Minutes – June 21, 2018

BERKSHIRE HILLS REGIONAL SCHOOL DISTRICT

Great Barrington                   Stockbridge                 West Stockbridge

SCHOOL COMMITTEE MEETING

Regular Meeting

Monument Mountain Regional High School – Library

June 21, 2018 – 7:00 p.m.

Present:

School Committee:                S. Bannon, D. Weston, A. Hutchinson, R. Dohoney, B. Fields, K. Piasecki

Administration:                      P. Dillon, S. Harrison

Staff/Public:                            B. Doren, M. Berle, K. Farina, K. Burdsall, A. Rex

Absent:                                    J. St. Peter, D. Singer, A. Potter

List of Documents Distributed:

May 17, 2018 School Committee Meeting Minutes

June 7, 2018 Meet & Confer Minutes

RECORDER NOTE:  Meeting attended by recorder and minutes transcribed during the meeting and after the fact from live recording provided by CTSB.  Length of meeting:    hr, 50 minutes.

CALL TO ORDER

Chairman Steve Bannon called the meeting to order immediately at 7pm.

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, Committee Recorder, members of the public with prior Chair permission 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.

MINUTES:

May 17, 2018 School Committee Meeting Minutes

June 7, 2018 Meet & Confer Minutes

MOTION TO APPROVE SCHOOL COMMITTEE MINUTES OF MEETING OF MAY 17, 2018 AND JUNE 7, 2018 – B. Fields                 Seconded:  Piasecki               Accepted:  Unanimous

TREASURER’S REPORT:  N/A

SUPERINTENDENT’S REPORT:

• Good News (See Below) – P. Dillon – Tonight, instead of good news, I would like to take a minute to thank two people. I realized this is our last school committee meeting of this school year.  I would like to start with Amy.  Amy joined us a year ago and in her short time she has had a tremendous impact in rebuilding relationships, listening carefully and forced us to ask hard questions.  She maintained our commitment to student voice and got a group of educators and students very excited about opportunity about change.  In the coming weeks, Amy will share some of those themes in a memo that will likely be instrumental in our work going forward.  Thank you Amy for all you have done.  We wish you the best in your new role.  Often superintendents can be heard saying, “there is no handbook for this,” but there actually is.  I found it and I to give it to you.  I hope it is helpful in your  new role.  Amy’s voice will live on in the grand memo that we will share when she is safe in Vermont.  The next one is Mary.  Today I was at Muddy Brook for a series of meetings and Mary received two necklaces with a bead made by every student in Muddy Brook.  Mary is going to gain a lot of next strength if she wear it around on a regular basis.  This has been a week of celebrations for Mary and those celebrations are well deserved.  Mary has worked for us as a math coach, a third-grade teacher, our director of teaching and learning, our principal at Muddy Brook and across each role as our unicycle coach and leader.  In each role, Mary has focused on equity, excellence, the underserved and building partnerships to support students and families.  Her many accomplishments are quite remarkable and include building a collaborative model, expanding really significant opportunities for volunteers.  When you are in the building you will be amazed at how many volunteers, particular older people, helping out; supporting work in math literacy and making deep connections with many cultural institutions and non-profits, including The Norman Rockwell Museum which she is now their chief educator.  We wish Mary the best in her new role and look forward to opportunities to continue to collaborate.  Thank you both for your tireless efforts on behalf of students, families and staff, we will miss you both.
• Revised Job Description: Teacher Mentors –  Dillon –  we have a number of revised and new job descriptions for you to look at.  The first one is for teacher mentors.  There are a few small changes.  The first one is, instead of simply being a teacher, you must be a teacher with professional status and a proficient or higher evaluation rating during the previous year.  That is just raising the bar a little.  On the second page on performance responsibilities, we articulated different levels of teachers and the kind of support they get.  If we bring in an experienced teacher from another district, they need less support than a brand new beginning teacher.

