June 24, 2026 – School Committee – Video & Transcript
June 24, 2026 - School Committee
Welcome to the Whalen School Committee meeting on June 24th, 2026.
We are in the Whalen Town Building. We are being recorded by WACAM, and I am calling it to order at 6.11 p.m.
Is there anyone here for public comment? Hearing none, we'll pass over public comment. Okay. Up first is superintendent's update, and item A is continued discussion of the elementary scheduling pilot. Do we want to invite these guys? Yeah. Come on up, Brian.
At our last meeting, there was discussion of the elementary scheduling pilot, and since then, you know, Brian's communicated to the broader local community, and he'll just brief you updated some of the highlights of his communication, and then invite to see if there are any other questions in school committee members.
So, you know, as to be expected, this was a very difficult decision, and we know how much and how special our instrumental music program is in Whalen. And so, there was, I would say, a lot of support for this pilot, and there was people who, you know, were definitely feeling a sense of loss. And so, I want to acknowledge that again, that this is a brutal situation that we're in, and it's a last resort. And everyone who's advocating for instrumental music and citing research, they're 100% spot on. So, I'm not going against research or anything like that. We just have a really tricky situation with the timing of our content. I do think, in thinking ahead to next year, that this will be something that really does free up our schedule. When you look at the minutes and hours in totality, you know, adding a week and a half, basically, of instruction by doing this, I think can make a significant difference. We're going to track really, really closely, kind of the curriculum coverage of what we do. And certainly, we're going to track kind of where kids typically would be in music, kind of at the middle point of the year and the end of the year. Betsy and I met with Susan Memolee earlier this week, and we're trying to think of creative ways and creative ideas that we can maximize the musical instruction in a way that's going to allow us to have a little bit more balance with our overall schedule. But it definitely is something that we want the instrumental music program to succeed, and we're not against it. And so we are going to continue to collaborate and think about what's best moving forward while really thinking about what's best for the whole child. And one of the things that comes to mind is, you know, I've heard a little bit that this pilot is not in the best interest of the whole child. And I think about recess, to be honest. And, you know, we are one of the few school districts that still have two recesses per day. My kids are extremely jealous and need them to get one. And that social time is so key. It's so important to the development. And so if, you know, some people have suggested that you should just kind of eliminate recess in the morning, and the teachers and I stand by that decision that we don't want to do that because that makes, really grows and develops those social and emotional skills, those resiliency skills, those navigating conflict skills that are so essential. And the idea that we can't even sometimes teach a full Wayfinder lesson every week, again, the recess is even more important. So, yeah, I sit here feeling very bittersweet about this whole thing, but also feeling hopeful that this is going to allow us to educate the whole child moving forward.
I had a question, Brian, and thank you for coming back. I think there might be some confusion about how the remaining 45 pilot minutes a week in the pilot are going to be allocated. There seems to be some question about them being all ensemble, which I think you'd agree would be very challenging, particularly in fourth grade where they'll be picking up a new instrument for the first time or in third grade. So maybe if it's premature and you're still figuring that out with Susan and others, that's fine, but I just wanted to give you an opportunity to speak to that because there seemed to be some concern that we were going to sort of leave only ensemble and there wouldn't be any instruction in a new instrument. So I would say that we're still kind of figuring out the details of what the 45 minutes look like. And I think that ensemble can be a time with the right support. They can be a strong instructional time. So an ensemble at Loker is probably about 20 kids, 20, 25 kids. A lesson is probably 9 or 10 kids. It's across many different instruments. And so, yes, the ratio is much better. And I think that if we can think about how to kind of best support the teacher to be able to differentiate instruction, then, you know, we have amazing instrumental music teachers who are so skilled that I'm not saying, again, that it's going to be the same as what Happy Hall and Claypool have next year. I'm not saying that at all. But I think we need to think outside the box on how do we make that 45-minute period maximize the effectiveness with it. But it'll be different. Like, and everyone involved in the pilot recognizes that it will require something different than just the ensemble, as people appreciate it. So I just wanted to give an opportunity for the community here that, like, it's not eliminating instruction in favor of ensemble. Those 45 minutes will be used in a different way. Yes, I think we're still kind of figuring that out, but we're committed to those 45 minutes being as meaningful as possible.
But can you, maybe I missed it last time, what necessitates this fade-off? What's forcing us to do this? So it's a good question. So, and I don't like to just say about minutes, but, you know, basically, if we look at all the standards that we want to cover and all the recommendations that we get from research, we really need, we're 160 minutes per week short on what we really need to be doing. And that's basically three weeks of instruction, 96 hours. And we have looked at every aspect of our schedule over the last several years. And we haven't touched instrumental music because we didn't want to, because it's a wonderful program. We're only teaching 50 out of the 60 math minutes that we're supposed to be doing. There are 120 minutes of music between bands, strings, and general music. 90 minutes, if we're lucky, of science and social studies per week. Wayfinder, we only have 30 minutes allotted for our SEL time. It really, teachers have found when they've implemented this year, they really need 40 minutes. Fourth and fifth grade health, when we plug that into the schedule for those 12-week sessions, it's coming out of somewhere. So sometimes it's missing math, sometimes it's missing ELA, sometimes it's missing science and social studies. So we're in a situation where I don't know what else to do. We're talking about combining library and technology at some point in the future as well to try to free up some more instructional minutes for the classroom, as well as kind of modernizing and thinking about how we can be really effective and strategic with our library and really thinking about how to educate the overall literacy of all of our students, media literacy. So kind of all those factors together. 72% of our teachers believe that our schedule is impeding our ability to meet the needs of all learners. And so that's kind of what started this whole thing and prompted the committee. And we just have this really big shortage. And I don't know how else to do this because I know that we're not covering all the standards we're supposed to be covering. I know that we don't get to all the units that we want to get to in math. We're not doing as much writing as we want to do. In this new reading program, we're talking about doing six out of nine units next year. Now, part of that is a first-year implementation, but we should be doing another 30 minutes in our reading program because that's what the guidelines tell us we're supposed to be doing, but we've limited it to two hours. So we've reached a point where kind of what else do we do? Is that showing up in scores, Ryan? I will say this, that it is showing up in the ELA Edcast scores. I have a sense of what next the spring scores look like. It's preliminary, so I'm not able to talk about it publicly, but I'm not feeling great about it. I appreciate you talking about this again because this is a really complicated and emotional topic. So thank you for thinking critically about this. I think, correct me on any of this if I'm wrong, but over the last, at least since COVID, but I think before we have been trying to align our curriculum across all three schools so that all of our students are learning the same standards. That's why we implemented Bridges. That's why we got Wayfinder because they were really struggling with SEL. That's why we're implementing this new ELA. It's about equity. And I'm hearing you say that your teachers are saying is that we don't have enough face-to-face time with our students. And I think what we've also talked about before is that students are struggling to deep dive into subjects for a long period of time because they're not getting enough of that uninterrupted time. What I think I'm also hearing you say is we're thinking about whole child and I was a band kid. My daughter plays the flute that I played for 30 years before I gave it to her. So I'm really empathetic to families who are instrumental families. That's not every kid. And when those band kids or orchestra kids go, what I'm hearing is that other kids stay in the classroom and their instruction is interrupted. And that's not equitable. We've worked so hard to get our curriculum equitable that this feels like the next step. If I could change anything about this pilot, I really wish that all three schools had aligned because it puts you in a tricky situation. It makes it a little bit more inequitable when really we're trying to make things more equitable. So I wish we could have gotten there. You know, I did some research into our neighboring districts. We are the only district that I can find anywhere that does instrumental at elementary twice a week. All of our neighboring towns do it once a week. And plus we have music. So I want to reframe this as not taking away, but really alignment. So I appreciate you all thinking critically about that. Again, I'd really like to know what success looks like. I did go back and look at our MCAS scores that we talked about in November. And third, fourth, and fifth grade, they are lower. They're certainly lower than before COVID. So I see that there's something happening there that we need to pay attention to. So those are my questions. How are we measuring success? How are we reinvigorating science and social studies to reinforce those minutes? Kate, I just want to acknowledge, I know it's really hard to hear you're trying something at one school. And I think we do have a long history, though, of trying things on a smaller scale first. Because as you mentioned, this is going to be such a major change for the instructors. And to give them the space to sort of really, really try it in one place before having to generalize it across the board, I think we'll learn a lot in that and see what works. And if it doesn't, as Brian said, if it's a train wreck in any way, you're minimizing the damage. And it gives them time to really sort of focus the changes to one location first. And there's some scheduling implications to it as well. So I'm hearing that the MCAS scores were one way that we're potentially seeing, I don't want to say, a correlation maybe, right? Like we're not necessarily sure that the minutes are the direct cause of that. I'm wondering if there was ever any feedback sought from our middle school educators about any knowledge gaps as they were coming in to, you know, sixth grade and starting their year off with their units based on the exposure that the elementary students had with the current curriculum and the time allowed. And if not, is that something we might also want to look at? Just measuring to see if there really is any change with that added instruction, just recognizing that the, and I'm new here to it, just recognizing, right, that like the fidelity of the curriculum is based on like how the curriculum was researched in meeting those learning objectives and it doesn't mean that it was researched in terms of like a different implementation model or a different amount. I think that's a really good point. I think that's something we have not done. But I think connecting with the middle school to think about that. I would also add that we have more students in reading intervention than we've ever had in the history of my time here at least. And so I think the need is greater than it's ever been. And that's also part of the push for this is that, and I know, I've not, I understand the research of instrumental music. I understand it has academic benefits. And I'm not saying we're not seeing those. And the most direct way to teach a kid how to read is to give direct instruction on reading. Yes, and I think that's true for any other subject that a child is passionate about. Right? If you're a sports kid, you're getting braided instruction through that. If you're an arts kid, if you're a Dungeons & Dragons kid, like you're getting that creativity there. So it's a yes and, but it really depends on the child. So we need to align that. And the other part that I also worry about with lessons is, you know, families are paying to do this. And while there's financial assistance available, there, I'm sure there are some families that don't want to submit the application and they just choose not to do instrumental music. And so it is a big equity, from my perspective, it's a big equity issue on who's actually participating in this and who's not. It's not cheap to rent the instrument either and then paying for lessons on top of that. So we have a kind of a significant equity issue kind of within the school day within this. And so I think it's something that we really have to continue to be monitoring, but it keeps me up at night, to be honest, that things like that, to your point, Kate, that we're trying to become more equitable, it's not equitable. That was kind of my point last week because we live in Weyland. We know this. 70% of our high school athletes are also in club sports. Many children who start instruments in third grade, they've already started, right? They're doing practice partners. They're doing private lessons. Is that equitable? No, but I think that also impacts the students that are fed into the instrumental system and that's just not fair. And those students who are left out, the entry isn't as easy as one may think. So we have to be aware of that. And I would encourage you to look at, honestly, the racial breakdown of our high school and middle school bands and the percentage of white and Asian as compared to other students of color. And students on IEPs and the accommodations that you get in music class.
Can I? I have a few questions. Yeah. And I apologize because I wasn't present for your presentation two weeks ago. I'm trying to get up to speed. I had Betsy give me like a two-minute overview. But I've been doing some digging and whatnot. But a few different questions. One being, can you just refresh my memory on what those kids that aren't participating in the lessons are doing when the kids that do participate in lessons are in their lesson? So, I mean, our teachers are teaching them but they are doing things like independent reading. They're doing some review work. What bothers teachers, I think, is that they can't move forward in the curriculum. They've got to press pause. And so, and for some kids, getting an extra boost on something and getting some intervention during that time is beneficial. But there are also a lot of other kids who may not need that. And so, it's very hard for the teachers to make that a productive use of time. Right. Yep. Okay.
Another question. This was a long time ago so I'm definitely dating myself. but when I was on the school council at Happy Hollow I remember having a discussion with Jim Lee and he had said that at that point Wayland was a leader in the amount of instructional minutes that our children and students were getting. If you have any idea about that do you know what's changed to put us in a position where is it just a change in standards coming out from the state? Is it that you know we change something about what they're doing that they're not getting as much instructional time? Like do you know what the dynamic is that changed there? What was the shift? That's a really good question. I think there's a variety of factors. Okay. I mean I think standards have changed. Yeah. You know until about eight or nine years ago and Trisha O'Reilly was huge with this like we weren't doing a lot of math like we were and look at our math MCAS scores they've been transformed over the last seven or eight years. We weren't doing as much literacy. We were doing the academic demands of the standards have increased significantly and so that has increased our time that we've needed to do with that and so there was a lot more flexibility in the past and we don't have that same flexibility and we can still educate the whole child in a way that's going to be meaningful but it is something that has changed over time. I'm not sure that we were ever a leader in instructional minutes. Okay. I just remember him saying that and who knows he may have been caveating in something else but it was And he was my amazing colleague No, no, no. Yeah, yeah. But the length of the school day hasn't changed but the amount we have to cover has changed and I would argue look at kindergarten. Kindergarten is very different than it was I mean I ran a kindergarten school for four years when I first came to Whelan but what we did then and what we do now is dramatically different and so I think our ability to be able to fit everything in has increased yes or decreased yeah. See we both dated ourselves because my daughter was in that kindergarten school and many people here don't even know that that existed except for Scott because we can date him too.
You're 30. What are you going to do? I'm going to go on now. And I would also just say that like I'm thinking about with Scott sitting here like thinking about health again how our teachers probably haven't been able to embrace it like they would because they're losing instructional time. A lot of districts have wellness twice per week like we don't have that and so why is music so disproportionate compared to everywhere else? As important as it is why is it so disproportionate? Why are we in this situation where it's such a huge difference? Because we have an amazing program and what's going to be best for every child? A wider variety. Right. No. Thank you. I know this isn't the only thing that we're doing to try and maximize instructional time for kids. What else are we planning to do potentially next year? And are there different things that maybe we could pilot at the other elementary schools to learn things kind of all at once and reconvene and see what worked best? Not that I know better than the scheduling group, just a question. They were the co-chairs, Ryan and Betsy were the co-chairs of a year-long scheduling committee at the elementary level. So I think one of the key things that we're doing that looks different is really aiming for more of a block schedule that allows us to be more efficient and targeted particularly when you're doing intervention that's going to match up. So I think historically there's been a lot of autonomy in the schedules which has made it a little bit choppier for special educators if they're coming to deliver services. There have just been some inefficiencies and there's no malintent in any of that and there's a lot of good reasons to have autonomy in scheduling. But when you really work towards block scheduling to the degree that we can given our part-time people and our space constraints you're able to utilize your minutes more strategically so that's one of the big hopes. We're also looking to move wherever possible some of the meeting time to do that in different non-instructional times so that we can maximize minutes. And as Brian mentioned we're exploring that idea of kind of trying to streamline more efficiently our library and our tech time in a more cohesive potential way. Is that potentially coming out next year across all three elementary schools or are we looking to do that down the line? We had been looking at this for this year. We had explored it. It was kind of when the decisions of the committee came out was to see if it's feasible this year. We're still having to just a couple hours ago we were talking about this very thing. It is a little bit tight until obviously the school year ended yesterday. The timing may not be 100% right for that change and so we would then explore more fully for the following year. I think it's important for the community as a whole to understand all of the different pieces because I think there's so much passion around the music program and all its success and how fabulous it is that a lot of people didn't hear. It was like they heard that and that owned the discussion and so I think hearing these pieces is really important that it was really thoughtful that it's not the only thing that's happening that there's a lot of different moving parts that are trying to come together to maximize the time. And I think one good example of that is the committee talked at length about the skills time that they've had in the past which has taken place a lot on technology and really has asked for that to have a new focus on some SEL and choice time to balance these rigorous academic demands with the other side of the coin which we know is equally important. If kids don't have the skills to regulate they can't attend to those academics so they don't have the skills to navigate conflict with a peer in a group situation that is just going to detract from their ability to engage fully in the academics. So I think the committee was really I mean the number of times we talked about the balance and the whole child and really looking at all of the components was a real focus of the committee. It was our biggest priority. Yeah. Whole child and equity were the two main topics.
triggers in my mind. Is there anything that we as a committee could do to further support this effort other than just listen and tell you we support you but is there anything we could help you with?
It's a great question. And you don't have to be on the spot but if there's something let us know. Open off. Yeah. If you think it's something you'll be the first to know. And I would also just say I would love to stay in touch about this and I would love to collaborate and you know potentially problem solve some challenges that come up you know I think it's important that we you hear from me before next June right? Absolutely. And then we talk about this kind of throughout the year and so this is a this is a big change which is why we're just probably in one school and so I think it's it's something that I want I want to be very transparent open about everything that we're doing and I want to have as many people who are willing to collaborate to try to figure out the best way of doing this. And Aaron I know you weren't here last time but our other two elementary principals are really committed to being on the same page at the end of this year and to really learn from this pilot in whatever direction it goes because we don't want the schools ultimately doing different things we've worked so hard to try to have more continuity of experience for students so that is the ultimate goal and they're fully in support we appreciate all the work that you do to make the three schools aligned because that's clear so thank you for that.
