School Committee - Regular Meeting

it gets everyone's attention good evening i'll call the order a special meeting at the salem school committee of july 9th 2026 at 6 p.m this meeting is taking place in person at 29 highland avenue room 227 in salem in person attendance is the primary method for public access to this meeting a secondary method provided if technologically feasible through some access television and remotely through zoom with the meeting link posted for zoom in the agenda for this meeting spanish and portuguese interpretation is available via zoom in using the links in the posted agenda we have one item on our agenda for this evening interview of our superintendent finalist mr andrew bott Do you want to come on up? Thanks. For this evening, we'll give you two or three minutes for an opening statement if you'd like to make any opening remarks or introductory remarks. And then there's a series of questions from the committee members. Committee members who wish to ask a follow-up question to any of the questions may please indicate you'd like to do so by raising your hand and I'll call on you. And then at the conclusion of the questions, you'll have an opportunity for another couple of minutes for a closing statement if you wish.

All right.

Great. Excellent. And with that, the floor is yours.

Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be here and to see some people again and to meet the rest of the committee for the first time. I am incredibly excited about this opportunity, specifically because of the crossroads where the city of Salem and the schools where you find yourselves. To me, what is so exciting about this opportunity is that incredible amount of work has happened over the last number of years to build continuity, to build momentum, to build stronger community connections in sort of every way that you think about community. And there has been significant progress. The strategic plan just ended. The city is at the start, the launch of a process for a new strategic plan. And there's so much opportunity to not only build on the successes, but also to continue working in the areas where maybe success hasn't happened as much. For the students, for example, who haven't experienced the success of early college and the high school, or the increasing the breadth of students who access career pathways and career and tech ed opportunities as just some examples. To me, that's so exciting. I think for me, there's an incredible alignment that I have come to appreciate through the process. over these past two months where my belief in all students, and when I say all students, I really mean all students, and not just to provide opportunity, but to build in the supports and to push students who may be struggling with accessing opportunity to pull students along to coach students so that everyone is able to open the doors that that upon graduation give access to so many different post-secondary opportunities and that what what to me what i see in the vision and the work of the city and the schools and i say the city and the schools because there is such an alignment that I've come to, again, really understand and see between the city writ large and the schools and the opportunity that everyone wants for students. And to me, that is how I've always operated. And to me, that's incredibly exciting to possibly be a part of that next step in the process in partnership with the city, right? In partnership with everyone across the city of Salem.

So I'll start with our first question. Equity often requires difficult choices. How do you approach decisions about allocating resources, opportunities, and supports across students, schools, and programs when needs exceed available resources?

So the first thing that's critical is that you have to have a clear roadmap. And so to me, what I would say is for the immediate future, this next year of budgeting, as the new strategic plan is being developed and approved by this committee, There is a vision of a graduate. There's a portrait of a graduate that needs to be the guiding document of the work, of the decisions that are made, because there's never the amount of resources that we all collectively want to do everything. And so what are the goals as outlined in the vision of a graduate? And what steps do we have to take? What steps can we take to achieve those goals? The second thing is, what does the data tell us? Where are the needs? Where are the needs within schools? Where are the needs among student groups? Where are the programmatic needs? And so that decisions can be made, both how are we moving to achieve a strategic plan, a strategic vision, and then how are students moving in their progression towards achieving the goals as outlined in that strategic plan. And to me, those two guiding principles, what does the data tell us about where our students are, and what is the guiding light of the school system, It makes decisions not easy, but it guides very, with a lot of clarity, the prioritization of funding decisions in a challenging budget. And so to me, those, you have to start with those two, those two entry points are foundational. I've given it two examples of how I've approached this over the years. So first example I'll give is a superintendent in Brookline. Budgeting was all based on formulas in the town of Brookline. It's different from when I talk about Boston. Boston has a lot more discretion at the school-based level for schools to get your overall allocation. You have to meet collective bargaining requirements and legal requirements, and you have to build the budget that meets all of your obligations under special education and English language learners and collective bargaining. And then you have some options at the school level. Everything was formulaic. So schools had enrollment numbers that then meant you had the finance office allocated a certain number of kindergarten, first, second grade classes, a certain number of elective teachers, a certain number of paraprofessionals. Very, very formulaic. The one thing that was not formulaic was literacy intervention allocation. So the allocation of literacy intervention teachers. For the sake of this example, call them literacy specialists. The reality is, so at the time when I started as superintendent, literacy specialists were funded under Title I, and the Title I funding was diminishing significantly and was anticipated to drop to a point where it wouldn't even, even the funding available would not even be able to fully fund the literacy specialists for two of the eight K-8 schools. And all of the K-8 schools had some level of literacy specialists. And so the way that we approached this was what is the student need? What schools have the biggest gaps in literacy achievement? Where are those gaps? What grade levels are we seeing in those gaps? What is the data telling us about the student needs? And then really looking at what are some of the root causes. In this case, with literacy specialists and gaps in literacy, there was a direct correlation to the socioeconomic profile of the schools. The two schools that had a larger number of students who qualified for free and reduced lunch had significantly lower achievement levels in literacy. And so we made a decision to fund literacy specialists moving forward based on the need across the schools. So certain schools, the proposal was to have more literacy specialists, two or even three FTE of literacy specialists versus, say, one at 1.0 FTE across every school. And there was some, because it was new in the town, there were some sort of questions among principals. Well, this is not fair, right? And this becomes a very sort of prime opportunity to say, well, is it fair or is it equitable, right? Are we talking about an even allocation? Is that what we're seeing as fair or is fair the students who need the highest level of support when we have limited resources are the students who get that level of support, right? What we're doing is we're trying to achieve a more equitable outcome with respect to literacy for our students in the elementary schools so that we're not seeing gaps persist into high school and on to graduation and beyond. Simultaneously, as the Title I funding was diminishing, we had to figure out a way to move some of the funding onto the general operating budget so that it would and could be maintained irregardless of decisions at the federal level. And that was a bit challenging because of the budget constraints. The town, again, because like every city and town, costs where the increase in cost, inflation, utilities, transportation, healthcare was far outpacing the cost of the increase in revenues, Prop 2 1⁄2 and development and increases in development that generated more revenue. So there had to be decisions made about where the funds would come from and how the additional monies could be found on the operating budget. And we figured it out. We moved forward with it. So two schools had three literacy specialists, and then the rest of the six K-8 schools had some varying level of one to two, again, based on what the data was telling us, where the highest need was. And then when you looked at the outcome, you had principals that were very focused on progress monitoring at regular intervals, looking very closely at the data in six to eight week cycles of the students who were receiving support for the literacy intervention. And you saw progress not only there, but you saw progress ultimately in MCAS performance, in Boston it would be the MAP scores, in Brookline it was a different assessment. at the time, but the challenge was to find the funding. The move that was new in town was that the funding was not the same for everyone based on the formula, but it was following the need that students had. And the outcome was that we saw significant progress in student achievement. And so, to me, it captures an approach to a budgeting, a system-wide approach that I've taken. If I could give one other example, let me just, I'm losing my voice quickly, I apologize. School-based example, when I started at the Orchard Garden School K-8 in Boston, the very short sort of story of my start at the school was I came in in March after the state had passed the turnaround law. And there was about $250,000-plus invested in safety infrastructure, so security paraprofessionals and CFCs, or community field coordinators, which were doing discipline, right? Really just sort of in the halls, lots of suspensions. And on every metric, the school had one of the highest suspension rates, but also one of the highest incident rates of unsafe incidents in the city, and again, one of the highest rates in the Commonwealth. What the community wanted, and by community, like sort of large, like the community around the school, as well as the community within the school, was a robust arts program. The school, I started there in 2010, the school opened in 2003. So it was new construction, opened in 2003. It had two art studios, it had a dance studio, it had a theater, it had purpose-built music rooms with the acoustic tiles. It had a room, so I got there in 2010, it had a room full of instruments that were perfectly tarnished, like the flutes had never been touched. The tarnish was, there were no fingerprints on the tarnish. It sort of had this vision of this sort of, this space to where any student who enrolls could thrive in the arts and find the place, find their haven in the arts. And so the drive within the school community and the community sort of writ large was to significantly expand the arts programming and not wanting to wait. And so I had a conversation with the superintendent and I said, I think the right thing to do is to stop investing so much in the responsive structure of safety, like the safety team, the deans, the discipline team really is what it was. It was not a safety team and sort of the proactive way you think about the term, but really was a discipline team and said, let's build a school that the kids are excited about and that students want to be at and where students, everyone can find their thing and the thing that they can be excited about. And luckily I had the superintendent's support because I did not have a lot of support sort of beyond that. People thought it was a crazy idea. And it really turned out to be, I mean, it was common sense, right? So to give you the example, there were several news stories about it. The BBC did a story, and NBC News did a story, and it was sort of framed as this stroke of brilliance. It really was like doing what's right for children and what's right for a community, and it worked. And it worked not only because we invested the money, but then we thought about what are all the proactive things we need to do to build a strong community. Because this discipline infrastructure is in place because the community of the school, right, there is not a strong school community. Students are not connected to school. Students don't feel safe. And so sometimes you have to make a hard decision that can be perceived as the wrong decision because of where you are in the moment. But you have to think about broadly what are all the things you have to put in place so that students succeed within that. That was a decision that was made with students in mind, with the support of parents and guardians, with the support of the larger community that fought to have the school built in 2003. And then what are all the things we have to do to make sure it's successful? So it's a budget decision that then also you had to think about all the operational structures around it. And so for me, those are both examples of how in challenging budget times, decisions are made. What's the data telling you? What's the community vision for the school? And how do you then make the decisions with the available resources to maximize your progress towards achieving the vision while also maximizing the achievement of students and the success of students.

