And then we also utilized the all AVID 8 students at all five junior highs. And then we also uh worked with our building reps too to look at the plan as well at the end. All right. So throughout this process uh we really focused on our work on making changes to best support our students in their growth both as both as learners and young adults. Uh we started again with with some school observations right more than just my knowledge of of being at Benarik and Sean's knowledge of being at plank while we were visiting schools kind of seeing how students are operating within the school how how teachers are supporting those students. We really focused on um organization planning preparation and time management. Again, these are grounded in that developmental responsiveness aspect of the rubric along with uh our organizational structure. We know students thrive on structure and you'll see in our current structure versus our proposed structure, we're trying to provide a little bit more structure at the start of the day so that these students can start the day uh in a more successful mindset.
The changes that we will make will provide for structure within the day and it will provide opportunities, structured opportunities for our staff to help students strengthen those skills. With the shift in structure, it does um give us an opportunity and and personal belongings such as coats and backpacks will be able to be kept in lockers. Um we're going to talk more about the the impact of that and how we can support our students and our schools through that. Uh there have been questions as as this is rolled out. I remember when Jeremy was talking about student rights and responsibilities and there was questions about about this that was put in there about just this part of the overall district plan. So we will address those in the upcoming slides. Um but for now we just want to show you the overall structure of the day.
Again if I'm going to look at this slide a little bit what what these structures and changes are going to do. It's it's providing less unstructured time to start the day. We really want again students at the junior high level need need things pretty clear-cut ages 11 to 14 as they're learning and growing within the system. So we really want to minimize the distractions uh that are within their day in and out of the classroom. We want to reduce their anxiety giving students more control over their environment giving more of the um self-efficacy as as you mentioned earlier the importance of that within our district. We also want to really maximize the space within classrooms so that collaboration and flexible learning and small groupoup instruction can happen more easily. Again, as as identified students, but even throughout this plan, a lot of this is also with the additional minute in the passing period.
It will reduce anxiety for students. You can see and hear students, they don't have time within our current three three minutes to do what they need to do to get from one end of the building to the other. Uh and we really want to again support these students and and the essential skills of being organized, managing your time, uh giving them that sense of responsibility along the way. So as you can see here is our current schedule on the left. Uh all schools, all junior highs open at 7:45 in the morning. That's when when buses are waiting outside or students are waiting outside and buses are already on their way to their next uh pickup at the elementary level. But students can come in and they enter right at every school. There there are three different areas for each grade level. And then there's also the cafeteria for students having breakfast.
So when students get in there anytime 7:45 or later, they are there for 45 minutes to hang out with their friends, do what they want to do, hang out with on their phones and and all of that. Currently, the bell to get ready for student support time or the rest of the day starts at 8. Again, if you've been in a junior high, these students are not using their lockers at all. They don't even know their locker combinations, both of them. So or where they are. So again, in our current structure, students have 10 minutes to just be around the building. So even if we're starting student support time as instructional minutes at 8:10, students are kind of in the building unstructured for 25 minutes to start their day. If you look at the student support time and the way and we're going to share share kind of how current is set up with what we want to do there is the potential for another 22 minutes of student support time with very little structure albeit within a classroom right sometimes students are working on um a success maker they might be silently reading a lot of times you know in in various areas they are they are just in the classroom getting ready for their day so again one of the things that we're looking at doing is just shortening that time to start the day at 8:00.
Instead of having the kids walk the building for 10 minutes, we want to again provide some more structure, give them five minutes, get to their locker, get ready for the day, go to their their first hour class. The union, this has been part of that huge collaboration the union has in their contract that they need 15 minutes in a row of uninterrupted time for that to count as part of their plan time within their contract. Uh Sean and the union leadership has worked with with the union u since their contract starts at 7:55. They are willing to kind of concede this five minutes on that planning time to make this overall plan happen. And again, that five minutes is needed as we're adding a minute to every passing period. The rest of that passing period uh changes go to the the passing or the rest of the minutes for those passing periods come from student support time.
