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[McLaughlin]: Hi everyone, this is Melanie. How are you guys doing? Can you hear me okay? Yeah, I can't hear you guys, so I'm gonna try to troubleshoot this for a minute.
[Kreatz]: Hi, can you hear me?
[Graham]: Yeah, I can hear you.
[Kreatz]: Wait, I have a glare in my background. Let me just try to shut a shade. It's like really it's like the light is coming towards me. Hold on. Let me go shut that. I'm in a different location. I don't have my usual spot.
[Graham]: That's okay. My camera is not cooperating today. It just shows a brown screen. I don't know what's brown, but I will spare you the brown square and just leave my camera off, sadly, because that's how my day's been going.
[Lungo-Koehn]: Okay, Melanie, can you hear us now?
[Graham]: I can. Thank you. Okay, perfect. I'm going to go ahead and start the meeting and read the meeting notice. Okay, please be advised that on Wednesday, October 11, at 4pm, there will be a family engagement and communication subcommittee meeting held through remote participation via zoom. The meeting can be viewed through Medford Community Media on Comcast and Verizon. Since the meeting will be held remotely, participants can log in by using the following information. So, https://nps02155-org.us slash j slash 988. 574-683-91. If you wanted to dial in, it's 1305-224-1968. Questions and comments can be submitted during the meeting by emailing me, Jenny Graham, all one word at medford.k12.ma.us. If you are planning to do that, please include your first and last name, your Medford street address and your question or comment. So I will start by calling the roll. Member Kreatz.
[Lungo-Koehn]: Yes, sorry. Yes. Member McLaughlin.
[Graham]: Here. And Member Graham here. So we have three present, none absent. Our agenda was set forward to us per our unanimous vote of the school committee on May 1st of 2023. And it reads, whereas the school committee seeks to increase transparency and community engagement, and whereas Medford Public Schools has recently relaunched its website on a modernized platform that enables regular maintenance, be it resolved that the communications and family engagement subcommittee meet to discuss updates to the website that would promote family engagement, improve accessibility and ensure transparency for all MPS families and residents of Medford. Be it further resolved that the communications and family engagement subcommittee will invite Ms. Lisa Miller and her students to work to launch the site and are currently working on plans for phase two of development. Um, so that is our agenda. Um, and, um, by way of background, uh, for everybody on the call, um, with us, we had a presentation. Um, I believe it was right before may 1st from miss Miller and the students that worked on the initial phase of the, um, the website. And during that meeting, um, what the, um, No, I heard the ideas for what the next phase might look like of the website. And so we wanted to have this discussion to really talk about sort of A, what is possible. So Ms. Miller and her students are here and I want you to introduce everybody in just a second. So we wanna hear a little bit about what's possible and talk about what some of the ideas are amongst this subcommittee. And we're actually also thrilled to have Mr. Thomas Dalton with us who has joined us as the director of communications on behalf of the district. So we're super excited to have you working with us on this as well. So Miss Miller, did you want to? I saw that you sent me a presentation. Did you want to start by introducing? Yourself and the team here so that we can hear a little bit about. The presentation you wanted to provide us.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: Sure, and I'm, I'm Lisa Miller I teach programming and web development at Medford vocational technical high school, and I am the web administrator for the public Medford public schools website. I have a team of wonderful students, five of them I think looking at the. Board the grid here, it looks like three of them are here today that are on the student website team, they are critical to the maintenance and updating and posting news on the website. I would like to let them introduce themselves. I'm not sure I did share the presentation. I don't know if that would be useful for me to go through, or if you had more specific questions that you just wanted to jump right to, or if you wanted me to kind of go through the presentation also.
[Graham]: I think go ahead and introduce, have everybody introduce themselves, and then I think we would love to hear from you all.
[Lungo-Koehn]: OK. So Carolyn, why don't you start? Hi, I'm Karen.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm the team manager of the website team. I just have to thank you for being here and work together with you all.
[Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you so much. Thank you. Hi, I'm Tanza Ndesel. I'm a senior and I'm also in computer programming in the website team. I'm Rachel. I'm also a senior and also on the website team.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for having us.
[Graham]: We are thrilled to have you. We love having students in our subcommittee meetings and at our regular meetings, but these are a little bit easier for people to get to, I think. If they have to go to bed and go to school the next day, so. So Superintendent, I don't know if you wanted to say anything before we turn it over to Miss Miller to do a presentation.
[Edouard-Vincent]: Yes, I just want to say thank you Miss Miller for your leadership and for holding down the entire web. All the work that's the back end on the website that we have and working with the students who are doing fabulous work I also wanted to share that I believe some of our students have had the opportunity to work with City Hall as well. In the past. So I hope that that work is able to continue happening, doing continued web work. So I just want to congratulate them and encourage you to keep doing the wonderful work that all of you are doing. So thank you. I look forward to seeing your brief presentation. I also just want to recognize, too, as part of the team, Thomas, who's working closely with all of us on the senior executive team side, helping us with furthering our communication. So I'm very happy for the collaboration and partnership in how we are working to communicate as clearly and as effectively to the entire Medford community. So thank you to both of you.
[Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you.
[Edouard-Vincent]: And I do believe Dr. Cushing made you a co-host, Ms. Miller, so you should be able to share your slide deck to just point out some of the key highlights of the work that you're doing.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: OK, great. Should I go ahead and start?
[Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, please do. OK. Let me.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: I have to say it's been a while since I've had to share on Zoom back from the COVID early days. Can you see the slide presentation? Yep.
[Edouard-Vincent]: Yes.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: OK, great. Please don't hesitate to ask questions. I am going to go through this fairly quickly. You can ask questions along the way, comment, or wait till I'm done, whatever works best. And the students are available for questions as well. So with that, let's see. See if I can. OK, so there is the website team. There's two additional team members that did not have a chance to introduce themselves. Sekou Koyade and Vasilijas Tufis. They are both part of the team and part of the picture that you can see right here. And it's a really great student team. Um, I also wanted to just acknowledge that. So the students are the ones that are do and and I do a lot of the page update so if the. Lunch menu needs to be updated or information on any of the pages need to be updated the students do that. And then they also do some of the posting in the various news areas, but the additional posting is done by Thomas Dalton and for communications he's been doing most of the posting for the school committee and district and then each school has. a person who is responsible for their local news as well. So I just wanted to give credit there. All of them are returning at the school level except for Sarah Grant is new this year. I did want to just sort of as background information I checked the Google Analytics on the site I thought that it might be interesting just to kind of see how widely used the site is. I did this was back on, it was a couple days ago, and it was represents a 28 days previous so a four week period. The thing that I'd like to point out is that on school days, typically between 1,000 and 1,500 people do use the website, the dips or the weekends. So we do have quite a large number of users, I think. Before the launch of the new website, the usage was very, very low of the website. It would kind of appear at a flat line down at the bottom. And then just sort of some of the most popular pages on the website. The home page for the district school brains is second and the breakfast and lunch menu is always a popular item. And then things like the printable school calendar, staff portal, staff directory, athletics, and some of the school home pages. And again, this was for the four weeks leading up to October 8th. Some of the recently added items to the website have been we've started using some of the social media feeds on the home page of the district site. We now have the MPS Facebook account embedded. This is a screenshot of it. And so that's kind of the first of the embeds that we did. We also now have the Athletics X, or formerly known as Twitter or whatever it is, embedded within the Athletics area of the website. I put the next one, Athletics Home Games Weekly Post, trying to work out what that's going to look like, but trying to promote the athletics program more. Students have taken a lead on that and trying to just make sure that some of the activities around the high school and other schools are sort of posted about, promoted. And then another page that was recently created by the students is the CCSR page. They lost their website. We have a a new page there and that we will, the students will be involved in creating a more complete website for the CCSR program. In one of the things that was my understanding about what you would like to kind of discuss tonight, learn about, or this afternoon, is language translations. And so there are language translations built into the website. Currently, the five languages that we support, through Finalsight, we were able to purchase five language translations using a module called WEGLOTS. So we have, Brazilian Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Spanish, and French. You can see that in the screenshot is the superintendent's memo translated into Haitian Creole. I see a hand. Is that member McLaughlin?
