001good evening I welcome everyone to the September 12th regular board meeting thank you for joining us we will open the meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance please join I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all foreign thank you is should anyone wish to participate in citizen comment you can still do so by signing up um at the entry of the room and handing your form to Kim for our virtual attendees had an opportunity to sign up before the meeting do we have any requests to modify the agenda hearing then we will move forward towards the consent agenda in this consent agenda we have the maintenance from the August 22nd regular meeting August
00224 Workshop vouchers and payroll Surplus Personnel report contracts and the financial report do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda I'll move to approve the consent agenda thank you Julie second we have a second by Laura any discussion all in favor of adopting the consent agenda as presented thank you Catherine any opposed motion carries next we have our citizen comments and I believe we do have Olga you'll be uh granted three minutes uh Kim will keep a timer and uh the timer will go off once you reach your three-minute limit perfect thank you so much so I am Olga Jimenez I am I am the leadership program coordinator um at Cafe um which Cafe stands for the community of the mass of family education we are enhancing our current leadership um program um
003it is working with the city council school board and County Commissioners we are very excited about this opportunity as our goal is to be able to promote um uh engage Community educate um some of our community members as well before the pandemic Cafe hosted Community forums to inform the community of City projects new laws policy changes um and then who's running up next it could be from city council to um you know voting for superintendent um and just all that aspects of the community involvement um so I wanted to share that we will attend tonight's meeting um and in our Leadership Academy mission is to serve and represent underserved Community reps who wish to strengthen their leadership skill make connections inform the community of other projects that are going on invite our community to engage
004also in these meetings um and then just kind of learn and kind of partner with the school board and let you know that we will try to do our best to be in person we might have an opportunity to also do hybrid again we are hitting the winter seasons but just want to make sure that we're also safe and our ambassadors are as well we are going to serve four different counties between Grant Okanagan Chilean and Douglas um total of 20 ambassadors attending City and um County Commissioner meetings as well as school board meetings thank you fabulous thank you Olga um if we have no further citizen coming we'll move on to our special presentation Dr calhar excellent thank you and it is a very special presentation so I'm excited about that um and Liz
005is going to pop that up on the screen there for us and uh got my handy dandy clicker so I can take us through but um this evening I really want to take our board um and the community Through uh an updated demographic information for our district and a look into some of the data and you'll notice that some of the data that we're presenting tonight is presented in a little different format so I'm excited to share that at our last board meeting back in August we shared an update about our strategic plan and the available data surrounding our big six student outcomes in addition to that data there have also been some updates to the school report card recently so that's what I'm going to share with you Maybe oh there we go nope
006there we go excellent uh so during this presentation I'm going to review who we are in the Wenatchee School District the Washington state report card tool for K-12 and then comparison of cohort Smarter Balance data with peer schools and that data is not the most recent data but it's a year old but it's a it's a great look at the SBA data in comparison to schools that have similar demographics so I'm excited to share that with you wrong okay uh let's see here the Wenatchee uh School District students teachers and staff reflect the diversity and richness of Wenatchee through high quality instruction social emotional support and career connected learning we are helping each and every student achieve success and tap into their Limitless potential and so some of what you're going to see tonight reflects
007on certain aspects of the educational experience that our students get and it leans very heavily on the academic side of things what we leave out tonight in our conversation are other things like art music Fitness social studies many of our electives all of the Career and Technical education our social and emotional growth extracurricular activity and relationships so there's a big picture when we look at what all of our students are engaged with but tonight we'll focus mostly on English language arts a lot of math and a little tiny bit of science when we talk about the Washington comprehensive assessment of science so it's funny little noise when I click hello there it is okay perfect so who we are in the Wenatchee School District we have 16 schools and programs and Illustrated here we have
008seven elementary schools three middle schools An Early Learning Center the technical skills center a comprehensive High School an alternative high school and one K-8 parent partnership school and an 18 to 21 vocational transition program and that encompasses the wide variety of aspects of our educational program for our students we also have 890 caring and compassionate adults who are our full and part-time certificated and classified employees who take pride in serving our students they also prioritize the young people in our community they take they take care or sorry they care deeply about our students and working through numerous challenges each and every day to support our students these relationships are what help leverage our students success I am just on struggle Street here so thank you for your patience folks I do have the clicker in
009control right now so we're good but our students come to our schools with unique lived experiences and all of them in need of individual attention and so as I said earlier our students are so much more than what you'll see this evening the data does not define the whole child or how our students are Future Ready and so here's here's a an interesting visual for you and when you look at that uh 7414 those of you that are familiar with school board meetings will notice that that looks like a lot of students um and that is that is a head count of students so it's a different look than what we look at when we have a budget conversation a budget conversation is more uh along the lines of 6900 students or so so there's
010like a 500 student difference when we look at budgets we look at head count and who you know our FTE sorry we look at FTE and not headcount so this is kind of a head count perspective so 7414 students are involved in our school in some capacity some of those students are full-time equivalents but some of our students are also running Stark students who do not necessarily count when we talk budget so these are some great numbers here and what you see is the diversity in our district um and so we have we have our 54 four percent uh latinx and then we have our students with our 20 almost 23 English language Learners um we have 441 students experiencing uh some some some sort of homelessness then we have over a thousand students who
011are migrant and then uh over 1100 students on IEPs and so that's kind of a comprehensive look at who we are as a district and again our students are not defined by a demographic or a category in which they fall but each area helps give us an opportunity to understand potentially someone who might be a little bit different than us who care and so I'm going to jump into some state report card data and I know our board is familiar with the state report card I'm not so sure how familiar our community is with the handy and extremely useful tool but I want to share this information with you to keep you uh yourself uh keep you up to date and informed uh and in addition the data was just updated last week as well
012so you'll have some access to 23 20 or 22 23 data as opposed to some some older information as well so if you've ever logged on to the state report card you recognize this uh I'm a little bit behind sorry about that uh you recognize this uh this opening slide there on the left which has all the important numbers so our school and District performance uh across multiple student measures such as assessment proficiency graduation rates student growth and discipline there's also data on classroom teachers what our teachers qualifications are and then student teacher ratios there's also some school and District Finance information as well but the details and information that you see on these slides are very intentional and often are very intention intentionally used and often daily used by various leaders in our district
