Minutes – Jan. 28, 2016

BERKSHIRE HILLS REGIONAL SCHOOL DISTRICT

Great Barrington           Stockbridge        West Stockbridge

SCHOOL COMMITTEE MEETING

Du Bois Regional Middle School– Library

January 28, 2016

Present:

School Committee:   S. Bannon, R. Bradway, R. Dohoney, J. St. Peter, W. Fields, F. Clark, C. Shelton, A. Potter,  D. Weston

Administration:        P. Dillon, S. Harrison

Staff/Public:      M. Berle, B. Doren, M. Young, J. Briggs,

Absent:   K. Piasecki

List of Documents Distributed:

11-19-15 BHRSD School Committee Minutes, FY15 bhrsd Student Activities Audit binder; FY15 bhrsd financial binder; FY16 Q2 Transfer Overview Detail; January 28, 2016 agenda; January 28, 2016 Pers Report

RECORDER NOTE: Meeting attended by recorder and minutes transcribed, after the fact, from DVD provided by CTSB . Length of meeting: 1hr 30min

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CALL TO ORDER

Chairman Steve Bannon called the meeting to order @ 7:00pm

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PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

The listing of agenda items are those reasonably anticipated by the chair, which may be discussed at the meeting. Not all items listed may in fact be discussed, and other items not listed may be brought up for discussion to the extent permitted by law. This meeting is being recorded by CTSB and will be broadcast at a later date. Minutes will be transcribed and made public, as well as added to our website, www.bhrsd.org once approved.

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MINUTES –

BHRSD School Committee Meeting: 11-19-2015 minutes

Motion to approve minutes: A.Potter     Seconded: R.Bradway      Approved: Unanimous

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TREASURER’S REPORT  -None

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SUPERINTENDENT’S REPORT

P.Dillon:

• Wrote letter to MassDOT on behalf of the school committee. Attended meeting at Lenox branch MassDOT with Smitty Pignatelli, Chief Walsh, and Town Manager.Discussed plan for permanent solution but temporary solution of additional flags and portable flashing signs in the interim. Engineering plan will be looked into an alternate exit at the high school. Bus routes and timing were looked at. Discussion of lowering the speed limit. Note: the speed limits are different whether you’re approaching the school from the north (40mph) or south (50mph) on Route 7.
• Lee: Talks going well but still hard to tell where it’s going.
• Been in touch with the finance person from the governor’s office about Southern Berkshire Shared Services Project grant. Finalizing the contract around that. We’re being given $75,000 in cash and significant support in consulting and technology. Focused around professional development, curriculum, data and technology. Next step is to identify areas of importance across all six districts.
• Shaker Mountain: Continuing search for a superintendent with individuals and shared services. They’re working on qualifications for the application process and welcomes our application.
• Farmington River: Waiting to hear from them on next steps.
• Berkshire County Education Task Force: meeting this weekend

GOOD NEWS ITEM(S)

Muddy Brook Elementary School (MBE)

M.Berle, Principal:

• Dance: Family Dance filled the gym. Kids were teaching parents how to do the dances they learned in gym class. Live bluegrass band.150+ attended. Great community effort.
• 1st grade potluck: Very well attended. Tiffany Wilding-White, PTA president, is finding new and inexpensive ways to bring families and community together.
• Math curriculum is focus this year. Michael Flynn, head of Math Leadership Institute of Mount Holyoke, spent the whole day at MBE. Josh Briggs with able to bring him in and we will spend 4 days this year with him and time also in the future.By the end of the day he had the opportunity to sit down with every educational staff team member and got a real strong idea of what we do and will provide us with feedback.
• Have just completed our mid-year data review. Looking very carefully at progress and set goals for the School Improvement Plan.
• 1st grade working with IS183 on a mural. Map of Muddy Brook campus. Will be unveiled at Literacy night in March.

