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and now think about this for the future when we have the pre-k 5 school all those numbers are going to be added together and more likely than not the probability is that we will always be required to have a bilingual program from here on in and so is it a separate bilingual program for portuguese and spanish when we if we have 20 portuguese yes because you add the well i don't know how many of them middle school are in fifth grade but that's yeah we started that's going to start getting closer yes so this is just something to have on our radar from here on in we will most likely in brookfield have at a minimum a bilingual spanish program at the um at the candlewood lake school and that was indicated at our last meeting in the budget priorities the brookfield high school has 16 total students with total of four language spoken there and you can see the breakdown so total languages when we look across the four schools is 13 languages represented and so your question bob you can see that they're across the entire district there are 29 portuguese speakers and at the high school there are seven so if you subtract 7 from 29 you would have k8 and then we'd have to figure out how many of those students which we obviously have the data um moving forward we'd have to look at those grade levels in in the groupings of pre-k through five so i would predict that somewhere down the road that portuguese group is going to reach an n of 20 in the candlewood lake school because we do have a large portuguese population in this part of the state any questions on that no all right thank you for that um our next item is the homeschool report this is the most exciting report you could ever want this is a very difficult report to put together because parents do not have to respond to our inquiries and we are fairly diligent in the it's done in the human resources department in sending out the letters to people we we follow the guidelines the state guidelines and currently currently of current available data so that's really a loaded statement reveals that we have 35 students that are being homeschooled in our district and they come with these 35 students come from a total of 26 families and we send out the notice of intent to families who we know were previously homeschooling or who during the pandemic we had people that were homeschooling we sent them all the legally required letters and um some people send us letters saying we're not filling this out and that's the end of that we they are asked to fill out you know all their demographic data and what the grade levels of their students are and you can see the breakdown of the grade levels and then there are some people who will not tell us the um we had five people who filled out the forms but would not say the grade level of their students of note you sh that you should be aware of we have a policy a board of ed policy that addresses the res of a high school diploma from brookfield high school and what the attendance requirements are for being a brookfield high school student so when we carefully look at the forms that get filled out when they get sent back to us and when we see students that are in 10 11 or 12 we additionally send them when we i when i fill out the forms that i have to send back to them we write right eye right right on the form enclosed please see board of ed policy don't ask me what the number is i write it a million times but i don't have it memorized regarding high school graduation and we give them a copy of that in the envelope so that they understand that if you're homeschooled for 11th and 12th grade we're not going to graduate you from forkfield high school and that seems like pretty common sense but it is not universally understood by people so that's the information that we have from our attempts to collect data on home school children in the brookfield public school district questions remind me is the number up or down from what we've seen in the past it's about the same so even with the coven going on it's about the same yeah people came back the most of the folks who were homeschooling just uh like one or two and then we we lose people okay it's been fairly consistent okay but i can't attest to the fact that this is all the children right that's right we hear that we hear that speech every year okay thank you thanks dr ruby thank you all right the next item is the 2022 cave delegate assembly resolutions um so this is just an action and potential motion so every year cabe has a delegate assembly we are as a board we're members of cabe which is for everybody else that's listening of the connecticut association of boards of education and one of their functions is to lobby the state legislature on behalf of its members so what i have sent you is what they sent to me and really the board including you know the introductory letter regarding what the assembly will entail which is essentially a voting of their positions on several issues regarding state education so i also sent you the list of those proposed resolutions those are exhibit d and [Music] these are a list of the resolutions that have had substantive changes to them um they're not all brand new resolutions they're resolutions that have been around but they've had some changes those changes are in bold but what will be voted on at the assembly is what you see under belief so that actual statement of resolution so if you see belief or if you see the word resolution that's the wording that is getting voted on at the assembly so for boards that want to participate in the assembly they need to elect a delegate someone to represent that board and vote on behalf of that board at the assembly which is on november 11th in groton and so tonight was just to discuss the resolutions and if we want to elect a delegate that we would do that also tonight who was planning to attend the the cave event i think you were with anybody else nobody else expressed interest but you know it's you can every anybody can attend um you know it's not just the delegate who can attend any of our board members could attend if they wanted to and rosa really the purpose is to make sure that our local board is more connected to other boards and sort of the state in general so we have more of a voice or and more hooked into developments at the state level yeah exactly and one of the things and the reason why i brought this forward to you guys was in in previous self board evaluations we've said that we've wanted to become more involved in the state education process um and i thought that you know when i saw this this was a good way for for us to do that at all of the resolutions are lobbying resolutions urging the state to do with him an awful lot of things are urging the state assembly to deal with and most of these things again are their positions that they've held but in recent you know over the last year if any major changes were to be made um like for example there's a whole thing on remote learning so that became you know a big a big issue over the last couple years so now there's you know an updated resolution to that and i'll just add that the other part that will be voted on is their consent calendar so if you see this sort of like checklist this is these are a bunch of resolutions that are positions that they hold currently but they have not made any major changes to them so they'll be voting on them as an entire sort of package because there haven't been any changes so oh i see so this has been a standing package and we're just updating and adjusting it yeah yeah and i do have a copy there they sent it to me and i got it tonight too but um the actual resolutions that are in the consent calendar and then how often would you meet just once a year yeah this is once a year and we're always invited so i just don't i don't think we've ever participated you scan the issues it's not much controversial in what they recommend they're recommending now you know and most of the stuff i found was you know things that we've discussed things that we've um advocated for in our own community so you know it would be nice to have that voice at the state level as well and potentially get you know support from the connecticut state department of education and the legislature in particular well let's do these things one at a time um can i make a motion yes i'd like to move that we elect rosa fernandez as our delegate for brookfield public schools at the state delegate assembly the cave state delegate assembly a second okay um any discussion on that okay uh all in favor aye any opposed okay um so then do you want to go through um the approve we should probably approve the consent calendar um those are again enough feel free i can give you the packet but the list is that sort of look like a photocopy type of page those are the lists of the their resolutions any that they're deleting because they've accomplished them in the legislature or other things that they will continue lobby for but haven't changed their position on i'm going to do this generally and then intention to approve this whole document or so the first the the consent calendar would be these items these are items that have it and i think that's probably the simplest one to vote on first just because these are positions that haven't had any changes so they are positions that cave has took um and i if you want like the full wording of them you can look at them here i would need time to do that i don't okay feel comfortable doing that tonight okay how does everybody else feel about that we can be comfortable with a general general directional okay on these or i'd rather take time to thoughtfully you know read through this and win this on the next meeting so our next meeting will be until december so we won't meet again before we will meet again before and that's you know the the resolutions that actually have had changes those are the ones i sent to you guys last week um because i wanted you to have you know a good amount of time to read through them the consent stuff i didn't even get until tonight and those are items that haven't changed so even as even at the assembly as a delegate i will not be voting on each one of these things you just do like a consent agenda exactly to consent agenda approval on things that have not changed or on all of them on things that have not changed we'll vote on it as a packet and then what happens on the other ones that have changed then we can actually discuss and vote so considering that we've received it i would actually suggest that we authorize the chair to use her best judgment to represent us at the uh assembly as these items are reviewed and uh i'm just not talking about it's a bit of a delegation but it doesn't uh it's a question i mean as a group do we we're we would be saying we trust rosa to go in with a open mind and no less well enough to represent us i mean the only reason i say that is there's not anything really controversial in what they're proposing here i mean that's when you kind of read through these ideas yeah and i do want you to look at them as two separate things so anything that is new you know that those are the ones that i've that i've provided to you in detail and we can discuss those tonight we're not going to take the time to go discuss in the detail right i mean i'm confused on the deletions are they are the deletions replaced with anything no because those have already been they've lobbied for them and they've accomplished their goals so they're not going to continue to lobby for something that they've accomplished yeah so the first deletion it said proposed deletion accomplished in the 2021 legislative session right the second one was proposed for deletion issues already covered in the resolution and the consent agenda and the third deletion was it's no longer a statewide issue but i'm confused about the detailed description yeah like 11 like it's probably not 11.
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11.2 21st century skills is listed here under regular calendar oh right yeah sorry yeah so yeah so this is where if we wanted to go through each one of those resolutions and let's say you really don't like that resolution we as a board say we don't like that resolution then i would say i would check no on this box and then when i go to the delegate i would vote against it so on the consent calendar everything on the first page is stuff that they've already passed no there are they're not proposing changes right right so the only things we would really have to be concerned with are the news like are the things under regulatory calendar that are outlined here which are like maybe 15 things yes yeah [Applause] so is it is it worth looking at those 15 things and if there are any that like i agree with bob i think really most of them are not controversial i would feel comfortable having you represent us but if there are some that we want to discuss we don't i don't think we have to discuss all 15 of them right we could go to the ones that right maybe there are some that we just need to get some clarity on or discuss as a group right is there anything that jumps out to anybody you know i looked through these and you know i agree with bob i don't think there's anything too controversial i think these are things that we've lobbied for in our budgets year after year i think their positions we already hold it's just a matter of are we going to say that outside of brookfield you know i think that's that was that's generally the purpose of kate is to bring board boards of education together and say okay we're agreeing on the same things we're doing the same things in our district um you know should we as one voice say that to our state legislature all right so let's do this let's just do this and i'll help drive through it if that's okay with you um i will re and it's useful for the public to hear a little bit of what the what is being going on i'll read the belief or the resolution right not all the explanation language i think we ought to all listen to that and decide is that something we could generally support and then that'll give uh you can take notes rosa that's why i'm doing it instead of you and uh we can plow through 15 items and in a pretty quick time i think right and if we want to stop on any one of them we can stop and discuss it right so but if everybody's okay we'll just move on and go through the next one so so 11.1 was creating educational excellence i'm going to take this off if that's okay creating educational excellence through economic racial and ethnic integration the belief kabe believes that each child must have equal access to effective free public education and to the services of well-educated and skillful teachers boards of education working with state and local leaders and community members can play a key role in ending systemic racism then there's a variety of language below it um so this is about creating uh a balanced educational system we're already addressing this here with our equity we already have this deeply in our equity diversity it sounds like if i'm reading the explanation of the change properly that this resolution was already in existence and all they did was add a under number two exactly so we're not okay so there's a long long list for the public there's a long list of details and the ad was community conversations to build partnerships understanding and broaden support for diversity equity and inclusion initiatives and that is exactly what we are right yeah so the integrated educational programs are already in there infrastructure is already in there we're not creating something new i think i could support that that inclusion of what i just read that item a because that's what we're doing okay i'm okay with that all right i'm just gonna keep plowing guys if that's okay uh item number 11.2 um the resolution uh the subject is 21st century skills there uh it's a long resolution that's urging the state and federal government to support programs and research that focuses on problem solving creativity critical thinking and other high level 26 21st century skills that are important for success in global workplace the state and federal government should support school district capacity to provide the technology and tools necessary to foster innovative learning practices instructional methods and a mastery based grading system that bridges school and real world experiences it's exactly what we talked about in our round table and provide for greater personalization of education and prepare students for college and or career now the resolution change deletes this paragraph cave urges the general assembly to form a competency-based learning committee comprising of sitting superintendents and teachers school board members and deans of institutions of higher education to develop pre pre-k to 20 mastery based learning system that includes competency-based educational models to permit students to progress academically and that are not explicitly tied to a fixed amount of seat time as required under carnegie unit system and the reason for the change is the that that it just didn't need that last paragraph changes to learning models with online and remote learning will continue to be a higher priority than that right then that's very specific thing so i i don't know i don't have i i don't have a huge problem with that deletion because the first paragraph picked up all the things that we would want yeah right okay any issues all right 11 3 remote learning uh the issue was the need for a comprehensive online learning platform the resolution uh which is uh just updated to uh reflect current terminology so it's just a terminology change but i'll read it it's as a resolution as the cave urges the general assembly to require the state department of education to develop a vetted comprehensive remote learning platform for um offer the platform and courses contained therein at reasonable cost to districts and to provide training to district personnel to facilitate and assess student learning versus said platform and the change they changed the word online to remote and they change and they deleted for students in districts right that just was simple grammatical changes to me any issues with that one okay 11-4 this is about school climate culture safety and security um let me just see what the reason for the change again this is a long one and uh and it i'm just gonna i'm gonna hit some highlights if that's okay it it's it urges all school boards to address the influence of violence affecting children through school board policies parent education programs peer meditate mediation student assistant teams and the school district curriculum to maintain an environment that fosters learning and growth to develop review and maintain safety plans that present that address prevention preparedness mitigation and emergency response and recovery and to address environmental health and safety risks as well as potential security breaches in the coordination with appropriate local state and federal agencies i don't think anybody can disagree with those three items and it just the i'm going to paraphrase the rest it's urging state and federal government to provide greater resources to for doing this um and uh and that they delete the only change is they're deleting this last paragraph that says cave also urges the general assembly to direct the state department of education to develop resources for teachers dealing with students that have experienced trauma and they recommend that delete the last paragraph materials have been developed for teachers addressing trauma remains an ongoing issue man i i think i would love to have the state department of education develop resources for teachers i think i would disagree with that deletion anybody have a different opinion well and also but we i know we're we've done a lot of training not traumatic yeah but we were kind of taking that on so as why would we dr ruby have there been materials that are available to you that are you know and our teachers maybe that training for that yeah i know we've done a lot of trauma sensitive training but so if you go on to my website you'll see under social emotional learning it talks about castle which is the the major organization in the in in the world for social emotional learning and they have lots of materials on trauma that are research-based evidence-based vetted and some of the training that we've done in district com at all is born out of the castle so i'm not really sure what they're talking about but i would just think that just like anything else there's controversy and they're not ready to step into that right now because different people have different perspectives on that okay that's useful i see for me i don't think that as a first order principle you would let the uh you would you would step away from trauma right right first order principle right you would want to make sure that we are standing up and saying we ought to do something on trauma-based uh situations for kids so to me i would vote against this one or maybe you could just find out more information too about i can when even at the conference and you could uh inform it based on the discussion yeah right um yeah i think we're just saying we'd like it a little stronger [Music] okay everyone okay with that general guidance to our delegate okay um 11.5 student achievement and assessment the issue is the need to use student tests as teaching tools and not as part of the district's instructional program and to assure local school board involvement in assessment accuracy and relevancy of data used to assess the condition of education in the state of connecticut now this one is a adjustment from a existing resolution what they said in their explanation of changes they consolidated items number one and two as both address student achievement and they consolidated three and eight as both addressed assessment data i am not going to read this it's a page full page but to me just quickly scanning it it does look like the bolds are more about consolidation than they are about uh changing the the gist of it yeah i think we could support this one great any differing opinion on that no no um okay 11.6 drug tobacco and alcohol use um the issue is the need to eliminate use of illegal drugs and other substances tobacco and alcohol from our schools the resolution well first of all the reason for the change was updated to reflect current legislation on recreational marijuana and cannabis so um and uh um i'm just gonna read the resolution cave supports efforts of local state and federal level to eliminate and address the problems of inappropriate unauthorized illegal use of drugs tobacco and alcohol and other substances in the school environment cave and the highlighted words kay vigorously supports education about the recreational use of marijuana cannabis and its negative impact on children their education and development and the words vigorously supports education about the recreational use of marijuana cannabis and its and its negative impact replaces oppose the legalization of recreational use of marijuana because of its negative impact on children well that that that's that that that ship has left the left the court i fear so now we're going to be advocating for at least for education yeah so i think we can support that okay yeah i think we have to deal with the situation so that's 11.
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um six 11.7 technical education and career high school system the issue here's one that is the issues the need for a strong state technical high school program and the reason for the change um is just an editorial update to language um and it changed uh they just added the word it used to read cave supports a state technical high school system that and it gives four things and now it says cave supports a state technical educational and career high school system that i think that's not a significant change we could support that um 11.8 uh family uh health and wellness education so one of the changes that they changed the title of this one um and and this one the issue is the need for a program which deals with issues of family life education and human growth and development in the public schools so the change here is the title is updated to reflect the current terminology that's the only change so i would and basically this resolution is urged each school district to utilize a developmentally appropriate curriculum which deals with issues affecting family life child and human growth and development including lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer questioning lgbtq and to involve the community in this process so it's a broad based broad-based we uh looking for a program which deals with issues of family life which i think we do in our health curriculum yeah this was already in place they just changed the title to health and wellness education instead of family life education correct and we have this sort of stuff in our health program if i recall correct correct yeah okay um everyone okay with that one minor change next one is 11.9 educator evaluation and support and the reason for the change here is resolution language was updated so here the sub issue was educational evaluation and support guidelines and that cabe urges and i paraphrase that they that the state peac which is the professional educational advisory council continue to review the the guidelines and that the state department of education supports strong teacher induction into the performance program to retain new teachers so pretty straightforward things we've been very active on how we've dealt with our evaluation program so and they just changed the words to tie into the current language to include education or evaluation and support council ees so nothing significant there 11 is this working for everybody by the way yeah digest each one okay 11.10 performance accountability of contractors working in public construction projects and the explanation here is clarified language and that looks that like they have just what the resolution is is cabe urges the general assembly to hold contractors accountable for their performance on publicly funded projects by adopting the department of administrative services recommendation that the maximum retainage on a project be increased from two and a half percent to the previous level of ten percent and all they did was they changed the language to the previous level of instead of a parenthetical as it used to be that's the only change i think we could support that language and change um what is by the way what is retainage just it's not a big change here but does anybody know what retainage is maybe mr checko is the amount you hold back on a contract for each application for payment as a so it's a hold for performance performance okay the whole backward performance good thank you i'm glad you're here yeah right oh engaging mr checkout um uh lida item uh 11.11.
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i presume those are 11 or i i dot 11. i'm not sure which but this is public education funding and it's just editorial changes the issue here on this one was that borders of education are increasingly challenged to obtain adequate funding through the normal sources of state and federal grants and local property taxes i'm going to read this one because i think most of the public would be interested in it's not very long the resolution as it re will read is cave urges the general assembly to ensure that the primary sources of local district funding are protected from erosion through the development of biennial state budgets which maintain grant funding at the existing levels and avoid imposition of mandates or state tax shifting which might result in the transfer of state obligations to local property taxes cabe supports the concept of full state and federal funding on a current basis for any mandated programs cabe supports the passage of legislation making state mandates on boards of educational boards of education unenforceable unless fully funded the only change they made was where at the beginning it read cave urges the general assembly to ensure that it used to read cave urges the general assembly to take the necessary steps to ensure that so they eliminated the words to take the necessary steps which is a little stronger it just made it stronger and i think we would agree with that everyone okay with that 11.12.
