001e we'll call the meeting to order could you please rise join me in the flex I want to welcome everybody here tonight uh do we have any need for translation I see none I'll need approval of the agenda I motion to approve the agenda and I'll second that I'll second that motion all in favor I I I opposed so carries okay now it's time for annual reorganization but since we don't have any students here for to representative report we'll go into annual recognition reorganization of our elections uh I'm going to start off with the president this will be a roll call vote also so I'll ask which one of the individually um Schoolboard president position this beer it's very stressful sometimes but it's very important and uh I believe every board member should have a
002chance to sit on it at some time um at this time I would like to nominate Lindy prow as our next board chair I'd like to second that nomination okay allor okay I will start with the roll call vote director Gerber I director bazinsky I and I director PR I director peretta I thank you very much so now let you our new board chair I'm G turn this over to you start tonight yes you okay ready or not thank you I'm gonna use that to beat you with it isaro just making sure um I will now at this time accept a nom nomation for vice president uh I'll Nomine myself I guess for vice president do I have a second I'll second that nomination um do I do this as a roll call as well
003yes okay we'll move to a roll call vote isaro I it's an I from myself Ken I Chris I Aaron I motion passes 5 Z I don't know that's what I'm supposed to say yeah okay um we'll now um accept a nomination for legislative representative I Nate thereon I will second that okay we will now move to a roll call vote isaro I I for myself Ken I Chris I Aaron I okay I'll now accept a nomination for president pro tempore I nominate Ken I second that um we will go to a roll call vote isaro I I Ken I Chris I Aaron I I'll will now accept a nomination for WIA representative I nominate director Foria representative I second that we'll do a roll call aaro hi I Ken I Chris I Aaron I
004okay that concludes the nominations for our new school board presidency we will go ahead and um before we move on I just wanted to say thank you to Ken you've been a great mentor to everyone on the board myself especially um and I just really appreciate the example that you have set as president and um for all of the education that you have given and continue to give us so thank you so much Ken for all of your service um we'll move on to board member discussion and first up we have our legislative report by director Gerber no legislative report today the the session will open in January so we're preparing for that I attend like a a weekly meeting with the other Representatives um across the state and they're getting ready for it okay
005great um now on to our wasda debrief um we weren't able to do this last board uh meeting because we were missing too many board member you were gone and I was in on zoom and we decided that we would wait until we were in person to debrief wda so we can go ahead and do that at this time does anyone have anything in particular they would like to share or Pete did you have a specific way that you wanted us to D direct this discussion okay we'll just leave it open to whoever would like to share first I had a chance to uh attend a few of the uh seminars dealing with the budget and how the state deals out their money to the school districts and the different formulas that they used and
006uh I know a lot of the school districts across the state are experiencing budget crunches uh I don't think there's too many in the state that are not but the news that we got from them is don't expect any relief anytime in the future they are expecting between a 10 and 12 billion doll deficit in this next budget cycle without even addressing education so it's going to be a challenge the next few years basically is what they told us I want to discuss me and Pete and board member big ginsky we attended an lgbtq um across the state and uh we had had our own meeting and so I wanted to discuss it with Pete if you could tell him about the training that uh we're doing around the district absolutely so there were um
007approximately 100 folks in the room on the first day of wda it was an opportunity for folks from across the state to hear about some of the protections that exist in our state Law related to particularly students who are transgender and it walked us through the RCW it gave us an opportunity to hear about some of the protections particularly around names and pronouns gender identity a little bit about restroom and locker room regulations those kinds of things and certainly a conversation we've been having in our community and our principles have been dealing with you know day-to-day in their schools um in the last 10 days or so after wasda I had an opportunity along with Jessica shank and Sandra V to go to each School across the district and share some updates that came from
008that very session to talk about the policies in othell how long they've been in place the requirements in state law and those kinds of things we had an opportunity to visit a couple of schools twice just to make sure we were able to engage with most of our employees and U been productive conversations you know Concepts that people are wrestling with and and thinking through but um we took the approach that the more information they had the more resources we could put in their hands when difficult questions come their way the the more prepared they were to share that message with our parents and our students across our schools so I think the the conversations have been uh productive as how I would frame them great thank you anyone else have anything they'd like to
009share uh yeah I'll jump in here uh first of all I really enjoyed wda it was a great educational uh for for me being first time on the board I had a opportunity to one of the sessions I attend Ed was on cell phones uh Peninsula High School have been doing it for uh two years and so they had the whole uh principal superintendents um teachers they they all made a presentation and it was very very entertaining uh very educational on how they implemented things uh how they're changing things but the the success rate's been really really positive and that was the main thing but uh um it's something as as we move start moving forward it's some I think we should definitely I know we're doing it already at the high school but they
010kind of turned it up a notch and um uh one of the things they they said you could save $52,000 and not invest in the pockets um so that was a one of the key things I got they the those plastic containers was uh because the kids are smarter than us they they were putting um burner phones in them and so they said uh saved your 52,000 so um but uh yeah no it was uh very educational very very much enjoyed it yeah the conference was was really great one of the best parts about it as to get to um meet with a lot of people from other districts across the state one of my um one of my sessions there was I got paired put at a table with there was only like four
011of us one of them was the superintendent from the Seattle um Public School District so talking to him you have 40 48,000 students their district and it was just insane and then at the exact same table was a school board member from Evergreen I think is what it was and they just have one K through 12 school and so it was just amazing just talking to all these people about certainly different challenges but a lot of the same stuff too no matter how big the school is that we're facing around Washington right now um yeah it was it was a great conference um I attended probably my most impactful session that I attended was about having students ready for college and kind of next steps and and different running Start programs that different districts run
012and was really proud of the work that we do here at OSD where we are if we're not already there we're almost there of having an AA in our high school and um was just really proud to share that work with uh different schools across the state and you know I learned a lot about Community College vers fouryear University and um what they accept and what they don't accept and um just hoping that that our high school um is continuing to move forward with offering more classes and more opportunities for kids that uh you know so they they don't have to travel to to Moses Lake or to tr cities and they can be successful in our high school and not miss out on that experience um I also attended another session uh with our
013superintendent and um it was a the Pascal school district and they talked about how the board works with the superintendent and again was appreciative of the work that we've put in in our district to have a great working relationship with our board and our superintendent and um the effort that we continue to have to um communicate well and to be successful together so appreciate you Dr PR for that anybody else have anything they would like to add um one one thing of these wasda like when you're interacting and you're just walking from session to session I was just walking with a a fellow participant and and U just he was a first timer too and so we just got to talk and but uh one thing I I feel very fortunate we have a good
014board up here that gets along with our superintendent because uh the gentleman I was walking with that's he spent the whole time complaining about how they the board and the superintendent don't get along and they just can't get anything resolved in the the schools and it was just it was more than one occasion like that so it's just uh just really appreciate how how good o fellow's doing right now and we got a uh amongst us time of turmoil that things are are we're we're getting along we're doing the best we can for the kids all right thank you we're going to move on with required approvals do I have a motion to approve the required approvals I'll make that motion a second it all in favor hi hi any opposed okay um we will
015go ahead and move on to our strategic planning our our big event of the night yeah we'll um invite a few folks over whoever's in that first group to get themselves ready I do can I make a couple comments about wasda absolutely um and maybe the first one just a little bit of levity one of the things I heard in the session with uh pastor and and their discussion about superintendent board relationships was uh you imagine going to a restaurant with folks and ordering a dessert and there's six of you and you order one dessert and you all share it and I told Lindsay if that was an expectation that I'd be resigning rather quickly I wasn't going to share spoons with folks um we two keynote sessions that I thought were particularly important one
016was from Jeff Utch who worked with many of us in the room when we were uh processing the sort of online experience for student students and he visited othell a couple times and help us think about those platforms and the sort of the focus of his conversation was around Ai and how are we leveraging AI in our schools and making sure that students in communities like ours don't get left behind and so I thought there was some particularly useful information from him and then at the end we heard from the new wda president who happens to be a Schoolboard member in Wala Wala public schools and uh last year a couple years ago we attended uh the national School Board Association conference and we heard from a member of the Kennedy family who talked about
017the dignity index and that in a divided political time that exists Now in America um that we have to remember to treat each other with dignity particularly in public spaces like schools where all folks are welcome and what I appreciated about the comments from the incoming uh wasda president uh was this idea that leaders like this and leaders like all of you here in the room tonight are going to responsible for providing Clarity for folks and what are divisive times and there are some comments uh about what might change federally around public Ed and we're going to be living it and working it every day and it's going to be our job to to make sure our parents understand where things are headed that our students understand that and that and that we help the
018board make the best decisions for our community and and at the end even if our politics are different it's a public school where everyone's welcome and we treat everyone with dignity and so I appreciated his messaging like you say when you come to a a session in Spokane with represent pres atives from all over the state you could feel the East West divide you feel that in the room you feel that in the sessions and I thought he did an excellent job of trying to be a bridge for that conversation so and I always appreciate that any uh you all know because you've gone to a number of conferences in your careers and it's part of your job and getting better what I'm always impressed with people who volunteer and are elected to a position
019to go do that to step out of their expertise and sit in a room with folks and and listen to and think about these issues in a serious way so um I appreciate the board going and taking that on it was time well spent so now we're going to jump into the strategic planning uh presentation and it looks like John's going to do it all by himself apparently so I know he invited some friends up say again am I gonna be able to okay all right well this I'll I'll jump right in so we make sure we have enough Spa is that working oh he turned me down I apologize uh this is the cover sheet and so that's idea about believe achieve belong I want you to think about this tonight for the board
020as sort of the the cover for our book right this this book that we're writing as yell school district and the subtitle being that we're trying to make sure that every student has an opportunity to live their dreams and the the dreams that their families have for them are able to um to come to fruition and so we want to talk with you tonight about um who's going to click we want to talk to you tonight about sort of where we're at in that story but also to call back that this is not the first year of the ello School District right this school district has been in operation for a number of years uh many of us in this room have been here for over 20 years and so we've been down this path
021and and we've written uh stories and chapters year after year and we're thinking a little bit differently this year about what that story is but it's important that we don't forget some of the work and some of the folks that worked really hard over the last several years to to get us to the point we are now and want I want to call back for the board is uh this idea that over the last couple years we talked a lot about these three concepts professional learning communities uh providing feedback to our students and our staff and receiving that feedback and also a particular focus on how our multilingual Learners are doing in our system how are those kids making progress in in our school district and so that's some of the previous work that we've
022shared with you and I hope that you remember it's embedded in what you're going to hear tonight as well but what I want to share with you is is where we're headed in this path and what strategic planning is all about and so we spent about a year and a half uh partnering with Dr Campbell to think about this work and when you look at these images here what I want to call your attention to I want to use a a more recent one so I know a number of the board members were able to attend uh some some of the work around and some of the events related to the amazing shake so if you look at those arrows um where would you place the amazing Shake if you think about it as an
023event in the alello school district where would you say the amazing Shake which which one represents that experience for our kids and the way our staff put it together you think it's the end one everyone's tightly woven okay any other opinions on that yeah I would say the same the end one or maybe the second to last one but it was really great you know the different schools coming together as a district and competing and learning together I know there's a lot of cooperation with the staff and everyone who set that up I I agree with what was said I would say it would either be maybe the third or the fourth one only because um you could tell that different schools had different expertise around it I mean there were other some schools that
024were more prepared than others I think um after having this experience hopefully the principles will do what I did as a parent which is I I underprepared my child for this there's a lot that I could do to uh better prepare for for next time and so hopefully that's something that was you know a thought by everyone for me I think it's the third one just because I think uh there was more schools that got involved this year than the prior years you could tell what schools had done it before um but it was really nice to see being my first time watching who had done it before and how they prepared their kids and then the people that were the first time I think we're well on our way to hitting that next two
025tiers but I I with the new schools coming in I would put us at number three I even heard a te one teacher say this is my first time attending and I'll I'll prepare my kids next year differently better than I did this year so yeah and I I what I appreciated about that experience and thank you all for sharing your perspectives around that that I think people would tend to put us in that sort of those last three arrows right that that's you know this is um the first time we really did it as a system and how did people perform but I want to set the framework for what you're going to hear today and where I think we're at as a system so now I'm just offering my opinion as superintendent and
026I think that's a really good example because where I would place the amazing Shake would be somewhere between Arrow one and two because the arrows defined what amazing shak's supposed to be and what it's going to be and the level of understanding at schools is it at different spots because again for some folks it was new uh but what's really cool about that is it demonstrates progress and it sets a bar so that next year when we're talking about it we can say oh are now are we at the third or the fourth one right there we're demonstrating that progress where we don't want to be is Arrow one or even below that where there isn't a defined frame there isn't a Define frame now how do we go tell that story as board members
027and a superintendent you know we stay positive and talk about all the cool things that came out of that because if you took the amazing Shake apart and said did the kids have a consistent experience uh did the schools do a good job of recruiting judges uh did they all have an opportunity to get feedback like all those things occurred in a tightly woven way like arrows four and five and now we think about the system as a whole and so tonight you're going to hear about systems level work and where our system is headed and that it's okay if you're on that left- hand side right that's not a it's not a bad place to be the place you don't want to be is not knowing what the target is and not making progress
028towards Improvement so you're yeah yeah go ahead we're we're going to turn it over to the experts in the room and those are our building principles and assistant principles and some folks from teaching and learning you're going to hear from John wisman tonight from assistant superintendent Jessica shank and from Dr Meek they're going to help lead us through some of this work and and like I shared with the board at our last meeting the most powerful part of tonight will be not only sharing the work of our teachers and our kids but the question and dialogue that comes from the board uh back to these guys because really they they have the expertise around what you're going to hear tonight and so I'm really looking forward to the story that they're going to share with
029you we uh certainly appreciate the opportunity to share out the work that's happening um across the district around trying to reach um the goals that we have set in in this strategic uh plan for the district this image just represents of course the you're going to hear from all of the different campuses um but what I hope that you hear is and I appreciate the message that Pete just gave is that um the areas of unity of trying to um work closer together more collaboratively um supporting one another and recognizing that we might be at different campuses and different sites that we're all OSD that they're all of our kids and so especially as they go from the elementaries and to the a single middle school and to the high school and so just recognizing
