April 25, 2022 - Work Session Public Board Meeting

001to everyone taking these obviously none of you guys but any student listening and um another upcoming event is the junior and senior prom at the sheridan and valley forge and there's going to be food and dancing so i'm really looking forward to it and it's coming up and it's also coming to the end of the year for the seniors and there's a lot of events coming up for them so they have their senior trip at six flags some senior breakfast awards and scenes awards and scholarship night as well as actual graduation along with many more and another fun event from whistling high school's indian cultural association was a holy event and although it was rainy um a lot of students enjoyed celebrating the festival of spring and color as well as a lot of delicious

002indian food um and i want to give a shout out to the wissac and computer club who participated in a cyber quest competition and that was just encouraging students to go into fields of cyber security and wisdom sent a lot of teams to compete in this competition and a team of five of our students actually did win first place and then with second ultimate frisbee club also did really well this year and they're at a final ranking of 10th in the nation they competed in washington dc at a two-day event with 42 other high schools and then placed third out of the pool of 20 and then the last event we have coming up on friday is mini thon and we've actually raised about 18 000 so far our goal is 50 000 and um

003we're donating that for childhood cancer and i look forward to all these events and anything else in the future thanks so much sachi does anyone have any questions or comments yeah um sasha you mentioned that miniathon is coming up is there a way that outsiders can contribute online or by other means yeah i'm pretty sure there's um wizardkins for diamonds i'm not sure the exact website but i can get it sent somewhere to you guys um there's there's a fundraiser online that we have running for that thank you any other questions or comments no all right well thank you so much salji got the great report now we'll move on to our next presentation which is the achievement gap yes thank you so much um actually i have a confession to make that we're actually

004in before we commence the achievement gap report there's been a little trickery at work here tonight and um it's time now to say why that is look at me like that you're not the boss of me anymore we a couple years ago instituted something that's called the wiss nation hero award which is presented annually to somebody in the community in the school district who goes above and beyond maybe under the radar for doing things for kids uh there's a plaque that exists out where 2017 you may know mr lenny robinson he made it his lifetime goal to help students of ambler in many many ways in 2018 even o'brien was recognized in this room for all the work she does to make sure the students particularly an angler have enough to eat all the time

005including over the summers which was awesome and then um the 2019 in this room right before things got dicey we recognized robin betterly for her work with the boys and girls club you recall she brings the fresh fruit and food to the club shows the kids how to cook it for their parents and then she sends them home with the same exact bag so they can cook it again at home so her commitment to kids is awesome then we're gonna take some years off because we weren't here and we didn't want to do this um so we're gonna get caught up and there's a new name on this 2020 says tina durkash [Music] so when i first got here mr akash took me under her wing immediately everybody here knows her for various different ways

006she made me feel like i belong now i'm a kid kind of um and she even offered me her dictation skills her shorthand skills which were amazing i never took advantage i didn't know how but i wish i did um and then way more importantly she always reminded me she always kept me grounded when we had a tough situation or we had something decision to make what's the best thing for kids i can remember her saying that multiple times but just do what's right for kids and that always helped me she was at that point helping me try to help kids i have a couple people here tonight who you might recognize we're going to say a few words about tina and just her com her incredible commitment to kids everywhere so first i'd like

007to reintroduce and re-welcome dr gary avamon to this room good evening everyone it's really nice to be back in this uh what i consider to be home away from home and um i will say that um to come back for this particular occasion is even extra special we know that in any organization there are those who are on stage and there are those who backstage and in this particular case we're going to celebrate someone who has a backstage role but who wore many many hats in one singular position and i must say her contributions to wissa hicken over the years has woven so much into the fabric of this community and she is to be credited with a lot that has taken place now tina has worn many many hats here and i'm just going

008to mention a few of them that sort of resonated with me over the years first what a historian we have in our midst tina is the one person you could call upon at any moment and you say do you remember when or can you tell me about this and she knew exactly what happened and she was like a running encyclopedia so definitely a historian for us she was tremendously resourceful and always reminded that tina's computer desktop was something to behold her desktop was more complete and full in fact she had several desktops you just have to keep sliding them because they kept going on forever but the beauty of that was i always had things in folders i could find everything easily but tina she could have a thousand things open and she could go

009right to the right screen right to the right file and knew exactly where it was quickly she was a computer kind of an i.t specialist of a different kind she was a tremendous coordinator she definitely um rounded up all of us cats and made sure that she was able to get the agendas ready each each month for the for these meetings and uh she was relentless in that i'll just tell you when i first came over here as assistant superintendent i could always rely on tina coming in to remind me of my agenda items needing to be ready and ready to go she was tremendous with calendar she wore the calendar hat and forming a district calendar is no easy task and tina really helped to keep that going and make sure we were on

010on the money but that hospitality boy you know i was at stoney creek as principal before i came over to the board office and and i will say that tina really was a welcoming person she brought her sell her friendship to the table she was there every day to greet me we had lots of great conversations but she was always there to be supportive and just let me know how much she's there to help and to make sure i had a smooth transition over here she's a people person and so she had relationships throughout the building and throughout the district people who knew her well and people the community as well she was a good listener she would listen to all of our tales of womb and uh she was also a let's get this

011done hat kind of girl too she really didn't want to see things wasted but let's get things going let's get things happening and last she also had a great advisor hat um she was often the one as jim said to say you know you might want to think about this or you might want to think about that and it was her very very subtle and and ginger way of saying maybe you're not going in the right direction on this or just do it there you go so um yeah so tina wore many hats and uh there's no question that she had an unwavering commitment to the reputation of wysick and school district and worked tirelessly to ensure that this district shown every single day and throughout its history she did everything she could to make

012sure wissa hicken was recognized for all the good things that it did and it had a wonderful reputation but i have to say the last piece that had she wore the best was probably her family hat and we know that family means everything to tina and this evening we want to thank her family for sharing tina with us for so many years so hats off to you tina durkash what an is what an asset you've been to wissa hicken and we couldn't have been more thrilled to be a part of your journey here with us it's very hard to capture uh such a career in some few words but gary thank you for coming back and doing that and the other person we have tonight is somebody who's very familiar with tina's commitment to kitts

013and he's our own mike benny who you've seen around here who makes this building run and our meetings run efficiently so mike [Music] um i'm the guy that's using behind the scenes you know getting the board meetings ready and closing up the building but tonight i feel honored and privileged to be here because about two weeks ago dr chris field and katie came up to me and said hey mike do us a favor i was like yeah what's that and they're like um we want to bring tina and we're gonna have tina and dirk kosh come back here i was like what wow really it's like i haven't seen her in two years but worked with her for 19 years so uh i was glad to hear that and they wanted me to say a

014few words now gary kind of tied her professional career together here and i want to talk about tina she did a lot of community service work and i got to see that firsthand because i actually worked with her in 2014 and i gave five years of my volunteer service helping the children i want to take you for a heartfelt um ride with her uh commitment to community service and when i mean ride we're talking about trucks from addicts i got to know tina and truck traumatics is very dear to her heart it's in memory of her late grandson whose name was maddox and maddox was a lovable little boy who loved to play with toy construction trucks and at a young age of two years old he was always willing to share which is very

015unique for a uh for a child and trucks for maddox was started by her son jace uh jason and her um the word-in-law um liz in pittsburgh uh in 2013 in loving memory of their son they decided to give back to disadvantaged children and by doing that they decided since maddox loved trucks let's collect trucks and it just happened to be that christmas was coming up and they uh decided to collect trucks and it was so overwhelming people just came from all over the suburbs pittsburgh and they just filled the place up with trucks and they collected 4 500 trucks that's amazing first year that was 2012 in 2013 tina durkash decided to do something here in philadelphia and um so she started her and her uh husband bill they set up a campaign and

016uh they got these drop big white truck boxes and put them up at the high school there was one in the cafe they were all over town and uh we collected some more trucks so uh 2014 i hopped on board i said tina i like to uh really help you because i work for a church and uh i know a lot of people in the northeast area that's where i'm from fox chase and i can really um get some trucks for you oh no mike you don't have to do that yeah that's okay just bring a truck or two in yourself well appreciate that no no i'm gonna really help you so she gave me a couple boxes labels tape so i take these big humongous boxes i place them in the different buildings chiropractor

017office three churches diner and i'm like okay let's see how this goes so all of a sudden i go back to the diner to church hey mike we got a lot of trucks that were filling up and that was getting me all psyched up so so we did good right tina the first year i come in here with 55 trucks and i was like i'm gonna do better next year tina no mike we appreciate whatever you have so the next year i really got onto my game i went to the minister at the methodist church and i said uh pastor can i have a pancake breakfast he says yeah yeah vote for what i said i want to do something special for a kickoff for this truck dramatics at the church and i thought a