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e-learning and snow days um this one is a new submission uh the portland board of education in in september of 2021 it's submitted this so i'm going to read it the resolution cave urges the state and federal government to consider the effect of weather-related events that affect setting graduation date the end-of-year activities and the beginning of summer schools and camps recognizing that whether events power outages and other man-made disasters cause disruptions to continuous delivery of education in america's public school districts districts want the discretion to choose e-learning days for those school days affected by weather events and other disruptive events the benefits of remote snow days would require districts to ensure all students than their three bullets all students have an internet connected device with access to the internet would require districts to provide professional development of tech skills related to e-learning and year-round learning would be enabled through remote learning including snow days that seems like an awful big uh unfunded mandate if you ask me so i mean it kind of i liked the concept of it at the beginning right that that you know taken take into account the the snow days but you know to require districts to have the districts all of a sudden are responsible for everybody's interconnect that connected device and uh year-round and year-round learning i think the way that meant about the year-round learning isn't that we would all go year-round but if there was year-round learning you could do it through remote learning so oh good i i read it as just that it gives it give districts the benefits of remote snow days would require districts to ensure oh see i i read this i read it like you debbie too where it was like we want the discretion but you know okay if you're going to give us that discretion we're promising to make sure that all the students have equitable access to devices and internet and all of those other things that's how i wrote it my problem is i think it went too far right i think if they had stopped it at we want the discretion and not have all the requirements let us decide on how what we what each district would need to do dr ruby did you want to add something sure yeah and sure ensures what set me off in order for remote learning to work we learn this i mean this is we already learned this lesson remote learning worked last year in the previous school year for the younger students because we made significant changes to how we brought children into school we had kindergarten come half day for i'm making this up i can't remember let's say six weeks half day so that the teachers could train the children with only having half of the students in the class like six seven eight nine because some people didn't send their kids so they could train them on how to use technology and so we had much more success last year with remote with remote learning this year children who had to stay out of school for whatever reasons in the beginning of the year were totally and continue to be totally lost because we didn't have we didn't teach those children how to use the devices and how to work with google classroom and zoom and everything else that we did we spent a lot of time last year training teachers you guys helped us change the um the schedule and the pd days we did a lot of stuff so in order for i i just want to voice my opinion as somebody who's working on curriculum and instruction to just be able to say we have a remote snow day so that it makes it very convenient for all the end of the year events we need to understand that that's just checking boxes for numbers of days and keeping our schedule okay at the end of the year but it's at a tremendous cost of learning because we're not going to take time out of our even if we train children in the beginning of the year on how to use all these devices if it's not ongoing and we get to december or january or whenever you have the snow day i forget forget it we just heard um the mom talking gonna say and we're then we're taking away from the basics so i think that you know you have to decide what your priorities are are your priorities are the convenience of knowing when graduation is and planning those field trips and which are all important i'm not dismissing that but is that your priority or is making good use of the instructional time that we have um the priority and you'll parents i mean we heard from parents thank you for the snow day you know kids need to be out we you know most of us have children kids like snow days um parents maybe not so much but we're never going to please anybody i just hope that we can stay focused on what our mission is what we're here to do and how important instructional time is maureen i think mary rose was typing something in the chat on the screen to add to that i don't know if eric can pull up her or you can i i couldn't read what she was trying to say i didn't know that um kaye was in for half days through the beginning of november oh excuse me even more time so thank you mary rose so we really did a lot of work with those children and you know uh the discussion that joy brought up it was like hat you know having only six to eight kids in the classroom for half a day oh sorry we got so much we were able to teach so much more with the lower student-to-teacher ratio and that's why the children were prepared to do that work so i just think you know there's no magic wand for oh we just give them a computer and they do remote like it does doesn't happen like that but i think we wouldn't want to bemoan another school district who wanted to do that option right like i think um that's true this is the you know light of discretion and we don't have to yeah that's not saying we have to do that i mean there might be other school districts but that's just logistically well it does say school districts want the discretion to choose e-learning days for those school days affected by the events if they had stopped it there right and not put all the requirements this could turn into the biggest mandate ever right i know but i think we're hearing from the team that we probably wouldn't do remote snow days right yeah the question is whether or not all districts would still have to ensure that these three bullets or only those who choose to use i'm reading it only if you choose right that's how i write that's how i wrote it as well but what i can do is during the discussion of this particular item clearly state that we don't like this part of it but if you're just trying to get districts to have discretion in that matter then i would i would actually i think you should go one step further which is no no i think we're not gonna we're not gonna fight against the districts having discretion but what we've learned is and then and then launch on the you know kids ability to deal with e-learning and it worked when you had lots of easing in i think that's a really good i think the cave assembly ought to hear that so um ultimately this could really hurt districts that are more financially disadvantaged than we are too and they're the ones who might need it you know so those requirements could really hurt them perhaps if it turned into a mandate that you know school districts all of a sudden are responsible for these bullet points down there it would be that's a big overreach in my mind so did you get enough for that one yeah yeah everyone okay with that okay 11.13 there's only a couple more so maybe there's more than a couple more um no it's just a couple three more um 11.13 is established establishment of prioritized learner competencies standards for grades k to 12.
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the the this is a submission from the thomaston board of education and it's the issue is the need for standardized prioritization of learning expectations and standards k-12 the resolution cave urges that the state and federal governments to recognize the challenges facing america's public school districts and catching up for lost time and learning to covet 19 closures establishing a narrowed set of common prioritized learning competencies and standards within each content area would allow districts and educators to effectively focus instruction and alleviate pressure on students to learn more than a year's worth of material in one year's time assuming no further disruptions beyond the 2019-20 school year furthermore such prioritization would allow districts opportunities for meaningful collaboration with a reduction in curricular variance between districts and the statement of reason for the recommendation is addresses covid and the learning loss of students doing the timing with students returning the in person learning it may not be needed so i'm not quite sure what that means so i think what do you think about that one more so i think my thought is like wouldn't we do this sort of at the local level do we need the state to sort of prioritize well are there standards we have to comply with well we have the common core state standards the ngss standards the we have standards for everything but the state this um i was confused by the dates on this yeah because the state if you were to go on the state website the state has done a lot of work and they have done some prioritization of standards um so i'm confused so i think that's yeah i think that's why when this packet was sent out they're saying we might not even need this and it might be redundant i'm confused by this because they've done a lot of work we've gone to webinars we discussed it before um earlier that was the discussion that i had with the principals about do not launch into the curriculum when we have data that are showing us where where the holes are we need to work on that first and you know trying to really have teachers believe that we're not police we're not trying it's not a gotcha we want them to support kids and it ties into that whole social emotional piece if we're putting all this pressure on kids to do things that they're not prepared to do we're just gonna we're gonna shut them down and so we have to balance you know and the data are so important um for informing the instruction if kids can't do x and the curriculum for that for that grade level says you're supposed to be at double d or e or f some place down the the field you can't go there until you you teach them the precursor skills yeah so question so we don't need or want state and federal governments to tell us what to do on this because we got our hands on it or the state yeah from the states the state has provided us with a lot of a lot of resources um that are on the website and we have that in in what we're doing and what we're doing i think that that is the the beauty of the assessments that we do use when they're when the data are used the way they're supposed to be used so i'm thinking we're against this is not needed yeah i'd just also like to add with regard to the way we have our item banks in our standardized assessment and grading in the lower grades and we're working that up we have items where that the teachers use to assess mastery of standards and we can tell because of the way they're designed when a child isn't meeting a standard isn't like you almost met it or you met most of it it's all or none you either met the standard or you didn't meet the standard and we're able to look at using our item banks and see what the precursor skills to that particular standard are that the student doesn't have so that we don't keep hitting them you know with a hammer on what they didn't do we go back and we teach what we know they need to know to be able to do what they couldn't do for their grade level standard and our teachers have been like really working hard in k4 which is where we've completed the majority of that work for the past three years and that we did that whole big thing before the pandemic on the standards based grading you might i think as a as a parent rosa you might have been part of that and i can't remember who else's kids were at that very level but i think some of you were familiar with that yeah i i went to i went through this the thing with my grandchild i thought so thank you okay so um yes so that one's a no that one's kind of a no is not needed really it's yeah um um 11.14 out of 15.
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so uh the flexibility to employ individuals in career and trade fields as instructors this is a new submission from the waterbury board of education and the government relations committee recommends adoption and the issue is that boards of education education are working to provide career preparation opportunities within the comprehensive high school system but are finding it very difficult to employ individuals with both certification and trade experience our students will benefit greatly from learning from current practitioners of the trades the opportunity to explore career pathways combining education and training to prepare students for a full range of postsecondary education options including apprenticeships fits connecticut's educational goals resolution cabe urges the state department of education and the general assembly to take action to provide flexibility to comprehensive high schools to employ individuals in career and trade fields as instructors with professional certification in a specific trade similar to that that is provide provided to the connected connecticut technical and educational career system so it's it's basically saying you could do it with a professional instead of a teacher certified right that's essentially what i do that's what you do so colleges already do this yeah we're not considered a comprehensive high school we're comprehensive we're comprehensive we're not technical and that's the difference so what waterbury is suggesting which is in alignment with some of the feedback on thought exchange which is if we're going to expand options right in in career you need to find instructors you have to find instructors and we know with the teacher shortage and the difficulty in finding this gives an opportunity would be a good thing and it's not a requirement the way it's being proposed right right at least it's an option would be supportive of this one okay great thank you 11.15 anti-hate speech um [Music] this is a submitted by the cave board of directors and it's just a belief statement k believes that all students deserve to learn an environment that is safe affirming and free of bias and discrimination cave denounces the use of words or images that harass and directly attack individuals or groups based on race religion national origin sexual orientation gender or gender expression disability or any other aspect or of identity k believes that when students or adults speak explicit hate language at school it is the responsibility of the school district to actively respond to these incidents k burgess boards to foster school climates where differences are appreciated and not used to ridicule single out intimidate disrespect or exclude different groups we recognize that these injustices can have a negative impact on the educational experience that we expect for each child so it's about adopting that belief statement i'd like to see like political affiliation in there yeah i think that's a good good catch because we have seen situations in the schools where political affiliation becomes a problem okay noted okay any other suggestions on that one okay is this helping you yeah okay that's great can i talk about the deletions yeah i'm gonna do the deletions next so um deletion there are three deletions proposed the first one is vaccination of public school students and the resolution was about urging the general assembly to remove the religious exemptions from vaccinations to measle mumps and rubella and um it with the uh explanation of the changes it's already been done it's already law right yeah all right everyone's fine with that deletion okay no no one you can we can but um okay local local program policy decisions is i i i dot two um and the deletion the reason is proposed for deletion is the issue was covered in the legislative school board partnership resolution which is 1.13 and the consent agenda and and it was a the issue with local and regional boards of education are best able to make take local considerations into account in their decision making i hope so um resolution the cave supports the local development of specific subject area requirements to into course content requirements and staff and resource requirements that grow out of local goals and specifical learning objectives result from local policy decisions regarding program staffing and resources and result in local policy decisions regardless regarding effective and efficient practices so it was about us having the ability to make the decisions we need to make so as you've read the [Music] rosa the that this item 1.13 and the consent agenda does it in fact cover that so that resolution which is it's a little long but it reads cabe urges school boards to provide legislature legislators with objectively and with objective analysis of proposed legislation cave urges the general assembly to exercise restraint when addressing educational issues that impact local operations overly prescriptive law or regulation inhibits local capacity to innovate and best serve its public cabes supports a requirement that a local impact study be conducted before any education laws or policies are enacted by the general assembly or regulations that are or regulations are adopted by the state department of education the local impact study shall include costs and benefits of such law policy regulation so it's broadly written yeah so i mean i get so it's uh it's deleted i i understand that but i i just have to say it's probably that's i think that's terrible taking power away from local boards of ed to make decisions and policies i mean that's what we were doing in policy yeah i mean i i don't like because i guess it's already deleted so it is what it is but i can vote against the deletion but i think what they're saying is that we don't they don't they're not deleting because they disagree with it they're deleting it because they feel that it's these are the things that they are that they are also lobbying for and they feel that it's it's covered that it's redundant the language of local regional boards of education are best able to make local considerations into account in their decision making well why isn't that why can't that just be well do you feel that it's not covered by i don't think what you read is covered at all i don't okay i think it was that was more direction to the state that they can't implement mandates without doing local impact assessments right i didn't hear that strong statement that's in that's in what is written here okay which item was that number uh all three of those three dot two three dot two little just just issue a line that i i was reading but i also feel like you know we don't have the same challenges as danbury not the same challenges as bethel and i know you had there's a statement there that's a long sentence the need for a legislator nominate this one oh the best interest of all connecticut children well we live in a suburb we don't live in a city yeah no yeah this is this yeah so this is what they're saying the issue is the resolution is this is this is the the wording that they are going through okay i just don't think it's strong enough in what they're saying it's covered by okay and uh item 3.3 which is the last item that we need to talk through i think right is that the last one um they're deleting uh it's something because it's no longer a statewide issue and the subject was regional educational service center duties directed by the state so an issue with some legislative initiatives have utilized refcs which is the regional educational service centers to execute and evaluate statewide programs without adequate funding the resolution was the cave urges the general assembly to continue to utilize rescs for statewide programs to fund them adequately and refrain from mandating additional duties for rescs which would compromise their gov governance structure funding process or compete with time and resources needed for programs expect expected by local districts do we use anything from our escs we work with at advancement advances in our esc yes but that has to do with them specifically in their funding model that's nothing to do with us it really isn't that doesn't impact us it's no longer an issue it says it's no longer a statewide issue so i'm kind of indifferent on that we're voting against that no i vote for it i think we're leaving illusion it really doesn't apply so we can actually okay all right so it took a little bit of time but was that what was useful doing so okay so um so with that i would make a motion that we authorize our chairman to vote on these uh these items as guided by input that we've provided tonight second okay all in favor hi okay that's unanimous thank you all right um item e on our agenda is the brookfield administrators association contract okay i will move that the board approve the successor contract between the brookfield board of education and the brookfield administrators association hold on a second okay um is there any discussion on this or who is our who is our negotiating committee we have amy mike and debbie are you guys happy with what we negotiated we ought to probably just do a high level summary because the public does listen to this what what were the key changes on the uh in the agreement was there anything substantive other than normal salary increases and benefit changes the athletic director is now a 12 month position that was it i think that's the only thing i remember in the note that we received and the salary increases were within the bounds of what we have been generally budgeting correct okay right all right any other discussion on that schedule where is that those those secretaries yeah i've been confused sorry all right so all in favor aye any opposed no okay so that's unanimous the on to old business we have the canada lake elementary school presentation uh by dr john barrow all right everybody thank you um but powerpoint queued up and we also invited mr checko from the municipal building committee to be with here be with here be here with us excuse me this evening the late hour might have gotten me there for a second my apologies um so we're going to go through this presentation um just very briefly as an overview the presentation was uh developed at the request of the board members to provide an overview of kind of what the the moving and transition plan will look like for candlewood lake elementary for our staff and our students effect on our families as well as preparing for the budget for the coming year 2223 and that budget presentation as we've alluded to a few times will be at our next board meeting on december 1st a major impact on that budget would be any reallocations any new hires positions we need et cetera to really run the building at an optimal level having said that we're going to right off the bat talk about the construction schedule and importantly i mention that because that's going to impact our our ability to start the 22-23 year in candlewid lake elementary which as we back that up there's less of a budgetary impact on the 22-23 year and it moves forward into the 23-24 year regardless i want to acknowledge the uh construction piece also acknowledge and walk through the structure and vision for the school and that transition plan and then invite mr checko to engage with us on any questions about the actual construction project than the timeline and so forth all right so as we know we have the rendering of the new school that is kind of from the right side of the building where there'd be entry to the cafeteria and then you could see the roofing area to the entry of the building to the main entrance i'm going to go to the next slide which is actually about a 90 second drone video of the current construction just taken last week and eric you said this would just play automatically and there it goes so we'll just be quiet and take a look at things i mean the pilot's not narrating pilot and as you can see there the the as it's moving around to the left that those are the neighborhoods you're seeing there uh constructed and that's that side of the building that's closest uh at the bottom of the screen is the kindergarten side of the building you can see to the right the pre-k structure is not developed yet you see a foundation there for that and now we're the drone is on the danbury side of the huckleberry property or candlewood lake property and in the distance you could see the foot the the existing huckleberry hill school in the parking lot as the video goes around you can see that would be um i know you don't get an appreciation for the size of it until you when you see like the you know huckleberry next to this building and then realize also that this building is twice the height of it as well and then you're like wow you don't even have it all built down right yeah it's a it's a it's a beauty that one that the wing closest to us is much more finished than the others that's the cafeteria yeah they're working that way because yeah the pre-k walls haven't even gone up it looks pretty with the fall colors and the trees behind it that was the architect in the room they purposely set that up so there we go you get a feeling of like the size of it when you see like right tiny little i can just go a giant excavation machine all right i got it i got it all right so yeah i really want to address something very important for everyone um it's critical that people understand before i get into the what the transition uh is planned to look like and again it's the transition really is not going to happen next year as quickly next year as we thought there's there's a several month delay on things and so we're going to talk about that so we do have some supply chain issues uh specifically roofing materials are delayed by about three to four months uh this past friday uh mr checko from the municipal building committee had information from omg the construction company on an updated calendar we've been talking about that at several board meetings for the last month to get this accurate updated calendar and thankfully they got that to us at this point so it could help us in terms of the impact on uh budget and the like so the materials are delayed and the elementary the new elementary school will not be ready to begin the 22-23 school year so the impact everybody needs to understand is we will have a essentially for the most part a status quo year a status quo start to the year very traditional for how we move forward with our grades and it'll look very simple simply like this our current grade four students will transition and attend wisconier for grade five next year they will not be able to go to candlewood lake elementary school there will just won't be space because of the timing of the delay which will take us halfway through the year by that time they'll have experienced half of fifth grade there'll be wildcats at wisconsin it's just not feasible sent a ces grades pre-k to 1 will remain at ces for the entire year next year huckleberry grades two through four the current model will begin the year at huckleberry and it is anticipated the school will be finished sometime in december and we would plan for a very organized and intentional move-in after the holidays part of that will be looking at the school calendar next year and i'll bring a proposal likely at the december 15th meeting uh to help everybody over time understand the impact of this sovereignty could absorb it uh so i just said that in this in white there in january huckleberry would move in then one this is something that conceptually a lot of people didn't understand with the construction project demolition of of huckleberry the the building once it's emptied will begin sometime in january or february of 2023 so that's about 14 months away um not this summer as we initially thought because of the delay we need a place for the students to go to school at that point once huckleberry is demolished we have to build the other side of the parking lot in the driveways for buses and everything else and so there's only so much access to the building and so we wouldn't have been able to move in all students all 1100 students at one time regardless so there was going to have to be a phased-in plan anyway and then um the moving phase will be completed during the summer of 23 and that's when the center school students would prepare and the teachers would move in and then we would have a full complement to start the fall of 23 23 24 year everybody being in the building and so that's how that and then we would be one school um ready to go so that is the updated schedule it's important for the board and the public to know that that was announced to our pre-k5 teachers yesterday at the beginning of their uh professional learning so just a sequence of events municipal building committee informed uh mr dunn and myself on friday i forwarded that information to the board immediately um and then updated the board with this information over the weekend and uh into monday we talked with our pre-k to five staff faculty i should say not all staff faculty yesterday morning uh to be very frank as i was saying in my superintendent report extremely positive in terms of one a well-adjusted staff understanding worldwide supply chain issue in addition to that there was so angst with people in terms of feeling like they were moving in fast and this gives them some more time to move in a little more methodically a little more intentionally and they could be thinking this through and that opportunity for collaboration and team building over the course of the next year and a half they were actually really excited about and of course some people were really excited to move and there's obviously some disappointment there um as mr checkout always says 20 30 years from now we're going to look back and what really matters is we build the school properly and of high quality for the citizens of this town and of course for our students all right so i have a history here i'm not going to run through word for word it's important for the slideshow when i put these together that it shows shows a story and tells a story for for the reader so um as i present this i'll considering the hour and the length of the meeting tonight i'll just hit some some highlights for everybody on this slide but it's important for those who aren't familiar with the project or new to the community to understand there's six years of history to getting to this besides the decades of talking about it we really got to work back in 2015 and starting to address how we might approach this we hired ultimately decided to have a building condition study to really analyze the the value and the the lifespan of our existing facilities and where were we putting our money where was it best invested ultimately the decision was made after focus groups and all kinds of community engagement to move forward with a new school we explored lots of options prior to that the new school was the decision to be made there was land utilization and all kinds of studies involved and that really you know we kind of did it in two-year segments