We're gonna get started.

Good evening, everyone. Tonight.

This is the February 5th meeting of the school committee.

I'll start with roll call Ms. Brunel.

Here.

Mr. Brand Present. Ms. McDonough? Yes. Ms.

Goeth here. And then Ms. Collins, can you hear us?

No. Okay. She there. She was in Zoom. Okay. Well I'm here.

So we have a quorum.

We can now stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Please

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.

Thank you for joining that moment of silence.

We take that moment to honor those

of sacrificed for our country.

Are there any announcements that we need to provide

or we can do announcements afterwards.

I don't know if there's anyway there.

As I said last week, we went to the state house to lobby,

Sorry.

We went to the State House last week to lobby

with the legislators for funding for the macro program.

The governor's budget has it level funded,

and so the advocacy is actually for 33 million, which is

increase not level funding.

And it was really well attended by the legislators

and representatives from all the districts.

And it, I was very pleased at the presentation

that Representative David Lidsky did and,

and a shout out to our district in,

in our participation in the program.

So just to let you know that that is the advocacy point.

Great. I actually also have an announcement

from Spark Kindness.

They have a wonderful program next week,

February 14th, Valentine's Day.

The program is called Real Self-Care,

A revolutionary approach to taking good care of yourself,

how to Shift, shift Self-care from a task on your to-Do list

to a value-based practice of setting priorities.

And it's a talk with Dr. Puja Lachman.

And again, it's through Spark Kindness.

If you wanna register, go to spark kindness.org.

This program is actually at noon of February 14th,

so you can participate

and still have Valentine's Day plans in the evening.

Any other self-care?

Any other announcements?

So with that, I'll, I'll make a motion

to enter into executive motion, specifically

to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations

with non-represented personnel, permanent superintendent,

and to discuss strategy with respect

to litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental

effect on the litigation position

of the public body and the chair.

So declares and I do,

and I'll take a motion, I'll take a second.

Second and I'll take, I'll do a roll call. Mr. Brunell?

Yes. Mr. Brand? Yes. Ms. McDonough? Yes. Ms. Gors? Yes.

And is Ms. Collins online? She should be Ms. Collins.

Can you hear us?

I guess it's lost feed for a little while. I think so.

They state.

Okay. Amma.

Yes, we can, we'll meet her in executive session.

She has the Google meet.

So with that, we are in executive session now.

We'll return at approximately 6:30 PM

and we will go with the teacher representative,

Ms. McKinney McKinney.

Hi. So I don't have anything in particular

to report out on the teacher front.

Staff front. So no comments tonight.

Well, thank you for being here

and student representatives.

And I see both Kendall and in queue.

Oh, we just lost her, but Kendall's still here.

There you are.

Hi. I hope everyone's doing well.

So, pa this past week we started the flower drive

for Valentine's Day and it's going pretty well so far

and we'll be selling them up until the end of this week.

And it's just a really good activity leading up to break

because I know a lot of people have a lot of tests

and homework crammed in before the break.

So it's good to have a stress reliever.

And I know in Yang was gonna just mention how the musical

was put on last weekend and it was a really good success.

I know there was a great turnout from the audience

and I went to watch it and it was really interesting

and I loved the plot and yeah,

it was just overall really good.

Great. Yeah, we heard great reviews.

Thank, thank you so much.

I'm actually gonna jump now to the end of the agenda

to do the approval of the permanent superintendent contract.

So I wanted to give a quick background.

As people probably know,

the school committee engaged in a seven month process to

search and identify a, the next permanent superintendent.

In our January 12th meeting, we voted

to enter into negotiations with Dr.

Melissa Bash, who is currently the deputy

superintendent of Lawrence.

We engaged in negotiations on the contract

and we are pleased to say that

the negotiating team and Ms.

Dr. Bash reached a contract which the rest

of the committee has access to.

And we voted on it in the next set of session.

And I will take another vote in open meeting as well.

So this is a vote to approve the contract

for the permanent superintendent. So moved.

Second.

Any questions or discussion?

Ms. Brune? Vote. Oh, vote. Sorry. Yeah. Yes. Roll call.

Yeah. Yes. Ms. Brunell. Sorry. Mr. Brand? Yes. Ms.

McDonough? Yes. Ms. Gorses? Yes. And Ms. Collins?

Yes.

And I'm a yes.

So the motion passes

and I'm very excited now to announce

that our contract is now approved

and we will be welcoming Dr.

Pash starting July one, officially to our district as our,

the, the new superintendent of the Nick Public Schools.

Though we've been in touch with her

and she may make appearances earlier in the district

before her contract formally begins.

So congratulations everyone.

Next we'll talk about the formation

of a calendar task force.

So again, I why don't you just provide some background

to contextualize the conversation.

So over the, probably like two years maybe

the school committee in various conversations, the

policy subcommittee

and then the committee itself has had conversations

and decisions made regarding the calendar in order to

be more inclusive and accommodate the growing number of

religious holidays represented in our DIC mosaic.

We did already vote, I believe it was last meeting

for the 20 24, 20 25 calendar that is set.

And that is already online, I'm assuming.

But given the changes, we wanted to have more

of a long-term planning process for how

to set the calendar in the future.

So I believe it was last year we made, we passed a motion

to form a task force that will be comprised

of not only school committee members,

but also of members of the teaching staff as well

as the community to look into

what the calendar should look like in future years.

So a group of us met to plan that out.

And actually Julia, think

we talked about having you presented? Yeah. Okay,

So, so the motion as it was last spring

and then was to form, it was actually, it was

to form a working group

and it was comprised of school committee members,

administrators, teachers

and staff, parents, guardians, caregivers and students.

So that's the motion as it was.

And the work was supposed to be done in the fall.

We delayed it till the spring

after we had done the superintendent search.

So here we are

and we just need as a committee to determine

how we are going to identify those members

and if there's any additional folks that we would want

to add different than the motion was,

I guess it was in February actually.

So, so that's where we are.

So we, we can appoint school committee members

or we can decide if there's additional people

that should be on the TA and the task force.

I think that the thought is

to have this actually be a task force with posted meetings.

Kind of like the superintendent search,

but not, not like that exactly.

But that it would be a task force so

that meetings would be posted, people would,

the community would know we were talking about it

and have the opportunity to participate.

Do you wanna just read the members, the participants

that we voted on last February?

Would that be helpful to the committee

to just remind everyone?

So I do you mean?

I just said, so I think it was the five bullets I have here

our school committee members, administrators, teachers

and staff, parents, guardians, caregivers and students.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Are there additional

members for this task force?

Well, so there are, there's ideas for

that we can present the idea that we had. I can,

Can you remind me what that idea was? Yeah,

I, I have it upshot.

You have it up.

So again, we, one of the things

we talked about was learning from the superintendent search

and we thought that it worked really well

that we asked the groups

that we're gonna participate in the superintendent search

to nominate their own members.

So that's one suggestion that our, that we came up with to,

to follow that same process again.

And so then turning to those groups, for example, parents,

you know, whether or not that's the PCC

or PTOs, just ensuring that we have every level of

grades incorporated.

So about three parents, we suggested having

two from unit A

and perhaps one from the Administrative Assistance Union.

Since the administrative assistants are

so frequently dealing with absences and holidays

and calendars and all of that,

we felt like they had a really good

understanding of the calendar.

The suggestion was to have also one from the central office,

one principal, three students

and two school committee members.

The last two, I'll say that for having three students,

we felt like the calendar is, is an opportunity

to get more student voice.

And in the, in the superintendent search, I think our stu

student rep was fantastic.

I also think it would be beneficial for students

to have a peer in the group when they're in a group

of a bunch of adults.

So that's our recommendation to involve more students than

what we had in the superintendent search.

So I don't know if we need to a formal vote

'cause we already have the motion.

Oh yeah.

So I just have a question. Sure.

So in terms of the timeline for conducting the work,

would this start before or after Dr.

SP joins us and can kind of weigh in on

where she thinks this work might need to go?

So the plan was to start this as soon as possible

and have that work be done over the spring

with recommendations back to the committee in May so

that we can decide.

So to answer your your question, this would be before Dr.

SP comes.

So then I guess I would want to know what sort

of the scope and the remit was of this task force.

I mean, I can start it and others,

I've lost the thread since last Yeah, exactly

What

We had intended to do. I

Feel like this would be a combo of last February

and then the work that we've done.

Right. That's the scope.

Is that what you're gonna talk about?

Yeah. 'cause in some ways we already voted on

what the scope was last February.

Yeah. It's basically developed a long-term plan

for the calendar for future calendars

determining which holidays, how, you know,

what days are gonna be off.

How do we balance that with learning?

I would say, you know, one of the things we talked about is

this task force would define what are the values

that we want to focus on.

So for example, you know, we know we want to be inclusive,

we know we wanna be respectful of students

and families, religious cultures and traditions.

We also want to make sure

that the calendar supports academic learning

and reduces disruptions to academic learning.

We want, we wanna make sure everyone is able to comfortably

celebrate their holidays without

feeling penalized in any way.

So these are gonna be all values that the,

this task force would discuss

and based on those values develop, set of recommendations.

And again, I would just to echo what Ms.

Brunell said, the, the original idea was actually to kind

of do the superintendent search first,

which is why we delayed it to the spring

to learn from the process.

What I would think we probably all agree was a very

successful process and use similar steps.

So have the task force formed, just like, you know,

much similar to the screen committee

that we had for the superintendent.

Have them decide on how to collect data.

So focus groups and survey that, that would be,

they would determine that based on that they would

have the conversation about values

and based on that make specific recommendations,

which will then come to the committee.

Okay. Thank you.

Mr. Bru, would

You, just to add, so last, last year we voted on

the bullet points were community impact of changes

to the school calendar, the impact of changes

to the school calendar on the consistency,

sorry, of educational.

Thank you. Yeah, the consistency of educational programming,

the needs assessment of specific communities related

to the school calendar through discussion groups,

focus groups, town hall

and other community engagement methods

and additional background

and specific information on religious and cultural holidays.

So that, that's was from last spring. Thank you.

I'm up to speed now. Thank you.

Yeah. Mr. Brand.

Can, can those who are part of it,

what is the actual, assuming that we come to some

agreement on the makeup of this task force so people know

what is the actual time commitment?

So the, the, I like, I like the idea

of having more than one student.

It's not gonna be like the superintendent,

I'm assuming it's not gonna be like the superintendent

screening committee where it's meet every day

for a short amount of time.

And that's a big commitment for a student,

particularly if the meetings at night.

