Special Board Meeting 6-18-25

001All right, board. Thank you very much, colleagues. Thank you to our staff and community for being here today. This is a special board meeting, and I'm going to go ahead and call this to order an open session at 5 p.m. on the dot. And we're going to begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. Please stand. Ready? Salute. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you very much. Proceeding to the land acknowledgement statement. We should take a moment to acknowledge the land on which we are gathered. For thousands of years, this land has been the home of Patwin people. Today, there are three federally recognized Patwin tribes. Chachaltehe Band of Winton Indians

002of the Colusa Indian Community, Klitsaltihe Winton Nation, and Yozhatihi Winton Nation. The Babbin people have remained committed to the stewardship of this land over many centuries. It has been cherished and protected as elders have instructed the young through generations. We are honored and grateful to be here today on their traditional lands. Thank you very much, Trustee Rodriguez. Next is our equity statement. All students deserve excellent schools which are culturally responsive and set high expectations, a high quality learning environment, and equitable resources to ensure that they are reaching their full potential. WJUSD will be purposeful about providing equitable access to all essential educational opportunities for all WJUSD students, especially diverse and disadvantaged students who have historically been underserved by educational institutions. Thank you very much. Trustee Brubaker, and now we're moving on to our Board of

003Trustee agreements. We agreed to check in, remember our larger purpose, and respect boundaries. We agreed to remember that individual decisions are not personal, and we are open and aspire to finding common ground. We agreed to having empathy, being respectful, and assuming best intentions. Thank you very much, Trustee Rodriguez-Molica. Proceeding approval of board agenda and this is an action item and this is to approve the agenda for the special board meeting today on June 18th regarding review and approval of elementary school plans for student achievement and then moving on to a study session focused on improving student outcomes. Can I get a motion? I'll make the motion. Trustee Rodriguez motions to approve the agenda for today's meeting seconded by Trustee Garcia. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. So the motion passes with

004all board members present with one absent. All right. Public comment related for items on the special agenda. At the time of the, but not in general. Okay. So no. No. Not until the item is. Not until the item. So no public comment on the items on special board meeting agenda. No. We do, but it's at the time of the agenda. They want to speak before the item. All right. Okay, so we're going to go ahead and go straight into D1, info action. This is to review and approve elementary school plans for student achievement. Tonight we have brought forward once again the Whitehead Elementary School Plan, so I'll call the pencil block for any last questions before we ask the board to move for approval tonight. Thank you very much. All right, any questions or comments

005from the board for the specific site? Trustee Villagran. I would say I appreciate the time you spent adding the analysis and bringing down the activities. So it's definitely more helpful for me to see that. So thank you for investing that time to do that. Appreciate it. Yes, I also just wanted to let you know that we appreciate the efforts that you made. respond to the questions that were asked and the needs and we know it's a it required more energy and we appreciate it very much as we you know want to try and understand to the best of our ability you know our reports so that we can make the best decisions possible but we thank you for your efforts any other questions or comments from the board all right can we get a motion

006to approve the site plan for Whitehead Elementary School. Motion to approve. It's been motioned by Trustee Garcia. Can I get a second? Second. Second by Trustee Brubaker. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposition or abstentions? Seeing none, motion passes to approve the Whitehead Elementary School plan by all those board members present with one absence. Thank you very much. I have something I'd like to add before we move on. I would like to seek support from my colleagues to request that we get the site payment plans brought back in January or February as a written report with the addition of expenditures that sites have had up until that point. So, for example, if a site had $5,000 for VAPA supplies, they would notate. They spent $2,375.75 and we could just get an idea

007of where they are. That would, I think, help us better understand what's happening at our sites. And also, before the principals are starting on their site plans for the following year, maybe you could exercise in just seeing where they stand with their original goals and where they have it as far as their allocation of funds. Superintendent. Yes, we spoke I think this morning about this idea and I think that's something that we definitely will be able to report. There won't be presentation on by one, it'll just be information. Any questions or comments regarding the topic that Ms. Grubaker has brought up? Trustee Viettel? I'm just saying yeah, I support 100% of getting that kind of update to see where we're at. I think it'll be helpful for the board to have that information. So thank

008you for bringing that up. Any other questions or comments? Trustee Dolig is not here. I just want a little more clarity about what that would look like. So a report, not a presentation. Would it be essentially the site plan, like the last pages around the goals, with just an additional column? So I'm not going to micromanage, but sort of in my head, it would be their proposed expenditure amount with money subtracted from that or another column next to that of what they have already done. But it would just be the same plan just with that change because we don't want to add a bit of extra work to their principles who are already very busy. That's sort of my thought. So it will be linked to the goals and action items, the expenditures? I mean,

009it would just be added to the existing site plan. So linked to it, right? Yeah. We didn't talk in all the details. I would have tried to talk to my staff about what we could do, what's doable. So I'd like to report it to my discussion. I think that's fair. I'm only asking because I want to make sure that it's useful and to me if it is linked to the goal and the action item that would be helpful for me and it is part of what is there. If it's just general like how much money they have left in the different categories that would still be helpful I think but less helpful than if it was linked to the specific action item. I'll take that into consideration and talk to my staff about what is

010doable for us. Trust you Anna. So yeah, I guess I want to add that the information to me not necessarily meets the whole plan again because the plan is not going to change itself. But the information again by action item to be helpful again broken down, not a lump sum, but not necessarily the whole plan again because that's just a lot of things to produce. It could be a spreadsheet, whatever the superintendent identifies as. But being able to see what has been spent and what has not in that plan itself. Not a lump sum, but the more detail the better. But again, not the whole plan. I don't want to try to decipher what is and what isn't being updated or given up. So again, given the superintendent discretion to determine what that looks like.

011And again, after we get it, we can give feedback and it can improve every time after that. But again, yeah, superintendent having discretion to work with the staff to do that, I think is the ideal. Thank you very much. All right. The only thing that I'm going to ask is would you the follow-up question is would you give us your findings and recommendation as to what is feasible regarding this in your January yeah, I'll get you something come January What will be in Texas? There's one for location. We have things happening the focus right now is to get to some school and open up schools and hiring And I do have our new associate superintendent So I wanted to give an opportunity to adjust, get to know the department, and I'll work with her in

012the fall about what this could look like and report back about what we're able to produce. Great. Thank you very much. All right. Are we ready to proceed to the next item? Okay. Is the study session focused on improving student outcomes? I have one public comment. One public comment. Eric Garber. Good evening, Board. Hopefully you received my email I sent today. I just wanted to go over a couple of those points. First, I just wanted to start off by saying exactly how I started the message to you, which is I'm really excited that you're doing these study sessions. I appreciate the deep data dive and just hearing the narratives. I know it's kind of like a case study of each school site. I learned quite a bit from the four that presented. On May 15th,