over the last couple of years the continued design collaboration has been ongoing a lot of work with the educators on the educational specifications that's really the program and then obviously our our professionals really techdon and our municipal building committee working on the actual design of the facility um we bid the project start times were involved school naming committee was involved and as you all remember we were all there we broke ground last um officially uh we started we had a ceremony i think in march and then we really were breaking ground in in may so a lot of great history there with this project so the overarching plan for those who are not familiar with it at the end of the day we are consolidating the current the grade five model that is in the uh portables at wisconia with our center school students and with our huckleberry students so comprehensively pre-k through five we're joining three different uh faculty and staffs together and the original plan um our and i mentioned this earlier are rising fifth graders so students currently in fourth grade would have the opportunity um to be in candlewood lake elementary and because of the delay that that is not going to work work out so we had goals and and opportunities in this transition plan so this is important i do want to walk through these all five of these the first thing when we one of the big decisions going into building the new school versus like a renovated new or something like that was minimal disruption to staff and students we really didn't want to impact teaching and learning and we achieved that where the kids are in their spaces essentially not disrupted the entire construction process time we want to make sure that we're building relationships among faculty as they join together we want to use the design of the building strategically to create opportunities for establishing and sustaining a very very this was really important a family oriented culture support of student academics and connection and obviously continued consultation with the folks from yale as a matter of fact dr cipriano gave the keynote yesterday with our pre-k5 staff dr cipriano works in the yale center for emotional intelligence at yale develop protocols to operate candlewood lake efficiently and safely and ensure all the personnel transitions align with all contractual obligations so the process overview i'm going to go through briefly go through several slides talk about user group input organizational structure the upper and the lower houses and the rationale for that organizational structure the some of the pd that's uh commensurate with our transition how staffing will work so while it was the staffing was a big preparation for the december 1st budget we were ready those changes will not occur to the following year obviously school operations is going to be big how do we have the schools function in a house system but also together as one and where is that appropriate and as we've talked about principal la rochano and principal diamond in collaboration working together with their staffs and making that all work um and then the supply chain delay in the roofing materials just as a review of that other slide from before so in the user groups it's important to know right now we're preparing for bid on furniture fixtures and equipment something called small wares we think all the way down to waste baskets and flags and all those little details and technology which includes upgrading the phone system and simultaneously upgrading the phone system for the other schools as well it's not part of the project money's part of other funding that we've been working through and eric's working on that so a lot of that's been going on a lot of collaboration there and then as you can see there's a very lengthy list over the past uh several years where specialist spaces you know uh art music phys ed the collaboration and the work that went into that with tech on and having the staff there who are going to be in those spaces help with the physical design to make the educational specifications of program come to life library media center work resource rooms speech and language tutoring spaces the teacher work in breakout room break rooms the gymnasium all the technology administrative offices nurses offices storage custodial and maintenance needs um the cafeteria and the kitchen and certainly security and shelter and voting and all of those things all of that has been discussed over the last three years with tech on and that's called the user groups so the organizational structure we've talked about this several times upper and lower house and what we're going to do there is the structure would be one principle and one assistant principle in each upper and lower house okay and you could see in the i'm losing my sight there i want to make sure i get it there for we have pre-k in the lower house and that's so that's pre-k to two and then in the upper house grades three to five one principle and one assistant principle and then we have our grade five academy uh we worked with mrs lavroshano and she's starting to work with mr renda what that schedule can look like and some of the really interesting things we're gonna do and again this is going to evolve over time and it's gonna happen at an even more intentional and even slower rollout than initially planned both the upper and lower house don't forget in our spotlight tonight mrs baldwin had joined us she's our special education supervisor pre-k to five she is across three schools right now the way we are she will be housed at one school okay so she'll be there um so we have a lot of things to consider uh the one start time um we also have to look at the i've got to turn this just a little bit excuse me thank you i'm sorry what's that all better for you too oh good um there we're moving to we talked about start times right so a two-tier bus system is what we envision um and so what that would be is one tier for the elementary and then one tier for middle and high school but all parents with middle schoolers there would be separate bus runs for middle and high school we wouldn't be mixing them so that was something thank you jen we worked on that all right um the main entrance and the process for visitors is something we we're looking at where we're uniting that we'll be uniting the upper and lower house the separate neighborhood wings for each grade level and support services so in each grade level wing or neighborhood as we're calling it there are all the support services are built in so we're trying to reduce travel time as well so it really will make things feel small and intimate and back to that family climate that i was talking about before and then the upper and lower also have separate spaces so if you're in the upper you have your separate art and special areas and the same thing with downstairs and uh and health suites etc and then the leadership structure that we envisioned the the adjustment would be uh one principle remember whiskey is going to lose a whole grade that's 200 kids essentially you figure about 800 kids at the middle school the um it'd be one principle and one assistant principle right now there's one principle and two assistant principles so there'd be a reallocation of one of the assistant principal ftes from whiskenier to candlewill lake elementary remember canada lake elementary is going to be much bigger than uh wisconsin and bigger than the high school so we have to have the proper supervision and then we are envisioning um uh specifically due to the needs of middle school students and uh pre-adolescents uh a dean of students position and so we're gonna talk about how we can work on that with mr renda over time and we envision a reallocation of positions with some of the things we're going to do to match the needs and the change in the district but considering when you talk about positions you affect people's lives and we're not looking to do that at this point there's no need to discuss where that might happen because what we're thinking right now may change over the next year so i'm confused that's that's says you have three administrators um the dean of students is that we are envisioning that as a teacher leader position it wouldn't be an administrative position so you haven't really reduced it that's why i'm talking about there will be a reallocation but not announcing what that reallocation would be so it wouldn't it wouldn't be an ad it would be a reallocation of existing staff and again this is early in the sharing process so the rationale for the organization is we really need to make sure that the development developmental needs of our youngest learners are met and we want to make sure that we have that personal connection and providing those conditions in that close-knit family environment supervisor supervisory ratio provides a administrator to student supervision we typically have one administrator two it depends on the school between 200 and 300 students and so this model that i just went through will will continue and maintain that ratio the administrator to teacher supervision it's typically when you average it out and again there's pockets where it's quite a bit more and somewhere it's less but among our administrations uh they typically evaluate and supervise between 15 and 20 faculty members and that maintains the current ratio and of course family engagement we want to make sure that we're able to respond and engage with families and so it's important that we have the proper supervision in place proper administrative authority frankly in the buildings we also want to ensure that each house and neighborhood is structured to provide academic rigor i think that's something we heard tonight along with student wellness opportunities to build independence of course to be safe and secure flexibility for staffing in service to student scheduling needs so for example and when you don't have to travel between schools and somebody's assigned a majority of their schedule perhaps to the upper house it's it's much simpler process to move downstairs for a class or two that you might have to cover or student hours of need etc um in addition to that making sure that the grade five students uh transition to the middle school in a more in that traditional model uh for middle school which is the sixth through eighth grade because they would stay with candlewood lake through fifth grade the other thing we want to talk about is professional learning in the team building and bringing those three schools together i already talked about uh what we did yesterday with the pre-k to five faculty and in a real kickoff and initiating things we're going to continue that throughout next year and there's going to be a lot of opportunity one of the things that maureen and i shared in the budget priorities last last meeting was talking about really starting to examine our specifically our ela and our math curricular tools when you bring fifth grade into the fold now actually working with their colleagues uh in the lower grades that's natural team building they're working on authentic projects frankly together so that's important there's also some tentatively planned social studies work for the grade five teachers one of the things we're talking about is that in the academy the grade five teachers and the students would change classes uh by subject where uh and all the teachers would teach uh social studies and then they'd have their specific speciality so there's some pd that needs to be done there to support our staff so they're ready for that the staffing transitions we're talking about about 180 employees that would be at the school so moving them from three different buildings we have to make sure there's a lot of work that has to go again that was for next year we were thinking about that but now it's not going to be until 23 24.
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the real rule of thumb here is that if you're a second grade teacher at huckleberry right now when it's time to go to candlewood lake you're most likely going to be a second grade teacher you know unless there's enrollment shifts or something like that at candlewood lake or if you're a kindergarten teacher pre-k teacher at center or a fifth grade teacher at wiscons you're just going to teach somewhere else and essentially most people stay in the same s grade level and or special subject throughout their career but again requests enrollment retirement all those things get affected so again just going to the no new net administrator ftes and reminding everybody that two principles one in upper and lower two assistant principles upper and lower and then the special education supervisor so for approximately eleven hundred students we would have uh five administrators physically in the building and again i talked about the original plan and uh now we're gonna have to wait till 23 24.
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some other things that are very interesting at the bottom of that in the italics um it's important just to know that it's not just regular ed classroom teachers we've got para educators we've got special education staff we have all the special subjects to think about transfer the nurses the custodians the secretaries of the technology team i mean there's a lot of different support folks that are critical to moving our schools forward that support our schools and we have to have them there then i talked about the reallocation piece of the dean of students at the middle school and that would be something new although a reallocation and then in addition to that um working with chief purcell they're recommending the new town model which would be a school security officer that would be a retired police officer um at least when i was working with mr dunn the thought was that would that would be through the police department budget and then we'd have that person as a trained with us and working with us but trained by the police department specifically and then working there that also that position acts as a greeter so that'd be something we can have someone there at the door uh greeting individuals as they come in and being security and being a frankly an armed presence that could keep things secure with that many kids in one one space we really thought that that's what we need to do school operation so the original plan i've kind of gone through this of how we were going to move in and so forth so i'm not going to belabor that but what's important to know in i told this i've told this to different faculty members teachers are going to be responsible for for some packing will outline what that is but there's an actual bid in the project budget for moving so no one's going to be expected to pack these boxes and bring put them in the trunk of their car and move them over to their classroom one most of the materia the the furniture is or is going to be brand new and in the classroom um that's going to be all set up for the teachers um things that we keep such as our tech some chromebooks and things like that will be moved over there but teachers will be work we'll work specifically on um curricular tools how we want to pack those up label those and movers will be moving those so that'll be a very organized process that we go through and then of course we've got the new start times to be thinking about in the two-tiered bus system so everybody can recall just a reminder we're going to move to 8 a.m for the high school and the middle school and then move a little bit later to make the bus busing work 8 50 for the elementary school and that would end at 3 35 and in this power point so for the public that's watching they could click on the healthy school start times presentation that we did about a year and a half ago and then of course logistical planning has been underway how are we going to do a rival and dismissal and all of those things and that's been a big big source of focus for the um the principles and administrative teams thinking through all that all those efficient safety procedures just as i included here a drawing a schematic excuse me of the outline of the building which you can see on the left that we just saw the first part of the parking lot that's nice and clean where we could fit about half of the cars and that's why we would have had to have had a phased-in move and you can see where it says construction area in red that's the existing footprint of the huckleberry and when we knocked that down we would then have to build a whole new parking lot that would work with uh with the other part of the parking lot and again that takes time and so ultimately this rendering shows what the parking will look like as you can see very nice flow in now and then again i have this here i don't need to go through this with everybody but just a reminder of uh it was part of the initial slide about the supply chain delay and i think it's going to be important for mr checkout to join us in just a second here i did put at the bottom though that i recommend the board had voted that next year we start with the change in school start times considering the supply chain delay and everything going on i and and entering into a bus bid right now and likely a new five-year bus contract i recommend that we postpone and delay that change in start times one year and and keep it um the same for next year okay that's a that's that's a separate recommendation that the board will need to take action on and then finally next steps just so everybody knows the things we're thinking about obviously staffing is a big piece i talked about what we would have been preparing and proposing on december 1st for the budget for next year that is postponed and that won't be until at this time next year for the for the budget we have to look at security technology the grade 5 model all the logistical um and visitor protocols and the like all the features and the things we we need to do we're going to talk about that in various forums drop in zoom meetings all kinds of exciting opportunities where people could just check in and we could do little mini presentations or we could just have conversations like this and answer lots of questions um in addition to that uh protocols with building administration i talked about that uh spending plan um ken's working with technon on the energy savings and how that'll be impacted in the budget that's very important people forget huckleberry is heated by electricity so it's quite expensive and we're gonna have natural gas at the new school which is a lot less expensive all the moving and the bids that i talked about uh planning for the teacher assignments staff assignments and the transition and transfers accounting protocols we're going to be going we're downsizing whiskenier and we're taking two schools offline and creating one new school so there's accounting procedures and protocols that have to be worked on and ken's preparing that and then finally i talked a little bit about on december 15th i'll bring a district calendar forward because one of those has to incorporate when teachers move in mid-year next year when our huckleberry teachers move to candlewood lake they're going to need some time to set up the classrooms so we've got to look at our actual school days for the students and how we might make that work within our existing budget that's a lot of information coming at everybody but i wanted to get through that as quickly as i could and mr checko is here as well if you paul i think you might be able to join us actually at the table might be easier for you and um conversation time thank you very much so i i feel like i was trying to digest all that that's a lot it's a lot can you just sort of summarize because i'm not i think what i heard you say is we're still not moving even though there's delays in roofing materials we're still not moving all grades in at the same time correct okay so can you just tell say again what that staggered in time great question and i'll work right through that and and by the way i failed to share i sent out an email that lays this all out for all staff today right before uh this afternoon and tomorrow the powerpoint and that a similar letter will go to all families so everybody knows what's going on and it lays it out exactly as you're asking so to start next year it's a traditional start to the year the building will not be ready the hope is late november december we probably could get a certificate of occupancy and really be moving in at that point which would lead to an intentional well let me let me stop for a second so when i say traditional start center school goes to center school and is just going to stay at center school for the year okay whisken here the grade five students so current grade four matriculate to grade five stay at wisconsin huckleberry starts at huckleberry grades two three and four and let's say if everything goes well right after the holidays next year january of 23 the kids the buses bring them to candlewood lake instead of huckleberry and they go into their new classrooms okay and that's where you think you think about time where our teachers even though things will be moved there for them they need to be in a mid-year have to have time to set up their classrooms and the hope is that over the fall the building is in a such a a quality situation where on their own time hey your wing will be open feel free to go in and get excited and work on your classroom um on other time as well and what will then happen deb and this is where people didn't understand huckleberry is still standing it needs to be demolished that takes a few months as i understand it and paul could give the details on that but longer than just eight weeks to knock a building down we then it has to be removed safely and properly the area where the school had been needs to be constructed into the proper parking lot that takes another chunk of time that takes us through the spring of 23.
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okay so even if we wanted to force the center school kids in at mid-year as well there's no physical place for parking for staff busing it just couldn't work there's just not enough physical space and so fall of 23 we have the summer to get everything ready with the parking lot and everything all set right paul the kids will rise and move forward the the fourth graders next year who had moved in mid-year to huckleberry will become fifth graders at candlewood lake and new kindergartners will come in and everyone will matriculate over to candlewood lake so the start 23 with everything we know right now we would be able to move into the school with all students and staff and those fifth graders will just move to sixth grade and they will have a continuous experience at wisconsin correct there will be continuous experiences with here one of the things we talked about that with the pre-k5 folks yesterday and i indicated in my communication to the staff today is so this also gives us more time to celebrate the history of both schools alumni staff alumni students i know the ptos want to do some work with that so that's actually really exciting as well so i hope that breaks it down yeah okay thank you do you mind if i ask some questions tonight sure about please and so first of all paul thank you for coming i just appreciate that it's great to have you here again so and if i wanted to be here now and thank you for sitting through our long discussion on tape on cable resolution not a problem um so supply chain let's start with supply chain and uh could you talk just a little bit more about what we're learning about with the roofing materials and then and then secondarily are there other supply chain issues that are risks to us yeah okay when we talk about supply chain um you know everybody's thinking about ports and uh you know the port of los angeles and 60 ships out at sea and we're not talking about that type of supply chain here with building material particularly with roofing what we're talking about is the texas freeze last year now the state of texas is a hub for manufacturing for chemical processes so when you think about adhesives for roofing material you think about tpo thermoplastic membrane we talked about expanded polystyrene from bruce which is styrofoam those are all chemicals that during the texas freeze last year a lot of manufacturing got shut down now we had a very very high demand at the same time for construction material then texas kind of shut down for the freeze and we have low supply that's what's creating this backlog it's taken some time to get those plants back online the trucking industry obviously and covid didn't help much but we've had a such a big response in the construction industry over the last 24 months that both covid and the texas freeze just backed everything up the problem with the roofing and you know we all think about the roofing uh on our houses and it's just shingle you know it's a composite system that we put on these buildings so it consists of a base sheet insulation a cover board a membrane various adhesives and mechanical fasteners these all come from a singular manufacturer and they have to come from a singular manufacturer so we get a warranty on the system and that system is from the top of the roof deck to the top of the roof and it's that whole sandwich if we mix and match we're going to be left with a 1.2 million dollar roof without a 20-year warranty that we purchased so that wouldn't be good fiscally the so that that's the supply chain in a nutshell um we've been moving with concrete you're seeing that steel is going up we actually have interior walls going in electrical can't be run yet so we get the roofing on we do have enough roofing right now for areas a and b those two on the right which you saw kind of partially done right now so the interior work will continue there we are looking into alternative manufacturers and have been actually since july to see if there's any improvement we can make but right now all indications are the balance of the roofing is going to come in february unless we can find an alternative manufacturer for the systems okay so that's the supply chain are we pretty confident about february or is it is it just still an open-ended i think i can get it there look it's always um we did receive a letter directly from johns mansville who was the roofing manufacturer that february was the likely target date they've delivered part of the material to the site and that's when they're committing to supplying the rest now that being said i mean if you can protect the market as well as i can you know we wouldn't be sitting here um are there always those outliers yes are there any indications in the construction market and the construction industries now that we're going to see any other kind of ripple or residual effects not at this time and you know we trend that on a weekly basis and we knew about the roofing like i said it started in july we just didn't know what the total implication was going to be until last week and so we got a firm commitment okay okay now are there other areas that you're worried about for supply chain types of delays i mean that's that are on your radar screen not at this time we haven't been apprised of any from the construction manager um the roofing was a big one and again because we talk about construct consecutive processes right we need a roof on the building in order to do the electrical in order to do the mechanical that's why that one it really has this ripple it has a huge ripple anything else we can kind of move around the site and do you know switch things around but this really is required for building clothes yeah so that actually the other things are less risky overall yeah okay i mean even if we do have brick but even if we didn't have the brick we have the concrete walls you know we have styrofoam or insulation on the outside of the building we can close in the building envelope um it's it's a roof and that's really the issue at this juncture okay so the the two wings that we will be able to roof will we start seeing those actually look like the build the building's enclosed and then the construction will move indoors effectively yes we will that's uh been going on this week as a matter of fact and uh we've been working with the mason and the construction manager on the mock-ups of what the actual brick patterns will look like okay and start moving that forward so they'll actually do the facings on the building and things like that uh windows i believe are coming to the site being stored in trailers so we have other components to and close that building at this point and so then this is a curiosity question not a formal question when do you think those uh those other those wings that we can do will start being enclosed and looking closed you know well they're gonna they're gonna start really in short order now we're starting to move through those as soon as we get that mock-up approved on the masonry and we can say to the mason go ahead move along he'll start letting the brick around those first two areas okay so we're really really close so second big area of question um so we're gonna do we're gonna move the kids in uh from uh from the uh current huckleberry at christmas time effectively or into the beginning of the school year the beginning of january into the new school and that's when we're going to start demolishing the existing building that is correct is that a how disruptive is the demolishing process the first portion of the demolition process is really going to be internal because we have some abatement to do right there's lead there's pcbs there's asbestos um you know that's hidden behind walls it's not out in the open and that's going to be the first month month and a half after that there's going to be some heavy equipment on there that's going to be knocking down the building disruptive the classroom wings so i don't think it's going to be disruptive to the educational process um i think it's going to be more inquisitive for the kids to see the stuff go on but at that age group that you can guarantee the second question same kind of question on the that's the huckleberry is up on a hill right now with uh i'm presuming there's some amount of leveling in order to get those parking lots in um is that a disruption a disruptive process that's also big heavy equipment i'm presuming moving a lot of dirt around no different than the site prep that's been going on from the new building and the heavy equipment that's been moving around yeah and we've had cranes on site picking steel and you know a lot of heavy equipment moving earth and digging for foundations and the kids have taken it all in stride okay they've been really good with us all right good good um and a question for dr burrell the traffic flow with just the one parking lot with parents and buses all coming in if we walked through how the flows will work and make sure we don't have the traffic jams up kendall wood lake road yeah so so like all of these things it's certainly not going to be perfect but we are going to make it work the best we can deb jones for the bus company has been out um rob tenz has been out uh in july or august paul sat down with the principals and myself uh along with deb and we started really going through with rob tens of the construction manager counting the the parking spaces for grades two through five which was the original plan to make sure everything that was 116 or 123.
