Amery Board of Education May 2019

001to call the may 2019 board meeting to order we are reorganizing the board this evening so we have to do election of officers that's why i'm beginning rather than chelsea at this time i'm going to take nominations for president for the school board of emory i'll nominate chelsea whitley for the position of board president do i hear a second okay i'm going to turn it over you at this point then any other nominations we move to closed nominations and cast unanimous ballot for chelsea whitley to be president for the 2018 through 2020 school year on favor say hi hi i guess we'll now move ahead with uh the nomination for vice president are there any nominations for vice president hi nominate keith anderson the vice president any other nominations okay i will close the nominations

002and i'll make a motion that we cast unanimous ballot for keith anderson for vice president second okay all in favor of keith anderson being vice president say aye aye now uh for the election of clerk are there any nominations for the clerk position i'll nominate gayle johnson okay any other nominations any other nominations move to close nominations and cast unanimous ballot for dale johnson for clerk for the 2018 through 2020 school year okay all in favor of dale johnson being clerk uh say aye okay the last um position is for the election of treasurer i'll nominate sharokina for the position of treasure for the next school year second bet hey are there any other nominations any other nominations okay um is there a motion to close nominations i moved to closed nominations cassie unanimous ballot

003for charlene for our treasurer okay all in favor of charge being treasurer for the um next school year uh say aye all right okay uh so now the next thing on the agenda is um i guess the meeting dates for the 2019-2020 school year i make a motion to accept these meeting dates so then 2019-20 year as printed second okay any discussion all in favor say aye aye the amory board of education regular meeting dates are approved uh the next item on the agenda is the designation of district depositories these the same as last year exact same okay make a motion that we accept the list of official depositories for 2019 to 2020. okay okay all in favor say aye aye aye anyone opposed all right the school district of amory official depositories are accepted

004uh this the next thing on the agenda is the appointment of the wasb correspondent and convention delegate i don't believe we need a motion for that since it's an appointment and erin uh you you held that position last year are you interested in doing it again sure that was very interesting everyone in favor of aaron being delegate or anyone else want the job [Laughter] okay how about her the next item is the authorization for use of independent hearing officers for expulsion hearings held in the upcoming 2019-2020 school year what we have typically done is a representative from weld riley prin and ritchie has sat in on those expulsion hearings as a third party we haven't had one in quite some time but that's what we've used for decades here okay so make a motion to

005use the world riley representative for our explosion independent hearing officer any other discussion okay all in favor say aye aye aye all right we will um use the law firm of weld riley out of eau claire as the independent hearing officer for the upcoming school years is hearings board appointed committees there's been some jostling on the board appointment committees we've had some changes in staff we're still looking for a couple of representatives if you see on the screen anywhere you see an underlying name that's one of your names and um these are not set in stolen by any means these are not lifelong appointments you can certainly opt on or opt off or move around this is where it stands presently and if you you see that in front of you and you'll see it

006up on the screen is everyone happy with their committees that they're on or does anyone want to opt in or opt out i'm good okay all right yeah i was going to say do we need a motion for that i don't think so yeah yeah okay good all right the next um item is spotlight on education the mini graph project okay we have here this evening we have five mini grant presentations they're going to show you what they did with the mini grant money that was provided to them back in the fall there isn't any real particular order other than the way that becky put it into the system so we're going to start off with janice jensen and teresa haynes and the troops that are with them i believe perhaps or not just you

007two that'll be enough okay you're up you'll have to get in on that mic so you can be heard okay is this picking it up enough or closer oh there you go there we go all right um if you want to go to the next slide please in the fall in september we attended a keys to success conference and this is held twice yearly for focusing on needs for children with special education and we attended a particular breakout session by held by nancy lawton shirley from the points of stillness in in hudson and she's an occupational therapist that has done a lot of research on sensory needs and helping to children to focus and balance their bodies and and so forth and she stressed the importance of a balanced sensory system in order for the

008child to learn and focus stress that children will exhibit less behaviors when their bodies are getting input that they need whether it's auditory or visual or kinesthetic and so forth and she recommended two programs that day that theresa and i ordered with our grant money along with some other supporting materials and one is particularly called me moves and the other one is calming rhythms so i'd like to share a little bit about the me moves program memus is a patented system containing a series of short three to five minute video sequences designed to quickly and effectively calm the nervous system and build a bridge to the social world and the different programs include joy calm and focus kind of depending on the needs of the child at that time and i have used it with

009students from kindergarten through second grade at various times of the day and kind of various times of their needs some of the research behind them is that they have shown reduced off-task behavior in local like in minnesota bosata minnesota elementary school by 80 percent um in st paul some off-task behavior by 58 percent and then also in some schools in new york city by 48 percent we have selected to do with just a very small section of our students and some of these students are some very high needs students with off-task behaviors and working to focus so if you want to go to the next slide we'll show you an example what i have found with with this link too is to show you an example of how to use it not only does it

010help to reduce their um off-task behavior but it also gives them a sense of of coordination and balance and connecting like the right brain and the left brain and so forth and so we have found it to be very helpful um so which one well let me see it'll start here so if anybody would like to join along you don't have to do the big movements but even if you want to do the little movements with your fingers so you can focus on the rest of this so you can focus for your meetings and for me it's a good stretch of my arms it feels good in the day for students it shows that it's effective for all ages from tiny tots to elderly men and women it does get more complicated for my for

011my aging brain this one looks easy but it's not so it looks sorry and this is the focus one like i said they make it easier so that's just a quick example um i think this is part of the focus one right this is really have to watch and focus on what itself in the three to five minutes we find that this works for um for many students it's not the cure-all for all students um and that's why we also ordered um the calming rhythms because as we go through especially in the elementary level trying to find what fits for each child and their sensory needs because it's not a one package fits all now the calming rhythms was a it's just a cd and what it has is three different tracks on it and

012the tracks are like specialized rhythms that they've done a lot of research on to see what works for different kids track one is mainly for help in ending a tantrum or reducing acute anxiety track two is more effective for those kids that are in high arousal or they're easily over stimulated and track three is more for those low arousal slow to respond listeners i tend to play this right at rest time for a couple of my kids and if i forget to put it on they're over there putting this on so it's been really effective for them i borrowed it to our guidance counselor and she tried it in her room she had some various results some kids liked it and other kids didn't so you can go to the next so that's what we

013found is that we're using it consistently with me every day um we combine it with me moves and we're having a lot of positive effects on getting kids to focus and to calm down i talked about the guidance counselor and what we found is this is just one more tool in our toolbox to get kids ready to learn and we're just finding kids coming in with more and more sensory needs so we need all the tools we can get so we thank you so much for allowing us to have this and try it out thank you for your work thank you thank you i should have mentioned it being there were five mini grants the first of which is in special ed and then we have one in elementary intermediate middle and high school we're

014going to start off in closed session from now on by doing me moves to get us in the right place and i'll have chelsea lead us okay elementary okay so i'm alex lillianthal and i'm trish myers and we feel the need in 4k that kids need to be outside and we thought what better way to get kids outside more than to create a space where kids can take their work outside still get on all the things they need to get done but in a outdoor environment so we'll go ahead to the next one so we wanted to thank the school board george sigsworth and chuck berry have been putting in a lot of work and then some donations from jordan johnson okay so here's our outdoor classroom so i come from a school in which

015i had an outdoor classroom and i just saw the benefits of it so we wanted to create something that would benefit our 4k students but also all the way to second grade so um we are going to have lots of natural and things out there sensory things that they can play with um to support learning in stem and then nature appreciation and just a calming environment where they can just have an alternative to their classroom for those kiddos that need it um and some of the things that are out there is there's going to be a space for stage for social learning maybe some you know speeches or plays that they can do outside um they can work on building relationships with group and some of that things um social interactions with their peers and

016then there is a mud kitchen and some blocks for some of that stem stuff okay so the proposed map we're not quite finished we're close so most of the items are out there except for a few things so we have this is kind of what we're thinking this will be in that area i don't know how to explain that what is j wing in the oh building or the yes right there um where students aren't necessarily playing for recess it's just kind of a space right now so we thought that'd be nicely utilized um so there's an area for small groups seating the stump stump you can count jump skip play a stage for whole group activities like trish said plays or presentations those kinds of things a mud kitchen for some stuff that it's

017a little too messy for inside maybe for some people a building zone will have wood blocks tree cookies and that'll be like for heavy work for sensory input open area for whole body movement breaks yoga practice group building etc benches for individual or partner work and there'll be lots of little tables you see you'll see that in the next slide and then a messy art area so current progress these are some of the beautiful things that chuck and george have been working on for us so a lot most i would say most of the money was spent on materials and that was our current progress when i took the picture on thursday but that's our stage those are benches repurposed from the prairie and um some blocks and then another picture that i was gifted

018through email and again we just wanted to say thank you and um we'll update you when things are finished and in place okay on to the intermediate school all right so this is the fourth grade team and we have a few students with us we'll just go around and introduce ourselves i'm lindsey brooder andy wolf stephanie austin all right so we had a community project that we were working on we work within the local nursing homes and so we got extra this mini grant allowed us to do some extra projects with the residents there and give them some extra smiles along the way so i will turn it over to amy growth i had to go down a little lower so my my class and i um visited riverbend assisted living facility this year um