013to not only determine growth ascertain how we compare to other schools and districts but also to identify gaps and build plans of improvement holistically and the nice thing is anybody can access this information literally can look up any District in the state and you can drill down to any school in the district at all and I'll show you some examples of that as we go through this so here's some basic demographics on the report card you see that 7414 number you also see uh the gender and then race and ethnicity goodness slow it down okay and then we have uh we have the program characteristics here so another look at this and you can see some of these slides are a little bit holy cow there's a lot of information on there so a little
014bit overwhelming but you can see here from uh program characteristics anything from our English language Learners uh to our low-income students to our highly capable to migrants to Section 504 students that is the whole demographic uh program characteristic page it's a lot of information on there but very useful information when we're looking and planning for the future and then we get to some of the important data and this is the the data that has been uh most recently updated along with some of the demographics from 22 and 23 as we get to our Smarter Balance assessment data and you can see here that when you when you look at it it's chunked into two sections and the first section is is called General so that is the smarter balance assessment and the Washington comprehensive assessment
015of Science and so that those are our data fields there and as you can see our two our 223 data is reflected here for the entire District that's everyone comprehensively in the district and then on the right side you see the alternative information which is uh referred to as what aim and that's the Washington access to instruction and measurement and that's an alternative assessment based on alternative achievement standards aligned to the Common Core State Standards and so you can see that date in there and so it's comprehensively aligned there for all students and you can see the breakdown by gender and again to move on to that uh we have the ethnicity breakdown here as well and then we jump jump to that crazy slide with a lot of information but you can see the
016uh the breakdown there from our English language Learners uh students that might be in foster care uh migrant and non-migrants and then the whole host of students there so it's a breakdown where you have the smarter balance assessment and the Science assessment and then also the alternative information as well a lot of colors a lot of stuff do not feel like you have to digest this all in one in one spot um this is the next slide is one that helps me a little bit understand kind of the the breakdown of what happens per grade level in each of these areas and if you look at just the English language arts part at the top um you can kind of see what we what we get when we move from third grade to fourth grade
017to fifth grade we kind of see a natural progression of improvement um you look at sixth seventh and eighth there's a little bit of that natural progression of improvement um so so English language arts has has those nice lines um math doesn't really have those nice lines we still have some work to do in math and that's where our math instructional identity can help us with some of that work and we have a variety of tools that we'll be putting into place there and then you can see that uh that science is is in that same area we need to have some work there the Washington state report card also gives you a ton of other information um and we we referenced it on the first slide but here are some other things that you
018can look up not only for the Wenatchee School District not only for each School in the Wenatchee School District but any school in the entire state so there's a lot of information and a lot of David bear and the nice thing when you when you click on each of these areas you can look at the data in different chunks in different Fashions so um so that's a little snippet into the state report card I wanted to pause here for a minute and see if there were maybe any questions or comments uh from the board before we jump into the cohort data this is nice I'm glad see finally looking at some data yes good correct yes yes yes okay excellent we'll jump in here and so I'll set the stage here uh the data sets
019here are compared with other individual schools that have similar demographic makeup as our own schools and so often what you see when you look at cohorts is you look at here's the Wenatchee school district and here's a cohort of other school districts that are very similar right so we we're seeing a lot of that data what this does is it breaks down schools and it Compares them to like schools that have the same demographic and the demographic is uh is looked at from low socioeconomic status uh English language Learners and students on IEPs and I'll show you some examples of how that works but really every single school that we look at has a different set of comparative schools and so for me it was very interesting to see this because I hadn't seen our
020school districts or schools compared in this fashion so I thought it was interesting this data was compiled by the researchers at Stern analytics and it does represent uh data from 2122 so to set the stage um let me not catching up here we go to set the stage uh for these slides and to contextualize the information the school year is 2021 and during that year we have some information that was happening at that time and we know that we are going back to school students are returning to learning full-time but we also know that we saw the uh we saw the Delta variation uh hit us at the beginning of that year we're wondering oh no are we going to actually make it and we did but also during that year and January we saw
021the uh Omicron hit us as well so we had it we had different pieces of that um we also implemented a variety of learning recovery efforts during this year some of that came in the form of some teacher training on differentiated learning and then after school care and this was an interesting year because it was the one of the only years that our students will ever experience Smarter Balance testing twice in one year because the state pushed it to the next year so we had it in the fall and then we had it in the spring but anyway that just kind of sets the stage of what was happening this year in the data and we'll jump into what this data looks like okay so this is our first comparison so uh we're viewing uh
022cohort data in a different way and one of the things that is also represented here is um we're looking at those different districts but we're truly comparing the schools we're not comparing the districts so Wenatchee high school as compared to the other schools in that list based on uh Los socioeconomic status our English language Learners and then students with IEPs and the interesting thing here is and this was not something that I knew my data specialist had to share this with me but this data is actually based on students that took the test and so it's not the school's data so the school's data may look differently than when hi schools free and reduced lunch data may not be 57 but the students that took the test in 2122 in that spring that was what
023was representative there so it's true data when we think of that um and one of the things that I also want to share is that uh the students that test in the Wenatchee School District our numbers are really good I looked them up today and we had 96.7 percent of our students tested in the ELA in the English language arts category and 96.4 percent uh tested in math so we do this is a good number but you can kind of see the representation there and I want to make special reference to the the Cascade High School there Cascade High School and Everett at Cascade High School up the way so it's a different school so when we look at uh the data which I'll show you here so the first data set is our on-time
024graduation rate so you see Cascade High School is is uh is right there with us and automatically as I was looking at the data I was thinking oh wow leavenworth's doing all right and uh and in actuality it's uh Everett and I'm sure Cascade is doing all right I'm sure leavenworth's doing great but this is actually a different school so just to kind of look at at those comparison numbers a little bit different way of looking at the data you do see that uh Eastmont is in this um and Moses Lake as well can I interact with a question yep so just because the price The Pride was only reflecting students in various groups the Korean reduced lunch English language Learners and sped is the this on time graduation for all students the other one
