001uh, a uh, reader, there's the language comprehension side, and that's like the background and vocabulary um, that you bring to a text. It's where that meaning's really made, where you're interacting and thinking about a text. The other side of it is your word recognition, and that's kind of when I'm saying foundational reading, I'm talking about this word recognition side of things. So, it's phonemic awareness, the ability to hear sounds in words, to be able to segment sounds, or if you're sounding out a word to blend those sounds back together. So, it's all about being able to hear and bring it together. There's the decoding and spelling side of things. So, that's typically if you hear somebody, oh, just sound out the word. It's really students having the skills at recognizing, oh, this particular spelling pattern
002makes this particular sound in this particular situation because we all know with English, there's quite a few different rules, and sometimes it applies here and not there. Um, so, when I'm talking about foundational reading, I'm really focusing on that word recognition side of becoming a skilled reader because as you can see, if we don't have automaticity with that, it's you're missing a component of that reading. And as you looked, as Eliza shared out some of our data, like it was very evident to us that we really need to strengthen that word recognition and foundational skills for our K-3 students. So, we really are working towards having this goal of building practices and systems that align to research so that all of our students, by the time they get to third grade, have really strong foundational
003reading skills. So, this isn't the first year that we've started this work. We kind of started at Hiawatha looking into and building some practices the prior year and started to make some adjustments. So, I'll give you a little bit of that background and then tell you about our next steps. So, in 2024-25 last year, as a system, we recognized phonemic awareness, we really needed to make sure all of our students were having extra opportunities for phonemic awareness. So, we built in extra opportunities for that during core time where every student was getting that extra time on that. We also moved to using the same um program and structures during our core time and during our intervention and enrichment time. So, during core, students would get um a lesson on a particular skill, and then during
004the intervention or enrichment time, it would be the same program, but it might be a different skill depending on what they needed. Um this year, after doing some research and um Eliza had shared some of the work that they had been doing over at Scootney um with some Wiley Blevins in the what the research was saying about being able to apply those phonic skills in more uh than one way, we had moved to instead of that ELA enrichment time intervention time, that was additional time to practice and apply those core skills. So, during this time, students are taking that skill that they learned during their core time. They're doing writing and spelling with it. They're applying it in a fluency passage. They're doing word sorts with it. They're talking about it in terms of vocabulary.
005So, there's way more repetitions and different ways to apply that skill. This was a shift for our system. We're like, "Okay, we're making the shift." Our staff was like, "Okay, we're on board. Let's start it. Let's do it." We jumped in, did training as we went, and you know, we're still refining and doing some of that training, but it did also increase some of those opportunities. Prior to this, our students in second grade only had an extra 35 minutes of applying some of those skills, but now they have additional time with doing that. So, giving them that repetition and ways to apply those skills in different areas. Um some of our next steps is as we've gone through this is to continue with some of the professional development for our staff. That's both our paras
006and our teachers who do this work with our students and to continue to refine that. And then also, we've had conversations around, you know, we still there's still some opportunities that we need to provide for some students next year in our schedule for some enrichment or for some extra intervention. Um I don't have any specific numbers and data for you here tonight. Um but what I can tell you some of the feedback from our teachers is we just keep hearing them say, "Our students are more confident. They're attacking words. They're trying to spell words." Where in the past, they just want to know how to spell things and they're seeing the confidence in students. Bef- uh before we move on, could we take a brief intermission? Yeah. Could you go back to slide five? You're
007ready. Um Uh not that one. The data one. That one. So, uh for the board and for the the team sitting here, uh what what words or what feelings do you have or emotions when you see those scores? For me, it's hard to think like, "What about the other 70% or 60-something percent of kids that, you know, we're not there yet?" Mhm. That makes you think I want to like see what this year's numbers are so we can see where the trends go. Yeah, and I would say just um knowing that you're this is your all your first year and what a challenge you guys were encountering right off the get-go and but I'm appreciating off the get-go that you guys are tackling that and I appreciate that. I think for me one thing that
008it what it made me feel was um like urgency. Like this we have to have kids who can read. And so I feel like that has to be where our energy is until we can raise those numbers um we have to have like a really um like clear idea of how a plan of how to do that and a focus. Um like that is our responsibility is to create readers. So, that's that's what I felt when I saw that. Good. Um I want to share with you a reminder from December 8th our December 8th board meeting. Um we one of the sessions that I got to attend this weekend was about um narratives about public education and how we have to remember to uh there are so many things that when we click on it
009it's a negative news story. It's a negative story about someone that someone wants to put out. And so I want to remind you about this the Hiawatha people and the board members. So, go to slide 13, please. I'll tell you when. Keep going. That one. So, this graph showed um those students they just talked about and showed you pictures of and every student in Othello and all the schools in Washington the elementary schools. And if you're above the line in the middle you're performing better than the state expects you to. All four of our elementaries are above the line. Then you go to the next slide. And these are the the 51 elementary schools in our region. You know, we talked a little bit about vouchers and if if a parent had a chance to