030the importance of that so the four goal areas that we'll be discussing tonight is around safety and belonging early Excellence Mastery of standards and being future ready and so what we have asked is that um the buildings are going to give just a snapshot if you will of some of the work that's been happening at their schools and so um and and targeted towards these outcomes so the increase the amount of time that we're spending in our learning environments the number of students who are uh getting prepared to read at grade level by third grade increase the number of students that are proficient in math and increase the number of students passing all of their classes um at every grading period And so those will be the the the big themes that we'll be talking
031about starting with safety and belonging so of those gools are not necessarily ranked in a certain prior you know priority area but I am glad that we're starting with safety and blogging first um because before we can focus on Mastery of Standards before we can focus on being future ready and in graduation we need kids at our schools and we need them in our classrooms and um we want all of our students to to have a a feeling and a sense that they belong um that they're safe that they have adults that are advocating for them um and peers alike and so that's what we're going to start off tonight in focusing on so luckily I thought for a while I was just going to be myself but you're going to hear from five different
032campuses around this all of our schools this is a focus um but just for time sake we kind of divide it up um who would be sharing in each of these categories so we have five campuses I'll be sharing tonight um and they're going to be talking about uh how they promote attendant how they celebrate positive student behaviors how they build a community of Learners and so those will be the things to to listen for at the end of of their presentation there's going to be an opportunity to ask questions and so really invite you that as you go through and there's something that either piques your interest or you want to learn more about or hear more about or have a u deeper explanation of something um please capture that so that we can
033ask those questions at the end so that'll be the format for tonight and we'll start off with Jennifer Garza um in early learning so one of our focuses this year in the area of safety and belonging has been um making sure that we're providing professional development for our teachers uh because uh to be an inclusive campus we want all kids to be able to attend our preschool so we have students with special needs I think we have about 10 of them now that go to a special ed class but they also come to our gen Ed classes um and and then just every year we seem to get more and more students that sometimes struggle with um behaviors and then we also have our multi language Learners and so this year we really focused on
034um providing that professional develop on every every Monday and then we've also partnered with a few people across our district to um get their support be their expertise so we've worked with Nikki Wilkins who is the um ml director here at the district office and then Ashley Phillips who's our Behavior specialist and then um the counselor at MMS comes one day a week it was josn Gonzalez um and so they came one of them has come every Monday and um work with the teachers giving them ideas so Ashley has done things like a first then board so if it's sometimes students especially because this is their first time in a structured environment so they just have a picture board that tells them first you're going to do this and then you get to do this
035and something kind of simple but it really does help four and fivey olds to have that Visual and to know what to expect is coming and then Nikki has worked with us a lot on same thing using visuals and that how do we how do we develop the English language in our multilanguage Learners so we've just really had that focus and I think the staff has given me positive feedback about how much they appreciate um bringing in the other experts in our district to to support them so that they can support our students yeah and when John LED in talking about uh safety and belonging we really that is important students have to understand that you're safe at school and you belong at school and both of those being super important one of the ways
036that you can help instill that in your students is uh to celebrate success and to be very clear with them about the uh expectations that you have and what that success looks like in your school and so at Luda kaga our example is we say almost leonis right and everybody responds we are lions right it's part of what we are that's not just us telling you our mascot when our students say that they understand that there's meaning attached to it what does it mean to be a lion how do a lions behave what does it mean to belong to Luda KAG as a lion all of those things are are all wrapped up in in saying that and so one of the things that we we do and we know that other schools around our
037district are doing is we have really clear expectations for our students they don't come to us ready knowing every single rule and everything that we expect we teach them we're very clear about what those expectations are and when those expectations are clear students are more comfortable students understand what they should be doing and that we're going to follow up on it and so that's a very clear uh expectation that we have for our students and then we measure that success and so there's different programs so when we're talking about attendance uh we obviously communicate that with our parents but we have ways of measuring that and following up on it and and letting families know what the expectations are on it then and are and then same thing with our discipline right we track our
038discipline and we have a program for that and it lets us know hey is this a problem that a a couple students are having and we can support them or is this something that as a school right like it's a systemic problem we have a lot of students that are struggling in this way what can we do as a school to better support them and to change the way that we're doing it and so all of those things are really important in being um really clear with our students about what success looks like so then we can go and celebrate it and so we also so in order to do that have to partner with our families if we don't partner with our families and get our families involved in what that looks like uh
039number number one we're leaving them out they're just sending their kids to school unsure what's going on there right and so we try to communicate and we do that lots of ways we have talking points districtwide uh we also have newsletters that we send out on a regular basis and and we know a lot of our other schools are doing that too but also calling parents setting up meetings with parents involving the parents in the school as much as as possible and so that's a really important part of what we do that's how we let the parents know your kids are safe here your kids belong here it's important that they're here on a regular basis because we're doing important stuff um and then lastly is uh when we're Meeting those goals and when we're
040doing all those things we need to celebrate it right so we have a a bunch of different celebrations we do we're a house system school right that's our character education we get kids excited about that and involved in that you ask a kid at school what house they're in they're either going to tell you a name or a color right they may even like they'll know more details about what that means to be a part of that house system and so that's something that we do to build that sense of belonging and one of our and one of our things that we know too is that our school we have we have our mission as a school right biliterate bilingual bicultural by choice but we know in order to achieve those things that we have
041to celebrate the successes of our students and be very clear with them about um what we expect so that they can feel safe and they can understand that they belong and they understand what we're trying to achieve and that their families do too because if we're all on the same page kind of like that um the arrows that Pete was showing earlier on if the families are on the same page and they're pointing in the same direction and we're all tightly woven the kids are going to see success all right um McFarland's up next so part of our uh uh belonging and culture has been steered towards the staff and student recognition and um enjoyment of being at school uh some of that comes through and feel free to dig in and you're doing a
042great job tonight well done um so one of those uh that I do for the staff uh here at McFarland is popcorn Fridays um give a little juice to the staff um to get through the the last day of the week uh head into the weekend and so that's one of our fun little activities that that we'll uh do some of the other things that we created was our fun club and that's a a group of us that work together to come up with different ideas recognitions for staff uh for example uh some of the activities that we do uh secret staff dress up uh activities during our PD um Chris I believe is our reigning uh paper plate Champion um he had the opportunity to stop by uh just shortly after we had one
043of our activities and so we wrangled the ones that came to to help participate in that uh some of the other things scavenger hunts competitions uh birthday recognitions um I call it B mm bring your own mug Monday um and that's an activity um once a month bring your own mug coffee hot cocoa um different drinks are available in the staff Lounge for the teachers and then moving into some of the student recognitions uh we have the ABC cards so academic behavior and character cards there's different levels uh that require different um components uh attendance is a big one uh their behavior so their referrals and with those different levels platinum gold silver bronze you earn different um recognition in regards of PBS points um fun Friday and different uh treasure box items that they
044can pull out so rewarding them for those U positive attributes that we're looking for some of the other activities we do with the kids also birthday recognitions uh this coming Thursday we're recognizing perfect attendance for students uh for the month of November uh we'll do some random knocks talentless Tuesday um and those are some of the activities that we gather gathered up from um a trip to Renaissance Johnson's Renaissance uh this past summer we brought back a lot of fun activities and ideas uh regarding those um I'm going to talk about our uh discipline and attendance and I I guess uh Clint gets to be the fun guy and I get to take a little bit more um serious note with um if you look at the graphic up there so in 2023 24 um
045this is and we're comparing the exact same time frame last year as to this year and so if you look at the red area that six plus is Major referrals that means there's students 3.08% of our students last year at this time had six or more major referrals that would end in like lunch detention suspensions things like that um and then it it goes to two to five major referrals and then 0o to one and if you look at compare that to this year we are making great progress on our discipline I'm super proud of that um the work that we've done in order to make sure that our students are um behaving the way they need to with our PBIS system and with our rewards and stuff I think that really um takes into
046account of that um we have implement Ed a new cell phone policy this year um many of you probably have heard that where we do not allow cell phones during the instructional day on their person they're required to keep them in their locker and I really think that that has had an impact on our discipline uh data and then moving towards the other graphic there this is what we're starting with at MMS this year and I'm hoping next year we'll have some more um data on our attendance now we are we were we're doing a red yellow green system everything that's marked red there will have like a parent meeting or a um some sort of intervention with either tardies or absences at that at that point um it's making some difference but I'm this
047is more of a baseline for us so we're looking to to move forward with this going forward um we do do I take students to our CB board and our own in-house MMS ceb board and um of course TR Andy Court um that's part of one of my responsibilities uh I believe Josh will talk about that a little bit more later thank you I ask what what are those acronyms CB oh oh sorry CB is community engagement board um any other questions okay thank you hey good evening to all of you guys um I forgot my wallet I would have handed out Hondos to all of you guys I don't I don't have popcorn but we're just going to go with it and uh I I'll I'll owe you guys so um Lindsay good question
048on what our CBS that's kind of a good entry way to what I'm going to talk about I'm going to talk about some U some things that are relevant to to treny as well and kind of some factors that are impacting us first of all the acronym Community engagement boards what is it is probably more important than what the acronym stands for it's an attempt at uh it's an intervention and we we make that very clear it usually happens in this room and uh we we try to find out what is at the root of the problem for these families and these kids uh these kids show up um we have them every every two weeks and uh usually we have um every school is bringing four students the secondary schools are usually taking every
049spot Elementary just kind of Hit and Miss um they just they tend to like school um at that age and then when they get to the secondary school's just a lot a little bit harder to engage with them um one of our primary goals is try to try to find out what those factors are and try to find it ways that we can engage students with their with their uh with their school because there's always something at the root of the problem and we have different people that sit on this panel from our administrators to our juvenile officers as well as some other people from local businesses or agencies in in in the district one of the things that we're really working hard towards is trying to accommodate more students in our community engagement board
050so this year uh more than ever we've uh We've started some in-house Community engagement boards at every school meaning um McFarland middle school high school as well as our school uh up to date the high school has taken excuse me a total of 73 students our school has taken a total of uh 38 students to community community engagement boards and the middle school has taken 19 students how many have actually gone in front of a judge for cheny uh nine at each school high school and Desert Oasis and then two at uh McFarland Middle School our goal is to not have to go in front of the the judge right P acki um one of the things that we're doing that we're super proud of in the last week and a half um the judge
051has requested to meet with with me in regards to what are some things that we can put in systemically to help kind of uh conquer the big issue of treny and why kids are not coming so I've reached out now to Benton Franklin County as well as yaka County and then most recently Grant County what's really ironic is this is a very systemic problem across the United States but yet every County within Washington is doing it a little bit different everybody has their own their own Flash and one of the things that I've been interested to do is kind of find out what these people are doing with at each County and then kind of create a system for us that might work for Adams County so I'm right in the middle of that with
052Jessica shank and and judge Peter pbuy as well as um Adams County juvenal Court director Priscilla is also helping out with this and then just to kind of wrap up my time here um some of the kids regular school Traditional School just doesn't work for kids so one of the things that we we do for our district and in our school is we run an Al program um and we also run an um online digital program these are online services for students um we use two different platforms whether it's uity or odysseyware and these are kids that are online um for 27 and 1 half hours per week and then there's steps that we follow if they're not meeting this timeline and the reality is some kids are are not meant for Traditional School and
053some kids are not meant for online school so if they can't make it in the online program and they're just looking to as a way out of the educational World um they quickly find out that they need to go back to traditional schooling so again our overall goal is we're going to try to capture these kids so that they do not fall through the crack and they do not end up without an education in the future and no we do not save every student but these systems that we're putting in play they're getting stronger and and I firmly believe that we're going to have some systems um that are going to maybe not conquer but definitely enhance the the world of treny um at all schools and that's kind of what we're working towards right
054now uh question Josh is there have you been able to find like a a link to what it is that causes the treny like is there has there been yeah one of the biggest things that we know is that every single student is different every household is different but what really is a common denominator is family life um socioeconomic status involvement by the families um relationships and relationships doesn't mean with just them and their families but it also means with these students and our staff and I think Pete has mentioned this before it starts with the person that picks them up in the morning the bus driver and are you friendly to these kids or not these kids have to have a reason to come to school and sometimes it's Sports sometimes it's popcorn sometimes
055it's whatever we have to as a school as a system figure out what really matters to these kids if you think that's one bullet's going to kind of conquer at all um no every single student's different but as a system we also have to know our students because like I said Elementary is doing an awesome job it's just once they get to middle and then High School school just gets hard and these kids deficiencies they're more transparent and they're more embarrassed and then there's more factors like the social um influences that peer press brings um I have a clarifying question when it when you refer to absences this is both for the middle school and the high schools are those excused absences or are these unexcused absences unexcused absences the state looks at the attendance
056as those that have missed more than two in a month so unexcused absences only at the high school level it's anything 50% or more so we're taking five classes it's three or more classes in a day in middle school I can let Jenny answer that so um we also it's unex ex used absence that we're going after however I have been having parent meetings when we have a significant amount of excused absences because we're finding out that some of these kids are have like severe anxiety and so their parent is excusing them but they're still missing you know a lot of school you know when they're missing two or three weeks I mean that's a lot of instructional time and so we've been um something Josh and I have talked about is if we can
057curb this problem at the middle school we think the high school will be so much better off and so we're trying to catch it now as at a middle school and so we're doing a lot of things trying to to work with them get them hooked up with a counselor and things like that okay thank you at the elementary school though I mean there is a count it's five excused absences in a month and that does trigger a a a process for us to meet with families to talk about those excused absences another thing that's really important is that um we've been clarifying for families that there is a very specific list in our board documents as well as in the law on what excuses an absence and that is determined by the school not
058by the family necessarily and so we've been working with our families to say hey why was the student absent and kind of discussing with them okay we understand that reason but just know that's going to have to be an unexcused absence that's not an excusable absence and that's the way it's written in the law and that's the way it's written our board policy and that is uh determined by the building principal and their understanding of that or the design and that's a kind of a hard thing um to train families because it hasn't always been the way it's been executed in the past in the past it's been like oh is this unexcused or excused and the family gets to decide but we're being you know because attendance is such a big thing being really