018pancake breakfast people bring the trucks in they get free pancakes sausage juice coffee what a deal so they came bought trucks and this year i was like oh my goodness the trucks were overflowing i had to ask tina for another box or two so we did good that was in 2017. so in 2017 there was over um 8 000 trucks collected which is really great in philadelphia and pittsburgh so i just want to share this with you in closing the primary goal of truxxermatics is to bring smiles to disadvantaged children by gifting toy trucks to multiple charities on an annual basis the idea was based on maddox's love of um construction vehicles and his passion to share everything he had with his friends his parents fell only felt only fitting to give to others in

019memory of their son a simple request prompted a unexpected and incredibly overwhelming um outpour of trucks that um i think i need my reader glasses inadvertently transformed into a non-profit organization which was trucks for maddox a charitable trust it is the desire to maddox's family to continue this cause while honor maddox and keeping his spirit alive and i just have something i want to show you this is the logo tina gave me for all my uh work and i wear it proudly and the front it says truck dramatic so i wore this at every event that i would go to uh speaking of events trucks from addicts had a touch a truck event where the kids would climb on the trucks beat the horn get the photographs taken they also have a skating event on

020christmas day new year's eve uh morning skate uh ten dollars off you just bring a toy truck and here's a big one all you got fans uh they have a golf annual event every year in pittsburgh where uh tina's son lives and uh donations come in and money and it all goes to the charity and then uh my pancake breakfast and then all the drop boxes and uh we had a bowling event so you can see this is a very um beautiful thing that's um happening in our communities and i'm excited that i was excited to find out that tina told me there was a new giving the gift of clear vision eyeglasses where you see maddox tree mark were eyeglasses they always wore so the parents in 2020 decided to uh besides the toy

021trucks let's collect eyeglasses for uh parents to help their kids with their eyesight so in closing i just want to read real quick some of the charities that we donated to pittsburgh children's hospital of course in her faith for the homeless here in ambler children's hospital chop in philadelphia st place center for child protection health karo bob's pediatric center laura house maddie dixon community cupboard montgomery county office of children and youth children's home in reading pa north penn maui boys and girls the daily bread community pantry and thank you tina you deserve this night this night of recognition and [Music] everybody in this room thanks most important of all the children those thousands of children that were given these this gift of toys around the holidays thank you and somewhere up there in heaven and

022nomadic signs you so with that said congratulations tina for your community work all right so mike thank you and gary thank you so much um i think those actions speak louder than the words the the all of these these um so we say commitments on her part and and these um heartfelt gestures landed here in west nation in addition to pittsburgh so think about that how many kids here in this nation were the beneficiaries of this generosity so for that um reason tina durkash is our 2020 recipient of the west nation hero award i would probably um get a talking to if i made her come up and say a few words would you like to you don't have to [Music] thank you very much i am truly honored really thank you take a picture

023wonderful 10 years you will note and you won't be surprised that she ran out of here as as much as she is committed to the district she is not committed to public speaking or public uh venue so it took a great deal of trickery and dishonesty to get her here tonight all right mr [Music] okay so the real presentation tonight is the requested update on the achievement gap that the board asked for um this isn't this is not a replacement of or for the annual report we have in january but we realize there's some new faces there's some representations made in social media elsewhere about how we do things so we just thought it would be best to set the record straight and get some facts on the table uh it's a it's a brief

024agenda just it's kind of a recap getting rid of the same page of where things have been to find some things and share some ongoing work back in 2016 we launched our achievement gap 10-year attack plan and that since has spawned five annual public reports in this venue every january they're just they change slightly as we learn new things and as we um come to new conclusions but the construct is the same also uh you you may know we have our i form the superintendent's advisory council which consists of about 25 or so people from the community community members staff members to help be a conduit of information two ways they help share with me things they hear in the community we ask them to be the purveyor of information and facts back to the

025community and it's been very very helpful and within that group though we haven't met because of the pandemic we used to meet in person in this room and we'll get back to doing that uh very shortly 2018 we had our report these are called reports we're in this for the long haul we have to admit i think one of the keys achievement gap is nothing is changing overnight it occurred and it and it started through many many years so the solution is not going to be a short one we want to track academics we have a really good set of 10 indicators way better than what the state uses for their their very narrow view of things and we track those again with a little hiccup on the pandemic but we're going to continue to

026get back on that tracks very soon 2020 we just in this room we stated the brutal facts we had we stated very clearly we have not made any progress on any indicators since the last time and and we've we've morphed a little bit from targeted um kind of specific pause analysis to a more root cause analysis and we've we've come to realize that in terms of the gap that exists between students of different races at the cities there's a systemic racism at work here that creates an opportunity gap it belonging this or enrollment ap or gifted identification or all the things we've talked about there's an opportunity gap that exists and so then last in this past january our focus was we need a systemic solution it's a systemic problem it's not like okay we

027don't know how to teach reading to students of color okay that's not it at all it's lots of different things in the system that need to attention slowly but surely so that the whole thing gets fixed systemically so some terms here in our district we look at the achievement gap in terms of students from certain demographic groups currently achieving at lower levels in other students and the semantics are important there pennsylvania used as a term that's called historically underperforming students this distinction is really really important look at those groups that the state includes in their achievement gap analysis three groups they include special education students students with ips they include english learners and they include students from low-income households the state does not report out by race or ethnicity whenever you hear about the state

028talking about a district's achievement gap it does not have to do with race ethnicity we want it to here we want to be very direct in acknowledging the gap and dealing with a head-on so indicators we have a really robust set i'm going to go over all 10 but we go we do use some standardized test scores but we also use performance in the classroom like grades honor roll that kind of thing and we also include some other things such as which students are enrolled in ap classes for example this is a way better more robust look at achievement if you will or opportunity the state uses just standardized test scores there's so much wrong with using just standardized test scores we don't have enough time tonight to discuss that but they can they themselves

029can be biased and there's all sorts of test prep that can come in so while it is an indicator and we do care about standardized test scores especially in this week of pssa starting we know that there's way more to being a successful student and feeling like you belong and being part of west nation than just your test scores another key is that we are starting or we have already recognized the difference between academic growth and academic achievement so those test scores are a snapshot in time how much you know on april 26th about math and if you don't get too proficient by howard's measure of the state okay then you don't count for a yes and and while we do care about absolute levels of achievement and and west nation has actually got a

030really really good reputation for having our students rise to really incredible levels of achievement absolutely we also need to care about growth what about that student who came to us in grade three very much below basic in let's just say math grade four and let's say we did great things with that student and that student started to hit his stride and he's almost at basic he grew a lot over the year if we don't give him and us some credit for that growth we're missing things he does he's not just a one or a zero or a yes or a no he's a i grew a lot this year and i'm going to continue to grow over the next several years that's important and then i think it's also important to understand the difference between

031formative and summative assessments we've spoken about this a little bit in our in this venue our teachers use formative assessment every single day it's tactical it could be as simple as a ticket to leave slip where you you assess did your lesson land today so that's 24 hours or it could be something like the map tests which are given three times a year and as soon as we get those results back immediately that tells us where each student individually needs to grow summative things are at the end of a period typically a year like a think of it like a final exam or course okay and that's important it's a strategic thing to see how much you learned over the course of the year it doesn't help with instruction one bit because those kids leave

032the next year so the formative assessments and we do use those as part of our indicators are really really important so our ongoing work in this presentation about achievement gap and opportunity gap and our focus on students of color or students from low-income households we first want to make it very clear about though coming out of the pandemic our order of business is each and every one of our students there's a lot of things that need to get back on the right track a lot of needs academically socially emotionally and that that matters to us so all of our students matter as our first priority right now from there we have curriculum and program improvements multi-tiered system support is sort of like a way to not immediately dump a student in special education but meet

033their needs prior to that that's important we've spoken about foundations in this room that's a read that's going to be a reading improvement we've audited our curriculum for make sure it's inclusive and make sure that all students we see themselves reflected in their textbooks and in their curriculum and in their classroom conversations we've done work on identifying our students who might be gifted in a more inclusive way there there's a lot of curriculum and program improvements that we're working on and then just as importantly if not more so now is social emotional learning we have a steering committee set up for that it's been a little bit on hiatus during the pandemic we're returning this month we have gone to professional development on things like restorative practices we've infused sel throughout the entire day all