[McLaughlin]: Thank you. Thank you so much. This looks really great. I just wanted to ask, while we're on the page, where does one see the option for translation? So, for example, if I am a Portuguese-speaking family, I get to the website, where do I see that I'm able to translate it?
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: So it's down in the lower right-hand corner. Let me see. I'm not sure if it's going to let me change tabs. Can you see the... yeah when I just change Okay, so if you go down to the lower right and you click on the ink the US flag that says English next to it you'll see the languages that are available, and then you can choose the language all the navigation is, then you see if I can just switch over to. So now it's all in Portuguese. So it is down in the corner. I think one of the things, I think your question is important because we haven't really promoted this feature. And maybe that would be something that as we think about kind of next steps, promoting, educating about this feature would probably be a good thing to do.
[McLaughlin]: Thank you. Thank you, member Graham. Just, I would agree. I think that's fantastic. I think it's wonderful. It's a feature I didn't know about and one I definitely would want to share with families. So marketing and outreach for that would be great. Thank you.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: Okay, and then I know another topic was accessibility. We do try to follow best practices for accessibility on the website. So, what I mean by that are things like alt tags for images, so that If somebody is using a screen reader and can't see the image. There is a description of what is in the image proper heading usage, so that screen readers can organize the their presentation of the information. I have to say, I am not an expert on screen readers. I just try to follow the guidelines that I've learned. So my understanding is that the heading, proper use of heading is important. Issues like color contrast, making sure that there's enough contrast between the different colors that are used in text and navigation. and making sure that important text, if it is in an image, that we also duplicate it. And so the reason that I picked this particular screenshot for this slide is the unified basketball schedule came to us as a PDF that wouldn't be automatically translated or screen-readable. And so we took the text out of that and put it as part of the text of the news post so that it could be screen-read and that it could be translated into the different languages. Sometimes we will post a graphic that is kind of nicely designed, maybe it's a dance announcement, the neon dance is coming, they have a really colorful graphic for that, but we'll make sure that any information such as the date, the time, the cost, that kind of thing is also in text so that screen readers can't read the text that's in an image. And so that allows screen readers and translation to have access to the text that's important for that particular post or information. And we know that there are still issues that need to be addressed around accessibility. So there are PDFs that we have and we post that are not translatable or screen readable. Images that contain important text. Again, I did say that we do try to make sure that in our posts we pull out the important information. We have not fully tested the website, using assistive technology screen readers or other assistive technologies. I think that that would be, I would love to invite somebody into the classroom and who uses assistive technologies of any kind and talk with them, learn about their experience using the website, let them explore the website, learn from them, and possibly have some, like a screen reader accessible to us so that we can also just, when we create a new page, what would it look, what would it sound like to have it read to us? So those are some things. We're open to suggestions. We know that this is still an area that we have, you know, we could improve upon. And I think part of that is the website, but part of that also is the materials that we are given to put onto the website. So that's a kind of a two-sided point there. Member McLaughlin, did you have a question?
[McLaughlin]: Yes, thank you. No, I think this is really great too and appreciate your thoughtfulness and the students thoughtfulness about this and I'm really excited about it. For the alt tags for images, if you could just demonstrate how that works, that would be really helpful at some point. And then regarding the testing with the assistive technologies, I think that's a fantastic idea and would really encourage working with the high school transition program and the team there. And I'm sure that they can support and also Easterseals is super supportive with assistive tech, and I'm happy to connect folks. But I think having more than one self-advocate navigate and sort of work even with your team to help them understand how a person with a disability navigates a website would be fantastic. And as far as the screen reader goes, I think that's definitely something that's a great idea too, to be able to listen and try it out yourselves. with the incorporation of a self-advocate, I think, or more than one self-advocate, I think would be great. you know, I'm happy to do a little bit of research on the screen reader if you're interested, but would you be able to demonstrate an alt tag?
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: An alt tag is really, it's something that's inside of the website. It's not something that a user would see. So it's a little bit hard for me to demonstrate it. What it would be is that if a screen reader encounters an image, the alt tag, there's an image tag that puts an image on a page. The alt tag would say, photograph of two students playing soccer, or something like that. And so instead of being able to see the image, the screen reader would read the text that's in the alt tag. I can't really show it at this point.
[McLaughlin]: No, I understand. It's coding then for the screen reader to read it. Okay, that's great. And so with somebody with a screen reader can sort of go over that and it would read to it. That's helpful explanation, especially for... lay people who are listening and people like me who haven't used alt images or alt descriptions. So that's super helpful. And I think to your point, Ms. Miller, about uniformity around submissions is a really good point, especially when it comes to accessibility and ADA and language and what have you. So thank you for that food for thought.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: Thank you. And thank you for the resources. And if you do have any information on screen reader, screen reader suggestions or recommendations, please let me know. And I think reaching out to the high school transition program is a great idea. So thank you.