Monument Valley Middle School (DBM)

B.Doren, Principal:

• Program for emotional and behavioral disabilities. Hartford good collaboration with specialist and resources for the students needs. Working with Muddy Brook and students who have already been in this type of program we are getting kids who are working with consultants and are very integrated in the program. Really affecting students who otherwise would not be able to have integration with the rest of the students.
• 8th Grade- Bernice Lewis:child of Holocaust survivors. 8th grade does a project on the Holocaust and Bernice had a wonderful presentation with the entire 8th grade with songs and pictures and slideshows and it really brought a tangible awareness to the students. See connects to the students are right now with who she is right now and it’s a wonderful experience. She calls herself a peace educator.
• Restorative Practices: Talking circles that students have integrated into their everyday routine and way of conflict resolution.
• 2nd Semester Shift: Part of Exploratory & Student Support Program- Student council has advocated strongly for a study hall, Students needed a place during the day to do homework and work on organizational skills. Created IPACT (I Plan ACTively) to work with Kevin Costello, guidance counselor, to develop strong organizational skills, executive function skills, planning skills, working with teachers and building technology skills.
• Willy Wonka Jr, Spring Musical: Cast has place for every student who auditioned. Dr.Putnam doing amazing work there.
• Project Connection: Amazing continuity from Muddy Brook. Example: Berkshire Botanical has student who has been in that program for 4 years and are doing amazing things. All programs are providing wonderful opportunities.
• Trip last week with Don Sacco and Josh Briggs to BART (Berkshire Arts & Technology Charter Public School) in Adams, MA. Doing restorative practices with circles like DBM. Crossover connections where we want to share our techniques in both directions.
• Next week trip with teachers to DESAC (District and School Assistance Centers) Curriculum support for Western Massachusetts-Adjusting the curriculum for better support for students in math next year.

Monument Mountain Regional High School (MMRHS)

M.Young, Principal:

• Second Semester: Seniors disappointed with no snow days.
• Just completed mid-year assessments. Traditional tests teachers use, student presentations, one teacher used all of his assessment blocks for one-on-one conferencing with each student. Range of ways students are able to now show effectively what they have learned in the first semester.
• 15 WISE students this semester- Very interesting topics this year. Wonderful to watch the ideas develop and change and become what they will be, when presented by the students in May.
• Jacob’s Pillow start for 2 week residency on Monday. Been working with five or six teachers for a two-week period for about 26 years. They are reaching out to different clubs and teams to teach how movement can enrich what the students are doing in the extra-curricular programs.
• X-tech: Just finished a 10-day session with half the Freshman Class and we’ll began the 10-day session with the other half today. It’s a great way to get to know the students but it’s also a way to introduce to them to the themes & the expectations of students from both admin and other students. Will watch YouTube videos of student contributions taken over the years to help set a vision for these new students on what they can accomplish in their high school years.
• Jacob Robbins is heading to Malden for the Voice of Democracy state finals. One of 13 Massachusetts student to will be there.
• Want to recognize Matt McDermott, who’s been a custodian in the district for 25 years. Tomorrow is his 50th birthday and like to recognize him for not only what he’s done for Monument Mountain but for the whole District.
• Civics Life Project-Doing a documentary on depression and the effects of depression in young people in schools. Will be getting all that together in second semester.
• The Holy Grail was performed last night. It was hysterical. Great performance by the advanced drama class.
• The big events coming in basketball at MMRHS and girls swimming tomorrow at Simon’s Rock, both tomorrow night.
• Student teacher in Art this Semester. Graduate student at Westfield State University & Will be working with Neel Weber and Krista Kennedy.
• Two interns in special education. Both teachers at Eagleton. Doing their master’s program and earning their license In Massachusetts. Internships with Gary Kapchinske and Jodi Drury.
• Two interns in the guidance Department. One will work with Mike Powell one day a week and the other will be working with Pam Morehouse one day a week.

District Improvement Plan-

Peter Dillon: Staying the course and going deeper but not jumping around from topic to topic. Focusing on two high-level topics: curriculum and evaluation.  State requirements for evaluation are very strict and it’s been particularly taxing on the principals. A good job is being done with goal setting and principals regulating the teachers & educators and reporting back. State released aggregate numbers for all educators and while we are not at 100%, we are very close to it. Lots of tools for teachers and opportunities to look at data but always not enough time to get all the evaluations done. Figuring out a way to get the work done in the time available.