Yeah I think you know bringing you guys in in a I should say in a few months really it is a few months would be great just getting that temperature check on how these things are going how it's working and maybe if possible I guess either way that it's going bringing Susan maybe to talk about it too just to that aspect of it would be great so appreciate your time.
Happy no more kids in school for a few months. I still have Pegasus so I still have a little Oh that's right we'll see you next week I will see you next week. All right speaking of wellness wellness come on up so for our new school committee members Scott Parsegian is our district wide director of health and wellness. Thank you for having me. Nice to meet a couple of new faces. Like Aaron was razzling me before this was my 30th year at Wayland I just finished I'm also Wayland alumni so this is home to me. I live here both my boys went through the program so I love this place thank you for everything you guys do. It truly means a lot. I'm here to talk about wellness a lot is going on starting off with our elementary program again last year I sat here with Jenny Flynn who's our health education specialist and we talked about the fourth and fifth grade curriculum and how that's going again I guess I should maybe include some of those notes that Jenny sent out about what's going on in our health education program but it's going great we're in year three we just finished year three so it's incredible and again we're looking to expand we'd love to bring our health education program again down to grades at least two and three maybe one two and three but again as you just heard timing and I understand all that but again my goal as wellness director is to eventually bring health education even down to our lower grades again we're only given 12 lessons as Brian said it's not a lot of time so again trying to build on that and also we are looking forward to housing our pre-k over at happy hall and we are developing a wellness program for them right now Jenny Flynn our health education person as I just mentioned and Chris Fay nope sorry Chris George have already met and went down and spent a day and spent a couple hours at the Children's Way this past week to get to know them so that they can see them when they come up in the fall so again we're already starting that high school I don't know if you've heard if you have kids but again we're moving to a brand new elective based program at the high school this comes out of partly our mapping that we've been doing over the last two years as again to let you know again Massachusetts frameworks and standards for health and wellness came out two years ago before that they were not touched the last time they were redone by the state was 1999 so a long time so we've been looking at what's going on and what we're doing and what we're missing and what we can add in so one thing we decided to do was as the high school staff we would offer elective based wellness for our students what that means is that we're going to make sure that first of all everybody gets everything in the standards but then also allowing students to have some choice where they want to be not every student wants to be out playing flag football or softball or something like that and so we're offering a bunch of walking for life mat fitness which is yoga pilates all that kind of stuff we're adding an advanced fitness class to our high school public health class again all kinds of things we had kids sign up and rank them and see what they want to do number one with 256 was healthy culinary and nutrition so again we partner with whaling food services we actually use the kitchen at the high school to train our students which is amazing walking into a really a kitchen that they only get if they were working at a restaurant or something so we've been piloting this for the last five years and it's a successful course the only problem is we can only have the class when it meets on last block because obviously they're trying to prepare lunch and clean up and then we come in so but the way we have our waterfall schedule we're going to be able to add some more classes in there and then we're going to when it doesn't fall we're going to be in the class and really working on the nutrition part out of the frameworks and standards so that's that's a little bit about our elective base I can go more into it maybe next year about how it went and what's going what's positive and stuff like that but that's just a little brief part sports broadcasting class is also into our third year this year we had the highlight of doing a live broadcast of the state championship volleyball game the MIA gave us permission at the 18th hour and we were able to put together a seven person crew to head out to Westfield or not we were playing against Westfield it was Worcester and do a live broadcast where we had over 367 people tune in live to watch the game we got emails from somebody's brother that was in China that wasn't able to be there but was able to experience it just by our live broadcast and on YouTube now we're over 1500 views on our live broadcast of the volleyball game so he was really excited to be there it was great so our MVP our mentors and violence prevention program was asked to speak at the governor's youth healthy summit this past May where we talked about what we're doing different than other schools around healthy relationships if you don't know we run a 14 class that is mandatory by all juniors and that's still going to stay in our elective base all juniors are still going to have to take our MVP course but again we the kids did a beautiful job presenting what we do and why it's one of their favorite classes so that was really special to hear from them that they all love the class next big things happening I think we can over here and over here but we're about to build a brand new project venture ropes course and I don't know for those of you who have been on school committee we went together two years ago to the community preservation act together with a letter from you talking about how important this will be to our education and how doing some research our course was built in 1979 by like the grandfather of project adventure he helped design the course and then our course was used for the next five years as a training facility for project adventure helping other schools get this education into their schools well 1979 and we're in 26 right now it was also built in the woods behind the high school and it was built on trees so right now with the trees rotting and growing we have one element that is that is able to pass inspection right now without doing a full overhaul so with the help of these three people right here I think I'm safe to say that we are about to build a brand new project venture course at Whale High School which we're very excited John Berry is our lead teacher around project venture and he is really excited to get this up and running and thanks to all these three right here David you want to talk yet well our state representatives David Linsky and Carmen Gentile is retiring they called it from the house floor and we let it done with their commitment to health and wellness we'll have a I don't know a ribbon what do you call it for ropes cutting yeah yeah we're looking forward to it we'll invite them we'll invite all of you as well do we expect to have that done for the like by end of fall I just didn't know what the timeline so it's going to be done over the summer that's awesome that's great all the last signatures I was down meeting with conservation this morning to get her did you get an email from okay from Shannon or from Linda do you want me to follow up on there any help possible but we're up I think we're there right I do need a confirmation yeah we do need but we're yes I believe it could be up and running by the first day of school it's awesome so that's really exciting to do that we're going to build it behind the away bleachers right in front of the softball field so is it going to be like out of the woods now totally relocated in the woods right now they now they don't really do that want you to do it on these you can but they would do it in the woods and put poles in there to get machines and everything up there was going to skyrocket the price yeah we have all this open space so I walked the all the fields with Katherine Brennan who's also behind this project super helpful I just want to know that's great so we walked it we found a spot that we thought was out of everybody's way and we're just working on the last couple signatures on that like kind of on that cut through between going to the rock and going down to the wetlands that we're towards the right ball field yeah okay actually directly right behind the bleachers the okay bleachers great there okay it's going to put us out of harm's way of everything so we're really excited about that this is something that again I know you've been involved the last couple years trying to help us build but it's been a lot longer than that it's been a dream of mine to get this up and running and we finally gonna make it I I know we're gonna make it happen right my team so that's awesome I do want to say I opened a pleasant email last night at five o'clock that we're able to also help redesign our fitness room our fitness room is now over 15 years old there's been no budget to maintain no I mean my physical education budget cannot maintain a fitness room nor athletics so we're trying to work to get pieces together but we're able to maybe do a phase plan to really build a fitness room and obviously there's new technology and everything so again we're gonna start that phase again also this summer if you don't know our fitness room is one of our most used spaces in the high school the wellness staff whenever we have a free period our duty is to open the fitness room so we have kids all types of kids we have crew kids coming down that want to come and get a quick row in to kids that had a tough game the other night and they want to come and foam roll and stretch and do all the kind of the new technologies out there how to take care of your body so it's really one of the most used spaces in our high school and we keep it open you know I open it up at 6 30 in the morning for our students and it's open until about 4 30 in the afternoon for so all day long it's used and I'm excited to say that we're gonna be redesigning that space also sorry do you think there's any room for like a sponsorship for that you know Betsy and I were talking about this last year two years ago that we were going to build an outdoor remember that if we really get we're going to expand it and build outdoor and we are trying to get some funding and stuff like that to to expand it and give some more space that yeah and we talked about that and it was it was doable but and I'm forgetting now who was the sponsor behind it was gonna yeah there was a company but it was it was still really big big money they were gonna put in like 40% of it but it was still like hundreds of thousands of dollars right it's just not in the cards at the time but it was a very cool outdoor you could do like outdoor yoga and Pilates session and it was also geared to be enable any folks with disabilities to really access all of the materials really designed with a kind of a universal design bench to it so so we've been looking at this for a long time how to expand how to redesign how to make more space to do some of that functional training that now really students are really all about and so we're going to get rid of the platforms in there and we're going to put up some rigs if you've seen them and they take up less space but also giving us right now we have four stations to work at we're going to this new system we're gonna have six stations to work at and and they condense so it's given us more space again to do that functional training in the fitness room so really excited about that I was also asked to talk a little bit about the wellness committee I am the chair of the wellness committee along with Betsy and Aaron are part of it too and we've had a lot of great success over the years if you don't know what else can be looks at health and wellness of our students but also connects it with our food service department and what's being served to our kids and we've had some really tough conversations with food service about how to change things and how to bring in some new stuff and I continue to talk with Bonita and Cheryl about that about scratch cooking and how we're doing it now we're going to try to look to do it in our healthy culinary class and how we can work with them to maybe prepare better meals you know for our students this year one of our tasks was looking at our nicotine policy which hasn't been touched since 2019 we found out while it still hadn't had some vaping in there and stuff like that what it was not getting at was some of the nicotine pouches now that we see students using and even though we are doing that education in our classes it wasn't in our policy so we were able to have both the middle school and high school administration staff attend one of our meetings we talked about what they're seeing what they're what they want to see in the handbook and jay verhusky and myself will be meeting this summer to update the handbook and make recommendations to both middle school and high school administration to put into the handbooks for students coming this fall and also looking at the policy the district-wide policy do we not have that for tonight we don't have the file no okay no i'm sorry so i'm just gonna we're gonna pass over item c jay and i thought we were just at one of my last things also um was that we plan to be here in the fall to talk about our metro survey yeah the survey jay and i just um attended one of the conferences two weeks ago okay about um sharing the data with with your um schools and your town uh and jay thought that jay and i thought that would be a good time to kind of put them both together yeah we'd be done so we're going to meet this summer we have some time to plan it out okay i misunderstood so that's my bad no i i yes it's okay we're just giving people the heads up that the the policy information is coming all good and we yep we've looked at it quite a bit yeah yeah that's great um okay i think that's it except for the real piece that i wanted to talk about tonight um and again i'm sorry ronnie's not here because she was part of that and i've had students here and and also um our lead teacher chris fay but unfortunately the vacation uh everybody's out everybody's either at the cape or uh somewhere else so it's it's just me but they did present they did give me some materials to share with you about our unified team this came about by two seniors that just recently graduated uh audrey larson who's in there who talks about the impact of the program and penelope jinx they came to me and talked about how they want to take the best buddies program and kind of make it bigger here at whalen and i have known that other schools around us do a great unified wellness program it's being talked about and at the conferences i go to so um ronnie was able to find a you know 0.3 position to expand chris fay's role in our district and really become our unified teacher and this was our pilot year and again it's made up of a mix of students as you can see there we have our mentors that were seniors here around high school and then we have our students that are in the special needs program at whalen high school and i could just tell you by me dropping in on these classes i can't do it justice but i i walked in just you have the picture there on the roller blades it was like a old school roller skating party if you remember those right at roller kingdom down in hudson you know again that's where i would go uh but music music playing kids having a great time smiling laughing uh to an obstacle course that they created together and were timing each other and seeing who could go the fastest to some great health education talks that really brought health education down to their level where they could understand it because some of the students were just plugged in regular health education classes to be honest the material was just going over their head they were just sitting there and they weren't getting a lot so again this gave us the opportunity to use our mentors our seniors and really help educate and as you can read in there the bonds and the connections that students have made i got a couple quotes that i put together in there from students but wonderful wonderful class that we started this year we had 15 seniors asked to be part of the mentor program for this coming year which is great but it's actually too much what we're trying to figure out is too many of them but again just the one year kids hearing and seeing the impact on the program is just heartwarming and exciting and again i just i get touched by talking about it because it's really awesome and this is just for students that are part of the whalen school system um right correct this isn't okay yeah we registered registered with special olympics as well unfortunately some of the students they weren't we tried to get a basketball game together they just quite weren't ready this year hopefully we can build on it there were some other events too we looked at a bocce tournament that was coming up but unfortunately like the weekend that came the students had other things going on they couldn't make it so again we're hoping to get there and that that's our goal to really partake in some of the special olympic events with these but again the class happening during the school day that everybody can see i think is more meaningful than anything but yes our goal is to get to that special olympics basketball game where the whole entire student body comes out and cheers them on as they're playing against a rival link in sudbury or weston or natick or some of these other programs that are a little bit ahead of us but we'll be seeing the olympics but really that's what's going on um but really we're we're we're this unified happening inside the school day is something new not a lot of schools are doing a lot of schools do have the special olympics part but we're trying to build and make it better that was a lot and i can dump a lot more i'm very proud of the program that we have here at wayland those are just a few of the highlights from this year oh and i would say that our work with jess tepero and reach beyond domestic she used to work for reach she's now by herself we received another grant to work with her this year and this coming year we're going to focus on grades four through eight as she's been working with our high school kids over the last three years and she also presented with the students at the Healthy Youth Summit so now we're going to take that work that we've been doing with her as we receive the grant to continue to work with her I'm going to bring it down to the lower grades it's no we actually got it from the nurses and some part of their that's right yes yes that came out of yeah that the community nursing yes that's right again Heather that's awesome we're able to help find some of that money to continue the funding that's great I am applying to keep this going for the next two years with the Metro West survey they have a $20,000 grant and when I was when Jay and I went to the the meeting two weeks ago we actually happen to sit next to the president of the committee so we we got to talk to her about our vision of the if we put in a grant and what we're doing with it and she thought it fit the alignment so that's something else that we'll be working on this summer to submit to keep this work going I just want to say I'm glad to hear it just as a former colleague of mine yeah we am we work together on a an OVW grant but then also kind of snatched her up on my former campus yeah yeah so Jess has been with Waylon for over ten years and she's like a faculty member for us so she presents I know she's presented one of the elementary schools in both middle and high school at our teacher meeting so yes we're excited to keep that well I talked really great I know I'll stop in there so absolutely for now kids are I mean look at the transition from Brian there's so much happening we're making trade-offs so have to balance that with some mental health activities I feel so great stuff thank you yes it's number one and that's why you on the match yeah yeah and that's part of our all at the high school we have the field house and the fitness room open every block so again when the kids have a free period they're able to come and grab a basketball and and shoot around it or go into the fitness room and stretch and foam or whatever it might be but again because we're trying to get that movement I'm the least bendy over teaching you know no absolutely please I think next year we have to have a school committee on the ropes course yeah I mean retreat absolutely but a lot of great things happening a lot of things happen this year and a lot of things great coming next year I'm really excited about our program thank you for everybody for your support I think anybody no thank you great updates thank you so much we were so excited about unified wellness and I just looked through this and you know please pass on the excitement to Ronnie I remember like hey we're gonna roll this out so I wanted to know follow up and let you know what a great first year we had and only gonna get better really exciting yeah this is awesome and my middle school actually complements her wellness program so I feel like I must say that publicly because I don't know that that's always a demographic or constituency that super vocal and so keep it up or likes anything or likes anything yes no that was gonna be my question actually um did you get any feedback initially from students around the elective method I figured yeah that's awesome yeah that'll be great to hear about how yeah scheduling's a nightmare Laura and everybody but again I think the first year it was gonna be like that and again we hope to build off this and again by hearing from students what we can bring in we had a huge list but we couldn't offer everything so we've already scaled it down and then hopefully that we can add on or take off we're also doing um one of the new programs is out there it's called ref reps where you get certified to be a referee that is amazing because my huge shortage of them so the MIA and the state is partnered with this ref reps and we are offering the class we had 15 students sign up for it so so not bad but that's actually great for us to try it out this year and by the end of the class they are certified on whatever sport they decide to do in a class and Chris George is gonna be running that so he's gonna get a feel whether it be you know soccer or flag football or lacrosse or whatever it might be or basketball I think it's either gonna be soccer or basketball that we're gonna focus on for the first time that's all but yeah really neat course that kids are gonna walk away with something and they can make money and and they can make money even better absolutely test your SEL stuff too yeah and your conflict resolution it's all in there it's all in there it's all in the curriculum the whole child so again that is just another course that we're offering this year and we'll see how it goes that's great okay I heard mr. gas was making pizza yesterday oh we had outstanding day we had at the high school again we had kids sign up for things they wanted to try or do we had sewing we had making pizza we had fermentation we did have you know come play ultimate frisbee we had world cup we had wiffle ball but we had a number of back titties and then it ended in the field house we had a lip-sync battle oh I didn't hear about that we had a lip-sync battle and then we had if you haven't seen it the Whitney Houston challenge no where you have to hit the drum and we pulled up two people from each and each grade and then two teachers and the last one to go is Allison Mizuguchi and she nailed it it was like drop the mic she nailed it she hit the Whitney Houston drum we have it on film so it's just a great way to end and we did finish that lyric and we just kind of ended with a whole school kind of fun way to end but yeah it was a great day and again it was that elected base kids got to