059clear about what is excused and what is not excused with families thank you um I do have a few questions that I um jotted down um first is at the preschool you mentioned that for the sped students they spend part of the day in a sped classroom and then part of the day in a j classroom is that right correct so what I just want to hear a little bit more about like what are some of the challenges with integrating them there and then how is the medical side of things factored into those decisions um so the ones that we put into our gened classes are ones um that will that will go to probably typical kindergarten classroom and so we're trying to get them used to not just being like and when they're in
060the special ed classroom they're like in a group of about six to 10 sometimes even less than that um and so it can be very different and very overwhelming for them to go into a classroom with 18 students and so sometimes that can be a challenge for them sometimes they have some Behavior challenges also because you know a lot of them maybe like not loud noises bother them or too much too many things on the walls and that kind of stuff but they will go we're just trying to get them used to that that this is what it's going to what it's going to be like and so we don't currently right we do have a couple medically fragile students they currently like they'll be they'll be at preschool for another year so they just
061go to special ed so we kind of have both things going on so it's so like you said it's partially divided by who's going to go to the typical kindergarten and who who won't yeah we we do we have had a couple students um I'll just give an example my own nephew Kingston he um he goes to the self-contained classroom at wus and then he pushes out and goes to do a couple activities in the regular kindergarten room and he was in a regular preschool class all last year so it kind of just depends on by time we get to may you know where where's their ability level at are they ready for an even bigger setting so we kind of just watch that monitor that all year and then we make those decisions in
062May okay thank you I had another question how was the soft roll out for the kinder this year did it help get them used to it when we had that slow start so we had um we kind of had a little bit of mix review some of the teacher I I would say the majority of the teachers really liked it because they felt like they had a little bit more opportunity to get to know their kids I know at some of the schools they actually moved kids to maybe have a better fit with a different teacher or a different setting um it was two weeks worth and so I know some of the teachers thought that was too long they just wanted to do it for the one week so it was kind of those
063those were kind of some of the results we got from that yeah at our school it was positive reviews but I know that there were some differing opinions on it and there's Pro there's definitely pros and cons to all of it right I mean there's pros to saying like hey let's just get all our kids and get started and then there's pros to saying like hey this is kindergarten a lot of kids one room let's ease let's really ease our way into it and so um our teachers appreciated it but I know that there was definitely some some feedback about um what the pros and cons are or how we could continue it but improve it could I ask that the elementary schools give us some information because that was something big that we were
064looking at especially for me if if all the elementary schools could get us some information on just pros and cons of of what they thought and how it helped and how it didn't that'd be great and and if you're planning on doing it again next year that's something we uh at the beginning after we did that we I met with all the elementary principles or assistant principles and so I actually have all that feedback on posters that they made so I can type that and get it to you y that would be good thank you um Sor go ahead well my next question was kind of moving on to something else was your so part of this nope my next question was for something that Paul talked about for lud kaga so obviously sometimes these
065attend attendance issues are things completely out of the school's control and sometimes completely out of the kids control you mentioned these attendance followups what do those look like how do those work yeah so often what that'll be is we'll we'll look and we have a a program that um we look at that tells us hey this kid has this many days like it triggers the different levels that we see like two unexcused absences five unexcused absences or five excused we look at that and it may be like oh five excused that kid already did a pre-arranged absence form they explain they're going on family vacation cool we check that one off we're done it may be like oh this kid has uh three unexcused absences already we've already communicated with the family once we're have
066a a meeting and so we ask the parents we say hey we've had this many unexcused absences we need for you to come in and we need to have a conversation about um what's going on at home and and how we can make sure that the kids are at school every day and often times um you know we can look back at a a history and say what is it that is leading to this and what can we do as a school district to help uh partner with you guys to um help to help this and sometimes we notice there's a pattern and and we can really quickly to hey yeah we see where it's happening we see why it's happening this is a a family matter that you know we understand every family is
067different and you know has different reasons for why this happens and it really does give us that chance to do what Josh is talking about and take an individualized approach to why that student's not getting to school and help do our best to be very clear about what the expectations are for attending school and what we can do to help that family get their kid to school um my question was going all the way back to the beginning uh Pete when you talked about multilingual Learners how many how many different languages are we working with in our schools do you know roughly yeah well the predominant languages are Spanish and English right that's what we deal with but we have uh some students that are coming from South America that bring other native dialects to
068the table um but really the ones that we support as a school district are Spanish and and English Okay do we have a program like if we have a family that doesn't speak Spanish or English um I I have a brother in-law who works in Grant County and he said you know they subscribe to I can't remember what it's called but it's something where you can zoom in and and the person speaks you can just say whatever language you need and then you can have an interpreter do we even need those kind of services yeah there are some excellent uh technology tools out there to help with that and I know Dr meek and Amy Paris in particular Have Been instrumental and trying to find those resources that are already exist in our community if
069you think about the partnership we have with cbha they have some tools and resources that they use there for those specific services that we're able to access and use as well so absolutely we make every effort to provide um the information and and the language of the family requests thank you I got a couple comments uh first of all I think I think we're a year into the the ringtone system right where you press the buzzer and and go in like that's that really seems to be front doors yeah yeah just as a physical uh safety that seems to be really working well like is is there anybody complaining about it or have you got any feedback on complaints or just I think it's a great system but um we haven't really had very many
070complaints um the when it first went in we had a few complaints but once we explained um the reasoning why and every once you explain to to people the reasoning why and keeping their students safe it's pretty obvious they're pretty accepting of that yeah no I agree I was just just wondering what there's always people that complain about something but um the preventative maintenance I think you you kind of covered that um you know uh I just kind of always reflect things in my own person personal life being a farmer I always pre preventative maintenance goes a long ways like just a little grease in a and a PTO shaft and you get a lot more hours out of it so that I agree with the I think that's kind of the preventive if you
071prevent um the get a hold of the the kids and the behavior early and and your then it makes the high school a lot better so I um I appreciate that and then um the cell phone uh one thing in the seminar that uh Peninsula really uh you were talking about um putting the cell phones away like they they were they allowed the kids to have them at the beginning and at lunch and after school but uh after that no cell phones and they they're finding that the kids are actually before the Bell Rings they actually communicating with each other and they hadn't seen that in a while so the kids are actually engaging human conversation so that was a a great thing are you are you starting to see that um we do see
072that I think um one thing that I've noticed from last year to this year is we have an extremely less amount of like social media problems um complaints reports you know we were getting those all the time it was it was flooding my office all the time about so and so took a picture of me some so and so is recording this and posting it and there's very little of that um if there is uh any it's very it's very few and far between when you agree and so um it's really allowed students to concentrate on their studies um I have had a couple parents complain very fiercely about cell phones um obviously if a student has a medical issue or there's extenda circumstances we do allow them to have their phone I know um
073I'm diabetic and so I use my phone as a monitor and we have students students that that do that as well and they're allowed to keep their phone and they have a pass for that but for the most part those students aren't the ones misusing it anyways and so it's been it's really impacted our culture in a positive way what one thing they the peninsula mentioned is that that they've really got the kids on board so that if if Little Johnny or little suie is in a wheelchair and has to use a tablet like there's not well you take my cell phone away why do they get it but they they got the kids involved so that the kids can can as a group can say well there's a reason why Little Johnny or little
074Susie has that and then the kids kind of beat that or or conquer that situation um one other thing I wanted to kind of point out along with that is is that um the feeling of safety without the cell phones is our our feeling of safety with our students is a lot higher um last year we had a lot of kids that didn't want to use the bathrooms or different things like that because of cell phones and um we have had very little complaints in that area good and glint thanks for being the fun guy like I think that really helps uh break the ice for a lot of things a long night you need a little snack right yes appreciate it well I don't know if it's the popcorn or what it is but
075there's always a lot of shade given out or when things are bad but I at least want to say you guys have got that thing turned around over at the Junior High from last year and the year before um so just wanted to say you guys are doing a great job obviously the referrals are down and I imagine you guys will keep it up so if it's the popcorn or whatever it is keep doing what it is but um we also have to put a put it out there when when people are doing good work to say thank you because there's a lot of people that like just to put people down so thank you yeah I have kids one daughter right now the middle school and she talks about her PBIS points and all
076sorts of stuff so I I I love positive uh encouragement and and reward I'll do anything for a bag of popcorn so I think it's great my question actually had to do with that as well just what he said so this you know the referrals this year compared to last year you've already talked about cell phones is that that's one of the bigger things that youve attribute this difference to anything else that you would say definitely is factor to this that difference I'm gonna let Clint take this I've been talking a lot I got to share the love here I don't know how much I can help about what happened last year because I wasn't around um but I can just address what's going on this year and I think the overall culture of the
077kids being happy and enjoying being there at McFarland um the ABC cars the recognition the PBS uh the staff have really worked hard to make that happen um the PB BS store that we have um the donations that we've received to um really bolster that that store and have a good selection for the kids to choose from and and just some of the other opportunities the assemblies that we've uh put on for the students and recognitions I think that really has changed the atmosphere uh there at the school so uh for the better so go thank you I did have one more question actually for your meeting one more question then that's for Josh uh you get a lot of opportunities to work with outside organizations like the juvenile court and the law enforcement is
078there just how do you think those relationships are is there anything we can do with the district to and make them those better just how do you think that's going the relationships are going really well um when the judge um emailed me um and asked me to come to his office I was kind of nervous so right away I said can I bring Peter Jessica because I didn't know I kind of knew what he was going to ask for uh but I wanted one of them on on on on my side just because I I don't have the ability to make decisions and to my surprise is the judge is very very different than our old judge Dixon um this particular judge is really interested in working with us our juvenile court system um we've
079had healthy relationships with him like for as long as I've been in the system um a relationship with other agencies like Mental Health Integrated Mental Health um it's it's been positive it's going really well I think the best part is it's a relationships that we have and part of it is the community engagement boards we invite all of the stakeholders to to be a part of these and a lot of these administrators have been to multiple um Community engagement boards hearings and it's just going really really well Erin and again my goal I was just telling Jessica uh before this meeting my goal is to create a system we're going to take the best of all these local Eastern Washington counties and we're going to create a system for us where we're not going to
080jam-pack the the courthouse um on on juvenile court date because we understand there's criminal matters and treny is not a criminal matter but yet it's an important matter because John mentioned it at the beginning if these kids don't show up um it does we're not going to be able to teach them anything no matter who's in the classroom so we got to get them to walk in the door so that the relationships are very very healthy and and I'm looking forward to strengthening these relationships so he's like I said he's entrusted us to kind of do the leg work to come up with a system that he's going to embrace and he's going to uh uh uphold in in the courtroom so it's been it's been interesting great thank you all right as we transition
081to the next group I do want to add two comments as our our early Excellence group is coming forward uh one is around um why kids come to school and the majority of the time that a student spends at school is in the presence of a teacher and we hope that every one of those moments is a skill teacher who wants that child to and makes sure that that child feels welcome in our classrooms so I really appreciate the opportunity to hear about the creative activities that are going out there to incentivize kids to feel good at school but also don't want to forget that all the hard work our teachers are doing every day to provide a positive experience in the classroom so kids feel like they are missing out if they're not there
082the other thing that I think will be interesting to watch over the next several years for school boards and for school administrators is we heard a lot about learning and loss over the last couple years right they weren't in school covid learning loss learning loss we don't hear that term much anymore but I think one of the outcomes of that whole pandemic experience was uh a move to remote work for a number of families and remote learning that became a viable option and that missing school maybe wasn't that big a deal after you went a couple years with not being there so I think retraining some of those families unlearning some of those habits is going to take some time but you heard a lot of really good ideas from a lot of skilled people
083here to talk about um how we're dealing with that so just something for us to pay attention to moving forward the next section that we're going to talk about is early excellence and uh really the the primary goal here is that we want as many kids as possible every kid in our system uh by the reading on grade level by the end of third grade all the research out there around uh literacy and success in schools and then lifelong success to earn a living is tied to the ability to read by the end of third grade and so we're going to hear some of the really excellent work that's happening across the district uh related to early Excellence okay so you get to hear from me again um so one one of our focuses is
084on making sure that our teachers have clarity about what they're teaching why they're teaching it how they're teaching it um and so um for preschool we have Early Childhood standards that are national standards that we're required to follow um sorry I failed it clicking already um and then in specifically in Washington state we have the walk kids standard so hopefully most of you are familiar with the walk kids assessment that's the assessment all of our kindergarteners take in the fall and then again in the spring and so there's very specific standards in six different areas and so um the preschool follows those also because those are on a Continuum that say at this stage they should be doing this developmentally and then it goes up and actually the standards actually go all the way through
085third grade um but we mostly just use them in the preschool and in um kindergarten and so then with u moving to having transitional kindergarten classes that are full day we also have to take that assessment the walk kids assessment in the fall and in the spring and so we spent um almost every PLC last year U with our whole staff not just our TK staff going through those standards and making sure we were looking at our current curriculum and what um what are we doing in our everyday practices are we using best practices and then if there was an area maybe we were weak worked on uh beefing up those things and then with um transitional Kinder one of the curriculums that they the state recommends we use is called creative curriculum and so
086once again with expanding our program um my TK teachers spent eight days this summer really digging into that curriculum and then also the walk kids standards and making sure that once again are we meeting all those standards you know there's academic standard social emotional physical fine and gross motor um and so really looking at that new curriculum because it was new for them also and then making sure do they have Clarity around those things are we using best practices and are we um meeting our standards and then four times five times a year the besid so they do the walk kids assessment in the spring and the fall but to progress monitor that along the way during five times during the year all of our preschoolers whether they're in the TK full day or our
087half day classes take a an assessment um to just make sure that we're making growth and then making all the kids are getting the standards during the core instruction but then when they go into their small groups I the teachers can differentiate and make sure that they're U meeting kids at that level but still pushing them to U meet standard and be ready for kindergarten and so not only did they meet during the summer for those eight days but then several times on PLC they've been like they did two units in the summer and so then sometimes on their PLC days and then the right the Tuesday right before Thanksgiving they spent the whole day also working on getting getting the next two units ready so just trying to stay ahead of what's coming and
