YRBS and Programmatic Updates (20 minutes)

Transcript (~49 min @ 45:43)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 45:37 Speaker 2: obviously this is a little bit of passing of the torch here with Miss Berman joining Miss Lambright on her final school committee presentation Steven and and Patty have been working with our SWAC which is our oh I'm gonna forget what that stands for but our health advice our wellness and advisory committee and looking at the data you're going to see the data presented a little bit differently this year but that's because we have some projects in the pipeline that they will speak about tonight so with that i'll

▶ 46:25 Speaker 3: turn it over to you steven patty and carrie excellent so thank you and yes this is a historic

▶ 46:34 Speaker 3: presentation. This is the only presentation that you will have that includes two assistant superintendents for pupil personnel services. So I am honored to present some information tonight and be joined by Stephen Fogarty and I welcome Carrie Berman as the assistant incoming. are you still we were like feeling we should wear t-shirts or something tonight but in training

▶ 47:08 Speaker 3: no you're you're it i'm in you're it okay um so i i'm but i really am privileged to have um carrie here presenting with us this evening um and if we could keep those microphones

▶ 47:21 Speaker 3: close that would be great thanks thank you okay um so we will i just wanted to frame it a little bit it for you this evening so really what we're providing to you this evening is kind of an update on where we are with the YRBS process as you know we participate with having the YRBS every two years within the district and this time and I think we look back when we head back to 1997 maybe we have many years of data around the YRBS and we've had an opportunity thanks to work through our School Wellness Advisory Council Jess Hoffman has offered to support us with some of her work with PhD students and they will be we're going to share with them some data so that we can get some a longitudinal kind of look at why our BS data over several years so this evening we wanted to provide you with some just a little bit of information because this is typically the time we do share information with you around YRBS. And we've chosen to kind of focus on mental health and provide you with some key information around that and also how we are using YRBS data to help drive the decisions that we do. addition there are some questions that we were able to include as part of the Middlesex League specific to COVID so we don't have longitudinal data on those so we thought we would share that information with you so we were able to add on a few questions specific to COVID and again thinking about topics that we have talked about here many times the impact on our students coming back to school and specifically how it's been impacting mental health so that that's our presentation for this evening with more information to come and we will also share with you the entire YRBS information thank you so the CDC

▶ 50:01 Speaker 1: continues to create the YRBS, the biennial administration of it. This particular version was created by John Snow Incorporated. It was administered by the Melrose Public Schools as well as the Middlesex League and it was funded entirely by the Lahey Clinic. Our 9th through 12th graders took the YRBS as well as our 6th, 7th and 8th graders in the middle school. The core of the survey is based on risk behaviors and protective behaviors. Alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, unintentional injuries, mental health, unhealthy dietary behaviors, sexual behavior, bullying and violence, and some of the more protective behaviors are trusted relationships, academics, sleep, screen time, physical activity and overall perception of these behaviors so again as I I talked we want

▶ 51:03 Speaker 3: to focus if you want to go to the next slide I wanted to focus our attention on some of the mental health questions that were posed

▶ 51:20 Speaker 3: can we go back? Maybe not. I'm not sure that I can. Okay. All right. Okay. So

▶ 51:41 Speaker 3: that's okay. One more. Perfect. Thank you so much. So again, focusing on mental health of our students. And so one of the issues that we have talked about here before is the idea of um suicide and i have said before you you know one student thinking about um harming themselves is one too many and so what are those efforts that we can put in place and the yrbs is a good consistent kind of check-in to see what that data is looking like and again we'll be providing that longitudinal kind of look at at this issue but the numbers um again in a particularly stressful time thinking about how students are considering committing suicide ever for middle school

▶ 52:52 Speaker 3: or over the past 12 months that 13 to 21 percent of melrose students did something to purposely hurt themselves without wanting to die but thinking about that is a significant piece and is a a step in that kind of overall process if you're thinking about you know harming yourself in some way and and certainly not within this presentation but but part of that is then our job is thinking of what are those underlying causes you know what's the the reason behind kids feeling like that so this is important information for us to think about and then to think about what we need to do as a school district and quite frankly as a community to support our

▶ 53:47 Speaker 3: students. And just again this is in a broad stroke that 10th grade students are more likely to report purposely hurting themselves without wanting to die and 7th graders were more likely to consider suicide and I think if you go on to the next slide gives you more of the

▶ 54:10 Speaker 3: breakdown and these numbers are not comfortable numbers I believe to be looking at and again wanting to have an understanding of what how we take this this information and what plans we make.