025is for all students too it's just that is the breakdown of who took the test so out of 100 of the test takers 57 of the test takers had free and reduced 17 were ell and then 13 were on IEPs so it's it's still we still had 100 of test takers um yeah and then this is goodness then this is yes 100 of all those students yeah yeah but thank you for that clarification um and one more so this is when we get into uh some of the data here so we have our English language arts data uh so these are the students that were uh proficient there at grade 10 and you kind of have the breakdown of the students or sorry this the other schools that are involved and then you can see
026math on the other side thank you Corey can I ask a quick question sure Catherine you scared me but that's okay um I'm hiding um how were these high schools chosen why were these particular schools chosen so I'll go back uh they were chosen as as just a set here of the closest schools in relationship to Wenatchee high school with regard to free and reduced lunch uh English language Learners and special students that have are on IEPs so that's how this data set was was chosen they took all of Washington state correct match these three categories and these were the high schools they came up with the closest matched up okay absolutely and you can kind of see that there is there's you know a little bit of a disparity between the numbers on on
027here when we look at the lowest being 51 when we look at free and red free and reduced lunch and then uh the highest looks like it's 64 so there is a little bit of variance in there but that's how they were chosen so great question Catherine I believe you gave the name of a consultant firm who selected the comparable so this was done by a third party correct professional and independent yep Stern analytics uh they they do the data for a platform called homeroom foreign questions okay so I'm going to jump into middle school so we're going to jump into Middle School data here and for this particular slide I randomly chose uh seventh grade so that you could look at this and and here's the here's the interesting thing you're not going to
028find similar schools on each of these comparative pieces once again so um the schools that are compared with Foothills Middle School are demographically similar the schools compared with Orchard Middle School are demographically similar and the schools compared with Pioneer are demographically similar so you'll see some cross-referencing in there but they're not all the same so it's kind of an interesting look at data and I knew that Laura would appreciate that it's kind of cool to see it again to Julie's point the numbers and the scores are the things that we need to work on and improve but it's an interesting look at where we are with our data and I will have to check with Ron Brown he's not able to be with us here tonight but how can we get the same analytical breakdown
029from Stern uh for the 2223 data that might that would be an interesting uh for us to see okay here is the data for that and it's just interesting so when you look at this you want to applaud Orchard but Orchard is being compared to different schools and if you then extrapolate schools that have different demographics than Orchard may be placed in a different ranking even though we are a plotting worker that's that's good we did great um but it's just about how the data set is compiled so it's very interesting and again we do recognize and honor that we have some work to do in math moving on to Elementary this is how I just picked two randomly with the elementary we have all of the all of the data that we can share
030with the board and the community and uh can take a deeper dive into but we I picked John Newberry and and Mission View kind of at random to share with you tonight um and you can kind of see where John Newberry Falls along the Continuum there if you look at uh free and reduce ell and our students on IEP again we just cascade's kind of a popular name for schools that we're seeing also as anecdotal side to the data as we look here but uh we'll jump into what it looks like I chose fifth grade uh because our executive director of learning and teaching Heidi bus said fifth grade Corey is the culmination of the work that happens in elementary school so let's take a look at that uh and so you can kind of
031see here again we immediately want to think oh John Newberry didn't do well in in the English language arts category but again it's in the contextual framework of the schools that they're compared to and we look at math and we want to say well John Newberry did you know very well in math but again it's all about the the um the demographic similarities between these particular schools I also think it's a striking way for us to look at data in a new and unique fashion that um I rather enjoyed okay this is the mission view data and you can see that as far as free and reduced lunch is concerned we have anywhere from 69 to 78 in this Continuum and Mission View kind of lands there in the middle of 74. uh and then
032um their English language learner population at 43 and students on IEP at 13 and you can see here in this particular data set Columbia Elementary also fell on the same demographic characteristics so they are involved in this one as well and here's where you see the data land for English language arts in the fifth grade there on the left and then math fifth grade on the right so our our district big six is our guiding document and our plans um three of the big six were represented in the data that you saw today we had graduation rate English language arts uh which is reading on grade level and Beyond third grade we also saw math and so ready for algebra as part of that big six when we presented last time I believe Julie you
033had asked you know let's see some more comparative cohort data um and so we wanted to share that with you tonight um we have a variety of ways in which we plan to improve our scores over the next few years with our strategic plan and we also want to make sure that we're sharing well tonight actually you're going to hear about high quality instruction when we have our trainers presentation next so I'm excited about that and again this data is particularly focused on the academic areas of ela math a little bit of Science in there when we looked at the report card but we want to make sure that we keep data and our information relevant we want the border and our community to get the information and data that they want and so we
034plan to come back and bring more information that you'd like to see and understand and so would love to hear maybe what kinds of additional information and or questions you would like for us to address next time oops this is this is really good thank you for providing this additional information and I'm excited to hear about the plans moving forward because um you know regardless of where we fall on comparison to other school districts or other schools in particular you know when we have 18 of students meeting Proficiency in math in the fifth grade that's not a lot to write home about and um and I know that it's not because our staff doesn't care or they aren't trying or we you know we we aren't doing the best that we think we can do
035at the moment but there's something in the code that we haven't cracked yet and and we definitely um need to crack that in terms of what I'd like to see in the future is I would love to see um even though I know we had copied um you know as best as we possibly could some longitudinal data so that if if we indeed have a dip during covid years two or three years whatever it is that we acknowledge that and move forward from it foreign I am not going to make much comment because it's a lot of data and it's going to take a lot of absorption um and I do support what Laura says about longitudinal data although I'm a little more focused about being ready to use it in the future data is
036there for us to learn from and improve from and I just have one uh unusual uh comment there were a handful of outliers there that was screwed at 53 when everybody was l-sid 35 and one in the 40s in the math it would be and as we move into professional development and learning and actually that's the real engine room um it might be interesting to learn a little bit more about the outliers it may be a statistical anomaly or it may be that somebody's doing something that we can learn from Thanks Martin yeah I appreciate the presentation of all of this and and breaking it down into comparable groups and understanding how that works it is a lot of data to process um you know I will just say a few things that jump out