So I just to, if it seems like it's a pretty,

I don't wanna say it's not aggressive compared

to the superintendent screening committee,

but it's a, it's now until May.

So it's not that much time.

And just should probably put in the heads of the people

what time commitment might be.

Do we know that or is that what we're discussing now?

Well, our suggestion was that it would start in March

with a meeting to sort of,

so no it wouldn't be nothing near the

superintendent search committee.

But so in the spring we're talking about having meetings

to bring everybody up to speed on all the research

that had already been done, a values conversation

around any scenario.

Then time spent on focus groups,

which I don't think members would have to be there present

for, they would just need to be able

to interpret the data from those

and, you know, culmination meetings.

So I would think maybe four or five at the max.

We also didn't wanna like be too prescriptive

because we wanted the task force itself to be able to turn

to determine what they thought the process should be.

But when we were mapping it out that that's

what we thought might be helpful.

Yeah.

Mr. Just the other other question and,

and this is perhaps sensitive, I, I am of course biased

because I think the screening committee process went really

well and I love the idea

of individual groups choosing their own members.

Is it, was there discussion, do we think it's valuable

to make sure in this somehow, I don't know

how in the selection of these folks that

there is religious diversity

and how do we ensure that without any kind

of discriminatory anything?

I think you ask, just say that you're looking for

some religious diver religious diversity.

So I, I think so I, I I agree.

I just, one of the things that we did

with the screening committee is we said to the EAN

for example, send us whomever you'd like,

try not to be too prescriptive, wink wink.

Hopefully we get people from all different levels, right?

So maybe it's the same thing.

So my recommendation would be

to actually follow similar steps, which were

to vote first on the two school committee representatives.

One of them can be assigned chair,

but either way, both school committee members doing as well

of a job as Ms.

Brunell. And you did to possible to,

to to to do the invitations.

To do the outreach and invitations and, and the con

and that communication along with what Mr. Lewison,

I think Tim

Had a comment. Yeah,

I would just be nervous about,

about picking participants based on their religion.

Very different than picking them based on their

grade level or, right.

I mean, so I just wanted to be, wanna be careful with

that rather, you might wanna say,

we just wanna make sure we have

input from all the populations of folks

that this is gonna affect somehow.

And that's, that's the balance that I'm trying to

figure out, right.

Which is how to get those diverse viewpoints without

explicitly saying we want one person from this religion

and another person from that religion.

You know what I'm saying? It's tricky.

But it does seem like the remit that you have is really

to gather data about the impact of the calendar.

So you don't necessarily need to have, what you need to do

is ensure that when you're going out there

with your focus groups, that you're attracting

people from all these groups.

Right. I don't, not sure

that the representation on the committee has to

perfectly match what your focus groups are gonna be.

You just need to make sure you're gathering it.

Yeah. Ms. Wong,

I, I appreciate the intention that you're describing.

It may be as good to invite experts

to come into talk to the committee

and to, for those kinds of perspectives.

And depending on someone who's a member to speak for

and be objective voter.

It's just a thought.

Yeah. And part of what we talked about last of what work,

you know, again, the lessons learned from the superintendent

process is that between the focus groups

and what we call, not a fee, not a survey,

but feedback form.

'cause survey implies that we're surveying everyone in the

survey results kind of dictate,

but this is more getting feedback from people.

So feedback form and focus groups is the way

to list the different perspectives.

And so the idea is how of the, the goal

of the task force is not to represent all views in the task

force, but rather figure out how to collect the data

that gets us the range of views.

Sounds good.

So

is there any other questions or comments?

So one of the things that would be helpful,

I don't know if anyone is ready to do this tonight,

but is for us to identify those

two school committee members.

If anyone knows now that they're interested in being one

of the two members, it'll be helpful to know.

And if not, we'll just have to see

who draws the shortest straw.

Yes, I am interested because I made this motion.

I think it's really important that we do this work.

So I am gonna volunteer.

Great. Yeah, I'd be happy to join as well.

Well, so, so there's two spots. We have two candidates now.

Anyone else is interested

and we can always check in with Ms.

Fathers who couldn't make it tonight.

So we can make it official next time.

But if there's no other interested individuals, then we can

say thank you so much to you both.

So

You lost, you lost Kathy too? She's

No longer. Oh.

Just so you know, one woman

At night.

Okay. So there's two members.

So I can check individually with them

and come back next meeting

and we can vote next time. We can vote next time.

So if we were to start soliciting groups

to nominate members, could we start that?

Oh, I don't

Think what,

No, but I mean like when you did that as the school,

do we need to post a meeting that would say, we're now going

to talk about like, so how we're gonna get the members?

So the way we did it was we voted.

We voted Yeah. On the school committee members. And then Ms.

Brunell and I worked on the

outreach to the different groups.

But it wasn't until after we voted to, to officially

make it a thing.

I mean I I I hate to,

I'm not opposed to voting on it now.

I mean the meetings happened, we, when is the next meeting?

We don't like, not until the 26th. Oh right.

'cause of school vacation. So in the spirit of the timeline,

yeah, I'm not, like, I would,

I wouldn't mind making a motion and voting now, but

Like Yeah, bruell.

So I mean, one thought is

that the letter could come just straight from the chair

inviting these groups

and we could just, the hope was

to have this task force formed

by the 26th at the next meeting that perhaps the EAN

and central office could come back

and the students could come back with members

that might wanna be, you know, on the task,

task force by the 26th.

So I think if we wanna be like, do the letter by the law,

I think the letter could just go out by, from Shai

as the chair of this committee.

The only thing I'm, we talked about the parents, whether

or not it should go back to the PCC, is that, you know, is

that how we wanna solicit the parents?

'cause right now we didn't really come to a decision about

how the parents would get involved.

Can you, either of you

or both of you speak to the experience

of soliciting parents from, how did it go?

'cause I know, and obviously with the,

with the superintendent search, you specifically went

to the PCC to METCO and to CPAC.

But I'm curious what that experience was like.

Was it easy for them to find volunteers?

Yes. I, I would say it.

I think it was, and I think that the leadership in,

in all three of those organizations, they knew parents

who had been interested in, in the topic.

And so they reached out specifically,

you know, to those parents.

I, that's my understanding of what happened.

And the PCC didn't actually have somebody

who was on the PCC serve on the superintendent search

committee because they decided to delegate that outward

to somebody else who had to,

to Bella's point who had experience.

She was like an expert in the education.

So that's, in some ways it's, that's seems

to be a good group to go to.

The one I agree with all that.

The one caveat was that like the EAN,

it didn't meet right away.

So we, the sooner that we can put this out to people so

that they can plan, so they can have meetings

or do whatever they need to do the better.

So to wait until i, I like the idea of whatever,

whether we vote tonight or not, if we like the makeup

of the task force putting some sort of communication out.

So groups that have an opportunity to meet, have time

to do it before the work needs to get started.

So my recommendation, if everyone is okay with this,

is as a chair, Ms.

Corset as vice chair and Ms.

McDonough as a clerk can put together a letter together

and send it out

and then next time vote on the school

committee members. Yeah.

Why are we waiting to

vote on the school committee members? Just trying to,

Just because there's two members who are missing.

I mean, we have a court, we can

Vote.

Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.

Just it, I I know it was covered in the last meeting

and you know, it is work that we all agreed to last spring

to then delay it till the, this spring.

So, I mean, I don't know.

No, well the vote is just

who should be the school committee.

Yeah. Okay. So I think we're all in agreement

that there will be a task force 'cause

that is already agreed upon based on the previous motion.

But does that work? We can start sending the letters

right away Yeah.

For the sake of time. And then next time,

unless there's any objections from anyone have vote

for the two of you to be the two members.

Okay. Yeah. Still left.

Just I, I do have a comment before you move on from this.

Sure. But I wanna make sure you guys

are done with this conversation first.

I think so. Is everyone okay with that plan? Just,

Just to clarify, the parents are,

are we gonna reach out again to metco, PCC

and CPAC as those three organizations

to spread the parents across those

three constituencies?

It did. It, it was,

everyone had came with different perspectives.

So I think it builds in diversity if you reach out

to more than one parent group.

And we have the proposal is for three parents.

Yeah. So yeah,

This would be the advantage of doing the vote now

I think is that then the school committee members

who are on the task force could

figure out the different out.

Like there's decisions that need to get made right about,

So I'm happy to take a motion if, but

I'm just gonna make a motion.

How about I make the motion, okay.

I move to appoint Ms McDonough and Ms.

Gor goeth, sorry, to the calendar working group

as the school committee representatives.

I would call it a task force, maybe

School committee task force.

I dunno,

You can't make this stuff up.

Second,

Is your comment

related or should we keep going? Okay.

And do either one of you want to be the chair?

I think the task force selects the

Chair. That's a great idea.

All right. Gonna find no.

Great.

Okay, so we have a motion. Any discussion on the motion?

Did

Someone second, if we don't have anyone on line,

so we can just do a regular vote. Are those in favor?

Yeah, we can. Right? She's not back, right.

Oh, those in favor. Anyone against any abstentions?

The motion passes. Congratulations.

Thank you. Do we need to vote on the makeup

or is that what, like so that, that the,

the rundown of number of people? Or is that not,

I don't think so.

Okay. So we, we did vote on the makeup. Well,

Not as details.

We didn't vote on the details as we have it,

but I think Do you wanna,

Do you think it needs that detail?

I think you have the makeup from the last time.

I think you're, you're probably fine.

Yeah. I mean the two are consistent. It's

More general.

Yeah. Yeah.

But it was,

it does cover all the groups that,

Okay.

Okay. And still off,

Since you're talking about calendar,

I have some good news and I have some bad news.

And the, the good, the bad news is that for all

of the vetting that we did of the calendar

and all of the cycles that it went through,

somehow we didn't catch

that there were actually 30 days in April rather than

29 days in April.

So the next meeting, you're gonna see a new calendar

that goes before you that actually has the

appropriate number of days in April.

And the good news is that the school year will be reduced.

This is for 24, 25.

The school year will be reduced by one one day. Oh

Good.

That covers the sleepaway camp. That's it.

Situation. Knock on wood.

No snow. No snow.

Thank, that's a good thing that April has 30 days

the poem in one of them.

Okay. So I think we're good with the counter item.

Should we do quickly the, I know we have people waiting,

but can we do the quickly the consent agenda move rule

of the consent agenda second.

All those in favor? Any anyone against any abstentions?

The consent agenda passes.

And with that I'll pass things to Ms. Wong

for the superintendent's report. Thank

You.