▶ 54:33 Speaker 3: Next slide.

▶ 54:38 Speaker 3: So again, this is made a plan or attempted suicide in the past 12 months.

▶ 54:50 Speaker 3: And overall 7% of Melrose students report having made a suicide attempt. And the results of this survey indicate eight high school attempts resulted in an injury these are serious numbers to be looking at and important for us to consider as we think about how we can

▶ 55:25 Speaker 3: support our students this slide what I want to highlight in particular so this is a breakdown more specifically of the information and I think the startling number in this slide is the percentage of gender queer students is significantly higher than any other group again thinking about how do we support our students who are transitioning who identify as genderqueer is an important consideration for our planning at the secondary level this slide

▶ 56:07 Speaker 3: is actual attempts of suicide and again pointing out the highest group is gender queer so highlights not only the mental health issue around the struggle of suicide but the specific groups that may be more impacted and require a higher need of support from us so part of the yrbs

▶ 56:37 Speaker 3: also asks how do students seek support because you look at those numbers and i think they're pretty concerning and startling and so we want to also get information about how students are accessing support so on the positive side most melrose students report that they have coping strategies to relieve stress the majority of Melrose students and again those numbers aren't 51 to 63 percent have at least one teacher or other adult at school that they can talk to but conversely although that's more than half again thinking about then who are the kids who don't feel that way I also think this is an interesting point to think about and have discussion particularly given that this survey was done during a pandemic and considering how students who were particularly sixth graders and ninth graders had been in that building for the first time in a very non-traditional manner and may, in fact, have been in a remote learning environment for the entire school year. So what was the impact of that in this kind of reporting? A high percentage of our students report that they feel comfortable talking to at least one of their parents. As we know, support for students is not just about what happens in school, clearly, but what happens at home and what happens within the community. Six to 18% of Melrose students are taking medication or receiving some type of counseling treatment to address some of their concerns.

▶ 58:46 Speaker 3: And these are just the breakdown of their way to access treatment.

▶ 58:58 Speaker 2: All right. So just going to quick overview of, I believe, some of the coronavirus specific questions that were part of the YRBS this year, or last year, last spring. So as we stated before, these were added by the Middlesex League schools and the consultant that worked with them. Interesting question here, during the coronavirus pandemic, how often was a student's mental health not good? Tough way, I think, to categorize that. But again, I think when we look at the visuals that we can present, we can see those certain populations of students within, again, that LGBTQ community. Some of our other are very concerning within that group of students. And they self-identified during this. So continued trend that we're seeing across most of the questions. This was for the high school. and then if we look again pretty similar in terms of the middle school stats that come out

▶ 1:00:13 Speaker 2: so we're really trying to think about as and we're going to talk about some of the next steps that came out of the yrbs but some of the things that we're really concentrating and thinking about as we look at this data so a pretty interesting question here as well during the past 12 months did any of these things happen to you again i think the visual really does this justice

▶ 1:00:39 Speaker 2: but the one that's almost you know furthest to the right or second in the students family member or a close friend died we're looking at again a high school student or a middle school student pretty large part of our population lost someone that they considered who was very very close to them and that's certainly very concerning some of those other numbers

▶ 1:01:03 Speaker 2: maybe some of our students in Melrose weren't as affected as other area communities but certainly you know there was a lot of serious illness and a lot of loss that happened during this time so some of the things that we're doing