So, one of the areas that we are um kind of giving a little bit is going from 22 minutes a day of student support time down to 19. Again, we feel that with the structure that we can provide and and put forth for our buildings, we're really going to maximize that time. Overall, if you look at the bottom, students have the same amount of times in the classroom. They have same still same amount of time still for lunch.
There is um an additional of three minutes in overall passing periods throughout the day. And there's 3 minutes reduced from student support time to make this happen. Um, with all of this planning, right, from this point, we really wanted to get the the voice from our students. What would this structural change do for our students before we went further with our planning of how we're going to support them differently? We wanted to make sure that we knew the the areas that that they really wanted um addressed. And so we took to our AVID 8 students and they provided some excellent feedback for us. So we looked at or they identified the six following needs was the convenience and organization. Um many of them are worried about forgetting materials and being prepared within coming to class.
that time management and passing periods, amount of time given for that passing periods because currently it was three minutes locker operation, organization and efficiency. Like we said, some of them don't know their locker combination or where their locker is located. So helping them learn that and then access to the person their personal items is what they were also worried about. Um, we talked a lot about this that first couple weeks of school, the significant 72, spending some time and giving them executive functioning skills that the students lack of helping them map out where do you stop at your locker between which periods. Um, advocating with their teacher if they're 10 seconds or 30 seconds late because their locker didn't open. Um, that's a life skill that students also need to learn as well. So working with everybody to make sure that the kids begin to learn those executive functioning skills, be more organized and be more efficient.
Yeah. And I just want to point out right when we started this and and looked as the committee of our vision, right, helping students be be better at being organized, helping them with time management, helping them be responsible. Those were some of our driving factors of a of of our team. And then what was so interesting to to us as we looked at the survey results, it's the exact same areas that our kids said that they needed help in, right? How awesome is that? That our kids know themselves and what they needed for support is exactly what our overall dream and plan was of of providing that support for our students. Uh so again, looking at this um our changes are going to require us to support our students. Thank you, Sean. Um and so so we take this to student support time, right? and and we know that it's not a pocket of just supporting them throughout student support time.
This is an area that we want to support in all contents in all of our classes across our building, across our district, right? When we talk about being future ready and I know we've talked in in the past about the PACE framework, right? Some of the essential skills for employability are exactly what we're talking about in this plan. Uh we want to help our students plan, prepare, and manage their time. This was echoed by our students. These changes will require us to support our students both as a collective whole and as students as individuals as those needs arise. But again, the fact that they identified the similar needs as staff, we know that our plan will better help students develop these essential skills and we know that it will help them in long-term success. The key to all of this will be our support of our students and we know that.
So again, our current structure for student support time has been through a lot of iterations over the years. Those of us who have been here for for many years, this started as in between third and fourth period. This started in between eth and ninth period. It started with some code teaching. It started a whole lot of iter iteration. It is still pocketed at the start of the day if if we want to know the why of why we're needing to keep this here. This is to allowing or this allows for our high school students who go to high school for geometry to still come back and not miss any academics at that junior high level. I know that we we talked in the EL and II meeting about how do we shorten lunch and I know Plo and I have been talking about that for years.
We would like to shorten lunch. We would like to put student support time with lunch. Again, there are some factors that our team still has to work out if we are going to change the time periods of lunch and advisory. Part of that is how do we deal with that staffing when the entire school is on different schedules for three periods. Currently, we have junior high students who teach all three grade levels at the same time. So, if we start doing lunches and advisory differently and changing our overall structure of periods, that just involves some more changes that we still need to hash out. However, with student support time being at the start of the day, currently on the left, I don't want to say that it's unorganized. Schools do their own thing, but again, there isn't this district-wide um consistency that that this is again part of what we want to ground our work in.
How are we doing the same thing at Plank, Thompson, Benarik, Murphy, and Trober? And once we get there and we get this foundation right, we can continue to start building. So currently on Mondays, it's really up to the building. Tuesdays and Thursdays is a success maker intervention. Again, this has come from with our new math resource. This is an intervention that's part of it. It is something that schools use sporadically. Teachers use it off and on. It is used in some of our direct classes, but it's something that is rolled out as an option for all students. Wednesday is part of our literacy framework. We also have that independent reading and then we focus character strong on Fridays. Again, students have some autonomy of doing what they want to when they want to during the days, but this is really the overall structure. What we would really like to go to and that we've been working as a team um is really that support providing one of the things we've talked about and we've already put together a a framework for organization that we're just calling avid organization across our district.