Any follow up questions from committee members? Member Manning, next question.

I think you've answered parts of this, but try to sort of put it as a whole. Salem has worked hard to build a culture of high expectations for all students while also offering strong college and career pathways. How would you ensure students experience a coherent educational journey from elementary through high school and graduate prepared for success in college careers and life?

So this question really fascinated me as I thought about it. So the day that I was here for the day, I had the opportunity midday around lunchtime to meet with students. And I was originally scheduled to meet with students that were part of the superintendent's cabinet. But the group of students who were in that meeting in the superintendent's cabinet all had a mandatory meeting for AP classes. So the meeting that I was having, the time that I had scheduled was happening at the same time as I believe, if I remember correctly, like 250 plus students were attending a mandatory meeting for AP classes for this coming year. So I had a unique opportunity to meet with students who were not in AP classes and understand, like start to ask questions, not understand, I need a lot more time before I could say understand, but start to ask questions about how are you experiencing the school? What is it about school that you love? What is it about school that you don't, that you wish could change? And what, to me, there are three things that need to happen to understand how to proceed with the question that you asked. One is, what is the continuity K through 12 with the vision of a graduate? It felt perhaps, again, this is my initial impression. I am not drawing a conclusion. I am not purporting to have an answer. I have questions. It felt a little bit like there was one vision K through five and one vision nine through 12. And I'm leaving six through eight out because it was field day and I just experienced joy in this building. Everyone was happy and smiling, adults, students. And so I didn't ask a lot of academic questions because we were like, my questions like were deep in the field day. What fun things are you excited about today in this heat? Because if I remember correctly, it was also a really warm day. And so I'm not sure. I have questions about is there full alignment K through 12 so that that we can articulate so that principals in an elementary school can articulate that these things that we're doing now are leading into the opportunities that students will have in the high school for college and career readiness. So I think we have to get more information. So that is one question, right? And you get that information from teachers. You get that information from teachers and staff, from principals, from families, from students. There's also a question for me of in the high school is how is everyone experiencing the high expectations and the opportunities for college and career readiness? Now, again, I don't... purport to, I don't have enough information to say like this is the thing. But the group of students that I met with were very fired up about standards based grading and were very fired up about the sort of the cap on if you're doing work at grade level on the rubric it's a three. And the opportunity to get a four is sometimes not clear. It's sometimes, it's always above grade level. And if you're not in an AP class or an early college, well early college isn't using the standards-based rubric, but you're in an AP class where you have a an additional weighted GPA because of the AP class, your GPA can never be weighted and when you're looking at opportunities post high school, a three is on grade level and you're right where you are supposed to be and the feeling that if that was a traditional scale that that would be an A and that you would be at a different position competitively in applying for post-secondary opportunities than than you are with a three and what that means in terms of a GPA and the way that it's calculated. So I use that as one example of a question that I have because we have to understand the experience of every student. I had this opportunity of students not in the AP classes. And I also had someone, not anyone who I met with that day, but somebody said to me after the day said, oh, that probably should have been canceled because the students who originally planned didn't have the opportunity to meet. And I said, no. I want to meet with the students I didn't have the opportunity to meet with. And I got invaluable information about the experience of students who are not in AP classes. It sort of gives a direction for questions that need to be asked. So we have to get information about students and the students' experience within the work that we have. And then we do some very straightforward things. We career pathways. We work with the career partners to do an evaluation of the pathway. So in a health pathway, you work with industry partners in health care to say, are the students, come see the pathway. Are graduates prepared right now for who you're looking for? So seniors who are graduating next year, are they prepared for the jobs, the industry jobs that you are looking for? Are they prepared in what you anticipate it will be in five years so that we know if we need to change something beginning in ninth grade, we can start to change that so that students are fully prepared four years later if that is a pathway that they want to pursue. We do the same thing with early college. What is the success rate for students? What are grades for students? What are the areas that students are struggling most with? If it's writing, well, what are the things that can be happening in sixth through eighth grade that will ensure stronger outcomes in an early college class? What are the things that can be happening in elementary school that better prepare in writing for middle school, that better prepare for high school and early college? We work with our partners to look at the data, to understand it, and then we look for opportunities to go back to the healthcare example. Is there an opportunity for students to graduate with a CNA certification? Is there an opportunity for students to graduate with an EMT license? If you have a fully built out pathway, the sequence of courses is not, is not so onerous that a student can't move through a pathway and graduate with an EMT certification, which then opens up opportunities, countless opportunities in career, in income, in in post-secondary education. And so, to me, it's how are we working with all of our partners to understand the success of our programs? How are we working with our students and families and staff to understand the success of the programs? And then what are we doing? What is our K-12 map? Like, my cap is a thing. The state has announced some additional requirements for graduation that are coming for graduation. What are the career opportunities, the interest that we are giving students in elementary school? What are the middle school experiences? What are the high school experiences? So that we're opening doors to students. Because what it's really about is it's so often you don't know what the opportunity is. And so how are we opening doors so students are finding a path that they want to pursue? So, to me, that's how we improve. We improve by asking ourselves what we can do better. We improve by asking our students what we can do better. And we work with our community partners to work collectively on the next steps for improvement and growth of programmatic offerings.

Thank you. Follow-up questions from the committee? So I'll ask one follow-up. How would you work with classroom teachers to determine whether or not we're meeting those goals?

So there are, you have sort of these process of surveys, you have sort of some of these traditional processes, but I think the key way to do it is to get the information, to ensure that you create structures where you can get that information smaller settings so focus groups focus groups with principals that are much smaller say grade level focus groups or content focus groups focus groups with the superintendent and the central office staff at schools within the structures that schools have so we're not asking people to do you know a B and C in addition to everything else but we build it in as a part of how a day operates so that we can get the information. And we think about what are the right questions for surveys. There are some really straightforward things that you can do. This is, when you think about professional development for teachers, one of the most, and staff, one of the most successful things I have done over my career repeatedly in sort of different venues is every professional development session ask a five question, same five questions, Likert scale, one through five on the effectiveness of the professional development. And if ever it's three or lower, that professional development was not a success. The goal is you want your average professional development to be four or higher on everything. You get immediate response on how to improve. You can think of a similar format for getting information about preparedness. You can think of a similar format for How you get, you know, the questions can't be only five and they can't be on a simple Likert scale, but working, say, with the math department at the high school, you can understand what are some gaps that students are coming in with respect to problem solving. Then you can ask similar questions of six through 18, talk to elementary teachers about what are the gaps that these gaps are preventing students from accessing certain career pathway opportunities or certain early college classes or certain advanced coursework within the high school. And you'll find a range of things. Sometimes it's curricular. Sometimes the curriculum has gaps. curriculum always has gaps right the key is figuring out where the gaps are and solving for that because there's no such thing as a perfect curriculum sometimes it's a mindset thing I think I think we sort of generally in the United States this is a broad statement so I apologize but we do a terrible job of helping students understand how math right there's this common phrase of like I'll never Dean math again but math develops the problem-solving portion of your brain. So even if you go into a career where you do not need high levels of math to succeed, to participate in and struggle with the new concepts and to successfully complete higher level math classes, it fundamentally changes the way that your brain approaches problem solving. That is a key skill in this century and it will be a key career skill moving forward as students you know, sort of the new normal with careers that you're constantly changing and needing to be flexible and the pace with which there's change in careers, you have to be a good problem solver. And so we might find in asking teachers and staff that it's, that we've done a terrible job helping students understand the thing, like why we even do math, like what is the thing that's so amazing about this? I can geek out in a similar way about physics, which I've done, I did previously in interviews, so I won't do that now. But I think it's asking the questions and creating the structures. I think focus groups, supporting principals to run focus groups at schools, the superintendent leading focus groups as well, it's the best way to get information from the folks who are teaching students each and every day.

Member Baez, question three.

Hello, so I'm going to be asking this next question in Spanish, and I'll give our members a few minutes. I just want to thank our interpreter. Salem ve la educación como una misión comunitaria. ¿Cómo construirás asociaciones sólidas con las familias, el personal, los líderes de la ciudad y las organizaciones comunitarias? ¿Y cómo asegurarías de que las familias de todos los orígenes de Salem tengan oportunidades significativas para influir en las decisiones del distrito?

