10/5/2021 - NMUSD Board of Education Meeting

001good afternoon everyone welcome to the regular meeting um of our school board october 5th 2021 roll call please trusty elsie here tristy bartow here justine matoya here trustee wagon here trustee crane here trustee anderson trustee or soyleu here dr banzor here adoption of the agenda and before i have a motion i would like to move item 20b after item 16. so we have some presenters and that way they um i would like to adjourn this meeting in the name of our phenomenal board member judy franco thank you who passed away motion to approve as amended and adjourn in the memory of judy franco i'll make a motion to approve as amended and in turn in the memory of judy franco second moved by trustee bartow seconded by trustee weigan roll call vote trustee yossi yes

002trustee bartow yes trustee montoya yes christie wagon yes trustee crane yes trustee anderson trusteer yes community community input on closed session items only um i see no one here so there's no reason to read it we will now recess into closed session at 3 31 and we'll be back at 6 00 p.m um the items for closed session are 5a conference with labor negotiator 5b public employee discipline dismissal release employment and 5c student discipline pursuant to ed code sections 35146 48918c we have two cases we will return to open session at 6 00 pm thank you good evening everyone welcome to our open session i'm calling this meeting to order at 6 00 pm uh we'll first have opening ceremonies with a moment of reflection and pledge to the flag led by trustee crane and

003as we have our moment of reflection um i'd like everyone just to keep in mind that today today is world teacher day so we have a lot of amazing teachers in our district and just keep that in mind as we move from the meeting please rise place your right hand over your heart begin 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 also in uh before we went into closed session in the adoption of the agenda we moved item 20b up to after item number 16 because we're having a presentation and some several people are here in our audience we want to make sure to be mindful of their time and we also

004move to adjourn the meeting in memory of judy franco a very long-serving trustee of our district adoption of the minutes 9 14 21. so moved second move by trustee crane seconded by trustee weigan roll call vote trustee elsie yes trustee berto yes trustee mattoya yes jesse wagon yes trustee crane yes trustee anderson yes christie or soyu yes number 11 student board member reports the topic this week is how's the return to school going and what are students excited about we have three of our members here the roll call vote will be done by early college high school representative nicole mcmillan nicole would you like to start off hello members of the board president elc and superintendent first of all i'd like to say thank you for allowing me to come tonight it's been a wonderful

005opportunity first of all early college i would just like to say it has been an awesome start to the year definitely a lot better than on zoom online it's been really great to be back in school and i really think that it's really starting to feel like normal school again i know we still have masks and some social distancing but it really feels like normal and i know a lot of my fellow peers are having a lot of fun just being back on school on campus and talking to friends hanging out so i'd say it's been an overall really good start to the year i know a lot of teachers are also excited to actually be on campus um one topic that i'd like to bring up to you tonight is schoology i know it's

006been new for a lot of us this year we've been using school loop for a while and that's just personally what i'm used to and i've gotten a number of issues brought up to me about schoology particularly that it's just not as easy as school loop and i know that that can definitely just be because we're not used to it yet and it's certainly a new thing for all of us but sometimes um some of my fellow peers have mentioned that it's harder to navigate like for example sending messages or checking our grades it's just not all in one spot like school loop is and i'm sure that's something we'll get adjusted too but it's just something that i've heard multiple times mentioned to me so i'd like to bring that up to you all

007and yeah overall besides that we've had a really great start to the year and we're looking forward to making this year a great one thank you thank you thank you corona del mar high school representative katie barnes hello members of the board president elsie in superintendent attendant i am honored to be here this evening we were asked to address how our student population is handling the return to normalcy i want to report that chrono del mar high school is doing amazing and coming back to school this fall this last week we had a music concert which we had not offered in the last two years students were so pleased to perform even though face masks could be challenging for the singers they were so pleased to be back in action another positive outcome is our

008strong spirit cdm is showing awesome student support and attendance at games this past week we had a girls pink out volleyball game and it was the highest student attendance girls volleyball has ever seen overall student moral and engagement is much improved with learning in person on campus as well our students are excited and looking forward to our battle of the bay dance in two weeks thank you for letting giving you this opportunity to report tonight thank you thank you katie and estancia high school representative dane dodge good evening superintendent you can move it up okay cool yeah good evening superintendent board president trustees and guests um i'd like to report that the back to school process over this last month at asante high school is going uh very well uh i'd first like to start

009off with we had our first club rush in two years and we've had the most clubs ever uh uh participate in a club rush with over 20 plus clubs and 10 new ones and then i'd like to bring up sports our sports have been really uh back in the swing of things they've been doing really good i know volleyball is girls volleyball is 12 and two and they play cavalry tonight boys water polo is nine and four and football's only lost twice and piggybacking off the sports i think participation at sports games and at school events have been a lot has been increased and i i chalked that up to the new programmer using five star uh students are given rewards and points for attending certain uh activities and games at our school and they're

010allowed to use those points to get certain merch and prizes that you can't get otherwise and then one last thing i'd like to bring up is our counseling department's actually hosting a lot of things for our senior class this year to start getting into the college application process and i think that's really good thank you so much thank you and it's it's really very special for us to hear what's going on at all the schools and to see the school spirit and activities returning to somewhat normal and i know i've been i think we all have probably been to events either sporting events or musical events at the schools already and it's just great to see everyone out there having fun doing what they love to do so keep up the good work everyone harbor

011council pta report lisa bowler thank you good evening superintendent trustees cabinet guests i wanted to let you know that our meeting yesterday at the harbor council we had an overview of taxes it's the time for all our ptas to start thinking about their taxes being due and so we just gave them kind of a broad overview because we have a lot of new um pta presidents and didn't even realize that our taxes are due at a different time than our personal taxes so they're now aware of that and i want to thank all of these wonderful people right here who attended the pta meeting and stayed to answer all of our pta president's questions and we had a wide variety of topics and i think everyone was very pleased with getting answers to their frequently

012asked questions at their schools we also had a presentation on the upcoming college and career night which is going to be held virtually this year on october 20th from 6 to 8 pm and they already have oh they've got about 200 different possibilities of things going on that night and there will be representatives that they will be able to go into rooms with and hear about the colleges and it's all on the website you can go online and register if you're interested in attending our um membership is up over 300 3 500 members so great thank you to everyone who's joined it's not too late it's always ongoing and you'll probably hear me ask you to join every month all right every time i'm up here so um last year's membership was only 4 100.

013so we're this close to matching last year and we're very excited also at the meeting i passed out yard signs for walk to school day and um these are for the schools that hadn't got on board to get the the information packet so there are signs that they can put around their school talking about back to school or walk to school there were activity books that they could pick back for their kids and also we had some info cards that gave safety tips on dropping your children off at school safely and also those who walk to school how to do it safely and all of our ptas have their officers now so hooray they're all in compliance and we're doing well so thank you very much thank you lisa um next we'll go with csea

014is um whose present there's pam oh okay pam we weren't sure who was going to present sitting in the back evening president yes lee board interim superintendent dr hank bankser and cap cabinet and guest thank you for this opportunity from cse we would like to give a big thank you to all of our classified employees throughout the district for their hard work along with our students classified staff is back to supporting our new educational learning normalcy our members have done a great job and have always said yes since the beginning of the pandemic we are the ones that have always been there to support students and district needs no matter the circumstances csea wants to ensure that classified members needs and concerns will continue to be addressed amid every changing guidelines and following all the

015rules from all agencies csea is looking forward to ample notification and collaboration regarding any workplace changes thank you for your approval of our ta and mouse however subsequent action is needed for implementation of two mou summer assistant program and mers these will help to strengthen our employees and is a huge benefit to all members we appreciate the increasing communication and setting a strong foundation for a continued positive relationship with the future with our new superintendent dr wesley smith and also i would like to thank dr hank bankster for stepping and being our interim superintendent we'll miss you and i uh we wish you well with visiting your grandkids and being able to move there with them thank you and mft [Music] good evening president elsie board members superintendent and cabinet members on behalf of nmft

016i want to acknowledge all of the teachers certificated staff and school personnel for successfully completing their back-to-school nights for what will hopefully be a peaceful and productive year that work of helping families and students acclimate to the new school year and attain a level of comfort through building relationships and setting forth expectations for new learning and success is both critical and appreciated also we want to acknowledge and thank the teachers office teams tech department and district liaisons who help troubleshoot implementation of schoology during progress report time it was a lot of work all the way around since i saw you last i've had the opportunity to attend several sessions with employees dr brown with dr brown highlighting the new evaluation forms and standards for the pilot year of the um the new evaluation uh forms

017that stemmed from the mo view regarding those forums so that there'd be more meaningful and accurate process we appreciate the work being done by the district to have a fully informed thoroughly communicated rollout we also had the opportunity to meet with staff and administration at cdm to assist in refining the new safety and emergency plans with the new gate uh relatively new gate design again something that was made more complex by the you know covet happening and then you know picking up where we left off last um at the end of this week i'll be meeting with jonathan wilby pam saunders and i believe an administrator um with the um for an occupational health and safety committee that he's starting up again looking forward to that i don't have anything else and i'm going to

018close by wishing everyone a happy national hispanic heritage month so time to celebrate the contributions of more than 60 million latinos in the united states some of the country's founding hispanic people have enriched our nation's social political cultural and economic competitiveness as well as the labor movement so um thank you very much thank you and happy world teacher day right okay we're moving on to community input on non-agendas items uh trustee matoy this is an opportunity for the public to address the board regarding items not on the regular meeting agenda comments on non-agenda topics are limited to three minutes per comment up to 20 minutes a speaker may not relinquish his or her time to another person and i just want to add to the public our microphone that's at the podium is directional so

019if you have it pointing at your mouth we can hear you better if it's over to the side the microphone we don't pick it up so thank you okay we do have some comments um when i call your name please come up you have three minutes haley jenkins um hi my name is haley thank you for letting me have this time to speak tonight i'm once again here to discuss with you the controversial trainings that are supposed to take place november 1st with the anti-defamation league at last month's meeting dr banzler said that the decision to sign the contract with the adl knowing that the materials were proprietary was ill-conceived and he also said that crt is not in the curriculum in the school district either overt or covert but respectfully i disagree he said

020that likely because he's not seen the trainings and in fact i know that at least three of you maybe more have not seen the trainings at all so how can you vote to approve something for all of these students and teachers when you don't know what's in it isn't that irresponsible seemingly nmusd has a history of negative messaging sneaking in their sneaking their way into trainings in the classroom without the board knowing for example just this year before school started the elementary math trainings for teachers had a few articles telling the teachers to disrupt the power and privilege in their classroom i know because i read the articles if not for some brave teachers pointing this out to several community members this would have gone on so thankfully miss yelsey noted that she was infuriated

021that this article was included this was not the direction the board wants to go so the trainings luckily were stopped for the whole day i'm also aware of fourth and fifth grade teachers at some elementary schools being reprimanded for showing social justice videos asking kids what gender they identify with and let's just not get started on the tick tock teacher that we just had to deal with and she wasn't fired i believe she resigned which is kind of crazy parents can go down to the district office and view any textbook they can view the sex ed curriculum but why can they not view this a principal had okayed our team to sit down and view these trainings but then was later told by dr bauermeister that we could not so students are volunteering for something

022and they're not certain what they're going to volunteer for parents have to sign the permission slip but the parents don't know what they're signing their kids up for the current training has students fill out an identity molecule and students id themselves using five social descriptors class ethnic backgrounds gender sexual orientation etc and then they have to assess these as a source of privilege or an obstacle in society so come on this is a waste of time a waste of money you guys can change this just because it was taught in 2019 doesn't mean that you have to make the same mistake twice so please pause on this you can do that and research this open it up to the public open it up to the parents you need to all see what's in these before

023you approve them thank you thank you april murray hello i was here last month as well and i'm going to reiterate some things that haley just said um after hearing what i and other concerned parents said last month mr hank bangser said and i quote crt is simply not in the curriculum in this district either overt or covert and quote so clearly no one wants crt in the school district he also suggested that we find the information that we're seeking about the adl's training materials on the adl website but i don't think i was clear the last time that i addressed this board so i'm going to clarify this evening it was because of the content that i found on that website that we felt it necessary to address you in doing my due diligence

024i looked up the definition of critical race theory and according to britannica.com a critical race theorist holds that the law and legal institutions in the united states are inherently racist in so far as they function to to create and maintain social economic and political inequalities between whites and non-whites especially african-americans so while mr banzer was technically correct that a name critical race theory is not being taught in our district the guiding principles and ideas of it are let me give you an example that comes directly from the adl website the lesson states to quote address white privilege define white privilege as unearned and often unseen or unrecognized advantages benefits or rights conferred upon people based on their membership in a dominant group for example white people heterosexual people men able-bodied etc beyond what is commonly

025experienced by members of the non-dominant group it goes on to say quote it will be important to identify dominant identities like being white because students may not accept that they have white privilege by saying they belong to another marginalized group like i'm gay poor female and while that may be true it does not erase their white identity end quote so i'd like to address the unrecognized rights portion of this lesson it's the year 2021 and we're in the united states of america i think it's safe to say we can all agree no one no person of color is not having the same benefits or constitutional rights as their white peers it's not happening and it's in the lesson and you wouldn't know because you haven't reviewed it second to infer that a child's white identity

026supersedes all other aspects of their being and therefore makes them privileged is outrageously racist it portrays to the person of color that because of their skin color or black identity that they are underprivileged and oppressed which in my opinion is far more dangerous than our white students being labeled as inherently racist i only have a couple seconds so i'll just skip to the end you're assuming that the entire student body needs education on bias race and privilege but that's an assumption that reflects on the political climate of the seven of you in this room terminate the district's relationship with the adl true equity and any other organizations that promote this thank you barbie george good evening my name is barbie george i have a child in the newport mesa school district and i'm here to