034day it's not a standalone lesson it's in every bit of the classroom that everyone feels as though they belong and feel as though that their school is a safe and comfortable place to be if you don't have that then it doesn't matter what you do with curriculum program you're not getting any learning staffing matters an incredible amount of work has gone into making sure that as best we can our staff our teaching staff mirrors the demographics of our student body we're not there yet we have said as much in this room very clearly that we have work to do we've also very proud of the progress we're making but it's hard and by the way and jeff and everyone can tell you that every day anybody every single district has this problem and it's a

035challenge and we're just going to work at it we value that be recruiting higher and then once they're once we get teachers here we retain and support them and then as i said annually in the annual report we'll we'll share out how we did over the preceding 12 months our dei work diversity equity inclusion we have a sustained multi-year professional development commitment to taking people on their own personal journey wherever they start no judging just get up but you just better start moving you need to move we need to all grow learn about things like implicit bias how it might be affecting your teaching your classroom your district leadership and how it might create hurdles for student learning this is really really important and this is not a one and done professional development thing it's

036a multi-year multi-session commitment and then lastly this thing about belongingness now we're going to i'm going to share a little bit with a vlog in a survey in a second but we believe that we've come to believe this this gets to the systemic kind of level where um a sense of belonging has got to be in place first otherwise we're never going to close the gap to the extent we want to and that goes for students and staff we fail them if they feel as though they're they are not valued or they do not belong in western schools we need that feeling of belongingness we're working on that now the recent survey um we administered in february we're not going to go over the all the details right now we have posted the details on

037our website or will tomorrow um people can view them there's lots of questions and you can see how the responses went for tonight the responses were very minimal in terms of race ethnicity differences but here's the thing we really need more we need we need to do this again which we will and we need to do better at how the survey was administered what survey instrument was used and perhaps most importantly how we engage some people to to interpret a very sophisticated instrument we didn't we didn't we've learned some things lessons learned we didn't set it up as much as we could have in the classroom we didn't like the the how and when you took it maybe even the y we'll get better at that and then and we're going to eventually seek to

038include families in the survey as well that's a pretty big next step we're trying to really lock down first the school step but ultimately we want to have families be involved in that process as well so in summary um how do we how do we sort of like keep the energy going we have a sense of urgency these things take time we are always looking for new strategies and ideas trying some dumping the ones that don't work keeping those that do talking with colleagues new strategies new ideas are good and we're going to track the progress and then we'll were reported out here openly and honestly and publicly so that's the summary of it it's it's not against a report all of our annual reports are on the website anyone's welcome to see the results

039by indicator i'm here to tell you they they haven't made we haven't closed the gap on any of them yet but we're gonna what questions might you have i'll start i guess um what a lot of people are going to hear is the sense of frustration uh that you feel that they feel um that you noted at the beginning that this is a 10-year attack plan that started in 2016. in 2020 there was an acknowledgment that that had narrowed and then we had a pandemic which means it could widen again simply because of that so from from my perspective when you talk about things like academic growth or belongingness they seem like data points to a certain extent and while it does take time and there is a sense of urgency what are the data

040points you are going to be looking for at the next annual report to see whether we in fact are starting to change the cycle um to not necessarily completely close the achievement gap but to start the process of getting people to understand that we're trying to trend in the right direction because it is going to take time so specifically are there data points that you're looking at the next time around um yes thank you the answer is yes our indicators are we're purposely chosen to span grade levels it starts with grade three which is our our local assessment of reading um uh grade four is our local assessment of math facts mastery grade five off top my head i think we go to pssa scores grades six might be honorable i'm not sure about these

041but they'll go from gpa how you did on the sat practice psat if you're enrolled in an apa class so we'll track all of those some of them might not be quite as applicable coming off of a pandemic i would say that of those the the grade three uh reading indicator and the grade four math facts mastery are the ones that would concern me the most because if as if a student is behind in reading early on then that just sets the stage for more gaff later so of of our ten indicators i would pick those two what about in terms of belongingness what types of indicators you're looking for so we don't have indicators of belongingness i think that's a really good point that what we intended the survey to do to be would

042be a an annual tracker of that people because belonging this really is about how you feel so um we'll use this year's survey as a baseline and and make the improvements that we spoke of next year and then annually we'll just track to make sure that not only is the tide rising for everybody feeling like they belong more than they do now but also that there are no gap we didn't perceive a gap out of this year's results but the flaw the flaws in the survey and the lessons we learned i think i'd rather reserve judgment on any gaps in belongingness until this time next year we can share the better survey results thank you jim just to follow up on marshall's questions so you mentioned grade three the reading success of students like i

043know at least one of the elementary schools we've had to cut the after school program because we did not have a teacher to run that program are the other elementaries continuing to do that program all right um so our approach to reading would be this we we want to as soon as we can identify students who are still emerging readers and we have now a very good formative assessment map in addition to the indicator uses the devil's results which can be done actually in the second grade also beginning of third grade we we want to have the reading if you will remediation or catching up the land squarely during the school day we don't want that to be an extra and we don't we our approach is not to have it be something that we

044need to tack on but rather integrate into all day behavior even if it's in science you there's a very good school of thought that says you can teach reading with science uh textbooks and science passages and whatnot every teacher is responsible for teaching reading all the time and things like the foundations curriculum is going to help us with perceived short short falls in grammar maybe or or coding decoding there's ways that we can get at the teaching of reading they don't require the after school boost however it's nice to have an after-school boost for identified students if they're able to come and willing to come and if we have skilled teachers able to help us with that program so those are three ifs that have to fall into place we'll provide the after school activities

045now and the future as often as we can given given those limitations and then do you anticipate sending the next one out next school year yes next school year we need to give people a little bit of time to just disassociate this one from that one otherwise a lot of survey burnout possibly late fall we haven't really finalized that yet i don't know um dr duwan is with us tonight uh dr ewan do you have a better sense of that is it late fall or winter what do you think that is correct late fall i have a question about oh sorry amy are you done one more question you mentioned you talked to other colleagues have you heard what other districts are trying we're not the only district that has this issue and obviously they're

046also trying things that they're kind of failing out and maybe there's some things they're succeeding driving sort of goal is that you can never really put your finger on what exactly worked you have to try a host of things and then to see if something worked or maybe the combination of those things worked so we do speak often with colleagues i would my the one example that comes to mind is ways to infuse sel into into the entire day so some colleagues will say well we have this program and it's and you know it's nice but it takes up 30 minutes every other day and that means we have that much less time for reading and math so we talk about that well that's not what we want we have this way that we can

047introduce routine in the morning to get kids welcome feeling welcome and settled and kind of ready to learn and maybe a wrap up at the end so you're not losing so much curriculum time yet you're injecting a feeling of belonging and comfort both right when they get here and before they leave those things we can hypothesize that they work we'll never be able to say that yep and we did those and then all of a sudden our gap closed by two percentage points but we can assess whether or not students feel like they belong and hopefully that results in but in turn results in closing the gap [Music] all right thank you yeah [Music] so my question was we're um collecting this data on belongingness but what strategies do we plan to use to increase

048belongingness do we have any of those uh we do i don't know dr dewan you want to share you you and i were discussing this today and i think you might be a little more versed on these yes thank you um you know many of the strategies are going to work in concert so when we think about the efforts around social and emotional learning and the impact that that will have on a student's sense of belonging is is in the research to show that there's that that will have a positive impact on that sense of belonging our efforts in looking at restorative practices ensuring that relationships are at the foundation in all of our classrooms those are things that are going to hopefully and we anticipate positively impact the sense of belonging for students um

049and thinking about across our school day ensuring that there's voice and choice in the classroom and the instructional strategies that teachers will employ throughout the day can also help to affect the sense of belonging so you know again it's that it's a layered approach and thinking about the many ways that we can um ensure that we're looking at how are we having students to think about themselves and and understand how valued they are having their voices be heard um having opportunities to connect with not only their teachers but also their their peers and so there are so many different things in terms of those strategies but those are just a few um that i could mention off the of the top of my head here i had a few things um thanks for the overview

050appreciate it and totally get that we need to look at quantitative and qualitative elements and how interwoven all these aspects are of education first question for the social emotional piece and we don't need to solve for it today but i would love to see a presentation about what we're doing from that perspective i do feel that with the pandemic that might have also widened the gap and want to understand what we have in place what we're trying to achieve how do we help our students feel you know socially and emotionally you know balanced how would may 2nd be for a very comprehensive presentation on that may 2nd may 2nd got it and then i know that we talked about this before and today was just an overview but i do feel strongly and i will