sign up we had 32 offerings out there well we did like a one of them did a walk and talk walking and the pizza and yeah yeah yeah great so yeah we had it was a brand new thing we tried and it seemed to work out pretty great the female student voice and sort of has gone through all of your updates absolutely yeah yeah yeah from this the what unified wellness program being a suggestion students to correct it was two students that kind of brought to our attention and made it happen it's awesome thank you Scott great thanks great to see you have a good summer keep us posted on the road course absolutely all right thank you thanks so much thank you everybody have a great summer thanks and we'll see you in the fall you'll give me a date and we'll talk about the Metro West survey great okay all right thank you thanks again thank you so we have financial matters discussion and potential vote to approve to fund the new ELA curriculum yes so this is the CKLA he knows that we had a presentation on a couple school committees ago apologies we didn't kind of align this at the same time I did email everybody it wasn't on the web link so apologies for that it's the summary of the timeline the process and this is the formality of the approval for the bid purchase and as you recall we did get the capital approved for FY 27 for 350 thousand as well and we had the prison grant to offset the rest of the cost so again where this is curriculum instruction the procurement is there is exempt because you can imagine if you had to go with a low bid of something of this nature so that is the course that we adopted for this process again you have the the whole presentation on the full this school year of 2026 that they piloted two different curricula and they provided all of their rationale for the the overall recommendation for the CKL CKLA Camino's curriculum and we've identified the funding sources the total cost is four hundred thousand three hundred forty five dollars and thirty four cents can't forget those pennies count still and the breakdown is we have a portion of that that it was is used is going to be used for this fiscal year out of the prison grant that does end June 30th so we wanted to make sure that we utilized our grant funding and did not leave anything on the table in hopes maybe we'll get another one another year or so but this was this is the the breakdown of all the components of that process and of the materials that we are going to be having access to with with these funding sources so this is the final piece of that process in being able to go ahead and purchase and move forward with with that recommendation from the team that you heard the presentation May 27th I'm just for clarity the Frog Street pre-k curriculum is that four years were purchased for the twelve thousand one hundred seventy seven oh three that is not multi-year so that will get all the teacher instructional materials and all the materials for year one for the okay okay and we will be good to be able to sort of fund going forward there because it's a lower ending as well that will happen in the in August 31st city just a lower price point all together for that be classroom right right yeah okay okay yes um and that's a comprehensive curriculum very dramatic based it was piloted by um teachers of the TTCW this year okay they're comparing that to a couple other programs very basic but what what's included in this curriculum in which one CKLA CKLA yeah so it'll be all the instructional materials for uh for teachers so all the teachers manuals there's an online manual component as well with with slides it will be all the instructional materials for uh for teachers so all the teacher's manuals there's an online manual component as well with of the reading materials and our intervention kits for which align directly with the tier one whole class instruction so it's very well aligned there the text sets as Sarah pointed out in our in her presentation are really designed like the whole program is designed around the science of reading so but so both the skill building and the knowledge building and the text sets really work together to build a more comprehensive background knowledge for students which enables them to to to read more effectively basically and so they are you're you kind of sit in a topic for three or four weeks before moving you know reading a book about one thing and then moving to the next they really intentionally build and they build also vertically over time so there are you know themes that you're hitting in second grade and then it builds on on very purposely on say a science unit in third grade so they're in line of those so complete packages it is all all the pieces and um as well as professional development pieces so if we do get another year of the grant with that will enable us to do is to really um have the funding to train some grade level leaders to sort of run those plc's that we've i know talked a lot about so because sarah's one one amazing human and she can't be in every place all the time so that is that is the hope of that next round we're working on that cloning though right yeah so don't underestimate um yes and we and um we're actually having a full day of training tomorrow um using funds from the the grant um so there will be 65 teachers that will be in an all-day training tomorrow for ckli yes kirsteen can you help me understand so obviously we had the 350k capital that went to town meeting looks like we're using just over 235k of that in year one for the acquisition and i see your note that the remainder will be available in subsequent years how does that work does that stay in our capital budget it does okay so it's not indefinite so the idea is that we've been given that money we use it as quickly as we can which again we did have a good portion of the prism grant that funded it so it does enable us to kind of go out year one and then be able to get the related materials in the subsequent year okay so that's all the consumables and you do the nice part is you don't have to get them all at what right like we don't have four years of stuff that we're holding on to you can order against that and through their portal okay but we've maxed out the amount that we'll receive under the fiscal year 26 prism grant correct so anything that we would get going forward would be related to training um through the prism grant or uh if we were to get more like fiscal year 27 it would be around implementation okay and trading okay pd around the science of reading as well so okay use it in a number of different ways and with the cqla all k through five will participate in pd on this at some point so i know you said you're doing all day for 65 but ultimately across the board everyone will go through pd for this um some of our super wednesday time is used for that as well as we've also been working with this um woman from school kit that um it's another program that is aligned sort of helps you figure the best way of doing unit and lesson internalization work around those and they sort of through three months yeah so rachel has been great rachel from school kit and she has partnered with sarah um sarah and myself and and the leadership team um from the curriculum council around sort of designing the pilot and the best ways to roll roll things out with staff and um really you know thinking through sustainable models for for making helping teachers make most sense of how to maximize the instructional materials and you know i think for a long time teachers have spent their their prep time really figuring out like what to teach and and there's a real shift with this hqims and it's um adapting the materials to meet the needs of the students in front of you so um you know what to emphasize pacing all all of those pieces so when when they start a new unit they're going to go you know start by taking the taking the assessment itself and and really thinking through how do all of the lessons build together and really thinking purposely around that and you know you're one everything's just going to take longer which is as brian said why we might only get through six of the of the nine units this might be a stupid question um i know like with bridges at least this is the way i understood it so also could be wrong but with bridges there's sort of like built-in um intervention models that can be used with it yes so there's bridges intervention same thing is true ckla okay and there's um there is intervention for you know sarah really talked to you about the different components so there's um intervention for the skills components and um so that's your your phonemic awareness all of all of the those kind of foundational skills pieces as well as the knowledge building component so if kids have sort of gaps in things they might get extra previews ahead of time so that they are most well suited to be able to participate in the whole group instruction so i think you know as sarah mentioned historically we've done a lot more small group with kids moving at their own paces and this is a lot more really raising the the rigor bar for all students and making sure we can have access points for for everyone within those high bars so it's it's it's an adjustment i think for kids for teachers um just the way instructions delivered is is is different so it's it's a big lift for folks um but an important one we we need it yeah yeah so so feeling really really excited for it anybody have any more questions on that would you like a motion i would entertain a motion i don't know let me make sure i get the sense right um so i move to approve a selection of ckla caminos third edition totaling four hundred thousand three hundred forty five dollars and 34 cents from the fy 26 prism grant and fy 27 capital item for elementary elementary literacy curriculum sorry i didn't do that wrong nope you didn't do anything wrong i'm just is that the right way to raise it are we taking money from two different pools and that's why you need it that way is that that's because i'm we're being transparent with the funding source and that's that's fine i just wanted to make sure we okay um okay do we have a second second okay all in favor aye any opposed none okay that's exciting that's great i can't wait to
so this is just me trying to wrap my head around this did the prism grant give x amount of money and no matter what we spent on it we were only getting x amount of money yeah one of the criteria one of the constraints of the grant is they will pay up to one half of your k-3 curriculum which is okay that's why we have to go back into your capital funding yeah i'm just yeah okay and it's it's also for a multi-year um right the month yeah so yeah okay all right thank you i'm sorry i just i'm just trying a little complicated it's been a lot of time on the phone with tracy from ukla so committee so i think we touched on some of these last time that i was here in an attempt to sort of discuss like what was out there what we needed have give people a chance to think about what they might be interested in we think we were missing two people as well so we couldn't have a constructive okay conversation about what it all meant okay so when you look at the list you will see that we currently have the policy subcommittee which is typically something that's needed every year um there's constantly changes and updates that get circulated um from the mass association of school committees that drive
kind of regular policy updates and then typically there's at least a few over the course of the school year or the or the fiscal year that we um as a committee think is important to um to revise update implement could be totally new um so kate i think is interested it was kate and christina previously rodrigo i think kate's interested in staying on the committee um a subcommittee i apologize um that is a meet as need but i think there's generally a decent amount of some updating that needs to happen like the standard mask updates yeah so that one um we definitely need someone else to serve on just and i don't know how much i said but we can only have two people serve on these subcommittees because we cannot have a quorum of our committee present on the subcommittees um um the these subcommittees that we have do need to post agendas and hold public meetings and create minutes and approve minutes just like we do as a full committee um so that is a piece to it we recently decided that we would only kind of enact a finance subcommittee in the event that we had something to task the finance subcommittee with um because we feel or the committee that at the time last year really felt that it was important that things that were being discussed around finance and coming from kirsteen and her team really should be in front of the whole committee on a regular basis because it's such an important pillar of like our three you know main functions as a school committee so that's there i don't know that we necessarily have anything right now so we don't really need to appoint people but should keep it in mind should we have something that comes up over the course of this of this year i can share we redid the like task yeah i can share that too just so you can see what we um adopted last year thank you that'd be lovely um and then the superintendent evaluation subcommittee will need to happen for next year um i believe we discussed around the table that we were not doing um an annual formal evaluation of david do we need to take a vote on that or no i do think we do okay because i don't think we ever actually did but it is not on our agenda for tonight so my thought is i'll we can put it on for our next one it was just an open question i had no yeah yeah yeah and i'm happy i mean i i'm happy to do that yes well to be on the committee just because i was on the last one that would be very helpful so i'm happy to be on that what is the timing of when that happens though it should be done before june 30th for next year and sorry numbers of this but some of some of the process and some of right a lot of that will happen you guys will still be here don't worry um uh i'm letting you stay don't worry about it thanks guys um so yeah it would start probably it starts with goals right and then aligning david sort of kind of comes out with his personal goals from the district goals that get set toward the beginning of the year and then we discuss and then we review but i would i would i think like it's more toward like late winter that like a formal evaluation sort of starts to occur and get thought once we approve district and the superintendent's individual goals we can tee up the like format and schedule and so like some of it is desi has different forms and we created one ourselves following that process last time that i think worked reasonably well absolutely yeah that again yeah um so we need a person for the policy subcommittee and we need a person for the superintendent evaluation subcommittee to work with betsy and typically the chair does not serve on any of these committees you have your own chair subcommittee that is a body of one that is 150 percent current i have experience with policy review and development so that feels natural to me but honestly wherever i'm needed is fine i don't know if you have a strong preference between i don't have a strong preference here so you can okay yeah i'm happy to work with the sorry i didn't mean to cry yeah okay anything that's done by either subcommittee is going to come to the full committee for a vote anyway so you always get input it's just a matter of trying to kind of move things along um and get some work done not at the full table and you know just to kind of be more efficient really is the idea so um are we all comfortable we can have um kate and jess is jess okay jess jessica jessica jessica okay sorry uh kate and jessica on the policy subcommittee and then for the superintendent evaluation subcommittee we'll have betsy and prashant great all good okay i can put that in here to shorten names i love it um and jess last name nika it's all right okay okay anybody watching will jessica my brother married a jessica she goes by jessica got it um jessica what is your last name is it trao trawa trawa thank you keep it
because i have you in my phone as something different rear you're i think that must be your maiden name but for whatever reason okay but that other jessica that i just referenced is greer got it so we have jessica trawa make some more sense i am good as needed i have some good news with respect to do you want to do the liaisons first or can i go to the delegates delegates okay um good news that our youth advisory committee we have two seats to appoint on that um which cannot and one seat on the wayland housing partnership they're both up as of all three of those seats are up as of june 30th and um it cannot be someone from the committee it needs to be someone appointed outside of the committee heidi ellis is willing to re-up for another term in her seat appointed seat on the youth advisory committee i have someone that i'm pursuing to fill the second seat but if you guys have other options or potential people that you think would be a good fit or interested please feel free to pursue so um and then uh jackie a spirit to santo vega i believe is willing to continue her seat on the wayland housing partnership i wasn't able to get strict confirmation from her but i was able to connect with mary aunties who is i think kind of like the chair of the housing partnership and jackie actually works in this area i think for in a neighboring town and so mary thinks that she's willing and able and ready to continue to serve in that seat and capacity um so my thought was that i guess she travels sometimes to i think it's puerto rico and she can't always access her email and she'll go for periods of time so mary was thinking maybe she just hadn't been able to get back in touch so my thought tonight was to um reappoint heidi to the youth advisory committee for one of our seats and reappoint jackie into the wayland housing partnership um appointee seat and then we can continue to pursue someone for the second seat for the yac is everyone okay with that and are we okay for the time being on the cipc i know that came up earlier in the year but it wasn't clear i need to firmly connect with brian which is my bad because i need to talk to him via telephone for right now we're okay okay great um there is a lot of issues as i think some of us are aware some of us may not be but there's a lot of open seats on the finance committee and so i there may be some change there that brian will need will need to fill okay brian's on the cipc so um with that i would entertain a vote just to reappoint um heidi ellis into the yic seat for the next term and jackie espiritu santa vega into the seat for the wayland housing partnership for the next term do i have a second second lovely all in favor aye okay any opposed hearing none okay great i will let abby downstairs know for the liaisons are you gonna say something can you just clarify the role of the liaisons are these actively attending these meetings so there's some of these that are you are actively participating as a member of the committee so wellness advisory um betsy's a member in light of her position as the assistant superintendent i am the liaison so i but we attend the meetings there's four a year for that typically okay there might be another one in there but typically scott kind of keeps us to four um and that is that one um the athletic advisory only meets when it's needed like we had to vote on um
making gymnastics a club at the high school level uh and co-op and so we had a meeting of the athletic advisory committee in advance of that um but typically i don't really have not had to do a lot that's not a huge heavy lift cpac you don't have to it that's like just there's another group and we're sort of like someone for them to literally liaise with and connect with but you don't have to attend all the meetings i think cpac's a little bit not defunct at the moment but it's been a little yeah um i think they i think they meet a little bit more when they meet they went a little bit more frequently yes like the others they're not a quarterly organization yeah they're typically a monthly yes organization right but you don't have to go you don't you don't have to attend every month as the liaison to that you're not like someone who needs to take a vote um you don't have to be there for it's less of a lift on that um i will say i think because things have been going so well in ronnie's department thanks to everyone here um i think cpec has had a a good little bit of break of feeling the need to meet so frequently um i hope i said that right uh recreation i don't know that we've had anybody in that for a while but those are literally like just being a person that rec can reach out to um and open meeting law minutes so we created this that is definitely not a liaison that's like a one person subcommittee um i'm like a friend no um so in i would say about three years ago and two years ago we went through a real rough patch in trying to get open meeting law compliance under um under control and just staying on top of regular review of our executive session minutes release of those minutes redaction of those minutes etc approval all that good jazz and so we maybe a year and a half ago kind of implemented these liaisons to sort of play a role in ensuring our compliance there um and so kate was in like a shared liaison position there with christina rodrigo um and so kate i'm hopeful you'll stay but we should have someone else that joins you just to kind of stay on top of it and get up to speed on the needs there um the audit committee that's someone that's our liaison uh or i guess yeah we haven't had to fill that seat so that must not be up yet because i haven't heard from anybody downstairs no and i think it's four years for those it's a long yeah so we'll just leave that one alone um i'm moving housing partnership out of here um negotiations so currently that's actually a tbd you're not um legislative liaison so these are kind of all right now there's nothing going on with any of these really there will be i'm sure with potentially legislative liaison maybe um around different like prop two and a half stuff that's coming up um who knows the bus parking were extended for a period of time there on our permit who knows what will happen with that so that one could get live at any point um permanent the pmbc um as things transpire with our long-term facilities plan um that might expand as well um something you think we can revisit next year as we get closer to so yeah i i don't think we need to do that i mean even if if things were to move super quickly we could revisit in like six months or something but right now i don't think um the other thing that i would i would kind of throw in the mix here as well which i did skip over pto and the tech board we do need someone in that tech board space um for whatever reason that always seemed to come through um susan botan but you're not really connected with that so um aaron muller was the the person for that previously and if maybe i can ask for more information do they even meet monthly i feel like it's quarterly right did they meet the board for tech all right we can get more info on that but i think it's a quarterly it's not monthly and i know that the director was it was out at the end yes yeah um yeah so but we do need someone to serve in that capacity and i want to say the meetings are like a set time but you can do them via zoom i'll get more information on that so we don't have to do it tonight because i don't think there's anything like immediate happening if i need to i'll go to whatever i need to go to um so but that's definitely one we need to fill um and then wpsf i do so we decided to lighten that a little i went to three betsy goes to most i think it would be nice to divide if we can i think there are certain ones where it's very helpful and either our school committee member i think or assistant superintendent can do this like it's just very helpful to give them updates on things that are coming so it's a good opportunity to rally and educate a group of parents who are active in the schools and involved that said i do not you know i think there are a few meetings where we both get a lot of value in all of it um i think it it is a heavy lift for either or both of us to attend all of them so maybe what i was going to propose is that maybe in september you and i look at the meeting schedule and then maybe i don't know who their president is i think blair has done with her two years so i don't know so we should we could just have a quick conversation even by phone and say this is what we're thinking there's you know obviously a lot going on we'd like to suggest that we make sure someone covers these meetings and focus the like school committee update or district update and maybe we can sort of staff half of them i think that that's probably ample like obviously grants meeting is really useful the best yeah wait i would a good way to just broach the conversation with them and see if we can align with good times to because you also meet with representatives separately so i think it does become i want to be mindful of the time it becomes it becomes a lot of time and yeah so i think we can collectively work on making sure that our engagement and interest remains high and it certainly is but that we're making sure that physical presence is where it's most needed and of highest value 100 agreed okay so do you want me to i'll stay on that and i'll do that yeah i'll stay on that okay um okay the one thing sorry that's also going to be a potential that we may need to educate about sort of the state of anything that we need to do with respect to prop two and a half as well and so i've already started to sort of plant that seed um when i did attend those meetings so um i think that's also an important partnership i was actually just i just got kicked out so i have to re-sign in but i was just going to say i'm i'd like to add to this list um the kind of for lack of a better word like the override working group that david and i and kate and kirsteen are currently a part of by kind of default um so i'll just keep that down there and i think it's going to increase a little bit in um so i'll put that down there i'm just going to put uh superintendents override working curve it's called the future future future financial planning i know look how much joy it brought her to make it yours just give her that little bit here's here's how i look at this david
