, note cards? Um, note cards, yeah, a lot of note card sorting, um, which is, is fun for math intent because we're inside especially, math also, we're into categorization, um, and trying to learn from organization of ideas, um, and we're working on some content-specific techniques that we'll go into in a second. Um, and as Deborah mentioned, it's part of, um, many of our professional practice and student learning goals is here. Right. And so, this, um, picture up here is just a sample. This is a tracking form that some teachers in my department have used. It was sort of adapted from, uh, um, fostering algebraic, I think, yeah, fancy nose, um, form that was created. And so, you know, I've gone in to teachers and I've observed part of their classes and I can just keep track of who's talking, what kind of talk they're doing, are they talking at all, and then teachers have data to look back on and then they can move forward based on that data. Then they know what they need to work on and what they need to create and help the students. Yeah, it's not evaluative, but it gives us a good sense of, uh, gives them feedback on what, um, they're doing to help them. What the strengths and weaknesses are. Yeah. So, you're looking for the students to be engaging in this type of talk. Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah. That's the goal. Um, so, we're helping our PLCs, um, develop, uh, activity, as you said, and manipulatives, um, and assisting with that evidence collection. Okay. So, um, the next two slides are on math. And so, this is, uh, one teacher in the eighth grade, you know, after I went in and I did a couple of observations and we sat and we analyzed, we said, you know, our students or her students at this point were really good at talking. They were actually very good at sharing and explaining their steps. They need a little help in listening, um, and bringing other people into their conversation. Maybe not shocking when we think about adolescence. So, um, so we came up with these cards that were category specific, and this is just three of the categories here, but I can't even remember. China, look at that yellow card. Um, building on or connecting others' ideas, right? Like, so that we knew was one thing. Another category was challenging, um, asking challenging questions in a respectful way. So, we created these cards and then she has just started recently. She took two categories, those two that I just mentioned, and did a lesson in past. Everybody had these two cards. And on each card are the sentence stems that fit into those categories. And she challenged her students, okay, you have to use all these sentence stems or at least one or two from each card within this lesson. And so, you know, the kids, they were a little silly with it, but they did it. And it worked and it made them, it just made them think about how they can incorporate, um, different kinds of talk and include people. And so, she'll do it again. And we'll just practice. It's just a practice, right? So, you just continue to practice. So, that's one thing. My seventh grade team is, uh, we're trying to take Sarah Ward's executive functioning, because we've had some professional development on that, our building thinking classroom, and the, um, elevating student talk, and mash it together. And mash it all together. So, this was part of our planning doc. Since then, this has turned into cards. We like cards. We do like cards. And so, this has basically taken, you know, Sarah Ward talks about jobs, job roles. And so, we tried to create these job roles. Um, and then, how does that match to the, the sentence stems that really go with them. And so, the designers, we actually created as a group. So, imagine three students are up at the board in groups. And the whole group, they have to do the designer card. And so, the together, before they even pick up a pen, before they even start, they're thinking, okay, here's our task. How does it have to, how are we going to map it out? What do we need to do? What's our planning? And so, that's the group involved. And then, each student gets one card. One student's a navigator. One student's the scribe. That's a very building-thinking classroom. And one student, which isn't shown here, is the pivot pilot. So, the pivot pilot is watching what's being written on the board, and watching for mistakes, and pointing out inconsistencies. And somebody else is the scribe. And somebody else is estimating. Like, what should we be looking for? So, just to give you one idea, that's where we're headed. So, in science, it's our first Super Wednesday. We did a professional development together about how this accountable talk, how this elevating student talk really works within, specifically, a science classroom. And so, we looked to resources as part of our professional development prior. In Super Wednesdays, we were looking at a program called Open Sci-Ed. That's a free open source program that's used by many schools. And it has benefits and drawbacks. So, we're looking primarily at their pedagogy and talking about sense-making, which is a big hot theme in science right now, is how do kids know? How does it make sense? How does it attach to their world and surrounding? Putting it together with evidence and ideas. And so, we are taking different parts of the lesson, have different strategies that can work best throughout the unit. And so, thinking about building on initial phenomena and phenomena-based instruction, which is, again, another one of our professional developments that we put together. And basing a science lesson on things that are happening in the real world. Like, what's the best time of day to fly a kite? Or why did Groppel just fall fall from the sky? Which happened this week? And which is like a soft hail. A weird precipitation happening this week. We're in weather right now. So, you know. How to build consensus. It's just a big open circle idea, which we're working on. And really using this flowchart of teaching tools that I found that really helps divvy up where the talk moves are best at each part. Are you working with students together in a group? Are you having them, are you checking in on each of their answers? Or is it for them to develop their own knowledge? And we'll check in a little bit later. Which moves are best and which moves are more easily worked as a teacher and for the students for what we need. And so you go to the next slide. Thank you. Our current game changer practices are also some conversation sentence starters. Sixth grade is really working on those quite a lot to build our academic talk in the science classroom. Student created categories for these concept carved sorts. We're very much into categorization in science. But also uniting different ideas and showing how categories move and change in science all of the time. And how do we, how can different groups categorize things differently? What does that mean about our knowledge of topic? Working on some driving question boards, which is an open-sided idea as well, where we have these phenomena and students have to, in groups, talk about why that might be happening and what questions they have. So not jumping to conclusions, but developing really good questions that we can get evidence for. And really elevating our turn and talk to be really specific about what we're looking for, what we're listening for, and making sure that everyone is really participating effectively to get knowledge and listen to each other. And so we're in the process of exploring many other techniques and reflecting and figuring out what works for us best. Okay, so moving forward,
it's really just about taking everything and mushing it together. And time and create, you know, it takes time to create things, right? And so we have to experiment and play with the new ideas. Yeah. And then see what works. And just as we did in RPD, we play with ideas. Right. And some things can go, you know, work beautifully across all subjects, and some things are really subject-specific, and... And continuing to talk with each other to get ideas and see what works. I think one of the things that we talked about, the first year, this is a multi-year process, because it was about, last year was about our staff learning under the guidance of our curriculum leaders. And this year is about exploration and trying things out in the classroom. And I love the role that both Stacey and Rebecca are playing with their teachers in terms of that data gathering, because that's hard to do while you're trying the new techniques or the new strategies. And so for the curriculum leaders to support teachers in that way. And it makes, it actually shows, like, where are we? Where are our kids? And what is the next logical step, given what we're trying to do with them? And so, as we move forward, you know, we're going to continue to see Elevation Student Talk as one of our goals, because what we want to see is that the students are, they're able to do this with greater independence over time, because it will take them, as well as probably the years of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, to develop these skills deeply. And for us, it means of continued planning and collaboration. And this year, we've also added in that executive functioning piece. And it made me think so much about that idea of the students understanding, what does it look like when I'm doing this? Like, how do I envision myself doing this? And right now, we're still supporting them a lot and teaching them how to do it. And so in the, you know, the upcoming year, what it will look like is time, departmental time, continuing to be focused on this work as teachers look at lessons again, look at activities again, and embed these practices so that students actually gain that independence and automaticity that we want them to have as they kind of move on from middle school to high school. And especially, as we say, up there in the age of AI, continuing to develop their sense of voice. Talking to each other. Exactly. Face-to-face. Yeah. I have to think that this work will also assist in building writing skills around having your evidence to support whatever, you know, end game you're trying to get to. Um, so it seems to be such a well-rounded application, like, thing to be learned. Skill. As a teacher on the Writing Center also, I, um, find it so helpful when I do have the time to individually work with students and have them voice those, um, ideas before they write them down in any subject that I'm helping them with in the Writing Center, whether it be social studies or English or science-gathering evidence from their novel that they're reading. Um, and so continuing that in our science classes as we're building argumentative talk and writing is key. I love argumentative talk. I'm there for it all day. Um, a couple themes that I just, first of all, I love everything about this. Like, it really resonates. I mean, um, the, one of the things that I talk about in my other real job as an executive is how do we foster cross-functional collaboration? How do you get stakeholders who have different POV to show up and do, like, so what you're doing mirroring the jobs and playing different positions depending on the problem or the day or where you sit, that is such real life ability to have that sort of agility in how you see yourself and the role that you're going to play in particular attacking a different problem and that sometimes you're the pivot pilot. Sometimes you're the, you know, accountability mechanism and sometimes you're the ideation mechanism and sometimes you're the operational solutioner and that I think is just tremendous, um, agility that I think is great to model at these really formative stages. The other is I remember both personally and then also as a classroom teacher, like, trying to engage this age group in talking is organically challenging and some of that comes from the legacy or traditional approach. Put, like, a spotlight on them, you try to engage or if we put them in groups there wasn't as much structure and I think what I love about this is this, like, democratization of talking that everybody's expected to do it but don't worry, you have a script, you have a prompt, we have a start and, like, it's not always you're called on to give an answer and it's right or wrong, it's really allowing them to feel confident to express an idea but, but in pounded limits so that they sort of know, okay, right now I'm supposed to express this kind of idea. And over, and I just, it really I think is going to be wildly impactful. I'm full circle, David, to our talk of impact. Um, the one thing I would really want to encourage is we've talked here at the table a lot about the transition from our eighth graders to our ninth graders and I would love us in this multi-year effort to really be thinking about how do we help them harness and hold on to the skills you all are invested in working so hard to build and model as they matriculate, right? Like, how do we continue these skills and leave opportunities in their classroom and group work in high school to say don't forget if that wasn't a middle school thing, these are life lessons and they're really going to serve you well and encourage the students to continue that and also continue the, um, results that you're seeing and sharing that especially with the ninth grade team. What Betsy said. I mean, I find myself speechless and that's not the point but I, I too, you know, share the similar sentiments. I'm here for all of it. I think it's, it's awesome. It's fantastic life lessons for the kids. We heard a little bit from the upperclassmen that were here earlier. They, I was amazed at how they kind of contributed to the other person's conversation and I imagine that they probably have some more difficult conversations behind the scenes and hopefully they're armed with some of these tools on, on how to have that and how to have a difference of opinion and how to come together on those. So, yeah, fantastic. And it's a lifelong process. Thank you. Thank you for doing it. Thank you. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you for opening up your classroom practice and sharing it, like, with all of us. Um, and to circle back on that, I think it's really important that the community as a whole and at the very least families understand what's going on on super early release Wednesdays. So, when you guys join us and you're talking to us about what you did on super Wednesday number one, it's really, it's invaluable, I think, for us to support what you guys are doing. Um, and then for people to be able to see, like, oh, I can ask my, you know, kid if they're the driver or, you know, the navigator or the pivot person or, you know, and just kind of, it's really helpful. Um, so I appreciate that so much from that perspective as well. So, thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you. And I love that your presentation is clickable, and I literally have clicked on, like, almost everything. So, I can't wait to spend more time with you. Excellent. Thank you all. The word pedagogy has always made my head spin. It just doesn't, like, really make sense to me. And I'm like, me! I don't like the word paired. Oh, I like that. Like OG and paired. Yeah. Oh, mmm. Let's give all the SAT words. Let's just put them all in there. Vocabulary. Boom. Go. Um, I found out that supposedly, this is totally off topic, but when she was saying what was falling from the sky the other day, it made me think of how last night I was driving kids to lacrosse practice, and they were talking about how there's one day coming in the next couple weeks that supposedly, supposedly, for a minute or two, the world is, or seconds, the world is supposed to lose gravity. Like an elevator? Well, I mean, it's not the science person. Don't catch her in the parking lot. And I was like, wait, is this legitimate? Like, is this really? Are we talking about this in school? And the kids are like... It's like when you jump up in an elevator and everything like that. Well, but you're not going to come back down. Oh. Because there's not going to be any gravity to pull you. I'm like, is my house going to like that? Did they say that on TikTok? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then I said, and so... Now I'm going to take a picture as that on my face. And so I said, I said, um, I said, wait a minute. Is this like, so I'm asking, this is a discussion I'm having from the driver's seat. I'm like, wait, is this real? Tell me more. Like, where did you hear about this? Who's talking about this? And then they're just like, okay, whatever. We're going to talk about, we're going to go on the trampoline when this happens. So that when we hit that, like, we're just going to go into the universe. That song, Levitating, is going to be very popular. Yeah. No one else is sorry about this? No. No. But I'm going to ask my kids when I get home. Ask them. No. Google it first, otherwise. Hold on, hold on. April Fool's is just around the corner. There is a April Fool's and on 4-1. No, it wasn't. I thought about that. Thursday next week. Good call, Benson.
The viral claim that Earth will lose gravity for seven seconds on August 12th. Oh, August. Is a false, unsubstantiated rumor. You can't believe everything you read on the Google. Is that your AI overview, though? I don't know. NASA has not issued any warning regarding loss of gravity, and scientists have debunked the rumor. Don't believe everything you see and read, kids. That's the lesson. There would be a catastrophic return. Everything would slam back to Earth, causing widespread damage, injuries, and immense geological disruption. But you'll be fine because you're on a trampoline. Definitely. Okay. We'll just go boop boop. All right. Sorry. I digress. We are going to switch gears and talk about finance. We're going to talk about finance. As we know, financial updates to school committees are some of the most important that all of you do as in your fiduciary roles. In the non-gravity world. And I should say that, you know, obviously, you know, last year was a real challenge. You know, had to use different resources and a partial freeze. And your Kirsteen being in her first year is certainly watching our finances very closely. Even, I'll talk about in a little while, just, you know, we had a meeting with our finance director and town manager just late this afternoon in terms of just impact. You know, communities are really facing, the weather this winter has been a real challenge for municipal governments and school districts. And that has been, you know, the last few years we have not had that challenge. But if you think about how much the over budget that this has caused, and we are different than the federal government in the sense that we have to balance every year. And so as a result, you know, we even talked today about what are we going to do about just in Whalen how much over budget the snow and ice. So that's going to add a little bit of a challenge to us that was as of four o'clock today. It's not in this report, but we'll talk about it. Okay. Thank you, David, for that segue into it's not quite an exact quarterly report, but I felt it was very important to kind of put this all together and see where we were in February, just given last year's circumstances. And I did kind of provide a little bit of a different different constructs so that it was narrative, but as well as actually showing the numbers and how the numbers come together based on the projections and what we're anticipating. And again, this was as of the end of February. So again, the challenging part with our financial system is that it does not encumber payroll. That's the largest piece of our budget. So for me, that is a real concern. And so what I wanted to be able to show and illustrate is that, albeit it looks like we've got this, you know, wow, we still have 40% of our budget available. Nope, we don't really. And how I, you know, provided the information is what the pay periods remaining as of, um, through March and the end of the year, we have, um, different, uh, groups that are a different number of pay periods. So that's also a challenge in monitoring and making sure we get those right. Again, projecting, um, a different absences and leave of absence, sub coverage amounts, um, retirement payouts. Um, we'd have our longevity payments that are due at the end of the year. And we have done, um, this year, a, an agreed, um, two-part co-curricular stipend process, which does allow for greater monitoring and budget projections. So I do know that that's a pretty good number. Um, and then looking at the non-personnel, when we go to the, um, specific categories, they are reflecting deficits. And so I wanted to be able to provide the context that we still have not done those transfers to our bus fee revolving account and circuit breaker reimbursement accounts that we're, we're just holding on, you know, to the very, um, last point where we know we need to take it precisely exactly, exactly how much, but those, um, categories are, um, roughly in the deficit of 100,000 and 660,000 respectively. Uh, so the second page is where the illustration is for the column breakout. Um, the Munis report, again, it, it shows, so what I, uh, wanted to provide was that on the left-hand side of this, um, chart, we have what the Munis report does provide. And it has our personnel, year-to-date costs, no encumbrances for personnel, non-personnel, the year-to-date expenditures, and what we have already encumbered. So again, combining those two numbers, expense and encumbrance, the Munis report provides the, um, expense and encumbrance of the $32,985,000, which shows an artificial available balance of 22 million dollars. So what I did on the right-hand side of this illustration is incorporating the projections through the end of the year in both the personnel and non-personnel, um, based on those identified, um, the bullet points previously. And again, this was as of February. We were, um, we're hoping, again, these are things that still have not been entered into our system. We know we have graduation expenses. We have a lot that's coming up that we still need to, um, put in for, but it does, um, reflect, uh, roughly $800,000 available. Now we know that we're going to have some, um, differences, uh, with that. Again, budget pressures, as we just heard, um, towards, um, the weather, unprecedented winter weather. Can I ask a quick question? Mm-hmm. Sorry. Um, why are the non-personnel encumbrances per Munis so much higher than our projected encumbrances for non-personnel? Um, what I just explained is that we have not done the reduction out. But is that exactly what it is? Sorry, I just, yes, I didn't. Okay, that's all it is. So it's roughly $760,000 less. Okay. Yes. All right. Okay, similar question. The projected encumbrances, did those, sorry, the $826,000 projected available, is that after any unexpected overages due to custodial, um, costs because of weather, or is that not included in the projections yet? And then the next question is, is that $826,000 include the $760,000 that we have in? It is net of that, yes. Okay. And again, I put in the projections that I had at the point in time, new items are already- Because we got more. No. So, um, yes, we're about $50,000 over in our custodial overtime with that line alone. So, um, that is definitely a significant, and again, facilities, we're having significant HVAC issues, um, burst pipes, again, are freezing conditions that really has required even more, um, maintenance repairs and urgent response times that just cannot be, um, pushed out. Like, those are immediate that we have to take into account. Um, we had, um, again, just carefully watching the special education out of district, um, services. We are, you know, really hopeful that our circuit breaker is going to get us to the end. We're trying very hard not to have to tap into that stabilization fund so that we can truly have a safety net going forward and continue to build on that. I'm, I'm not going to say anything about anything, but that's our, that's our hope. Great. We'll stick with that. We did receive an additional, um, grant that was, um, that Ronnie did report, but I wanted to include it in the financial because it was not in that first, um, quarterly report and that we were one of, um, only 78 recipients to receive that funding. So that was revolving funds. Again, these are, these are really, um, just at the point where they're only able to, um, provide the, the level of offset that we've identified. What we really had to, um, utilize those resources in 2025. So in that capacity, we're looking to try to just incrementally get ourselves, um, back to having a better fund balance in those regards, but we are still, um, running positive and we will continue to watch all of our budget pressures and, uh, you'll be, um, again, looking at all of the expenses as we're coming through in the final quarter. Um, this is where the crunch time is and it gets really, really challenging. Can you just refresh my memory? The $50,000 grant is toward fiscal year 26, correct? Um, yes. Yes. Okay. So it's like, but accounted for done. Um, let's see. Well, or I could send it by until, um, September. It's already accounted for. I mean, I had to, when I put in the proposal for it, I had to write, how would we be using it? Mm-hmm. So, um. But is it, is it all against, like, expenses out of fiscal year 26 or are we also being able to cover some into fiscal year 27 with it? Okay. Some into 27 for like, it's more professional development. Yeah. I thought that's what I was just, I was just going to say that. It's supplemental. It's not where we can offset our budget. Yeah. It's, I get to do extra stuff because that I wanted to do, but, uh, now we can do it. Yeah. I have a question. I was looking at the transportation and this is related and sort of a little bit off topic, but there were never bus passes given out this year. So anyone who paid for the bus never got a pass. They were. They were laminated and distributed in the classroom level. Okay. Well, they never made it home. No. And I can guarantee you they're not being checked by the bus drivers. While I love that sometimes my kid says, I'm going to jump on the bus and go, I paid for the bus. So I'm, but I'm going to go to this person's house. So I don't have to go and worry about there's people that I know are riding the bus for free all year because no one's checking bus passes and bus passes never made it home. Maybe they did in some people's houses, but three people around the table. They were distributed. I can assure you that they were, but I don't know from once they left us. Right. We saw them printed, laminated, cut, and distributed to the buildings. Yeah. So just a, and you know, if they're, if it's, even if it was, they were distributed and they are checking them, fabulous. But I think the second part of they're not being checked and we can get on a bus for the year and go both ways every day and no one. Our registration process has been delayed purposely because we are in the process of reconfigurating how that registration process and payment structure is going to be handled. And all of that is going to be done through our bus routing software and power school. So you're going to get a nice one page form and it's going to be consolidated so that the payment is done at the same time. We, and we will be able to have real time bus lists based on the route, AM, PM, all of those types of things. And that we will be more diligent in tracking that to make sure that we don't have any bus capacity issues and challenges that we have notably sustained this year. I will just say that that it has been a very difficult year in terms of how the new routing software was rolled out. There was a challenge in how the collections were being done, cross-tracked. There were like three different methods, reports that were trying to be cross-checked. It was just not logistically cohesive. And so that's why there's been a delay, but we are going to get that out in a nice streamlined package and will be better next year. I just want us to collect our fees where we need to collect the fees. I'm okay with waiting, waiting a little later for registration. Um, okay. Yeah, because they used to get mailed home. And I totally appreciate the fact that that was a cost, etc. And however you do it, fine. Let's just, uh, does anybody have any other questions on this before we move forward? Thank you, Kirstie. Thank you. Thank you. Um, great.