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we landed on those a proper number so we'd have visitor spaces so we believe we'll be able to make that work um and uh continue to plan for that okay based on that um second logistics question is if i think of two three and four as the grades doesn't that put one of the grades downstairs and two upstairs yeah and we in in exactly bob so you know um three four five on the top is kind of the the alignment left to right we would do so it would be and then one two uh k one two on the bottom so two would be on one side if they to get through two and an empty five up above exactly three and uh you got your visualization four over and we don't wanna ask our you know teachers to set up classrooms you know two different times and that kind of thing so that that's that's the initial thought right now that's why there's downstairs administrative structure you had you've figured out how you'll be able to deal with that half a year exactly and and again we'll work with uh with principal lavroshano on that and and also with uh with the teachers you know the staff may say hey you know for this half a year we won't we don't mind having the classrooms adjusted and moved in the summer time we'd rather be up with everybody else so we could be together you know so that's part of the communications and working together with everybody is getting input because sometimes like i found out yesterday in the pre-k uh to five uh work some of the teachers were sharing the huckleberry teachers were sharing they were more interested in watching the welding than the kids out at recess and so they they were all through the fence looking at this great welding and all the sparks going off and the kids were like yeah we don't we've seen it already it's no big deal so um you just never know where people are coming from you need big heavy equipment you get the big heavy equipment the kids oh absolutely yeah it's fantastic um great thank you and then my my last question i'll let everybody else ask questions is it's actually for you and and mr post um does anything that you've described tonight impact our state bonding and we have to go do we have to go through a communications process with the state given a delay in this in the opening times or is that kind of a normal process paul you look like you wanted to start with the answer there well state bonding as far as the um financing yeah and the bonding no um you know we we've been in communication with the state uh we actually have a meeting with them i think on the 16th to talk about ffa and that budget process but they're well aware of the support of the supply chain issues i'm guessing we're not the only school with this uh no i'm not unfortunately we're not brookfield's not unique in this one this time i know where you meet i just didn't want to have a situation where timelines kind of got uh bollocksed up with what the states agreed to or not agreed to and we get into some sort of uh we promised you a big percentage of the cost of the school but uh but guess what it's you know you didn't make the dates no the dates weren't um the dates were really internal to our district the state doesn't sign off on you need to have this done by okay so there's no date no gate date guidance at all no i mean look if we got into a situation where they stretched out for six years for one reason or another the state would yeah start to look at us and say hey guys but um you know two three months four months it's routine for construction okay unfortunately got it okay that's all that's all the questions i have mentioned about the move management services sure please pull doc i will mention that we did purchase through arcade as our owner's project manager move management now we will do that now in two phases and you know yes there'll be a minor financial impact but they will handle that entire process for the district go in instruct teachers on what needs to be boxed provide the boxes how to label them you know teacher xyz grade two classroom they will move everything that that teacher boxes up bring them to the new classroom desks will be set up cubbies will be installed all the teacher will need to do is then unpack the boxes okay and exactly and that's why we would build in the time in the in the calendar for them to be able to do that sure that does that that can be uh that's the unpacking pack is it's a lot of work that's a big deal for a teacher um just out of curiosity what happens to the old fnf the old uh f yeah it just gets tossed yeah the district does have first right of um salvage for anything that they want to salvage use or reuse in any of the existing buildings the equipment technology desks everything that's going into the new building is going to be new and that's what the town yeah i know i just was you know the if there's if there's anything that was uh donatable sellable uh or the like you know there there's a lot of a lot of organizations out there who would love to have some tables or desks or chairs absolutely you know having an opportunity in that little window from when you've exited the building to do it to let your local charitable organizations maybe come look at what's there and and and take it before we throw it in the dumpster would be a very good public service and i i think another thing that's important for for the public to know is tomorrow as a matter of fact the the um mrs baldwin our special education supervisor pre pre-k to five as well as principal labrador and principal diamond are meeting with myself and uh eddie from tecton and we're actually going to talk about what equipment and specific furniture for all different needs is appropriate this includes physical education equipment right you're not just going to get rid of all that beautiful equipment you bring that over but a lot of the basics like student desks and things like that will be brand new in the building so we're going to go through a discerning process there and that's actually scheduled for tomorrow thank you yeah i think there was a particular to um otp oh some new equipment that you had purchased already in the past year or so and that equipment will be reutilized very specific equipment for specific student needs yeah yeah that would make sense that makes sense so anything that's relatively new you would want to say could we use it but i just keep thinking i we did this when i closed down a bunch of facilities with the company i work for and we made a public day it wasn't a long drawn-out thing it was uh bring your uh what we do on saturday they did a come walk through the building and and and if you're interested we'll put your uh you can claim it and you have to have it out there out of there by monday right you figure out your trucking right whatever you want to do and you know what file cabinets um uh and we let employees in there right when the employees wanted some of that stuff sure so um and so just uh it's just a really good will building exercise we just have to be ensured that every document a piece of paper is out there you'd be surprised at what gets left behind oh god yes not surprised at all you got to remember the company i work for it has very secretive documents for technical design and uh that we spent all we we actually had an army of employees going for everything and you know the filing cabinet you found the piece of paper down in the bottom right you know that kind of stuff so sorry i i've dominated the questions i apologize to the board [Laughter] no no no no dr burrow made me wait two hours you all better ask at least by the by the way i think it was one hour paul but but paul tells me he's hoping to come to 7 30.
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well i said really said 7 45 you wanted to come earlier we'll be moving through the suggestion he's going to make me he's going to make me present at the next nbc meeting now to pay payback so if um dr will's gonna quote me the the actual quote is um when i use it with my clients in three to five years nobody's gonna remember that the building opened three months four months they'll remember if it's wrong yeah so let's just kind of take our time but do it do it right make the move correct and move on how about this we're having a soft opening in january and a grand opening in september that's what we're doing yes that's how you explain it to everybody i think you might have the time to plan that event you can plan all those rounds what do you think you know does anybody have any questions we will be and i know rose has been asking me about walkthroughs and everything and we were doing it just before the nbc meetings obviously with the time getting short in the evenings we're going to try to schedule a saturday and fight the board event to start going through the tough thing is when the site's open it's an active construction site and we want to make sure that we're not impeding their progress and at the same time we're all safe so we'll let you know that we all saved our helmets so we're good that's good i'm wondering if um there's a way to involve the fourth graders who will not get to go to the new school um maybe i don't know i'm just thinking of like maybe have them design a mural or something that'll go to the school some i don't know help with um yeah i know that um both both uh specifically the the administration and the team at uh at huckleberry and mr renda and his team were thinking of making it very special yeah the tran the transition itself and and the other opportunities there so i don't know what those ideas are yet but they talked about that yeah yeah okay but uh the kids going to fifth grade in particular were expecting that being able to enjoy the new school and now they won't so we haven't that's that's where that's where there's not light exactly we can't forget that that's where my disappointment discipline something special exactly and um the portables at the middle school will be demolished once that fifth grade class then moves to sixth grade you bring up a great point after the building right is complete and we move fifth grade into the new elementary school then the portables will be taken down we have some all fields that we need to construct and realign at both west canyon and other sites that we're still studying in town um there's a lot more to this than just the new school building yeah so thank you for bringing that up that's important yeah and you know everybody knows that we haven't forgotten about that portion and another piece to this is the lead time not only for the budget but i did forget to mention as i was moving through the the slides quite quickly is you know there's a lead time that that principal renda needs in terms of building his schedule you know it looks very different when it's six through eight versus five three and so it's not only the impact on staff and families and all that there's that the schedule physically looks different and dr ruby was actually talking about the you know the way the classes break down so there's just this is a ripple on every level so it's a lot of logistical planning it just takes time yeah and and so we're going to take advantage of the time we have to be even more intentional all right any other questions no i'm dismissed thank you thanks for coming paul thank you paul i appreciate it all right uh our next item is public comment we don't have anybody signed up for tonight um so we are on to three main points and i would suggest this discussion that's a very hard really three main things on our channel um we had all of the all of the um class size reports yeah i was thinking we would kind of put a section for dr ruby with class size report um all the reports came really everything that dr ruby recorded in one you know one point i thought the huckleberry spotlight yeah that would be good to lead off that would be really nice yeah and then obviously the element which i would put first yeah i would do that number one okay that's a very important bit of information probably yeah you can't capture some of the input that we got and the flavor of it in just uh looking at a presentation or getting an email letting people go see the video listening to paul and this discussion about what's going on with chemical plants in texas there's some learning there yeah yeah all right um upcoming events okay uh center school has a pto meeting virtual on tuesday november 9th at 7 o'clock on thursday november 11th they have their virtual veterans day assembly that'll be stream starting at 9 20.
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on friday november 12th they celebrate world kindness day on thursday november 18th is picture retake and monday november 22nd is the community meeting huckleberry has tuesday and wednesday november 9th and 10th the second grade field trips to the firehouse and kids kingdom thursday november 11th they have their virtual veterans day assembly tuesday november 23rd is picture retake day and monday november 29th report cards are available whiskenier end of the first marking period tuesday november 9th wednesday and thursday november 10th and 11th is early release for conferences picture retakes are tuesday november 16th and they have pto on wednesday the 17th brookfield high school has picture retakes tomorrow and wednesday and thursday november 10th and 11th they also have early release for conferences and all schools will have early release on wednesday the 24th and close thursday the 25th and friday the 26th for thanksgiving recess let's see thank you um anybody else with any upcoming events i know sometimes we have like little drop in ones all right um so that's it so without objection meeting adjourned thank you everybody [Music] oh wow
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four three two one uh good afternoon everyone um welcome now is the time set for the uh board meeting of the arizona state schools for the deaf and the blind um just uh we're in person today in phoenix just a few ground rules to go over we're mostly distance here on the on the stage so if folks feel comfortable they can take off their masks while you're speaking that's really up to you unless you have any kind of issue with that and also when you're speaking if you can do two things and these are ground rules that we go over all the time one if you can state your name before you start speaking that helps uh the interpreters uh and then two if there's a a change in speaker just pause for you know a beat uh a second or two um so the interpreters can catch up and uh turn their attention to the to the next speaker other than that uh we'll be ready to go to 1.01 call to order and roll call and uh for the roll call sue k brittany buchanan here linda bove here lynn davison here mike gordon i'm here dean howard i'm here pb chance david nigro present aaron wonders president and myself sue k caneifel all right thank you sue k uh we can move on sorry uh we can move on to uh item 1.02 call to the public on agendized items as we've done for the last year and a half as opposed to having people physically appear you've been able to email in emails of certain length uh and fill out a form online uh to submit those comments and suitcase we have any for the agenda items i don't think so yeah they're all gonna be coming up later today so we don't have any to read so the next item is going to be 1.03 information item superintendents report superintendent reichman hello everyone i'm happy to see everyone present today i am superintendent annette reichman hello president nigro assistant superintendent rex assistant superintendent cooper and members of the board and the asdb community as well those of you who are here and those of you who are watching on our live stream welcome to our november 4th 2021 board meeting i'm happy to see you all here it happens that november is my favorite month of the year because it's thanksgiving that is one holiday that i think is very unique to us in the united states we take the time to gather together with our family and our friends and we express our appreciation and our gratitude for the gifts that have been given to us and to each other so i want to say thank you to the board of the dr of directors for your time for your efforts for your energy your commitment and your support to asdb i truly appreciate you i also appreciate the asdb community our educators our staff and members of the community as well for their commitment motivation effort energy and support in providing the best possible education we can to our students i am truly grateful for all of that thank you i want to start with the story of asdb you know that asdb was founded back in 1912.
