[SPEAKER_09]: Let's see. Member Bramley. Present. Member Graham.
[SPEAKER_12]: Present.
[SPEAKER_09]: Who's next? I don't have it written down yet. Right, then Member Olapade.
[SPEAKER_05]: Present.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Reinfeld. Present. Member Ruseau, present. Mayor Unger is online.
[SPEAKER_12]: Absent at the moment. Okay. And can you call member McLaughlin as the final member?
[SPEAKER_09]: Yes, sorry. Member McLaughlin is also absent.
[SPEAKER_12]: So five present, two absent, all please rise to salute the flag. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. On our agenda, item number three is executive session. Executive session pursuant to Master in Law, Chapter 30A, Section A3. The Medford School Committee will convene an executive session to discuss strategy and preparation for negotiations with Teamsters Local 25 administrators because an open meeting will have a detrimental effect on the bargaining position of the committee and the chair so declares. Also, executive session pursuant to Mass General Law, Chapter 30A, Section A3. The Medford School Committee will convene an executive session to discuss strategy and preparation for negotiations with Medford Educational Secretary's AFSCME Council 93, because an open meeting will have a detrimental effect on the bargaining position of the committee, and the Chair so declares. Item number three, executive session pursuant to Mass General Law, Chapter 30, Section A3. Medford School Committee will convene an executive session to discuss strategy and preparation for negotiations with Teamsters Local 25 custodians because an open meeting will have a detrimental effect on the bargaining position of the committee and the chair so declares. And finally, executive session pursuant to Mass General Law, Section 30A3, sorry, Chapter 30A, Section A3. The Medford School Committee will convene an executive session to discuss strategy and preparation for negotiations with SEIU Local 888 cafeteria workers because an open meeting will have a detrimental effect on the bargaining position of the committee, and the Chair so declares. Is there a motion on the floor?
[SPEAKER_09]: Motion to enter executive session.
[SPEAKER_12]: Motion to enter executive session by Member Ruseau.
[SPEAKER_09]: Second.
[SPEAKER_12]: Seconded by Member Olapade. Roll call, please.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Bramley.
[SPEAKER_12]: Present, yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Graham.
[SPEAKER_02]: I do this every time. Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. Member McLaughlin is absent. Member Olapade. Yes. Member Reinfeld.
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Ruseau, yes. Mayor Lungo-Koehn. absent.
[SPEAKER_12]: So five in the affirmative, two absent, we will be in executive session till approximately 6pm. And we will see you back here. Thanks. Have item number four on the agenda, good of the order. Are there any comments for the good of the order from the group?
[SPEAKER_14]: Member Reinfeld. Yes, I was just wondering what's happening with potential budget presentation by Tracy Novick. That's a math school committee.
[SPEAKER_12]: That's a great question. I have to connect with the mayor and the superintendent on this schedule there, but it is still like on my radar and to-do list. So I will try to get that done this week.
[SPEAKER_14]: Thank you. I think it's super key.
[SPEAKER_12]: Any other questions or comments for the good of the order? Okay. Item number five, we have the consent agenda, which is bills and payrolls and the regular school committee meeting minutes from February 12th, 2024.
[SPEAKER_14]: Motion to approve.
[SPEAKER_12]: Motion to approve by member Reinfeld. Second. Seconded by member Branley. Roll call.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Branley.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Chair Graham. Yes. Member McLaughlin-Zaplin, absent. Member Olapade? Yes. Member Reinfeld? Yes. Members say yes. Mayor Lungo-Koehn? Is the mayor online?
[SPEAKER_12]: She has not rejoined.
[SPEAKER_09]: Okay, I'll put her as absent.
[SPEAKER_12]: So five present, two absent. Consent agenda is approved. Is there a motion to- Motion?
[SPEAKER_09]: Chair? Sorry. Motion to take continued business, actually new business item eight, out of order. Second.
[SPEAKER_12]: Motion to take item number eight, new business ratification of memorandum of agreement, including job descriptions with Teamsters Local 25 out of order by member Rousseau, seconded by member Reinfeld. All those in favor? Aye.
[SPEAKER_07]: Aye.
[SPEAKER_12]: All those opposed? Okay, the rules are suspended and we'll take item number eight out of order. So this item, we are thrilled to announce that we have concluded our work to document the and substantially revise the job descriptions on behalf of our administrators. So that was a contingency in the contract that we settled back last June or July, which was a three year deal. And there was an extension of an additional year, which would be the school year 24, 25, which would include a 3% increase commensurate with the increases for the MTA, our teachers association at that same time. contingent on this work that we did to update and improve job descriptions. So I'm thrilled to announce that we are completed. And I would ask for somebody to make a motion that we took an executive session and we will vote that again on the floor to make it official.
[SPEAKER_09]: Motion to accept the job descriptions for Teamsters Local 25 administrators unit.
[SPEAKER_12]: motion to accept the job descriptions for Teamsters Local 25 by member Rousseau, seconded by member Olapade. Before we take the vote, I just want to say for the record that that includes our community schools director, our athletic director, our assistant and associate principals, Our Assistant Athletic Director, our Director Ones, which are academic department directors. Our Director Twos, which are academic department directors who have a broader span of teachers under their wing. Our Director of English Language Learners, our Director of Health Services, our Director of Professional Learning and Student Assessment. our Director of School Counseling and Behavioral Health, our Director of Technology, and our Special Education Coordinators. And I believe we have one of the members of the unit here tonight with us, Ms. Rachel Perry. And we also have Nancy Campbell from Local 25 on Zoom. Ms. Perry.
[SPEAKER_03]: Good evening Superintendent Edouard-Vincent and members of the school committee. On behalf of the Metro Public Schools administrators and local 25 Teamsters, I wanted to thank Superintendent Edouard-Vincent, Peter Cushing, Suzanne Galussi, Joan Bowen, Jenny Graham, and Paul Rousseau. Thank you for such a collegial relationship that allowed us to work together on getting a fair contract ratified. and then also continuing that work on the job descriptions that added that additional year to our contract. I think on both sides, we had the same goal in mind that our students come first and we need to make sure we get that work done for our students. So big thank you.
[SPEAKER_12]: Thank you, Ms. Perry. You're welcome. Ms. Campbell, did you want to speak? Do you know if Nancy wanted to say a few words or if she's all set? We'll give Ms. Campbell just a minute. Thank you, Ms. Perry, and thank you to all of the administrators. The effort was really important to us as a committee because being clear about the role that every person plays when it comes to impacting student outcomes and learning is really important. And, you know, throughout this contract as an all contracts job descriptions are a subject of bargaining with all of our partners, and this unit in particular was a challenge because you all do very different things, so it was not quite as simple. as in some units. So thank you all for your work. Every member of the team participated. So every single one of our administrators was there and participated. They asked good, thoughtful questions. And I think the conversation was collaborative. It was hugely refreshing. We were all on the same page about what we were trying to accomplish. We set out a goal and then we actually exceeded the goal. So also thanks to everybody for making it four meetings instead of five. We all loved the extra time back. But I think more importantly, the collaboration and the efficiency was very notable. So thank you all for your hard work. And we are happy to talk to you again at the bargaining table in another year. Any other questions or comments for Miss Perry or anybody else? And I do see the mayor joining us on Zoom. So we'll just hang a minute and see if she wants to say something. Mayor, I see that you're online. We are just about to take a vote to approve the job descriptions and memorandum of agreement for Teamsters Local 25. I didn't know if you had any comments that you would like to make.
[SPEAKER_11]: No, thank you, Vice Chair Graham. I just want to thank all involved that put so much time and effort into the job descriptions. Appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_12]: Move approval. Thank you. So on the motion to approve the job descriptions and memorandum of agreement with Teamsters Local 25 by member Rousseau, seconded by member Olapade, roll call, please.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Bramley.
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Vice Chair Graham.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member McLaughlin-Zapison, member Olapade. Yes. Member Reinfeld.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Ruseau, yes. Mayor Lungo-Koehn.
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes. Six in the affirmative, one absent. Motion is approved, congratulations, we're done.
[SPEAKER_13]: Is there a motion to revert back to the regular order of business? Motion to revert back to the regular order of business.
[SPEAKER_12]: Motion to revert back to the regular order of business by member Reinfeld, seconded by member Branley. All those in favor? All those opposed?
[SPEAKER_13]: Oh, roll call, sorry, go ahead.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Branley?
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Vice Chair Graham?
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member McLaughlin's absent. Member Lapate? Yes. Member Reinfeld?
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Members say yes. Mayor Lungo-Koehn.
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes. Six in the affirmative, one absent. Motion passes. Item number six, we have report of subcommittees. There are none. Item number seven, we have the report of the superintendent. Item number one is the superintendent's update and comments. And I will turn it over to Dr. Maurice Edward-Vinson.