that's right that's right we we really understand the need for the schools to get an override and have a positive response from the community to the override and so in the event that there might be other areas throughout the town government that aren't as sensitive to the nature of the need we have to be the owner of that ship and keep it going forward instead of getting stalled by an iceberg so that's why forward perfect framing aaron let's call it the moving forward group and a standing consistent metaphor in that delivery you really just had that through line we'll be meeting again a little over a week yes um you got that right i think we might want to liken it to something other than the titanics perhaps well but it's the titanic that doesn't that doesn't agree no agreed we are yes that's right okay okay so i am i really love serving on the wellness advisory committee so i would be thrilled to say on it but if you guys if there's someone that really feels like they would like to um step in there i'm i will acquiesce that even though i don't want to um but i will i will um someone and i'm looking to the side of the table because you're the newest members should really partner with kate and just get aligned with the needs on the open meeting law and the minutes and just ensuring compliance there and i can do them i mean this is what christine and i did last year so i can just can own doing them but as we get closer to maybe next spring when who knows what will happen uh making sure that other people know how to do it because it's seems confusing it's actually not it's not it seems a little bit overwhelming overwhelming absolutely yes um thank god i can volunteer for that yeah yeah great okay so i will it really is although
um and really anyone's welcome to liaise with the pto and attend their meetings but that's just kind of like an official um okay tech i will get more information on but please everyone think about that because we need we've got to have somebody um okay athletic advisory i'm happy to stay on that that that's like such a low lift um that like i'm happy to stay on that and if it somehow gets like super heavy or there's something going on people feel strongly about we can we can add somebody in swap you know whatever you guys want to do um so we need to fill so cpec and recreation anyone feel i'm happy to do recreation okay that's mostly like with katherine right and it's i mean i could just email her and say i'm here and i'm serving that that's kind of what it is there's no um i mean when there were certain things that were going on i wasn't that person but i met with david perlman to like fight a good fight on something um when he was like the chair of or do you park and rec whatever it is parks and rec okay thank you you can put me down for cpac cpac yeah okay jessica uh should we include the facilities master planning group that we we certainly can kind of already yeah i'm that's kind of probably going to morph though into david you're on your facilities support yes which is like me and david right yeah and a bunch of other people but right um um what does that look like next my thought is that's kind of going to morph a little bit maybe we discuss right that after in the fall i think we're going to spend more time in the last committee you were right i think the superintendent's override working group which you're also part of we should just leave that one there and then we'll we can do the other you should get hats so we know which you're wearing like in december we'll shift back to our facilities as we get to the soi because that we're still on track to submit the statement of interest next winter okay we'll be getting that work in the fall and that you all need to approve the sois we really gotta keep that ship moving okay um you'll see it in the goals which we gotta get a meeting for the goal we'll get to me oh i didn't mean the facilities i meant the other ship oh yes can't land in you know area 52 or anything okay uh-huh i do i know but i do appreciate the ship connection like i'm with you i am just like mind melting tonight it is approaching eight o'clock everybody i know yeah it is this has been very punchy okay it's still sitting though it's true it's true okay um can you you guys can all access this right through the so do you guys just want to put in your info like over whatever the next few days whatever just put it in there and that way we don't share that loud i'm gonna close that down so we did that lovely sorry put it for where there are at the top cell phone if you go to the top of that yeah there's a spot just under your name above your email if you could do that that would be fabulous it just helps diane who knows or if we're looking for each other um consent agenda do you want to do the calendar yeah did i miss that i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry
okay sorry computer's being funky i'm sorry never mind okay so unit a returns on 8 27. okay isn't that interesting all right so diane kind of plots these out typical is every other week sort of looks like twice a month except for the budget season sometimes we plan for more however um it sort of seems like maybe we leave things as is and see how things adjust yeah just a couple of things um in terms of goals you know important part of our summer work these are goals and we were hoping to if it's possible to schedule a meeting in later august to share our goals um a couple of the dates that i don't know um the 24th or 25th um it will be 24th or 25th of august yes those are like right those are the dates we selected that will give us real time to get them done um meaning like a daytime or an evening evening like a school committee meeting i don't know that's a new one that is a new one i know 24th is probably better for me i have to be in middlebury vermont for a thing on the 26th so i'd probably want to i have to drive up there on the is that monday the 24th and then one other thing i was checking i um the october 7th i'm going to be at a conference for a few days i don't know if it's possible to flip the october dates to like the 14th and the 28th unless we want back to back i apologize for that i thought you want to do the 14th and then oh so we don't back to back i don't know and then maybe we could like and i i'm sorry that this is what happens when you have one um challenge i don't know i want to just pull up um they have on the calendar some times like already when there might be maybe you have an idea betsy not you betsy but this betsy like concerts and different things that sometimes start to happen or open houses or back to school nights so october 14th instead of the 7th on monday's a holiday do not see anything on the 14th i see pep band on the 16th okay 28th i see the triumph trunk retreat is on the 27th so i think the 28th is available um okay does anyone else have an issue with that no we will have back to back unless we shift yeah so we could either do 14 21 or we do 14 28 and then yeah it's really hard when i can't see the number and for whatever reason i can't now it's your well it's the time of day and right i'm like it's the 11th it gets a little tricky because the 11th is veterans day on the wednesday after
well and then the 25th and 26th are 26 is thanksgiving right and 25 will be a probably some crazy super early release from school um why don't we just do back to back in october and if we have a shorter meeting 14 21 right i'm okay i'm okay with that i just don't need a meeting we'll just take a little break okay so 14 21 and i apologize for that okay so 14 21 well we have the i mean if the health survey is ready that's a longer meeting so maybe we could do what that one of those august 24th hold on hold on hold on hold on okay sorry sorry october 7th to october 14th all right so i don't know how diane does this with the x out so i'm just gonna ask her to fix it you will okay yeah sure oh yeah can she recirculate because i haven't calendared any of this yet what fourth is in boston what november 4th first meeting in november yeah we'll plan we'll plan oh i'm sorry okay yeah i thought you were talking about august and then i was like wait what um okay do you want to just confirm that with latoya yep and we'll solidify that
okay and maybe we'll have the last day of school on the 16th next year instead of some like fun snow days where there's no the rain days rain days are my favorite days thank you david not this year no it's true there was plenty there was plenty of snow this year it's real snow christine has the plowing bill to substantiate that reality um so okay we should probably have a meeting in july
i mean really it's only for discussion regarding you know what we don't need to worry about that right now we've discussed the calendar for we've got one on in august for goals and we can we've switched around the october we discussed metco headquarters meeting november we'll confirm that with latoya we'll work around with budget we may need to add some here or there for different purposes but and we do another thing aaron i don't know a retreat we talked about it i know we did but you didn't we tell me if you talked to ava i did talk to eva i'm even really sure the dates i mean we talked about some dates it was hard because of summer we have our own retreats we have conference conferences the only day we came up with was like july 7th yeah that's not gonna work for a lot of people at least also like two weeks from now yeah we will have to plan because it's really we could do one like in the winter or something in the fall i think you know that idea we would have to do it i don't know if those worked for eva but those were the other two weeks we talked about the the week of the july 20th 27th or 30th right that was the other 28th or 29th 28th or 29th i had to project with her that was the only other it won't be here i think we have to do it because of the summer's just hard with people yeah so we could do it in the fall you know something i think that's great for us and we kind of just like yeah it's been good previously we've done it yeah we'll find time in the fall that's better i think that's great that'll be good okay so july you want to do tbd yeah let's just do tbd okay okay um for the moment i just want to make sure okay um no that was me i had to turn my volume down no that's fine okay um all right so we're good on that david you will talk to diane about the calendar and editing that and then recirculating for school committee meeting and then we kind of already touched on it i think i think the one as far as administrative matters e discussion regarding need for town to override in fiscal year 28 um i think it would be helpful kirsteen and david if we could model out for this table what a budget without an override looks like as far as fte cuts that would potentially need to be made we don't need necessarily who or specifically where but maybe what that would just kind of what that looks like we could generally if we are short how many positions something general yeah i think it would be good for because for purposes of educating the community i think we need a better answer than just like i keep telling people it's like we can't have third grade for fiscal year 28 just no one in third grade will go to school or skip it for that year but i think we need to have a better answer so if we can model that that would be helpful and i think it would be helpful for those that weren't part of the past couple years budget cycles and seeing exactly what we did to kind of cut costs the other thing you may find i forgot about this until recently but probably was it two years ago we actually had a meeting that we have a recording of where um somebody from the state came and did an overview the chapter 70 yeah the chapter 70 like public how public schools are funded yes um and i don't remember what i want to say that was like a february meeting or a march meeting i can find it and i it would it was very well done and it is complicated but it will help inform sort of how much the being at levy capacity in terms of being able to generate revenue from the local property taxes and how much of our school expenditure is tied to the ability to raise funds from local tax property taxes and i would say you know when we do something like this uh kirstein we can share what we know so i always like a category like this is what we know this is what we don't know certainly there are things we don't know like you know state aid we won't know or and while health insurance is in our budget it has an impact on our budget of course in terms of what we get from the town but there are certain things we absolutely i mean i'm thinking um we would have to estimate all the things we do in a usual budget like look over the last few years on special education tuition and transportation kind of project where our averages have been um we can take a look at obviously we need to know you know salaries which are a piece of this so we'll we should have a good chunk of it and then we'll have some unknowns but we can kind of estimate based on right now we're in the middle of closing out and starting a fiscal year so i hope there's no um um we'll need a little time pressure to build this with still a lot of unknowns that right we'll get some more knowns um other than that i just think in general there's a need we've done everything we can to make cuts within level service we have not filled positions for two years running um we have very closely looked at enrollment and anticipated numbers over the next few years um we have relocated the children's way into happy hollow and out of the town building as a way to be more efficient we've cut staff yep um and last year we almost didn't make payroll but we did uh so i just wanted to put this on here to highlight for everyone around the table for the public for the community anyone who's listening or watching that it's a real need it's not um inflated and i think we need to keep our eye on that and just keep pressing um and i want to have a good answer for what it looks like if we weren't to have an override so that everyone has a good understanding um okay anybody have any questions or any other thoughts or anything else that they want to say on that topic before i move on to the consent agenda i think that visual as soon as we can get it understanding uh is really important because i think we had a hard conversation with our principals earlier in this meeting and that was a very hard conversation for our community to have just that the conversations that we will need to have next year are going to be i think much harder so we need to be prepared with those facts so people can really visualize what this means because it's complicated but then it's not right this is what it means um the the better that we can visualize that for our community the better
good so we got some new guidance and i'm putting this under administrative because i am um i don't know where else put it right now so we got some administrative got uh some guidance from the town clerk and we were advised to remove matters not anticipated by the chair from our standing like agenda and while i understand that that move is really to push everyone to update their agendas and get everything out in front of the public as much as possible in advance of a meeting it bothers me not to have a place where people can voice things that they may not have truly anticipated until the meeting um the select board has an item that's toward the end which was typically where our matters not reasonably anticipated would go that's called something along the lines of like members concerns like share of concerns i don't love having it be concerns but so if you could all kind of think about maybe where we what we could term it and i'm happy to kind of keep it in the same section before executive session after the consent agenda what have you um just kind of like a place that also maybe there's something you want to talk about and i'm not listening to you and i didn't put it on the agenda and you're getting frustrated or whatever that it's there for people to have a place um so i i hope that we don't use it for that purpose because if you have something you like to speak about i'm happy to put it on the agenda so please come to me i'm glad to raise that because you know i noticed that on the agenda tonight and i think what happens is that sometimes we have things happen after we need the agenda yeah and that happened to us this week there's something i would have shared um you know this is really really sad news is that you know at our middle school we have an incredibly dedicated principal uh one of the most dedicated people some of us have ever worked with um you know who had to step down for health reasons um and i just want to thank deborah romeo for her commitment you know her thoughtfulness her care over the last two years um so that's something on the agenda i would have talked about and i just want to you know let everybody know that um we're going to need a couple of weeks to put together a plan because we can't do things immediately when things come at us um and you know making sure that schools have excellent leadership teams is one of the most important things we do and we hire them and support them so we will um during the week of july 6th sometime that week we will have a plan of what we're doing but for now um you know we want to acknowledge deborah who will be here just a little while longer and just need some time to to work with our middle so folks in terms of next steps and needs thank you for sharing that uh i think you've worked really hard with your team and building a really great strong team around you and you've done a great job at stabilizing our buildings and our district since you've joined um and deborah's played a great part in that and um i would just want to thank her for everything that she's done and we wish her all the best we'll make sure that our schools will let you know in that week sometime that week we'll work between now and then okay um so that's what i was looking for from all of you i have a sea of alliteration going to my head right now members moments members musings you know i'm just i'm gonna keep working i want to keep cooking that i really like members music i thought you might yeah okay um so next time maybe i'll just play with that and just then discuss it um so consent agenda is there anything anybody wanted to discuss had issues with they're in there they i put them in for the last meeting no they weren't there i did oh because diane said they weren't there we passed them over twice okay i just i'm gonna go back to the other meeting then june and i just heard from jackie and she has no objections to continuing her service excellent timing i answer her later um are they in the executive session folder by mistake because they're not in the june 10th i put the executive session one in the executive session okay so hold on but it's not the executive session no it is we need the executive session so did you approve those last time no we didn't approve any may 4th but we wouldn't do the executive session in consent agenda we would do no i know but it was in the so they're right there i can see them it was the one that was town meeting yes 5 4 26 is a draft draft where in the executive session oh okay now the only thing we're wondering is but we're missing that open yeah yeah so let me see if i put that in the wrong place well so the es ones are there if you guys want to look at them and we can vote those okay i would vote if i wasn't there because you can vote for a quorum you don't it doesn't have to be and you can state that you're voting for that purpose and i put them in the may 4th folder by accident i know i did them and i put them in because it was in a much not happy state that i was putting them in there i might have to find those on my computer or something i don't know why they're not in there because i you're right i don't see them in there either but i know i did them um it's because they're labeled wrong they're in the june 10th holder under sc minutes 4 29 26 draft so i'm right now going to rename that you want to move them to the next folder um i can they are now i mean through the 24th oh there they are with the right name i might add procedural question because this is a consent agenda may 4th meeting so should we abstain from the vote i can't verify these minutes having not been here if we're voting on approving both at the same time as a consent agenda item you can abstain or you can participate either way um you can always participate to make a quorum as well even if you weren't there just so you know okay um and we can pull those out and separate them as well and vote on them separately okay so i wasn't there either so i'm gonna participate it's okay free to play ready or do you guys want a little more time oh no i'm never though okay move to approve the consent agenda okay all in favor aye any opposed none okay it's just the one tonight right yeah um before i do this do you guys want to stay for executive session do you think we're going to talk about um just for the bargain what do you think yeah we'll just try to keep it quick okay sure okay sorry i could go ahead and move to enter executive session for the purposes of discussing strategy related to collective bargaining with the whalen educational association unit a as permitted by mgl chapter 30a section 21 a3 and for reviewing and approving executive session minutes with the intent to redact and release said minutes as permitted by mgl chapter 30a section 22 may 4th 2026 may 27 2026 and june 10 2026. the school committee will be joined by david fleischman superintendent betsy gabron assistant superintendent and kristine patterson director of finance and operations uh-huh the school committee will adjourn an executive session and will not reconvene an open session do i have a second second uh betsy kate yes jesson ruchant yes
Is there anyone here for public comment? Hearing none, we'll pass over public comment. Okay. Up first is superintendent's update, and item A is continued discussion of the elementary scheduling pilot. Do we want to invite these guys? Yeah. Come on up, Brian.