010move their kid to Royal City or move their kid to to Warden or move their kid to Moses Lake, would they want to do it? And if you show them this data and said, "Here are the 51 schools in our area." And we go to the next slide. And here are the 25 schools that have positive results. Only half of them outperformed what the state and the data and all the experts tell us our kids can do. And of those 25 schools on the next slide, you'll see all of the Othello schools are at the top, including Hiawatha. People have been working hard there for a number of years. Students and families have been working hard. And so even though I we never forget about that 70% of kids who haven't made it. We never
011stop looking for the best research. We never stop training the new people we get. Next slide. But we have to remember that there's over a thousand elementary schools in Washington and our schools are in that top piece of it, the top 20% for what the state expects us to put out. And and it it you can get caught up in that negativity about what that number is. But I want you we need to take every opportunity we can to remind people that they're getting a good return on their investment. Lots of really good people working really hard with our kids. And so I want to make sure that we acknowledge that every time we get a chance to. Okay, so kind of how are we going to do it? And what Eliza and Melissa are
012kind of talking about is building a system. And that's what we have to have Um a system that keeps going even if the pieces switch. Okay, so Melissa's gone or whatever happens, we need to have a system. Sorry, I'll take out the garbage. We need to have a system in place. So, when we look at that we see RTI MTSS work. And RTI stands for response to intervention and MTSS stands for multi-tiered system of supports and they're effectively the same thing. Um just with the MTSS, that adds like a behavior component into it as well. Um and so like the comprehensive focus is academic, behavioral, social, emotional, and then mental health. So like building all of those things into our system. So why it matters, we need to create a capacity to implement high-quality data-driven
013system that just kind of aligns with our school's focus and the use of our scope and sequence. Okay. Um when we look at our outcomes, we need to strengthen our data-driven decision-making. Um we need to make sure we have equity for all our students in those tiered systems of support. So kind of think of it as like a triangle. Okay? So at the very bottom of that triangle, we're going to have our core um instruction. And that instruction is for all of our students. Um then you move up in the triangle, that's our tier two intervention. And that intervention is going to be for some of our students, okay, that aren't quite getting it. And then the very top of the triangle, it should be the least amount of our students, is going to be
014our tier three and our intensive intervention. And that should have the least amount of students in it and those students are getting all of the support starting at the core they're getting tier two and tier three. Okay, that's the most important part is they're getting all of those to try to get them back to where they need to be. Um. We need to make sure that we're aligning our scope and sequences. So that's our core instruction that we're giving to our students every day and that doesn't just mean the grade levels but that also means K six so vertically aligning as well. Um. And then just building those leadership teams which I'm going to talk about in just a minute. Um and then when we have all of those things put together and in place
015just the impact that it can have on our students to grow and thrive. So when we take a look at our team it's a really big team because we have to hit all of these different pieces of our students. So it has Eliza and myself with Melissa as our instructional coach. We have our counselor Blanca our school psychologist Maria special education is Octavio. We have our ML teacher multilingual teacher Julia and then we have some classroom teachers who are involved with that as well in K2 representative we have Jessica 34 is Liz and then in 56 we have a couple Katie and Jennifer. So with all of that in mind we took that group teachers and specialists to a training a couple of weeks ago and just to kind of give us some tools that
016we need. Now at Hiawatha we have good instruction happening. Okay, when you go into the different classrooms there is really great things happening. It's just about kind of tightening it up and just making it more succinct so that everyone is kind of on the same page. Um So and really our goal is to really have that strong tier one instruction so that there's less students in those tier two and tier three situations. Um So here's kind of the some of the key takeaways that we had from that training. Um is that all students have to learn what's called the essential grade level standards. And um working with um the teachers will work together and with what we know about the SBA and things like that, they'll come up with and some of them already have
017those key standards that will be teaching. Um we need to build common planning. We have PLCs and we just need to strengthen those a little bit, okay? Talking about what you're teaching, how you're going to teach it, and then practicing with each other. It's not just all right, here it is, because we all know there's different styles, there's you know, different things that go into it. And so it's really about the equity. So if we have all those teachers working together, practicing their teaching together and practicing their planning all together, they're going to be able to deliver instruction where all of the students are going to get that same equitable instruction. Um couple things that they'll work on also is having common assessments, what it looks like to be proficient, what it looks like for
