June 2026 Board of Ed: State Student Advisory Council

 State Student Advisory Council 
for some reason, they never link to the presentation from the SSAC on these...I wish they would

used extensive amounts of data in their work
host successful regional and statewide stakeholder engagement events

March Board of Ed: midyear report from State Student Advisory Council

 This is from Isabella Chamberlain, Hudson High School, who is the SSAC chair
focusing this year on student wellness, especially emotional wellbeing; bullying and harassment; and nutrition and school nutritional environment

using state data in working through this

Chamberlain: there is a concern that recommendations are made to the Board and nothing is really done with that
midyear is so that it is while there is work being done on it
hope is that this allows a feedback loop on their work
Fisher: more than half of Black or Asian students being treated badly, you're not going to be engaged
Department's push for culturally sustaining curriculum, make sure we actually live that mission
Rocha: how can we engage just beyond the presentation
Fisher suggests members going to regional meetings
Chamberlain: want to ensure students are creating the focus
give the students the data and say the focus area has to come from that; up to them to do it
connection between Board and students but keep freedom there

What are we doing here, Worcester?

 I am of course posting this after the Worcester School Committee meeting at which this was discussed. This is partly because this isn't intended as anything other than my thoughts, but it's also rather been a bleak week. It's a hard week to pull together the through line to write. 

Board of Ed for November: budget priorities

 There is a printed memo here which is NOT ONLINE which is annoying. 

Commissioner describe the budget process
"highly structured timeline"
he should have a nice little flowchart like some of us do when we explain this

to read on so-called ethical AI use

 With the school year now fully underway, I’ve been dismayed to see how the default position on generative AI throughout the educational landscape has been to ask how we might use it ethically, without considering that the answer to the question might be: “We can’t.”

I’m seeing this at my kid’s high school and at the University of Minnesota (where I work), from my professional organization and from the Minnesota Department of Education. It seems to be the norm pretty much everywhere. But what if we just didn’t accept that these programs must infiltrate every part of our lives? Or at least not the products currently being sold to us, literally sold to us so megacorporations can make more money, but also metaphorically sold to us as inevitable.

We can stop. We can pause. We can demand something better. And we must. Because there is a body count.

In the Minnesota Star-Tribune 

Is there Monday bad news on AI?

 Of course there is Monday bad news on AI!

• The Atlantic, not an organization known for having its eye actually on the ball when it comes to threats to childen's health, as we learned in COVID, turns its (brief) attention to the collision of teens, mental health, and AI. The piece rightly notes that leaving it to big tech to protect teens is not a complete answer, though it does not suggest another.
  
  
• The Harvard Business Review (yes, I heard you scoff) leads its piece on AI-generated "work slop" with this: 
  

  A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. Consider, for instance, that the number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, while AI use has likewise doubled at work since 2023. Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return.

  The piece also gives us this rather cheering chart from the perspective of trust in people over the crap we're getting from AI: 
  
  

  
  
  
  
  
• It appears that 30 Massachusetts school districts have taken up the "curriculum pilot" on AI put together by Massachusetts STEM Advisory Council and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative with Project Lead the Way.
  ...and I have to wonder if any school committees publicly reviewed and approved that substantial curricular change before anyone moved forward. Hm.

We don't encourage children to play with poison

 ...and we shouldn't be pretending generative AI is anything but.

Let me preface this by saying that this is a tough read, so please keep that in mind.

Some things to read this week

From tabs I have open today:

• I thought this look at the "anti-conviviality" of generative AI was very interesting and important for those who are in education: 
  

  The expertise you would have gained by growing your own fruit, by trying in fits and starts to make your own vision a reality—these opportunities for growth are completely lost. Unless you actively work against the natural way to use these tools, you become increasingly dependent on them. You can produce and produce without ever growing yourself. Even worse, it's not hard to see how the skills you do have will slowly atrophy from lack of use.

•  Intriguing question being raised by the courts in Canada on if social media companies might hold a "duty of care" to school boards: 
  

  Should the Court recognize a novel duty of care in this case, social media companies could be found liable to individual users and public institutions, such as school boards. 
  
  

• And speaking of Canada, a recent report from the Ontario Ministry of Education yielded this post on the importance of recess: 
  

  As researchers who have long studied the links between school environments and children’s well-being, we know that reducing or restructuring recess time can negatively impact learning and development.
   Indeed, research consistently shows that recess plays a vital role in academic success, mental health and overall well-being.