Can I give a spoiler alert? I know we're on camera. Sure. You're also going to roll out the parent-student geo-tracking app. Oh, we had that before. It, like, didn't work. Oh, no, this one's going to be fantastic. Oh, awesome. Right? That's great. Because it would be like, is the bus coming? Is the bus coming? The bus would be, like, here, and it would be a little fuss, actually, on your route. I love it. Cool. So, love it. Great things to look forward to. Love it. That's a good spoiler alert. That's a good spoiler alert. Do you remind me of the update Pickup Patrol in the afternoon when my kid bikes off? We'll make all the bells and whistles happen. Great. That's coming as well. Pickup Patrol. Added service. Added service. Added service. That's awesome. That's great. Uh, okay.
Kirstie, you're up again. Thank you. Capital Report overview. Um, the Capital Report is just an executive overview to, um, update on what has transpired since the fall, since our preliminary requests, um, where some of the projects are for the current year, and that have, um, balances from prior years, that, uh, we are diligently, um, closing those out, and making sure that we are doing the projects. Um, again, we have the student information system replacement. That was our power school, so that is complete. We had a minibus purchase for athletics. That was complete. We also got a second minibus for district-wide, um, that's also housed at the house, high school, just because they're already got a process in place for, um, deploying those vehicles. Our feasibility study, we are in the process. That will be complete by June 30. And then we have various, um, capital, the, the larger building-related projects that are in progress, that Mike Fea has already provided anticipated, um, amounts needed for getting us through the end of June. So a number of these that were open for, uh, several years are now going to be closed out. In addition, as we were going through the capital process, we needed to be able to identify and close out, uh, some of those projects in order to be able to, uh, prioritize the FY27 items that we put forward that were new, uh, from the five-year, um, report, which included the, uh, safety and security, uh, item, and the reading literacy item, which we did, uh, provide enough closeout to get that, um, incorporated in this round of capital funding that will be going forward to annual countenating. And those were the, um, unfortunately, we did not get the phase three athletic projects, uh, move forward. Um, the, uh, select board and FinCom decided to, um, sever the, um, the two, and so the wastewater treatment plan for high school will be going forward. The phase three athletic project we will need to look at subsequent years and advocate, um, for that to be completed. So I feel like I missed something on this. Um, this is the baseball field. So we're, we still have to send our students to another field to practice and compete. Did you have a question? Nope. That seems expensive. So how are we getting them there? By bus and bus is expensive. Yes. It's the transportation cost. Yes. So it's an added operational cost. It's not, um, to the extent of the $2 million project, um, sticker, but it is challenging for our teams. And, um, could you do me a favor, Christine? Could you pull together, um, numbers against that, what it does add to our budget each year from an operating perspective? It's roughly $15,000. Oh, I think too, I think we might've covered that last time. So it's an additional $15,000. Well, it means if we are using those resources in athletics and not able to use them in other areas such as replenishing or replacing uniforms and things like that, that would have been a priority in that category. I'm a little bit speechless on that. Um, wasn't it, my memory is like a pasta strainer right now, but wasn't it like hovering around $1.2 million a few years ago and now it's $2 million and what do we expect to be in in a few years? And this was going to be to do them together was a proposal to reduce like by $400,000, correct? It was going to be roughly $250,000. Oh, $250,000 less. Okay. And the additional oversight of our, um, town engineer, because she will have to be. Right. So it was like closer to, yeah, all in, it was like a $400,000 to do them together reduction. And so the FinCom and select board went against what Brian and our town engineer and Michael McCall had suggested. Do you know why? You can listen to their meeting. They had a whole meeting about it. You can also look at the email, um, Brian, I forwarded it to you separately and I cannot. I want to say Harley. Yes. Oh, Harley. Thank you. Um, sent about it. Um, okay. It's not, you didn't miss it. This is the first time we're actually like hearing at the table that it didn't happen since we last talked about it, but there was some other stuff that had loaded around. Um,
I think, um, I was going to say, I think this also speaks to the larger planning effort that we're making in that trying to keep it not spread out to these multiple phase projects as much as we can. Um, it's hard to stick to the timeline, right? Because it, they seem to lose priority the further out we get. Um, and I, I understand that maybe athletics isn't, you know, a huge number on the greater community's priority list, but it's really important to over like 85% of our students who play athletics. Um, and it's important to keeping our students in district. It's important to keeping our high school competitive. Um, it's a significant piece to kids, high school experience, middle school experience. There's so many life lessons that are learned while you're, you know, participating in athletics. And so I just, it's important. And I think it's more than just throwing a ball around and being, you know, active. Right. And I think we as a committee and as a, you know, administration and a district should be trying to concert effort there. And I think, you know, it's something we should all be keeping in mind at this point. Um, this is really unfortunate. I think in the long run, this is going to get pushed out further and it's going to end up costing the town more money. Um, but I think one other thing that's an important learning piece here is if you have too many of these multi-phase long-term projects, you lose the institutional memory of the decision makers. And like, that's just a reality of volunteer-based municipal government. And so I think my sense is one of the headwinds here was no, like a lack of continuity and a lack of expertise. I want to think that, however, it's a lot of the same people that were here when we broke this out into multiple phases. It does speak, though, to the volunteer nature of the job in general.
This is really sad. I don't even have a baseball player in my house. I don't either. But to not be able to have a baseball game at your home school seems just,
that's our sport. It just, it seems like something that we should have. You know, we have the wastewater treatment as a focus that's probably really important, let's be honest. But just to leverage the efficiency of the two being done at the same time. So this is just not being revisited. It's the decisions made.
Unless we want to make a motion on the floor. We can always do that. I don't think that that would even do anything because they've already concluded to not move before we couldn't. No, it would have to be that, like, we would maybe. We would make a motion on the floor.
And, maybe? Sorry.
I'll read up on all of this again. Again, and it's in the reverse is the way it typically goes, but equity, softball team's got a brand new field. Baseball team's traveling to over what, off Riverview? Circle up. Is that really where they're going? Off of Stonebridge? I could be wrong. Oh, my. Okay. Anyway. I just didn't see.
So, okay. Thank you, Kirstie.
I also, the other thing I want to say is I was really in favor of the CIPC being created. And we also fought, whether it was super, it was probably more behind the scenes, but to get you, that, your position onto that committee as not a voting member, but as a standing member, so that there was a voice for the schools at the table all the time. And, this first round, I don't feel like has gone very much in the school's favor at all.
One of the challenges is that, from what I understand, is that the, when the charge was done last year in annual town meeting, it was identified to, that those meetings would run during the day when town and school employees were available to meet what it's actually transpired, is they're meeting on Wednesday evenings when most of, I can't be in two places. And so, that posed a significant challenge. And then being called into other meetings on different nights, but links or things were not working appropriately. So, to your point, I think there's just been a lot of growing pains through that new process. Um, again, we did get to prioritize that we're not on the five-year plan.
Um, maybe that's something that, as a committee, we may want to make a little bit of a concerted effort around voicing concerns and kind of working toward year two being a more, uh, accessible, inclusive, productive, process, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, this also, we got, and thank you for your effort, but like, this also came up very suddenly, and then moved very quickly, and even the meeting where it was discussed was. And I think part of that was because you're sitting with us around the table every other Wednesday night. You can't be in two places at one. So, um, okay. And I think the other piece there is we do have a voting member, and maybe we look at, um, Love Brian. He's dedicated, and he has shared that maybe he's not the best to be a straight-up advocate for the school, something he's, you know, willing to discuss with us. But, um, maybe that's something we do want to think about. Um, so, yeah, this one's a loss for the schools, for sure. Anything else on that? Okay. I'll hold it. I'll hold the end. Moving on. We're having such a good night, too. Oh, now our next item. A little uptick on the momentum. Our next item is an uptick. Earlier, I was, we were talking about supplement versus supplant. When you have a revolving fund for tuitioning students in, that can serve as a fund to support your programs. So, we're really privileged. You know, we talked about this at budget time, as you recall, about with our expanded programs, is to be able to tuition students in. Uh, Ronnie's done a great job working in other districts, and sharing meetings, and having other districts learn about our programs. And so, as a result, we have to set up a revolving fund to be in a position to accept tuition from other districts. So, we need school committee approval for that. So, that you can see our tuition number, uh, that we came up with. And we need your, your approval. And we expect to have a student, uh, perhaps next year, as well. Maybe this year. Maybe this year. We're, we're, we have two referrals that we're looking at. And would this be a tuition, regardless of grade level, or not necessarily? Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. And what programs are we looking to tuition kids into? You know this is coming. Yeah, um, the one for this year is, is at the high school. Um, not, it's, um, for our social emotional program. Um, next year, possibly the LBC at, uh, PlayFit. But it's because of our... My eyes twitching. I know. But it's because we have, we have room. We just, we have room. I don't think we have room. I don't think we have room. I don't think we have room. I don't think we have room. I, and maybe this is like an offline conversation, and this is just like so near and dear to the two of our hearts, but don't take this as a tack. We just want to hear more. All we hear about is parents that can't get their kids in. I have, I, I, I would love to hear from that because I have been all over, like, it's, I guess here's the thing. When you say you can't get your kids in, you, we have a very strict entrance criteria. And I do think people don't necessarily understand that. So it's not like, oh, my child is having a reading difficulty. They should be in that program. They, we really, Jen and Megan do, and Naomi, really, really, and, and the packet that we're reviewing. I mean, they are going through this just as they would anything else with a fine tooth comb to make sure that it fits our entrance criteria. So we really, you know, the, because of that, I think the parents, and I'm happy to talk to any parents. So if anybody reaches out to you, they can certainly reach out to me, and I can share more about why we have to keep that entrance criteria and what, um, the program and how we keep the integrity of the program. Um, but from what I know, and I've been on all of the schools, we, we have room. So I, I think I asked this before, but second grade. And why don't we refer? Because I know, I understand it's like a separate set of, of, you need teachers. You need staff. We need to hire another teacher and another teacher. It's proven that like catching kids at second grade is more effective than at third grade. So I'm hoping if we can, we could use, we can, I don't know, tuition and maybe offset some of that cost. And then maybe one could lead to the other. I'm just so worried there's kids on the cusp that would benefit from the immersion. And if they graduated out, that would be amazing. But we're not doing that yet, like. Well, that is what this would end up being. Well, no, I had another, no, not for now. What I was curious to ask is like, what happens if our circumstances change? Like, I don't understand generally. When you accept a student, is that what you mean? Yeah. So like, if we, what you're asking for is to, us to approve the tuition and the, the sort of moving forward with this, what happens going forward? Does that sort of give a carte blanche or? Exactly. It's really, it's really establishing the fun. And then we make decisions based on case by case basis. And you're right. I mean, you have to be cautious in terms of accepting students, um, for a range of reasons. It's complicated, complicated from outside, but certainly kids have had success. We tuition a student, um, to another school district too, right? Now we do it to other districts. The reason we do it is because we don't offer programs, but as we strengthen our programs here, there is an, you know, opportunity. But you do have to watch numbers and is it, is it a match and all of that? But it is something, because it is cheaper to send a student to a district than a collaborative. And what happens if the in-district population that meets the criteria increases? Right. I mean, it's a, um, if we, it's year to year and we, you know, like a program could, you know, you, you could be at any program and they could close or they could say, so you could say, you know, moving forward, we're not able. And then that district would have to find an alternate placement. You certainly look at cohorts before you accept students across the grade. So let's say we're watching a student in the third grade. They're not admitted because they don't meet the entrance criteria. By the fourth grade, they do. We'll still, we're not, I'm sorry. But then that spot is full by an out-of-district student. What happens? We're not filling the program with that. I mean, first of all, I know. I know, but like, if you add that person because there's one seat available, we don't want to see the seat go to waste. Certainly don't. But that seat is available in third grade, but then that student that we are watching for consideration to LBC then qualifies in fourth grade. What happens? I have a very good trajectory of students. So like, yes, a student could pop up that we don't know. We have students that we're watching who are currently in second grade. We have students that we're watching that are currently in first grade, even students in kindergarten that we're looking at. And knowing all that in mind, we look to see how many spots we'll make available. So we're not, like, say there's only three third graders next year. I could technically go up to seven. I'm not going to open up four spots. Maybe open up one, maybe two spots. That's it. I wouldn't fill all of the open spots without tuitioning in students. Knowing, also keeping some spots open for what we think might be coming up. Again, kids do become eligible. We can have move-in students. And if the spot didn't become available, if we needed it, we can always then say our placement's no longer an option. Can I ask a question while you're thinking? I know you're noodling on that. Can I ask one question? I'm trying to be open-minded, yes. I'm working hard at this. I really am. It's okay. No, these are good because I need, you know, I just want you to be like, we're being very, we're taking this very slow and very carefully around, you know, if it's even appropriate. You know, the things that we've talked about is, do you do like an evaluative period to see if the student's appropriate, where you would just do like a 45-day evaluative period to make sure before you offer placement? It's like that. I just struggle with the fact that if 20 percent of the population is dyslexic, that's approximately 40 kids per grade level. How do we arrive at three? Like I just, I have three in my house. Well, but, because I just, I struggle with how, yeah, go ahead. But, 20 percent of that dyslexic population doesn't necessarily need the LBC. Agreed. As well. I agree with you. Right? So, for example, right, my kid, right? When she was entering second grade, there was one spot open at the Carroll School. And when they looked at her on paper, she fit their cohorts because they had two classes of eight kids. Like that was what their cohorts were. She really looked like she was a great fit for those cohorts, like for the cohorts and for the seat. So, the next step is they bring the kids in and they have them test and they all take the same test. And they called me and they said, look, good news, bad news. She looks really good on paper, but she's too advanced for the cohort. Right? So, she didn't need, or maybe she did, right? But like, she didn't need Carroll School, where she was at. But what she was able to get at Happy Hollow wasn't enough. Right. Right? So, she needed the LBC. So, third grade, she's in the LBC. Huge progress. Great. Awesome. Um, so, yes, 20 percent of the population may be dyslexic, but not everybody needs the LBC because there's other kids that like could make total progress in, at Happy Hollow, getting the services with the special education teachers and pull out and push in how we're doing now the Cotah classrooms, which I'm sure makes a difference. Absolutely. And I do agree with that, Erin. And that's my experience too. And going, because I'm part of the Dyslexia Institute that, um, and we have a great plan that we'll share. It's very comprehensive. But one of the things that I've learned and we've learned there are increasing our evaluations at kindergarten and first grade levels and specific, excuse me, evaluations that you can give that will really help pinpoint if a student is at risk of dyslexia. And what interventions are we putting in place earlier? So, we have a whole new intervention model that, you know, Sarah Sondag is spearheading and through all of this work that we've done through the Dyslexia Institute that we're going, that's also helping us, you know, identify earlier and put interventions in earlier. And maybe those kids will still need LBC, but maybe by identifying even earlier, um, you know, we also, the Cotah model does help. Um, you know, when I was a teacher in Framingham, I taught at the code, I was a co-teacher and I had a couple of kids here and there that went to the, like the Framingham LBC type program, but a lot were able to stay because I was Wilson trained. I was giving them on the inter, um, accommodations, modifications on the spot. So that really does help. Uh, the majority of our teachers are trained in Wilson. Any new teachers we onboard, we have trained in Wilson. Um, that's a big change from five years ago to now and huge, huge shift. Like that's big. Right now we have 40 teachers taking two classes at Landmark, um, that I offered, um, you know, a writing class and an executive functioning class and that's general ed and special ed teachers. So I'm trying to increase the capacity of all teachers, not just special ed, but all teachers. So we can really use these strategies that we know are effective throughout all classes. So I think a lot of this work that we're doing is now we're seeing the results where we're catching and we're intervening earlier. Um, our LBC teachers are really good about like, if a student is referred and they're making some progress, they make recommendations around, all right, try this, increase the service to this, try this, see if you get, and we've able to stop some kids from needing to come because they have kind of consulted with those teachers and said, try this. And then those kids have made progress. Um, so, um, we're really trying to, one thing that we are really working on, our kids were in like Spanish immersion, um, and you know, are identified as dyslexic. And we, you know, Liliana is part of our dyslexia institute because we're really trying to work on increasing that capacity as well, because that adds another layer. So I just think all of these things have added and we're in a much different place than we were when I started, you know, three years ago, certainly. Um, I agree with you wholeheartedly. And I think I just have a little trauma. So I'm trying to get there. I know, I know. And listen, right now it's all kind of just theoretical. This is just in case it becomes a reality. We have, we're prepared and we have programs beyond our LBC, right? Right. The high school program or the 18 to 22 has so much capacity and it's such a great