[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you and good evening. Yes, it's hard to believe we're already here at March, and this month marks the beginning of Women's History Month. So I look forward to all the things that we're gonna learn about the wonderful accomplishments and contributions of women throughout history, with our female governor and many other wonderful women leading in Massachusetts, our own Mayor Lungo-Koehn, the nation and the world. March is also the wonderful time that we start official spring. And as all of us are hoping for warmer weather we can see that beginning this evening, we're going to be in for quite a bit of rain over the next few days but we'll make it through all of that. A friendly reminder to the community that next Wednesday, March 13th, is an early release day for all of our students. The Andrews and McGlynn Middle Schools will be dismissed at 1130, and all other schools will be dismissed at noontime. Our faculty and staff use the early release days for professional development workshops throughout the afternoon. In the athletic area, Mustangs continue to compete in state tournaments. Last week, Medford student-athletes competed in state tournament games around Massachusetts. On Monday, a Mustang girls basketball team showed tremendous effort in a state tournament matchup at Lincoln Sudbury High School. Although they came up short in a tough 59-40 final result, we were proud to watch these Mustangs fight for victory. Congratulations to our Mustang girls basketball team for a 15-5-0 winter season. Also on Wednesday, our Mustang boys hockey team faced off against Pope Francis Preparatory High School in West Springfield in a first round state tournament slot. The Cardinals may have beaten our Mustangs, but spirits were high among the Medford contingent after a strong 11-9-1 winter season. Also coming up this Friday is our World Language and Cultural Festival. So we hope that you will be able to join us for our first ever World Language and Cultural Festival this Friday, March 8th at 5 p.m. The World Language Department and the Medford High School World Language and Culture Club will host fun celebrations of world languages as a fundraiser for student scholarships. All are welcome. Also coming up later in the month, but I wanna just give everyone ample notice, on Wednesday, March 20th, that is going to be Medford Malden Transition Fair. Medford and Malden Public Schools joined together for a transition fair to provide students, families, guardians, caregivers, and professionals with information about community-based services for adults with disabilities. This event is free and open to all Malden and Medford residents and surrounding communities. Students between the ages of 14 and 22 years old, years of age, who receive special education services through an IEP, along with their family and caregivers are welcome and encouraged to attend. The event exhibitors serve adults with a number of disabilities, including autism, developmental disabilities, intellectual disabilities, and emotional disabilities. Again, all are welcome. Please mark your calendars for March 20. At tonight's meeting. I'm looking forward to welcoming Dr. Nicole keys and Mr. Eric Esner, who are seeking school committee approval for student travel to the University of North Carolina for the National Ethics Bureau. Our Medford Ethics Bowl students have continued a successful streak of several years in reaching this national competition, and I hope that you will approve this exciting and enriching travel opportunity for our students. We'll also hear from our Director of Family and Community Engagement, Ms. Megan Fidler-Carey, for an update on our district's popular before and after school programming. These programs offer extended day, school day, for many of our younger students. Dr. Cushing will also present a revised excessive heat protocol for the district, reflecting our well researched and evidence based recommendations for the district's approach to keeping school open safely during times of extremely hot weather. As we observed this past September, in particular, we've been experiencing more and more hot weather in recent years, causing us to consider a plan, consider and plan our approach to handling sweltering conditions. Lastly, which we just approved, I truly am very, very excited that the committee has approved the vote for the MOA with our Teamsters Local 25 school administrators. The journey began last year in the fall, and the school district and school committee, we worked closely and really worked in a collaborative, cooperative spirit to get to the approved MOA that we just did this evening. So I just wanted to say thank you and congratulations for a job well done on all of our parts. Thank you and I look forward to this evening's meetings.
[SPEAKER_12]: Thank you, Superintendent. Item number two, we have recommendation to approve travel to UNC for the National Ethics Bowl. Mr. Eric Esner, ELA teacher, and Dr. Nicole Chiesa, Director of Humanities. Oh, not yet. You're not on yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, good evening. We have been enjoying great success with our ethics school team for several years, actually since its inception 11 years ago, under the leadership of Mr. Eric Esner, as well as our philosopher in residence from Tufts University, Miss Audrey Ledbetter. They have once again achieved great success. We are so proud of our students. They were victorious at the New England Ethics Bowl competition and the regional playoffs. They surpassed schools, including Windsor Academy, Buckingham Brown and Nichols, Lexington High School. They have done an amazing job. Based on these victories, they are now qualified to attend the National Bowl at the University of North Carolina. This will be their fourth time attending that bowl, and we are so proud of these students, so grateful to Mr. Esner and Ms. Ledbetter for their leadership, and we are requesting approval for the out-of-state field trip. Mr. Esner was just gonna give a little bit of information in terms of what the students will do those few days that they're there, and then we're requesting approval. So thank you for your consideration.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you. Um, so it's a three day event, the first day is like a welcome ceremony reception. Kids get to mingle with students from other schools from around the country, which is always a lot of fun for them, and they get to bed nice and early so they get up and compete the next day they do. several rounds, three to four rounds on the first day and those teams that qualify continue on into the final rounds on Sunday. Um, for those teams that don't successfully go through, there's a series of workshops for the students and for coaches to help them prepare for years to follow. Um, then there's a word ceremony at the end and at that point we'd return, return back home. So, uh, yeah, it's a action packed weekend of debate. So
[SPEAKER_12]: Thank you. Any questions from the committee? Member Ruseau.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. I feel like we keep seeing you. It's nice to always see people for great reasons. I see what the cost is. I'm just wondering about, this isn't a request for funding. I don't think, I did read it, but I didn't see that in there. So what are the thoughts at this point in time on the funding? It's about a little over 10 grand for the whole 10 of you to go. And yeah, what are your thoughts on that?
[SPEAKER_01]: We were requesting some funding, understanding that that may not be available, but we are working very closely with Dr. Vincent and the Director of Finance to see what funds could be available. Moving forward next year, we plan to be very straightforward with the students in terms of if we win, this will be the cost and kind of just have it laid out when they join the club. Not to deter people, because of course we would you know, support anybody that couldn't go, but just to be a little bit, to be very clear and upfront with it. But we are working, I don't know if Dr. Vincent and I have talked about this a few times, we are working to see what funds would be available, and the students are aware of potential fundraising that we'll be doing. Time is short. There's also a financial aid application that we will be submitting to the UNC Chapel Hill that Mr. Esner is working on as well, which should give back some funding should we be successful in receiving it. So we're working hard on that application as well so that we can get there. It is costly, but again, it's a wonderful experience for the students. So does that answer the question?
[SPEAKER_09]: It does. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that correct, Dr. Vincent? Did I portray that correctly?
[SPEAKER_08]: Yes, you accurately portrayed it and where again, wasn't expected. We talked about looking to see if there's something we can figure out with Mr. McHugh and because last year we were able to fund it through, I believe some of the ESSER. So if there's a possibility to, you know, pull a little bit of that to support them and then moving forward, where we've had four consecutive years where we're on a wonderful streak. And I don't see that streak going away to start doing fundraising so that we could have a separate revolving account that the Ethics Bowl team could just kind of have there and do fundraising over the course of the year. Because to come up with that money in about one month's time would be a really, really quick turnaround.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. Yeah, that certainly seems like a rough period of time to have to come up with that money. And obviously, raising money for this when you don't even know that you're going to end up going. Well, that's, that's not very motivating. Who's going to do that. So I do hope that we can find the money in the district somewhere in a line item of money that is not actually getting used for this year. For the public that doesn't necessarily know this, at the end of the year, any money we have left over, we have to give back to the city. So if we can, if Mr. McHugh can find some money that we're not going to end up using, I would be very happy to see it used for this purpose. And I would like to find out whether it's just an email that says, you know, we were able to get all the kids to go. And if, you know, we still have two meetings before. So if it looks like there are going to be kids that can't go and there's no way to finagle the funding, I think I certainly would like to hear about that before it's too late. So thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: We appreciate your all of your support. Thank you. Other questions?
[SPEAKER_12]: From the chair, we actually, Thomas Dalton, our director of communications, was recently able to set up a dedicated link to allow people to make donations to the McGlynn Playground Fund. And I wonder if there is an opportunity to do something similar. to allow the community, any community members who are out there who might be listening or who might read our, the superintendent's weekly newsletter to help support the team. So I don't know if that's possible, but I would like to make a motion from the chair that we explore whether that's an option and just report back to this committee. So motion by me, seconded by member Rousseau. roll call.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_12]: Six in the affirmative, zero in the negative. Is there a motion to approve the field trip?
[SPEAKER_14]: Sorry, I had one more question. I see in here that meals are the responsibility of the travelers. Is there a plan in place if there are students for whom that could pose a hardship to cover that in a sensitive, discreet way?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, we will have a plan in place for that. Thank you. Member Olapade.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was a question about the maximum of eight students. Is there an expectation by the organizers that you have to have eight students for a team or is that a decision you two made?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's seven and then add one as an alternate. So that's where it comes from in terms of competing. So yes, that's kind of the restriction that they put on us. Correct. Yes.
[SPEAKER_14]: And how many, yes, how many students are on the team here in Medford?
[SPEAKER_00]: The number exceeds, well, it serves as both a team competitively and a club. Yes. So there are students who take part in it on a non-regular basis and that number would exceed maybe 15, 16, 17. And then there's a dedicated number split into kind of two teams, team A and team B this year. The first five of whom qualified, the second team did not, but still actively fought.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'd also love to be on the agenda prior to the end of the school year, of course, to honor these students as well as some of our other humanities, authentic learning opportunities that have been very successful. So we'll look to honor everybody, hopefully, should time a lot, which I'm sure would be very nice for everybody.
[SPEAKER_12]: Perfect. Is there a motion to approve the field trip? Motion to approve. Motion to approve the field trip by member Branley.
[SPEAKER_09]: Second.
[SPEAKER_12]: Second by member Lopate.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes. Six in the affirmative one absent motion passes and the field trip is approved. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_12]: Item number three, we have a before and after school update. Ms. Megan Fidler-Carey, the Director of Family and Community Engagement. Ms. Fidler-Carey?
