On Thursday the 7th, we had our first meeting of the school year. You can find the agenda here; the video is posted over here.
Headlining the night (I'd say) was the Superintendent's opening of school report. While the slides start on page 55 of the agenda, as above, I recommend watching that section if it is of interest; it starts about an hour and 7 minutes into the meeting. Note that the statistics there on staff hiring are related to the introduction of new assistant principals and others that happened earlier in the meeting.
Because I know we've already had our first run-in with exposure this school year in my family, so I assume we're not alone, here's the current COVID protocols:
Note we also gave our consent to the recommended hiring of Dr. Tammy Murray to the position of Director of Special Education; she was interviewed in public session during the meeting (it
starts about 44 minutes in). Please note the way that I have phrased the above: the special education director is not selected by the School Committee in a Massachusetts district; we have advise and consent. We can say no, if warranted, but we are presented with the superintendent's choice (or choices, as has happened in the past) to which we agree or not. Dr. Murray has extensive experience both in and out of the district, comes highly recommended, and I'm really pleased she's agreed to take this position.
Member Clancey gave a report from the Governance committee, which included an update on the strategic planning process; note that we also approved the updated list of who is on the ad hoc committee for that later in the same meeting. The group met for the first time on Thursday to be oriented, a process that was videoed and will be shared publicly. They'll meet again on the 26 and 27 to do the work on pulling together the strands of what we're moving forward with; that work will report out to Governance on October 3, who will report out to the full committee on October 5.
The work of putting that into outcomes will be done in late October, which will be reported out to Governance on November 28, which will report out to the full committee, alongside a report from administration on the strategic plan, on December 7. It will be presented for our vote at our final meeting of the year (and term) on December 21.
I'll put that in some easier to follow form!
We did send a number of items to standing committee or administration: vision of a learning, a request to update the cell phone policy, the walk zone, the proposed parent app, and training of wraparound coordinators.
We also had an interesting discussion of a $300K grant we voted acceptance on for a college program that involves our graduates re-enrolling as WPS students (and thus getting counted in our enrollment).
We did get an initial list--to which we made some changes which I'll share in another post--of superintendent reports for the year, which is great!
We also had a chance to honor Ivonne Perez, for her 19 years of work in the district; Belmont Street School for their Safe Routes to School work; and yes, district operated transportation for their state award:
There'll be another one of these, this time national, in November!
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