program. Right. So our LBC is one little piece. It's all of our programs. It's all of the programs. No, it's all of them. Well, that's what I was asking. Yeah. Which programs are we thinking? Yeah. You know, cohorts change in years. Understood. Like some years you have some grades and it just happens this way. You have a heavier cohort in certain years. So in those years when you have low cohorts and programs, you do it kind of strategically that way. That's often what happens. Yeah, I understand. Yeah. And that's why I'm, I'm like, you know, the spreadsheets I have are like out, you know, kindergarten up to see and like highlighted you might be, so we're not filling those spots. Again, and I want every kid, not just a wailing head to get the help they need. Like I, I'm totally. It's a real, it's just something that we really, you know, I wasn't here when the program started, but the program is phenomenal and our teachers are so great and we're so fortunate and a lot of districts don't have that. So if we can leverage it a little bit. My two girls didn't have it. So it's great. I have to say, thank you, Omar Easy. Yeah. This was his. This was his baby and whether it got, it happened and this is a huge win for the district. Huge. Um, and the numbers that you're saying for elementary teachers that are Wilson trained, the shift in those numbers in the district is huge. So like, great wins for people around this table that have been able to bridge that gap and get people to do that. Um, so this, like, that's huge. And that is a big difference from when our kids were huge difference feeling the, you know, I agree a hundred percent. Uh, even the colloquy I had here in the district when I was concerned about my kindergartner, there's no resemblance to where we are currently. No, there's so many strides for everybody around this table. And I, I, can I just ask one question? Who makes the ultimate question? Go ahead. Ask it. Who makes the ultimate decision on who gets tuitioned in? Uh, it's, it's not my decision. It's the, the people who will be working with the students. So, um, you know, it would be if we're, it would be Jen and Megan and Naomi. I mean, I'll oversee them. I'll be part of it, but it's really, it's, you know, um, it's Hannah, Rubio, Kayla Thornquist, and Michaela over at the high school for our social emotional program. They're the ones who are going to ultimately decide because they know the kids. I don't, you know, I know names, but I don't know exactly the cohort. So they'll know, is this student an appropriate match for the cohort we have? They may look good on paper, but we'll have to meet the student. The student may come for, you know, a visit, um, you know, a shadow day to really that, to make sure, because we don't know, and we'll have to go out and observe that student in their setting because we don't, it's an unknown student. So we really want to make sure kind of like it's the process that district schools do. One of my questions is, um, if we tuition someone in, is that different than if we were to accept a student, um, from a non-resident, say, under the teacher's contract, um, and we ended up not having room or something changed, would we, once we've tuitioned them in, are they in our district? You mean how do the non-resident teachers, kids factor into this? No, no, I'm saying with a non-resident, they don't have room or something happens, what's the, it's year to year, it's year to year. So like we should require the landmark school, right? Like I, we don't, we don't, they are responsibility. That's right. And I don't know that. Okay. No, no, we don't know that question. The home district is responsible. Right. Like we tuition in a student. If they need a more restrictive environment is your question. Right. Right. We don't know that. The home district is the more restrictive environment. Okay. There's still. Or if something happened to change and it was like, we can't service this level. Then we just say. And that happens. That does. It happens, you know, where we would say, you know, it's not appropriate. We're going to have to end the placement, but then they would go back to their district. We don't know them. Okay. Okay. All right. Um, is there anything else that we should be putting into the approval of the non-resident tuition revolving fund that gives some sort of guardrails or should we, I can see that. I sense that. So, and if we need more time, do we have to create this today? Can we take more time? I sense some, like, um. So, if I can add. Yeah. This is just approving, creating a fund account. I know. In our municipal system. We have not accepted students yet. We don't have, you know, we're not saying we're going to, you know, bring in a whole group. We're just identifying that this was something we talked about during our budgeting presentations. This was something that got enthusiastic. Understood. And we want to be able to be ready because we have an opportunity, potentially. But by doing this, by saying yes to this, we are allowing tuition in students. That's what this says. I don't. Yes. With, with, with the fund established that we are, you know, again, administratively asking approval to do that based on what we've identified as a fair, um, rate and process. So, understood. Yeah. My question is, if we were to just noodle on it until April 8th, is that okay? Does that cause a problem? So, I can try to get there. Yeah. Well, and I also, I, I do think it would be important, um, Christina may have questions she might want to ask around this. I think she did have some, and I think Kate did too, and unfortunately they were like short, um, notice we're not able to attend. So, I would, I would appreciate it if we could just come back to this on the 8th. If that's not going to cause a problem. No, I didn't ask too, but it's like, I'd be curious because other districts do this. I would be curious if they, maybe not in approving the fund, but if they adopt intuitioning policies. I was gonna, yeah. Like, I would love to know if there's some, if districts who do this have created policies around. Just high level. Uh, you know, capacity assessment. I have not seen that. That's not a practice because you want to leave it flexible. Right. Well, you would see, um, Betsy, in terms of reporting. So, for example, when Ronnie does a report on the, on data every year of students, you would have a column, for example, out of district tuition students. So, that, that's pretty much how, in terms of the reporting, you would see it typically. Well, that's financial reporting. But I think what I'm hearing is more concerned about constrained capacity. You've seen a special ed update. Okay. Not just financial. Yeah, I mean, I think the fund, yeah, I mean, the, this is the piece. Yes, I guess this is what allows us to accept the tuition. Right. To accept, to put the money. Um, go ahead. I was gonna say, I think my thought is, and what I sort of am hearing, and what I may have heard before, when this came up around the table, was, yes, enthusiasm about being able to bring more kids in, and do it at a benefit to the community. Right. Totally hear that. I think everyone supports that. I think the other piece is, there may be some, um, desire to, at a high level, just say, like, there will be some form of check and balance. Whether it be that, you know, at a high level, that child will be evaluated by the existing teachers, what have you, you know, uh, director of special ed will confirm the space. Some transparency. Something. Some transparency that it's happening. Um, not saying it's definitely gonna happen. I just think, let's put this on the agenda for 4-8, have it be, and maybe, I saw Betsy write down, maybe you can see if there's something, and I can do some research, too. I can at the same time. I mean, I've been a part of districts where we're taking, and then I've not, it's more just a revolving account as far as I know, um, but it's a fair question. Yeah, I can reach out to the two districts that we, because we tuition a couple students into other districts. I have... One of them does not, because I... Yeah, you know that. Oh, they do have to sign a, I mean, they sign a contract, and in that contract, it, we can put a clause around, like, space availability, but they will sign a contract. Right, and the other thing I should notice, so the, there's also accountability, because the out-of-district coordinator in those districts, this is on their caseload. Right. You know, often not to the same extent as the 766 schools, but they're responsible. Yeah. And out-of-district student, in terms of them following up. Right, like our, like, I follow these too, just because it's easier, but, um, we, when we send these students, we sign a contract, and that is where you would be able to put this language. Yes. Um, around availability and space, and, like, there's always in, there's pretty standard contracts, but there's, like, a 30-day clause around, like, termination, things like that. So, um, you know, I'm happy to, like, bring a sample contract, if you'd like to see. Um, but, yeah. Okay. I, I, I don't know. That would probably be where the accountability would be. My other question is, which I, I looked at this, and I looked at it twice, and I don't think I saw it, but Kirstein sometimes says, Erin, it's right there. So, but my question, I don't see transportation. No. We're not, we're not responsible. They would be, so, as them taking this as an out-of-district placement, them being the home district, they would then need to figure out transportation. Yep. Okay. Just like we would for out-of-district. We're not funding it. Okay. We're not setting it up. Okay. Okay. Tuition, once districts establish these programs, um, assessed annually. Yes. Okay. Yes. And that's what we put, um, the structure of which we would review that. Okay. Annually. And they can certainly, it, it's almost an every year increase. Um, as we know, our out-of-district schools have increases. Oh, yeah. They're going to put it 14% up year two. The same, I was about to say. You know, if, if a student, for instance, if a student was in one of our programs and needed a one-to-one aid, that cost would be on the sending. Faked into that. No, it would, they would have to pay additional. That's what I mean. Like, it would be on top of, but they would have that. They would have to pay in addition. So, in the contract, it would say something like, if additional, you know, this is the fee that it would be, they would have to pay, we wouldn't pay for that. This is what you get for that tuition. Right. For this tuition, there's no summer included here. This is 180 days. If you want summer, there's this. If you want, um, or if the student requires summer, you have to pay this much. If the student requires an aid, you pay this much. Um, so this is just, um, the base, uh, tuition. Okay. And we'll follow up. Gemini is not finding any policies right now. Oh, well, Gemini is usually spot on. I mean, I haven't, I've never had a district send me any policies, but again, I'll give you, I'll bring some sample contracts. The contract might cover it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's monitoring they have to do. There's, there's a lot of, uh, regulations in this stuff. Thank you. No. Yeah. I'm happy to, and, and I know what the LBC is the one that, but we've got our, so many, so many programs. Yeah. I mean, our staff has worked so hard with all of our consultants and they're just, they want to share. Right. Like we want, we want it all to be successful, right? Like we want the incoming student to be successful. We want our programs to continue to be successful. Some of our programs are getting a little tiny and we want to make sure that those peers have the cohorts as well. So it's like a win-win, um, you know, nobody wants, you know, you have two, three kids, five is nice. Um, but a lot of, I'll give some more. Completely agree. And if, um, maybe we can commit to getting questions to Ronnie before this next school committee meeting, that might be helpful to you. Yeah. That would be great. And I'll, I'll bring some, some, um, the, the contracts. Okay. Thank you.
I'll get there. It's okay. I, I don't know. I, it's, it's your, I know. I know. I just, all the programs too. I want to be just very transparent that like, I'm already, we're already planning next. Like I, I, I could tell you how many kids are and who's coming. Like we're really, and with Debbie and Naomi and Becca and okay, like we're really on top of it, um, of the movement and, and need. Great. No, I, I appreciate that the thought was there. It was brought up. You were bringing it back to the table. We have the potential and I think that's awesome. I just want to give a little bit of extra time. So I really appreciate that. I don't, that's fine. Um, okay. I would like to announce the re-review of and continue non-disclosure of all previously redacted and released or slash and entirely withheld executive session minutes and materials from 2010 through 2025. Anyone have any questions on that? Congratulations. Thank you.
Okay. Um, I have this item, uh, D and, um, Betsy and Ronnie and I do a fun thing four times a year and, um, um, we meet with, we, we participate in the wellness committee. Um, and one of the things that came out of the most recent meeting was, um, we're looking to do an overhaul of the tobacco policy, um, to expand to include nicotine products, right? Nicotine products which includes like the pouches and the non-tobacco but nicotine products that are not currently covered. So there's a couple different places. There's four different policies that touch on this in our school committee policy. Um, what we've, we asked at the last meeting was, um, because the committee only meets four times a year, at the next meeting, which is in May of the wellness committee, they are supposed to come back with some proposed, um, and they being like Scott, um, community health nurses and, um, Jay Verhuski from the youth and family services, um, revised language, um, that we can hopefully just adopt, um, to make it more current, um, one's for staff use, one's for student use, one's for teaching about it, um, and there's one on school premises, so outsiders coming in, right, to attend a concert or, yeah, yeah, so, um, and that seems to be, you know, there's, there's some positive numbers with vaping, but the zen stuff is, um, so I said we should start showing the ones where when we were younger, you know, the guy with the missing jaw from the chew, like, that's such a visual, you know, movie series, yeah, oh my gosh, you know what I, you know what I saw the other day, it was, um, this is not an egg, and it was an egg, and they said kids from the 80s and 90s, this is your, and I was, and I look at it and I go, this is your brain on drugs, like, so stuck with us, right, so, um, um, anyway, I just wanted to kind of update, yeah, everybody on that, and then Betsy, can you maybe give just a, um, I think I was looking at something else for part of what Jay was talking about with the brain, the, the big brain blow up, can you just touch on that, because that's kind of exciting, and I'd love for people to be able to experience it. So at one of the upcoming, um, youth nights? Yes. But they have, they have several years, it's at the high school. At the field house for the middle school kids. Yes, they have, um, sort of this outside, it's, it's like an inflatable brain that you go through, and you learn about all of the ways in which parts of the brain are affected by different substances, it, it seemed super cool. Yeah, like, I was like, can we go? And so we, we asked. Can we keep it an extra day? Yeah. He was going to try and do that. We're going to look into whether or not, like for, so that students outside of this particular activity. Like the high school kids. Right, like wellness classes might be able to go through and really experience it. It was very cool. It was, yeah, it was like so cool. So keep that on, you know, your radar, and if you hear things about it. Um, they are also, um, another update from that meeting was that Jay's team is moving back on site. Right down the hall. Right down the hall in this building. Oh, good. Oh, good. And so they will be back on site and, and starting to do some more in-person things, which is great. Um, as far as like the, um, like counseling and therapy type of sessions that they do. Um, what else? Oh, we're going to have Ronnie talk to us about, or Chris Faye. Oh, yes. The unified programming later, later in the year. Um, and probably again, in the fall, we'll have Metro West Health survey. The data should be coming back. It's taking a long time though today. I mean this year. Every year. Yeah. Well, now that it's a lot of trials, it'll come back faster. It's not. It doesn't. Um. It's a lot to compile and really run all the, if you can get it into the dashboard, so. Yes. And then, oh, lastly, um, something that, you know, Scott, as the district-wide wellness, um, coordinator, director, they would really love to get the health and wellness education, um, down into the K-2 grades. So, a little more time would be great, um, to be able to expand that down into the K-2 classroom. That's been a hugely positive addition to our three. There are so many things that are being talked about in my house that I'm like, oh, okay. Now you're going to have to do it. You get to do it last time. I can hear things three times. I'm only supplementing now! Um, so, but really, um, I think I'm really excited about the, um, time committee. And I know that's not what you're called. Thank you, yes, but, um, just, um, hopefully there's a way to get there, um, and everybody would love to see that happen because there are ways where we could definitely be more compliant than we are today with the new health standards. There are more standards. Uh, somebody once told me that if you taught all of the standards in the K-12, uh, standards in every subject area, it would take you really, like, K-16 to be able to do it. Yeah. Um, the power standards. Yeah. So, um, I think that was the last thing. It's just the more time in the elementary for K-2 would be. Great! Great updates. Thank you. Absolutely. Lastly, uh, I think, on this list, yes, um, unless I hear otherwise from the members of the committee that are here, anybody around the table, uh, the plan was to post and hold the, um, budget hearing for fiscal year 27. Is that right? Yes. Um, on the 8th, April 8th, um, it's a regular meeting. We would just, you know, yeah, we just have it at the beginning, um, and we could plan with, um, David. So, basically, just, that's kind of like an announcement, hearing no issues from anyone that, that's the plan. Um, and I would welcome a motion on the consent agenda, unless there are any issues anyone had. Is there anyone that wants to speak to a Latin student's trip to Italy? That's new. That's amazing. Can we go? Yeah, like, can I send a case? Day test to Capri? I know. Oh, my goodness. You can have one of those after the school committee terms over, right? Is that new? Mm-hmm. I would have left if that was the case. And go back. Okay. Um, is that new, though? We don't do every trip every year. I know, but I don't think I've ever heard of a Latin trip. I've lived on that trip. Oh, great. Here we go. Oh, so it went last year? It goes every other year, yes. It hasn't happened since before, I believe. Yeah. Ah, so that... Oh, 2027. Okay, okay. How was it? Got it. It was a lot of fun. Just remember we're engaging with... Oh, sorry. Thank you. That's super helpful. Um, that's awesome. Okay. So it's over April vacation that year? Mm-hmm. So the two, or the Monday. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I will approve if I can go for, for, I will pay, but if I can go. Um, because like just there, and I will just... I also have a piece of Pompeii that I stole when I was there in college, and it's, it's okay. I'll bring it in. Just reminding you of any... Okay. Oh, good. One thing. I just snuck it away. Um, perhaps not for tonight, but just a reminder to ourselves. The fun? Yes. Yeah, this is, this is a big, um... It's a big price, uh, ticket, or sorry, price tag. But I just, the learner travel ship reminded me that for international trips... Maybe we can reinvigorate that effort. No, the curse seems here. You just have all kinds of revenue coming in, different sources. Well, no, one of the things we've talked about, we don't have a way, is like if there were opportunities over years, and it happens differently at different schools. We started this, like, right when I came on the committee. Rolling things over. But, like, trying to tellies wanted to offer to contribute. Right. To help offset costs in this year for students in future years. Like, something that we could support, um, in a fund that was available to help make these. I mean, I, I think we've had good representation from the leaders on the staff who take these, and from some of the students, that there's a lot of fundraising and that we're trying, but I think the committee was interested in something that would be sort of more long-lasting and available for, you know, all sorts of special field trips or other outings that necessarily come with additional cost. And the families might be willing to say, I'm going to do an extra, or I'll do a half an extra and put it in there. Yeah, round, rounding up can go a long way. CVS and the roundup, or my student loved it. I'm going to leave a legacy. Yeah, what? And provide a scholarship for another student. Yeah. Thank you for bringing it back. We did kind of let that fall off. I think the middle school's going to, um, do their, their plans to think about, it used to be sort of an annual big fundraising that, that happened, and, um, and do it sort of once every three years, so that it happens once later. The calendar school? Yeah, the calendar school, so. Oh, welcome back.