I'm not confident enough in my Spanish to give the whole answer in Spanish. The key here is to involve the entire, to open the conversation to the full community. Lo más importante es de incluir toda la comunidad en esta conversación. Las preguntas de que es lo que la comunidad quieren para todos los estudiantes, que le faltan las escuelas y cuáles son las ideas para mejorarlo. So a great example that I will give is the work, and so as I talked a few minutes ago about budgeting in Boston being a very school-based decision, opportunities like early college and opportunities like career pathways are also school-based. They're not sort of systematically implemented across the district. There is support within the district once you start down that path. But when I started my work at Brighton High School, Brighton High School is uniquely located between Franciscan Children's, which is now partnered with Children's Hospital Boston, and at the time, St. Elizabeth's Hospital is now Boston BMC Brighton. And so, two large healthcare institutions. And what families said was, how come we do not have access to the health career pathways that are available at other schools? And we don't have access to it. Our newcomer students do not have access to it. Our special education students do not have access to it. The admissions policies within the Boston Public Schools for high schools, and I won't dive into that, but there is a very complicated admissions structure to high schools in Boston where sort of all but five schools have special admissions processes. And in most of those special admissions schools, if you don't start there in seventh grade or ninth grade, in particular ninth grade, you don't really have the opportunity to get into the school after that. And so newcomers, for example, the large number of newcomer English learners in the city of Boston didn't have the opportunity starting in 10th grade or 11th grade as ELD1 or ELD2 students to access a health pathway. When healthcare industry, what families knew, because what they could see on the news, what they knew from community conversations and community meetings, is that not only is there a massive need for, there's a massive gap in the number of workers in the healthcare industry versus the jobs, right? At one point, thousands and thousands of vacancies just within the Mass General Brigham network alone. and a great need for multilingual staff in the programs. And so families said, why don't we have, we want the same thing that students at this other school that has a special admissions process. We want this for our students. We want this for newcomers who enroll at any time. We want this for newcomers who might be an ELD one student and how are we gonna support it? And so we then worked with our community to fully understand what is the path that we want to build, how are we going to support the path, where are the points where we're gonna have the highest level of support in English and really have a majority of class in English versus bilingual teachers, say in an introductory class, pathway class, principles of biomedical science as one example, where the teacher can go between multiple languages to support and accelerate academic development as students are learning English. career pathway is one example. I followed a similar path with early college, and specifically designed early college for English learners. And so how are we ensuring that English learners, because largely across the city of Boston, students who were accessing early college were not ELD2 students, right? Some ELD3 students, a lot of students, fours, had exited and mainstreamed into fully mainstream English classes. But ELD2 and ELD3 students were not having the same level of access. So that was a desire named by students, by families, and by our early college partner. And so we worked together to build the programs that gave not only the access but the success within that to students who otherwise the system sort of writ large was marginalizing, right? The system marginalized English learners with respect to access to early college, with respect to access to pathways if you enrolled in school after ninth grade. And so there are ways to solve it and there's ways to, you work, you want is you engage in a real conversation. It's not just a form, but okay, here's the real conversation. Let's work together. Okay, I need you to call, you know, person X to help move this forward. We, how do we work with our political leaders? We had a renovation of our science labs. The science labs, you know, failed accreditation, the annual, the accreditation process, the decennial. process, we needed new labs. And our city counselor said, oh, there's this developer that's planning a bio lab in the neighborhood that's interested in sort of exploring a different type of community benefit project. Would you be interested in talking about the labs as a community benefit? Yes. So then the initial response of the district was, well, that's complicated. So it's like, okay, then we talk with families, with the city councilor. How can we all work together? Because yes, it is complicated, but it's not undoable. And so how do we work together to make sure that that happens? In Brookline, it was i inherited a system where the pto presidents met with the superintendent monthly i shifted that to parent leaders so it wasn't just pto presidents but parent leaders within the schools the ptos the school state councils or anyone else right if you if you joined the instructional leadership teams or sort of you were involved in the the extended day programming that or sort of other parent opportunities. I opened it to CPAC. There were CPAC meetings, but CPAC needed to be at that table as well. I invited the parent leadership of the African American Latino Scholars, which is a program within Brookline, and Steps to Success, which is a program to support low-income students across the town. Another way you do it, one is what are the specific action steps you want to take, like the career pathways, early college examples that I gave. The other is how do you take a structure that exists, identify the bias within the structure, and then change the structure so that the voices are inclusive of the broader community. And those conversations became much richer in the work that happened and really actually became very important to the school committee in thinking about policy decisions and policy work that was happening, feedback relative to collective bargaining priorities, what are things that families would like to see happen in a subsequent round of collective bargaining in budgetary priorities. It became a much more inclusive and representative body by identifying the issue and then solving for it and bringing a much larger, much more comprehensive representation of voices to that table within that structure.

Any follow-ups to that question? Members not.

Thank you. Appreciate the response. One thing that you noted that I wanted to unpack a little, if you don't mind, you used the term real conversations, which I appreciate. And I'm curious how you would approach beginning that here in Salem, not currently being a member of the community. How do you envision having those real conversations with communities that don't know you?

Yeah. So when I say real conversations, just to sort of fully pull back the curtain, what I'm talking about is like it is so often organizations create a structure of like listening sessions so that you can say like we held five listening sessions, but the plan has already been decided. And so to me, a real conversation is listening, asking questions, putting forth, like, here's what I'm hearing, and also saying, like, well, I saw this thing, right? Like, I did it right here. I saw this. I got this glimpse talking to high school students about a real issue that they have with a grading policy. I do not have an answer. I have a lot of thoughts about it, but I need to ask a lot more questions. And so the way I do it is I continue to ask questions. And so I ask questions of more students. I ask questions of teachers who are implementing the grading policy. In that example, there are so many things that are amazing about standards-based grading, right? It's not necessarily a conversation about we've got to throw out everything and start over. Perhaps there is a relatively straightforward way to address the concern and uphold all the things that are so powerful about standards-based grading. But it's a conversation and understanding. So educators, students, families, the committee, people who have in higher ed who've experienced it or in unions that are, you know, you've got an application process for an apprenticeship and you know, do grades play into that and are students disadvantaged? It's really understanding what that chessboard, for sort of a lack of a better visual, like what that chessboard looks like And also talking through possible solutions. Say, well, what do you think about X? What do you think about Y? Here's an idea that I have. What I've learned over the years is that it is very powerful and the idea is always stronger when I come to a conversation to say, I've been thinking about this a lot. here is the idea that I have based on this information that I have. What am I missing? What am I getting wrong? What are the questions I didn't ask? How do we make this better? Or how do we make a decision to say, like, that's actually not the right path to pursue and we need to have a change of course because it's actually that proposed solution doesn't actually solve the problem that was identified or the challenge or the area for growth. And so real listening is just that. It is asking a lot of questions. It is being present and making sure people understand. It's also being very upfront with the data. And so early on, I talked about this in my day-long interview, so I apologize for folks who've heard this before, but I think it's relevant to this question. One of the things early on as superintendent that I identified in Brookline was a gap in the high school in the recommendations for students for advanced coursework, for honors and advanced coursework. So recommendations were made by eighth grade teams of teachers. And white and Asian, 70% of white and Asian students in the eighth grade were recommended for honors and advanced classes in the high school. 30% of African American and Latinx students were recommended for honors and advanced coursework in the high school. And so on the face of it, there's a question, there's an issue here. First question is, what does the data tell me? I need to say, yes, there's an issue. And what is the data behind this telling us? And so we did a taking student names out, but sort of keeping demographic information. Here are all the students with the exact same demographic profile. And what is the differentiation in recommendations that were happening for the honors and advanced coursework? The difference was happening based on the racial demographics of students. Students could have the exact same profile. And one student, a white or Asian student, would be recommended. An African-American or Latinx student would not. Exact same profile, MCAS scores, grades, attendance. So that is the definition of structural racism. The structures of the system have to change. So I had a lot of thoughts coming in about what could happen differently about the course recommendation process. I took it to principles. I took it to the senior leadership team. Principals took it to the eighth grade teachers who are making the recommendations. We simultaneously had to do work because there was a sort of visceral reaction among teachers saying, like, I'm deeply uncomfortable with you saying that we're racist. And it was not about individual actors, individual racism. It was about a structure. It is the definition of structural racism. There are good actors in a system where the system is set up to have disparate outcomes that are disparate in how they affect students of different races. It had to change. But it was listening to people. And then it was talking with families about it. So there was simultaneously a conversation where families were saying, well, we didn't know anyone can actually override a teacher recommendation. So anyone, you just have to call, if you're an eighth grade parent, you just have to call the high school. And students that were a part of the Steps to Success program that I referenced a few minutes ago, who are low-income families, students from low-income families, writ large, families are like, we had no idea we could make a phone call. It's like, okay, here's how you do it. Yes, that's the high school's policy. So it's an information, right? So our approach became, because we had conversations at that leadership, that, you know, parent and guardian leadership cabinet that I described a few minutes ago, we had conversations about it there. So we had a information campaign for families. We changed the process at the high school with feedback from teachers and we started to see significant, immediately we started to see significant progress in the change. Now the second thing that the high school wanted to have happen was to de-level history for the ninth grade. The high school wanted to take a step to D-level history. And the school committee was behind that move. And so there was a year-long process of working to get an incredible amount of community feedback on what does the ninth grade course need to look like? What is the rigor of the ninth grade course? What are the expected outcomes of the de-leveling of the ninth grade course so that students who are still interested in advanced coursework in history and the social sciences can start to pursue that in the 10th grade? And what it did was it further broke down so the course recommendation process was stronger, But it also broke down some of the silos. That de-leveled class broke down some of the silos that started immediately upon enrollment of high school, where your schedule often dictates, if you're in multiple honors classes, you tend to be with a lot of students who are also in honors classes. And in a large high school, it can create silos. Here's an opportunity in a really interesting history class that teachers worked incredibly hard to design, that families, parents, and guardians in the school committee gave a ton of feedback on. for students to be truly heterogeneously grouped and have a common experience entering the high school. And I actually think it was a huge success. It has become a point of contention in the town now. And I think it's been caught up in sort of larger politics. But it is something that I continue to be very proud of supporting that next step that the high school wanted to take. sort of following just after the work that happened to change the process. And it's all about listening and getting that feedback and having those real conversations and hard conversations to come up with the best possible plan.