088um making sure they're ahead of the game and doing what we need to get the little ones ready for kindergarten okay so at scoy um we we knew looking at data and looking at our um students in third fourth fifth grade that we had a significant amount of students that were um not meeting benchmarks marks not reading um successfully at a third grade level and um we had been spending a lot of time and energy and resources um on providing interventions and trying to backfill trying to um address those needs at those later grades and this year we really changed our approach and um changed our system to improve our foundational reading instruction in the primary grade level so in kindergarten through second grade um we made some big changes one of those changes was
089how we used our uh PLC time on Mondays and we have been separating our teachers um and meeting as a K2 group and then a three through six group and in our um PLC time for those kindergarten through third through second grade teachers we have provided a lot of really intentional professional development on um our uh curriculums that we're using on um giving teachers time to actually practice teaching lessons to each other uh to debrief and talk about how instructions going in the classroom and um a lot of conversation vertically between teachers from kindergarten first grade and second grade and so that has really changed um the way that we are providing instruction in the classroom we uh moved our core phonics and phonemic awareness instruction from small group instruction in the past um a
090lot of that instruction had been provided by Paras in small groups and this year we changed uh made a change to our system and now all of that phonics and phonic awareness instruction is being ma uh being provided by the classroom teacher in a whole group setting and then we're using our Paras to follow up and provide um practice opportunities for those students in small group setting um as far as collecting data and um kind of knowing if we're being successful and what it's going to look like when we're successful we know that um because this is such a big systemic change that it's going to take time to see those results um so we will be looking at data um mainly through our rgr and dibles assessments um but we know that we're not
091going to see huge changes right away um because we've really changed our system it's going to take time to as the as these kindergarteners move through their primary grades um that our goal is that you know over the next couple years we're going to be having a high percentage of third graders that are um reading functionally and fluently at third grade once they've moved through their primary years just a a quick question when you say time that's we need till they're in third grade before you'll see the results or no I think that we'll begin to see results um at the end of this year I think that I just think that those results will compound each year so as our our group of kindergarteners now moves through three years of this change in our
092system that um that there will be a huge you know reward at that time but I I think absolutely um through through um this year we'll see improvements at each at each level so you'll know right away if something if you got to do even more changes yeah definitely we'll we'll look at the data and make adjustments um as we go but yeah the long-term goal is that to have a student that actually goes through a system for three years um that hopefully we see the reward in third grade gotcha thank you thank you okay hi there um so you're going to hear some of some similar things with scoy um the principles this year have done a lot of communicating and collaborating um we've done walks in different schools to pick up new ideas
093or to see how things are being implemented so we can strengthen our own practices within our school um so that first piece we've over the last few years um some of our summer work that we've done with teachers is kind of back planning the year looking at how many days are in the month instructional days are in the month how many instructional days are in the year and then planning really um purposefully to make sure that we use our time as wisely as we can because time is is precious in education um so making sure that we've we can get through everything that we need to get through for the entire year and we've been doing that for the last few years and then we've also been in um aligning with like with our curriculum
094as well so not just with the curriculum but the practices so we've really over the last few years aligned with the what what are we teaching when are we teaching it so we're um that helps also with planning on okay our students going to get this assessment on this week do we have everything ready for them so they're going to be so they can be successful um we've also we have you'll hear the same sort of things we've been doing common plc's with our K2 for foundational reading and we've been doing um that we've started this year but it was based off of the data that we saw from last year and then we've also been doing common plc's for our 36 around reading comprehension um we've switched from looking at just individual standards to
095targets which is more a grouping of the standards which in ela it just makes it um um it just makes more sense it groups the commonalities of those standards and so our 36 have been creating all new curriculum um focused around those targets and um they all have the common slides and they work together to then practice what does that look like we have common organizers common slides common chants common gestures and when they get together for those plc's they can say hey we're working this this next univ and instruction is around Target 2 let's model what that looks like and teachers will get up and present principles will get up and present and then the everybody else are the the class and so we can see what really what does that instruction look like
096are we teaching it at the highest level that we can and We Know by doing that we know that we've got quality instruction in every classroom so when we walk in we can see hey they're they're doing it like we practiced or hm I think we need a little bit of tweaking there let's get somebody to model that um I'm saying I'm a lot uh another thing was the K2 that foundational reading last year we looked at that rgr and Dibbles data and really dug into it so gave teachers the booklets and said okay let's create we have a form that we can say okay this group of students they're missing in their their Blends or they're missing their R controlled vals or they're missing you know just get very very specific so that when
097we work with students in not just in our intervention time but um all throughout the day we can be really really intentional with that instruction because we know exactly what students are missing what and we do that with every round of testing um and so rather than just working on those things in that inter interventions um and our kids walk to their interventions so they might be going to a different classroom with a parah and working on that but when they come back to their home room that teacher knows exactly where every kid is at so that they can work on those skills throughout the day in every subject we also we saw um with our foundational reading our our Kinder and first really rolled it out last year but but a little bit in
098second and third was taking our um our hegerty which is teaching um those fun the phonics and phonemic skills and not just doing it in intervention time but doing it in whole group time so they're getting like sometimes double triple doses of that throughout the day and um it's exciting because I'm going to jump down to that data piece um we saw kids coming into this 24 school year comparing it to the kids coming into the the previous year we saw a 10% increase in the third grade students who are fluent readers which fluent meaning not just word count per minute but word count and accuracy and we're excited we know that that with the intentionality um and the intensity and the purpose of instruction this year um because we're continuing that work and we're
099just building it and getting it making it better and better and better um we're excited to see where that leads us to next year but we're very we're constantly um what's the saying like oh I can't think of the saying anyway checking throughout the throughout the year we want to know where kids are at every step of the way so that going into next year we could be really we have high hopes for for where they're going to be um the other piece will is going to talk about when it's his turn it's um around classroom walks we've really been trying to get into about eight classrooms a day and giving feedback um he'll I'm not going to touch too much on that but we've been really pushing on that so we can give really
100specific and targeted feedback to our teachers thank you okay so um some of this might seem a little redundant because you guys already got to visit us but um going to hit on the idea around the vertical collaboration in the K2 PLC um Jesse kind of spoke about it as well from hawaa but the idea that uh the top part there 3.1 says ensure Educators have support and resources necessary for this systematic instructional alignment um we're in about year three or four of the vertical vertical collaboration at our building um started with 36 Ela quite a few years ago and then have built from there and um this year I've really jumped into the K2 phonics piece uh our teachers are incredibly hungry to to do better than than we had been and um a
101lot of this work started last year for them is around the phonic piece and um saying what we're doing just it wasn't it wasn't getting us to where we needed to be and so how can we get can we take that next step and so this vertical collaboration piece of meeting every Monday and again you guys got to see that uh when you visited our building of them all sitting in one room how are we teaching these certain things what are the absolute best practices what are what's getting us the biggest bang for our buck with this specific section of the of the lesson um right now I think we're on less or section I think we've gone through five of them so far and just dissecting each section of the lesson itself and um
102when I say that I mean like what is the best way for us to teach it what is worked for our students okay now let's create a this is what the curriculum says but when we at weitas this is what the lesson's going to look like like and um that's what that flowchart idea and Scaffolding looks like the best practice is so they actually have a document they've created that says when we teach this part this is what it should look like and the idea around scaffolding we don't want to be doing too much for our kids we want to live right on that edge with them that we're giving you just enough support but you're the one doing the thinking you're the one doing the talking you're the one doing the practicing because the
103last thing you'd want to do is walk into a classroom and the teachers doing all the thinking the teachers doing all the talking because we already know how to read right like we don't need the practice they are the ones that need it and so uh making sure that we're we're always planning around that if the kids have it how do we remove some scaffolding how do we remove some scaffolding how do you remove it for part of the class but not the other part and um the more we can get in the room and talk about those things I think uh the more successful we will be um and the the bottom part the target it's it's really exciting because like I said the teachers are incredibly hungry and um a lot of times
104they're chomping at the bit and I'm kind of having to hold them back a little like not quite yet not quite yet and so a lot of this work around changing our phonics instruction started last year around about Christmas and it was really driven by a few teachers and they started to change some things and if we do it this way it's going to be better and let's try this and always watching is it actually working and um at this point in the year we have more fluent readers in grades one and two than we've ever had in our building and I've tracked all the way back to 2012 when we opened and so uh really really exciting we're just on the edge of the very beginning of the process but but um so far
105it's it's looking really good and again tying it back to that idea of systematic um and that alignment piece making sure that we might not be able to get 300 reps in kindergarten with certain skills but we know by third grade they have to read and so if we can work incredibly closely together we can get them by by that third grade time because once you move to third grade if you're not a fluent reader it's it's very very difficult because the you're now not learning to read you're reading to learn but if you're also trying to learn to read on top of that it's it's very difficult so um yeah that's what we have uh any questions for us um just uh one thing that come to come to mind um if you said
106things are rolling right now so if if it ain't broke don't fix it are you thinking okay we're hitting this we can do better or how do you how do you approach that well I think um in the discussions really were around you know we were getting to about that 50% Mark with our kids and we had done it year after year for about three years um even coming out of covid and so we knew the system was getting us to about 50 and about half of our kids were getting to third grade reading fluently and accurately but no matter what in the current system the way we had it we couldn't get past that part and so that's what really pushed the teachers to like they're not getting enough reps what what we're doing
107is not giving them enough they're not focused enough on certain skills we're throwing too many at them at once and they're not mastering it and then we're moving on and so really trying to figure out how to how to fix that and then um again back off so we're not the ones doing the thinking and talking we give just enough instruction and then make them practice practice practice practice practice and how can how can we design the lessons to you know there's 20 kids in the room and they all need to be reading accurately how do we do that and not letting kids practice inaccurately and so um the system wasn't wasn't completely broken but it was getting us exactly the same thing year after year so that tells us that it it was doing
108its job but it wasn't the right job so we had to kind of change course a little bit with it I think one piece to add about that from a strategic planning perspective is really these the the title of this whole presentation about empowering dreams for all it's for every kid right and if we we have systems that aren't guaranteeing that every kid can read by third grade we need to be constantly thinking about even though it might be rolling like Justin said right how can we do a little bit better and one of the foundational experiences I had as a building principal was let's say um in in schools with demographics that are similar to those in oel that you 70% of your kids at standard that would be pretty outstanding across the state
109of Washington across the country people would say wow they're they're doing some really exciting work there and the person who was talking us through this whole process said well if you have 20 kids in your classroom and you have their 20 little faces in your third grade classroom take six and X them out because those kids aren't going to be a standard and which six are you going to pick and how how are you going to speak to their families are you going to call those families and say hey you're not coming to school enough uh those kinds of things that prompt you to say until every kid gets there we're going to keep thinking and tweaking it and and I think at the board level and the superintendent level it's being keepers of that
110vision and having those aspirational goals that really smart people like this keep pushing on it every day and we keep asking the right questions it's really encouraging to hear the positive statistics and data about it of course to get some of the data you have to do lots of testing for the kids it seems like they're doing lots of testing that well more than when I was there I guess do the kids handle that okay or they get exhausted overwhelmed by the testing kids and teachers I guess um how does that go I think they handle it very you know very well um I think the more PA it on um it's like the rgr and dibles it doesn't take all that long um it's it's oneon-one we push all our Paras in the rooms
111done in in not very long so it's that testing isn't all that stressful once you get to like espa things like that that's definitely more stressful but again it goes to that safety and belonging we try to create those environments we try to break it up so it's not so overwhelming we do a lot of positive things big posters around the school little treats for the kids just so you know just be encouraging of like just do your absolute best um you know any test is going to be a little bit stressful but we try to make it as less stressful as possible I think too um it's how you approach it as a as an adult like if we as adults are guys we have to take a test again today that's how the
112kids are going to respond right or it's up there we'll get to it on Friday and we'll just get through it quick so we can get to next week right that that sends a message to the kids but if you have the message that hey this is your opportunity you get to show us did you improve or not and the K you like get them excited and look kind of switch it on them um what we've seen is they'll really buy into that and uh another thing is getting kids to track their own growth so even a green yellow and red did I get the question right I got it green yellow is I got it right but I was still a little confused or red I didn't get it right and you have them
113track and so at the the end it's almost like a game to them I got these three I can color them green you know like making it more um meaningful for them and not looking at it as a negative but as a hey this is my chance to show that I have been improving and then the teacher gets all excited and they're excited to take the next one because I want to get all all jacked up again so I think it's really how you approach it as a building and as a um as a system because if you ask the kids do you guys test a lot they probably wouldn't even know they're testing you know like it doesn't feel like that to them most of the time because it's um it's not a negative
114thing like we used we think of it as so I think it's important to have those celebrations we need to celebrate with our kids the growth that they're making and every little little bit of growth You' got to be like Yay you you rocked it you know I I do think there's an interesting piece around test anxiety that often gets overlooked because true test anxiety is pretty rare it's it's for a handful of kids but really when you think about anxiety in any situation it typically comes when the challenge you're faced with is higher or greater than your skill and so when these kids are prepared every day and they show up and they know I've got to take a test well that's okay I'm really good at this math that's not a problem I
115know that I can read 120 words a minute they don't get stressed out the stress comes when you're asking them to do things that we haven't prepared them to do and that that's on us not on the kid and so again lots of people working really hard to make sure that the lessons we design and the instruction that teachers are trying to provide every day day is consistent with what the kids are going to be asked to do right that's that's the fair thing to do for our kids right give them the experiences they need to be successful I think just to add on to what Justin was saying too about the attitude of the adults I have heard um more teachers in our building recently be talking um positively and excited for testing because
116they really believe in what they're doing right now and they're pouring their hearts into it and they're working hard and they are excited to see the data and see the growth and be able to celebrate that with their students um they really believe their students are working hard and um so they're kind of excited to see that reward um so I've kind of noticed a little bit of a a shift in that attitude too coming from the adults it's kind of like if you practice you know like if you're in basketball you don't want to practice all season long you actually want to play a couple games right and that's what the tests are like jump in and did we win or lose and on you know keep practice in so um yeah I also