Josh Briggs:Key point is that we’re trying to stay the course. Not setting new initiatives but trying to land what’s already started, Even if it takes a little more time it should be played out the way we want it to go. Seeing a lot more school focus this year than expected. DBM focusing on special assessments. MBE & MMRHS assessments coming from the interdisciplinary work being done. Not in this plan is the MMRHS self-study.

Individual Buildings:

MBE- Mary Berle, Principal:

• Units of instruction is the high focus. Working with partners from relationships built from Project Connection. Building those relationships with project connection was a long-range goal and now we’re seeing it come into the daytime schedule rather than just the after school schedule.
• Last year the focus was on improving teaching/instruction so that each class was taught with real purpose and clarity. Huge gains were made as a school in that area and as a staff agreed to continue to focus but shifting to student discourse. School-wide, across courses, paying attention to how much students are talking in the class to problem solve and sound ideas off each other and listening to what each other has to say.
• ELA instruction improvement- Erin Conway from BART came and spent 4 full days with Classroom and ELA teachers.
• SPED- Meets weekly with Kate Burdsall to develop a very concerted effort on PD with the SPED team.
• Academic vocabulary across the curriculum as part of the good work of increasing discourse. As students become increasingly diverse students but not all are increased English learners as their students from all different backgrounds and not all of them come in with the same academic vocabulary. In response to that we focusing on teaching and practicing better vocabulary and encouraging students to carry on conversations.
• Mid-year Data Review- last year we particularly focused on classroom teachers, SPED teachers and specialists. This year included all related services: PE, music teachers. Including everyone in the mid-year data review will help us identify interdisciplinary opportunities.
• Culture and Connectedness-Working on communication by doing a weekly email home and there are about 30 students in the building who get a daily email home from teachers. That’s a very big commitment. Focus in the Fall and focus on report cards home very big in partnering with families. Finding it’s very effective in most places and where it’s not, we are encouraging people to come talk with us because the staff care deeply about getting this right, it’s a priority.
• Therapeutic classroom- we have a dedicated teacher to one classroom to focus on and provide social-emotional needs. That classroom now has four or five full-time students with other students coming in and out. Focus is on making sure all of our students are getting what they need and that are regular classrooms are safe and productive and kids who need that extra support are able to get it.
• Student leadership: Buddy program(older kid-younger kid pair ups), lunchroom discussions with students on how to improve the school, student musicians playing in all-schools, students involved in school dances. Last year there was a stipend for a student leadership team but the person who was running the team last year is no longer doing it so that is a growth area that will be looking towards for next year.

All of the training, evaluations, development and conversations that goes on within the school always have a connection to student learning and growth.

DBM- Ben Doren, Principal:

• Instruction- Continuation of past five years since his employ. Focus is on teams working together to find what is best for the students. Partially departments talking about instruction and the details and standards of teaching. but more focus on the grade teams working as a unit with groups of students and how to collaborate around them, learn more about our own teaching. These teams are now educated enough to not need outside guidance or technique education to communicate effectively with the students.
• Curriculum- Refining the outcome of all the hard work that we’ve done in the last couple of years. It’s about performance assessments, it’s about writing in English. Lab reports in Science.  It’s about mathematical investigations and standards of mathematical practices in the CORE. It’s about research in social studies. It’s about amazing & really beautiful work in Art & Design. It’s about health and becoming healthy people in PE. In languages it’s not just and learning conversation but really getting into becoming native readers and writers in the target language.
• Assessment- Hardest work has been in self-assessment because it’s rather new through our rubrics. Shared understanding of where we want students to be at the end of math in 5th grade. Making sure the 5th graders are progressing at the rate expected and using rubrics through the entire area of academics. Requires teachers to agree or disagree and to collaborate- not easy, not there yet, but working on it. Plans being created, next year will be tuning the plans and the following year using them. Will really be effective in continuing the portfolio work that are started at the elementary school. Grade six seven and eight or more focused on preparation for the high school.
• School Culture- Amazing things have come together with school community. Not about having assemblies in the gym or rules posted for students to see or and disciplining boys and girls students. The community is the students stepping up and asking for clarity and the teachers really working together.