Any further follow-ups? Member Hoffman.

Tell us about your experience supporting students who face significant barriers to success, including students from marginalized communities and those at risk of disengagement. How would you ensure Salem's systems identify needs early and provide effective support?

I mean, I think for this question, I mean, this has been my career. And so the work of ensuring that schools are successful, that schools are successful for all students, whether that is special education, whether that is English learners, whether it is a student who just doesn't love school, is disconnected from school, whether it's a student who has had a concussion and are having a hard time reengaging. I mean, there's so many ways to look at this question, and it's just what I do. A key part of this is you have to know the students And you have to know what the data is telling you, right? So it is a multifaceted approach. My expectation, when I was superintendent, my expectation of principals was similar to an expectation I have for myself as the head of school, which is you have to know when a student walks in, you have to be able to sense like, okay, something's off, I need to have a conversation. Or I need to ask the person who is this student's Every student needs to have their one person. So first and foremost, schools have to have strong community. Every student needs to have a person. They need to have their person, preferably multiple people. School principal, the school leader needs to know who all the kids, all the students' person is. You need to have an understanding of when students are walking in, who's off? Who's having a bad morning? What's this trend that's been happening for five days? But you also need to understand at a deep level what the data is telling you. And so if you think about attendance, the challenge for attendance is your kindergarten attendance pattern becomes very fixed very quickly if left unaddressed. And so chronic absenteeism in kindergarten, in a grade that is legally not required by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, can become your attendance pattern moving forward. And if it is not a strong attendance pattern, Even again, even in a grade that is not required by law, it has so many impacts down the road. So it's what is the kindergarten attendance and how are you intervening to support students so that students do not become chronically absent? How are you watching your chronically absent students? I watch students on a, it's a weekly basis, who has missed three consecutive days in a week, who's missed five consecutive days, whose attendance dropped this week over last week. Sometimes that's, as the year progresses, it becomes so fractional that it's more helpful to look in a two-week trend, right, as the denominator goes up in the number of days. What are the interventions that have happened? What are the, like, there are so many things that you can do for attendance, and it's the same thing for, how you're supporting any student from traditionally marginalized groups. So one is an expectation that anyone you work with, so I'm gonna go back to early college, sort of in the spirit of, All the work that's been done about in Salem to bring incredible college and career readiness opportunities, or not readiness, but college and career opportunities and high quality opportunities to students. One thing that has to be non-negotiable is that your partners have to work with everyone. Brighton High School has one of the district's few programs, substantially separate special education programs for students with an emotional impairment where it's externalizing behaviors. And so the way that the disability manifests itself is in externalizing behaviors. So we have upwards of 50 students. It's a large number of students. The conversation with Bunker Hill in our early college application was, we are writing this with the explicit goal of increasing the number of multilingual learners who are accessing early and succeeding in early college and are getting momentum behind an associate's degree while still in high school and we are gonna support students who are also in the special education program. And what do you need as a partner from us? What do you need us to do to ensure that students are successful? And what do you need in terms of our support to make sure students are successful? Because the access is a non-negotiable. If you're gonna be a partner with us, the access is non-negotiable. And so I use that reference as a partner. It's the same that you do with an AP course offering. Because you're an English learner, you might be an ELD2 student, you deserve and will have the same access to AP Calc if that's where you are. I believe deeply in AP by choice, not AP by prerequisite. I believe that students deserve the opportunity and you may not have had a great academic experience until the moment when you are ready to say, I am ready to have this, like I've gotten the support and I am now ready for this great, like to take this next challenging step. And so how are we going to support an ELD2 student in AP calculus? How are we going to support a special education student with any number of special education profiles, right? What does the IEP say we need to do to support the student, and how are we going to make that happen, right? That expectation has to be there, that we are going to give the support, we're going to have access for everyone, and we're going to give the supports for everyone. And then it's the everyday work. The principals need to know it. I want to know it. One of the things that I got super excited about in terms of knowing students is one of the elementary principals at the end of the focus group said, okay, I've got five students who I will meet the chronic absenteeism target if these five students are here the next, I think it was four days. She's like, so I'm going to make phone calls right now. And I was like, that's fantastic, right? You know at that level that here are five students who are on the cusp And we want to be sure that they get over the finish line. And not to forget about anyone else, but you need that level of specificity. And so what's the student's academic achievement? What's the progress? It comes down to, I've said this a lot over the years, People, data, time, and community, right? And so how are we supporting students? What's the time students need to be successful? Who are the people supporting students and how are we supporting the adults who are supporting the students? Does everyone have, what's the data telling us? so that we know exactly what we need to do. How are we monitoring that? How are we adjusting at appropriate intervals so that we are constantly on an upward trajectory? And what's the community that we're building to be sure that students are successful? All those gears are in sync. Everyone is going to succeed and everyone has equal access, right? Because you've set that non-negotiable that everyone, everyone means everyone.

Any follow-up questions? All right. School districts across Massachusetts face significant fiscal challenges. Tell us about your approach to budgeting and resource allocation and share an example of how you have navigated a period of financial constraint.