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here miss harlan here miss ham here ms harrigan here mr matelli mr paragini here mr white mr chairman thank you i asked you to stand for the pleasure united states of america and to the republic for which stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you for joining us have an awesome showcase so i'm going to head over to this leader thank you tony well we're really glad to see everyone tonight down here in the chapman library this is a really fun evening for most of us because we get to showcase something new something exciting that we're doing within the district so if you were at convocation if you were at one of our curriculum committee meetings you saw mike selem you need to put together a fantastic video for us highlighting this summer's curriculum writing institute of which we had over 80 teachers participating in rewriting revising and reviewing curriculum across our district we were revising rewriting with the eye towards writing curriculum with deep authentic learning tasks at hand we wanted kids to do authentic problem solving and be involved in real world experiences and so today we have with us some first grade teachers and kindergarten teachers and we are going to show you the work the fruits of the labor from the team that was in kindergarten in first grade and the units that they developed for first and second grade so now i'm going to turn it over to kristen lopa who is going to kick us off and kristen is now our full-time assistant principal at doolittle school we are really excited to showcase some of the work that was done over the summer by our elementary team this is just a quick picture of what the curriculum writing institute looked like at highland school these this summer on those dates in june um we are going to be talking tonight about a couple of our units that were revised our kindergarten and first grade units so we that's why we have our kindergarten and first grade teachers here tonight they are in the process of teaching these units right now so we're seeing firsthand the impact that they're having on the students in cheshire so here are some of the projects that we worked on and we are going to showcase the kindergarten and first grade tonight i'm going to introduce kathy carlucci she is assistant principal at norton in chapman so school at the institute this summer um our instructor was linda van wegen and um using these principles here she really guided our instruction as teachers um as we created these authentic deep learning experiences for the kids um i was in a unique position because i was leaving the classroom and becoming an administrator right when this was all happening so for part of the institution i actually worked with colleagues in creative units and then for part of it i acted as an administrator and worked with all the different elementary teams and watched what they were doing so i can assure you that the overwhelming message that i heard on both sides was that the teachers were just so grateful to have this opportunity to work with everyone in the district you know especially teachers from one elementary school collaborating with teachers from another to really spend the time to get into this kind of planning because this isn't the kind of planning you can get done in a you know 40-minute prep period on a busy wednesday afternoon with kids all over the building so it was really really appreciated um the teachers were excited they were energized um and i think that the results of their work um is now benefiting other teachers and all of the kids of course as well um so next i'd like to introduce pat castle um she is our ela k-6 literary um literature specialist um and she's going to get into a little bit more about what the teachers actually put together for you hi everybody so um during the summer at the cricket so as uh kathy was saying what i do is i support reading in all of the elementary schools so i go to all five of the elementary schools including darcy and um we've done we've always done very well with reading um and especially ever since full day kindergarten we've worked really hard and you know routinely we have about 70 i'm sorry about 90 90 or higher of our students at grade level or beyond in reading by the time the year ends um but we're always trying to be better we're always trying to get better and so our little group during the summer who met two of the teachers who are with me today uh just gene petro and christina borger from from here at chapman and join me on the committee to look at our curriculum and decide uh how what could we do better about reading kim desert who's the principal at darcy sat in with us on numerous occasions we also had the help of michelle torres who's an ot specialist at darcy so we had a lot of eyes on this project that we worked on and what we were seeking to do was to um improve that very early literacy piece we were very good at getting kids to read like look at words and read write in the code and read and we're thinking well what else could what is there something we could do better and and we knew that we probably could do a little bit better on helping kids make the connection between reading and writing because they're reading over here at this point of the day and then we're here in the afternoon writing over there but when you're little you don't really see how those two things connect right so they're really two sides at the same point and what we wanted to do is to bring in uh that whole piece of literacy so that kids could experience it in a holistic way and so that the reading and the writing both was benefit we wanted to develop children's moral language we wanted to make them aware of the sounds in words this is the science of reading this is what we know from the national reading panel of 2000 this is what works so the phonemic awareness phonics alphabetic principle the fluency with whatever skill level you're at and then eventually in vocabulary so what you have under your table is um a menu card the other thing that we were seeking to do was to create something that wasn't going to be ponderous for teachers to have to carry out that it could be carried out quickly very efficiently and very effectively so we're looking at is something that a teacher could have and look at and work very instantly off of um so the first column that you'd be looking at would be the standards of kindergarten and there are standards for phonological awareness and phonemic awareness which is sound awareness it could be rhyming it could be words and sentences but it's mostly the sounds of individual words right phonemes and then the second section as you go down those are the standards for alphabetic principle knowing the names and the sounds of the alphabet and then using clinics to read and the last section on the back page is motor work so we have to produce letters right we know the sounds and then we need to connect the symbols that make those sounds so that's what the first column is the second is a series of activities that we would have our students do on a regular basis that would hit particular standards or particular skills that are aligned with the standards on the left and the other three columns are what part of you as a human being is doing this okay so in the green is the auditory piece i'm listening for sounds can i discriminate individual sounds can i tell the difference between one sound and another and you're going to do a little activity in a minute and we'll see if you can do what kindergartner can do we'll find out well sometimes the things we are supposed to do they've never been asked before and so you'll see what it is we're seeking to go more deeply with this instruction and make connections for kids so that so that reading and writing are more not only more connected but more effective then you've got your auditory piece you know some kids are auditory learners that could be your strength that could also be an area of weakness for you so how do we how do some of these standards connect with your auditory systems and then the last would be your kinesthetic so if you're visually maybe you're a better auditor or vice versa or maybe learning through your whole body in a holistic way it's going to be best for you or one part of that is going to serve everyone so then when folks are out and students are out there working everyone's getting something everyone's getting support all the time that helps them and so the idea would be that we take a piece from each of these a piece from the phonemic one or two pieces which you're going to see now demonstrated by our teachers one or two pieces and today you're going to see two pieces from phonemic from chronological or phonemic awareness that just targets sound like it says here you can do it in the dark you're not looking at words not looking at the alphabet this is getting your sound awareness uh sharpened right your auditory discrimination and then a little piece from pre-re you're going to see a pre-reading skill that is mapped on to letter sound fluency and then you're going to be participating in a dictation piece as if you're a classroom of kindergartners so you're going to see what it is to be asked to produce a sound instead of being asked to produce a letter so it's the flip side of what we teach anyway and so we think it's more connected and so when you go through this loop of things through all of your modalities really you can own it and you can use it because the standard is to use what you know and not just to receive it right and that's what our goal was to be more effective and again that's why we had the ot person in there because we wanted to be sure that we were following best practices even in an area that i'm not an expert in the expert in reading i'm not the expert in ot then we had afterwards folks from um uh you know speech therapists and other you know expert kindergarten teachers a lot of eyes were on this and really helped us to kind of really uh tighten it up and make it good what are the key points about this approach it is multi-sensory which like as i explained essentially it packs the whole child it's a universal design so it helps all students if you're an english learner there's support here for you it's just all baked in the bread right if you have an iep if you have a speech goal whatever it's helping everyone including our gen ed students you want to make everyone a little sharper maybe understand things better it keeps asking students to participate so it's fast it keeps waking up the brain and it keeps you ready to learn um i already said audio visual audio and visual anaesthetic the fact that the same little activities a small set of activities keep on repeating the children learn them and that frees up cognitive space when they're working so they can pay attention to the content so the content flows through the activities all year in fact these activities the same ones are could be used first second and third grade because when i say to you guess my word what's the first sound and locate you can still say oh it's cold and um last one it's a repetitive but not boring the kids are really enjoying is very active and for our students for you know for all of our students it's a long day to sit in kindergarten and listen to the teacher talk all day so when they're active they're better learners i'm going to introduce justine petrov kindergarten teacher at norton and christina borger who is kindergarten teacher here [Applause] hi everybody so this is an example of a visual that we may give to our class to give them an idea of what we are going to be doing today during the bridge module so we want them to understand that we're going to be listening first then we're going to be looking then we're going to be doing um and this is a visual that we can use throughout the whole year because we're adjusting the standards um as we go through the year to focus on whatever we're doing in our reading conferences in our readers workshop in our writing curriculum and um these activities can flow through that like pat was talking about we can continue to up our game with the same activities um hitting different objectives and standards so the first game we're gonna play is we're gonna play guess my words remember friends we're listening for the sounds you're gonna listen for the three sounds and then when i snap you're going to say the word remember to wait for the snap give everybody time to think so the first word listen nice loud and proud voices all right next word nice job sap sat we changed the ending sounds nice job [Music] nice last one nice job today with guess my word [Music] all right boys and girls get ready we are going to do change a word i want you to listen to my word and then you'll echo it the first word is matt echo matt matt change the um to er ready go right excellent echo rat rat change the er to go excellent echo hat change duke go all right this one might be tricky echocat change ah to i go here [Music] remember the sound we're changing a sound not a letter echocat check change ah to i typed excellent nice job with change of word all right it's fluency time just remember your eyes are up on the board we're getting our brains ready we're gonna be looking and saying all right friends remember we're working i'm starting on this side and moving all the way across just like when we write our name we've got to start on the side move across your color experts so we're going to start that tracking with our eyes using our color words get ready to say the color words all set you bet good and you know what i forgot to say something so important and you remember if you make a mistake keep going it doesn't have to be perfect it's okay if you make a mistake keep going we're getting ready for our letter sound fluency and we want to keep reading got time to fix those mistakes later oh my goodness there's another line when i get to the end of this line what am i going to do mr white what am i going to do when i get to the end of this line [Music] just like when i write just like when i read i gotta go back to the beginning all right two lines here we go all set red purple yellow purple orange green green orange red red purple [Music] nice job you kept going you were loud and proud you are color experts all right it's time for sounds let's get ready remember we're going to start at the beginning of the line and we're going to go all the way across this time we're going to say our sounds it's okay if you make a mistake keep going i'm sad you bad wow that was so good all right friends here we go two lines what's that nice job my friends all done with fluency let's get ready all right boys and girls for the folks in the front row you have a whiteboard marker and eraser underneath your seat if you'd like to play along um you can pretend to have a whiteboard marker eraser for this okay all right you're going to listen to my sound and then write the letter that makes that sound on your whiteboard thumbs up when you're ready here's your first sound when you have it ready hold it up nice job get rid of your second sound hold it up great job next one ah interesting boys and girls i'm wondering it's not a think of another vowel that says ah like opera or octopus there you go very good all right here's your next one great and last one and erasers away and you're all set right just to wrap up the kindergarten piece with just a few thoughts one is picture doing that letter sound auditory visual kinesthetic connection on a daily basis for just that amount of time that's a seven minutes right just that amount of time on a daily basis building the sound skills over the course of a year you're really going to be able to do exactly what these attend intended which is a be able to read and bridge that skill to writing so many um this is kind of a one-off from some of those deep learning tasks that you'll see as a feature in some of our clicking writing institutes the authentic tasks here are being here so that's that's kind of the grounding for for uh this work and you heard pat mentioned that um this is set up for now but it's also set up to be the skills of the embed and routines that we've met with students over a period of time just to make sure that they've got this really strong foundation for both reading and writing all right now we're ready to move on to first grade um then i'm going to introduce caitlyn hi and christine anachrio they are first grade teachers at doolittle who are in the process of teaching [Applause] all right good evening everyone we are so proud and excited to be here to talk to you about what has been going on in our classrooms during writing time this is a poster that was created by one of our teammates kelly lauren to kick off the unit so what it says is first grade authors wanted so we told our first grade kids that the new kindergarten classes in doolittle really are in need of some non-fiction books and the teachers came to us asking for experts on some topics where we could create our very own nonfiction book to share with the kindergarteners and you could see them absolutely light up with excitement they were so excited to become real authors and to really experience an authentic task that would really be tied throughout the rest of the year in writing to really authenticate what writing means to them and how they can use what they know in an awesome way to create something amazing so what we first did was we brainstormed different topics that the kids are experts on so we talked about what is an expert what does it mean to be an expert we talked about how an expert is someone who knows a lot of information about something so right now i'm going to show you an example of what we did with our kids i want you to turn and talk to the person next to you and talk about some things you are really good at some things you know a lot about share that with your friend go ahead [Laughter] [Music] lot of is in the room and as you can imagine in first grade we also had a lot of experts on some really cool things we had them share out and then we gave them a recording sheet where they were to record certain topics they're an expert on in first grade believe it or not we have experts on leaves we have experts on marvel and ferraris karate video games there was a wide range of topics that the kids came up with and they were so excited to get started so the kids were trying to master writing an informative text in which they name a topic supply some facts about the topic and provide some sense of closure that's how we connected this unit to the common core state standard and these rubrics are underneath your choice yes if you want to look at a hard copy so we want the students to be able to earn a three in order for mastery in first grade but what's really awesome is they do have the opportunity to extend their learning some of those students that are a little stronger in the subject of writing can extend what they know and earn a for so what was really cool about the creation of this unit was that not only we had the teacher rubric that was switched around and made a little more specific for us but we also had a student rubric that was created so what we did was we shared this with the kids so they knew exactly what was expected of them and they could anticipate what they were going to be doing and what's awesome about it is over here they have not yet starting to and yes so we talked about how authors start off at a starting point and then they need to keep adding things and sometimes we don't add those things right away but this is going to be the process that's going to lead us to create a sex successful chapter book um if you want to go back one slide what um we did as katelyn said we gave this them to start off with we went through every piece that they needed to hit they needed to make sure that they were specific about their topic that their writing was organized we went through all the sections that they had facts not opinions in their piece that their sentences sound the way that they talk and all the conventions as well uppercase letters lowercase punctuation and this rubric was extremely helpful because it was in kid-friendly language so one of the lessons in the unit is peer editing which in the past has been a little challenge because we didn't have this rubric in this kid friendly language and this time when i did it it was so nice to see i paired them up they were able to share their pieces and listen to their friends and somebody was like that's a that's a lowercase b not a capital b you need to make that a capital if this size just doesn't have a period you need to add one so they were being teachers themselves and helping their peers fix their piece so that was really nice to see as teachers that they were taking on that role themselves and editing their piece as they went along like real writers do it was so cute my kids were like this is hard work i'm like yeah to be an author it's hard where christina gave her kids the example that harry potter what was it in one day i know they think that that's magic and that's what happens they put in a lot of work so i'm going to go through each section that their piece had and caitlin is going to pass out some student samples we also have one on the board to share with you each piece needed an introduction they needed a table of contents they needed some topics a closing sentence and they were really excited about the about the author page so this is an example of one of my students he told me he was an expert about karate which is based off of actually taking karate he said his sister wrote a book about it was sharing facts with him so he felt like he was an expert and could write the book about it he was very excited he said miss macro i get to write the dots like they do in the real books and i said absolutely so he was able to show the introductions on page one his different sub topics in the matching pages as well the conclusion and the all about the page so his introduction sentence was do you want to learn more about karate i can teach you the sub topics we took a lot of time focusing on these subtopics there was a lot of editing during this process trying to get them to understand that the heading goes on the top we have our sentences underneath we also talked about how in informative text they have real pictures and not just fake pictures so they added labels to their work this is his trophy this is the belt that they wear in karate he added the dojo china japan him breaking the board and as caitlyn said especially these subtopic days when they were really working hard with them the room was quiet and during writing time in the past we've noticed hands are up i don't know how to spell this i don't know what to do for this but because it was something that they actually knew a lot about and they felt confident in that their writing time was really really great in the classroom when they were focused and really giving it their best work in their conclusion i hope you liked learning about that and all about me page was something that they were excited to do too because they know in the books that they read the authors tell a little bit about themselves he said his favorite color was red he thinks the word that describes him is cool he doesn't like shrimp um different things that they got to do so we noticed that this piece was just a great way to connect everything in writing to make it really authentic and real to them and we saw a huge change in this implementation of this unit compared to past years it was it was really great and um we just wrapped up this first book they actually get to make a second book about what they're experts on and that one is going to be a little more independent we're still going to guide them along but since they did this first one it's really going to be them showing us what they know because they did a wonderful job with it the first time and we're going to share it with the kindergarten classes at doolittle so he made a little um preview for them to get them excited hi my name is [Music] because he says at the end hi my name is robert and i wrote this informative book about karate because i'm an expert on karate and i hope you're excited to read it um because i was excited to write it and i'm going to share it about where um where projects started what you wear and what it is hi so they really did an awesome job and as kevin said before what um jess and christina and pat talked about we do those similar tasks during our foundations time too and we've noticed that them writing on the whiteboards with the digraphs the short vowels they're able to sound out these words a lot better so as we said it goes to the grades that's a perfect example of how in first grade that's crossing over into the reading and the writing as well later on in first grade we do a whole unit on non-fiction text features and a lot of the time the kids struggle with it because it's just looking at a book and they're not actually doing the task we're really interested to see how much they pick up from this writing unit in correlation to the reading unit because we really think that because they actually did it they created the table of contents they did their labels included all of those parts that they're really going to do well [Applause] okay thank you thank you so we are really excited about this new unit we're really seeing now the impact that it had on our students and we realized that we really focused on making sure that our students had a lot of opportunities to practice writing really giving them a lot of practice during the writing block so we realized the more that writers write the more that the students write the better writers that they become so we're very hopeful and interested to use all of these practices that we've changed in some of our upcoming units so we want to open it up to see if you have any questions or comments for anyone on the on the team i don't have a question but i think this is really great and fascinating and you know to think about like five and six year olds well you know being able to sit down and really sort of walk through that whole process of becoming a life that's fantastic so um and kindergarten activities you know i can see where they would really be engaged and like alert the whole time it was a lot i was having fun [Music] but anyway that's a terrific job thank you thank you thank you for all the work you guys did during the summer um have you had to uh or i don't know if you have a chance to implement this uh in the second and third grade perhaps the kids who maybe missed some of this in kindergarten or first grade or second grade when we shut down in 2020 they may have missed some of this development if you have to use that just these techniques for older kids may have missed out or i can answer that question um so one of the first things that we did of course we monitored very closely last last year how students were doing and and i think that you heard probably on other board meetings the outcomes were very good um better than we had hoped we didn't do we were on it but you know you don't know what's really going to happen when when things are interrupted that way but um we've been proactive in taking a look at all of our primary students in first second and third grade we have screened them at the right way in the beginning of the when they came back in september to take a look at the the whole phonetic piece to see any gaps at all if there's anything that people didn't really really know um and then uh so that we could make a plan and so the teachers could right away address it for example in third grade they don't usually work on the six syllable types until later in like about now november but we moved that unit to right away in september so that teachers would immediately if they're gonna if somebody doesn't know the short vowels they would teach them in the closed syllable type so that right away you know and that's kind of a layering thing where you're gonna pick up speed because you're addressing what someone doesn't know and yet it's in the curriculum to work on two civil works um things like there were strategies where we made sure that we were catching folks up there a couple of individuals who weren't here are available for learning somewhere out of the country for example i mean yes there's a few there's a few when we're working with those students but in general we look to see is there anyone who doesn't have the skills that they should have coming in so our first great teachers as they said they we we shared uh the the strategies that we're working on in kindergarten with grades one two and three so they have something similar to this it's not a curriculum piece it was more informational but they know what the activities would be and um what how it aligns to their standards so second and third grade don't have phonological standards but that listening piece and what you did where you manipulated that that sound in the center and you really listened to it was a long eye sound and not a short eye sound um that's what really gets people stuck when they're spelling and things like that is like can you isolate where that place is and what's wrong about it and what audit you know to what from sound and not just from looking all the time right so um so and i've been going into classrooms and modeling these strategies as have the rams so that teachers uh in those grades are exposed to it and they're using it and the other day i was at highland and a third grade teacher said you know my kids are over there writing during writing cream they're going like this with their hand they're they're tapping the sounds because we're now giving everyone a strategy that they can use um when they're not with us right when they're sitting out by all by themselves you might see it at home someone might be tapping sounds or doing any one of these little quick little activities and so yeah we aren't trying it to uh to degree in all of those primary grades to just be sure we never let nothing uncovered right right so i noticed i was not up to grade level on the vowel sound so i'm just curious you were using the short vowel sounds versus the one and then on a broader uh perspective it's only november and you're dealing with kindergartners do they already know the difference between have you gotten so at what stage were we in the process we purposely put in something that would challenge adults because kindergartners are really just working on individual letter sounds of the alphabet and they're the most common