013I'm looking forward to learning about these eight. I hope that it will increase the kind of dialogue that I'm hoping will happen after these sessions to maybe scale and bring some of these practices to the other school sites. And so that was kind of my question I was hoping to be maybe elaborate on today was, well, what is the plan after these sessions? And so as I continue, I hope it's important that the intended outcomes is that we're going to have... a way to maybe strategize and scale the things that we're listening to today and then creating a framework to monitor and support the important student outcomes that I think is impacting the students of greatest need in our district. And that's why I sent all of you that data which outlined the performance gap

014from all now 12 elementary schools, so from the past three years, you can see that there is a persistent and I would say a bit troubling performance gap. If you look at our district as a whole, our Our low socio-economic students have increased barely in ELA by 1.41 percentage points over the last three years and in math just 0.84 total in three years. Where our non-socio-economic disadvantaged students have increased during that same time period by nearly 10 percentage points in ELA and 7.28 in mathematics. And so that gap is widening the last three years. And so I'm hoping that we can have a strategic implementation of the funds that is designated just for these students. And so if you look at our supplemental and concentration funds, these funds are designed by the local control funding

015formula for this exact purpose, to help the students that need more attention. And that's why the state has given money to districts that need greater attention for these students. And so I noticed from the two, the... two years ago and maybe three years ago the carryover was to the tune of about 15 million dollars of unspent funds designating just for these students so i'm hoping that that will be used for that and i also concluded just for you miss rodriguez um cohort data because i know you actually cohort data at the bottom i included well what about our sixth graders over three years how do those exact students how they've been doing and you can see that achievement gap also widening with those exact students not just on these you know total district students and

016so As we move forward today, I am greatly looking forward to hearing from the next eight schools. But I do want to point out in the data, there's about four to six schools, I would say, that are in desperate need of additional funds that might be at a larger scale than the other schools. And that's what this supplemental concentration should be for. And there's a couple from the last presentation that actually, one, eliminated the performance gap that also could be taken with some learning, too. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any other public comments? I'm going to hold the comment on this specific item. We're going to proceed to the study session. Okay. So this is the second of three sessions. Having our principals come and present support regarding some of their data, requests made

017by Trustee Lojica. Today we do have eight sites that are going to be presenting, so we're going to be very tight on time. We've asked our principals to keep their presentations brief and just to highlight some of the key areas and very focused into the areas of weaknesses and areas of... success that we tell and so we were trying to get to all of them tonight so that we don't need to ask our principals to come again so that's our goal tonight I am going to be helping the principals giving them you know five minute I'll have my a little warm on my phone so that you'll hear the five minute and then you know I'll try to take three minutes so that you kind of help you keep on track okay I'm going to

018ask the board to be mindful of the questions that you're asking that they be very directed towards the presentation the principals are here to and prepared to address the presentation they're not prepared to ask questions that are not on the presentation and so to help us stay focused on the time of what we're here tonight i ask that you try to do your best um to keep your questions directed to the questions i mean to the presentations that they're doing today um and then before we get going i just want to once again remind everyone that the purpose of this is to learn about what's happening in our schools to understand um what the areas of need areas of successes what some of the highlights are that our schools are doing. This is not a

019comprehensive plan presentation. It's impossible to learn everything that's going on in school in 10 minutes of this presentation. So I just wanted to keep this in perspective. About that, that we're here to get an understanding of what's happening in our schools to help you later to develop policy or areas that need to have a better understanding of our sites. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and have Chelsea Mohica kind of just do a little quick refresher. She's not going to do the whole presentation that she did last time, but she's going to just a quick little highlight of reminders of what the data, her data presentation is and how it can be used. Thank you superintendent. We did share the slides in this agenda item so you're welcome to review them in more

020detail but as our superintendent just shared I'm just going to really hit the highlights of what I shared last time as a refresher. So one of the key things that we found in the meta-analysis reviewed was that extended learning time or additional hours either in the school day or an extended calendar year and teacher replacement did demonstrate some improvements in student outcomes. It was found to be one of the most effective efforts in the Schuler et al meta-analyses that they reviewed. They also shared, as you all know, that the longer you stick to an intervention or the greater the time is of implementation, the greater the impact is. So not to expect impacts to be really quick, right, in like less than one year. Another article by Corlinder et al., published in 2019, really highlighted

021PLCs or professional collaboration and monitoring data and having collaborative conversations around data. The 2019 article by Podolsky et al. really focused on years of teaching experience and it highlighted that greater number of years in teaching experience is related to higher academic outcomes or greater academic outcomes and also in reduced rates of student absenteeism and having more experienced teachers at a school site also helped other teachers that are less experienced be able to learn and grow and it impacts their own students academic outcomes as well. Again, just hitting the key points here. Leibowitz and Porter from 2019 was a study that focused on leadership and principles. And this one really highlighted all of the different hats that our principles wear. And it looked at this time spent and skill across five categories. And as a quick

022reminder, these are instructional management. and internal relations, organizational management, administration activities, and external relations, such as coming to board meetings like this one tonight. And this study highlighted that it is very helpful when principals are able to spend more time across the five categories and not just concentrate their time on one or two of them to the expense of other categories. The authors did a really great job of also emphasizing the amount of hours that go into a work week for administrators and citing a study that showed that our administrators tend to spend like about 60 hours plus a week during the school day. So they shared that as something to consider because simply telling principals to spend more time let's say on instructional management isn't enough because they have no more time to spend.

023So it was a suggestion made in this article was to actually increase support for principals in the form of additional administrators at the school site to be able to increase the hours that they're able to spend across these categories. The last study I'll share was from 2023 Lynch et al. And this one focused on summer programs. that were focused on math. So they found that summer programs that focused on mathematics increased student outcomes in mathematics. And it follows similar literature where summer programs that focused on English language arts increased outcomes on English language arts. And here the key really is focus on the subject area, not just having it as one of many subject areas during the summer school school day. And I'm happy to talk about this a little bit more with my colleagues

024if anybody has any more questions. The full PDFs I saw were also attached to the agenda, so the whole article is on here. And I just want to remind folks that I focused on the meta-analyses because as a whole, all of these research studies address 185 research studies, individual studies. So it really provides an overview or a summary of 185 individual studies. And that's all I'll share for now. Okay. So first we have Maxwell Principal Adam Allum who's going to come up and do his presentation. And I'll give you the five-minute and the three-minute learning, okay? Perfect. Thank you. Good evening, trustees, or afternoon, trustees, superintendent. My name is Adam McLaren. I'm here to present on the wonderful progress that Maxwell has made in the last three years. A little while ago when I was

025younger and a little less gray in my beard, I was a Boy Scout. And we had many mottos, but one of them was leave the place better than you found it. And I believe we've done that at Maxwell. So there's four areas I would like to highlight tonight. And of course, I'll dig into a couple of them. One of which are increased ELA and math scores. Also increased ELPI. and also moving all of our significant subgroups out of the red, which was a task that the state put in front of us last year. The second area I would like to highlight is the decrease to chronic absenteeism. The third, high teacher retention. And the fourth is PLC implementation and commitment to embedded intervention. So I want to dig into a few of those, specifically the