I believe that budget needs to have a huge level of transparency. So when I came in as superintendent in Brookline, the deputy superintendent for finance and I immediately met. And she had been the deputy superintendent for finance for, I believe, two years, a year and a half before I started superintendent. And the budget document, I'm not going to call it a budget book, the budget document, if I remember correctly, it was between 20 and, say, 35 pages. It was a narrative. And she said, I want to make the budget book very transparent. And so we I said, what do we need to do? What do we need to think about? We created a massive budget document that was fully transparent. What are all the FTEs? Where's the money being spent? How's the money being spent school by school? How's the money being spent by departments? What was what was challenging is you had a You had school-based budgets, but then some of those positions were also managed by the central office. And so we created dual documents. So you could see this is in the teaching and learning budget, and it is deployed in the schools. Well, how are we spending on professional development? How are we spending on supplies? What are our transportation costs? What are our out-of-district costs? Line by line by line. That process created... The full transparency created an incredible amount of trust with the town's finance committee, the town's advisory committee, which is very fiscally conservative, which I think with the challenges of budgets makes a lot of sense. The advisory committee, not the select board, not the finance subcommittee, the advisory committee. So there may have been questions about the priorities in the budget, but it was not about where's the money. And so then I or some of the deputy superintendents or school committee members, if school committee members were also present for advisory committee meetings could say, this is why that's in the budget document. This is why it's a priority. This is how it's helping achieve this goal as laid out by the school committee, as opposed to, well, where's all the money? How's all the money being spent? And then it can become a conversation of do you really need $1.6 million in supplies? And then you can say, well, here's what paper costs. It just creates a level of real transparency. It also made conversations like when somebody from the finance committee would say, well, the town needs three fire trucks. Are you saying that we should sacrifice a fire truck for this to fully fund the school budget? I could say, what I'm telling you is this budget is designed to achieve the priorities as set out by the school committee. And so I'm not saying what you should do one way or another with the fire department. I think you should try to find ways to fully fund both. What I'm saying is that this is the budget, this is the transparent, the clear, the budget document that is going to allow the school department to make progress towards the school committee goals. Now, every year was a fiscal challenge. You saw my resume. We one year had to operate an override that was successful. But prior to that, we had to balance deficits where costs were increasing greater than expenditure. even after the operating override passed, it wasn't enough funding to cover the, what the select board ultimately approved was a operating override that funded a portion of the deficit for both town and schools, but not the full amount of the deficit. So there were still some challenging budget decisions. One of the things that I identified in the budget was the structure at the high school And the weeds of it are not important, but it was a structure that spent about $1.6 million. And at the time, it was my belief that the high school was not using enough data. There was far more money being invested into that particular intervention. It was called tutorial. And it was basically like a study hall with certified teachers to help students who were sort of struggling with work. So like more of like an academic resource center. So you sort of think about the idea behind it, an incredibly powerful idea. But in its implementation, there were sort of far more sections of it that were being run at a significant expense to the school department based on what the data was saying. And so I started the conversation with the high school and with the school committee, the finance subcommittee to say, here's an area with a $1.9 million deficit that year, if I'm remembering correctly, about $1.6 million all in was dedicated towards tutorial. And I was not advocating eliminating all of it, but sort of a partial adjustment. Through that process, through the conversations, through work with the high school, it was important at the time to the high school to not cut back on the program, but to work on sort of improving implementation of the program, and so the school committee decided that they didn't want to reduce the funding to that program, and instead wanted to raise fees to partially close the gap. So to raise athletic fees, rental fees, and some of the fees minimally for the pre-K program, for not the universal pre-K, but for sort of the other half of the pre-K programming. And the fees, specifically the athletic fees, It was a move that would raise more revenue, but it was going to restrict access. And so it goes to your question about a disparate impact. It was a policy change that I believed and the Deputy Superintendent of Finance believed would have a disparate impact on low-income students. And so what we then did was worked with this with the policy subcommittee to develop and implement a financial assistance policy that allowed for a sort of The end result was an increase in fees that addressed a portion of the deficit that year. It resulted in funding the financial assistance policy at a level that we believed it needed to be funded at. And it created a way so that access to athletics was not dependent on your ability to pay for athletics. And so I believe actually it was a really strong financial assistance policy. It was, you know, in sort of the points at which you qualified for financial assistance really tracked the cost of living in the town and not the federal sort of levels of designation of living sort of out or below the poverty line, but what the cost of living was. And we did a lot of information, sort of information campaign on what the financial assistance policy was and how you implement. And so that was a way to work with the committee to not, to sort of respect the decision of the high school to want to improve the way that tutorial is being implemented, but also sort of go down the path that the school committee felt was sort of one of the ways to address that budget deficit, but then put a policy in place to remove barriers that that financial decision would have created for low-income students. And so really sort of in any budget process, it's looking at where are the places that we can talk about budget challenges. Sometimes it's straightforward. You have an enrollment drop, it's about a section. It's about you have to collapse this, you know, sometimes there's a bubble in a school or... It's a, you know, one or two grades have, say, three sections when the rest of the school has two sections. And as enrollment moves through the school, it is a reduction that naturally follows enrollment trends. It's never easy. I'm not saying that it's, you know, budget reductions are never easy, but it's a much more straightforward decision. So you look for those first, and then you look for in the decisions that we're making, how do we then also make sure that we're not creating a new obstacle for students, students who have been historically marginalized. I will say that I strongly believe, I personally strongly believe that budgets should not be balanced in tough budget years on sort of, we should not count on grants. Grants are a way to, to me, grants are sort of two-fold. It's a way to launch a new program, and as the program works and you build it in, if it's that important to the schools, we need to think about ways to bring it into the operating budget so it has long-term sustainability. I also believe that grants like to fund early college, for example, I say an early college specialist, and I'm probably using, this is a term that I use in my everyday work, but to fund an early college specialist to support students on a grant or to fund an art teacher on a grant or to fund a world language teacher on a grant, and that grant goes away, you lose the programming, then what's the impact on students? And so to me, grants become a very tricky way and not the best way to balance a budget. And so just sort of to be fully transparent, I'm not opposed to grants. I think grants are an incredible opportunity for schools and for a city in looking at sort of every way to fund schools. And we have to be really careful and thoughtful about the grants that we do pursue and how we pursue them, because you can create a double cliff of, you're masking a budget deficit with grant funding, and if that grant funding goes away, if the funder, the government entity that funds it, or a private foundation that's funding it changes their priorities, you're both losing the grant and you've got the deficit, and it has a much more massive impact on students. I've long held that. When I started at OG, at Orchard Gardens, we had a $3.7 million school improvement grant. That was back in the day of the massive SIG grants. And I didn't fund a single position on grant money. I funded extending time. I funded partnerships. We partnered with Citizen Schools at the time for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. We funded that. What are the things that we need to do to accelerate student learning now? We massively extend the day and opportunity for students so that we can accelerate the trajectory that students are on. And when the grant funding goes away, we still have our core academics, our core teachers, our core athletics, our core electives. they're not grant dependent. So I just say all that to say that I, I don't look to grants to be sort of the savior. They are very important tools, but I work sort of very conservatively with grant funding and really see it as an opportunity to build new programming in. I used it recently, grant funding, to launch an Arabic language program at Brighton High. Students wanted a challenging language. So again, listening to students, students said, in our school community, The prominent languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French. Can we have a world language that's different from all of that? And how can we do it? And so to launch it, we worked with a partner that the agreement was the first year they fully funded it, the second year they partially funded it, and the third year the school completely took over. So we now have a fully operating Arabic program with two Arabic language teachers and growing enrollment as students have experienced success in building the program. So I see grants as a great way to bring in new opportunities, but not necessarily the solution.

A follow-up question. I just want to ask briefly the superintendent, you know, can function as a bridge between the school committee and our teachers unions through the budget process, contract negotiations, just daily operations, lots of interactions with Salem Teachers Union and with our other unions. How will you approach that role?

It's really an open dialogue. And so what I had in Brookline was open, I mean, very open dialogue with the union president. And so we talked frequently. I would hazard to say almost every day, if not every day. We had scheduled meetings. So things that we couldn't resolve immediately, right? It might be a phone call to say this thing's happening. I'd say, let me look into it. I'd call back and say, we can solve this immediately. Here's the solution. How does that sound? Great. Sometimes it was more complicated, and we had biweekly meetings. It was me, the HR director, and the deputy superintendent for finance, where we would try and solve some of the sort of more complex challenges that were happening. And sometimes it's a very direct conversation that I could then say to the school committee, here's this thing that has come up that is actually bargaining. Like I can't solve it. It is actually something that needs to be bargained. And so it is a school committee decision to see if this is something that is an impact bargaining. moment or is this something that is a re-opener? We stop sort of what we're doing right now and it comes back as a conversation in the opening of sort of main table bargaining session, right? Because it is a bargainable, you know. But there's lots of ways to do that. But to me it's very open, very open communication. I went through a very complicated round of contract negotiations in Brookline. So I came in as a rookie superintendent with contract negotiations that were, the contract had expired a year prior. And the communication was really broken between the school committee negotiating team and the union negotiating team. It just was sort of, it just happened, right? There's not any blame in that statement. It just was sort of what the state was. And so where progress was able to be made, the union president would call and say, I have an idea. What do you think about X? And I'd say, I have opinions of it. That's actually a school committee question. But if you're talking about X, Y, or Z, but let me take it to the school committee so that some of that pre-conversations could happen prior to sitting down at the table so that there was sort of a better understanding of like where where everyone was to sort of better support like there was no negotiation happening right it was about like information here's this question well here's the question that will come back absolutely no negotiation sort of no direct dealing between myself and the union president i want to be perfectly clear about that she was not direct dealing with me i was not direct dealing with her But it was getting information that helped the negotiating team largely ultimately resolve the contracts. It looked like it was going to be... It potentially could have been sort of the first strike that was sort of... There have been multiple now sort of subsequently, but it was sort of headed that way and through open communication and really just like... I got a call from the president, I picked up the phone. What's going on? So if it was an emergency, we could deal with it. If it was a question, I could say, let me take that question to someone. I just think open communication is just the key, right? And being honest about like, well, that's not something I can do, but let me take it to the right people. And I use the example of the teachers union, the BEU president, but same thing with the several other unions in the town. Just very direct conversation, open lines of communication.

Member Miranda.

How do you balance supporting principals and school leaders with holding them accountable when student outcomes, school climate, or equity goals are not being consistently met?