027speak about the adl curriculum club whatever you want to call it i am the state director of a national 501 c 3 community outreach organization that specializes and serves the underserved and minority communities my husband that african-american handsome man back there he is also a board member of that organization and i'm here to say that though you may want to use flowery language and change words around this is critical race theory in a nutshell and if you we've been told to look at the website and if you review those materials it's critical race theory you can call a rose a thorn it's still a rose this is critical race theory and i would like to know why is it that there have been many requests from parents to review the materials that's being taught to

028the teachers for them to teach the children this in the club which i understand it's a club and i will just say this this is a cell phone and it has more technology than they had to for people to go to the moon and i do not understand how in a wonderful building like this with lots of computers no one can seem to find these materials to be able to let parents see what is being taught i just don't understand that perhaps you guys can clarify that for me because my children they are like experts they can find sneezing pandas if you want to watch that but when parents are requesting the materials which and i also understand everyone here hasn't read the materials and voted on it why is that an impossibility why in

0292021 it is impossible to see these materials so i would like you guys to reflect upon that to really think about that because my children who are mixed race are not victims they are not oppressed and i don't believe that anyone who is caucasian is an oppressor and anything that wants to put that kind of poison in a child's mind is not beneficial children lost a year of of schooling and perhaps we should just concentrate on the math and the english and the history that they did not receive and forget about these kind of things that all they do is divide our nation basically divide our nation let's not focus listen i had brain surgery and i had to receive blood products not one time did i ask who the blood donor was or what

030race they were it doesn't matter we are one people thank you for your time thank you carrie i'm sorry if i got this wrong frozen nickel good hello thank you i'm kari vozenilik um good evening to the board and uh superintendent president yesley i'm here to talk about electives at t-winkle i have two children who go to victoria and ultimately they would likely go to two-winkle and during the summer i talked to some friends and became aware that there's a concern about the lack of electives at t-winkle and so i sent you guys an email in july talking about how we looked into the lack of electives and it's concerning particularly my email focused on the lack of foreign language at t-winkle when i looked into it i realized that t-winkle is the only middle

031school in this unified school district that doesn't offer any foreign language every other middle school does and i was particularly concerned because i realized that to apply to uc or cal state they need at least two years of foreign language and so two includes students have to wait until high school to get a foreign language class and all the rest of the middle school of students get to do it in middle school so i was concerned about that and i emailed you and i got a very prompt reply from president elsley which i appreciated and that reply said that you would request a special study session if i remember correctly in the fall after the new superintendent was appointed and so a few days ago i sent a follow-up email because it's fall and we

032have a new superintendent and asked for the status of that of that special study session and the response i got back which again was very prompt seemed to put off calendaring that study session um it is no longer seem to be on us an upcoming calendar and so that's why i'm here i'm here to ask that the board look into putting a study session on the calendar to add electives to teamwork thank you thank you erin eisner hi i'm erin eisner i have three kids a four-year-old newport coast elementary and two younger ones that i hope to have in the same school board or the same school district we moved here late in the middle or actually late 2020 from la after it became very clear that the los angeles school district was not prioritizing

033kids i'm concerned now that we're not much different with these never-ending measures and refusal to honor parental rights over whether to cover their kids faces all day even though it impedes their breath communication social development and promotes irrational fear over a virus that poses virtually no danger to them i listened to the last several board meetings i heard many powerful well-reasoned speakers discussing the harms and lack of benefits from the masking but then when i attended a pta meeting last month i heard president elsie speak to us and say that you've been on campus and you don't think that the masks are a big deal you don't think that they're they're a problem and it's just some parents so it's one thing for the position of this board to be that you want the school

034to stay open so you're going to follow the rules it's a whole other thing for you to brush off this indefinite masking as no big deal and to suggest that some parents are just overreacting those words were crushing to me because it meant that the leadership of the school board may not be concerned with the harms that they're causing how can you even make that assessment about what's happening under those masks you know whether my four-year-old how she feels when no one can hear her or understand her or smile at her so you also mentioned that your kids have been out of school for 15 years so maybe perhaps you don't understand that but this and the kids had faces then so yes some parents want their kids to freely breathe smile see classmates smile

035back at them communicate and interact with fellow humans to have their little voices heard when they're learning to speak learning to read lips and to learn appropriate facial expressions to get through life i remember when this all started and my two-year-old went from sharing smiles with strangers at stores to seeing nothing but masks and now my eight-month-old baby will be smiling but if i put a mask on she rips it off until she can see my face again because faces matter and kids look to adults and peers to learn if what they're saying is being well received and we are depriving them of that and instead we're cloaking them in this irrational fear of every human they come close to most u.s states are not masking kids sweden norway denmark switzerland netherlands do not mess

036kids uk and ireland even australia does not match kids under 12. i think you all know what's been happening in australia it's insane so why because the harms outweigh the benefits so here just might despite very little risk of bad covert outcomes we have stood by while kids have lost huge parts of their young lives and now every day we're letting them lose moments of humanity and connection thankfully kids generally do not have serious problems with covet if they catch it they'll build immunity like millions of other kids have most more kids have died of flu every year and we did not sacrifice their faces breath communication and mental health for a measure that has not been proven to make any meaningful difference i also saw that no one on this board would make a

037motion to put this on the vote last time and i think that we have a right to know what everyone's position is on that issue um thank you ms eisen thank you um and i just wanted to make a clarification because you did address me personally that i said parents were that i had made a comment at your meeting that parents were overreacting i did not say parents were overreacting what i said was i've been at schools including newport coast from the first day it opened and i noticed students did not seem to be affected by wearing the class in class i never mentioned parents i i would just say how do you know that and and i would just i would i would just like to say i was in the classroom but you

038can't know what every kid is experiencing my four-year-old thank you i just wanted to clarify that i did not say that parents right but that was the implication when you say that it's not a problem okay and and i would say i'll just say a couple more things i mean would you allow it's over i just wanted to clarify that you had made a comment that that you were quoting me and i didn't say that so okay i just have a couple more things there's just no off-ramp at this point because the policies please we have another free their faces wendy elise good evening honorable president members of the newport mesa school board my name is wendy i'm almost a 50-year resident of this school district and former school board member and former city council

039member so i am still concerned about our community and um i too was in 2019 concerned about the incident with our young people regarding the red cups that were drawn in a symbol a horrible symbol of a swastika and i did take part in several quite a few of the meetings and thank you dr bauermeister i saw you somewhere um there he is okay for returning my call today too and then covet hit and we couldn't meet in person and i think we're all kind of consumed with life and and however the human relations task force continued and unfortunately um i didn't realize that the anti-defamation league had come in to provide materials well during covid um a lot of things happened but i remember when the anti-defamation league was really the the premier organization

040to fight anti-semitism but that's changed and during covet as we all know that critical race theory has been front and center uh in many school districts that we are concerned with what you have approved in this last vote recently and i have sent several public uh requests for the information and we still cannot see what you have approved and i would like to ask all the board members especially the new board members if you have seen and been privileged to understand what is is happening to the teacher training and to the student leader training have you seen that because you all voted on it and if it is uh anti it is if it has critical race theory in it i think that per their website that we have to be concerned because uh there

041are new terms the uh implicit bias i asked somebody today do you know what implicit bias is no you know uh the white privilege all these terms are now in our culture but we can't see what is being taught to the teachers and and to the student leaders so dr bauermeister did leave a message that a friend of mine might be able to make arrangements to see what kerry taurus has seen in in the training and we but we all would like to have it over at the sanborn center so that we too can understand because it's not just the teacher training it's what the teachers are learning to train to our kids in this district so thank you for your time thank you okay we'll move on to superintendent comments oh thank you president

042elsie uh last month uh september 14th i i used about 90 percent of my comment time uh to reflect uh on the comments that were made in both the section of the agenda for agendas items and non-agendized items i went point by point i'm equally going to decide this month not to do that there as president elsie was quoted saying one thing i was quoted from september 14th generally i think pretty correctly i would just say one thing that when i said the the substance of the adl training was ill-conceived i was specifically referring to the second year program which was rejected by the board and is not in place everything else i think i'll just leave to your follow-up comments to my comments and better left uh i think with two exchanges just to

043be sure i have that on record is what i was referring to was ill-conceived uh what i'd like to do since this is my last board meeting among three i'd like to talk for a bit about the human interactions that i've experienced in the last what will be 10 weeks when i'm finished almost all entirely under the heading of highlights i've had the privilege of working with these seven board members five assistant superintendents annette susan and rosie some more intimately on every on an everyday basis and others not so much it's more a little bit more hit and miss as you would expect with board members but i have to say this after spending the better part of my professional life as a superintendent i think i'm maybe qualified to comment a bit on what

044i've seen here compared to other places first let me talk about the board members one of the things that happened over the last several years in california and throughout a good part of the country is that uh the totality of abort board geography which for many many many years was the entire district they have been subdivided into sections right and so whether they're five board members seven or nine as i had in new york when i started the total school district has then to some extent in the life of the board member been subdivided into what they call zones here and what i've seen among these board members is a really healthy combination of what i would call an intense involvement in the issues of the constituents in that particular zone while generally always thinking

045about the totality of the school district and that's a hard thing to do the other thing i would say about them is that they have been very tolerant of what my mom would call her son's idiosyncrasies uh over the years that i've been a superintendent and i i was kerry was asking me if this really is your last board meeting i don't know i may unretire for the fourth time but in any case if this really is your last board meeting how many do you think you've attended now i have to count both regular and special okay because they both count sometimes the special went longer than the regular i'm about into four figures i was thinking about 1100 so wow wrap your arms around that that's a lot of seat time up here i'll

046tell you so for that i want to thank the board members it's been a wonderful experience with a couple of weeks to go uh to the assistant superintendents i told them in the first meeting we had on august 3rd that they were going to be inheriting an interim superintendent who was i think to be generous inquisitive i learned a long time ago that you learn by asking questions and so i'd say that maybe you could call my style generously the socratic method if you wanted to be a little less generous you could probably call it never ending and innovating but in any case i appreciate working with you it's been fun and i've learned a lot from them and hopefully we've learned a lot together to annette who keeps us on our toes when something

047has to be communicated to the full community most recently trying to figure out exactly what governor newsom was saying with his new rule on vaccinations it took about three or four different forms within about an hour but ultimately i think it was clear and hopefully we made it clear to the community about what was coming up probably as of july as opposed to january so annette thank you to rosie right who keeps us in line we always know what what's happening up here she gives us scripts all the time like say this don't say this you know make sure you call for a vote make sure you have the opportunity to get people's opinions on things so rosie thank you very much for all the work you've done with me and and for the board

048and finally to the person who's lived next to me about 25 feet away for these weeks since i've been there susan i know you're watching i told you to watch thank you for your help for your wisdom and always one thing i always found helpful when i came into a new school district the superintendent i always hoped that i was quote inheriting the executive assistant who's been in that district for a while right because that person can help you not step in landmines you know if you're about ready to say something to somebody says don't do that you need to understand the background with that person so susan you've been great and uh you've been one of the best i've ever worked with over the years and finally i have to tell you the thing

049that i uh i'm most disappointed about to some extent it's it's i'm disappointed in myself but i think it was more a condition of the job that i had to do i know wes smith is going to spend an inordinate amount of time in the first several months he's here really getting to know the people the principals the teachers the classified staff obviously the board members and he'll do that by getting around the school district spending time in schools you know in public meetings city councils chambers of commerce whatever the clubs are that people belong to that are really important in this area because i did that every time i went to a school district as a superintendent i just had to make a decision when i came here i was either going to process

050issues now i wasn't expecting a couple that we had i was going to help process issues administratively or i was going to go do that i was not going to be able to do both because if i tried to meet everybody in 10 weeks that's pretty much all i have time to do so i didn't do that and now i feel like i'm leaving a couple of weeks from now having met some wonderful people but only a very very small percentage of those who work here and have made this place great way way before i got here and i'm sure it'll be great for decades after i leave so that's my biggest disappointment i did get to about a quarter and a half of a football game until it was such a runaway that i

051decided to leave because i can't stand blowouts and a couple of other places but ultimately not anywhere near what i would have liked to because i i know the quality of programs around here and i just having a chance to see them so maybe i'll come back i might come back for the battle of the bay i'm not promising but i might because i'm a football nerd and i just want to thank everybody it's been great and uh i will watch the october 26th board meeting on youtube when he's sitting here and i'm at home with my scotch and soda and everything will be exactly right in my life [Laughter] thank you very much thank you dr bankster and we'll have more to say about you later but the only thing i will say to

052the public right now is every single day when i talk to him i always say i don't think you ever thought you'd have to work so hard being an interim superintendent for two months and you really have done that thank you more on you later okay um okay we now have moved item 20b up and um there's no we have no input on agenda then i don't get don't have to talk yes okay um and is that kerry actually i'm gonna welcome up dr baumeister who's gonna introduce this item thank you president elsie members of the board dr bangser cabinet and distinguished guests is with great pride tonight that i present the freedom committee and living history program for your support we have denise weiland with us tonight who is the facilitator of the living

053history program that serves all of our secondary schools denise works with the schools and the freedom committee to set up our veterans coming to campus to speak to our students it's one thing to learn about history from a textbook but having these veterans bringing history to life for our students is truly life-changing tonight we also have with us scott williams and some of his teams some of his veterans would you all join me right now in thanking our veterans for their service to our country [Applause] scott is the president of the freedom committee of orange county and he and his team train the veterans and help them get their presentations together i've been able to sit in on a couple of those and it's they do an amazing job i know many of you have

054come and watched these presentations and know how truly amazing they are so at this time i'll turn it over to denise and scott to tell you more about our living history program excellent how many people does it take to run a program that's why we need rooms okay that's just one good evening president yelcy dr bangser and members of the school board thank you for this opportunity to share a few photos and talk about our students experiences interacting with the veterans from the freedom committee of orange county as they present their living history program the freedom committee of orange county is a non-profit volunteer organization whose mission is passing the torch of liberty onto future generations by bringing living history to the classroom over 20 years ago jack hammett a world war ii veteran pearl

