Long. Yeah, that was always a big one. >> Different teachers. It was kind of fun. >> Yeah. >> All right. And that was it. Do you guys have any questions? >> No questions. only thing that intrigu intrigued about with the the um kind of crossgrade level the colonies and some of that stuff is one of the things that I was always fascinated a bit about and really happy about it like at the high school level was where the kids because the block schedule had an ability to intermix at different grade levels which I think really help kids progress and find friends at the right ages and stuff like that. kind of interesting to see how that that might actually kind of grow through the district over time as these kids, fifth graders are not just like fifth grade buddies to kindergartens. It's kind of a little bit more engaging.
>> You do you do it takes years because it I mean obviously year one's their first year together, but those kindergarteners and like first graders, they're with each other every year then through fourth and fifth grade. Like they're with each other for years. So then you start to see them interacting on the playground, you start to see them interacting in the hallways. Uh, one thing that um I like new students I feel like really liked at at my old school is if a new student was transferring in mid year, I would put them in a den before they got there and then I would have those kids down in the office to then give them a tour of the school and be like, "You're going to be a part of our den. They'd take them around the school. They'd introduce them to the to their new den leader." And then like on day one, that kid feels like they have like eight to 10 like friends in the school that they can go to across the whole school to start off their uh start off starting in the middle of the year.
So, there's a lot of things that just kind of like spring naturally out of having something like uh colonies or nests or dens. >> Cool. Thank you. >> Thank you guys. [applause] >> Our last presentation is a video since principal apprentice could not join us today. out of the country at the board meeting tonight. So I am Nicole, principal at JD Nelson Elementary School and this is one of the second grade teachers and also the school leadership. All right, so let's review our goals this year. We had three goals. The first one was proficiency in reading. We started the year at 65.48% of our students showing proficiency in their reading skills. Our end of the year goal was 70% and we did exceed that goal in the spring at 71.61%. So we were pretty excited to see that. We also had a goal and this is something we focus on for several years.
Learning targets and success criteria. focus of our school improvement plan. When we started the school year, 10 out of 21 classes had students that were able to speak to the learning targets and success criteria. So, we set a goal that we wanted to end the year with at least 71% of students being able to speak to it. We actually exceeded that goal at 95% of our students being able to speak to learning targets and success criteria in their classroom. Our final goal was focus on a sense of belonging, specifically peer-to-peer respect because something we've noticed that is an area of need in our building. In the fall, our belonging data, our students reported 68% of them felt a sense of belonging at JB Nelson and that peer-to-peer respect was still our greatest area of need at 56%. We set a goal for the end of the year.
We hoped to get to 71% of our students reporting that sense of belonging and we wanted that peer-to-peer respect to increase to 60%. When we reviewed our data in the winter, we were really excited because we had grown to 70% of students reporting belonging and 62% reporting peer-to-peer respect, which was an increase in both categories and in fact exceeded the goal that we had set for the end of the school year. However, when we got to the end of the school year, we saw a drop. So, 66% of students reported that sense of belonging and 56% of students right back to the beginning reported that respect action steps that we took throughout the year for our math proficiency in reading. We had our instructional coach, our reading specialist, and our fifth grade team that had field tested the CKLA lead professional development for the staff.
And it included um discussions and um learning with the whole school and with grade level teams. The learning Our teams continue to work together and with our instructional coach to make learning targets and success criteria that were clear and easy for students under to understand and to help the students understand how to use them and why they are important for their own learning. And then in the area of the sense of belonging, we started our year with our wish tree and that included our schoolwide community and with a variety of activities and even brought the families into it for our reading night and then ongoing things throughout the year. We had our daily Jaden promise that was said together every morning. We had mindful Mondays grade level buddies that focused more um on inclusive activities between tried to um make those a shared experience for the whole school.
We started and tried a new problem solving protocol for recess time. and we started using achievement badges that students could earn for um different things that they accomplished schoolwide or [clears throat] as we reflected on this year our instructional rounds and chance rounds showed that we had significant growth. We had met our targets on these goals. So we have focused on the learning targets and success criteria in our school improvement plan for the last several years. And we really we have met those goals. So, we want to continue that work, but that is not going to be the focus of our school improvement plan moving forward. Um, as we already talked about, our fall panorama belonging data was higher this year than last fall, but it did not end up we did not end up sustaining that. We grew in the winter and then dropped again in the spring.