037at me is when we are comparing down to the school level and we see a particular you know this grade five with two or three local schools in it one of ours and two across the river and we're so substantially low it kind of is what are we doing wrong what's the formula but then in in the same vein I'm that that constant struggle of you don't want to find yourself teaching to a test just to improve what is you know reflected in the in the report card so I have faith in all the tools and things that we're implementing um independent from the the smarter balance testing itself but yeah um I do look forward to you know bringing this all up globally and however that works thank you Julie Catherine do you have
038any comments questions I think I agree the presentation is wonderful I love to see um not these exact numbers but numbers and data like this um I would kind of like to see a little bit and and it's it's uh straight but I I understand what you're saying of how we have the comparison of the schools I want to see a broader picture uh in with this explanation uh I like it I think it's very good and very informative I want to see kind of just in a broader snapshot of where we stand in the state I understand we're looking at our comparable demographics but I would be it it causes me to be interested in more precisely a a bigger picture of um where we're at comparatively for the whole state I guess I
039think I mean we're looking at 11 schools here I think is what we is what it the comparable demographics but I'd like to see us where we stand uh with the rest of the state absolutely thank you I'm just going to give a quick analysis um of what I think um I think this is great data I think oftentimes we tend to look at our neighboring school districts and say oh you know Cascade Eastmont um Moses Lake but we failed to recognize uh that our demographics are vastly different than our neighboring school districts I like what Corey said you know these demographics don't don't Define our students but they do factor in um in regards to how we can serve them and the results that we get I'm going to continue to be this squeaky
040wheel and let's just look at the data how what it is um you know we have over 50 of our non-english language learners um attaining um making standard are at standard meeting standards when under 10 of our El English language Learners are are making those so just that that opportunity Gap um it's wide and um although the demographics don't Define our students we really need to take a deeper dive into that aspect of our students um again Kudos I'm hoping we can get um continue with that cohort and ideally we would like to see our schools move up or those percentage increase I'm looking forward to seeing this data with our um next or this year's last year's data or whatnot so thank you excellent thank you very much can I beg permission to have
041two comments after what the president said it's let's not be demographically defined this is part of equity that if we succeed with all students our goals should be in a sense to make demographics matter less so it's fine to compare but if we look at long-term development uh let's not be demographically defined everybody has same potential oh absolutely and I think ideally um you know it would be fabulous to get our numbers to go up across the board and not um have one pop one demographic of student population carry that weight or carry us um behind well thank you everyone for the time I appreciate it and I would like to welcome executive director of learning and teaching Heidi busk to the podium and uh she's going to welcome her trainers and uh and our
042Wenatchee School District team oh you need to get the clicker yes you got to get it thank you hi good evening and thank you so much for the opportunity today to share about our district trainers and update you on the work that we're doing this year we're excited to be here tonight um as you know we've moved from a professional development model in the past several years where we had an instructional coach in our elementary schools and an instructional coach in our middle schools and this year we had um had to change it up a little bit and fortunately we had the opportunity to hire four amazing District trainers who are providing professional development to our entire District it's a lofty feat a lot lofty goal to do this but they are working really hard
043to make this happen um tonight we would like to introduce you to our district trainers and we would also like to share about our professional development focus and how it um how it supports our strategic plan and also how IT addresses the equity work that was identified in our Equity review so at this time I would like to invite our team members to introduce themselves good evening I'm Lisa Lewis and I'm the K-5 mtss which is multi-tiered systems of support trainer hi I'm Betsy streen and I'm the 612 mtss trainer I'm Brittany yacho and I'm the 612 ELD or English language development trainer hi my name is anaisa lamus Polito and I am the TK through fifth grade ELD trainer good evening I'm Amber Burks I am the assistant director of mtss pk-12 it's been
044a fabulous team we're so excited we're just waiting just a minute for it to pop open there they are again if you need to see their pictures um I'll back up just a little bit here back up back up I'm going the wrong way how do I go backwards I know oh there it is it's a different button that's that's not the way mine works okay there we go um we really came together and um an established our existence why we exist when we first came together and so um we came up with this which really defines the work we do we exist to build instructional and collaborative capacity to ensure high levels of learning for all and our vision is to build administrator and teacher capacity to increase achievement and close the equity Gap
045system-wide so the American Institute for research explains that educational Equity is achieved when all students receive the resources opportunities skills and knowledge they need to succeed in our Democratic Society that's our promise our promise is to build that Foundation of diversity equity and inclusion from which each student emerges future ready so we play a big part in helping that happen I'm not good with this clicker so through a guaranteed and viable professional development plan we are working toward educational equity guaranteed means that every student no matter which school they're in which classroom they're in we guarantee that they receive that same high quality instruction from teachers using the most effective instructional strategies and viable means that it's feasible it's doable it's capable of working effectively and successfully so in order to achieve our goals our
046mission and the purpose that we exist we knew that we had to be very very intentional um as Heidi was talking about we moved from a model where we had many more instructional coaches to now four and so we knew we had to be very intentional around our focus on the instruction that has the greatest impact on student learning so what we did was we took a look at effect sizes that compare strategies that have the most effect and we leaned into those and those are the strategies that we have selected across our system um with our very intentional plan um we are working to equip teachers to with the right tools and strategies to engage interact with their students of diverse backgrounds and then we are also supporting the number three here focus our
047instructional leaders to be able to lead this bold instructional leadership to change outcomes for our students foreign so we 've shared with our teachers and our administrators our essential questions did I jump ahead too far there we go right uh before we did that we'll talk about this so um the professional development Focus the focus for the year addresses big six number one providing high quality instruction for our diverse Learners last board meeting we presented our big six data and as you saw we have growth opportunities for rigor and engagement our PD Focus also addresses a need identified in our Equity program review Equity gaps and achievement outcomes for multilingual learners in particular IT addresses three of the focus areas really well so Focus area one access to learning opportunities Focus area 2 instructional practices
048and policies and focus Area 3 curriculum resources materials and policies so really that focus on instruction and how do we best instruct in our classroom moving from what works to what works best for our multilingual Learners which is essential but these strategies that are essential work well for all of our students they're really good strategies so when we had the opportunity to meet with all of our teachers in August and do a training we shared these essential questions with them and said this is really what we're going to be focusing on all year long and those essential questions are how can we collectively take ownership for accelerating the language development and content outcomes for multilingual Learners and also what high leverage strategies can we use to engage a hundred percent of students in rigorous academic