At our last meeting, there was discussion of the elementary scheduling pilot, and since then, you know, Brian's communicated to the broader local community, and he'll just brief you updated some of the highlights of his communication, and then invite to see if there are any other questions in school committee members.
So, you know, as to be expected, this was a very difficult decision, and we know how much and how special our instrumental music program is in Whalen. And so, there was, I would say, a lot of support for this pilot, and there was people who, you know, were definitely feeling a sense of loss. And so, I want to acknowledge that again, that this is a brutal situation that we're in, and it's a last resort. And everyone who's advocating for instrumental music and citing research, they're 100% spot on. So, I'm not going against research or anything like that. We just have a really tricky situation with the timing of our content. I do think, in thinking ahead to next year, that this will be something that really does free up our schedule. When you look at the minutes and hours in totality, you know, adding a week and a half, basically, of instruction by doing this, I think can make a significant difference. We're going to track really, really closely, kind of the curriculum coverage of what we do. And certainly, we're going to track kind of where kids typically would be in music, kind of at the middle point of the year and the end of the year. Betsy and I met with Susan Memolee earlier this week, and we're trying to think of creative ways and creative ideas that we can maximize the musical instruction in a way that's going to allow us to have a little bit more balance with our overall schedule. But it definitely is something that we want the instrumental music program to succeed, and we're not against it. And so we are going to continue to collaborate and think about what's best moving forward while really thinking about what's best for the whole child. And one of the things that comes to mind is, you know, I've heard a little bit that this pilot is not in the best interest of the whole child. And I think about recess, to be honest. And, you know, we are one of the few school districts that still have two recesses per day. My kids are extremely jealous and need them to get one. And that social time is so key. It's so important to the development. And so if, you know, some people have suggested that you should just kind of eliminate recess in the morning, and the teachers and I stand by that decision that we don't want to do that because that makes, really grows and develops those social and emotional skills, those resiliency skills, those navigating conflict skills that are so essential. And the idea that we can't even sometimes teach a full Wayfinder lesson every week, again, the recess is even more important. So, yeah, I sit here feeling very bittersweet about this whole thing, but also feeling hopeful that this is going to allow us to educate the whole child moving forward.
I had a question, Brian, and thank you for coming back. I think there might be some confusion about how the remaining 45 pilot minutes a week in the pilot are going to be allocated. There seems to be some question about them being all ensemble, which I think you'd agree would be very challenging, particularly in fourth grade where they'll be picking up a new instrument for the first time or in third grade. So maybe if it's premature and you're still figuring that out with Susan and others, that's fine, but I just wanted to give you an opportunity to speak to that because there seemed to be some concern that we were going to sort of leave only ensemble and there wouldn't be any instruction in a new instrument. So I would say that we're still kind of figuring out the details of what the 45 minutes look like. And I think that ensemble can be a time with the right support. They can be a strong instructional time. So an ensemble at Loker is probably about 20 kids, 20, 25 kids. A lesson is probably 9 or 10 kids. It's across many different instruments. And so, yes, the ratio is much better. And I think that if we can think about how to kind of best support the teacher to be able to differentiate instruction, then, you know, we have amazing instrumental music teachers who are so skilled that I'm not saying, again, that it's going to be the same as what Happy Hall and Claypool have next year. I'm not saying that at all. But I think we need to think outside the box on how do we make that 45-minute period maximize the effectiveness with it. But it'll be different. Like, and everyone involved in the pilot recognizes that it will require something different than just the ensemble, as people appreciate it. So I just wanted to give an opportunity for the community here that, like, it's not eliminating instruction in favor of ensemble. Those 45 minutes will be used in a different way. Yes, I think we're still kind of figuring that out, but we're committed to those 45 minutes being as meaningful as possible.
But can you, maybe I missed it last time, what necessitates this fade-off? What's forcing us to do this? So it's a good question. So, and I don't like to just say about minutes, but, you know, basically, if we look at all the standards that we want to cover and all the recommendations that we get from research, we really need, we're 160 minutes per week short on what we really need to be doing. And that's basically three weeks of instruction, 96 hours. And we have looked at every aspect of our schedule over the last several years. And we haven't touched instrumental music because we didn't want to, because it's a wonderful program. We're only teaching 50 out of the 60 math minutes that we're supposed to be doing. There are 120 minutes of music between bands, strings, and general music. 90 minutes, if we're lucky, of science and social studies per week. Wayfinder, we only have 30 minutes allotted for our SEL time. It really, teachers have found when they've implemented this year, they really need 40 minutes. Fourth and fifth grade health, when we plug that into the schedule for those 12-week sessions, it's coming out of somewhere. So sometimes it's missing math, sometimes it's missing ELA, sometimes it's missing science and social studies. So we're in a situation where I don't know what else to do. We're talking about combining library and technology at some point in the future as well to try to free up some more instructional minutes for the classroom, as well as kind of modernizing and thinking about how we can be really effective and strategic with our library and really thinking about how to educate the overall literacy of all of our students, media literacy. So kind of all those factors together. 72% of our teachers believe that our schedule is impeding our ability to meet the needs of all learners. And so that's kind of what started this whole thing and prompted the committee. And we just have this really big shortage. And I don't know how else to do this because I know that we're not covering all the standards we're supposed to be covering. I know that we don't get to all the units that we want to get to in math. We're not doing as much writing as we want to do. In this new reading program, we're talking about doing six out of nine units next year. Now, part of that is a first-year implementation, but we should be doing another 30 minutes in our reading program because that's what the guidelines tell us we're supposed to be doing, but we've limited it to two hours. So we've reached a point where kind of what else do we do? Is that showing up in scores, Ryan? I will say this, that it is showing up in the ELA Edcast scores. I have a sense of what next the spring scores look like. It's preliminary, so I'm not able to talk about it publicly, but I'm not feeling great about it. I appreciate you talking about this again because this is a really complicated and emotional topic. So thank you for thinking critically about this. I think, correct me on any of this if I'm wrong, but over the last, at least since COVID, but I think before we have been trying to align our curriculum across all three schools so that all of our students are learning the same standards. That's why we implemented Bridges. That's why we got Wayfinder because they were really struggling with SEL. That's why we're implementing this new ELA. It's about equity. And I'm hearing you say that your teachers are saying is that we don't have enough face-to-face time with our students. And I think what we've also talked about before is that students are struggling to deep dive into subjects for a long period of time because they're not getting enough of that uninterrupted time. What I think I'm also hearing you say is we're thinking about whole child and I was a band kid. My daughter plays the flute that I played for 30 years before I gave it to her. So I'm really empathetic to families who are instrumental families. That's not every kid. And when those band kids or orchestra kids go, what I'm hearing is that other kids stay in the classroom and their instruction is interrupted. And that's not equitable. We've worked so hard to get our curriculum equitable that this feels like the next step. If I could change anything about this pilot, I really wish that all three schools had aligned because it puts you in a tricky situation. It makes it a little bit more inequitable when really we're trying to make things more equitable. So I wish we could have gotten there. You know, I did some research into our neighboring districts. We are the only district that I can find anywhere that does instrumental at elementary twice a week. All of our neighboring towns do it once a week. And plus we have music. So I want to reframe this as not taking away, but really alignment. So I appreciate you all thinking critically about that. Again, I'd really like to know what success looks like. I did go back and look at our MCAS scores that we talked about in November. And third, fourth, and fifth grade, they are lower. They're certainly lower than before COVID. So I see that there's something happening there that we need to pay attention to. So those are my questions. How are we measuring success? How are we reinvigorating science and social studies to reinforce those minutes? Kate, I just want to acknowledge, I know it's really hard to hear you're trying something at one school. And I think we do have a long history, though, of trying things on a smaller scale first. Because as you mentioned, this is going to be such a major change for the instructors. And to give them the space to sort of really, really try it in one place before having to generalize it across the board, I think we'll learn a lot in that and see what works. And if it doesn't, as Brian said, if it's a train wreck in any way, you're minimizing the damage. And it gives them time to really sort of focus the changes to one location first. And there's some scheduling implications to it as well. So I'm hearing that the MCAS scores were one way that we're potentially seeing, I don't want to say, a correlation maybe, right? Like we're not necessarily sure that the minutes are the direct cause of that. I'm wondering if there was ever any feedback sought from our middle school educators about any knowledge gaps as they were coming in to, you know, sixth grade and starting their year off with their units based on the exposure that the elementary students had with the current curriculum and the time allowed. And if not, is that something we might also want to look at? Just measuring to see if there really is any change with that added instruction, just recognizing that the, and I'm new here to it, just recognizing, right, that like the fidelity of the curriculum is based on like how the curriculum was researched in meeting those learning objectives and it doesn't mean that it was researched in terms of like a different implementation model or a different amount. I think that's a really good point. I think that's something we have not done. But I think connecting with the middle school to think about that. I would also add that we have more students in reading intervention than we've ever had in the history of my time here at least. And so I think the need is greater than it's ever been. And that's also part of the push for this is that, and I know, I've not, I understand the research of instrumental music. I understand it has academic benefits. And I'm not saying we're not seeing those. And the most direct way to teach a kid how to read is to give direct instruction on reading. Yes, and I think that's true for any other subject that a child is passionate about. Right? If you're a sports kid, you're getting braided instruction through that. If you're an arts kid, if you're a Dungeons & Dragons kid, like you're getting that creativity there. So it's a yes and, but it really depends on the child. So we need to align that. And the other part that I also worry about with lessons is, you know, families are paying to do this. And while there's financial assistance available, there, I'm sure there are some families that don't want to submit the application and they just choose not to do instrumental music. And so it is a big equity, from my perspective, it's a big equity issue on who's actually participating in this and who's not. It's not cheap to rent the instrument either and then paying for lessons on top of that. So we have a kind of a significant equity issue kind of within the school day within this. And so I think it's something that we really have to continue to be monitoring, but it keeps me up at night, to be honest, that things like that, to your point, Kate, that we're trying to become more equitable, it's not equitable. That was kind of my point last week because we live in Weyland. We know this. 70% of our high school athletes are also in club sports. Many children who start instruments in third grade, they've already started, right? They're doing practice partners. They're doing private lessons. Is that equitable? No, but I think that also impacts the students that are fed into the instrumental system and that's just not fair. And those students who are left out, the entry isn't as easy as one may think. So we have to be aware of that. And I would encourage you to look at, honestly, the racial breakdown of our high school and middle school bands and the percentage of white and Asian as compared to other students of color. And students on IEPs and the accommodations that you get in music class.
Can I? I have a few questions. Yeah. And I apologize because I wasn't present for your presentation two weeks ago. I'm trying to get up to speed. I had Betsy give me like a two-minute overview. But I've been doing some digging and whatnot. But a few different questions. One being, can you just refresh my memory on what those kids that aren't participating in the lessons are doing when the kids that do participate in lessons are in their lesson? So, I mean, our teachers are teaching them but they are doing things like independent reading. They're doing some review work. What bothers teachers, I think, is that they can't move forward in the curriculum. They've got to press pause. And so, and for some kids, getting an extra boost on something and getting some intervention during that time is beneficial. But there are also a lot of other kids who may not need that. And so, it's very hard for the teachers to make that a productive use of time. Right. Yep. Okay.
Another question. This was a long time ago so I'm definitely dating myself. but when I was on the school council at Happy Hollow I remember having a discussion with Jim Lee and he had said that at that point Wayland was a leader in the amount of instructional minutes that our children and students were getting. If you have any idea about that do you know what's changed to put us in a position where is it just a change in standards coming out from the state? Is it that you know we change something about what they're doing that they're not getting as much instructional time? Like do you know what the dynamic is that changed there? What was the shift? That's a really good question. I think there's a variety of factors. Okay. I mean I think standards have changed. Yeah. You know until about eight or nine years ago and Trisha O'Reilly was huge with this like we weren't doing a lot of math like we were and look at our math MCAS scores they've been transformed over the last seven or eight years. We weren't doing as much literacy. We were doing the academic demands of the standards have increased significantly and so that has increased our time that we've needed to do with that and so there was a lot more flexibility in the past and we don't have that same flexibility and we can still educate the whole child in a way that's going to be meaningful but it is something that has changed over time. I'm not sure that we were ever a leader in instructional minutes. Okay. I just remember him saying that and who knows he may have been caveating in something else but it was And he was my amazing colleague No, no, no. Yeah, yeah. But the length of the school day hasn't changed but the amount we have to cover has changed and I would argue look at kindergarten. Kindergarten is very different than it was I mean I ran a kindergarten school for four years when I first came to Whelan but what we did then and what we do now is dramatically different and so I think our ability to be able to fit everything in has increased yes or decreased yeah. See we both dated ourselves because my daughter was in that kindergarten school and many people here don't even know that that existed except for Scott because we can date him too.
You're 30. What are you going to do? I'm going to go on now. And I would also just say that like I'm thinking about with Scott sitting here like thinking about health again how our teachers probably haven't been able to embrace it like they would because they're losing instructional time. A lot of districts have wellness twice per week like we don't have that and so why is music so disproportionate compared to everywhere else? As important as it is why is it so disproportionate? Why are we in this situation where it's such a huge difference? Because we have an amazing program and what's going to be best for every child? A wider variety. Right. No. Thank you. I know this isn't the only thing that we're doing to try and maximize instructional time for kids. What else are we planning to do potentially next year? And are there different things that maybe we could pilot at the other elementary schools to learn things kind of all at once and reconvene and see what worked best? Not that I know better than the scheduling group, just a question. They were the co-chairs, Ryan and Betsy were the co-chairs of a year-long scheduling committee at the elementary level. So I think one of the key things that we're doing that looks different is really aiming for more of a block schedule that allows us to be more efficient and targeted particularly when you're doing intervention that's going to match up. So I think historically there's been a lot of autonomy in the schedules which has made it a little bit choppier for special educators if they're coming to deliver services. There have just been some inefficiencies and there's no malintent in any of that and there's a lot of good reasons to have autonomy in scheduling. But when you really work towards block scheduling to the degree that we can given our part-time people and our space constraints you're able to utilize your minutes more strategically so that's one of the big hopes. We're also looking to move wherever possible some of the meeting time to do that in different non-instructional times so that we can maximize minutes. And as Brian mentioned we're exploring that idea of kind of trying to streamline more efficiently our library and our tech time in a more cohesive potential way. Is that potentially coming out next year across all three elementary schools or are we looking to do that down the line? We had been looking at this for this year. We had explored it. It was kind of when the decisions of the committee came out was to see if it's feasible this year. We're still having to just a couple hours ago we were talking about this very thing. It is a little bit tight until obviously the school year ended yesterday. The timing may not be 100% right for that change and so we would then explore more fully for the following year. I think it's important for the community as a whole to understand all of the different pieces because I think there's so much passion around the music program and all its success and how fabulous it is that a lot of people didn't hear. It was like they heard that and that owned the discussion and so I think hearing these pieces is really important that it was really thoughtful that it's not the only thing that's happening that there's a lot of different moving parts that are trying to come together to maximize the time. And I think one good example of that is the committee talked at length about the skills time that they've had in the past which has taken place a lot on technology and really has asked for that to have a new focus on some SEL and choice time to balance these rigorous academic demands with the other side of the coin which we know is equally important. If kids don't have the skills to regulate they can't attend to those academics so they don't have the skills to navigate conflict with a peer in a group situation that is just going to detract from their ability to engage fully in the academics. So I think the committee was really I mean the number of times we talked about the balance and the whole child and really looking at all of the components was a real focus of the committee. It was our biggest priority. Yeah. Whole child and equity were the two main topics.
triggers in my mind. Is there anything that we as a committee could do to further support this effort other than just listen and tell you we support you but is there anything we could help you with?
It's a great question. And you don't have to be on the spot but if there's something let us know. Open off. Yeah. If you think it's something you'll be the first to know. And I would also just say I would love to stay in touch about this and I would love to collaborate and you know potentially problem solve some challenges that come up you know I think it's important that we you hear from me before next June right? Absolutely. And then we talk about this kind of throughout the year and so this is a this is a big change which is why we're just probably in one school and so I think it's it's something that I want I want to be very transparent open about everything that we're doing and I want to have as many people who are willing to collaborate to try to figure out the best way of doing this. And Aaron I know you weren't here last time but our other two elementary principals are really committed to being on the same page at the end of this year and to really learn from this pilot in whatever direction it goes because we don't want the schools ultimately doing different things we've worked so hard to try to have more continuity of experience for students so that is the ultimate goal and they're fully in support we appreciate all the work that you do to make the three schools aligned because that's clear so thank you for that.