So we had several presenters lined up

and we're gonna submit some modification to the schedule.

So we were expecting to do the student global travel

with Jason Floyd, but he wasn't able to make it tonight.

So that would be postponed to another time.

But our output was to have a bit of a global theme.

So that was student travel.

But we do have two of our three presenters.

We, we lost his admin.

I was saying that we're drop the mic flies in terms of

whatever cold virus related, like things been seasoned.

But we have, we have Tim Love, deputy superintendent,

Joseph Blocker, high school principal

who accompanied me along with other educators to

educators served by hel talent along with

Karen's not able to attempt to make.

So they have some slides they prepared to share with you

their experience and what they've learned from it.

Share this via Zoom with the audience as well.

Try to,

Okay.

So I don't think that's the beginning yet.

Okay. Yep. You wanna kick it up? Sure.

Hi everybody, I'm Josepha Blocker,

the principal at Natick High.

And we had the good fortune of being able to join a group

of educators who went on a learning trip to Finland

and Estonia, Finland

and Estonia are two of the countries

that are ranked highest in the PISA exam scores,

which is an international test of students across the world.

And so we were very intrigued by what processes

and educational strategies they are using in their schools

to be able to achieve these results.

And so we can move I guess to the next one.

So we were a group

of 16 educators across six different

Massachusetts school districts.

Harvard, mass, Lincoln, Sudbury, Natick, Needham,

Wayland, and Wellesley.

Four of us were lucky enough to join from Natick,

including Tim and myself as well as Bella

and Karen Gani from Benham.

There was a union leader from Needham who joined us as well

as elementary

and secondary principals from many

of those districts I mentioned.

And some educational consultants, student services directors

and other superintendents.

So it was a really well-rounded group, which made

for really rich conversation on various perspectives

as we moved through the trip.

And just a great thank you to the school committee for,

for allowing us to take this travel.

That was fascinating and hopefully we'll bring some great

benefit back to Natick in the near future.

So we visited five schools while we were there.

They were in urban, suburban and rural settings.

All from K to 12 varying sizes.

We also visited a teacher training school, which was a jewel

of the trip, I would say most, I would say most

teachers all joined a teacher training school as part

of the process to become certified as,

as teachers in, in Finland.

And so that was fascinating to see them kind

of working under master teachers

and then learning the skill in the trades as, as in the,

in the educational environment.

We also visited the Ministry of Education, which is similar

to Desi in Finland

and engaged in four different professional development

sessions on both finish

and Estonian education with our, with our partners

to consultants from the work we had.

One of the best parts about the trip I think is kind of,

you know, establishing these learning partnerships

with the colleagues that we, we went with,

we met in January again just recently

and we processed takeaways.

Thank you Bella, for supporting that, that process.

She's been wonderful in making sure that we stay connected

and continue the conversations

about the learning that we had.

There is a beginning of a high school

instruction and learning

workshop. Do you wanna talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, definitely.

So the principal of Needham High, Aaron Kott reached out to

the Wellesley High principal, the Wayland high principal,

the teaching and learning director in Lincoln Sudbury

and the,

and me as well to see if we wanted

to form a high school working group to

continue our conversations about teaching and learning.

I don't think we would've forged

that partnership if we hadn't had so much concentrated time

to talk about pedagogy while we were there.

But we're gonna talk about sort of teacher

exchange workshops because we have different PD half days

across our different districts

and start to really think about what it looks like

to have excellent instruction across Metro West.

And I think these are some good districts

to partner with around that work.

So I was excited to be included in that process.

And we're beginning meeting next week

to talk about some next steps towards

realizing that goal. So,

And here there's also an article from Need Our

counterparts there who did a presentation

to their school committee and their school administrative

teams on what they learned from the, from the

adventure I will call it.

And feel free to read that. It's a fantastic article.

Just a quick kind of map, you can see where Helsinki

and talent is at the base of the map.

We had most of our days in Helsinki, then we

crossed over the Baltic Sea into into Talon

for the second part of our trip.

The population of Finland's around five, 5.5 million

as you can see here, I would say eight,

8.5% have a foreign background.

So it was very diverse. You can see in

that bottom right slide, the country of origin there,

you know, in Finland, many former Soviet Union,

Estonia and Somali and Iraq, China, Vietnam, Turkey,

Afghanistan, India, former Yugoslavia.

And so there there's a variety of of different

diverse folks in the, in the areas that we went to.

You'll see Estonia is about 1.3 million

and you can see the the kind of ethnic composition of

of Estonia where many are.

Belarusian, Ukrainian, Finnish.

And again it's a variety of folks.

The capital of in largest city in Estonia's Talon.

And the really cool thing about Talend when we got there,

and I didn't realize this either, is that much

of the infrastructure that that is there was built

around when the Soviet Union was in the Olympics, the one

that was, it wasn't held right?

It was, it was. And

and they had, they had built it up

for the sailing competition in the, in the Olympics

because it was part of the, so you need the time.

So it was wonderful to see that in the city.

Yep, sure. So when we were in Finland, a lot of

what they talked about was this idea of a lot

of trust put in educators.

So teachers designing assessments,

really versatile methods allowed to teachers

for implementation of standards

and teachers being allowed to de decide

what their own success criteria looked like.

And so you'll see that as sort of a through line

as we talk about what our experience was like

in the various schools.

Finland as a country has one school district.

So they have one teacher's contract for the entire country,

which leads to people generally working in neighborhood

schools and a lot of community investment.

So if the educators have the same pay and the same standards

and the same sort of process existing,

no matter which school they work in across the country,

then people tend to stay within

communities that they live in.

There's also very little ranking

or competing amongst schools.

And so it is sort of a very freeing type

of environment there for educators in that

educators are sort of all part of one big group that is part

of one big school group for the whole country.

So they talked a lot about the

Finnish way while we were there.

And so the homogeneity of the country in terms

of demographics really allows them to have this focus on

what culture means in terms of the Finnish way.

And even the folks who are immigrated

to Finland largely are folks who are coming from Sweden

and who are coming from other areas in the Baltic.

And so that type of homogeneity allowed them

to talk about sort of what it means to be Finnish in a way

that, you know, possibly is

not transferrable to the United States.

'cause it's sort of antithetical to American,

the American diversity of experience.

And yet there are some things

that we're gonna talk about at the end

that we feel are transferable.

But within that finished way is a highly

integrated form of instruction.

So they really focus on a few key skills

around reading and writing.

And then everything else is around integrated learning.

And teachers have a lot of fluidity on how to instruct

and when to instruct on these other topics.

There's a high level of trust in in educators

and that goes multi-directional.

There's a high trust from teacher

to student and student to teacher.

There's high trust going from teacher to leader.

There's a high trust going back and forth in that direction.

Same with parents to school

and same with parents and their children.

And so all of that high trust

gets exhibited when you walk into the school environment.

One of the things that struck me immediately walking in

is that the phones don't ring.

There were, I did not hear the phone ring at all in the

offices while I was there

because the kids are where the kids go

and the teachers are where the teachers go

and there really isn't a lot of, there's just a lot

of acceptance that things are going to go as they go.

They also had this idea

of a home cooked meal essential to their culture.

And so kindergartners through 12th grade

all had an open buffet.

They could go back as many times as they want.

It was always paid for by the school.

They had plates, forks, knives, glasses,

and it was just a very, you could see that that idea

of creating home permeated in the culture, there's a lot

of flexibility in the curriculum.

There's also very highly qualified teachers.

The acceptance rate for their teacher colleges is about 10%.

It's very highly competitive

and it's a very sought after field.

And they also do a lot of looping.

So kids will have sometimes the same teacher from

first grade through third grade.

And so that teacher will know that there are standards

that they need to achieve,

but they may choose to do a certain thematic union

unit in second grade versus in first grade when they get

to know these, a certain group of kids

and they have a lot of flexibility knowing

that these are gonna be their kids for a long time.

I think we all, we always ask about, you know,

what do you do with kids who have have different needs

and do you have a system in place to be able to evaluate?

And similar to special education in the states

and they do, they call it a diagnosis and support plan.

They have three levels of support, obviously teachers

and they have what you call their student welfare group,

which is, you know, positions like your nurse, psychologist,

social work and principal.

And then they have some outside consultation services too.

But essentially they have basic support for all students,

similar to our tier one type of instruction.

And then kind of intensified support, which is not yet kind

of a special ed process, but just additional supports based

on where they see kids' needs.

And then they go into a similar model to us

where they call it special support,

which is much more intensified.

So those three levels of support.

So there certainly are students with disabilities.

We did not get to visit any actual special ed schools.

That's one of the things

that we wanna do at at some point

if we ever get a chance to go back.

But, but we did visit some from students with special needs

or with that special support

and they certainly seem like they were integrated into the

classrooms and, and part

of the community, which was wonderful.

Let's see this one, yeah, so this is kind of the structure

of, of the education system.

There are no grades, there are are years essentially.

So you can see this early years in education care

and essentially that's your,

your your young, your young ones.

And I believe that is, is that free?

I don't remember if that was free for families

or not for that.

Yeah, yeah it was. Yeah. I dunno

If that was, I think it is free.

And then also the teachers are required

to be licensed. That's right.

That's right. So then once you finish that side though,

you have, you have 10 years, right?

So you're in year one, year two, year three

and then you're basic education when you hit year 10,

you then go on one of two different pathways.

One is to either your vocational side of things

or your academic side of things.

And this is actually the first time you see any kind

of assessment that we, that we see in, in Finland at all.

And that helps understand which,

which way the students will, will go.

Now just know that the vocational piece is really, really,

it's, it's a large portion probably was it 46% or so?

I think 45% or so of students.

And they value that just as highly as they do

the academic side of things.

And once you get the vocational piece

and into that kind of upper secondary training school,

you then also still have the pathway to go

to a academic college

or to some kind of a polytech

bachelor's degree if you want to.

And they, they, they value both sides incredibly.

Some of the, the schools that we,

that we saw at the upper levels were also

theme based, right?

So if we went to visit a school

and it was all based in music for example.

And so if you went to an academic school,

you could actually choose the theme

of the school that you wanted to go to.

One was based in art, one was based in, in, in the music

interestingly enough, the athletic piece, none

of the schools run any athletics.

'cause we'd asked, Hey, is there athletic based one?

And nope, actually all the communities do the athletics

and the schools don't touch it at all.

So it was a really fascinating kind of a,

a system that they go through.

But again, they're not even looking at any matriculation

examinations until after you get past that 10.

That year 10. Which is amazing

because we test, test, test, test, test.