• You should always read what Zahava Standler at New America writes; today she writes on the crucial role a national Department of Education fulfills and what we stand to lose by not having that: 
  

  Across these policies runs a common thread: We are not in this together, we owe each other nothing, and the future is not our concern. It is a small, mean vision of America.

• Relatedly, the New York Times has a lengthy piece on the damage the Trump administration is doing to community colleges, and, by extension, our communities: 
  

  Community colleges already subsisted on budgets that most four-year schools would find laughable, lean operations that delivered hefty returns on investment for their areas. Get care at a local doctor’s office, or prepped for surgery at a hospital, or treated after an accident, or have someone come to your home to do repairs — “those are all community-college grads, all of them,” the community-college leader told me. “This collateral damage is going to end up being regional economic damage.”

  and the joy in this quote! 
  

  “Milton is the GOAT!” he cried out. “‘Paradise Lost’ is everything that I love!”

June 2025 Board of Elementary and Secondary Education: State Student Advisory Council

 Craven plans to skip the budget update

Student member Ioannis Asikis reporting out on work of SSAC

in person meetings held in Leicester, Worcester, Everett, and Methuen this year
hybrid model maintained to promote accessibility
expanded reach, made meetings more frequent

grounded work in Youth Risk Behavior Survey, representing thousands, weighed to be representative 
thus not only in students on SSAC only

community dialogue with other organizations and agencies
regions reported out on themes within the survey and made recommendations
overarching themes across the state on mental health and connectness to school
mental health must be as prioritized as physical health
embedded across student experiences
across the state there was seen needs for: 

• better access to support
• improved staff training
• stronger relationships between students and schools

mental health access
connectedness/attendance
stigma reduction on seeking help

on Q on how this gets back to local districts, we get a spin around referral back to regional SSAC groups but "how does it get reported out to school committees" comes up empty because there isn't one
THIS IS A THING THAT COULD AND SHOULD BE CHANGED.
Frankly, there also isn't a throughline on what happens even to these reports once they're given!

on Q on how to get information to students, Asikis notes Secretary Tutwiler's Instagram (acknowledgement in the back of who actually runs that), mentioning also newsletter or email 

Asikis speaks of his own experience as an immigrant student growing into being part of student voice 

Interviews for the Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education

 

Coming to you live from Mass Bay Community College in Wellesley

My rundown of the finalists can be found here. My initial perspective on them can be found here.

There is a livestream of this, which will be going up here. UPDATED: video is here.

Posting as we go. 

Jack Elsey, Lily Laux, Pedro Martinez to be interviewed

and Craven just said a whole bunch of things including the schedule which I missed because I was trying to find the livestream...sigh...it also isn't written down, as best as I can tell

The Board is soliciting feedback on the finalists here. 

Board of Ed for December: opening comments

 The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meets today in Everett at 9 AM. You can find the agenda here. 

It is a positive FESTIVAL of faces here at the meeting today...MA Teacher of the year, past student rep Ela Gardiner (home from college! Yay, Ela!), loads of voke superintendents, an MTA group (and that's just who I recognize)...

Round up for the end of the week

 Some things to read or consider this week:

• Some Aquinnah Wampanoag elders gathered last week to talk about the closing in 1968 of Gay Head School, which served Aquinnah Wampanoag children in Martha's Vineyard.
  
  
• The Boston Globe ran an "epic fail" headline on an article that only followed the experience of two students; no systemwide data on transportation on the first day of school was yet available. This is how the educating reporting earns our cynicism.
  
  
• Useful paper out this week on public comment and public policy found four things: 
  

  First, commenters at public meetings are unrepresentative of the public along racial, gender, age, and homeownership lines; second, distance to the proposed development predicts commenting behavior, but only among those in opposition; third, commission votes are correlated with commenters’ preferences; finally, the alignment of White commenters (vs. other racial groups) and neighborhood group representatives and the general public (vs. other interest groups) better predict project approvals.

• In light of the shootings in Georgia, note that in Oswego County, NY, in response to threats by a 10 year old boy, law enforcement visited the home to remove guns if there were any (there were not), because NY has a law that "allows law enforcement to search a home and remove guns if someone is thought to have access to weapons and be a danger to themselves or others.”
  