MOTION TO APPROVE THE REVISED JOB DESCRIPTION FOR TEACHER MENTORS – D. WESTON             SECONDED:  B. FIELDS                   ACCEPTED:  UNANIMOUS

• Request – New Job Description – P. Dillon – we are trying yet again. We have tried this in a variety of ways over time but to redefine teacher leadership roles in the buildings.  We are proposing two roles.  One is a teacher team coordinator and the other is an instructional lead.  Parts of these positions have existed in different ways.  It is pretty clear that they speak for themselves.  We have the support of the BHEA to pilot this work for a year and then to reconsider it for continuation.
  • Teacher Team Coordinator – This position is both supporting communication within the building across a whole range of sectors and supporting teaching. We are quite intentionally allocating these in a saner way across the buildings.  It used to be that the positions were quite top heavy at the high school and now there is some equity in this.  We think this will support work within the buildings and also across buildings.  Most of the positions are building based.  A small number of positions are across buildings because we think that will be helpful.  Fields – my only question, Amy, are the MMRHS coordinators, are they basically the department deans now? A. Rex – the difference is, we have one for each dean but their roles are very specific to department managerial tasks.  Whereas the deans this year have been more of a leadership team and doing support work with me in terms of school leadership.  This is more traditional department manager.  B. Fields – is it assumed the deans will apply?  Are these voluntary positions?  Who is going to apply for these?  A. Rex – it is a stipended position and there is one in each department has stepped forward.

MOTION TO APPROVE THE TEACHER TEAM COORDINATOR:  R. DOHONEY                     SECONDED:  D. WESTON                       ACCEPTED:  UNANIMOUS

• Instructional Lead – this is deeper, more complex position. Their role is potentially quite significant.  In the first year, they are going to work on getting up to speed, supporting instruction and learning how to be a coach; an instructional coach/leader.  In their second year, we see having them have a big impact directly on teachers and how teachers are supported.  There will be five in each building which is a lot but we are making a conscience decision to invent in our people.  One of our challenges has been, while we have many people that informally take all sorts of leadership roles, we haven’t by design built a deep bench of leaders so when an administrative position pops up, we  don’t have people we can go to.  We think this is a first step to building a more thoughtful teacher career ladder to building a deeper bench.  We also think from a numbers perspective, if you think of a principal and an assistant principal  supporting 60 teachers, you might be talking no less than 20 paraprofessionals, the possible amount of facetime they can get with each of those people is limited and this shares the opportunities to provide support.  We also think builds better communication within and across the buildings and hopefully also builds a greater investment in not only the people in these roles but all the people in the building around some of the progress we have made and hope to make.  Bannon – the stipends that we are doing away with will pay for these positions.  P. Dillon – it is entirely a wash.  B. Fields – so the stipend for the instructional lead would be more than the team coordinator.  P. Dillon – yes, significantly more.  The big indicator of that is and we tried to do a very clear job of articulating this; the performance responsibilities on the back of both, you can really chart out a sense of what the commitment is from a time perspective.  All of our stipended roles, whether it is the football coach, quiz team person, you can’t quite translate it into an hourly job.  Everybody does more than that but from a time commitment, the instructional lead is maybe 2 ½ or 3 times as much as we anticipate the coordinator to me.  D. Weston – two of the three job descriptions that we saw so far (inaudible….) we have to evaluate them for our purposes and also for the other employees.  P. Dillon – agreed.  We have talked about using a short form for evaluation because it is not their primary responsibility but with subsequent years appointment.  R. Dohoney – It looks like this is a three-year appointment?  P. Dillon – it is three years contingent upon the pilot.  The reason it isn’t just a one-year appointment is we don’t want to invest a whole lot of time training people and have this great cohort of 15 people and then start the next year from scratch.  R. Dohoney – I totally agree with that.  I would also like some type of formal mechanism of rotating leadership positions because if not you are having the same people doing the same thing all the time.  I don’t think that is great.  P. Dillon – one of the things we did because we wanted to catch this before the end of the school year, is we posted it contingent upon approval of the school committee.  We got a number of applications.  I think it is fair to say the applications we got are not only the usual suspects.  In each building, people at all points of career are stepping up; relatively new people, experienced people and people in the middle.  Some are familiar names and some have not been in formal leadership roles yet.  I think the net we cast and Kristi cast was wide and people are willing to take a rish and step up.  B. Fields – so you have five in each building as of now?  K. Farina – yes.  B. Fields – so this is already….this is going to start this summer?  K. Farina – our hope is that they could start this summer.  B. Fields – I am glad to hear what Peter said in regard to new people stepping up.  At least in the high school it was always the same people and after awhile nobody would do anything because somebody else would do it.  I am glad you are ready to go on this.  P. Dillon – if you approve this tonight, we could reach out to people tomorrow which is a little presumptions of us but I thought you would give us a little latitude going into summer vacation.  It would be much better to tell people than to wait two weeks and it is before the Fourth of July and people are on vacation.  A. Hutchinson – is there a way that they will be divided up among subjects or grades?  P. Dillon – we talked about that alot and we wanted to maintain some sort of flexibility within each building.  We didn’t say there has to be an English, Math, Science, etc. We thought people could work across multiple areas so we didn’t save a spot for each subject area in terms of picking people.  Assuming you approve this, in the planning part there will be some deliberate focus around who is responsible for what.  We are not going to leave anybody hanging but it may be that somebody with an English background that is helping other teachers more broadly in the humanities, etc.