Right. And and they do not. So you wanna add to that?

Yeah, I think

that the apprenticeship program is also

really interesting to hear about.

And in addition that that early sort

of preschool kindergarten experience,

it wasn't compuls compulsory,

but they said I think about 80% of the people opt into it

and it is available and free if people want it.

But that almost all the kids start first

grade reading either way.

Which we, I also found really fascinating

'cause we know that's not necessarily the case here when

kindergarten is compulsory.

So they have a national core curriculum similar to

how DSI has standards per state here.

And that part of

that core curriculum is school culture missions and vision.

And so they do give this sense of guidelines

around assessment and guidelines for support

and welfare of students, which I think comes through in

how they write their standards.

We'll talk a little bit about their transversal competencies

that they talk about a little bit later,

but they do talk a lot more about the whole child

and the whole student in terms of

how they expect education to run there.

And it really is integrated

and woven throughout that national curriculum in ways

that were really profound.

So the transversal competencies,

everything is based on these competencies.

So if a teacher, you know, I mean there's

so much autonomy for the teachers.

They're pretty much told to say, Hey,

here are your competencies, these are the things

that we want you to work on in your classroom.

And they are then, you know, charged with doing so.

So things like thinking

and learning to think, you know, these are all things that,

you know, we have envisioned in our profile

of a graduate here in Natick.

Obviously similar things,

but they have brought it to life in,

in everyday work that they do.

And each teacher's classroom is doing it a little bit

differently and we'll get into it later.

But many of the administrators really don't know what

that looks like or what that might be.

And that's because of the, the autonomy teachers are given.

And I think it's also important to say, you know,

the teachers are put on the level of, you know,

doctor or lawyer, right?

As a profession, they're not paid as well.

So that's certainly a, still still a significant concern,

but they're given that autonomy to to, to take this,

make the curriculum they think is gonna meet the needs

of the kids and then follow through with it.

And it, it's amazing because then you see the scores

on the pizza and they are, they're very,

very high. So yeah,

They have these transversal linked to standards.

Similarly how we would have our, you know,

our English classrooms tied to ELA standards for, you know,

grade 10 and 10th grade.

But there are also, within each standard, one

of these transversal or more than one is also linked to

that academic standard.

So teachers really do ha see no, no separation.

They see that there's equal importance in term of, in terms

of teaching self-care

and managing daily life versus teaching and academic skills.

So for example, we went to a school that had a theme for,

for instruction for about eight weeks

and then they would turn over to a new theme

and they were talking about, you know,

appreciating the human body.

And so part of that was how do I take care of my body?

How do I manage that in my daily life?

And part of that was going to science

and really, you know, mapping out all the bones.

And then they would read a book on how bodies are different

and talk about cultural competence around how all

of our bodies are different and

what do bodies look like in different homes

and what do families look like

with different bodies in different homes.

And so they managed

to take these different transversal competencies

and weave them through thematic instruction,

which was really fascinating

to watch in various different places.

Do it different ways. But it was, it was fascinating.

So I talked about a little bit

of high trust and teacher autonomy.

So as you can see on this slide, you can read that, right?

There's no teacher evaluation system,

there's no high stake tests,

there's no teacher recertification.

In fact, you know,

and this will go, this is, this is both in Estonia as well.

So I'll, I'll kinda share it here.

I remember seeing and, and talking

to some teachers in Estonia and similar in Finland.

And we said, so, so how does the teacher evaluation work?

You know, are the administrators ever in your room?

And they looked at us like we, you know,

like we had two heads.

It was like administrators,

why would they ever go to your room?

Right? So there's, there's no evaluation system at all

that trust has put in the teachers to, to complete the tasks

that, that are given to them.

And you don't know how do,

there's no assessment of the kids outside

of the teacher assessing the kids themselves

before they move them on.

So there are no high stake tests, which also lead to a,

a reduced impact on social emotional difficulties.

I don't think any kid there felt stress.

That's, that's how I felt when I, when we talked

to the kids, you know, and that was amazing.

And again, no teacher recertification as well.

So that system of of, you know, giving the autonomy

to the teachers and the kids, the ability to,

to be the kids in the classroom led to a, a,

a non-stress environment all the way through. Yeah,

It, it was really interesting, you know, one

of our colleagues while we were there said,

what do principals do here?

You have no teacher contracts,

you have no evaluation system, you have no testing,

you don't go see people teach.

You're not doing athletics, you're not doing.

And so they said that they really do work a lot on school

culture and on getting to know the kids

and on, you know, the budgets.

They do have to do that piece.

And, but it, it was an interesting sort

of brain flip from all the things that we are focused

so much on as educators, our guide who

did a tremendous job helping us understand culture

and giving us PD there said, you know, this is sort

of the picture they paint and it does sound very utopian

and they're of course like anywhere else is variability.

So he would say like, you know, did I feel like all

of my kids' teachers bat at a thousand all day long?

Not always, but I, he did feel, you know, a strong sense

of confidence that his kids were getting a good

education all the way through.

So, So they,

they talked a lot about differentiation.

'cause we asked, we said, you're a very homogenous

population, you know, what does it really look like in

classrooms when kids learn at

different speeds and different rates?

And so they showed us this math class

and there are these two books sitting on the table,

which if you looked quickly,

you would not have seen them as different.

But one of them has a little e there

and these are the pages

where the teacher's teaching this lesson.

And you can see that one of them has tons of steps laid out

with boxes to really guide students.

A lot of scaffolding and one doesn't,

but the teacher is teaching the same lesson to all,

and it's just highly differentiated.

And it's two different books

and not immediately apparent

to the students if they aren't really looking

to see who's doing what.

But it allows everybody to access the same

content at the same time.

Which, you know, I think that it was, it was powerful

to watch how somebody, how another country

does it all in the same room.

Oh, before you go to Estonia. Yep.

So, so in Finland you might say, well

how do they know it works that that one time they do have

that test scores at, at the end of 10th grade.

They are, they find that no matter where you're in Finland,

that the results are, are very similar.

So that's one of the reasons why people go

to visit Finland is their sense of equity

and equitable outcomes.

So that's, that's the other piece there,

Right?

Their gap between socioeconomic groups is really small.

So

Estonia too small to fail.

Countries like Estonia are wild

animals constantly on the alert.

You are forced to innovate to do something

that nobody else does.

So as you can see in this tree, it,

it's actually a very similar model to, to Finland in

that way where they do have a vocational

and they do have a upper secondary tier

that is more academic.

However, I think it was a much smaller percentage

of students that would do vocational work over there.

And I don't know if we have that in the next slide here,

but there were certainly fewer students heading

to the vocational side.

I think what, what you saw in Finland was very similar

otherwise to Estonia.

I think that the, the culture in Estonia was one that was,

you know, we saw a tremendous amount

of things like we saw here for example,

things like UDL we're gonna work on now we're gonna work on

on different ways to, to provide access to kids

reading programs.

You name it, it was, it was there,

They're a little more tech

focused I think than Finland was.

They relied a lot more on technology

because people are spread out

and they wanted to make sure all kids have access.

There was also a certain sense of urgency

and pride over being able to be autonomous right now

and just wanting to take advantage of that

because of their history of being taken over a lot.

So they were talking about like, we have control

of our schools now and we're gonna do it while we can.

And so there was an interesting sort of,

I don't know whether it was more of like a, a drive

and a fight that came with that, that need to sort

of have self-determination while they can,

that accompanied their sort of desire to educate kids.

They also had similar challenges to us in terms

of migration, right?

So it was interesting.

So we had been talking about kids coming over from Ukraine

possibly to, to the US and they're right there.

So they had a substantial amount of kids come over.

So this is similar issues when they,

they're bringing kids on and also the fact that they speak

so many different languages, the languages

of students coming into school were,

were certainly impactful for them as well.

So they're some of the similar challenges that we have here.

So highlights. So,

and I think many of these things are the same.

You know, the technology piece,

I think Josepha just talked about.

There's the 90% of vocational, 10% in Estonia.

I think I like the safety and wellbeing

and the happiness one the most with, with Finland.

Yeah. It showed in every, everywhere we went.

There's one elementary school that we went to

and you'll see pictures, you know, we went in

and we took our shoes off as we walked in the door

because every kid took their shoes off

as they walked in the door and it was very comforting

and they had a very small cafeteria

with tables and flowers on them.

I'm not sure if that was just for us or not,

but it sure seemed like it was their daily

piece. It was really lovely.

Yeah, I mean the safety piece is also notable

that they don't do afterschool childcare

after first grade that the kids just, we trust.

It's that high trust. So we would see kids walking on the

street and taking city buses who are seven and eight

and there is just this general sense of safety

and shared community and we take care of our country.

Our country takes care of us.

They allot the number of positions

and universities tie to the expected needs

of the job market in 10 years.

So they have this sort of, my country takes care of me, me

and now I'm gonna go do something my country will need.

And so that just

that sense was very pervasive from everything from

childcare to the bosses.

If I could underscore that.

So the vocational tracks here, people follow,

we say follow your passion what you like,

but there they, the tracks that are created

will end up in jobs there, there are tracks to jobs

that they need employee. So it's different.

Yeah. You wanna talk about your stuff

Here?

Yeah, so, so these are just a couple of pictures

that I just found sort of captured the experience for me.

So it was all the kids with their, their socks on

and you know, we were all with our socks on.

Our socks were just unbelievably clean at the end.

We could not believe how immaculate these schools were.

And everybody always had their shoes off. I'm

Really glad I wore my good socks.

I know, right? I'm like, do I have a whole,

nobody warned me about this.

And there were just tons of little things like this foosball

table that's just out

and we trust the kids not to leave class to play it

and it's just gonna sit there

and everybody has their backpacks.

You can't quite see on that locker area,

but just hanging in the hall

and we trust that nobody's gonna take our stuff.

So kids were leaving computers like in backpacks,

on hallway shelves and just again, like the plates,

the knives, the forks,

and how much we think about kids like injuring

themselves on those kinds of things.

And they don't have any thoughts of that.

They're just like, we're gonna trust the kids

to be responsible. I

Don't think we actually ever saw any

paper, anything, anything at, right.

Just, that's another piece of it at all. Right?

It was all glassware, silverware.

It's a very integrated sense of sustainability.

Yes. That I was a sign on the bathroom in

a a 4K to five school

and I just found it to be profound that like, that type

of symbolism is just there

and integrated into how they do school.

And the kids were, this was sort of an open area

and some kids were sitting on couches working

and some were in classrooms working

and they would just say, we're doing these things now

and we just go work where we like to work on them

and then we come back when we want to.