[Graham]: And Ms. Miller, I will also check with my team here at work. We do a lot of build of e-learning content. And when you build those kinds of resources, particularly for use in state government, the agencies are typically very interested in making sure there's section 508 compliance, which is all the things that you're talking about. So it's making sure that anybody who is needing to use that resource can access it. And the sticky part about 508 compliance is that it is in the eye of the beholder. So there is no set of rules that says like, yes, check, this is 508 compliant, what you can do is you can sort of test for the things that are the most common. Nope, 508. So it's a set of standards that govern the sort of digital publication of material. And one of the things that state agencies grapple with certainly is when they're providing these kinds of whether it's websites, whether it's e-learning, what have you, that they sort of have to take a best effort approach to cover as many bases of best practice as they can. And then if there are individuals who require something particular, then the goal is to like individually meet that person where they are, because there is no standard for what you need to be able to access the information. So a lot of times when we talk about 508 compliance, you know, there's there's sort of rules of the road, like you talked about, like making sure a screen reader can read alt tags. And that takes a whole body of work, right, to alt tag everything, really be thoughtful about PDFs and things like that, color contrast, et cetera. There is a best, there are like guidelines that sort of get you there probably like 90, 95, 96, 97% of the time. And it's this website certainly sets up all of that very nicely, I think, to the to the sort of point in conversation around the information that you're receiving. I do think there's probably an opportunity for us to communicate. these best practices in terms of what you need and how you need it to make life easier for everybody who's going to post things. So, I mean, you know, Tom is going to know these things, you're going to know these things, but somebody who's like, Hey, can you post this on the website? Here's a flyer. Um, even if they're able to give you like, here's the image and here's the details, like that makes it easier for you. So I think there probably are some standards to think about as this, as we talk about next iteration, that would be helpful. for the team to put together to say hey if you're going to give us information here's here's how we would like you to give it to us and here's why because people would never you know most people would never think about like how would I describe this photo I just I'm looking at it right and so that take that's all a bunch of that's a body of work that has to happen in order to make this accessible on an ongoing basis. So I think some of those like sort of ideas around like how you want to receive information would be really sort of helpful for all the people that are trying to feed you stuff. Tom?
[Thomas Dalton]: Yeah, thank you member Graham. I'm glad that you honed in on this idea of, you know, having consistent expectations for how this content should be coming in. And that's something we're already working on with our principals with our subject directors and coordinators and with our posting. designees, making sure that everybody has clear expectations about what kind of information is needed to add something to the website. And that's up to and including thinking about these accessibility best practices that Ms. Miller outlined and that we know we still have a lot more work we can do on. But it's definitely a major priority, because when we think about consistency of our content and our content being useful and accessible to all members of our community, we're very interested in really prioritizing these matters of visual accessibility, of other kinds of disability accessibility. So it's a huge priority. It's something I think that we're still developing all of the parameters for, but definitely top of mind for us as we're instituting these processes for developing this kind of content.
[Graham]: Great. Thank you. I appreciate that so much. This is such an evolution from where we were not that long ago. So we're like zooming light years ahead, which is really exciting to see. Remember McLaughlin?
[McLaughlin]: It is exciting. It's been a banner week with the disability awareness event and this, I'm so happy to see all of this. And also just to that point, I know that the superintendent is working with the New England ADA organization and the executive director there on matters related to accessibility. And I'm sure that they would also be a great source of information for accessibility and websites, and there was a grant written around some of this, and I don't think it just pertains, as some people might think, you know, it's regarding physical accessibility or other, it includes, you know, all accessibility and the website would be included on this, so there could be, you know, if the grant comes through, Um, there could be some additional funding to help with this too, which is always the bottom line, right? Um, is where's, where's the money coming from as well. But, um, and in regarding the students and all the work that you guys have done, you know, um, I think you have great material for your resume and for your college applications and being able to share this. So thank you so much for all the hard work that you've put into it. And please don't underestimate the value of talking about the accessibility when you're sharing the work that you did on the website and how you made it both language accessible and individually accessible. I think that's super important in your applications too. So thank you.
[Graham]: Ms. Miller, I think you have some additional slides. We'll stop interrupting you.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: No, I'm happy to hear the conversation. This is great. I don't really have a lot more, but I do have a little and this is a rather big page. So thinking about possible phase two items. So really building on the accessibility should also be here. But thinking about ways of including more social media, we do have the ability to embed 20 social media feeds. We're using two, as I had pointed out earlier, with the district Facebook and the athletics Twitter. We're currently thinking that each of the schools will have a Facebook page, I mean, a Facebook embed on their main page. And we're, we're thinking about Instagram I think the students support the, the idea of Instagram as being an additional social media feed that might be more appealing to the students. Kind of a bigger topic about how we are going to move forward with social media Thomas has been great and helping initiate some of this and thinking, helping us think about it both in terms of what we want to do as well as some of the guidelines around social media use. So that has been very helpful staff directory procedures. This is really about we have 800 employees listed in our staff directory on the website, and having some streamlined systems for keeping that up that directory up to date, making sure that I'm getting the information about new hires, you know titles where they, you know, school location. department, and as well as when somebody leaves making sure that I get the information to remove them from the website so that that staff directory does continue to be up to date. So that's a little bit of a challenge and it's more of a. kind of a logistics challenge, I think, but something that I would like to see addressed. Library module, currently we're using an external website called LibGuide for the high school. And we would like to bring a lot of those resources that are particularly student-oriented into the final site main website. And just this week, we've heard from Andrew's middle school librarian, saying that she would like access for her students easy, accessible resources for the middle school students. So we will be working on that also soon and having that built into the website. I think the staff portal needs some attention. It's not awful. But really, when we were launching, it fell to low priority. Really, the community outward looking website was more important was prioritized I think appropriately so but I think a little attention to the staff portal thinking about what information is there how better to organize and present it would be beneficial to the staff. We have been looking at ways of adding additional online or We're not looking at it yet. We're open to adding, I should say, more online payment forms. We currently have online payments for athletic user fees and AP exam fees. We also used online payments for summer school payments, and I think that went really well. But we do have this ability, and so thinking about additional uses for the online payments. We've talked about with the students having an interest in possibly establishing more of an internship definition for some of the what the student website team does. A lot of the vocational programs have internships or co-ops the senior year and maybe thinking about the student website team more as an internship. So maybe exploring some possibilities there they they contribute a tremendous amount and thinking about how we think of them and label that kind of role and. Kind of thinking about that I think would be a nice part to something nice to include in phase two. And then also thinking more about student focused content and resources on the website. What are the students looking for? The students shared some good ideas just yesterday with me. If they wanted to address, I'm not sure if they want to say anything about that or if I can just say it. But they, well, I'll say it, and then if you guys want to add more, how about that? So two of the areas that came up were additional information about clubs and activities, how to get involved more, when clubs meet, all of that kind of stuff, as well as additional mental health resources. So those were two categories. I don't know if the students want to add anything to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, about like the clubs and like, like the stuff we want to like add to like the website, I guess like, we just want like the clubs to be more like relevant on the website, like how I'm like a couple clubs, like the meetings usually get like, flipped, like usually get like a random day, and they don't like announce it, or whatever. So we kind of like want it, like the website to be a bit more like club focused, where like we there's more information. Um, also, I don't remember this was mentioned, but maybe more like mental health resources on the website to like help students.
[Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Rachel.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: And in terms, and I would love to hear more about what students are looking for. I think that it has potential to really provide information and resources to students. I think that, and that's an area that I think we're a little bit weak on right now, and that there's a lot of potential for growth. And really we're open to suggestions. This website is for the community, all aspects of the community, whether it's students, family, staff. So we're very open to suggestions. And then, just a little more. Just to make sure that everybody knows that a piece of all of this is that there is a mobile app that is available right now. I took this screenshot you can see the top event is on the news is today's meeting. So the mobile app is available. It does show calendar events, news, it has access to the lunch menu school brains. I want to make sure that we kind of keep the knowledge that this is a piece of the website. It draws directly from the website. There's nothing additional that we do to maintain the mobile app. It pulls directly all of the information from the website. So if we add a post to the website, it automatically becomes available on the mobile app. It is there, it is in the Play Store and the Apple App Store. There is one issue with on some phones with being able to select the high school as the location you would like to filter on because we have such a long name. It is doable, but it's a little bit, I don't know, it needs to be improved. But we haven't, you know, I think that there's been some information that's gone out about the mobile app, but it hasn't really been pushed a lot. It's definitely been included in the superintendent's memo, if I remember correctly, but I just wanted to make sure that that was not forgotten. And then the last slide I have, the last two are really just thank yous, and I just wanted to thank the school committee of the administration. Diane Caldwell is not here today, but she's been really taking the lead on so many aspects of the website development. Molly Leighton, director of technology, Thomas, who's here, and then the posting teams, and the student website team, and just everybody. It's been a team effort. There's been a lot of people involved that have helped to bring the website to where it is now, and we'll continue to make it better as we go forward. So that's it. Thank you.
[Graham]: Thank you. Member McLaughlin, did you have a question?
[McLaughlin]: Yeah. What is the name of the mobile app? Is it just Medford Public Schools? Yes. Thank you.
[Graham]: Um, so I think we, when we brought this to the school committee, we definitely, um, were interested in exploring a little bit more about phase two. And so I, um, and there were a couple of things that. Um, sort of piqued my interest as you were talking. Um, and, and that I've heard about, um, and actually I invited, uh, miss Perry today as well, because I think we couple of things that we've heard at the school committee over. the course of this last year is that some of the athletic teams are like, they're sort of like out there on their own for a whole variety of reasons, sort of managing their own websites where they're like sort of posting all of their community right like their Their track results their information for teams, etc. One of the parents on the track team brought that to my attention that the track coach was like sort of maintaining this website on his own at his own expense and I, I certainly don't think that we. sort of asked him to do that, but I imagine that he did it at a time when our website was really not very functional and he wanted a way to sort of provide all of that. And so that to me was one of the reasons why I invited Miss Perry is because I think all of the athletic teams and to to Rachel's point earlier, our extracurriculars all have potentially the same sort of use case and need to be able to have a space that can sort of live underneath the auspices of our overall website and be nimble and easy enough for people to post, but still informative. So that we don't have, and one thing that does concern me from a sort of security perspective is like we don't have people out on all kinds of websites all over the place posting information that may or may not conform to sort of the guidelines that we would use to manage our own internal website. So one question I think I had for this group from a phase two perspective is Like, is there an opportunity to take that as a body of work around athletics and the extracurriculars and figure out really a process by which those pages can exist and can exist. with the right like parameters and controls in place. And I wanted Ms. Perry to be here for sure because obviously there are some tentacles there with athletics. So I would just be interested in any thoughts that the team has around whether that is something that's viable for us to be thinking about as part of a phase two.
[Perry]: Sure, I can speak to the athletic piece. So we have what we call our school today and our scheduling, our registration site, We have team pages where I post all of our scores, all of the rosters are there. So all of that information is housed there and it is linked from our final site to our athletics pages. The only thing we really don't have is a specific page where we have news from our athletic activities, for example, maybe doing a highlight of, thank you for bringing that up, maybe doing a highlight of certain games or doing a highlight of coaches or a highlight of students or captains. So maybe having a specific athletic news page where we can kind of do some of those things. But I think for at least the scheduling piece, the rosters, the scores, all of that stuff is kind of housed in that our school where that is also linked on that side. Yep, that's the schedule that you see there. Um, and those are all links. So when we have registration open, for example, winter registration, we open in a couple of weeks, we have students that register for hockey that signals our activity schedule. Let us say, okay, kids are scheduled for hockey. Let's post that hockey schedule. So it's all kind of intertwined. And when I do rosters, I pulled from the registration site, the kids that registered for hockey, I pull that over to the hockey roster. And then that all gets pushed over to our facility scheduler. So like I said, it's kind of a big web there, but for our need, I would definitely say getting that news out. I do ads on Twitter every week about our upcoming games. We have pictures of our students. Thank you for bringing that up. That was actually the crew team just had a meet on Sunday. So that was their information, but I try to do, or I do every week, you can see boys, freshmen soccer there. We do ads and we push that out to Twitter. I also send it to coaches so they can push it out to Facebook and so forth. But that's what I have for my end.
[Graham]: Thank you, Rachel. I guess one of the things that I don't know a lot about from a final site perspective is whether there are integrations available that would make some of these connections easier so that everybody can sort of work in the native place that they work. And it doesn't have to be like so labor intensive to sort of move information to final sites. So in other words, like this final site have some sort of integration that would work with Is it our school where all of the athletics work is happening and then can, is there some like more integrated way on the back end for the website to organically take the information that is being populated and managed in our school or whatever it's called? on the athletic side. So I didn't know what kind of integrations were available with final site that we should be thinking about taking advantage of. And those always are like sort of meaty projects that would definitely to your point of like internships and things like that, those sort of lend themselves to that kind of thinking a little bit more.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: And I will say that final site does provide an athletics module. They do say that they have integration I'm not sure when we look it looked like maybe they were almost there but not quite there so it might be something where in the future that integration might be a little bit cleaner. I think it's something we need to stay abreast of and keep an eye on what final site is offering it is an additional fee. I forget what it was, but it wasn't, it was like $5,000 a year or something for the integration. Um, I'm not sure but it was in that range, plus or minus some amount. So it is something that we've looked at a little bit, but looking at, after talking with Rachel and trying to understand more about the complexity of scheduling, rosters, facility management, all of that, Rachel can say more about that. It became clear that the current tool, you know, what final site was currently offering wasn't quite there, but we are optimistic that I think that that could be a future thing but we're also looking at ways of like, like the page that we're looking at right now where we are able to Rachel updates, the Twitter feed or X feed or whatever it's called. And then we're able to embed that on the website. We've been looking at ways of, you know, highlighting, promoting home games. I like Rachel's idea about highlighting, you know, teams or coaches or players. So kind of, I think the idea of maybe an athletics specific news might be a nice idea. So I think that there are definitely things we can do and hopefully eventually we could move toward that more integrated, kind of module using the module that final site provides. I'm not sure if Rachel has anything to add to that, but that's sort of kind of where I feel like we landed when we've had this conversation.