MOTION TO APPROVE THE INSTRUCTIONS LEADS:  B. FIELDS                     SECONDED:  A. HUTCHINSON                       ACCEPTED:  UNANIMOUS

• District Safe and Supportive Schools Action Plan – K. Farina – At our last school committee meeting, I already referred to this and I had the first page that I shared with you in context of all of the work we have been doing connected to social/emotional learning and creating safe and supportive environments, so what this is is a more polished (not finished) document that I will be submitting to the state which the three building action plans that were developed as part of this process. Each building had a team that did an evaluation using a tool that the state provides and then from that tool, we identified the top areas of need in each building and also across the district.  We are trying to align some of the work for next year.  This action plan under each of the overarching outcomes are four that we identified that we are going to be working on at the district level, have some actual action items that we hope to be doing next year.  This particular grant provide an opportunity for a continuation grant and that I will be looking for in the fall and as soon as the state does make that available we will apply for continuation funding and that will help us implement the action plans that we have developed.  Weston – It says “identify and align data using a database system to track demographic, academic, behavioral, intervention data.”  Are you talking about some type of computer-based….K. Farina – a data management system that we use in an aligned way across all three buildings.  D. Weston – that is something that we don’t have but we want to have?  K. Farina – that is correct.  D. Weston – that is interesting because we were just having a discussion in my building today about behavior that we don’t have a way to track that long term and I wish we did.  P. Dillon – I think the neat thing might be if several districts in south county could potentially get on the same page…..
• Shifts in Instruction Connected to Enrollment – We had a waitlist of EK kids and we thought it might make sense to propose an additional section there but as we dug deeper into the data, it became clear that many of the students were actually younger and it didn’t make sense to go forward with that potential plan. We are not proposing that.  The second one was around vocation programming at the high school really around one program that has…this happens as kids select classes for next year, but one program has become remarkably popular and one program, the opposite happened.  What I am doing and it is cost neutral, is reallocating a very small amount of resources from one program to another and the program that is growing is getting a little more support and the other is getting a little less.  It works because the program with more kids needs an extra class period and the other does not.  Dohoney – so status quo on the EK?  M. Berle – I can share a little bit there.  We had 24 people on the waiting list.  Some of them were three year olds.  We reached out to everybody that wasn’t a three year old and that was about half of them.  Many people had already signed on at Southern Berkshire and others found other programs.  We gave people a deadline to get back to us is they were still interested.  There were four people.  At that point, I took your suggestion, Rich, and made the class bigger.  Today, we sent emails to four folks.  We had another people drop out and we are up to 19 in that class but based on their screening scores, I think it will be a good class.  We are meeting all of the four year old need.
• Updates:
  • Security & Safety – We are doing some summer meetings with the Great Barrington and State Police, so I will give you more of any update at our next meeting.