055harbor survivor and founder of the freedom committee of orange county contacted me to organize a series of living history presentations by a panel of five world war ii veterans to the students at corona del mar high school i was on staff at cdm i had children of my own attending cdm and my father also served in world war ii so i was thrilled and honored to become associated with such a worthwhile program jack asked me to help develop the living history program at cdm as a signature program and model for the freedom committee over time our format evolved as the program expanded to include over 400 students conducting small group interviews of more than 70 veterans who you see here the students videotaped their interviews and wrote reflections on their experiences and at the end

056of the school year we hosted a luncheon for the students and participating veterans to celebrate their stories of service and present each veteran with a documentary video our students made this dvd for dr norman lotz as technology advanced the students presented the veterans with a flash drive of their video and eventually a link to their video posted on youtube in 2014 after observing years of the program's success at cdm the board asked us to grow the program as a result the fcoc living history program is now offered at all of our high schools and many of our middle schools and has been adapted to meet the particular needs of each individual school so what i've put together is a little slideshow of all of our different programs before coven this is a slide of newport

057harbor high school principal sean bolton and history teacher garrett govars we've also had andrew mabry host our veterans in the school library and at that time the students conduct small group interviews back bay history teacher jason kovac students hazard has his students meet with veterans in the multi-purpose room and they also conduct small group interviews costa mesa high school principal jack haley and history teacher gary gonzalez host their small group interviews in the library estancia high school principal michael hall who's also a veteran and member of the freedom committee and history teachers john williams chris schilling and margaret cannon students attended their veteran presentations in the hall and you'll see a familiar face up there we had a visit from kirk at one of our presentations early college high school principal david martinez he's also

058right over here and teacher sandy kipstool and juan olier hosted veterans in their classrooms and conducted small group interviews in their multi-purpose room costa mesa middle school history teachers joe marie hayes ray triggs justin taylor aaron hall and neva gonzalez invited our veterans to give their powerpoint presentations in their classroom and they also moderated a veterans panel in their performing arts center t winkle middle school teacher chris flores combined several classes to attend veteran presentations in the library sorry we were scheduled to present at t-winkle when covet had in april 2020 and chris was instrumental in helping our veterans continue their presentations using zoom so thankful to chris enson middle school history teacher lindsey sharon is a great advocate of the living history program over the years we've worked together to schedule veteran speakers in

059all of the history classrooms each of our schools have made our veterans feel special and welcome by providing breakfast and lunch posting beautiful signs around campus and writing heartfelt letters of appreciation our veterans have endured and adapted to tremendous challenges and hardships in their lives so it was not surprising how quickly they learned new technologies to share their stories of service including using the share screen feature on zoom to show their powerpoint presentations and engage in follow-up q a distance learning kept our veterans connected to our students and during the very height of coved we even added a new school the cloud campus thanks to history teachers scott kawaiwa i don't know if i said that right and ashley stout scott k fco veteran bios are provided to the teachers before the veteran presentations so

060their students can be prepared to ask questions this last photo is of my father who served during world war ii by flying supplies over the burma hump watching the documentary video made by a group of northern california students as part of the stories of service program before he passed away in 2014 was one of many inspirations for our program jack hammett also passed away in 2014 but only after preparing vietnam veteran scott williams to assume leadership of the freedom committee scott and i share jack's vision and our passionate about preserving his legacy by continuing to provide our students with these first-hand educational experiences i want to thank our dedicated teachers principals and board who are all responsible for the continued success of our program finally i want to thank our fcoc veterans a lot of

061them here for their service to our country and for their continued service sharing their living history with our students thank you [Applause] okay good evening president nelsey and members of the board and the superintendent i didn't get a chance to meet you i know one of your friends i'm wearing the hat i know it's indoors it shouldn't be done but we need the advertisement thank you we have some of the same slides so as a slider seeing now we became a 501c3 in 2011. prior to that it was an organization of members veterans that gathered at the neighborhood center in costa mesa and actually they gathered in the history or the um coast mesa history meeting room and that so there was about 12 of i retired at the ripe old age of 66 in

0622009. i wasn't looking forward to doing anything with veterans i hadn't done anything since i left or was uh finished my on army ii tour in 1969 we all we were working with the boy scouts at their fireworks stand and a guy named ted mourinhos was a world war ii veteran said you ought to join our group my immediate thought was why would i hang around with a bunch of old gray-haired men they were 20 years older than i was i went to the first meeting and at that time the only we didn't have any microphones we didn't have any cameras to record and the we had i think 12 people but the first story i heard later i think it was a later one was a bomber pilot 21 years old crew of seven

063flying back from bom bombing in germany i think coming back to italy and they crash and they agency so that was so interesting i couldn't believe it and i was hooked they survived they lost one crew person on the crash the initial crash then they were able to get on the wing of the plane and it stayed afloat a fighter pilot helped to see them go down and within about two hours a seaplane from the british came by and picked them up so you have i think nine crew plus the pilot and they start their takeoff uh on the ocean and they can't lift off because there's so much weight so they had to motor across the sea to the port in italy which is ally port so you can you can imagine i was

064hooked even though they were really old and i was only 66 i learned my lesson and then um i worked with jack a lot as you all know you may know is a very convincing person and uh we ended up um getting beyond my scope here but so we we somehow he gets in a discussion with one of the members and i think was over memorial day on who invited to speak on the dais and the the in the individual that was leaving the committee was their tech guy well their tech their tech was a microphone with a 10-foot cord and one of these um speaker boxes that are about the size of a big ball you know like a 20 by 30. and so he wanted me to go pick it up so that

065was my job the guy left and so i was doing that um that's how i got involved and eventually let me move through this real quick so that's jack jack is uh 1922 2014. so i joined i think it was 2009 2010. he promised me he'd be sticking around for about you know six years uh unfortunately he passed away in 2014. i wanted to touch basically and this is uh what we do the freedom company of orange county is an organization of veterans founded in 1995 by warrant officer jack r hammett navy world war ii pearl harbor survivor we actually there were about six that actually started the foundation we have that on our website but jack was such a motivator i talk about jack so the purpose was to educate students to the sacrifices

066made by veterans to preserve our liberties veterans from each war cold war through today's wars and i just wanted to mention today that we have um uh approximately 120 service military members in our organization we still have world war ii veterans uh most of them are not able to come uh world war ii veteran ted tanner who lives in newport beach john hughes is a pearl harbor survivor dick o'brien infantry world war ii george emerson uh army air corps lives in hiking beach gordon wilson u.s u.s navy lives in mission viejo we have two women veterans jane ashton world war ii united united states army uh she lives in santa ana and she is a hundred years old wow carol singleton is the manager for heroes hall and she was iraq veteran the united states

067army let me quickly uh today i brought i i sent an email once we found out when when this was going to happen to my board so today i have four members of our board of directors i have captain tim richards united states army vietnam veteran i have um i'm trying to do this by first lieutenant kirby matter united states army army and gary teagle senior chief united states navy and dwight hansen united states marine corps bob bob olds i think denise touched on um norman lotz recently and i've i interviewed norm loads at his home for creating a powerpoint presentation and it was a very uh short time after that he had heart surgery and kind of went downhill after that but i bought the book the gambier bay which is story about his

068aircraft carrier it's actually called a jeep carrier because it was small it only handled i think about 16 to 20 planes but they could build hundreds of these carriers and they would support the invasion in japan because you're you're fighting you're going island by island and you need to have military artillery support to knock out the enemy and that was a key thing for the for the airplanes so uh so what we did i took the book to captain bob ohls a 30-year navy man captain ship captain and also an airplane captain and i said we'd really like to do take a look at his book and read it i mean look at his book and based on the 30 years uh in the service bob had actually uh captain ships through that same um

069island i mean it's a huge island in it and so he put it together we have that up on our website and it's a great i think it's a great motivational tool to see what these individuals did and we have you know so you can listen to it so i just wanted to touch on that bob cannot make it here tonight uh captain holes because he was recovering from spinal surgery so quickly i'll just move forward so our our board of directors are 11 members led by major general william mall united states air force retired he is known for leading the united states uh invasion of granada he was the lead commander captain robert all's united states navy retired colonel wayne scott united states navy uh i'm sorry the united states air force retired major

070allen harvard united states army retired captain tim richards first lieutenant kirby matter myself warrant officer james grimm and sergeant milliken and dwight hansen and i got gary tegel quickly so what do we do we recruit these individuals many of the veterans are simply like i was got out of the service went back to work as you can appreciate in 1968 69 it was not a very it you know you think it's bad today it was worse they were actually burning buildings but that's a whole number so what we do is we get them to fill out a military application for a military application we want to sit down and talk with them we want to know what their you know background is in the service and then we also from there we take that information

071and this is uh hard to read but this is a dd214 this is a military record on that eight and a half an eleven eight and a half by eleven paper you have the individual's start date his rank when he left promotions how many days he served how many years he served how many years of education and his awards and medals and that that that person is honored honorably discharged and that is one of the key these two two key parts of our um what what our agreement is with the uh school district and presenting people that they know what they're talking about and we know who they say so what we do is we eventually come out and we have put together their military bio and that's what we had sent to the to

072the teachers it gives a basic quick look at it so who else do we have we have we've already introduced kirby matter speaker trainer 25 years with a santa ana community college as a teacher and administrator all veterans who wish to take part in our student interviews or speak to students must attend this two-hour class okay so the class lasts about an hour and we usually have three or four other veterans that and i have it over at my house we sit at the table and we go through this and then we show other videos so that that person can learn this is a schedule uh sample schedule going forward and that that is going to be handled by our chairman douglas milling chairman of the freedom committee's living history speaking living history speaker program

073works with the veterans to create their military history format and schedule living history presentations that we would then give that information to the niece so that she can schedule with the teachers the this is where it really gets time consuming because you've got somebody that's going to go back into his somewhere he's got his pictures and stuff from when he served his country and so then putting that into electronic form because we thought it was better for the kids to see what some history is also we asked them to provide us a picture when they were young and pretty at 18 years old and a little bit about their family where they grew up so they can see that we were also human beings before we got to this stage doug milliken is the author

074of the book testimony of the protected doug was an infantryman in vietnam major allen harvard united states army retired program chairman for the freedom committee programs the program chairman is responsible for scheduling speakers for our monthly meeting and for speaking to the rotary club or the dar daughters of the american revolution or the sons of the american revolution or schools other schools outside this district uh we just did one recently with the rotary club in yorba linda the freedom committee of orange county's uh freedom committee of orange county's website so we have in this downtime we were very busy because we were improving our website we have 120 personal military history stories remember we do not do this professionally we had our at one time we had a gentleman by the name of ray wong

075a brilliant brilliant person he was our video guy uh he grew up in south central l.a graduated from caltech and had also a degree in chemical engineering from berkeley but he loved the world war ii veteran so much he did all of this all the video and everything so i mentioned a special presentation that we um so we have on our website world war one because one of our veterans grandfather and had a very good story so he's on there world war ii korean cold war vietnam iraq and afghanistan special presentations i mentioned earlier the battle of the leyte gulf world war ii by captain robert olds and it has at the very end the feature that denise was talking about where we have the kids video on it but i think if i was

076a manager i would have the everybody in my department look at that because when you're in times like this you think oh me oh me take a look at one where a guy was his battleship was shot out from underneath his uh aircraft carrier was shot out from underneath him i'm talking about normal oats of semen it was it was in the biggest battle before the end of the war and uh the the battleship yamamoto which had i think 18-inch guns was able to fire those cannons from their ship 20 miles away so as the fog clears in the battle they're able to see that there's the gambier bay and they start firing at the gambier bay and pretty soon they start hitting and eventually sink it uh quickly i want to talk uh event

077real quickly okay website we have now provided we've retained the service of accessibility under title under the american with disabilities act you have to provide access to everyone uh now it just fits our age group of 77 and a half or whatever we are we're a bunch of old guys uh so it fits our so maybe you've lost a little bit of your eyesight lost some of your hearing so you have so you have to provide accessibility to everyone and this used to be it just applied to establishment but due to the great attorneys in new york and california they are now able to say well if you're in retail and if you only do four percent of your business in some state that is the connection then they move along and say the fact

078that you're providing this to everyone you need to make it accessible so that the ada or the unruh act in california is um a minimum four thousand dollar fine but then you're by the time you get there you're paying attorney's fees that's 20 to 30 000. anyway i didn't want to get there so we by having this service for 50 bucks a month we're complying with ad ada web i think it's a wcag 2.1 also our community service we do the memorial day service we haven't been able to do it with people in the stands but we did it we still do it and we we we have recorded it for two years and put it up the past two years in and last but not least we miss the students and the corona del

079mar veterans lunch thank you for your time [Applause] i i see uh and we missed the lunch oh yes with every with all the veterans at cdm as well and we hope to uh reestablish that when we can after covid because it is a remarkable program and i just wanted to mention that this item was originally on our consent calendar just as an approval because we've done it before but i really felt that it was a program that we needed to highlight because it is so special and i know scott called me yesterday and he was saying well what are the issues is there are some issues that are going to go no no no no this is we want to just celebrate what you've done we all really appreciate what the veterans have have

080brought to the entire district i've worked with denise i've known her since she worked at cdm back in the late 90s and i was there when she established this program going forward at cdm and it became such a special program that and and there it is very elaborate because at the end there's a celebration in the gym that is jam-packed we saw a picture of it up here of the veterans and the students and uh local officials everywhere anyone who knows about it wants to come anyone who's not busy on that day it is very special the veteran would cancel their medical appointments yes and some of them wear the same uniforms they know they were in world war ii so um it's it's they have great stories they all do and i just love