[SPEAKER_06]: Hello. Thank you for the opportunity. Nice to see you all. Nice to see some new faces and meet you, meet some of you for the first time. The purpose of today's meeting, and I framed it a little differently than normal, because there are some new members and I know some new families to Medford Public Schools, I figured I would take the beginning of this to just do a sort of overview of the programs, so I don't leave anything out and take for granted that people know more about the programs than we'd like them to. We do have a slide presentation. come in just one second. But I can tell you all about it. So the before and after school program runs at all four elementary schools in the district. The before school program starts at 7.30 and families can drop off. And I always describe it as it's separated into two groups. There are the kids that need a little more time waking up and then the kids that really need to get all their energy out before they can sit down for some focused learning. So there are teachers that are, ready and poised for both of those groups and then they take them to breakfast, and then they're ready for school. So that's the before school after care program and then after school. It's from dismissal until six o'clock, and I say dismissal because on those early release Wednesdays that we have where school gets out at 12, we do have after school programming until still until the six o'clock pickup time. The programs vary from school to school because the schools are different from each other. The groups of people are different from each other, the sizes of the school, the setup of the building, and the needs of the families. So it's not a cookie cutter program. However, we do break it into about four segments. We have snack, homework time, physical time, and then structured time, where we do either a craft or some more physical activities and structured games, that sort of thing. But again, depending on what the interests of the students in front of us in that particular year are, it might be a little different or depending on what the skills and expertise of the particular staff at a different site are, it might look a little different from site to site. We're also going to discuss the tuition that we charge. This is a tuition, this is a fee-based program. The costs of this program are completely covered. It's a self-sustaining program. It's in a revolving account. So they are completely covered from the tuitions that we take in. We do have a financial assistance program. So we're going to talk a little bit about that this isn't program that was a little bit that was new, we stopped taking vouchers from the state, and instead instituted our own financial assistance program, based on the same criteria that the city uses in determining low income as well. pay rates and how they compare in other districts. One thing I did want you all to know about the new people is we are Medford is a member of a consortium called the Network of Extended Day Directors. It's NEDS. And I am currently the chair of NEDS. And once every other month, we all meet, these are directors from all over Massachusetts, and we meet to talk about after school. We talk about all of our challenges. We talk about our best practices, share policies, share different things. And it's just a really great network to lean on to find out if I'm going crazy or if other people are experiencing the same things that we are. So we will move ahead. Next slide, please. Yeah, this is sort of what I've just described. So we can, we do have, in there was we have a student to teacher ratio of about 10 to one, which is consistent with the state and other programs in the area. Vice Chair?
[SPEAKER_09]: Yes. Thank you. Should we hold questions to the end or?
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes, let's hold questions until the end and then we will roll back through slides if we need to. Great, thank you.
[SPEAKER_14]: I think we can move ahead.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, this is the so the organizational structure of our programs is at the before school, the way that has worked out, we have teachers or Paris from the school that just come in a little bit early that we pay to run the before school program. The after school, we do have some teachers, some Paris, but it's more often than that, it's outside people who are coming to work for an hourly wage. It's overseen by the superintendent for academics instruction, Suzanne Galussi, and then managed by me at the but from my office in the high school. Each site has what's called a site coordinator. And I like to lovingly describe that as the principal of that afterschool program. And they oversee group leaders and assistant group leaders who are like the teachers and the paras. And then we also, and this I'm very proud of, employ high school staff. And we've got some excellent high school staff members who are, you know, the kids look up to in a way that's very different than any of the adults. It's really, really fun to see. Okay, I think we can go to the next one. This is the part that's new this year that I'm most excited that I can share with all of you, even though even the veteran school committee members, because we have the new formatted early release days, we decided to fill those six hours with enrichments. So we invited in some different, you can see some pictures here. What's not shown is one that we're really excited about, which is the National Arts Honor Society students. We had those students come in and lead some art projects, and that was really cool. Unfortunately, Ironically, we didn't get any good photographs from that experience, so I couldn't really show it here. But I wanted to give shout-outs to Curious Creatures, the Mass Audubon Society, Ooch the Yo-Yo Guy, the Medford Police Department, who we partnered with, and they had their canine unit come and brought the dogs, which was very, very exciting. Local author Wendy Pfaffenbach, and also local artist Susan Altman came and did her mural project. So if you guys know the big murals on Medford High School, she did sort of mini versions with each of the students at each of the programs. And it was, it's wildly successful. I'm really happy with it. We've got some good ideas for next year too, for what to do with those early release days. Okay. All right, next slide. And this is the, this is the brass tacks. So these, here's some data for you. This is what our numbers look like. So last year we determined that it was more beneficial to talk about the data in terms of seats and to talk about what we can offer families at the schools in terms of seats, not students. This data is showing you that we have 95 students enrolled across the district, but on a given day, there are 90 seats in the before school program. And again, that goes with that ratio for teacher to student that we talked about. So you'll notice I have the waitlist information there too. There's no waitlist at the McGlynn and Mistetuck, which is very fortunate for those schools. However, there does remain a waitlist at the other two. Next slide. And then in afterschool, our total number of students served went down a little bit because there were more students who signed up for a five-day-a-week slot versus one having a two-day-a-week, another having a three-day-a-week. Again, that's why we found it very important to talk about it in terms of seats, that the Brooks on a given day has 120 seats, and the other schools, because of staff ratios, have about 60. And again, I'm sure you're all seeing those somewhat alarming waitlist numbers that we'll talk about a little further in the program. In the past we've talked about how important it is to think about the demographics of who we're serving in our program. I still find myself worried that there are families who don't realize that they have access to our program and who students could really benefit from it. And when I say access like maybe they don't completely understand our financial assistance and how robust it is, or they, they. I'm not sure they don't know about it, which I can't believe because we're very I believe we're very thorough and making sure that everybody knows about the program, but this is the demographics of our Of our students in the program and you'll notice at the bottom that we do have to McKinney Vento students. That's our unhoused population. So we've got to unhoused students currently in that taking advantage of after school. The registration process, I believe is as fair as we can get it. Last year we instituted something new for the waitlist, I'll get to that in a second but for those of you who are new and again families who are new. instead of it first come first serve, we have a lottery system. And so on April 1st, a Google form will be on our website, it'll be shared through social media, it'll be shared everywhere we can get it, on all of the principal's newsletters, on the superintendent's newsletters. So on April 1st, the Google form will open up, the lottery will open up, it'll be open for two weeks. So people will have two weeks to get their name in there to enter into the lottery. And then it will shut down. And on April 14th, we run it through a sequence generator called random.org. And that runs it through, takes each name, how many kids did you signed up for this? And it re-orders those numbers. So it's completely random, completely fair. And then we take all of those numbers that are associated with names and we let them, the first spots open to those families. And we notify families. If they are put on a wait list, we give them information about other programs in the area. And then here's what's different here's what I was excited to share last year when we instituted instead of having a ranked list. that if you're on that list in a certain order, you're sort of doomed to that ranking on the list for life, we've instituted what's called the lottery pool. So in a given grade group, so say at the Brooks School in the third grade group, somebody moves, and so now a spot has opened up. I'll go to all of the third graders on our wait list, and re-put those names in the lottery, the random number sequence generator. So it's like running a lottery again every time. So it's always completely fair. Nobody is stuck at the bottom. So far that has worked really well. We've used it every time. I have random.org as a bookmark on my computer. And I think that that's made it fair. And it does, it's interesting to see how it does change the order. Next. Okay, so this now we're getting into the budget for the after school program. Again, I did say this is a self sustaining program. We tried to make sure that we're keeping it as accessible and affordable as possible for families. We're paying our staff fairly, which we'll get into again, too, for staff retention. And I think we are doing a good job. I'm happy with what we see. Again, I'm part of NEDS, so I have the opportunity to look at a lot of data from other districts. And we are very competitive, both in how much we charge families and how much we pay our staff. The costs are listed here. I've tried to be really thorough in thinking about every single cost that I can. So including cell phones, and I even talked to custodians about like, if we use extra wipes or paper towels, let us know, you know, and we'll get you back. And we've tried to be pretty thorough about it. So with all of that in mind, and I'm working with the director of finance to think about the administrative costs that we use, meaning HR and custodial fees and the finance office and payroll. And we think we spend just over a million dollars a year for the before and after school programs. Okay, next. And then here's what we're bringing in. So the tuition that we'll bring in that we're projected to bring in by the end of the year is about a million three. And again, that's after the financial assistance that we've given out this year. So you'll notice it's $53,000 so far this year. And actually that number is already skewed because this week we invited another family for March to start in March and they just qualified for 50% off. So that number is even a little different for how much we're giving out for financial assistance, but also for how much we're bringing in for tuition as we add students. And then we did receive, we were fortunate to be awarded a grant, we have every year since I've been working here, from the Community Development Block Grant that they use for community programs to support low-income families. And so we use these to subsidize tuition for low-income families. We were enjoying $10,000 a year for a while. That's the max you can ask for. And this year and the last two years, we've only gotten 96. But I have my fingers crossed that next year we'll get 10 again. We'll see. And here's the costs of tuition that I've showed over time. So before school program, that one sort of stayed still for a while. So last year we kind of right-sized it. We hadn't raised the rate, changed the tuition or the pay for quite a while. So we fixed that, we right-sized that last year. So this year, I think just so that we're not finding ourself in a big gap of time that we just need to raise it just $1 a day, I think would be plenty for families. I mean, yeah, it doesn't need to be more than that. And if you look on the next slide, I'm saying the same thing for after school, because again, we right sized this tuition. When we were looking, especially during COVID when it was extremely difficult to staff, we looked, that's when we did a hard look at the neighboring and surrounding communities and realized that we weren't paying our staff enough. at all a competitive rate and that's why it was really hard. We were losing them to Malden, we were losing them to neighboring communities. So we right-sized our pay rates and I think now we're very competitive. In fact, some other communities looked to us and were quoting us in their