▶ 1:01:23 Speaker 2: the decision-making and moving forward and how we can support our students and families best so we have Melrose Public Schools has done some work with the NAN project before we did mental health 101 with them two years ago i believe it was a pre-pandemic on one of the early release days where people were invited in that is one of those opportunities that's presented to teachers that they can take advantage of paraprofessionals different people but it was not mandatory so to speak but this is going to be all secondary staff are going to attend this training next week on the second and qpr is all about question persuade and refer so it's not clinical but it's a suicide prevention tool and it's something that all of our teachers educators staff members are going to become familiar with so that we can really support the people who may

▶ 1:02:24 Speaker 2: be dealing with these mental health challenges i'm going to turn it over to stephen for our next

▶ 1:02:29 Speaker 1: opportunity so in addition to the nan project we've worked with sos and signs of suicide within the middle school but we're going to expand that program into the high school this year we want to thank miss dobbins and for securing a grant to make sure that will happen for our students and staff and you know that all staff will be trained on this instrument and we feel it's important because these students have relationships with various people various capacities and we're excited to bring that program to the high school the uh there's a question that the great dr wolf our school physician talks about every year is is there an adult in the building or a teacher that you feel you have a relationship that's trusted that you can have a serious conversation with and we found this year this past spring that about 63 of the high schoolers have that relationship and we found about half of the middle schoolers have that relationship some of these answers are obvious some of them are not so obvious as to why that's going on with the pandemic and a major focus what we're doing is trying to build better relationships better community and that that's a major focus for what we're doing the discussion started this summer with the leadership retreat we had many faculty staff school nurses there as well this information was shared it was discussed and for some people it was the first time seeing data like this and for others you know you deal with this every day and that was the first step the wellness department has been looking at this data since the school year began we spent two department meetings broken up by grade level and cross the grades to discuss this how can we create better opportunities for our students to meet more people to have more trusted relationships so in the middle school project impact slash world of difference is a program that we had we're kind of revitalized with the anti-deformation league with extended team time a major focus is to build community and relationships during that time school counselors are meeting with students more regularly the guidance department in the middle school has social emotional learning grade based lessons that will be rolled out shortly and then there's just other opportunities for student interests such as all the clubs and activities that go on in the middle school and then intramurals and working in conjunction with our partners at the melrose recreation department to provide opportunity and healthy alternatives to what's going on maybe less screen time screen time and certainly more exercise and activity At the high school, it kind of mirrors some of this, and again, the focus is to build better connections and relationships to improve community. Project Impact, student peer mentors, okay, doing the right thing and giving the students the tools necessary to lead their friends, their peers, in the right direction. Crew is something new at the high school. We're a month and a half into that right now. It's a grade-based community of students learning from one another and experiencing.

▶ 1:05:47 Speaker 1: specific opportunities school councils again small group and one-on-one opportunities to meet with students we currently have about 80 different clubs and activities and many of these are student driven where they latch on to a faculty member that will guide them in the right directions and of course you know we have a robust athletic program that we want to see grow and flourish with with more opportunity as well so there is more information to come we're looking at some of the longitudinal data that we have and you know we look forward to sharing that with you but this is just a snapshot of what's going on you know it's been hard times for many and we're looking for ways to make

▶ 1:06:28 Speaker 4: it better very good thank you very much much appreciated any comments or questions from the committee mr. Ozzie Thomas then miss McAndrew thank you so

