September 9, 2026 – School Committee – Video & Transcript
September 9, 2026 - School Committee
Welcome to the Wayland School Committee meeting on September 9th, 2026.
It is 6.10 p.m. We are being recorded by WACAM.
We have four of our school committee members, excluding Prashant Shukla,
and we also have our administration present, parts of them.
Okay. Who's here for public comment, to actually make public comment? Two? Don't trick me. Three? Okay. I'm going to give you each three minutes, since there's just three of you. So do you want to set the timer? And we can open public comment. So whoever wants to go first, you can come on up, and if you can just state your name and address for the record, you can sit, you can stand, and we just ask that I say this in front before every meeting, just respectful and within the purview of the school committee. Okay. So thank you. I'm Penny Wayne Shapiro, 8 Bigelow Road. Last time I spoke about the importance of music on brain development in all areas and the integrated nature of playing music and its effect on holistic learning in all areas. I'd like to speak on that. I've been a professional musician for almost five decades. I'm a former first violinist with both the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. I'm also the founder and director of Weyland School of Music, which yesterday celebrated its 29th birthday. Since the beginning, students from the Weyland Public Schools seeking private lessons have been a substantial part of our enrollment, and we've felt very privileged to help them build sound technique and musicianship, to become strong contributors and leaders in our wonderful music. I'd like to speak about the importance of music in the school ensemble. So it's from that double perspective that I'd like to address today the administration's claim that a co-teacher model and more ensemble time makes up for losing 30 minutes in private instruction every week. This may sound reasonable to the uninformed, but I will be blunt. It doesn't. Those two things are not the same. You cannot have one without the other. Lessons are where you learn how to play your instrument. Ensembles are where you use those skills that you've learned so you can successfully play with others. It's like saying we can cut pure math instruction time because children will learn math from shopping. No, you learn math, and then you can use that math to be competent in interactions with others. I can tell you exactly what happens to students who don't get enough instructional time on the instrument because I've worked with many of them. They fall behind, they decide they're no good at this, and they quit. Sometimes their parents bring them to us for lessons before it's too late, but frankly, at that point, it's a struggle. By 5th or 6th grade, it takes us a much, much longer time to address the issues that have been left unaddressed and to help them to reach basic competency and confidence again so they can keep up with their more fortunate peers who've been having enough individual instruction all along. We will never give up on them, but we can't help being aware of how much harder it is than should be necessary. You might be surprised that one of my frustrations in the London Philharmonic is that one of my frustrations in the London Philharmonic is that one of my frustrations in the London Philharmonic is that I was so much time playing with others that I didn't have enough time to actually maintain my skills. That's a complaint of orchestra players everywhere. So again, these are not the same thing. So please, don't cheat our children of the private instructional time that they really need to become successful musicians and in becoming successful musicians, become better learners across all areas. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations as well. For the record, I'm Joshua Nussball and I live at 22 Wright Road. Can you just spell your last name for me? Nussball, N-U-S-P-L. That's it. Okay. Everyone spells with an E at the end or a U-I or something, I don't know. You spoke last time, right? I did speak last time. Yeah, and I didn't get it last time, so I figured I'd ask this time. Thank you. No, it's better than you ask. So like I mentioned, I'm Joshua. I am a graduate of the high school and the fine arts program. And again, I did speak at the last committee meeting regarding the pilot program. I would, once again, like to restate just how big a mistake you were making by implementing the pilot program, but also just in general, if the pilot program is considered successful. 75 minutes spent in the music program are perhaps the most 75 most effective minutes spent in the entire school day. Each minute is absolutely crucial to developing student skills on an instrument. And with like 40% of the time gone, the students will not be able to properly learn how to play their instruments. Again, this is not just me saying this, but this is the actual music teachers, the actual musicians in the room who have just spoken, who are saying this. It will destroy the music program if you go through and cut 40% of the time from the elementary schoolers. Okay. Over 500 people have said yes. Over 500 people have signed the pension to try and stop these cuts. Yet all of this has been ignored. I do understand that sometimes there's a need to make decisions that like everyone may not agree with. And while I personally do disagree strongly with the decision made, what is completely like not acceptable is the way the decision has been made and sort of how the community has not been listened to when making this decision. We've made our concerns very clear about the program. We've raised many doubts about the effectiveness of the pilot program and what a full cut across all elementary schools will do to the music program, all of which have been completely ignored. The district has not clearly shown that 30 minutes extra will significantly improve academic outcomes. The district hasn't even shown a consistent reason for why they are cutting music programs in the first place. And many of their arguments actually have data which disproves it, yet the districts completely ignore it. And additionally, implementing a new curriculum while initiating the pilot program, like a new ELA program, like discontinuing or implementing the pilot program, makes it impossible to determine whether the pilot program is actually responsible for a change in the outcomes of like the academics of the elementary schoolers. And this address, this concern has not been addressed. Additionally, if you cut this music program, there will not be a good music education, which is provided to all students. The only music education will be able to come from like private teachers and other sources which are dependent on the income sources or the actual knowledge of the parents. Like, for instance, my parents had no information about anything about music, and I would not have been able to become the musician I am today if not for the music program that they have here. So it's not just an income thing, but it's also a knowledge in music. So I ask that the community deserves better. And I ask that you, like, address these concerns that we have raised and that we've like brought to attention when making this decision. Thank you. Thank you.
Hi. I'm Madeline Donville. I live at 20 Marshall Terrace in Wayland. And I actually went through the Wayland music program myself. I bought a home in Wayland because of the quality of the schools. I have three children. I want them to have the best policy. I want them to have the best education. And part of that differentiator compared to surrounding towns is really the music program. Countless studies have shown that there is a very strong link between music and education, development, brain development, as Penny and Josh mentioned. Like, I don't need to go into that. But music really does drive the quality of our schools. We have an outstanding music program. We have outstanding test scores compared to other schools that is really driven by music, at least in my opinion. And I myself, have been the recipient of that. As Josh mentioned, there will be no way to actually measure this pilot performance because there is the compounding variable of the other curriculum launching at the same time. So I'm just curious how we're actually thinking about measuring that if we don't have a good way to really differentiate those two pieces. So staggering the launch of those would actually allow you to have a better perspective on what is and is not working. So I would recommend that at the very least to push this back so that you actually can measure those two different things separately. The last thing I'll mention, I work in the corporate world. My husband works in the corporate world, and AI disruption is just present across all industries, jobs, even learning, schools, kids, how they're growing up. Music is one of the few things that's not going to be disrupted by that. That will still allow their brains to develop, still allow them to learn. And I think it's really, really important that all children are given that opportunity, particularly through the schools. And so like there's countless studies that show that screen time, it's not good for children. And spending as much time learning that focus, learning that concentration through learning an instrument, I think is actually more important than it's ever been. And I think it actually will be one of the biggest differentiators between children, like growing up and learning and their ultimate academic success and leading to college and jobs. And so I think it's really more important than ever to prioritize that. And if that means that we have to like change the schedule and make sure there is enough time for the instruction, I think that's really important. That's my perspective. I'm just going to share it. Thank you for the time. Thank you.
Did anybody who came want to give a public comment after I? No. Okay. Just wanted to double check. All right. So no more public comment. Close public comment. Okay.
David, next up is a revisit of the proposed 26-27 district goals. Do we have an updated? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Sorry. I'm just trying to.
I don't think we did. Did we have updates? Updated version? Yeah. Yeah. And we really appreciated your feedback. So some of the changes you will see, they're color coded to indicate where we are. No. Just in the folder. 1C updated draft. That's it's a spreadsheet. Sorry. No. No. That's the meeting. That's the meeting. That's the topics. That's the topics. It's file 1A. It's 1A. Google doc. Not 1C. It's a doc. Got it. Thank you. So you'll see in there on the left side, we have a color coded system in terms of goals that are new and goals that are ongoing. Betsy, did you do that?
We worked on chat. Yes. In the spirit of our friend, Eva Thompson, who worked with color coded. Way to go. So, you know, I think there's a real mix because it really indicates, you know, we have too much green, too many new goals and how do they hit across various levels in the system. So we really found that feedback that you gave super helpful and will make this a permanent part of our goals. The other part we talked about in terms of broad themes is taking a look at measuring and assessment and kind of splitting those out. You'll see some italics at the end of each area of measurement there and what the specific, you know, and when we talk about that, you know, we want to talk about both quantitative in some cases, but of course, qualitative as well. So you'll see a mix of both qualitative and quantitative, you'll also see in terms of specifics. We. We spoke about, you know, had a good discussion about early elementary screen time. We also, if you look on that goal, we added middle school in terms of you had raised that issue, which is really, you know, a ripe issue for middle school students in terms of Chromebooks and how much time and what assignments and purpose that came up as well. So we, we added that part in the same section as elementary. As we think about the screens.
Okay. So I'm just aligning.
Why am I going to page six? Because that's where the technology. Oh, but I'm looking at something else. Hold on. Sorry. I'm looking at the. The. Portrait of a learner, like against the academic achievement goal. Yep.
And where you have the measurement tools. And then I'm looking at the proposed calendar for our meetings against that. And it looks like you have.
A finalization. So like, I'm going to go back to that. Of the portraits of a learner on June 9th of next year. And I'm just. How much I know there was community, how much more community feedback are we going to take on that? Um, before you think that that's in a final format, I guess I'm coming to us on June 9th of next year. Um, great question. I, I think, um, you know, we did get really good community input. Um, I know Kate, you were, um, one of the sessions last year, um, we'll be doing more work. Aaron internally around getting feedback and beginning to think about how to, how do we operate operationalize. We were actually just talking about that today with one of the principles, um, you know, one of our around balance. Okay. Balance and joy. And that was a theme that they were talking about as one of our, uh, virtues or dispositions. We haven't figured out what we're going to call it competencies. So, um, I think in more of the work will be internal Aaron around how to operationalize. Um, but we will be including, I think, as we think about meetings over the course of the year, building based meetings, I'm about to schedule some meetings in October and November. And certainly some of those meetings, we will discuss and, and, and kind of discuss the different virtues and get feedback and input from stakeholders that way. Um, when you say stakeholders, I heard mostly internal, but does that also mean community community meetings? Um, you can expect that from principals as well as our meetings that will be theme over the course of the year, um, to, to introduce that. And, you know, I talked about this opening day with the fact, um, that we're going to have a meeting with the faculty and staff around, you know, this is our kind of destination of where we, where we want to be and where we want all of us to be. Um, and we'll spend thinking about how we get there. Okay. Cause I, um, I feel like there should be sort of a midpoint check-in on that. That's maybe like a draft of what the portrait is. It's a draft of what the portraits look like, um, for feedback from the table. Um, and then I guess the way that I'm looking at that is this overall goal, right. Is finalizing the portraits by the end of this year so that next year will basically be like the, the integration and the operationalizing. So you're, you're finalizing the portraits. Yeah. In line with mapping it to curriculum, et cetera. Right. Exactly. And we have the curriculum mapping goal. Right. It was right next door. If you saw that. Right. And that's, but so I think where I'm a little bit torn is how much do we feel like those portraits are finalized now that are mapping that's being done is not going to be for not if there is maybe any tweaks at this point. It would be smaller tweaks. And I think as, as the different schools begin to sort of explore them and basically try them on, so to speak, if there are places that don't feel like they're matching or resonating well, I think, you know, and if we get that feedback from the community too, we probably make small tweaks. I don't envision a grand overhaul. It was a pretty comprehensive process, um, over many, many, many meetings. That's very nice. And that for the life of it, or you guys went to some of the meetings, but it kind of ended externally after a few meetings. And then you all met to continue to meet internally. Yes. And sorry, I just, I want to make sure we're aligning
external internal. This is a big picture item. That's going to drive a lot of decisions moving forward throughout. Yeah. The entire community. Can I, yeah. Can I also a couple, I just need to level set a little bit. So we talked about the virtues and I understand the virtues came out of the foundational work that was done last year, but I don't think those virtues other than here have been like broadcast to the community for a opportunity to like react to those as an output of the foundational work. So totally heard that there was a lot of effort and architecture and like. Yeah. Yeah. Getting that input. But there's also a lot of work that a smaller group of contributors do to take all of that information, distill it and make decisions about what stays and what maybe doesn't get factored in. If I'm hearing you correctly, I think before we get to final, you feel like there may be a need to like pressure test that with the broader community, or at least give people opportunity if people choose not to avail themselves of that, but like to get feedback on the virtue, piece. And then I had a clarifying question, which is some of this conversation around a portrait started now two years ago, partly around wanting the committee, wanting to understand where we were with our graduation requirements and how those compared with peer districts and frankly, where we thought higher ed was going to be needing exploration of not necessarily predominantly traditional liberal arts pathways, but are we thinking enough about students who might be pursuing. Yeah. More, you know, STEM or STEAM pursuits and our requirements were robust enough early on that if they decide that partway through, they can still do that. So I guess I don't understand how we go from the virtue work to like those more tactical, but I think the committee thinks really important elements of change that might achieve and how we sort of do operationalize or implement, if you will, the portrait. of a learner work. I don't, I think the idea was that it would actually be something we implemented and architected around and not just something that was aspirational or visionary. And the June date feels like there's not enough of a runway to launch for September from my perspective. Unless you're doing a lot of work this year before it's really finalized to prepare for that, what I imagine a real launch in September. Yeah. I mean, I think the way we look at the launch is that, um, you know, we don't want to just turn it into initiatives, but, you know, given the virtues, dispositions, what are some things that we could shift, you know, we're not talking about an overhaul, but what are things we can shift to address some of those competencies work that we're talking about. But I think this feedback is helpful for us in terms of over the course of the year, how do we engage our external community in some of our, um, meetings discussions as well. And we can do that. Yeah. Cause it'll be a new audience. Cause last year was kind of, we used focus groups across stakeholders, but I think we can think about how to, how to do that. Um, because you're right. Want to make it concrete and not just aspirational, but yet we need to. No, but I also think we should do a baseline assessment. I mean, if we've identified virtues and we get alignment on the virtues, then I guess the question is some of those virtues might not require overhaul. I don't want to use that word loosely, but like maybe others require more rigor. In order to get there. Like I want us to be honest with ourselves about where we are starting from, as we adopt this vision of a learner and that we're probably not going to adopt it. And it's magically going to map to current state. There's definitely. There was a piece of that at the last April super Wednesday at the high school where this was introduced, people kind of started addressing that. You know, how can we tweak address and where are we with it? So that would, that was a piece of, he said that it gave us a sense of people. It was really engaging discussion. And, and, um, that kind of gave us a model about where to go from here and some other places. So this is super helpful feedback. So we could actually put in a mid-year check-in as you're suggesting, and then think more about community engagement. As we begin to structure our meetings, we can talk about that. It's almost on Tuesday too. And I will say there's, um, there has been more, um, more guidance from the state around graduation requirements. Uh, in late June of last year, there's, um, a number of components of that that came up that they'll, you'll see a lot of them in the high schools, um, school improvement plan when they present that later in the year. Um, but for example, like the common, the common core, uh, will be the