026academic ones, because when we're here learning about data, it's really important to understand how each school sees themselves and what we've been able to do with how we see ourselves. So first off... Over the last three years we've been able to increase our English language arts scores 18.1 points and math up 6.6 points. To dig specifically into last year, we increased 11.1 points in ELA and 17.7 in math. So you see the discrepancy between the 6.6 and the 17.7 because we did see a decrease in the middle year. ELPI, about 6.5%. And again, ELPI is the English Learner Progress Index. That's how far students are progressing towards their acquisition of the English language. And also, as I said before, the state asked us to make specific plans in our SIPSAs about how we were going

027to move student groups out of the red. So our significant subgroups are many, but English language learners, Hispanic students, socioeconomically disadvantaged, white students, students with disabilities. And we moved all of those out of the red into the orange, which is a huge accomplishment in one year. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize. I'm so sorry. Anybody could have just waved me down at any point. And hopefully you have some of that in front of you as well. Two minutes left. I apologize about that. Two minutes. Okay. And then moving into the second area, which is decreased chronic absenteeism, down 12.3% over three years. And I'm happy to report to the gentleman who spoke just a moment ago, the largest decrease we saw is students with socioeconomically disadvantaged at 15.4%. We also see some really great gains

028for that student group in ELA. I'm trying to pull that number here, 15.7 points. They're actually the topmost group that moved in English over the last three years. High teacher retention, huge. We heard that the amount of years that a teacher has teaching can be positively beneficial to student outcomes. It is on a later slide that we won't be addressing, but the majority of my staff has 13 plus years of experience, which has been crucial to our success. I turn to those veterans for their expertise in the classroom. We have not had too many new teachers and so we have not needed to train anybody up, which has been fantastic for us. And lastly on this slide, PLC implementation, which has been transformative for us. We've been very methodical, we've been very intentional in that

029implementation over the last three years, and that PLC process has enabled us to start to become comfortable with data. Data can be uncomfortable for some folks. There's a sense, well, all teachers have that sense, which is there's always more that can be done, and when you see numbers, teachers do take that personally at times, and they say, wow, I could have done more. And so, That commitment to the PLC process has enabled us to be able to move all of our intervention efforts that were happening outside of the school day, which are wonderful, like our ELAP programs and some after school and before school tutoring, but we were able to move that inside of the school day to guarantee it for all students, 30 minutes a day, which has again been transformative. So to recap

030this slide here. Plus, add a couple of other context items is that I believe we've been able to achieve this through the PLC process. That implementation and singular focus has helped teachers to focus on movement in teaching, learning, and assessment. We've also provided ample time for collaboration, which has been vital for teachers to be able to do that work. They need the time to do that work, and that has been a hallmark of my administration is giving folks time to do the work that they need to do. Also, strategic use of data. Check your time, just happy or half way through. Perfect, thank you so much. Strategic use of data. One of our sort of magic bullets or secrets is we focus a lot on cusp students when we are doing our intervention right before

031the test. So we make sure that those students who are responding well to instruction, we spend that extra time to them to move them to that next performance band. And again, that has moved our numbers quite a bit over the last three years. We have also really enabled our English language learner to provide lots of support not only to students, our English language learner specialist is what I meant to say, to support students strategically. Those students who need the most help are getting her help, but also her coaching of teachers who provide our designated and embedded ELD. And lastly, some very wise and strategic investments in ELRISE, making sure that all of our teachers know the pathway and what it is to reclassify. And also positive classroom implementation of ABCOLA PD implementation has been transformative

032for that ELPI number. Moving on to our challenges. I don't want to spend as much time on challenges, so I think we're good on time there. First of which is we have seen an increase in a number we don't want to see an increase in, which is our suspension rate. It has climbed 1.6% over the last three years, steady incremental increase. We do see increased behaviors. I think a lot of principals behind me have seen an increase in behaviors, and we are still looking for ways to solve those things. Luckily, one of the... Things we've been able to decrease in our suspension increase is students with disabilities. We've been able to decrease that number by 4.5%. So even in challenge, we are still able to meet with some success. Also those persistent achievement gaps that

033we are well aware of. Our ELLs are underperforming in ELA. Our students with disabilities and white students are underperforming in math comparative to their peers. and it's a consistent and persistent challenge. And lastly, staffing can be very challenging. We've been very lucky to have a very strong and solid staff for the last three years, but the area we've been struggling is in the special ed realm. So RSP staffing has been up and down over the last three years, along with the support paraeducators, which are vital to performing those functions in the classroom with push-in support. As the years have gone by, we've gained more stability, and so that's why we've seen increases is it was very rocky very shaky when when I started but as we went by we were able to gain strength those

034are the two areas that I would like to to chat about tonight thank you very much sir of course thank you questions or comments from the board who would like to go first all right seeing none who would you like trust you to let me get one weekend We'll start with you and then we'll go to the right. Okay. I saw Trustee Rodriguez angling toward the mic. Do you want to go first? Okay. Thank you so much for your presentation. I learned a lot about your site, so I appreciate the time and energy that you put into this. I did see in the slide focused on... the professional environment. Yes. One of the things that you noted on here that as opportunities provided for teachers to improve their instructional abilities was peer observations. And I

035wanted to just hear a little bit more about how those peer observations work at Maxwell. So there's a couple of different things. One is... typically engage that with the evaluation process and so I'm partnering those folks that are either in their probationary one or probationary two with a mentor teacher and so it's part of sort of my in-house requirements that they spend some time observing that teacher so release time is vital and you have to fund that in SPSA to make sure we can have substitutes for that and we follow what's called the Feldman learning rounds model which is, I think, very, very important for teachers in the sense that the philosophy of Feldman Learning Rounds is about what do you see that's good. Observing teachers can be sensitive, as we've talked about before, is

036that... Having a guest in one's classroom, whether they be an evaluator or not, people do become self-conscious, and they want to present their best face to someone who's learning from them. And so the professional learning rounds do have that as a basis. No critique is within the form itself. It's only about what can I use, what can I apply to my own teaching. Of course. Hi. Oh, hello. Good. So my general question is around the improvement in terms of suspension. There's some improvement in the work that you're doing there. Yes. You know, my curiosity goes to, you know... obviously behaviors can be different, right, for why it may lead to suspension, but is the engagement, is the intervention based on something that's very similar? And is that something that's involved in the suspension rate slowing

037down, I guess? Yes, so it's kind of ironic. We've seen our suspension rate increase, but... commensurately we've really tried to up the amount of response and the types of response that we've had because as we're seeing these numbers grow we're running out of options in the sense that traditional suspension does not typically work for students. So I've got a fantastic example. There's a young man who's a kindergartner who was having lots of trouble with his hands. He was being very rough with people. He was quite angry at times. And we marshaled our resources in all of our different ways, in the traditional ways, but nothing was working. So we called a meeting with the counselor, his parent, our behavior specialist, a social worker, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And in that meeting, we were