051say it again that maybe a once a year update is not enough and that more than just an overview was kind of what i was hoping we would get like we would actually get data points or data inputs or something for us to be like we're tracking well we're not tracking well here we need to do this so i was kind of hoping for a little bit more and i will continue to hope to see that and then i understand third grade is a critical year but i also have read that k through two are pretty important if you miss the gap if you miss it there it's kind of hard to catch up so what are we doing for leading indicators for k one and two so that we don't lose anybody in those

052critical critical early early early years so i hope to see some of that you you uh you're raising a very good point k to two uh great very very important while they're not on our list of 10 indicators that that series of formative assessments we spoke about are are incredibly valuable for younger students you don't really need to i mean it's just to inform the instruction in a first grade classroom say test taking is like an extended period of time is a little questionable but teachers are really skilled at very short snippets of formative assessments to know okay johnny's got those sounds down but i might need help over here so he goes in this small group today that assessment was administered 24 hours ago it's fresh and it's also relevant it's his scores were

053administered well in that great it doesn't the example doesn't exist but um forever at decatur 2 we're always doing formative assessments and molding instruction accordingly also before kids even get into kindergarten when they're registering we already know who's going to need extra help because they're put through a little bit of a assessment then we catch them early we do and and we offer them a uh pre-kindergarten summer program to that's more about socializing than academics affect us barely any academics but it helps them hit the ground running when they get here in kindergarten to start doing some academic stuff [Music] james point during our next quarterly report are there some data points of the list of various data points that we look at that can be shared out like maybe gpa or one of the

054other points i i will look into that i i don't want to say that we would have meaningful quarterly data points we just we don't it doesn't the way this works there aren't like leading indicators and other things the leading indicators are the formative assessments that that if we asked our teachers to compile all of that and in some reportable form it would be a lot of work they use it frequently but i mean we could give reporting grades it's just not going to really it's you need the year-end grade the quarterly grades aren't going to matter that much the psat practice psat happens once a year so that's out um mastery of math facts again the teachers are are constantly assessing that asking for a compilation more frequently is going to be a pretty

055heavy lift i don't want to leave anyone to think otherwise no i don't understand that i guess i understand zeppy's frustration like carrying it once a year and finding out there wasn't much progress and then having waited a whole another year to find out there wasn't much progress along the way we were sort of hearing what's working what's not working if there were some data points that we could see midway through the year or even quarterly if some of this stuff is available that could be shared out with us early not that we want anybody to scramble and gather extra information but things that come out at different points throughout the year if we could have that data yeah there's probably a nice array of things that we could probably look at like percentage of

056students hitting on a roll we get that data every marking period that should be an easy thing how about how many kids have enrolled in ap programs that should be readily available by marketing not marketing period but i guess semester like i think there's probably easy data points that we can look at just again so that we can see how things are are trending we can try jim regarding data i think it's less about the availability of data i think there's actually like tons of data and all kinds of different keys understanding like what are the right kinds of data points to be looking at and which ones make sense now i recognize that some of the student outcome data points we're looking at let's say like pssa results or let's say um one one

057thing i think is a good example that we've looked at in the racial equity committee is the representation of black students as an example in our gifted population right it's like dramatically way below the representation of the general population of students right so looking at that annually that's not going to change a whole lot right but we can have some um theories about what some of the root causes are for disproportional representation and to talk about things we're going to do to try to change that dynamic and that representation over time and the things to monitor is maybe the implement the implementation of those strategies which then over time we hope will improve the actual housing measures so for example in the committee we've talked about uh one of the barriers being how people are

058identified for even for testing into gifted and then actually get placement to give it and it's the process right now is driven either by teacher recommendation you know or parent you know pressure basically right but see those two things those are going to tend to i think be biased towards um white and more affluent students and then maybe even asian students and we see that i think in the representation of in gifted so one of the strategies we talked about is like how do we then make the testing process for identification of gifted take the human element out of it make it more objective and we are implementing this spring universal screening for all students so it's not reliant again on parent you know motivation or pressure or like the teacher recognizing it in a

059kid because we know that white teachers for example are more likely to recognize signs of giftedness in other white children and less likely in non-white children right so we know that from research so again the strategy was around universal screening for gifted so [Music] this spring we're doing that we can we can number one check on did we implement it how many kids were screened what are the proportion of kids who got identified and went on for full testing and did any changes in terms of who's getting admitted or put into the gifted program and is that happening so the overall picture it's going to take years to kind of play out right before we change that overall representation but in the meantime we can at least articulate you know what we think are the

060root causes what's a strategy for trying to address it and tracking our progress and implementing those strategies and then tracking on you know what sort of like implementation data points uh might lead us to believe that the strategy is working or not right so that's a different way to think about it again it's not just the bottom line indicator because those things take time to shift and change but if we're thinking about doing active uh we're taking active measures to try to change it we can at least report on that um and then that's a way i think that we as a board can kind of get a peek at progress that doesn't leave us you know kind of waiting on an annual basis to see if something happened or didn't any other comments or

061questions really quickly as a parent before i joined the board you know i think in the last year there's been a lot of progress in terms of hiring miss latorre forming the racial equity committee um and you know jim and minnie way really bringing this to the forefront um i mean it has been but even more we i feel like i feel your sense of urgency and i know it's not an easy problem to solve and so you know just being a parent not on the board i felt like the district was making it a priority and so i you know i appreciate you bringing this information to us so thank you for that yeah just to kind of build on what dean's saying is that every district around us has the same kind of

062racial equity challenges and issues and achievement gaps but you'll find very free very few districts that actually talk about it openly explicitly and certainly at the board table so i think that's if nothing else the fact that we as a board and administration are making commitment to to to talk about it openly and directly and trying to hold ourselves accountable for doing something different to change that dynamic is is a huge leap forward the progress can always be faster writing can always be more more impactful but i think the first step is that you know we're we're talking about it and we're acknowledging it and trying to do something about it jim i'm wondering if you can give us an update on two things i know there were two efforts underway at one point one

063was regarding belongingness to start a campaign with with visual videos and things like that that would be targeted to the students to to foster a sense of belonging if you can just share where we are with that program as well as the effort to engage the community on a more regular basis i know that we were looking at potentially libraries and community centers in the area at one point to offer additional support for students who who may fall within the gap is that still ongoing and are there any updates as to where that might stand as well thanks paul yes uh the we may have to get back to you in this test of the videos um we've had our community conversations uh regarding uh related topics to dei and seo we haven't been been

064we haven't re-engaged the idea of in-person um opportunities at places like the library um just because of the pandemic but i and we won't be able to get that this school year but i would envision us revisiting that in a coming school year just the same way we were talking about after school programs at the schools there are ways to provide extra supports if students can get there if students are willing to get there and if we have the staff to help us i think that's great i'm looking at this as a holistic approach that involves the community and all stakeholders to to play a part as well as the administration and the district and so the i think the more we can get those uh other organizations involved obviously coming out of the pandemic

065and when it's safe to do so i think i think would be great and the other thing i would also suggest if we haven't already potentially look into uh summer programs and uh other programs throughout the year when school's not in session where some of these other organizations might be helpful but again a holistic approach that involves the stakeholders within the community as well as a year-round approach to just allow us as much time as possible to try to work to to reduce the gap i think we would all benefit agreed thank you thanks paul anyone else questions or comments thank you so i don't see anyone registered in person we have one on zoom it's carmina taylor okay carmilla you can go ahead and amuse yourself [Music] so good evening everyone um i want

066to just say for zephy amy paul and joe i'm thoroughly impressed that you finally started asking questions that made a that really gave down to some answers so i was listening and i think you know zeppy last time you did specifically ask for gpas and the superintendent said yes that could happen i still think it could happen because in january 2021 you identified dr crestfield the disengaged and cloven slide students you hired temporary teachers on assignment to address those gap issues with those kids so why not see where their grades are now in 2022 so that's actually my question what are the grade levels for the disengaged and coveted slide students from 2021 and where are they in 2022 in terms of restorative justice i just want everyone to know that i attended the harvard

067university achievement gap institute and when you talk about restorative justice the outcomes are the number of detentions and suspensions that have been reduced so then my second question is did you guys survey the parents the black parents uh black parents of boys that have a propensity to have greater detentions and suspensions whether the code of conduct policy is working those are the those are the repeat offenders those are the ones that get in trouble that's what you need to gauge your outcomes with um the keystones two of the white parents that spoke last month or the last board meeting clearly provided data that showed the slides in the keystones which warranted the question of why we should have more accountability other than once a year so why not be honest about the keystone exams i