academic requirements, which is going to cause, um, us to need to make some shifts and to what, what are required courses. So rather than, um, so we'll need to increase some math and some science. Uh, around requirements. And again, most, most kids were hitting the common core anyway. Um, but others are going to need to, and we're going to also sort of see what implications does that have on our staffing needs and things like that. So we've already started, um, Alison, uh, there, there's a number of us that met, um, over the summer to begin looking at the sort of tasks, um, involved with us. It's a multi-year rollout that the state's going to have. So the first piece that will come on board are the. Common core, um, standards, and that will be required of our current eighth graders. The current eighth graders will need to meet these graduation requirements. And then others are going to roll out at a time. So for example, they're, um, proposing to eliminate MCAS and instead have these end of course assessments that are going to align with your sort of beginning of the year. Um, excuse me, beginning of high school, beginning of high school, but also align to different courses and that these assessments are supposed to be going to factor into grades as well as kind of overall graduation requirements. However, they will not be a single thing that then prevents a student from graduating. There's an AI literacy piece to it. There is a, um, a culminating career, and they calling it the work. Yeah. So, a, um, a robust sort of volunteer or work skills experience there is a an end of kind of graduation either a portfolio or a sort of capstone experience that might be had in a particular discipline there's a there's a lot of flexibility around this too and you know the state keeps saying this is not something or this is doing we're doing to you it's we're going to be doing it with you so they're engaging stakeholders as this process evolves but they have come up with kind of seven seven different components to graduation requirements that are you know financial literacy is another graduation requirement it's going to be included so more to come on that we're going to create a working group that's going to kind of meet throughout the year around the different points because tracking all of this is also going to be a a a large component because because you don't just like have to pass particular courses but you have to pass particular assessments aligned with those courses so it's and there's a lot of work to do you know as people are watching this saying wow end of course assessments I mean this is a major lift for the state Massachusetts is you know there's not a history of high school and of course assessments in New York State students started taking Regents exams the year civil civil war ended in 1867 65 that's when Regents started I wasn't teaching then and I was teaching a while ago and we we had Regents then as Kate knows we passed through Regents that's why you're here we have another but that so that you can see what how different this would be for Massachusetts and we didn't need time to kind of figure this out I guess I kind of see these as a little bit like they're parallel but I'm sort of seeing them as a little bit separate um where state requirements and then the port how's the well right like the portrait of a learner is also I I'm seeing it more as like not just graduation requirements but like personal achievements like your being as a student and and your virtues there's a mirror right there were just a person like you want to develop the whole person right so not just as a learner where I see like graduation requirements focusing a lot more on your academic achievement based on what I'm hearing so I think they go hand in hand but it may take us kind of revisiting some of the district like policy slash statements that exist and what the district is striving to create and what the district is striving to create so I also think that you want to make sure we're included in crafting that right there are some links because it's not you know academics but also there's the you know career readiness financial it's kind of a range of skills this is quite ambitious it's very ambitious and energizing I would say in many ways so okay I sort of took us on a bumpy road off of the goals but that's still still there I like cell phones yes oh yes I was just gonna say tech cell phone I did hear some anecdotal feedback that they were changing what they were doing at the middle school as a far as how they were handling inserting the phones and or device and locking them from last year's sort of very trusting method yes inspection if you will are unified let's all do this together so I really love the addition of the parentheticals in the measurement so I've just been scanning through and my only request is when we have our follow-ups on the goals for mid-year progress let's make sure that the measurement assessments are we circled back to that and we get the through line if something is decided as not not ready or something that you decided to use something instead you know help us stay consistent with what we approved and how we set out to measure it uh huh I'm looking at a question about your presentation of high school and then can you would you like to� our very last goal which is about our finances for FY 28 and given some of the conversations that we've had with select board last week and some of the conversations that are ongoing should we generalize that goal to say something like there's a structural need to assess the financial future of our just generalize a little bit I don't think the behavior needs to change but I think that the language in the green needs to change yeah we can do that
so one of the pieces of feedback that we got at the last meeting too was in conjunction with Spanish immersion and really thinking through how do we sort of maximize the impact of this program school-wide we had we had significant conversation around that and I certainly understand the desire to ensure that our kids are really progressing down those anticipated language proficiency goals and hitting all those pieces one of the struggles though that we we found in thinking about the middle school is you know when the kids come to middle school there are really four languages that are celebrated there and all of the signage all over the school is actually written in all four languages and not just Spanish so so there is a tension between sort of celebrating a particular program and I think there's a real focus on celebrating all four languages all four cultures at the middle school so I do think you know we need to keep a careful eye on those achievement goals and and the ways in which kids are being able to use that language and that is certainly at the forefront as we're thinking through what the high school trajectory looks like and the potential opportunities kids may have they connect with both travel and application of their language in different whether their internships you know it depends on the subjects in which they.. so I appreciate all yourblick. might go quite nicely with some of the requirements of the new graduation requirements, actually applying some of their language in different areas, different arenas, and exploring, as we mentioned, I think, before, the possibility with different universities to show around those pieces. So we did not sort of really pull out that particular strand. I hope that makes sense to folks. How many languages are in the language program at the high school? There are four as well. Four as well? Yeah. Typically, most languages, all the languages run at the high school. The novice level does not run every year in every language. Spanish always runs, and it's about half of our students that take Spanish in general. This year, there were enough novice students to take a French, have a French. We have a French novice class this year, but level one does not always, for the novice language, right off the bat, does not always run every year at the high school.
Anybody have any further comments? This is good progress, in my opinion. Agreed.
My only comment I would say is I want to thank you and all the stakeholders that come with this. It's ambitious, and I think we recognize that it's a lot. And I think, David, you've commented in the fact that when we think about improvements and advancements it's hard to not have the wish list grow and grow and grow but there's also just the reality of keeping the trains running day to day and meeting students where they are at any point in time and so there is a healthy tension between having very ambitious improvement goals but also wanting to just maintain the day-to-day and so thank you for not shying away from the ambitious thank you for your helpful feedback
i do think you have to add the school committee as people responsible for goal area number six operational absolutely yes we are happy to do that
i just assumed we were implied i don't disagree with you
i shared this with david earlier but i feel like there's a real depth to our goals now because they're building upon each other year over year and i love that you can see color-coded how they have been building upon each other you know i think our goal is previously were great but now you can see how they're growing and i think that's really encouraging so you know there's a lot of work behind that so thank you to everyone who's behind that how much uh i'm just looking at the note around school specific strategic actions are contingent upon the input of school councils um and i'm just thinking about the three separate elementary schools and i'm wondering if there's something we could do to try and align them in their efforts around their strategic action planning and their improvement plans they actually um worked on all theirs together so you'll see when you see their school specific they're very closely aligned across the board there are some um threads that are school specific for example there's school specific graphic planning i know there's a some school specific some preschool components at happy hollow but not at the other schools there's some spanish immersion components at loker that aren't at the other schools but otherwise they're pretty consistent across the schools the teams work together for example our summer retreat all together the elementary teams yeah and we've had several follow-up meetings around them as well so they will also as you know having served on several school councils through the years aaron that um school council will then sort of weigh in and then they you know urge a particular direction um but it might i doubt they're going to vary significantly based on that but you know time time will tell right because the council has to vote on the improvement plans yes and take kind of action around those so i'm just wondering if there's a better way for us to align those and like the actual school councils and and ensure that there's sort of like an equity in how that in every sense of the word and how these get prioritized i guess because i think certain schools may which makes sense like the spanish immersion it only lives at one school so that's the only one that can really prioritize it but aside from those types of things i think we should maybe try and i don't know how we would do that we could probably do it around pulse see with school councils we have to look at the statutes too around that
especially
who knows where we're going with our building plan but in the event that there's a merging of constituencies in the future it would be great to kind of have those all
nicely and i think our curriculum adoptions have also ensured that it's a more consistent experience in that regard too yeah that's been great over the past few years having you know a new reading a new writing i know that is across the board yeah you make it easier to align your goals when you're right right no when creating opportunities and i think this happened last summer too like it was very noticeable when the elementary improvement plans were presented that the building principles were very mutually aligned and supportive and so i think you've created space for that in the summer retreat which helps to continue to build an elementary administrative team feeling as opposed to what i think sometimes we intentionally or not sort of like organically leaned into building specific processes and approaches and so i think that we've really made a concerted effort in recent years to make that an elementary level vision and they're they're committed to that that comes across joining you the second week in november
together
yeah i'd be i haven't looked at the statute in a while the school councils are building based though not grade level based right so there isn't yeah so there isn't a natural way to achieve necessarily what you're thinking of which is more but i'm wondering if we could do something provide some opportunities i wonder if there's a particular school council that feels strongly about something if that principal then shares that with the other teams do they get on board collectively with in a particular direction or do they sort of say well you know maybe that's a goal for next year but because we're aligned around this you know and they can have those conversations as well
i i think that that's kind of
in i don't know maybe the past seven years kind of been a missed opportunity for community voice i think people don't recognize throughout the community that that's really like available and that they're supposed to be people from um parents community members at large staff and it is a way to get other voices aside from administration and school committee and pto involved um and so i know they're always looking to fill those seats um anyway and i imagine in the principles right letters coming up looking for folks usually september's right because they do have to be voted in the members um but it's easy and it's not like you know i shouldn't say it's easy but it's not a huge lift they probably don't meet before school with the elementary anymore because they start so early but i used to enjoy einstein's bagels and cream cheese from jimmy back in the day um so anyway that would be my plug for student for school councils as well it's really i think a missed opportunity for the community to to have a voice um and And I do think that the principals try to involve them as much as possible in driving consensus. And anyway. OK. Anything else before we would potentially entertain a vote on the goals?
I did notice it's a draft and not a drafty draft. No drafty draft. It's one step closer to the final. One why way from the vote.
Did I miss anyone? Why, I was going to say, would you like a motion? I make a motion to approve the draft Wayland Public Schools District Goals and Improvement Plan for the 2026-2027 academic year. Do we have a second? Second. Second. OK. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? None. So, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. And those will get posted on the district website once the draft is removed. And the language from that last? Yeah, a couple of little minor. Yeah. OK, great. Will you share those out in the newsletter, too? Sure. Yeah. OK.
Great. So are we prepared to, well, I guess with respect to the district handbook, an employee handbook, didn't we ask for a red line? Am I? I thought we did. From? I think we wanted to know what the specific changes were from previous. Which is, in essence, a red line. Yeah. Did we get that? Because I didn't think we. I thought you asked for us to let you know when it was done. I'm sorry. That's OK. I thought we did talk about a red line. Are we done? Yeah. I'm not sure how to do that. No. There's a lot going on. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What? What's going on? I can connect with Jen and ask her if she can create that for us, just so we can kind of. Because you don't need it. It's been shared. If there's updates that we discuss around the table, it'll just get made on the fly and shared again. So OK. Did anybody have any comments on that while we're on the topic? Otherwise, I can ask Jen if she can. can run that sorry just a red line version is like like a compare yes trap before yeah you can do that retroactively yeah you run it as a compare yeah you can do it's like a black line maybe on the Google I think she can do the revisions yeah okay but I don't know because we made a copy of it worst-case scenario I can run it myself okay so if I need to probably just put last year's and next year's oh she can do that okay okay all right so Jen do you want to ask her do you want me to ask her I'm fine with doing whatever I can I can ask okay and then if she can just email it to us so we can definitely have it it Oh any questions or comments any questions or comments questions by the 23rd yes
I know one of the things that she's really been working on with the elementary principals actually is that aligning the format and the content across the elementary school which is super helpful I think Okay, Diane, can you just flag, thank you, can you just flag it as like follow-up? Yeah. Thank you. Make sure it's on there for the 23. Okay. Okay.
Discussion of the proposed meeting topics for 26-27. Oh, sorry. Can we, I had one broader question on the handbooks before. I just, this might be, it may be a stupid question, but I just, I wanted to make sure without doing it a side-by-side myself, that all of the policies and the appendices of the student and family handbook are literally verbatim taken from our policies because I just, now they're sort of linked and posted. They're in multiple places, and I didn't know if we needed to worry about the consistency. So there's social media in here, there's weapons, like there's things in here, and there's cameras in here, and we've, have all of those policies, and so I just was. They're pulled right. They're pulled direct from, okay, thank you. Yes, and we went through and updated anything that was updated since last year, and did that. So if it's not right, we're coming after you. I asked on the record. We'll fix it. Got it. If we missed one, but I think we've got them all. Okay.
We actually spent a long time debating whether we should put the text in or just do all the links, but we figured people would get lost in the linking and like wouldn't get back to the source, and it was a big debate. I similarly have been debating, do we do it as appendices? Are they supposed to be embedded? Is it always consistent in the employee in here? And so it's good to know, you know, reasonable minds can.
Betsy. Oh, sorry. Are we good? Yeah, so I just wanted to clarify. We're going to bring it back with the. On 9-23. Perfect. Yes. And Betsy's going to take it up with Jen, and they're going to get circulated prior to our 9-23, so we have enough time to review. Okay. Formulate any questions, comments, etc.
Okay. So 26-27 proposed SC meeting topics related to superintendents area of the agendas. Yes. Okay.
T. Gavron. I have. I have. I have. I have. I have. I have. question for you. Jay and Coach P are coming for 9-23 as of right now to do Metro West Health survey data presentation. Was that when we talked about doing the updated wellness policy or... no. Because do we have a wellness committee meeting in between there? Before them? I don't think we do, right? I think we're just going to do the data at this time. We could have them come back. Okay, I just want to make sure we do that because there was a lot of work on that. Yeah, the tobacco. Yeah, the nicotine, tobacco, yes. I think we needed one more committee meeting. before we were ready to bring it to this group. Okay, is that what, okay. So I will reach out, unless you're going to talk to them or see them like in the next couple days, I can just reach out to Scott, send him a note about getting that on the calendar because I don't think we put it on the calendar even at our last one. All right. Are we going to make that, finish those recommendations then that would then go to the staff? Policy subcommittee and then go to the committee? I think the idea was to skip the, candidly, decrease the work on them because really it would kind of be just like bringing it to us in the format that I think the wellness committee can give it to the committee in, get it on for a review and a vote. I think it makes sense. I don't think it's something that like these guys need to review offline and then bring to us with, so and then just get it voted on and then move forward. Sounds good. Okay. Um, so that needs a meeting and follow up with SC on policy revisions, and that's nicotine, tobacco, and wellness.