  

• And because this always brings up discussion of mental health, a reminder that mental health is more of a predictor of victim than assailant.

• May J.D. Vance's characterization of school shootings as "a fact of life" be the real life "crime, boy, I don't know" *

________________________________________

*and if you snark about The West Wing references, you are free to read elsewhere.

Massachusetts, we have a budget, mostly.

On Monday, Governor Maura Healey signed the FY25 conference committee budget. You can find the Governor's signing statement here along with the record of vetoes. 

As the most of the larger K-12 education accounts of the budget were signed as passed by the conference committee, which I covered here, I'm going to skip those and go right to the vetoes, of which there are quite a number that impact K-12 districts. 

(I know, right? You'd never know this from the coverage.)

Do note, though, that DESE has posted the final FY25 Chapter 70 and net school spending requirements. This means we can play "exactly how far back did making the minimum per pupil increase $104 set us from SOA gains?" which I'll get to in a future post.

The following is taken directly from the line item account veto document.

Some suggested reading

• On what is absolutely a test case in Oklahoma on public funding of religious schools; this is the St. Isadora online charter school 
  
  
• On the messed up priorities of a Congress that moves to ban TikTok but doesn't get schools appropriately supported
  
  
• Jonathan Haidt's new book The Anxious Generation has been getting a LOT of press; Nature Magazine has a review which finally puts the claims into context
  
  
• Bill Runey, Superintendent of the Dighton-Rehoboth Regional School District, wrote a column about district budgets this year that will resonate with many

oh, if only they were fooling

 On this, the holiday that I loathe most, it is appropriate, I suppose, that the education reform opiners at Reason have their opinion piece, a piece of poorly informed illogic entitled "Public schools wasted COVID funds, Biden’s education budget tacitly admits" in The Hill.

None of that is true or follows, to be clear. 

The argument, lest you go melting your brain looking for it, is that, since the President's proposed budget has "$8 billion grant program to further support public schools’ COVID-19 recovery efforts," the three rounds of ESSER funding didn't work!

But nearly three years after Biden signed ARP, students still aren’t caught up, despite the federal windfall.

Well, golly, people, what have we been doing out here? 
I cannot roll my eyes any harder at this.

That part is quite stunning all on its own, but we can add to that the evidence of "waste" that they cite:

Researchers at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab estimate that 20 percent of ARP K-12 dollars have gone to facilities — HVAC upgrades and building repairs

Now, WHY, during a pandemic in which the contagion is transmitted via air, would schools want to do HVAC upgrades?

I have heard milder versions of this a number of places: how could schools--fill in the blank--add staff, pay staff more, add services when they knew this was short term funding?

This continues to lose sight of what the funding was for: it was to help schools deal with the pandemic. At the beginning--remember the spring and summer of 2020?--this included questions of if we would have state and local funding for schools at all, and if that would mean we'd need to lay staff off. As time went along, it became clear that students needed (among much else) mental health supports, which means either staffing or outside services (or both). They needed supplemental learning supports, which means either additional pay for the staff schools have currently, or additional staff, or both.
One time funding is enormously appropriate for facilities repair--a massively underfunded issue with American schools--and whether it is directly cleaning up the air or making it a bit more likely that schools won't crumble into pieces. 

I am not going to defend every last dollar spent in ESSER. I can't. I'm not all of those places. But this nonsensical and ongoing scolding, which somehow mysteriously never appears municipal side is exhausting. 

I have long since come to the conclusion that some people just don't like public entitites, even ones who are more accountable to and closer to their constituents than any other branch of government, to have money to spend on behalf of those under their care. 

Gosh, I'm tired of it.

If you'd like a look at what we know of what hasn't yet gone out to districts yet (remember: there's a delay on reporting!), K-12 Dive today looks at the 6 months left report.

November Board of Ed: FY25 budget recommendation

 Mohammed: budget is just under $8B but vast majority is distributed via formula 
memo is here
three priorities proposed:

• early literacy
• mental health
• teacher diversity
  
  

To read this week

 Here's a few longer pieces that I'd recommend this week: 

• Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider on the Democrats needing to come back to/up with the why of public education in New Republic. 
   "Winning education back means reminding Americans of everything that schools can be."