[Perry]: Yes, I agree. I think there was a couple of things that wouldn't really be transferred over. So we were kind of waiting to see what would happen if they could, you know, do that in the future. But I totally agree. I think maybe, you know, wait to see what happens with them and then if it can be integrated, then we do that. I think what was happening too, with our school today, you can actually load all of the schedules onto a Google calendar, right? So I think that's, but we couldn't go the other way. So I think that was a glitch too. Right, Lisa, if I remember.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that sounds familiar, yes. I'm not a hundred percent, but that sounds right.
[Graham]: Got it so and maybe the the right sort of implementation approach is to start with the some of the clubs and activities that don't really have a presence right now and work out sort of how that. can work, whether it's like student students to have access to post on behalf of their clubs or that's something the advisors do, but I would imagine like as you do that there's some like rules of the road that come out right in terms of how to make it as effective as possible and then. Maybe like the next phase could ultimately be like when this integration is available from an athletics perspective we sort of bring the rest of the athletics teams along that same pathway that we've worked out with, with the extracurriculars, and I will say that final site.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: has really a lot of different levels of permissions and we like let's say we did say okay students for different clubs could post on a club's board or something, you know. It's really easy to set up where they wouldn't have access to anything other than just that one, you know, board that they could post to. So that we don't open ourselves up to a larger number of people potentially having access to other areas of the website that we just, you know, for security reasons, we don't want everybody to have access to.
[Lungo-Koehn]: Oh, sorry.
[McLaughlin]: Thank you. Yeah, and I think to that, I think those are. are really great points. Member Graham, in terms of the phase two and thinking about the integration and also the groups that are not represented. And in addition to that, to Thomas's role in sort of all of this as well as sort of the uniformity and be able to create some standardization and standards of some of this. And so, for example, you know, we have approved and required a non-discrimination statement for all sign-ups for any activity of the life of the school. So, you know, whenever there's a form that goes out to sign up for an athletic event or to get tickets for a dance or, you know, any of those things that there's a non-discrimination statement that says, you know, Medford does not discriminate on the basis of all the things that we don't discriminate on. And if you need accommodations, here is the path to, you know, request accommodations to participate. And that, again, was going to be out 9-1. And I think that, you know, just with the start of the school year, it's been a little bit delayed, but that's coming and it should be uniform on everything that's the life of the school. So I would imagine, you know, maybe that's part of Thomas's role in some of this. If not, I would like to know whose it is or whose it would be just in terms of uniformity in messaging or approval, I guess, or something.
[Thomas Dalton]: Yeah, definitely part of my role, Member McLaughlin, and actually just circulated a memo with building principals this week reminding them that that should be included on all the appropriate web pages and most of all on flyers and sign up forms for events to affirmatively remind that we offer all reasonable accommodations to anybody who needs them for any event. So yeah, that's an important point and something that we're definitely on top of.
[McLaughlin]: Excellent. Thank you. And if that could be added to the phase two of the website as well, that would be great. I know I did a search on it the other day and it hadn't happened yet. So I know that you guys are working super hard on it and I really appreciate all the effort. And member Graham, I'm sure you're thinking of this, but just sort of wondering if there'll be another FCE meeting regarding phase two you know, the implementation of phase two.
[Graham]: Yeah, I mean, I think the the goal of this meeting was for us to have some discussion about the options for phase two so that we could, you know, bring that update back to the school committee for sure. But also, you know, understand whatever we sort of think through and give Miss Miller in the in the project team some time to think about like what it will take and to do various things and what they might need from us to be able to do those things. So I think there's some work on their part and then we can reconvene so What we might do at the end of this meeting is continue the meeting to a date in the future and then we'll sort of pick it up at a point, probably, you know, maybe even after the new year I'm not sure, depending on, you know, some information that, you know, depending on how much work there is to do to really think through those next steps. But two other things that sort of were on my mind as I thought about the website in general. One was around payments, payments of all kind, and whether there's really like a sort of a, I'll say a single unified venue for payments to Medford Public Schools? And I think the answer is no, or maybe not yet, but is there like a single place where you could go and you could pay for a lost library book, to add money to somebody's school lunch account, to sign up for athletics, to pay For whatever the things are right that that money flows into our our school district from families and so you know maybe in the bigger picture I would want there not to have to be money that flows into the district from families, but in the meantime. Is there a single place and does final site have capabilities there that we should be exploring as part of phase two in terms of of all things payments and? Certainly when we talk about payments, security becomes a really big part of the discussion. And I, you know, I will admit that I have some agita around our payment processes sort of across the district because I just don't know enough to feel like each and every one of them independently is, you know, sort of rising to the level of the kind of standards that you want to see in place when you start taking money. So I didn't know what kind of capabilities final site had, what we're using, what we're not using, what the options are, and how do we create like a single place for people to go when they have to do something like that.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so I mean, I'll start with just kind of my first thoughts. So we do use BlueSnap through FinalSight to handle online payments. And we've been using them for things like the AP exam payments, summer school, and the athletic user fees. Each of those has very unique information associated with the form that they need to fill out to make that payment. So, you know, what sport are you participating in or what AP test are you taking, that kind of thing. And so I think that having separate forms is how we've approached it so far. I guess I'm trying to think how it could play out where you had a more universal one. I don't really, I can't envision it right now, but I might you know, with more thought maybe something would come to mind. I could also just see having a page on the website that was like payments, and it just had a list of all the things that we did accept payments for that you could kind of click on and not have to go say okay well wait Where is that AP payment? It's down over in student services and testing and AP. And maybe somebody is having a hard time finding it. So if there was like one universal place that all payments were listed, something like that might be an easy step, step one step. So I don't know. Those are the first thoughts that come to my mind. I see Thomas raised his hand too. Thomas?
[Thomas Dalton]: Yeah, thank you. Something along those lines is employed on a lot of municipal websites. I live in Malden. And in Malden, you can go to cityofmalden.org slash billpay, which is a link I'll share in the chat also. But it does basically just list out all the different kinds of bills that the city might send you and get you In the case of Malden, they use a third-party bill service. But there are options like that, like Ms. Miller said, to just set up a page that lists out all the different things that you might pay for and link out to all those different forms. Because as the presentation showed, there is a really complete form for athletic sign up that lists all the different sports for each season and which ones you're paying the fees for. There's a good list of the AP exam options and all the different things you might sign up for. So it might just be a matter of setting up a kind of landing page to link out to this stuff.
[Graham]: Yeah, I think that could sort of get us a good portion of the way there, honestly. So I don't necessarily think it needs to be like, when I'm thinking about one-stop shopping, I think the thing that I'm thinking about the most is like the security required to safely sort of take online payments that we don't wanna be managing like many modules of, um, software that's taking in payments. So for, if everything is able to sort of coalesce around blue snap, then we know, and your team can make sure that like, we properly like worked with somebody who's a security expert around payments that we feel like. Good that they have all of the controls in place from a blue snap perspective, and then everything is flowing through there. And so that makes sort of life simple. And if there's a simple landing page for for parents like coming in and saying, how do I pay this thing? It could be just as simple as like those two pieces sort of linking together. And I think that would be like a great next step in terms of like providing some accessibility. And I don't know if there are other things that are like operating outside of BlueSnap, but certainly like trying to like pull them all into one place. Certainly you can pull them all into one place pretty easily, but also like on that back end from a like cash management perspective and our CFO would probably, you know, need to weigh in here, but how do we create like financial controls over the money that flows through whatever these tools are as well? So that would be like, that's one of the things on my mind. Ms. Perry, did you have your hand in the air?