117think honestly I put a lot more value on the interims than and I know this is is not great but then the esba because I think that um at least for me I put myself in that position when I took the SATs I I didn't get test anxiety I got test exhaustion where it was like too many questions I'm just going to start filling this in because I did I didn't have the stamina to do you know an eight hour test um so I think think for kids that they it's like hey I just learned this and I know how to do it and it's such a shorter test um that's when I really think that they show themselves um sometimes the longer test they get more test exhaustion and when I asked my kids
118after the S they're like how did you do I I got really bored after a certain amount of questions or whatever so I I think that they're really great um I was gonna I have a question for you Jennifer do you guys track what's percentage on average of preschoolers that are ready for Kinder or considered ready for Kinder do you guys track that information yeah um I mean we usually are in the high 90 range and we I don't think we've ever been at 100% but I mean we've been as high as like 98% 97% 94% so yeah we we track their growth from the very first time we test till the end of the year and then from year to year we can see the progress so yeah great and just to go off
119that because I used to kindergarten and give the walk kids um that walk kids is really helpful because it it gives you developmentally where they're at and you can really see okay this this 5-year-old who's going to be going into kindergarten they're they're re reaching those developmental milestones and it really breaks it apart so that's why that walk kids is really helpful to see developmentally not just developmentally academically as well that's on there um it it breaks that piece down too because it's so important for kids transitioning from preschool to kindergarten the rigor and the expectations just go drastically higher and so it helps that that assessment helps you determine where are they at and are they going to be ready great thank you you well you're halfway through your assessment so hang in hang
120in there I'm exhausted good evening so for Mastery of Standards we're going to continue some of the themes that you've just heard about early Excellence into a Mastery of Standards the overall outcome for Mastery of Standards is that we uh increase the number of students who are meeting or exceeding Proficiency in each grade and content area and so that's really the the meat of what we do teaching and learning wise across the district and um you we've got almost every building represented up here um that doesn't mean that the buildings who aren't up here aren't doing that work this is this is our daily work you're going to be hearing um very good examples about the common planning that teachers are doing together the feedback that principles are giving to teachers and the feedback that
121teachers are giving to students um some standards based grading updates and then the data systems that teachers and administrators are using to track student progress you'll see some um concrete data in the slides today today uh so but as uh different buildings are at different places with the their work right now you okay okay well um I can guarantee you that when we come back in the spring I believe we're scheduled to be back in April for a presentation similar to this there's going to be much more data as we um can show you what's been going on throughout the school year so to get us started I think scy is gonna going to begin um yes if you will uh look at that 1.1 it says ensure teachers collaborate on agreed upon best teaching
122practices so this journey for scrutiny in go three began during the summer so our Focus was on shifting from standards in Reading to um targets and as Jesse said you know targets are more of a cluster of standards and so we were really changing the way we were thinking about teaching so during the summer we learned about um reading strategies and then we came together as a school and decided like what are we going to do for students to make sure that they're fluent readers um another learning that we did during the summer was unpacking targets and really um thinking about how are we going to teach the targets that align with each other so we're really talking about um third fourth fifth and sixth grade students because we're talking about espa now and so
123how are we going to get them prepared um but with the shift and how we were thinking about reading and teaching reading we also knew that just the learning in the summer wasn't enough that they're going to the teachers are going to need ongoing support so we have structured all of our plc's to make sure that we're giving the professional development that the students or that the teachers will need to feel like they have the skills to go out and teach the students so we're really coming together at plc's and we're working on um making sure that we have common anchor charts making sure that our chance and gestures are the same making sure that our graphic organizers and our writing prompts they align to what the students need to really um make our system
124stronger and what's been really exciting is that the teachers are asking to do peer observations so that we can align more and that we can make our system stronger so again I apologize but I'm going to come back to the um the vertical collaboration and the PLC work to make sure to make sure that our students uh are getting the best from each teacher every day we have to collaborate and that's what um this goal is really around but the math teacher Clarity resources that we talked about when you visited our building every teacher has um what they need for the entire year every single standard how it's going to be assessed exactly how to teach it um and then we meet every Monday for them to go through that and um uh again backing
125up three four years when we started the ELA work it was much easier on the ELA side because um main idea the uh theme summary all that those don't change from third through really through high school and so you can get a te group of teachers in a room and talk about that but math is a little bit tougher because the content really does change from year to year and the the instructional sequence is very different from uh from grade to grade third grade might be start with multiplication fifth grade might be starting with fractions and so trying to get teachers in a room and talking about it is is pro uh it gave us a challenge but we I think we figured out a way to do it and so they come together once
126a week on Mondays just like I talked about earlier with phonics and they talk about you know this is what I'm teaching this week in fourth grade they get up teach it and then everybody in the room Kinder through sixth grade has to give them input how how are you teaching that hey if you guys taught it this way tweaked it a tiny bit that would really help us in fifth grade or hey this is how we taught our second graders that that same kind of concept if you talk to them like that in this way with that they'll they'll see the connection and so really making the connections as adults and so the kids don't have to and um that leads to the best teaching practices then well what is the best way to
127teach it you know uh not just what what we think but what truly is the best way um this the work in this area is where really at the the iceberg with it and kind of coming back to your question Chris um you know when do we know if we're we're there or not and we kind of reach that same thing in math that that about that 50% you know that we can get about half of our kids to standard and how do we get to that next spot because we again if you look at our data the last three years it's right it's been right there and so how do we move to that next that next level and I think this is how to do it getting the teachers in the room because
128like I told you guys when you're in our building too um we have incredibly incredibly gifted teachers that know a lot more than I do and so I'm not going to be up there telling them what to do when they they do it every day they're in there they're living it they're breathing it they understand it at an incredibly deep level I just have to give them opportunities to get in a room and and talk to each other about it um and so what it's led to so far this year and this whole process of trying to continually get better is you can see there um talking about interims Lindsay um we have the highest percent of students passing interim number one across grades K through six so I just took all the kids in
129the in the entire school did you pass or did you not pass um and this year we were at 73% last year 68 57 the year before and 41 year before so you can see that gradual increase and uh it's pretty exciting because that calibrating and really making sure we're all in the same page is is is helping kids that Justin that big jump uh from 2021 41 to you know now you're at 73 is that was a lot of that because of Co too you think um or no I don't know if I would say that I think uh we really ramped up I mean the assessment was pretty rigorous it it stayed the same but I don't think we were teaching to that level on a on a consistent basis back in 2021
130um whereas now we are and the teachers know that you got to hit these marks and it's it's not so much just for that test but that test is directly aligned with the espa so we know that we're shooting at the right the right Target and uh it's just getting much more clear and precise and focused on what we're doing I think that's what's Led Led to that I'm not going to lie Co probably had a little bit to do with with that that that number so Jus how long's the collaboration been going on 20 22 23 um when did you guys start that 22 was the first time it well no 21 you're right is when it started for 3 through six Ela and then it's it's built its way through in ela but
131this is the first year that we've really hit the ground running with that math with uh really focused on math and you you see only a 5% jump but what's what's interesting is though like um it's it's hard to get that last it's harder to go from 75 to 100 than it is from 25 to 50 and so um that's kind of where we're living right now and how do you how do we get those last few kids how do we get them all there and not just say dang we got to 73 like like Pete was saying that you could say oh that's great but that's still six kids in every classroom that aren't there and so this is that next piece to really push us over the edge and um and it's it's
132we're all on the same team we're all rolling the same way and uh it might not really show its its effect this year because really when the effect is going to be seen is when kids are in the system and we're teaching this way for three four five years and the instruction is incredibly tight and we're talking the same language K through six that's years of the kids education that's half their K12 experience and if we can really tighten that I think I mean we could push that 9500 per. it's just nice to see that you made that jump from 41 to 73 and you're still wanting more progress yeah I think one of the innovative ideas that uh Justin could talk about um that occurred at wus was around the looping uh project that
133he implemented and his teachers supported him through because you've heard from a number of people tonight talk about the the targets and the clustered ability and how there's very little change from you know third grade through high school around that that idea but in math it's sequential and so the looping really created an excellent learning opportunity for teachers I've always taught this in third grade and now now I now I know what they do in fifth grade and when I went from third to fifth I needed to figure out what they did in fourth and all those skills and learning that he led them through are starting to pay off not only in in the instruction that they deliver but the outcomes for kids too and so it'll be interesting interesting to watch that that
134progression for that particular project good evening so for OHS we've been doing a lot of work and looking at our um everything that we have in place and what we can change to improve our our students and our teaching practices so again if we're agreed upon best teaching practices as our Focus then we had to find time to make sure that our teachers had time to align their student um their stand based grading and their data cycles and get them aligned for the Mastery for their leadership and everything so through that our leadership Focus was to make sure that we provided them the time and the space to do that work um and so what we really had to do is like meet the teachers where they were what did they need and how could
135we uh support them in the specific needs that they needed and what they needed was time to look at their pacing look at their standards and make sure that they could have any adjustment uh they needed to perfect their their alignment so what we did this year is look at their data cycles and we restructured them so what happened is we we brought them to this room right here for a a whole day um I worked with the math and science and then everybody else had their content and what they did is they looked okay here was our first trimester what went well what didn't what did we not what did we not meet where do we need to meet and they said so they had really great conversations about about how did we realign
136our uh proficiency skills to make sure that our kids are meeting the the 3.0 proficiency skills that we want them to meet uh the conversations also included the um again like everybody else has talked about the best teaching practices what is it we need to how do we going to teach this what do how what uh strategies are we going to bring in uh to support them in that then what we've also done is provided uh professional development on specific uh learning strategies especially our Avid strategies and our multilingual strategies that support all of our Learners by doing that what has happened is that each teacher in each department gets to choose from what has been provided in the in the per in the PD and choose which strategies they're going to be implementing what
137happens now when they go to their data cycles and they're looking at this analyzing the student data they also need to analyze how they taught it did we reach all the students what do we need to tweak how are we going to fix this strategy um if it worked well for me and it didn't work well for somebody else then what happened how do how do we align that so our students are getting the best um that our teachers can provide and the best learning opportunities um let's see here um so and with all of that I mean we did a lot of work talking getting feedback from the teachers them telling telling us what they what they felt they needed and US providing it to show their support and make sure that this work
138could get done but in the end you know we want to look what the proofs in the pudding what evidence do we have that this was successful we have um uh qualitative teacher feedback highlighting the fact that they did value the time that they got to spend with the data and really wrap their heads around what they were asking what they were being asked to do and what they were asking students to do and how do they work as a team to make sure that what they're doing is equal throughout all their their content and making sure those opportunities are there um teachers reported that with this work that they had better Clarity and understanding the uh expectations the standard-based grading expectations and also express some confidence that they had a better ability and understanding
139of what they needed to do and how to get there so the time was well spent and very supportive for for the for our te teachers um and from there we were going to be able to have data tonight to kind of show some of the um the differences that his has made but we've had some hiccups in um in our Reporting System the way they were reported so we weren able to have that data for you today but we we'll we'll have data for next time so because we um like I said we wanted to make sure that our data systems and our standard based was all aligned so our students could uh reach the Mastery that's expected all right so I'm G to focus on 2.1 um which is really around um the
140same Target of of instructional Excellence but um around providing feedback for our teachers um so Jesse talked a lot about the work we've done over the last several years in aligning our content and curriculum and our scopes for our teachers but the the pivot we want really wanted to make in the next step we wanted to take this year was to move from the what to the how you've heard several um principles talk about that so we wanted to make sure we were moving from the what to the how um so establishing a common framework in language for Quality instruction um I went to a conference a visible learning conference and they talked about that we talk a lot about feedback as as Pete said that that's been a focus of ours for for several
141years um the conference I was at I was at talked about this as being the feed up before you give feedback are you setting a clear expectation and a real clarity as a staff for what does quality instruction look like and the how we're presenting that to students so we've been doing a lot of work U um around that um Jesse talked about those and and many principles have talked about those aligned plc's um in those plc's people get up and model and rehearse and talk about hey what worked and what didn't work and what's clear we're talking about common strategies and and and and and how we expect that that instruction to be given um and then we're in classrooms more and more increase the presence of how we're in there giving them feedback
142on it um not as there's an accountability aspect of that but just another set of eyes when you're in the middle of teaching it's a really difficult and complex job um when you're in the moment it's hard to um process everything that's going on so having another set of eyes in there to say hey did you see this did you think about this when you did this I noticed this from these students um though that feedback has been really really powerful and then something some a piece of feedback that we got from our teachers um in the beginning of the year when we started talking about feedback was we really wanted to make sure that our our feedback was a dialogue that it wasn't just me dropping in seeing something dropping an email and then
143moving on um but that uh we asked questions we tried to get more context um that if we suggested something we followed up um and those sorts of things so that's something we've worked on really really hard and it's really changed the tone of that feedback and that process with all of our teachers in a really really positive way we've done some surveying just early in the year and gotten some feedback on that so A couple of of of points we've increased just at hawaa our walks from through November um last year to through November this year there's a 72% increase in the number of we walks we've done and almost half 40% of that feedback has been some sort of dialogue whether the teacher emails back and reports um or shares something or shares
144their thoughts or us following up and having a face-to-face conversation and just talking through some things so that's been really really positive and we're we're excited to see how that's been impacting instruction and getting us to the how of the instruction um and not just the what so hello board um I don't know if you've heard but we were doing standard based grading at McFarland this year and I don't know if you've heard from teachers members but uh we went we jumped into the deep end and went full implementation with everyone and uh when I think about the collaboration that we we've been able to experience with uh in terms of our leadership and how we support our teachers we've been surrounded by a really great team with Jessica leading us and Josh Meek and
145the rest of the building leaders between the Middle School and the high school um but also with what we piloted last year in terms of pure coaches like for example we had Laura Cooper John Smith Deon Lewis and this year Deon Lewis continuing to support us in in more on the Empower side of things but um it's important that there's this distinction between standards based grading and Empower so I'm going to be talking about standards based grading itself um but again we've had a very strong collaboration we've been doing our best to stay on top of things and how we manage a work order system to provide that support for teachers I can also say that when it comes to ongoing professional development um since August we provided at least six different instances of support