• Golly gee, maybe money matters for schools after all! Yes, we've known this for quite awhile, but that One Guy who has been arguing for years that it didn't is coming out with a review of research showing that, um, maybe he was wrong.
  Twitter has been appropriately scathing:  
  

  May I be impolite? How many US students have suffered because they attended schools that didn't have the resources they needed? And how many schools are underfunded because of state & federal policies that were designed, in part, based on this man's work? https://t.co/i3Xb0kE1tW

  — Jersey Jazzman (Official... no, really) (@jerseyjazzman) May 16, 2023

      How many millions of students have been harmed by the misguided insistence that money doesn't matter for schools? How many teachers have left the profession or left underfunded schools out of frustration with budget cuts that the old assumptions deemed justified? https://t.co/woydUrAahf

  — Jess Calarco (@JessicaCalarco) May 16, 2023

• Texas schools are saying enough already with tying school "safety" funding to equipment and not funding mental health. 

• School avoidance (which isn't "becoming" a mental health crisis, but more IS a mental health issue) appears to be growing across the country (or at least more schools and families are talking about it).

• And I am ongoingly appreciative of being represented by Rep. McGovern in Congress; his work on the House floor and this piece both against book bans is just one reason why.

Three years on: civility and gender and power

 This has been buzzing around in my head since the Board's vote. I'm still wrestling with how to put this; there is much more to be said on this.
As always, this is simply my personal perspective as a single member of the Worcester School Committee.

The pins on my lapel the night the Board met.
The raven says "Nevermore."

When asked for their reflections on the public hearing regarding the proposed charter school, Board of Ed members Matt Hills and Michael Moriarty both said something similar.

They said the hearing was civil. 
That people were respectful. That people were polite.

And both men meant that as praise, clearly, from the context of that remark: it was good that Worcester had been respectful.

I have blogged, generally live, Board of Ed meetings at this point for years. I've followed the appointment of a new Commissioner (I was at the meeting at which it was announced the prior Commissioner had died in office that morning), the changes to regulations required by federal law changes, the shifts under federal administration changes, the various responses to a pandemic, and much more, including lots and lots of votes on charter schools.

And yet, I haven't gone back to the end of February vote to cover it. 

Partly, it's psychosomatic; I had norovirus during the meeting, and I can feel the symptoms coming back when I open the video. 

But also, this was a vote that I put a lot into (as has been noted; thank you for that), and I genuinely do not remember one in which the level of contempt for the thoughtful, logical, relevant concerns was quite as clear as this. Far from being treated with respect, we were dismissed.

But there have been other meetings recently that have been similar.

Let's note, for example, the Commissioner and Board's ongoing (and usually not properly posted) dramatic exasperation with the Boston Public Schools, which often is led off by the Commissioner expressing his sardonic puzzlement over how it is that whatever it is they've decided is the problem this month could be possible when city and district leadership came before the Board and assured  them, and so forth.
Tell me he would have done that if Marty Walsh were still mayor, or if Tom Payzant were still superintendent. 
But Boston is, and has been, under female leadership--women of color, in more than one case--for some time now, and so this mocking tone is something the Commissioner brings to the Department's purported oversight. 
And the Board's "oversight" of the Boston Public Schools is of course much less oversight than it is following wherever it is the suburban writers of the Boston Globe feel is the latest "scandal" (seldom if ever informed by anything happening in the education world at large) which somehow (again, without posting) find their way to the table of the K-12 education system for the entire nearly one million students in Massachusetts. 

And thus while I am at heart an optimist (I don't know that I could bear to do what I do otherwise) to some degree the vote at the end of February I suppose shouldn't have surprised me. The known motivations of a Board nearly entirely appointed by Governor Baker have been well-known, and largely have little to do with the largest concerns in public education at this time. (Let me note the quite marked exceptions of the Secretary, and the student, parent, and labor seats, as so often.)

We were respectful, it seems, but we were unheard. While I have, as a member of a public board myself, respect for processes of public procedure, gestures towards 'respect' may not be heard.

There is a massive effort across the country to privatize public education funding through voucher expansions. Last year's Supreme Court Carson v. Makin decision opened the door wider to public funding of religious schools, something which could well be built upon should the Supreme Court decides in favor of the school in Charter Day School v. Peltier. Trans youth are under open attack across the country, including in Congress itself. There is a wave of book banning and limitations of education across the country. Far from grappling with the systemic inequities in education, we have states doing nonsensical things like setting up CRT hotlines. Youth mental health has been declared a national crisis. 
And teacher turnover has hit a new high.