Yeah I think you know bringing you guys in in a I should say in a few months really it is a few months would be great just getting that temperature check on how these things are going how it's working and maybe if possible I guess either way that it's going bringing Susan maybe to talk about it too just to that aspect of it would be great so appreciate your time.
Happy no more kids in school for a few months. I still have Pegasus so I still have a little Oh that's right we'll see you next week I will see you next week. All right speaking of wellness wellness come on up so for our new school committee members Scott Parsegian is our district wide director of health and wellness. Thank you for having me. Nice to meet a couple of new faces. Like Aaron was razzling me before this was my 30th year at Wayland I just finished I'm also Wayland alumni so this is home to me. I live here both my boys went through the program so I love this place thank you for everything you guys do. It truly means a lot. I'm here to talk about wellness a lot is going on starting off with our elementary program again last year I sat here with Jenny Flynn who's our health education specialist and we talked about the fourth and fifth grade curriculum and how that's going again I guess I should maybe include some of those notes that Jenny sent out about what's going on in our health education program but it's going great we're in year three we just finished year three so it's incredible and again we're looking to expand we'd love to bring our health education program again down to grades at least two and three maybe one two and three but again as you just heard timing and I understand all that but again my goal as wellness director is to eventually bring health education even down to our lower grades again we're only given 12 lessons as Brian said it's not a lot of time so again trying to build on that and also we are looking forward to housing our pre-k over at happy hall and we are developing a wellness program for them right now Jenny Flynn our health education person as I just mentioned and Chris Fay nope sorry Chris George have already met and went down and spent a day and spent a couple hours at the Children's Way this past week to get to know them so that they can see them when they come up in the fall so again we're already starting that high school I don't know if you've heard if you have kids but again we're moving to a brand new elective based program at the high school this comes out of partly our mapping that we've been doing over the last two years as again to let you know again Massachusetts frameworks and standards for health and wellness came out two years ago before that they were not touched the last time they were redone by the state was 1999 so a long time so we've been looking at what's going on and what we're doing and what we're missing and what we can add in so one thing we decided to do was as the high school staff we would offer elective based wellness for our students what that means is that we're going to make sure that first of all everybody gets everything in the standards but then also allowing students to have some choice where they want to be not every student wants to be out playing flag football or softball or something like that and so we're offering a bunch of walking for life mat fitness which is yoga pilates all that kind of stuff we're adding an advanced fitness class to our high school public health class again all kinds of things we had kids sign up and rank them and see what they want to do number one with 256 was healthy culinary and nutrition so again we partner with whaling food services we actually use the kitchen at the high school to train our students which is amazing walking into a really a kitchen that they only get if they were working at a restaurant or something so we've been piloting this for the last five years and it's a successful course the only problem is we can only have the class when it meets on last block because obviously they're trying to prepare lunch and clean up and then we come in so but the way we have our waterfall schedule we're going to be able to add some more classes in there and then we're going to when it doesn't fall we're going to be in the class and really working on the nutrition part out of the frameworks and standards so that's that's a little bit about our elective base I can go more into it maybe next year about how it went and what's going what's positive and stuff like that but that's just a little brief part sports broadcasting class is also into our third year this year we had the highlight of doing a live broadcast of the state championship volleyball game the MIA gave us permission at the 18th hour and we were able to put together a seven person crew to head out to Westfield or not we were playing against Westfield it was Worcester and do a live broadcast where we had over 367 people tune in live to watch the game we got emails from somebody's brother that was in China that wasn't able to be there but was able to experience it just by our live broadcast and on YouTube now we're over 1500 views on our live broadcast of the volleyball game so he was really excited to be there it was great so our MVP our mentors and violence prevention program was asked to speak at the governor's youth healthy summit this past May where we talked about what we're doing different than other schools around healthy relationships if you don't know we run a 14 class that is mandatory by all juniors and that's still going to stay in our elective base all juniors are still going to have to take our MVP course but again we the kids did a beautiful job presenting what we do and why it's one of their favorite classes so that was really special to hear from them that they all love the class next big things happening I think we can over here and over here but we're about to build a brand new project venture ropes course and I don't know for those of you who have been on school committee we went together two years ago to the community preservation act together with a letter from you talking about how important this will be to our education and how doing some research our course was built in 1979 by like the grandfather of project adventure he helped design the course and then our course was used for the next five years as a training facility for project adventure helping other schools get this education into their schools well 1979 and we're in 26 right now it was also built in the woods behind the high school and it was built on trees so right now with the trees rotting and growing we have one element that is that is able to pass inspection right now without doing a full overhaul so with the help of these three people right here I think I'm safe to say that we are about to build a brand new project venture course at Whale High School which we're very excited John Berry is our lead teacher around project venture and he is really excited to get this up and running and thanks to all these three right here David you want to talk yet well our state representatives David Linsky and Carmen Gentile is retiring they called it from the house floor and we let it done with their commitment to health and wellness we'll have a I don't know a ribbon what do you call it for ropes cutting yeah yeah we're looking forward to it we'll invite them we'll invite all of you as well do we expect to have that done for the like by end of fall I just didn't know what the timeline so it's going to be done over the summer that's awesome that's great all the last signatures I was down meeting with conservation this morning to get her did you get an email from okay from Shannon or from Linda do you want me to follow up on there any help possible but we're up I think we're there right I do need a confirmation yeah we do need but we're yes I believe it could be up and running by the first day of school it's awesome so that's really exciting to do that we're going to build it behind the away bleachers right in front of the softball field so is it going to be like out of the woods now totally relocated in the woods right now they now they don't really do that want you to do it on these you can but they would do it in the woods and put poles in there to get machines and everything up there was going to skyrocket the price yeah we have all this open space so I walked the all the fields with Katherine Brennan who's also behind this project super helpful I just want to know that's great so we walked it we found a spot that we thought was out of everybody's way and we're just working on the last couple signatures on that like kind of on that cut through between going to the rock and going down to the wetlands that we're towards the right ball field yeah okay actually directly right behind the bleachers the okay bleachers great there okay it's going to put us out of harm's way of everything so we're really excited about that this is something that again I know you've been involved the last couple years trying to help us build but it's been a lot longer than that it's been a dream of mine to get this up and running and we finally gonna make it I I know we're gonna make it happen right my team so that's awesome I do want to say I opened a pleasant email last night at five o'clock that we're able to also help redesign our fitness room our fitness room is now over 15 years old there's been no budget to maintain no I mean my physical education budget cannot maintain a fitness room nor athletics so we're trying to work to get pieces together but we're able to maybe do a phase plan to really build a fitness room and obviously there's new technology and everything so again we're gonna start that phase again also this summer if you don't know our fitness room is one of our most used spaces in the high school the wellness staff whenever we have a free period our duty is to open the fitness room so we have kids all types of kids we have crew kids coming down that want to come and get a quick row in to kids that had a tough game the other night and they want to come and foam roll and stretch and do all the kind of the new technologies out there how to take care of your body so it's really one of the most used spaces in our high school and we keep it open you know I open it up at 6 30 in the morning for our students and it's open until about 4 30 in the afternoon for so all day long it's used and I'm excited to say that we're gonna be redesigning that space also sorry do you think there's any room for like a sponsorship for that you know Betsy and I were talking about this last year two years ago that we were going to build an outdoor remember that if we really get we're going to expand it and build outdoor and we are trying to get some funding and stuff like that to to expand it and give some more space that yeah and we talked about that and it was it was doable but and I'm forgetting now who was the sponsor behind it was gonna yeah there was a company but it was it was still really big big money they were gonna put in like 40% of it but it was still like hundreds of thousands of dollars right it's just not in the cards at the time but it was a very cool outdoor you could do like outdoor yoga and Pilates session and it was also geared to be enable any folks with disabilities to really access all of the materials really designed with a kind of a universal design bench to it so so we've been looking at this for a long time how to expand how to redesign how to make more space to do some of that functional training that now really students are really all about and so we're going to get rid of the platforms in there and we're going to put up some rigs if you've seen them and they take up less space but also giving us right now we have four stations to work at we're going to this new system we're gonna have six stations to work at and and they condense so it's given us more space again to do that functional training in the fitness room so really excited about that I was also asked to talk a little bit about the wellness committee I am the chair of the wellness committee along with Betsy and Aaron are part of it too and we've had a lot of great success over the years if you don't know what else can be looks at health and wellness of our students but also connects it with our food service department and what's being served to our kids and we've had some really tough conversations with food service about how to change things and how to bring in some new stuff and I continue to talk with Bonita and Cheryl about that about scratch cooking and how we're doing it now we're going to try to look to do it in our healthy culinary class and how we can work with them to maybe prepare better meals you know for our students this year one of our tasks was looking at our nicotine policy which hasn't been touched since 2019 we found out while it still hadn't had some vaping in there and stuff like that what it was not getting at was some of the nicotine pouches now that we see students using and even though we are doing that education in our classes it wasn't in our policy so we were able to have both the middle school and high school administration staff attend one of our meetings we talked about what they're seeing what they're what they want to see in the handbook and jay verhusky and myself will be meeting this summer to update the handbook and make recommendations to both middle school and high school administration to put into the handbooks for students coming this fall and also looking at the policy the district-wide policy do we not have that for tonight we don't have the file no okay no i'm sorry so i'm just gonna we're gonna pass over item c jay and i thought we were just at one of my last things also um was that we plan to be here in the fall to talk about our metro survey yeah the survey jay and i just um attended one of the conferences two weeks ago okay about um sharing the data with with your um schools and your town uh and jay thought that jay and i thought that would be a good time to kind of put them both together yeah we'd be done so we're going to meet this summer we have some time to plan it out okay i misunderstood so that's my bad no i i yes it's okay we're just giving people the heads up that the the policy information is coming all good and we yep we've looked at it quite a bit yeah yeah that's great um okay i think that's it except for the real piece that i wanted to talk about tonight um and again i'm sorry ronnie's not here because she was part of that and i've had students here and and also um our lead teacher chris fay but unfortunately the vacation uh everybody's out everybody's either at the cape or uh somewhere else so it's it's just me but they did present they did give me some materials to share with you about our unified team this came about by two seniors that just recently graduated uh audrey larson who's in there who talks about the impact of the program and penelope jinx they came to me and talked about how they want to take the best buddies program and kind of make it bigger here at whalen and i have known that other schools around us do a great unified wellness program it's being talked about and at the conferences i go to so um ronnie was able to find a you know 0.3 position to expand chris fay's role in our district and really become our unified teacher and this was our pilot year and again it's made up of a mix of students as you can see there we have our mentors that were seniors here around high school and then we have our students that are in the special needs program at whalen high school and i could just tell you by me dropping in on these classes i can't do it justice but i i walked in just you have the picture there on the roller blades it was like a old school roller skating party if you remember those right at roller kingdom down in hudson you know again that's where i would go uh but music music playing kids having a great time smiling laughing uh to an obstacle course that they created together and were timing each other and seeing who could go the fastest to some great health education talks that really brought health education down to their level where they could understand it because some of the students were just plugged in regular health education classes to be honest the material was just going over their head they were just sitting there and they weren't getting a lot so again this gave us the opportunity to use our mentors our seniors and really help educate and as you can read in there the bonds and the connections that students have made i got a couple quotes that i put together in there from students but wonderful wonderful class that we started this year we had 15 seniors asked to be part of the mentor program for this coming year which is great but it's actually too much what we're trying to figure out is too many of them but again just the one year kids hearing and seeing the impact on the program is just heartwarming and exciting and again i just i get touched by talking about it because it's really awesome and this is just for students that are part of the whalen school system um right correct this isn't okay yeah we registered registered with special olympics as well unfortunately some of the students they weren't we tried to get a basketball game together they just quite weren't ready this year hopefully we can build on it there were some other events too we looked at a bocce tournament that was coming up but unfortunately like the weekend that came the students had other things going on they couldn't make it so again we're hoping to get there and that that's our goal to really partake in some of the special olympic events with these but again the class happening during the school day that everybody can see i think is more meaningful than anything but yes our goal is to get to that special olympics basketball game where the whole entire student body comes out and cheers them on as they're playing against a rival link in sudbury or weston or natick or some of these other programs that are a little bit ahead of us but we'll be seeing the olympics but really that's what's going on um but really we're we're we're this unified happening inside the school day is something new not a lot of schools are doing a lot of schools do have the special olympics part but we're trying to build and make it better that was a lot and i can dump a lot more i'm very proud of the program that we have here at wayland those are just a few of the highlights from this year oh and i would say that our work with jess tepero and reach beyond domestic she used to work for reach she's now by herself we received another grant to work with her this year and this coming year we're going to focus on grades four through eight as she's been working with our high school kids over the last three years and she also presented with the students at the Healthy Youth Summit so now we're going to take that work that we've been doing with her as we receive the grant to continue to work with her I'm going to bring it down to the lower grades it's no we actually got it from the nurses and some part of their that's right yes yes that came out of yeah that the community nursing yes that's right again Heather that's awesome we're able to help find some of that money to continue the funding that's great I am applying to keep this going for the next two years with the Metro West survey they have a $20,000 grant and when I was when Jay and I went to the the meeting two weeks ago we actually happen to sit next to the president of the committee so we we got to talk to her about our vision of the if we put in a grant and what we're doing with it and she thought it fit the alignment so that's something else that we'll be working on this summer to submit to keep this work going I just want to say I'm glad to hear it just as a former colleague of mine yeah we am we work together on a an OVW grant but then also kind of snatched her up on my former campus yeah yeah so Jess has been with Waylon for over ten years and she's like a faculty member for us so she presents I know she's presented one of the elementary schools in both middle and high school at our teacher meeting so yes we're excited to keep that well I talked really great I know I'll stop in there so absolutely for now kids are I mean look at the transition from Brian there's so much happening we're making trade-offs so have to balance that with some mental health activities I feel so great stuff thank you yes it's number one and that's why you on the match yeah yeah and that's part of our all at the high school we have the field house and the fitness room open every block so again when the kids have a free period they're able to come and grab a basketball and and shoot around it or go into the fitness room and stretch and foam or whatever it might be but again because we're trying to get that movement I'm the least bendy over teaching you know no absolutely please I think next year we have to have a school committee on the ropes course yeah I mean retreat absolutely but a lot of great things happening a lot of things happen this year and a lot of things great coming next year I'm really excited about our program thank you for everybody for your support I think anybody no thank you great updates thank you so much we were so excited about unified wellness and I just looked through this and you know please pass on the excitement to Ronnie I remember like hey we're gonna roll this out so I wanted to know follow up and let you know what a great first year we had and only gonna get better really exciting yeah this is awesome and my middle school actually complements her wellness program so I feel like I must say that publicly because I don't know that that's always a demographic or constituency that super vocal and so keep it up or likes anything or likes anything yes no that was gonna be my question actually um did you get any feedback initially from students around the elective method I figured yeah that's awesome yeah that'll be great to hear about how yeah scheduling's a nightmare Laura and everybody but again I think the first year it was gonna be like that and again we hope to build off this and again by hearing from students what we can bring in we had a huge list but we couldn't offer everything so we've already scaled it down and then hopefully that we can add on or take off we're also doing um one of the new programs is out there it's called ref reps where you get certified to be a referee that is amazing because my huge shortage of them so the MIA and the state is partnered with this ref reps and we are offering the class we had 15 students sign up for it so so not bad but that's actually great for us to try it out this year and by the end of the class they are certified on whatever sport they decide to do in a class and Chris George is gonna be running that so he's gonna get a feel whether it be you know soccer or flag football or lacrosse or whatever it might be or basketball I think it's either gonna be soccer or basketball that we're gonna focus on for the first time that's all but yeah really neat course that kids are gonna walk away with something and they can make money and and they can make money even better absolutely test your SEL stuff too yeah and your conflict resolution it's all in there it's all in there it's all in the curriculum the whole child so again that is just another course that we're offering this year and we'll see how it goes that's great okay I heard mr. gas was making pizza yesterday oh we had outstanding day we had at the high school again we had kids sign up for things they wanted to try or do we had sewing we had making pizza we had fermentation we did have you know come play ultimate frisbee we had world cup we had wiffle ball but we had a number of back titties and then it ended in the field house we had a lip-sync battle oh I didn't hear about that we had a lip-sync battle and then we had if you haven't seen it the Whitney Houston challenge no where you have to hit the drum and we pulled up two people from each and each grade and then two teachers and the last one to go is Allison Mizuguchi and she nailed it it was like drop the mic she nailed it she hit the Whitney Houston drum we have it on film so it's just a great way to end and we did finish that lyric and we just kind of ended with a whole school kind of fun