049learning so that's just a theme we're going to keep going throughout the year as we work with our teachers okay the term essential strategies refers to high leverage strategies that increase engagement and accelerate learning essential strategies are excellent for all learners but essential for multilingual Learners and students with learning differences they are guaranteed across a grade level and or system the term is parallel to priority or essential standards the phrase was coined to emphasize that tight evidence-based Tier 1 instruction across a system is foundational to the work of a professional learning community and mtss processes guaranteeing effective instructional strategies or routines from grade level to grade level is a critical component of aligning systems to ensure guaranteed and viable instruction in this year we will provide professional development and support on language focused strategies these
050essential instructional strategies have been identified as what works best or having a high effect size so you can see in our Secondary School 6 through 12 we in August did a professional will develop around academic discussions and getting all students engaged in academic conversations and we will continue in October with academic vocabulary and language and then in the spring with note taking and summarizing and then with Elementary we're focusing in on academic discussions and then academic vocabulary and language and you can see that in terms of our ELD with secondary we're focusing in on integrated ELD and in elementary we're talking about integrated and designated English language development all right Elementary is also continuing their focus on math instruction last year we identified priority standards created common pacing and common formative assessments elementary math PD
051last year focused on procedural fluency and purposeful questioning this year we're digging deeper into engaging instruction mathematical growth mindset through the mathematical practices productive struggle student discourse and a problem-solving process with a language protocol so all of the work in math this year is also language focused so our PD is language focused with an emphasis on getting students to talk we no longer want silent classrooms and we specifically came to staff in August saying why is speaking or oral language so important and critical well academic language is that formal register that we use in professional or academic studies for speaking and writing it's not inherent and so students have to learn and have to be taught how to speak in a very formal way and not just our multilingual students but all students and so
052if we want students to read and write academically they must speak the academic language first key click again one more so these are outcomes for August professional development for elementary and secondary we built understanding about how to support our MLS through Collective ownership of the four language domains which are Reading Writing listening and speaking we explored why the wsd essential strategies are critical for diverse Learners and we help to understand how to implement academic discussions for 100 engagement for all learners all right and our August learning outcomes for math were to reflect on current practices and gain new insights into mathematical mindset and instruction to understand the importance of building a mathematical mindset community Through the standards for mathematical practices and to deepen knowledge around how students learn to problem solve in mathematics using the
053try discuss connect routine or framework with the essential strategy language routines we would also like to share with you what our October professional development Focus will be so in October at elementary level we are working on essential strategies for diverse Learners part two and this involves designated ELD strategies and supports for academic vocabulary and language structure which is focused on listening and speaking and in math in math we'll continue with our Essentials math strategies for diverse Learners with the structure of a math lesson we'll continue with that try to discuss connect routine along with the three reads language routine we'll be talking about co-crafting questions and word problems and language routines for fact fluency and fact interview assessment at the secondary level again with the focus on academic vocabulary and language structure we will continue
054part two and that is a focus on academic vocabulary and language thank you so much for the opportunity to share this important work that we are engaged in this school year we look forward to providing updates as we move forward and do you have any questions for us yes I do so going back up to your essential questions I think it was called um will you be applying the PLC questions to your questions to know how you're doing what you need to do to do better and all that kind of stuff oh absolutely okay good yes um and that since I'm not in the world of um instruction every day um can you summarize how much of a change is this PD approach from what's been done in the past so a couple of things
055the PD approach is quite different because we have we have our district trainers providing the same professional development to every school every teacher every classroom throughout our district so it's very common so it's in District house trainers so once we provide that training they're actually right now starting tomorrow heading out to plc's so they're following up with our professional learning communities to help them with implementation help them with questions and wonderings they might have and then giving them an assignment to continue this work so that when we come back together in October they'll be able to share what they've done how it's going and all of those pieces so the professional development part is different in that respect where we're not bringing in an outside trainer and I know we've done that before our structured
056literacy was all in-house and very well done um we are now and that was tier one that focused on tier one instruction that core instruction and that routine that we made sure was happening in every classroom so this professional development is very much that way where we are rolling out this is best practice this is what works best for our students and then we're asking we're following up with that continued support so the part that's about if we're thinking about what's happening in the classroom and the professional development we're providing we're not bringing something new there have been students have been talking in classrooms for a long time it's not a new practice but it's an intentional focus on implementing that practice understanding how essential that is for our students because of the high effect
057size of growth for them so we didn't want to come in and say one more new thing here go learn something brand new and start that we wanted to say let's build on the work you're doing we saw in our data that our students weren't talking a lot in our classrooms remember it was about that 40 some to 50 percent of students really having those conversations in the classroom and that student talk exceeds teacher talk and all those all of those so that data really informed our work the professional development Focus was also informed by our administrators saying this is the work we want to do next so it wasn't a brand new thing but it's an intentional focus with support to help this happen so when we go out and do our data walks
058this year or learning walks this year and we collect data on our big six number one we want to see our teachers using these strategies to elicit 100 student engagement that's one of our data collection points so we we expect to see this happening all over because they're they've done it before we're going to be more intentional we're going to plan it in our PLC and talk about the instructional piece that what do we do next and how is that going to support our students and then come back and talk about how did it work what did our data say so um does that answer your question um it's that's that's really good news and on a number of different levels than one of the one of the things that you mentioned is it's not
059something new it's building what we already have because we've heard teachers say so many times we don't need one if we ignore this initiative long enough it'll be gone and we'll start something new so we might as well not even bother absolutely so this sounds hopeful like this is different so I'm I'm really glad to hear about that so you talked about engagement and the idea is to get I think you just said 100 engagement in the classroom so what other um systemic results are you hoping to see if you came back to you know at the end of the school year what what data points we'll be looking at and what will we see yeah so we'll look at our big six um number one hi um the instructions high levels of their instruction