Today marks the third anniversary of the weekend when it was made starkly clear to us in Massachusetts that we in local leadership were on our own--it's the weekend when literally every single superintendent in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts called off school due to the pandemic prior to the Commissioner (who had told superintendents to hold off) and the Governor taking action. That it wasn't catastrophic was due only to local leadership.
Unfortunately, that lack of leadership was indicative of what we would see throughout, and now, with crises of many kind spreading across the country, we have this lack of support and lack of care and thought and focus only continuing. 

I'll say what I said when I ran to get back on the Worcester School Committee three years ago:
We deserve better.

I do not know how we get out of this without major changes on the Board (the Board, recall, appoints the Commissioner). The only way that happens is action by the Governor, unless the Legislature takes the step (as it did in the 1990's) to remake the Board itself. 

It is, though, a disservice to not only local leadership in education, but to everyone in public education in Massachusetts, and most importantly, to our students throughout the Commonwealth to allow this lack of focus on the raging emergencies in public education to continue. 
It's simply far too important.

October Board of Elementary and Secondary Education: goals of the Commissioner

 Riley: "while the Department historically has been one of compliance, enforcing mandates, both federal and state" has argued since his arrival "that we at DESE need to play a more supportive role with our districts"
think the goals reflect that thinking (presentation here)
also think the Department needs to decide "if we're going to continue to be a kind of counting and a mirror organization or are we willing to jump in and support our districts"
wait, how are those two different things?
Strongly recommending move towards support

four themes:

• Provide Supports to Accelerate Student Learning 
"this is shifting away somewhat from that compliance role"
early literacy, acceleration academies, deeper learning, early college, IEPs and English learners

• Build a Diverse and Culturally Responsive Workforce 
"research proven to be effective for children"

• Cultivate Safe and Healthy Learning Environments
mental health "students came back from the pandemic often disregulated, often with challenges"
that includes mental health, food, housing

• Align DESE Supports to a Shared Academic Vision of Deeper Learning
"a vision for where we're going with this Department"

Peyser: "this are ambitious goals, and these are the right ones"
balance essential "with areas of improvement"
would suggest--"I was going to say 'add,' but I don't want to add to an already long list"--is early college (which Riley just said under student learning) 
would add career pathways
strengthening career pathways
"think of that in point four of the first point"
"the 25 percent growth...ambitious...would include innovation pathways and the after dark vocational programs"
existing programs are already growing as well
h/t to Secretary Peyser for demonstrating up to the end here that the Baker administration has been only early college and very specific aspects of vocational
Riley: were talking about students in high school being disengaged prior to the pandemic
"this idea that students are ready to do more...resonates with me"
Peyser: early college, strengthening Department's capacity to manage it
"don't want to lose sight of something that's really something internal"

Stewart: visioning exercise
really looking forward to having them share their vision
strategic plan: data being collected educator preparation programs
look at everything being proposed here: has to be "sauce that pulls everything together...and that's family engagement"
just want to see more of that
Riley: going to be talking about that on Friday

Mohammed: curious: how will you know over the course of the year where you are?
What kind of targets do you have?
"is there some kind of dashboard" that provides where you are
Riley: most of these goals are measurable
we can find a way to distill those and capture those for this Board to understand

West: thoughtful document, appreciated foregrounding accelerated student learning
sometimes you have an overarching goal with others in service of it
didn't see included anything on the changes in the competency determination process
"hope that's on your radar screen as well"
Riley: can expect we will adhere to the regulations as we begin to roll this out
important to hear from districts themselves in how it is rolled out

Lombos: glad to see diverse and culturally responsive workforce
interested in how we get to tried and true data-proven ways for students of color to improve
culturally responsive and inclusive curriculum is another way
Riley: focus on data to serve all our students better; "see what is most impactful"
"prior to five years ago, we didn't understand that there was a relationship between teachers of color and student performance and we're probably the only state that's focusing on this right now"
that is entirely not true, but it is troubling that he would think that; does he pay so little attention to what other states are doing?
These are the "kinds of data nuggets that we're looking to recover"
Canavan: what are the levers we could pull or push to have the greatest results?
had seen data that was even more granular than (what was just presented)
wonder as we highly these bullet points "to really really push on absenteeism"
really effectively move the needle on
how is the state going to move the needle on that?
Riley: for the first time, many families have children who were chronically absent "through no fault of their own"
"this is something...we're going to keep pushing out to parents and out to the public"
"kids that for whatever reason were caught up in COVID protocols missed more days of school"
(some of them got caught in COVID? itself?)
Canavan: "I had a kid who missed ten days of schools, because at that time the protocol was staying home for ten days...you could get super unlucky and be exposed multiple times, but is the lack of luck...anecdotally there seems to have been a shift in attitudes about attendance...COVID itself has been a huge driver of absence, but COVID has also been a driver in people getting used to not being in school as much"