way to end but yeah it was a great day and again it was that elected base kids got to sign up we had 32 offerings out there well we did like a one of them did a walk and talk walking and the pizza and yeah yeah yeah great so yeah we had it was a brand new thing we tried and it seemed to work out pretty great the female student voice and sort of has gone through all of your updates absolutely yeah yeah yeah from this the what unified wellness program being a suggestion students to correct it was two students that kind of brought to our attention and made it happen it's awesome thank you Scott great thanks great to see you have a good summer keep us posted on the road course absolutely all right thank you thanks so much thank you everybody have a great summer thanks and we'll see you in the fall you'll give me a date and we'll talk about the Metro West survey great okay all right thank you thanks again thank you so we have financial matters discussion and potential vote to approve to fund the new ELA curriculum yes so this is the CKLA he knows that we had a presentation on a couple school committees ago apologies we didn't kind of align this at the same time I did email everybody it wasn't on the web link so apologies for that it's the summary of the timeline the process and this is the formality of the approval for the bid purchase and as you recall we did get the capital approved for FY 27 for 350 thousand as well and we had the prison grant to offset the rest of the cost so again where this is curriculum instruction the procurement is there is exempt because you can imagine if you had to go with a low bid of something of this nature so that is the course that we adopted for this process again you have the the whole presentation on the full this school year of 2026 that they piloted two different curricula and they provided all of their rationale for the the overall recommendation for the CKL CKLA Camino's curriculum and we've identified the funding sources the total cost is four hundred thousand three hundred forty five dollars and thirty four cents can't forget those pennies count still and the breakdown is we have a portion of that that it was is used is going to be used for this fiscal year out of the prison grant that does end June 30th so we wanted to make sure that we utilized our grant funding and did not leave anything on the table in hopes maybe we'll get another one another year or so but this was this is the the breakdown of all the components of that process and of the materials that we are going to be having access to with with these funding sources so this is the final piece of that process in being able to go ahead and purchase and move forward with with that recommendation from the team that you heard the presentation May 27th I'm just for clarity the Frog Street pre-k curriculum is that four years were purchased for the twelve thousand one hundred seventy seven oh three that is not multi-year so that will get all the teacher instructional materials and all the materials for year one for the okay okay and we will be good to be able to sort of fund going forward there because it's a lower ending as well that will happen in the in August 31st city just a lower price point all together for that be classroom right right yeah okay okay yes um and that's a comprehensive curriculum very dramatic based it was piloted by um teachers of the TTCW this year okay they're comparing that to a couple other programs very basic but what what's included in this curriculum in which one CKLA CKLA yeah so it'll be all the instructional materials for uh for teachers so all the teachers manuals there's an online manual component as well with with slides it will be all the instructional materials for uh for teachers so all the teacher's manuals there's an online manual component as well with of the reading materials and our intervention kits for which align directly with the tier one whole class instruction so it's very well aligned there the text sets as Sarah pointed out in our in her presentation are really designed like the whole program is designed around the science of reading so but so both the skill building and the knowledge building and the text sets really work together to build a more comprehensive background knowledge for students which enables them to to to read more effectively basically and so they are you're you kind of sit in a topic for three or four weeks before moving you know reading a book about one thing and then moving to the next they really intentionally build and they build also vertically over time so there are you know themes that you're hitting in second grade and then it builds on on very purposely on say a science unit in third grade so they're in line of those so complete packages it is all all the pieces and um as well as professional development pieces so if we do get another year of the grant with that will enable us to do is to really um have the funding to train some grade level leaders to sort of run those plc's that we've i know talked a lot about so because sarah's one one amazing human and she can't be in every place all the time so that is that is the hope of that next round we're working on that cloning though right yeah so don't underestimate um yes and we and um we're actually having a full day of training tomorrow um using funds from the the grant um so there will be 65 teachers that will be in an all-day training tomorrow for ckli yes kirsteen can you help me understand so obviously we had the 350k capital that went to town meeting looks like we're using just over 235k of that in year one for the acquisition and i see your note that the remainder will be available in subsequent years how does that work does that stay in our capital budget it does okay so it's not indefinite so the idea is that we've been given that money we use it as quickly as we can which again we did have a good portion of the prism grant that funded it so it does enable us to kind of go out year one and then be able to get the related materials in the subsequent year okay so that's all the consumables and you do the nice part is you don't have to get them all at what right like we don't have four years of stuff that we're holding on to you can order against that and through their portal okay but we've maxed out the amount that we'll receive under the fiscal year 26 prism grant correct so anything that we would get going forward would be related to training um through the prism grant or uh if we were to get more like fiscal year 27 it would be around implementation okay and trading okay pd around the science of reading as well so okay use it in a number of different ways and with the cqla all k through five will participate in pd on this at some point so i know you said you're doing all day for 65 but ultimately across the board everyone will go through pd for this um some of our super wednesday time is used for that as well as we've also been working with this um woman from school kit that um it's another program that is aligned sort of helps you figure the best way of doing unit and lesson internalization work around those and they sort of through three months yeah so rachel has been great rachel from school kit and she has partnered with sarah um sarah and myself and and the leadership team um from the curriculum council around sort of designing the pilot and the best ways to roll roll things out with staff and um really you know thinking through sustainable models for for making helping teachers make most sense of how to maximize the instructional materials and you know i think for a long time teachers have spent their their prep time really figuring out like what to teach and and there's a real shift with this hqims and it's um adapting the materials to meet the needs of the students in front of you so um you know what to emphasize pacing all all of those pieces so when when they start a new unit they're going to go you know start by taking the taking the assessment itself and and really thinking through how do all of the lessons build together and really thinking purposely around that and you know you're one everything's just going to take longer which is as brian said why we might only get through six of the of the nine units this might be a stupid question um i know like with bridges at least this is the way i understood it so also could be wrong but with bridges there's sort of like built-in um intervention models that can be used with it yes so there's bridges intervention same thing is true ckla okay and there's um there is intervention for you know sarah really talked to you about the different components so there's um intervention for the skills components and um so that's your your phonemic awareness all of all of the those kind of foundational skills pieces as well as the knowledge building component so if kids have sort of gaps in things they might get extra previews ahead of time so that they are most well suited to be able to participate in the whole group instruction so i think you know as sarah mentioned historically we've done a lot more small group with kids moving at their own paces and this is a lot more really raising the the rigor bar for all students and making sure we can have access points for for everyone within those high bars so it's it's it's an adjustment i think for kids for teachers um just the way instructions delivered is is is different so it's it's a big lift for folks um but an important one we we need it yeah yeah so so feeling really really excited for it anybody have any more questions on that would you like a motion i would entertain a motion i don't know let me make sure i get the sense right um so i move to approve a selection of ckla caminos third edition totaling four hundred thousand three hundred forty five dollars and 34 cents from the fy 26 prism grant and fy 27 capital item for elementary elementary literacy curriculum sorry i didn't do that wrong nope you didn't do anything wrong i'm just is that the right way to raise it are we taking money from two different pools and that's why you need it that way is that that's because i'm we're being transparent with the funding source and that's that's fine i just wanted to make sure we okay um okay do we have a second second okay all in favor aye any opposed none okay that's exciting that's great i can't wait to
so this is just me trying to wrap my head around this did the prism grant give x amount of money and no matter what we spent on it we were only getting x amount of money yeah one of the criteria one of the constraints of the grant is they will pay up to one half of your k-3 curriculum which is okay that's why we have to go back into your capital funding yeah i'm just yeah okay and it's it's also for a multi-year um right the month yeah so yeah okay all right thank you i'm sorry i just i'm just trying a little complicated it's been a lot of time on the phone with tracy from ukla so committee so i think we touched on some of these last time that i was here in an attempt to sort of discuss like what was out there what we needed have give people a chance to think about what they might be interested in we think we were missing two people as well so we couldn't have a constructive okay conversation about what it all meant okay so when you look at the list you will see that we currently have the policy subcommittee which is typically something that's needed every year um there's constantly changes and updates that get circulated um from the mass association of school committees that drive
kind of regular policy updates and then typically there's at least a few over the course of the school year or the or the fiscal year that we um as a committee think is important to um to revise update implement could be totally new um so kate i think is interested it was kate and christina previously rodrigo i think kate's interested in staying on the committee um a subcommittee i apologize um that is a meet as need but i think there's generally a decent amount of some updating that needs to happen like the standard mask updates yeah so that one um we definitely need someone else to serve on just and i don't know how much i said but we can only have two people serve on these subcommittees because we cannot have a quorum of our committee present on the subcommittees um um the these subcommittees that we have do need to post agendas and hold public meetings and create minutes and approve minutes just like we do as a full committee um so that is a piece to it we recently decided that we would only kind of enact a finance subcommittee in the event that we had something to task the finance subcommittee with um because we feel or the committee that at the time last year really felt that it was important that things that were being discussed around finance and coming from kirsteen and her team really should be in front of the whole committee on a regular basis because it's such an important pillar of like our three you know main functions as a school committee so that's there i don't know that we necessarily have anything right now so we don't really need to appoint people but should keep it in mind should we have something that comes up over the course of this of this year i can share we redid the like task yeah i can share that too just so you can see what we um adopted last year thank you that'd be lovely um and then the superintendent evaluation subcommittee will need to happen for next year um i believe we discussed around the table that we were not doing um an annual formal evaluation of david do we need to take a vote on that or no i do think we do okay because i don't think we ever actually did but it is not on our agenda for tonight so my thought is i'll we can put it on for our next one it was just an open question i had no yeah yeah yeah and i'm happy i mean i i'm happy to do that yes well to be on the committee just because i was on the last one that would be very helpful so i'm happy to be on that what is the timing of when that happens though it should be done before june 30th for next year and sorry numbers of this but some of some of the process and some of right a lot of that will happen you guys will still be here don't worry um uh i'm letting you stay don't worry about it thanks guys um so yeah it would start probably it starts with goals right and then aligning david sort of kind of comes out with his personal goals from the district goals that get set toward the beginning of the year and then we discuss and then we review but i would i would i think like it's more toward like late winter that like a formal evaluation sort of starts to occur and get thought once we approve district and the superintendent's individual goals we can tee up the like format and schedule and so like some of it is desi has different forms and we created one ourselves following that process last time that i think worked reasonably well absolutely yeah that again yeah um so we need a person for the policy subcommittee and we need a person for the superintendent evaluation subcommittee to work with betsy and typically the chair does not serve on any of these committees you have your own chair subcommittee that is a body of one that is 150 percent current i have experience with policy review and development so that feels natural to me but honestly wherever i'm needed is fine i don't know if you have a strong preference between i don't have a strong preference here so you can okay yeah i'm happy to work with the sorry i didn't mean to cry yeah okay anything that's done by either subcommittee is going to come to the full committee for a vote anyway so you always get input it's just a matter of trying to kind of move things along um and get some work done not at the full table and you know just to kind of be more efficient really is the idea so um are we all comfortable we can have um kate and jess is jess okay jess jessica jessica jessica okay sorry uh kate and jessica on the policy subcommittee and then for the superintendent evaluation subcommittee we'll have betsy and prashant great all good okay i can put that in here to shorten names i love it um and jess last name nika it's all right okay okay anybody watching will jessica my brother married a jessica she goes by jessica got it um jessica what is your last name is it trao trawa trawa thank you keep it
because i have you in my phone as something different rear you're i think that must be your maiden name but for whatever reason okay but that other jessica that i just referenced is greer got it so we have jessica trawa make some more sense i am good as needed i have some good news with respect to do you want to do the liaisons first or can i go to the delegates delegates okay um good news that our youth advisory committee we have two seats to appoint on that um which cannot and one seat on the wayland housing partnership they're both up as of all three of those seats are up as of june 30th and um it cannot be someone from the committee it needs to be someone appointed outside of the committee heidi ellis is willing to re-up for another term in her seat appointed seat on the youth advisory committee i have someone that i'm pursuing to fill the second seat but if you guys have other options or potential people that you think would be a good fit or interested please feel free to pursue so um and then uh jackie a spirit to santo vega i believe is willing to continue her seat on the wayland housing partnership i wasn't able to get strict confirmation from her but i was able to connect with mary aunties who is i think kind of like the chair of the housing partnership and jackie actually works in this area i think for in a neighboring town and so mary thinks that she's willing and able and ready to continue to serve in that seat and capacity um so my thought was that i guess she travels sometimes to i think it's puerto rico and she can't always access her email and she'll go for periods of time so mary was thinking maybe she just hadn't been able to get back in touch so my thought tonight was to um reappoint heidi to the youth advisory committee for one of our seats and reappoint jackie into the wayland housing partnership um appointee seat and then we can continue to pursue someone for the second seat for the yac is everyone okay with that and are we okay for the time being on the cipc i know that came up earlier in the year but it wasn't clear i need to firmly connect with brian which is my bad because i need to talk to him via telephone for right now we're okay okay great um there is a lot of issues as i think some of us are aware some of us may not be but there's a lot of open seats on the finance committee and so i there may be some change there that brian will need will need to fill okay brian's on the cipc so um with that i would entertain a vote just to reappoint um heidi ellis into the yic seat for the next term and jackie espiritu santa vega into the seat for the wayland housing partnership for the next term do i have a second second lovely all in favor aye okay any opposed hearing none okay great i will let abby downstairs know for the liaisons are you gonna say something can you just clarify the role of the liaisons are these actively attending these meetings so there's some of these that are you are actively participating as a member of the committee so wellness advisory um betsy's a member in light of her position as the assistant superintendent i am the liaison so i but we attend the meetings there's four a year for that typically okay there might be another one in there but typically scott kind of keeps us to four um and that is that one um the athletic advisory only meets when it's needed like we had to vote on um
making gymnastics a club at the high school level uh and co-op and so we had a meeting of the athletic advisory committee in advance of that um but typically i don't really have not had to do a lot that's not a huge heavy lift cpac you don't have to it that's like just there's another group and we're sort of like someone for them to literally liaise with and connect with but you don't have to attend all the meetings i think cpac's a little bit not defunct at the moment but it's been a little yeah um i think they i think they meet a little bit more when they meet they went a little bit more frequently yes like the others they're not a quarterly organization yeah they're typically a monthly yes organization right but you don't have to go you don't you don't have to attend every month as the liaison to that you're not like someone who needs to take a vote um you don't have to be there for it's less of a lift on that um i will say i think because things have been going so well in ronnie's department thanks to everyone here um i think cpec has had a a good little bit of break of feeling the need to meet so frequently um i hope i said that right uh recreation i don't know that we've had anybody in that for a while but those are literally like just being a person that rec can reach out to um and open meeting law minutes so we created this that is definitely not a liaison that's like a one person subcommittee um i'm like a friend no um so in i would say about three years ago and two years ago we went through a real rough patch in trying to get open meeting law compliance under um under control and just staying on top of regular review of our executive session minutes release of those minutes redaction of those minutes etc approval all that good jazz and so we maybe a year and a half ago kind of implemented these liaisons to sort of play a role in ensuring our compliance there um and so kate was in like a shared liaison position there with christina rodrigo um and so kate i'm hopeful you'll stay but we should have someone else that joins you just to kind of stay on top of it and get up to speed on the needs there um the audit committee that's someone that's our liaison uh or i guess yeah we haven't had to fill that seat so that must not be up yet because i haven't heard from anybody downstairs no and i think it's four years for those it's a long yeah so we'll just leave that one alone um i'm moving housing partnership out of here um negotiations so currently that's actually a tbd you're not um legislative liaison so these are kind of all right now there's nothing going on with any of these really there will be i'm sure with potentially legislative liaison maybe um around different like prop two and a half stuff that's coming up um who knows the bus parking were extended for a period of time there on our permit who knows what will happen with that so that one could get live at any point um permanent the pmbc um as things transpire with our long-term facilities plan um that might expand as well um something you think we can revisit next year as we get closer to so yeah i i don't think we need to do that i mean even if if things were to move super quickly we could revisit in like six months or something but right now i don't think um the other thing that i would i would kind of throw in the mix here as well which i did skip over pto and the tech board we do need someone in that tech board space um for whatever reason that always seemed to come through um susan botan but you're not really connected with that so um aaron muller was the the person for that previously and if maybe i can ask for more information do they even meet monthly i feel like it's quarterly right did they meet the board for tech all right we can get more info on that but i think it's a quarterly it's not monthly and i know that the director was it was out at the end yes yeah um yeah so but we do need someone to serve in that capacity and i want to say the meetings are like a set time but you can do them via zoom i'll get more information on that so we don't have to do it tonight because i don't think there's anything like immediate happening if i need to i'll go to whatever i need to go to um so but that's definitely one we need to fill um and then wpsf i do so we decided to lighten that a little i went to three betsy goes to most i think it would be nice to divide if we can i think there are certain ones where it's very helpful and either our school committee member i think or assistant superintendent can do this like it's just very helpful to give them updates on things that are coming so it's a good opportunity to rally and educate a group of parents who are active in the schools and involved that said i do not you know i think there are a few meetings where we both get a lot of value in all of it um i think it it is a heavy lift for either or both of us to attend all of them so maybe what i was going to propose is that maybe in september you and i look at the meeting schedule and then maybe i don't know who their president is i think blair has done with her two years so i don't know so we should we could just have a quick conversation even by phone and say this is what we're thinking there's you know obviously a lot going on we'd like to suggest that we make sure someone covers these meetings and focus the like school committee update or district update and maybe we can sort of staff half of them i think that that's probably ample like obviously grants meeting is really useful the best yeah wait i would a good way to just broach the conversation with them and see if we can align with good times to because you also meet with representatives separately so i think it does become i want to be mindful of the time it becomes it becomes a lot of time and yeah so i think we can collectively work on making sure that our engagement and interest remains high and it certainly is but that we're making sure that physical presence is where it's most needed and of highest value 100 agreed okay so do you want me to i'll stay on that and i'll do that yeah i'll stay on that okay um okay the one thing sorry that's also going to be a potential that we may need to educate about sort of the state of anything that we need to do with respect to prop two and a half as well and so i've already started to sort of plant that seed um when i did attend those meetings so um i think that's also an important partnership i was actually just i just got kicked out so i have to re-sign in but i was just going to say i'm i'd like to add to this list um the kind of for lack of a better word like the override working group that david and i and kate and kirsteen are currently a part of by kind of default um so i'll just keep that down there and i think it's going to increase a little bit in um so i'll put that down there i'm just going to put uh superintendents override working curve it's called the future future future financial planning i know look how much joy it brought her to make it yours just give her that little bit here's here's how i look at this david