019and one of the ideas their director had come up with um is well from pinterest we did not come up with this on our own but something that we could do together so a portion of my grant money went to the supplies for this the way it worked was the students and i visited with the residents probably our fourth visitor third or fourth we traced a resident hand and did our best to rotate a resident arm in hand next to one of the students and so you can see the difference between their hands and ours and the idea was um there's a saying in the middle of it again that we borrowed um but it was the director's idea um from riverbend that we will give this to the emory public library now and hoping

020that they will hang it into in the kids reading area and there's a plaque in the process of being made from on behalf of river bend and from our fourth grade class so the next time you're there hopefully sometime this summer you'll see it so that's what it is all right so then as we you can go ahead and i think there's just a couple p okay so then we get into um i visited or we visit amory memory care and i'm at willow ridge and we visit the community center yep and so now we'll turn it over to the students they can give their testimony i don't know if you want them to speak in the mic would you prefer that yes okay so um who would like to go first just their testimony

021on what did they do at their nursing homes and kind of what they enjoyed the most probably and while they're doing that you can page through kind of the pictures it's okay bring it down um i enjoyed going to the community center and making blankets with them because it made a connection with all of the students who was there making blankets with them um i had sort of a connection or a feeling between my resident um every time i hoped that they were there because i really enjoyed doing crafts and reading and games with them so this is you can see this is community center and obviously each one of our nursing homes has different residents and their capabilities and what we're able to do with them lots of us do crafts or play games

022often reading to the to the residents a lot um we sometimes it's sometimes monthly sometimes bi-monthly depends on um the different types of nursing home we go to but we were able to this was really fun to get on my facebook she sent that to me the the next day and i was like oh that's so good to see that they're using it right and so this is yep so we were able to um each one of us three made um seven blankets each with the money that was given um and then we were able to buy the frames my i bought frames for them i think andy you brought some snacks for them that they requested bingo prizes that's right yes andy and we did snacks and they did snacks right right so there

023was a frame that we gave each of the resident with their um with a student and then the resident that they could keep in their rooms and that was the blanket set so then i think there's one more maybe two more okay and then the at the memory memory card they were able to gift whoever they would like to but um interactions in residence are priceless emory students do so well with them we have appreciated adding a little joy to their um each one of their lives at each visit that we go to we thank you for the opportunity to add a few smiles and make their day a little bit more special middle school is up next i'm danielle mccall i teach sixth grade science i'm ariel humpel i teach seventh grade science um

024and thanks to the mini grant at the middle school this year we were able to start and compete with a science olympiad team just a brief background on what science olympiad actually is science olympiad is a team competition so it allows students to implement the next gen science standards into a variety of different competitions or events so we traveled to boyceville where there were 29 other teams competing all in one day in one building in february and there were a possibility of well over 20 events for students to be in and compete in and our team is up on the board we had a team of 10 members you could have a team up to 15 and we originally started with 15 but we had some that had previous commitments and really the only day

025that we required them to be there was that february 16th day so the 10 members that competed are up on the board and you can see they competed in 13 different events there's 23 that they actually there's 23 different events but our kids competed in 13 of them and so to determine who would be in what event we kind of left it up to them and what their interests were and then we paired some of them working and events together um there's a lot there's limits on how many can be in each event um some it's just one person some it's a pair or up to three people was the most you could have in any event um and so we're pretty much done with our speech but we do have a little video that

026the team members put together throughout the day of competition so you can just sit back and enjoy [Music] we had a little fan club too it was the only event you could watch so laughs [Music] okay [Music] thank you [Applause] and lastly high school hi everyone so my name is julie montgomery reese and i work both at the middle school and the high school my official title is student success coordinator but essentially i'm a school counselor and my main purpose is to fold one to support some of our most at-risk students in the district and then also to try to increase trauma-sensitive practices throughout the schools in the district so actually before i started my job when i knew i was taking a job in amy i was talking to the local area youth librarian

027and she was talking about how she was having a lot of young lgbt youth from the area from amy osceola saint croix falls were the three schools she was sighting and they were all telling her that none of the schools had any clubs to support who they were and so she was planning to start a club at the library and it would rotate monthly and it would be a diversity club so it's going to encompass a lot of different aspects of identity for students and she gave me a flyer and she was like could you just hang it on your door so kids know about i was like for sure so that's one of the first things i did and i just noticed just by hanging that on my door i was getting a lot

028of of our own lgbt population in the emory high school coming to me and saying can we start a club here and so it was it was more of the students driving it but i ended up writing the grant kind of for them but also for all my students so my goal is through my space and you can shift to create something comfortable where kids who maybe don't have comfortable home lives or maybe don't feel comfortable in their own bodies or with their own identity yet a place where they would feel safe and comfortable and so through the mini grant i was able to work with slumberland who gave me a deep discount on a really nice couch and chair they are really nice they're like nicer than what i own at home um and

029so initially i was just thinking this would be like where we would have our gsa which is the gender and sexuality alliance club meetings because i was just thinking in my mind there's no way i'm ever going to get more than 10 kids a small school that's just it'll be a nice little space for them so again the goal is sense of safety and building trust those are cornerstones of being trauma sensitive so you know is being lgbtq and that's lesbian gay bisexual or transgender for those of you that don't know um and q is queer that's not necessarily a trauma but what we do know through national surveys that our lgbt youth face a lot of harassment at school a lot of them don't feel safe and a lot of them deal with an

030anxiety that prevents them from focusing on their academics so i was trying to help provide a sense of belonging go ahead in order to help them feel like they belong i had to build trust with them and i had to show them that i saw them for who they were and that i was there for them i was going to provide a confidential listening ear and be someone who was just going to be there for them except them for who they were so i ask them for quotes it feels a lot less stressful and creates a more relaxing environment and it's helpful when you're processing a lot of extreme emotions and you just need a comfortable place to sit having comfortable seating helps me relax and feel more at home and at ease having comfortable

031furniture made me feel much more secure in miss montgomery reese's office it helped provide a comfortable environment where my fellow students and i could speak openly with each other now we eventually outgrew that space i was having 21 kids come every week during warrior time and non-academic time they weren't all necessarily lgbtq some of them were considered themselves straight but felt like they were allies of the community some of those kids who weren't necessarily lgbtq would come when i'd say well why are you here and they would say well people are really nice here and i just feel like i can be myself you know so it's a student-led club they determined their priorities and and i should say that the gsa is something there's over a thousand chapters nationwide so this isn't just something

032that like we made up it's something that exists across the country um their priorities were determined in three areas advocacy work social and emotional support and community and cultural belonging some of the things we're able to do this year me and these three students we led a training for staff to so that staff would be equipped to provide safe space in their classroom and 21 staff across the district attended that there was a parent and student panel as a portion of that training and that was just an incredible to have parents and students be willing to come forward and tell their story of what it was like to be lgbtq within the amory school district it was pretty powerful they studied the amory transgender policy so that they could understand how supportive the school district

033already is of who they are they were totally surprised at what that policy said and they were they were like when they read it initially they were ready to like be defensive of themselves and they're like this is our policy like it supports us you know so it's really cool for them i think it helped them feel like they belong in the school district they did a fundraiser during the theater production at the high school theater production and they raised over 250 for the trevor project the trevor project is a national organization that fights suicide against suicide in transgender youth they did create some anti-bullying lessons for the middle school students that they hope they can present next year as part of the anti-bullying month in november and then they created an lgbt history timeline

034so they kind of studied the history of the lgbt historical figures and just how far things have come in terms of legalities so that's it i just want to thank you all for your support and also slumberland was awesome thank you to all of the mini grant presenters you are welcome to stay for the rest of the meeting we would not be offended if you left though we get it if you're still on the agenda you can't leave uh who had the vouchers this month i had the vouchers so i will uh make a motion we approve the consent agenda items second any discussion all in favor say aye aye the agenda items are approved um is there anybody down for community comments okay uh next is um administrative committee department reports okay i'll that

035lead off here with high school then pass it over to tom and then down the line we have act results for our kids only we don't have anyone else's results yet that doesn't happen until august typically we scored a composite score with our junior class of 21.1 to put that in perspective we had a 21.0 last year that ranked us as 80th place in the state and from what i'm gathering everyone's quick to want to know everyone else's score but not as quick to ask to share their own that scores are down statewide and ours was up so if the state's down and we're up that might move us up a little bit um into the maybe top 50 60 who knows but 21.1 is where we uh where we stood this last year so

036we're very happy with that seniors last day is friday i say that with jubilation and sadness simultaneously they're ready to be done and i understand it is may after all the senior walk is this friday if you have a chance to check out what that looks like we will do um a video of that and shoot it out on social media it's probably one of the more fantastic events that we do every single year it's our third year of doing that for those who are unfamiliar we start at the high school we board up the buses and bring the seniors in full graduation garb over to the elementary to the wall of sound which gets pretty crazy over there and then head over to the middle school they're not as excited about our presence but