081seeing the picture of all of you together at the end it was a little sad when i looked we were talking about it you look at the picture and the first row they've all passed away and it's it's uh there's very few world war ii veterans left and and we had so many 15 years ago yes absolutely actually i have a question following up on that a little bit i was wondering as part of this my dad my grandpa's actually i'm an interpreter in world war ii my dad was in vietnam in the navy so this is something that's really important to me personally i don't have the stories like the full stories of both of them because both of them couldn't talk about it i'm wondering if you when you go to the campuses

082do you recruit or ask the students do you have a grandparent do you have someone in your family that we can include their story how does that process work well i know that when i like when uh i'm assuming a lot of guys do the same thing when i make a talk with them i ask you know if anybody have veterans in their family and they'll raise their hand i did that at the irvine school and a kid raised his hands his father fought in the indian wars but he's talking about india pakistan but they yeah we will we would like to you know uh they can go on our website and to get an application uh and fill it out and then we'll contact those people some some veterans it's very difficult to bring

083back those memories uh but so it takes some time um recently i had a infantry veteran vietnam who came to organize our organization very qualified infantry guy but he lost the point man he was a kid he went through basic training for what and the kid point man who leads the squad into the jungles i was killed in one of their one of their battles and he never he never made any contact with him but after he went to our meeting it just triggered something he he sent he found that you can go on the internet and you can find whether that person where that person is buried and he ordered flowers and had them uh delivered this is on in new jersey with a note then he got a call back from i think

084one of the sister of the decedent and she told them all about the family they had i think six brothers uh all of them were all of them were firemen and and so was it so he made a good connection but but i still can't get him to come to the meeting i just wanted to also address your questions so at chrono del mar high school it was a unique program and when we started it we actually asked the students if they had a family member that would they would like to interview my son interviewed my dad which was really special we flew him down from san jose so that was really great about that program because we had so many grandpas and uncles and and it gave them a chance to make a keepsake

085for their family that they never would have had so i just wanted to let you know that we did that i'll just leave the card that gives all the information and karen trust imageway i just want to say that i've not only attended the cdm celebration but i've also gone to i want to think that i went to one at early college but i know i've gone to costa mesa high school and the small group discussions watching the children's respect and admiration and understanding on a different level is so important and as a former principal and when we did our veterans day programs we the kids brought in their veteran or active service parents and while while it's great for our kids i want to just personally we all so appreciate that you guys are

086willing to give up your part of your days and your your time sharing this with our kids so they know how lucky we are to live here and how important it is to know what people have sacrificed so thank you thank you very very much thank you i appreciate the district for their commitment uh to the i mean this is part of american culture to serve your country you don't always i happen to be married and just graduated from uc santa barbara and i got my gaucho and uh you know we're linda and i are planning on going out and getting jobs and making you know we don't want to be starving students and uh then i get a letter that i have to report for a physical and got inducted so graduated in june

08766 so i was at fort ord as a basic trainee in december 8th of 1966 so it all worked out and i have two granddaughters at chrono del mar so we're looking forward to it thank you thank you thank you thank you and i have to say you didn't miss a beat doing covet no no you were able to zoom in all of these and actually i sat in on a few of them which was nice that we could do that but it really was just as special we didn't have the celebrations like the lunches and things like that but it really was wonderful to continue to have this program through covet i i know you mentioned zoom so we've been living on zoom but a friend of mine 69 i went to work with

088a shell oil company i mean that's no and a friend i met at that time 50 years later we got back together he went on kind of mba at sc and he has retired he's been working for score which is the associated with the small business association so he is their guy that does all of the zoom meetings for the score people in this in orange county so then he he realizes that we could use his help so he ended up you know training like we're going to have a veteran that's going to go on zoom right so uh we would set up a zoom meeting and pete would go through it with them and it might take us to you know you start out hope you can do one hour and it might it

089might you know go on but you've gotten done and they really as long as you remember to share share then that it's going to work so thank you very much thank you thank you both okay so the item yes i was just going to make a motion okay okay um i'd like to move that we approve the continuing consulting agreement between the freedom committee of orange county and the newport mesa unified school district for the 20 20 21 21 2022 school year shouldn't be that hard the 2021-2022 school year got a second second who was that trustee okay moved by trustee mutoya seconded by trustee wagon will call vote student board member nicole mcmillan trista yelsey yes christy bartow yes christie montoya yes christy wagon yes justin crate yes tristy anderson yes trustee or soilu

090yes thank you again that was that was really a a great report and celebration yes really what are what our kids are learning and which moves me on to the next item which is also talking about what our kids are learning so we'll move on we'll wait there's more on instructional initiatives mr drake and ms torres good evening and yes what an exciting opportunity to actually talk about education again right so very refreshing to to listen to our veterans and to see what is what our potential is this year to actually continue educating our kids in a more traditional fashion so in getting everybody off zoom so good evening board president elsie board members and interim superintendent hank bangser john drake and i are here this evening just to share some information with you about

091our instructional initiatives as we move forward in the k-12 setting and what we have planned for this school year in terms of instruction so while we have lots of things that are going on in our schools we really try to focus the work and the energy behind what we would like our teachers to be doing and our principles to be doing and we thought this was really appropriate because having come out of kovid we were unsure of um you know where everybody was in terms of their instructional capacities so anyhow we are looking forward to this year and we have our principals k-12 elementary and secondary included working on several different things and we do have some desired outcomes for the year we want to ensure that the initiatives that we're moving forward and that

092you will hear about tonight are creating a shared knowledge of instructional focus so one of the most critical points of impact as we know is the teacher and student in the classroom and the second based on john hattie's work would be the principal leadership and so we want to ensure that our principles are calibrated and focused on sharing that knowledge reaffirming our collective commitment to our shared instructional focus so one of the things we want to ensure is that each of our teams elementary and secondary understand the work and are committed to continuing to share that focus it's important for us to define our roles and responsibilities with our teachers and staff so that everybody understands what role we play in educating students and within these initiatives it's critical for us to know what's expected

093of me as a leader what's expected me of as a teacher and any other support staff that we have interacting with our students and then of course as we go through this process we always want to continue to have a mechanism to identify steps for effective implementation so we start with our initiatives we have a plan we meet with our teams and then we continue to monitor that throughout the school year to ensure that we are focused on effective implementation so i'm going to lead off and talk a little bit about secondary before i turn it over to john drake in a few slides to talk about elementary but as our secondary team came together last year and i will be including our director of teaching and learning for secondary mike shaka in just a

094moment and then we have principal dave martinez who's here with us as well he'll be he'll be chiming in to really talk about how we arrived at our instructional focus and the work and how it's playing out in our schools so as a secondary team we decided last year i was not here however our team my secondary team decided that we really needed to think about how we were going to get students to demonstrate their thinking after you know 18 ish months on zoom and with cobit we wanted to make sure students had the ability to talk and respond and so our initia our instructional focus for the year in grades 7 through 12 is listening and responding to student thinking we want our teachers to help students demonstrate their thinking right and share that

095and do so in a manner where they're communicating that so that's what's exceptionally important to us this year because again with students having been on zoom we weren't sure we were really engaging them it was the environment and many of our teachers and you as parents perhaps knew that not all students were online just talking and engaging right we had many teachers who reported the computer screens were up kids weren't talking we don't know if they're online their cameras are off and so this was a really critical focus to us and of course as we prepare students for post-secondary education their ability to communicate their thinking is critical to their success so what does a listening and responding to student thinking include promoting student voice within the classroom so what we're doing is we're training

096our teachers and working with them to help create learning environments and lessons that help promote students speaking in the classroom we want them talking asking questions frequent opportunities for students to share their thinking and thoughts so collaborative environments so if you go back to again a traditional environment we want to see kids sitting together we want to see them talking and sharing student-to-teacher talk and peer-to-peer talk we don't want to see as much teacher driven discussion right we want to make sure that students are talking with their teacher and students are talking to each other so we call that peer talk i have here less teacher talk and more student discussion response that's really important because it's more than just answering questions it's about having that rich discussion much like we heard our vets talking

097about those table talk discussions and you also commented on how rich those discussions were we want those kind of learning environments happening in our classroom every day less lecture of course checking for understanding and a greater focus on skills and so that's really critical as we move forward through this year to be able to determine if we're meeting our mark in terms of instruction so i'm going to call up actually mike shaka at this time and i'm going to have him talk a little bit about what a focus on a listening and responding to student thinking entails thank you assistant superintendent torres president yelcy assistant uh interim superintendent bankser and members of the board so what does a listing and responding to student thinking entails well first and foremost it is all those comments that

098uh super assistant superintendent torres mentioned but really it starts with this focus on timely actionable meaningful feedback and you're going to hear that that's phrase of words over and over and over not only this year as we come out of the pandemic but as we move forward with education in general it's an iterative process of learning we're going to continue to examine and re-examine student work based off the feedback it's not just a one-and-done give us your work and then we assign some sort of grade it really is this i'm continuing to reflect on what we think is our best work and then challenging and pushing our students for more it implies knowledge of the student thinking so we as educators need to understand what our students are thinking as we respond to them so

099that that's easy to say and very challenging to do so as we work to train our our teachers and really to work with them i think that implied knowledge of student thinking is absolutely critical and then again adapting our lessons responsively so that idea of responsive teaching that we've been talking about for so long so what are teachers would you rather go through it and then answer questions or do you want to take questions it's up to you maybe we can i just wanted to know what does timely actionable meaningful feedback look like absolutely great question um so first it's this idea of timely so giving feedback in the moment uh i i could make the analogy of a coach at practice rather than having a student shoot a basketball and then later on a

100couple weeks later you say hey remember two weeks ago when you shot that basketball well here's a little bit feedback so this idea of feedback in the moment second is actionable making the students respond to the feedback i know when i was a teacher i was just guilty all of the time for taking a student essay marking it up with this beautiful feedback about all the things that they could improve on and then hand it to the student with a grade on it and the student would take one look and say here's my grade in the trash so it's this idea of holding the students accountable to that iterative process of responding to the feedback and incorporate it in this example to another draft of an essay and then meaningful is uh focused on the

101idea of not content focused but more on the skills so it's moving away from this right wrong yes no and more of these probing questions of depth of knowledge three for example of of challenging the kids to think deeper thank you so so very quickly um just a glimpse of what teachers are doing so what is what does it look like in a classroom when when a teacher is a listening response student thinking they're creating a space where student voice both written and oral dominate the classroom so it's not just students talking it's students expressing their thinking through writing and and verbalizing their their thoughts um positioning students is competent i think this is critical to understand that every student brings value to a conversation every student brings unique perspective and to positioning them to

102where their thoughts and ideas are valued so the students can build off each other's thoughts and ideas eliciting gathering evidence of students understanding so as students share their thinking we as educators are are processing that and then responding to it so it's constant formative checks for understanding um asking questions is provo as opposed to providing answers so we don't just again staying away from that right wrong yes no but why how tell me more so the students can really get deeper and deeper and explore their own thinking one of the key components is connecting students ideas to each other it's not just having all of the conversation bounce from student to teacher but student to student and having the students connect their ideas and build these ideas and these theories to either collectively have some

103product that is co-created within a classroom you're going to see this again providing timely actionable meaningful feedback and then reflecting on evidence of student learning so you can plan the next steps so again this idea of responsive teaching and finally what are the students doing because while it's great to talk about teacher action what we're most interested in is what the students are doing so what does a classroom look like when the students are experiencing a focus on a listening and responding to student thinking and the first one is they reveal their understanding through reasoning methods in written work and classroom discourse again a lot of these ideas are connected so so it feels repetitive in a way because all of these ideas are really core to the same fundamental ideas reflecting on mistakes and

104misconceptions to improve their own understanding making it safe to make mistakes making it safe to share their thinking even if it's not fully fully baked uh and again using using that collaborative model to build on it from peer-to-peer asking questions responding to and giving suggestions and then assessing and monitoring to their own progress towards learning so again this component of students being able to self-assess and say hey i can challenge myself it doesn't always have to be some exterior force acting upon me to probe me and push me to to think deeper i do have a question i have a question so just blur it out um well from from having three children gus go through the the district and all this a lot is already happening in the classroom so what is the distinction

105of are you just kind of confirming what the teaching is are you adding to it what exactly i mean is different from i i think there's a great observation absolutely i've gotten on a number of learning walks which uh kerry's going to tell us about in just a moment but it was magical watching some of this already happening so it's not that this is some new silver bullet that's going to change trajectory i think what's unique is one a collective focus that we as principals and a learning team are going to focus so that we're able to calibrate and move it forward collectively to where it's not happening in smaller pockets of maybe the teacher down the hall that i'm friends with but it becomes a department-wide discussion a school-wide discussion and a district-wide focus

106okay thank you and you'll also note that there are some disciplines that lend to this more than others and so we are stretching some of our professionals in discipline areas where you know discourse has not necessarily been part of the environment so if you think of math classes historically when we all sat in a math class moons ago right um there wasn't a whole lot of discourse that's changed we have a lot of excellent math instruction happening throughout the district but we are trying to ensure that teachers are thinking through that process as they're developing their lessons so that they are able to have students reveal more of that so we had mentioned earlier about um you know the social studies teachers and the rich discourse with veterans that's a great opportunity that breeds natural

107discussion right great storytelling and i you know and the sharing but we have other disciplines that could struggle with that so we want to help them think through that piece so how are we looking at it so great comment um trustee crane how do we how do we know what we're looking at or encourage others where we're not seeing it what we've created for this year is we are doing principal learning walks and in just a moment i'll have dr dave martinez come up and talk to you briefly about his first experience with that but what we're doing is we're taking our instructional leadership team our ed services division to each of our secondary schools and we are doing principal learning walks and what learning walks are it's a formal protocol that's been established by

108the secondary leadership team so principals came together and said these are our priorities when we're visiting classrooms it builds culture not only for our leadership team but also for the schools that we visit it is a strategy for improvement for instructional improvement and it is really principles learning from other principles and that's really what's important here is that principals get to go to another school site and visit several classrooms for a dedicated amount of time looking at a very particular thing and they get to return back to their team and talk and deconstruct that visit from the principal lens what do we need to do as leaders to support teaching in the classroom and that's what the our discourse has been about and that's what's been really exciting is that we've been able to formalize