146in different ways that surround standards based grading since August and what we're also doing at the building level is providing monthly support in terms of that's optional for teachers for them to come in and when they when they're ready or if they need help uh to seek that support and so um we have the leadership team we have a work order system we have a collaboration with Matt Shay who's been pretty responsive who's the the developer for ower but again speaking specifically a standards based grading we also have Tom Christensen who's been a huge support for us too is a standards based grading tosa for example and um and again those ongoing monthly optional meetings and supports there for us the you know as of last week something that we've been paying attention to and
147if I in no doubt I don't I don't doubt at all that it's come to your attention just how pacing impacted athletic eligibility and that's something that we've been working through this fall um and we've made this transition that because we're still in our first full year of implementation um to not penalize students for being on Pace or not being on Pace but to really just focus on a scoring for kids and so if a 1.5 on a fourpoint scale is equivalent to a d that's really that's that's really all we want to look at just build on from there with our kids in terms of pacing and the academic rigor something that we've been focusing on is um how we map out over the course of a semester at McFarland because I know OS
148is on trimesters but being on a semester system is how do we map out the the scaffolding and that rigor of learning throughout the course of a semester with u 1.5 goal opportunities to two to 2.5 and to 3.0 opportunities and what what does that look like for us in our first four year of implementation and so we're learning that this year um what I can say is that for the we have a pretty good balance of 1.5 or lower to um 2.0 to 2.5 to 3.0 or higher opportunities that are pretty balanced in those three areas equaling 100% And so we have a good balance there but something that we're building this year is really a focus on the rigor of instruction that matches really what proficiency or Mastery looks like in our proficiency
149scales and after we built those being conscientious of what we've built and made available to kids um to make it available to those that are ready for that rigor of learning that are already if they're coming to us like Justin was talking about data with that while heus has been able to show and how they've shown growth over the years it doesn't make sense to live in scaffolding and in 1.5 or 2.0 opportunities for kids if they're ready for 3.0 just a few few weeks into the year depending on the proficiency scale so as we build these for our kids in our first four year of implementation this is something that we're going to be mindful of moving forward how do we create more rigorous opportunities in a more timely way for the kids that
150are ready while still scaffolding for the kids that still need the scaffolding and intervention and so um I've learned there's a lot of moving parts and it takes a full team to do it no doubt there's been some feedback about standards based grading but I can say that in conversations with people Empower aside they're very much in favor of Standards based grading more so than which we're working through in our own review as a system um the teachers also buy into the fact that when it comes to improving the equity for kids the alignment for kids and communication and that impact on learning for kids it's it's good for kids but with that needless to say it's been a huge lift I've been an administrator for a while and this is one of the this
151is one of the heaviest things that we've been we've had to do as a system we wanted to do as a system and even with that lift being so heavy I I admire and I really greatly appreciate our staff who who have taken this on and knowing that it's what's best for kids you know empow side focusing on standards based grading um they've embraced that they've accepted the challenge and we're going to keep building and learning from each other and we're going to keep moving forward so you're probably hearing a lot of similarities and making connections to everything that you've been hearing so far and we still have another Mastery um of standard and goal area that we want to get to but to kind of loop it all together a little bit for right
152now is getting into goal area 4.1 which is establishing an effective data analysis system so we've heard a lot about we've been talking about the What the how the standards it's all um an underlying current for that though is how are we collecting that information how are we analyzing that information and what are we going to do with that information um basically the first bullet here is responding versus reacting and at lud kago we choose to respond to our data instead of react and thinking about it in a different type of professional environment if we were sick and we were feeling unhealthy we would probably go seek a doctor at that point right we'd get a prognosis and make some adjustments for our health we wouldn't wait until the very end of the school year
153and um or the very end and get an autopsy and then say Oh we could have done something different in the beginning that's what we do with our data at ludico is we do a respon to information and we do that by doing frequent and focused data analysis Cycles throughout our school we have um in our core areas reading and math fluency cycles and that happens about five times a year actually right now at ludic kaga we are doing a data cycle where every single student in our school K through six is going to go through a pretty quick I think Jesse was talking about it at hawaa when she was referring to Dibbles and rgr for reading fluency a pretty quick data cycle um but but for us we do it in both English
154and in Spanish to see where they're at with reading fluency or math comprehension fluency we do that five times a year followed by uh reading and math comprehension we do that four to three times a year and Lindsay was talking about that earlier with our intrs we do that with our language arts intrams in both English and Spanish as well as math interims in English and Spanish as well uh equally we have aggressive monitoring or exit tickets or entry tickets that's something that happens daily in the classroom when teachers are introducing new lessons or new activities we want to monitor them we want to see what kids are doing how they're reacting if they're responding really well because they have a lot more background knowledge then we're going to go faster through it if they
155need more help and assistance we're going to slow down and try to Target the needs that they have right then and there because every kid is different and every cohort is going to respond to lessons differently every single year so we have that in place as well all of that for ludic kaga is really wrapped up in to how we analyze our data and put it in a very coherent type of way we have a building wide um data analysis sheet that is very colorful full of tabs and if you're anything like us we live in data every single day um because it's a way that we can make adjustments see tweaks and do it without emotion because we all love our kids but if we are just doing things to do or teaching them
156in the classroom because we love them and we aren't necessarily responding to what their needs are well we're going to love them into literacy if we don't do that with with data um so we have our data analysis Cycles at ludic kaga we do actual full days of release time for our staff members we do that three times a a year and we release them with data in hand and with student results with them we go through by name by student by Target and we really analyze what their kids are telling us so we can make alterations right there in the now we equally use that time to analyze data to come up with what we're going to do in the future so we sit down and we rehearse what we're going to do in
157our upcoming lessons we're going to model it with each other we write what's called exemplars where if this is the example of rigor that we want our kids to get to here's how we're going to do it and we're going to practice that before we go live in front of them doing that initial work really helps us to not have to do a lot of REM um remediation later on we get more kids at standard in the very beginning um this last little bullet here you can see that we've collected data for all of the content areas in math fluency math comprehension reading fluency and reading comprehension for K through six and our average percent passing for all of those assessments combined went from 27% passing to 69% passing last school year um if you'll
158see that and you'll notice that we still aren't there right we still don't have kids at reading level or at math proficiency level but what we do want to point out the effect size and the the effect size for this is 0.54 and that's actually over a Year's worth of growth there's been a lot of research and work around effect size and that's come from John Hattie a lot of his meta analysis work there and he says that 04 is a number that you can Target point4 means one year's worth of growth so if you're a third grader and you're just present in third grade and doing well you're going to learn at least 04 years worth of growth what this data shows us from Luda kaga is that on average our k6 kids in
159all content areas were getting at 0.54 so that means they were doing more than Year's worth of growth last year and even though our 69% passing is not there yet it's showing that there is an academic divide that we are starting to conquer questions from the board uh Carlos uh one question um you said you had support staff uh available for the teachers for the um Stander race grade are are the are the teachers utilizing that support staff yes they are yes uh for both sides of it whether it's standards based grading with Tom Christ as a TOA or de on the Empower side of things and the technicalities beond that that they they are being ued okay can we ask that same question for the high school yeah so we also have Tom Christian
160working with us on that end and we have Alexis Miller working on the Empower site and so she has a drop a uh drop in hours and so if teachers have a question they can wait till the end of the day then they can go see her or if she's available during her plan then she can help them there CHR you said is a tosa he has more flexibility and he's always there for support can you tell me what the acronym is for tosa what does that mean teacher on special assignment thanks well done guys wow and to and to speak more to what Tom's role is you know everyone knows what Devon does on and her support for Empower like Josh Meek helps us with um but Tom's role is to really help the
161teachers around the the design of the proficiency scill the language in them to make sure that the language is that is used is at the appropriate level at a 1.0 or a 2.0 that language is clear and accurate for foundational language versus uh Mastery and just reviewing those with the teams and giving them feedback and working together to make any improvements or tweaking if they need to have you noticed um changes with your you know your teacher group so you you have your math and your science and your English have you noticed that they are working working together differently than they have in years past or is has it just looked like more of the same in the way that they're working together well through our our team plc's I'll say it this way through
162plc's and just anecdotally in my own observations and through classroom walkthroughs I'm seeing an increased alignment in practices because of the use of those scales and how to teach to them um I can also I Jenny would be a better person answer for Ma specific to ELA especially with our 38 alignment work in relation to the scales um and how we can continue those practices that the elementary kids have been learning with for seven years case six and then coming to us for two years rather than just changing an entire system what can we learn from our elementaries um and how the kids are coming to us so that we don't have to do everything completely different at the middle school what can we make our own as a middle school in learning from the
163elementaries and the growth that they're showing um and also in relation to standards based grading yes we're seeing in we're seeing improved alignment there um in terms of teaching practices um strategies that are being used graphic organizers Etc and so I'm seeing improvements but I don't have any evidence to show you here tonight I think uh one of the really important aspects of that question and that's a really good question to ask around standards based grading we've we've heard over and over from the elementary folks today about vertical collaboration and teaming and how much that's helped the experience for the students but also the experience for the staff it makes their job um I think more enjoyable and more efficient it took a lot of work to get there to develop those relationships and and
164those collaborative um that collaborative Spirit what what standards based grading and the use of a tool like Empower has required teachers to do is to collaborate when they're teaching the same course or or they're teaching a course that's going to lead to another course um that what I have observed and the feedback I've received from teachers is the biggest challenge for many has been I've got to change what I'm doing now because the way I taught algebra was different than the way Aaron taught algebra and now we have to talk about that and we have to agree about that and maybe I don't like some of his ideas and before I could just do what I wanted to do well those that opportunity has gone away because we're working on this tighter alignment so teachers
165have been the what tells me that there's greater alignment is that we're hearing some concerns about this project that people are knocking on your door and saying wow this is CH and that's that's evidence for us of a little more um guaranteed and viable curriculum is what we've talked about for years we're able to guarantee with more certainty what's going to happen in a nth grade algebra class than we ever have before and that has made some people uncomfortable for sure then it's a matter of putting the resources and tools in their hand to allow them to do it efficiently because if I'm already concerned and going to complain about the work load from having to work differently then you better fill that Gap by giving me tools that work really well can I add
166to that because what you were seeing about our the alignment with the teachers and the conversations um for example and that was talking about giv them to support the data cycles for the high school because of where they were at we had to look at our restructure so for so they could have those conversations and they could get that alignment and they could get on the same page and so that what a lot of the conversations they had were okay that that is not a three-level work how are we going to come together to make sure that this is a three-level work or this is the evidence that we need to gather so the conversations were completely different now we hope those data Cy well those data Cycles will move to more like student analyzation
167of scores and things like that but before the teachers can get there the conversations that Pete just explained had to happen and those are happening in the data cycles that we're providing at the high school you also heard every one of our elementary principles talk about what and how and how important those conversations have been what standards-based teaching has created is we have to agree on what we're teaching and now we're actually having to talk about how we're teaching that that's unique to a lot of secondary schools in a secondary experience and and again we have to provide the resources for our families and for our kids because one of the so we can talk about uh the supports that the district office has provided Dr Meek's expertise Jessica's expert expertise um Tom Christensen as
168a TOA which is a what teacher on special assignment perfect and uh all those resources but that's two or three or four individuals what I have started to hear about is teachers who are working with one another about how they're grading and how they're using Empower and you're also starting to hear it from kids because kids will walk into a classroom and say well when I was in Perez's class he talked about it this way and I had to have this many pieces of evidence so as the kids become more fluent at it as well that's going to accelerate as much as any one individual can right they're going to provide the expertise but it's really going to be the student voice and experience driving this change I I know that I have a freshman
169and I have a seventh grader and my freshman's experience is you know clunky a little bit because she it's new but I mean my seventh grader has picked it up seamlessly like oh yes I am you know I'm AE of pace at this and doing this and just the language is already there for her so it there hasn't you know my heart goes out to these other students that are having to learn something new because that's never easy and to go from one way of grading and changing you know their whole concept about it but um so it'll be interesting to see what these seventh graders are looking like as they get to be Juniors and seniors and our teachers are doing the right thing by the kids by you know aligning their their practices
170and the the Mastery of Standards Pete Pete was right ons of when you think about when I mentioned alignment earlier and he spoke to it too when I speak about alignment we're talking about assessments being aligned to standards we're talking about the student feedback being grounded in the proficiency scale language right um and how those grades now more closely correlate to scores for standardized testing I mean we're improving in that way much much more that it also because we share those proficiency scales as a team and in math Etc it really forces that conversation about how we get the kids there too and so before outside of Standards based grading there was a lot more latitude for teachers to approach it in many different ways but it's really helped us to collaborate more to calibrate
171our practices more and in fact you're in the 38 alignment work that we're we've just embarked on this year it's been it's been a huge lift but everyone still agrees over how hard it's been and frustrating I'm sure you've heard it's been to it's they still believe that we're on the right track and it's the right thing to do I had a question about so is there is there collaboration also happening between schools like if elementary schools are creating the same materials to teach the same things are we are we sharing those materials between schools or know watching each other teach between schools is that happening should it happen would the teachers want that would they not I I would say um yes um one of the things that's been really powerful is our ability
172um over the last two years as principles we have our plc's that we have um every couple of weeks and we get into each other's schools and those always include walks and walkthroughs into each other's schools that's really given us an opportunity to um see what's going on in each other's schools and then reach out and so I feel super comfortable reaching out to any of my colleague principles and saying hey I saw this in your fourth grade classroom my fourth needs this hey is there some way we can get together and get hooked up um we had something fall through for just logistically but after doing the first round of interims and looking at some data pieces we had plans to take all of our third grade teachers and walk through some third grade
173classrooms um in in some areas that they really shined and to go see what was going on there um so I would say that collaboration is really strong in the sense that people feel feel comfortable reaching out and doing those things I think the the caution is that it's re it's we've found that it's really import important for each teacher in each grade level in each school to go through these processes on their own and learn how to develop some of these contents and learn how to develop some of these hows their context is different their teams are different and it's just important to develop the expertise so while we have that collaboration and we glean from each other um even all the way up I know Carlos has a lot of our instructional coaches