037i'm sure they'll share their their sadness or happiness however they do so the intermediate uh they're very excited and happy as well and then i tell the seniors they'll go back to the high school will they'll generally not like you at all because they're staying and you're leaving but that's part of the deal graduation uh is on the second of june so we're counting the days down for that rather significant event so that's high school tom well at the middle school we just had a really fun event on friday it was our second annual genius hour community expo and that is where our students got to present all their project-based learning activities and presentations and visuals that they've been creating and again just a little bit on that we we gave the kids an hour

038a week to do a research project about anything they were passionate about and just kind of got out of their way we led them through guiding activities and what on how to go about it but we let them choose what they were going to research how they wanted to present it and give them a lot of voice and choice i was pretty excited because we i think we had about 250 to 300 guests that showed up to walk around and take a look at all the different events and again it's the second time we've done it so every year you try to make improvements i really want to thank our committee and our in our staff for putting all their energy into really making this work and for the first time ever we're going to

039be doing like um well we brought in some judges this time to say hey let's go around and take a look at which ones do you think really stood out and so we have some kids that are going to get like the da vinci award and then we have the best in show and then we also give students the voice and choice the students have the student choice award and we're going to make it kind of play that up next this friday and celebrate all their hard work and that should be really exciting for the kids and i think in education sometimes we forget the value of what those kids have and giving them a chance to to get to get out of their way and let them do something is very really valuable and

040you'd be surprised what they can do it's really cool we have some field trips coming up a big sixth grade field trip coming up this thursday they're going to the barron county historical museum and get to take a look at what life was like back in the day and that's really fun for those kids to see that kind of thing and we get them away from technology and cell phones and and do the other thing which is cool uh band is really up and at it right now and a lot of our students are back practicing marching in a sixth grade chance to practice marching for the first time because we have the memorial day parade coming up and then we have the clayton clear lake parade this summer so we're really excited for middle

041school band um we have some teachers i don't know is anyone going to talk about plc all right we have a group of teachers from all four buildings that are going to be going again to the plc conference and i think this is our third year we brought full staff our fourth year that we have someone reps from the district going and just again that's um really taking a look at what what do what do we feel kids need to know um how will we know if they know it and then what do we do if they do or don't know it so we're talking about setting those really vitally essential standards and how to assess them with quality formative common formative assessments and then how to respond with interventions reteaches and i had a

042teacher to today because i had a community that we were working on some standards-based grading and some philosophies and different things off of goals with some staff and a teacher said you know for one of the first times i really i look back at how i used to teach and i would give the assessment i would give the data and i'd test them and and i'd move on and you always had those kids that would get like a like a low grade and you just gave the low grade you moved on and he said i can i just didn't quite get it but now i just look at the gains they get because we don't let them off with that if you didn't get it you have to come back we're going to reteach it

043we're going to give you additional different types of instruction and then we're going to reassess show us you know it and just seeing those kids the light bulb go on sometimes with that individual attention and i think it's one of the best initiatives this district has taken on and research shows it's one of the best things you can do to make sure that kids are learning at high levels all kids so i want to thank the board for continuing to support taking staff to that conference and for all the work in the initiative that we've been doing it's been really great and so that's what we have going on at the middle school and all the district-wide for some okay i've got um the warrior walk-a-thon that i'd like to report on may 1st the

044weather was very chilly but we did get out there it is our only fundraiser that we do for the intermediate school and it's all based on physical activity so we don't sell any trinkets or t-shirts or pizza we actually the kids get pledges to see how many laps that they can do in at the track in 30 minutes and we have great prizes and good competition with the help of katie from power up she was able to get us some prizes and also some very healthy snacks that the kids got when they were done erin osserel is the one that headed that whole program up and she just did an amazing job so we're really proud of that fundraiser then coming up um this week is camp wapo for our fifth graders we go out

045on wednesday night we're there all day wednesday stay wednesday night and then all of thursday this is my 26th year that i will be going out with the fifth graders and i still enjoy every minute um and then finally on may 30th aim will have their final showcase of the year and that will be held at the high school auditorium okay i would like to share that we had 4k orientation last week and we had 98 percent attendance um very excited to report that i was just looking online because we did a survey monkey to see get feedback from our families and it's overwhelmingly positive so it's fun to see um if you want to try to guess the best part of the day any ideas what that might be the school bus ride that

046was the very favorite part of the day so thank you mr olson because there weren't older kids that's cause tom drove [Applause] yes mr olsen did a fabulous job and we just do a little tour around our campus and talk a little bit about what everything the buildings and the grades and the principles and the outdoor facilities and everything we have and yeah they really i guess they enjoyed that part but overwhelmingly positive results a couple of fun things happening you know this month is crazy busy with all kinds of activities but some of the highlights june 3rd is our elementary and intermediate school track meet the out the intermediate is in the morning and the elementary school is in the afternoon june 4th we have a title 1 parent meeting so those families that

047have children in our title 1 program are invited in to learn about the progress their children have made and just review a little bit about what title one is all about and why we have title one so that's a an important time for our families june 7th is our famous hot dog end of the year cookout and this year is our second year that we are inviting scholastic in scholastic is a book company that we use throughout the year and we are offering a buy one get one free book it's a fabulous opportunity for parents and visitors to purchase books and they get high quality books there's we make no profit everything goes to families getting a book free with their purchase so it's a fabulous way to kick off the summer we all know

048that there is a summer slide meaning our children lose momentum during the summer and so if we can keep them reading it is fabulous and so we are also very much encouraging a partnership between our school district and the public library they do a fabulous job of programming in the summer and so we encourage our families to participate in the public library as well and then just last but not least i think i've mentioned to you the pyramid model training that staff participated in basically what it is it's it's an evidence-based training and it's all based on young children's social emotional learning and what we can do as faculty and staff to meet the needs of these children we had 16 staff members able to attend that including our support staff our our teachers of

049young children and administration and the last session was on friday and i just want to thank the school board for their support in that along with the grant that katie johnson and kate weisenbeck wrote they helped fund some of the dollars for staff to attend julie bechkel from sisa 11 is an amazing asset to our district she offered the training free to us through a grant that she had and it was just an overwhelming wonderful training for all of us that attended so thank you in the world of special education um again uh a lot is pre-planning and looking to the next thing we're still working hard to complete a lot of the meetings and uh the procedures and paperwork that we have yet to get finished for this year so just echoing some of

050what ms meyer said on the pyramid model very wonderful opportunity for our staff and really the professional development that staff got there really applies itself some of those pear educators go on into clubhouse or their pair educators supporting our students through the summer school program and it's just knowledge that just continues to build and and spread across the school district and those other activities so just another added value to the training that you give staff you're making the amory school district better to accommodate for kids that have disabilities in their summer school with that looking forward again the scheduling process in full swing high school and middle school have put together starting to put together some plans for scheduling intermediate school staff met tonight the elementary school has a date on the calendar to continue

051conversations on transition planning and scheduling just want to thank all staff that are involved in that process it's a difficult conversation it can really be a a place where you learn about your colleagues values that you learn about the skills that all of the educators here in the school district david amry have and difficult conversations lead to good things motivations to support kids certainly that's what we all keep in mind when we're going through that process so i just want to thank everybody for that conversation as we move forward at the high school level um there's indicator 14 which is a post high school outcome survey we have a couple staff that are working to mail those letters out over the summer we actually get feedback from the community members of parents in the in

052the community on what their sons and daughters are doing whether they're gainfully employed and with that information that informs some of the transition planning that we can do to support kids moving forward there's also a grant fund that for every gainfully employed survey that we collect we're able to get some money back to a thousand dollars that that amount will be increasing to 1500 next year so there's also some money that comes along with that um finally our people services team reviewed the section 504 forms recently and that's just starting a conversation on another plan in the school district there's ieps there's plenty of accommodation plans that we have this is just another accommodation that supports kids and we always want to take periodically a look at our forms to make sure that they're easy

053for staff to use that they're legally compliant and then they do what they're supposed to do which is just to support students and to help staff understand that the needs that a student with a disability might have that's the world of special education i will be sleeping overnight attending my first waffle yeah next wednesday with some third and fourth and fifth graders and i may be more nervous than some of them it's just fifth grade but it is his first night and he has volunteered to stay over and i think that's wonderful so thank you for doing that i've done that before take their flashlights away when you go to bed [Laughter] or guys gonna have nightmares until it happens next for the reports are the wasb spring meetings is that you aaron sorry um

054yes um so i think that what what time was everything about the season meeting well the cc meeting which is on june 3rd right that's the spring i guess that would be almost summer yes that's the meeting that's the delegate meeting for cesar 11 delegates and there's nothing to report yet because we have not gone right but i am on the sisa board correct of control um so i we'll volunteer to attend the meeting as our delegate from this emory school board because i have to be there anyway for the season meeting that follows immediately after the uh the delegate meeting from all the csu more to report in june okay all right next um on to informational items the first item is the legislative update okay this is a big week for uh state