that's right that's right we we really understand the need for the schools to get an override and have a positive response from the community to the override and so in the event that there might be other areas throughout the town government that aren't as sensitive to the nature of the need we have to be the owner of that ship and keep it going forward instead of getting stalled by an iceberg so that's why forward perfect framing aaron let's call it the moving forward group and a standing consistent metaphor in that delivery you really just had that through line we'll be meeting again a little over a week yes um you got that right i think we might want to liken it to something other than the titanics perhaps well but it's the titanic that doesn't that doesn't agree no agreed we are yes that's right okay okay so i am i really love serving on the wellness advisory committee so i would be thrilled to say on it but if you guys if there's someone that really feels like they would like to um step in there i'm i will acquiesce that even though i don't want to um but i will i will um someone and i'm looking to the side of the table because you're the newest members should really partner with kate and just get aligned with the needs on the open meeting law and the minutes and just ensuring compliance there and i can do them i mean this is what christine and i did last year so i can just can own doing them but as we get closer to maybe next spring when who knows what will happen uh making sure that other people know how to do it because it's seems confusing it's actually not it's not it seems a little bit overwhelming overwhelming absolutely yes um thank god i can volunteer for that yeah yeah great okay so i will it really is although
um and really anyone's welcome to liaise with the pto and attend their meetings but that's just kind of like an official um okay tech i will get more information on but please everyone think about that because we need we've got to have somebody um okay athletic advisory i'm happy to stay on that that that's like such a low lift um that like i'm happy to stay on that and if it somehow gets like super heavy or there's something going on people feel strongly about we can we can add somebody in swap you know whatever you guys want to do um so we need to fill so cpec and recreation anyone feel i'm happy to do recreation okay that's mostly like with katherine right and it's i mean i could just email her and say i'm here and i'm serving that that's kind of what it is there's no um i mean when there were certain things that were going on i wasn't that person but i met with david perlman to like fight a good fight on something um when he was like the chair of or do you park and rec whatever it is parks and rec okay thank you you can put me down for cpac cpac yeah okay jessica uh should we include the facilities master planning group that we we certainly can kind of already yeah i'm that's kind of probably going to morph though into david you're on your facilities support yes which is like me and david right yeah and a bunch of other people but right um um what does that look like next my thought is that's kind of going to morph a little bit maybe we discuss right that after in the fall i think we're going to spend more time in the last committee you were right i think the superintendent's override working group which you're also part of we should just leave that one there and then we'll we can do the other you should get hats so we know which you're wearing like in december we'll shift back to our facilities as we get to the soi because that we're still on track to submit the statement of interest next winter okay we'll be getting that work in the fall and that you all need to approve the sois we really gotta keep that ship moving okay um you'll see it in the goals which we gotta get a meeting for the goal we'll get to me oh i didn't mean the facilities i meant the other ship oh yes can't land in you know area 52 or anything okay uh-huh i do i know but i do appreciate the ship connection like i'm with you i am just like mind melting tonight it is approaching eight o'clock everybody i know yeah it is this has been very punchy okay it's still sitting though it's true it's true okay um can you you guys can all access this right through the so do you guys just want to put in your info like over whatever the next few days whatever just put it in there and that way we don't share that loud i'm gonna close that down so we did that lovely sorry put it for where there are at the top cell phone if you go to the top of that yeah there's a spot just under your name above your email if you could do that that would be fabulous it just helps diane who knows or if we're looking for each other um consent agenda do you want to do the calendar yeah did i miss that i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry
okay sorry computer's being funky i'm sorry never mind okay so unit a returns on 8 27. okay isn't that interesting all right so diane kind of plots these out typical is every other week sort of looks like twice a month except for the budget season sometimes we plan for more however um it sort of seems like maybe we leave things as is and see how things adjust yeah just a couple of things um in terms of goals you know important part of our summer work these are goals and we were hoping to if it's possible to schedule a meeting in later august to share our goals um a couple of the dates that i don't know um the 24th or 25th um it will be 24th or 25th of august yes those are like right those are the dates we selected that will give us real time to get them done um meaning like a daytime or an evening evening like a school committee meeting i don't know that's a new one that is a new one i know 24th is probably better for me i have to be in middlebury vermont for a thing on the 26th so i'd probably want to i have to drive up there on the is that monday the 24th and then one other thing i was checking i um the october 7th i'm going to be at a conference for a few days i don't know if it's possible to flip the october dates to like the 14th and the 28th unless we want back to back i apologize for that i thought you want to do the 14th and then oh so we don't back to back i don't know and then maybe we could like and i i'm sorry that this is what happens when you have one um challenge i don't know i want to just pull up um they have on the calendar some times like already when there might be maybe you have an idea betsy not you betsy but this betsy like concerts and different things that sometimes start to happen or open houses or back to school nights so october 14th instead of the 7th on monday's a holiday do not see anything on the 14th i see pep band on the 16th okay 28th i see the triumph trunk retreat is on the 27th so i think the 28th is available um okay does anyone else have an issue with that no we will have back to back unless we shift yeah so we could either do 14 21 or we do 14 28 and then yeah it's really hard when i can't see the number and for whatever reason i can't now it's your well it's the time of day and right i'm like it's the 11th it gets a little tricky because the 11th is veterans day on the wednesday after
well and then the 25th and 26th are 26 is thanksgiving right and 25 will be a probably some crazy super early release from school um why don't we just do back to back in october and if we have a shorter meeting 14 21 right i'm okay i'm okay with that i just don't need a meeting we'll just take a little break okay so 14 21 and i apologize for that okay so 14 21 well we have the i mean if the health survey is ready that's a longer meeting so maybe we could do what that one of those august 24th hold on hold on hold on hold on okay sorry sorry october 7th to october 14th all right so i don't know how diane does this with the x out so i'm just gonna ask her to fix it you will okay yeah sure oh yeah can she recirculate because i haven't calendared any of this yet what fourth is in boston what november 4th first meeting in november yeah we'll plan we'll plan oh i'm sorry okay yeah i thought you were talking about august and then i was like wait what um okay do you want to just confirm that with latoya yep and we'll solidify that
okay and maybe we'll have the last day of school on the 16th next year instead of some like fun snow days where there's no the rain days rain days are my favorite days thank you david not this year no it's true there was plenty there was plenty of snow this year it's real snow christine has the plowing bill to substantiate that reality um so okay we should probably have a meeting in july
i mean really it's only for discussion regarding you know what we don't need to worry about that right now we've discussed the calendar for we've got one on in august for goals and we can we've switched around the october we discussed metco headquarters meeting november we'll confirm that with latoya we'll work around with budget we may need to add some here or there for different purposes but and we do another thing aaron i don't know a retreat we talked about it i know we did but you didn't we tell me if you talked to ava i did talk to eva i'm even really sure the dates i mean we talked about some dates it was hard because of summer we have our own retreats we have conference conferences the only day we came up with was like july 7th yeah that's not gonna work for a lot of people at least also like two weeks from now yeah we will have to plan because it's really we could do one like in the winter or something in the fall i think you know that idea we would have to do it i don't know if those worked for eva but those were the other two weeks we talked about the the week of the july 20th 27th or 30th right that was the other 28th or 29th 28th or 29th i had to project with her that was the only other it won't be here i think we have to do it because of the summer's just hard with people yeah so we could do it in the fall you know something i think that's great for us and we kind of just like yeah it's been good previously we've done it yeah we'll find time in the fall that's better i think that's great that'll be good okay so july you want to do tbd yeah let's just do tbd okay okay um for the moment i just want to make sure okay um no that was me i had to turn my volume down no that's fine okay um all right so we're good on that david you will talk to diane about the calendar and editing that and then recirculating for school committee meeting and then we kind of already touched on it i think i think the one as far as administrative matters e discussion regarding need for town to override in fiscal year 28 um i think it would be helpful kirsteen and david if we could model out for this table what a budget without an override looks like as far as fte cuts that would potentially need to be made we don't need necessarily who or specifically where but maybe what that would just kind of what that looks like we could generally if we are short how many positions something general yeah i think it would be good for because for purposes of educating the community i think we need a better answer than just like i keep telling people it's like we can't have third grade for fiscal year 28 just no one in third grade will go to school or skip it for that year but i think we need to have a better answer so if we can model that that would be helpful and i think it would be helpful for those that weren't part of the past couple years budget cycles and seeing exactly what we did to kind of cut costs the other thing you may find i forgot about this until recently but probably was it two years ago we actually had a meeting that we have a recording of where um somebody from the state came and did an overview the chapter 70 yeah the chapter 70 like public how public schools are funded yes um and i don't remember what i want to say that was like a february meeting or a march meeting i can find it and i it would it was very well done and it is complicated but it will help inform sort of how much the being at levy capacity in terms of being able to generate revenue from the local property taxes and how much of our school expenditure is tied to the ability to raise funds from local tax property taxes and i would say you know when we do something like this uh kirstein we can share what we know so i always like a category like this is what we know this is what we don't know certainly there are things we don't know like you know state aid we won't know or and while health insurance is in our budget it has an impact on our budget of course in terms of what we get from the town but there are certain things we absolutely i mean i'm thinking um we would have to estimate all the things we do in a usual budget like look over the last few years on special education tuition and transportation kind of project where our averages have been um we can take a look at obviously we need to know you know salaries which are a piece of this so we'll we should have a good chunk of it and then we'll have some unknowns but we can kind of estimate based on right now we're in the middle of closing out and starting a fiscal year so i hope there's no um um we'll need a little time pressure to build this with still a lot of unknowns that right we'll get some more knowns um other than that i just think in general there's a need we've done everything we can to make cuts within level service we have not filled positions for two years running um we have very closely looked at enrollment and anticipated numbers over the next few years um we have relocated the children's way into happy hollow and out of the town building as a way to be more efficient we've cut staff yep um and last year we almost didn't make payroll but we did uh so i just wanted to put this on here to highlight for everyone around the table for the public for the community anyone who's listening or watching that it's a real need it's not um inflated and i think we need to keep our eye on that and just keep pressing um and i want to have a good answer for what it looks like if we weren't to have an override so that everyone has a good understanding um okay anybody have any questions or any other thoughts or anything else that they want to say on that topic before i move on to the consent agenda i think that visual as soon as we can get it understanding uh is really important because i think we had a hard conversation with our principals earlier in this meeting and that was a very hard conversation for our community to have just that the conversations that we will need to have next year are going to be i think much harder so we need to be prepared with those facts so people can really visualize what this means because it's complicated but then it's not right this is what it means um the the better that we can visualize that for our community the better
good so we got some new guidance and i'm putting this under administrative because i am um i don't know where else put it right now so we got some administrative got uh some guidance from the town clerk and we were advised to remove matters not anticipated by the chair from our standing like agenda and while i understand that that move is really to push everyone to update their agendas and get everything out in front of the public as much as possible in advance of a meeting it bothers me not to have a place where people can voice things that they may not have truly anticipated until the meeting um the select board has an item that's toward the end which was typically where our matters not reasonably anticipated would go that's called something along the lines of like members concerns like share of concerns i don't love having it be concerns but so if you could all kind of think about maybe where we what we could term it and i'm happy to kind of keep it in the same section before executive session after the consent agenda what have you um just kind of like a place that also maybe there's something you want to talk about and i'm not listening to you and i didn't put it on the agenda and you're getting frustrated or whatever that it's there for people to have a place um so i i hope that we don't use it for that purpose because if you have something you like to speak about i'm happy to put it on the agenda so please come to me i'm glad to raise that because you know i noticed that on the agenda tonight and i think what happens is that sometimes we have things happen after we need the agenda yeah and that happened to us this week there's something i would have shared um you know this is really really sad news is that you know at our middle school we have an incredibly dedicated principal uh one of the most dedicated people some of us have ever worked with um you know who had to step down for health reasons um and i just want to thank deborah romeo for her commitment you know her thoughtfulness her care over the last two years um so that's something on the agenda i would have talked about and i just want to you know let everybody know that um we're going to need a couple of weeks to put together a plan because we can't do things immediately when things come at us um and you know making sure that schools have excellent leadership teams is one of the most important things we do and we hire them and support them so we will um during the week of july 6th sometime that week we will have a plan of what we're doing but for now um you know we want to acknowledge deborah who will be here just a little while longer and just need some time to to work with our middle so folks in terms of next steps and needs thank you for sharing that uh i think you've worked really hard with your team and building a really great strong team around you and you've done a great job at stabilizing our buildings and our district since you've joined um and deborah's played a great part in that and um i would just want to thank her for everything that she's done and we wish her all the best we'll make sure that our schools will let you know in that week sometime that week we'll work between now and then okay um so that's what i was looking for from all of you i have a sea of alliteration going to my head right now members moments members musings you know i'm just i'm gonna keep working i want to keep cooking that i really like members music i thought you might yeah okay um so next time maybe i'll just play with that and just then discuss it um so consent agenda is there anything anybody wanted to discuss had issues with they're in there they i put them in for the last meeting no they weren't there i did oh because diane said they weren't there we passed them over twice okay i just i'm gonna go back to the other meeting then june and i just heard from jackie and she has no objections to continuing her service excellent timing i answer her later um are they in the executive session folder by mistake because they're not in the june 10th i put the executive session one in the executive session okay so hold on but it's not the executive session no it is we need the executive session so did you approve those last time no we didn't approve any may 4th but we wouldn't do the executive session in consent agenda we would do no i know but it was in the so they're right there i can see them it was the one that was town meeting yes 5 4 26 is a draft draft where in the executive session oh okay now the only thing we're wondering is but we're missing that open yeah yeah so let me see if i put that in the wrong place well so the es ones are there if you guys want to look at them and we can vote those okay i would vote if i wasn't there because you can vote for a quorum you don't it doesn't have to be and you can state that you're voting for that purpose and i put them in the may 4th folder by accident i know i did them and i put them in because it was in a much not happy state that i was putting them in there i might have to find those on my computer or something i don't know why they're not in there because i you're right i don't see them in there either but i know i did them um it's because they're labeled wrong they're in the june 10th holder under sc minutes 4 29 26 draft so i'm right now going to rename that you want to move them to the next folder um i can they are now i mean through the 24th oh there they are with the right name i might add procedural question because this is a consent agenda may 4th meeting so should we abstain from the vote i can't verify these minutes having not been here if we're voting on approving both at the same time as a consent agenda item you can abstain or you can participate either way um you can always participate to make a quorum as well even if you weren't there just so you know okay um and we can pull those out and separate them as well and vote on them separately okay so i wasn't there either so i'm gonna participate it's okay free to play ready or do you guys want a little more time oh no i'm never though okay move to approve the consent agenda okay all in favor aye any opposed none okay it's just the one tonight right yeah um before i do this do you guys want to stay for executive session do you think we're going to talk about um just for the bargain what do you think yeah we'll just try to keep it quick okay sure okay sorry i could go ahead and move to enter executive session for the purposes of discussing strategy related to collective bargaining with the whalen educational association unit a as permitted by mgl chapter 30a section 21 a3 and for reviewing and approving executive session minutes with the intent to redact and release said minutes as permitted by mgl chapter 30a section 22 may 4th 2026 may 27 2026 and june 10 2026. the school committee will be joined by david fleischman superintendent betsy gabron assistant superintendent and kristine patterson director of finance and operations uh-huh the school committee will adjourn an executive session and will not reconvene an open session do i have a second second uh betsy kate yes jesson ruchant yes