So I think about this question in, when you think about like a scatterplot and line of improvement, right? Improvement in schools, right? Because we're humans, right? Educators are humans. Our students are human, our family. It is not a straight line, right? But the question is, what is the scatter plot of improvement looking like? And so how are we making progress towards our goals? And is the general trend upwards? So my expectation of principles is that principles have a clear understanding of those data points. What are the data points that are above that that average line of improvement? What are the data points below the average line of improvement? What are the things that are going to be done differently to address those data points that are below the average line of improvement? And then what are we doing to maintain the success for the data points that are above the average line of improvement? I'm going to go back to the example, the budgeting example I gave about the prioritization of funding with the literacy specialists. One of the things when I started in the town of Brookline is that data was really a four-letter word. And it was a culture that had built up over time because of a misuse, I believe, of data and how data was used and sort of a collective move away from seeing the power of data to give you information, to tell you what's working and what's not. I've long said, you know, failure is feedback. The data on a thing that you're trying, if it doesn't work, you collect the data and you stop doing it, right? You don't persist in the thing that's not working. So, in the increased funding for two schools in particular with literacy specialists, that was an expectation that the principals are supporting the literacy specialists working with a district person, the ELA coordinator for the district, sort of working themselves and with the superintendent's office on monitoring the progress of growth for students. So it was shifting. The expectation was principals identified a need. I supported the need. The data supported the need. I supported the need, worked with the school committee to fund the need. Then my expectation is, okay, now there's work that you have to do to shift the culture of data And here's how I suggest you do it. Let's talk about this, how I think it should be done within this smaller circle, and then how can that expand out to other systems within the school. And so for me, my expectation is you understand the things that are working, you understand the things that are not working. You follow through with the things that are not working. You're very clear in communicating. One of the things I said to principals in Brookline was, if you even sense that something is not going to go well or that there's an issue that's coming up, let me know. Because we can work on it ahead of time. We don't have to wait until something happens. breaks down. And so to me, it's it's it is a very clear lots of support for principals and school leaders because it is a incredibly hard job. And it's a constantly like you can never plan your day. Right. You have sort of a wish list for the day, the things you want to get done. But it is never linear. And you constantly have to be improving that scatterplot of of improvement points have to be, that line of best fit has to be improving. And when it's not, we have to have very real conversations about what's not. There have to be certain non-negotiables. Non-negotiables are, if there's an allegation of bullying, it has to be investigated and addressed. If there's an equity violation, it has to be investigated and addressed. You have to communicate. You can't get a report of an equity violation and then sit on it for a week, right? It has to be addressed. So certain things are non-negotiable and making that very clear and an expectation that will be followed through on. And if you don't know, if you're struggling to follow through on it because of the complexity or because of sort of what happened, Ask for the help. That's the job of the superintendent and the superintendent's office is to support through any of it, right? If it's relatively straightforward or if it's something that's complex. But those have to be non-negotiables. There has to be a focus on school culture. Schools have to be a joyous place. I've talked a lot about data. In this time, I'm not keeping track of how long, but sort of hour plus that I've been talking. To me, data is an important tool because it gives you a snapshot of a moment and it gives you some insight into the questions you should be asking of what you should do. Data, I mentioned a few minutes ago, sort of data being equated as sort of a four-letter word. Because when a community or a school focuses on data at the expense of community and joy, well, then the whole thing is breaking down. So I expect principals to have joy. I loved... I mean, maybe people didn't love field day at Collins the day I was there, but I loved seeing the joy on people's faces. I don't think people could hide the excitement of how much fun everyone was having. Adults were laughing. There was joy in conversations between adults, between adults and students, between students. That doesn't happen the last week of school on field day without that work happening all year. So I expect the culture and the strong school community work to happen. I expect clarity around what's working, where's improvement, meeting the goals, exceeding the goals, where are we struggling? How are we gonna work together to address the areas where we're struggling? What do you need to maintain the successes? And then there are certain things that are just non-negotiable that have to be followed through on. And to me, that's how I approach my work with principals. And as a longtime principal, I have a deep, deep understanding of the complexity of it. Also, with so much time in schools, I have a deep appreciation of the complexity of teaching and the complexity of being a paraprofessional. These are incredible. The school-based jobs are so... complex and difficult. And everyone who's in them are in them because they love working with students, right? People really love their job. And so the role of superintendent, you have to be very supportive of that. And there have to be clear expectations.

Thank you.

Follow ups. I have a follow-up. So can you tell us about your approach to professional development as a tool to support educators in that work?

Yeah. I mean, I think there are a couple of different ways that I think have been that I have seen particular success. So there's professional development. When you're trying to sort of make system-wide change, there are professional development opportunities. There's an experience that an entire system can have that can be a springboard to the next step of the work. And so An example is in Brookline, schools are closed on election day for the presidential elections. They were when I was superintendent. They weren't closed for town elections, but for large elections, sort of larger elections they were. But it was a staff professional development day. We were beginning the deep work of equity, of identifying the inequitable outcomes in the system and trying to come to a common understanding of sort of how do you have conversations around the work so that you can actually engage in the work? How do you open the door successfully to the conversations? And so we reached out to a keynote speaker who I did not think would say yes and said yes quickly. And so Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum came up and did a keynote for the entire system. Everyone was in the high school, auditorium. It was election day 2016. She had an incredibly powerful message to the school, the community at large. And then we had a series of breakout sessions after that where principals planned with the with staff, school-based staff, school-based breakout sessions to engage and follow like sort of the next conversation in sort of how are we now going to sort of actualize this vision that's been laid out? What are we going to do between now and December break to take steps forward with this? I also worked with the union president. The union president wanted to have a particular session that was run by union leadership about the history of paraprofessionals and sort of the history of paraprofessionals relative to sort of the demographics hiring trends over time, salary, just to fully understand the role. And so we worked together to build in time for that session as well so that there could be sort of this collective understanding of sort of the history of paraprofessionals, the expectation of paraprofessionals, the intersection of paraprofessionals and teachers. And so it was a day that was sort of multiple, it was a strong day and multiple, there were multiple people involved. I think school-based professional development, I think there's a real power for school-based teams and principals to drive that. So school improvement plans should be aligned to the vision of a graduate, portrait of a graduate, and the district strategic plan. school-based professional development should come out of the needs in the school improvement plan. And then there are experts in the schools who can lead the professional development, whether that's the principal or teacher leadership opportunities, ways to uh you know not require people to take on more but one of the most successful ways that i've seen over the years of teacher-led professional development is to both create the time and compensation for people's time and planning and delivering the professional development in their area of expertise to their colleagues to accelerate the growth within a school community around the work that that the school community is working on in that school improvement plan aligned with the district's strategic plan. So I think that's another way to think about professional development. I also mentioned earlier, you've got to get feedback on professional development. The worst thing to do is have professional development that is terrible and wastes people's time. And so often you hear from people who experienced professional development, like that just was a miss. And so you've gotta, as the person, any person leading professional development has to be willing to get the feedback that yeah, that missed the mark. And you might have planned really hard, so it is not an indictment of your ability to lead professional development, it's just saying like that professional development just, You know, the lines just, they missed, right? The lines stayed parallel, right? They didn't intersect. And so we just need to do something differently next time. So you've also got to constantly get feedback from people who are participating as participants into the effectiveness of the professional development so you can adjust.

And we're stuck. Oh, now we're at Miranda.

As you were speaking, this question came to me, but I'm curious, during your time as the superintendent, can you tell me about some of the successes and failures? And maybe if you can recall some data that was used to, you know, to prove this in some way. But successes and failures of recruitment and retaining educators of color.

Yeah, so this is such an important question. So the, I worked really closely directly, the superintendent directly with the HR director. I believed it was a shift that was important to me. And so I had, you know, there were three deputy superintendents in Brookline and I had the HR director become a direct report so that she and I could work hand in hand on just, just this. There were several strategies that we put in place. One was we got a full understanding of the hiring timeline. And when you look at the hiring timeline, and I would need to understand this for Salem and the hiring timelines for surrounding communities, in Brookline, Brookline consistently posted jobs after Boston and had a salary structure that was slightly lower than Boston's. In the end, the top salary step was about the same, but in Boston there were nine steps, and I think at Brookline at the time there were 15 or 18 steps. So it took longer to get to the highest salary level. What happened is when jobs were posted at or before all of the surrounding towns, including Brooklyn, Newton, Boston, Newton, Cambridge, Somerville, Dedham, when the hiring happened early, the district, we were able to hire a greater number of diverse educators. So in every way you think about diversity, right? So we were able to have great success. So that required having a strong sense of budget early on. it required having a strong sense of attrition and trying to understand what were the number, what's the general annual attrition rate of teachers who are not retiring? What's our anticipated retirement rate? One year we tried implementing sort of early recruiting with letters of commitment, but not necessarily the exact position. That's tricky, because people want to know what their exact position is. So it was sort of an attempt. We tried something. We got a lot of interest, and we actually were able to hire people into actual positions when they posted, because we had done a lot of the interview work prior to job posting, right? A relationship had already been built. We also changed the process and the expectation for principals. And so there were specific questions. We worked on questions that, how do you keep bias out of questions? And how do you really look at like, What are the questions that help you get a complete understanding of a candidate? And how do you check not only racial bias, bias about language, but how do you check a bias to say like, oh, you went to this university and I went to this university. Oh, I know the program, it's a great program. Yeah, it may be a great program, but everyone deserves a fair chance in the question. So we really moved to scenario-based questioning. And made sure that people were not leading in the questions. So taking out the questions of like, well, at school, at Brighton High School, we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We believe blah, blah, blah. What do you believe? It's a scenario, like in this scenario, the student comes and reports this to you about their, you know, they failed a test, they did this, how do you, what is your next step? Or what are your next three steps with the student? Like give a scenario. We also made sure that the diversity of the interview committees was expanded. We required that parents, parents and guardians were included and students were included. Now at the high school, that was not a shift, but in the K through H, that was a shift. because the K-8 students were not always included. So the combination of those, right, all created sort of a different path for hiring that resulted in greater diversity in educators. Simultaneously, we did a lot of work with the recruiting candidates to apply, greater diversity of candidates for the district leadership team, as well as school principals. And so over three years, we saw good progress in leadership positions as well, in the diversity of individuals in leadership positions, as well as of teachers writ large across the district. Then the key is how do you retain educators, right? So we worked on a, obviously you have the first-year mentoring program for anyone who's new, but we also worked with the professional, so the HR director worked with the professional development coordinator, sort of the team in teaching and learning, to create affinity groups that met regularly to support any educator, so it wasn't just new educators, but new educators brand new to teaching but also new to the district or new to a school were invited to join by veteran educators who were also participating in the affinity groups. And that was another level of support in addition to the structured mentoring programs We had a year one program and then we had a year two program because year two in a lot of ways is just as hard for different reasons from year one, but it is a hard year as well. And so increasing our support for new educators to to provide the support to retain individuals once they were hired. So those were the steps that we took. It requires constant focus. It requires a lot of recruiting work. It requires a lot of presence on social media. It requires reaching out to colleges and universities to get postings out on all the message boards and the the digital communication systems that students are using at the colleges and universities. So you have to be very proactive with all of your outreach and not just hope people apply. And then you had to have the right structures in place to take bias out of the questions and then once hired, support people once in the job.