055budget joint finance committee here's tony ewers budget on thursday of this week the committee will then make a recommendation to the state senate and the state assembly as to what position they take on this matter we are in a divided government state so we have a rather sizable contingent of republicans and then a democrat in the governor's seat uh we have budget forecast of zero dollar increase per pupil that's likely to be what occurs based on the language that's coming out of both sides they're not even meeting at this point in time and thursday is the beginning of the formal process they have to have a budget agreed to by june 30th or you simply use this year's numbers which for anyone's finances seems like a really bad idea but it's been gridlocked for a

056while so that's the big update coming out the three priorities that governor evers has set forth he said we absolutely must have accessible affordable health care high quality education and fix our infrastructure specifically roads the first and the third are met with less resistance than the second but all three are met with resistance in some ways so we'll see what happens next we have mr benson reporting on standardized testing now the inception of this uh there's been some inquiry with me about the amount of standardized testing that occurs in the school district of amory please note what you're going to see here rather clearly is there's a lot of mandate and then they're going to see some local assessment as well so i'll turn it over to tom yeah thank you for letting me come

057up and talk about student assessments and state testing someone's going to do it i'm not talking about cool science programs or great communications like you just saw but maybe if you do some zen hand movements like you learned make it go faster so we have quite a few state required assessments and so those are those are assessments that the state sponsors requires us to do and that is the bulk of time pretty much of the lot of the assessments that you hear the first one you see up here is the forward exam um i think it goes back and or can correct me if i'm wrong but 1991 i think it was their first year the wkce test and that was like what traditionally what was your state test and we actually were on that

058test from 1991 to 2014 and things were very consistent and then in 1415 we moved over to a computerized test we went to the badger now we're on the forward test which we've been on since 2015. so this is a computerized state assessment covers english language arts math science and social studies and it's an untimed test so the times that you see here are approximations and you can see depending on the grade level you're going to be taking um two tests at the high school high school just has to do the social studies portion otherwise most of the time they're taking six tests or 11 tests and depending on your age the approximate time is is is there and you can see up to eighth grade the approximate time is about 435 minutes and we

059learn real quickly if we want our students to do well we test early in the morning and we test in small sections and then we move on and then we the next day we do another one and just by doing that in nature the students should perform better just because they aren't burning out during the day so we actually test that between five to nine days depending on the grade level so when you see how there's nine days of testing but they might be testing for just um you know 45 minutes to 50 minutes each day on that so that's the state test that when people think of the state test it's really what originally was the state test and that's oftentimes what they're referring to the high school has assessments coming up the act

060aspire test is also a computerized test for ninth and tenth grade i don't know if i go into real great detail on all of these but you know that's testing english reading math science and writing and that's why the social studies test has to come off of the forward and that's about four and four and a half hours to complete and the students take that over one day all 11th graders take the act as the state test at the high school and one of the real things i was impressed about that is that we always kind of anticipated there would be a big downfall in scores and and there was when we first went to every student taking the act other than maybe just kids that were college bound but slowly over time they'd come

061right back up again which is great so that we're showing that all kids can do it if you really make that effort and sit down on it and that's about three and a half hours a day in one day act workkeys is a test that's probably the most misunderstood around the communities but that's a state skills assessment test that really takes a look at career readiness are they ready for applied math locating information reading for information and and that's an additional test and that's taken usually the very next day after they've taken the a.c.t um and yes there's one day that the state gives you and then there's another one makeup day and then there's like this emergency day and if you don't catch it there you're in trouble and we've had some bad weather

062every time we were hitting testing so we were lucky to get a really good percentage though i believe right mr driffler but yeah the day we were going to do makeup testing was spring break so we had one day one choice we had snow day that day i'm not sure if we had emergency it would have been trouble but we got almost everyone in i think all but like one or so yes we got we got everybody in on the act oh that was great um at the elementary school they don't have the they're not part of that forward test but they're still required to report out on how well our students are doing in reading and so they take what they basically take an early literacy readings test and you can see there right

063now they're taking like the ames web plus or the ames test and that just depends on the building and how long it takes and how it's administered um and orally also uh works with the aims through um right now you work for the star i'm sorry so the aims test is going through and you see there where there and some of it is um administered electronically to small groups but most of it is done one-on-one with the student so that takes a lot of time is you have to sit down and work with the kids individually and then often off of that what we report out is um then we have to report out how well our kids did on their proficiency on that test to the state it's not something the state does we

064have to report back to them the dynamic learning maps is a required state test for kids in grades three through 11 who are intellectually disabled and cannot take the traditional state test and it's a really really small population like less one-half of one percent perhaps i know in the middle so i had four kids out of 450 you know that took it and those are students that sit down with their core teacher and they're taking an alternative type of assessment the access test is the required state test for english language learners and basically if you're new to a new student to the united states or if you come from a family that that english wasn't a native spoken language then we're required to not only provide you great service and try to increase your ability

065to read speak listen comprehend all of the different english components but then also assess them every year i want to make light though that these students that are access or ell students are also required to do the forward test and all of those as well and cheryl kind of oversees a lot of that and dave hawkinson is doing a lot of the access testing right now and he's done a really nice job with that and i think we probably have 25 maybe students that are approximately taking the access test right now and as they can score if they if they score at a high enough level they can be exited from the program recently the state also required us to throw in high school civics exam and you can't graduate from high school if you

066don't pass the civics exam um as of today all seniors have passed which just didn't look of time for a few as of today they're asking questions like where's minnesota and they have to figure it out there are some interesting questions there yeah so and that's probably basically said about one hour and um so that's those are really your required state tests that were we're mandated to give um and those are important tests there's always a big debate on are we assessing too much and how much time does it take of the day and how much time coming out of instruction and those are all things that we really are concerned about but at the same line we've really learned how to take that data from that and then drill down and try to make

067improvements for our school but i think the next the last few assessments you can see are local assessments that we give and um i don't think it would surprise anyone that the more local the more control you have over a specific assessment all the way down into a specific classroom probably increases in value toward that teacher and for that kid and for that family but the star tests our star reading and math tests those are screeners that we're going to give our students and they're quick screeners they can take up to 30 minutes and we're able to do give every kid that screener three times a year um for example in middle school we'll give it in the fall on both and then we're going to take the results and we'll sit down in data

068teams and we'll say take take a look at okay which kids really are scoring below the 25th percentile is kind of a cut off which ones we really are concerned about and then if so um what did they do the year before or what have they shown on the state tester what are you seeing in the classroom and then we're oftentimes on planning interventions for those students to try to bring those skills and remediate as much as we possibly can to intervene early intervention and so it's an early screening test that just gives us an idea of how well each student is doing and then we give that three times a year aims web math tests for grades k through five and that's another benchmarking test that they do locally that helps follow along with

069the other testing that they're doing in the classroom to make decisions for kids on how to intervene and best help them to go quickly dibbles is a reading test for grades three through five which is also another test where you're sitting down and you're taking oftentimes like a two minute reader you're having the kids read and you're taking a look at how well they're reading what what how's how their fluency how many words per minute and all of that fountus and pinell is another reading assessment for grades k2 and there's a diagnostic reading assessment um and then but before i go to the last two is that the individual classrooms um are really to where there's a lot of really high quality assessment and we're really working on improving those assessments and we had another

070meeting in my building today about how to really really make those assessments valuable and basically that is okay i this is what i i told you off my plc this is the standard that i'm measuring and i want to make sure that every student's made it so i'm going to assess them with my own classroom assessment maybe if i'm a fourth grade teacher i'm giving that we're all giving that assessment so then we're sitting down as a team to talk about how everyone did and then how can we work together to help those kids that didn't get it and so that that local assessment has a lot of value to it as well and those don't have to take a lot of time they can be real quick the youth risk behavior survey is an

071assessment of at risk factors typically right now we're giving that in kids between 7th grade and 12th grade orally has given the me and my world survey in the past but basically what that's doing is it's looking at it's an optional survey but it it takes a look at at-risk behaviors what types of things maybe kids are doing that we might be concerned about or things to celebrate we use the data from that to go after grants and go after research and to go after making improvements in our building if we're seeing something but oftentimes if you don't have that kind of data optimally you're not going to be able to secure a lot of grants that we're doing and we have a lot of grants that we write every year and i don't know

072if the community realizes that hundreds of thousands of dollars that are sitting out there that if we didn't write the grants we wouldn't be able to do some of the great programming that we do and then um the student engagement survey is a survey that to measure school connections and so we're giving that at the middle school right now so it's basically how engaged are they and what are the factors that maybe are getting in the way of that and i just realized i probably skipped some of our state required ones didn't i nationally oh yes so the jump back i'm sorry um the nape test is a nationally required test and that test you're kind of randomly selected at times i think in the district we've given it maybe four times in 20 years

073i didn't have to give it this year but sean and or did um and but to be honest with you the test isn't that complicated to give it's the prep work that they require you to do on the back end it's but it's horrible just put it that way there's the things that they make you do to make sure that everything is done the way that the national test requires and the hard part about that is that they come in then and they have these teams of people that come in and they do this test and you never see the results again you never get results per kid but what it does is it throws your students in with your state and you do you can get state and national results compared to other countries