MMRHS- Marianne Young, Principal:

• Self-Study: Most of first semester doing an innovative, professional, comprehensive self -study using the mission statement as the benchmark. Essential question that’s been asked/answered all semester is, “Are we who we say we are and how do we know?”
• In the School Improvement Plan is Data on: Assessments, AP exams, SAT, PSAT, ACT,

MCAS. Data year after year shows students are competitive, above state standards on test averages. But also looking at our courses, our graduation requirements, our expectations of our students.  Is their performance & our performance reflecting the mission statement we have put forth? Have looked at: our data, course of studies by department and through the shared leadership group for academic affairs, report cards, discipline data AND have asked every teacher in the building for notable strengths/ needs/recommendations. Resulting in a 75 page document that captures the performance assessment from the lens of the department content area and from the lens of the shared leadership group which include student management, student support, academic affairs, community outreach, and data.  Intend to collaborate with 3 Community partners for each department in this initiative to observe and provide feedback: one in business, one in higher education, one community partner.  A couple day visit from these partners and by April 5th feedback should be provided to MMRHS. Coupled with own feedback, this info will be used for future school improvement plans.

• Some data drawn from ~300 senior class student exit interviews from last 3 years from students and parents telling us if we are who we say we are. “MMRHS creates educational opportunities. Have students and parents been given the kind of opportunity for success, for learning, for growth, for discovery that we say we are?”

Q- R.Bradway: Are there current areas of identified risk that could jeopardize the opportunity for hitting the goal of the School Improvement Plans?

A- M.Young: MMRHS-We cannot let the Monument Mountain facility get off the table. The school needs to meet the academic requirements for students to gain real-world knowledge and preparation for career and college, both in facilities (Science Labs) and materials. Not having that to offer to the students is the “Risk” of not being able to do our jobs.

A- M.Berle: MBE- One key is the success of the Therapeutic Learning Center. The impact is tremendous for the students involved but also for the rest of the school as well. Also, All resources are being fully utilized at MBE, There are no extra staff. Being mindful that any cut will be very impactful at the elementary school level.

A- B.Doren: DBM: (Echo Mary Berle’s comment)

Q- F.Clark: Information on integration between the buildings and the schools? We are at District that has a certain flow between the schools and what is being done to maintain/increase that? PD between the department teachers to make the flow from school to school easier.

A- J.Briggs: Maintaining the individuality of each building and of each teacher while making sure all of these things are still in a dialogue is essential for success. Lots of good work going on at the elementary school but there was a lack of cohesiveness between grades. So we started to address that but then realized that we needed to go beyond the elementary school and make it a K-6 or a K-12 conversation. Looking at PD for the next 2 or 3 years and how to carve out the time to look discipline by discipline (Science, Math, ELA, Social Studies, Exploratory) to get all educators in the room at the same time and have these conversation.

A-P.Dillon: There’s also the reality that it’s not just us but also 8 other districts in South County where there are strange little disconnects between all of them and us. They do send us students so that is a reality to be aware of.

Q- R.Bradway:Can we look at this new PD schedule, for awareness?

A- J.Briggs: As that vision is created it will be shared with the Committee.

Q- R.Bradway: How is curriculum mapping being optimized for the district?

A- M.Young, MMRHS: Using Atlas to document our curriculum at MMRHS, the alignment & the conversations about curriculum have stayed mostly at the high school. The English and social studies teachers at the high school have had some conversation with the eighth-grade English and social studies teachers,  so that connection is growing. Math has had some but not a lot and science hasn’t been picked back up for the last 2 years after making some progress before. The K-12 curriculum conversation is happening in spots but is not as much of a concerted effort as it could or should be. The teachers would like to see it happen and it came up several times in the self- study.