No, that's awesome. That's great. And once every three years is a, is a good, Right. That's a good, if you're not doing it. Everybody does it once while they're in the middle school. Right. Yeah. That's awesome. Um, so maybe outside of that, do we have any issues?
Or comments, questions, or would, do we have Ellen present? No, I don't, I'm good. I move to approve the consent agenda. Second. Okay, all in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed, none? Christine, I did want to thank you, um, you're, it's very helpful when you- Do you like my little notes? I do like your notes. Well, after a few times of bothering you, like, if you were like, okay, let me just call out when it's unusual, or not even what it is. It helps me as well. Yeah, I find it quite helpful. Um, any matters not reasonably anticipated by the Chair.
No. Here, give us a hand. Ha ha ha. I move to enter Executive Session for the purposes of discussing strategy with related to collective bargaining with the Whalen Educational Association, Units A and B, as permitted by MGL Chapter 30A, Section 21A-3. Thank you. And reviewing and approving Executive Session Minutes with intent to redact and release said minutes, as permitted by MGL Chapter 30A, Section 22, February 25th, 2026. The School Committee will be joined by David Fleischman, Superintendent, Betsy Gavron, Assistant Superintendent, Kirsteen Patterson, Director of Finance and Operations, and Diane Marabella, Recording Secretary. The School Committee will adjourn an Executive Session and will not reconvene in open session. Do I have a second? I'll second. Okay. Betsy? Yes. Erin? Yes. Erin? Yes. Okay. A small little committee, thank you. We are quick. We are quick.
And we will go right into superintendent's update. First up is National Honor Society update, so are we inviting some folks up to our table? We have a lot of folks. Love it! So I'll just give brief context. First, this was an item on the agenda a couple months ago, and we said we would get back to you with an update based on some questions that the school committee had. And so tonight we have a panel of folks who will share. We have two of our staff members, Principal Allison Taguchi and Amy Lima, who work at the National Honor Society, among many other hats at the high school, and a group of students, just to follow up on some of the work that they've been doing to address some of the questions that you've had in planning, and to address some community questions. So we have a short presentation, and I'm sure there will be questions. Come on up to the table. Bring some chairs. David, do you want to move one down since Christina's not here? And then Becky can you. We like to include everybody around the table.
Yeah.
Unless you don't think we have this, right? I didn't think. I didn't think you were fresh. This one's like, oh, hello. If you have me, just put one on here. Yeah. Not like, ooh, okay. Yes, that works so much. It really does when I'm like turning this way, and I'm like, am I on the right slide? We just have to have more chairs than we need.
All right, so why don't we start with some introductions, if that's okay. You all know me. Hi, I'm Amy Lima. As Dr. Fletchman said, I have been advising National Honor Society, I think, since 2009, I'm a co-advisor, and more recently, by myself. My official role at New England High School is academic support coordinator. Hi, I'm Sebastian Guzman. I'm a junior in high school, and I've been present to most, if not all, the meetings regarding planning the National Honor Society. I'm Katie Stillman. I'm also a junior, and I've also been involved at the meetings and planning new jobs. Hi, my name's Audrey. I'm the president of National Honor Society, so I'm a senior in high school, and I've been working with these guys to kind of talk about the new Honor Society that we're hoping to implement, but I've also been on the organization for the last two years, so I have a little bit of experience. Hi, I'm Helena Anson, and I'm a junior, and along with Sebastian and Judy, I've also been president in, I think, all of the meetings of planning this new chapter. Hi, I'm Mackenzie Moran. I'm also a junior, and yeah, we've just been working to create this new sort of honor society. Hi, I'm Renee. I'm also a junior, and I'm really excited to present our vision for the new society. Can I ask one question? Totally. Is your sister Thea? My sister is Thea, yeah. She's really good friends with my daughter, Holly, so I'm like, she looks just like you. Yeah, they're like on FaceTime all the time. All the time. That's definitely, yeah, that's my little sister. Okay, you can proceed. Okay. Important, important question. It's very important. Yeah, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. So tonight we wanted to update the committee and interested folks on where we're at with our NHS process. The last time we had a conversation was right after I sent a message, as you recall, announcing that we were going to be replacing the NHS chapter with something new, and that there were some concerns about misalignment of values. And as it turns out, that message was premature. But it did start a really good conversation, which we had wholly intended, which was to sort of evaluate what it is that we think would be a really meaningful experience for students when it comes to the pillars of NHS. What is NHS offering students, and what isn't it offering students, and can we have some good conversation about the vision, and really providing our students with something sort of custom designed, right, that really reflects what they care about. So tonight we're going to sort of update you on our process and our direction, and see what kinds of questions that you have. So for our next slide, Betsy, I want to talk a little bit about where we've been since the end of December. Actually, since October, which is really when Ms. Lima and I met with the current NHS officers, including Audrey, to talk about our own sort of observations and concerns about NHS and to get their input. And they were open and reflective and supportive of having a conversation about something, about having something new. And so in early January, a group of juniors and the current senior officers gathered to begin discussing, reflecting on NHS, and then also thinking about what else do we crave when it comes to a student experience that's like an honor society, but that's a Wayland High School honor society. A core group of students met seven times. Many of these guys were active participants in those exciting conversations. And so we've generated some real vision and momentum around offering something new. And what we'd like to do is to continue offering NHS to eligible juniors. So at this point, and we can go to the next slide, Betsy, thank you. We'd like to propose that both offerings are available to students. We recognize, I personally recognize, the sense of kind of loss and distress that some families and students felt with the announcement that sort of a national chapter of NHS would no longer be a part of Wayland High School. So we want to continue offering NHS. At this point, it would be a spring induction for eligible juniors. We are on track to offer that to our eligible juniors this year, where they would then actively sort of participate as NHS members their senior year, which was back to a model that we had not too, too long ago, while continuing to develop this new group, because there is such excitement and a really emerging vision that we'll talk about when it comes to this new opportunity for students. So our proposal is to do both. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Audrey, who's going to talk a little bit more about sort of the nature of the conversations during our process and discussions, and then bring a little bit more specificity and vision to kind of what we're thinking about. Oh, sorry. You can go to the next slide. Perfect. Yeah. So I have been a part of National Honor Society for two years, and I've really loved my time there. You know, we do a lot. We do a lot of community service, and that's kind of the main goal of the organization in the chapter, is to kind of fulfill it with people who are really excited to help our community. So I think the conversation really started by looking at all the aspects of National Honor Society that we wanted to keep. So there's four pillars. Can you remind me of the pillars? There's character, community, service. Yeah. Good to know this. Yeah. So we each kind of sat down and looked into the pillars more specifically, and talked about what we loved about each of them, what we wanted to keep in place. We looked through the handbook and everything. And then we also talked a lot about what new things we wanted to add to an honor society, maybe some things that the current society lacks, and that we're really excited about potentially implementing. I think that this conversation has shown that we, National Honor Society is a really awesome organization that we have at the high school, and everyone who is a part of it does love it. But there's some room for expansion as well, and some people who might be looking for a little bit more in terms of an honor society at the high school. So yeah, I think we want to dive into a little bit more specific. Yeah, that's neat. So as we've been having these conversations, the thought that's occurred to, honestly, it started from some of our officers, our current NHS officers, and I've really held on to this idea, is that there's a difference in National Honor Society really feels like a celebration or a recognition of what students have accomplished when you look at sort of the selection criteria. And then this additional group that we're hoping to start is more about what students can build and do during their time at Whelan High School, as opposed to sort of celebrating these four characteristics that students have already demonstrated and built. So this new group that we're hoping to begin takes a look at, we ended up with these core values, I would say, rather than the four pillars. And so when we've had these discussions, we've sort of ended up with the idea of community. Like we kept coming back to community, whether it's like community service or serving our student body in the school or building a community within the group. So this is where this graphic sort of came from with community at the center and then sort of other values that feed into the idea of community or can build from community. So now I'm going to turn it over to our students who are going to talk about some of these values and sort of why they've come up as we've been discussing what an Honor Society could be.
So I'm going to be talking about community. Throughout the past few months at the high school, we've talked a lot about community as a whole school and a few goals that we have as a new Will and Honor Society kind of emerges is to expand our sense of community throughout, out of just our schools and into like the greater town. One approach we've talked about is volunteering as a bigger group. Currently, the NHS does most of their volunteer work individually, except for those two chapter projects, which I don't know how many people are in those chapters. Yeah, the whole chapter is involved in the chapter project. Those are the only things we kind of do as a group. Right. And so we're trying to make it not seem like a checkbox that these students and members of NHS are just completing and instead making an impact on our community and how they're positively impacting our community and what parts of... I feel like I'm using the word community a lot. But what parts of our community need our help and what are we taking away from it? And by doing that and kind of asking members of the new chapter, what have you learned? What have you taken out of this is really important to know and like interpret what you're doing So building on to Molina, I'm going to be talking about impact. And as you already mentioned, we kind of thought that the current NHS is kind of focused on the meeting requirements. Again, that checkbox idea. So our vision for this new society is really going to be centered around meaningful impact. So we want to really invite students to have this passion and this drive to create impact in the community that's very personally significant to them and to the community. So instead of doing like a few service projects here and there or something that's short lasting, we really encourage students to present ideas that are more long term and meaningful to them and the community around them. So we're looking to really emphasize not just participation, but impact in general.
So I'll be talking about the commitment. This is more of just like a character aspect of the students we want to kind of draw into this group. We're really looking for students who are like not only like academically very strong, but like very committed and dedicated to like bettering the community. We really want just like consistency over like not impactful stuff, as I've already mentioned. And we're hoping that this like smaller group will sort of be maybe a little bit more active than the big chapter like of NHS. So just really committed to helping. So I'm going to be talking about intentionality. This kind of builds off of impact a little bit as the two are a little bit related. But intentionality runs a little bit deeper. I think intentionality at NHS is really about understanding who, which kind of groups we're helping, who is our target groups, how can we defend them, protect them, or support them, or build them up in some way. I think it's all about the personal connection doesn't have to be in person. You don't really necessarily need to go and meet them. But as long as you do some research or meet them, it provides a more personal connection, which I think offers greater intent and purpose for doing a certain thing that might be helpful for them.
And so for curiosity, we wanted to take the idea of scholarship that was advised in the NHS chapter and kind of turn that more into looking at the student as a whole. Because with the NHS, a lot of that scholarship is very focused on just a GPA component. Whereas with this new organization, if we can focus on curiosity, that will allow us to look at the student more as a whole and see, are they curious about what they're doing, are they doing things individually, such as interest projects, and how can we have that curiosity go into more community, go into more community aspects and things that they're doing. This will connect a bit more to that impact portion, where students are more curious about what they're doing, and they will learn more about what different groups they can help and how they can do these things. And this will also help with the community in that these students will be learning more and sharing that with everyone else who will be equally curious and equally wanting to learn more. And that will just help students as a whole learn more and grow from the experience of being in this organization.
So you probably just got a taste of how awesome these conversations have been. And I want to just applaud wholeheartedly, not just what our students are offering this evening, but their participation and active engagement in this process from start to now. I'm sure you have questions about, okay, so now what, and different timelines and specifics. So we'll try to hit on those as best as we can, knowing that, and I know you appreciate this, that this is sort of, this is under construction. And we're creating this new group with as much clarity and being as true as we can to what has risen in our conversations, but also mindful of a time frame and making sure that students who want to be participating are aware of it and have the opportunity to sort of become a part of it. Even the process of what that looks like has been an interesting conversation in wanting to create sort of a process for inclusion in this new group that reflects actually what we're describing tonight about how we value holistic curiosity, commitment, how do we measure commitment, how do we measure intentionality, those kinds of things. So that's been really exciting as well. What kinds of questions do you folks have?
Well, I'm just going to start with thank you for being curious and committed to this. And you know the way to our hearts put students here.
Absolutely. You guys are amazing. And I just, extraordinary to be able to sit at this table and talk. I think it took me a year to feel okay about doing that. So bravo. And certainly coming from you, I have a very clear picture of why you want to explore an additional option. And I think it was very gracious to maybe run these two parallel, knowing that there might be a little bit of divide until, you know, there's kind of a clear path forward with this. But you guys are very actively taking the lessons learned from National Honor Society and building on it. So it sounds like a beautiful start to me. It's more of a comment than a question, I think. And it takes time, I would assume. So I don't think I'll press you that hard for a timeline yet. Maybe they will. I'm still formulating, so if you already... Oh, I can ask one question, and then you can... Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. I can ask one. Good. I guess, how long do you plan to run the two simultaneously?
I guess... Just next year or to be determined? Yeah, to be determined. Okay. Right. There isn't sort of... I guess with the new group, and I'm sorry we don't have the name of the new group, if that's a question, we're working on that. But there's no intent to have the new group eventually take over NHS. Or there may just be... There may be... Right with the new group, yeah. Right? And I love what Amy said as far as NHS. One difference is the sort of the NHS as being sort of, in many ways, the culmination of achievements that have happened up until then. Right? Of sort of being a part of the chapter and an inductive member reflects accomplishments up to that moment. And then a commitment to do certain things to continue that eligibility. This is building that and creating and achieving while you're in it and contributing as part of the group. So, and they may just find a complimentary place in the Whelan High School community forever and ever. Yeah, I liked that distinction, too. I wrote that down. That resonated with me, too. Thank you. Go ahead. Sorry. That's fine.
I'm assuming that the idea would be that this would be available for, like, 2020... Class of 2027, but probably participation in senior year versus getting involved this year. Because it seems like there's still a lot of work to do. I think what we're imagining is that this spring we can probably get a core group of current juniors, next year's seniors, started. I'm imagining some of these students who have already been involved in the process would be going all right from the start. And then maybe do an additional round of, you know, member selection and induction next school year in the fall as well. That could include current seniors if it's in the fall and then underclassmen as well. Juniors, maybe, and sophomores. Depends on how we put this together. But in the near future, we're going to reconvene this group to sort of think through some of those pieces. But we're hoping to at least gather a group who already knows they're interested in this at the end of the school year so we can, like, hit the ground running in the fall with them. Got it.