Thank you.

And we're stopped.

Thank you. Salem has a strong foundation and an ambitious future, including a transformative high school project that will impact the community for generations. What should Salem schools look like 10 years from now? How can the superintendent ensure that long-term investments remain educationally sound, fiscally responsible, and responsive to community needs?

I mean, that second part of that question is the hard question, right? Because you're investing in the physical plant of the high school. And so I think the key is making sure that spaces have flexibility, right? We know what we want for the school to look like for the next 10 years. We don't necessarily know what we want a school to look like 50 years from now. So ensuring that flexibility is built into the design. I think having a clear understanding of that and wanting to ensure like we don't necessarily know where we will be, but we want to have sort of these spaces now that can become is really important. It's important to have that articulated well I know how I would articulate it. I'm not gonna sort of presuppose how to articulate it for Salem. I would have to get to know that. I know how to articulate that well for the various building projects that I was a part of in Brookline. And when value engineering came onto the table, by the construction team to say costs are overrunning by X amount. We need to value engineer out this amount. It's making sure that the value engineering doesn't value engineer out the priorities for the project as well as future flexibility for the project. And so if you think about the some of the vocational spaces, right? You can purpose-build vocational spaces that are beautiful right now. And in 10 years, the work of those vocational spaces have fundamentally transformed. And so how can you build in, say, for example, again, I don't know this to be the example, but these are the questions that I would ask. How are we building in flexibility within the infrastructure, right? Flexibility within the wiring behind the walls. Are the walling, is it sheet rocked or is it movable panels that have long-term durability? So if this space needs to go from A to B to C from now to 15 years from now because of where the electrical trades and electrical engineering are heading, we have that flexibility that that doesn't get value engineered out because that will cost more than drywall in the space. And so I think that that conversation really being on top of that as a superintendent, as the district, the team that is the operations team with the OPM that's hired on behalf of the city to manage the project with the construction team of the project to make sure that what is envisioned and what is approved is what is carried out ultimately. carried out in the project because costs are unknowable. We know what steel costs today. I'm sure that the cost of steel has been projected out into when it's purchased for the project and that could change. And so it is a complicated process. And so with a capital project, that has to be very clear. And that's something as a new superintendent, I would have to get up to speed on very quickly because everything is moving, right? The project has been approved and I believe schematic, you can correct me if I'm wrong, the schematic design is happening. It's in the, or the engineer, the construction documents. It's in the construction document phase. And so that's critical work. The first part of the question, can you just repeat the first part?

So Salem has a strong foundation ambition future, including a transformative high school project. What should Salem schools look like 10 years from now?

So this to me, there's a catch 22 in this question because the strategic plan is being developed, right? And so the strategic vision for the district is not my vision, it is the community's vision. It's the vision that the school committee ultimately will approve. So 10 years from now, what I believe needs to happen is that the strategic plan and vision that is put in place over the next year needs to be achieved 10 years from now. What to me, we need to make sure happens is that School, I'm gonna go back to schools are joyful places. When students talk about school, they talk about enjoying school, liking things about school, being connected with school, including teenagers who don't necessarily like to say the things that they're connected to, but can name the things that they're connected to. Elementary students can name the things that they love about the school, the things that they're excited about learning. And that as a community, we have increased the opportunities for students throughout the schools, pre-K through 12, so that when students are graduating, like fundamentally this is about, I said this a while ago, it is about how many doors are open for students when they graduate. Students having a plan, they're gonna go through the one door when they go out, but if that turns out to be not their path, enough doors are open that they can circle back and go through another one, that we are increasing opportunities. Students are taking really amazing classes, challenging classes, succeeding in the classes, excited about what they're learning. We've expanded. the STEM opportunities, pre-K through 12. We've expanded career pathway opportunities. One of the most exciting things, I think, about the six through eight sort of space in the coming years is how to build the learning about career opportunities in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. Students don't necessarily know what's available, what's out there. And so how are we opening those doors? How are we opening those windows for students? So for me it's increasing opportunity and it's increasing success and it's making sure that the students who are not connected with school now 10 years from now, well not, we can't wait 10 years. A year from now, we are winning in that realm. More and more students are connected. We are, for students who have disengaged in school, we have created programs or built upon programs that are reengaging students and we're seeing greater and greater success. But the how, I mean it really is tied to the strategic plan. And I say that with sincerity. I'm not trying to like get out of, I truly am not trying to get out of an answer. I just, it feels in interviewing for this job, it would feel presumptuous to me to say like, this is exactly where we need to be in 10 years, because that's ultimately a community decision. It's the values of the community. And my responsibility will be to ensure that the work of the district is all directed towards achieving that vision.

To follow up, Amber Stott.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I'd love to hear a little more about the community aspect of it, right? Like, again, how will you, how do you envision making sure that we know what the community needs or, again, saying we like as a body, but how would you communicate with the community, get connected with the community to really kind of pulse check that as much as you can?

So I think with families, with parents and guardians, it's through schools, right? So it is regular meetings at schools to meet with families, with parents and guardians to understand the feedback relative to that, the school community, what are families looking towards. One of the things that I loved in going around the community the day that I was here is seeing, right, there's a clear vision of where the district is headed and there's a lot of uniqueness among the elementary schools. And I think that's something that is really special. I think that it is not about having different standards, but it's about the path, like there's some uniqueness in the path, right? And the sort of the cultural celebrations or the events that are unique to that school and the murals that are on the wall, right? That should be celebrated. That is a visual of sort of how a school captures sort of within the direction that everyone is going, some of its uniqueness, right, as a community. As superintendent, you have to be present in a school to understand that, and so it's attending those meetings, it's going to the plays, it's going to share the sessions where students are sharing publishing parties and so you're you are seeing the publishing party but it's an opportunity for people to say oh you know what i was thinking about i wonder about and then that becomes a question that say in another venue i can say oh i heard this thing i'm wondering um like tell me more about this or how are you feeling about this it becomes more of a conversation it's who are the community partners um and so at orchard gardens So Orchard Gardens was founded with a vision, there was a visionary, her name was Edna Bino, she was a visionary community leader. Her vision when housing development, when it was redeveloped, when housing was redeveloped, was that a piece of land would be set aside that 90% of the students in that area of Roxbury had to leave Roxbury to go to school every day. So 90% of students were bused out of sort of that geographic area of Roxbury. And Ms. Bino wanted a school built where housing previously was as the rest of the housing was redeveloped. Not any loss of housing, sort of just a reallocation. And it was something that the federal government had never done. The mayor at the time talked about sort of the force of meetings with the federal housing authority that he and Ms. Bino would go to to get that land set aside. And then the school just was, from the day it opened, it was just, I mean, respectful. I mean, not respectful, just honestly, it was a disaster. And The work coming in was not me as a turnaround leader and implementing a plan. It was working with the community groups. I worked very closely with the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, which is a community-based organization in Roxbury to understand, to get community voices beyond the parents who are currently enrolled as students, but who will future enrollees be? Who are families that are thinking about, you know, they have an infant and they will enroll in the school in a couple of years? Who are community members who are very concerned about the success of the schools and have thoughts and input? And so, to me, I would want to understand who are the DSNI equivalents in Salem who can help me make those connections to broaden the voice. Who are the, I'm gonna forget the name of the foundation, I apologize, but the foundation in town that funds, in the city that funds all of the STEM opportunities for students. It's working with that foundation to understand what is the history, what is your vision, what would you like to see next? And then how does that intersect with the strategic plan? How does that intersect with what principals and teachers and students and families are wanting for schools? So for me, it is a process of getting to know everyone. And so it's being present at events. who are the community-based organizations where that information, who are the providers, you know, the Boys and Girls Clubs or YMCAs or community groups, community-based organizations that have programming outside of school hours, who have input into the operation of schools. It's all of it. So it's a process. It is not immediate, but it can happen, I think, in a relatively expedited timeline through being present and being sort of trying to be everywhere and really communicate with everyone possible.

Member Bias.

I wanted to add a little bit to Member Stott's question. What about families who might not feel comfortable, you say having families come to the schools, who don't feel safe coming into the schools?