068like the idea of the number of honorable and ap courses um i did a right to know request and found that when the superintendent did um his presentation in 2016. there were seven black children from k to 12 identified in the in the gifted program and now um the most recent data shows 10 so that's a yield of three in five years that right there is a data point that needs to be addressed i have eight school districts in montgomery county that i oversee we are doing the penn survey belonging they're anecdotal they do not produce data points we need more answers paul thank you for acknowledging that the community needs to be part of the process i'm down 14 seconds i'll be back at the second public comments but please take note of the

069questions i asked thank you thank you katie is there anyone else registered online no more speakers okay thank you then we will move on to our board president report and first my informational item i'd like to announce that our new pspa liaison is going to be dan congratulations and thank you for your service duffy and i'm excited to hear your upcoming reports we had our first thing today so we'll have our first report this evening um and then i have two action items uh which is the approval of a resolution number w522 for the appointment of wave t coleman is business administrator for document six one and the approval of timothy p matthews is board treasurer for the 2022-2023 school year and those will both be voted upon at our next board meeting any questions

070all right then we'll move to our superintendent report okay thank you the informational item is just an update on our our list of district goals and ongoing priorities for the year this is update number two the first update was in february and the next one will be in june um i won't read the goals themselves we should be familiar with them by now but the district goal one has to do with investigating later school start times and uh i think we are making a very good headway on on that front this month and next month the community or the advisory committee is is going to hear some presentations over the summer we'll create some specifics and then come fall this room will have uh some presentations on what options exist specifically for whisking given our

071geography and given our transportation and then we'll be able to gather feedback from board community students family staff and remember our ultimate target is to is to vote on something in january so we have time to implement it uh in september of 2023. so lots of work to do and we already have thank you to ryan and jeffy for being on that committee and you're going to hear a lot of talking in the next couple months our next goal is to create an annual discussion and accountability cycle for the board's racial equity oversight committee and we have certainly done that as to dovetail with the district's equity planning committee and in our monthly meetings of what's known as affectionately known as ryok we do speak we did examine a list of things that can be

072first addressed such as as joe pointed out the the gifted program and then and then come back to it with either impressions from the last meeting or thoughts since the last meeting from the people on the committee and then so so as we just don't talk about something and then dump it it's more of a scaffolding effect goal three as you may remember is to support the implementation of strategies and activities that are designed to enhance a sense of belonging for all students i think we've discussed those a good bit already which will combine with enhanced target instructional supports and and uh same for those this was created crafted obviously coming off of what we knew was going to be a pandemic the bends the covet bends as it's being referred to and we have

073lots of things in place that i think we already just discussed uh four a is to develop and improve a 2022-23 budget that meets all of our needs and challenges and is both fluid and flexible that progress is underway finance committee had a budget workshop earlier and has one more in may before the board will consider the final budget later in may four b is to develop and implement a financially sound capital improvement plan for both the high school athletic fields and the former pool area of middle school and both of those projects are underway we have funding identified for both and the design team for both is busy at work getting those documents in order five a is to systematically review the second third of the district's policy manual yes that's happening it's another

074another chunk tonight to review and we will finish year two of the three year goal this year so we got one more year to go we can do it and five b is to devise and implement a plan for a total redesign of the district's website and that work is ongoing and i know that zephy and her communications committee will could perhaps give an update on that but lots of work is being done getting some good feedback and i think the progress is being made there so those are our goals any comments or questions for jim well thank you so much for that report you're welcome and my one action item just for review tonight is the the revised calendar for this existing school year um we will have one fewer weather days needed than

075scheduled so school will be out one day earlier in june so i i hear lots of objections to that would like would people like to go later i don't think no no okay sashi i'm sure you would prefer june or no you're over quiet over there no i'm definitely very excited to get one day earlier and that one day really counts okay fine it's decided then fine well thank you so much for your report tonight jim any questions or comments at all no all right we'll move on to dr juan's report hi good evening uh there are no informational items and no action items this evening all right thank you dr juan thank you we'll move next to our board solicitor report jeff i have no report i talked to you enough in executive session

076well thank you jeff all right we'll move next to our board secretary thank you there's no informational item and at the next meeting we will present for approval uh various minutes including the march 14th budget and facility meetings march 24th excuse me 21st racial equity oversight committee the march 28th work session public meeting minutes the april 4th regular public meeting minutes and the april 18th policy committee meetings thank you wade any questions or comments on those no wait can you go ahead with the board treasure report yes thank you no informational item and at the next meeting we'll be presenting for acceptance finiting the treasurer's report for march 31st 2022 for document 11-1 thank you raid any comments or questions thank you all right we'll move on next to our director of human races report

077danielle hi good evening tonight there are no informational items a four-year review are nine action items under 12 b the first two action items include retirements resignations appointments changes of status leaves of absences extracurricular changes and volunteer additions action items three and four are a revised staff job description and a new extracurricular job description item five is for the approval of our agreement with sts um who provides our substitute teachers item seven is a conference request and items eight and nine are the approvals of the wizard administration um act 93 agreement uh act 93 and confidential salaries that were will be effective on july 1st per the employment agreement stated in july of 2021 and also were board approved in may of 2021. so that's all that's all i have and that concludes my report

078thank you so much danielle any comments or questions all right well thank you again we'll now move on to our committee reports what's our communications committee stephie hi i have a couple of updates informational uh one uh as dr cressfield uh mentioned there is some work being done on our website um kristen rowlands and jennifer moore house are the women who are behind the scenes doing all the hard work so kudos to them they are looking at every single page and getting feedback from the different departments and through the different stakeholders to make sure information is relevant updated and you know has everything that needs to be provided they are working with reorganizing some of the content with the middle school and the high school human resources etc they're changing out um some of the

079uh information on the athletic page which once you get into middle school and high school is a very important page because every day is different um they are still talking to different vendors to kind of see where we're going to move the platform i think that decisions not going to be made for a little while so they're still assessing and then they will continue to have discussions through all of maine all of june so that they could go through all of the content and make sure that they've had it once over with everybody so i asked per timelines it looks like everything is trending really well they're on track and can't wait to see this new website so nothing glorious to report other than all the work and the hard work is being done right

080now the second item um that i will inform on um as again dr chris fields mentioned ronnie and i are on this subcommittee for the school start end times there's an advisory committee again that's across stakeholders so we are the two board members but we also have teachers students as well as the community be part of this so there is a meeting tomorrow and at tomorrow's meeting we will get presentations about how some other districts have fared with this change so that will be really nice to see and then we're also going to hear from the athletic director to hear about how schools deal with after school sports because that creates another element that we need to work through and then um the third bullet says a day in the life of our students so

081i'm assuming they're just gonna walk us through what you know this new schedule would potentially look like so i'm excited to hear how those go and then there'll be another one in may as well so um we're we're going to continue to have these advisory council meetings so that we can get all the questions that i think all of us and our our community has about what this might do to everything because it impacts more than just your star type right that's all i have for today does anybody have questions sepi i do um the meeting tomorrow night is that open to the public so this is just for those who are in the community my understanding and jim keep me honest here is once we've gone through all of this some version of what

082we see gets done here at the school board but that won't happen until like next school year that's correct this is we're in the um fact-finding stage i would call it and an opinion gathering stage is not for feedback on specific ideas once once we finish with this committee work over the summer we're gonna we're gonna put together documents that would be required to for everyone board community staff students um to take a look at okay well here are three options this this is how whisk could do it with where say we flip the start times this is how whisk could do it if we just slide all the start times later and this is some third thing that wistas came up with because we have already triple tier busting or double tier and it's

083it's can be something else it's going to require some creativity over the summer and then the all everything else from there will be a public maybe with zoom and in person or maybe some first we haven't figured out yet but open to everyone okay great thank you and i i guess i could provide an update of like at our next meeting yeah any other comments or questions i think i have a quick quick comment actually so it is possible that we are going to be in permanent daylight savings starting in spring of 2023 and i just want that to be kept in mind as the philadelphia sunrise would be at about 8 in december and january so just for my elementary kids and the time thanks thanks dan any other comments or questions all right

084uh we'll move on next to our curriculum and technology committee report ronnie i have nothing to report that in a way dr dewan may have some things to say yes thank you we have one informational item this evening and several action items item 14 a1 is our informational item and this is a focus on our district's comprehensive plan for 2022 through 2025 every three years districts prepare and submit a comprehensive plan to the pennsylvania department of education the comprehensive plan demonstrates the district's commitment to continuous improvement of leadership teaching and learning in an effort to ensure all students excel to their fullest potential the comprehensive plan identifies priorities and action plans with steps to address the established priorities our comprehensive planning process was coordinated by me as the assistant superintendent and steered by three essential