And they really did have a lot of control

and autonomy within the spaces they were given.

And it was, it was just really neat to witness.

Yeah.

So these were more high school classrooms

and they felt a little more traditional

because these were also schools where, you know,

there was already stratification around who tested and where

and what people's interests were.

So they did look a little bit more like

what you would envision a

traditional classroom to look like.

We were, we had student guides

and in the upper schools that we visited

and their English was striking.

I almost forgot that we weren't in

an English speaking country.

And then they started to talk

to us a little bit about their world language learning

trajectory about, you know, in your early grades,

if you come in speaking fluent finish, you're going

to either start in first grade learning Swedish

or Estonian in Finland,

and then in third grade you'll learn the, the third,

whichever one you haven't done yet.

And then in sixth grade you'll pick up a fourth.

And so they leave learn having fluency in almost in three

to four languages at least, largely

because they need them to be able to get around the country.

But if you build that, those neural nets during

that critical zone of development around how

to learn language, I would guess that it would be easier

to learn a third

and fourth if you already have those pathways built.

Learning the first and second through that process

of early language acquisitions.

So that was another really interesting thing to note

as we visited the secondary schools, just how easily

and fluidly they'd be talking to us in English,

they'd go talk to a friend and finish and come right back.

And like it was, it was wild to watch them switch. So

This, this actually a picture on the left, I, I believe

that was Estonia we went into, it was a middle school,

well that wasn't middle school.

It was upper, upper 5, 6, 7, 8 level.

The kids were prepared with questions for us.

And I think the most telling question was,

we don't understand in the US why

and how you deal with these school shootings.

Like why are there school shootings in the us?

And it was a really difficult thing.

We gave it to the principal from Wellesley school, I think

to answer that question to Jamie.

Yeah, but it was, I mean, they don't, they don't have those,

they don't have those concerns that,

that we do around safety here.

And it goes to the culture, I think,

and it goes to their belief system.

So that was a fascinating thing on the right,

you can see one of the, one of the upper level schools

that had an art focus.

And so there's beautiful art everywhere in that school.

And it was wonderful to see kids who,

and kids get a, get a choice for the most part of

where they want to go and what theme they wanna do.

So if they have that passion already,

they enter those schools and,

and can create some amazing things

along with their academic work.

So some key takeaways, right?

The, the power of a really calm, clean learning environment

and how much that impacts kids' sense of self

and kids' self-worth, right?

You could see how much the kids felt ownership over their

environments, the impact of high trust between parents,

kids in school, and how much that governed everything there.

The power of focusing on executive functioning

and life skills really early.

I remember Karen, who, who isn't here with us right now,

but she, she said, I just came away reaffirmed.

If I can get them to read, write,

and manage themselves,

then they will learn everything else when they leave me.

And we say, yes, that is true.

And the idea that there's no dead ends, the integration,

the early learning of second

and third languages, they're heavily centralized system.

And interestingly enough that if you took Massachusetts,

which is a similar size to Finland, and you took just us

and we compared ourselves against Finland,

we would be on par.

Massachusetts is doing something right,

even if the whole data

for the United States doesn't look great compared

to Finland, we in Massachusetts are doing

something that's worth noting. So yeah,

Back in, I think it was

Calming

2014, 15, it sounds about right.

They did a piece, did a study

where they actually assessed certain kids in the US

and different levels and,

and Natick actually participated in, in these PISA tests

for some of our kids, as did

other districts in Massachusetts.

And our scores definitely rivaled, which was impressive.

So we've been much better from there since. So that's great.

Yeah.

So then we,

we talked a lot about what's in our locus of control.

So they're a very different society than we are.

And so what is within our locus of control here

that we could transfer?

And so the idea of a consistent focus on building trust

within our sphere of influence within our schools,

within our district is something that we can aspire

to regularly, even if it's not the culture

of the whole world around us.

We talked about multidisciplinary learning in earlier grades

and, and and increasing collaboration across disciplines

at the secondary level.

We talked about world language earlier

and how our profile of a graduate really

looks a lot like those transversal

and how if we were to be able to sort of connect them

to standards that exist from dsi, would we be able

to have something similar?

So we started to flush out some of those ideas.

And also just this idea of how of kids rising to the,

I increased autonomy

and agency, which is part of what UDL espouses in terms of

how that type of learning is,

is geared more genic learning for kids. So

Some self-determination, right?

Yes.

So social emotionally, obviously, you know,

shared leadership to support everything in school for kids,

the more opportunity for agency

and the self-determination as we discussed,

we have been working on this, right.

And something to continue to work on.

But we saw there that

executive functioning was supported everywhere.

Especially the transportation thing blew me away.

Just kids jumping on the, on the local trains.

And I mean I, we would never, never see

that here the way it was there.

And at young, young ages, like they did some of 'em travel

On their own up to hour to get to school.

Yeah,

That's wild.

And there is no, there are no school buses.

I don't know if we said that. Did we say that? Yeah.

Buses, there are no school buses, buses, no transportation.

So it's either you're biking to school,

you're jumping on the local rail train, adding vocational

and life skills even earlier to support the whole child.

Normalizing the vocational training

as a career pathway, right?

I mean there were days and,

and not so much, so many more I think,

but there were days when vocational was

kind of a bad word, right?

And I think we've gotten way past that

and the, the vocational schools have increased their rigor

and, and kids are very successful in both the vocational

portions and the academic portions when they're there.

Reduced distractions and the sensory input.

I mean I think that just goes

to the, the environment itself.

I mean I think it might be a,

a difficult start if we ask all the kids

to take the shoes off when they came into school.

We could try and I love the investing,

the idea there were no dead ends.

Definitely. Can I just say too,

and this would be a really cool opportunity,

now you can do this if you want, if you want to,

and this would be a conversation with the aem

and I was talking to you a little about this today,

but wouldn't it be really neat to pilot a, you know, three

to four year pilot where we took three

to four educators in their classroom, said, Hey listen,

we're not gonna evaluate you for three to four years

and we're gonna have some kind of an agreement

and let's see what those results look like afterwards.

You know, you create the instruction, you be you.

And let's see what that, what that kind

of comes out at the end.

Just a thought process that might be deep.

Yeah. And just finally thank you.

I mean this was really a life changing experience.

I'll say for me as a new principal to be with a large group

of secondary principals from the area,

it was really a profound professional learning experience

and really helped me think a lot about

what education can look like if you sort of

for forego all the things you think of

as the norm and the necessary. So

It was a lovely trip and I really

appreciate you sending me along.

I know Karen really appreciates it well

and she wish she could be here tonight,

but thank you very much.

I think if Karen was here, she might say she was struck

by the way they scheduled.

So in the elementary especially, there'll be instruction,

but there's built in basically playtime

all throughout the day.

And so that, that she appreciated that.

The other is just a comment about the geopolitical climate.

We just, we arrived on ten seven

and it was interesting to be away from here while

that was happening, but also to see how that news was,

I don't know, processed over there.

So it's, it's probably significant to note that both Finland

and Estonia, their independence really wasn't

until like 19 17, 19 20.

They are new countries formerly dominated by Russia.

And so their allegiance to self-determination

is just really profound.

And the just being able to take care of one another,

but really appreciating being in an environment in peace

and what that means.

The other thing that might be interesting is

that Finland is 70% Lutheran.

And so it's very homogenous in terms of the primary religion

and who is part of the,

but Estonia is decidedly they categorize,

they'll say this percent is agnostic,

this percent is areligious.

Pretty much like subcategories I didn't really ever think

about about not being religious.

So the but their dedication to, to

outcomes through education kind of transcends.

They're very different perspective on religion.

And so then next trip this fall

I'm looking at going to Ireland.

This was was before the conflict resolution

that's now happening in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

But the, the interest in going

to Ireland is really about how they teach reading.

So the decision to go to Ireland actually was chosen

before this latest debate across the country.

Actually Ireland has been adhering

to a more phonics based instruction

while England was adhering to a more balanced literacy.

So it's interesting how it's come out.

Their PISA scores were strong

and the last PISA score

around Ireland finished second and in ELA.

So anyway, I hope Native will send educators to Arla maybe.

And I was really glad that that, that you were able

to send Tim and Karen and Joseph up.

You have any questions for us? Cool.

Thanks for going and learning

so much and bringing all that back.

You're welcome.

Any questions from the committee?

Yeah, course Seth.

So I just, I mean that was really fascinating

and thank you so much for sharing that with us.

And I guess I just have to give a little plug

for like the little mini experiment at Lilja

where you do have looping and a lot of the,

and having had a child who went through that with Ms.

McEnany, you know, a lot

of the experiences you described in elementary school are

things that happened in that, in that classroom

and it really did have a profound effect on,

and I had a little control group

of two kids who didn't do that.

So, you know, you could really see

how just their very small tweaks.

So I, I love the idea of doing more, you know, sort

of pilots of different aspects of this

that we could easily implement. So exciting

For people that don't know what looping is,

it's having the teacher, the same

teacher more than one year.

It's, it is very powerful experience for those

who are able to do it.

I think Brookline and their K to eights does

that quite a bit where they'll have one teacher

for like first grade

and then the teacher follows 'em

into second and then goes back.

I, I actually had the opportunity to loop with ninth

and 10th graders in science.

So biology and chemistry

and I, I can say that when you start the second year,

you just hit the ground running 'cause you know them and,

and there's such a high level of trust

and knowing students you really take personalized learning

to another level when you have a second year.

Yeah. Ms. Brunell,

Well first I was wondering

if school committee members could

Go next year,

But one thing

that this makes me really excited about our next strategic

plan, because it strikes me

that your values are then put forth in actual decisions

that are made for the school.

So even like what you shared about like the, the, not the,

you know, the silverware and the plates like sustainability

all through that, or students coming with shoes off

just to create like a more homelike feel not,

and I can see that as like a buzzword in like a,

an article like, you know, students

with shoes off in school, right?

But if you, if you dig underneath it, it's like, what, what,

what's the why there and what is it?

How does it impact students?

So I really appreciated this presentation.

I'll be honest, when I saw 32 slides, I was like,

oh gosh, 32 slides.

But talk fast.

No, I really, I'm fascinated by this

and I really appreciate the thought to sort of

get out of our own comfort zone

and for you to think about education

in a totally different way,

Honey should mention.

So the first trip I went to Helsinki in 2013,

Dorothy Presser joined us

and at that time she was on the school committee.

Oh, I wanna say Linfield, is that right? Yes.