One of the questions that I had was you kind of touched on the scholarship piece. Is there an idea that there will be some form of scholarship tied to this or no? I would say what we've been thinking of is a different idea of scholarship. So NHS, one of the, like, most strict components in National Honor Society is the scholarship pillar is specifically identified only by GBA. Like, in fact, in the selection process, if a student has the GPA, like, you're not supposed to consider scholarship beyond that. Like, it's a yes-no checkbox. Whereas in this group, in the selection side of things, we're thinking about how do we measure a student's sort of desire to grow and learn? Students on the panel here have been talking about is it students who have shown improvements? Students who, I don't know, receive a teacher recommendation? Like, whatever it might be, some other way to show that. And then we're thinking that it ties into the work of the group in terms of students maybe researching different topics that they then want to do service-related to. And potentially also researching things that they feel like our school community or the greater community needs to learn more about to become better, like, members of the community or the world. So sort of taking that scholarship piece and instead of having it be a yes-no checkbox, having it be something about the work of the group as we go. Like, do students show that desire to learn and share information or to develop their plans based on the information that they've learned? If I could actually say one more thing about that, that would relate more to the curiosity component. So we would have you having an idea of their studentship from that teacher recommendation portion of it. And then also taking a look at academic curiosity instead of just a numerical how well they've been doing. So we could look at student improvement or what they're doing outside of school that shows a vivid academic curiosity, what sorts of classes they're taking, etc. Things such as that, as opposed to the very rigid and singular GPA requirement of the NHS. Yeah, the other thing is the national organization does require you to make that choice based on the GPA system that we use at our high school. So since we use an unweighted GPA, we're looking at it not really considering the classes that the student is enrolled in. So someone who is maybe taking all college regular classes that has a 3.5 would be considered. But someone who takes all honors classes and has a 3.0 would be considered, even though their weighted GPAs would be a little bit more similar. Maybe the honors student would usually be higher. So I think that maybe with this new honors society, we'd kind of consider a wider range of students, take into consideration course load, but also things like that they did outside of school as well. Yeah, one more thing I'd like to add. We're in a very experimental stage in our design process of rebuilding NHS. And I think there's a lot of observations we still have to, there's a lot of things we still have to observe and figure out moving forward. And I think course load, but also effort, plays a very important role. Oh, yeah. If we see students who are actively trying to increase their grades or show improvement, and they're really pushing themselves through everything with all they've got, maybe the best they can get is a 3.5. But if they're putting that extra time in outside of school and in school to really show and grow, I think that is a very important aspect that we will consider. And a lot of it right now is just going to be observatory, seeing what the students are capable of. Do you see this as being student-led that participate in the acceptance process? We actually were talking about that a little bit. One idea that I brought up a little while ago was potentially doing student interviews, because I think that you can really get to know someone through having a conversation with them. And I think it takes a little bit of pressure off of it when you're kind of face-to-face with someone that's your own age or of similar age to you. So I think that that's a place where students can potentially help. We haven't really talked beyond that. I think maybe. I think some things like grades and GPA and stuff like that can be private to students, and I'm not sure that other people would want that publicized to even just other people on the committee. But it's definitely something that I think we're all open to talking about, and it's a cool idea. I think another aspect that we've been talking about a little bit is ask maybe if we end up asking teachers for recommendations to this new society, that could help us while we're asking for teacher recommendations in our college application process. And with the interview process, that would help us in our later life. Definitely. Thank you all so much. It's really exciting for us to have you here, and thank you for sharing what really has clearly been a thoughtful and deliberative process. A couple of things. I love the idea of underclassmen. I mean, if you're really going to capture that notion that this is something that's ongoing and active and that you're striving for as much as you've already achieved, I think giving you a longer runway to participate can matter. I also love the possible mentorship opportunities that exist in that organically. One thought on selection may be a personal statement of some kind that sort of demonstrates the why and which of your new values resonate. You know, diligence is another way of measuring scholarship. I love the concept of curiosity as well. So thank you all. I have sort of similar questions about where you land, but want to give grace to the process that clearly has been very formative since we last had an update. They're all much nicer than me. They say thank you. They smile. No, this is great. There was a question, though, that I had, and now I got sidetracked because you guys are always nicer than me.
Underclassmen timing.
Oh, no. And I guess this is just kind of like feedback more than question, but I'm getting a little bit caught up on with impact and community and service. Like, is it going to be group-focused service each year, or is it going to be – I'm hearing, like, some seems more individual, but some seems more group. So just feedback, not – and I'm sure that will all get worked out. But that was just, like, something that kept, like, resonating. I think right now, just to give you some context, we do a leadership project. So all of the members are required to do a five- to ten-hour service project that reflects something they're interested in. And we write about it. We talk about kind of what we – how we've grown, et cetera. But then we also do chapter-wide projects. So the officers, myself, and then we have four other officers, we work together to plan this project that kind of benefits the community. That includes all of the members, and all of the members are required to participate. But it winds up being mostly the officers doing kind of the majority of the workload, and then the other members are kind of just jumping in and doing, like, how – anything that we need them to do to kind of facilitate the process. I think that I personally like the initiative of the leadership project, but I think that we could expand a little bit more on the chapter project and talk more about how are some ways that we can get together as a group and volunteer more. How can we kind of make this more of a group effort rather than just an officer's effort. So I think that that's where the group versus individual thing comes in. I think we probably still have to work out some kinks on if we'll keep the leadership project. Maybe that's something that remains in the regular National Honor Society, and that we do something different with the regular Honor Society. But those definitely are still some things that we need to have conversations about. Hopefully it'll be more community-based things, I would say, but we don't know anything for sure yet. And I think – oh, sorry. One more thing that we've mentioned is that each individual member of this new group is going to be doing individual service throughout the year, and this group is going to be a place where they can pull from as a resource, where if they have something that they're very passionate about, that they want to have more of an impact in, such as organizing a slightly larger-scale community service event, they could grab from that group to have more members who are also interested in that thing, help them with pulling. And I think one distinction between the two levels, because like we've said, we're going to run two parallel groups. The smaller groups or the more new underclassmen that may join, we might prioritize more individualistic approaches to community service to really hone in on their skills and really develop them so that by the time they're old enough to compete and join in the higher, more elite Honor Society of our school, they'll be ready to contribute massively to the larger-scale group projects that are really about connecting all members of the community together. Yeah, and also like, like with this group we're trying to sort of take, like what you're saying, like the weight off of just like the few officers for like making a community service project and really putting it back into the hands of like dedicated students instead of just like making them just volunteer for whatever project they're talking about. Just one last thing to add, as I already mentioned, like the current projects, they're like five to ten hours. Our goal is to do something more long-lasting, maybe throughout the school year, that the students can continuously contribute to throughout the different months to create this bigger impact on the day. Yeah. I'm just going to throw in, we do have a semester, we have community service requirements individually, so we do 20 hours a semester, and I believe 60, 50 or 60 hours are required to actually be eligible to join the National Honor Society. So it is a lot of individual work, but I guess the hope would be to focus it more holistically on the group, but still keeping those requirements because I think it's important to ensure that the members are actively motivated towards getting those hours in because, you know, that's a big part of the Honor Society. I think another thing to go off of what Wernay said was if you're doing something so long-lasting, you want to reflect back and really make sure you know what you're doing is something that's good and how it's positively affecting the community. And, you know, maybe it becomes something bigger, like somewhere down the line in your later life, but, you know, I feel like it's really valuable to circle back and find out why. Why are you doing this? What impact does it have? I love the way you all are talking so much about impact. That's often not something that's talked about with high school community service. You know, sometimes it tends to be about resume padding in the college applications. I've never heard students talk so much about impact. And, you know, so much of, before I came back to education, I was the CEO of a large non-profit. And most of our discussion was about impact and how do we measure impact. And it's such a good skill to think about how do you measure impact. And that could really change the nature of the service of Wayland High School, just thinking about impact and getting that in students' minds. It's not about the hours. It's actually about how you impact people and communities. That's thought number one. Thought number two, you know, Betsy, we've been talking with a bunch of teachers and administrators about the portrait of a learner, and we'll talk about that in an upcoming school committee, in terms of what kind of qualities do we want in Wayland graduates. And so much of the discussion today is you're talking about the qualities that we want in our graduates, in terms of commitment, curiosity, exploration. I feel like we could take this language and put our vision of a graduate together. And by creating this organization, you're going to allow more students to achieve some of the portraits that we will want in the future.
I think that the result of this process is hopefully that we're going to get a larger group of people who really want to be present in this community, and who love helping, you know, Wayland residents or people surrounding people, and who are really interested in what they're actually doing, rather than the people who are just adding it to their resume because they think that they need to to get into a good school, which is absolutely not true. But I really, I'm very, very excited about this. And I think that we're going to get a lot of people who, like, are really excited about this too. I think it's probably going to be a little bit of a shock at first, and people are going to take some time to adjust to it. But I think that once it is implemented and everyone has the opportunity to be a part of it, you're going to get a lot of people who are really passionate about what they're doing, which is awesome. Audrey's sad that she's graduating. I know. Who is this is here for me? Thea can do it. Yeah. William, I have a brother. Yeah, there is one that falls in between. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, but that's your impact, right? Yeah. Is that you see something that you would like to change, and you get to leave it for your siblings. Yeah. And everybody else in the community. Like, that's awesome. It's been a really fun process. That's great. And really fun for us. I mean, Amy and I have just enjoyed so much these conversations, and really getting at the heart of who are we as learners, who are we as a community, what do we want to create, what do we want our impact to be? So it's been just absolutely all so very much. And thank you all for your thoughtful questions and support of this new venture. Thank you. Thanks for coming back and coming to visit us, so thank you. I need to give you guys an update soon. Yeah, that would be awesome when you really start to roll it out or something. We welcome alums and students. We do. We do. We do. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. I don't think I can share it, but I'm sorry to submit to a request. Got it, got it, got it. Okay. Okay. Allison. She sent a request so that it could be shared with us. Just the presentation, so I can just pop it in the folder for everybody. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, guys. Thank you. Can you share it with... Oh, can you give the... If you just give it to me, I can put it in the folder and everybody can access it. I requested access to share it with Erin. That's all. But it had to go through you, which is why she kept having to turn it. I know. I'm like, all right, forget it. I'm just going to... It's okay. We have talked about turning this table and flipping the whole room. I know. But... Um... It does. It does. Spring cleaning. Absolutely. Bye, everyone. Thank you. Bye, Amy. Bye, Amy. Have you. Accountable Talk update. Yes. And this is not an easy task, following. I know. You know? Well, if they can do it, we can. You're all just as engaging. I like that answer. Just as engaging. These are the educators who shake these students. That's the connection. That's the same way we'll use. There you go. Uh... In this one, we're just clicking from the agenda, right? So, it's a pleasure. Last year, you had an update on Accountable Talk. And there's work continuing. Principal Deborah Romeo, Curriculum Leaders, Rebecca Polo in Science. So, it's great to have this team here for the updates. Thank you. Um, I'm going to actually pass it directly to Rebecca and to Stacy. Um, for just a really brief introduction, the reason Rebecca and Stacy, out of all the curriculum leaders right here, is because they've done just a lot of work within their subject areas as well as the general work that we did last year. And there are many teachers in both of their departments that have dedicated their professional practice goals to elevating student talks. And so, um, they're going to give you kind of the math version and the science version. You'll see how they're similar, but you'll also see how they're used to their discipline. And so, um, I am so grateful for their leadership and hard work and their presence here this evening because, um, I know they're just going to bring this all to life for you. So. Thank you. Um, I just want to start by saying that this Elevating Student Talk in Math and Science really comes from a lot of the hard work that we've done as a full curriculum team. Um, and the work prior to that that we've done on engagement and our work in our departments the year after that and Elevating Student Talk and now incorporating executive functioning and we're all trying to, um, really build off of each consecutive year of professional development. But a lot of the work, um, that we're bringing to you is a part of our, our greater, um, collective. Yeah, I can see some, do you want to explain the students? Um, sure, yeah, these are, um, math graphics. So, a lot of the Elevating Student Talk are one of the, one of the pillars, I guess, is doing, um, card sorts. So, we put magnets on these card sorts to just get kids up at the boards and they are, I can't even tell what this is. I think these are graphs in situations. So, they're matching, right, the graph with the, with the, uh, description. And then in the bottom corner is just some sentence stems that we hang on our whiteboards. So, that they're prompts, right, for students to, who sometimes might not want to be talking, or might not know what to say, or how to interject into a conversation. So, they're just reminders. Have that academic talk. Yes. Yeah. Um, I think the next slide. Yeah. Okay. So, our history is, um, this is the work that we did collectively, um, where in the summer, prior to our Elevating Student Talk, professional development, the curriculum leaders, um, took on a bit of a book study, um, with Unlocking the Power of Student Talk, Teaching Kids to Talk with Clarity and Purpose, by, sorry, Rosent and Winchow. And we had the four themes that we built into each session, which was talking to build relationships, talking to play with ideas, talking to report, and talking to analyze and argue. And each session was built, not only to emphasize each of the four, we focused on one at a time, but we were building in each one as we went. And we did it in a way that really, um, embodied and had the participants engaged in each of these as we went along. So, we practiced what we preached. We really tried to model it. And I think the next slide, this is sort of the summary, and it has links to all the different activities that we had teachers engage in for each of the different types of talks. And this resource was really useful for our, um, teachers to look back on in previous, uh, in subsequent years to be able to build their portfolio of accountable talk strategies. So that's the history. That's where we've been. Um, but here we are now. And here we are now. So, in math, we've been doing a lot of Building Thinking Classroom. I'm not sure how familiar the committee is with this. But this is a, um, a student-centered pedagogy. There are 14 pillars. The main thing that everybody knows about when they think of Building Thinking Classroom is students out of their seats and up at the boards, um, working and collaborating in random groups that are constantly changing, right? Sounds like you know. Well, aren't you just a know-it-all? It's awesome. Um, so it's a change, right? And we are, um, continuing to create, um, activities that, that make sense at the board, right? It's not just worksheets. I mean, sometimes there are worksheets, but we're trying to get kids up at the board. And it's, it's fun, and I think that they like it. So we're trying to connect that, what we've been doing specifically in math, to the elevating student talk and trying to interweave them. In science, we've been working on CERs or ERCs, which is a way of writing or speaking an evidence-based argument, um, as part of our practice standards, um, so it's claim, evidence, reasoning, and then our conclusion as well, um, which are very important to create an evidence-based discussion. And one way that, um, we talk about CERs and CERTs is through, um, the way we have students build on those is through discussion, through things like matching cards together about what great claims, evidence, and reasoning are, playing with evidence, um, and then being able to speak your reasoning before you can write it. But both are focused on the student constructive knowledge that's really key to what we're, um, pushing for our pedagogy in both subjects.