085groups leadership council which is our administrative team the district's equity planning committee and the board's racial equity oversight committee in total these three groups represent members from all stakeholder groups including students parents and guardians staff administration board members and community members and over the course of the school year each group met monthly at their respective meetings to explore data reflect on current practices and identify action steps for improving our efforts in the district for moving forward many of those action steps are now reflected in our district's comprehensive plan for 2022-2025 the plan is now posted on our district's webpage for a 30-day public review period and we will seek board approval of the plan at the public board meeting on june 6 following the 30-day public review period excuse me and this evening we have

08614 action items in section 14b of the board agenda and will be seeking approval for these items on may 2nd i guess i should pause if there are any questions about the information item before moving on to the action items okay one question so um help me understand for the period that it's open for public review and the public pose questions and kind of impose inquiries and if so is is it through here through the board meeting or is it through some other fashion that folks should make that request that's a great question thank you for that um they could certainly of course ask questions or present feedback at either board meet board meeting they could also direct those queries or um comments to me via email um at md1 wsdweb.org thank you for that

087all right um with our 14 action items in section 14b of the board agenda walk through each of these item number one is related to the instructional days for our seniors as it stands now at the conclusion of the 21 22 school year our seniors will have 179 instructional days they began the school year with 180 days of instruction on our calendar however one day was lost due to inclement weather conditions when this happens districts may submit a request to pde for an exception to the required 180 days but of course we must first seek board approval the day that we will be recommending for this act 80 exception is august 25th 2021 which was uh the day that included in-service activities centered on curriculum planning and professional development so on may 2nd we will

088be seeking approval from the board for us to submit this request for an exception to pde the next item is number two the gateway to college partnership is an opportunity for our identified students to take classes at the montgomery county community college to earn credits for their wissa hicken high school diploma while also earning college credits this partnership began in 2013-14 school year when the district entered into the partnership with the mccc and the gateway to college national foundation to provide an alternative pathway for students who are at risk of not being successful in the high school environment and or dropping out our district pays the program fees associated with students selected to participate in the gateway to college program and for the 22-23 school year we anticipate uh that there will be no more

089than 12 semester openings allotted based on student need with the cost not to exceed 43 000 for item number three we will be seeking approval uh to renew our agreement with the montgomery county community college for the 22-23 school year for our high school students to enroll and participate in college credit so this is a dual credit program which is different than the program i just mentioned um so for this dual credit program we have an annual agreement and we'll be submitting requests but excuse me we'll be seeking approval for that agreement on may 2nd for item number four each year the mciu administers and coordinates billing efforts for the school-based access program the access program allows districts to receive federal medicaid reimbursement for certain therapies delivered to some of our students who are receiving

090special education services this is an annual agreement with the mciu and there are no changes from the previous agreement for item number five the mciu shared service profile for the 22-23 school year is an estimated cost of what the mciu believes the district services will encompass in document 14-5 you'll see the plan's adjustments are noted in both red and blue text to indicate the district's recommendations this shared services plan demonstrates anticipated services to support our students for item number six document 14-6 includes a memo requesting approval of curriculum instruction budget expenditures planned for the 22-23 school year this includes instructional resources annual assessment and software renewals and annual district memberships for item number seven as we know stage two of the district's curriculum review cycle for social studies has come to completion the planned courses

091of study listed have been revised and are now being recommended for approval as noted on document 14-7 this was an informational item at the march 28th public board workshop meeting and the 30-day public review period and excuse me began on march 29th and on may 2nd will seek approval for the adoption of these planned courses of study for social studies for item number eight these are instructional resources that are being recommended for final approval to support the instructional programs in k-12 social studies k-12 english development english language development and grades 912 mathematics as such we'll be recommending these resources to be purchased to support the delivery of the respective curricula the 30-day public review period opened on march 9th and will seek final approval on may 2nd for item number 9 the mciu virtual high

092school consortium partnership offers courses reserved for students who are in our biotech allied health program these courses are also reserved for students in our gifted program that exceed the courses we offer in the building for example if a student accelerates through all of our math courses that are offered they could take a math course during their senior year through the vhs platform this is an annual agreement with no significant changes from the previous school year for item number 10 the montgomery county intermediate units montgomery virtual program the mvp is a provider for our wiki and virtual academy the wva uh students in grades k-12 will continue to be able to choose to enroll in the wisa hicken virtual academy next school year this is an annual agreement with no significant changes from the previous school

093year for item number 11 there are two requests for extended field trips uh the high school's jazz band and the middle school invention convention the high school jazz band comprised of 35 students will travel to harrisburg pennsylvania on friday june 3 to perform at the state capitol the band was personally invited to perform by representative mary jo scanlon this is the first time that the band will perform in the state capitol since 2006. how exciting and congratulations and at the middle school four middle school students won the pennsylvania invention convention and have qualified for the national invention convention in dearborn michigan these students will travel with their parents or guardians of the national convention on monday may 30th and return on friday june 3rd congratulations to those middle schoolers right on number 12 we have

094an annual renewal for the appointment of our school physician and school dentist for the 20 excuse me for the 22-23 school year there are no significant changes from the current service agreements and more information of course is included in document 14-12. item number 13 will be seeking ratification about place services and tuition costs for three students as indicated in document 14-13 and finally for action item number 14 we will seek approval of the outpost services and tuition costs for one student as indicated in document 14-14 and that concludes my report this evening are there any questions of course i have this is quite the list um so i'm just curious for especially items two three and nine how do students even know that these programs are available to them like is there an outreach is

095it like known uh because i think we're phenomenal that we offer this i just want to know you know is it well known yes thank you i know that um you know this this idea of how are we communicating to students and families and ensuring that they're aware of the various wonderful programs that the district has to offer is something that we've reflected on through our various committees through i think and with the administrators in particular the middle school and high school um to ensure that those conversations are happening as students are progressing before they get to the high school that they're aware of those programs um and i know that there is a big event at the high school where they look at all of the programs available for students and make sure that

096families are well-versed and informed and we've been working on how are we helping at the middle school level families to become aware and some of that includes conversation some of it includes communication written communication but some of it also includes updates that we've made to our website for families to know all the offerings that are available this is an area that we're continuing to reflect on and certainly are open to feedback all right thank you thank you dr john i have a question um can you can you refresh my reflections to the purpose of the school dentist and doctor like what role they serve for our district specifically yes yes we do have um services that the district is required to to provide we had some conversation recently it seems about the same topic um

097what those um the costs that we provide that are required for those services um pde requires that we have certain health screenings certain dental screenings that occur in certain grade levels um and so they are they the relationship that we have with them helps support those pde required screenings that we have to provide for all students and again at certain great levels i don't have it in front of me but i'll i'll be sure to send a vote to the board so that you have that information and the only reason i ask is i see the school physician he's pretty close by in jenkinstown but the school dentist is in voorhees over in new jersey is this somebody we would refer students to to go for any sort of like dental assessment that we would

098need to report that's a great question thank you and it helps me to provide greater clarity so they would come on site into our school to do those screenings oh great thank you any other questions or comments all right seeing none we'll move on then thank you so much dr juan thank you uh next we have our finance committee report david [Music] i'm so sorry facilities facilities joe all right for the facilities uh committee we have one informational item it's essentially a recap of the facilities committee meeting that we had on april 19th we spent the majority of the time talking about um bluebell elementary expansion and alteration options uh this is in response to our projected increasing enrollment and capacity issues at blue bell um i see this i see the slides up here

099are we planning on walking through these slides jim i think there was a request just to do a quick summary of the main three options okay right yeah so there were three main options approaches that the architects reviewed with the committee last week and in essence we sort of settled on option three is the the preferred option um for expanding capacity at blue bell um [Music] i don't know wait if you want to just jump to uh that the actual slide we could just talk through at a high level what option three entails high level got it um so option uh one providing for a full build of the multipurpose and which would be for the gymnasium cafeterium and a large group space plus classrooms one of the advantages is based on the fact that

100it's on the um one tip of the building it wouldn't have an incredible amount of construction impact some but not an awful lot um all of the options improve the traffic and circulation um some of them you know slightly different than the other ones um and the one other con that we the one con that we had is noted uh from the educator standpoint the long distance uh from k to the end of the new construction and that there's no back corridor as is we will see in um item three um wait um just in the interest of time maybe we could just jump straight to option option or concept number three yep understood option two was not particularly uh loved by the committee so we are going to skip that option three is could