[Perry]: Yes, so quick question for our pool right now for membership to the pool we are taking check or money order. It would be great if we could do something online. My only issue is, or thought would be, there's a lot of different memberships. So if you're a Medford resident under 58, it's $120. Seniors over 58, it's $50 for six months. If you are not a Medford resident, it's $150. Is there a way through this website that we could allow people to sign up for memberships, but they would have to prove their age, like show a license or something like that. Does that have that capability?
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: Not to my knowledge currently, but I have not fully investigated that either. So again, that's something I can put on my list of things to do is like a verification. I do know that for something like, The AP exam, we do have a little checkbox, like a little radio button, and they can say if they currently receive free or reduced price lunches, then if they click that button, the prices change on the page. So that's the honor system. And I think that there's some checking by the guidance department on that. That verification, I am not aware of. This is sort of self-reporting. I'm just kind of bringing this up as I'm talking. But again, I can look into that. That would be something that I could investigate. Thank you.
[Perry]: I can take a check now. I can see the address, so I know where they live. Yeah.
[Graham]: Right. Well, and I think you know this could be sort of a great meaty little project for. For students to sort of sink their teeth into because it's it's a little bit it's bigger than just the web development piece of it, but it's really about how you make. websites useful, right? So you would make so many people happy if they could pay for their pool registration online. But to your point, if we have to have a way to have these checks and balances, what can be done to create something sort of manageable and approachable that allows that to happen too, I think is, you know, a really great question.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. So just what I have displayed right now, just so you can kind of see what I'm talking about. This is for the AP exam payment. There's a little radio button here that says if they do receive free or reduced. If they say yes, all the prices after the exams update to be $15. And that's kind of how BlueSnap works with the forms is whatever payment is associated with what they check, that becomes, you know, they can add them up if they're doing three exams, it adds it all up and then leads to a payment page after that. So that's the example.
[Graham]: Member McLaughlin?
[McLaughlin]: Thank you. Yeah, and I just wanted to get back to the language accessibility issue or issues that we were talking about in the beginning, particularly regarding, you know, outreach and thinking about that I just want to put a bug in folks here about the cultural brokers and using, you know, City side, I'm assuming, you know, maybe I shouldn't assume, but I would think the mayor would welcome the opportunity to work with the cultural brokers to really help them get the word out about. the website, and then also I think there's an opportunity to look at the interpretation line. I don't think that the school has an interpretation line, but I know the city side does. Is the school, do you know, Dr. Edouard-Vincent, is the school accessing the interpretation line?
[Edouard-Vincent]: When interpretation is required for meetings, we work with Paul Teixeira, our director of EL, so we do have interpreters available for specialized meetings that do take place. I want to say with Bay State interpreters,
[McLaughlin]: But I'm talking more about like if you know if a if a teacher needs to call, or if a family wants a teacher to call them and I know that they have talking points but perhaps or school committee member to call them and their, you know, their family is. you know, primary languages, again, say Portuguese or Haitian Creole or something. Does the school have access to the city interpretation line? So, you know, we have an interpretation line at my office. It's a great tool. you know, we're able to call a third party who then, you know, creates a party line, you know, gets the third person on the phone and then interprets between the two languages. And it's been really fabulous in terms of relationship building and really being able to reach families. So it sounds like we don't know the answer to that question, but- We do have interpreters, member Graham.
[Edouard-Vincent]: We have Mr. Bonbon who is- No, no.
[McLaughlin]: Sorry, go ahead, Member Graham.
[Graham]: So I just want to be mindful of the fact that we are sort of under the requirement of the open meeting law, and we really shouldn't be talking about things that aren't officially posted. So I think this is a great conversation. But if there's a question about the website, I think we should continue to answer that question. But I think your question is a little bit different than about the website. Am I right, Member McLaughlin?
[McLaughlin]: No, actually, thank you for asking though it's about having the language line on the website so, but I can investigate further in terms of access and to the superintendent's point I understand we have interpreters superintendent for outreach, you know, for specific meetings or what have you. we don't necessarily have those for, you know, individual phone calls or outreach from school committee members or sort of those things that a language line provides. So my question is, does, I would assume the language line is a citywide access language line, in which case that means that the school can access it, in which case that would mean that it can be shared on our website. But I would like to confirm that.
[Graham]: Yeah, and I don't think you can assume that because it's a city resource that the schools have access to it. There's some particular laws, regulations, rules, whatever, about sharing of resources and how those things actually come to pass. So I think checking in on that first makes sense. And then if there are phone numbers that can be used to sort of access this, making those numbers available on the website makes perfect sense. But I think that needs to be sort of vetted before we can make the ask that it goes on to the website.
[McLaughlin]: Agreed. Thank you very much. That's exactly the point. Thank you.
[Graham]: Great. And then I think the other, so two other comments that I had sort of on my agenda, I was in, we were, parents were invited to something that the guidance office was doing, like Coffee with the Guidance Councilor or something like that. And, In the context of that invitation, there was another website listed that was like medmhsguidance.com. Hold on, let me get the exact website. Cause I wrote it down. I was like, I have to remember to bring this medfordhighguidance.com. And so I think my question would be is like another phase two. sunsetting the independent guidance website, whatever it might be. I don't know, I haven't been there, but I would imagine that we would want the good work being done in our guidance department to be front and center as part of our website.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: I'm actually surprised that that link is still there. That is an old link that site doesn't exist any longer. And we have moved all of the content over to the final site website. Oh, that's great news.
[Graham]: Okay. Perfect, because I saw that I was like, how, how do we keep finding websites that are sort of like out in the ether here, but it is hard to sort of unwind them. So
[Thomas Dalton]: So maybe more likely that it was just an artifact that got moved over from an older version of an invite accidentally.
[Graham]: Yeah.
[Graham]: Perfect. So to the point of some of the discussion we've had so far, I think the other next step that would be really great is something that officially describes for the public what's what's on the website, what it's all about, that the website is available in five languages. I think people would be so delighted to hear that. And I don't think we've done a great job of describing all this good work outside of school committee meetings, of course, but I also am acutely aware that school committee meetings are attended by a very, very, very tiny fraction of the population. And we have, you know, 4,000 odd students that come through our doors every single day. how can we sort of push out a more formal communication about what's on the website, what's available, how to access it, that the app exists, like how they work together, et cetera. So I think a lot of really good work has been done that we need to promote. So I think that's like another sort of maybe next step or phase two type of item. And then. Sort of the last thing on my mind is really around some of the information that gets posted and shared about our school committee meetings. So one of the things that we did. As we set our as we passed our first school committee set of goals, I think maybe ever in the history of Medford was talk about a desire to translate our. our agendas into multiple languages so that they are more accessible to our families than a simple English posting would be. And I happened to notice, Dr. Edouard-Vincent, that the last handful of agendas did include links if I'm remembering correctly, that were translated, but.