So, we're in our exploration phase right now. We've got lots of energy, lots of people coming up to us saying, oh, I got an idea for this, and oh, can you help me make, um, note cards? Um, note cards, yeah, a lot of note card sorting, um, which is, is fun for math intent because we're inside especially, math also, we're into categorization, um, and trying to learn from organization of ideas, um, and we're working on some content-specific techniques that we'll go into in a second. Um, and as Deborah mentioned, it's part of, um, many of our professional practice and student learning goals is here. Right. And so, this, um, picture up here is just a sample. This is a tracking form that some teachers in my department have used. It was sort of adapted from, uh, um, fostering algebraic, I think, yeah, fancy nose, um, form that was created. And so, you know, I've gone in to teachers and I've observed part of their classes and I can just keep track of who's talking, what kind of talk they're doing, are they talking at all, and then teachers have data to look back on and then they can move forward based on that data. Then they know what they need to work on and what they need to create and help the students. Yeah, it's not evaluative, but it gives us a good sense of, uh, gives them feedback on what, um, they're doing to help them. What the strengths and weaknesses are. Yeah. So, you're looking for the students to be engaging in this type of talk. Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah. That's the goal. Um, so, we're helping our PLCs, um, develop, uh, activity, as you said, and manipulatives, um, and assisting with that evidence collection. Okay. So, um, the next two slides are on math. And so, this is, uh, one teacher in the eighth grade, you know, after I went in and I did a couple of observations and we sat and we analyzed, we said, you know, our students or her students at this point were really good at talking. They were actually very good at sharing and explaining their steps. They need a little help in listening, um, and bringing other people into their conversation. Maybe not shocking when we think about adolescence. So, um, so we came up with these cards that were category specific, and this is just three of the categories here, but I can't even remember. China, look at that yellow card. Um, building on or connecting others' ideas, right? Like, so that we knew was one thing. Another category was challenging, um, asking challenging questions in a respectful way. So, we created these cards and then she has just started recently. She took two categories, those two that I just mentioned, and did a lesson in past. Everybody had these two cards. And on each card are the sentence stems that fit into those categories. And she challenged her students, okay, you have to use all these sentence stems or at least one or two from each card within this lesson. And so, you know, the kids, they were a little silly with it, but they did it. And it worked and it made them, it just made them think about how they can incorporate, um, different kinds of talk and include people. And so, she'll do it again. And we'll just practice. It's just a practice, right? So, you just continue to practice. So, that's one thing. My seventh grade team is, uh, we're trying to take Sarah Ward's executive functioning, because we've had some professional development on that, our building thinking classroom, and the, um, elevating student talk, and mash it together. And mash it all together. So, this was part of our planning doc. Since then, this has turned into cards. We like cards. We do like cards. And so, this has basically taken, you know, Sarah Ward talks about jobs, job roles. And so, we tried to create these job roles. Um, and then, how does that match to the, the sentence stems that really go with them. And so, the designers, we actually created as a group. So, imagine three students are up at the board in groups. And the whole group, they have to do the designer card. And so, the together, before they even pick up a pen, before they even start, they're thinking, okay, here's our task. How does it have to, how are we going to map it out? What do we need to do? What's our planning? And so, that's the group involved. And then, each student gets one card. One student's a navigator. One student's the scribe. That's a very building-thinking classroom. And one student, which isn't shown here, is the pivot pilot. So, the pivot pilot is watching what's being written on the board, and watching for mistakes, and pointing out inconsistencies. And somebody else is the scribe. And somebody else is estimating. Like, what should we be looking for? So, just to give you one idea, that's where we're headed. So, in science, it's our first Super Wednesday. We did a professional development together about how this accountable talk, how this elevating student talk really works within, specifically, a science classroom. And so, we looked to resources as part of our professional development prior. In Super Wednesdays, we were looking at a program called Open Sci-Ed. That's a free open source program that's used by many schools. And it has benefits and drawbacks. So, we're looking primarily at their pedagogy and talking about sense-making, which is a big hot theme in science right now, is how do kids know? How does it make sense? How does it attach to their world and surrounding? Putting it together with evidence and ideas. And so, we are taking different parts of the lesson, have different strategies that can work best throughout the unit. And so, thinking about building on initial phenomena and phenomena-based instruction, which is, again, another one of our professional developments that we put together. And basing a science lesson on things that are happening in the real world. Like, what's the best time of day to fly a kite? Or why did Groppel just fall fall from the sky? Which happened this week? And which is like a soft hail. A weird precipitation happening this week. We're in weather right now. So, you know. How to build consensus. It's just a big open circle idea, which we're working on. And really using this flowchart of teaching tools that I found that really helps divvy up where the talk moves are best at each part. Are you working with students together in a group? Are you having them, are you checking in on each of their answers? Or is it for them to develop their own knowledge? And we'll check in a little bit later. Which moves are best and which moves are more easily worked as a teacher and for the students for what we need. And so you go to the next slide. Thank you. Our current game changer practices are also some conversation sentence starters. Sixth grade is really working on those quite a lot to build our academic talk in the science classroom. Student created categories for these concept carved sorts. We're very much into categorization in science. But also uniting different ideas and showing how categories move and change in science all of the time. And how do we, how can different groups categorize things differently? What does that mean about our knowledge of topic? Working on some driving question boards, which is an open-sided idea as well, where we have these phenomena and students have to, in groups, talk about why that might be happening and what questions they have. So not jumping to conclusions, but developing really good questions that we can get evidence for. And really elevating our turn and talk to be really specific about what we're looking for, what we're listening for, and making sure that everyone is really participating effectively to get knowledge and listen to each other. And so we're in the process of exploring many other techniques and reflecting and figuring out what works for us best. Okay, so moving forward,
it's really just about taking everything and mushing it together. And time and create, you know, it takes time to create things, right? And so we have to experiment and play with the new ideas. Yeah. And then see what works. And just as we did in RPD, we play with ideas. Right. And some things can go, you know, work beautifully across all subjects, and some things are really subject-specific, and... And continuing to talk with each other to get ideas and see what works. I think one of the things that we talked about, the first year, this is a multi-year process, because it was about, last year was about our staff learning under the guidance of our curriculum leaders. And this year is about exploration and trying things out in the classroom. And I love the role that both Stacey and Rebecca are playing with their teachers in terms of that data gathering, because that's hard to do while you're trying the new techniques or the new strategies. And so for the curriculum leaders to support teachers in that way. And it makes, it actually shows, like, where are we? Where are our kids? And what is the next logical step, given what we're trying to do with them? And so, as we move forward, you know, we're going to continue to see Elevation Student Talk as one of our goals, because what we want to see is that the students are, they're able to do this with greater independence over time, because it will take them, as well as probably the years of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, to develop these skills deeply. And for us, it means of continued planning and collaboration. And this year, we've also added in that executive functioning piece. And it made me think so much about that idea of the students understanding, what does it look like when I'm doing this? Like, how do I envision myself doing this? And right now, we're still supporting them a lot and teaching them how to do it. And so in the, you know, the upcoming year, what it will look like is time, departmental time, continuing to be focused on this work as teachers look at lessons again, look at activities again, and embed these practices so that students actually gain that independence and automaticity that we want them to have as they kind of move on from middle school to high school. And especially, as we say, up there in the age of AI, continuing to develop their sense of voice. Talking to each other. Exactly. Face-to-face. Yeah. I have to think that this work will also assist in building writing skills around having your evidence to support whatever, you know, end game you're trying to get to. Um, so it seems to be such a well-rounded application, like, thing to be learned. Skill. As a teacher on the Writing Center also, I, um, find it so helpful when I do have the time to individually work with students and have them voice those, um, ideas before they write them down in any subject that I'm helping them with in the Writing Center, whether it be social studies or English or science-gathering evidence from their novel that they're reading. Um, and so continuing that in our science classes as we're building argumentative talk and writing is key. I love argumentative talk. I'm there for it all day. Um, a couple themes that I just, first of all, I love everything about this. Like, it really resonates. I mean, um, the, one of the things that I talk about in my other real job as an executive is how do we foster cross-functional collaboration? How do you get stakeholders who have different POV to show up and do, like, so what you're doing mirroring the jobs and playing different positions depending on the problem or the day or where you sit, that is such real life ability to have that sort of agility in how you see yourself and the role that you're going to play in particular attacking a different problem and that sometimes you're the pivot pilot. Sometimes you're the, you know, accountability mechanism and sometimes you're the ideation mechanism and sometimes you're the operational solutioner and that I think is just tremendous, um, agility that I think is great to model at these really formative stages. The other is I remember both personally and then also as a classroom teacher, like, trying to engage this age group in talking is organically challenging and some of that comes from the legacy or traditional approach. Put, like, a spotlight on them, you try to engage or if we put them in groups there wasn't as much structure and I think what I love about this is this, like, democratization of talking that everybody's expected to do it but don't worry, you have a script, you have a prompt, we have a start and, like, it's not always you're called on to give an answer and it's right or wrong, it's really allowing them to feel confident to express an idea but, but in pounded limits so that they sort of know, okay, right now I'm supposed to express this kind of idea. And over, and I just, it really I think is going to be wildly impactful. I'm full circle, David, to our talk of impact. Um, the one thing I would really want to encourage is we've talked here at the table a lot about the transition from our eighth graders to our ninth graders and I would love us in this multi-year effort to really be thinking about how do we help them harness and hold on to the skills you all are invested in working so hard to build and model as they matriculate, right? Like, how do we continue these skills and leave opportunities in their classroom and group work in high school to say don't forget if that wasn't a middle school thing, these are life lessons and they're really going to serve you well and encourage the students to continue that and also continue the, um, results that you're seeing and sharing that especially with the ninth grade team. What Betsy said. I mean, I find myself speechless and that's not the point but I, I too, you know, share the similar sentiments. I'm here for all of it. I think it's, it's awesome. It's fantastic life lessons for the kids. We heard a little bit from the upperclassmen that were here earlier. They, I was amazed at how they kind of contributed to the other person's conversation and I imagine that they probably have some more difficult conversations behind the scenes and hopefully they're armed with some of these tools on, on how to have that and how to have a difference of opinion and how to come together on those. So, yeah, fantastic. And it's a lifelong process. Thank you. Thank you for doing it. Thank you. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you for opening up your classroom practice and sharing it, like, with all of us. Um, and to circle back on that, I think it's really important that the community as a whole and at the very least families understand what's going on on super early release Wednesdays. So, when you guys join us and you're talking to us about what you did on super Wednesday number one, it's really, it's invaluable, I think, for us to support what you guys are doing. Um, and then for people to be able to see, like, oh, I can ask my, you know, kid if they're the driver or, you know, the navigator or the pivot person or, you know, and just kind of, it's really helpful. Um, so I appreciate that so much from that perspective as well. So, thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you. And I love that your presentation is clickable, and I literally have clicked on, like, almost everything. So, I can't wait to spend more time with you. Excellent. Thank you all. The word pedagogy has always made my head spin. It just doesn't, like, really make sense to me. And I'm like, me! I don't like the word paired. Oh, I like that. Like OG and paired. Yeah. Oh, mmm. Let's give all the SAT words. Let's just put them all in there. Vocabulary. Boom. Go. Um, I found out that supposedly, this is totally off topic, but when she was saying what was falling from the sky the other day, it made me think of how last night I was driving kids to lacrosse practice, and they were talking about how there's one day coming in the next couple weeks that supposedly, supposedly, for a minute or two, the world is, or seconds, the world is supposed to lose gravity. Like an elevator? Well, I mean, it's not the science person. Don't catch her in the parking lot. And I was like, wait, is this legitimate? Like, is this really? Are we talking about this in school? And the kids are like... It's like when you jump up in an elevator and everything like that. Well, but you're not going to come back down. Oh. Because there's not going to be any gravity to pull you. I'm like, is my house going to like that? Did they say that on TikTok? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then I said, and so... Now I'm going to take a picture as that on my face. And so I said, I said, um, I said, wait a minute. Is this like, so I'm asking, this is a discussion I'm having from the driver's seat. I'm like, wait, is this real? Tell me more. Like, where did you hear about this? Who's talking about this? And then they're just like, okay, whatever. We're going to talk about, we're going to go on the trampoline when this happens. So that when we hit that, like, we're just going to go into the universe. That song, Levitating, is going to be very popular. Yeah. No one else is sorry about this? No. No. But I'm going to ask my kids when I get home. Ask them. No. Google it first, otherwise. Hold on, hold on. April Fool's is just around the corner. There is a April Fool's and on 4-1. No, it wasn't. I thought about that. Thursday next week. Good call, Benson.
The viral claim that Earth will lose gravity for seven seconds on August 12th. Oh, August. Is a false, unsubstantiated rumor. You can't believe everything you read on the Google. Is that your AI overview, though? I don't know. NASA has not issued any warning regarding loss of gravity, and scientists have debunked the rumor. Don't believe everything you see and read, kids. That's the lesson. There would be a catastrophic return. Everything would slam back to Earth, causing widespread damage, injuries, and immense geological disruption. But you'll be fine because you're on a trampoline. Definitely. Okay. We'll just go boop boop. All right. Sorry. I digress. We are going to switch gears and talk about finance. We're going to talk about finance. As we know, financial updates to school committees are some of the most important that all of you do as in your fiduciary roles. In the non-gravity world. And I should say that, you know, obviously, you know, last year was a real challenge. You know, had to use different resources and a partial freeze. And your Kirsteen being in her first year is certainly watching our finances very closely. Even, I'll talk about in a little while, just, you know, we had a meeting with our finance director and town manager just late this afternoon in terms of just impact. You know, communities are really facing, the weather this winter has been a real challenge for municipal governments and school districts. And that has been, you know, the last few years we have not had that challenge. But if you think about how much the over budget that this has caused, and we are different than the federal government in the sense that we have to balance every year. And so as a result, you know, we even talked today about what are we going to do about just in Whalen how much over budget the snow and ice. So that's going to add a little bit of a challenge to us that was as of four o'clock today. It's not in this report, but we'll talk about it. Okay. Thank you, David, for that segue into it's not quite an exact quarterly report, but I felt it was very important to kind of put this all together and see where we were in February, just given last year's circumstances. And I did kind of provide a little bit of a different different constructs so that it was narrative, but as well as actually showing the numbers and how the numbers come together based on the projections and what we're anticipating. And again, this was as of the end of February. So again, the challenging part with our financial system is that it does not encumber payroll. That's the largest piece of our budget. So for me, that is a real concern. And so what I wanted to be able to show and illustrate is that, albeit it looks like we've got this, you know, wow, we still have 40% of our budget available. Nope, we don't really. And how I, you know, provided the information is what the pay periods remaining as of, um, through March and the end of the year, we have, um, different, uh, groups that are a different number of pay periods. So that's also a challenge in monitoring and making sure we get those right. Again, projecting, um, a different absences and leave of absence, sub coverage amounts, um, retirement payouts. Um, we'd have our longevity payments that are due at the end of the year. And we have done, um, this year, a, an agreed, um, two-part co-curricular stipend process, which does allow for greater monitoring and budget projections. So I do know that that's a pretty good number. Um, and then looking at the non-personnel, when we go to the, um, specific categories, they are reflecting deficits. And so I wanted to be able to provide the context that we still have not done those transfers to our bus fee revolving account and circuit breaker reimbursement accounts that we're, we're just holding on, you know, to the very, um, last point where we know we need to take it precisely exactly, exactly how much, but those, um, categories are, um, roughly in the deficit of 100,000 and 660,000 respectively. Uh, so the second page is where the illustration is for the column breakout. Um, the Munis report, again, it, it shows, so what I, uh, wanted to provide was that on the left-hand side of this, um, chart, we have what the Munis report does provide. And it has our personnel, year-to-date costs, no encumbrances for personnel, non-personnel, the year-to-date expenditures, and what we have already encumbered. So again, combining those two numbers, expense and encumbrance, the Munis report provides the, um, expense and encumbrance of the $32,985,000, which shows an artificial available balance of 22 million dollars. So what I did on the right-hand side of this illustration is incorporating the projections through the end of the year in both the personnel and non-personnel, um, based on those identified, um, the bullet points previously. And again, this was as of February. We were, um, we're hoping, again, these are things that still have not been entered into our system. We know we have graduation expenses. We have a lot that's coming up that we still need to, um, put in for, but it does, um, reflect, uh, roughly $800,000 available. Now we know that we're going to have some, um, differences, uh, with that. Again, budget pressures, as we just heard, um, towards, um, the weather, unprecedented winter weather. Can I ask a quick question? Mm-hmm. Sorry. Um, why are the non-personnel encumbrances per Munis so much higher than our projected encumbrances for non-personnel? Um, what I just explained is that we have not done the reduction out. But is that exactly what it is? Sorry, I just, yes, I didn't. Okay, that's all it is. So it's roughly $760,000 less. Okay. Yes. All right. Okay, similar question. The projected encumbrances, did those, sorry, the $826,000 projected available, is that after any unexpected overages due to custodial, um, costs because of weather, or is that not included in the projections yet? And then the next question is, is that $826,000 include the $760,000 that we have in? It is net of that, yes. Okay. And again, I put in the projections that I had at the point in time, new items are already- Because we got more. No. So, um, yes, we're about $50,000 over in our custodial overtime with that line alone. So, um, that is definitely a significant, and again, facilities, we're having significant HVAC issues, um, burst pipes, again, are freezing conditions that really has required even more, um, maintenance repairs and urgent response times that just cannot be, um, pushed out. Like, those are immediate that we have to take into account. Um, we had, um, again, just carefully watching the special education out of district, um, services. We are, you know, really hopeful that our circuit breaker is going to get us to the end. We're trying very hard not to have to tap into that stabilization fund so that we can truly have a safety net going forward and continue to build on that. I'm, I'm not going to say anything about anything, but that's our, that's our hope. Great. We'll stick with that. We did receive an additional, um, grant that was, um, that Ronnie did report, but I wanted to include it in the financial because it was not in that first, um, quarterly report and that we were one of, um, only 78 recipients to receive that funding. So that was revolving funds. Again, these are, these are really, um, just at the point where they're only able to, um, provide the, the level of offset that we've identified. What we really had to, um, utilize those resources in 2025. So in that capacity, we're looking to try to just incrementally get ourselves, um, back to having a better fund balance in those regards, but we are still, um, running positive and we will continue to watch all of our budget pressures and, uh, you'll be, um, again, looking at all of the expenses as we're coming through in the final quarter. Um, this is where the crunch time is and it gets really, really challenging. Can you just refresh my memory? The $50,000 grant is toward fiscal year 26, correct? Um, yes. Yes. Okay. So it's like, but accounted for done. Um, let's see. Well, or I could send it by until, um, September. It's already accounted for. I mean, I had to, when I put in the proposal for it, I had to write, how would we be using it? Mm-hmm. So, um. But is it, is it all against, like, expenses out of fiscal year 26 or are we also being able to cover some into fiscal year 27 with it? Okay. Some into 27 for like, it's more professional development. Yeah. I thought that's what I was just, I was just going to say that. It's supplemental. It's not where we can offset our budget. Yeah. It's, I get to do extra stuff because that I wanted to do, but, uh, now we can do it. Yeah. I have a question. I was looking at the transportation and this is related and sort of a little bit off topic, but there were never bus passes given out this year. So anyone who paid for the bus never got a pass. They were. They were laminated and distributed in the classroom level. Okay. Well, they never made it home. No. And I can guarantee you they're not being checked by the bus drivers. While I love that sometimes my kid says, I'm going to jump on the bus and go, I paid for the bus. So I'm, but I'm going to go to this person's house. So I don't have to go and worry about there's people that I know are riding the bus for free all year because no one's checking bus passes and bus passes never made it home. Maybe they did in some people's houses, but three people around the table. They were distributed. I can assure you that they were, but I don't know from once they left us. Right. We saw them printed, laminated, cut, and distributed to the buildings. Yeah. So just a, and you know, if they're, if it's, even if it was, they were distributed and they are checking them, fabulous. But I think the second part of they're not being checked and we can get on a bus for the year and go both ways every day and no one. Our registration process has been delayed purposely because we are in the process of reconfigurating how that registration process and payment structure is going to be handled. And all of that is going to be done through our bus routing software and power school. So you're going to get a nice one page form and it's going to be consolidated so that the payment is done at the same time. We, and we will be able to have real time bus lists based on the route, AM, PM, all of those types of things. And that we will be more diligent in tracking that to make sure that we don't have any bus capacity issues and challenges that we have notably sustained this year. I will just say that that it has been a very difficult year in terms of how the new routing software was rolled out. There was a challenge in how the collections were being done, cross-tracked. There were like three different methods, reports that were trying to be cross-checked. It was just not logistically cohesive. And so that's why there's been a delay, but we are going to get that out in a nice streamlined package and will be better next year. I just want us to collect our fees where we need to collect the fees. I'm okay with waiting, waiting a little later for registration. Um, okay. Yeah, because they used to get mailed home. And I totally appreciate the fact that that was a cost, etc. And however you do it, fine. Let's just, uh, does anybody have any other questions on this before we move forward? Thank you, Kirstie. Thank you. Thank you. Um, great.