▶ 1:06:37 Speaker 3: much this is really critical to discuss this issue of suicidal thought suicidal action and it's so important for us to be able to talk about this with our children with students and make this not a we have to get rid of it as a taboo subject it is not true that if you talk about suicide that you're going to cause someone to become suicidal and that's like it's really great that you guys are willing to come up here and start to talk about the data from the YRBS, especially since we, you know, know that mental health problems are at a huge, enormous tidal wave level. And that's just as true for the adults as it is for our students. So I really appreciate that you have the NAND project coming in. I just at my school did the SOS program with my students on Monday. They're both great resources, and I think it's just as important to pay attention to the adults as it is to the students. So if you're training the staff, they know that they can also help each other. We can't help each other enough right now. The pandemic has gone on way too long, and people are really worn out. So I just have a couple of questions. So thank you, first of all. Second of all, I'm just checking, you have one category of genderqueer students. Do you mean lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and questioning students, or do you mean students who are non-binary and, you know, transgender or non-binary? Just curious about that one category, and then a couple other questions, too. Yeah, so this is the categories that were developed by CDC. And I think it, the gender queer was, the description behind it was to be as expansive as possible. DR. The umbrella term for LGBTQ? DR. Yes. DR. Okay. DR. Yep. DR. Just checking that. I'm really curious because I know that there is also this very big problem within the mental health world for outpatient providers being completely maxed out and there's not enough outpatient providers how are you doing providing linkages from school to mental health providers how's that going so i i would say that i have heard from many districts first of all our staffing even within the district challenges of people being able to have enough school psychologists social workers adjustment counselors all of those pieces we're fortunate that we have been able to maintain and hire and secure our staffing within the district so that's a good piece and it is we are hearing from families that they're having challenges if they're seeking you know we certainly have families who already have established relationships with providers outside of school but families seeking to establish a new relationship unfortunately some are meeting with more success than others but there's definitely a challenge and families are waiting we also have students who have have been hospitalized and may require a higher level of support following the hospitalization and they are waiting extended period of times in the hospitals waiting to access the supports because there just is not room in programs and i think there's this whole trickle effect that the programs don't have enough staff to provide what they typically have done so it's it's again you know certainly supporting and providing parents and helping them to make those connections but i think our best pieces are again one of the proactive supports that we can do pieces like putting in sos providing crew having kids feel connected with each other i think those are all the supports that help people to feel part of the community and that they have people that they can talk to thank you the other question i had is how different are these numbers the suicidality and numbers in this data set in comparison to previous years pre-pandemic So, that will be part of the information that you get, but I did, I mean, part of why we talked about and chose, you know, the numbers are higher this year, and in some cases double what they had been pre-pandemic the last time we did the YRBS. And so, again, you know, I think that's why it's important to actually take even kind that broader look so what piece of the impact of the pandemic has this had on the results of the yrbs um but you know getting that big longer term picture and then moving on stephen and carrie will be looking at what's the impact i'm hoping that the numbers are looking different the next time Melrose does the YRBS. Thank you so much. Ms. McAndrew and then Mr. Obronski.

▶ 1:12:33 Jennifer McAndrew: Thank you all. Thank you for being here with us and for this report and I have a couple of comments and one question. I'll do my question first which is on the slide with the trusted adult numbers which showed and that's asking about a trusted adult at school right showed a pretty lower number at the middle school than the high school I guess I'm interested in your thoughts on what you attribute that to that gap if anything what what you're thinking about in terms of um you know increasing that percentage and if how that compares to previous years

▶ 1:13:25 Speaker 1: if you've asked that question in the past the question has been asked in the past and it is down and some of the things that come off the top of the head right away these students started remotely so a third of that building you know was not in person and then when they finally did arrive you know you're seeing half their face like all the other buildings and most of the world so challenges for sure and we're trying to get over that hurdle and create better relationships you know it hasn't it's been hard everything is and what can we do to make it better and those are the things that we've been bouncing around the room for a long time and trying to create more positive opportunities and experiences that work to make those

▶ 1:14:10 Speaker 3: connections sure i i was thinking about this piece particularly how there's so many factors that contribute but i was also thinking about how we were not able to provide our typical summer programming so one of the pieces that i i particularly have enjoyed in the past is our students without border program where i think it's an excellent opportunity for incoming sixth graders so students who were fifth graders that summer before participating in in that summer programming gives them an opportunity to become familiar with the program to start making connections with peers to start making connections with adults start feeling connected as part of the middle school that didn't happen you know we were not able to provide that kind of transition support that we typically do from fifth grade to sixth grade i think those are steps that again we can think about the importance of providing that for our incoming students and again digging into some of those data is that a higher number also and i'm not a statistician by any means but i'm also interested that i did want to highlight we also included the sixth graders if you look to our past wire bs we had not included sixth graders before but quite frankly this information is important for us to know for all of our secondary students