060for all students and we should see the teachers using strategies to elicit 100 student engagement will be one of them that we should see increase because the teachers have had professional development how to use those strategies um the teacher notices when students aren't engaged let me let me change my question a little bit all right what are the results that we're going to see in students oh yeah yeah so we are hoping to see great results um when students are talking about their academic language when they're using that academic language and they're learning that those sentence structures we should see and and listening speaking reading and writing using that academic language we are hopeful to see an increase in our multilingual Learners who meet proficiency on the Wida okay because that's a rigorous assessment so
061we know we have a lot of work to do in that area but we hope to see when students are using that academic language that language is on our assessments for Wida it's the language of school that they are using for science and social studies so we didn't just train our our Ela and Math teachers our whole system learned about this so we should see these strategies happening in every classroom um so we should see that we're hopeful to see an increase you you saw some of the math work that Lisa is working with the elementary um our students struggle on the smarter balanced assessment whenever we have a problem we have to figure out a word problem a problem how do we tackle that so we see our data in that area needing to
062improve a lot and so when she talked about the framework with the language routine that's teaching our kids how to not just look at a word problem and look at the numbers and see a keyword that says more so I think I'm going to add them together because we're learning about addition right now so that happens a lot they look at numbers they word pick and number pick and then they do an operation they don't really understand how to break down that problem and understand what it means so Lisa's working really hard with our elementary teachers to put that into place and again Laura this is not something new this is part of our math program this routine is part of our math program but we're going to get better at it so that we
063can bring in more language to help our all of our students be able to access that so we should see hopefully gains in our data we know that our students are learning more we should see our CFA data and be able to track that along the way and we're also implementing using some of our SBA formative interim assessments that give us those dipsticks into how our kids are doing in relation to what how they will the questions they'll see on the smarter balance assessment so um we're putting a lot of pieces into place that really aren't new we're just getting better at the things we do good thank you thank you anything else well I think this is fabulous what I like the approach and maybe I'm wrong on this um but I know there
064was Pockets um within the district or schools or some of them or some classroom teachers were doing it others were not but to see it as a district initiative I think it's great um and that consistency across uh all grade levels um I think it's fabulous just a quick question in regards to the language um the academic language it sounds like we've completely moved away from and I'm not saying this is good or bad um uh glad strategies oh no are we still are they yeah beating oh yeah okay yeah there's still a big piece of what we do especially at the elementary level um Anna Issa is is right there she'll she's working and will be working with our elementary teachers to continue that work this year and support that so yeah and when
065we're talking about academic language and we're talking about a sentence patterning chart in glad that's academic vocabulary and language that the kids are using in their learning sentence structure they're singing a song while they're doing it so yes it's it's all part of it still so then that reminds me of the science of reading okay it's not there all right anything else yeah I'd like to get the end point um of a question but I would go get there on a roundabout route and that's on engagement by the way close the equity Gap is what I was trying to clumsily say about demographics that yeah if you succeed the demographics are important in the data but they're not the end point absolutely um so engagement and we have an absentee problem nationally particularly at High
066School um and so seeing discussion and the emphasis on participation and getting everybody interested and seeing that structure that looks to me as a non-educator as a very good way to go um and I'd like to kind of understand a little bit about exactly what academic vocabulary means and how it applies from the professional point of view it's more Precision more consistency in how you're teaching I am um confused when I'm volunteering in elementary school the students know technical words that I don't know because they're used in education today on the other side that I would say there's an interest in people wanting to speak the language that they feel comfortable with um and so uh as the end point being a engagement um how do you see getting Precision in the techniques and the
067language and the definitions linking to having interesting words and language that students can relate to and feel engaged with okay you lost me at the last part well for a teacher a technical word is fine for a student where that's a strange word not used outside school their parents don't understand it um this is it Eternal for a turn on how how do you professionally get to the point where that me that engages them because it's interest them as opposed to gosh this is technical jargon yeah so the vocabulary that we work with and actually they're going our trainers are you know doing that next with that academic vocabulary we have a routine just like we do with our um with our structured literacy routine there's a vocabulary routine that we select the words from
068the complex text that students are going to be reading whatever cat or whatever subject that is in and then we identify those words that are necessary for students to be able to understand that concept or that skill that context and then we teach those words with a routine so the teacher models it the teacher there's several steps to do it in the end it's they teach the definition the students then practice using that word with partners and then we have a discussion so when we have that academic discussion students know those words they feel successful with those words and then those words are part of a word bank that they can look at to access and then we have complex sentence frames so a starting of a sentence with maybe an academic word of however
069we don't use however often in our language and our kids don't but that's a word that we want them to become familiar with and have it to start rolling off their tongue because then when they read that complex text and they see that word however they know however is signaling something so then they're going to be able to understand that complex sentence and when kids understand what they're learning and they can use the language of what they're learning and they get to talk to a partner in English and oftentimes they use Spanish in our in our school district they go back and forth they they help each other with oh they start to ask a question in Spanish and then the other one answers in English and that's that's awesome we let them that's perfect
070we however they need to use language to understand meaning but they feel successful and they're building relationships with the kids that they're talking to they've got that that safe environment that the teacher has created and I know last year we had I'm going on and on but this is really exciting for me uh they last year we did a workshop and you talked about how do you create that safe environment and I don't know if you remember I think it was bets it was Betsy and Alyssa came and did a workshop for you and and um this is one of those ways that teachers create that safe environment they teach kids how to have those conversations they provide the academic language and support to have it so that kids can talk about what they're learning
071using the language of what they're learning and then when we ask them to write they feel confident being able to write it because they've already spoken it and that's a word that they're starting to own or a concept they're starting to own so it's just all connected I hope that answered your question I don't know if it did I think it was much larger than my question but it puts my question as a small part of a big topic thanks okay all right okay all right thank you so much and these these trainers and Amber are an amazing team and you're gonna see great things from them and they are working hard and running back and forth from place to place so if you see them give them a thumbs up Thanksgiving we're out of