sound so they would be short sounds or vowels and hard sounds are c and g right they don't do the job for you not yet because the assessment that they're given the letter sound that you saw that's the standard for that standardized assessment and so you know you teach yourself how they can get through it right but it's very important that we don't only always practice with one kind of phonics feature because you're never going to find a book that has only one feature in it and so it's important for students to be flexible so most of your sounds are going to be short a and throw that extra thing in there just for the kids who actually do know those things and can't do them but also just to keep you on your toes just like when you teach three letter words not all words have three sounds some have four so you'll put in a two sound board or a four sound word here and there just to keep everybody flexible so did that answer your question yeah sure of course good the other thing is that we um we were using the long vowels only during the phonemic awareness piece where they're listening not looking and when that relates back to writing and they're sitting trying to sound out a word they're not thinking about is this a long vowel or short vowel they're just trying to get their idea down and so if they're trying to sound out cake they need to be able to take a it's not so much about how they're representing the sound or the a sound and at you know it's not the convention of adding this silent e it's getting the a and k down so they show all three sounds and somebody can read it and that's something that they're already starting to do quicker because they're hearing how to take those sounds apart and then being able to recode those sounds and and encode those sounds onto paper there is a kindergarten standard though instead of answering your question where they need to be able to discriminate is it a long sound is it a short sound they don't have to read it they have to be if i say a they say oh that's the long sound oh that's the short sound so they should be able to discriminate auditorily but they have all year to do it so it's maybe something you wouldn't do this early in the year but again some folks will be out there that do know that or are ready to learn it and so we'll throw it out there we'll see who knows it the only way to know that you don't know is to find out [Music] are there any i love i was reading all about coyotes i love the artwork too but i'm also amazed was that just how far has come along uh in terms of in faith and katherine talked about these advanced techniques of movement fairly great levels because my daughters went through uh i want to do school i remember i remember getting to book you know to book structure layout table conference a little bit later it's just great to see this happening very level are there any additional resources that you as educators can use to help to help make this a little more easier or impactful for you what is technology whether it's more right i only have because our budget season's coming up in a couple months and i'm sure you'll all be sending your your and your pledges but either is there anything you see out there being under school systems that can help with uh phonics or other things technology wise or are you fairly comfortable with the tools you have right now i will answer that we have been looking at kevin hanlon has helped me research some of the um materials that are out there for finance programs they're very pricey they're very large and if you implement it as it's written that you would take you forever just forever there's every lesson you could think of you have to the teacher has to have the knowledge to know okay they know that i'm going to move forward now they cover everything because you might have to teach it all but if you don't have to teach it you have to go by and go to the next place you have to follow the children so so yeah so yeah we work from the science of reading and you know what we're looking for is you know i was reviewing the other day the list of coffins and materials they all do the same thing you know i always just like phoenix and pop star they all do the same thing but because they're all based on the science but um maybe maybe eventually i saw something the special ed teacher was using the other day and it was like our card and it just kind of went through a lesson so that's it's a lot faster um if you know what you're doing you don't need to have the look explain it to you in every chapter that sort of thing but we did purchase some single ten sets of different resources and pack worked with some others to strip those down and say what do we really need to be able to do and have from this um and rebuilt kind of what you saw from the keyboard cycle and something similar happened in writing you did go out and nab a whole series of different writing resources that kind of led to some of the conclusions on okay we can bundle these two units together let's give them practice of running through the society practically this first time you'll be more authentically doing it the second time really just a small shift of writing and putting this in book format and making an authentic task to say yeah you're writing a book for kindergartners right so just to gain that excitement on it and another part of this was just some shifts in understanding that information isn't the same as research on that so that you know just some of those resources pointed us to some of the decisions that were made ahead of converters so instead of buying sets culture every class we bought some singleton of a variety of resources stripped them down and said what are we ready to get out of the support well again you're able to do what you do best and customize the the material in the classrooms and i just love the tropical hands-on actually writing the book versus my computer i applaud for wonderful work things awesome there are some materials that we probably will end up being made by some phonics but readers you know specialized types of readers we may buy some materials not really we have a lot of magnetic letters but things manipulatives that kindergarteners can use so they can learn because for example if you're going to learn something in the beginning you just look at pictures and you say oh that's it that's the sun what is the sun what's the first sound and sun if you don't have anything to look at you know you can't just talk about thin air so you know there are some materials that we might end up needing that are going to help if we if our goal is that all of the kindergarten teachers have the same resources and that there's a consistent approach and the resources our resources are consistent that helps a lot with helping us all have a consistent practice and all being effective so like kevin i won't say no we don't need any resources but i would say that we would be targeting certain ones i think the number one resource that that i that i don't want to say we need is time and i think that was what was the most amazing thing about the curriculum institute is the time that we were afforded to do this work that is going to have a lasting impact and so more of that so my question is what happens next summer do you take what you've done and go further or do you go to the next grades in the next phrase so kevin and i sit with pat and alicia and we sort of have a math outline of the things that need most attention to the least attention so i'm kind of intrigued by the acceleration and i'm just wondering how this compares what you've got now it compares to what you were doing two years ago you know as i understand acceleration morally you can correct me it's it's getting down to the the core skills that these kids have got to have what isn't there anymore that that was i want to call it stranius but is how how is this different from what say a fourth grader learned when he was underground i think that um a big piece of it is his economy of time is having those that high difficulty small dose um and and having explored that really in depth and seeing um even if you look at our math curriculum and that's something that we talked a bit about during the institute was if you look at the eureka math curriculum that we took on a number of years ago when those fourth graders were probably in winter um we we started this new model of having a fluency piece and having an application problem and then going into the concept development and it was quick quick and then deep and that's kind of what like almost a component of the bridge is that quick quick quick so that during reading and writing we can go deeper um so that it's we're not spending a whole mini lesson just talking about letter sound fluency or a whole mini lesson just talking about changing initial sound we're we're dipping into it every single day so it becomes very routine it becomes very um practical and they become really confident in it you know something like the color fluency was something that we did for the first time this year and i saw such a huge impact not just on the performance on their first letter sound fluency which is the first time it's october they've been in kindergarten a month and they're doing you know rows of sounds and some of them don't even know how to write their name but they went into it with confidence because they had practiced the routine of it with colors they know their colors even even my student who is an english learner who is very quiet during the day was shouting his colors he was so excited to show his fluency and practice that routine and he was able to tell us some sounds that he knew on that letter sound whereas in the past many of our students in the beginning are gearing headlights um and it was just a quick dip i mean that was i would have done even less getting ready for the first time so in kindergarten that's been a big change it's just that frequency one of the things i'd like to add about acceleration is acceleration to me that's been going faster it's about being more efficient and effective so kindergarten teachers they won't tell you what all they ever have done is accelerate all the time because what happens is i come in i see who knows the letters which letters you don't know if they take tons and tons of data and say you know these five letters you know seven letters you know these twelve letters not the same kind that who knows everyone knows different ones right and so we're constantly keeping those records to say the way to make make people move forward and to accelerate learning from people is to make sure that you're learning what you need to learn but you're not spending time with something you already know how to do um it's it's very detailed it's you know doing a lot one-on-one and kindergarten teachers and first-grade teachers that's all they would do kindergarten and first-grade teachers take more data then add everybody else in this district together because there's so many small pieces to measure right there's a lot of strong pieces to mention and so you you can only go so fast as what you know that is the next place for that person today so does that help with acceleration we were we were covering the same standards when your fourth grader was in kindergarten but we are trying to be more efficient with time and get things like i also think going off of jess the kids having the foundation that they have doing what they're doing in kindergarten and then coming in with that confidence that they know how to phonetically spell out their letters and they can do it in a chapter book we've never done chapter books before this is our first time doing it and their excitement alone was enough to get them to sit down and like christina had said normally we have a whole bunch of hands and sometimes even tears because they don't want to put the pencil to the paper but this unit they were so excited to get to their seats they were so excited to get started so i think it just like um she said it just bridges it all and it just all comes really nicely together even the first unit we did in september compared to this one we're like okay it's new there's a lot more writing or we're a little nervous and it was ten times better than what we did we were shocked like wow they can actually do this and the higher students got an opportunity to write more facts they could keep going the lower students that needed help it gave us time to sit with them and really work with them it was easier to fit it to each individual student if you can write more facts keep going if you need some help we'll come fool you so it was great in that sense how much time was it for this i'm sorry what how much time did that happen that was a couple weeks yeah two weeks about pushed him along because we wanted these ready for tonight but they did it they did which was right we might have done a lot of writing in one day but maybe even a little bit more two slides that had the rubric so you heard the standard right here's the standard then you heard the focus on this is what really needs to happen for students oh and we're showing our students what that is so that when they're conferencing they are spot-on with look at practicing so a lot of it has to come with here's the standard here's the most important things that have to happen from that and putting that in front of students so they have some ownership of that when we were talking about this ahead of time the commentary on students we really understood exactly where they were going where they were going to be so it's things like that that help promote kind of what we're talking about acceleration-wise things like that are afraid of the heart and they get to write another one this is just their first one that's right a whole nother one so we're so excited to see what happened it's so cool to see them so little and like the really high kids are so responsible now that they have this rubric like i say then you know how to read your writing you sit down you look at that rubric you tell me what you're missing and they go and do it and it's so cool to see them responsible for their work and held accountable and be able to self-reflect on their own progress i'm curious about say like kindergarten you were talking about data collection i mean how do you literally do that you know here's 26 letters long and short sounds marking everyone by hand do you have an ipad and then you go back and look at it i'm not comfortable with doing anything like that on an ipad it's just a pencil paper and use we have but you know in the beginning you take a lot of data and the more letters you know i don't have to check on so many so we have a good reason to rub it out and we're very fortunate to have kindergarten instructional oh yeah absolutely who really are all lifeline when it comes to that data collection and intervention okay on the spot support um you know i've i've talked to gary in other districts where that was not afforded to us and it's it's a massive absolutely not true and in first grade too it's not it's not the same degree of support we do have a first grade ia and she's awesome and she does similar things interventions and it's not reading it's not a whole day yeah it's not very great it's not for every classroom the great the grade 1i circulates among the classrooms so they don't have as much time for support as the kingdom of our niece who are there throughout kindergarten instructional systems which are separate okay and they're not they're for juice boxes and pine trees they're many of them actually have some educational background some of them had last you know certification they're not working under a certification right now but in any case they're very well trained and they're very responsible and they carry out these not just the assessments but also when the kids need extra reading and so forth they know what to do you know how to do it stay consistent so is that is that only a kind of does that go through the 12th senior year like is there a so for regular a general education primarily in kindergarten and also we have a shared ia from first grade to help okay thank you if you put the effort into primary you won't have to do so much remediation we also have one um our our ia the year this year patty amato i believe is um she works with christine castellano in the leading program at dodd middle school so another non-special education support so it's like one person that died she's the only one are there any questions or comments from our steamed audience as soon as they're in them uh that's i first of all on behalf of the board thank you so much for taking the time uh not just for being here tonight and walking us through and i love the hands-on exercises but you know also having your kids prepare these books for us please send them our our thanks and we have a very impressed facebook so that's awesome in a couple weeks uh you guys also put a lot of hours in today so thank you for staying late tonight and uh this is huge for us this year mike is recording this and you know hopefully he gives his resources parents uh if we're aspire to come to church you want to see what he's all about we can greet up on i think it's a great program so thank you so much thanks for everyone joining us this evening [Applause] thank you so much
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
[Music] so [Music] wow [Music] no no no no [Music] hello [Music] so [Music] no [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] talking about the future of artificial intelligence now we will bring all those leading minds together to share out how the future of artificial intelligence will impact k-12 k-16 and all formal education please welcome back to the stage michael matsuda neil sahoda adrian posner joseph zaki and joining us for the first time today dr michael and thomas dr thomas is a space expert specializing in program management and business operations for complex space systems she is on a mission to make rocket science affordable in efforts to create equitable access to space for new and existing satellite providers moderating today's panel is mr matt horton mr horton is the director at the milken institute's center for regional economics and california center mr horton's programmatic work at the institute is focused on identifying a variety of financial tools public policies and collaborative models that leaders can deploy to increase investments in education community development housing employment and other areas supporting human capital and place-based economic development please put your hands together for this world-class panel on artificial intelligence all right thanks um is is adam still in the room adam raise your hand from the panel i have an idea for you how many parents in the room so while adam was talking about the shushing model all i could think about is how i could easily apply that same to get my kids to take another bite so adam if you need another business idea an app to get your kids to take another bite is i think a parent tech gym so um here while i pull up my notes um with the slides on the slides there we go so i'm matt horton i'm a director at the milken institute's center for regional economics and california center and for those that aren't familiar with the milking institute we're a non-profit um nonpartisan uh think tank um which is which is a lot of fun and you know our work and and my work as the announcement said really focuses on on public policy um in in really three key areas uh the talent pipeline um housing infrastructure and kind of workforce in general as kind of a means to to look at economic development and you know we do a number of of of research that i think kind of informs this conversation that you can take a look at on our website one is an annual report that we put out on best performing cities um and another is a biannual report that we do on state tech and science which measures investments in higher education and things like that uh but really more um directly i think related to the concepts and themes that are throughout this conversation today and i think one of the reasons why michael asked me to be here today is right before the pandemic we put out a report around preparing california for the future of work which really took a look at identifying the prospect for enhancing access to skills and broader economic attainment as the future of work begins to unfold and and that premise around the future of work you know the scary aspects of automation that's going to come and take away all of our jobs was was really kind of demystified for us in terms of like jobs that can be automated will be and what our challenges associated with that dynamic unfolding is really not just upskilling but providing enhanced access throughout the talent pipeline in in terms of uncovering that equity dynamic that we've heard about here later on in the pandemic we released another report that was kind of inspired by that which was about recalibrating the workforce dynamic which again and you'll see at the end of these few slides here before we get to dr thomas uh really highlight a lot of the themes here um that that everybody's working around and and should be applauded around as a really living breathing best practice around the future of work so i i commend your efforts um so just to provide a few data points as we get into this conversation around equity and and the prospects for um public policy and investments in the talent pipeline that that you're all working around you know when we talk about access and and the jobs and labor market especially in california we see that you know higher attainment leads to higher higher wages and higher living standards by no surprise and those higher wages and higher living standards are really concentrated around stem and steam careers and stem and steam kind of education investments and curriculum that that we're all talking about here today so especially around computer science and agriculture architecture engineering excuse me um so what does that mean when we talk about the the best practices that you that that around ai and and and digital skills and digital skills access and enhancing those road maps and and frameworks around employer engagement around certification and certificate models is really the question about scale and and again it's no surprise to what everybody's working on here in this room which is which is which is the prospect for our our further dialogue on the panel and just to get a better sense of how this breaks down we see the variance between other kind of other kind of sectors and education levels based on industry and sectors and again not that this is uh revelatory to people in this room but the really three key aspects that we central on in term that we center on in terms of the future of work is you know how do we increase workforce participation how do we accelerate the adjustments in the workforce development programs to keep pace with these developing skills which you're all seeing here today and then how do we invest moving forward in the regional talent pipelines that you know kind of imbue those pipelines with the ability to adapt and engage and partner with industry sector leaders so you know with that we're going to turn it over to dr thomas who i know has some really insightful remarks here about the diversity equity inclusion aspects and thank you [Applause] [Music] well hi everybody i am so excited to be here and seeing friendly faces uh that i recognize and i really appreciate the warm welcome and i'm just so honored to be sitting on the stage with these incredible human beings so my name is mike lynn and i'm an executive leader at virgin orbit located in long beach california so i just wanted to touch just very briefly just a couple of minutes um you know about ai from my perspective and how i do believe it's truly intertwined in everything that we do across many industries including education but just to look at the photos um on this particular slide here on the left that's an actual footage from my company's most recent launch so the airplane at the top is called cosmic girl and that is our flying launch pad it's a converted 747 and we strap that rocket that you see below there called launcher one underneath the wing of that aircraft and our chief pilot had just released the this particular rocket and it was on its way to space and we successfully deployed um several nasa small payloads that were developed by students and so there's a lot of ai and machine learning that goes into space and on the right there that is an actual photo that was nestled on our launcher one rocket that took a picture of one of the satellites before deployment into space before it reached its orbital destination so it's just a little bit about what i do and so this i call my academic and career constellation and i won't bore you with all of the details but i have a really unique pathway to engineering or particularly stem however even when i was getting my bachelor of arts degree in political science my mba my doctor of education and most recently my master of science degree in space systems engineering ai and machine learning played a huge role in all of that and i worked primarily on the business side of the house within aerospace but i was still responsible to develop homegrown tools things that you wouldn't necessarily think a political scientist or an mba student or graduate would normally do but again ai machine learning is so ingrained into everything that we do and so when i was at johns hopkins university i particularly i had a few areas of study but one area of study that i did very in-depth research on was machine learning which is a subset of um artificial intelligence or ai and with that i learned um how deep it really runs i particularly looked at how social media platforms use various machine learning algorithms to accept or debunk misinformation or information but i quickly realized how that's uniquely intertwined and many things that we do so i wanted to kind of frame an issue that i think we have um you know we are surrounded by so much data and if we haven't already we don't have enough humans on the planet to process that data so what does that mean i would argue that it means that every single person regardless of what discipline you are in will have some role in how to process data and how to automate data and that's where the ai comes into play so i know you've been here all day and i got here not too long ago but i just wanted to kind of frame from my perspective you know what is artificial intelligence and what is machine learning and with ai uh it's really the transfer of human intelligence to machines and so it's really driven by humans and i want that to resonate because i think a lot of people believe that everything's going to be run by robots and that is we have to distinguish between the sci-fi and the science and so you know machine learning is the fundamental part of ai as it pertains to the process of learning from data sets over time so how does the data get better how do we get smarter and so i think this has been talked about but again because ai is driven by humans we have to ask ourselves how biased are we because that's what's going to program what it is that we need to do in order to keep pushing forward and trends of the future i'm not going to go too deep into this but essentially there are billions of dollars that are being invested right now in ai across many industries that is a huge opportunity for anyone especially folks in education to really take hold of this huge opportunity and i also wanted to touch on military applications you know we sometimes we always think of you know for-profit or or different things like high-tech google but the military is also looking really heavily into ai and how they use it to protect our nation and all in there um on that note but i i do think uh this panel for giving me just a few minutes to introduce myself and just to kind of give you my view of the world through ai [Applause] now that that's fantastic and i was talking with adrian at lunch a bit about about how this conversation intersects dr thomas with with especially sectors in in defense and in military that that require domestic workforce like where do you see the prospects for scaling this this type of ai program especially as it relates with industry leaders like yourself sure well i think it starts in the classroom it starts at a very young age it starts with you know teaching kids that i mean i'd have two-year-olds that can navigate my iphone and it's really how do you operationalize that and how do you build that into your curriculum so that kids can understand that this is something that they can do for a living and it doesn't have to look so traditional yeah do you see best practices around this dynamic uh working in other parts of the country um that that you can point to or and that question i think to the rest to other folks um i'm happy to answer unless if somebody wants to jump in here i don't want to dominate the time no they've all spoke okay um yes so you know one thing about technology was really cool it creates a borderless society so i do think that this is something to where it does open up the world of possibilities um to do more international business uh international business which really helps all of us but also too it opens up the doors through an educational perspective because now we have more opportunities to learn how to learn and and how to educate yeah joseph when we had the the call a little bit earlier this week just to talk about some of the themes here um you kind of came at this from a different angle around um maybe how we engineer different types of incentives to bring in industry leaders like yourself do you want you want to talk a little bit about that insight yeah absolutely um so we're talking about creating an ai workforce and you know for us at loco we also uh hire vets you know i think that there's a a huge pool of talent especially in the military of people coming out and that have incredibly valuable skills soft skills and technical skills that can be directly applied here too so not to forget about those guys because um as you know we're looking to shore up our defense strategy as a nation you have to really think about where you're you know who's the front line here who's who's really uh seeing the full picture or has the missing pieces uh to fill in the gaps so i think it starts in your local community but i also think that there's a huge pool of talent you know in our veteran community um and it definitely