101you flip two more that's it thank you option three is construction of um basically the same facility in the back with the uh classrooms going along the back as a corridor so it's really just a flip conversation to the back of the building the educators generally liked the fact that it gave more of an educational feel and connectiveness for the building one of the cons is that it is the highest cost it will be a difficult construction just because we have so many points of continuous construction to current uh education you know going on during the day so that will be a bit of a challenge and it also creates more of an impact to the um to the bus garage we have to essentially take some of the woods in that dark gray in

102the upper right hand corner and convert it into [Music] a bus garage facility needs because we're stealing some of the bus garage for the parking in the playground in the back we we also had the design team based on board input there was a request to consider whether or not we'd be able to do a bus loop in the back and can you call that up so based on the board input the design team jerry and architect and some engineering support as well they designed a loop that pretty much completely changes the um structure of how people are getting in and out so in the yellow in the back up to the top of this picture is um a bus loop so you would come in to the bus garage the same way you would

103come if you were parking and then we've created an additional loop with an additional exit off to the top the advantage to that was based on some of the board voice concerns about leaving the playground area which is on the bottom center left and that would allow for the playground and the hard surface to remain one of the disadvantages would be again um we are not going to increase the exit capacities for the leaving cars so they would go back onto symfony lane so that is a bit of a disadvantage um we're still fleshing through the various details to this but uh the design team thought it would be appropriate to just quick put it up the for the board um if there's any reaction to it based on the board feedback did mrs farlow

104have any reaction to this kind of or did she see it yet she's seen it uh great question thank you um assault came together today at about noon so i've sent it to um mrs farlow but i haven't heard anything back yet okay thanks the one thing wade with that um recent variation it does actually separate the the bus and um passenger car traffic in the front of the building that's currently there now so if nothing else that that's an improvement thank you yes um so again there were three main concepts that we looked at to be settled on option three the slides this slide deck will be available on the website so folks want to take a look at some of the other um site plan concepts but um you know three is again

105where we had some consensus around that um the overall cost of that was in the neighborhood of um i think it was about 21 million or maybe 21 to 23 million depending on whether or not we wanted to have the alternate option of adding some additional classrooms um as part of concept number three so um i mean it will certainly improve the capacity and i think alleviate the short and long-term capacity he's a bluebell but it does come with a pretty sizable cost that we have to take into consideration um in addition to taking a look at bluebell and some of the construction options there to alleviate overcrowding we also took a look at concepts for renovating the former pool space at the middle school and the basic approach would be to convert that into

106additional classroom space a total of six classrooms um were part of the design and we took a look at some schematics associated with that as well now i think the the rough sort of initial ballpark estimate for that project if i recall was it was it about 5 million yeah 5.4 million thank you yeah okay so um if some some folks might recall is that we looked at renovating the former pool space um a few years back at that point thinking about turning it into a performing arts space and we had earmarked the budget of a neighborhood of six million dollars so fast forward to where we are now it's a different approach with a different set of goals more instructional space but the overall price tag being a little bit less than what we

107were sort of contemplating a few years back so um that's a that's a good development there in addition we took a look at some results from a traffic study in the high school area where really the the road between the high school and middle school mcmahon did some analysis and put together some recommendations on improving traffic flow but i think based on the discussion we decided to table those recommendations for now until we have a clear understanding of what's going to happen with the later school start times for the fall 2023 and based on that then we may revisit the whole uh recommendations around traffic flow but there's a thought that with later school start times we're going to actually just naturally alleviate some of the traffic injection congestion that currently happens on that road

108and then aside from those um reports and updates we then reviewed some of the action items which are going to be a four vote for next week and wait can you run through those action items that we have on from silly's list thank you so um item one is discarding uh and selling obsolete equipment we do this a couple times a year we have the modular connection which is the electric data installation at 123 000. we have co-stars supply bids which we have every year totaling 164 000 to various vendors and mr moore walked through why this has been positive for the district and the final one essentially [Music] ties us with the montgomery county intermediate bid to various providers and this provides the ability for mr moore to lock in the actual pricing when

109it's beneficial to the district thanks wade any uh questions about the either the action items or the informational update on last week's committee meeting nope okay that's my report then thank you thank you joe all right now david the finance committee thank you amy um let's see our informational item from the finance committee is a a recap of the april 19th meeting of the budget well finance committee budget workshop where we received an overview of fairly good detail from dr hain mccloskey considering special education and the many facets that go into that department and what they deliver that particular uh component is expected to increase around four percent i believe in this budget and um we also got um reviews of the regular education component support services business services and student transportation we revisited [Music]

110a review of new programs and item requests that has been prioritized to some extent to help us uh better decide what if any of those can be funded or left behind they're all certainly going to be valuable additions if we can find the way to fund them but that's part of the discussion that will happen at the next meeting which is to occur may 9th at 6 30. wade would you like to add anything to nope okay thank you would you mind going through the uh action items thank you so the first item is the standard approval of the financial reports for documents 16-1 the second item is as we discussed the meeting as part of the state process we need to propose a final budget which will then be available for public inspection we

111will advertise it make it available at various locations and put it on the website etc and that document is included in the packet is document 16.2 it includes a 3.37 tax increase which is as we've discussed that again can change between now and when we adopt it uh next month item three is a follow-up from the last meeting which is the approval of the waiving of the stadium usage fees for the rotary club item 4 is [Music] receiving a proposal and the approval of the fox rothschild annual legal services retainer and other and that is included in document 16 3. item 5 is the approval of the proposals from melee falconero item document 16-4 and the last item is item 6 which is the list of payments issued for the month ending march 31st 22

112for document 16-5 any questions or comments no all right well thank you so much david and wave that report we'll move now to our policy committee report marshall thank you amy uh we have two informational items this evening the first is a recap of the april 18th policy committee meeting the second one ties into the recap it is the policy manual review summary per document 17 1a at this last meeting um we discussed the end of the employee related policies uh rounding out the the 300 series that we will be looking at for the remainder of the year there were four items which uh were up for review two had to do with sabbatical leave uh one for administrative employees and the other for certified employees uh there was one provision regarding drug and substance

113abuse relative to all employees and then uh the fourth was the look back measurement for the health plan eligibility under the affordable care act relative to our bus and van drivers only because of that there were six different provisions up for deletion as they essentially are now outdated and wrapped up into uh newer provisions so uh we have now finished up the 300 series essentially for the year we'll be moving on to the six to 900 series in the fall and next week we will uh be looking for under our action items tonight you will see we'll be looking for approval of the first reading from our work session um [Music] of these policies that we went over i did have a quick question though for katie i did not see on b one through

114eight sections 338 or 357 did i is that not included in in the vote for next week uh 3 30 for sabbatically for administrators where there were no changes so there's nothing to review to vote upon and then 337 the same thing they're just 357 seven yeah thank you okay so next week again we'll be looking for approval of the first reading of action items b one through eight wait thank you marcia are there any questions or comments all right seeing now we'll move on into our racial equity oversight committee report paul thank you amy um we have one informational item which is a recap of our april 18th meeting we had two [Music] presentations by the by the administration both were fantastic one was the update regarding the racial disproportionality in special education programs

115and the second was the results of the belongings survey for students and staff we've already heard from dr chris field earlier in his report about the belonging survey at least an overview on belonging i'll ask dr dewan if she can give us a brief overview of the disproportionality in special education programs yes thank you and so at the meeting on april 18th the committee focused on as mr badger said special education services is one of the the agenda topics the district presented information on the disproportionalities in special education for students in pde's chat who are receiving services through chapter 14 which is special education and chapter 16 which is gifted education and the steps currently taken to address those disparities in identification and discipline and in student placement and we also highlighted the next steps

116and shared research on best practices to address these trends this topic is one that we'll loop back around for this committee to continually review and reflect on progress that we're making in terms of ensuring that we are mitigating the disparities that we see thank you dr dewan as i said there were two fantastic presentations one thing of note we did also recognize that there is some overlap between the special education program disproportionalities as well as the achievement gap that's something that we will probably take a look at moving forward as well there were no action items uh for this week and so uh if there are any questions or or comments paul i just want to make a comment on the the term disproportionality which is a kind of a mouthful when we use that

