What happened at the mid-January Worcester School Committee meeting (with a few procedural notes)

 I've been trying to write these retrospectives, both for my own tracking and to serve everyone else. Please let me know if you're finding them useful?

The agenda for the meeting is over here. 
The Committee met in executive session before public session for discussions on five of the contract negotiations currently being conducted.

We also did this: 

Congratulations to our Business Team for receiving the Association of Business Officers International Meritorious AGAIN! Yes they have received this award 10 years in a row!!! 😀 #excellence #allmeansall ⁦@worcesterpublic⁩ pic.twitter.com/NF4GjiaCfu

— Rachel H. Monárrez, PhD (she/her/ella) (@drrmonarrez) January 20, 2023

And because this really is that important, here's what I said about that: 

Paul Matthews, the Executive Director of the Worcester Regional Research Bureau, spoke briefly on the WRRB's recent report on the evolution in School Committee governance. He also highlighted the Bureau's interactive dashboard on the new school committee districts.

From the held items, we received some additional information about the outside mental health resources coming into the district. That looks like this:

The report of the superintendent was on the multilingual department, the department that oversees language acquisition. What I think is important to remember about English learner enrollment is that it is a point in time count; students are continually moving through that status, as they test out. So while about a third of our students are English learners at any one time, what is perhaps a more useful statistic is that nearly 60% of our students speak a first language other than English. In other words, this is most of our students. 

Let me also call attention to two slides from that report. First, this is the students we're talking about here:

On the students who are currently English learners, the state sets out six years for them to move into out of that status and test out. Here's how we're doing on that: 

You'll also see the MCAS results from this group of students in the report as well.

We voted acceptance for two grants: $5,950 for an arts residency grant for a street art program at Worcester Tech, and $421,326 for English learner education support. 

We approved position descriptions (we approve new position descriptions; we do not approve salaries, save for the limited number of contracts under our purview) for a Physical Security Systems Administrator (the funding for this was already in the budget; this is an IT position managing school safety systems) and a WorkDay Implementation Specialist. WorkDay is the new enterprise system for the city, which will handle payroll, budget, HR functions all INTEGRATED. For something like this, WPS is just a city department (though one with both many times more employees and a larger budget than everything else combined), and we're just starting the transfer. This is looking ahead and planning for what will be a multiple year process.

If a contract will go for more than three years, that length of time has to be approved by the School Committee, so we also approved the administration seeking leases of, first, three years plus up to two three year renewals for the alternative program that currently is housed at St. Casimir's; second, of ten years, plus up to two more five year renewals for the transitions program (that's students who have special education needs that are in the 18-21 age range and are being transitioned out of the district) that is currently at the Fanning Building (in a space both too small and not suited to them). 
And just to be clear: those contracts do not come back to us, as that isn't under our purview.

We resubmitted Burncoat High School to the Mass School Building Authority. In order to get it onto Tuesday's City Council agenda--we both have to vote this--we also voted reconsideration.
Why? Under the rules of the Worcester School Committee, any member (and it is ANY member, regardless of how they voted) can file for reconsideration (think of it as "wanting to vote that again" with the assumption being voting differently) of any vote we took up to 48 business hours after the meeting. That means that any of us have until the end of the day Monday to file after every meeting. Reconsideration can only be done once on every vote.
As a result, votes of the Worcester School Committee aren't actionable until Tuesday morning. If we want something to take effect immediately, we basically tie our own hands by voting reconsideration at the meeting. We have to suspend our own rules to do that (those are "yes, I want to suspend the rules" votes) and then vote on reconsideration (thus we vote "no, I do not want to reconsider the vote we already took"). We did this on Burncoat, so it could be taken up by the City Clerk on Friday to be posted for the Council's Tuesday's agenda.

We sent an item looking at options for livestreaming of sports and other events to Finance and Operations.

The School Committee also hires legal counsel, so we authorized the hiring of Iandoli, Desai & Cronin P.C. to take care of an H-1B visa for an existing employee. Note that we are also the budgeting authority for the Worcester Public Schools; thus it is up to us to say that it is in the district's interest to allocate funds in this fashion. To me, it is simply in keeping with Worcester's long tradition as a city of immigrants.

We sent the social media policy back to Governance for further work.

We also send the out of state travel policy to Governance.

We filed four items--three from Member Kamara and one from Member Mailman--at the end of the meeting that were submitted by my colleagues; here, filed means that nothing further will be done on it. Let me talk a little bit about this, as I think that this can seem mean or like it's limiting a question if you're flipping by the video (it starts about 2:08 into the meeting)

The first item was "To explore a review of the certified nursing assistant job and salary and to

conduct review of similar CNA positions in similar school districts." Now, remember what I said above: position descriptions are ours. That part is in order. After Member Kamara asked that the item be taken "as it reads" (which just means "I have nothing more to say about this than is on the agenda"), I rose to ask that she consider amending to ask only that we consider the position description; the other items are not under our purview. She wished, however, to keep the request to consider salary in the item, so I made a motion to file, which passed.
The second and third items were taken together; they were:

To review the steps of accessing accommodation services for students on IEP per the Individual and disability education Act (IDEA) and the roles that administration and parent/guardians.

(that should be the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) and:

 To review the process of students needing accommodation for extra time for exams or tests. 

Let me just be super clear: these are well within the realm of things School Committee members and others might want to know about. As I said at the meeting, this might be something to take up at a SPEDPAC meeting, for example. 
What they aren't is under School Committee purview; these are not things on which we have any ability or legal right to take action. They also don't lead to anything about which we can take action. This thus isn't the business of the School Committee.
As our rules say, "Agenda items filed by School Committee members shall be under the purview of the Committee, focus on the business of the Committee, and should be concise and specific."(That's the beginning of Rule 25)

Something different happened with Member Mailman's item, which read, "To resume public reporting of health data and absences while COVID is still prevalent in the city." You might remember we'd been getting COVID information at every meeting; that ended, on a split vote on a motion from Vice Chair Johnson, at our December 15 meeting. However, a motion from Member Clancey, asking that the information still be shared, passed. That less than clear to us (or at least it was to me). After Dr. Monárrez explained how the information was being shared both with the committee and on the website, the motion was filed.

Next meeting on February 2!