comes it comes down to opportunities and really um you know i think when it when we look at our internship program working with students who are coming from um you know maybe lower income or are not as connected um you know you know lives and and and coming in first generation second generation maybe they're not as connected as the ivy league parents and kids and so they need that network too so you have to start thinking strategically how to build these pathways and a lot of dimensions well yeah and even even maybe some some more carrot and stick kind of dynamics that that scale the type of of coding programs and and career pathways programs that you've been able to to work here in uh locally too that that that came up in specific didn't it the id the idea of an incentive program around coding and i just i thought it was a great idea so thanks but um adrian the uh the announcement earlier today around the the google certification kind of collaborative um but i mean that was i was hoping you could talk us through a little bit more of that in terms of how that came about and and just the opportunities for for the further integration with the with the k-12 and beyond kind of curriculum sure um how it came about i guess is very complicated and i won't bore you with all of the details but i think that um at google i've been i've been there almost seven years and the entire time that i've been there i've been working on educational programs of different kinds um and and trying a bunch of different things that some worked some didn't and i think the career certificates are sort of like the culmination of a bunch of different ideas from different teams and the basis of the idea really is give young people hands-on experience which sounds like kind of a duh but in in a lot of ways it's something that industry hasn't you know having that sort of industry informed perspective at a younger age and having especially for those going into more technical roles hands-on experience doing the work for which they're trying to be hired later is the number one resume builder and the number one set of skills that recruiters are looking for in the high tech industry so when our recruiters go and look at resumes you know you see two students with you know two different resumes one went to csu fullerton one went to san diego state let's say and they both got 4.0 and they both have a cs degree and they're both applying how do you differentiate these those two students are functionally the same they've both taken the same sort of set of classes etc and the number one thing that recruiters are looking at are have they done um project-based learning have they built things before are they contributing to the open source community and right now i'm only talking about technical roles not non-technical roles are sort of similar thing but really the google career certificates idea comes from knowing that in order to give students greater opportunities we have to give them access to the tools and the technologies early on so that they can actually use these things so that they can supplement their own sort of experience in education which is not to say that this is a way around formal education because it's not it's designed to be embedded like no one's trying to make a teacher obsolete here like you all know teachers are absolutely integral to this program the functioning of this program and the reason for that is because it's not just the technical skills it's the soft skills too it's the it's the project management it's the creative problem solving it's the persistence i was talking about earlier so in a lot of ways and there's this very long-winded answer at this point but in a lot of ways the google career certificates is an attempt to take project-based learning put it embedded inside of a formal education model and then you know in order to give students access to things that they you know industry informed ways of problem solving and industry informed ways of working so that they have that sort of practical experience that gives them a leg up so that by the time they do get to the point where they're ready to apply to a job or take those set of life skills somewhere else in a completely different direction they have that hands-on experience that otherwise is really very hard to get unless you're somehow very well connected you know for those of us out there who who's who don't have a strong network of you know ivy league folks around them or who don't have access to a computer at home or for those of us who don't even know what a software engineer does right having that having those people in front of you is so important because you know we can't be what we can't see that's the expression i think it's absolutely true so the career certificate is attempting to do all of that which is quite a tall order um michael and then maybe neil too um you know maybe talk to us a bit about the the urgency that you saw and met in terms of meeting the and to fill the opportunity gap with kind of the skills enhancement and skill based learning employer partnerships like how did that system of investments and partnerships you know come about it's not easy but i think uh the key takeaway hopefully for our audience which uh you know what not only it's internal we're speaking to a lot of our own people our parents our teachers but external as well i know there are other people from outside watching this because people now because of the google partnership um are asking auhsd like you know how did you guys do that and i think that the number one piece is it needs to and this answers the urgency if we're truly serious about the urgency we need to make this a priority and integrate it during the school day and um and we can't we being that k-12 system cannot do that alone without the partnerships that you see up here without the community college and to build those systems internally based on relationships based on trust and and it does take courage for because i think one of the problems and challenges not only in the state of california but across this country we have spent 20 years with with the wrong drivers too much emphasis on teaching to the test on a test score distilling all of the talent that we saw demonstrated with students from kennedy and cyprus who presented into a multiple choice test score uh you you're not going to get a kid that we saw without all the work all the integrated work uh beginning with the teachers having the freedom to allow the adam noms to create a such shooter in seventh and eighth grade rather than teaching to the test so i think that is really foundational in terms of the message uh to scale up and uh that's why we're so proud of the partnerships with the folks that you see up here in the institutions across the district and i think it's it's a lot of this is called infrastructure problems a lot of things you hear superintendent matsuda talking about the other panelists talking about are all very relevant and if you look at from the flip side there are companies and other organizations that want to partner and provide you know after school or supplementary whatever they can do to try and help upskill the students the challenge is many of those you know people don't know how academia works some of the challenges so even like the stuff that we've done together like with the saturday workshop program it's prevention you know he worked really hard to you know cultivate get by with his team across the board and i think without that level of buy-in we wouldn't have seen the success that we actually had so we need the bilateral partnership we need the buy-in from both sides we need the infrastructure which is more than just access to equipment and apis and technology that's important we also need the ability to do the follow-up or the you know the way to let the students be able to move forward because too often i see you come in like during engineering week they do a cool project some of the kids are really excited and then they have no outlet to take it forward right especially underserved communities they may not have access to a computer or a teacher that's free time to engage on some of these things and i think that was actually one of the things again that we did that was so powerful because yeah we do the saturday workshop and then you have a few of the teachers reserve time in the monday class to have a discussion about some of the things that were discussed and some of the things the students thought about over the weekend so i think to be successful ultimately yeah and to attract you know industry leaders you're talking about matt and vice versa it's a bilateral partnership you know not focused on curriculum focused on infrastructure but at the end they everyone has committed the goal of improving outcomes for students yeah um joseph and adrian and dr thomas i think you kind of talked about kind of the untraditional pathway a bit and and how this model is has really helped kind of uh provide enhanced opportunities to folks but you know is it just from the bottoms up that we build these kind of pathways you know through the k-12 system for students without traditional technical backgrounds like how do you bridge some of that gap in terms of you know bottom-up efforts with kind of some top-down supports [Music] anybody well i have a a perspective on this but i'm sure there are many perspectives on this so i will offer one i think what what you're describing is a systemic problem so systemic problems if they're going to be solved require systemic solutions so i think that that is to say bottoms up is great like we definitely need um we definitely need you know investment in k-12 we definitely need investment in education we definitely need um you know infusion of um of money and and up to create these opportunities but we also have to speaking as myself and not the google part right now we also need companies to change we need them to recognize that the way that they for example of source talent in the past doesn't work we need them to change their hiring process we need them to open their minds to the places where there's sort of hidden talent hidden to them not to us and not not to us in this room in this room where that's why we're here right but i think that you know traditionally going back to my example of that recruiter looking at these two resumes those are the folks that need to understand what this the work on these resumes represent and i think we've aired too much on the side of the easy solution you know it's it's easy to go to an ivy league school and pick someone who's smart that's easy but it's it's requires some significant thought some some significant problem solving some significant systemic intervention from the top down as well so i often feel like as educators and i felt this when i was an educator the burden was like all on me like i've got to solve this problem i got to get these kids to college i got to get them through their degree i got to make sure they can write this essay they got to pass the test or whatever and that's true but it would be really nice if there were some folks on the top that were working just as hard as you all are so that's that's the message i evangelize and hopefully some people will listen but i think ultimately it has to be both because this is not a problem that one group of people can solve that up from uh adrian so i i completely agree that um bottoms up approach but then top down can't be ignored and i think for a firm like loco where we're doing pioneering work i mean there's no blueprint to how how to build these things that we're doing um and so our criteria when we hire is very different than a normal kind of traditional fortune 500 or tech company so we're looking for uniqueness and and really hands-on experience um is where it's at and so i think that when we look at our community and how we can give back to foster these pathways it is absolutely um working with you know high schools and and superintendent matsuda and and the visionary um you know pathways that they've created here but also it has to lead to something substantial um so i do appreciate the the google search certificate programs that um are starting to become uh you know into the program as well i think that at the community level community uh college level as well that there's some work that could be done there um they move very quickly and can adapt to these new kind of programs um not to say that the four-year universities are antiquated but working within that system can be very challenging for not only students but also for startups like us where we are looking to recruit faster i can't wait four years for you to get a degree and then be in debt and then be desperate to take a job like we want them fresh we want to identify them young so they can move faster and and you know the education can come if you want to fill in the university that's cool but i think there needs to be different pathways that are created at a much more grassroots level in your community and working you know directly with the organizations and the startups and um the people who want to get started sooner so that's where i think that we we align quite a bit is just breaking down the kind of structure that's been there and finding these unique pathways that that are kind of naturally forming due to the the absolute need that's coming from industry but also for the future for these kids um i 100 agree um i've been also preaching that you know there has to be a partnership between industry and academia and me going through the educational system it was always portrayed to me as it's binary i have to do academia or i have to do industry and that's unfair to today's student i think today's student is so different than yesterday's student or the student before that generation especially at the higher ed level students are not not all students i should say i don't want to be absolute but most students at least that i know are working and we have to be mindful of that and we also need to adapt to that and understand what learning needs are necessary and that's probably more on the higher ed perspective but i'm sure there's there's a lot of that um you know the high school level as well and you know i think um you know while education needs to be mindful of that but also industry is already noted we have to make sure that when we're looking at resumes one thing that i think is really important it's okay if they don't check all of the boxes because they will grow into that role but also in the education realm we also have to be able to train students how to fill out or how to complete their resumes what are some interviewing tips and tricks you know a lot of my saturdays and sundays are spent helping students with these things that they have no idea how to go about this and that's not a ding on this on the educational system it's just we need to be more mindful of that but then also on my side on the industry side we also may need to help them connect dots as well because there's so many skills that are transferable but we also have to be mindful of the inequities um that are included in all across the board um but yes i i think there's very like-minded people up here and i think you know that's why we're all here because we want to see this grow we want to see this expand especially you know today's student is inundated with data and we have to know how to process that and how to manage that you mentioned like interviewing skills some of those you know more traditional like soft skills that we talk about i know i mean are we thinking about and integrating soft skills or have we drawn up too many walls around kind of these interconnection points around curriculum are we integrating soft skills in as much as we should yeah i mean one distinction that i'll make and this is just my personal view i personally don't like the term soft skills because i think it gives us the opportunity to put it over here i think they're essential skills and i think that they need to be taught i do think that a lot of the essential skills are being included and they are being looked at um but i would say that there needs to be a more access to those skills um when it comes to project management based items or you know instead of um looking at okay we have to check all of these boxes now this is how you're going to how you're going to ace an interview or this is how you're going to write the best resume um to get noticed or to distinguish yourself and even in the workplace and industry i will tell you that a lot of times soft skills um translates into gender and that's a big problem and so i think that and i'm not speaking about any particular company i'm just saying in general i've seen that and i've seen that those types of skills they're dismissed and then therefore there's a focus on other hard skills or technical skills and those are the folks that get rewarded but actually we need to be teaching the essential skills because those are just as important if not more important in some cases [Applause] [Music] any other best practices or comments on soft skills um michael um we spoke a bit on the call earlier too about and also the the complimentary focus that we need to have on teacher talent and resources to scale these types of program like the technical skills the the kind of coding and ai background um do we do you want to address some of that dynamic in terms of the needed resources and investments that that help support this program yes and but i want to go back to what uh the police about soft skills that we call the five c's i think that we have spent the last this district has spent the last six years integrating those skills into the classroom into instruction and like to really commend many of the teachers here and in doing just that in fact we've been working with uh with mr tim nguyen and matt coleman on creating a system of integration which i think is going to and we'd love to share that with our friends from google too because i think it's really we feel we're a cutting edge district nationally in terms of building these types of partnerships but we are working on the integrating those soft skills into the classroom into the grade book with evidence and um there are a number of districts across the state across the country that are interested in doing the same thing and there's no reason why we each should have to reinvent the wheel we're inventing it here we know we're ahead and you know we want to really work with our partners to because we've identified i think what the problem is right we have the the entire k-12 system has really the wrong drivers they're not aligned to the world of work in the world of life and um and that's what we're attempting to do um any other insights on the talent the resources the investments the i guess i would add too that i you know for those of you that that remember back um before lunch which seems like a long time ago um when i was speaking i was saying that you know at google there's a sort of joke but it's also a bit of a truism that you write like one line of code a day and you spend the rest of the time sort of discussing that imagine how hard to do that would be if you hadn't spent any time in your formal education or elsewhere developing the soft the soft skills i also not i'm not a fan of the term because it it does feel gendered and i've i could talk about that for many many hours um so but i won um luckily for you but i think i think that this is a sort of crucial thing that some some folks kind of visit is a misperception about business and maybe even particularly the tech industries is there's a sort of myth of like like i said like the mountain dew slamming hoodie wearing tech bro who's just in the dungeon like typing away code when the reality is the the candidate that we're looking for is much more socially engaged like coding is a team sport and it requires a lot of like i know this might scare some some students who might be listening but you have to know how to write too writing a critical thinking reading reading comprehension you may you know you have your english teacher telling you like you gotta read this mid-summer night stream because trust me you'll thank me later and you're like come on like but they're right they're right those those are fundamental skills that are just as important as the other like the project-based learning and the hands-on coding that's all wonderful and it's more of it is needed but a truly like industry informed perspective would be holistic because when you're at work you have to do all of those things you have to get along you have to work as a team you have to know how to give and receive feedback these are all skills they don't come naturally and i think sometimes when we act like they do come naturally we are discriminating actually against people who don't have the opportunity for that same kind of education that's another point that i will leave to decide because that's a long story too but i think that you know this is this is very important to think about like holistically you know from an investments uh standpoint this came up a bit earlier and and neil i mean being at the uc system what what do you see there and i guess on down the the education pipeline in terms of the need and investments that support you know more this curriculum like you know really tangible r d investments do we need more maker spaces do we need more personnel and teachers like what what's the higher education investment quandary well we we need all of that and more i mean one of the biggest challenges actually is that you know as designed today the uc system most universities even to some level the k-12 are not designed to move fast right we're used to change happens and there's time to react and so forth but like in the uc system if you want to create a new class it's a two-year process so by the time your class is approved it's already outdated and so again you know you know i keep talking about infrastructure some of these things is that we have to adapt our own systems to actually meet this makerspaces incubators or labs more you know teachers professors they're all helpful but if we don't like direct it you know and put all the stuff there it's not going to be very effective it's it's like you own a ferrari right you have no destination in mind and there are no roads to drive on and there are no gas stations so unless we put all the pieces together we're not going to actually get very far with any of this and that's i think one of our biggest challenges i think looking out you know i know a lot of people look at oh my god he's got he's just telling us this is so hard we have no no magic bullet solution it's true there is no magical solution for us we all i know we're all heads down with our work and i know that we've got plenty on our plates just trying to keep the lights on but i think this is the real struggle just throwing more people this is going to solve the problem throwing more money isn't just going to solve a problem this is an ecosystem type of solution we need everyone to come together and partner together to make this work right and if you're all hoping that someone will figure it out and we can kind of play follow the leader by the time someone figures it out and you start to play catch up that solution's probably already outdated so it's really on all of us everybody in this room to come together and figure out the best way to move forward and continually move forward and i think the fact that all you people here today are in this room tells me that you don't want to make this happen you realize that we need to make this happen so kudos to you i wanted to add to that one of the things that i've always envisioned in orange county in general was to create a non-profit artificial intelligence institute so it's something that's always been on my mind as far back as when we founded loco so if anyone wants to talk about that or has interest you mean i i think this is a worthy discussion that flows right into what neil was saying i think there's a there's a big need to create new opportunities and to create new kind of you know organizations that are tied into the community and um are not out for a profit but really the profit of giving the knowledge to students and to creating new ways of getting them into you know careers and new ways into the field yeah i think um san diego at the san diego foundation just launched a very similar initiative around um some sector-based economic development i forget what it was around them um michael did you have some thoughts on that too i thought you had your hand i'm sorry um you know in that sense like you know where where is where is this industry where is this conversation heading you know we hear a lot of conversation about the metaverse and and the expansion of jobs and jobs that we don't know like what what where where is this going in terms of jobs that we haven't even begun to think about yet i'll i'll jump in i mean i think that's exactly why i was talking about hybrid intelligence it's not so much worrying about what exactly the precise jobs are going to be we know what they're going to entail and that's essentially augmenting the work that we're able to do with these machine capabilities so just generally speaking we know that we're going to have to get better at critical thinking we have to get better at the essential skills we're going to have to be better and be creative right everyone i know that everyone wants to be a programmer our bosses are like that but everyone has to have a basic understanding of the the toolbox the technical capabilities because there's no way to wield that otherwise right we all need to know an industry some domain expertise when it comes to the future of work it's it's different it's not just you learn math you learn english you learn spanish right it's about now interweaving all the subjects together moving these skills together so that we can actually be able to do something yeah i'd like to tag on to that i think you know empowerment is really important and you know allowing students to be gap fillers you know one thing that i i did publish earlier this year it was entitled you don't have to be a rocket scientist to work on rockets and i think that it's really important to understand just from the 100 000 foot level you know what is the what is in the art of the possible so we actually have doctors of education working on rockets we have people who studied teaching their entire lives and that are credentialed and they are working on rockets we have in-house fashion designers and internal or interior designers and that really help a positive workspace and you know they create our swag you know our t-shirts um that get us all together and rallying together um i can't say that was the you know where rocketry was going in the 50s and 60s but that's where we are today and so i think allowing students to come up with great ideas and empowering them to experiment and i say the word fail very lightly because failure is just another opportunity to learn and grow but to let them experiment with that then the students are teaching us on how we can equip them to help them to grow i would add to that if that's okay please don't quickly thanks um and this is just sort of a different way of saying what i think you two are already saying but i think what is sort of unique about this historical juncture is that we don't know the answer to this to your question yet we don't actually know yet exactly i mean we have some ideas but we don't know exactly it's not like um you know like my grandfather was a cop and his dad was a cop and being a cop felt very like easy to do in the sense it's just like a job and you go and do it and it has a sort of like prescribed norms more or less um and this is back in the day before and anyway i don't want to go down that road anyway um again i keep bringing up these different conversations sorry about that but or like a bank teller like a bank teller before you sit in a bank you cash the checks you give out the money it's fairly straightforward what's unique about right now is that we don't know what these roles are going to be we don't know what they're going to look like and part of what's exciting for students right now is that you're going to tell us what these roles are you're going to tell us what you're going to do it's not the other way around maybe for the first time in history you're going to tell us what the job is and so these skills the the ones the very ones that you all are bringing up are so important as a basis and these experiences are so important as a basis because it's that skill set and those sets of experiences that are going to uniquely come together in each of you and then you're going to say like oh i'm going to go work on rockets and i'm going to do this very specific thing that probably doesn't exist right now so that's to me a really really exciting moment to be in michael i did see your hand yeah so i i look at it both from an organizational standpoint as well as the individual students right so the organizational standpoint you're dealing with the k-12 bureaucracy right most that's the way most public schools are opera operate they operate and they're very comfortable in the status quo whereas we need to have a mindset of a startup we need to be nimble and we need to be able to pivot as the economy pivots and as this and operating in this uncertain world and so we call you know that's there's a lot that we've learned from the business side you know in terms of classic peter sengay learning organizations that's what we're attempting to do internally with our district and it takes a lot of systemness it takes a lot of healthy transparency internally right at an organizational level to be like a startup that's a huge mental model shift but then what we want for the kid is what we saw exhibited today which is an example of the soft skills the 21st century transferable skills we call it the five c's and that's why it's so vital that our teachers are integrating those soft skills during the school day again this is not extra credit or after school this is happening during the school day and um i'm really proud of the work we've done in the last six years to get there there's enough of our admins there's enough of our teachers enough for our parents enough of our students who are exhibiting that and um that's i you know i think hopefully that's the takeaway and that's a takeaway for our partners here to see a district in an urban setting that's unionized that's um but that is beginning to