Can I give a spoiler alert? I know we're on camera. Sure. You're also going to roll out the parent-student geo-tracking app. Oh, we had that before. It, like, didn't work. Oh, no, this one's going to be fantastic. Oh, awesome. Right? That's great. Because it would be like, is the bus coming? Is the bus coming? The bus would be, like, here, and it would be a little fuss, actually, on your route. I love it. Cool. So, love it. Great things to look forward to. Love it. That's a good spoiler alert. That's a good spoiler alert. Do you remind me of the update Pickup Patrol in the afternoon when my kid bikes off? We'll make all the bells and whistles happen. Great. That's coming as well. Pickup Patrol. Added service. Added service. Added service. That's awesome. That's great. Uh, okay.
Kirstie, you're up again. Thank you. Capital Report overview. Um, the Capital Report is just an executive overview to, um, update on what has transpired since the fall, since our preliminary requests, um, where some of the projects are for the current year, and that have, um, balances from prior years, that, uh, we are diligently, um, closing those out, and making sure that we are doing the projects. Um, again, we have the student information system replacement. That was our power school, so that is complete. We had a minibus purchase for athletics. That was complete. We also got a second minibus for district-wide, um, that's also housed at the house, high school, just because they're already got a process in place for, um, deploying those vehicles. Our feasibility study, we are in the process. That will be complete by June 30. And then we have various, um, capital, the, the larger building-related projects that are in progress, that Mike Fea has already provided anticipated, um, amounts needed for getting us through the end of June. So a number of these that were open for, uh, several years are now going to be closed out. In addition, as we were going through the capital process, we needed to be able to identify and close out, uh, some of those projects in order to be able to, uh, prioritize the FY27 items that we put forward that were new, uh, from the five-year, um, report, which included the, uh, safety and security, uh, item, and the reading literacy item, which we did, uh, provide enough closeout to get that, um, incorporated in this round of capital funding that will be going forward to annual countenating. And those were the, um, unfortunately, we did not get the phase three athletic projects, uh, move forward. Um, the, uh, select board and FinCom decided to, um, sever the, um, the two, and so the wastewater treatment plan for high school will be going forward. The phase three athletic project we will need to look at subsequent years and advocate, um, for that to be completed. So I feel like I missed something on this. Um, this is the baseball field. So we're, we still have to send our students to another field to practice and compete. Did you have a question? Nope. That seems expensive. So how are we getting them there? By bus and bus is expensive. Yes. It's the transportation cost. Yes. So it's an added operational cost. It's not, um, to the extent of the $2 million project, um, sticker, but it is challenging for our teams. And, um, could you do me a favor, Christine? Could you pull together, um, numbers against that, what it does add to our budget each year from an operating perspective? It's roughly $15,000. Oh, I think too, I think we might've covered that last time. So it's an additional $15,000. Well, it means if we are using those resources in athletics and not able to use them in other areas such as replenishing or replacing uniforms and things like that, that would have been a priority in that category. I'm a little bit speechless on that. Um, wasn't it, my memory is like a pasta strainer right now, but wasn't it like hovering around $1.2 million a few years ago and now it's $2 million and what do we expect to be in in a few years? And this was going to be to do them together was a proposal to reduce like by $400,000, correct? It was going to be roughly $250,000. Oh, $250,000 less. Okay. And the additional oversight of our, um, town engineer, because she will have to be. Right. So it was like closer to, yeah, all in, it was like a $400,000 to do them together reduction. And so the FinCom and select board went against what Brian and our town engineer and Michael McCall had suggested. Do you know why? You can listen to their meeting. They had a whole meeting about it. You can also look at the email, um, Brian, I forwarded it to you separately and I cannot. I want to say Harley. Yes. Oh, Harley. Thank you. Um, sent about it. Um, okay. It's not, you didn't miss it. This is the first time we're actually like hearing at the table that it didn't happen since we last talked about it, but there was some other stuff that had loaded around. Um,
I think, um, I was going to say, I think this also speaks to the larger planning effort that we're making in that trying to keep it not spread out to these multiple phase projects as much as we can. Um, it's hard to stick to the timeline, right? Because it, they seem to lose priority the further out we get. Um, and I, I understand that maybe athletics isn't, you know, a huge number on the greater community's priority list, but it's really important to over like 85% of our students who play athletics. Um, and it's important to keeping our students in district. It's important to keeping our high school competitive. Um, it's a significant piece to kids, high school experience, middle school experience. There's so many life lessons that are learned while you're, you know, participating in athletics. And so I just, it's important. And I think it's more than just throwing a ball around and being, you know, active. Right. And I think we as a committee and as a, you know, administration and a district should be trying to concert effort there. And I think, you know, it's something we should all be keeping in mind at this point. Um, this is really unfortunate. I think in the long run, this is going to get pushed out further and it's going to end up costing the town more money. Um, but I think one other thing that's an important learning piece here is if you have too many of these multi-phase long-term projects, you lose the institutional memory of the decision makers. And like, that's just a reality of volunteer-based municipal government. And so I think my sense is one of the headwinds here was no, like a lack of continuity and a lack of expertise. I want to think that, however, it's a lot of the same people that were here when we broke this out into multiple phases. It does speak, though, to the volunteer nature of the job in general.
This is really sad. I don't even have a baseball player in my house. I don't either. But to not be able to have a baseball game at your home school seems just,
that's our sport. It just, it seems like something that we should have. You know, we have the wastewater treatment as a focus that's probably really important, let's be honest. But just to leverage the efficiency of the two being done at the same time. So this is just not being revisited. It's the decisions made.
Unless we want to make a motion on the floor. We can always do that. I don't think that that would even do anything because they've already concluded to not move before we couldn't. No, it would have to be that, like, we would maybe. We would make a motion on the floor.
And, maybe? Sorry.
I'll read up on all of this again. Again, and it's in the reverse is the way it typically goes, but equity, softball team's got a brand new field. Baseball team's traveling to over what, off Riverview? Circle up. Is that really where they're going? Off of Stonebridge? I could be wrong. Oh, my. Okay. Anyway. I just didn't see.
So, okay. Thank you, Kirstie.
I also, the other thing I want to say is I was really in favor of the CIPC being created. And we also fought, whether it was super, it was probably more behind the scenes, but to get you, that, your position onto that committee as not a voting member, but as a standing member, so that there was a voice for the schools at the table all the time. And, this first round, I don't feel like has gone very much in the school's favor at all.
One of the challenges is that, from what I understand, is that the, when the charge was done last year in annual town meeting, it was identified to, that those meetings would run during the day when town and school employees were available to meet what it's actually transpired, is they're meeting on Wednesday evenings when most of, I can't be in two places. And so, that posed a significant challenge. And then being called into other meetings on different nights, but links or things were not working appropriately. So, to your point, I think there's just been a lot of growing pains through that new process. Um, again, we did get to prioritize that we're not on the five-year plan.
Um, maybe that's something that, as a committee, we may want to make a little bit of a concerted effort around voicing concerns and kind of working toward year two being a more, uh, accessible, inclusive, productive, process, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, this also, we got, and thank you for your effort, but like, this also came up very suddenly, and then moved very quickly, and even the meeting where it was discussed was. And I think part of that was because you're sitting with us around the table every other Wednesday night. You can't be in two places at one. So, um, okay. And I think the other piece there is we do have a voting member, and maybe we look at, um, Love Brian. He's dedicated, and he has shared that maybe he's not the best to be a straight-up advocate for the school, something he's, you know, willing to discuss with us. But, um, maybe that's something we do want to think about. Um, so, yeah, this one's a loss for the schools, for sure. Anything else on that? Okay. I'll hold it. I'll hold the end. Moving on. We're having such a good night, too. Oh, now our next item. A little uptick on the momentum. Our next item is an uptick. Earlier, I was, we were talking about supplement versus supplant. When you have a revolving fund for tuitioning students in, that can serve as a fund to support your programs. So, we're really privileged. You know, we talked about this at budget time, as you recall, about with our expanded programs, is to be able to tuition students in. Uh, Ronnie's done a great job working in other districts, and sharing meetings, and having other districts learn about our programs. And so, as a result, we have to set up a revolving fund to be in a position to accept tuition from other districts. So, we need school committee approval for that. So, that you can see our tuition number, uh, that we came up with. And we need your, your approval. And we expect to have a student, uh, perhaps next year, as well. Maybe this year. Maybe this year. We're, we're, we have two referrals that we're looking at. And would this be a tuition, regardless of grade level, or not necessarily? Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. And what programs are we looking to tuition kids into? You know this is coming. Yeah, um, the one for this year is, is at the high school. Um, not, it's, um, for our social emotional program. Um, next year, possibly the LBC at, uh, PlayFit. But it's because of our... My eyes twitching. I know. But it's because we have, we have room. We just, we have room. I don't think we have room. I don't think we have room. I don't think we have room. I don't think we have room. I, and maybe this is like an offline conversation, and this is just like so near and dear to the two of our hearts, but don't take this as a tack. We just want to hear more. All we hear about is parents that can't get their kids in. I have, I, I, I would love to hear from that because I have been all over, like, it's, I guess here's the thing. When you say you can't get your kids in, you, we have a very strict entrance criteria. And I do think people don't necessarily understand that. So it's not like, oh, my child is having a reading difficulty. They should be in that program. They, we really, Jen and Megan do, and Naomi, really, really, and, and the packet that we're reviewing. I mean, they are going through this just as they would anything else with a fine tooth comb to make sure that it fits our entrance criteria. So we really, you know, the, because of that, I think the parents, and I'm happy to talk to any parents. So if anybody reaches out to you, they can certainly reach out to me, and I can share more about why we have to keep that entrance criteria and what, um, the program and how we keep the integrity of the program. Um, but from what I know, and I've been on all of the schools, we, we have room. So I, I think I asked this before, but second grade. And why don't we refer? Because I know, I understand it's like a separate set of, of, you need teachers. You need staff. We need to hire another teacher and another teacher. It's proven that like catching kids at second grade is more effective than at third grade. So I'm hoping if we can, we could use, we can, I don't know, tuition and maybe offset some of that cost. And then maybe one could lead to the other. I'm just so worried there's kids on the cusp that would benefit from the immersion. And if they graduated out, that would be amazing. But we're not doing that yet, like. Well, that is what this would end up being. Well, no, I had another, no, not for now. What I was curious to ask is like, what happens if our circumstances change? Like, I don't understand generally. When you accept a student, is that what you mean? Yeah. So like, if we, what you're asking for is to, us to approve the tuition and the, the sort of moving forward with this, what happens going forward? Does that sort of give a carte blanche or? Exactly. It's really, it's really establishing the fun. And then we make decisions based on case by case basis. And you're right. I mean, you have to be cautious in terms of accepting students, um, for a range of reasons. It's complicated, complicated from outside, but certainly kids have had success. We tuition a student, um, to another school district too, right? Now we do it to other districts. The reason we do it is because we don't offer programs, but as we strengthen our programs here, there is an, you know, opportunity. But you do have to watch numbers and is it, is it a match and all of that? But it is something, because it is cheaper to send a student to a district than a collaborative. And what happens if the in-district population that meets the criteria increases? Right. I mean, it's a, um, if we, it's year to year and we, you know, like a program could, you know, you, you could be at any program and they could close or they could say, so you could say, you know, moving forward, we're not able. And then that district would have to find an alternate placement. You certainly look at cohorts before you accept students across the grade. So let's say we're watching a student in the third grade. They're not admitted because they don't meet the entrance criteria. By the fourth grade, they do. We'll still, we're not, I'm sorry. But then that spot is full by an out-of-district student. What happens? We're not filling the program with that. I mean, first of all, I know. I know, but like, if you add that person because there's one seat available, we don't want to see the seat go to waste. Certainly don't. But that seat is available in third grade, but then that student that we are watching for consideration to LBC then qualifies in fourth grade. What happens? I have a very good trajectory of students. So like, yes, a student could pop up that we don't know. We have students that we're watching who are currently in second grade. We have students that we're watching that are currently in first grade, even students in kindergarten that we're looking at. And knowing all that in mind, we look to see how many spots we'll make available. So we're not, like, say there's only three third graders next year. I could technically go up to seven. I'm not going to open up four spots. Maybe open up one, maybe two spots. That's it. I wouldn't fill all of the open spots without tuitioning in students. Knowing, also keeping some spots open for what we think might be coming up. Again, kids do become eligible. We can have move-in students. And if the spot didn't become available, if we needed it, we can always then say our placement's no longer an option. Can I ask a question while you're thinking? I know you're noodling on that. Can I ask one question? I'm trying to be open-minded, yes. I'm working hard at this. I really am. It's okay. No, these are good because I need, you know, I just want you to be like, we're being very, we're taking this very slow and very carefully around, you know, if it's even appropriate. You know, the things that we've talked about is, do you do like an evaluative period to see if the student's appropriate, where you would just do like a 45-day evaluative period to make sure before you offer placement? It's like that. I just struggle with the fact that if 20 percent of the population is dyslexic, that's approximately 40 kids per grade level. How do we arrive at three? Like I just, I have three in my house. Well, but, because I just, I struggle with how, yeah, go ahead. But, 20 percent of that dyslexic population doesn't necessarily need the LBC. Agreed. As well. I agree with you. Right? So, for example, right, my kid, right? When she was entering second grade, there was one spot open at the Carroll School. And when they looked at her on paper, she fit their cohorts because they had two classes of eight kids. Like that was what their cohorts were. She really looked like she was a great fit for those cohorts, like for the cohorts and for the seat. So, the next step is they bring the kids in and they have them test and they all take the same test. And they called me and they said, look, good news, bad news. She looks really good on paper, but she's too advanced for the cohort. Right? So, she didn't need, or maybe she did, right? But like, she didn't need Carroll School, where she was at. But what she was able to get at Happy Hollow wasn't enough. Right. Right? So, she needed the LBC. So, third grade, she's in the LBC. Huge progress. Great. Awesome. Um, so, yes, 20 percent of the population may be dyslexic, but not everybody needs the LBC because there's other kids that like could make total progress in, at Happy Hollow, getting the services with the special education teachers and pull out and push in how we're doing now the Cotah classrooms, which I'm sure makes a difference. Absolutely. And I do agree with that, Erin. And that's my experience too. And going, because I'm part of the Dyslexia Institute that, um, and we have a great plan that we'll share. It's very comprehensive. But one of the things that I've learned and we've learned there are increasing our evaluations at kindergarten and first grade levels and specific, excuse me, evaluations that you can give that will really help pinpoint if a student is at risk of dyslexia. And what interventions are we putting in place earlier? So, we have a whole new intervention model that, you know, Sarah Sondag is spearheading and through all of this work that we've done through the Dyslexia Institute that we're going, that's also helping us, you know, identify earlier and put interventions in earlier. And maybe those kids will still need LBC, but maybe by identifying even earlier, um, you know, we also, the Cotah model does help. Um, you know, when I was a teacher in Framingham, I taught at the code, I was a co-teacher and I had a couple of kids here and there that went to the, like the Framingham LBC type program, but a lot were able to stay because I was Wilson trained. I was giving them on the inter, um, accommodations, modifications on the spot. So that really does help. Uh, the majority of our teachers are trained in Wilson. Any new teachers we onboard, we have trained in Wilson. Um, that's a big change from five years ago to now and huge, huge shift. Like that's big. Right now we have 40 teachers taking two classes at Landmark, um, that I offered, um, you know, a writing class and an executive functioning class and that's general ed and special ed teachers. So I'm trying to increase the capacity of all teachers, not just special ed, but all teachers. So we can really use these strategies that we know are effective throughout all classes. So I think a lot of this work that we're doing is now we're seeing the results where we're catching and we're intervening earlier. Um, our LBC teachers are really good about like, if a student is referred and they're making some progress, they make recommendations around, all right, try this, increase the service to this, try this, see if you get, and we've able to stop some kids from needing to come because they have kind of consulted with those teachers and said, try this. And then those kids have made progress. Um, so, um, we're really trying to, one thing that we are really working on, our kids were in like Spanish immersion, um, and you know, are identified as dyslexic. And we, you know, Liliana is part of our dyslexia institute because we're really trying to work on increasing that capacity as well, because that adds another layer. So I just think all of these things have added and we're in a much different place than we were when I started, you know, three years ago, certainly. Um, I agree with you wholeheartedly. And I think I just have a little trauma. So I'm trying to get there. I know, I know. And listen, right now it's all kind of just theoretical. This is just in case it becomes a reality. We have, we're prepared and we have programs beyond our LBC, right? Right. The high school program or the 18 to 22 has so much capacity and it's such a great program. Right. So our LBC is one little piece. It's all of our programs. It's all of the programs. No, it's all of them. Well, that's what I was asking. Yeah. Which programs are we thinking? Yeah. You know, cohorts change in years. Understood. Like some years you have some grades and it just happens this way. You have a heavier cohort in certain years. So in those years when you have low cohorts and programs, you do it kind of strategically that way. That's often what happens. Yeah, I understand. Yeah. And that's why I'm, I'm like, you know, the spreadsheets I have are like out, you know, kindergarten up to see and like highlighted you might be, so we're not filling those spots. Again, and I want every kid, not just a wailing head to get the help they need. Like I, I'm totally. It's a real, it's just something that we really, you know, I wasn't here when