Sub-Committee Reports:

• Policy Sub Committee: Dillon – we met to talk about the valedictorian policy which is something that has come up a number of times.  They did some work at the high school and we have another round to go on that, then we will come back to this group.  Connected to that, was the idea of what happens when somebody graduates early.  There are a wide range of ways to do high school here.  There were concerns around if somebody graduated early, could they still be the valedictorian or salutatorian?  Looking at that the recommendations, they will be shared at a later time but it is mostly around notification dates and paperwork.  There are times when then valedictorian and salutatorian are chosen and those times don’t line up with requirement around a desire to graduate early.  We will come back after the policy committee is comfortable with the final version.
• Building and Grounds Subcommittee: We met Tuesday.  We talked about having an accessible bathroom and the male bathroom is the most pressing.  We talked about the student courtyard in the front and redoing the circular driveway to accommodate that.  We talked about ordering new science lab desks and how long they would take to get from China and having somebody local to build them instead.  We talked about the asbestos brinks being redo on one of the boilers.
• Superintendent’s Evaluation Subcommittee:   We ton – we did meet yesterday and we are about halfway through getting an evaluation written.  There is another meeting on August 23rd prior to the school committee meeting.
• Technology Subcommittee: N/A
• Finance Subcommittee: N/A
• District Consolidation and Sharing Subcommittee: N/A
• Next Steps Sub-Committee: We met on Tuesday night.  John Whittaker who was our project manager on our two failed projects, he was not at fault, but he was a guest speaker and he talked about some history of those two projects and clarified some of the MSBA requirements and building requirements.  For instance, there are a lot of building requirements that people attributed to the MSBA requirements but they are not.  There are strict building code requirements when we do over 30% of the school.  He gave some clarification on that.  He talked about one particular project in Nantucket which decided to not take MSBA funds recently because in Nantucket there are a lot of very wealthy people who pay taxes but don’t use the schools and don’t vote there.  They did it 15 months faster.  I thought it was well received.  It was interesting.  There were some people that were for the project last time and some against it.  They thought it was good to have John there.  We appreciate him coming out to do it.  He is tied into the MSBA as far as understanding the process.

Personnel Report: P. Dillon – the assistant principal for the high school search is ongoing.  To date, we have about five applicants.  Some look quite promising.  We will review those and get people in for interviews.

• Certified Appointment(s)
• Long-Term Substitute Appointment(s)
• Retirement(s)
• Leave of Absence(s)
• Reassignment(s)
• Resignation(s)
• Extra-Curricular Appointment(s)

1. Piasecki – I have a couple of questions. Why didn’t you do a meeting where people were invited to meet the new principal like you did the last time.  P. Dillon – mostly because I got very nervous about the timing of it.  I didn’t want to risk anyone of the candidates to another position.  What I did was a little less than ideal but it appears to have worked.  The proof in the pudding will be a year from now.  It was an expedited process because we were really quite late into June.  P. Piasecki – also, I just found out tonight that Scott Annand is not longer the assistant principal.  No one said anything about that.  P. Dillon – I sent an email to the school committee.  I thought I did.  Scott made a decision after that process that he wanted to return to teaching and Amy and I supported him in that decision and he is going to be a science teacher which is where he started.  I must have sent it to everybody but the school committee.  I sent it to the staff and parents.  Scott is doing what a long tradition of people have done.  Jay Canning at one point was the principal and then he went back to a teaching position; Jack Spencer was a principal and ended his career in a teaching position.  Scott is following in that pattern.  I will send you the email that I sent to staff and parents.  It was quite celebratory of Scott’s decision.  He has been quite accommodating around this and has decided to work over the summer to help with the transition.  We are going to have him work 20 additional days at his current per diem rate to support Doug in that transition.

Business Operation:

Education News:

Old Business:

New Business:

MOTION TO ADJOURN AND ENTER INTO EXECUTIVE SESSION PURSUANT TO MGL C. 30A, SECTION 21(A) #2, #3 TO DISCUSS STRATEGY WITH RESPECT TO COLLECTIVE BARGAINING.  HOLDING THIS DISCUSSION IN OPEN SESSION MAY HAVE A DETRIMENTAL EFFECT ON NEGOTIATIONS.  THE SCHOOL COMMITTEE WILL NOT RE-CONVENE IN OPEN SESSION FOLLOWING EXECUTIVE SESSION:   R. Dohoney                   Seconded:  B. Fields                       Accepted: Unanimous

The next school committee meeting will be held on July 26, 2018 – Regular Meeting, Middle School , 7pm

Meeting Adjourned at  7:50pm

Submitted by:

Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

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Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

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School Committee Secretary