▶ 1:15:57 Speaker 2: can i add just one more thing so i was actually surprised during the summer when we looked at those numbers and i was shocked especially at the high school but that only 60 almost 63 of our students felt close to one adult i was shocked because i felt like that was something i thought we did a good job on so i'm not sure how the pandemic impacted that i will also just want to add for at the middle school that their electives or off-team classes were virtual i think for the entire year so oftentimes a chorus a band an art teacher those are who pull out in students and have some of those different conversations when we can get them you know into something that they may be more interested in and they may be able to form a better relationship with so i'm wondering if by not having those in person if that impacted how students also responded to this because their virtual experience remained longer than both our elementary students

▶ 1:17:00 Jennifer McAndrew: and our high school students so excellent thank you and extracurriculars as well probably same point right um thank you um i'm interested in the um i'm so glad to hear that all secondary staff are going to be um trained on the the nan project um and you know what i'm thinking about and i'm interested in your thoughts on when i'm looking at that is that you know especially these these issues these concerns they don't just magically start at sixth grade so i'm interested in thinking about you know what are we doing in the elementary around some of this age appropriate of course but are we thinking about training any of our elementary staff maybe fifth grade or instructional coaches or others mental health staff or is there another program that we should be doing for elementary students and also how and if what sort of information do we provide to parents and opportunities for parents to be either trained or at least to get information about some of these programs just so they can reinforce the messaging that you're um you know that you're that you're putting forward at school i could take some of that the um

▶ 1:18:15 Speaker 1: it was interesting we have not presented this information to the elementary principals before and the some of the many of the elementary nurses were there and they ate this up they were really highly engaged in this activity and had a lot of interest so i'm sure they're seeing much of this and you know they didn't really have access to it at a prior date so we had a lot of great breakout conversations about this and strength um talking about strengthening those relationships so i think you will see more work going that direction um in the wellness classes in the elementary certainly the conversations in second grade are very different than the conversations going on in fifth grade and you know they're working on this material as well the wellness teachers and you'll see more pointed discussions lessons involved to try to bridge that gap a little

▶ 1:19:18 Speaker 3: bit and I would just add that our support staff our social workers our school psychologists our adjustment counselors and our counselors you know work as a professional learning community and so have opportunities within across the district to discuss and share resources and information part Part of that conversation of even doing the YRBS for sixth graders was, again, I think our lens from 10 years ago might have been, oh, sixth graders, we don't want to ask some of these questions or we don't want to get some of this information there. No, I think we need to. And I think we, you know, again, more proactive, not just at the secondary level, but at the elementary level as well. And we had talked about, actually, should we include elementary in this training as well, those group. And we actually thought we would break that out for another time because some of it may be a bit different of a presentation of how you would do um like the training that they're going to have at the elementary versus the secondary great thank you and just finally to reinforce

▶ 1:20:45 Jennifer McAndrew: a point that we talked about at one of our previous meetings recently actually related more to covet response but we do have funds available through the sr3 grant and we i think um maybe others would agree on the committee that if there are additional resources staff i completely appreciate the points about and have talked with the superintendent about the hiring situation and the availability of staff right now but if there are things that we can do that we need to use those funds we can use them over the next three years to deploy additional staff resources i think i would like to hear as one committee member about those opportunities because i'm very concerned about some of what we're finding here as i know you and your colleagues are as well so thank you