038able to determine some really, some big root causes for the behavior. Kindergarteners are tricky because they don't have psychology degrees typically. So they don't always know why they do what they do. But in that meeting, not only was the parent very receptive to our questions about how can we help her, because she was actually saying, I'm having trouble. I'm having trouble at home. I don't know what to do. And you're seeing exactly what I'm seeing at home. So having the behaviorist there, we were able to prescribe some, I think exactly what you're talking about is behavior replacement. And so that student, we actually made him a junior peer coach where he was going around the playground and the lunch area. where he was having the most trouble because it was during those times and he

039was tasked with pointing out positive behaviors and he was there then rewarding students for their positive behaviors and his behaviors decreased significantly and almost dried up by the end of the school year and it was about a two-month turnaround. Does that answer your question? I think well so in essence you know in every situation whether it's with the teacher counselor Does everybody have the same tools at their disposal, at their tool belt, to be able to deal with a basic situation? Or is it for some reason, you know, certain tools don't get applied to a particular group, but not to others? I believe they do, yes. The majority of the behaviors we're seeing are not in the classroom and are not being referred by teachers. They're typically in that unsupported time of lunch and recess.

040Those are the times that we're seeing the majority of the behaviors. What would you say is your observation in regards to being able to work with families on behavior? What are the difficulties there? What successes have you seen that can kind of help illuminate a better pathway to connecting with parents? Yes, it's tricky. I think the example I provided is probably one of the better examples. There's shame associated at times where folks... You know, the saying is that kids send their best, or sorry, parents send their best kids to school every single day. I don't think any parent says, all right, go have an awful day. They say, go have a great day. But that being said is they don't always have the tools themselves to provide that for them. And so when we do

041bring them to the table, they're often very thankful. But at the same time, there is some shame associated with that at times, to be meeting with professionals, and thinking that we're judging when we really aren't. We really are part of the solution and part of the support system for that student. Does that kind of have, does that kind of, you know, basically shed light that we need to do more preventative work with our parents around how to deal with behavior issues, how to set up our young students to go to school every day? Absolutely. Yes, it couldn't hurt. I'm talking to this ad. This is very complex because parents come from all different walks of life, different levels of stress, different levels of economic backgrounds, trauma, broken families, and they all respond very differently. They

042do. And you're very polite, but sometimes they're not very nice and not very cooperative. And then some are. And some are going through... personal things, whether it's too much parenting piece. So it's very complex. There's a lot of work that our principals do. And when it works the best is when the school and the parent are on the same page and working together and they come up to agreements and they're trying the same strategies together at home and at school. That's when it's most successful. Many times parents come, they're not interested on how to support their child, they're wondering what are we going to do. about the other student, who has been the other student. So navigating through all these emotions and different perspectives from different people. So there's no one size fits all approach.

043Principals and teachers have to adjust. And sometimes there's no support at home. And sometimes the school is the only place. where students are trying to adjust in a structured environment and they have a hard time being successful. So we just keep on trying and trying different tools and keep on trying to reach out. Yeah, I think that one of the things to try and bring out onto the table that's not really talked about a lot is the tremendous amount of poverty we have in Yolo County. By reading some UC Davis, we should say this county is the highest in poverty in the state. And that impact, which it's making on our parents, right? So low resources may mean working multiple jobs or working very difficult jobs. You have to have the space and the time

044to be able to incorporate some teachings, right? Like we all do. Yes, like we all do. And I think that's one thing that we need to keep in mind as we look at our... the studies, you know, we're also working in this very unique position in being a very impoverished county in which that issue has not been talked about enough or engaged enough. Thank you very much Trustee. Any other questions or comments from the board? Trustee Viannana? Can you go to slide two? These are the two that we were viewing? No, there's the, and then there's the outline. This one? Yes, okay. So number five, it says extended learning opportunities. Yes. And extended learning and enrichment. If you can go to that slide where you have that extended learning opportunities. Which of those are the,

045I wasn't able to determine which ones were enrichment and which ones were the other category. Yes, so we, After this presentation was created, we got a little bit of clarification about some items that we could add to this list because there's, you can see on my notes, about 20 additional items that I could add to enrichment and extended learning. So, before and after school, we would consider that extended learning. So we would be doing academics. Homework help, same. But also, as you may know, ELOP also has enrichment opportunities associated with it as well. And I cheated a little bit, I'm sorry, because I was just too proud of our wind time that's embedded into the school day. It's not extended in the sense that it's outside of the school day. But I could not help

046myself by putting it up there. But if I could add a few items, we have a beautiful choir that does a Posada winter concert, spring concert. Cross-country is fabulously popular in this community, which is fantastic. We have a student-derived club that's called the Horror Reading Club. They didn't workshop that name much. I said Goosebumps. I thought that would have been good, but anyway. A Lego club, plus field trips, plus assemblies, and I won't read you all of those. Thank you. That's helpful. Yes. That's it for this. This comment is not specifically to your plan although there's one on the challenges. To me, some of these were like more outcomes than the challenge. For example, with the behavior and discipline, I'm sorry, suspension. Suspension is not the challenge, right? The behavior is the challenge and what's

047causing the behavior, of course, that you would get to go deeper. But the suspension is not the challenge itself. So suspension is, I guess, the symptom of the challenge. And just a few times, just in the plans as a whole. um there was more focus on the outcome than the challenge itself so you know maybe for next year um we find out a bit more but nonetheless it was helpful and again recognizing you know i guess what's leading to those yes uh suspension rates and you know assuming y'all are having conversations um to address um you know whatever it is that um is had increased whether it's the behavior or the reaction to the behavior right because sometimes it's the reaction not necessarily the behavior but again you know every circumstance is different so yes

048again not specifically to your place want to make that before the rest work we'll present but thank you thank you thank you trustee i don't necessarily need to go around asking you guys to to take a turn we're going to do the same when we did it last time so i just wanted to kind of kick us off all right thank you very much thank you so much super hidden the next site next principal you know who you are okay good lane field thank you very much mr baker good evening everyone good evening trustee batista svala president trustees and super intended to take a look i'll make sure i use the clicker I'm Phil Pendergast, the product principal at Plainfield Elementary. I have been the principal for seven years. I just completed, I started mid-year

049through, so it always messes me up trying to figure out exactly how many years I've been. So seven and a half I think I've completed. And so for student strengths, again, I think we have a tremendous amount of strengths at our school. Obviously... I think every principal here, every educator wants their school and all their students to perform at their peak potential and it's our job to help ensure that they get to that level. One of the strengths, again, we've really focused and taken on writing in our PLCs. It all started with teachers analyzing our S-MAC data and I know I put in my CIPSA, at least the CIPSA response to Trustee Rodriguez-Malheka that the core curriculum we had was a little lacking. And so our teachers were looking and utilizing what they had and

