[Cushing]: All right, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We apologize for the delay in getting started. Please just wait one minute. We're trying to get a few more people on, and we will be with you momentarily. Thank you very much.
[Unidentified]: Once again, apologize for the delay, slight technical difficulty, and we will be with you momentarily.
[Cushing]: All right, good evening Medford. My name is Dr. Cushing. I'm the assistant superintendent of schools for secondary. We appreciate your patience as we have a slight technical difficulty getting two of our very important people on for this call. And we would like to now welcome Dr. Edouard-Vincent. I'd like to welcome David Murphy, our assistant superintendent for finance and operations. Suzanne Galussi, our assistant superintendent for elementary schools, Joan Bullen, our Director of Pupil Services, and Avery Hines, our Director of Health Services. And without any further ado, I am going to turn it over to Dr. Edouard-Vincent.
[Edouard-Vincent]: Good evening, everyone. Thank you. In one of my most recent communications, I shared that flexibility is something that we're going to need to be prepared. And so today was an example of being flexible as we encountered a little technical difficulty. um on our side here but I am so excited to be here this evening. I um this evening it's an opportunity for us the Medford Public Schools and my entire team to be able to respond to some of the questions that many of you put forward through um email communications and those of you who are going to be on live tonight sending questions to us We're very interested in responding to your questions. We want to let you know that we're excited for the start of the school year. I think it's critically important that I say, as we've always said in the past, that our priorities are safety, equity, and consistency, and we're going to continue to use those as our guiding pillars to do all the work that we're doing this evening. Because so many of you did send some questions through email, I would like to just recognize and start the top of the session saying that. But before I address some of the questions that were sent in and knowing that more questions are going to come forward, I do want to give each member of the team just an opportunity to say to you some of the pieces that they will be addressing today. So I'd like to start with Mr. Murphy, if you wouldn't mind sharing some of the pieces that you're going to be able to speak to, and we'll just go around the group and let everyone say a few pieces that we addressed over the course of this session right now. We're not hearing you at this moment, Mr. Murphy. So I will ask Ms. Bowen to just give us a few pieces that you will talk about over the course of this evening, and then we can have Dr. Cushing, and then we'll move back to Dean Murphy.
[Bowen]: Good evening. Can everyone hear me okay? All right, great. Good evening. I just want to thank everyone in the community for joining us tonight. I just want to give you several updates in regards to special education programming and our initiatives that are coming up this school year. We just wrapped up our extended school year program in August 13th, and it was a great success. We had a lot of staff work through the summer, so we're very happy and appreciative that they were able to do that and provide our students with services. We have been busy interviewing and hiring for our many open positions within the district. We do have one new administrator joining us. Kim Clinton will be the special education coordinator at the high school, and there'll be a few shifting of the administrators, the other special education coordinators' responsibilities throughout the district. Susanna Campbell will also be at the McGlynn Elementary and Middle School. Lauren Perilla will be at the Missituk, the Andrews Elementary School. And everyone else will remain in their specific responsibilities and roles. I did want to let people know that we have filled our evaluation team leader positions. Sarah Anders, who is our connections teacher, will be joining us as the ETL at the Brooks Elementary School. We also have Robin Reier, who will be joining us at the Andrews Middle School, and Amy Delano, who will be our new ETL at the high school replacing Kim Clinton. We have this year, and some of them include our special education teachers will be involved in a year-long professional development regarding IEP writing with Alan Bloom, who is the guru of IEP writing. We'll continue our work with dyslexia. We have a team of general education and special education leaders who have gone through the Massachusetts dyslexia guidelines. They have reviewed Medford's level of compliance with those guidelines and have developed and will begin implementation of action plans that target those prioritized areas. Lastly, we are piloting our disability awareness curriculum in the schools. We are very excited about this. This is a continuation of Susanna Campbell's work with the disability awareness workshop that she does in, that she has provided with staff members throughout the district the past two years. We will be having classrooms across the district focus on specific disabilities. So kindergarten will be focusing on autism, grade one will be visual impairment, and our high school students will be focusing on disability as civil rights. And our goal is to expand each year with a different grade level and a disability so that all grade levels are covered in the next couple of years. So we're very excited about the upcoming school year. We look forward to working with you and continue to prioritize our most vulnerable students as we return to school in the fall. Thank you.
[Galusi]: All right, good evening. As Dr. Cushing earlier said, my name is Suzanne Galusi. I'm the assistant superintendent of elementary education. So I'm just going to provide a few little updates that we've been working on this summer. So first, our big focus district-wide, which Dr. Cushing will talk about too in a little bit, but our big focus this year is SEL. which means social-emotional learning, and starting the year so that we are creating supportive, engaged, and collaborative learning environments for our students. At the elementary level, that means responsive classroom, which I've spoken about before in forums such as this, school committee meetings, and in my updates that I send to families. But responsive classroom, we are going to focus on this. In part of that program, there's something that's called the first six weeks. In Medford, we're kind of doing it as the first three weeks. But the first three weeks of school are going to work on those skills that are going to lay the foundation for that learning environment that's going to carry through for the entire year. So it is a time to build the classroom community, build positive, safe, relationships within that classroom and work on expectations. It's a time for the teacher and the students to work on how they want the learning environment to be for the year and going through the expectations for every block of the day. So what does it look like? What does it sound like? How should we be when it's math class, when it's writing class, when it's science class, and working with students so that they're aware of what the expectations are throughout the day. will have them in a very good position to know how the day is going to be for them and then how the year will carry on. When we lay the foundation like this at the beginning of the year, There's less disruption to the learning and there's more engagement on the students part. It also builds trust and empathy, which are skills that we want not only for learners, but for humans in life. This summer, we Well, at the end of the year, we created at every building a responsive classroom support team. So there are teachers at every building that are going to be the touch point for that school building when it comes to responsive classroom and social emotional learning. Those teachers engaged in a week-long responsive classroom training this summer. Out of that group of trainers, two of them this week gave some training on responsive classroom to new teachers so that they're ready to start next week understanding our expectations for responsive classroom and that initiative here at Medford Public Schools. They will also be providing district training throughout the year. Another exciting piece, as we have mentioned last year, but I will mention it again now, is we have an additional special for the students this year. So that means there will be five offerings for students as a special activity. So there's art, and there's music, there's technology, there's physical education, and now there's Nexus. Nexus is a class that is going to target age-appropriate skills for students in social-emotional learning and executive functioning. So we're going to re-engage students in school and hone on those skills that are the social skills that are going to help them navigate school again, and also work on some of those executive functioning skills that are necessary for the grade level. We've partnered with Hill for Literacy. It is a group we've partnered with before, but this year Hill for Literacy is going to be coming in every month and working with our K-2 staff on their ECRI program, which is Enhanced Core Reading Instruction. It is based on the science of reading and we're so very happy and honored that they're going to be working with us this year. I'll be sending out more detailed information about that to families as we begin. And then the last piece I just wanted to mention is, I'm sure it's top of mind for everyone, but principals have been working all summer alongside me planning for this year. And they've put in lots of hours, but I wanted to let you know that when It comes to school-based routines. So how is it going to be at arrival or dismissal, lunch, the schedule of the building? All of that will be shared by principals prior to the first day of school. But I do want families to know that at the elementary level, there will be two separate locations for lunchtime. That way we can split up each lunch period and ensure that we are socially distancing students during lunchtime. Um, please email me if yo or give me a call. I'm h any questions or concerns you very much and we do look