Hills: was struck by the comprehensive nature of the goals in the memo when I read it
liked the comprehensive nature of what you were trying to do
set some expectations as part of a final document for a year from now what this Board should expect to see
resource conversations with the Governor and the Legislature
"Set our expectations given what we're seeing"
Riley: state ed departments move at "a more ponderous pace"
saying we need to move "more urgently...also be able to pivot if need be"

Supports coming for Worcester schools

 Let me start by saying that this is not even close to a complete post! I'm trying to pull together a few different strings of things here.

• You may have seen the reporting that the Worcester Public Schools are looking for outside counseling services at 15 schools. Clearly, someone is keeping an eye on the city's bid list, which is smart! Here's the one in question. This, of course, is part of the much larger work that's now going on in the district in both meeting and working to more comprehensively and sustainably meet student mental health needs; you might have read Dr. Marie Morse talking about that in Worcester Business Journal. There's going to be long-term planning rolling forward, too.
  Some of that also is in the reworking of administration positions we discussed at our last Worcester School Committee meeting. That link goes to the reworked org chart; in that, you'll see (towards the right) that the (new, to be filled) Positive Youth Development position is over both (current)  social-emotional learning and nursing under the (new, to be filled) Chief Academic Support Officer. 
  All of this is first of all acknowledging that this is work that the district needs to be doing. That itself is a refreshing change, as you might remember we spent all of last year having that reality denied by district leadership, even as students, staff, and parents noted the need. If we're going to do this right--and that's something that current leadership, thank goodness, is committed to--that means both that it isn't just internal work--thus the bid--but coordinating with outside work. It also means actually coordinating internal work, and that, frankly, just hasn't been happening. At some point I need to write a whole thing on why we need good administrators and how things fall apart without them...oh for world enough and time. 
  
  
• Also at our last meeting, we approved two position descriptions: one for a Dean of Students, one for School Culture and Climate Assistant. The School Committee, remember, approves new position descriptions; we only hire directly a handful of people. 
  These positions are a) pilots; b) not uncommon in other districts; c) school personnel (they're assigned to a school and in a school building). 
  As we moved to no longer have police in the secondary schools, one concern raised was "what are you going to do now that the police are out of the buildings?" The reflection was that, in some cases, the school resource officers might have had interactions with students during the school day that would now be removed, and that some of those interactions were contributing to a positive climate. I'm not going to argue about this here; I know what the data says overall about this, and also, Worcester's experience has varied on this widely. This is part of the response to that concern.
  The Dean position is an assistant principal level position. This also fills in a gap from my perspective that dates back to 2011: when we pushed teacher evaluation into something much more time-consuming, we took some of the time away from assistant principals, and I don't think that we did much to fill the spaces that left. Having a position that specifically is designated for student interaction at the school level is something I'm interested in seeing tried out. This pilot is at North High.
  The School Climate and Culture Assistants are staff that are in the hallways, in the lunchroom, around students; they're paraprofessional level positions. For the pilot, we're adding five of these: three at North, two at Sullivan Middle. Again, those are positions that are directly working with students.
  
  
• For those who have been ongoingly concerned about things like student discipline and restorative justice practices--you can't just drop those things in!--I also want to note how the Positive Youth Development position is described:The ideal candidate will demonstrate knowledge of • Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports • Trauma-Informed Practices • Restorative Practices and Restorative Justice • Educational Neuroscience
  The position quite specifically is focusing on this question, which also means it isn't simply being added as "a thing to do," but is specifically somebody's job. 

And since we've already voted the above, let me add this: the work that goes on in classrooms has always needed structural support to go well. The crush around schools right now makes that even more important. This is the kind of attention to that which allows teachers to actually connect with students and gives students the support and the environment to learn.
It's very much a work in progress, but it IS a work in progress, which itself is progress!