072Applause folks thank you so much thank you really appreciate Heidi and Amber's leadership and our trainers in restructuring what coaching looks like in the Wenatchee School District so thank you for your creativity and your intentionality for the work so again thank you we do have one action item which is the Wenatchee Education Association collective bargaining agreement excellent so all we are asking for here is approval of the uh the Winnie a collective bargaining agreement that was recently ratified and so we put that in front of you um so the board can uh take action on that thank you thank you hope everyone had a chance to review that CBA uh do I have a motion to approve the CBA between the Wenatchee school district and the Wenatchee Education Association move to approve the collecting collective
073bargaining agreement between Wenatchee school district and Wenatchee Education Association extending from September 1st 2023 through August 31st 2025. I second that we have a motion by Julie in a second by Laura do we have any discussion I would like to say just thank you to the bargaining group and to the district group as well um for making this a smooth process for all any further discussion all in favor of approving the collective bargaining agreement between the Wenatchee school district and the Wenatchee Education Association from September 23 through August 25. um please say hi hi any opposed hi or clarification purposes was that a i to approve or I to a post it was a late eye to approve thank you I decide to move as fast as I could okay uh motion carries thank you
074next we have the superintendent report all right um so couple of announcements and I'll then I'll get to my report but I just wanted to talk to our board and our community here so uh following a few more than a few potentially recent arrests in our local school districts including our own I just want to take a minute to reassure our staff our students and our families that the Wenatchee School District does take these situations very seriously while we cannot share any details about the allegations we can confirm that they do not involve any Wenatchee School District students we will continue to work closely with law enforcement as the investigations continue and progress as they are criminal investigations we cannot answer any questions at this time but we appreciate your patience and the trust of
075our community and knowing that safety is our top priority when it comes to our students and staff and our school community and then in reference to safety we want to emphasize ensuring the safety of our students is one of our top priority our top priority if it isn't the top priority our staff and leaders strive to create our thriving environments as we talk about in our classrooms buildings buses and extracurricular activities students emotional and physical well-being in school is directly linked to their academic performance and we recognize this fact when Safety and Security concerns arise students are encouraged to speak to a trusted adult at the school or report those concerns anonymously through our safety Reporting System known as Vector which is prominently located on our school and districts websites and available 24 7 for
076our students staff and parents to report any safety concerns that that might arise and they can do that by phone or text 844-336-1964 additionally school counselors administrators and Social Service staff are available to Brookside support of the building and I just I mentioned this because we have a great deal of new families that are new to the Wenatchee School District this year and so also look in the future for a wealth of information that'll be coming uh both using our blooms correspondence tool and I believe it'll be in our weekly as well so just get that information out for everyone and I also just want to acknowledge uh that we are in week three if we if we didn't realize that it may feel like longer or it may feel like less I don't know
077how fast your time's going but this is week three and I am and I'm hearing throughout our system uh that it that this year feels a little bit different for staff and so I just want to recognize that and just share that if you all remember as a system we made a host of Staff reductions last year amidst budget crisis and those reductions as well as 20 plus positions that are still vacant in our system are making this year feel very different for our Educators and so I just want to recognize that and as a district we've been open and transparent about the impacts of this multi-year budget concern we are literally in year one of intentional reductions to help us get closer to balancing those revenues and expenses a term that we've been using
078as as a Cabinet here is Right sizing or what I like to say adjusting to live within our means and I want to take that this time to acknowledge that our system is feeling a little bit of the impact of that reduction in staff this year and what's great is our staff is rising to the challenge and just as we expected them to um and we all everyone's working their tails off to make sure that our students do not feel the impact of the staff reductions um quite literally the buffer for that work is our staff and taking responsibility of ensuring that our students don't feel the outcomes of Staff reductions or vacant positions uh this is the work that we'll continue to do because that's what the Wenatchee School District does we take on
079challenges we persevere through hard times and I want to thank our district and everyone involved that we see you we honor you we honor the work that you're doing and you're appreciated we will continue to find creative ways to support our staff as we work through the challenges that will present themselves this year we'll look into additional hiring fairs potentially and outside of the box thinking um and I will personally be sharing with each school department Association our board and our supportive Community what the lay of the land is with regard to our budget uh beginning in October so I just kind of wanted to throw that out there and thank you for the time to allow me to do that I'll move on to the normal superintendent's report and I'm going to talk about
080the Chelan County Fair very exciting uh Diane and I were able to make it to the fair last Thursday where we will we're able to see Wenatchee high school students engaging actively in sheep and pig showing and it was awesome uh while we were there uh our new Wenatchee High School Communications specialist Kate Williams was interviewing multiple students she took a ton of pictures and those will appear in Wenatchee High School social media and newsletters we were able to meet with a couple of students who had just completed the steer judging competition and one of them had taken the first place ribbon so she was super excited about that and then finally we checked in with Bridget and Noah at the Vex robotics team from Foothills Middle School and learned about their upcoming new competition
081challenge as you know the challenge changes every year so there's a variety of these balls and squares and things that they have to get into these certain areas it looks super hard um but the the team showed us their current robot and performed on the field that was set up there and the fair was a great time as usual and uh I actually look forward to hearing more of the comprehensive outcomes of our students at the fair so I haven't actually seen all of that yet so I'm excited uh then we had they didn't get to see this but Diana did and this is good so we had the the Jr JROTC flights with the Civil Air Patrol so the cadets from Wenatchee Air Force Junior ROTC flew alongside the pilots the Civil Air Patrol
082at ping board last week which sounds exhilarating and dangerous um this is an exciting opportunity for our Jr OTC uh Cadets who were experiencing this for the very first time but it was a chance for them to build strong relationships with the Civil Air air patrol during the flight evidently the cadets were able to apply what they had learned in the classroom in the program's Aerospace curriculum making it an excellent example of Hands-On learning and the military I guess refers to that as curriculum in action I'd say that's curriculum in action so the JROTC program has been in existence for the last two years and has grown to over 60 Cadets super cool uh fiestas Mexicanas uh last weekend was uh the huge event in Triangle Park and Triangle Park was hopping all weekend long
083uh the entire weekend was incredible it was such a great example of our strategic plans priority of Partnerships in action uh we had numerous agency booths tons of food great food uh vendors a multitude of other sponsors and groups were on hand for the fun uh El grito uh celebration happened Saturday evening at 6 30. host of elected officials were on hand executive directors of various agencies a couple board members um it was great it was uh fortunate enough to be able to say a few words uh about how honored we were to host the event at Triangle Park and partner with fiestas Mexicanas and I look forward to next year's celebration already um we had another student uh podcast receive an honorable mention from NPR last spring when Angie's School senior Sophie uh Sophie