▶ 1:21:43 Speaker 4: and just please know that as you move forward in your work mr obramsky uh yeah no it's extremely concerning i'm actually extremely surprised um so in terms of the we're doing a school climate survey uh soon is it possible to include um stuff in there on student engagement and i guess it would have to be wouldn't have well you'd have to have it it couldn't be anonymous at that point so is there a way to survey the students on their engagement within the school and see if they're actually involved in activities within the school and uh if they're not uh is it possible to like we we've we've added crew which is fantastic like i think that's phenomenal somebody brought up to me like boys volleyball uh recently um i know like prep schools they do like a freshman a jv and then they have the varsity but then they have like a three team they call it like the third like is it possible to like through the essa funds like why can't we increase the amount of activities and increase student engagement in order to get these kids in front of adults and off the phones and out of the house like i mean we have to re-engage the kids like at some point and i'm sure like these results aren't just in melrose like we're um i mean once we do compare comparison data i'm sure we're going to see it in other communities as well but it is extremely concerning and i'm a big believer in engagement student engagement and you know trying to get the kids involved within the community but it has to start early and it has to start in middle school and i really think like increasing the amount of activities even if we have to increase the amount of teams you have an a team a b team a c team in order to get kids supported and increase drama activities if we have to if there's one play and not everybody made it add another play like at this point like i because it's definitely concerning and um you know it's something to think

▶ 1:23:54 Speaker 3: about thank you yeah i think that's a very um it's a good point um and um you know when we we do sometimes look at problems you do want to look at what are those kind of root pieces and what are those underlying steps that we can take so although we're having challenges you know finding and maybe like if we said oh yes I want to hire X amount of social workers or school psychologists I'd probably have a challenge trying to to accomplish that but maybe there's some ways to expand some of that engagement student engagement in different ways and we certainly will continue that train of

▶ 1:24:42 Speaker 4: thought and engagement right it's not like i don't want to you know i don't want to increase the workload dramatically but i also think that you know under the circumstances there there is some room where we can work and is it is it even possible to engage like ask the students you know what what activities are you engaged in and if they're not engaged in any is it possible for the guidance councils to connect with them and say what would you like to see here and what can we do

▶ 1:25:12 Speaker 3: to make this place you know we did do some of that um i was just thinking of the survey i know that they had done at the high school during their crew time around resiliency and part of that i don't know all of the questions but we certainly can take a look at are we getting that information about student engagement because that is one of those under having people kids feel connected kid is a really important strategy in helping kids to develop healthy ways of dealing with their stress, of feeling that they can speak to somebody, that they're connected with an adult. It's critical work. So thank you, John, for that. Thank you.

▶ 1:25:59 Speaker 2: And I'll just add, I know that the NEASC team was just out at the high school at the beginning of october um and through the quick kind of one page piece that i don't know i don't think it's been disseminated not finalized yet but the chair and the visiting team in sharing with us the kind of our recap was very impressed by the the students and how they did feel connected to the high school so although that's anecdotal evidence at this exact moment in time i think that we will see some evidence come out of that niasc report that's going to look much better than the evidence that we had during the pandemic so i'm happy that we can hopefully see some of that and i think

▶ 1:26:37 Speaker 4: that's why this is so surprising because it does like it seems like there's so much off it and i was shocked right it's just right shocked right thank you reframe it slightly yeah i mean this

▶ 1:26:48 Speaker 1: was given last spring and then we started that school year remote and we started drawing them back in it it took a while there's a complete different vibe down there right now as to what's going on it's certainly i would say a much more normal much more traditional school year and uh there is a different feeling all right thank you thank you that's important thanks for

▶ 1:27:08 Speaker 4: pointing that out and bringing us back a little bit because i think it is important to recognize that this was done you know at the height of uh you know the pandemic thank you mr mayor let's

▶ 1:27:24 Paul Brodeur: follow up a little bit on what mr obramsky was talking about um i got two thoughts in my head And one is that there is part of the trick, I shouldn't say trick, that kind of dismisses it, part of the way to make this work is meeting the kids where they live, I assume. And that means, I mean, there might not be an activity for some kids. That might not be the way they work. Does that make sense? Because when Mr. Ruben is talking about connection with the guidance counselor, that's kind of an alternative or just kind of a check along the way that that makes a lot of sense to me because there might be other things going on in the background that it's not really a an in-school thing necessarily but you know how do how do you mind that stuff probably more importantly is that as we're talking about this and this is kind of a unique snapshot in time and we do it the the yrbs is once every two years yes is that right How do we, given we're in a particularly challenging, unusual time, how can we, if at all, figure out how we're doing better without waiting for the next play RBS, right? Because I assume this is going to, like, the anecdotal evidence looks good. There's a different feel to this year. But I think all of us, you know, these are very, very shocking numbers. and you know they're a little bit dated but how do how can we get assurance before the next yrbs