050also seeking out some writing resources such as Step Up to Writing, Writing Highway, even Mystery Writing recently. And that's really helped. Our teachers really have that instructional continuity between grade levels throughout the writing process. And this also includes consistent strategies amongst those grade level teams. Again, really being intentional with that writing process. Far too often, our curriculum just doesn't have enough. It's kind of pieces, responses to some literature, but it doesn't really teach the structured approach of that planning, prewriting, drafting, doing the revisions, editing, and then doing the rewrite and publishing piece. I want to give a shout out to my PLC team, especially the second through sixth grade teams that have been working together on those PLC unit plans for writing. I know it's been helping last year, and again, we didn't do as

051well as we would like to in our cast for our SIPP data. This year, though, we're really looking forward to seeing that growth. One thing I do always know, we have a really strong sixth grade HeLa teacher, which I'll get to in a moment here with the literature circles. The good thing is once our students get to that sixth grade level, last year at least 68% of both of the sixth grade classes were proficient or exceeded standards in ELA, which was a huge undertaking and really just shows the amount of growth. Students at all levels not meeting standard, standard nearly met, and those that even were at standard met went up. And so it was great to see. The next strength I'd like to say is the expanded use of our literature circles. The teachers

052and students call it book club, but it's much more than that. It really goes into reciprocal teaching. I can describe the kind of... the process of that, but really each student really has a job that they do. They're grouped by reading ability with a high level interest book and then go through the process, really teaching each other. They get to practice reading fluency, which was something that in the upper grades and intermediate grades, they don't really get as much practice on or direct instruction on. This is a way for, it's a highly engaging way where students actually get to do that. They have comprehension and they're a lot of writing tasks, responding to literature and the different prompts that teachers provide. And they, again, have jobs, get to present their outcomes of those and really

053take the lead of having a book club. And it's fantastic. And we're going to continue to expand that with Mrs. Johnson as our teacher expert. Similarly with our intermediate grades, our early elementary, our early primary grades, and their PLCs have been really working on phonics and having the essential standards, kind of moving up the grade levels. It is known to apply grade level phonics in decoding words. Our literacy paras have been a tremendous help in that, and this group of our teachers and educators. They're really important and mindful of how important that kinder and first grade level is, really making sure those foundational skills are really being met. Because once you get to learning to read it, that becomes reading to learn. And that's where we typically see students falling behind. And we really want

054to make sure that we're intentional with that. On academic performance, although again, as I said to start out, our goal is to have a high level, all students being proficient or above. We're in the medium range. And I don't know if you've taken a look at the CAASPP release items, the performance tasks. They're pretty difficult. And I know our students are working hard. They take it seriously. And again, really trying with some of those strategies I just shared earlier. We'll continue to... to make gains in each of those areas in ELA and math. Kind of as a percentage-wise, over the three years, our CAT scores range from 47 to 51% in ELA and then 43 to 50% in math as a third through sixth grade cohort. And again, it varies a little bit. Like I

055said, last year we went down a tad. I'm really hoping to see growth this year. I know scores have been coming out. I'm already looking at those and putting them into spreadsheets of students on how well they do with iReady, beginning of year to end of year, and then also go back and kind of have a map of how they've done on the CAS assessments from third grade all the way to sixth grade. So I have a lot of data to show growth. identify some points on where we're getting stuck out. Our teachers use that data as well. Okay, we're getting there. I'll skip that rediagnostic. It is a pretty good gauge of how well students will do on the S-MAC. Our teachers know this, and we really keep promoting that. We want to keep

056getting that number higher and higher to 100%. Chronic absenteeism, it's a strength that we've been working on. Right after COVID, we were at 32%. last year in 2024 went down to 17% I'm speaking with coordinator Lissa Perry she said waiting for about 14% this year still too high in my opinion but making progress our English language progress indicator the LPI ELPI it's at 63.6% last year and it's been hovering around there and that's 60, you know, medium to high range. And we're going to continue to do that, and that's really where students are making growth each year on the ELPAC. Take that magic number of four, and then having some good assessment scores as well to get reclassified. And then lastly for our strength is our highly involved PTA and volunteers. Our PTA has raised

057over, you know, $30,000 this year, and that all goes back to our students and our school, from field trips to assemblies. Giving teachers additional funding that they can get reimbursed for providing an art and garden coordinator lunchtime funding and after-school clubs and just general school needs PTA alone has volunteered over 2,000 hours this past year Held over you know 20 student different activities at our school and organized 17 fundraisers and definitely want to thank them for their leadership their time and commitment to supporting and impacting our school. And that's just the PTA, our parent volunteers come to the classroom quite a bit to support the teacher and students as well. for challenges. As everyone knows, it's the achievement gap in math and ELA. And through our PLCs, this is something our teachers, myself as the

058instructional leader, we're really focused on and being intentional with some of those strategies that I shared previously, but also really focusing on those different student subgroups. Students with disabilities, students with socioeconomically disadvantaged, our English learners, our Hispanic Latino students, you know, all of them. We really want to make sure all are getting what they need. The good news is, is last year, even though we did go down, all students, all student groups were above typical growth scores on their CASP or ELA math. English learners, Hispanics, white, and students with disabilities were up, you know, set nine points above the typical growth. So there is growth. CASP data is always interesting to look at because it doesn't, they're always growing, right? So you're always going to lose some, but it doesn't have that. the longitudinal data

059piece and that's what I try to always capture in my data tracking. But again, it's where you're at and then how much you've increased or decreased since the past year. But still have work to do that. As I said, even though chronic absenteeism decreased, it's still at 17.2%, which to me, it's way too high. We want to get back to pre-COVID levels where it's below 10%. Even that, to me, is still too high. We need our students here each and every day to ensure that they're learning. declining enrollment I think I think this is just you know a national phenomenon but with that we do have every every so often some staffing reductions which does lead to you know either reduction in grade levels or classes and also the combination grade classes which has its

060own challenges but again there's positives with that as well with our school site as I don't want to say small, but not in a high number. We do have limited psych funds for that. And that does limit our ability to provide some outside professional development on a wide scale. However, we overcome that with having, again, teachers step up, really utilizing the PLC model, teachers sharing out best practices. Again, using that PLC model as you're going through what's working for one teacher and really getting that extra support and training and instruction on how they're implementing that. Very powerful way to do that. Let's see, the other part, having a smaller staff with the PLCs, while it can be a challenge, we don't have the ability to have necessarily every grade level have a grade level teaching