074and so that's like the net they call that the nation the national test or the national report card that you may be heard of and that's the nape test and i've given it twice in my building in in the past but again that's not something that we do that often unfortunately when you do have to do it it's right about the same time as your state test so you're really overburdened with paperwork on on the back side and then the ap tests those are the advanced placement exams for 11th and 12th grade for those kids that took an ap class as you know there's testing in amory includes us government environmental science literature chemistry psychology u.s history biology calc all of those and those take approximately two to three hours per subject and those are

075students that are taking those classes that want to score well in that to get college credit and and if you're going to get that college credit and you're choosing to take the class then so it's not necessarily required but it would be if you so choose to be in that so those are all the different assessments and there's quite a few of them so um and like like i said to parents too because we we are constant that there's a lot of assessments out there we understand that a lot of that and majority of it we don't have control over a lot of the local assessments that we do though are real quick things that we're doing and those are giving us really good data about how to help your child or or their students

076make great improvement any questions i have a couple um so for the ap classes is that something that our ap students have to pay i mean i know they cost money for tests do they pay part of those fees themselves they do it's ninety four dollars a test unless they're a free and reduced uh student and then it's zero dollars to them and fifty two dollars to the district that's the law but if you pass the test it saves you a lot on the tuition um i guess i'm wondering like what kind of feedback you get from your staff as far as you know testing i mean it feels to me as a parent when i'm getting these scheduled sometimes that i'm going are you learning anything i mean like you know what i mean

077over these couple of weeks where they're having and again maybe because the nape test was this year also so it was like the nape and the the forward test well um we have been really cognizant of not trying to interfere with classrooms so we give the teachers a lot of flexibility in helping create the test schedule within the required times that giving example we used to test all of the eighth grade then all of the seventh grade all of the sixth grade and even though the testing for those grade levels was um the same amount of time the special ed teachers that had kids in all those classes were tripling their days that they were having the test and pretty soon we were like well that's not good and so jess smith who's sitting over

078here right now would tell you that she really appreciated some so we said okay let's how can we restructure and so um it does take a lot of time out of the classroom but what we try to do is to minimize it as much as we can be smart with the schedules that go around it um and and i guess too you know like you said every one of these tests also comes with required prep work that you have to do with kids explaining them how to use the computer before the tools and and things so there's time that has to go into that as well and that we don't have a lot of control over but we do try to minimize it as much as we can but i i also think that there

079is learning that takes place when they're testing i mean it's not like an instructional but they're learning what as they go through the test they're learning about themselves they're learning about how to apply their knowledge so it's not just a total waste to say when our kid is in a test that they're not learning anything that day because they do and and good skills um to just test taking skills are good things to learn as well i think they become self-aware too of what they know and what they felt confident in and what they realized that they didn't know and didn't feel confident and i've heard you know from kids like my kids that come home be like i blew that i didn't know anything but i think it did real good there yeah and

080i think too we really said we sat back and started to evaluate how well kids are doing and what we can do to support them better and we can teach them you know how to take the test and we can teach them um obviously the skills they need to get into it but the biggest thing is to teach them those self-efficacy skills to say hey i want to do well i'm going to take pride in myself i'm going to put in the effort it's going to take um oftentimes for kids that aren't scoring real high it's not that they didn't have the ability but they got to the question and after you know after the 11th test and the 435th minute they get to that and i'm like i've had it they just you know

081and so we have to teach them that perseverance and and to take pride in that and so we just we've done everything you possibly can do from making sure they eat breakfast before they test each day moving them around getting emotion talking to them convincing them how important this is down to setting goals for them individually and as groups if you guys can do this this is the types of things that you can the rewards that you earn in life and i'm trying to help them set goals and plan and oftentimes if i'm a kid and i'm taking an ap class or i'm taking an act i'm seeing where that's taking me and i'm it's only just right across the you know right across the door there when you're in third or fourth grade sometimes

082they don't always see the value in it and so we really have to sit down and try to explain to them um what's going on and then you have those kids that really like it because it's like they like testing and they get on i was like shane curtis's kids or something i really like doing that so i would just maybe make the recommendation as much as much as you can emphasize that information to parents you know i feel like maybe parents aren't always seeing the value of the testing or seeing you know the value of helping their students i know you know i know we get letters home like it's testing make sure they're going to sleep you know whatever but even helping them see the value of what you do with the data

083and how you know how this is important and valuable right because i've heard you know i've her parents be like yeah it's only testing whatever you know i mean and so to help change that mindset at home too right as much as we can and i think you know maybe at the middle school it gets harder because you're less connected as parents you know versus you're getting family folder notes all the time from that and and i think too i get where they've been through it's three or four times now so they're uh okay right stay test but and i think it was it's so important as far as on what we can learn from it and what we can do for kids but it's even more important to know if you're not doing well

084the state's going to jump in and have big opinions about that you know and so um as far as coming back and evaluating schools and again that's where i'm a little more critical because just all right that's i just looked for approval and but i'm where does that start that's why more critical is not so much not as much taking the assessment but maybe not so much taking the assessment but um putting that much you know just that much on one test and then you can evaluate the value of everything that we do every day for 100 you know 186 days that we have those kids in that classroom that we're going to put all of that value off of that one test and that bothers me a little bit because there's so much you

085what you saw today from these kids and speaking and all this is not going to be measured by that test but um and so there's a lot of learning that goes on in the other parts but um we do know that it's important and we want to start this and obviously the state says it's important but that's i think too when we come back and we present on all the different great things we're doing there's a lot of lenses that we want to look at as far as how successful we are although we're really happy because traditionally we are one of the top if not the top performing district in in this csa and our middle border conference traditionally on this test so we're proud of that but and again we just want to make

086sure that we take a look at everything that wasn't so bad right it wasn't bad at all that's because i didn't say one night well you're using the data that's the important thing that you know through all this assessment and testing you're you're using it with the staff where it can be in some cases it's just not applicable but in a lot of places it is it's just when you look at those minutes though i mean that is a lot of minutes you're telling me a lot of minutes and i think those it seems like those grades you have orally where it seems like they overlap with several different tests and it's just that it's just and this doesn't even count the pre-work for kids at the high school the ap bubble in filling in

087all the pre-registration materials takes about two hours before you even take it take a shot at the first question a-c-t same thing yeah to albers to get ready to take and now i wonder with um with the computerized tests i've heard that students tend to be more likely to just click instead of paying more attention to the question oh absolutely no absolutely when they were taking the test well first of all i'm a paper and pencil type person anyway so if i'm like i don't like reading off of an e-reader so i like the book in my hand and i like to write and i actually think better that way and i think too that when the kids are sitting down with that book and the teachers were watching them and they knew they were

088turning that book in there was account more accountability than there is on this computer they hit enter and we don't see it we don't even know they could have what i don't know what they wrote um yeah so that that's true i mean like just with my son that in math he tends to just go i think it's close to this one instead of doing the problem and you know so we say like get out a piece of paper and actually do the problem and find the right answer don't just and those are tests those are the test taking skills too that we teach because we provide them all with scratch paper and no matter how much we say it it's they're still those that don't it's it's a challenge but all right um so

089we they do the act aspire and that's kind of just a precursor to getting ready for the act and kind of like a projection of how they're going to do on these same tests same order 9th grade 10th grade so it's the precursor but they're given an hour longer to do that test why do you know uh the the time is different based on the amount of time that they have for screen time for act aspire it's slightly shorter in most cases and the um the difference between online versus paper and pencil the act has still done the paper and pencil variety which i frankly think is much better way to go because the pct is given it's three and a half hours and then the aspire is four and a half hours i think

090it should be switched yeah it's crazy because that i think it is it was actually transposed in the numbers i think is what occurred on our end the value of the act is that it's free this is a college reportable score that kids can use it it's free and it's not a free test to be doing on your own and kids take it very seriously and most people care it's because they know they can use it for college in some cases they stress themselves out so much their score probably goes down slightly but it's a big deal that's another question again they all have to be as juniors can they take it again because a lot of times you increase your score or can they take it before their junior year you could take the

091act 25 times if you want to pay we take we have we had 12 kids took it in eighth grade this year and um parents oftentimes will ask me well what's the value of of that to take it into middle school you have to score at a certain level off the forward test to qualify through the new mods program but um i always tell parents i said well your son or daughter is going to get exposure to it and just like anything on the act traditionally if you every time you take it you tend to score a little higher until you camp um but almost always there's that bump after and it's just that familiarity and then we a little more relaxed because you've done it before and you have the confidence that you go

092in it's going to give your child that and um you know and then we've had kids score you know and it's also motivational for them because they get home and they say hey i scored about where an average student in high school would score because they're like a more advanced student at the middle school um you know then we had the class and kid get in the upper 30s when he was in eighth grade so we knew he would do well um so yeah there's it's a it's a pretty valuable thing but you can take it multiple times i know all my kids took it a couple of times it's not uncommon is it offered here in america we offered it here in emory every may okay but you can go elsewhere you can pick