school committee presentations, but now we're all really about equal. We're neither the highest or the lowest on either tuition or pay rates. So my recommendation again to you all would be same for afterschool to raise it just a dollar a day. Okay. Our biggest challenges won't be a surprise. Go ahead, click one more time and then it'll show. So the two main things that you're always gonna hear me talk about are staffing and space. We cannot meet the demands of the afterschool needs of our families. This is not a problem that is unique to Medford. Again, I'm on NEDS. I talk to them all the time. We're emailing each other all the time. Comparing wait lists trying to thinking about where's the best place to advertise for staff staffing is really the number one hardest thing for after school, because two to six is a really bizarre time of day to try and find people to work. And also space. So the picture that I've chosen to illustrate this is the McGlynn playground that we were writing love notes on right before it was being demolished. So our, our buddies at the McGlynn actually are only playing at the Hormel playground after school, which is just not ideal you can imagine hourly wage workers as it's getting dark, trying to wrangle elementary school students in this gigantic field while like neighbors are trying to just come play soccer and it's just, that's been a big challenge. But space in the school, though we know that the children go to that school all day and it's their school and it's their building, after school space is very different than school day space. During a school day is for focused learn teaching and learning and after school is really about like curiosity and gross modal skills and running and. yelling and exhaling from being in school all day with focused teaching and learning. So the spaces are not, it's not really one-to-one. We do enjoy the gym and the cafeteria and the auditorium where possible or the library most in most schools and some of the specials rooms. That's nice, but it's somehow still as tight. So space is something that we're constantly kind of working on with principals, with custodians, to expand as much as we can. But these are the constraints that we face when thinking about addressing those wait lists. Okay. For hiring and staff retention, because staffing is our biggest challenge, these are the prices that we, this is what the rates we pay now that we've right sized. So I think these are still very competitive. However, what I'd like to propose, can you click it one more time, Dr. Cushing? is I would like to propose instituting just once an annual wage adjustment that's commensurate with the units, the bargaining units. Instead of worrying about it year to year and having to come to ask for it year to year, I was hoping that we could just say that unless there's a real right sizing necessary where people, we need to significantly change the rate. Oops, sorry. I was hoping that we could sort of, that would be a way that when I'm interviewing people for the job, I could say, and the great news is, a percentage increase from year to year that follows whichever of the bargaining units. So that's one of my things for consideration tonight. Oh, one other thing that I'd like to just point out, especially for new folks, is at that bottom category, you'll see it says wraparound paraprofessionals. That's something that we explored last year. We talked about having a paraprofessional whose hours were from 11 to five, during the school, like that spanned the school day, into the after school. So that was somebody that was already there, they would be there right at dismissal, and that would be their whole job. This experiment has not yet proven successful. I still have high hopes. We only had two people apply for the position. We had it posted, I was sort of hoping for two at each school. We only had two people apply in total. And one of them ended up taking a daytime para job because she could be a lot more lucrative and actually make a lot more money for what she was doing because she had an expertise that we needed in the school day. So I'm hopeful. I think we should give it another year to try it out and then really look at it and try to think about what we might be able to do differently. Okay, one more. I think we might be nearing the close. Oh, this is my other big thing that I wanted to talk about. The other purpose of this presentation is to further discuss how we're partnering with other programs in the city. I think the demand for afterschool care should not be on the shoulders of the school district alone, especially because we know that being in the same school building all day is not the best thing for every single kid. Some kids really need a change of scenery. even though it means getting on a bus to go there. There are other programs in the district, and I'm delighted to report that last Friday, we held a meeting at the Medford Public Library. There were 10 of us around the table from six different programs in the city. The only two missing were Grace Works and the Recreation Center. Kevin Bailey, they couldn't make it, but all of the other programs in the city were all in attendance. We decided to form this group, our own little network within Medford. We're going to meet twice a year, we hope, once before school starts and once before registration, so that we can sort of do a balancing. We can ground ourselves, compare notes, do best practices, find out what the challenges are in the city. The biggest challenge they faced was staffing. and also transportation. So that was something that I, that's where the district can be helpful and work with them to get transportation, to get kids to their programs safely. We're talking about maybe being strategic about which programs take kids from which school. And it was just a really great meeting. I'm really excited for what this partnership's gonna bring. And I think we're just about at the end. Yes.
[SPEAKER_12]: So, thank you, Miss Fidler-Carey. Member Ruseau.
[SPEAKER_09]: I have many questions, and I want to make sure the new members have a chance to ask theirs. So I'll ask the last question I just wrote down, and then I'll come back afterwards. When the district covers transportation, when transportation is handled to get kids to these programs. I presume the district is paying for it, but is the after school, is your budget paying for that transportation or is it like the regular bus routes are being adjusted so as if that's where they live?
[SPEAKER_06]: Great question, and it's the latter. The regular bus routes are being adjusted.
[SPEAKER_09]: Excellent. Thank you. I have many questions, but I'll wait.
[SPEAKER_02]: Member Branley? So I'm just curious. Well, one, I'd like to thank you because I was a member of the school program when I worked at the Brooks and I loved it. And actually as a parent at the time, I was making a lot less than what the parents do now, which is good. I've never paid enough, of course, but the pay was why I did it. And the pay has come up significantly since then. So that's great to see because there is that definitely divided group at morning program that some just need a hug and to sit and chill and others are, ready to bounce the ball off the wall. So for each other. But no, I think I think this is great. I know how hard you work. So my only question is, on the re registration for current students, how long does that last? And when does that what are the dates? Oh, great question.
[SPEAKER_06]: So that's underway. I actually did write that down.
[SPEAKER_02]: It says new registration April 1st remains open until April 13th, but just curious about their re-registration.
[SPEAKER_06]: So re-registration for current students and their incoming kindergarten siblings. So that is a good clarification. I'm glad that that came up. It has started. That happens the week after February break. So that's underway. And I made a note. We've already had 51 as of 445 this afternoon. 51 had already re-registered for before school. And 204 had already re-registered for after school. Wow, okay. And again, this is and their incoming kindergarten siblings.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, and then does that stay open, like if they, do they have a deadline that they have to meet that by if they're re-registering?
[SPEAKER_06]: They do. I've said they have to have it by April 13th because when we write, that's when I will, when I run the lottery is when I know how many spots I have open. So by April 13th is when I need to know when re-registration is committed. Perfect. That was it. That's all I had.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for all you do. Thank you. Member Olapade.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. And thank you so much for being here. A question, actually, after what Member Branley said about the lottery system. For parents that have multiple kids, when they're slotted into the lottery, is that any children they have, or is it just one child, and is it separation between both?
[SPEAKER_06]: That's an excellent, excellent question. I'm glad you asked that. I would encourage you to to enter both names, but there is a question on there that asks if there's a sibling. And if the first one comes up, then the sibling would come up next, would take the next spot. However, I will clarify too, that if there are people who are currently on the wait list and they enter their incoming kindergarten student, so they're currently on the wait list. So those people don't need to re-register for the wait list. They don't need to re-enter the lottery. If you're currently on the wait list, it rolls over from year to year. But for incoming kindergartners, they can enter them in the lottery, and I will give them the option. I'll say, look, because that's the thing, I have more kindergarten spots than I do anything else, any other spots, because those people have rolled up from the year before. So I would offer them, I would say, your name came up in the kindergarten lottery. Do you want to put your kindergartner but not your third grader? And I've had both answers. We did have one family that said yes.
[SPEAKER_14]: Member Reinfeld? Yes, I'm wondering how our programs compare. I love that you've had this meeting and that you're moving forward with the other programs in the city. I tried to do a little bit of research and I see that our rates are on par. Do they also have waitlists of similar sizes?
[SPEAKER_06]: They do. And in fact, so one of the martial arts programs said that he was growing his program this year. And he said, as soon as he put that in, because his registration was in February, he said, as soon as he put that information out, he was full in two days and now has a wait list.
[SPEAKER_14]: And then are there other, so you said in the current schools, you're using the cafeterias, the libraries, the gyms, yeah. And so I'm a museum educator by training, so I'm familiar with the informal or unstructured learning environments. What are the options elsewhere in the district, kind of beyond elementary schools? What would we need to run that sort of program somewhere else or for someone to?
[SPEAKER_06]: To have it be one of our programs like but we take a bus to the different site is there other places in the district like other schools or. So we've explored the idea of coming to the high school. What we ran into was that the traffic logistics were horrible. The, the fact that the building, again is designed for high school age students and used by high school students at different times during the year right for sports and after school clubs, and there are high school students in the building at the time all the time so it's sort of. We just didn't feel comfortable for the way that the traffic pattern would have to go, the bus would have to go behind. If we were gonna use the back of the school, it just, it proved to not be a viable, safe option. We talked about using one of the cafeterias, and then that would be a cafeteria program, which wasn't so attractive, you know, to get on a, we couldn't think of how many families would wanna put their student on a bus to go all the way to the high school to hang out in a cafeteria all day.
[SPEAKER_14]: And I recognize staffing is certainly an issue. Are you competing with these other programs in Medford for staffing? Is everyone trying to hire the same people?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, we talked a lot about that at this meeting. One of the Solutions that people often come up with when they're trying to help me think of this is like, oh, well, you guys are right next to Tufts. Do you advertise at Tufts? And the answer is yes, 100%. We are on the Tufts jobs board. It's an employee outreach thing called Handshake. It also goes to UMass Boston and Lesley and all the different schools, Salem State. We're on all of those job boards. And the only Tufts students that we've gotten to work for us this year are by word of mouth. It's because we already had one Tufts student who said, oh, my friend was interested in doing it too. They didn't find out about it from Handshake. However, there's one program who is up on North Street closer to Tufts University and they employ a lot of Tufts students and I realized that like if I'm a Tufts student and I'm looking for an after school job like that programs right here I can get there I walk versus, you know, tripping across the city to get over to the Mississippi or the Roberts, unless I live there so I'm wondering if that's part of the reason but yes the answer is. Again, that two to six time slot is a very unique lifestyle that can afford that or a person who's interested in that and interested in working with kids. So we are definitely all competing. Member Lopate?
[SPEAKER_05]: To follow up on that question about staffing, do we have an idea about the percentage of retention rates for our staff compared to other districts that you've talked to?