Okay. You guys don't have to wait for me to stop if you have questions on this or thoughts or comments or. So what we try, just very brief background, what we tried to do is think about our goals for the year and think about the timing and work on the goals. And you can see we also. Okay. We also put some time in for learning in terms of school committee work and learning. Um, we took two, two meeting dates. Um, you can see a lot of time with both the elementary and secondary principals. Um, and some of the other ongoing goals, obviously shift every year, student services is pretty much standard. You've been doing April has been the, has been the time. Um, and we also, um, you know, connected to our Metro West. We thought it would be helpful to talk about mental health in, in the district. Um, cause we think you'll have follow up questions from Metro West and to have a team, folks on our counseling team join us to talk about some of the work and some of the training. We've been doing as well around, around C-STAT. So that would be something we think is important to do. Jessica, that's your, your background. My area, yeah. So we'll be ready for that. Um, do you think that we need additional facilities planning coverage? Probably prior to February? Yes, we will go back. And I do think that's helpful, Erin, cause we'll probably need more facilities planning than just one. I think there are probably a few meetings that we'll need to, uh, I mean, we can slot it in and not have it be the main focus, but I think that we're going to need to have some more coverage of that. Um, historically we've had a meeting. Yes. With the district's MCAS results as well. I'm not seeing that. I don't know whether we want to talk about whether that should be augmented with other academic achievement measurements in the wake of removing the 10th grade. Like, I don't think that that necessarily is the sole or be all end all, but I didn't see that in here. And I think we'd still want to keep an eye on our K through eight. Right. So what we decided to do, uh, Betsy, in our second meeting in November, we thought in addition to MCAS, we would show other assessments as well. Oh, there it is. Okay. So we're doing goals and MCAS. Exactly. Some other formative assessments that we would do in addition to MCAS, just kind of to make it, to make it. So that says how we use data, but is the idea also to present actual results to the committee on academic. Exactly. Okay. No, no, no, that's okay. I was like, I understood. It seemed more of like, these are what these are and how we use them as opposed to this is how our students are performing. Kind of a combination. Okay. And I know we wanted to revisit the device conversation, um, in the fall. So we would do that when. I thought we would do it when our principals. Principals are here for middle school and high school. Join us as part of a broader discussion. I thought that would be a good time. As part of the goals discussions? Yes. That will be on their list. They're going to talk about a broad list of goals and under their SEO, that will go, we'll be prepared to talk about that. On this December 2nd meeting, you have in here a placeholder to talk about the new high school grad requirements. We talked about adding a mid-year portrait connect. I don't know if that will align timing wise, but it might not be a bad time to do those all in one. I just popped it into the January meeting with the budget, but I can move it to the, um, the first meeting. Let's see where we are- Yeah, I mean, see where you are process wise.
am i remembering correctly the facility the msba will be due in early april okay so that's why you're thinking we might need more than one okay i'm just looking at that february 24 okay and we think our budget dates are on target based on the impact of last year yeah i think we're just gonna have to i think they look solid we'll just have to see what happens as we get closer um because before that we're gonna have to basically have our number but it won't be detailed to them which not a lot of sense i thought a lot of surprises there but we're all gonna want it before then it's basically gonna come there's gonna be another meeting that's gonna end up i would guess between our 11-4 meeting in our 12-2 meeting that's going to end up being a joint meeting with the select board and the finance around budget it's my guess just everything study FYI for people's schedule slippery slope we may need to also I feel like we may need to end up adding one in October because one we have flagged as a retreat but we may end up needing another actual meeting so I flagged that as well as a 1.5 for you October and I don't know about December that's gonna be a tough time if we needed to add another one but just flagging if we need to move budget issues earlier to have to add in November into summer right I think we have some time because all we have a secondary schools I the December 2nd so we would probably had another topic or two and so there is opportunity and some of these meetings to add a second or third topic but we just don't want to add some eight topics and meetings that they just going to do well Wednesday night tonight's an exception with a football game typically got just one Wednesday night football so it's very fascinating season did notice he didn't even schedule anything in march i did a little light here he's not even planning on showing up um okay so all right anybody have any i mean i feel like it's not anything we need to vote but just and we'll update it as you know feel free we'll talk about agendas but we thought it'd be helpful to give you a broad overview it's a healthy calendar yes it's a lot it's good thank you okay uh all right so last time um we revisited the ask around um evaluating the 26 27 scheduling pilot that was taking place um so we were going to talk about that tonight yeah i'll just do a brief intro before it goes to betsy um last week the week before loker fourth and fifth grade families received a communication regarding this topic in terms of assessment evaluation of the scheduling pilot so betsy will kind of highlight what was in what was in that communication and more thoughts so that that was uh before school started go ahead can we take one step back because i think and rightly so i understand there's been a lot of focus on the music shift that's being piloted at loker um but there are other changes that we've we've implemented with the elementary schedule that is impacting other schools right um we we shifted how we were scheduling things overall there were this is not the only change so no we just speak to that a little bit sure sure we had a um a group that met year long uh where we had a number of i think 10 different meetings over the course of the year um sort of looking at looking at uh best practices and scheduling hearing from some other schools and the ways in which they scheduled looking at the um the challenges sort of in general where the rub points were for teachers for specialists for um special educators kind of looking at lots of different folks perspective that it was a group of um lots of people that that that worked in different areas but also specialists um special educators classroom teachers administrators were all part of that uh we surveyed surveyed teachers as well and brought that information then back to to the group um and came up with a series of recommendations um really thinking about the ways in which we schedule and the ways in which we tried to um particularly with our new curriculum think about cohesive blocks of instructional time um to allow us to sort of maximize you know minimize transitions to and from places but also maximize time on learning through those so the way in which they sort of started scheduling and the formats that you're using are different this year um we're looking at making another change next year to get some more um core class instructional minutes and combining some specials um so we had talked about could we do this this year and we decided to wait until next year in the summer so i think this is a good time to start spending some more time on our um our students of color and because the the team is working together for example the library and technology teams are are working together to um offer offer their their sort of combined the content that they cover and kind of whether they co-teach it or streamline which many other districts do so they'll visit some other schools that do that this year and be working on that on our And we talked about moving band, chorus, and orchestra into that time block, too, which would mean that chorus was not after school. So that will be another place in which minutes are shifted for next year. The ways in which we are scheduling our intervention is, too, we've sort of aligned and came up with some structures to do that across the board and where they're coming from within the CKLA block. And we're also scheduling grades to have as similar as possible schedules to really sort of maximize intervention times for special education as well as just tier two general ed instruction. So I think there's a number of things that we're doing to try to improve the scheduling because it's not a super, super, super long day. So that's just some background. And we did make some strides with the teachers and the new contract around restructuring of PD planning time. Right. So PLCs that used to take place during the school day or a big chunk of them took place during the school day are now going to be happening after school on Wednesdays. So we're trying to move as much of our meeting times outside the instructional day. Okay. As well. So those were big areas we're looking to, again, recoup some instructional minutes for those pieces. Okay. Thanks. Am I remembering correctly, one of the takeaways from the scheduling committee group was that not having more consistent blocks was creating variegated transition time and that there was a conclusion that there was a lot of this sort of transition time that ultimately when you added it up over the course of the day was really disruptive to kids' ability to shift tasks, reengage, and that our hope and expectation is that we would be able to get more quality instructional time if we had more dedicated blocks and sort of anticipated and that each of the kids' days were not feeling less consistent or routine, that we were trying to increase that sense of structure. Yes. Less fragmented, for sure. Okay. So that would... Okay. So that is one of the things that Brian wrote about, we'll be looking at schedule consistency and flexibility around, if you have one fewer component that you're trying to schedule across multiple grades, it makes for a less fragmented schedule in that regard. So they'll be looking closely at that. Curriculum coverage was another area around the depth of instruction and what's going on during those times. Particularly in science and social studies, are they able to get through more content than they have been in previous years or in comparison to other schools? And I do, as I pointed out, it's really complex to assess all those pieces with multiple variables changing simultaneously. So I just want to acknowledge that piece as well. And instrumental skill development will be another component. And is there... You know, is there attrition that looks different than other years across our music program? So Brian will also conduct some focus groups with classroom teachers, with music teachers, and really think about and hear back the feedback from teachers, how the change has impacted their instruction and what they've seen with students. He will be, you know, in classrooms a lot, sort of observing what looks the same, what looks different from previous years. So it's a combination, I would say, of qualitative and quantitative measures. This is purely anecdotal and I shared it with David, but my local fifth grader came home yesterday and said, you're never going to believe this, mom, but they completely changed the schedule and we do things for longer now and we're not running around. And I said, huh, it's wild, like, how do you like it? And she's like, it's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's amazing because it's not stressful. And last year we felt like we were always never having enough time to do anything and now we get to do things for a long period of time and it's great and it's so relaxing. So I don't know if the teacher communicated that to them that this was a new change, but it made an impact on just the feeling that she has in her. The experience, the feeling. Yeah. They were seeing things happening, which I think is meaningful if they can dive into the curriculum, it's great. It may be helpful to share something out with the entire community around overall adjustments that we've made in an effort to streamline and find as many efficiencies as possible. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a really important thing to do is to maximize student instructional time, um, because it's not just one thing that we're changing. It's multiple areas. Um, and maybe sharing out in some form of digestible. material best practices that you picked up on from the presentation that the working group had around elementary scheduling do you guys feel like I don't want to make you do it if it would be a waste of time but do you feel like that would be helpful I do I mean I also obviously this has been a topic that people feel strongly about and have a lot of opinions about and I think that transparency has been helpful and I think you've done a great job we've now talked about the scheduling challenges and some of the solutions numerous times I think it also is an unavoidable reality in public education that correct me if I'm wrong every year you're changing multiple things at once because either you're dealing with policy mandates or you're dealing with new curriculum or you're dealing with new a different mix of new teachers or not your training your PD research is coming out so while in an ideal world we would be able to change one thing and study that and then compare it I think that that is not a luxury that we often have in public education and also if we think that there is something that needs improvement and the data that came out of the scheduling working group was very persuasive and I would encourage encourage people to watch that meeting and that slot and the slides that were presented around the takeaways from that and it was quite compelling as to the finite limits of what we can do our school day is contracted it is finite we certainly have very good partners that we talk about in terms of what we can do to find creative solutions and how to get it all in but we are dealing with fixed variables and I think rarely do we have a year where you are not changing multiple things either by necessity or by design and I think it might be helpful also to just acknowledge you've developed skills to be able to measure these things and that it is it is possible to glean both successes and continued opportunities for change and so I also think if we're going to revisit or share that information the one thing that I think hasn't been said as clearly as it should is that every student is still receiving a music special there there is no cut to music such that they may have heard a lot about the importance of music and academics I personally agree I think the committee recognized that every elementary student is still receiving music instruction and every elementary school still has opportunity for instrumental instruction as well and so to the extent there's been any confusion about that I just think it is important to reiterate that and I don't think that um um Brian's last communication made that clear and I just want to make sure that families new to the district are not concerned that we used to have music instruction for all students and somehow now we don't
I um I just want to say I appreciate kind of the the breadth and the balance of thinking about some you know concrete measurable items and then looking at you know what Community feedback is but I think for me I would feel more comfortable if we had or if I had a more finite understanding of the rubric right of like what percent change increased decrease what have you is going to be used as a measure for moving forward if the pilot is going to be expanded and I feel like in in the air of like transparency I think that that's only fair also to the families to know specifically like what we are trying to look at I know that this is still very new and I know I came in this role very late in this process after you know you had already been looking at the scheduling and all of these variables but I do think that when you can't provide control the you know we need that transparency because I want I don't want to be sitting here in April or May and then hear that we're moving forward without the actual way of showing the measurements have been met or not or we're not moving forward because they haven't been met so I just wanted to say that I think it would be helpful if in the coming months we could see you know those specific items that we're we're looking at
okay is there the intent to have
have to come back and the team would need to follow up and have further conversation with Brian Well, also, don't you have the control? Because you're only doing it at one school. The other two schools, you're not doing it. So, like, don't you have that, like, comparator? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I meant control, like, control around, like, I think what we're hearing from our community is that while I believe school council members were a part of this process, or at least that's, I think, what was shared with us in the spring meetings, right? Like, I think that there were a lot of community members who weren't necessarily feeling like they were part of the process until, you know, decisions were being communicated. So I'm just saying, like, if the pilot looks successful to these measures and it's going to then be replicated with, you know, the other two schools are going to be wrapped into the same, the same... You know, scheduling for consistency, I think that there's going to be a lot more families in the district who are feeling like they don't have the control and part of it. So I think, you know, the more we can be transparent and measured and showing, like, these were the metrics and these were the considerations.
Again, I'm not... I don't know which way it's going to land at the end of the year, right? But either way, I think we need to be able to have a finite way, at least, of showing. Some of these items.
I mean, quality. Quality. I know quality is hard, right? But the curriculum coverage, right? Like, we will know comparative times because we'll have control, you know, we'll have control against other schools, against the other schools. And instrumental skill development, we will have comparison. But I understand. I understand, right? Like, the qualitative things, we're not going to be able to show, necessarily.
Well, I mean, I think student voice might be important, too. You know, I think that that's... Not just instrumental students. Right. But other students. We have a control group within LOCR. We've always had a control group within LOCR because not every LOCR student takes instruments. So we have students who will be positively impacted by... by the curriculum without, you know, they're our control group. And then you add the instruments on top of that and that's something else to look at. But we have to listen to all of the voices because it's not just one impacted group. There's another group that's been impacted for a long time who might not necessarily feel comfortable coming to this table and disclosing their student's situation. That's a much harder conversation for families to have. And it also involves disclosure of their child. So I think we need to be really sensitive when we're talking about this that we're not just talking about one impacted body of students. There's another quieter but equally impacted body. I think that... And I, like, yeah, I think similarly, like, the more we can be... I don't want to over... I don't want to provide too much information, right? But I think that the more we can be transparent or at least...
... Balanced in presenting, you know, presenting that there are multiple bodies of students, you know, I think... It just allows, I think, for folks to have a greater picture or understanding of the challenges that were being considered. I think Brian's email to the actual impacted families really did a good job of that because he really did discuss... how this weighs on everybody. It was not an easy decision. People were impacted either way. I really appreciated how in-depth he went into his decision because it made it, I think, to me, very clear. I think, Jessica, I mean, teacher observation, you know, teachers have seen whole classes of students in terms of both, you know, in various subjects and musically. I mean, that's really important as well, our educator input, which is what we use for a lot of our... of our decision-making, and they'll have diverse views as they do on many topics, and that's what we should encourage.
Yeah, I think... I'm not... I just want to say, you know, I think what I'm just trying to share is, like, when you don't have control, like, bringing from, like, trauma-informed perspectives, right? Like, when you don't have control of decisions, the more transparent folks can be with the process, right? Like, the better it is off. For folks who are feeling impacted in some kind of way, whichever way the decision goes. So I think, for me, it's just, you know, recognizing that there's going to be folks who are watching today, or there's going to be folks whose children are in third grade who are going to be, you know, entering, you know, entering into, you know, potentially their, you know, their music education and, you know, wanting to know some of this history or wanting to know who are not involved right now in the conversation. And so being able to say, like, here's the four metrics, you know, with the curriculum coverage, we feel success would be if 10% more curriculum was, you know, I'm not... I don't know how... I don't know what is reasonable for significant change, but I think it would be helpful on the quantitative items to be able to know what that increase or deficit is that's being measured moving forward.
I think just to kind of... I hear everyone's. Like, I appreciate everyone's discussion around the table. I think on the flip side of that, too, there's people who don't have their child necessarily in an instrument in fourth or fifth grade or third grade that have no idea what their child who's not in an instrument is doing during those blocks where other members of the class are being pulled out for a lesson. And they may not realize that because it's not something that's focused on. It's just, oh, you know, my kid's not interested in doing an instrument or whatever. And so they may not even understand how that time is being... how that 30 minutes was being spent for their child. Not going to an instrument.