So it's such a good question. So when this year, when we were having back to school night at Brighton High School, there's a high level of ice activity in the neighborhood. And so families were just not comfortable coming to school and families wanted to have access to information. And so what we decided to do is we, every teacher created a YouTube video that we loaded onto a YouTube channel. We sent the welcome back, right? What everyone who came in person, would have experienced with here's how you can connect with me, here's the work that we're gonna be doing this year, here's what I'm excited about, like all of the same information uploaded to a YouTube site and we send out all the links. We also send out directions in all the languages that families in our school community speak, to set up the closed captioning on YouTube. So how do you set up the closed captioning? So it could be, you could get the translation immediately for that message. And then how to communicate with families. We then created open Zoom links the night of open house. So we sent this information out before open house so that families, and I tracked like the views. I was like, every day I was like, who has more views? And we would push out through the various communication channels You know, the links again and communication, gave it to students. Not only did it help, I mean it helped give access to everyone and it created a safe way for families who were not safe coming to the neighborhood at night given the level of ICE activity. It created a safe way for families to engage in the school. And so for me what's important is finding the ways to do that in the various venues for families in Salem. And so if it is that particular challenge and concern, there are ways to create access and opportunity and have real two-way dialogue without having to be physically present at school. If it's a family, if it's someone who had a bad experience or family who had a bad experience in school and is just physically uncomfortable coming to school, there are ways to do that. You can meet with families outside of the school. Another thing that we run at Brighton is we run a citywide, a re-engagement program for the city. And so there's Brighton High School and then parallel to it, it's a re-engagement program for students who dropped out or basically dropped out. And there are varying degrees of comfort level given safety, given sort of things that are happening in the city with students. Students enroll in that program from across the city. But there are times where students don't necessarily feel safe traveling across the city. So we teachers go, it's a very sort of, there's in-person work, there's online work, there's digital coursework, it's a real hybrid program to help students who are overage accelerate sort of themselves getting back on track and getting back to where they want to be with respect to a high school diploma and what's next, right? Planning for what they envision for themselves next after high school. But there are various reasons where students do not feel safe traveling through the city, traveling on the MBTA or however to get to the Alston Brighton neighborhood. And so we have people go to, teachers in the program go to libraries. And so they have office hours in libraries. and students don't always access those office hours, and if you're coming in person when there's four teachers in the program and teacher A is at office hours, you'll just work with teacher B, C, or D who can pick up the work of teacher A because teacher A is at this particular library for that day. And so it becomes a sort of very flexible way of ensuring that no matter what might be happening in the city, there are ways for students to safely access, have entry points and access their education. And so we think about, so to me, for your question is also thinking about what are those what are the ways we do that for families as well. So so I think the digital media is an incredibly powerful way to do it because if you're if you are not safe at a given moment or for a given period of time physically in the community or physically near schools we can take away that challenge by creating really powerful and interactive digital opportunities for families to engage. And so to me, Zoom was like the bane of everyone's existence during COVID. And it's truly a lifesaver to have sort of the ways that we can create safe, truly engaging opportunities. So I give those two examples to say, I don't have the exact venue, but I don't say there's no solution. I don't ever say, well, there's nothing we can do. There's something we can do. We'll figure it out. And we're going to make sure that you can access your child's education because a family member, parents and guardians, and extended family are the most important people and educators in a child's life. And we have to be sure. Like, we 100% have to be sure that families can access school, even if they're not safe to do so physically. It's just our responsibility. So that's how I would approach it. Constantly being flexible, constantly changing how we're doing it, and making sure that we're relentlessly communicating these ways so that families always know that they can be connected.

I want to be mindful of your time as we're nearing the end here. So I do, I think that you answered this in a few different ways, but so feel free to kind of gloss over if you need to so that you have time for your closing statement. Describe a time when feedback from family, staff, or community members caused you to rethink your initial approach to an issue. How did you communicate your decision and what did the experience teach you about leadership?

So very early on in my career as a principal, this was really a fundamental learning moment. So the fourth and fifth grade, we had two sections at each grade. And in each grade, in the fourth grade and the fifth grade, one, the students, it was self-contained class, elementary class. Students who had teacher A in the fourth grade and teacher A in the fifth grade did phenomenal in English language arts and not so great in math. And teacher B in the fourth grade and teacher B in the fifth grade, students did phenomenal in math and not so great in meeting the benchmarks in English language arts. And so I sort of, the data said, you know, there were other schools nearby that split the, you know, departmentalized, you know, sort of split the teaching responsibility. So we came out of a break. I had done, notified families really well. I had sort of done, you know, the groundwork to say this change is coming, coming out of break, you know the teachers, here's what the schedule will look like. I didn't talk to the teachers enough about it. I made the danger of the word assumption. I made an assumption that everyone was experiencing the data the same way that I was and that everyone understood the change coming out of the December break in the way that I was seeing it as the right move for students ultimately. This was at a time when Boston was all K-5, so students were then going to sixth grade. It positioned students best. And so the teachers responsible for teaching students the feedback was you didn't communicate enough with us. And we agree, and we're upset. And they were right to be upset. And so for me, it was this foundational learning moment of, you can never sort of jump to the conclusion that everyone sees the information, the chessboard, even though we had some conversations about it, sees it the same way, and really pause There's an urgency with students. We have a fixed amount of time, but we can't act so fast that we're acting before everyone has an understanding of how we're acting and why we're acting, and a common understanding of the decision. Consensus around the why. Maybe not full agreement that it's the best plan, but consensus about why the decision is being made. For me, that was like a foundational moment to learn how to better communicate. We have one other example budgetarily. So when my first, I believe my first day as superintendent, in Brooklyn. The deputy superintendent for administration finance called and said, we have this issue. There's a there's a outside organization. The district transfers about $500,000 a year to the organization to run their program. It's actually a violation of municipal finance. So we need to stop it. What we need to do is we need to get the organization to run a 501c3, and there are positions that they're overseeing that are actually in the collective bargaining agreement, and we can't have an outside organization overseeing bargaining unit members. That's the responsibility of the school district, right? So there's a municipal finance issue. There's a collective bargaining issue. So to me, it was like, all right, we've got to resolve this. What immediately happened was it was summer. Not everyone was around. What immediately happened was folks made a leap to, we're going to stop funding the program. when it was not a stop in funding, it was a shift that had to happen so that the funding structure could get in alignment with municipal finance. And so ultimately, so it just took a pause to say, okay, we're not like, to me, it was like, all right, we have to do it. And In the summer, there's the challenge of making sure that everyone fully understands the municipal finance issue, the collective bargaining issue, and it's not a support issue. It's not about support for the program. It was a longstanding program, longstanding partner. The students who were served by the partner had incredible success. It was not about the partnership. And so fundamentally we had to work with the organization to get a 501c3. I worked with the school committee and ultimately the town manager to make sure that for that year they were okay with sort of status quo of the funding mechanism while the organization became an independent 501c3, entered into an MOU so that then there could be sort of a proper funding sort of fee for service with a 501c3 and an MOU. So to get in alignment with municipal finance and then working with the union for impact bargaining for what was the collective bargaining implication for the members who actually were governed under the collective bargaining unit but had been historically supervised by this nonprofit partner. So that all happened over a year. But initially it was sort of this, okay, we have to get, yeah, we have to do it. We have to get in alignment with municipal finance law and our fiscal responsibilities and sort of not jumping in even though it was summer to say like explicitly from the get-go this is not about funding the program this is about making sure that all of our structures are the the 501c3 structure the our collective bargaining obligations and our municipal finance obligations are all in order so that the program can be successful. Because if those things are not in order, we're not going to be able to run the program. This is another sort of very specific learning, but I think a really important learning. Not everyone dives into budgets the way that a superintendent has to. And so again, sort of not jumping to a conclusion that sort of everyone sees the numbers or sees the steps in the same way, even when it's a have to and not a sort of a recommendation.

Any follow-up questions? So the floor is yours again, Mr. Bott, if you want to make any closing statements.

Yeah, I mean, I think I'm going to end where I started. I think, to me, this is an incredibly exciting opportunity. The commitment that the city has shown in the growth of the schools is just so remarkable. And it's really exciting to see, you know, sort of in every conversation that I've had, there's this nexus of the schools are so important to the town. our students, our youth are so important to the city. The global support for students, for schools, and quality education, and the exciting opportunity to enter into a new strategic plan to take everyone, to take our students, to the next levels to continue all the progress to me is such an exciting opportunity. I hope I get the opportunity. I really, as you could probably tell when I was talking, to me our most sacred responsibility is to the success of students and working with families and all of the adults, educators, and community members to sort of wrap ourselves around and hold our students at our collective core, the success of our students. And so to me, that's what's so exciting about this opportunity. And I hope I'm the choice. And no matter the choice you make, um i just wish the committee and the the community and the city the best moving forward and again i hope it's me but no matter what i really i do i wish i wish uh the students and schools uh all the best in these next steps that that you're about to make as a as a community thank you thanks very much is there a motion thank you um motion to adjourn

okay motion by Miranda seconded by member bias under discussion oh was it member Hoffman seeing none all in favor any opposed we're adjourned thank you everybody