084Macon uh along with her 2023 graduates and Emmy Sutton and I a Lynn Orozco submitted their podcast titled life inside the green band tents to National Public Radio student podcast challenge we all remember that uh their podcast was given an honorable honorable mention out of 3 300 submissions across the state uh sorry across the country and the piece tells the story of Wenatchee High School banned students who used the green pop-up tents to continue playing music during the pandemic uh after the photo of the students went viral the podcast offers a unique perspective on how students navigated the challenges posed by the pandemic and continued to persevere through their passion for music so this is the second student podcast from Wenatchee High School to be selected for a National Honor so I appreciate that very
085cool um again I want to thank the cafe Leadership Academy for joining us tonight thank you for being here and that's it for the superintendence report okay thank you now we'll move on to our board communication I have a lot to say so I'll let you guys go first so we've got some good and bad news so uh bad news you probably all have now heard that the Supreme Court weighed in on Capital funding being part of basic education and it's not so all the more reason we're going to have to look internally to be able to improve our facilities over time um I know that was kind of one of the questions I always had in my mind is well why can't we have facilities similar to anywhere else in the state if we're
086supposed to educate to the same standards but the Supreme Court has weighed in and said no Capital facilities are not part of the basic education that the state is required to support so disappointing on that front um but the good news is I have very much appreciated all the hard work and enjoyed the first three weeks of school it's been very busy having three kids now in three different schools I feel like I've experienced all of it at some level I really enjoyed some of the articles that came out in the paper and were shared on the district websites of the the welcomes to both the new students and to the new administrators at the schools I thought there was some really fun neat articles to introduce some of our new principles or principles and
087new roles that kind of was exciting for the new year I've had a lot of time going to all these school events now so far in the first three weeks it feels like things have actually um for this being what I would consider really the first real Year back with everything kind of churning like it did all the preschool welcomes everything's sort of on schedules sports activities everything starting it feels more seamless than I expected it to so I appreciate all the staff the work that's going into that making students and parents feel seen and heard during these first three stressful weeks um speaking of activities it's Battle of the bridge week so come out to all the the fun especially High School event events this week I think we've got soccer tomorrow volleyball Thursday
088and football Friday so should be fun come show our support the weather should be great so all the more reason and I just one need for improvement I know we're rolling out this new blooms platform um I liking the messaging format so far but I'm finding it a little bit confusing sometimes understanding what building or whether this is a district-wide communication or a teacher or a special a programmatic communication so you know a very specific thing from a parent in the district so but I I'm guessing if I'm feeling it some other parents may be experiencing it as as well because I've got a few updates and I'm going what school is this what kid do I need to do this for so I'm not entirely sure so I'm I'm getting the messages and I
089appreciate it but I don't know how we clarify a little better where they're coming from to so I don't have to read it four times I guess I'll go next I simply want to thank all the staff of the Wenatchee school district for everything they do at the start of a challenging Year and have great confidence in you uh the second area I wanted to launch into is Partnerships is par a part of our strategic plan and we've already heard about Fiesta's Mexicanas I saw that as a tribute to the whole Wenatchee Community the number of Civic organizations there working together was just simply awesome and I think the whole Community can be proud of that and the school district is part of that and I I see those Partnerships maturing and gaining strength and
090uh you know that this morning people met in this room um in a similar similar vein and Cafe thank you very much for being here I'm really glad of your Outreach to understand how civil Civic government works and you have your Gala on Thursday night looking forward to that um and then uh another uh following on On maturing the core pack Board of the parent advisory committee for bilingual and migrant parents met last week and they are making great strides in learning their Authority and how to manage and what kind of interested me is I had no idea that they actually approved their budget and they had about a 10-page budget to look through not like the 300 page one we get and it's a part of the 300 page one read but seeing that
091what's involved in this kind of work and gaining strength on October the 4th will be the multilingual night at the high school I believe so that kind of inter Civic group School District being very much a part of it that's something that I think is very valuable it feeds on the community it feeds on the help that goes into the into the school district to support our activities extracurricular another thank you Catherine you can use my time Maria I'm all good I don't have that much I I just want to say think I want to say thank you Dr kalahar for acknowledging the safety component of our staff students um again I concur students staff Y is a number one priority for the district and for me as well thank you for acknowledging the climate
092of our district given the the budget and Staffing constraints um we see you we hear you um last week I attended the panther parent night at Wenatchee high school and it was a really neat event um I saw Dr philhar there and it was just amazing to see how many Community Partners were there um with their tables um but also our Wenatchee High School staff and our District staff there that evening the amount of uh support services that we have for our students uh it's great within the community and the district so thank you for taking that time out of their busy evenings to um to be there available for our staff our students and our families um during that time I got to talk to two Cadets from the ROTC program and I learned
093so much from them it with my like 10 minute conversation with them and I encourage you guys to just they were you know in their full regalia um it was just it was really neat to see them and I heard all about the flight simulation one of them got to fly and take control uh so that was really neat I also got to talk to our three of our Avid students who were greeting um our the community again I learned so much from just engaging with them for a short amount of time um I won't speak too much on fiestas Mexicanas but it was also great to see uh District leadership uh at the stage there for Vito and uh thank you for the district leadership for coming together and embracing the cultural activity it
094was hard to miss um if you drove by Miller or Orlando yeah or we're at the soccer game or the football game on Friday um you wouldn't have you can't you couldn't have missed it um that is it for my update just a couple reminders we have a workshop scheduled for next week the 18th at one okay and then our the general assembly still scheduled for September 22nd and 23rd I believe Catherine will be attending that remotely and our next regular board meeting is scheduled for September 26th at this time I just want to say that I will be absent from the um 18th I mean I will be out of the country well we'll be here hopefully you'll think about us on your trip [Laughter] if there is no further communication um at this
095time the school board will now resist into executive session for a period of 30 minutes to evaluate the qualifications of an applicant for public employment to review the performance of a staff member or to receive and evaluate complaints or charges brought against a director or staff member pursuant the district policy number 1410 and RCW 4230 11-0 this discussion will be close to the public the school board is not expected to take final action following the executive session thank you the school board is extending the executive session for a period of 15 minutes until 8 10. foreign meeting is adjourned