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't. For us, I'd say it's about 70% of our staff are repeat over the years. It's pretty good. There are some people in NEDS, we talk about our lifers, the people who have made a career of this and other people, it's a stepping stone to something else. We definitely, a lot of our high school students, if they're interested in teaching, we encourage that and we encourage them to work with us when they're home from college. when they're getting their teaching degrees, two of them are now looking to be teachers, which we're very excited about. We've got three of our former high school are now paras in the district and work for us in afterschool. So it is a bit of a pipeline. I'd love to kind of formalize that with a teacher, that would be really cool. We do work with the early childhood, speaking of in the vocational school, we work with the early childhood teacher for their students as well.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. I love it. Nobody asked the same questions I have to ask. Just need you have to listen to me for longer. So the one of the most common things we hear about is you know we have the students whether they're high school students are tough students. And the ratio of 10 students per adult, for the most part, we cannot include those people in our ratios because students have finals and they can't show up or tough students go on spring break and we can't close the program down or tell parents your kids can't come to the afterschool program because we don't have enough adults. So I think that's an important, when we list all the different kinds of people that we have working, Frankly, there's a whole lot of them that we can't include in the numbers for our ratios and I don't think there is a solution we're not going to actually get any tough students or or Medford high students who will be like no no I under no circumstances while I miss work like that's doesn't make any sense we want our high school students to be students first. and tough students probably want a break when they have breaks. So I think that's just an important thing to repeat yet again. The demographics categories, I appreciated you putting those in. I'm not for tonight, but if you could run those numbers and put like another column of how those compare to the district. And I realized that these, you know, it's like the number of students on an IEP is 45, but like, are they distributed evenly across the grades? It's not an easy thing. I mean, I would be fine with just a big, you know, take the grades that you cover in your program, and then get that, how many students, and just get kind of percentages. It's not the most well thought out request, but I think you understand my point.
[SPEAKER_06]: No, I do. And I'm seeing even one more column, like percentage of the program versus percentage of the school.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, thank you. You answered those questions, wonderful. So the, oh, you answered what the, oh, the proposed annual wage adjustment, you keep, you mentioned, the union or the unit, there isn't actually one number for the different units or unions. So I like the idea that we would say we will do that, but we would have to pick a union to peg it to. And I'm fine with that. I don't think there's anything unusual or strange about that. I would wanna just kind of ask our attorney about whether or not we can take a non union group of employees and tie their increases to a union because essentially that union ends up negotiating for these non members. And I know that like we're at where I've worked at Mass General Brigham. you know, the nurses at Mass General Hospital are non-unionized and the nurses at the Brigham are. And so the Mass General nurses just get whatever the Brigham nurses are getting. They just move lockstep, except the Mass General nurses didn't have to pay union dues. So I do just want us to get clarification before we would make a motion on that piece.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then, I mean, to add to the, data pile of that, that's common in NEDS.
[SPEAKER_09]: Oh, it is?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_09]: Oh, well then, frankly, that's common in NEDS. I didn't make it up. Okay. It's such a great idea. I assumed you made it up. Okay, well, if that's common in NEDS, and I definitely like that, can you just find out whether they typically tie it to the paras or the teachers? I know a lot of districts, the teachers and the paras are in the same union. So because they're not in Medford, we may have to just pick one. The negotiated increases in their contracts are typically very similar, although paras recently have had very big jumps because we wanted to fix that scale. So like when we did a 25% increase in the last pair of contract, if we had done this then, you might have a financial problem in your program if we just 25% increases across the board for your staff. So we do have to be a little more thoughtful on that. That's... That's my one concern there. And then that was somehow was all my questions, because I've asked them over and over through previous years. So I do want to thank you for explaining that lottery stuff, because while I understood the lottery in general, the whole, the incoming kindergartner getting through, and even though the other sibling is still on the wait list, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I wouldn't want to have to be the family that's in that situation, but at the same time, It's one less problem for families that can make that work. But it's unfortunate we don't have the space to be like, you're kindergarten again, so we're going to make room for the third grader. But that's not how it works, because once they're in, they're not leaving. So thank you for all your work. I know it's never ending.
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, credit to a great team. Like I've said in the past, we do have excellent site coordinators. We've got a lot of good people working with us on the afterschool and lots of good champions. So thank you.
[SPEAKER_14]: Yes. Sorry. Yeah. Could you give us a sense of how the waitlist has grown, what the trend is here? Is it getting, I assume it's getting bigger or is it leveling off?
[SPEAKER_06]: Where are we? It's leveling off. It got a lot bigger. Suddenly it felt like. I first started working here six years ago. I'm with you, Dr. Edvard Vinsant. We're in the same tenure, six years, right? And I feel like it's just gotten bigger, bigger, bigger. The story I need to make clear about the waitlist is some people are getting on just because they know how hard it is to get in. So they're like, I got to get a spot. I got to put my name in right away, whether I need it now or not. But I might need it in the future. So they're getting on the waitlist. Whenever a spot opens up, I call people off the waitlist. And I've already had four people say, oh, no, thank you, I don't need it. So that means that the numbers that I had leading up to my phone call to them were inaccurate because there was a number on my waitlist that didn't actually need it. So I worry about thinking about what the waitlist means. So yes, the numbers that I have actually written down in my spreadsheets are getting have gotten bigger. They're leveling off over the last two, three years.
[SPEAKER_14]: Yeah, I'd be really curious to see that as long as along with the numbers of percentage of people who are declining waitlist spots. I mean, I think if that's changing as well, that tells us something about how people are filling their needs.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. I keep, I wonder, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly something I can do from now on, keeping track of both of those numbers. I think I could even get it retroactively. Certainly what the wait list looks like over time, I could get for you.
[SPEAKER_14]: Yeah, because I think you're absolutely right that the raw numbers don't tell the whole story. And so what are the key metrics here to understand how we are or are not meeting the need? Because we hear a lot of anecdotes and what, what's true across the district or in specific schools be really helpful.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right. And I know, you know, if I'm a parent who doesn't have any is didn't get into any of the programs in Medford, I could see somebody else who's already in one of the other programs in Medford doesn't need it as badly as they do. But the parents want to stay on our waitlist because So we are the most attractive. We're the sort of number one choice for everybody because their kids don't have to get on a bus because they know exactly where the school is to go pick up their kids after school. And I had that frank conversation with all of the programs on Friday when I met with them and they agreed. They said, it's maddening when you call them and they say, yep, terrific. And they come and then they call us and say, oh, I'm leaving tomorrow because I got into the school after school program. So then it's not the end of the world because then a spot opens up and they get to call somebody off of their wait list, but it's changing. So then the question becomes, you know, who gets, should it only be for the people who aren't in another program? But maybe that other program's not ideal for them. It's, again, these numbers tell a story, but it's not just the, as clear as just the numbers.
[SPEAKER_14]: And then one more, you may not have this answer until the end of the year, until next year. So Ready, Set, Kids is a new program that was kind of formed in response to some of the challenges. Has it helped?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, they're lovely people, they were at our- Yes, and this is not about them and the quality of their program, which I've heard good things. It's created a different set of problems, right? Because since we're in partnership providing transportation to all of the programs, Ready, Set, Kids is on the corner of the city. It's really difficult to get to from all of the elementary schools, even the Brooks School, which is very close to it, just because the traffic at that hour is a nightmare. because there are so many, there's overcrowding on the buses. That's a discussion for a different day. So yes, it's been helpful. They only have 30 spots in the 30s range. So our wait list, you saw how big it was. It's in the hundreds or over a hundred. So it's helped. Okay. I mean, it's great to have, I would like a bazillion options for families because each program, like I said, is a little bit different. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_14]: And I know that's one difference in between, I know you said these problems are not unique to Medford, but I think there are communities around us that have many more options.
[SPEAKER_06]: In terms of private options, not preschools. Yeah. As though we have a YMCA, a youth center, it's not like a giant, it's not one of those giant facilities that can house.
[SPEAKER_14]: I live next door to that one. I see the space.
[SPEAKER_13]: Mayor Londo Kern.
[SPEAKER_11]: Yes, thank you, Vice Chair Graham. If you look at slide eight, it does show that our numbers are increasing at a school or two, so I guess my question is, we are doing better with staffing, and how much have we increased over the last two years with regards to staff levels?
[SPEAKER_06]: So staff, we've got more reliable staff, meaning they can work more consistent days in the Last year and the year before we had staff that weren't sort of sure which days they could work from week to week, which was a little harder to staff for, and certainly harder to, you know, to depend on, but we did. I mean, we made it work, but the increase was because of reliable staff that were, you know, could give us set days when they worked, so then we could give set days for the families on which days, you know, how many kids we could have. but I worry about that because, you know, compared to the year. I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_11]: Yeah, no, I only ask because I know that we have made requests to try to increase, especially at the three schools that are not at anywhere near the capacity as our fourth school, which is the Brooks, and just out of fairness to families from the three other schools, I think it's just important to try to continue to increase staffing so we can increase those levels to make it more fair across the district. You know, I think there's 90 people on the wait list for the Roberts alone, but we only have 66 spots where at the Brooks, it's about 125. So that's just my only plea to do whatever we can. And I know you're doing a great deal, Mr. McCarry. I just hope that we'd be able to increase, continue to increase as it seems like we have at the Misita. which I'm assuming means you must have found one or two more staff members there. So any push I can give to, we're working on things on the city side, our rec department's ready, willing and able to help set up a program. It's just a space issue. The YMCA was, when they were gonna go into St. Francis, rec was gonna open a program on Forest Street, and then that fell through for the YMCA. So I know how difficult it is to, continue to increase capacity, but there's definitely over 200 people on the wait list, 200 families, and we want to try to do whatever we can, even if that's just a staff member or two more at each of the other three schools. So that's just my only plea for the families that are struggling in our community. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. I did have one more question I forgot to ask earlier. So I know that when we've talked about not not you, but when we've talked about, you know, whether we change middle school to an elementary school and we've had kind of off the record conversations around what can we do around our challenges around some schools being very oversubscribed and other schools being well the mistook having a much lower population of students rezoning is a temporary problem that just essentially kicks the ball a few years and people move to different places and then you have the same problem again. And one of the things that we had discussed was that bathrooms for elementary kids are actually different, which unless you've been in one since you were a kid, you probably don't remember, but they're like, they're these ridiculous little things. And so if we open a program in the high school, I assume we have to renovate the high school to have bathrooms that they can use. And is that a requirement of, the regulations which you know all that stuff and I don't.