[Edouard-Vincent]: Yes, you are accurate. For the regular meetings, we, in September, that was like the deadline that we were given. So we started translating all of the regular meeting agendas with the hyperlinks in the header. So that just similar to the way the Friday communications go out, the translations are also available.
[Graham]: And I that's great news, I was so excited to see that. I did wonder, though, it looks like somebody is like essentially having to hand translate them much like they do with your. your weekly memos, and I'm not sure if that's true, but it looked so similar in structure to me. And I just wondered if there was a better way to make use of the website if we were to post our agendas a little bit differently than we do, so that they're not PDFs, because PDFs can't be translated. But if there was a different way for us to post school committee materials to the website, would that inherently sort of avail us of the translation services that are available through final site and make the process of all of this translation a little bit easier.
[Edouard-Vincent]: That would be, I think that's a great suggestion. I would have to defer to Lisa or Thomas like to say if we get the content possibly in a different way, would that be possible?
[Graham]: Thomas, you had your hand in the air. Did you want to?
[Thomas Dalton]: Yeah, yeah. You were reading my mind, Member Graham. I think.
[Eunice Browne]: I'm doing it soon, but also checking Janice. So at five minutes.
[Edouard-Vincent]: Oops, can we? Got it. Thank you.
[Thomas Dalton]: Yeah, I think you're exactly right, that if we just move away from linking to a PDF and instead include the text of the agenda in a news post, the existing translation and accessibility tools on the website would automatically be covering what we're doing there. And we've moved in a similar direction on the superintendent's memo. The main reason we still include the Google Doc translation in the superintendent's memo is because we often share the Google link when we send out the text message version of the memo in the weekly updates. But yeah, if something's on the website, we don't need to separately translate it because the built-in translation plugin handles it.
[Graham]: Right. And so I think, you know, that I think would be a great other sort of next step. I know we gave you like 25 next steps in phase two, so you can you can sort of put all those in a hat and shake up the hat and figure out like what makes the most sense from a implementation perspective. And, you know, Carolyn and Rachel and Tenzine and the other folks that are on the team certainly probably have a lot to say about the work that's required and the work that they are going to undertake. So I would certainly want to defer to you all to think about all the things that we've talked about. I think this like school committee, this idea about using the website as sort of a way to power some of the objectives the school committee has around accessibility and translation, if we can get that right with the agendas, could we get that right with the minutes? And could we get that right with some of the other materials? And so I don't wanna like, I don't wanna boil the ocean necessarily like right out of the gate, because I think that is where good projects sort of fall apart, but if we could start and try with the agendas and get a process that works, is there a next thing and a next thing and a next thing that could build there? Thomas?
[Thomas Dalton]: Yeah, definitely. I think that's exactly the direction we should be headed. Because what I love about working with our website is that we own everything that's on our website. The downside is that If Mark Zuckerberg pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on Facebook, if Elon Musk pulls a plug on That's per the open meeting law that we publish all of the minutes online after the committee approves them. And like the agendas, yeah, maybe there's scope for posting them in a different format. So they're PDFs currently. And so maybe that's something we look at changing so that they're updated by the website.
[Lungo-Koehn]: Member Graham? Member McLaughlin?
[McLaughlin]: Yeah. And to that point, I think that's great. And I think these are, and again, you know, you know, not putting too much out there on folks all at once, but I think that, you know, these are great, but if we don't get the marketing and outreach out to the folks who need it to know that it exists, right. I mean, first things first, I'm so glad that we're even, you know, doing this and, and, and, you know, I'm thinking of it. And I want to make sure that we're really thinking about how we're getting the information out so that people know that it actually exist, so thank you.
[Eunice Browne]: Great. Eunice. Folks, welcome back. Quick question. I try on a regular basis, as I'm sure you've seen, to keep people informed as well on everybody's behalf and posting the links and so forth. occasionally I'll try and post, you know, the entire agenda or a part of the agenda. And I find when I do it with the city council, city clerk sends out his agendas in both a PDF and a word format. So I can either very easily just cut and paste the entire Word document agenda and share it out. Or maybe I just want to highlight a specific resolution or something that I think will be of interest to the community. And so it's easy to pretty much copy and paste four or five lines. But when I go and do it with the school committee, It ends up kind of all running together and then I have to go in and adjust spacing and so forth so that it's readable. I don't know if that's because it's PDF or what, but I'm just curious why that is. And for anybody who wants to maybe highlight a part of the agenda or even the whole thing, as opposed to just copying a link, there must be an easier way. I don't know if any of that made sense. And I apologize if I'm putting it in a spot in the discussion where it doesn't belong.
[Graham]: No, no. I think that's actually a great point, Eunice. Because what we don't, we follow all of the rules that sort of keep us in compliance. and make us consistent with the open meeting law and the posting requirements of the city, which are we're actually still a physical posting city, which is a whole other topic. But when it comes to like making people aware of what's on the school committee agenda, that's a different matter entirely. And I don't think we do a great job at that today. And so people like yourself, You know me if I if there's something on the agenda that people you know it happens sort of organically which isn't a problem. But if there was a posting on our website that we could sort of point to link to on a regular basis. Then it becomes easier to sort of put that posting in a whole variety of places on our website, you know, in various local pages and whatever. And then it becomes easier to link to from like the superintendents Friday memo and and all the other places we're communicating from so that people have people have a better chance of accessing that information than they do today. I think the other thing you sort of highlighted, which is not necessarily like a website thing but it's certainly a communication thing is that there is some sort of service happening by the city clerk who is, you know, in all transparency, paid for a specific job that he's doing. And this is part of his job responsibilities, is to get the word out about the council meetings. He sort of works on behalf of the council exclusively. But he has, over time, I believe, created a mail list of sorts of people who wanted get those things in their email box. And it's not the everybody, but the people who say, hey, can you put me on your list? And then it goes out on a weekly basis.
[Eunice Browne]: We don't have something like that.
[Graham]: Yeah, we don't have something like that yet in Medford public schools. But I think that's another question probably for Tom to think about in terms of communication and like, how do you start to manage like essentially like sub interest subscriptions, right? Like that's, I think that's what we're talking about. You know, it's different than like everybody getting the superintendent's weekly memo. It's like people who want that email in their email box, signing up and saying, please send this to me, you know, on whatever the interval is. And so I don't know final site has some sort of like, connectivity that would make that easier or promote that. But I think that's some food for thought that might address some of the comments from Eunice. And Tom, I see your hands in the air.