174helping with this target work and some instructional leadership there um it's important that all of them learning become well versed in those things sometimes it's it's it might be totally developed here but it's important to go through the process of developing it here at hawaa because of what we're going to learn going through that process so that's what I've seen with collaboration so far yeah another uh really nice because we've aligned all of the ELA assessments the interims um on lid when we had that day where um the teachers could get together then like all the third grade teachers and fourth grade teachers and fifth grade teachers they were able to get together and kind of talk about their experience but also give tips or um you know like if they were struggling with something
175they could bring it up because all the teachers for that grade level were in a room and so they were able to start that collaboration because we all had the same test which was really nice and helpful because uh every building's in a little different place um in this journey and so it was really nice um we had a lot of feedback that they really enjoyed that opportunity to get together with other teams um so that they didn't feel like they were in this alone I do have uh just two comments Asar before we move past that question one is um one of the biggest challenges for us particularly at the elementary schools has been supporting ludak kaga with some of the Spanish documents and and requirements about that to make sure that the alignment
176work that's happening across the district because there are some some um additional needs that exist there just for Spanish so that's been one of the challenges we've been thinking through with Christina and Paul and her team over there the second one I'll be a little bit more direct about um particularly about writing the what and thinking about how we're going to do it every one of our k6 every one of our K12 teachers you all hired and we hired and they supervise and evaluate to teach that's what they were hired to do some of them are really good at doing that and writing curriculum some of them are not uh some of them are of the opinion that they're really good at both and they might not be so some of it is conversations that
177we have to have as a district and that principles have to have with folks of uh it's not sort of the stay in your lane idea it's really hey we looked at all the stuff available and this is the best stuff this is the guaranteed and viable curriculum that we're going to use well I don't really like it because Aaron wrote it well I don't really know Aaron and Aaron doesn't work at our school but it's really good stuff and our kids need really good stuff and so we're going to use that so some of it is just this culture piece and and talking about it and ties into what we'll shared like we want to make sure teachers go through it but the expectation has never been and shouldn't be that every teacher is
178writing curriculum our job as a district is to provide that for them and and when you see things like Teachers Pay Teachers take off across the country it's because school districts have struggled to get them the resources they need and it's also because they're not paying particular attention to what they're putting in front of kids every day these guys are in classrooms enough every day that they know what kids have in front of them and and so we have a responsibility as a school district I do as a superintendent to make sure that's all high quality stuff and sometimes it's difficult conversations with people about hey I appreciate that you worked on that on the weekend and and you think that that's what we should be using but we're going to use this stuff over
179here and and so those become again little school culture conversations and district-wide conversations in a district this size but we have some really talented people who I would put against anyone in the state for writing some of this stuff there there's some really skilled people and our teachers that are doing this stuff for us so my question was kind of like er so as far as the collaboration through the elementaries but how much collaboration is it there between the elementaries and the junior high that's what I'd like to know to get those kids that are going from six to the junior high how much do you guys do with them and them with you somebody I I will answer since I'm the one who receives the kids at McFarland right through the four schools um
180it it really starts with the impactful principal PLC that we have and it's because of that principal PLC work we've been able to see an increased alignment of practices through the four systems because when we visit each School we're talking about the work that's happening at each School the data that they're starting to see and then we go into classrooms and we walk through together on on what we see with a a certain focused instructional lens and then we come back and we talk about it when you repeat that enough times you you get to see what works and what doesn't and then you start asking the question what can we do to continue how the kids are coming to us k6 to McFarland 78 again so through the principal PLC work um we've been
181able to and it's already been spoken to earlier but this idea of how to measure this growth as a system 38 I'll say it that way through the use of those interims and a specific set of targets that are assessed with each interim three times throughout the we can all jump in on right and so of course I can see that people will make this claim that it's to compare systems but it's not it's to align it's to align the learning and the strategies that we use to close those gaps between the systems and so it's been profound for us at McFarland we're just embarking on it but it we're on the right track in the feedback that we're getting with our teachers in our work with our elementary leaders to continue that work to
182us so out of curiosity just teachers meet once a week if I every Monday how often do you all meet principes once every two weeks once every two weeks yeah and just to add on a little bit um it's been exciting to see Carlos pull some of our instructional leadership and some of those pieces up to to the Middle School um I would say and the other principles can agree or disagree but um I would say this year is really like the first opportunity that he's had to do that because it's the first time we're aligned at a high enough level I think if you go back two or three years if he tried to collaborate with the elementary schools he'd be collaborating with four different entities that were were pretty diverse and in how
183they did it if he was to say hey we want to do it like the elementary schools well that's four different ways um that's starting to align more and more and more and so that game's able we're able to get into that game which is really really exciting and and just like what was referenced earlier when the elementary principles were talking How We Do peer walks our teachers go see each other teach and that reinforces the what are we teaching how are we teaching it what's the alignment in the riger looking like uh We've also had the ability to have Middle School uh teachers come down to our sixth grade in fifth grade and watch how we're teaching down here to start doing that cross connection as well like I I I think I like
184that three through eighth grade because like you guys said it's it's it's the jump where they're going to need to be where they can keep going ahead and not have to play catch up yeah through this alignment work something that is becoming consistent in our in our walk through that we're trying to build at McFarland um and it does exist in some Pockets but we want to build it with more frequencies this idea of intensity and urgency that's feedback that we've received from our elementary people um how we teach reading how we manage the kids through teach Like A Champion for example or in our first year of elevation and the multilingual support there for our multilingual Learners and what that looks like and so those are just some some examples uh of what we're
185doing to improve not just the what but how teach it my other question was for the junior high in the high school and you hit on it when you were talking about it you said standard based grade and then you kind of said Empower over here poweride um Power inside so um what we've learned so far at least me from having two daughters at the high school the standard based grading is actually pretty nice it's it's getting teachers to have to talk when they don't want to U making them uncomfortable I like that I like to make people uncomfortable because then you have to talk what I'm not understanding is what needs to change for them to buy into to empower because yet I do not see nor the teachers nor the students getting along
186with Empower so I don't know if this is a you question Jessica or or or who but what is it that is so frustrating about Empower that people can't get behind it there's a lot of things that are frustrating about it there are also people that would um argue pretty vinant that they do like it and that it is working for them so there there's two camps there but Empower might not be the right tool and we're doing um in fact I think next Meek is our second meeting where we have a group of teachers from across the district who are meeting to specifically look at Empower and other options so that hopefully by the end of February we can make a recommendation do we stick with Empower and double down with that or do
187we go a different direction with a different tool that will be more user friendly so standard base grade in would state it would just be the Empower part perfect yeah we're almost there one one more group to go thanks guys thank you g absolutely sorry for making this so long it just it's a lot of information right we apologize at least a new President's first meeting and she makes it three hours long you're gonna blame this on me eron absolutely well uh thank you for uh your stamina here to get through it and you saved the best for last uh so we're the group that's going to share some information about future ready and before we get into all the details uh as parents we know that we we raise kids not to kids for
188the rest of their life but to be positive contributing members of society and as a school system it's it's not much different uh we don't raise students just to be students forever but we raise them to be lifelong Learners and so this work is really exciting to talk about the great things that are happening especially at our two high schools currently and so uh specifically this target is going to look at uh how we're increasing the number of students that are passing all of their classes every grading period uh in nth grade uh nth grade is a it's really is a gatekeeper per year and every statistic would tell you that if students are having success in ninth grade it puts them on that right path to graduate from high school on time and be
189ready for their future uh and so um excited to have uh this team share with you some things that are happening in both schools okay I'll go first here um at Desert Oasis High School kind of like what's been mentioned relevant to standard based grading our initial plan was to kind of make the slow gradual um move towards Sanders based grading and allow our big brother Ella High School to kind of make all the mistakes and we would just kind of learn from their mistakes and we had a plan all in our mind about how we were going to kind of jump into this and then um and then this year happened and uh we said okay um we've kind of had to re uh revise our plan I'm trying to get our teachers on
190board with Sanders b greting as fast as possible uh we're at almost full implementation in the areas of math and my English teacher um what I've been more than clear with my teachers is I want to prepare my students as well as my teachers for what's to come and what's coming our way is a transition towards the high school and unless you've walked in the shoes of my staff or myself um it's a little interesting because what what the task has been is we have all these initiatives but at the same time you also have to keep people motivated and and uplifted and that includes students as well as even parents in in our particular system so one of the things that we've really done um an intentional job as is kind of looking at
191this transitional plan and we've done this through focus groups and I know you guys have been kind of made aware of it these focus groups have included our students our parents our staff as well as um the otella high school and their staff and and kind of what what is what is it that they're thinking what is going to be best for our our students in this transition and I think one of the things that um in order to take a proactive approach is um one of the things that we're excited about is what this potentially could look like this transition um what we realize is that we need to support these students with this transition and I don't want to speak too much about the direction we're heading but there's some ideas right now
192that that we have shared um uh with the tnl team and and I and I appreciate the work that the district office has done in supporting us through this through this phase and um we're going to continue working through this phase so that we can make sure that when we do make this transition that we can offer support not just to our students but it's got to impact the entire system and that includes I mean all of oo high school so there are kids up there that are similar to our students they're struggling academically they're struggling with substance abuse they're struggling with social emotional needs mental health needs um and and we want these systems to to accommodate for those needs as well so um we have some things kind of rough in in the
193rough draft phases but again I don't think this is the time to share all of those things unless they ask me to uh but again we appreciate the the expertise I've been meeting with my teachers frequently uh because I got to make sure that they're still okay um because they have they have a hard job we have implemented some things this particular trimester that are helping us dramatically with attendance and even the behaviors in the classroom so I think that's all I want to say in regards to that we go I'm going to go and talk about the first and the third bullets up there without that first bullet without data we're not going to be able to to work with our intervention systems and create what we want to do and that has helped
194students be the best that they can be um we've been able to and this journey started pretty much in the spring last year in March and April collecting data and now we're at the point where we can actually collect the data and we can tell you exactly which scales students are struggling with exactly where students are at with uh unexcused absences exactly where students are with their discipline and I think it was director Chris that said uh something about cell phones and and that that that's our number one issue is is with with discipline referrals right now is our cell phones which which we're pretty lucky with um once we've collected all that data then we can go through and work with some of our intervention systems one of them that's listed there is our
195Guardian Angel program each one of the administrators at the high school does have about a handful or so of students that we work with individually we talk about discipline we talk about attendance we talk about academics and how we can improve those um we also meet with them and discuss about their weekly goals monthly goals and talk to them about graduation in June of 2028 which sounds like a long ways away but it's going to come real real quickly uh some of our other other intervention programs within the pack is that we have a Monday intervention within every single class some of our teachers call that evidence days um it's spent a lot of time doing reteaching doing some small groups some doing some individualized um learning we also have intervention days Tuesday Wednesday and
196Thursdays where students are pulled from advisory and they're working on those specic uh specific scales I was mentioning earlier that we've we've d we've Doven down into and we know exactly where they're at um this Saturday is going to be the very first Saturday that we're going to be doing a intervention for our students that are still strugging a little bit with uh the scales from last trimester and so we're hoping to get a lot of students here to be able to push them a little bit harder and to get them to learn what we intend them to learn um uh as you I'll be continuing on with what Scott started here and we're we're talking about nth grade academy um and just kind of to set historic IAL record on this um this is
197such an important Initiative for us because historically that transition from 8th to 9th grade is one of the toughest transition and historically to fellow high school at the end of the year anywhere between 35 or 40% of our freshmen are no longer on track to graduate that's been the historical trend for the last 15 years at aell high school um so this is very personal and very important to us because this is how I know Justin mentioned it earlier like you don't want to practice all the time you want kids to compete um as administrators and as Educators in the district this is how we keep score this is how we judge ourselves this is how we compete against ourselves and when we see that numbers that high that tells us we have a problem
198and we're finally in a spot where we can start addressing that um and husky pack is one of the ways that or is the way we've really done that and the specific point I'm going to talk about is being intentional about scheduling for freshmen um this is less about like placing kids in classes and more about making sure that we have the right teachers in place so that the students schedules work for them have we developed have we got the right teachers in the Husky pack have we developed a sense of teaming in the Husky pack what's the environment we've set up and Scott and cat have really LED that work this year starting with taking to our freshman team to visible learning in San Diego this summer wasn't that right yes yeah so they
199could start to get some common agreements on how we're going to talk to the kids what we're going to talk about how we're going to set expectations in the classroom including like what is our transition going to be as we move from one class to the next we're all in the same Hall so we're going to go to three minutes and here's what that movement is going to look like they're going to walk on certain sides of the hall it's um it's really trying to apply some of the principles that work in Strong Middle Schools and taking some of those systems around teaming placing them at a high School level to ease that transition into kids go crazy when you're like oh I can do whatever I want I can leave like I can pick
200my classes and there's 1300 kids here and I can just go do anything well no you're not ready for that yet we're going to give you some choice but we're going to help guide you in making the best choices you can for yourselves so that's that's the what this is about is being intentional around scheduling for the Freshman is just making sure we have the right team members there that we're getting to know them that are counseling staffs onard Bo and we collaborated this year with the Middle School more than we ever have about give us some combinations of students that might be best for them not to be in the same room together like they they find each other and can become off task really easily we got academic data from the Middle School
201especially with Brenda coming on board at the high school this year moving up from MMS um so it's Shoring up those systems further and then just pushing the work forward uh we would love to have shown you some data compared this year to to last year but as Brenda mentioned earlier we we found a little bit of a a glitch that we're correcting when you talk about the logistics of the Husky Back 2 I want to I want to kind of draw your attention to something is that you know schools across our country have tried to solve a ninth grade transition problem for a million years and I don't think anyone's found the Magic Bullet yet however what I really applaud our high school team for doing is f developing a bottle that keeps kids