093it again and again and again if you want to yeah yeah no i just wondered if you know if it's typical or if they pretty much just take it because it's right as juniors and that's it the single biggest score other than your gpa and getting into college those two numbers i would say majority of the kids that are if they're interested in going to college are going to take it more than the time that they take it their junior year they'll take it again if you get a 36 then you're good to go but that's not everybody right i didn't get a 36 i know i know the next item is a professional development hour process okay per your request from meetings ago we're here to talk about the pdh process the purpose of

094the delay was to make sure we got all the way through the transition window which we are now successfully through the transition window is to move people forward from their 1819 contract into the 1920 contract year on april 26th anyone that wanted to do that made the declaration to do that so now we have gone one full cycle of pdh now we're going to talk about what that looked like so if you could move ahead a slide the professional development program we're trying to connect the professional development to compensation this isn't an easy thing to do because you need to first to define what professional development is and you need to draw the line between what it is that you're doing and how you're going to be compensated for it that's been a tricky process

095for us to figure out our goal is to make our staff better via professional development which which could potentially make them a stronger teacher further it's a collaborative effort we are all about plc here we are sharing ideas because many of these pdh opportunities are not taken by one person in isolation they're taken by groups of people working collaboratively on a specific item or is a group of people presenting to other staff and lastly if it's going to be a win for our teachers is likely going to be a win for our kids and likely it went for our district and it has been so this is what the certified staff compensation scale looks like there are two pages here this goes from the a1 level which would be theoretically the first year teacher entering

096from uw river falls and year one of education in any line of work here in the district as a teacher you travel through the first second and third levels a one a two a three and the way you do that is by accruing 90 hours of professional development or six graduate credits six times 15 gets you to your 90 hours once you are through those 90 credits then you move on to b1 and the same thing holds true there b1 b2 b3 and then you move to c then d then e so through the course of the first five levels there depending on how aggressive you want to be you take you about 10 to 15 years when we move to the last alternative compensation package from a steps and lanes you're in for instance

097you're number six and you have a bachelor's degree plus 15 credits your salary is we moved away from that to an alternative compensation skill three years two or three years ago and then we moved to this scale which was directly connected to professional development the goal was for it to be a financially sustainable for the district but just as importantly meaningful for the staff person because just to make them do it just to make them do it seems punitive and seems counterproductive so we're trying to make it meaningful and in many ways it has become that because folks are generating their own professional development rather than sending them somewhere and do a canned presentation something they're not even going to use in the classroom once you get into the f level you'll see there f1

098through f10 you have less professional development to move from year to year but there is still 30 professional development hours that are required of you to make that movement if someone wants to stay put and we haven't bumped into many of those people you don't need to do any professional development all you can just stay right where you're at we had a couple of folks this year that have stayed put but we have suspicions that the reason they did is because they're going to be retiring next year so there really wasn't a whole lot that they could gain there on to the next slide you'll see the remainder of levels the significance of the g level is a master's degrees required in order for you to be g1 so you could get zillions of professional

099development hours at the f level if you don't have a master's degree you don't proceed forward once you have your master's degree you then proceed forward in the way that you see there on through g on through h and then into the i level and cap out our salary schedule at i8 and there are folks here that have been in the i category after placement last year and still continue to be to get all the way to the end you're looking at 20 to 25 years of experience to be into that level which is what you would expect so on to the next slide you'll see and let me stop there do you have questions on the scale itself because it's having seen it just for a little bit of time it might be a

100little hard to comprehend because there's a lot going on there with all those letters and numbers okay the next slide shows you your path by which to get pdh there are really three paths the first is college credits probably the cleanest and easiest i go to river falls i take three credits of work i get 45 pdhs 3 times 15 there's my professional development for the year i'm going to bank them and move on to the next year or you can do some form of district approved professional development there's a ton of technology pdh that's out there there's always something new to be learned in technology so you simply schedule out four next tuesday after school at four o'clock i'm doing such and such and i show up and i'm on the attendance list i

101get credit for that you could teach a pdh that's listed there or you could help coordinate someone else teaching one and lastly an action research project for instance at the high school we have an acp initiative that's mandated by the state which is academic and career planning so there's a group of folks this summer that are looking on the next phase of academic career planning at the high school and declaring some hours to be able to do that all of those hours are run through the administrative team every single tuesday we bring the items for approval and we don't approve them all in rubber stamp form sometimes send them back with more clarity needed or simply state that's just not professional development we can't approve that so we have a system in place for approval

102or denial once they're approved or denied then we have a system to track then we'll get to that in a second here are some examples of district approved pdh in the form of classes a variety of things there in district and out of district that people have done for course work you'll see all of those examples they're sort of there in the center examples approved this year numerous opportunities college credits these are credits that are taken you could do them online or physically present for master's degree credit graduate credit undergraduate credit technical college credit there are all sorts of options the number of online options is expanding rapidly so it's hard for us to keep up on the legitimacy of those online options because we don't know those outfits in some cases they're simply too

103new we know river falls that's pretty quick to approve so a lot of classes have been taken thus far this year so sean how do you distinguish what is kosher and what's not what the first thing we require of them is a link to what the program is and it's pretty quick to figure out that bob's history page is probably not the best resource for a social studies teacher to get pdh you could figure out pretty fast via the outfit what's legitimate and further you can also see who's making the request in combination with the others around them that are making the requests and what they're going to do with it because there's a form they actually fill out to determine what they're going to do with that request it isn't just you take the

104class and it's done you have to declare what its purpose is so it's uh pretty quickly uh you arrive at its legitimacy pretty fast and is a college credit a college credit a college credit no matter what because it's a college credit it's a college credit it's not investigated to see what it was or what we do if we if it isn't clear we do because sometimes we'll say it's 20 hours well i'm not really just i mean 20 hours of your time does that mean 20 credits what does that mean so a lot of times hours means literally hours we're doing it friday evening from four to nine and then saturday from eight to three there's a lot of those that are out there and one of the items here that i if i

105have not already covered covered a lot of stuff is it has to be done outside of the school day not during the school day so weekend options are often times when people are selecting the four o'clock option is an after school option so it's not done double dipping in that way during the school day were you asking if every class was approved no matter what the class was is that yeah if a college credit as long as it's a college credit is it just approved because it's a college credit well we we require them to submit to get the class approved so that it's there's an application process and they have to list down there what is the class what is the class what are you going to learn in that class what are you

106going to do with that class so it isn't just you know river falls three credits name of class it's much more extensive than that i've attended some pretty hanky classes i have to wouldn't qualify for that i have to okay action research project these are determined by the the staff that are doing the action research they're brought to us on tuesday mornings to go ahead and for approval or denial there's a variety of those you'll see listed here there is an absentee project that's going on that had its inception probably six months ago where we're looking at absenteeism k-12 that's sort of proliferated into a much bigger topic looking at processes for attendance looking at policies on attendance k-12 to try and make sure we're doing the best we can to get kids here each

107every day so this is what ultimately qualifies for professional development i'm not going to do the cardinal sin of powerpoint presentation by reading you a powerpoint slide the 10 items that you see listed there are what we note as professional development because it aligns with one of our wisconsin teaching standards so that's what we want it to be the next line indicates what you need to do in order to be able to use your professional development hours for trade of salaries so you needed to indicate how many hours that you did and you're going to declare that third box there i'm trading x pdhs to move from x level to x level and say for instance i'm turning in 60 pdh to move from c3 to d1 i mean that would be what it would

108look like they had to turn that in by april 26th and then we move everyone forward accordingly based on their having completed that work and they have a contract which reflects that in the 1920s school year they have until the 16th of august to demonstrate the work's been completed via transcript or whatever it has to be though we'll work with people if a transcript isn't yet available on august 16th so that's the process for pdh trade if a teacher or staff member took the pdh development hours training say in october is there a time frame that they're required to turn that form in to get credit or is it just by april 26th and then that's it they have to have approval in order for it to be to be something they're going to do

109in districts so you take that form fill it out turn it in and then do the coursework or the project or do that next tuesday after school activity you have to have prior approval so you kind of have an idea of what's going on before all of a sudden you just get this and this is the manner by which we're going to articulate the day trade but the next slide you'll see here determines how we're going to track it we actually have a website where you track your hours so we can and becky created this and thank goodness she did because now we can keep track of where everyone's at so if you're a staff person want to know how many pdh hours that you have your old method was to pick up the phone

110and dial extension 272. now the the method is to go onto the website and you can look for yourself and you can see and this is a sort of a sample of what it will look like and then when someone makes that process of transitioning forward with their salary by trading at pdh you'll see it says they're trading in 20 and minus 20 from your total and you move forward and you keep trekking along on to the next professional developments so the idea of creating professional development which is connected to salary has been achieved is it meaningful i would imagine in a lot of cases if not most cases it is it's not in all cases and lastly the financial sustainability piece which is the piece we always have to keep our eye on now