You know, so I think that's also something that may be helpful to share with the broader community to understand how maybe it worked before and what the pilot, although I think it's still going through some evolutions on exactly what it's going to look like or what it is looking like this year, um, I mean, maybe it's going to be something that's going to be that may help to flesh out for those that are, um, just seeing it as a loss of music, um, to show what the change is for those in instruments and those not. Um, because I do hear your point, Betsy, and I think some people are just seeing music as gone and that's... that's not the case. Um, I totally understand where the decrease in the instrumental is really impactful and very hard and I don't think anyone wants to see that around this table or in the community. Um, so I do... I think that that would be helpful too. I just think a kind of holistic communication, around it to clarify for the greater good and community would be helpful. Um, because impacted families that are seeing change to what the instrumental music looked like for an older child at Locher for this year, um, is not the same as everyone understanding how this is impacting the elementary kids. So I think that that could be a really helpful piece of communication to circulate. Um, I certainly appreciate not everyone has the time to come and sit here. Not everyone has the time to find us on YouTube or Wacom or whatever and listen to all of this. I talk a lot. People don't want to listen to me. Get it. Um, so maybe sharing that out would be another, you know, um, and even giving a link, to the presentation that you gave, which has some really, um, you know, summaries of the teacher feedback, et cetera. It's a great body of information for people to, um, understand. And that being said, we're never going to make everybody happy. Um, there's, you know, there's not a hundred percent winners in this. So I just, um, that's my kind of two cents on it for the moment. Okay. The moment, but I think that would be really helpful and I agree. I think having some real kind of, even if it's sort of fluid or sort of like, this is where we see sort of a benchmark, something would be great.
Um, also it's an evolution, right? This is an evolution of a pilot and we have neighboring peer districts who also operate a private pay instrumental program in other ways. Right? So this is an evolution of being creative and figuring out how we can do that in a more equitable way.
I also, I don't want to write the communication. For you, but I also think that there's one other piece of information that was a little bit misleading that I heard, saw, um, in that this was a budget decision. It's not what this was. This was not driven by budget. Um, so I think that would also, even if it's just me saying that now, I don't know, but this wasn't a, a, a budget driven decision, at least to the best of mine, knowledge of all of this. Um, so, um, okay. Do we want to take, since we're on the topic, do we want to take, um, item?
It's the next item. So it's not even out of order. Look at that. I planned perfectly. Um, we're out of time. Keep your hands up. Thank you. Diane discussion regarding potential reduction of fourth and fifth grade music fees for local students during the 2627 school year and possible vote to approve a revised fee. I know there was discussion of this originally when the pilot was discussed in June, May and June. Um, I think we thought we would revisit it when there was more of an understanding of exactly how it was going to shake out for students. Um, I, I, uh, I, students, do you have a recommendation? I know in the, it was talked about going from 150 to 90 for low-care fourth and fifth grade for this year. Is that the recommendation? Is there a different recommendation based on how it's sort of panning out with the actual I think that was the number, right? 90, right? Yep. I'm looking at Kirstine for the math. I did not understand. Yes, I think it's 90 prorated, which is what we do. And I mean, that seems to make the most logical sense. So can you just give me a refresh? Because I haven't talked about the instrumental fees. I'm not sure if ever, which if I'm wrong, don't. Quote me, but since I joined the committee or adjusting them, what does that fee go toward? Like, what are we telling parents? It's not the instrument, right? No, it assists with the teaching salary for those lessons. So it's just an offset for, okay. So what you did, 150 is the annual divided by 75 minutes and then? And then you prorated it for the 45 minutes for the pilot.
Thank you, Ronnie. That's great. I'd already done it. Give me something to get out.
Does that still seem solid? Have you talked to Brian about it or?
I mean, I think that seems, I mean, I think for the last time it seems reasonable. It makes sense. I mean, it makes sense to me. I just, I'm not sure. No, I think it's fair to families. I think the question is financially. Right. Does that, if it was offsetting staffing costs, are we still fine? Yes. Okay. . Okay. Being responsible for that fiscal. Number one. I'm sure it's a drop in the bucket for how the feelings of all of this, however, I, from my standpoint, I would say that it's not so bad. standpoint that feels right, given what we're doing with the pilot. Does anyone have any different feelings on that? No. Would it need to be reimbursed back to those families? They've already paid it, right? I don't remember. No, I have two. I have two enrolled. We've already paid it. Okay. Okay. So is that, I guess I'm thinking that would be a logistical piece that would have to be taken on. Would there be appetite for doing like a credit toward something? I don't know. Or at least the option if families wanted to do that. I'm just. I'm going to have to deal with that. Before in past lives, like credits when this happens. You know, if it's a fourth grader, can you take a credit against your fifth grade? If they don't, can you, you know, does that. So do we want to maybe take a vote that. We have to be careful on cross funding. Okay. So I think it really just needs to stay either. I meant like a room. That's what I meant. Like, or, or we refund families. Right. So how do we, if it's, if you're crediting it, it can be applied to next academic year. Like we don't have to be applying the funds to a program, this budget cycle. I think that's going to be over complicating where the, the tracking of this is for such a small, you know, group. Yeah. I think the easiest way is to go through the, uh, advisor who did the collections and reach out to families and we can identify, would you like to, um, leave the, that original amount in the program as intended, or would you like a refund? I guess that we have to process, we, we need the family's information check has to be cut, you know, and it would not be, that would be several weeks out. Um, in order to, are we talking like 80 kids? How many families? Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Does that make sense to everybody? Guys, I feel like I'm driving the ship here all alone. Yes. We're good. I think it's fair. Okay. Do we want to take a vote? I want to entertain a motion. Do we have to, do we have to first vote on the rate and then vote on the, I think it's just on the process or can we do it all? Just on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a reduction in the rate for these families and to permit the district to implement the refund or whatever it may be. Should families elect? Right. However, okay, I'd ask Betsy to do it, since she's, since she's already made part of it. Yeah, I, um, I will move to approve the reduction in the music registration. fee for loker families enrolled in instrumental music for the 26-27 school year from $150 annual fee to $90 and to authorize the director of finance and operations through her designee to contact families and give them the option to receive a refund for any overpayment or alternatively to contribute the full $150 or the extra $60 to the music program in the wayland public schools do you need to specify that it's the fourth and fifth grade no it's third two for strings isn't it it's only fourth and fifth that are getting my fourth and fifth that change uh you can just add okay for the fourth and fifth grade for the fourth and fifth grade do we have a second second uh all in favor aye any opposed no okay so can you just give us um plan for an update on that maybe uh kirsten in the next like couple yeah i'm thinking like couple meetings so two meetings i just want to know that it got communicated and then and maybe that's something that goes through the board of trustees and the communication that you're going to send out or brian's going to share or
it's one of those times that we have periodically and i don't want to derail us but like where we feel like there's potentially opportunities where we could have given to people to say if you would elect to contribute those funds to help do something else like i know we've talked about that a little but it's another one where i'm like i would have loved to be able to say if instead you'd like that money to go towards scholarships for students who can or whatever i know it's hard but anyway i think you did it by saying they could leave it in the fund fair enough and that way in the event that like you can pay for two you can you know that those options mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm okay mm-hmm okay did you have a mm-hmm mm-hmm nevermind sorry
um mm-hmm policy you so mm-hmm just gonna add that mm-hmm that asp would that speak okay About the Protect Act that was recommended by MASC. David, Betsy, do you want to just talk about what this is or talking about the Protect Act? Oh, yes. The Protect Act, which was passed when? Like June, but then they were told we had to do it September 1st. Exactly. That was the context. It was literally passed. I think it was passed, and then I think Desi was working on that language. Yeah, and the guidelines were given to us just a couple of weeks ago, right, Betsy? Yeah. It's about procedures for interacting with civil law enforcement, and we were given a very tight timeframe in terms of policies. This is not typically how we do our policy work, for those of you who are new, but this is certainly an important topic and something we need to follow and have an official policy. There's a draft policy, but then every district has to think about their individual context. What else do you want to add to that? Anything else? I think that the Policy Subcommittee has taken a look at the policy, and we've looked at the sample procedures and have tweaked them to match our context, and our hope is to share them in our first quarterly Safety Committee meeting, which is on Monday, which involves principles. Many of us at the district have said, well, we're not going to do that. Many of us at the table, as well as our fire partners, police partners, nurse leaders, it's a large group, and we have lots of different areas of safety, from cybersecurity to fire safety to police work to the facilities pieces as well. So we will go over this with them then, and we're awaiting some model training that's coming out as well that aligns with it. Policy language is very straightforward. We reviewed it. It's just, what do you do if law enforcement shows up at a school? We had talked about this last year, that you already have protocol for who is in charge of each school, and then who do they contact, and what do you do? So we didn't really have, you know, speaking for myself, I didn't really have any questions about the bones of it. It seems very straightforward. My question was, do we need people to look at this probability? Probably not, but, and do you have the protocol, which you do, so. Yes. I guess I have one, I don't know if it's for this group or not, but one of the things in the procedures is that all of the, like, principal cell phones around here, it also says that this is going to go on our website. I wonder if we post it without the cell phones. I think so. Yeah, I don't, that would just go to the people within. Yeah. So. Redacted version, I guess, would be on each. Yeah. It does require that, though, that we post this. We did have a, I think we did have a question, and we might have been getting into the weeds of, do we then have to update any other emergency response plans, or do we have to link, do we just have to link to this? Because it seemed like this, the guidance document that we reviewed talked about integration with emergency, other emergency response policies. Yeah. You know, there could be aspects of this that trigger one of our other policies. So I think as long as they're linked and connected, and the whole team understands where those overlaps are, that will be in okay shape. And Jessica and I, in our next policy subcommittee meeting, can look at these cross-references for us, just to make sure that all of those policies are accurate, current, and up-to-date. I assume they are, because we're going to have to update them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I assume they are, because there are emergency plans. But we will, we can do that in the next meeting. Just a minute. And I think just the other question we had was, is this the type of policy update that we should be building into communication to district families? Just to know that... Hey, this law was passed and we want you to know here's where you can find the policies on it in general. Right? components civil procedure can't yeah okay no i think and we certainly did that when we updated our anti-bias policies you know communicate i think the families just to be comforted to know that we're thinking of the range of issues particularly in this climate yes we thought it would be better coming in your communication versus a principal's communication do that district okay two things one should we remove the reference to executive director we have a district superintendent it's only going to be the superintendent can we delete the reference to executive director like the third paragraph there's a few of them yeah i think it's it's um number one or i yeah so it's paragraph three and then are you are you looking at the i'm looking at the queen v2 in 3a in the folder could you give us editor access to that um v2 if you i was gonna say i'll just do it not yet but i can just
but it's so it's paragraph three yep one
um four
i just give you editing
i'm gonna refresh i'll just do it i'm gonna do it as a red line i don't have edit access yet
i did all right unless i can't somebody else is gonna have to give it i think it's the owner of this one and i don't think she can do it from her computer oh are you connected
mask draft not the one that you emailed us
that one that's what i'm looking at the 3a i didn't go into it that way i just sent it for an email oh i'm this would be going to diane okay so i don't think we're talking about like from em ils maybe I'm in a different document I don't know I don't see you in these documents yeah I don't either all right anyway I would suggest that we make that um adjustment and then my next question is we have some pretty strict protocols around contacting the school district attorney so I just want to make sure that like we're not free willy-nilly enabling people to contract this contact the attorney for the district which is item number three so while it says it has to have that I want to make sure that what is in the procedures does not go ahead and contact the teachers well that's what we don't have the procedures right so yeah we have you have them we just yeah and the procedures say basically if if somebody's showing up with a warrant you we're gonna get in touch with the our attorney to review that okay who who is going to get in touch with you yeah I don't think our current as long as it's David yeah I don't like I'm all building administrators yeah no no no that's what yeah like no okay those are my questions if we can make those changes but the procedures were we created by you guys specifically like they're whaling specific off a model right there was a model okay procedures that desi issued to us produced okay I've shared back with policy which we don't need to and we'll get feedback from the safety team on Monday this is a question I should know the answer to but in the along the lines of removing the reference to the executive director do we have a school resource officer memorandum of understanding we do we do okay see I should know the answer to this just met yesterday as a matter of fact I am appropriately chagrined but I'm not afraid to ask the question got updated for this we met a different topic what what is it getting updated procedures actually is procedures so you're gonna share that with the committee for review correct absolutely it was I'm thinking I'm writing yes absolutely you know there may be members that have strong feelings David hates when I ask those questions any other questions this is an interesting one do we know like does this get posted it's not like we do a 30-day you like no I don't this is one of the ones that like I think we need to review that the like policy that we have on that yeah so that we yes yeah yeah I think we should put that on the next agenda because there was an item recently we did another one recently to like we did yeah no I agree okay so we could use it was a floor we can take over you could use that one I should consider a discussion about it okay yes would you comment get that added no I you know oh that's right yes it was another one that really we don't it was fabric or Do you just want us to approve this and then okay... so so. so? Do you just want us to approve this and then okay so move yeah as edited okay second second all in favor aye any opposed none Diana I made the motion Betsy seconded approve as edited and somebody's gonna have to give me that revised because I got to put it in the policy or the manual the procedures you mean procedures policy the policy is the speech yeah but I don't know that did update for me because you made updates right I didn't make updates yes you're an editor all right okay
all right
Oh next on the list is school committee's annual town report um i don't i can do this again because it's like very templated so if you want me to just do it and i think you need to do it by the 28th might be the 22nd hold on sorry let me double check
oh by september 30th i'll bring it back for our next meeting for thank you you know what that would be wonderful you know i have a lot of free time and i would love to draft this careful you said that publicly
our next is the 23rd
draft okay
okay
kirstine this is where i had my question for you i know you just mentioned before we came in that you had something you wanted to look at for the warrants or something are you good on that oh yeah i just um prepared the additional payroll warrants here so they're in question moving for your consent okay thank you um august 24 minutes are not there
every time
edited oh but those are executive did we do regular yeah we did regular and it's just the vote to go into executive thank you okay sounds like I did them yeah what okay so we have 27 August 24 is out and anybody have a motion I make motion to approve the August 27th or the consent agenda and send oh sorry the consent agenda as presented last the August 24th minutes just friendly edits okay second all in favor aye any opposed