061partner. So we have to do vertical teams. However, though, in speaking with all of the teachers at the end of the year, they actually really got a lot out of it. They got to see where every student needs to go for the younger grade levels. the grade levels that they're teamed with on the higher end of that spectrum or that grade level team, really get to tell and inform the teachers, here's where our students are coming in with, here are some of those skills that they might be lacking, either consistently or here's what we need them to come with, here are some strategies you can use. And so that's been very impactful. And then just last of the challenge that I have up here is the limited teacher and staff availability. We do have after

062school intervention funds available, some time to busy schedules, teacher burnout at times. I don't get hands jumping up saying, yes, I will do it. i have the money i offer it not all the time usually they will come on board if i'm persistent enough but again that's just i think the reality of where we're at but with that we do have some classified staff who can fill in that role again with like to have teachers but if we don't we still have some classified staff that are very competent in doing that and that's all thank you very much mr pittiver any questions or comments Trustee Villanueva, I'm going to start with you. Regarding the limited funds, site funds, have you all, like either the smaller schools or are you with another school, collaborated around PD

063so that you can kind of get your resources together for a facilitator and then your staff goes to their site to be able to benefit? Has that happened in the past? It's been a while. I think we did do that probably when I we did have some extra money dedicated for Professional development where we're able to do that standalone funding source We haven't though because again it kind of comes down to when will it be I mean those do get expensive or I'm trying to get all my staff to do a two-hour training if it's after school or during the summer and that two hours is usually not not feasible enough to provide hire somebody to come on for just depending on the cost, usually it's pretty expensive overall. And I even think if we

064were to split that, it would be a significant amount of our funding, not that it's not valuable and useful. And that's something we- My staff is actually talking about, especially the intermediate grade teachers, about having, you know, step up to writing training throughout. Right now we have a couple different writing programs. All are great. I think they're all very good. But having one so there is that real consistency throughout the entire methodology of writing. Because again, funds are limited, right? Kind of piggybacking maybe with another school that's already having a facilitator come in. Again, for those small ones, obviously not where you're talking about where there's a series of engagements that's also a whole different conversation because a person has to probably go to your school site to be able to be effective that way.

065But there's an opportunity to just... You know, most of the time they pay for like 40 seats and spots and only like 20 people go. So they still have these 20 spots that kind of go unopened. And if you all kind of communicate with each other, hey, we have some spots, if any of your staff wants to go, it might be a way just to tap into each other's resources. So that was it. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Moving around. Hi. You shared a little bit about your PLCs, and I remember you sharing about it when we were reviewing your SIPSA as well. And you shared that in grades two through six, the focus is on writing, right? So I was curious, what's the focus in kindergarten and first grade? Yeah, so that's... Yes,

066so our two and three do writing our four and six team up and they do writing for for TK Kinder and first grade In addition to that essential standards of known apply grade level phonics and decoding words It was, if I'm not mistaken, it was recalling story events, characters, and setting. I'm pretty sure that was. And then again, it levels up with rigor as you go up. I think with kindergarten, we always push them to write, but it's being able just to retell those different keys. And then for the first grade, that's when they're actually going to start to write out in those sentence frames. So in a way, it is still focused on writing. It's just that writing looks different in the younger grades, right? Absolutely. Yeah, dictating or, you know. Okay, great. Thank

067you. We'll just keep going, right? I'm curious when you are talking about the literature circles where it sounds really intriguing, is that like within a classroom or does that happen amongst classrooms with sort of similar age kids but maybe different skill levels so that you can sort of optimize that? Yeah, so it's, I mean it could be. I think our school is a little unique just again we... We don't have as many classes per grade level as some other schools do or other sites do. However, these are actual classrooms. Our sixth grade teachers core teach, so one really specializes and focuses on designated ELD and English language arts, while the other one does math and social sciences and science. And so that way they kind of get to see both. experts in both fields and

068really give that, devote that energy and time into that specific subject. And again, they get to see instead of just 32 students, let's say they can see 64 and really have an impact on there. So they do write get up again just by the classroom depending on their because they want to make sure that they're fluent right as much as they can we know that students that they're at this you know they're all at the same level of reading ability and comprehension but they group them together with high interest books and they support each other again by the end of the year since the start it's tremendous growth. It's great to see. I would imagine if you get interested in a topic that they'll just go game with you. So thank you. How are you?

069Doing well, how are you? Good, thanks for being here today. My question revolves around chronic absenteeism. What kind of engagement are you doing in terms of working with parents on that issue? That's one way to look at it, but what are you also doing in terms of trying to empower our students in knowing how important it is for them to be at school? Because every day they're gone is the day that they don't learn something, right? Absolutely. Yeah, and so again we track attendance and monitor students kind of reaching, before they even reach the chronic absenteeism threshold. So again, based on the number of days we're in school enrolled, we look at that any students that at that 10% level. We do that weekly in our wellness teams just as a group of professionals. Our

070attendance lays on our administrative clerk. reach out to those families, our teachers reach out. We share that data again with the teachers. We continue emphasis on building classroom community. We know that's one of the biggest things is if students still connected to school and have that trusted adults, have friends they're going to be more inclined to come to. We do again have that adopt a student initiative where teachers do take on three students throughout the year where they really make that extra effort go above and beyond to get to know them better than just the They'll ask some questions outside of school, really try to get to know them. Sometimes they go to their athletic games or other interests. Having check-ins, check-outs, we celebrate student attendance. Good attendance publicly with certificates. We have a school-wide

071raffle, so any class for the month that is over 95% attendance. We do a will of the names drawing every Monday morning assembly, or I shouldn't say every Monday, but once a month. And the winners get an In-N-Out gift card. Students love that. And again, early contact with families. We know that needs to be warm. Oftentimes they can be a little apprehensive. They think that they're in trouble, and we just want to make sure that we can provide them support. Ask what can we do. Is everything okay with the student? Are they feeling okay? Can we connect them with different services such as counselors? If we need to, we can go to that next tier level with the NDIH, the Urban Valley Indian Health Professionals. We can provide some therapy either to the students individually

072or to the families as well. And again, continue building capacity with our lunchtime clubs. Get them involved in student activities. used advisory councils, student council, again, And that's what we really try to do with some of those lunchtime clubs. We try to find something for everyone. A lot of kids like to play on the fields, play on the playgrounds. So we're noticing more and more the sixth graders are starting to socialize a little bit more. So we're trying to find spaces for them in games to really engage them. And that's a good setting. And so would you say at the beginning of the year, is there a particular engagement with the parents trying to state how profoundly important it is for them to come every possible day? Is there something like that that occurs, or

073is it really just an engagement as the issue arises? No, we're proactive at our back-to-school night. We've scheduled ours that. That second full week of school, so on the 18th, we usually get a pretty good turnout. So we really, at our whole group meeting, we have our Title I meeting and go over those goals, what we use our Title I's for, but also our school goals. And one of those being attendance, 95% attendance. We talk about chronic absenteeism. And again, a lot of parents don't know. You know, you miss 10% of the school year, more like 18 days, right? And then you're considered chronically absent. We also talk about independent study. All my parents square weekly newsletters that go out. Those always have the last seven days of attendance, our year-to-date attendance. Reinforce that if