111that we know who moved from what from this present year to the next school year now we can know exactly what one year of movement looks like financially and then you can make adjustments accordingly or leave things as is my hunch is most everyone that can move is going to move and my hunch is that it is going to be financially sustainable because salary is never going to be a situation where it always remains the same you always have to project cost increases there in any line of work but you will know more what that looks like and movement in the month of july and purposely in july because we have to process what has occurred here in the last three weeks and we'll bring that back and you can see it for yourself thanks

112becky that's awesome i couldn't agree more so one other question so you said it couldn't happen during the school day so um what i mean i don't know exactly what the process is but if somebody is going to a workshop you know if they're going to cesa or some kind of workshop or something and they are i don't know how that works not during the school day it has to be something that's done after hours well you could i if you wanted to i'm not sure that is professional to take a day off to go to a training to get a salary increase whilst the sub teaches your kids that's not usually happening i don't know a case where it ever has happened but it's not something that's done during the school day so teacher

113in service days those are not professional development hours okay those aren't either you know so we have we have a lot of teachers that maybe go to a conference during the day and and they get you know like an in-service allotment to go to it and but they're not allowed to use those hours for us so if they get sent to an in-service conference but what they do is for instance greta mccarty does a lot of this as library media in our technology integrator she goes to sisa she brings back the information and the next thing you know about three weeks later there's a pdh offering after school next tuesday at four and guess who's teaching it yeah greta mccarty because what she learned she's teaching and she'll get the development hours for you and

114then whoever it gets that's happening all over the place which is it's really great because it's cheaper for us to do it for our own staff than to send everyone to cisa but otherwise people are going on weekends yeah in the summer or like the sixth grade did their book study and they did it after right after at four o'clock or you know they would meet and they did i don't know how many hours did you do is 11 16 hours on this book study and then they then they came and presented to a staff meeting which no one got professional development for because it was a required staff meeting but then we kind of were saying okay this is what we did and this is what we learned now we're going to be doing

115some professional development opportunities for you next year and then we have a lot of staffing really interested in learning more about what their efforts are so yeah thank you it's been a very successful process we've made a lot of progress here in the last six months it's a lot of work yes it was but it's much clearer now much clearer we had staff meetings with all four staffs and that's what they reported to us it's much clearer we understand what we have to do is the meeting over so we can go get it done basically and yeah they've taken care of business all right um the next item all right now we're on to action items uh the first item is the gas pump donation okay emory express down downtown has a pump that's devoted

116towards uh the emery school district they have a percentage of proceeds from that pump that are donated to the district you'll see here on this picture uh the store manager at the amory express sharina olson and the owner of the amory express doug reinhardt and myself we needed a bigger check i think um next time i'm working a bigger check are kindly donating 749.39 this is a quarterly not exactly because we sort of sits the beginning of the year we're working through the kinks we want to do a quarterly donation um each and every quarter that money's going to be donated in the the spot i've worked with doug on this that we wanted to put it it's not going to the district to pay to use doug's words the xl energy bill we're sending

117it to the district to be used for kids that need help the angel fund is where we're going to split it between all four buildings the angel fund is we're all situations where kids have need financial whether that be shoes or a jacket or a field trip or whatever it is that we help those kids financially and it will always go directly there until doug tells us otherwise because it is after all a donation ah in july i'm going to come with a presentation on the um angel fund because there are there's another group that's stepping forward that wants to donate as well and they want it to go directly to needy kids and in the angel fund we can guarantee that's exactly what's going to happen so perfect it's up to you to accept

118the donation we'll have to accept the 749.39 donation from amy express designated for the angel fund second any other discussion all in favor say aye aye all right all right it's approved okay express yeah yeah cool i read about that in the paper yes very cool um okay next is the proposed playground purchases at this time i'm going to ask my favorite coal presenter to come up to the mic because you can work with me on this team i'll do the talking time i promise no no it's your top it's you this is the present state of the elementary and intermediate school playground mats i know you probably don't spend a lot of time out there i as the father of some elementary folks there are some issues there um this is what it looks

119like presently so what you're here this evening to do is to accept a bid for the replacement work on that and it's not just the mats we're also talking about the mulch we're talking about the mat you're talking about i'm assuming the dirt the peed rock there you go that's why you're there tom keep going sand boxes exactly so we accepted three bids for this and this is the bid we are are going to go with with your approval and the purpose of this bid is because they were comparable in price and further this was the only bid that included all the product in one um one order that we needed one vendor so this will do the trick to upgrade what we have going on out there when will this be delivered i mean

120i'm assuming summer oh we haven't done nothing yet okay we haven't ordered nothing yet right yeah but it's the hope is to get it through the summary before the school year begins by all means is there any prep work time that has to be done by you guys to get that ready or just smooth it out and the matches pull out the new mats underneath the swings is there a motion to accept the material purchase yeah suppose to move forward with the proposed playground material purchases for eleven thousand four hundred fifteen dollars get those kids some new stuff out there oh second okay all in favor say aye aye all right anyone opposed all right thank you welcome good job painless if that plant could get any bigger i think he wants tom wants him

121to swallow it up over there all right next we have the uh ple pricing good evening it's that time of year again to decide what we want to do with um our meal pricing so you can go the next slide um the paid lunch equity is basically the tool to help determine to make sure that our reimbursement rates for our free and reduced price meals are not going to pay for the students that do not qualify for those benefits so i entered in the information for this year and according to the tool they are recommending an increase that should be 17 cents which gets waited out amongst all of the schools but it caps at an increase of 10 cents so right now our weighted average was currently at two dollars and 83 cents so

122based on the tools recommendations i played around with the numbers and if we increase the elementary meals by 10 cents it would meet the 2.92 cents and they're they've recommended a weighted average of 2.93 i believe that the recommendation of the higher price increase is due to us not increasing the prices last year because of um the oh my gosh the balance yes the balance i can't think of the word the fund balance in food service yes um so you can go to the next slide um so they are giving us that exemption that's the word um they're giving the exemption again to school food authorities if their balance was positive as of december 31 2018. um our balance on that date was indeed positive um in the tune of 260 thousand so the next

123slide these are the recommendations that i would like to give for what we do i would like to file the exemption along with the following price changes so last year we had to change our pre-k meals to meet the pre-k recommendations through the cacfp guidelines my interpretation of that was not exactly correct because the guidance that they gave was just minimums so we changed the whole way that we were producing our meals and portion sizes so therefore we reduced the price to them at my big review this year i determined that we did not need to do all of that extra work because it ended up being a lot on my staff so i would propose going back to the same portion sizes and meals as the k through second grades get and putting their

124price back to the same as what k through second grade is getting um and then i would recommend not changing any of the meal prices for the other grades as you guys are probably well aware it is kind of headlines right now i feel like we're always kind of in the spotlight um i know chobani yogurt just donated a large chunk of money to get um some lunch accounts out of debt so i think we would again be doing a disservice to raise those prices i do recommend raising the adult meal prices from 375 to 4 my three years of being here we have not ever raised the adult meal prices and if we can raise the kids i think that maybe we can try and find a different source of revenue to reduce that

125effect on the kids the milk prices we are getting a new vendor this year and no matter what vendor we had our milk prices were going up so i'm recommending also increasing the milk price by five cents and then lastly the extra entrees those as well have not gone up since i've been here so i recommend a 50 cent increase um the extra entrees are just basically the main item that students can buy in specifically the high school if they want more food so it's like a la carte item so not part of the program and then if we do want to go this route and file the exemption then we would be set stacey is that milk price is that for just at lunch breakfast is there some look break in like that elementary

126so is that do they have to pay for that same price during our milk breaks time too yeah so unless they're free or reduced right we participate in the wisconsin school day milk program so students that are free or reduced get a free milk for milk break and then the students that are paid have to pay for it does pre-k still get a free milk isn't that something so pre-k is still on currently the district is paying the milk breaks for that so we did have discussion about that cheryl and i and sean have all talked about it and i would recommend that they also be included with the wisconsin school day milk program so they would start paying for their milk the paid students would those students that are free and reduced would get

127free and how how many times a day is milk break for them once so they're getting a milk offered at their breakfast they get a milk with milk break and then they also get a milk at lunch and they have to so but that all has to be paid for so if the child takes three milks a day that's a dollar twenty a day in milk if they're in full pay if they're full pay right uh they're not paying like in addition to their meal price though the milk is included in their meal price right okay okay so they brought a bag lunch and had a milk with their bag lunch and do we um do we have good participation with kids drinking for milk i feel like it's gone down a little bit i

128know specifically we don't have chocolate milk currently do we have no we have chocolate milk we do harley's like yes we do no people have asked me to take me on the ship no people have asked me if i would take it away because we did take it away 4k can't have chocolate milk but all of the other grades can so and i won't take that away 4k can't have it at all like 4k can't have chocolate milk no it's their guidelines and it's skim isn't it chocolate yep it's chocolate skim do you think more kids are drinking water more like more water yeah because it's offered right in the cafeteria the water is right there yeah all right all right motion to make uh is there a motion for these price recommendations okay i've

