With the agenda for Thursday's Worcester School Committee meeting now posted, it seems we may need a quick explainer on a Worcester (it's part of Plan E) process, as Member Maureen Binienda has filed for reconsideration of the motion to allow students to march in graduation who have yet to complete 2 credits or fewer, a vote which she lost at the last meeting, 8-1. I wrote about this back in 2014, but let's walk through how this works for this upcoming meeting.
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.
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.
I'm still working out how to do this both A) this go-round and B) when I'm doing it from home without a desk. I'm still taking lots of notes, but I'm finding it trickier to type. Because my notes on my blog have always been as much for me as for anyone, though, I'm going to continue to post things from the meetings, even if I have to do it later. Should you want to take a look, the video is online here. It was, of course, again an entirely remote meeting.
Technically, we had two Worcester School Committee meetings last night: the first was the school choice hearing. This is, note, school choice in to Worcester; school choice out is simply allowed by state law. We actually don't have to have the hearing if we are allowing school choice, and last night, there wasn't a presentation or deliberation; we simply voted in favor of it.
On the regular agenda, the first item was, as I noted earlier this week, Ms. Biancheria's filing of reconsideration of the vote to waive the requirement this spring that students take the AP exam to achieve AP GPA credit. There is no deliberation prior to the vote on reconsideration, and the vote went as the vote on the item itself had gone: 5-2, Biancheria and Monfredo opposed. This, again, means that students who are currently taking an AP course can choose or not to take this spring's AP exam; their Worcester Public Schools GPA will not in any way be impacted by that decision (not taking the exam usually gives only honors level credit).
Our student representative Kwaku Nyarko asked during the section of the agenda that is theirs that we make plans to meet with our student advisory council soon, particularly given the current circumstances. The Mayor agreed, and we haven't set a date, but we'll keep you posted.
The report of the superintendent was not something that usually happens in April: an update on the next year's budget.
The crux of the problem is this: since our February initial look at FY21, the economy has borne the impact of what UMass Dartmouth Professor Michael Goodman has called "a medically induced coma," in which we have intentionally made choices that have slowed the economy in order to bend the curve of the infections of coronavirus. That may well impact the current fiscal year; it will for certain impact next fiscal year, as was reflected in Tuesday's state economic roundtable (my liveblog is here; the MASC coverage is here). This not only raises questions around Student Opportunity Act funding; it raises questions around regular year to year funding.
I will always tell you watch Worcester Public Schools budget presentations, and this one is no exception; it starts about nine minutes into the video.
for Worcester watchers--as our vote from two weeks ago striking the requirement to take the AP test to get AP-level credit in the GPA is back on Thursday's agenda--but also in general; as I've said before, it was Mr. O'Connell who taught me to know the rules:
A motion to "reconsider" a vote is just what it says: it asks the public body if they want to consider again what they have already voted.
A "yes" vote to reconsideration means "yes, let's vote that again."
A "no" vote to reconsideration means "no, let's stay with the vote we already cast."
If the "yes" votes succeed, the item is taken up again, and the members of the body then vote whatever the item was.
If the "no" votes succeed, the item goes forward as originally voted.
In most committees, only those who cast a "yes" vote can make a motion to reconsider and it must be done within the same meeting.
In Worcester, any member can file for reconsideration of a vote within 48 business hours of a meeting. They are to give the reason for doing so. It then appears as the first item on the following agenda.
As a result, no vote in Worcester is official until 48 business hours after the meeting.
In Worcester, this is sometimes staved off--and votes go through right away--by voting reconsideration at the same meeting, as an item can only be reconsidered once.
Thus if you are watching the AP item for Worcester for Thursday:
if your hope is that the requirement for testing is waived for this year, you're looking for a "no" vote on reconsideration (and that's it; the vote from two weeks ago is the vote).
if your hope is that the requirement of testing is reinstated for this year, you're looking for a "yes" vote on reconsideration followed by a "no" vote on the actual motion.
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