202in a cohort of sorts and at the same time doesn't uh prevent them from taking advantages of what a comprehensive large High School can offer so kids in the Husky pack still have their core classes together but they can still participate in band or in World Language or in uh upper level Sciences or whatever is of interest to them and so that's a a unique challenge but I think they're doing a great job of of trying to to blend The Best of Both Worlds in there and and really um when you asked about earlier about uh hearing complaints about the the door buzzing and all that is the the shift to the Husky pack was a was a pretty big shift for nth graders and really there wasn't a lot of grumbling about it um
203all of a sudden that you know it not only required a lot of teacher moves to to pull it off on that campus but just ninth grader schedules in general look different this year than they have in in a number of years and uh and our our freshmen and their families have transitions nicely to handle it Josh I was just wondering how's the morale with the students the staff and and the families um with what's going to happen yeah so um just to be totally honest it's um there's good days and there's bad days um it just kind of depends most of the days are have been good days and it and it and it kind of goes down to the testing and like Justin alluded to and and many others about it depends on
204you as the leader you as the teacher me as the principal uh kind of what my Outlook on on things are so I got to make sure I constantly keep myself uplifted U so that I can also portray that to my staff and one of the things that that I know that most of my staff doesn't is that this um this student support service idea that we're looking to to uh probably bring to your attention at some point in the near future is something that's going to complement the work that the high school's currently doing with putting in systems to identify at the end of the day at risk youth kids that are just at Jeopardy or at risk of not making it academically socially or whatever um if we can accommodate those students and
205and kind of meet meet meet them with with what they need um they're more likely to be successful and and and then eventually graduate from high school so uh for the most part my staff I think like I said they're they they're they're accepting of it and we're kind of looking forward to to the Future on like what is this opportunity going to bring for us so on this one I think I'm I can speak for the board that school means a lot to all five of us up here so if if there's something that we could do to make dread dis and a little easier or whatever please ask whether whatever it could be for the families for the students for the staff please let us know yeah thank you we we appreciate it
206I do want to just interject one piece here around uh Dohs and it's this image right here Josh how long have you been the Principal at dos eight years eight years so uh seven or eight years ago uh Josh and a group of us went to Spokane we were at that time looking to change Dohs how do we offer something better to those students and those families and so we looked at some of the program models that existed in the Spokane Public Schools and we came back and Josh with his team developed this pyramid of supports you can see what it's titled Pathways to graduation and at the bottom of that period has always been othell high school and and I think the perception right now and maybe it would be my perception too if
207I was a staff member at Dohs is that we're pulling out that that block right and what's going to happen to those kids in there what's going to happen to that pyramid what what I think is important and will help with morale and providing Clarity for folks is thinking about how does that sort of grayish blue block that we're going to pull out how does some of that blend in with ell High School how do we take some of those practices and and drag it down uh you're you don't see on this current uh document um or this image our online learning options and our programs were doing there and some of the things that came post pandemic so I I I think it's important for us as Leaders to you know we understand sort
208of the hurt that's attached to it but there's some really cool opportunities coming for teachers and for kids by making this transition we really can offer a strong experience to our kids uh and again I'm not one of the 10 or 15 people that works at that school every day but I I do think it's important that the 4,500 kids in our district and some that may end up in that model they're all eventually going to end up at ell high school now right we're going to be a one high school Community it's thinking about how do we improve oel high school and how do we create that experience by some of those things that we're going to bring over from Dohs and we've done it before that that the initiatives that Josh brought over
209when he became the principal there improve that site and I'm confident that we'll do the same thing at alello High School I think that's the biggest difference zaro is that like some of us know what the what what those differences and those changes are going to be whereas my staff doesn't know yet but the reality is we're removing that block but we're still going to be there now we just have the opportunity to impact more people at the high school so you took a challenge eight years ago and you guys came up with Husky pack last year and made it work uh I don't think there's going to be an issue with coming up with an idea of how to make it work um I've never never seen you back down from something um so
210your hands are full and we're here to help you with whatever it is that you need to uh to make it a success again so thank you you mentioned sorry sorry eron go ahead uh you mentioned a Saturday intervention for some students is that mandatory for them no it's not mandatory we are inviting the students that we feel can need more help but it's not mandatory are you getting good response from that uh so far we have a few invitees but not as many as what I'm hoping for quite yet um our secretaries are reaching out to the students that we're trying to get there for a little bit more help so they helping out with us too and on that just to to reh highlight an earlier conversation about sandard based grading I think
211something that Scott said that was key and that is you know with a traditional grading system we might know hey these students are failing algebra they're they're not having success in algebra what they know now with their data and with standard Bas grading is they can tell you specific scales where students are struggling and specific skills and strategies that they need to work on for that Improvement and so that uh it should be both empowering to students and parents knowing you know knowing where you're at in that learning progression but also uh for teachers and for the intervention model to be able to actually move them forward and not just be wondering about you know what is it in algebra that they're not understanding yeah and we could be some of the kids or students
212that we coming to this they're like one or two pieces of evidence away from passing that course they just the trimester ended they needed a little bit longer so Scott has set these ways up for them to and not only have they done that they've been Tuesday through Thursday right they're able to go during lunch and during their advisory time to get extra help and get those pieces of evidence turned in so we're really trying to extend the learning opportunities for those students so that um they can be successful because we don't all learn at the same Pace all all the time some of us take a little bit longer to figure out what we want to do in life than other people um and Scott is built in a system that has the flexibility
213to allow for that there's nothing worth your freshman year your first trimester and you're like okay I'm already off track to graduate no I really want to keep going so even though the trimester is over they still have an opportunity to redeem themselves and and increase that greed just turn in those pieces of evidence you need the teachers have already all agreed that they'll accept them then it's a gr change form so the system exists we have just never had a way to implement it and this is kind of been our Avenue to to start that I I do want to weave a couple things together here because this is a very important Point um the things that exist and allow us to do this one of them is Empower that we're able to track
214the standards that the kids are missing through that tool that we can go back and have them make that part up uh so Empower again has its critics and rightly so but there are some components and experiences we can offer kids because we have that tool the second one is what they just described the attitude from the teachers and the flexibility that they describe to let freshmen stay on track that's exactly what you hear at Dohs every day for the last seven or eight years so again those practices and that mindset from teachers and administrators is transferable it's going to be a different scale for sure there's a lot more kids and teachers but I I don't want people to think that it's all going to go go away it's going to be our job
215to communicate that it hasn't all gone away just to add to Lindsay's question there real quickly those opportunities for our students are going to last throughout the entire year and if they need so all the way through summer school as well well just feedback from a parent of a ninth grader um I I think it's been extremely successful as far as you know socially I ask my daughter and her friends how's husky pack what do you guys think I think because they don't know any different uh it's been great and they I mean teenage girls will find anything to complain about but really they haven't had any complaints so it's been great so feedback from parys that I I think it's been successful and um this kids don't hate it you know they're not like
216ah this is the worst thing ever I think it's been really great in that area and especially if it's helping them to be successful academically even more so good job one of the strategies that I I I think we need to to Really applaud is there's a team of six teachers that are making that happen every day and while the student experience is different the staff experience is definitely different um you know they they are they're very uh tightly connected and collaborative day by day and so uh you know they they have a huge responsibility in making that successful and we were in an interesting position that four of the of them are new to OS this year uh and so they've kind of like the students they they may not know better but they're
217really uh having a lot of success because they've committed to working together uh for those kids to be successful so so so so far the Husky Pack's really been been going really good huh all your minds yeah definitely for sure I think there's lots of different indicators that would tell you that whether it's discipline David shared the number of ninth graders that are on track uh we're not ready yet to to to give a definitive number to it but it's better than it has been um also I even you know I think it's worth us celebrating as a system what Scott is sharing about this Saturday intervention because we're able to intervene a lot quicker and keep those kids on track rather than waiting till the end of the nth grade year and saying oh
218you know you're you're not on track and so congratulations welcome to the next three years of high school that uh you're going to continue to be off track and so there's a lot of indicators that I think point in that direction good and I think that also ties in with the idea of safety and belonging too like if I already have a notion in my head that I'm not gr at school and I show up my ninth grade year and it's like yep I knew I was bad at school I don't want to do this anymore they don't none of us love to go do things we're not great at this gives them the space to find success um and we have the the adults in the room that are willing to work with them
219to help them find that um and I think Pete said it best like that is what Josh and that system at Dohs has done so we need to take the success we're finding at the pack and getting that to spread out more and more because I I know we have adults that are willing to do it they just don't know how yet and that's our job as Leaders is to give them the tools to say this is how you do it we're here to help you with that so we're we're g to get there all right well John's ready to go because he clicked to the next slide so we're ready be ready though because we're GNA go back in just a second I want to go through all the slides one more time one
220by one yes you enjoy that um we've been working with uh uh Dr Chuck Selena from Gonzaga he's been helping out on a project at the at the high school and I found a quote from one of his articles um and this quote about supporting teachers and when teachers feel supported they'll support students and I don't think that could be a more appropriate quote for this presentation around standards based grading around vertical alignment around the what and the how and the consistently see consistency you heard from our principles and I think it's also appropriate for this particular presentation because you're hearing from our people who are supporting teachers every day who are out there every day trying to make sure that they have the feedback that they need and the tools that they need and
221it's it's really really really hard work um I've heard aaro say this in a couple of other settings and he said it again tonight this is a lot it's complicated stuff and we could be here for another two hours talking about it and still never get to the bottom of it but I hope you're as impressed as I am and as proud of the people who presented tonight with the clarity that they spoke about the work that's happening and when this work really takes off if we're really operationalizing the Strategic plan in the coming presentations you'll hear from teachers not just these people at some point maybe if few years down the road you'll hear from kids maybe you'll hear from parents right things that are happening uh across our school district and I want
222to end by going back to the the image with the arrows and talk a little bit about uh we've been talking about Motion versus action in the school district for a couple years now so motion is really sort of that left-hand side those left-hand arrows and and you we've all heard the phrase going through the motions right what does that mean when you just go through the motions not a whole lot right you're not you don't have any real Target like um you're busy and you're probably tired but you're just going through the motions and really this whole strategic plan was based on a theory of action if we do this at the district office as principles as teachers then students will get these outcomes and and so today I hope you had an opportunity
223to hear about the specific behaviors that these fine folks are demonstrating and leading every day and that our teachers and the rest of our staff are putting into action to actually move us further to the right because all of our kids deserve it and there's a whole lot more happiness as an employee on that right hand side you're always going to be tired right and hopefully that um that that those efforts don't feel wasted don't feel like you're just going through the motions that we're actually taking action so appreciate the board being so attentive and asking so many questions as we describe the actions that we're all taking in in the service of our kids every day so appreciate the opportunity to share that work um thank you so much sorry listen it's my first
224time okay um thank you to everyone who showed up tonight this was a ton of work before you showed up here and then to show up and present in front of the board um it's not lost on any of us the time and effort that you put into your daily jobs and then to also add in this this is a huge lift to come here tonight and share this with us and uh we appreciate it we none of us are Ed Educators we all work in different fields and so um it might feel annoying that you have to educate us on the work that you're doing um apologize for that but deeply appreciate it so thank you for sharing your time and your talents with us and especially for sharing your time and your talents
225with the kids that really deserve it in this community so thank you yes thank you very much and uh I'm excited to have kids going to school here in the the future that's ahead of them so thank you I'm sure none of you think of this as your ideal evening but we really appreciate you being here and all the work that you do and let us know how we can help okay we will move on to public comment we're not accepting any tonight sorry we're out of time just kidding I don't think we have any um moving on to upcoming events on December 18th we have a regular board meeting at noon and then December 23rd schools out for Christmas break um anything else that the board has to add to that um isn't there
226something on Thursday with Big Bend uh the Big Bend is having their um executive board meeting Amy Paris who's one of our staff members happens to be on the Big B board so they're going out into communities around the area uh trying to have a board meeting not unlike this in that community so it'll be set up just like this it's open to the public folks are are welcome to attend and I think they sent you individual invites so that you could come and participate but it'll you're welcome to attend that but it's not an official fellow School District board event okay um and we will go ahead and move on to the board self assessment of the meeting just one item it's not on the agenda but I know it's going to be close
227when we get to the 18th I know Ken and his family take a strong lead and they have helped develop this the Community Christmas basket program and so many of our principles and staff help generate the lists but also the supplies for that so on the 21st anyone who can come out and help the community deliver those Baskets at the fire department I believe Ken yes yep uh you know we welcome anyone in all hands to come participate in that Community event thank you when when will you need you need volunteers to put the baskets together too right actually started started already start in the evenings probably tomorrow start to put stuff together uh we're trying to coordinate so we don't have too many people there at one time and try to keep them busy
228and at the same time so uh there'll be calls going out as most of you know my son Jeff involved with the schools has been making a few of those contacts now lately and I'm just him run that portion of it too so okay and I'm not sure um how many churches in the community are involved but I know that on December 18th Wednesday night uh they'll be going around the community collecting canned goods so if you get a knock on your door from church kids they're collecting Goods for the Christmas baskets so yeah okay we'll move on to our board self assessment a few months ago we had a board meeting where both Ken Lindsay were gone so Chris was in charge and it was only like 20 minutes long so I don't know
229why I think it's the president um long meeting but time well spent very educational thank you guys again yeah excellent presentation like like Lindsay mentioned before uh you got to educate our kids but you're also educating us and and I appreciate you guys uh being able to have patience and present it to you yeah cuz we're not Educators and and you guys use a pile of acronyms and we're still digesting them I mean three of us are still we're right exactly a year into our our uh term here so we're still learning everything so but uh appreciate it we didn't talk about it today but to all the elementary schools and Junior High the amazing Shake was amazing U first time being there and it was awesome it was really really cool to see and
230um well organized is um it was just kids are amazing that's all I can say the Charisma that they have at that age was just it was it was awesome to see so thank you guys for putting all the time and effort into that it was a good example and Showcase of the type of students that we have in this community very impressive exactly um my Delta for the night would be that we don't have any student here probably for the better for them though honestly it's way past their bedtime school night yeah I missed that on popcorn yeah thank you for the popcorn definite highlight was the popcorn thank you okay if no one has anything else we will go ahead and move on we have an executive session we do the torture still
231yep just hit uh the board will recess into executive session for 15 minutes to discuss the sale or lease of land no action will be taken following the executive session thank you and have a good night