A- M.Berle, MBE: Atlas is not set up for interdisciplinary units and a lot of time was spent this year working on those things and setting goals. When you try to work across multiple subjects,  we’re trying to work a way to include the interdisciplinary units in each of the subjects that works with the system and is aligned. The assessments are easy, the problem is documenting them in atlas.  Also trying to strike a balance of how much time we want to put in to maintain where we are and innovate to where we want to go.

A- J.Briggs: Want to strongly emphasized that this is one of our areas of greatest needed growth, so as to break down the “Silo Effect”. The payoff will be very, very big. Alignment means conversation, NOT all doing the same thing.

(NOTE:The Silo Effect refers to a lack of information flowing between groups or parts of an organization. On a farm, silos prevent different grains from mixing. In an organization, the Silo Effect limits the interactions between members of different branches of the company, thus leading to reduced productivity. Source: Wikipedia)

            B.Fields: We, as a Committee, need to keep in mind that our students aren’t getting put into a lock-step and to remember that each student is individual with individual needs and learning styles.

J.Briggs: Lockstep is an educational disservice because teaching someone that the world behaves in the exact same way for 13 years is not accurate. There is a huge benefit in students having to adjust to new teaching styles, having to adjust to new teachers.

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 SUB-COMMITTEE REPORTS

            Policy Sub Committee- P.Dillon: Scheduled- Feb 9th @ 5pm

            Building and Grounds Sub Committee- R. Bradway: haven’t met yet, need to schedule

            Superintendent’s Evaluation Sub Committee- D.Weston: Nothing new

Technology Sub Committee- R.Bradway- Nothing new

            Finance Sub Committee- R.Dohoney: Has met twice since the last meeting. Voted earlier today on the final draft budget to present to the School Committee. Reduction in programming is the end result.

          Regional Agreement Amendment Sub Committee- P.Dillon: Meets 02/24/2016 at 6:00pm at District Office. W.Fields RAAC Tri-chair: We briefly covered the agreement but haven’t gotten into the dollars and cents of it; those are coming struggle. It is a large committee.  On path for new agreement but certainly needed changes in regards to wording. MARS consulting is money well spent in their advisory.        

District Consolidation & Sharing Sub-Committee- S.Bannon: has not met because we’ve taken steps as a whole committee rather than a sub-committee.

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PERSONNEL REPORT- P.Dillon:

Non-Certified Appointment(s); Rebecca Burcher is new hire as SC Recorder. Great to have her.

Resignation(s); N/A

Retirement(s); Long time teacher Sue McVeety is retiring, plenty of time to plan.

Extra-curricular Appointment(s); N/A

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BUSINESS OPERATION – S.Harrison:

FY16 Q2 Transfer Overview & Detail Report

• 23% of the second quarter transfers were done to adjust to general operating needs. Principals try to anticipate their needs for the following school year, when developing their budget; however, actual needs may vary in any given year, after classes begin.   Transfers are needed in order to allow for sufficient purchasing to address these changes.   The following transfers were done to accommodate these changing needs
• 08% of the transfers were done to take advantage of enrichment opportunities in programming and assemblies at the middle school and high school.
• And the final transfer was done to create two new accounts to reflect a differentiation between classroom/ specialized paraprofessionals and the Directed Study Supervisor position at the middle school and high school. Again, this allows for a more accurate reflection of expense allocation.

W.Fields made Motion to Approve,      Seconded: R.Bradway     Approved: Unanimously

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EDUCATION NEWS– None

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 OLD BUSINESS– None

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NEW BUSINESS–

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PUBLIC COMMENT– None

WRITTEN COMMUNICATION- None

Executive Session Agendafor the Purpose of Negotiations, not to return to public session(Chapter 30A, Sections 21, 22, 23 # 3) 

Clark made Motion to move to Executive Session. Seconded: R.Dohoney    Roll Call: All “yes”, So moved.

Public Session Adjourned at 8:30pm

The next meeting is scheduled for Feb. 11, 2016 – Monument Valley Middle School Library

Submitted by:    Rebecca Burcher, Recorder

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Rebecca Burcher, Recorder

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School Committee Secretary