109a team to really take a look deeply at um about instruction and so learning walks actually came about years ago and they were inspired by inspired by the medical practice because as you may know when you become a doctor of medicine you do rounds right and so you walk around as a medical team and you go watch an expert in the emergency room who's removing someone's gallbladder in emergency surgery right and you don't learn to do it one way you learn to do it many ways you see different circumstances and so education has taken on that model and said look if we go as a team of professionals and we look at the practices of some of our greatest you know instructional teachers out there we should be able to take that information share it

110with others and replicate it and replicate it and then continue to improve that practice so it is always in search of practice to meet the needs of the students that you have in front of you because each year students change and their needs change and we're seeing that of course this year coming out of covid the emergence from the 18 months that we were away from students has demonstrated that we have some unique needs that maybe we didn't have three four years ago our education field changes with students and it should continue to change to change and teachers are practitioners of their field and they adjust their instruction to always achieve the best outcomes for their students and we learn from each other and so we've had some really great opportunities so far to do

111that i'm going to bring dr shaka back up for one more item to talk about our matrix and how we're measuring and what we're using to measure student outcomes this year he's going to talk a little bit about how they arrived at this matrix and then i'll have dr martinez up here in just a moment thank you so i i think it's important to reflect back on the creation of this matrix and and the small number of words you see up here represents an enormous amount of collaborative work through the secondary principles over the last two years and really it's the hub for our instructional focus so this instructional focus was designed as a mechanism to to create positive growth on this matrix and and this matrix really um identifies four categories that we felt

112were very important for us to move forward for our students it's not comprehensive of everything but it was four areas of focus the secondary schools wanted to collectively focus on and so we spent the last two years building the columns of the matrix which if you look at column four you're looking at these summative metrics of student success and then shifting over to your left left you look at both district-wide and site-based formative on-track metrics and then the actions that we would take to influence those metrics and so through the co-creation of this model we've really grappled with that this idea of accountability and empowerment and one of the principles in our group kind of coined this idea of we want to increase the accountability that we hold each other that we hold each other

113to in terms of student achievement but we want to match that with a level of empowerment through the sites in the collective team so that empowerment we can make decisions and move forward to ultimately influence student outcomes so we're very excited about this metric but this matrix but this is what we are trying to influence with our instructional focus of eliciting and responding to student thinking and we believe that um a true focus on that will show us positive results and student outcomes i love that um i had one question um going back so how often are you tracking the key metrics is that something you do we can use that something would you like to share a little bit about the admin interns and mr elmer and all the other information you have on

114that absolutely so it depends on the metric so if you look at the column four those are summative so those tend to be at the quarter at the semester at the end of the year those are are summative and that's where we take a look and say okay how did we do the formatives are tracked oftentimes daily so for example we have a program mr elmer which is a software program that really gives us to the minute student data student by student we can track a variety of metrics by a student to take a look at a snapshot to look at everything from irl to s back scores to current grades to gpa to attendance to take a look at the trajectory of different students and mark those those different points based off of the

115last six weeks for example is a student's attendance going up is it going down is it staying stagnant we have our admin interns at all four of our middle schools and all four of our comprehensive high schools and we have positions that we've created at our alternative schools to do the same work and these admin interns have created a cohort of students that they feel are most in need of of uh consistent progress monitoring and that happens every single day that's helpful what i meant though was if if you're tracking often the students daily and then you have the key success matrices maybe only quarterly you're getting only lag measures so is there a kind of a commonality where you're looking at here are the kids last week here's where like i to like for

116me i conceptually can see it but i i just am wondering what you do in the middle space of figuring out okay we have 75 kids right now that all look to be in one place and that's going to impact like literacy absolutely so so we look at uh the predictor of our the multiple predictors of our summit of assessments so i'll use uh grades for example you know grades official grading period comes out at the semester for high school so clearly we don't want to just wait until the semester and say oh well gosh those grades didn't turn out quite how we hoped um so we look at everything from in the moment grades that we pull from schoology to number of zeros um number zeros is a great predictor for student grades um

117as is attendance so we're looking at these daily predictors of our of our bigger summit of assessments and that's really the work of the admin interns and that was why their position was created to really have the daily focus because our assistant principals and principal team can only do so much right so this these individuals who are seated in those positions are really tasked with that's the intervention as you're paying attention to those groups of students that change by the way because students right you know do more do less do more do less and so that's an ebb and flow of student data that's ongoing and i do want to note that this is our first year with it and we do have these new tools in fact i'm getting trained on mr elmer tomorrow

118very excited about that finally have time um so there you know this is something that is a continuous model for continuous improvement so we can continue to refine our practices as we know throughout the year what's working and what's not yeah my question is actually kind of less about students my question is actually less about students than it is about maybe like is there a teacher that needs to get moved to a different spot or is there a program that's not working at a specific we look at all of those factors yes so part of the stuff that plays into this is um we have all these different learning programs support programs that all you guys approve um through board through board action right all the different learning supports and supplemental programs if we notice

119that there's certain data sets for example our english learners are not meeting the standard in literacy they continue not to meet the standard we have the same group of students then we can look at educational tools to help improve that so this help informs also some of the other factors that push into the classroom that exceed the teacher if that makes sense um i'm going to invite dr dave martinez up um he was our first site early college to have us at our principal learning walk so i'm going to ask him just to describe the morning who was there how it went and the feedback he got from his staff good evening president yelcy superintendent dr bankser members of the board executive cabinet members in attendance so tonight major league baseball begins playoffs i got

120to bat lead off and i was happy about that because you know when i was a youngster playing baseball i always wanted a bad lead off because you get more at bats throughout the season so um it was very well received by echs and uh it was a school of our size it was really common for us to be able to have visitors come in because we are always receptive to that practice and learning from each other so i i picked really i asked five teachers on my stuff one in math english science history and avid to be potential visitors and they were looking for the opportunity uh we picked a friday it was september 24th so you had a picture there with all the principals in our npr we started the day discussing what

121the action was going to be completed selected a period and then these visits were basically 8-10 minute visits so we had three teams of four principals including dr shaka that rotated around and you know what we told each other we're gonna do is we're gonna look and see what was uh the processes that are being used to elicit student thinking and responding and you know i i'm going to go back to my coaching days i always told my teams during the week we have got to make the cake the day before the game we're going to bake the cake and on game day it's going to be a piece of cake to run this plan that's how we're gonna do it so what we're doing is we're making the cake you wouldn't eat the ingredients

122by themselves the raw egg the baking powder the soda the flour but you put it together nicely it's gonna come out awesome so what we're doing is we're looking at those questioning processes so we're not ending up like the teacher in ferris bueller's day off who's saying anyone anyone anyone no you're drawing that knowledge and you're building on so the student feels like they're a contributor their ingredient to that cake and building that capacity so um we went around we did our visits i would say the stars were actually the middle school principals because a lot of our students had not seen them as you know a few months to a few years they're like hey dr hotness and you know dr quang and uh you know good to see you and and but we

123knew we had work to do so again we were looking at examples of how that eliciting student thinking and responding was happening and we actually settled on three classes because we had 30 minutes to work with so we went with english math and avid and after the visit had happened we all convened and talked in our groups as to what we saw what was going to be that as dr shaka mentioned what was going to be that immediate feedback we can give back to our teachers so the intentionality with our teachers is to be able to work with them on a frequent basis this is not going to be a you know one-time visit this was early college's chance this was it i had a chance to debrief with my three teachers and thank them

124for being a part of the process and provided them the summary statements that our groups came up with that they saw what was happening in the classroom just with that eight to ten minute snapshot and then i had the opportunity a week later which would have been last friday to share with the rest of our staff and use it as a springboard to what we're gonna be doing on november 1st so one begets the other and you start making that cake in between it was it was perfect timing for me because the idp meetings had just concluded october 1st it was my chance to meet with my teachers 101 and talk about this because i had my own idp and that was to be a better instructional leader for the teachers and get back in

125the classrooms because we were dormant for a year and two weeks so it allowed me to start visiting classrooms through that lens and they know what i'm looking at and how i'm going to be able to better them to be basically impressing upon the instructional focus that we established because as i told our students and i tell them this the class means my job is to put them in the best possible position to be successful and the way we got to do that is i got to mentally have you go through a workout you're going to be thinking and you're going to be encouraged to think and share and not be afraid and be in that environment in the classroom where it's going to be comforting and supporting and you're able to contribute because if

126they can do that then they can do a lot of things uh in life as they move on from high school so you know the last point that i think is of importance and i'll end with this if you look at the picture there including myself there's at least a half a dozen principals in there there are also wasp chairs western association of schools and colleges chairs they don't just participate in these visits we chair these chairs and we help other schools outside the county uh with their focus so to be able to lean on that and help us with that capacity and be able to go to those schools because a number of us are going to be commissioned to go to schools outside of the county to help with their accreditation process it's

127going to help us get some other ideas that we can bring back to our campuses and again it all goes back to principles learning from principals and being our plc so you know end with this our last plc i remember five years ago we had a plc meeting and we have our plc meetings at 6 30 in the morning on a friday and i remember dr baumeister saying you know what are the two most important things a principal should be aware of and you know 6 30 in the morning i just barely had my coffee i could barely think of what it could be um so it's real simple it's just cni curriculum and instruction everyday curriculum instruction if that's being delivered day in day out amongst your team and you develop a common language

128a common set of strategies that are going to be working then you know the rest of it's going to take ourselves like the john wooden approach you know you deal with the process that cake's going to bake itself and it's going to be pretty darn gone good so that was our experience at echs and i have a schedule for you just to share of all the visits that we're going to have throughout the year so we've already scheduled those out so we're super excited about that i think we started with early college and we end with newport harbor high school so at this time i'd like to invite up john drake and he's going to tell you all about elementary programs well he's coming up can i just ask you i i've been here long

129enough i don't know of anybody else but when we first started learning walks board members were invited to go see some of them is that a possibility for us once we get our feet under us yeah our sea legs absolutely we can talk about that we're going to try to um create the comfort level within the plc team and a comfort level with our teaching team and then we can get there yeah and i'll go ahead and that's why i have a schedule for you just so you can see where we're where we're headed okay great thanks thank you carrie and uh good evening uh board members superintendent dr banks here it really is a pleasure to talk to you a little bit about curriculum instruction teaching and learning and you know i've had the

130opportunity to spend the better part of an hour with all of you talking about and sharing with you you know the major initiatives uh and findings that we've had that have led to these initiatives and so uh what i thought i would do is just go a little deeper into um you know what uh carrie and mike uh tabbed you know a collective focus and our collective focus k-6 throughout newport mesa with all of our principles is building their capacity in our teachers capacity and deepening all of their understanding of our k-6 content standards in mathematics and that having a direct impact uh you know in the classroom in the context as we build our our capacity around the [Music] the standards in mathematics we want to always make sure that we have learning goals

131and so in the context of deepening our understanding of the math standards we really are shooting for these four goals the first one being obviously tied directly to the standards that we deeply understand the learning called for within the standards not only the learning but also what that learning looks like in a classroom and that we're also at the same time kind of along the lines of what trustee anderson was talking about building our capacity around assessment and data building our literacy around those two pieces and recognizing that a lot of that data and assessment happens in the moment of teaching and utilizing that to identify what students know and then you know taking that next step instructionally to build on that we can only do that if we know the standards deeply uh also

132developing a professional vision of um instructional leadership you know one of the things that um you know covet has has done for us or to us has you know really kind of gotten us away from recognizing the importance of of what our actions are as instructional leaders because a lot of them have been around safety and operation and so it's time for us now to get back together and really build uh a common vision around what an instructional leader does how they act what how they're spending their time and as a district probably a bigger conversation for us is how are we supporting them with the time to do this uh down the line but but but initially starting with that you know common vision of what instructional leaders are doing and then finally uh

133you know a shared vision doing this all in the context of also developing a shared vision of high quality instruction and so as i've shared with you in the past um we decided towards the end of last year that we were going to focus our efforts you know collective efforts around deepening our understanding in this content area of mathematics and the standards and so um we or i guess i decided basically that we would spend four hours a month with our principals two different sessions of two hours around uh you know participating in some experiences that are going to build our capacity in this area of of content standards and mathematics with the intent of of principals taking it back and spending two hours uh two of their wednesdays a month building the capacity of

134their teachers from what they're learning from the experiences we're having at the site and this all kicked off on october august 17th when all of our principals they did an amazing job they teamed together and held held district-wide grade level meetings around these uh content standards specifically focusing on um focus and the coherence of the standards i mean we had done about six to eight hours of work together getting ready for that prior to and that kicked us all off on the same page since then you see here there are two highlighted parts here or in blue the month of september we dug into the standards for mathematical practice and we'll gain a little understanding of that in a second really focusing on the use of of tools of mathematical tools appropriately and strategically by

135kids we've done a lot of work around that and and our principals have gone back and hence done done work with their sites and so as we dive in uh to to this work uh just to clarify there really are two types of standards in our math standards there are the eight mathematical practice standards which are identical kindergarten through 12th grade so smp5 or stanford math practice 5 which is using tools appropriately and strategically is the same in kindergarten as it is for 12th graders so those are those are consistent and then we have the mathematical content standards which are different at each grade level right uh you're going to be counting a lot counting cardinality in kindergarten you know all the way through fractions uh in sixth grade um and and really our standards

136call for these two pieces or these two parts of the standards to be connected they're not isolated you don't use tools without doing mathematical tasks but their tools are there to support them um uh in acquiring and meeting the expectations of standards so in some of the literature that i sent you you know i'm always going to send you a little homework to do i sent this article called got tools because it really does a nice job in a pretty succinct way of getting at the big ideas of of smp5 and that is that tools are what it means to do math and are part of what it means to do math for forever it's been kind of i know when i grew up you were just supposed to know this stuff when in actuality