129made a motion to accept the recommended price changes in our lunches and to keep the k-12 lunch prices the same second okay any other discussion questions all in favor say aye aye thank you thanks all right now we're into the curriculum orders we are this is the conclusion of at least a three-year journey for our teachers in pre-k through fifth grade and so it's gone through all of the paperwork that's needed to go through the meetings as you know i reported a year ago that we were going to we selected down to two programs and we did pilot both of those programs it was pearson envision and houghton mifflin expressions and i'm here to tell you that the vote came out for houghton mifflin expressions which is the program that we currently have but it's

130an enhanced program and so if we just becky i think just going through this very quickly it's an excellent program it's it's all about investigating motivating students engaging students and empowering students kind of going back to that whole we want to make sure that we teach them math that they can apply later like apply in science class or they can apply on the test it isn't just um sitting down and filling out worksheets it's very engaging there is research behind this program dr fuson is the author of the program she there's a little bio about her just down a little bit further but excellent the test scores have proven through research that this is an excellent program dr fuson has done a lot of research it's all right in the materials one of the things

131that is improved is she's put her research right into the lesson so if it's um on decimals her research is there and not all in the front of the book that maybe got passed up as the teachers were getting to their lessons so i think that's great um it's different because we're using many different things um from the rest of what's out there they want to make sure that you're focusing it's coherent and then that big r word is rigor we need to make sure that we're always pushing our kids to learn more it has to be harder as mr benson said that perseverance word is one that we really have to teach kids they want to quit when it gets hard you can't learn when it gets hard and you quit you have to

132persevere and so that's one of our things the rigor and then of course technology is something enhancements in technology we're one-to-one so we want to make sure that it fits nicely with our programs or with our computers there's a personal math trainer and we can teachers can go in and actually assign kids homework based on what their need is so that's new with this and then the hmh player it's all helping the teacher to provide the program to the students and then those real world concepts it's not just learning about math in a math book it's how does math connect with the real world and then of course we still have some um paper pencil i think back maybe a couple we skipped over it right there we want to make sure that we still

133have that student activity book we don't have a hardcover math book it's a consumable that we go through every year but it's very good for kids showing their work we want to make sure that they do that um in class and then there's like an online also ebook for our students or if the so consumable activity books with this grade level do they get destroyed eaten up lost is there a way to print like some of that material from the online then yes absolutely they don't take their workbooks home though so they shouldn't get lost but if they did we can print them off there yes and then just making sure that the one the big word up there is math talk it's having kids turn and talk to themselves about math during the lesson

134having kids to come up to the screen teaching other kids um all about that math talk and then finally i think well we missed maybe a little the differentiation is very important because we want to make sure that once we look at the standards and we've got kids that aren't meeting that standard we have to be able to back up for them fill their holes up and so that's that differentiated curriculum if they're meeting the standard then we want to enrich them as well and so there's materials for all of those uh personalized assessment is also there teachers really like that um and so that and then teacher addition and training is all together so that's houghton mifflin and our 4k program preschool is just a little bit different you know that houghton mifflin had

135a 4k program but our teachers it just didn't click with them and both cheryl and i support we want the teachers to be the most comfortable with their materials and so they opted to uh i think if you keep it's not on there okay oh it isn't on there all right um the 4k decided to go with what's called creative curriculum for preschool and it should be in your packet it's a whole it is a program that is directly uh created for 4k students and art there it is our teachers that's what they wanted to do and so and totally approved both cheryl and i approve that purchase so what we're here tonight is to tell you we're just slightly over budget not much um between it for so if we go all the way

136from 4k through 5th grade we have a proposal that you have in front of you from math expressions the common core 2018 hybrid edition it's a rollover the reason it's a rollover is because it's the current program that we're using we're just getting the newest and the best and it's a six year program so we will get the online service for the next six years um and for all of that is one hundred thousand six one hundred six uh wait one hundred thousand six hundred and one dollars and one cent um so and and that's an estimate because by the time um we're re with our real numbers uh we don't order until after the first of july because this is all next year's money um it you know we should be really close to

137that 100 000 mark and this isn't new money this is budgeted money every done curriculum every year forever so it's a planned expense and your budget is a hundred thousand it's a hundred thousand zero over about like six hundred one dollars yes in one cent and one second don't forget don't forget and this is i just wanna really congratulate our teachers they honestly we took three years to study this math program it's very very important to us and to our students in pre-k through fifth grade so they just did a fantastic job of working through it um lindsay bruder was here earlier tonight she is the chair of that committee and she's done a fabulous job organizing that so i'm here to ask for your approval of these two programs so i make a motion

138that we approve the math curriculum second any other discussion all in favor say aye thank you all right next on the agenda um is the approval of the 2019-2020 open enrollment application okay you'll see up on the screen the green is the open enrollment that are applying into the school district of amory in the red is the open enrollment applying out from amory to another location there are 11 in the green column there are 27 in the red column we don't want it to be as such we would like to flip that reverse that curve you're being asked to approve or deny the open enrollment ends is really not much you can do about denying the open enrollments out you could certainly say no they could certainly apply to the state and you will have

139wasted your time probably because the answer in the end will be yes this is for the traditional open enrollment window open enrollment has uh in recent years switched to a 12 month year process you simply need to apply for alternative open enrollment and do that via application and typically you're able to move from district to district at any point during the year this just happens to be the traditional month of february open enrollment so it's up to you to approve or deny the green column in essence of kids coming in from other districts move to accept the open enrollment into the district for 2019 2020 11 students second okay all in favor say aye aye aye what you're going to hear next month this is a piggy back off of this item is the projections

140of our child care enrollments at clubhouse into district we had talked about that but to get that done in clear form we need to get through the school year to be able to see that more clearly because then we can see all the movement that's occurred so in june i'm going to bring to you kids enrolled and what happens to that kid do they stay do they end up going to school here or they go elsewhere i would contend two things you could even out your open enrollment ins and outs with a more expansive child care option and i would also contend you could have an upward surge in your open enrollment your enrollment i should say if you had more spots to place kids and why i say that is it's all about employment

141it would be nice to be able to have a child care option where folks that work in this town can bring their kids with drop them at daycare get them at the end of the day and go back to the resident district but i think you would find if people brought their children this direction with them to work they would drop them and eventually they would enroll them because they would move here because they would find out all the wonderful things we're doing in amory that's our hope but that's a much bigger conversation as we move forward all right thank you next we have health partners contract renewal this is simply the formal vote based on what you were presented by j.a counter last month remember we are in the middle of a nine percent

142rate cap meaning this is year one entering into year two what your if you vote uh in the affirmative you're voting to enter into a third year with health partners via ja counter a third party administrator negotiating that and the cap would then be seven percent and that is a cost savings to the district of some fifty five thousand dollars so my recommendation would be that you would approve that and lock things in at seven percent with health partners i'll make that motion second okay any other disqus discussion all in favor say aye aye all right employee handbooks this is round two of revisions remember we began the process with certified staff and support staff back in march and looking at the handbooks and remember there are two handbooks for each employee group the handbook

143itself and then the staff the benefits and compensation compensation benefits is actually how it's listed so there are two of each you looked at handbooks last month made many changes already there so what you're going to see here this evening are the compensation and benefit handbooks for certified staff and support staff we're going to start here with certified staff you'll see up on the screen the notion of six graduate credits has simply been removed from this document because all we do with credits anyway is convert them to pdh so we just multiply it by 15 so it's sort of redundant to have it there twice so that would be removed and you could chime in at any moment or wait till the end however you want to do that so that would be the first

144item that we would change credits there as well the last month you talked we talked about the handbook itself and there was a lot of reference to pdu in pdh so that we're combining that into the presentation you just saw that documentation is going to be removed from this handbook it sort sort of becomes a third item for each employee group because it's really that large to be a third item all by itself we are asking you to move summer school compensation there are two rates of pay at twenty four dollars and twenty eight dollars to thirty dollars per hour for all types of work that are done during summer school you asked for the financial impact of those to make that change if we used similar hours in 2019 2020 school year using eighteen

145nineteen hours work it would be about three thousand three hundred dollars to make that change now it would be different if more hours are worked or less hours work but that would be using comparable hours and our plan this summer is comparable selection it is comparable there are only so many hours in the summer to work so it's you sort of locked in in a way in the benefits section you'll see two year changes there that's simply pushing the year forward the language underneath hra it did used to state that you would be paid at the rate of pay of 90 that's no longer the sub rate of pay it's 116 dollars so what we've changed the language to is current rate of subpay or half the current rate of subpay if it's a half

146of a day so that would be those two changes the hra language that you see below that that noted item there of two thousand dollars per year used to be fifteen hundred the financial impact of that if you move forward into the 1920 school year would be a grand total of a thousand dollars because it applies to two people so two people times 500 gets you your thousand dollars if there were 62 people it would be a lot but if there's 62 people we have had an apocalypse of some sort here in regards to retirement the 5 500 item there used to say 5 000 and the 5 500 would be a grand total impact of five thousand dollars because you're talking 10 people at 500 dollars per gets you to your 5 000. so

147that would be the change the other three items that are noted in there is an example in the 2000 used to say 1500 so that's where those changed if you continue to scan down i think that's all oh there's that pdh section that