[SPEAKER_06]: So if, yes, it would be for the little guys. We're not licensed, so we don't have regulation, we are licensed exempt, because, you know, the state has already determined that these school buildings are safe for children, so they're safe for after school so therefore we are licensed exempt, so we don't have a licensor coming and telling us what we need to do regulations in the same way that a private company would. However, we even just with that in mind, we even explored the idea of what if we only bust the older kids over the high school, the bigger kids, but it was still very costly. It would be an extra bus and it's still, I mean, I'd be willing to continue to explore these things in an effort to do anything we could, but for that reason, we wouldn't have invited the little guys.
[SPEAKER_09]: Oh, okay. Yeah. Thank you. And I mean, not that we are ready or anything wrecking ball at the high school but then we also have to face the impending reality that when we weather, whatever we do with the high school. We're going to have displacement challenges, not right you know for families now, what happens in. three years, two years, three years, whenever we're actually really ready to start doing something interesting with the building may not be their biggest concern. But as a member of this body, I do think about like expanding programs at a high school that we won't necessarily be able to keep. It's like building up this like new demand or making the community very happy about a program to then immediately shut it all off. doesn't sound like a particularly strategic approach to solving the problem. So thank you again.
[SPEAKER_12]: I have a couple of questions myself, and then there's at least one hand from the community that I wanna take before we wrap this up. So my question is just to get clarity at each school is the constraint staff or space or both. And I'm not clear, like when I look at the distribution of students at the Brooks, we're filling 53% of the need if you take the total in the program, plus the people on the wait list. At McGlynn, we're filling 77.6% of the need. At Missittuck, we're filling 65% of the need. And at the Roberts, we're filling 42% of the need. Having said that, the program at the Brooks is about double everybody else's program, so I'm trying to understand, is it space, is it staff, or is it both for each building? Can you answer that off the top of your head, or do you need time? I mean, simply, it's both. In all buildings? Yes. And so what are the space constraints at the McGlynn, the Misituck, and the Roberts?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like I said, in every building, we use those specials rooms or the gym, the cafeteria, the library. In some places we use the art rooms, in some we use the computer rooms for different reasons, partly because some of those specials spaces or extra rooms that we used to enjoy as afterschool rooms have become offices as the needs of students during the day are becoming greater and different diagnoses or different specialists I'm not positive exactly which ones, but we need more office space than we've ever needed in the past kind of, I don't know Derek unprecedented office space. So we last year at the Roberts we lost one of our after school rooms for office space for that, where one of the I'm not sure who the person was, what they did with the, but they need to meet one-on-one with students during the day. And we couldn't use that room as our afterschool room anymore. So now we were only in the art rooms and the gym and the playgrounds and the cafeteria.
[SPEAKER_09]: Point of information.
[SPEAKER_06]: Point of information, member Rousseau.
[SPEAKER_09]: When you say office space, you're not referring to, you are meaning space for which students are receiving services.
[SPEAKER_06]: I just wanted to- A little bit of both, yeah. And where students are receiving services, yes. Okay, great, because typically when I hear that, I think like- It's like the desk for the person who didn't exist, whose job didn't exist in that building before, but now needs a desk to give the services and a one-on-one space, yes.
[SPEAKER_12]: Thank you. So how can, those same spaces fit twice as many kids at the Brooks?
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a huge challenge and it's a kind of an argument every day. The Brooks has two art rooms and we can use both of those. It's got a nexus room that we can use. The McGlynn nexus room is a lot smaller for whatever design reason, I'm not sure why. And so we can only fit way fewer students in that nexus classroom than we can at the Brooks one, for example. One group at the Brooks doesn't have a home at a given time. And when I say home, meaning at dismissal. We don't like to send all our kids out to the playground right at dismissal because that's when families are there. It's a little chaotic. They're there to greet their students and actually meet with each other and spend time together. So to add the afterschool students into that mix is a little bit chaotic. So we keep our students inside until about three o'clock until about a half hour after dismissal when families have had time to play and gather and then they can go. So at a given time in the Brooks, for example, we have to combine groups. So there might be 40 kids in the cafeteria right at dismissal or 40 kids up in the library, two separate grade groups just to get, to take attendance and make sure that everybody's there. It's not ideal, it gets very loud. And then teachers who are finishing their contractual obligations until three o'clock are sort of like, why are the afterschool kids so loud all the time? They're all in the hall, you know, if we're in the hallways trying to utilize the hallway space, we're trying to get our prep work done. And it's just, it's difficult to share. I don't mean to sound complaining, by the way.
[SPEAKER_12]: No, I think it's helpful because I think when you look at these numbers, to me it says, why can't 124 kids be at the McGlynn? Why can't they be at Missittuck? And why can't they be at the Roberts? Because those wait lists would all be cleared long before those counts reach 124. So I think the question that I have for you and the administration is, what can you do to solve the space problem? So if you have constraints in buildings, like that are, if you have things that are working in one building and that they're not available to you in another building, what can be done to pull all the principles together and say, how do we create space capacity? And does that, what would that provide? Like what kind of capacity would that provide? I also feel like so I think that's one request that I have of you all is to say, what can you do to solve the space issue. If you have the staff and I understand that you have to have both for this to work at all but I would like some clarity about what. can be done to create more space so that if five people knock on your door tomorrow that you can deploy them and we can start to clear some of these wait lists so I think that's one thing that I have a really big question about and I think the other question that I have for you and you don't need to answer it today is What should the capacity of our buildings be when it comes to after school. I know it's much less than 550 kids or whatever it is that are in the building I know it's much less than that. In the past you have talked about. Um, real like fundamental like building safety concerns that are very different in the afternoons than when you have a building full of adults so there's 100, 100 adults in a school building during the school day at any given time. So if an evacuation is needed, if a medical emergency happens, if, you know, if anything requires people to mobilize, you have lots of options inside the school day. And I know that you have many less in the afternoon in the afterschool programs. And so I understand that the number that we can accommodate in any given building is much less than like the capacity of the school. I also think your point about the kind of space that is suited for after school is like, I think you did a nice job sort of outlining that but I would actually like you to tell us a little bit more about that because what you and I have talked about and what we have heard over time I think is really important, which, which are things like Can you just take classroom space? It was not that long ago that the administration, none of the people in this room were standing before us telling us if they had more staff, it would be no problem. The programs could be endlessly big. And at the time I was like, well, that's exactly what I want to hear. That's amazing. But I think that's not true. And I think you all need to tell us what you recommend so that we can support you and we can set policy about how big these programs can be in these buildings so that There's a clear number that we're shooting for because I think what you've said in the past is the Brooks program cannot get bigger, right? Is that still true?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_12]: And I think what you're saying right now is it has to get smaller. And I think that's a really hard message to dish out to the community. So what I would like to see is some clarity about like, what is that capacity? And in sort of in tandem with that, if you could get to that capacity number, how many more staff would you need in order to like sort of rise to that capacity level? I think that would be very helpful information to have. The other thing that I think would be helpful to have about the wait list is you transport all of the kids to other programs. What percent of the kids on the wait list are in other programs? So when you look at this, you think like 106 children at the Brooks do not have afterschool care. I don't actually believe that's true. I don't believe people are leaving their kindergartners to fend for themselves. And while we may be the most desirable program, that's amazing. And if we had lots of space, we could take everybody and their money. But in the meantime, I wanna really understand the gap in the community, which is bigger than just who can fit in our program. So I'm hoping you can do some work maybe with our director of data and reporting to present sort of a more evolved picture than this so that we can understand that So that when we talk about like pulling for the lottery, we're clear about like what number are you trying to get to now and what number like what number are you even able to increase to if more staff come through the door than you're expecting because I think that's part of the frustration in the community is like people. I think that programs should be growing and you're saying they can't, and I think we need to be like really crystal clear about why that is so that there can be no confusion, it's not to say that anybody will be happy with what you have to say but I think if we can all be on the same page about those realities I think that's the first step to actually sort of solving a problem. I guess the other question and request I would have for you all is to work with the two middle school principals to say, Is there space in their buildings, which the makeup of what happens in middle school, after school is completely different than high school, but is there space in their buildings to help you with capacity? So, and if there is, again, like what kind of staff would you need to sort of fill that capacity, whatever it might be to sort of demonstrate to us what you think the growth could look like and set our expectations about how fast it can happen. Because I think if we said like, great news, we could take 70 more kids if we opened a program at the Andrews, for example. I think it's not realistic that all 70 of those kids can come in this year, because you have to have staff, you have to have all the things, right? But like, what might be reasonable? I think that's really important for us to understand. In terms of the, the rate for staff. I am actually not in favor of tying it to a contract. I think we've done a lot of things for this group in particular that have been out that have operated outside of what we've been able to do. for staff that are on contract with us through our union partners. And what one unit needs and what the next unit needs is often really, really, really different. And I would hesitate to tie us to a contract who may or may not be experiencing the same kinds of issues that afterschool is when it comes to compensation. So I think I that's I think a vote we would need to take when we had a little bit more information and I would love to see if this isn't how we choose to go forward with staff comp changes like what would your recommendation be for next year? I think I would like to see that before we take it for me personally. Any votes on how staff rates will change for next year? So I think that would be super helpful and then my last I'll say question or comment. is around not for this year, but exploring if there's a way to shift our rate structure for tuition so that increases to the general population joining the program do not also create an increase by percentage point essentially for those folks who are receiving financial assistance. So like when I look at this, right, we're charging $11 an hour essentially for before school and we're charging like $8 an hour for after school. So to me, I would like to see those after school numbers go to something commensurate with the before school numbers, but I'm not ready to do that now because doing that would hike the 50% threshold for those families receiving financial assistance. So I would also like to see like is there a way to uncouple this from a percentage point to like a flat dollar amount where there's like different different scales for tuition so that we as a committee could say, we're moving the general scale up $3 or whatever it is, but we're making a decision this year not to move this other scale. So I don't think we can accomplish that before you need to be able to tell people what the program's gonna cost next year, but I would like to see that in anticipation of this conversation next year so that we can be really thoughtful about who we are increasing tuition for and by how much. And I think right now, like the increase that you're proposing is really modest. And so it's also modest for those people on financial assistance. But if we are the most desirable program in the community, putting on my like business finance hat, we should be the most expensive, right? And I understand that we are not necessarily like here to sort of pull in lots of cash. That's not what we do as a district. But I would like to make sure that we can adequately pay for all the things that we need. And if there's revenue generation happening, that's that's sort of a plus and a bonus. But if if people are coming to us because we're the chief, if the desire is because we're the cheapest program, I think that inflates the need in a way that is confusing. So I just want, I want to have a clear picture of what the need is. And so that's where that like sort of look at the wait list and other afterschool programs, I think becomes important. What you would recommend for staff raises sort of independent of tying it to a contract because they are not members of collective bargaining and they're not subject to union dues, and frankly their interests in terms of changes to sort of their environment are probably quite different than what our union partners experience and there's, you know, there's 10 unions so like which one. So I would like to see what that like recommendation number is as well. If you all could think about that when you think about like really drawing a clear capacity picture for us and maybe come back in April or May to talk to us about that. We do have one member of the community, but is there any, are there any other questions from the committee before I continue? Member Ruseau?