the program started, but the program is phenomenal and our teachers are so great and we're so fortunate and a lot of districts don't have that. So if we can leverage it a little bit. My two girls didn't have it. So it's great. I have to say, thank you, Omar Easy. Yeah. This was his. This was his baby and whether it got, it happened and this is a huge win for the district. Huge. Um, and the numbers that you're saying for elementary teachers that are Wilson trained, the shift in those numbers in the district is huge. So like, great wins for people around this table that have been able to bridge that gap and get people to do that. Um, so this, like, that's huge. And that is a big difference from when our kids were huge difference feeling the, you know, I agree a hundred percent. Uh, even the colloquy I had here in the district when I was concerned about my kindergartner, there's no resemblance to where we are currently. No, there's so many strides for everybody around this table. And I, I, can I just ask one question? Who makes the ultimate question? Go ahead. Ask it. Who makes the ultimate decision on who gets tuitioned in? Uh, it's, it's not my decision. It's the, the people who will be working with the students. So, um, you know, it would be if we're, it would be Jen and Megan and Naomi. I mean, I'll oversee them. I'll be part of it, but it's really, it's, you know, um, it's Hannah, Rubio, Kayla Thornquist, and Michaela over at the high school for our social emotional program. They're the ones who are going to ultimately decide because they know the kids. I don't, you know, I know names, but I don't know exactly the cohort. So they'll know, is this student an appropriate match for the cohort we have? They may look good on paper, but we'll have to meet the student. The student may come for, you know, a visit, um, you know, a shadow day to really that, to make sure, because we don't know, and we'll have to go out and observe that student in their setting because we don't, it's an unknown student. So we really want to make sure kind of like it's the process that district schools do. One of my questions is, um, if we tuition someone in, is that different than if we were to accept a student, um, from a non-resident, say, under the teacher's contract, um, and we ended up not having room or something changed, would we, once we've tuitioned them in, are they in our district? You mean how do the non-resident teachers, kids factor into this? No, no, I'm saying with a non-resident, they don't have room or something happens, what's the, it's year to year, it's year to year. So like we should require the landmark school, right? Like I, we don't, we don't, they are responsibility. That's right. And I don't know that. Okay. No, no, we don't know that question. The home district is responsible. Right. Like we tuition in a student. If they need a more restrictive environment is your question. Right. Right. We don't know that. The home district is the more restrictive environment. Okay. There's still. Or if something happened to change and it was like, we can't service this level. Then we just say. And that happens. That does. It happens, you know, where we would say, you know, it's not appropriate. We're going to have to end the placement, but then they would go back to their district. We don't know them. Okay. Okay. All right. Um, is there anything else that we should be putting into the approval of the non-resident tuition revolving fund that gives some sort of guardrails or should we, I can see that. I sense that. So, and if we need more time, do we have to create this today? Can we take more time? I sense some, like, um. So, if I can add. Yeah. This is just approving, creating a fund account. I know. In our municipal system. We have not accepted students yet. We don't have, you know, we're not saying we're going to, you know, bring in a whole group. We're just identifying that this was something we talked about during our budgeting presentations. This was something that got enthusiastic. Understood. And we want to be able to be ready because we have an opportunity, potentially. But by doing this, by saying yes to this, we are allowing tuition in students. That's what this says. I don't. Yes. With, with, with the fund established that we are, you know, again, administratively asking approval to do that based on what we've identified as a fair, um, rate and process. So, understood. Yeah. My question is, if we were to just noodle on it until April 8th, is that okay? Does that cause a problem? So, I can try to get there. Yeah. Well, and I also, I, I do think it would be important, um, Christina may have questions she might want to ask around this. I think she did have some, and I think Kate did too, and unfortunately they were like short, um, notice we're not able to attend. So, I would, I would appreciate it if we could just come back to this on the 8th. If that's not going to cause a problem. No, I didn't ask too, but it's like, I'd be curious because other districts do this. I would be curious if they, maybe not in approving the fund, but if they adopt intuitioning policies. I was gonna, yeah. Like, I would love to know if there's some, if districts who do this have created policies around. Just high level. Uh, you know, capacity assessment. I have not seen that. That's not a practice because you want to leave it flexible. Right. Well, you would see, um, Betsy, in terms of reporting. So, for example, when Ronnie does a report on the, on data every year of students, you would have a column, for example, out of district tuition students. So, that, that's pretty much how, in terms of the reporting, you would see it typically. Well, that's financial reporting. But I think what I'm hearing is more concerned about constrained capacity. You've seen a special ed update. Okay. Not just financial. Yeah, I mean, I think the fund, yeah, I mean, the, this is the piece. Yes, I guess this is what allows us to accept the tuition. Right. To accept, to put the money. Um, go ahead. I was gonna say, I think my thought is, and what I sort of am hearing, and what I may have heard before, when this came up around the table, was, yes, enthusiasm about being able to bring more kids in, and do it at a benefit to the community. Right. Totally hear that. I think everyone supports that. I think the other piece is, there may be some, um, desire to, at a high level, just say, like, there will be some form of check and balance. Whether it be that, you know, at a high level, that child will be evaluated by the existing teachers, what have you, you know, uh, director of special ed will confirm the space. Some transparency. Something. Some transparency that it's happening. Um, not saying it's definitely gonna happen. I just think, let's put this on the agenda for 4-8, have it be, and maybe, I saw Betsy write down, maybe you can see if there's something, and I can do some research, too. I can at the same time. I mean, I've been a part of districts where we're taking, and then I've not, it's more just a revolving account as far as I know, um, but it's a fair question. Yeah, I can reach out to the two districts that we, because we tuition a couple students into other districts. I have... One of them does not, because I... Yeah, you know that. Oh, they do have to sign a, I mean, they sign a contract, and in that contract, it, we can put a clause around, like, space availability, but they will sign a contract. Right, and the other thing I should notice, so the, there's also accountability, because the out-of-district coordinator in those districts, this is on their caseload. Right. You know, often not to the same extent as the 766 schools, but they're responsible. Yeah. And out-of-district student, in terms of them following up. Right, like our, like, I follow these too, just because it's easier, but, um, we, when we send these students, we sign a contract, and that is where you would be able to put this language. Yes. Um, around availability and space, and, like, there's always in, there's pretty standard contracts, but there's, like, a 30-day clause around, like, termination, things like that. So, um, you know, I'm happy to, like, bring a sample contract, if you'd like to see. Um, but, yeah. Okay. I, I, I don't know. That would probably be where the accountability would be. My other question is, which I, I looked at this, and I looked at it twice, and I don't think I saw it, but Kirstein sometimes says, Erin, it's right there. So, but my question, I don't see transportation. No. We're not, we're not responsible. They would be, so, as them taking this as an out-of-district placement, them being the home district, they would then need to figure out transportation. Yep. Okay. Just like we would for out-of-district. We're not funding it. Okay. We're not setting it up. Okay. Okay. Tuition, once districts establish these programs, um, assessed annually. Yes. Okay. Yes. And that's what we put, um, the structure of which we would review that. Okay. Annually. And they can certainly, it, it's almost an every year increase. Um, as we know, our out-of-district schools have increases. Oh, yeah. They're going to put it 14% up year two. The same, I was about to say. You know, if, if a student, for instance, if a student was in one of our programs and needed a one-to-one aid, that cost would be on the sending. Faked into that. No, it would, they would have to pay additional. That's what I mean. Like, it would be on top of, but they would have that. They would have to pay in addition. So, in the contract, it would say something like, if additional, you know, this is the fee that it would be, they would have to pay, we wouldn't pay for that. This is what you get for that tuition. Right. For this tuition, there's no summer included here. This is 180 days. If you want summer, there's this. If you want, um, or if the student requires summer, you have to pay this much. If the student requires an aid, you pay this much. Um, so this is just, um, the base, uh, tuition. Okay. And we'll follow up. Gemini is not finding any policies right now. Oh, well, Gemini is usually spot on. I mean, I haven't, I've never had a district send me any policies, but again, I'll give you, I'll bring some sample contracts. The contract might cover it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's monitoring they have to do. There's, there's a lot of, uh, regulations in this stuff. Thank you. No. Yeah. I'm happy to, and, and I know what the LBC is the one that, but we've got our, so many, so many programs. Yeah. I mean, our staff has worked so hard with all of our consultants and they're just, they want to share. Right. Like we want, we want it all to be successful, right? Like we want the incoming student to be successful. We want our programs to continue to be successful. Some of our programs are getting a little tiny and we want to make sure that those peers have the cohorts as well. So it's like a win-win, um, you know, nobody wants, you know, you have two, three kids, five is nice. Um, but a lot of, I'll give some more. Completely agree. And if, um, maybe we can commit to getting questions to Ronnie before this next school committee meeting, that might be helpful to you. Yeah. That would be great. And I'll, I'll bring some, some, um, the, the contracts. Okay. Thank you.
I'll get there. It's okay. I, I don't know. I, it's, it's your, I know. I know. I just, all the programs too. I want to be just very transparent that like, I'm already, we're already planning next. Like I, I, I could tell you how many kids are and who's coming. Like we're really, and with Debbie and Naomi and Becca and okay, like we're really on top of it, um, of the movement and, and need. Great. No, I, I appreciate that the thought was there. It was brought up. You were bringing it back to the table. We have the potential and I think that's awesome. I just want to give a little bit of extra time. So I really appreciate that. I don't, that's fine. Um, okay. I would like to announce the re-review of and continue non-disclosure of all previously redacted and released or slash and entirely withheld executive session minutes and materials from 2010 through 2025. Anyone have any questions on that? Congratulations. Thank you.
Okay. Um, I have this item, uh, D and, um, Betsy and Ronnie and I do a fun thing four times a year and, um, um, we meet with, we, we participate in the wellness committee. Um, and one of the things that came out of the most recent meeting was, um, we're looking to do an overhaul of the tobacco policy, um, to expand to include nicotine products, right? Nicotine products which includes like the pouches and the non-tobacco but nicotine products that are not currently covered. So there's a couple different places. There's four different policies that touch on this in our school committee policy. Um, what we've, we asked at the last meeting was, um, because the committee only meets four times a year, at the next meeting, which is in May of the wellness committee, they are supposed to come back with some proposed, um, and they being like Scott, um, community health nurses and, um, Jay Verhuski from the youth and family services, um, revised language, um, that we can hopefully just adopt, um, to make it more current, um, one's for staff use, one's for student use, one's for teaching about it, um, and there's one on school premises, so outsiders coming in, right, to attend a concert or, yeah, yeah, so, um, and that seems to be, you know, there's, there's some positive numbers with vaping, but the zen stuff is, um, so I said we should start showing the ones where when we were younger, you know, the guy with the missing jaw from the chew, like, that's such a visual, you know, movie series, yeah, oh my gosh, you know what I, you know what I saw the other day, it was, um, this is not an egg, and it was an egg, and they said kids from the 80s and 90s, this is your, and I was, and I look at it and I go, this is your brain on drugs, like, so stuck with us, right, so, um, um, anyway, I just wanted to kind of update, yeah, everybody on that, and then Betsy, can you maybe give just a, um, I think I was looking at something else for part of what Jay was talking about with the brain, the, the big brain blow up, can you just touch on that, because that's kind of exciting, and I'd love for people to be able to experience it. So at one of the upcoming, um, youth nights? Yes. But they have, they have several years, it's at the high school. At the field house for the middle school kids. Yes, they have, um, sort of this outside, it's, it's like an inflatable brain that you go through, and you learn about all of the ways in which parts of the brain are affected by different substances, it, it seemed super cool. Yeah, like, I was like, can we go? And so we, we asked. Can we keep it an extra day? Yeah. He was going to try and do that. We're going to look into whether or not, like for, so that students outside of this particular activity. Like the high school kids. Right, like wellness classes might be able to go through and really experience it. It was very cool. It was, yeah, it was like so cool. So keep that on, you know, your radar, and if you hear things about it. Um, they are also, um, another update from that meeting was that Jay's team is moving back on site. Right down the hall. Right down the hall in this building. Oh, good. Oh, good. And so they will be back on site and, and starting to do some more in-person things, which is great. Um, as far as like the, um, like counseling and therapy type of sessions that they do. Um, what else? Oh, we're going to have Ronnie talk to us about, or Chris Faye. Oh, yes. The unified programming later, later in the year. Um, and probably again, in the fall, we'll have Metro West Health survey. The data should be coming back. It's taking a long time though today. I mean this year. Every year. Yeah. Well, now that it's a lot of trials, it'll come back faster. It's not. It doesn't. Um. It's a lot to compile and really run all the, if you can get it into the dashboard, so. Yes. And then, oh, lastly, um, something that, you know, Scott, as the district-wide wellness, um, coordinator, director, they would really love to get the health and wellness education, um, down into the K-2 grades. So, a little more time would be great, um, to be able to expand that down into the K-2 classroom. That's been a hugely positive addition to our three. There are so many things that are being talked about in my house that I'm like, oh, okay. Now you're going to have to do it. You get to do it last time. I can hear things three times. I'm only supplementing now! Um, so, but really, um, I think I'm really excited about the, um, time committee. And I know that's not what you're called. Thank you, yes, but, um, just, um, hopefully there's a way to get there, um, and everybody would love to see that happen because there are ways where we could definitely be more compliant than we are today with the new health standards. There are more standards. Uh, somebody once told me that if you taught all of the standards in the K-12, uh, standards in every subject area, it would take you really, like, K-16 to be able to do it. Yeah. Um, the power standards. Yeah. So, um, I think that was the last thing. It's just the more time in the elementary for K-2 would be. Great! Great updates. Thank you. Absolutely. Lastly, uh, I think, on this list, yes, um, unless I hear otherwise from the members of the committee that are here, anybody around the table, uh, the plan was to post and hold the, um, budget hearing for fiscal year 27. Is that right? Yes. Um, on the 8th, April 8th, um, it's a regular meeting. We would just, you know, yeah, we just have it at the beginning, um, and we could plan with, um, David. So, basically, just, that's kind of like an announcement, hearing no issues from anyone that, that's the plan. Um, and I would welcome a motion on the consent agenda, unless there are any issues anyone had. Is there anyone that wants to speak to a Latin student's trip to Italy? That's new. That's amazing. Can we go? Yeah, like, can I send a case? Day test to Capri? I know. Oh, my goodness. You can have one of those after the school committee terms over, right? Is that new? Mm-hmm. I would have left if that was the case. And go back. Okay. Um, is that new, though? We don't do every trip every year. I know, but I don't think I've ever heard of a Latin trip. I've lived on that trip. Oh, great. Here we go. Oh, so it went last year? It goes every other year, yes. It hasn't happened since before, I believe. Yeah. Ah, so that... Oh, 2027. Okay, okay. How was it? Got it. It was a lot of fun. Just remember we're engaging with... Oh, sorry. Thank you. That's super helpful. Um, that's awesome. Okay. So it's over April vacation that year? Mm-hmm. So the two, or the Monday. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I will approve if I can go for, for, I will pay, but if I can go. Um, because like just there, and I will just... I also have a piece of Pompeii that I stole when I was there in college, and it's, it's okay. I'll bring it in. Just reminding you of any... Okay. Oh, good. One thing. I just snuck it away. Um, perhaps not for tonight, but just a reminder to ourselves. The fun? Yes. Yeah, this is, this is a big, um... It's a big price, uh, ticket, or sorry, price tag. But I just, the learner travel ship reminded me that for international trips... Maybe we can reinvigorate that effort. No, the curse seems here. You just have all kinds of revenue coming in, different sources. Well, no, one of the things we've talked about, we don't have a way, is like if there were opportunities over years, and it happens differently at different schools. We started this, like, right when I came on the committee. Rolling things over. But, like, trying to tellies wanted to offer to contribute. Right. To help offset costs in this year for students in future years. Like, something that we could support, um, in a fund that was available to help make these. I mean, I, I think we've had good representation from the leaders on the staff who take these, and from some of the students, that there's a lot of fundraising and that we're trying, but I think the committee was interested in something that would be sort of more long-lasting and available for, you know, all sorts of special field trips or other outings that necessarily come with additional cost. And the families might be willing to say, I'm going to do an extra, or I'll do a half an extra and put it in there. Yeah, round, rounding up can go a long way. CVS and the roundup, or my student loved it. I'm going to leave a legacy. Yeah, what? And provide a scholarship for another student. Yeah. Thank you for bringing it back. We did kind of let that fall off. I think the middle school's going to, um, do their, their plans to think about, it used to be sort of an annual big fundraising that, that happened, and, um, and do it sort of once every three years, so that it happens once later. The calendar school? Yeah, the calendar school, so. Oh, welcome back.
No, that's awesome. That's great. And once every three years is a, is a good, Right. That's a good, if you're not doing it. Everybody does it once while they're in the middle school. Right. Yeah. That's awesome. Um, so maybe outside of that, do we have any issues?
Or comments, questions, or would, do we have Ellen present? No, I don't, I'm good. I move to approve the consent agenda. Second. Okay, all in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed, none? Christine, I did want to thank you, um, you're, it's very helpful when you- Do you like my little notes? I do like your notes. Well, after a few times of bothering you, like, if you were like, okay, let me just call out when it's unusual, or not even what it is. It helps me as well. Yeah, I find it quite helpful. Um, any matters not reasonably anticipated by the Chair.
No. Here, give us a hand. Ha ha ha. I move to enter Executive Session for the purposes of discussing strategy with related to collective bargaining with the Whalen Educational Association, Units A and B, as permitted by MGL Chapter 30A, Section 21A-3. Thank you. And reviewing and approving Executive Session Minutes with intent to redact and release said minutes, as permitted by MGL Chapter 30A, Section 22, February 25th, 2026. The School Committee will be joined by David Fleischman, Superintendent, Betsy Gavron, Assistant Superintendent, Kirsteen Patterson, Director of Finance and Operations, and Diane Marabella, Recording Secretary. The School Committee will adjourn an Executive Session and will not reconvene in open session. Do I have a second? I'll second. Okay. Betsy? Yes. Erin? Yes. Erin? Yes. Okay. A small little committee, thank you. We are quick. We are quick.