I'm just volunteering.

Should we vote now?

Sometimes legislators have come with us

and so Alice Pech was on that first trip in 2013

and you see Jessie's work on early childhood

and it really is really from her bringing that to, to Desi

and trying to make that happen.

Yeah. I

Have a super quick comment and you might,

maybe you covered this when I had to step out,

but I was just curious about the length of the school day.

Did you say anything about that? Is it longer?

Did I miss that? I have a shorter

Day and less homework.

Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah,

like I was just wondering about the commutes

and I, you said some people, the kids travel an hour.

I'm like, are they there from nine to four?

Are they there a short amount

of time? Interesting. No, they're not

Staying for after school sports.

Well, and in, in some cases they set their schedule even

at the younger levels, right?

So they'll come in and they'll, they'll set their schedule

to go to this class and then they'll have a break in the

middle and they could even go home in that time.

I think it's almost like a free period.

Oh cases. Oh, for lunch maybe? Yeah.

If they can and they'll set their schedule based

on what they, what they need.

Hmm. Interesting. Well if there's anything,

the second thing would be if there's anything the school

committee can do to continue to support this sort of work,

happy to consider it.

'cause it feels like it was very exciting for you

and fulfilling professional.

Yeah. Professionally.

So I would be happy to continue

to support that type of work.

Great. Yeah, I'll just echo that

because I didn't get to go to Finland

but did get to travel to Kennedy Middle School

when we're doing the superintendent site

visits and the high school.

But I was just very impressed with what we have

and including, you know, some of the innovations

that were built into Kennedy

and to a certain extent to the high school.

You know, we might be building a new elementary school soon.

So thinking not just, and it's

not just about the physical space.

The physical space was one of the things in, in, in some

of the pictures, the common space.

That was something I noticed at actually Kennedy was kids

working together outside

of the classroom in this really nice open space.

The kind of similar to, to your picture you had,

but bringing these ideas, I mean I think that's

how Kennedy was designed, right?

People going out to other countries, seeing

what education can be

and doing a nice job of saying what is transferrable?

What is not? 'cause we're not Finland.

We, we won't be Finland ever, right?

We don't wanna be Finland.

If we wanna be Finland, we'd go to Finland, right?

But what are things that are working that are transferrable?

I like the fact that there's kind

of like an MTSS thing going on in Finland, the three tiers

and the child study team.

It looks like there's something similar to that.

So I don't know who came up with it first, we or them,

but it's not competition.

What I, what I, what was also wondering about is,

is your thoughts about trust.

You said trust is such a huge theme.

How do you like having come from there and back here?

What are some, any ideas of how you build trust and, and

and like you said, trust in all relationships, right?

It's students and teachers.

Teachers, students, teachers and teachers.

Teachers and administrators.

It, it's such a huge question, right?

And I think about, you know,

in certain ways you build trust one person at a time, right?

And so I think that, and then there

and yet there's also ways that systems provide trust.

I think for, I think in the country, right?

Finland creates trust by this idea

that the government takes care of everybody.

Everybody has a pension, everybody has a place to live.

Every, we didn't, we I think saw one homeless person

the entire time we were there.

And that's how they build trust.

And so then people give back to that group thought, right?

I think here trust looks like a lot of communication.

It looks like people really believing

that you care about their kids

and want what's in their kids' best interest.

And that even if they don't agree with how you're doing it,

they understand why.

And I, I think it's something that

you always have to work on.

I think this country is built differently than Finland in

terms of sort of self autonomy

and the idea of entrepreneurship

and the individual is really resonant in,

in America it's part of our story.

It's part of our national story, right?

And so I think within that, I think that trust might be sort

of implicit there and it has to be earned here.

And so, you know, part of my entry process,

which you guys are gonna get sick of hearing from me,

so I have to do that next, but is a lot about

how do you build trust by listening to people

and reflecting back at them what you're hearing. But

I would also say, you know, if you're a, a parent

and a staff member, a teacher trust is built

by when your kid goes into school and they're not bullied

and they feel safe.

And I think here we have too many incidents of, of safety

and bullying that occur that might break trust

between parents and, and staff members and teachers.

Not that, you know, it's just kind of a nature

of where of where it is.

So kids go to school and they feel safe

and parents have no reason to question

that on a daily basis.

And I think with the, with the staff

and the administration, you know,

I mean there have been too many times, at least in the,

we'll just say in the US not just in in Natick where,

you know, staff might be evaluated in a way that's not fair

and not appropriate and you know, and

and evaluated based on high stake testing, right?

And all these kind of things that are, that, that, you know,

that aren't, aren't necessarily fair

and they don't have that issue there at all.

So there's those components as well.

I think Finland didn't really start from this place.

The, what you see in Finland is a result

of a 40 year educational reform.

Their, their results actually were very poor

and they as a country decided to get to, to come together

and develop educational policy reform for

what they feel they don't, they don't have big families.

So they really felt that the investment in the education

of the youth was just fundamental to the,

to the future of the country.

But also such a, they saw it as such a important asset

that they wanted to all come together to care about.

So yeah, 40 years of, of reform and doing that.

But Finland has set up a model which

it would probably do well for

other countries to think about.

They decided to make their educational policies apolitical.

They made a commitment that this is our sustainable plan

for five years, no matter who's in power.

We are committed to this.

So interestingly Estonia has taken that to the next level

'cause they, they are doing 10 year plans.

So they're educational,

they have like a 10 year long range plan.

If you think about in our country how,

depending on who's president,

how our educational policies have shifted.

So I, I would say that Finland should, should be noted for

making educational policy apolitical. Yeah.

And long term.

Yeah. Yeah.

Great. Well thank you so much.

This is such a fascinating presentation.

I'm gonna leave this here with you. Oh

Okay great help.

So we were trying to consolidate time. Yeah.

To make it convenient for Josepha.

So the first one was supposed

to be student high school global travel

and you have the Helsinki tale

and now Josea is here to talk to you about the findings

of her entry plan.

Alright, so, so I wanted to start out

and just talk through a little bit

about the entry plan process.

I'm guessing that most of you in this room know

what entry plans are,

but I'm guessing there may be people listening

who don't necessarily.

So for my entry plan, the purpose is really, you know,

anytime there's a transition it's a natural time

for reflection for a community.

So to give people time to do that, to, for me

to fully understand the culture's values, goals

and traditions that are inherent in the school community

already to build trusting collaborative relationships

where I start by listening

and making sure I really hear people's lived experiences

and the environment already

to do a deep dive into structures, policies

and decision making procedures so that I know

what people are accustomed to.

And then to build a comprehensive picture about

what the strengths and areas for growth are so

that we can build a school improvement plan

that works towards maintaining what's working

and addressing things that we want to change

for the betterment of the school.

So this was sort of my overall visual of exactly

how I was gonna do that.

Which we are at the end of now.

And I'll go through a little bit about

what each stage of that looked like.

But roughly it was

to visit I did probably a little bit more visiting than I

might have ordinarily given that the high school principal

and Anna were both leaving

and they were both such visible presences in the district

for a while that I felt like the high school staff needed

to see me a little bit more before they left for the summer.

And so I went to eighth grade step up night,

I spent days shadowing the deans and vice principals in May.

I went and presented the entry plan

to the leadership meeting in May

to make sure they understood

what it would be before they left.

And then also went to the last faculty meeting of the year

and presented it in June so that people knew who I was

and they'd seen me once outside of the interview process

before the summer and knew they could come

and talk to me in the summer if they wanted to.

And they could also choose to wait

until the fall if that was what was better.

Then during the summer I did one-on-one meetings

with everyone on our leadership team

and in our admin team as well as some of the central office.

And then opened it up to any staff

and parents who wanted to be part of that.

We did a deep dive into the data as as customary here

for State of the Union and then did a, a big survey push

for staff at that June faculty meeting.

I introduced it and then for families it was in August

and then for students it was when they came back.

And then the opening of school was really me having all

of my firsts along with the kids.

And so this ninth grade class is,

you know, we're freshmen together.

I kept telling them that and so got to meet the new staff

and said to them I was gonna

that they should just ask Zach Galvin all the questions

'cause he knew all the answers and I didn't yet.

But it was great just to have

live people and get to see people.

After doing all this learning about Natick in the fall,

we had just gotten that grant for the inclusive academy.

So that was really one of the first things was really

getting up to speed on instruction so

that we could be active in that implementation process.

And I just sort of did a deep dive into as many classrooms

and PLCs and clubs and activities as I could

and then started meeting with groups of kids

and families back to school night.

I also put out a survey for parents if they wanted

to sign up to meet one-on-one or in groups

or if they just wanted to leave me a note.

And so some people took advantage of

that if they had particular things they wanted

to talk about after that too.

So there was sort of a second round

with families at that point.

So chief takeaways from that process,

first in terms of academics, one of the first questions,

do your kids feel or do you feel appropriately challenged?

And largely they do.

I'm always curious about the people who are sort of in

that ambivalent middle, whether it means

I'm not appropriately challenged and that it's too much

or whether it's too little.

But there is a large group who definitely feel around 70%

in both parents and students

that they are appropriately challenged.

Again, a lot of these graphs look very similar.

So I'm again always curious if it's the same people in

that group three, but a lot

of folks are feel really largely confident

that their kids are prepared for post-secondary life

and fewer than 10% said that they weren't confident at all.

So that was actually very, very heartening.

Kids largely feel like academic help is

available if they need it.

So this was a student response

and so, so that was also positive to see academically

in terms of belonging.

That question about trusted adult always comes up

when we talk about belonging.

And I was interested whether the parents' perception

of whether the kids had trusted adults was the same

as the student perception and it largely was.

So the parent data tracks right along with the student data

that we probably have about, you know, 65 to 70%

of our kids feeling like yes I can identify that person.

And then a smaller group that's sort of in the,

in the middle where they aren't sure

and then groups that are pretty sure

that they don't have a trusted adult, which is is always

concerning and we wanna make sure we can identify

who those kids are and get them support.

And with a few of them they gave me their names in the

survey so I reached out to them afterwards

or found their guidance counselors and we went

and talked to them about what it was in particular

that was creating that barrier

for them for belonging.

I was curious about how families felt,

whether they felt a sense of belonging

to the school in addition to students.

'cause I think sometimes a family sense

of belonging can be tied to whether

or not their kid feels like they belong or

and also what activities that kid does.

If it's a, the type of activity

where there's like a game every weekend,

then you're gonna see the same people over and over.

But if not then you might not feel

as integrated into the school.