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. There was something that you just said that, made me realize something sort of obvious at this point. So McGlynn has a lot of space compared to the other elementary schools, like a lot. If we think of it as one building, which I mean, it was built as one building. There's no wall that comes down. So I am interested in how, are we not using middle school space?
[SPEAKER_06]: We're not. There are a lot of middle school clubs that happen. One thing that we do, here's an anecdote story that illustrates the difficulty of shared space. So one of the exciting things that our afterschool program at McGlynn does is they're in charge of all the recycling for the building. So they go classroom to classroom and they collect all the recycling and put it in those big bins and they love it. It's a responsibility. They're really good at it. The kids that do it enjoy it. It's sort of on a rotation of which kids get to do it. Again, this is after school. They've been in school all day, focused teaching and learning all day. This is after school. So they're a little bit noisy. They're a little bit excited that it's their turn to do it. So they're kind of maybe kind of running from room to room. And they get in a lot of trouble with the after school or the middle school teachers in the middle school hallway because the middle school and rightfully so they're having like a study club after school or whatever kind of club that they're having in their classrooms that requires kind of focus. And the students have chosen to be there. And here's this kind of ruckus outside and it's like oh here we go again the after school kids are noisy and they're running all over the halls and they're unattended and but they're they're not they're doing exactly what we've asked them to do, you know, maybe a little speedier than during the school day we would let them walk right because but That's, that's the sort of discrepancy and incongruity and the space is just designed for two different uses of the space at the wrong time. So that's, that's, and just hearing that day after day having teachers sort of report to the principal, these after school kids are so loud or to the to our site coordinators, it just gets It makes it so, you know what, okay, we'll just stay out of that space. We'll just direct it over here. And that just makes it harder.
[SPEAKER_09]: I think that's a great example of the challenges of the shared space because you've kind of put to bed my idea of like, why don't we just like make this gigantic building have way more kids? And that's with the relatively small numbers that we have the at the McGlynn. So, you know, you double it, you don't double the problem, the problems probably goes up exponentially.
[SPEAKER_06]: And again, and there are fewer adults in the building. And there are adults that weren't that didn't necessarily go to graduate school to learn about behavior management in the classroom, the same way that you know, the teachers all day did.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_12]: Thank you. And I think those are those are great illustrations of challenges I think what I would like to hear you all come back and talk to us about is, how can you collaborate across buildings with all these like really smart people we have in our district, and come up with like plans or solutions or things to try. So I like I totally get it I'm sensitive to all the things you're saying and like waving a magic wand we just like conjure up a new building and it would be this giant like sort of. I get like sort of the Nirvana point of view, but I think there are some like There are some obstacles like in the mix that I would like to see us commit to solve and I think that will require some collaboration from our middle school staff and maybe they need to sort of highlight that in their staff meeting because I don't want your staff feeling unwelcome in our buildings and I absolutely understand how tiring that can be and sort of why people would shy away from continuing to try to plug away at that kind of expansion but I also think like there's you know literally hundreds of kids who are trying to come into our program and again if I just like put my business hat on hundreds of kids it's like twice as much revenue as we are pulling through the door on this today and again it's not that's not what we do as a district but it is a data point worth talking about. So if you guys could sort of pull that together, I think that would be super helpful. And I do want to take some questions. There's at least one hand up on Zoom. I know the committee can't see that, but there is one member of the community with their hand up, Lenko.
[SPEAKER_07]: Thank you very much for recognizing me. Can you hear me well?
[SPEAKER_12]: We can hear you. You have two minutes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_12]: For the record, please.
[SPEAKER_07]: Lenko Tankov. So I just wanted to start by sharing and emphasizing that Medford's afterschool program does not provide enough space for all families that need it. And our problem in Medford is unique because we don't have access to other private programs. The ones that you have listed have different age groups, so they don't serve K-4 or K-8, and two of those programs are martial arts. So there aren't enough programs for the parents to use, and it's becoming a larger and larger problem as the city is growing. Also, more parents are coming back to work in person and cannot pick up their children. So my first comment is in regards to the lottery. It's currently set up that it serves parents that already have a child and the other child has a guaranteed spot. So this is serving fewer families in the district. The second comment is that this is a self-sustaining program. So I believe that the capacity issue can be solved by raising the wages. And I would like, my question here is, can you put some numbers behind the capacity numbers as you've already discussed, but being proactive about the space and how it's being used? Think about all of the space that can be used. And I would like to think about the challenges that you talked about, but really put that program at first priority because it's needed. And in terms of the staffing, my question is if raising the wages would solve this, given that it's self-sustaining. Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_12]: Thank you, Lenko. Are there any other questions from members of the audience? Okay, so I think we all have sort of asked questions that might warrant a next look. Oh, Member Ruseau, did you have another question?
[SPEAKER_09]: Just gonna make a motion.
[SPEAKER_12]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_09]: I was gonna make the motion to approve the new pay rates for before and after school tuitions.
[SPEAKER_12]: Motion to approve the new recommended rates for after school, before and after school tuition by Member Ruseau. Second. Seconded by Member Reinfeld. Roll call.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Branley?
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Vice Chair Graham?
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: And my Glockman is absent member all the padding. Yes. Remember, right.
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: So yes, Maryland go current.
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes. Six in the affirmative one absent the motion passes so tuition rates are approved. And then I think the question that I would have for the rest of the committee is whether there are any other data requests that you would like to see Ms. Fidler-Carey bring back to us on a second look at this. Perhaps you can email the superintendent with what those requests might be if anything comes up in the next week or so to give Ms. Fidler-Carey some time to think through and work with our Director of Data and Reporting, among others, to figure out what all information she can provide us based on what we've asked for. Does that work for everybody? Great. Thank you, Ms. Fidler-Carey. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
[SPEAKER_11]: Member Graham, if I may. Sure. Can we put in a motion to get an update in May in hopes to expand capacity at our three other schools?
[SPEAKER_12]: Sure, so the motion is to get an update in the month of May, in the hopes of being able to look at potential capacity expansion by Mayor Lungo-Koehn. Is there a second?
[SPEAKER_09]: Second.
[SPEAKER_12]: Seconded by Member Olapade. Roll call.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member Branley?
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Vice Chair Graham?
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Member McLaughlin is absent. Member Olapade? Yes. Member Reinfeld?
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_09]: Members say yes. Mayor Lungo-Koehn?
[SPEAKER_12]: Yes, thank you. Six in the affirmative, one absent, motion passes. Thank you, Ms. Fither-Carey. Next time you don't have to come in person. You can come on Zoom if you want. Okay, we have item number four, revised excessive heat protocol. Dr. Peter Cushing, assistant superintendent of operations enrichment and innovation. Dr. Cushing?
