Educational Programs and Personnel - Jen Razi-Thomas/Sheri Leo

Transcript (~3 min @ 37:50)

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▶ 37:40 Margaret Raymond Driscoll: one is absent, so that is five in favor, one abstention, and one absent. And that concludes our business under finance and facilities.

▶ 38:23 Speaker 2: Good evening, everybody. I'm Sherry Leo, and this is my first time up here as the vice chair of the Educational Programs and Personnel Committee, so bear with me. I'm going to be looking down at my notes a lot, but here we are. And today, I wanted to start with a few updates to the agenda as we get ready to get started on this committee business, just so that we are all on the same page. First, there is a report site council updates, that was listed in error. We will get an update on the MVMS School Improvement Plan at a future meeting, and we will have one of the administrators come to share about that. So we're not going to be covering that today. And then we will also not be having a vote on the PD plan today. Instead, we'll get a report on the three interrelated topics that are listed. So the end-of-year assessments, the curriculum update, and the professional development plan, because those are really connected. The focus will be on the vision and strategy and tools and resources that will then help us understand what the PD plan is being built out for into a future vote in July or August. So we're going to start with discussion today, a vote to come in July or August. In addition, we do have a brief report out on summer programming as well. So we're going to take these a little bit mixed up into a couple of different categories. And with that, I'd like to invite Superintendent Berman to frame this up and share the reports on the topics in whatever order you think best to get us started.

▶ 40:03 Speaker 5: Great. So I will welcome Melanie Azevedo, our Executive Director of Academics and Accountability, and with her tonight is also Michelle Theodore. So Michelle is one of our speech and language pathologists. She also is one of our AAC experts, so that's augmentative and alternative communication. So she works with some of our students who are non-verbal or who may need some communication devices that may look a little bit different in the classroom. So she comes, and she's part of the PD committee with Melanie, but also a great deal of experience across all of our grade levels. So tonight, I think a lot of these plans are really intertwined. Curriculum leads to professional development, and all of that work leads to our end-of-the-year assessment. So I can turn it over to Melanie, who can walk us through some slides that highlight the pieces from the memo, and then we can certainly take any questions you have.

▶ 40:59 Speaker 7: So I'm going to actually start with the summer memo because I think that's going to be hopefully a little faster. So thank you for having us here today. Michelle also serves as the co-facilitator of the PD committee, so she helps me along with Principal Lecow from the Franklin School. So we all work together to look at all of this. The memo you have in your packet is the summer memo. This is more for informational purposes. The first part of the memo, pretty much verbatim, was emailed out to all families on Monday, June 15th. There's one slight shift that we were thinking and working with the students and the secondary administration. We've been working with the secondary teachers to have more built-in accountability at the start of the year to encourage more students to complete their summer assignments and really read the books and do all of that. So you'll see in the memo that even if they don't finish it by the time school starts, because we all know that families have lots of things happening during the summer, there'll be conversations around the books that are for summer reading. There'll be conversations around the themes. We'll use some of the data from the math work to help support getting started in the beginning of the year. And then the second part of the memo is about our summer learning program, which will be held at the Lincoln School for our rising pre-K through fifth grade, and then at the middle school for our rising sixth grade through twelfth grade. We are under the umbrella of Summer Learning Academy, but it also includes ESY. And that at the end of the summer, either myself or Ms. Berman or somebody will be back to give a report and an update of how things went, the number of students that attended, all of those kinds of things. So you have the memo in front of you. I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have.