do we have August 27th we have August 27th executive do we have August 24th executive yes we do okay thank you Kirsten do we have item a we do not right okay he is he did send me a message and he's okay okay so I'm going to revise I move to enter executive session for the purposes of reviewing and approving executive session minutes with the intent to redact and release use set of minutes as permitted by MGL chapter 38 section 20 to for August 24th 2026 and August 27 2026 the school committee will be joined by dates in August 11 the content and instruction David Fleishman, Superintendent Betsy Gavron, Assistant Superintendent Kirsteen Patterson, Director of Finance and Operations, and Diane Marabella, Recording Secretary. Ronnie always gets off easy. The school committee will adjourn an executive session and will not reconvene an open session. Do I have a second? Second. And Betsy? Yes. Kate? Yes. Jessica? Yes. Erin? Yes. Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Who's here for public comment, to actually make public comment? Two? Don't trick me. Three? Okay. I'm going to give you each three minutes, since there's just three of you. So do you want to set the timer? And we can open public comment. So whoever wants to go first, you can come on up, and if you can just state your name and address for the record, you can sit, you can stand, and we just ask that I say this in front before every meeting, just respectful and within the purview of the school committee. Okay. So thank you. I'm Penny Wayne Shapiro, 8 Bigelow Road. Last time I spoke about the importance of music on brain development in all areas and the integrated nature of playing music and its effect on holistic learning in all areas. I'd like to speak on that. I've been a professional musician for almost five decades. I'm a former first violinist with both the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. I'm also the founder and director of Weyland School of Music, which yesterday celebrated its 29th birthday. Since the beginning, students from the Weyland Public Schools seeking private lessons have been a substantial part of our enrollment, and we've felt very privileged to help them build sound technique and musicianship, to become strong contributors and leaders in our wonderful music. I'd like to speak about the importance of music in the school ensemble. So it's from that double perspective that I'd like to address today the administration's claim that a co-teacher model and more ensemble time makes up for losing 30 minutes in private instruction every week. This may sound reasonable to the uninformed, but I will be blunt. It doesn't. Those two things are not the same. You cannot have one without the other. Lessons are where you learn how to play your instrument. Ensembles are where you use those skills that you've learned so you can successfully play with others. It's like saying we can cut pure math instruction time because children will learn math from shopping. No, you learn math, and then you can use that math to be competent in interactions with others. I can tell you exactly what happens to students who don't get enough instructional time on the instrument because I've worked with many of them. They fall behind, they decide they're no good at this, and they quit. Sometimes their parents bring them to us for lessons before it's too late, but frankly, at that point, it's a struggle. By 5th or 6th grade, it takes us a much, much longer time to address the issues that have been left unaddressed and to help them to reach basic competency and confidence again so they can keep up with their more fortunate peers who've been having enough individual instruction all along. We will never give up on them, but we can't help being aware of how much harder it is than should be necessary. You might be surprised that one of my frustrations in the London Philharmonic is that one of my frustrations in the London Philharmonic is that one of my frustrations in the London Philharmonic is that I was so much time playing with others that I didn't have enough time to actually maintain my skills. That's a complaint of orchestra players everywhere. So again, these are not the same thing. So please, don't cheat our children of the private instructional time that they really need to become successful musicians and in becoming successful musicians, become better learners across all areas. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations as well. For the record, I'm Joshua Nussball and I live at 22 Wright Road. Can you just spell your last name for me? Nussball, N-U-S-P-L. That's it. Okay. Everyone spells with an E at the end or a U-I or something, I don't know. You spoke last time, right? I did speak last time. Yeah, and I didn't get it last time, so I figured I'd ask this time. Thank you. No, it's better than you ask. So like I mentioned, I'm Joshua. I am a graduate of the high school and the fine arts program. And again, I did speak at the last committee meeting regarding the pilot program. I would, once again, like to restate just how big a mistake you were making by implementing the pilot program, but also just in general, if the pilot program is considered successful. 75 minutes spent in the music program are perhaps the most 75 most effective minutes spent in the entire school day. Each minute is absolutely crucial to developing student skills on an instrument. And with like 40% of the time gone, the students will not be able to properly learn how to play their instruments. Again, this is not just me saying this, but this is the actual music teachers, the actual musicians in the room who have just spoken, who are saying this. It will destroy the music program if you go through and cut 40% of the time from the elementary schoolers. Okay. Over 500 people have said yes. Over 500 people have signed the pension to try and stop these cuts. Yet all of this has been ignored. I do understand that sometimes there's a need to make decisions that like everyone may not agree with. And while I personally do disagree strongly with the decision made, what is completely like not acceptable is the way the decision has been made and sort of how the community has not been listened to when making this decision. We've made our concerns very clear about the program. We've raised many doubts about the effectiveness of the pilot program and what a full cut across all elementary schools will do to the music program, all of which have been completely ignored. The district has not clearly shown that 30 minutes extra will significantly improve academic outcomes. The district hasn't even shown a consistent reason for why they are cutting music programs in the first place. And many of their arguments actually have data which disproves it, yet the districts completely ignore it. And additionally, implementing a new curriculum while initiating the pilot program, like a new ELA program, like discontinuing or implementing the pilot program, makes it impossible to determine whether the pilot program is actually responsible for a change in the outcomes of like the academics of the elementary schoolers. And this address, this concern has not been addressed. Additionally, if you cut this music program, there will not be a good music education, which is provided to all students. The only music education will be able to come from like private teachers and other sources which are dependent on the income sources or the actual knowledge of the parents. Like, for instance, my parents had no information about anything about music, and I would not have been able to become the musician I am today if not for the music program that they have here. So it's not just an income thing, but it's also a knowledge in music. So I ask that the community deserves better. And I ask that you, like, address these concerns that we have raised and that we've like brought to attention when making this decision. Thank you. Thank you.
Hi. I'm Madeline Donville. I live at 20 Marshall Terrace in Wayland. And I actually went through the Wayland music program myself. I bought a home in Wayland because of the quality of the schools. I have three children. I want them to have the best policy. I want them to have the best education. And part of that differentiator compared to surrounding towns is really the music program. Countless studies have shown that there is a very strong link between music and education, development, brain development, as Penny and Josh mentioned. Like, I don't need to go into that. But music really does drive the quality of our schools. We have an outstanding music program. We have outstanding test scores compared to other schools that is really driven by music, at least in my opinion. And I myself, have been the recipient of that. As Josh mentioned, there will be no way to actually measure this pilot performance because there is the compounding variable of the other curriculum launching at the same time. So I'm just curious how we're actually thinking about measuring that if we don't have a good way to really differentiate those two pieces. So staggering the launch of those would actually allow you to have a better perspective on what is and is not working. So I would recommend that at the very least to push this back so that you actually can measure those two different things separately. The last thing I'll mention, I work in the corporate world. My husband works in the corporate world, and AI disruption is just present across all industries, jobs, even learning, schools, kids, how they're growing up. Music is one of the few things that's not going to be disrupted by that. That will still allow their brains to develop, still allow them to learn. And I think it's really, really important that all children are given that opportunity, particularly through the schools. And so like there's countless studies that show that screen time, it's not good for children. And spending as much time learning that focus, learning that concentration through learning an instrument, I think is actually more important than it's ever been. And I think it actually will be one of the biggest differentiators between children, like growing up and learning and their ultimate academic success and leading to college and jobs. And so I think it's really more important than ever to prioritize that. And if that means that we have to like change the schedule and make sure there is enough time for the instruction, I think that's really important. That's my perspective. I'm just going to share it. Thank you for the time. Thank you.
Did anybody who came want to give a public comment after I? No. Okay. Just wanted to double check. All right. So no more public comment. Close public comment. Okay.
David, next up is a revisit of the proposed 26-27 district goals. Do we have an updated? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Sorry. I'm just trying to.
I don't think we did. Did we have updates? Updated version? Yeah. Yeah. And we really appreciated your feedback. So some of the changes you will see, they're color coded to indicate where we are. No. Just in the folder. 1C updated draft. That's it's a spreadsheet. Sorry. No. No. That's the meeting. That's the meeting. That's the topics. That's the topics. It's file 1A. It's 1A. Google doc. Not 1C. It's a doc. Got it. Thank you. So you'll see in there on the left side, we have a color coded system in terms of goals that are new and goals that are ongoing. Betsy, did you do that?
We worked on chat. Yes. In the spirit of our friend, Eva Thompson, who worked with color coded. Way to go. So, you know, I think there's a real mix because it really indicates, you know, we have too much green, too many new goals and how do they hit across various levels in the system. So we really found that feedback that you gave super helpful and will make this a permanent part of our goals. The other part we talked about in terms of broad themes is taking a look at measuring and assessment and kind of splitting those out. You'll see some italics at the end of each area of measurement there and what the specific, you know, and when we talk about that, you know, we want to talk about both quantitative in some cases, but of course, qualitative as well. So you'll see a mix of both qualitative and quantitative, you'll also see in terms of specifics. We. We spoke about, you know, had a good discussion about early elementary screen time. We also, if you look on that goal, we added middle school in terms of you had raised that issue, which is really, you know, a ripe issue for middle school students in terms of Chromebooks and how much time and what assignments and purpose that came up as well. So we, we added that part in the same section as elementary. As we think about the screens.
Okay. So I'm just aligning.
Why am I going to page six? Because that's where the technology. Oh, but I'm looking at something else. Hold on. Sorry. I'm looking at the. The. Portrait of a learner, like against the academic achievement goal. Yep.
And where you have the measurement tools. And then I'm looking at the proposed calendar for our meetings against that. And it looks like you have.
A finalization. So like, I'm going to go back to that. Of the portraits of a learner on June 9th of next year. And I'm just. How much I know there was community, how much more community feedback are we going to take on that? Um, before you think that that's in a final format, I guess I'm coming to us on June 9th of next year. Um, great question. I, I think, um, you know, we did get really good community input. Um, I know Kate, you were, um, one of the sessions last year, um, we'll be doing more work. Aaron internally around getting feedback and beginning to think about how to, how do we operate operationalize. We were actually just talking about that today with one of the principles, um, you know, one of our around balance. Okay. Balance and joy. And that was a theme that they were talking about as one of our, uh, virtues or dispositions. We haven't figured out what we're going to call it competencies. So, um, I think in more of the work will be internal Aaron around how to operationalize. Um, but we will be including, I think, as we think about meetings over the course of the year, building based meetings, I'm about to schedule some meetings in October and November. And certainly some of those meetings, we will discuss and, and, and kind of discuss the different virtues and get feedback and input from stakeholders that way. Um, when you say stakeholders, I heard mostly internal, but does that also mean community community meetings? Um, you can expect that from principals as well as our meetings that will be theme over the course of the year, um, to, to introduce that. And, you know, I talked about this opening day with the fact, um, that we're going to have a meeting with the faculty and staff around, you know, this is our kind of destination of where we, where we want to be and where we want all of us to be. Um, and we'll spend thinking about how we get there. Okay. Cause I, um, I feel like there should be sort of a midpoint check-in on that. That's maybe like a draft of what the portrait is. It's a draft of what the portraits look like, um, for feedback from the table. Um, and then I guess the way that I'm looking at that is this overall goal, right. Is finalizing the portraits by the end of this year so that next year will basically be like the, the integration and the operationalizing. So you're, you're finalizing the portraits. Yeah. In line with mapping it to curriculum, et cetera. Right. Exactly. And we have the curriculum mapping goal. Right. It was right next door. If you saw that. Right. And that's, but so I think where I'm a little bit torn is how much do we feel like those portraits are finalized now that are mapping that's being done is not going to be for not if there is maybe any tweaks at this point. It would be smaller tweaks. And I think as, as the different schools begin to sort of explore them and basically try them on, so to speak, if there are places that don't feel like they're matching or resonating well, I think, you know, and if we get that feedback from the community too, we probably make small tweaks. I don't envision a grand overhaul. It was a pretty comprehensive process, um, over many, many, many meetings. That's very nice. And that for the life of it, or you guys went to some of the meetings, but it kind of ended externally after a few meetings. And then you all met to continue to meet internally. Yes. And sorry, I just, I want to make sure we're aligning
external internal. This is a big picture item. That's going to drive a lot of decisions moving forward throughout. Yeah. The entire community. Can I, yeah. Can I also a couple, I just need to level set a little bit. So we talked about the virtues and I understand the virtues came out of the foundational work that was done last year, but I don't think those virtues other than here have been like broadcast to the community for a opportunity to like react to those as an output of the foundational work. So totally heard that there was a lot of effort and architecture and like. Yeah. Yeah. Getting that input. But there's also a lot of work that a smaller group of contributors do to take all of that information, distill it and make decisions about what stays and what maybe doesn't get factored in. If I'm hearing you correctly, I think before we get to final, you feel like there may be a need to like pressure test that with the broader community, or at least give people opportunity if people choose not to avail themselves of that, but like to get feedback on the virtue, piece. And then I had a clarifying question, which is some of this conversation around a portrait started now two years ago, partly around wanting the committee, wanting to understand where we were with our graduation requirements and how those compared with peer districts and frankly, where we thought higher ed was going to be needing exploration of not necessarily predominantly traditional liberal arts pathways, but are we thinking enough about students who might be pursuing. Yeah. More, you know, STEM or STEAM pursuits and our requirements were robust enough early on that if they decide that partway through, they can still do that. So I guess I don't understand how we go from the virtue work to like those more tactical, but I think the committee thinks really important elements of change that might achieve and how we sort of do operationalize or implement, if you will, the portrait. of a learner work. I don't, I think the idea was that it would actually be something we implemented and architected around and not just something that was aspirational or visionary. And the June date feels like there's not enough of a runway to launch for September from my perspective. Unless you're doing a lot of work this year before it's really finalized to prepare for that, what I imagine a real launch in September. Yeah. I mean, I think the way we look at the launch is that, um, you know, we don't want to just turn it into initiatives, but, you know, given the virtues, dispositions, what are some things that we could shift, you know, we're not talking about an overhaul, but what are things we can shift to address some of those competencies work that we're talking about. But I think this feedback is helpful for us in terms of over the course of the year, how do we engage our external community in some of our, um, meetings discussions as well. And we can do that. Yeah. Cause it'll be a new audience. Cause last year was kind of, we used focus groups across stakeholders, but I think we can think about how to, how to do that. Um, because you're right. Want to make it concrete and not just aspirational, but yet we need to. No, but I also think we should do a baseline assessment. I mean, if we've identified virtues and we get alignment on the virtues, then I guess the question is some of those virtues might not require overhaul. I don't want to use that word loosely, but like maybe others require more rigor. In order to get there. Like I want us to be honest with ourselves about where we are starting from, as we adopt this vision of a learner and that we're probably not going to adopt it. And it's magically going to map to current state. There's definitely. There was a piece of that at the last April super Wednesday at the high school where this was introduced, people kind of started addressing that. You know, how can we tweak address and where are we with it? So that would, that was a piece of, he said that it gave us a sense of people. It was really engaging discussion. And, and, um, that kind of gave us a model about where to go from here and some other places. So this is super helpful feedback. So we could actually put in a mid-year check-in as you're suggesting, and then think more about community engagement. As we begin to structure our meetings, we can talk about that. It's almost on Tuesday too. And I will say there's, um, there has been more, um, more guidance from the state around graduation requirements. Uh, in late June of last year, there's, um, a number of components of that that came up that they'll, you'll see a lot of them in the high schools, um, school improvement plan when they present that later in the year. Um, but for example, like the common, the common core, uh, will be the academic requirements, which is going to cause, um, us to need to make some shifts and to what, what are required courses. So rather than, um, so we'll need to increase some math and some science. Uh, around