And so it was interesting to see that it was the same sort

of trajectory for staff, for caregivers and for students.

So, but there was I think a more notable one

to two area there than there had been

in some of the other graphs.

And so again, sort of wondering a little bit more about

who those folks are feeling cared for by staff.

So this one was, was pretty heartening that a large number,

a large percentage of kids feel like staff generally do care

about them as a person greater than 75%,

which is a pretty good margin there.

And then the last question which I ask the kids is do you

have at least one close friend at school?

And almost 90% of them said yes firmly

and it's less than 5%

that are saying either no or I'm not sure.

Which again, I thought was like a pretty good statistic.

I don't know what the data would look like in other schools,

but that actually gave me, that's a pretty protective factor

for kids in their mental health.

So really positive to see.

So then the interviews

and the open-ended questions, I tried

to synthesize those into some themes.

Oh sorry, two more quick graphs. The teachers love the PLCs.

They over and over again said that it was like one

of the things that kept them in NAIC in the interviews

and they're a really, really

important part of their practice.

And you can kind of see this on their,

the graph too and communication.

The caregivers and the staff felt similarly,

the graphs were identical, which I also think is interesting

'cause they received two different communication streams.

So with a large portion saying like yes it's effective.

And then a smaller group in the middle

and trailing off at the end.

I'll talk a little more about communication later

but communication meant a lot of different things

to a lot of different people.

And so when some folks said yeah the communication is

effective, it meant something very different

from somebody else saying it.

And that came through in their comments.

So what's going well again, the faculty, they love the PLCs,

they love the, I think for faculty social emotionally it's

very protective that they feel like they have a sense

of belonging with colleagues that's regular and predictable

and that it also does impact the kind of teaching

that they are doing 'cause they have regular collaboration.

That kind of team time is really unusual in schools.

And I think for high school staff in particular, it was just

for me coming in it was eye-opening to see how much having

that time could impact teaching and learning.

So that was really neat. They generally feel supported

by administration, which you don't always hear.

And that was actually very positive to hear as well.

All three groups mentioned the diversity of opportunity.

So parents, students

and staff that they felt really proud of

how many extracurriculars and athletic teams

and the wide variety of courses

that challenge kids in different ways.

They also pretty universally talked about the facilities

and how beautiful the high school is

and how many innovative spaces there are.

And staff feel like they have the resources they need like

when they need materials, when they need supplies.

When in a lot of those open-ended conversations

and I could see it in the office

that when people came down they could get their needs met

and go back to doing teaching

and learning, which was notable positive.

The strong feel of the community is also really evident.

The number of people who go to Nat Chii

and their parents went to Nat Chii or live here

and teach here or work here

and their kids go to one of the elementary schools.

That type of community pride

and investment I think is one of those immeasurable factors

that impact school life to a degree that

you can't overstate.

And so it does create a very strong sense of pride

among students, faculty, and the community at large.

The staff like and respect each other

and they are really invested in the school success.

And I think that a lot of that does come

from that community feel.

'cause so many of their colleagues are invested,

they can't help but feel invested the staff like

and appreciate the kids, which all

of us would hope is a no brainer

but isn't, that isn't true everywhere.

And they really do like

and appreciate the kids they, when I talked about positives,

almost everyone said the kids, which was really fun to hear.

The kids generally feel like it is a welcoming and accepting

and inclusive environment.

I will talk a little more about that later,

but it's, it's not everyone that feels that way

but largely they do.

There is a dedicated highly qualified faculty,

a dedicated invested parent community.

The vast majority of kids really do feel like the school

cares about them and most

of them have an adult they can trust other positive factors.

Students and caregivers feel challenged.

They also talked about the fact that there's a mix of kids.

There isn't just one kind of kid at Nat High

and that they appreciated that as part of their,

their students' experience.

Parents mentioned that that kids who advocate

for themselves find what they need.

The kids love priv

and that they get a little sense of freedom there

and the majority of caregivers feel like they are prepared

for what they want to do next areas for growth.

So the communication piece,

that communication meant something different to everybody.

So for some people it meant the website

that they just couldn't find what they needed when they went

to the website to find it.

And so I heard that sort of in different sort

of little detail forms from people like, well I went

for this form or I couldn't find that form or,

and it was sort of like the technology not rising up

to meet them when they needed a thing.

For some folks it was about the newsletter

and how the newsletter goes out and when it goes out

and what format it takes

and whether it's linked or OneStream.

For some folks it was making sure they get the same info

that their kids have because they'll feel like stuff

isn't happening and it's

that their kids knew and they didn't.

And so they kept saying over

and over, please don't assume my child tells me anything.

We wanna know what they know when they know it.

And so I talked a little bit to guidance about that

'cause they do a lot in guidance stem so much

with the students when they have that term of guidance stem

and we really, you know,

in in secondary ed we talk a lot about the gradual

release of responsibility.

How we get kids when they are basically like, you know,

a touch older than eighth grade.

They're middle schoolers when they enter

and when they leave us, they're going to be adults

that can function ideally on their own in the world

and how big a gap that is

to take them from point A to point B.

And so trying to figure out what that balance is.

But we definitely heard a lot from parents as I was going

through the data around I need to know what my kid knows.

And then for some folks it meant like my kid was struggling

and I didn't know till it was too late.

And so I think for when people say like communication,

I think they mean all of those things.

And then for staff, when they say communication,

they wanna know about things that are happening

with their kids that they're teaching earlier.

If there's something personal

or if there's a major event that happens in school

with a particular child that they want to know earlier.

So in terms of belonging, there's a lot

that's working really well in terms of belonging.

But there are some notable places

where people said they would like more support

and a greater need

for mental health support is one of those places.

They said that we could do more

to educate students in preventing microaggressions,

especially related to race and antisemitism.

Some caregivers said they wanted more school-wide activities

in the earlier grades some caregivers expressed concern

that kids who are quiet or not exceptional can get lost

and can feel unseen.

And the staff wanted more social gatherings.

So we now have a functioning fund squad

that is planning things.

So that's very exciting.

A few other factors, some caregivers said they would like

more parent support with post-secondary planning.

I think some of that when I was hearing them

and then matching it to what I was seeing in guidance has

to do with the communication piece that it may be

that their kids are getting that information

but it's not translating to them.

And how we can triangulate

that communication stream I think

is gonna be important there.

Some kids said they wanted school to start later

and I did this survey right after we got the phone tree.

So they all told me they wanted their phones back,

but they're not still telling me that now, which is good.

And again, this sort of relates right back to

what we were talking about with Finland, but soft skills.

So both staff

and families mentioned

that their kids just need more support now in terms

of life skills, conflict resolution, financial literacy,

executive functioning, what does it mean

to know how to study?

And some parents put went so far as

to say you should have a mandatory class

that teaches those things.

And I think that there are some, there is another school

of thought that says we should integrate

and weave them through curriculum as kids are learning.

And I don't know if it has to be an either or,

but it was definitely something that came up.

And then behavior.

So it was notable how much behaviors came up,

but that they were different for each cohort

that the themes were really different.

So for staff it's kids wandering through the hall

or cell phones or respect when I intervene with a kid

or kids who aren't coming to school as much.

But for caregivers it was academic integrity

and possible incidents of bias.

And for kids it was bullying.

So the fact that those three didn't line up was really

intriguing to me that the staff aren't seeing the same thing

that the kids are and the kids aren't seeing the same thing

that the caregivers are seeing.

And so why is that

and what are we not seeing that is resonant for each other.

And then everybody said people vape in the bathroom,

which we've been doing a lot of work on, a lot

of partnership with Natick 180

around the potential solutions there.

And then also working with the vape detectors now

and trying to, we have staff now volunteering to do some of

that work in the hall during their, during their duty time

and making some inroads there already, which is good.

So summarizing this is an amazing school with a lot

of really good resources and offerings.

There's a highly dedicated qualified staff who are invested.

Many students and families feel a strong sense

of belonging and some may not.

There is support available, but not all kids access it

or know how to access it or maybe can access it.

We have a really explicit goal of being inclusive

and we still have some work to do to realize that

when I asked people what they needed from me,

they pretty uniformly said to be kind,

transparent and follow through.

We still need to work on soft skills and behaviors,

but we have to identify which behaviors I think are the most

salient to start with.

That mental health substance use

and vaping are issues for our kids

and need some attention

that communication practices generally serve folks.

But there are notable areas we could address

and that some caregivers need more support on the

post-secondary process.

And then I just wanted to end

by saying thank you for the warm welcome.

It's been really nice to actually get to know some

of you over the course of the last six months, especially

with the superintendent process.

And I've just been loving getting

to lead this amazing school.

So

Thank you so much for coming

and for not coming

to here tonight, but also coming here today.

I can thank you for presentation Ms. Gu.

Thank you. This is really interesting information. Yeah.

So I had a couple of questions. Sure.

So some of the, the things

that you've noticed like say say the vaping

and the substance abuse

and then like the, the stuff about studying

and sort of executive function functioning.

How much of that do you think I maybe this is,

this is a too difficult too a question

without an answer, just tell me that.

Yeah. But do you know if that's emergent at Natick high

or if that's being carried over

from, you know, middle school?

Oh, that's a tough question around onset, right?

I know they do Burt in middle school and in high school,

but we also aren't allowed to track

that data internally, right?

'cause that's supposed to be anonymous.

Kids also don't always volunteer that information.

And so, I mean I have some anecdotal stories from different

people, but I wouldn't wanna speak on themes without having

more info from the middle schools. Okay.

Yeah, no, no, fair enough. Thank you. Yeah.

Any other questions? Yeah, Mr. Brand,

I don't have a question.

I have a comment. Thank you for the presentation.

It's great. I just want to Share

feedback that I get as a parent.

Yeah. Of two high school students,

not from generally, not from my own kids,

but as a credit to you,

the communication in particular.

And I'm just re-looking at the, that slide, slide 21.

Every time you send one of those emails, like a newsletter

that is about something that is not great to hear about.

I will. And I, again, only speaking for myself,

I will regularly get texts from friends of mine.

Yeah. Unsolicited.

Did you see the email from the principal of the high school

and complimenting how well written it is.

Thank you. And how they feel really good

and informed from getting those

emails that are I'm sure, sure.

Not easy to write and not always easy to read.

So I just wanted to share. Thank you.

An appreciation as a parent over the last couple of years,

I've watched my niece, both of my daughters

and my nephew start and make their way through high school.

And so it's just nice to hear when you don't,

like I'm not going around town asking people, Hey,

what do you think of these emails?

And people are making a choice to like reach out.