018students to understand um what's being taught. And then a huge takeaway is that having students involved in their learning, okay? And that starts with goal setting, students tracking their work, getting feedback from the teacher, students reflecting, okay? Why did I not get this? Or this is how I got it. And just making sure that um uh they understand. And then finally that cycle just starts over again. And it just continues on to um the next goal-setting phase. There's no more clicks. So, we just wanted to thank you guys for visiting a few weeks ago and then for having us tonight. And that's the end of our presentation, but if you have any questions or comments to share with us, we would love to hear from you. I did have a good question about the student
019goal setting. How How is that happening? Is that between them and their teacher? How do they keep track of that and revisit that? So, some teachers have it in their class where the students will like put their stuff on the wall and they can track their progress that way. Some of it's more private situation where like you might take like an interim or the STAR test or something like that and you'll get your score and then you'll come up with the goal, okay, I want to improve by 20 points or something like that. And so, that would just be between the teacher and the student and that's one of those things that we need to to push a little bit more. It's happening in some of our classrooms. Kind of like I said before, we
020have good instruction happening, but we really need it to be more succinct and we have everyone on board. And then I saw one of your stats said the 14-year average for your teachers, that's pretty high, right? That's that higher than average for amount of years, so that's great. I don't have any more questions, but but I did want to say that thanks for having us over for the site visit. It was it was great. We got to see a lot of things in the classroom walks are always they're always great. I think it's normal for us to feel like you know, with a huge change over from year to year to be a little nervous about that like a new principal, new vice principal, new everything. But from what we saw and from what other
021things we heard your staff say about you, it all seemed like it was going really well, so we appreciate that. Yeah, I just have a comment. I don't have any questions, but I too appreciated the site visit. I thought there was just like tonight there's a lot of transparency even maybe like the numbers not that you didn't want, but I think that it's good for us to see both sides whether you know improvement or it's great. And and what I saw when I was in Melissa's group to go around to each of the classrooms um each of those teachers was teaching the same thing. Maybe their own little style, but the students were engaged. They were all And I remember just sitting back and what one student was having a particularly hard time with a
022word and the teacher stayed with that student until he got it. And that just really meant a lot to me because as a student who might struggle, it's easy to might everybody else is getting there. Let's just move on. Let's push through. And I just really appreciated seeing that teacher stick with it until he got it. So, thank you. Yeah, I'm going to agree with Bertie. I thought it was so cool and I felt bad for Melissa because I was asking too many questions. It was my first site visit. I've had a lot of other things come up lately so I haven't been able to make them, but it was really nice to see like the students go through all this go through all the things. All the classes doing the exact same thing. So,
023us being able to see every teacher's actually focusing on the same thing. So, it was pretty cool. So, thank you guys. It was your first time at I Water Period, right? >> Yeah, actually period. I had to call and I'm like, "Where's the library?" I've never been here before. So, yeah. Well, I am a Thunderbird born and raised. Sorry I wasn't able to make it to the site visit, but I appreciate you guys coming tonight. It seems exciting and I'm I feel like the world is your oyster. You're just getting started. So, congratulations and hopefully it's only up from here. Thank you for coming tonight. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. >> Okay, if there's no other comments, we're going to move on to public comment. Do we have any? Okay. Upcoming events, um we
024talked like we talked about in board discussion, board member discussion, it's pretty much everything on this list. Um minus that we also have, you know, our regular scheduled board meetings and a site visit for WaHeTa's after our Ludlow Caga site visit. Um our next board meeting will be on the 27th of April and it will be at noon. So, that's really the only standout in our upcoming events that we haven't already talked about. We'll move on to the board self-assessment of the meeting. Um a pro for me tonight it uh is you know, I know a lot of people in this room we didn't get home till 4:30 in the morning and um so it's been tough to to get here. So, I just appreciate everybody showing up tonight and um appreciate Hiawatha for coming
025to all of us as we're not in our best tonight, but um still giving us a really great presentation. So, thank you guys. And thank you to the board and the district for showing up tonight. As a pro I I just want to um thank Aaron for giving us like the national look at where the money is and where it's not and um giving us a perspective that you know, it's across the board and not just every us feeling it. So, thank you for that. Another plus was um I mean I like that Pete reminded us that we're still in the top 25% so even though we're not we don't think we're doing the best we actually are doing pretty well so I thought that was a great reminder. We miss JR and our Liliana.
026No Gabby. And Gabby or Gabby? Yeah. Okay. You're right Gabby doesn't start yet. When does Gabby officially start? She said June. Yeah it'll be in June after the after the school year we'll take Liliana through graduation. Okay. You were right sorry. Well I have the mic following up on the Hiawatha report and Director Gerber's question to me. The average teacher experience in the Othello School District is 11.4 years so Hiawatha above average and the average in the state of Washington is 13.4 so just slightly under the average at Hiawatha. Gives you some context. Do you have anything else for board self-assessment? Okay. At this time the board will recess into executive session for 30 minutes to discuss the performance of a public employee and the sale or lease of real estate. No action will be
027taken following the executive session. This meeting is adjourned.