[Thomas Dalton]: Yeah, thanks member Graham, you know there there are a few things, certainly where we're always interested in making sure that the meeting postings for the school committee are accessible widely, the the actual formal open meeting law posting of the meetings. So, although we prepare the agenda and central office and get it sent out the city clerk does actually handle the, the, the official posting on the city website, and the physical posting at City Hall which I, my understanding is that's what actually constitutes notice of the open meeting law. But we also do other things. We've started to work on the integration between final site and our district Facebook page. So if you look at the Facebook feed, you'll see that when I post a school committee agenda on the website, I'm typically pushing it to Facebook also, so that that's available to people. We typically have the agenda for the next week's meeting in the Friday memo from the superintendent linked. So yeah, it really is that idea of creating that core piece of content that goes on the website and then figuring out all the different useful ways we can point to it and link to it and drive interested folks to it. So the email thing is certainly another idea that we could consider exploring.
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: Lisa. Yeah, so I also just wanted to add that we do post all of the meeting announcements for school committee, the subcommittees and the regular ones, and any other news you would like on a school committee news board, what they're called and final site and people can subscribe to that board and get an email whenever somebody posts on that, that board.
[Graham]: Wow, that's great. I did not know that. I have my, we have our own like mechanisms where we get those things, but I get asked somewhat frequently, like, how do I make sure I can get these things that I've never really had a great answer? So when we talk about like what the website can do and communicating about that, that would be a really helpful example for people who may want that. And then it might be a little bit easier for people to get to.
[Thomas Dalton]: Yeah, and that's true of all of our different individual news boards on the website. So if a family at the McGlynn Elementary is interested in getting email updates on McGlynn news as it gets posted, that's also available. Wow, that's great. Yeah.
[Graham]: Yeah, that's great. I did not know that. So we only have a few minutes left. I feel like we talked about a lot of potential things that could be phase two. And I didn't know if there were any other questions. Ms. Miller and our student website team, whether you had questions for us. that we could answer for you while we're all here together. And I think my other question would be whether there are other sort of priorities that our students have that need to be sort of discussed and prioritized as well. And if you had questions for us about those.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so we had like one it's kind of big so it doesn't need to be like fully answered now. But, um, I was talking like kids last year who worked on the website, and like the people this year working on it and we kind of want it to be like, at minimum like an internship because we feel like Programming doesn't have a lot of opportunities for high schoolers. So we feel like this, along with, this is a big ask, I do admit that, to maybe even get paid. Because we feel like this is a big job. It's very professional. It's stuff that typically adults with sometimes bachelor's degrees use have to do this job. So we feel like it could be, if having it at least be an internship would be really good for us. We understand this is a big, big question, though. Um, so it's okay if like we guys can immediately answer this now.
[Graham]: Um, no, Rachel, that's a great question and a suggestion. And I definitely, I don't have an answer for you now, but I do have maybe some other questions for the superintendent. Um, and for miss Miller, like we, I think we're not that versed in what it takes to sort of create. an internship type role that meets like the educational standards, right? That your shop needs to sort of adhere to, right? Because we would wanna make sure that if we're gonna go down this road, that there's actually all the requirements are met because I know that the, you know, in vocational education, there's all kinds of like rules and sort of rules of the road that have to be complied with. So I think my question for the superintendent and Ms. Miller is, whether there's something that you need from us to sort of pursue that, or if that's like a takeaway that you can take and consider how we might be able to sort of formalize this into an internship role. And I mean, I think the possibilities of like the kinds of things that we need are somewhat endless. And certainly, you know, year to year, there could be, you know, lots of good stuff going on there. Ms. Miller?
[McLaughlin]: I had a question to Member McLaughlin, I mean Member Graham.
[Graham]: Okay, Ms. Miller, did you wanna go first?
[X1f0jMHGEbc_SPEAKER_04]: So just quickly, so there are two different types of work for seniors in the vocational school, co-ops and internships. I think there are more rigid guidelines and requirements for co-ops. The internships are a little less strict. And I think that I could work with Chad Fallon on trying to figure out what exactly would be required for an internship. We did have one of our students intern at City Hall last year. And so we have that as sort of a basis to build upon. Great. Superintendent?
[Edouard-Vincent]: Yes, and I just wanted to comment that I definitely would need to bring in Mr. Fallon into the conversation, but also from an equity perspective, I really would just want to say, as I think about all of the vocational programs, From robotics and engineering to our CNAs to automotive and construction, craft, labor, depending what year students are in. and what they're doing. I just feel like it's a much bigger topic because you could also have shifts in students selecting different vocational programs based on based on the compensation. And like in, I'm just saying it like in culinary and everyone's learning different crafts, different trades in every single area. And we do have to look at it on a case-by-case basis, but I would really wanna have Principal Fallon involved in the conversation and really just think about how, doing something like that, how it would impact any of the other programs. So I just want to say I think it's important for students to definitely get real world experience, but I wouldn't want it to be something where we end up pitting, not intentionally but unintentionally, one program against another. And so I just wanted to put that out there because I support all of the programming and all of the different opportunities that students have to learn and creating those co-op experiences where students do get to go out into the field and receive compensation for it. So I just want to put that out there because we need to have a lot more people at the table to have a meaningful discussion.
[Graham]: Sure. So, and member McLaughlin, I think you had your hand in the air as well.
[McLaughlin]: Yeah, I did. And just, I know this is not on the agenda for the, you know, for the internship or what have you. So I just want to be mindful of that as well. And I guess I would just say to the students in particular, I think it's always really good in terms of just policy and a policy memo and drafting anything like that. to demonstrate like how many hours you've put in, what that's looked like, and what would a comparable rate be in the community for that, right, so that you're talking numbers in terms of, you know, what you've actually done and what you've saved the school from paying and the hard work that you've done and, you know, all of those things. So I would really encourage you to put that material together as this is being considered as well.
[Graham]: Yeah, I think that's actually a great suggestion in terms of like thinking about how this becomes potentially a more formalized thing that could continue one year to the next is to like actually just, you know, sort of make a proposal in a business case. for the district to consider. And I think to the extent that superintendent you need or want members of the school committee at the table in this discussion, we certainly can do that. But I would assume that by and large, like this takeaway is for you all to sort of think about and report back to us on, is that fair? Yes. Okay, great. Motion to adjourn. Is that a motion to continue?
[McLaughlin]: Oh, motion to continue, yes, thank you. To January, can we say the first meeting after the January break? Yes. Representative is available to request a call back.
[Graham]: Is that a second Kathy?
[Kreatz]: Yes. Sorry, I'm in another meeting.
[Graham]: Sorry. Okay, so we have a motion to continue to the first meeting of the new year. And a second by Member Kreatz. So I'll call the roll because we're on zoom. Member Kreatz? Yes. Member McLaughlin? Yes. And member Graham, yes. Three in the affirmative, zero in the negative. This topic is continued. And so we- Thank you everyone.
[Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you.
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