074you're going to be out for an extended period of time, please check in. We can get an independent study option going for you. So we really try to be proactive on that. And our teachers are the same. They really, you know, when the kids come back after a while, you know, they really try to, you know, correct, you know, really tell them that they missed them. And it really gets them to want to come back and, you know, have everyone really wants them back there. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? We'll go back around. Related to the chronic absenteeism, have you been able to identify, like, the key? factors or influences or variables that Is there in theme is there something in common among other students? Which the school could do something

075about or are these factors outside of control for example, you know No family vehicle or one family vehicle, right that's gonna affect you know, but that's not something you control Yeah I mean, honestly, I would have to say the vast majority of them are extended illnesses that just continue. And, you know, again, I'm always skeptical. Again, if there's, you know, once they get to that kind of 14th day of unexcused or excused absences, that's where we do have, you know, need to get either a doctor's note for us to excuse any further absences and really try to work with the parents. Oftentimes, though, it's, yeah, I mean, it's illnesses and they just keep adding up for whatever reason. There's been some... We were probably at 97% attendance up until November and then that's when you

076know this I think there was a series a Whole entire it seemed like for our school that there is getting out groups of students and It would spread and it was tough All right anyone else Okay, seeing that superintendent. I think we are. Thank you so much I'd like to invite our Psych Tech Technology Principal Maria Martinez. Thank you, sir. Good evening. Superintendent Nadia Lumpkin, President Debra S. Tatis-Ezavala, Board Members. I am the proud president. principal of Science and Technology Academy Charter School. I have been principal for now, this is my eighth, finishing my eighth year, but been at SciTech for 15 years as a co-founder. So I've been seeing, I've seen SciTech evolve, grow for these, for 15 years. And there's a couple of things that I'm really proud of. and I wanted to

077share with you. The first thing that I wanted to highlight is the phonics program. Four years ago, as we were doing the LCAP and looking at our data, we looked at the fact that our students' phonics instruction was really important, lacking. As a charter school, we have an independence on what we teach and how we teach. So we have autonomy in our curriculum. So as we were very gliding and we had that conversation, we saw that pandemic had a big impact on especially our kids' reading abilities. So we asked our... what are we going to do about it? So two of our primary teachers researched a program that we could all agree to and during that summer they trained each other and then made agreements and took parts of the program and said this is

078what we're all going to do from TK through third. The following year they looked at benchmarks, they looked at assessments, and then they looked at changing or moving some students if needed. Last year, they then looked at target time. So they used their expertise and the knowledge of, and they concentrate on just one strand. And so they would multi-age students and put them in where they needed to go based on data. And so we've been keeping track of that reading progress and this year I'm happy to report that we had a 15% increase in our iStation or iSEP reading data and then 1% in math. So we're seeing some growth. making sure we stick to a program and make sure that we're looking. You're not going to have results right away. So we're slowly implementing

079and we're seeing that staying with the same program is making a difference. Especially when all our primary teachers, our RSP teachers, our EL specialists all have the same language that we're using through this phonics program. And then we have the visuals and mnemonic devices that all students are using. And so that has really created that our students are not using a new system every time. Another thing that we're really proud of is our students with disability and their growth in our test scores. Our students with disabilities have grown 25 points in language arts and are still far below meeting standards, but they have made an increase. And in math, they have grown 24.7%. Our gen ed teachers, our RSVP teachers work very closely. We know our students. Our RSP teachers collaborate with them. In addition,

080she also collaborates with our para-2s so that they know the students and they know their plans and so that collaboration has made a difference. Family engagement. I don't know if you've yet attended our events, but we have a really high family participation. And one thing that we're really proud of is that the participation in our conferences is really high. It's above 95%. When I asked the same thing in our family surveys to see if they also... believe that that's the same. They also, 98% said that they attended their conferences, which is huge because we are a team. And so the more we collaborate together, the more results we're going to see with our students. So that's really something that we would love to keep on. Our teachers really make sure that if student parents are

081not able to come, we do Zoom. or that there's a phone call, there's a follow-up. So that's really great. And this year, in events for parents, we had Explore It come, and we had about 200 people participate in that. So they're always really proud of that. Decreasing chronic absenteeism like the rest of my fellow colleagues, we all have worked really hard in decreasing especially after pandemic. And so one of the groups that I'm really proud of is the students with disabilities. Overall, we decline as a school 4.4%. And then our students with disability, which we were targeted as our students were in red in our dashboard. So we really needed to see what can we do for our students with disability. When we asked parents and we saw what was the root cause of it,

082again, like principal vinegar sickness. sickness and they're they're prone to get sick more often and so that was the number one. For the other students we did contracts, we did incentives, we did family visits, home visits. The wellness team has been a very instrumental tool for this. I don't know if you know what a wilderness is. I think you've probably heard about it, but we all come together to look at our attendance and what we can do. We have attendance liaison. We look at the social, emotional part of our students if that's the case. And so we look at the pieces and then we look at solutions. And so That has been something really good that our students with disabilities, the absenteeism decreased. We're hoping that it will continue to decrease. Just wanted to time

083check, you have three, four minutes. Oh, four minutes? Okay. Adult relationships is really good too. Student, adult. We do a lot of buddy and multi-age. activities so our teachers know our students. I make it a point to know all their names so that they know that I know who they are. Reclassification, we went from 27% to 48% last year of kids being reclassified. And then something that really proud of is the collaboration. Our governance supports three days of paid collaboration or 16 hours of paid collaboration and since we don't have a curriculum, teachers get together by primary and upper grades for resource and they look at backward mapping, data. They look at developing thematic units, novels that we're going to read, things like that. So they use that. And then the PLTs and PLCs, that

084has been really important for us, looking at data, looking at what we need to increase, what we need to do. With strings comes also, there's things that as a small school, there's challenges. One of the things is, and we don't call it, I don't see it as a challenge, I just see it that it has made us think outside the box. So as a small school, school of choice, we have demographics that are different. We have a 26% of students with special disabilities. We have 20% of our students are gait, 8% are language learners, and so that creates different opportunities for us as a staff to grow. But sometimes it's also a challenge because we have to think what are we gonna do and how are we gonna change our program or how are we

085gonna address the needs. We're a small staff, so like Principal Finnegar, we only have one person, one classroom, and we have combinations so that also creates a different dynamic within our school. But we have learned how to do that in terms of the fact that the teachers, we co-teach, we move students so that their standards are being addressed. Third grade has been a revolving door since I stepped out of it. So like you were saying, you know, longevity and stability is really important. So we have seen that. And so, but this year I'm hoping that the teacher that's coming in, she has gone from para to now a teacher. She knows her school and hopefully that will create a strong team. This gap, this course for our subgroups, we know that there's gaps and so