137mathematicians use a lot of different tools and so that's a practice we want to make sure that our our students and teachers are accessing because the standards call for them and we are finding and you saw this in the article that students are actually more the more that they use tools the more successful they are with math not only in getting the right answer but also becoming much more flexible in their thinking and understanding the concepts and representing their thinking and they should select the tools that make sense to them that they're going to be able to use to make sense of the mathematics and it's also really important here that not only are our teachers talking about how to use the tools but also why right because it's those strategies that we want kids

138to be sharing with each other to learn socially you know how to do the math in different ways and so it's really important not to just focus on how are they using the tools but why and giving them the opportunity to explain that and then also one of the other pieces is when we talk about using tools strategically it's important for for teachers to draw that out as it happens in the moment in the classroom for example if a student starts a mathematical task and gets about you know 10 minutes in and realizes this tool isn't getting me there and goes and gets another tool that's going to be better for them that's a time to talk about strategically using tools and get that student to share the why elicit their thinking as as they're

139doing in the secondary levels this i know you can't read but these are two pages from our standards and what you see highlighted there this gets back to the idea that content standards and the standards for mathematical practice have to be one in the same on the left there you've got basically all the math standards in kindergarten and those highlighted areas are specific areas in the standards that call for standards i'm sorry that call for the the tools to be used using concrete objects using drawings to show and represent and on the right is fourth grade and the same type of thing you'll see there in the highlighted areas are the content standards but the highlight are the tools that that should be used in this case it's a fraction model and the different ways

140to do that so it's just an example of how these are are tied together so our real goal um in doing this these are the five goals that we sent out uh as we approached our work at least initially through getting to this idea of mathematic mathematical practice five and that is that we want teachers to understand how to use tools strategically that they are part of doing math that they lay a solid foundation for more efficient strategies for students initially it may take a while whether they're using unifix cubes or pencil and pencil and paper that they will lead to more efficient strategies for kids we want teachers to also learn how to engage students in that not only how our tools being used but why that strategy piece as well and that all

141students have access to tools any tools that's going to make the math more accessible to them and we want all students to explore the use of tools and problem solve and persevere to do that choose appropriate tools choose them strategically and use them at any point in time and whatever they need to make sense of the mathematics that they can also represent for others and the teacher their thinking and so um what i i know you want to hear is actually from the people who are doing the work uh and i had an opportunity uh about 10 days ago i called aaron on wednesday because i looked at his plan and said hey can we can i come and watch can i come and participate with your teachers and i did and was able to

142really just step back and watch a principal you know take what he had learned and make it his own for his teachers but do it in a really uh important way because as you notice on the left he's got his as we would want all our teachers and as we plan our pd for our our principles the goals he's trying to achieve and the experiences that he's outlined in the middle and then the last piece is my evidence but we do want to have evidence of learning and we talk about that what are the artifacts here and we'll show you some artifacts i think you know that show that his teachers are taking this work up but we also want to make sure that we're measuring are they learning where are they so that we

143know what our next step is to take so i've asked dr peralta to come on up and share his experience in this collective focus of deepening our understanding of our math standards it is very quiet but i also i've been to dr peralta's math nights using tools so i'm very excited for what you're going to share well thank you um i hope i don't let you down no pressure mr drake thank you for the introduction uh madam president members of the board dr bangser executive cabinet yes thank you for this opportunity this evening so um in a nutshell 10 days ago our staff had an opportunity to come together as a classroom and learn together it was an extremely meaningful experience for me because um you know i wanted to set the stage so that

144teachers didn't see me as the principal principals have that myth of we know you whatever that whatever that question is out there we know it right char it's like they look to us and i i wanted i wanted to convey to my teachers uh that that humanizing aspect of teaching and learning just like every child sitting in front of us has a story and has unrealized dreams um i i had that story as well i shared my background experience with mathematics with my teachers ever since my earliest recollection of mathematics it was drill and kill and for me it resulted in a fixed mindset and i i had a middle school teacher that shattered my unrealized dreams of becoming a medical doctor and she said you know you're not very good at math what are

145some other things you want to explore what she didn't know is that both my parents were teachers and like two days later they were in the principal's office and i was like oh my gosh but um i wanted my teachers to see the uh humility and the vulnerability that i had in getting up and working with them and learning together in mathematics but we rolled our sleeves up after setting the stage and we did some math and we focused on a third grade standard and our our problem that we worked on was 3 times 24 is what and at each table there was a variety of tools for them to use to make sense of mathematics and as they were able to think through this and share with one another how they use the models

146and what they were thinking i was circulating the room and there were two points in my professional development that i did some think alouds i shared with my staff that i was circulating looking for student thinking and what i'm looking at is who's thinking do i want to leverage because we have to be really intentional about that so i was walking and circulating looking and noticing that one of my teachers was thinking a little bit more concretely about math and a few others were thinking a bit more abstractly about this problem and so we wanted to bring this out because that's what teachers need to do is to think through and intentionally who's who's thinking do i want to elevate do i want other kids to hear about their thinking and then to make make

147connections and comparisons um on their thinking the other point where i stepped out and did a think aloud is is with our choices and when we're working with our students we want to circulate that room and look at that students thinking who knowing our students this might be a struggling learner or someone that doesn't have a great deal of confidence we want to highlight their thinking and we can start off with their type of thinking to share and to start off our conversation and i pointed this out and i said thank you for getting our conversation about mathematics going you have contributed to our class and look it we're going to get going with this mathematics that is a powerful motivator for kids and what it's telling our students is that my teacher values and

148respects my thinking and what i have to contribute to the community in the classroom that is very very powerful so what we got out of this day was that when teachers are intentional about selecting their tools that they're fun and they're engaging for students the second thing is that tools are a way that we make sense of mathematics and communicate our thinking about mathematics and lastly when our teachers use these tools along with their sel components we have an opportunity to value every single learner in the classroom so that they don't have those unrealized dreams that i had so thank you are you okay with that okay oh and there's some how do i get in the next slide just oh so the evidence the evidence so i walk through some classroom and this is

149on one day where on the left you see um um what's the precursor to an open number line they use in third grade um it's it's very concrete and sets them up for understanding how to use an open number line uh in fourth grade and then the middle photograph uh we have a kiddo that's used um ten frames and some arrays to make sense of mathematics and then on the far right they're using omnifix cubes to make sense of their mathematics in their fifth grade classroom so this is going on like i always say learning is a journey we still have a long ways to go but um this is this is a great start to the school year when i heard earlier the thought of talking about learning in school right now is a

150really really cool thing thank you justine i have questions not specifically for you eric but you could feel free to chime in i i appreciate that we're doing a deep dive into math and that's really important but i'm curious because oftentimes when that is said the perception that we're not then that we're not doing as much with literacy and literacy is like ginormous and i can see where this really helps with the understanding and the language comes out as this is going but how does it transfer because what we hear constantly is that kids need to be reading at grade level and i i know the magic number is third grade but i'm saying they need to be reading at grade level in all grades because if they're not reading at grade level in grade

151two it's going to be real hard to get them to grade three and et cetera and we and once they get to grade three we want them to just drop off because they made it to grade three okay so how do you see this transferring that's question one question two is this does not happen all the time all day long this is just part of the tool that's being used as often as we possibly can because it's such a good way to teach the concepts that we learned by memorizing and doing it over and over again enough until we could just do the adding in our sleep or do the multiplication tables which do help because it makes the thinking go faster but anyway those are my two questions so i'd answer the first question

152by going back to our uh big big goals these while we're focused right now in our capacity uh around mathematics and understanding those standards these goals apply across the curriculum um so we're talking about high quality instruction high quality instruction is high quality instruction and we're talking about it responsively all those components of knowing your students knowing what they know and building on that as opposed to identifying what they don't know and trying to fix them you know is is part of that building that vision and what that looks like in the classroom we're doing it in the context of mathematics um it doesn't mean we're not teaching language arts and not trying to get better in language arts and you know focused on on improving there but our collective focus is this and through

153these goals you know it goes across the curriculum and we have so many new teachers wonderful wonderfully we are so blessed to have new teachers and i remember when i entered into the elementary teaching world because my main training had been in secondary and it was right when whole language was coming on board and my perception was okay that's all we're going to do is whole language and the kids were going to just naturally learn how to read because my training wasn't concrete enough for me to make that transfer and i just want to make sure that our teachers aren't are doing what i did which is a disservice then to the poor my poor first fourth grade class god love them they're adults and moving on and they're okay so i i didn't screw

154them up too badly but it's sadly and and wonderfully we we add we switch we but we really don't drop off some stuff so i just wanted to make sure that in my mind that that high quality instructions still happening in language arts and some of these techniques especially how this program values the socio emotional needs of our students if a child feels that their teacher values their thinking they'll keep thinking that's right thank you john isn't it true aaron uh particularly as uh state standards evolved into the common core to whatever extent common core became the lexicon of a particular school district that mathematics in this era has become far more reading intensive than it was going back third time so you can't i mean one certainly isn't done it through the exclusion of

155the other right so you really have to have strong reading skills often in fact that's become that's become to do good to do really good math right and that's become in some respects a hindrance to some students learning math because their reading skills are not strong enough right yeah and i would say communicative right it's much more communicative that you have to be able to explain your reasoning uh you know critique the reasoning of others and do that you know both written and verbally so absolutely it's definitely you used to be able to look forward to the big page with just a bunch of numbers and you could do the math and get it done and then there was the word problems and now it's like but then real life math is word problems trustee

156anderson trustee anderson thank you yeah i did just want to follow up because i wasn't sure i don't want to steal dr pratt's fire i wasn't sure what he was going to be speaking about but um i think one of the things that we haven't talked about in the course of this is the parent piece and the thing i think i've gone to two of them now um at victoria where he has a parent night so the kids get to the parents aren't like doing anything their their job is to do similarly what the principal does in that space of walk around and see the student learning independently what they've been taught so i think for me overall one of the things i think um i would love to see as we're building and communicating

157this is to make sure that we're including parents in that conversation at every phase particularly with math and particularly because it's so different from what they learned i think in the past there's been this hesitancy of well we don't want to tell them what we're working on because then they'll try and teach the kids the way they learned it oh yeah but we can't not the standard algorithm doesn't come into play until fourth grade but i think we need to continue i just that was something to me that i think that dr peralta did so well and he was able to like there were a couple of people in the room that were like i don't know how to do this and by watching a second grader sit on the ground to do it for

158four minutes they understood so and that is authentic teaching when you're teaching someone else how to do it that is you know um and i think one of the things kind of on the side of that is making sure that we're communicating out what the standards are to me in my teaching credential program every lesson everything we did was just dripping in the standards for that not necessarily to be the case now um concerns me a little bit or maybe previously you know decades before i got mine um but i think to have the standards for every grade level widely accessible to every parent so they know here's what you are supposed to know by the end of second grade that it's one of the things i wanted us to do during the hybrid learning

159so parents would know by the end of kindergarten here's what you need to know because if we're not all rowing we don't all know what the direction is people can't make they can't come alongside the teachers and support them as well so i would like to make sure that we continue to push that information out to the community thank you thank you and my partner here trustee bartow is keeping a watch on trustee or soyleu who has a question so bob can we move to trustee or solo hi thank you can you hear me um so my question is about what was mentioned mr drake about the wednesdays the two wednesdays a month are spent with those principals taking back the the math standards work and working with their teachers do we have a sense

160um if that's being done by everybody and sort of what's the accountability implementation process for that to make sure that everyone is indeed coming back for two wednesdays a month and sharing those am i going to echo no okay um so a couple of things it is being done i would say the kickoff of the school year to uh you know through september um i know a majority of the principals got at least one in heading into october kind of looking through plans that they have it looks like they do have um two planned for october and we'll continue to monitor that we you know it's usually kind of on week off week so we'll meet next tuesday to talk through really our november first time together so it should be able to give them

161some time also between now and then to finish up tools so that we can jump on into you know the next set of standards but each of the principles has a planning guide that identifies dates goals you know the experiences they're going to be providing their teachers um and then the the outcomes that they plan to use as evidence of learning um you know throughout the the months that they're that will do this so that piece is in place to support their planning as well as you know really gives me an idea of what's happening at sites as well as you know also allows me to identify what's happening and and the sites to get out to to support thank you and i had another question that i don't know if it's for dr shakka

162or for you because it's sort of about the entire district and this approach to you know amplifying the student voices and increasing student engagement in the classroom and that's you know i'm from what i recall when i was in school that's sort of a different method than the way teaching was done back then so i'm trying to figure out what is the professional development around like that engagement um model of learning and eliciting student voices that's a whole nother way of teaching that folks are going to need professional development around and i'm curious is that also two wednesdays a month or what does that look like tell you how we're working it into our principle sessions is we will take time um you know all of our uh experiences with our principles are around doing

163math together and digging into articles together and having these conversations and as we're facilitating them and by no means are are we experts in doing that but we will point out um you know different ways that we have tried to facilitate the conversation and the learning just within our room whether that's you know circulating and explaining kind of as aaron was saying why certain people's uh models were chosen to be shared you know or you know building upon thoughts and using sentence frames and things along those lines are all kind of modeled and used and you know kind of explicitly talked about uh in our um you know in our sessions one of the principles it was funny you know was sharing with me what she had done for one of her sessions and she

164said yeah and i even you know talked about the facility move facilitation moves i was making in order to continue the conversation and build on the thinking and nudge and push the thinking in the classroom with with her teachers so that's one way we're going about doing it is modeling it talking about it um and encouraging that to happen you know even at the sites yeah and at secondary it's really a multi-faceted approach we've got we're coming at it from every angle we can possibly think of clearly there's some unique challenges to professional development this year uh but we've got everything from uh training the principals as uh assistants were superintendent torres outlined we have our our every two week assistant principles of instruction meetings uh to where we go over trainings with our assistant