And so I think you're doing a really great job. Thank you.

In a big, in in, in your first year.

And I look forward, I have a couple more years in the,

in the building, so let's keep it up. Alright,

Let's keep it up.

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

It's hard to know sometimes how some of that gets received,

but thank you.

Did. Yeah. Yeah.

So I appreciated all that you did to try to get a sense

of the community and all the meetings and the surveys and,

and it was really, it was really clear that you were trying

to get a sense of what was happening, what are the things

that are good and what are the things

that we could improve upon?

What are the things that struck me that sort of crystallized

One of the the confusions I've been having is

when you talked about guidance,

because I've been feeling like, so in the newsletter

I will, they they have a very large

and informative newsletter.

You have to click in your newsletter to get to it. Yes.

And I didn't start clicking for like a while. Yes.

And then I started clicking

and I thought, oh my God, there's all this information.

So that's interesting to me that you say that

because I also don't hear anything about

what happens in guidance stem.

So that piece about making sure that families are either

right, getting a separate newsletter about guidance.

'cause really important stuff starts to happen

as they get up in the years.

But, and then maybe figuring out like

what is actually happening in guidance m So

that really struck me as something

that would be really important.

I feel like in from guidance, there's just a lot of videos

too, or reliance on virtual things.

And I, I I also wonder if maybe there's like a deeper

connection that could be created by having,

I know videos are great and,

and that creates a situation where everyone can access them.

But then are there in person things that might also

be a part of connecting people

to what's happening in guidance.

So, and then, I mean, I have to ask like

how this is now a separate topic.

Yes. That's my guidance piece.

Did did kids really say that about like a later start time?

Yes. So did they, that was in a,

in the survey or

Some of them met in the open-ended areas?

A few, some of them mentioned it.

There was enough of them that I felt

like I should put it as a theme.

It's fascinating. Okay. Well thank you. I appreciate that.

I will continue on my mission. All right,

Mr.

Brune,

Thank you for this.

Yeah. I'm so glad that you're here

and that you're finding a welcome here.

I know many of us hope that you feel welcome for many years.

So just real quick, what I've noticed just in my time here

on the school committee, that some

of our surveys at the high school were not always, well

there weren't great numbers on them.

So I was wondering, did you, did you feel like these

are representative of the 1600 kids?

It's a great question. 'cause you always

wanna look at that end, right?

How many are you actually getting?

So I was trying to decide whether I should ask a group

of teachers to have all the kids do the survey.

And I decided that doing that felt really forced

and that it might not have the same welcoming effect.

So I did have, I did sort of blast them a whole bunch

of times and I got about 250 kids when I looked through,

when I spot checked some of the names.

And when I spot checked some of the demographics,

it did cover a wide group.

There's no way for me to know if it was a representative

sample because I couldn't,

the names weren't attached to all of 'em.

So I, I don't know if that fully answers your question, but

Yeah, no, that's helpful and I Yeah, I appreciate that.

But, and especially

because you're saying that it, you know, it might be a,

a broad sample.

Yeah. A lot of these slides I saw from the

student perspective, it's like a 70 30 split, interestingly.

Yes. Yes. So 30%

of our high school is still 500 kids, right?

Yes. And so that's,

and I appreciated that you are not ignoring that number

that while there's se you know,

70% might feel like they are grooving

and they are, you know, they're on track

and feel appreciated

and feel like Nat High School is their, is their place.

You know, I think we all have work to do to make sure that

that number continues to go up.

Yeah.

It's the only number that matters if it's your kid. Right.

And so I think that that's, you know, I think

that the data tells us that a lot of systems work,

but it doesn't tell us the story of every child.

And I think that that's part of what you're saying too.

Yeah.

And I just like, one, one comment is, my hope not only

as a school committee member, but just

as a community member here in Natick, is that there is

some sort of consistency of experience

for our students at the high school

because I have found that there are kids that thrive

and then there are kids that

really, really struggle.

And that divide between the thriving

and the ones that are struggling so deeply is, you know,

it's just a, it's a loss for all of us

and it's a hardship on everyone.

And so I think that, I hope that those resources, we,

we can continue to bring resources

to students who are not thriving.

And I, at one point, I think I heard some mention

of us talking about trying to make the high school sort

of a, like a smaller experience.

I don't know how that will play out.

I I don't have any diagnostic

or, you know, prescriptive ideas for that.

But I, I do think of like study halls

where there's 80 kids in a study hall.

I would love to see some of that change.

Yeah. I think you're not alone in that.

I think if there was a way

to get kids into classrooms physically for study hall,

we would, you know, I think

after my interview process,

I spoke a lot about the house system

and how much, how every high school I have worked at

that is this size has some type of house structure

to make the bigger school feel smaller.

And that Natick, I don't think was this big

and then became this big.

And so it isn't an integrated part of the community.

And so what I've said to folks who have asked me,

alright, great, you have a job here.

Are you gonna put a house system in our high school?

Is that I needed to really look at

what the cost benefit would be

and if having such a system would fix the

actual needs we have.

And so if we were to look at doing that,

there would be some trade-offs

and there would be some things to really investigate.

But that is one way to make a big school feel smaller.

And just one last comment,

and maybe that's related to that.

The idea of like a student having a trusted adult I think is

obviously paramount.

But now that I, I am,

and this now I'm speaking mostly as a parent, now

that I'm three kids into the high school, there's a part

of me that wishes that there was a, a trusted adult

for the family as well.

Yeah. Because our kids, each one of my kids have connected

with different teachers

or have been different guidance counselors.

I, again, maybe this is anecdotal, this is anecdotal, I,

I wonder how many other people feel this way.

But you really like start to establish communication,

especially with a guidance counselor.

And then unfortunately in my experience, that has changed.

And so then you're built as a family,

you're also building a whole new relationship in

a very large high school.

Yeah, I do.

But I, you know, I heard recently that there were

so many PE parents that came to the eighth grade orienta

or the ninth grade orientation that you had to change rooms.

That was unbelievable.

What a great problem to have.

Right? Oh my gosh. So we have these parents that want,

they want to want connect connection.

So thank you. Yeah.

Good. Thanks. So a couple of things. So thank you again.

It's a great presentation. And not only the presentation,

but all the work that went to get this information.

It's just amazing.

One of the things that struck me is the one specific bullet.

It's students who advocate find what they need, which goes

to the self-determination issue.

Yes. That it, it doesn't say

all students get what they need.

Correct. It's those who advocate for what they need,

which connects to the soft skills, the, you know,

besides conflict resolution, financial literacy,

but it's also the self-advocacy.

And I'm just curious your thoughts about, you know,

are you thinking about ways of integrating, thinking about

how to build that kind

of self-determination advocacy skills?

'cause I think to Ms. Bruno's point might even close

that gap between those who succeed

and those who thrive, those who struggle.

If everyone can advocate for what they need

and they forget what they need.

Yeah, it's a great question.

And so I think that part of, you know, I have to give credit

to Sue Baloni for doing this Inclusive Academy grant.

She connected with me in April before I started,

and she said, apply for this grant for the high school.

Are you okay with that? And I was like, I'm going

to trust and say yes.

But it, it is a really wonderful opportunity.

I think Universal Design for Learning

or UDL really is the way to create learners who understand

what they need as learners

and can then advocate for

using those strategies in myriad settings

and to give kids some choice

and voice in terms of their learning.

And so virtually all

of our professional development this year has been focused

on UDL strategies, some at the departmental level

and some at the school level.

And so we're gonna be continuing to do a deep dive into

that over the next two

and a half years as we're part of that grant.

And you know, sometimes educators say

that they don't like pd that is one-offs.

And now we've done so much UDL, they're like,

are we moving on from UDL?

And I don't think we ever fully will ever get everybody,

you know, exactly in a UDL mindset.

But I do think that we are moving closer and closer to more

and more staff really understanding what it means

to give choice and voice.

And I think once kids are used to having that, they can

transfer it to other areas.

But it is definitely a process of how do you do

that in a classroom where there are myriad diverse needs.

And so we're, we're actively working on it. Yeah.

Yeah. Great. I'm glad that you're part of that academy.

Any other questions or comments?

Well, thank you so much of for coming

and doing two presentations of Yes.

Yeah. I just, I wanna say till you probably,

you may have understood this,

but having josepha blockers,

your high school principal is a, is a very coveted asset.

Thank you. Yeah. So coming to Natick

and hearing that Josepha was here, I heard from

so many people I've been trying to convince Josepha

to be a principal forever.

So kudos to Anna Nolan

and to Natick for being able to capture josepha.

Oh, thank you. It's been a privilege

and an honor for me always to work with someone who is

first in their first time experiencing their position.

So it's always an honor

and privilege to work with someone who's newly

coming to that role.

But it's been amazing. Thank you.

Working with Josepha, she has,

she has extraordinary instincts.

So, and, and also you talked about the communication,

whether Josepha is communicating to caregivers,

to the faculty, or just as a member of any of our teams,

somehow Josepha always holds

at her core when she's communicating

that there is a child. Yeah,

Thank

You.

There is a child in that is the root of the work

that we're doing, or the root

of whatever dilemma has been created.

So this is, so yes, you are lucky that you,

you, you captured Josepha here.

Thank you. There's something else I wanted

to say about your being here.

Oh my goodness. Anyway, it's, it's, I'll think

of it later, but it's been such a privilege honor to work

with someone new, but also someone like Josepha

and I, I she's completely novice

and we learn so much from her.

Yeah. So she extends our thinking in different

ways, just right.

Vertical, horizontal, every which way.

So it's been really wonderful to learn and work with Joseph

and support her in this.

So it's been, oh, I know, this is what I wanted to say,

that, you know what, every high school principal, no matter

what is navigating unknown territory, adolescence,

and post pandemic, everyone is, so

to have someone doing it

for the first time is also extremely extraordinary.

But it's, you are right.

It's kids figuring out, wanting to be independent,

all the things that you wanna do.

And it's natural to them with not necessarily the practice

and skillset that they might have had before.

And it just looks a little messier at, at times.

And it's great to have josepha with the sensitivity and,

and I think she has the trust of her,

her coworkers in this endeavor.

But I really do feel that she has said that the,

that the staff at the high school are committed.

They're committed to all the kids in the building. Yes.

Every, every which way that they are.

So testament to Joseph

and also testament to everyone at the high school

Thank you for your kind words.

It's been a, a privilege to learn from you as well.

And you got me to go on this trip

to Finland when I wasn't sure I could handle it my second

month, and it was really transformational

and I will always be grateful for that