requirements. And again, most, most kids were hitting the common core anyway. Um, but others are going to need to, and we're going to also sort of see what implications does that have on our staffing needs and things like that. So we've already started, um, Alison, uh, there, there's a number of us that met, um, over the summer to begin looking at the sort of tasks, um, involved with us. It's a multi-year rollout that the state's going to have. So the first piece that will come on board are the. Common core, um, standards, and that will be required of our current eighth graders. The current eighth graders will need to meet these graduation requirements. And then others are going to roll out at a time. So for example, they're, um, proposing to eliminate MCAS and instead have these end of course assessments that are going to align with your sort of beginning of the year. Um, excuse me, beginning of high school, beginning of high school, but also align to different courses and that these assessments are supposed to be going to factor into grades as well as kind of overall graduation requirements. However, they will not be a single thing that then prevents a student from graduating. There's an AI literacy piece to it. There is a, um, a culminating career, and they calling it the work. Yeah. So, a, um, a robust sort of volunteer or work skills experience there is a an end of kind of graduation either a portfolio or a sort of capstone experience that might be had in a particular discipline there's a there's a lot of flexibility around this too and you know the state keeps saying this is not something or this is doing we're doing to you it's we're going to be doing it with you so they're engaging stakeholders as this process evolves but they have come up with kind of seven seven different components to graduation requirements that are you know financial literacy is another graduation requirement it's going to be included so more to come on that we're going to create a working group that's going to kind of meet throughout the year around the different points because tracking all of this is also going to be a a a large component because because you don't just like have to pass particular courses but you have to pass particular assessments aligned with those courses so it's and there's a lot of work to do you know as people are watching this saying wow end of course assessments I mean this is a major lift for the state Massachusetts is you know there's not a history of high school and of course assessments in New York State students started taking Regents exams the year civil civil war ended in 1867 65 that's when Regents started I wasn't teaching then and I was teaching a while ago and we we had Regents then as Kate knows we passed through Regents that's why you're here we have another but that so that you can see what how different this would be for Massachusetts and we didn't need time to kind of figure this out I guess I kind of see these as a little bit like they're parallel but I'm sort of seeing them as a little bit separate um where state requirements and then the port how's the well right like the portrait of a learner is also I I'm seeing it more as like not just graduation requirements but like personal achievements like your being as a student and and your virtues there's a mirror right there were just a person like you want to develop the whole person right so not just as a learner where I see like graduation requirements focusing a lot more on your academic achievement based on what I'm hearing so I think they go hand in hand but it may take us kind of revisiting some of the district like policy slash statements that exist and what the district is striving to create and what the district is striving to create so I also think that you want to make sure we're included in crafting that right there are some links because it's not you know academics but also there's the you know career readiness financial it's kind of a range of skills this is quite ambitious it's very ambitious and energizing I would say in many ways so okay I sort of took us on a bumpy road off of the goals but that's still still there I like cell phones yes oh yes I was just gonna say tech cell phone I did hear some anecdotal feedback that they were changing what they were doing at the middle school as a far as how they were handling inserting the phones and or device and locking them from last year's sort of very trusting method yes inspection if you will are unified let's all do this together so I really love the addition of the parentheticals in the measurement so I've just been scanning through and my only request is when we have our follow-ups on the goals for mid-year progress let's make sure that the measurement assessments are we circled back to that and we get the through line if something is decided as not not ready or something that you decided to use something instead you know help us stay consistent with what we approved and how we set out to measure it uh huh I'm looking at a question about your presentation of high school and then can you would you like to� our very last goal which is about our finances for FY 28 and given some of the conversations that we've had with select board last week and some of the conversations that are ongoing should we generalize that goal to say something like there's a structural need to assess the financial future of our just generalize a little bit I don't think the behavior needs to change but I think that the language in the green needs to change yeah we can do that
so one of the pieces of feedback that we got at the last meeting too was in conjunction with Spanish immersion and really thinking through how do we sort of maximize the impact of this program school-wide we had we had significant conversation around that and I certainly understand the desire to ensure that our kids are really progressing down those anticipated language proficiency goals and hitting all those pieces one of the struggles though that we we found in thinking about the middle school is you know when the kids come to middle school there are really four languages that are celebrated there and all of the signage all over the school is actually written in all four languages and not just Spanish so so there is a tension between sort of celebrating a particular program and I think there's a real focus on celebrating all four languages all four cultures at the middle school so I do think you know we need to keep a careful eye on those achievement goals and and the ways in which kids are being able to use that language and that is certainly at the forefront as we're thinking through what the high school trajectory looks like and the potential opportunities kids may have they connect with both travel and application of their language in different whether their internships you know it depends on the subjects in which they.. so I appreciate all yourblick. might go quite nicely with some of the requirements of the new graduation requirements, actually applying some of their language in different areas, different arenas, and exploring, as we mentioned, I think, before, the possibility with different universities to show around those pieces. So we did not sort of really pull out that particular strand. I hope that makes sense to folks. How many languages are in the language program at the high school? There are four as well. Four as well? Yeah. Typically, most languages, all the languages run at the high school. The novice level does not run every year in every language. Spanish always runs, and it's about half of our students that take Spanish in general. This year, there were enough novice students to take a French, have a French. We have a French novice class this year, but level one does not always, for the novice language, right off the bat, does not always run every year at the high school.
Anybody have any further comments? This is good progress, in my opinion. Agreed.
My only comment I would say is I want to thank you and all the stakeholders that come with this. It's ambitious, and I think we recognize that it's a lot. And I think, David, you've commented in the fact that when we think about improvements and advancements it's hard to not have the wish list grow and grow and grow but there's also just the reality of keeping the trains running day to day and meeting students where they are at any point in time and so there is a healthy tension between having very ambitious improvement goals but also wanting to just maintain the day-to-day and so thank you for not shying away from the ambitious thank you for your helpful feedback
i do think you have to add the school committee as people responsible for goal area number six operational absolutely yes we are happy to do that
i just assumed we were implied i don't disagree with you
i shared this with david earlier but i feel like there's a real depth to our goals now because they're building upon each other year over year and i love that you can see color-coded how they have been building upon each other you know i think our goal is previously were great but now you can see how they're growing and i think that's really encouraging so you know there's a lot of work behind that so thank you to everyone who's behind that how much uh i'm just looking at the note around school specific strategic actions are contingent upon the input of school councils um and i'm just thinking about the three separate elementary schools and i'm wondering if there's something we could do to try and align them in their efforts around their strategic action planning and their improvement plans they actually um worked on all theirs together so you'll see when you see their school specific they're very closely aligned across the board there are some um threads that are school specific for example there's school specific graphic planning i know there's a some school specific some preschool components at happy hollow but not at the other schools there's some spanish immersion components at loker that aren't at the other schools but otherwise they're pretty consistent across the schools the teams work together for example our summer retreat all together the elementary teams yeah and we've had several follow-up meetings around them as well so they will also as you know having served on several school councils through the years aaron that um school council will then sort of weigh in and then they you know urge a particular direction um but it might i doubt they're going to vary significantly based on that but you know time time will tell right because the council has to vote on the improvement plans yes and take kind of action around those so i'm just wondering if there's a better way for us to align those and like the actual school councils and and ensure that there's sort of like an equity in how that in every sense of the word and how these get prioritized i guess because i think certain schools may which makes sense like the spanish immersion it only lives at one school so that's the only one that can really prioritize it but aside from those types of things i think we should maybe try and i don't know how we would do that we could probably do it around pulse see with school councils we have to look at the statutes too around that
especially
who knows where we're going with our building plan but in the event that there's a merging of constituencies in the future it would be great to kind of have those all
nicely and i think our curriculum adoptions have also ensured that it's a more consistent experience in that regard too yeah that's been great over the past few years having you know a new reading a new writing i know that is across the board yeah you make it easier to align your goals when you're right right no when creating opportunities and i think this happened last summer too like it was very noticeable when the elementary improvement plans were presented that the building principles were very mutually aligned and supportive and so i think you've created space for that in the summer retreat which helps to continue to build an elementary administrative team feeling as opposed to what i think sometimes we intentionally or not sort of like organically leaned into building specific processes and approaches and so i think that we've really made a concerted effort in recent years to make that an elementary level vision and they're they're committed to that that comes across joining you the second week in november
together
yeah i'd be i haven't looked at the statute in a while the school councils are building based though not grade level based right so there isn't yeah so there isn't a natural way to achieve necessarily what you're thinking of which is more but i'm wondering if we could do something provide some opportunities i wonder if there's a particular school council that feels strongly about something if that principal then shares that with the other teams do they get on board collectively with in a particular direction or do they sort of say well you know maybe that's a goal for next year but because we're aligned around this you know and they can have those conversations as well
i i think that that's kind of
in i don't know maybe the past seven years kind of been a missed opportunity for community voice i think people don't recognize throughout the community that that's really like available and that they're supposed to be people from um parents community members at large staff and it is a way to get other voices aside from administration and school committee and pto involved um and so i know they're always looking to fill those seats um anyway and i imagine in the principles right letters coming up looking for folks usually september's right because they do have to be voted in the members um but it's easy and it's not like you know i shouldn't say it's easy but it's not a huge lift they probably don't meet before school with the elementary anymore because they start so early but i used to enjoy einstein's bagels and cream cheese from jimmy back in the day um so anyway that would be my plug for student for school councils as well it's really i think a missed opportunity for the community to to have a voice um and And I do think that the principals try to involve them as much as possible in driving consensus. And anyway. OK. Anything else before we would potentially entertain a vote on the goals?
I did notice it's a draft and not a drafty draft. No drafty draft. It's one step closer to the final. One why way from the vote.
Did I miss anyone? Why, I was going to say, would you like a motion? I make a motion to approve the draft Wayland Public Schools District Goals and Improvement Plan for the 2026-2027 academic year. Do we have a second? Second. Second. OK. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? None. So, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. And those will get posted on the district website once the draft is removed. And the language from that last? Yeah, a couple of little minor. Yeah. OK, great. Will you share those out in the newsletter, too? Sure. Yeah. OK.
Great. So are we prepared to, well, I guess with respect to the district handbook, an employee handbook, didn't we ask for a red line? Am I? I thought we did. From? I think we wanted to know what the specific changes were from previous. Which is, in essence, a red line. Yeah. Did we get that? Because I didn't think we. I thought you asked for us to let you know when it was done. I'm sorry. That's OK. I thought we did talk about a red line. Are we done? Yeah. I'm not sure how to do that. No. There's a lot going on. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What? What's going on? I can connect with Jen and ask her if she can create that for us, just so we can kind of. Because you don't need it. It's been shared. If there's updates that we discuss around the table, it'll just get made on the fly and shared again. So OK. Did anybody have any comments on that while we're on the topic? Otherwise, I can ask Jen if she can. can run that sorry just a red line version is like like a compare yes trap before yeah you can do that retroactively yeah you run it as a compare yeah you can do it's like a black line maybe on the Google I think she can do the revisions yeah okay but I don't know because we made a copy of it worst-case scenario I can run it myself okay so if I need to probably just put last year's and next year's oh she can do that okay okay all right so Jen do you want to ask her do you want me to ask her I'm fine with doing whatever I can I can ask okay and then if she can just email it to us so we can definitely have it it Oh any questions or comments any questions or comments questions by the 23rd yes
I know one of the things that she's really been working on with the elementary principals actually is that aligning the format and the content across the elementary school which is super helpful I think Okay, Diane, can you just flag, thank you, can you just flag it as like follow-up? Yeah. Thank you. Make sure it's on there for the 23. Okay. Okay.
Discussion of the proposed meeting topics for 26-27. Oh, sorry. Can we, I had one broader question on the handbooks before. I just, this might be, it may be a stupid question, but I just, I wanted to make sure without doing it a side-by-side myself, that all of the policies and the appendices of the student and family handbook are literally verbatim taken from our policies because I just, now they're sort of linked and posted. They're in multiple places, and I didn't know if we needed to worry about the consistency. So there's social media in here, there's weapons, like there's things in here, and there's cameras in here, and we've, have all of those policies, and so I just was. They're pulled right. They're pulled direct from, okay, thank you. Yes, and we went through and updated anything that was updated since last year, and did that. So if it's not right, we're coming after you. I asked on the record. We'll fix it. Got it. If we missed one, but I think we've got them all. Okay.
We actually spent a long time debating whether we should put the text in or just do all the links, but we figured people would get lost in the linking and like wouldn't get back to the source, and it was a big debate. I similarly have been debating, do we do it as appendices? Are they supposed to be embedded? Is it always consistent in the employee in here? And so it's good to know, you know, reasonable minds can.
Betsy. Oh, sorry. Are we good? Yeah, so I just wanted to clarify. We're going to bring it back with the. On 9-23. Perfect. Yes. And Betsy's going to take it up with Jen, and they're going to get circulated prior to our 9-23, so we have enough time to review. Okay. Formulate any questions, comments, etc.
Okay. So 26-27 proposed SC meeting topics related to superintendents area of the agendas. Yes. Okay.
T. Gavron. I have. I have. I have. I have. I have. I have. question for you. Jay and Coach P are coming for 9-23 as of right now to do Metro West Health survey data presentation. Was that when we talked about doing the updated wellness policy or... no. Because do we have a wellness committee meeting in between there? Before them? I don't think we do, right? I think we're just going to do the data at this time. We could have them come back. Okay, I just want to make sure we do that because there was a lot of work on that. Yeah, the tobacco. Yeah, the nicotine, tobacco, yes. I think we needed one more committee meeting. before we were ready to bring it to this group. Okay, is that what, okay. So I will reach out, unless you're going to talk to them or see them like in the next couple days, I can just reach out to Scott, send him a note about getting that on the calendar because I don't think we put it on the calendar even at our last one. All right. Are we going to make that, finish those recommendations then that would then go to the staff? Policy subcommittee and then go to the committee? I think the idea was to skip the, candidly, decrease the work on them because really it would kind of be just like bringing it to us in the format that I think the wellness committee can give it to the committee in, get it on for a review and a vote. I think it makes sense. I don't think it's something that like these guys need to review offline and then bring to us with, so and then just get it voted on and then move forward. Sounds good. Okay. Um, so that needs a meeting and follow up with SC on policy revisions, and that's nicotine, tobacco, and wellness.