165principles of instruction to then share with their sites at the secondary level during their pd sessions which tend to take place during late start early outs in addition we also have monthly meetings with our instructional coaches so we have instructional coaches at our sites at all of our sites and they are working with us to move our professional development forward in addition to that we have our department chairs there's been a desire to continue to further empower our department chairs to be instructional leaders so we're working with our department department chairs and instructional areas to build capacity there as well so we're coming at it from every angle we possibly can to make sure administrators uh teacher leaders and then this november 1st we have um our instructional coaches and assistant principals and principals we'll

166be delivering uh pde focused on listening and responding to student thinking to all of staff so we're trying to reach as many people as possible and and build that redundancy really impressive i love hearing about can you hear me thank you that's very impressive i love hearing about this this model and this pedagogical approach to really engaging the students and to follow up on what president yeltsin was asking earlier you know i would love when those um site visits are possible to do those walk-alongs with you alongside um that would be really exciting so thank you so i had a question um first of all thank you for all of this work this is a really impressive amount of effort and resources that are being put into improving student learning and outcomes and i'm very

167grateful for that um both personally and as a board member what in one thing in my business when we have like a big initiative is we have a way of checking into seeing how we're succeeding and there's different elements obviously there's data and that's important and will be hard to have immediately we have instant data um do what do we have monthly what do we have quarterly what do we have annually um coming from a student that says hey this is working or we have the data that shows that's working do we have any kinds of systems built in to check in on students at a student level to you know maybe we follow an individual student maybe an individual classroom but something that is actually showing an impact that we can one be encouraged

168by but to see the progress on are there any systems in place other than kind of what we talked about from a data perspective but just where the whole instructional team gets to see that regularly yeah some of it from at least my perspective will be kind of that qualitative piece of what teachers are seeing that maybe they haven't in the past as we go through this and as they dig in and understand the intent of the standards even deeper than they do now and giving kids those opportunities to make sense uh you know and do that so that some of it is qualitative we are doing at least third through sixth grade some interim assessment blocks this year which will happen in january and then again in the spring which will give us some

169indication of you know are we better off than we were um and you know that knowledge piece is really important you hear me talk about that capacity piece um and so we are measuring you know we teachers took um you know a a knowledge survey at the beginning of the year and we'll take one at the end of the year just to see if we had impact there as well and is there a way that like a mechanism we have to share that with the team either the principals or the teachers in a way that's ongoing and sort of you know regularly scheduled well one of the things that we have started at least at our week our bi-weekly meetings with principals is you know aaron and randy lempert shared i was able to see

170both of their their sites was able to share you know what they were doing um so that's one way uh that we're kind of making our practice public and and identifying what worked and even sharing what what isn't working i don't i don't want to pretend like this is magical and super easy work and everybody's happy and and uh um you know perfect um but we're moving along and so kind of that's that's one way we're doing it um and probably a better conversation also that i can have with some of the principals to kind of figure out some other ways that we can make that more public yeah i was thinking even if it were like a quarterly kind of video update of something we've been focusing on that's easy and it's site-based and

171i think would be encouraging to other sites who maybe had gotten stuck or you know we have these wonderful plans and sometimes i feel like sites stop hearing about what the initiatives are and so things like bake sales and you know different sorts of things kind of get get the forefront so thank you november november trusty crane yeah just very quickly so um so basically the principals are going to put in about 40 hours of professional that you're you're training them for about 40 hours for the year right correct and then as far as a timeline of the initiative having a rollout is this there it's for you're going to train the principals for a year and meanwhile they're also helping the staff along the way with their professional development and these are all pedagogical

172tools that are going to be initiated in the classroom throughout the year so is this throughout the whole district consistently and and so are we can we assume that by june you would have what dr uh trustee bardo mentioned kind of a an output assessment of the results of the year definitely we'll be able to share with you kind of i think you've seen some of my one pagers or two pagers of some of the things we've been doing we can put something like that together for sure that's a lot of work thank you okay in advance one more question um in relation to connecting this more to student-led instruction rather than teacher-led i think there's great need and value for the teachers to be trained and how to listen well to student voices and

173i think to me that further kind of uh draws my attention to the fact that we need to have as many teachers as possible in elementary school to go through just the basic implicit bias 101 classes are we still thinking of doing that at some point this year because i know secondary was getting a lot of that first i just i could i can see situations where if a teacher is not trained in that and is not elevating certain voices or understanding what someone's context is that's not knowing my name and my story that's the opposite and we don't want that to happen so is that going to be happening for elementary teachers so um right i believe and you can tell me if i'm wrong uh carrie but but we're looking at you know

174finishing up the secondary this year in the middle schools as well and then coming down at a future point um to elementary yeah we just had to um you know we kind of shifted gears um over the summer and so we had been in talks about doing it k-12 we were going to finish up secondary and then start to onboard some of our elementary schools um and so with the pivot that we ended up making we ended up pulling off the elementary for the for a temporary amount of time just so that we could finish up our secondary schools but that is something that we had planned on so we haven't talked about that since and we can always address that at a later time if you would like the board decide if the board

175decides to continue personally i see it as a huge need so thank you thank you thank you okay and i just want to thank uh dr peralta for staying here this evening and helping me out with this and then thanking him the reality is there's 21 others that are you know taxed to the max and are doing incredible things out there so it's also uh you know thank you to all of them you know who are putting in the time and the learning and supporting their staff through all of this absolutely thank you thank you to our teachers they are working so hard i'm so proud of my teachers so elementary teachers are getting it even if it's not on the agenda for them to get it they're getting it anyway thank you all that

176was that was really a great report and loved hearing from mr shaka and dr peralta it it was very refreshing to hear some academic initiatives that are going on thank you all right we'll move on to item 17 consent calendar um we have claimed time this week and i think everyone got questions answered so i moved that we approve this consent calendar with the except no that was on discussion action i move that we approve the consent calendar second moved by trustee muchway seconded by trustee crane roll provo trustee yossi yes trustee bartow yes justine montoya yes christy wagon yes twisty crane yep trustee anderson yes trustee or soyleu yes item 19 public hearing on compliance with requirements of ed code section 60119 and 60422b sufficiency of textbooks on instructional materials that are consistent with

177the content and cycles of the curriculum framework for 2021 2022 and this is the williams settlement legislation so i will open the hearing anybody would like to speak come one come on someday we're going to have a cricket sound effect see no one i will close the hearing and move to item 20 discussion action 28 adopt resolution 808 10 21 in compliance with requirements of ed code section 60119 and 60422 sufficiency of textbooks and instructional materials uh miss torres would you like to comment on this yeah so this is just what we consider a routine portion of business to ensure that all of our students have access to appropriate instructional materials in the classroom and after doing an audit in the early portion of the school year we are sufficient so all right thank you

178excellent good emotion so so moved i'll second moved by trustee crane seconded by trustee bartow will call vote trustee elsie yes christy bartow yes justine montoya yes justine yes trustee crane yes trustee anderson yes trustee or surly yes okay we are quickly moving down to item 21 which is informal reports um dr bank said would you have anything else just real quick i would tie 21a back to 15 the end of my uh comments there i indicated that in my other lives i would have had lots to say about how things were going in the first month plus of school but as i said because i haven't had a chance to see a whole lot about what's going on in schools uh i had much more to say about the people with whom i've worked

179so i very much do look forward to hearing you know an occasional either get an email or a text or a phone call or maybe i'll call to see how the rest of the year's gone because now that you have me hooked at least at least for this year for this year i definitely want to see how things unfold and with that i'll just pass it on because all the assistant superintendents always have something interesting to say from each each to each uh office thank you mrs george all right just a couple of items i'm excited to say that we're looking at creating a dual enrollment partnership with coastline community college district for school excuse me for the schools other than early college you already have a full full slate of courses and so we

180met earlier this week and so i would imagine at our next board meeting you will see a contract coming forward to be able to offer courses at some of our other schools after school that are outside of our current uh course catalog so things that the students don't have access to during the school day where it's in development just letting you all know that's coming we're also looking at some opportunities after school for tea winkle and so we are looking at the spanish enrichment program that we'll be running a few days a week after school and then we're also looking at speech and so that will also run maybe two to three days a week after school at t-winkle so at our next scheduled board meeting you will also see a contract for speech and

181debate coming forward we'll be contracting with an outside agency who does an excellent job at teaching young people how to use their voice we're just planning for the november first pga that's coming really soon and so we have a full slate of activities planned for our teachers on that day and then just letting the public know that we continue to work through some of our schoology challenges and so i appreciate our student board member sharing her uh her perceptions and thoughts on the program and we are continuing to work out the kinks so thank you thank you mr drake i think i will let my 25 minutes at the podium stand as my report this evening thank you thank you so we have worked really hard and have tried to find every covid related paper

182clip we can find that's claimable with fema and i hope you find this astonishing that the claim will be just over two million dollars so we're really pleased with that oh a lot of clips jeff yeah there's a lot of clips mr holcomb nothing to report tonight thank you miss olson yes i have a couple of things to share with you as well as the public one is that we are gearing up in hr to implement the mandate of those who of our staff who are not who are not vaccinated we'll be going through a weekly testing and so we'll have to be implementing that next week and very happy to share that we are at about 80 percent vaccinated of our staff which is fantastic and we are going to offer an on-site covid

183vaccination clinic for our staff who are interested uh and that actually will begin this friday october 8th it's all day they can sign up the information went out to staff today for sign ups and then the second dose is november 5th and we're going to tie that one and it is permissible to our annual flu clinic so we're going to try to capture as much as we can and provide that service to our to our staff i also want to share and follow up on a couple of our um mous that we have with our associations you heard both of our associations this evening refer to a couple of them that were agreed upon in conjunction with our tentative agreements rtas and so csea one of the topics you heard was about the mers and

184so we do have a mou that indicates we will meet three times a year or three times this year to explore it to discuss it to look at the challenges that we're facing in paying in a timely fashion and actually our first meeting will be october 25th so that's already on the books as the first as a first step and so we're excited and appreciate the collaboration and the conversations that we have with our csca representatives and then interns with nmft you also heard that we too are very pleased with the collaboration that we have to roll out our evaluation for our service providers so just as a reminder for everybody that is our counselors our nurses uh librarians social workers uh speech language pathology pathologists and uh psychologists i think i got them all

185yeah all six okay i'm counting mathematical tools yes i am i am being a former math teacher yes i do use those tools uh one of the things that we did to ensure us or hopefully ensure with the intent of a smooth rollout is we did hold meetings with all of our administrators to go through the standards that have been agreed upon and to look at the forms in the process and i really want to thank megan brown and shashana nakano who who worked on that along with me and so that we have a solid foundation with our administrators and then the next part of which you heard sarah speak to is that we also met with the service providers in their like job-like groups we have two more to go um and megan brown

186and shauna nakano are leading that and doing a fine job i'm here to i'm really pleased to hear that the feeling is mutual and so we will continue that we will be revisiting it as a group in january how's it going what's happening and then again in may so that we can finalize it for the following school year so thank you when lisa buller got up to talk a little bit about harbor council and she said october 20th i'm like october 20th for college and career october 20th is also our very first parent education night i was gonna ask and um it it's probably a little bit different demographic it's related to um halloween doesn't have to haunt your house and it's with um dr reba who's our health consultant and um so she's gonna

187do this and for families and kids about healthy habits for halloween so not that our secondary college-bound students couldn't use it but it is out there annette has been promoting it it went out on blackboard and connect and it's in english and spanish and it is the first one and then the there's also information about save the dates for the other ones and the topics will come up come out as we get a little bit closer would you send the infographics to us the something that yes because i like to attend the parent meetings i learned something at every single one yeah and i think we got an email today well then i missed it because i wasn't getting all my emails i also have a hard copy oh thank you for all people thank

188you so i can give that to you and we can do both yes i mean we that's right they're both on zoom right and the times are yes yes so people could participate in both of those absolutely um because my neighborhood trick-or-treaters definitely want me giving healthy snacks that's right that's right so it's a good opportunity dr reba is a great district partner with us so we're excited about that um it's also on our school website you know news feeds and all of that and the other thing we're really excited to share this evening is that october is dyslexia awareness month and um it hasn't annette is texting his keep saying what this is what we did for um the virtual education so she's paying attention online but um in order for us to um

189to kind of promote and support dyslexia awareness candy barella through special education has developed a dyslexia specialist team and carrie adams one of our special education coordinators heads up this group and it's people who are are sai are you specialized academic instruction teachers part-time and then part-time they are kind of reading intervention specialists and they're getting a lot of ongoing training and um really to help to help our students in special ed who we know often lag really behind in their reading skills so um uh this is i can i can send this to you as well but what i think it is it's it's kind of nice you know you got to be with the times where you have the qr codes and it talks about you know for teachers it was like watching

190this video did you know that your students chromebook have so many features that support students with dyslexia from embedded features to add-ons to improved access to read and write for google so there's there's all kinds of things so we're excited for this group some of this that we're we're doing some additional training for them and others is through some of this one-time covet money and we think it's a great use of of money to kind of enhance the skills of a lot of our folks in all of these reading kind of programs so we're excited about that this i i'm excited about it did the did the definition of dyslexia it it has morphed back in the day it was an overriding catch-all phrase for any child who was struggling and with an identifiable reason

191why they were having trouble reading and i often had difficulty explaining to a parent who said my child's dyslexic saying well it's no it's not like saying your child's left-handed so that it's something specific that we can work on and to all left-handed people i wasn't saying that that was a disability i'll get yelled at when i go home tonight um but i just meant so does it have a more narrow definition now and i'd love to get some information so maybe i'll make an appointment with mrs barrella and i will be there well and and once you get the handy-dandy flyer it says what actually is dyslexia and they're talking about a language-based learning disability and really it's it has to do with phonemic proficiency and often students who have this disability have higher