This is checkpoints on like binder binder checks, binder reviews, making sure that our binders are organized, checkpoints on our lockers. It is is leaving up for are we planning for the weeks, right? Using student planners, right? As of right now, not every junior high is using a student planner. That is something that we are bringing back as part of this plan. We will have not consistent looking planners, but consistent planners as far as the the process and then we are going to help students plan their weeks. All of that within student support time starting on Mondays, right? As part of this AVID organization, as the year goes on, there will be opportunities that we will as schools look at grade reviews. Let's open up our power school. What homework assignments are we missing? Again, some of this overall planning, time management, and organization that our students need.
We're going to we've we've found this in talking with teachers. We need to increase our time within character strong. The lessons that are a part of that take more than 22 minutes. And and again as as we are really looking at the whole child and the mental health of our students this character strong it's a researchbased program there are a lot of resources in it Dr. Paul can attest to that that we're not even tapping into yet because we don't even have the time allocated for our staff to be able to use it. So we wanted to expand that to two two days again talking with teachers part of the middle school philosophy. How do we allow flexibility within our schedule for students to get what they need? We are going to carve that into Thursdays, right? We've talked with a lot of teachers where they might, you know, Sean might IM a student or email a student.
Can't IM them in junior high? It's not open. But they would email a student, hey, we need extra time on this on this assignment. Remember to come in Thursday morning. I'm going to write you a pass. You can come to my room. This is the one time throughout our day where all students and staff have access to each other. So, we need to continue to capitalize that as we can. and Friday focusing again as a district we're working with our student services department we're working with Ben Owen we're working to implement the school links um really that career pathways a lot of that as this pace framework gets um implemented within our district a lot of that work will fall within classes within contents we are currently working out when and how and where that's going to happen but this also gives us another time um for us to do some more of those um surveys days and exploratories within the school day for students to explore career opportunities and we wanted to to pay tribute.
There are some schools doing tremendous work. I will give a shout out to Trober with what they are already doing on that career exploration and they're bringing in guest speakers every month. We still want that time for them to do that and then again as we are getting more consistent expand on those opportunities for all of our students. I think uh John took a lot of my talking points here, but it's okay. Um so our student support time, we talked about the need for that organization piece of it. Students come in and they're very unorganized. I remember a couple weeks ago I opened a student email and I think they had 785 emails and they were all from Google Classroom. I'm like, why aren't you deleting this? Oh, I probably should delete them. So giving them the time and teaching them organize not only their physical materials but their digital resources and materials that they have as well.
Um the character strong piece uh John mentioned that we haven't tapped into the full potential. A lot of the character strong have weekly challenges. A lot of people aren't getting to those yet and it's hard to do a weekly challenge on a Thursday or Friday when it's the end of the week and it's kind of just dropped out. So just to kind of put that priority piece on that as well. That organization will also give them time to go find their lockers. Maybe even those Thursdays pull students in and help organize their locker or make sure that they're getting their materials in the certain spots and going after third period instead of sitting and talking to their friends and grab their math book. Um and then that Thursday is really important to make up tests and quizzes, see students, reteing. And I have a lot of sixth graders that come and see me um for reteaching of that of math or work on their Excelss.
And I think that's really important. And then that future ready piece, thinking about high school and even life after high school is really important. I I have a freshman and trying to get him to even think about something is is is hard. So it's just something that we really I'm glad that we're pushing out. We're down to questions. Anybody have any um before I'd love to ask Dr. and K to speak a little bit to um how the strategic plan influenced or didn't influence the presentation we heard this evening. Absolutely. As you heard from both John and Sean, this directly impacts our strategic plan. Um the priority two, which is our systems of support, our pillar two, which is educational access and supportive environment. And objective two specifically says reorganize the structure of student support time for junior high to be more responsive and student centered.