Okay. You guys don't have to wait for me to stop if you have questions on this or thoughts or comments or. So what we try, just very brief background, what we tried to do is think about our goals for the year and think about the timing and work on the goals. And you can see we also. Okay. We also put some time in for learning in terms of school committee work and learning. Um, we took two, two meeting dates. Um, you can see a lot of time with both the elementary and secondary principals. Um, and some of the other ongoing goals, obviously shift every year, student services is pretty much standard. You've been doing April has been the, has been the time. Um, and we also, um, you know, connected to our Metro West. We thought it would be helpful to talk about mental health in, in the district. Um, cause we think you'll have follow up questions from Metro West and to have a team, folks on our counseling team join us to talk about some of the work and some of the training. We've been doing as well around, around C-STAT. So that would be something we think is important to do. Jessica, that's your, your background. My area, yeah. So we'll be ready for that. Um, do you think that we need additional facilities planning coverage? Probably prior to February? Yes, we will go back. And I do think that's helpful, Erin, cause we'll probably need more facilities planning than just one. I think there are probably a few meetings that we'll need to, uh, I mean, we can slot it in and not have it be the main focus, but I think that we're going to need to have some more coverage of that. Um, historically we've had a meeting. Yes. With the district's MCAS results as well. I'm not seeing that. I don't know whether we want to talk about whether that should be augmented with other academic achievement measurements in the wake of removing the 10th grade. Like, I don't think that that necessarily is the sole or be all end all, but I didn't see that in here. And I think we'd still want to keep an eye on our K through eight. Right. So what we decided to do, uh, Betsy, in our second meeting in November, we thought in addition to MCAS, we would show other assessments as well. Oh, there it is. Okay. So we're doing goals and MCAS. Exactly. Some other formative assessments that we would do in addition to MCAS, just kind of to make it, to make it. So that says how we use data, but is the idea also to present actual results to the committee on academic. Exactly. Okay. No, no, no, that's okay. I was like, I understood. It seemed more of like, these are what these are and how we use them as opposed to this is how our students are performing. Kind of a combination. Okay. And I know we wanted to revisit the device conversation, um, in the fall. So we would do that when. I thought we would do it when our principals. Principals are here for middle school and high school. Join us as part of a broader discussion. I thought that would be a good time. As part of the goals discussions? Yes. That will be on their list. They're going to talk about a broad list of goals and under their SEO, that will go, we'll be prepared to talk about that. On this December 2nd meeting, you have in here a placeholder to talk about the new high school grad requirements. We talked about adding a mid-year portrait connect. I don't know if that will align timing wise, but it might not be a bad time to do those all in one. I just popped it into the January meeting with the budget, but I can move it to the, um, the first meeting. Let's see where we are- Yeah, I mean, see where you are process wise.
am i remembering correctly the facility the msba will be due in early april okay so that's why you're thinking we might need more than one okay i'm just looking at that february 24 okay and we think our budget dates are on target based on the impact of last year yeah i think we're just gonna have to i think they look solid we'll just have to see what happens as we get closer um because before that we're gonna have to basically have our number but it won't be detailed to them which not a lot of sense i thought a lot of surprises there but we're all gonna want it before then it's basically gonna come there's gonna be another meeting that's gonna end up i would guess between our 11-4 meeting in our 12-2 meeting that's going to end up being a joint meeting with the select board and the finance around budget it's my guess just everything study FYI for people's schedule slippery slope we may need to also I feel like we may need to end up adding one in October because one we have flagged as a retreat but we may end up needing another actual meeting so I flagged that as well as a 1.5 for you October and I don't know about December that's gonna be a tough time if we needed to add another one but just flagging if we need to move budget issues earlier to have to add in November into summer right I think we have some time because all we have a secondary schools I the December 2nd so we would probably had another topic or two and so there is opportunity and some of these meetings to add a second or third topic but we just don't want to add some eight topics and meetings that they just going to do well Wednesday night tonight's an exception with a football game typically got just one Wednesday night football so it's very fascinating season did notice he didn't even schedule anything in march i did a little light here he's not even planning on showing up um okay so all right anybody have any i mean i feel like it's not anything we need to vote but just and we'll update it as you know feel free we'll talk about agendas but we thought it'd be helpful to give you a broad overview it's a healthy calendar yes it's a lot it's good thank you okay uh all right so last time um we revisited the ask around um evaluating the 26 27 scheduling pilot that was taking place um so we were going to talk about that tonight yeah i'll just do a brief intro before it goes to betsy um last week the week before loker fourth and fifth grade families received a communication regarding this topic in terms of assessment evaluation of the scheduling pilot so betsy will kind of highlight what was in what was in that communication and more thoughts so that that was uh before school started go ahead can we take one step back because i think and rightly so i understand there's been a lot of focus on the music shift that's being piloted at loker um but there are other changes that we've we've implemented with the elementary schedule that is impacting other schools right um we we shifted how we were scheduling things overall there were this is not the only change so no we just speak to that a little bit sure sure we had a um a group that met year long uh where we had a number of i think 10 different meetings over the course of the year um sort of looking at looking at uh best practices and scheduling hearing from some other schools and the ways in which they scheduled looking at the um the challenges sort of in general where the rub points were for teachers for specialists for um special educators kind of looking at lots of different folks perspective that it was a group of um lots of people that that that worked in different areas but also specialists um special educators classroom teachers administrators were all part of that uh we surveyed surveyed teachers as well and brought that information then back to to the group um and came up with a series of recommendations um really thinking about the ways in which we schedule and the ways in which we tried to um particularly with our new curriculum think about cohesive blocks of instructional time um to allow us to sort of maximize you know minimize transitions to and from places but also maximize time on learning through those so the way in which they sort of started scheduling and the formats that you're using are different this year um we're looking at making another change next year to get some more um core class instructional minutes and combining some specials um so we had talked about could we do this this year and we decided to wait until next year in the summer so i think this is a good time to start spending some more time on our um our students of color and because the the team is working together for example the library and technology teams are are working together to um offer offer their their sort of combined the content that they cover and kind of whether they co-teach it or streamline which many other districts do so they'll visit some other schools that do that this year and be working on that on our And we talked about moving band, chorus, and orchestra into that time block, too, which would mean that chorus was not after school. So that will be another place in which minutes are shifted for next year. The ways in which we are scheduling our intervention is, too, we've sort of aligned and came up with some structures to do that across the board and where they're coming from within the CKLA block. And we're also scheduling grades to have as similar as possible schedules to really sort of maximize intervention times for special education as well as just tier two general ed instruction. So I think there's a number of things that we're doing to try to improve the scheduling because it's not a super, super, super long day. So that's just some background. And we did make some strides with the teachers and the new contract around restructuring of PD planning time. Right. So PLCs that used to take place during the school day or a big chunk of them took place during the school day are now going to be happening after school on Wednesdays. So we're trying to move as much of our meeting times outside the instructional day. Okay. As well. So those were big areas we're looking to, again, recoup some instructional minutes for those pieces. Okay. Thanks. Am I remembering correctly, one of the takeaways from the scheduling committee group was that not having more consistent blocks was creating variegated transition time and that there was a conclusion that there was a lot of this sort of transition time that ultimately when you added it up over the course of the day was really disruptive to kids' ability to shift tasks, reengage, and that our hope and expectation is that we would be able to get more quality instructional time if we had more dedicated blocks and sort of anticipated and that each of the kids' days were not feeling less consistent or routine, that we were trying to increase that sense of structure. Yes. Less fragmented, for sure. Okay. So that would... Okay. So that is one of the things that Brian wrote about, we'll be looking at schedule consistency and flexibility around, if you have one fewer component that you're trying to schedule across multiple grades, it makes for a less fragmented schedule in that regard. So they'll be looking closely at that. Curriculum coverage was another area around the depth of instruction and what's going on during those times. Particularly in science and social studies, are they able to get through more content than they have been in previous years or in comparison to other schools? And I do, as I pointed out, it's really complex to assess all those pieces with multiple variables changing simultaneously. So I just want to acknowledge that piece as well. And instrumental skill development will be another component. And is there... You know, is there attrition that looks different than other years across our music program? So Brian will also conduct some focus groups with classroom teachers, with music teachers, and really think about and hear back the feedback from teachers, how the change has impacted their instruction and what they've seen with students. He will be, you know, in classrooms a lot, sort of observing what looks the same, what looks different from previous years. So it's a combination, I would say, of qualitative and quantitative measures. This is purely anecdotal and I shared it with David, but my local fifth grader came home yesterday and said, you're never going to believe this, mom, but they completely changed the schedule and we do things for longer now and we're not running around. And I said, huh, it's wild, like, how do you like it? And she's like, it's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's amazing because it's not stressful. And last year we felt like we were always never having enough time to do anything and now we get to do things for a long period of time and it's great and it's so relaxing. So I don't know if the teacher communicated that to them that this was a new change, but it made an impact on just the feeling that she has in her. The experience, the feeling. Yeah. They were seeing things happening, which I think is meaningful if they can dive into the curriculum, it's great. It may be helpful to share something out with the entire community around overall adjustments that we've made in an effort to streamline and find as many efficiencies as possible. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a really important thing to do is to maximize student instructional time, um, because it's not just one thing that we're changing. It's multiple areas. Um, and maybe sharing out in some form of digestible. material best practices that you picked up on from the presentation that the working group had around elementary scheduling do you guys feel like I don't want to make you do it if it would be a waste of time but do you feel like that would be helpful I do I mean I also obviously this has been a topic that people feel strongly about and have a lot of opinions about and I think that transparency has been helpful and I think you've done a great job we've now talked about the scheduling challenges and some of the solutions numerous times I think it also is an unavoidable reality in public education that correct me if I'm wrong every year you're changing multiple things at once because either you're dealing with policy mandates or you're dealing with new curriculum or you're dealing with new a different mix of new teachers or not your training your PD research is coming out so while in an ideal world we would be able to change one thing and study that and then compare it I think that that is not a luxury that we often have in public education and also if we think that there is something that needs improvement and the data that came out of the scheduling working group was very persuasive and I would encourage encourage people to watch that meeting and that slot and the slides that were presented around the takeaways from that and it was quite compelling as to the finite limits of what we can do our school day is contracted it is finite we certainly have very good partners that we talk about in terms of what we can do to find creative solutions and how to get it all in but we are dealing with fixed variables and I think rarely do we have a year where you are not changing multiple things either by necessity or by design and I think it might be helpful also to just acknowledge you've developed skills to be able to measure these things and that it is it is possible to glean both successes and continued opportunities for change and so I also think if we're going to revisit or share that information the one thing that I think hasn't been said as clearly as it should is that every student is still receiving a music special there there is no cut to music such that they may have heard a lot about the importance of music and academics I personally agree I think the committee recognized that every elementary student is still receiving music instruction and every elementary school still has opportunity for instrumental instruction as well and so to the extent there's been any confusion about that I just think it is important to reiterate that and I don't think that um um Brian's last communication made that clear and I just want to make sure that families new to the district are not concerned that we used to have music instruction for all students and somehow now we don't
I um I just want to say I appreciate kind of the the breadth and the balance of thinking about some you know concrete measurable items and then looking at you know what Community feedback is but I think for me I would feel more comfortable if we had or if I had a more finite understanding of the rubric right of like what percent change increased decrease what have you is going to be used as a measure for moving forward if the pilot is going to be expanded and I feel like in in the air of like transparency I think that that's only fair also to the families to know specifically like what we are trying to look at I know that this is still very new and I know I came in this role very late in this process after you know you had already been looking at the scheduling and all of these variables but I do think that when you can't provide control the you know we need that transparency because I want I don't want to be sitting here in April or May and then hear that we're moving forward without the actual way of showing the measurements have been met or not or we're not moving forward because they haven't been met so I just wanted to say that I think it would be helpful if in the coming months we could see you know those specific items that we're we're looking at
okay is there the intent to have
have to come back and the team would need to follow up and have further conversation with Brian Well, also, don't you have the control? Because you're only doing it at one school. The other two schools, you're not doing it. So, like, don't you have that, like, comparator? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I meant control, like, control around, like, I think what we're hearing from our community is that while I believe school council members were a part of this process, or at least that's, I think, what was shared with us in the spring meetings, right? Like, I think that there were a lot of community members who weren't necessarily feeling like they were part of the process until, you know, decisions were being communicated. So I'm just saying, like, if the pilot looks successful to these measures and it's going to then be replicated with, you know, the other two schools are going to be wrapped into the same, the same... You know, scheduling for consistency, I think that there's going to be a lot more families in the district who are feeling like they don't have the control and part of it. So I think, you know, the more we can be transparent and measured and showing, like, these were the metrics and these were the considerations.
Again, I'm not... I don't know which way it's going to land at the end of the year, right? But either way, I think we need to be able to have a finite way, at least, of showing. Some of these items.
I mean, quality. Quality. I know quality is hard, right? But the curriculum coverage, right? Like, we will know comparative times because we'll have control, you know, we'll have control against other schools, against the other schools. And instrumental skill development, we will have comparison. But I understand. I understand, right? Like, the qualitative things, we're not going to be able to show, necessarily.
Well, I mean, I think student voice might be important, too. You know, I think that that's... Not just instrumental students. Right. But other students. We have a control group within LOCR. We've always had a control group within LOCR because not every LOCR student takes instruments. So we have students who will be positively impacted by... by the curriculum without, you know, they're our control group. And then you add the instruments on top of that and that's something else to look at. But we have to listen to all of the voices because it's not just one impacted group. There's another group that's been impacted for a long time who might not necessarily feel comfortable coming to this table and disclosing their student's situation. That's a much harder conversation for families to have. And it also involves disclosure of their child. So I think we need to be really sensitive when we're talking about this that we're not just talking about one impacted body of students. There's another quieter but equally impacted body. I think that... And I, like, yeah, I think similarly, like, the more we can be... I don't want to over... I don't want to provide too much information, right? But I think that the more we can be transparent or at least...
... Balanced in presenting, you know, presenting that there are multiple bodies of students, you know, I think... It just allows, I think, for folks to have a greater picture or understanding of the challenges that were being considered. I think Brian's email to the actual impacted families really did a good job of that because he really did discuss... how this weighs on everybody. It was not an easy decision. People were impacted either way. I really appreciated how in-depth he went into his decision because it made it, I think, to me, very clear. I think, Jessica, I mean, teacher observation, you know, teachers have seen whole classes of students in terms of both, you know, in various subjects and musically. I mean, that's really important as well, our educator input, which is what we use for a lot of our... of our decision-making, and they'll have diverse views as they do on many topics, and that's what we should encourage.
Yeah, I think... I'm not... I just want to say, you know, I think what I'm just trying to share is, like, when you don't have control, like, bringing from, like, trauma-informed perspectives, right? Like, when you don't have control of decisions, the more transparent folks can be with the process, right? Like, the better it is off. For folks who are feeling impacted in some kind of way, whichever way the decision goes. So I think, for me, it's just, you know, recognizing that there's going to be folks who are watching today, or there's going to be folks whose children are in third grade who are going to be, you know, entering, you know, entering into, you know, potentially their, you know, their music education and, you know, wanting to know some of this history or wanting to know who are not involved right now in the conversation. And so being able to say, like, here's the four metrics, you know, with the curriculum coverage, we feel success would be if 10% more curriculum was, you know, I'm not... I don't know how... I don't know what is reasonable for significant change, but I think it would be helpful on the quantitative items to be able to know what that increase or deficit is that's being measured moving forward.
I think just to kind of... I hear everyone's. Like, I appreciate everyone's discussion around the table. I think on the flip side of that, too, there's people who don't have their child necessarily in an instrument in fourth or fifth grade or third grade that have no idea what their child who's not in an instrument is doing during those blocks where other members of the class are being pulled out for a lesson. And they may not realize that because it's not something that's focused on. It's just, oh, you know, my kid's not interested in doing an instrument or whatever. And so they may not even understand how that time is being... how that 30 minutes was being spent for their child. Not going to an instrument.