192than average cognitive skills so that's really where you see some of these frustrations so you know it's inefficient pathways between the different areas of the brain used for reading thank you so that's kind of the definition we use um as we're moving forward but we're excited um uh to to um you know proud of kerry and adams and the work that she's done with this team and they're very excited and and you know out there you know trying to help their fellow teachers and and meet the needs of all kids thank you is there a way that we can take that special team on the road so they do some assessments of you know maybe first or second graders that are not in a sped class or have have any kind of tracking because i

193think there's so many students that are sometimes under diagnosed so part of their support model is to assess provide supplemental dyslexia specific assessments um ident identify a consult with the multi multi-disciplinary teams to determine a student's learning profile if their learning profile indicates dyslexia they analyze and synthesize data to build an individual instructional program they support families and schools with implementation and they do direct individualized services so they do have they are on the road this is what they do they um once we've given them a lot of training then they're saying basically if you need support come reach out to us and we will come and and you know it's kind of that train the trainers model right so we've built we've built their capacity um and now they're going to go out and

194be able to be this team that goes just deployed out to help others wonderful thank you dr what percentage of kids do are have dyslexia in our district do we have a number i mean a rough percentage i don't know um any idea miss varela just just curious okay yeah yeah so did you hear that the majority of students um with dyslexia are actually continuing general education programs maybe with some special education support but you know we can we can um you know dyslexia isn't a um eligibility right under the so you're going to keep track necessarily so it's it would it's really kind of trying to tease that out but we'll know more as the team goes out this year as well and and you know works with school sites to really help pinpoint

195those specific students that's why it's such a great use of the incoming money that we have because it doesn't it does it cover the broad spectrum and not the new it's the base of the pyramid not the tip of the pyramid and it it isn't necessarily ongoing money mr trader so oh i know that's a good thing we have to get really really good at it so we can figure out how to do it within our real budget the key takeaway is we're helping kids that are struggling with literacy and reading and i think it's wonderful that we have an awareness month for it and a team that's out there doing it so there we go there's my reading thank you thank you very much okay we're going to move on to board reports and

196i'm going to go first today um because other people may want to fill in on some of what i report so i'm going to talk about dr banks take your time we're going to be here for another couple months yeah there you go um but no dr bankster when we um knew we were hiring a new superintendent and we realized that in that process we could we needed to bridge a gap between mr lee sung and eventually mr smith and so we interviewed he actually went through an interview we just didn't bring him in here we interviewed for interim superintendents and literally you've been here two months which is amazing because it feels like forever not in a negative way but it seems like a lot longer because we've done so much and i think

197i've probably talked to you every day even when i was on vacation i think we averaged one a day yes so um so i'm going to start with what you say to me all the time i'm going to tell you the end of the story and then i'll throw up this is how this is how he goes so the end of the story is we um when we interviewed for the interim superintendent and i went back and looked at some of the notes that i had taken when we interviewed you and the last thing we said what should we expect from you as an interim and you said i hope you know i will tell you the truth and you have done that from the get-go you have told us the truth of what of

198how you see things in the district so now i'll fill in a little bit of the blanks um earlier we asked you what is some of the things that we should know about you and you said you loved being a superintendent for as many hundreds of years and you also said it's not about you as an interim it's not about you you have to step back from being the focal point and he's done that you've definitely let other people solve their own problems when we asked you what is the primary goal of an interim you said these are and these are my impressions of what he said a lot but this is what i do um provide a sense of professionalism and make sure the handoff is good or better than you received it and

199i would say you definitely did that as well i feel i personally feel that we are in a better position today than when you came in this summer and i know i always said you were the bridge to take us to the superintendent kind of like you know could be implied that that's just a filler position you have not served in that capacity you've really made decisions gotten things done motivated people to get things done and i think we all appreciate it and your last message was just don't mess it up you have not you have definitely left it in better hands [Music] than when you came in i know personally i've really enjoyed working with you i do have i have your phone number even though he told me today he may change it

200wise move but we will get in touch with you and i hope you will continue to see um through just observe so that you can see the things that you've started what the outcome is and we are really excited to have dr smith come in with us um i know he's i hope he's probably watching tonight um and i know he'll be spending time he spent some time with you and he will be spending time with you next week uh before he officially starts so we feel like we're in a really good position and it's because of all the work you put into it right so i know other people want to say something but we do have a little card thank you um well i just want to start with my coastline rop report

201because i'm going to tie it in all together so coastline rop is currently looking for a new superintendent and i and having just gone is that is that is that is that the coastline in maryland and i would have felt much more concerned about the entire process had we not gone through the process we had just gone through which has been so great but i just wanted to say i don't know one um maybe you've never been called this before but to us to me um you kind of felt like mary poppins um you've got i have definitely never been called um you got us organized when we were you know yeah we're in a lot of different places and i think you kept helped us keep a great sense of humor through all of

202the different challenges we faced and we really appreciate you and i don't know about the singing we haven't got to that part but you know but thank you very much it's been really a pleasure to work with you my pleasure we're combining our reports too right so i can do that and then go back to the end because i actually had a few um delegate assembly did meet while we were the delegates of orange county did meet which is a representation of school board members throughout orange county and we were very it's very comforting because it's comforting to hear some solutions other districts have done but it's more comforting when i hear that we've already taken the forefront and we're ahead of the game and it was this one particular was nice because all the

203delegates were congratulating us on our selection of dr smith so that was wonderful and i wanted to talk about our community alliance meeting that we had um trustee crane and i attended which was on zoom so it means we each had our own little box um this was a very productive meeting and it was really wonderful to hear from so many organizations that we work with throughout our all those ones you didn't get to see because you focused on the problems when you said you were a bridge my brainwell immediately went you were a bridge over troubled waters because we didn't expect to have so many bumps and that bad was it well we have well we expected i uh well i expected it okay cove it's going down things are going to be smooth

204life will be fine i always get trapped by that wonderful feeling of bliss and then pow oh wait kobe's back even different it's different covid oh okay yeah so anyway you handled it well you supported us wonderfully which was just what this commun the social our our sale team does it was wonderful because it was one of the few times they actually said it is the social emotional assistance intervention and learning team because i never knew what sales stood for except that they were great people that i always felt good when i was done with that meeting which is what their purpose is is to help us recognize that we as a board we were nervous we were scared we had a big process to go through and you were very wonderful helping us you

205and i on the other hand were related to illinois and talked about good the good old days and speak the same language on way too many times and you will be missed you you made a big impression in a short period of time the common comment that i heard was leadership that you provided leadership in such a short amount of time and now that's always welcome um all right so those are my two big reports the there i i can't pick out one particular group but i know trustee ukraine is going to do that so i wanted just to elaborate on the community a lot of this meeting that we we attend it's always such a good it's a good feeling meeting yeah because we we realize how amazing our community is and our community

206partners are as far as resources for our students very focused on students and i was hearing some statistics that were amazing for example the assistance league this year closed 1 500 students of ours 1200 of those 1500 students were uniform schools and the others were 300 that were out of out of um i think second at secondary level they provided a thousand water bottles and dental kits they also provide orthodontic and dental services it's just amazing what they do as partners and we so appreciate and and the list goes on we've got trellis we have you know um we've got sos we have chalk we have the the hogue foundation there were so many there's so many that were are just part of our um dna and we don't necessarily celebrate them enough and so

207we we thank the community alliance group that brings us all together and appreciate the resources that we provide our kids newport mesa embraces it takes a village we use our village so that's i just want to add that because it's just really important for the community to know how much we value our partners wait so well hank hank you were you just jumped right in you fit right in uh there was never really a learning curve in the sense that you knew a lot and we've always felt comfortable approaching you and i do believe the same went with the staff because you know you jumped in with the assistant superintendents the directors and made them feel heard and there wasn't really any disconnect i didn't see i didn't feel i didn't see it and um

208i'm just looking forward forward to you binge watching our board meetings oh yeah yeah mini binge thank you we look forward for our lunch tomorrow you bet i just wanted to um quickly say that i had the pleasure of going with john drake over to adams elementary and seeing the pilot program of the um structural new model for um reading for ela and that was um amazing so similar to what we just learned about today for math um we're piloting there and what was even better is we walk into a first grade class mrs sperlings and uh the tosa who was in there was one of my good friends from college so talk about a community um so and she was doing some wonderful work and i can't wait to see more of that and

209how that gets rolled out because these kids were learning um words and they were able to move groups where you had maybe the higher achievers maybe people that already knew how to read in this group and they were still getting high quality instructions just as much as the um other ones in in the um the mainstream group and it was great and i wanna can't wait to see more of that um throughout our schools but i wanna talk about hank and and hank i think when i first met you you said oh you remind me of one of your daughters and i said okay well i didn't want to say that you remind me of my dad but do you like your dad yeah i do like my job yeah so that is a compliment

210um but you really led us through some of the uh more difficult times that we've had in the past uh i you know i think we all received over 600 emails about uh something that happened in in september uh yeah some troubled waters which is obviously a good song in my dad's favorite song bridgeover triple waters um but i think one of those emails you sent to us and you said i know that you guys have received some disgusting emails and i you know i want to know that you're doing the best you can and at that moment i knew that you really cared about the board um and you were only here for you know a month at that point and and you cared not only just about doing your job but about us

211personally and to see how we were doing um but also i have to give you this other compliment that i've heard from some principals that they said um someone texted me and said wow i'm really gonna miss hank so to get that kind of level and to be that to have that uh text message come through with someone that's only been here for 10 weeks is pretty outstanding so thank you for everything yeah thank you i'll go next because we're out of order um well i just want to say thank you very much for being such um a calm and confident leader who is always open to dialogue i always feel like the best answers come when everyone discusses them and come to consensus and you really help usher that in and listen well so

212um i really appreciate that and i think um to see the way that you led the district in such a short amount of time was really wonderful so thank you thank you and trustee or solo would you like to add anything sure um um i just want to first add that i went to the same um adam's pilot that um trustee wyatt had gone to this morning i went and it was just so excellent to see the kids so engaged in in learning their reading um and i really do hope that um that pilot does get expanded beyond um adams and ray and there's really great learning that we can take from that um and then one more before i get to hank i want to just give props to um leona and sarah jocom

213because they've just been so on the ball with not only the vaccine clinics and all of that but also offering testing for the teachers and having orchestrated getting those testing kits to the front desks of each of the schools um so that's really exciting as well so that communities have access to tests and our staff has access to tests and um and vaccines as needed so that's just really exciting that that continues as we get to move and think more about the educational um impact we're having too but about about um dr bankster um i have just had so much uh positive interaction with you and um i am a little bummed though because you told me i reminded you of your daughter so now i feel like that's just your line [Laughter] but but

214in all truthfulness i really just appreciate that you understand my rough new england nature and all i want is the best for things to happen and i know that sometimes that's the new englander in the california situation sometimes doesn't come across as as i need it to but i know that you understood what i was saying all the time so i really appreciated that i moved to clarify this thing about my daughter so any any any uh female between 40 and 50 and i'm i'm doing generalities here crushed are you definitely that's okay okay no there it goes no a few of you a few of you don't anyway in that general age group in the general i actually don't remember saying it more than once but but i can tell you i can tell

215you the if i ever said anything to you about resembling in any way my daughter that is an ultimate compliment she's just one of the most outstanding young people i know and i'm biased but i think i'm also accurate the last thing i want to say is please take this in the right frame i was not expecting a gift i don't know what's in there but i have to tell you that when i retired from my quite longest superintendency of 16 years in 2006 i retired from the same district where i've been a teacher and assistant principal uh starting in 1971. so there were 11 years in between i was teacher assistant principal left for 11 years a bunch of stuff came back and i was really fortunate when i left i had a great

216relationship with the board and the community and so the board got together and they gave me a gift now i they sort of asked me and i said i don't want like this big trip or anything because that's going to get that's going to get in the newspaper no no i don't know i'm getting the punchline here okay so the you know they didn't give me a big trip because that would have been in the newspaper and i want to read about that so they actually came up with a really pretty cool thing and they actually named the administration building after me so when i drive by whenever i go to chicago suburban chicago they didn't take it down yet i mean my name's still up there and that's that's one of those cool in

217perpetuity things having only been here 10 weeks i had a little bit lower lower level of expectation so rosie can i have the name plate is that okay and can i also have the interim superintendent because you're not going to use that one again right is that what it says so you're not going to you don't even need the you know other than my name right for wes right you're going to have a new superintendent in reality right anyway so thank you for your comments i really do appreciate it and you know i said what i had to say earlier on i didn't know you were going to do all this but i do think that thank you karen for recollecting some of the things i said and actually i used a couple of paragraphs

218from the letter that i wrote to you all as an introduction before i came to interview i used it several times reflecting on interim superintendents i have followed known loved and not loved i've had some not so good experiences following three interims two of them were good one was not so i think i know a little bit about that and i've done enough superintendent searches to see how some of those transitions go west will be here you know that he'll be here next wednesday afternoon and then again on friday afternoon we have left we have a little more to do and i think he is uh he's ready ready to go and i if he if he wasn't excited about this district before tonight then i'm sure he is now having seen this presentation of

219what we actually do other than some of the other issues so thank you very much i appreciate it i really do and you're not gone we have enough that's i just wanted to mention some of you may have noticed beautiful flowers that are behind us that are often in front of us but we they were tall this time these are provided from our step flower cart program for our older students that are learning a skill and part of that is flower arranging and they will provide the board we we paid for our flowers so that no one worries about our public funds going toward that but but it's such a nice thing it's such a nice touch it makes it feel real real and i wanted to acknowledge the step flower cart program because they

220do such a wonderful job thank you and i don't know how they what they do with these flowers but they last they live a long time best deal in town for sure yes yes okay any other comments if not i will ask for a motion to adjourn in the name in memory of judy franco who we did name our courtyard after yes yes i have a motion so moved i'll second move by trustee wagon secondly by trustee bartow all in favor okay thank you good night everyone meeting adjourned at night