So, we really are reflecting on what what worked and what maybe we can do differently. We had that strong launch of belonging through our family literacy night. Next year, we're looking to have a make sure that it continues all year long. But we're also listening to student voice. We held some student focus groups this spring and we're reflecting on how best to strengthen peer-to-peer respect and peer relationships next year. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to our wrap up of the year. We have a lot of things to celebrate. We have work still to do. If you have questions, we would be happy to answer that via email or you can ask Dr. because he does come to our Wow.
[laughter] >> Well, any questions you have [laughter] >> is there. So, I've seen some consist or some consistency with those like SEAL scores that they'll go up in the winter and then drop again in the spring. Is there any explanation? >> I think uh context is always important, right? Like as a student, we're kind of just taking a little dipstick of where they're at with that sense of belonging in those four questions. So, I think anytime you're doing that type of assessment, it's very context driven. So, and that's complicated, right? Like we don't know what's going on in kids' family life, what's going on at school. their peer relationships are at that age um developmentally pretty volatile sometimes and they're changing. So I think it's just when you're taking that dipstick. I think the overall kind of purpose is to see where are we headed as a system, right?
Do we have systems in place to continue to increase that performance little kind of ups and downs I think are to be expected in that. >> Natalie, did you want to add anything? [laughter] >> I think one of the things Yeah. Go for it. kids, but then as you heard from all of these buildings, they're reacting and changing. And I think that's the important part is they're trying to find out what's going on with our kids, how can we increase that? And to me, those conversations are super valuable. Listening to our kids is super valuable. And then just moving forward with those those plans. We're going to get out of the PowerPoint for just a few minutes to show the board and the community uh some district data that's on the website. So, if you're a board member and you have your computer up, you can go to bps101.net and under the about tab, there's a strategic plan um dropdown and then there is the interactive dashboard link that's right there.
So people who want to learn more about our strategic plan in the community and and what we're all about can click into each of these uh fields to see our mission and vision, our theory of action. And then we're going to focus on these priorities that the board has set. So enhancing teaching and learning. We'll click in there. And then there's an interactive dashboard that shows both our math and our reading, both our goals and where where we are right now. So you can see with the blue line that is our math growth. So we're slightly below the target overall as a district for our math growth and then we are well above on the red line our reading uh actual ELA reading growth as a district. So some things to celebrate but this is again is about trend data. Are we trending up? Are we trying to accomplish those goals?
That truly for me is the power of the strategic plan as it sets that direction and we go in that direction. We want to be headed up. So, uh we'll talk a little bit more about these numbers um when we get into the slideshow, but just so you know that the community can see all of this information and then we'll scroll down a little bit and you'll see some not updated data because as Joanne said, uh the state had some issues with the accuracy of ACT scores. So that's not updated yet, but as soon as we get that, we'll update that so the community can see that as well. So it'll show that both the math and ELA scores there. We'll go to the second priority. Tim Holly gets the, you know, she loves driving while people just kind of bark out things at her.
So, we'll go to priority two and this is just an overview. Natalie's going to go into this in a minute. Uh, but you can see that overall trend data with Panorama under strengthening student belonging. You can see that we're on target for that and still maintaining very high national percentiles uh but with both our elementary and our secondary targets. And then there's some blank data below and that's because board goal 2.2 is increase family and staff satisfaction. This spring we gave for the first time a staff survey that was selected by help me >> student services committee. So they selected a survey to deliver to our staff and some of our schools reference some of that that data which we're getting for the first time. And then we also did a community survey and [clears throat] we're going to work on building greater u participation in that survey but none of them like equal satisfaction right there about a number of metrics both for staff and their sense of belonging and parents how they feel we're doing but we didn't know how to fit that into the category of satisfaction.
So we're going to work with Panorama and see if there's some things that we can do to get a little bit simpler data to report back to the community. So, we just have that data and we will continue to work on some alignment and getting some data in this part of the dashboard. But I wanted to give you a little update on that and then Tony will just do a general overview of priority three. Certainly priority three really focuses on our operations and our facilities and ensuring that our resource allocation is devoted to the right things to both maintain sustainability and improve our outcomes for both academics and for the key way that we do that the only way that we do that in from the board power metric standpoint is to look at the uh financial profile score that is provided to us by the Illinois State Board of Education.