[SPEAKER_10]: Good evening, Madam Vice Chair, members of the committee. I appreciate this opportunity to represent. So I went through the video and the questions and suggestions that were posed previously. I've made the edits. The only one that really wasn't made was a set of rules for AC buildings and a set of rules for buildings that don't have AC, because as we do a comprehensive look at the district, What we want to do is we want to make sure that we're paying attention to spaces that may, at any given time, even with new and updated air conditioning units that we hope to have in place over the next X number of months, as that work is ongoing, that we're paying attention to the district as a whole, and any individual space that may have a temporary HVAC issue that needs to be resolved. So what we did was we changed everything here is from the National Weather Service, which at times has some conflicting information or information that does not directly correlate to one another. But what we did was we switched from the heat index and risk levels and protective measures from the last time from a three bullet list that I think was confusing as to time and days. And so what this will do is we are more direct to member Graham's suggestion that the Metro Public Schools will use these inclement weather protocols. as we move forward. And then that by having these human indexes, by paying heed to the weather, we actually pay attention to the weather. Superintendent is a member of a service that provides updates on a daily basis. Those are shared with us, that we are very in tune to the weather and to make sure that we're paying close heed to what's going on. You'll notice that on page two, that the caution, extreme caution, danger and extreme danger did not change to match. the indices on the front. That's because we will have to pay attention to the information that is being given to us by the National Weather Service and local weathermen and local services that we may have to adapt and move forward based upon the recommendations of that day or the day's upcoming. So what this will have us do is we will be really paying attention as we are getting heat advisories, heat warnings, and those types of things that you've probably heard more frequently than was previously presented. The QR code directly links. So if you have the document yourself, there's a hot link in there. And then the QR code is for if you have a paper copy that will automatically open up the MIA's heat protocol for us to pay attention to and to use that. So thank you, Member Ruseau, for that suggestion. And we are in the process of developing a checklist. We have updated the numbers in there as well. We will be checking the temperature inside as well, Member Branley, so thank you for that. The best instrument from expanded research over the past however many weeks since I last presented to you, sorry, is the Spear scientific heat stress meter, which will So basically this, it's a wet heat globe. That is the wrong term, I apologize. But the best way is not with a thermometer or anything like that. But by this scientific tool, I looked at the middle range price because they go up as high as $700 for us to invest in a few of those. So I think that this protocol puts it more in the hands of the extreme heat operations team to really come together to pay attention to what the National Weather Service and other providers are telling us, that we are prepared and ready to move as the heat builds as opposed to being caught flat footed as we may have been in September.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. I appreciate the changes especially closing the missing one degree gap. There's on the first page. Right under the first table, the last sentence of that paragraph, during high heat days, there's... I missed that on the formatting, so I'll fix that. Thank you. And then, actually, the sentence before that, which is a complete sentence, actually, it doesn't seem to actually... I don't know what on earth it could mean. The information will allow a five-day window of preparation for extreme heat. I don't know what that is suggesting will happen for that five days, because there are date there there are timeframes about like how far ahead etc to, you know, to plan for these events so that that that sentence also seems like if you took the sentence out, it seems like it would actually say the same stuff, which is that doesn't need to add anything, so less is always more.
[SPEAKER_10]: Right, so by the five days was basically saying that we should be able to have prepared five days out, and understanding of the level of heat that's going to be coming, so that we can be prepared. And I'm not sure why that sentence didn't finish. Okay, because in the keyboard in the chair, I understand that.
[SPEAKER_09]: But in the definitions, there are all these other time frames that are not related to the five days. So that's why I feel like this five days is just sort of like randomly in there. That isn't reflective elsewhere.
[SPEAKER_10]: So I didn't entertain a motion to strike that.
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah. Clearly, this isn't actually a policy in our manual. So I certainly hope you would strike that. And then the other thing that I know we did talk about this at the last meeting about using different words from caution, extreme caution, danger, and extreme danger. And while I understand what you're saying, they use the exact same colors and they are in the exact same order. And in fact, lower risk level even includes in parentheses, the word caution. We either have to give up the color coding on the top table, or we need to bring the risk levels in line with the NWS Heat Index because there is way too much confirmation going on that these are related concepts in this one page. The exact same colors They're really close together. No rational person is going to see that top chart and not think that it's related to the bottom one. And then to see different wording, and I understand why. But I would recommend either we give up the use of color coding in the top entirely, whether we change risk level to just being one, two, three, four, and do something different there to take away that excessive, there's just an enormous amount of information here that makes you think they're related when they're not. I understand why you would want to not have them be related, because this is the preparation stuff at the top.
[SPEAKER_10]: And what I will say, I apologize for cutting you off, is These were taken from the exact same page on the National Weather Service. And so I would say more to take away the color from the top. And maintain, I really think maintaining the caution, extreme caution, danger, extreme danger, really paints a very clear picture. I also think that as we go through this, that working with our communications director, that we'll be able to put out information to families as well to help them over the weekends and in times when school may not be in session in September and late June as we have some days during those months.
[SPEAKER_09]: Sounds good to me. Yeah. And the only other thing, you know, just some formatting stuff, there's like a random sentence under the temperature chart that
[SPEAKER_10]: You know, that's actually what I meant on the formatting.
[SPEAKER_09]: Oh, sorry. And, you know, there, I was looking through our, the, the MSC policy service. And there is a policy that at least one district has possibly only one that. heat modification policy, JJIH. So I think that it might make sense once you've finished kind of getting all this stuff done, if you can just, you know, it doesn't have to be another presentation, but, you know, just include it in our packets. And then one of us could motion perhaps to send it to subcommittee to adopt it as a policy officially. Formatting wise, you know, I couldn't find any policies anywhere that include interesting things like color and graphics. which is a limitation of our policy service that will continue to bug me. So figuring out a way to make this into just words for the purposes of policy would be a little work. But I think it makes sense to get it adopted as a policy. But for instance, the equipment needs, I mean, that's not a policy. That's a list of things we need to buy. So but thank you.
[SPEAKER_10]: And if you do have questions on that, there's wide variation in the misting devices. We would be able to get, they're called CoolZone portable fans that would be about $150 per day per unit that would be able to be positioned outside of the schools as students would enter back in if they were doing. Obviously that's less important potentially than other items on here. One of the things that we definitely need to consider, it's being considered and has been considered in the McGlynn playground reconstruction is natural shade, but there may be some playgrounds as we move through our other schools and rebuild when natural shade, just for whatever reason, is an option. So considering shade structures, that are put up and taken down or permanently installed and with shade sails, for lack of a better term, that can be taken in and taken out during the winter months so they have a longer life.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. I have one other question on the water bottle filling stations. Are they really that expensive?
[SPEAKER_10]: So the filling stations themselves, and Mr. McLaughlin will be able to answer this best, but are about $1,000 a piece. The installation and retrofit to the to the existing area is what's very expensive. We did just get invited into a program with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for testing of the water in the buildings. So we're providing them building maps and also either discounted or free bottle filling stations. So.
[SPEAKER_09]: We'd still have to install them, I take it.
[SPEAKER_10]: That's up for interpretation right now, but we're hopeful that we'll be able to get that discounted. Thank you. Okay, yep.
[SPEAKER_14]: Member Reinfeld. Yep. I was wondering if we could reorder things in the definition section. The rest of this protocol does a great job of going from progressively, introducing progressively more extreme conditions and I found myself jumping around and reading it backwards. With the definitions that the outlook is kind of the first stage and then we're looking at the watches or the advisory.
[SPEAKER_10]: Yes, I can definitely reorder that. Interestingly enough, that is how they are, which is equally confusing on the National Weather Service.
[SPEAKER_14]: But I think if we flip them, it'll make it more... I think the goal here was perhaps to make the excessive, the most extreme thing first, so we see that first, but it felt really inconsistent with... I'm happy to flip it. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_12]: I just had one, maybe two questions. The first is from an equipment needs perspective, how much of this money needs to be spent expended this year, like what's the total that we are seeking from a budget perspective.
[SPEAKER_10]: So the biggest thing, so right now, we'll be rating, we are currently rating myself, Mr. McLaughlin, members from the city team, Brenda Pike, Fiona Maxwell, Alicia Hunt, and anyone I forgot to mention, my apologies. but we're currently actually rating and we'll have a meeting on Wednesday on the owner's project manager aspect of the McGlynn and Andrews HVAC project. All right, so that is moving along, all right? And we've been very clear about our desire for the electric facility. full electrification of that, that there may be some backup of a natural gas generator in the event of a power failure, but that's something that we're actively working on. The other, and we have to look at how feasible that is, but it is the ultimate goal that we're there. I apologize, I'm having a really hard time reading. No, so it's really right now the purchasing of the fans for MHS and AC Limited. So that's $50 times 200. So in the neighborhood with delivery probably around $10,000. The bottle filling stations is unrealistic in this budget cycle before the end of the year, if I'm being honest. The maintain on hand supply of the 40,000 waters can be easily accomplished as well as I would say a replenishment as necessary. The sphere scientific, it would be nice to have two of those in the district, one for athletics and one to be moved around the district as necessary. So those are, and I mean, the artificial shades, that would be a really wonderful, these are easy ups, pop-ups. And so with these, you need to make sure that they're secured in the ground so that if we do on high heat days, high wind is also a problem. So we need to make sure that these don't become projectiles for staff and students. So we'd need the sandbags and just other anchoring as well. So all in, it's about $4,500 per school. If any PTOs or PTGs would like to have branded, that would be nice. So that's all in, probably about $15,000 to $16,000. Okay. And will you, Superintendent, report back to us on whether
[SPEAKER_12]: I know there's a lot of other budget conversations going on. When we have a budget update again, can we talk about whether these requests can be filled in this calendar, in this academic year? Absolutely. Okay, thank you. And then just one other question, or it's maybe just sort of a related note is, can we make sure that the filters on the water filling stations are replaced in a timely way? I'm hearing some chatter amongst the high schoolers who have thoughts and feelings about lots of things, but commenting about how the filling stations that are there don't work because of the filters.
[SPEAKER_10]: So one of the things that we will do, we're still in the process of it's a copious amount of work, building out the new ticket system to make sure that every room and every space is accounted for. So we haven't launched yet but that work is ongoing just so that everybody is aware. One of the things in that system that we will be able to do is to put in, not just for bottle filling stations, but for others, time checks that are prompted to certain individuals for them to go and check and then to actually fill out a report of what they see. the light was green, but so that will be light was yellow or whatever it was so that then we'll be able to be on a time schedule. Realize those are not on a time schedule. There aren't an amount of filling, but what we'll do is we'll put in a monthly check or a bi-monthly check to make sure that those are being appropriately monitored and filters replaced.
[SPEAKER_12]: Cool. Thank you. Any other questions from the committee? All right. Thank you very much. We do not have any continued business and we do not have any reports tonight, but we do have some condolences. The members of the Medford school committee express their sincerest condolences to the family of Joe Rossetti, our assistant football coach. The members of the Medford School Committee expressed their sincerest condolences to the family of Denise Parr, wife of former football, Medford High football coach Al Parr. The members of the Medford School Committee expressed their sincerest condolences to the family of Fred Knox, former Medford High School teacher and varsity boys baseball coach. If we could all rise for a moment of silence. Our next meeting is on March 18th at Alden Memorial Chambers, Medford City Hall, in addition to Zoom. Is there a motion to adjourn?