117term essentially what we're talking about is um if you look at the the demographics of the district as a whole and the representation of different students white black asian etc um if our systems were equitable and sort of you know no other factors at play what you'd expect to see when you look at the specialized population when you look at the gifted population when you look at who gets suspensions um and more serious serious or disciplinary actions that you'd see similar proportions and based on the presentation that we looked at in our own actual data we saw wide disparities and over-representations of in particular black and latino students in sort of the negative areas and you know under-representation on some of the positive measures and so that's the disproportionality that we're referring to where it

118it's not representative of the district population as a whole as a whole and um we do have some serious uh disproportionality issues to address and try to tackle and again similar to a lot of the achievement gap stuff this is data that's sort of been built up over time and for us to try to unpack it and improve it it's going to also take time but the first step is number one acknowledging it trying to come up with some strategies for how we can address root causes put those um action plans around around in place to address it implement it and then hopefully over time see changes on the outcomes um but yeah it's important um data for us to be aware of and even more important for us to do something about what i

119noticed was that um the agenda and also the report that we look at looked at actually both reports were not available on the district website so i would ask uh maybe dr dejuan um or kd to make sure that those are available for the public to see if they weren't able to attend the meeting thanks thanks joe any other comments or questions all right well thank you so much for that report paul all right so now we will move on to our report of board representatives extracurricular marshall uh there's nothing to report at this meeting okay i also have nothing to report on the mci board of directors or legislative committee we haven't had a meeting since my last report uh north monco technical career center ronnie or david i think it's my turn um

120the committee uh the joint operating committee met uh last week and uh her presentations uh about uh the uh i guess it's a reflective uh assessment tool that the different departments use and uh collecting data that they report to the state which kind of illuminating about how they evaluate their uh progress uh and their uh effectiveness um we heard uh from mrs gina part of it she was the director that they just wrapped up their enrollment application process for this year they're over subscribed by a significant number of spaces i think they had 450 applications for about 300 seats in next year's programs so that's a pretty good situation to be in but apparently that has been a trending for the last few years [Music] and so i'm not sure that there's any remedy to

121that but if you want to get into those programs and i guess the little preparation would be good um until we can find ways to expand those and then finally there was a car show a couple of weeks ago that was hosted by their uh educational foundation that they have at the tech center they had a some concern that it wasn't going to go over because the weather was pretty lousy in the morning but it cleared off they filled up the parking lot and raised i think around 16 thousand dollars for the foundation of the success overall and uh other than that it was pretty much routine business that we considered thanks so what happens to those 150 overage does that mean like 150 kids of the 450 because there's only 300 seats are not

122gonna get a seat so will they move to a lottery first time you know first come first serve or do you make the cut like how does that work yeah it's a um imagine the most complicated scheduling challenge with getting five districts with five different schedules some students are part-time some are full-time some programs are oversubscribed some have capacity and if a student wants is interested in one of the over-subscribed programs there's an allotment they try to do it as fairly as they can it's not like a first come first serve older students get a little little preference they try to allocate it by district as best they can they try to give students who started part time and are going to go to full time and preference you know it's there's like there's must

123be eight different variables they roll into this equation to figure out how to allocate their slots and then they start talking to the students about well what about this program instead which is which is a conversation i don't quite understand because the student is interested in saying well thank you and and he or she goes to the tech school for welding or woodworking or whatever yeah don't go to cosmetology from there but in any event they they're very cognizant of the need to to be fair about it to to give students as as equal a chance as possible at all the programs and this problem that david described is actually a a good problem to have in the sense that there's lots of interest which i love from the text of students in the tech

124school and all five of the districts so um yes expanding programs is not something can happen overnight and they track interest in their programs religiously so if if they can see that the trend is down and a particular program for three years in a row goes on probation and then they phase it out and they can maybe double this other one over here but it's kind of a slow process all right any other questions or comments all right thank you so much for the report all right and our new psba liaison dm thanks i know it's late but we had a really exciting day amy and i went to harrisburg and there was a psba which is the pennsylvania school board association advocacy day and so we met with several of our representatives to talk

125about a couple of things a few things that we're advocating for is charter school reform i know ron had talked a lot about this when he was on the board but basically the charter school when someone enrolls in a cyber charter school they take the money that we spend on them with them and they don't have a brick and mortar there's much you know there's fewer operating expenses but there's no limitations and no reporting on what they spend their tuition dollars on and there's one estimate that cyber charter schools have spent 30 million dollars of pennsylvania taxpayer dollars on advertising alone and so this you know a little bit less so for wissa hicken but this is a huge problem statewide and i know it does affect our budget as well um another problem that

126districts are encountering is just growth in fixed costs in the last 10 years pension costs have increased 533 percent and then like i mentioned the charter school tuition costs have increased 128 and this is about 70 percent those two numbers account for about 70 percent the increase in expenditures per student over the last 10 years and these are two fixed costs that like we can't do anything about and so basically um our funding is falling short and so then that falls on the taxpayer the other issue is um special education costs outpacing revenue so in um 2010 about 38 roughly of district costs were were covered by state and federal funding but in 2020 that dropped to 25 um initially with special education mandates congress um uh said that it would fund 40 of the

127costs and the mandates that they put on districts but that has not happened um to give you an example mr hicken we spend about almost 21 million dollars a year on special education and we get state funds of about 2.4 million dollars so when that doesn't stay um when those funds don't stay on pace and our costs rise unfortunately that we have no choice but to uh raise that money by raising property taxes so it was really eye-opening um about you the funding that's needed in education so we went to the representatives and asked for a basic funding education for special education funding charter school reform mental health increased spending for mental health and then increased funding for career and technical um uh education which is a timely conversation i suppose um yeah so amy

128do you think that it was it was i had a really good day i learned a lot i got to talk to other school board members from other districts and as well as some business managers and superintendents and um it was really interesting i think you covered it really well i really enjoyed it as well and i was really surprised at the number of unfunded mandates what was the 140 144 unfunded mandates that the federal government or the state says you have to do this but then gives you no money to do it and so that's the position that we're in like do i want my taxes raised no i don't but like we're in a position where how are we going to fund our programs if we don't do that so yeah well thank

129you so much for that report all right so we are are there any questions or comments to her report yeah i just have one question what what were some of the examples of the unfunded mandates rosetta i have a whole list of 144 that i can show you um and actually i don't know jim is there a way we could get these slides on the website i don't know if they yes we do because they're fascinating and it's just great it's just so so interesting so like this whole page you know we'll white out all your handwritten notes on them no no i have a blank copy perfect yeah blank copy and dean if you could also um include the sagan fact sheet if we could add that to the website yeah that's very interesting

130good idea yeah any other questions or comments all right well again thank you all right we're now at our second public comment period i have no sheets for in-person comments is there anyone online none okay oh okay carmina you can go ahead and unmute yourself so i want to talk about facts here's a fact on september 12 2016 the superintendent offered me an opportunity to be on his advisory council i don't know if it was a year or two later but then i was dismissed off of his advisory council because he wanted to add new people i remember that he was asked multiple times to share with the community about the team gap plan that he had fact is that has not happened the facts are that there has not been outreaches to the community

131to engage and to help them understand how they can be a stakeholder how they can be a partner how they can be an asset to the school community that's a fact the other fact is that you know i asked the right to know question about the esser funds and the esr funds sr2 as i said before are related to low-income um title one um families and then sr3 is regarding intervention methods i received an answer that they don't collect the data in reference to the questions that i asked regarding esser i'm asking the school board who the superintendent works for and you guys work for the community to hold more accountability of actually getting a town hall um a physical meeting with people from the community because what i do know is that the outreach

132efforts that we have made as an alum as alums revising re re-establishing the alumni association we have had continual roadblocks and i just think and i just got off the phone i dipped off this call to get on a call with a class graduate from 2020 that said there is a disconnect between the students and the community um i have some recent alums that are going to be part of our hall of fame ceremony this weekend which by the way none of you acknowledged my email or said you were coming or you did it another disconnect with the community but long story short recent alums also said in 18 and 19 that are going to be part of our program on saturday that there's a disconnect between students and the community and obviously from the

133loans so there's a parallel pattern here the facts and the facts that there is not any community engagement the community is not more knowledgeable about the achievement gaps the community is not knowledgeable about the despaired impact on the gifted program the special ed program the title one funding those are all obligations of the district especially since you approved of this man of being a preeminent community leader i have more to say and i'll say it next week all right thank you for your comments camino is there anyone else registered katie and we're done with public comment and we'll move to board comments do any of my fellow board members have any comments this evening i enjoyed wednesday's community conversation with miss latour thank you [Music] any other comments or questions all right then do i

134have a motion to adjourn so moved all those in favor hi you want to post all right meeting adjourned