Uh in the last few years, we've seen a perfect score of 4.0 on that profile and uh the minimum the target baseline is just above 3.5. I think it's 3.53 if memory serves exactly. We do anticipate that we will not continue to see 4.0 scores in the future. I do expect in fiscal year 2026 that we're about to finish, it will be a 4.0, now, but in 2027 and the years after, we'll see that decrease probably right to about that 3.5 level as we're spending down our reserves and that will count against us because we won't have as much count cash on hand uh in case uh we face some adverse financial conditions. So, um we're going to keep an eye on that, but I do expect we'll meet the goal, but it's not going to necessarily be a perfect score moving forward. But that is one of the key ways that we measure our ability to um be able to allocate resources where they need to be.
So we thought we'd use the website just to highlight it, show that people can go here and look at this data. We'll willingly take any feedback you have about what could be better for our community to see. But I think this gives them ready access to some data as well as these presentations being put online and and doing them here. So if you have feedback, please seek us out and we'll do that. >> Is there a feedback uh option here for the people viewing? >> Not that I'm aware of. Is that >> there is a feedback? It's not necessarily on this page. Actually, if you scroll to the bottom there, maybe there are feedback mechanisms on the website, but not necessarily on the strategic plan page. >> Okay. >> So, if you could go to contact us, uh you can provide feedback on any topic, including the strategic plan.
>> Just two quick questions. Um for the staff belonging, what's your goal percentage of the st taking this questions. >> It was a little bit wonky this year because um the state moved there's a the five essentials data that Tara referenced. We want to not do that survey and focus on our own in-house surveys through Panorama. So in order to do that, you have to apply for like a waiver from the state of Illinois. They moved the timeline from like October to the following January. So, next year we're we plan to apply to not give the five essentials, which would help us to focus on getting all of our staff. You still want about 95% of your staff. That's kind of the goal that the state puts for five essentials if your district is going to participate in that. So, we still want about 95% of our staff participating in that survey.
>> What about the community? Like what's the goal for the community? >> Anything over 20 for a community survey is like really really good. So 20 would be to me like that would give us some really good data. We were below that this year. >> Are the staff and community surveys once a year, three times a year? >> Once a year. Yeah, those will be once a year kind of in that February March time frame. So because of this year we were putting kind of emphasis on taking five essentials and the panorama on the survey, I think we kind of diluted our our pool of participants. But hopefully we fix that for next year and then we'll go to the slides. Um just kind of going through these kind of you want me to go >> next. You can see our overall percentages which were represented in those graphs that the public has access to.
But let's spend a few minutes here talking about map growth and then how this is disagregated. So here we have both reading and math growth. Math on the left, reading on the right. And you can see our overall percents are very solid in terms of our overall growth. But when we start to look, we can start to see some things that I'm I'm really actually proud of. So typically what we've seen is a gap between um lowincome IEP students, e students, black and Hispanic students. So when we take a look at those categories, so like the top uh five of the six rows there, we can see that we're getting pretty nice growth, some growth that we haven't seen necessarily from some of those subgroups before. So that is something that we're watching. We're taking a look at. We're kind of proud of some of those uh numbers inching up.
So, if you look at reading, same type of thing. Moving for IEP students from 50 to 54. Carrie's going to talk a little bit about this in a few minutes. Low income 44 to to 56%. And then EL students 41 to [clears throat] 51%, black students, 42 to 54% of them meeting those growth targets. Those are pretty impressive numbers that our staff has worked so hard at reaching every student. It's something to me to really take some pride in. So, we hope with the implementation of new curriculums next year, we continue to see this growth. We have high expectations of our kids and I think that's a huge piece of our success this year is having that high expectation. Natalie, do you want to come up and >> act? Yeah, go ahead. >> I apologize. Um the math is that was that grades uh one through five or one through six or I don't I'm sorry >> this is uh K through eight act we'll come back to that you want to talk about this or you'll go to the next one >> uh you can go to the next slide >> okay >> so really within BPS uh just like we're celebrating academic growth we are celebrating the work of staff and students in uh achieving our goals that we set forth in positive student ratings of belonging belongingness.