▶ 1:29:00 Speaker 3: that we are trending in the right direction yeah and i i think that um you know the yrbs is a good data collection point that we get consistently every two years and we ask the same questions it's it's a well-developed tool and provides us with that piece but in the interim how do we know that we're making progress and they'll there I mean there's definitely concrete pieces so we know when kids are referred we know when kids are hospitalized we know when kids are struggling you know we have that information we you know we can we have critical case management at the secondary level and and know who those students are so we will know if those numbers are increasing and hopefully those numbers are decreasing we know that those numbers have increased we we were already concerned about the impact that the pandemic was having on our students we We were already concerned about how we were going to help kids transition. That was part of our thought process in developing CRWU, trying to make sure breaking down a larger building and making sure every kid felt connected to an adult. The YRBS data supported that we were making the right decision to go along with that. But we weren't waiting, we don't wait for the YRBS data, but It helps us to reinforce. And certainly when we get information that looks more concerning than typical, we can think about the pandemic and know that that's part of the impact, but this is the information we have at this moment in time. And so we wanna make sure we're appropriately responding and hopefully those actions of being proactive, making connections with kids will help us be trending in the direction that we want to, which is going way down.

▶ 1:31:15 Speaker 1: Thank you. And thank you for this. It's a, you know, it's very eye-opening. I appreciate it. And Mr. Chairman, my apologies for moving back and forth. I hear a little bit better when I'm closer to the speaker.

▶ 1:31:29 Speaker 4: Mr. Obronski, please. Yeah, I already, I know the answer to my own question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Is it possible to give the YRBS again this spring? Would they, would the, is that something that would corrupt the data or?

▶ 1:31:44 Speaker 3: That's an interesting question. So we, if we were to give the YRBS, you know, the exact same question, we definitely would have to think about how we would do that. And it would be only something Melrose was doing as in comparison to, you know, the state, country that's when it's given every two years so it wouldn't be given in a standard manner that we typically do i don't know what the impact of doing something like that on our own i don't know if it's necessary to give the entire yrbs but there could be something where we think about um how can we do some additional data collection doesn't have to be specifically the yrbs but similar kind of pieces to kind of check in um that we're on the right track yeah i think

▶ 1:32:46 Speaker 4: it's something to think about you know yeah that looks looking at them looking at the numbers lindsay

▶ 1:32:47 Speaker 2: dobbins um the director of student service and counseling is working really hard to on those SEL screeners for students to do consistently and the middle school is doing that during team time and the high school is doing that during crew to make sure that we can kind of see the baseline for

▶ 1:33:08 Speaker 4: where specific students are at a given time great thank you Mr. Acetonis this is just a comment

▶ 1:33:11 Speaker 3: based on what what Mr. Obrunsky was just raising if you're doing the signs of suicide the sos if If you do that work with students this year, you're going to basically be asking them very specific targeted questions around depression and suicidality. So it sounds like you're going to bake it into what you're doing this year anyway. Yes. So either through NAN or through SOS. So you're right there with it, which is good. Thank you. So thank you.

▶ 1:33:52 Speaker 4: anything further from the committee at this point seeing nothing further much thanks to each of you for your work in this regard for the presentation we look forward to further work and further discussion and with that said that concludes educational programs

▶ 1:34:08 Jennifer McAndrew: and personnel for this evening thank you mr o'connell and thank you miss white lambright for your final presentation to us as an assistant superintendent and thank you all Next up is Finance and Facilities with Ms. Driscoll and Ms. Razuchano.