act like a startup and um and i'm really proud of that joseph i think that's a great question to you i mean you started a tech company in the middle of a pandemic i mean what's your mindset on that soft skills um question there around the the leadership dynamics that it takes to thrive kind of in this rapidly changing space a lot of tenacity uh i think you have to be very nimble and fast on your feet we're able to do things at loco because of our small size and just the mindset of our employees that larger tech firms can cannot absolutely do so we can outpace people because of the nimbleness but we take great care to hire the right people so it always comes down fundamentally to a cultural fit you might have the technical skills you might have great education great resume but ultimately we have a unique culture at loco that allows us to move quick and attack for with ferocity and and so that's why we're so successful and i think pandemic accelerated that not only did it accelerate the need for our technology but it accelerated our culture and the way that we look at the world and how we have to be nimble as well when we hire so now we have two remote employees and before i would have told you absolutely not they have to be in the office but you can't take that attitude anymore and and for us we know when we come across someone that has those unique qualities that really fit into our culture the locos kind of have their own they definitely have their own say and then who enters you know our very small startup so i take everyone's input when we make these decisions because it's all valuable we work as a flat organization you know it's really i might be the ceo and i make some of the bigger decisions but when it comes down to the personal stuff and and who you want to be working with on these really hard problems you know 24 7 of course they have a huge say i don't want anyone to to disrupt that dynamic so i think we we've found ourselves to be very flexible and adaptive um to the changing you know needs of of you know how the industry is moving how the country is in the state and the place that it is and if you're not then you're really behind the curve because you have to kind of be ahead of this stuff and kind of anticipate what are the things that people are going to expect of you as a company and and the kind of benefits and the kind of flexibility you're going to have to their unique challenges so we try our best i mean i'm not to say that we do it perfectly but i think it's an ongoing learning process and our culture really comes down to our culture like we take great care to hire and find the people that really add to the culture and don't disrupt it in any way yeah yeah please build upon what he's what joseph's saying we all actually have this ability to be adaptable and flexible right in 2015 the first time i addressed the united nations i was warned that they think it's terminator time machine's going to rise up how could a world where i keep humanity it gave a little more optimistic speech but i was really talking about how ai can be used for public services it already is and agrees with stable development calls my 30-minute speech that night you know i was approached by the the leadership the secretary of general's like yeah we never thought about using the technology i think there's something here i want to figure this out i'm thinking yeah right okay u.n big bureaucratic slow moving government agency i kid you not four months after that talk we had the mvp for the af good initiative we actually had stuff in market and we've since obviously learned grown and scaled upon that that we had like 116 active projects going on today with an army of worldwide volunteers but it shows that even an organization like the united nations when they believe something is important enough you know helping people in the planet they're willing to set aside the red tape and figure out a way to actually make it happen to be nimble to be agile because the goals the outcome is just too important they know we have a short window like we have a short window to change turn things around let's just make it happen um you know we talked a lot today about you know that the dynamic of k-12 and even up into the community colleges and and a bit even into higher ed but you know covet has really accelerated a lot of the the inequities in our society um especially in black and brown communities um what uh and has displaced a tremendous amount of workers um and we say at the that that covet has accelerated you know fill in the blank especially the future of work you know what what is the space here in terms of opportunities for displaced workers and and reskilling even even you know for the the older generation of folks that you know find themselves looking for a new career i'll uh i'll jump in then i'll uh obviously there's a lot of training education out there through like google and microsoft and coursera and all these things i think the challenge that a lot of people are trying to either upskill or reskill is they don't know what direction to take it or they're not sure they can actually do this there's so much things that become tech oriented a lot of people think they have to be a technologist to be able to do these things yeah and that's not really the case i think that's one of the messages we actually have to impress upon people to realize that and i know that you look at the adult education continue education that's being offered again it's very narrowly focused right we'll teach you machine learning or we'll teach you security architecture you know we'll teach you to be a person that collects requirements and it's like i think without that holistic picture where people can understand what is really going on the pieces that go and make that happen they don't know where they fit into the puzzle so to speak and i think that's one area that we're actually constantly failing at as just an academic overall ecosystem is historically never good to explain to students or prospective students why some of the things we want to teach you are actually important how they actually get used in your career in your life and i think we need to solve that problem to help people that were displaced by kovid we need to solve that problem for our students today because what i'm my own experience is teaching is if they know how this stuff actually gets used they get more engaged because they know that there's a destination they're going to get to and this is why this is important learning rather than okay i took this class and then two years later oh shoot i have to know this for my job um i don't really remember what i learned yeah um that's a that's a really tough question i think to answer and just from my own observation and experience i've used this word already but it goes to empowerment and creativity and i think that goes to show how much we can and what we have learned in the classroom as an example so at the beginning of the pandemic we actually had a small group of rocket engineers and rocket scientists build ventilators for hospitals in california and we also deployed many out to africa and that took creativity that's a completely different industry and it was able to get fda approved to support and to help and be a part of the solution now yes there's resources and i understand that it's not as simple for other folks however i do believe in the power of creativity and collaboration and the more that we can experience that at a young age the more we can pull together in times of crises a lot of leaders have said this but we are truly stronger together so if we see displaced folks or if we see something that's spiraling out of control there's probably a wealth of skill sets that we can really leverage and pull on i mean even with our company you know we were just started in 2017 and we launched successfully twice in the middle of a pandemic with folks being remote now we had some folks on site but we had to completely change our overall operating structure to keep our teammates safe and healthy so that took a lot of creativity and you know that was hard because there's different generations that are coming together and we have to find common ground and to me that's rooted in what we've learned and how we were brought up as students as well so really leveraging that creativity i think is a start that probably only scratches the surface of your question but again just that overall empowerment yeah and i think it speaks to kind of the systemic solution that we've all been kind of addressing throughout here you know we're getting kind of close to the end of this session so i want to get um some final thoughts and maybe a bit of a call to action out of this and we've heard from some amazing kids um today uh who are working in in different aspects of this program like what michael will start at the at the back what would you say to the kids and from your perspective um like is there a call to action is there is there a need for support in terms of scalability i think uh the message to our young people is to uh develop a mindset really for lifelong learning you heard that it's a very uncertain world out there fortunately we have companies like google that are trying to fill the gap of uh you know continuous learning and i think that's in a love of learning and a curiosity about problem solving so i i think that we are on the right track and as the panelist here said there's we don't know what the answers are yet but we are trying to prepare you for this very uncertain world so you have the skills to continue to move forward joseph any any kind of final thoughts or next steps yeah well we we talked about this michael a little bit of teachers also getting uh accreditations and to continue their knowledge um in order to scale this internship that we've we started with kennedy you would really need technical people to run it and not you know we're a very small unique firm but how do you scale something nationwide for instance with this internship it'd be very challenging right now so we're still figuring it out but kind of one of the fundamental things would be to provide teachers really are the talent scouts here they know their students they know who who's uh you know attracted to this space and has you know interest and i think it starts with them too is that if they're the talent scouts they should also want to step up and continue their education and get certifications and maybe a unique certificate around something like this an ai or machine learning to be able to carry the torch forward and to run internships by themselves at the school so um i think i think it comes down to lifeline lifelong learning excuse me with students and teachers alike i don't think it ever stops uh we're in the age this revolution that's happening around us um you can't get complacent you really have to keep pushing forward and be determined to absorb knowledge and transmit knowledge yeah adrian any uh insight final thoughts around especially that bridging that untraditional pathway your insight that was really powerful yeah um hurting thoughts no no pressure or anything right better be good fix everything i think you know i think i i mentioned before that i think we're sort of at this historical like on the histo on the cusp of like a significant historical moment where the nature of work is changing and this is something people have said over and over again today and i i mentioned that you know the students of today are going to really shape in ways that i don't even think any of us in this room are able to predict like what all that is going to look like um but i think you know the the best advice i would give to a student is don't discount the significance of this change i know it's hard when i was 16 or 17 i didn't care i mean you couldn't have paid me to sit all day in this room there's i would have been off doing something i would have been surfing or something so it's it's for those of you who are still here congratulations you're all ready you're already doing great but you know i think for parents too like there's when i was a kid my grandma's always like you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer and and those that that was seen in my family is like we're a teacher of course like that was how you were going to go make money like those that was the economic opportunity and i didn't do any of those things really so whoops um but what i what i would say to kids today is like we are at this place where ai is the new that if that makes sense like if you want to make a good living and you want to change your life and you're a first generation college student in particular or you're you know you want to pull your family up or you want to create something for yourself there's a lot of opportunity here and it doesn't mean that you have to be just good at math or something like there's a lot of space here to do something that feels meaningful and also for for kids today there's a lot of space to create something new like i was saying before like jobs are kind of opening up um the way that we interact with work is changing we work from home now we do all we have all these sort of different ways of working and within that there's a lot of opportunity to try something new to do new things to define new jobs to have new roles in companies that don't even exist yet to do things not for profit too because not everything has to be not everything ought to be for profit please um and so i just i think that my advice here is don't don't automatically discount ai because it sounds mathy or it sounds technical um if that's not your thing that's totally fine but there's still nevertheless a lot of opportunity here if you're someone who's creative or you like to solve problems or you really um care about social justice because that's really where this there's an intersection here that i think is really really important um so i don't know if that's a final thought but i will stop there it's a great one neil what about uh [Applause] [Music] what advice do you have for the next master innovator i will say for all those students you guys have an incredible superpower it's a it's much stronger than anyone up here on this panel no offense guys and most of the people in the room you guys have a fresh set of eyes right we've we've learned things we've done things but we're also used to some things being the way they are you guys can actually find that different way of doing things you guys can be amazing disruptive thinkers and drive real innovation you can probably leverage ai and other technologies in ways we haven't fathomed yet and that's where i think the real change the real innovation is going to drive from so use it use that superpower and you know to talk about a call to action i have a challenge for every person in the room and watching the stream i know you've been hit with a lot of information today i challenge you to think about what's one small thing you can do to make this happen right to to bring you know this ai capability and get people ready for future work there's one small thing each of us can do what's the one small thing you'll do and mike will check that homework assignment on monday dr thomas um especially around this the prospect for increased representation and and and programs that support that you know what do you say to the the kids that are looking for those opportunities and how they can best you know access some of those or or work to increase those opportunities yeah um be authentically and unapologetic unapologetically who you are do not conform truly um and i say that speaking in experience um as a kid i was told that i was terrible at math and that i should find something else the last 15 years that's how i've made my living so it took me a minute to get that realization and it took me a while to get formally into engineering but i did not change i kept at it because i was passionate about it and i really cared about it and i will tell you that passion will take you a long way regardless of whatever barriers you face no matter what because i've lived it and i've done it and i started at a very low level and worked my way all the way up because of my passion similarly to that i would say celebrate your peers be collaborative do not be cutthroat and only compete with yourself and that will take you further than what you can even imagine and it's really about dreaming wildly but planning ferociously and just making it happen for yourself while asking a ton of questions along the way i still ask questions every single day over and over to make sure that i understand and that i have retained that information because that's how i grow and that's how i learn and if you're not sure how to do that find a mentor and if you don't know how to find a mentor my name is on the screen you can find me on any social media platform and i will direct you in the right place [Applause] what a what a great way to end this and i i think the student ambassadors have a small token that they'd like to present yes so we'll stay up here for that [Applause] [Music] [Applause] should we come down for a picture how do you want to do it oh yeah please please do it absolutely i've been up here too well sorry sorry good afternoon everyone my name is abdullah fattahi and i'm serving as the student representative to the board of trustees for the 21-22 school year thank you so much for having me here today i'm here now to thank you so much on behalf of the 29 000 students of our district to everyone here for participating in a historical moment for our own district it is becoming more clear than ever that artificial intelligence is the future and the anaheim union district is making massive strides in giving us students those opportunities thank you to everyone that made today possible and all the partners that are supporting the future of our community and finally i'd like to take take this moment to thank and honor the distinguished guests here with me today please join me in giving a round of applause to our amazing panelists superintendent michael matsuda [Applause] [Music] [Applause] we got a few plans mr joseph zucky [Music] [Applause] ms adrian posner [Music] mr neal sahara sohoda sorry [Music] [Applause] dr mckaylan thomas [Music] and finally mr matt horton [Music] thank you all so much for having me here today [Music] [Applause] this is cool thank you um michael i know um you were gonna come up and do final thoughts and thanks again for uh including me here was a really great honor to be here and uh thanks to our panel [Music] i think we also have something for amy amy could you come up here where is she andy corn [Applause] yay amy [Applause] [Music] you know um i started off by sharing the myth of you know the greek myth this morning prometheus and it was all about the gift of fire and again because of this distinguished panel of speakers we all have the awareness of that fire called artificial intelligence and i think the big takeaway for all of us is to it's now up to us to use it wisely on behalf of the anaheim union high school district our board of trustees and our 29 000 students and 3 000 employees want to thank our guests today for really really giving us that fire so that we can light the way forward thank you so much [Applause] so uh make sure you have your parking stamped right and we want to
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okay call the meeting to order roll call maria or present rick raleigh wilson so dennis bender christopher nunez will you please stand for the pledge of allegiance ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all please remain standing at this time we would like to pause in a moment of silence to remember haley roland a granite hills high school sophomore who passed away last week thank you very much board bylaws 9323 meeting conduct is available at the signing table whenever a member of the public initiates specific complaint or charges against an individual employee the board president shall inform the complainant of complaint procedure cf 1312.1 complaints concerning district employees kylie do we have any public comments pertaining to closed session we do not uh if none if we have no cards for public comments um [Music] mr rawley will you please read out what we have for closed session yes we have nine items uh item number one pupil personnel expulsion cases exp number six two one two two through exp 921 through 22.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
i'm not gonna go back that far in my history i'm only going to go back to the last five and a half years i have been superintendent during that time so i want to share my perspective of asdb's story and i'm sure each of you have your own perspective of asdb's story as well our teachers our professional staff our leadership team each have their own perspective of the asdb story and the outside community also would have their own perspective of the asdb story i'm sure our students and our parents have theirs as well i'm not going to go into all of those perspectives i will simply share my own view of the asdb story when i started here five and a half years ago that first year i'm sure you all remember i didn't do a whole lot in that first year you may have wondered what i was doing i was taking the time to travel around the state to meet and visit with and talk to all of our stakeholders i wanted to know who we were as asdb what our purpose was our history our present our future i wanted to understand asdb thoroughly so that first year i took the time to listen and to understand at that time as i met so many people i saw a great deal of dedication motivation and heart in our people and our staff they were working incredibly hard to provide a great education and supports to our students of asdb the commitment and the motivation were astounding i also saw that they were doing that work without a lot of data they did not have a lot of data to use in making their decisions i saw that there was not a very effective support system at the agency level we were not providing adequate support to our teachers and to our professional staff so what do you do when you don't have the support at a systemic level you create your own supports right that's the rational thing to do and that's what our staff had done they made teams where they were and each of those teams was an island within their own island or their silos they were working together and doing the best they could to provide supports and education high quality education and support to our students that was the logical thing to do at that time and if i was on one of those teams i would have made the same decision i realized early on that we had to figure out a way for each of those isolated islands to be bridged to each other so in the fall of i led a steering committee and we had our very first meeting we brought in agency leaders from all over the agency and across the state into one room there were about 55 people at the time if i remember correctly from that first meeting you might have thought that that number of people in a room would have been noisy but it was dead silent people were looking at each other and wondering who they were they didn't know each other they didn't work together so from then on twice a year and still to this day we bring in leaders across the agency into one room so to speak it had been in person previously and more lately it's been virtual but we are still giving those people the opportunity to see each other and hear each other and try to understand each other so that we are not living on islands alone we are one agency but we also had to get better we needed to provide data and we needed an effective system so we started to make some systemic changes and if you recall early on that very first systemic systemic change started with asking the advanced ed team to come in and take a look at us to evaluate us and give us an agency level accreditation did that because we needed a plan we needed a framework to guide us we hadn't had a framework and advanced ed was able to come in and give us that framework toward accreditation we were able to use that to evaluate our systems and find a starting point to make changes that was 2017 and 2018.
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item number two conference litigation government code section five four nine five six point nine subsection a current litigation seven cases c i v d s one eight one three nine five two one nine zero seven one seven two two zero one one one eight three two zero two two nine five six two zero two three three six six and civsb 210-3396-2111303 government code section 5494 correction 54954.5 subsection c and five four nine five six point nine subsection d two and e one anticipated litigation three cases 2018 1907 20 20 21 05 20 20 21 07.
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the other first thing that we did was work with the arizona department of education to get additional funding so that we could be involved in the school improvement process some of you may not remember that we did a fairly thorough assessment we did a gap analysis to try to determine where to start and how to improve our schools both tucson campus and phoenix campus the answer of where to start was with our curriculum at that time we did not have a formula formal curriculum in our schools so we started with english language arts and the board approved an ela curriculum for math in the sec for ela in the first year and math in the second year and then science and we are still working our way through curriculum selection every year we are reviewing and choosing our curriculum and finding how to provide a better education for our students and that was a huge systemic change the other systemic change was our early learning program you may recall that we've had early intervention for birth to three-year-olds that was an island and then we had another little island of three to five year olds our preschool programs on both tucson and phoenix campuses they were not working together was not a smooth transition from birth to three into our preschool program so we put them together and it became a zero to five program again reason being we all agreed that those first five years are absolutely critical for a child's development and language acquisition and independent living skills those foundations must be strong in order to build their capabilities to enter kindergarten and succeed in k-12 school we are continuing to make changes and we have been working hard on our regional cooperatives and we did have five regional cooperatives that were operating as five islands within the state each had their own process their own way of doing things their own definition of specialized instruction there was not consistency or standardization within those co-ops we did not have that so we we created a statewide system and we pulled together those five regional cooperatives and that is something that we are still working on and you will hear more about that later in our public comments there have been a lot of changes happening and i'm hoping that you all will decide to have a work-study session in the beginning of 2022 so that we have the opportunity to talk more about our leadership at itinerant services and you will become more familiar with that process and that progress of all of the changes that have been occurring then of course in 2020 the kovid 19 pandemic caused everything to shut down and through many things into chaos so we had to pivot very quickly we had to figure out how we could continue to provide education and support to our students virtually most of our teachers had never done that before so we made that transition and i'm sure you will recall that that what that process looked like and then during the pandemic you all surprised me you wanted to do a strategic plan yes we need a clear path and clear guidance from our board historically we have developed in a given direction and each of those islands would try to navigate or shift toward the direction that we were all trying to go in but we didn't have a clear plan we didn't have clear strategic planning and direction and the board created that you had a great deal of discussion and conversation around that and created our strategic plan i'd like to talk about the strategic plan just for a moment looking at the four pillars we have excellence in communication and relationships and what does that mean that means internally as well as externally we have to be able to effectively communicate we have to have those critical conversations and discussions without communication and without those relationships there is no trust if there is no trust then we cannot work together we cannot collaborate we cannot problem solve we cannot be creative and innovative we must have trust as our foundation the second pillar is outstanding student development that is the heart of our work our students are at the heart of everything we do it's interesting this sign development is similar to the sign for thrive so we don't just want to see our students develop we want to see them thrive and how we do that is by having a clear heart a clear purpose and a vision for what we're doing that is our second pillar and then our third pillar is superb organizational culture if we want our students to develop and thrive we must have high quality instructors and professional staff we have to be able to draw them in and keep them with us and the way to do that is to have a healthy and strong organizational culture that supports each other that is our third pillar and our fourth pillar is effective resource management and that is our people our facilities our vehicles our technology and our finances none of our other three pillars could happen without the resources necessary and without those resources being effectively managed so all of those tie together and that creates our vision that gives us our direction for the future that is the future of asdb i am inspired i am excited i am motivated and i am ready to go i want to make asdb the best agency in the country and i believe we can do that and i believe it even more now because of all of your support and your actions in supporting our efforts so thank you thank you superintendent are there any questions for a superintendent okay hearing none we can go on to 1.04 information item assistant superintendent of curriculum instruction dr rex good afternoon president nigro and board members this is kristin rex and i'm here to update you on pillar 2.
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