You know, so I think that's also something that may be helpful to share with the broader community to understand how maybe it worked before and what the pilot, although I think it's still going through some evolutions on exactly what it's going to look like or what it is looking like this year, um, I mean, maybe it's going to be something that's going to be that may help to flesh out for those that are, um, just seeing it as a loss of music, um, to show what the change is for those in instruments and those not. Um, because I do hear your point, Betsy, and I think some people are just seeing music as gone and that's... that's not the case. Um, I totally understand where the decrease in the instrumental is really impactful and very hard and I don't think anyone wants to see that around this table or in the community. Um, so I do... I think that that would be helpful too. I just think a kind of holistic communication, around it to clarify for the greater good and community would be helpful. Um, because impacted families that are seeing change to what the instrumental music looked like for an older child at Locher for this year, um, is not the same as everyone understanding how this is impacting the elementary kids. So I think that that could be a really helpful piece of communication to circulate. Um, I certainly appreciate not everyone has the time to come and sit here. Not everyone has the time to find us on YouTube or Wacom or whatever and listen to all of this. I talk a lot. People don't want to listen to me. Get it. Um, so maybe sharing that out would be another, you know, um, and even giving a link, to the presentation that you gave, which has some really, um, you know, summaries of the teacher feedback, et cetera. It's a great body of information for people to, um, understand. And that being said, we're never going to make everybody happy. Um, there's, you know, there's not a hundred percent winners in this. So I just, um, that's my kind of two cents on it for the moment. Okay. The moment, but I think that would be really helpful and I agree. I think having some real kind of, even if it's sort of fluid or sort of like, this is where we see sort of a benchmark, something would be great.
Um, also it's an evolution, right? This is an evolution of a pilot and we have neighboring peer districts who also operate a private pay instrumental program in other ways. Right? So this is an evolution of being creative and figuring out how we can do that in a more equitable way.
I also, I don't want to write the communication. For you, but I also think that there's one other piece of information that was a little bit misleading that I heard, saw, um, in that this was a budget decision. It's not what this was. This was not driven by budget. Um, so I think that would also, even if it's just me saying that now, I don't know, but this wasn't a, a, a budget driven decision, at least to the best of mine, knowledge of all of this. Um, so, um, okay. Do we want to take, since we're on the topic, do we want to take, um, item?
It's the next item. So it's not even out of order. Look at that. I planned perfectly. Um, we're out of time. Keep your hands up. Thank you. Diane discussion regarding potential reduction of fourth and fifth grade music fees for local students during the 2627 school year and possible vote to approve a revised fee. I know there was discussion of this originally when the pilot was discussed in June, May and June. Um, I think we thought we would revisit it when there was more of an understanding of exactly how it was going to shake out for students. Um, I, I, uh, I, students, do you have a recommendation? I know in the, it was talked about going from 150 to 90 for low-care fourth and fifth grade for this year. Is that the recommendation? Is there a different recommendation based on how it's sort of panning out with the actual I think that was the number, right? 90, right? Yep. I'm looking at Kirstine for the math. I did not understand. Yes, I think it's 90 prorated, which is what we do. And I mean, that seems to make the most logical sense. So can you just give me a refresh? Because I haven't talked about the instrumental fees. I'm not sure if ever, which if I'm wrong, don't. Quote me, but since I joined the committee or adjusting them, what does that fee go toward? Like, what are we telling parents? It's not the instrument, right? No, it assists with the teaching salary for those lessons. So it's just an offset for, okay. So what you did, 150 is the annual divided by 75 minutes and then? And then you prorated it for the 45 minutes for the pilot.
Thank you, Ronnie. That's great. I'd already done it. Give me something to get out.
Does that still seem solid? Have you talked to Brian about it or?
I mean, I think that seems, I mean, I think for the last time it seems reasonable. It makes sense. I mean, it makes sense to me. I just, I'm not sure. No, I think it's fair to families. I think the question is financially. Right. Does that, if it was offsetting staffing costs, are we still fine? Yes. Okay. . Okay. Being responsible for that fiscal. Number one. I'm sure it's a drop in the bucket for how the feelings of all of this, however, I, from my standpoint, I would say that it's not so bad. standpoint that feels right, given what we're doing with the pilot. Does anyone have any different feelings on that? No. Would it need to be reimbursed back to those families? They've already paid it, right? I don't remember. No, I have two. I have two enrolled. We've already paid it. Okay. Okay. So is that, I guess I'm thinking that would be a logistical piece that would have to be taken on. Would there be appetite for doing like a credit toward something? I don't know. Or at least the option if families wanted to do that. I'm just. I'm going to have to deal with that. Before in past lives, like credits when this happens. You know, if it's a fourth grader, can you take a credit against your fifth grade? If they don't, can you, you know, does that. So do we want to maybe take a vote that. We have to be careful on cross funding. Okay. So I think it really just needs to stay either. I meant like a room. That's what I meant. Like, or, or we refund families. Right. So how do we, if it's, if you're crediting it, it can be applied to next academic year. Like we don't have to be applying the funds to a program, this budget cycle. I think that's going to be over complicating where the, the tracking of this is for such a small, you know, group. Yeah. I think the easiest way is to go through the, uh, advisor who did the collections and reach out to families and we can identify, would you like to, um, leave the, that original amount in the program as intended, or would you like a refund? I guess that we have to process, we, we need the family's information check has to be cut, you know, and it would not be, that would be several weeks out. Um, in order to, are we talking like 80 kids? How many families? Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Does that make sense to everybody? Guys, I feel like I'm driving the ship here all alone. Yes. We're good. I think it's fair. Okay. Do we want to take a vote? I want to entertain a motion. Do we have to, do we have to first vote on the rate and then vote on the, I think it's just on the process or can we do it all? Just on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a reduction in the rate for these families and to permit the district to implement the refund or whatever it may be. Should families elect? Right. However, okay, I'd ask Betsy to do it, since she's, since she's already made part of it. Yeah, I, um, I will move to approve the reduction in the music registration. fee for loker families enrolled in instrumental music for the 26-27 school year from $150 annual fee to $90 and to authorize the director of finance and operations through her designee to contact families and give them the option to receive a refund for any overpayment or alternatively to contribute the full $150 or the extra $60 to the music program in the wayland public schools do you need to specify that it's the fourth and fifth grade no it's third two for strings isn't it it's only fourth and fifth that are getting my fourth and fifth that change uh you can just add okay for the fourth and fifth grade for the fourth and fifth grade do we have a second second uh all in favor aye any opposed no okay so can you just give us um plan for an update on that maybe uh kirsten in the next like couple yeah i'm thinking like couple meetings so two meetings i just want to know that it got communicated and then and maybe that's something that goes through the board of trustees and the communication that you're going to send out or brian's going to share or
it's one of those times that we have periodically and i don't want to derail us but like where we feel like there's potentially opportunities where we could have given to people to say if you would elect to contribute those funds to help do something else like i know we've talked about that a little but it's another one where i'm like i would have loved to be able to say if instead you'd like that money to go towards scholarships for students who can or whatever i know it's hard but anyway i think you did it by saying they could leave it in the fund fair enough and that way in the event that like you can pay for two you can you know that those options mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm okay mm-hmm okay did you have a mm-hmm mm-hmm nevermind sorry
um mm-hmm policy you so mm-hmm just gonna add that mm-hmm that asp would that speak okay About the Protect Act that was recommended by MASC. David, Betsy, do you want to just talk about what this is or talking about the Protect Act? Oh, yes. The Protect Act, which was passed when? Like June, but then they were told we had to do it September 1st. Exactly. That was the context. It was literally passed. I think it was passed, and then I think Desi was working on that language. Yeah, and the guidelines were given to us just a couple of weeks ago, right, Betsy? Yeah. It's about procedures for interacting with civil law enforcement, and we were given a very tight timeframe in terms of policies. This is not typically how we do our policy work, for those of you who are new, but this is certainly an important topic and something we need to follow and have an official policy. There's a draft policy, but then every district has to think about their individual context. What else do you want to add to that? Anything else? I think that the Policy Subcommittee has taken a look at the policy, and we've looked at the sample procedures and have tweaked them to match our context, and our hope is to share them in our first quarterly Safety Committee meeting, which is on Monday, which involves principles. Many of us at the district have said, well, we're not going to do that. Many of us at the table, as well as our fire partners, police partners, nurse leaders, it's a large group, and we have lots of different areas of safety, from cybersecurity to fire safety to police work to the facilities pieces as well. So we will go over this with them then, and we're awaiting some model training that's coming out as well that aligns with it. Policy language is very straightforward. We reviewed it. It's just, what do you do if law enforcement shows up at a school? We had talked about this last year, that you already have protocol for who is in charge of each school, and then who do they contact, and what do you do? So we didn't really have, you know, speaking for myself, I didn't really have any questions about the bones of it. It seems very straightforward. My question was, do we need people to look at this probability? Probably not, but, and do you have the protocol, which you do, so. Yes. I guess I have one, I don't know if it's for this group or not, but one of the things in the procedures is that all of the, like, principal cell phones around here, it also says that this is going to go on our website. I wonder if we post it without the cell phones. I think so. Yeah, I don't, that would just go to the people within. Yeah. So. Redacted version, I guess, would be on each. Yeah. It does require that, though, that we post this. We did have a, I think we did have a question, and we might have been getting into the weeds of, do we then have to update any other emergency response plans, or do we have to link, do we just have to link to this? Because it seemed like this, the guidance document that we reviewed talked about integration with emergency, other emergency response policies. Yeah. You know, there could be aspects of this that trigger one of our other policies. So I think as long as they're linked and connected, and the whole team understands where those overlaps are, that will be in okay shape. And Jessica and I, in our next policy subcommittee meeting, can look at these cross-references for us, just to make sure that all of those policies are accurate, current, and up-to-date. I assume they are, because we're going to have to update them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I assume they are, because there are emergency plans. But we will, we can do that in the next meeting. Just a minute. And I think just the other question we had was, is this the type of policy update that we should be building into communication to district families? Just to know that... Hey, this law was passed and we want you to know here's where you can find the policies on it in general. Right? components civil procedure can't yeah okay no i think and we certainly did that when we updated our anti-bias policies you know communicate i think the families just to be comforted to know that we're thinking of the range of issues particularly in this climate yes we thought it would be better coming in your communication versus a principal's communication do that district okay two things one should we remove the reference to executive director we have a district superintendent it's only going to be the superintendent can we delete the reference to executive director like the third paragraph there's a few of them yeah i think it's it's um number one or i yeah so it's paragraph three and then are you are you looking at the i'm looking at the queen v2 in 3a in the folder could you give us editor access to that um v2 if you i was gonna say i'll just do it not yet but i can just
but it's so it's paragraph three yep one
um four
i just give you editing
i'm gonna refresh i'll just do it i'm gonna do it as a red line i don't have edit access yet
i did all right unless i can't somebody else is gonna have to give it i think it's the owner of this one and i don't think she can do it from her computer oh are you connected
mask draft not the one that you emailed us
that one that's what i'm looking at the 3a i didn't go into it that way i just sent it for an email oh i'm this would be going to diane okay so i don't think we're talking about like from em ils maybe I'm in a different document I don't know I don't see you in these documents yeah I don't either all right anyway I would suggest that we make that um adjustment and then my next question is we have some pretty strict protocols around contacting the school district attorney so I just want to make sure that like we're not free willy-nilly enabling people to contract this contact the attorney for the district which is item number three so while it says it has to have that I want to make sure that what is in the procedures does not go ahead and contact the teachers well that's what we don't have the procedures right so yeah we have you have them we just yeah and the procedures say basically if if somebody's showing up with a warrant you we're gonna get in touch with the our attorney to review that okay who who is going to get in touch with you yeah I don't think our current as long as it's David yeah I don't like I'm all building administrators yeah no no no that's what yeah like no okay those are my questions if we can make those changes but the procedures were we created by you guys specifically like they're whaling specific off a model right there was a model okay procedures that desi issued to us produced okay I've shared back with policy which we don't need to and we'll get feedback from the safety team on Monday this is a question I should know the answer to but in the along the lines of removing the reference to the executive director do we have a school resource officer memorandum of understanding we do we do okay see I should know the answer to this just met yesterday as a matter of fact I am appropriately chagrined but I'm not afraid to ask the question got updated for this we met a different topic what what is it getting updated procedures actually is procedures so you're gonna share that with the committee for review correct absolutely it was I'm thinking I'm writing yes absolutely you know there may be members that have strong feelings David hates when I ask those questions any other questions this is an interesting one do we know like does this get posted it's not like we do a 30-day you like no I don't this is one of the ones that like I think we need to review that the like policy that we have on that yeah so that we yes yeah yeah I think we should put that on the next agenda because there was an item recently we did another one recently to like we did yeah no I agree okay so we could use it was a floor we can take over you could use that one I should consider a discussion about it okay yes would you comment get that added no I you know oh that's right yes it was another one that really we don't it was fabric or Do you just want us to approve this and then okay... so so. so? Do you just want us to approve this and then okay so move yeah as edited okay second second all in favor aye any opposed none Diana I made the motion Betsy seconded approve as edited and somebody's gonna have to give me that revised because I got to put it in the policy or the manual the procedures you mean procedures policy the policy is the speech yeah but I don't know that did update for me because you made updates right I didn't make updates yes you're an editor all right okay
all right
Oh next on the list is school committee's annual town report um i don't i can do this again because it's like very templated so if you want me to just do it and i think you need to do it by the 28th might be the 22nd hold on sorry let me double check
oh by september 30th i'll bring it back for our next meeting for thank you you know what that would be wonderful you know i have a lot of free time and i would love to draft this careful you said that publicly
our next is the 23rd
draft okay
okay
kirstine this is where i had my question for you i know you just mentioned before we came in that you had something you wanted to look at for the warrants or something are you good on that oh yeah i just um prepared the additional payroll warrants here so they're in question moving for your consent okay thank you um august 24 minutes are not there
every time
edited oh but those are executive did we do regular yeah we did regular and it's just the vote to go into executive thank you okay sounds like I did them yeah what okay so we have 27 August 24 is out and anybody have a motion I make motion to approve the August 27th or the consent agenda and send oh sorry the consent agenda as presented last the August 24th minutes just friendly edits okay second all in favor aye any opposed
do we have August 27th we have August 27th executive do we have August 24th executive yes we do okay thank you Kirsten do we have item a we do not right okay he is he did send me a message and he's okay okay so I'm going to revise I move to enter executive session for the purposes of reviewing and approving executive session minutes with the intent to redact and release use set of minutes as permitted by MGL chapter 38 section 20 to for August 24th 2026 and August 27 2026 the school committee will be joined by dates in August 11 the content and instruction David Fleishman, Superintendent Betsy Gavron, Assistant Superintendent Kirsteen Patterson, Director of Finance and Operations, and Diane Marabella, Recording Secretary. Ronnie always gets off easy. The school committee will adjourn an executive session and will not reconvene an open session. Do I have a second? Second. And Betsy? Yes. Kate? Yes. Jessica? Yes. Erin? Yes. Okay. Thank you.