086especially for our Yale learners who are around 70% from eating. proficiency and so we're looking we look as a staff and yield rise and best first the high expectations and making sure that we're all looking at that and with the fine lens is really important this year we're going to be last year we for teachers plus myself went to the PLC conference this year seven teachers are going to go so that we can look at Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 really with a different lens. As a charter school, there's additional reports due. I get to work on all the state reports, the LCAP, throughout the year. So sometimes I wear too many, a lot of hats. And so that has been something that's been challenging. But also, you know, I look at how to

087balance those things. I have a great support with our district. I work really closely with them. And this year my staff saw that it was, It was a lot, and so they suggested that next year I come to the district twice a week, I mean twice a month, so that I can concentrate on those reports, and so that I'm more engaged with them throughout the year. We just took on over the 10 minutes, so if you could just finish. Yes. Thank you. Any questions or comments from the board? And the challenge, you listed third grade. Can you elaborate more on that? Yes. So when I stepped out of the classroom and became an EL specialist, third grade has been a hard... and crucial year, but hard year to fill in with teachers. So every year

088we've had a different teacher, a different teacher. And even though we support them and help them and mentor them and all that, they don't stay. So it's been really hard. And that's a really crucial grade because they're going from reading to read to learning to read to reading to learn. And so we have helped that. Thank you. Your rate of parent-teacher conference attendance is just really, really impressive. So I wanted to hear a little bit more about what you feel has contributed to the high percentage of attendance. I know you mentioned Zoom option. I'm sure that helps. But I'm imagining there's other things that you all do that really contributes to that high rate. So we have an additional conference. It's called Personalized Learning Flight Conference. and we do it after the seventh week of

089school. During those first couple of weeks, we are assessing, we're looking at the students, we're getting to know them and all that, and each teacher makes like a plan for our students. And we meet with parents, and so we don't, so we meet with them, it's the same percent, I think last year we had 98%. rate of parents participation because that's the introduction that's the the the first step to creating the team that we need for our students. And so the teachers get paid for that. We have it on our LCAP and they just reach out again if they can't come because we are in X-Line, we have the Zoom option or teachers just call. We do also use Seesaw and so we communicate through that. And so teachers just reach out a lot. And

090so they get to know us. And then by the second conference, they want to come back and see if they're doing better. And then the third, they're coming back. And so I think that's a high expectation. Everybody's like, did everybody show up? Did everybody show up? So they're like, OK, we better make sure. Thank you. I have a question. So about what you say about the additional parent conference, when you have those that you're just mentioning. The PLPs? Yes. Yeah, so after like the seventh week. So this year, I think it's the first week of September. No, the last week of September. It's the seventh week. So we meet with parents. We don't want to wait until... November or for us it's December because we have it and so we want to make sure that

091we that the parents understand what our expectations are how we're how we're going to address you know if they're if they're there's a gap in reading a math or social emotional and then it's a time for our parents to share with us what they want for that year for the for their child so yes so in my My question is about, you say about target time? Yes, so target time is using the phonics assessment that the teachers designed. Then they place students, and then the teacher, like the kinder teacher, has one level of that phonics program, then the other teacher has another level, and so they put them based on students' needs. And then they teach for seven weeks, they assess. and then using PLT time, then they look at, are our groups changed again?

092And then they reshuffle kits and address what they need, and then they do it again, a second learning grade. So just for kinder and first? It's, it's, TK doesn't use it because TK is, they use the program, but they don't use the target type. It's from first through third. Now in third grade, there's kids that are, they don't need the phonics anymore. So they're doing literature studies, they're doing vocabulary development, they're doing writing, additional writing. Hi. Hi. How are you doing? Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. My question, for example, revolves around the work you did with special ed. Student sounds like you were able to catch up. You used, it sounds like you kind of used a wraparound type of system, support system, because I believe you mentioned that you did

093some home visits. Am I correct in that? For their absentees. For the absentees. So, yes. We did study it before. For the absenteeism of unspecialized students. OK. Can you just kind of talk about that population being very difficult to work with, very difficult to know how to? how to engage. So if you can just talk about how we get a process. We're using the wellness team. We looked at students, especially that subgroup, and then we talked to parents and again we have a close relationship with parents and sometimes they, students were, were We're getting sick, but then we talked about like, okay, are they ready to come back? Sometimes they're ready to come back, but parents are still afraid to send them because then they will relapse and all that. So we talked about like...

094you know, trusting us that they would come back and having that conversation about like if they're not throwing up, if they don't have a high fever, if they're not, you know, sending them back gradually. So we did that conversation with parents. Did that answer your question? I mean, somewhat, yeah. I mean, you're essentially, the support services is developing a relationship, deeper relationship than you would ordinarily. Right? Out of the box. maybe home visit, right? Maybe talking about issues of health and trying to garner their trust, right? Their child will be in good hands, that you're aware of their needs, right? Absolutely. So it seems like having to go the extra mile, you know, not the ordinary mile, is something that can go with the needle. Not just special ed students, but it sounds like health

095is a... is an issue that's involved in chronic absenteeism, but that could be part of it as well. Being vulnerable to let a sick child or somebody that you think is sick go back. And then being able to use masks no matter what. We have kids that use masks. We can continue to use masks. And it's okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any other questions or comments? Alright, thank you so much. Thank you very much. The superintendent the next one Freeman So just so the board knows we're averaging about 25 minutes each site So if we continue at this we should be done around 9 Thank you very much, sir. Good evening President Bautista Zavala, Board of Trustees Superintendent Lampkin and guests I'd like to get started here with let's see perfect clicker with

096our strengths to highlight In this first slide, I did go back three years ago here when we did experience some growth at our school site. And I did add it here. I was really proud of that growth. I'm still very proud of the growth that we had there. We were able, we were really focused on increasing. We wanted to hit that 30% mark in math. We made it to 31% that particular year. I think the state average that year was 34% and also in ELA we're knocking on the 40% door. And I wrote that up there, but then after I submitted this, I'm thinking I should have added two more very important things there. And those are collaboration and response to intervention as well. That really helped us get there. And so I'll talk a

097little bit about the collaboration as well. Definitely we all meet. on Wednesdays in our cafeteria and teacher team meetings. But there was there's a high level of trust because the the staff had been together for a number of years prior to that. And I'll give you an example of what of of how the staff went above and beyond. I had a fifth grade teacher who was in my office and she was really upset and almost in tears because she was working so hard and she was not seeing the results, right? She was just not seeing the results that she wanted to see. And we were talking about it, and I really appreciate how she came to me because, you know, that showed me that she perceived data as information and not condemnation, right? Because if

098she perceived it as condemnation, she would have never been in my office. So I appreciated that. And during that discussion, one of the things that came about was she wanted to, she asked me, is there anyone here who really is moving the needle with kids, who is just moving kids along? And I told her, yeah, we have some staff. There's a teacher I recommended who year after year gets kids to learn at high levels, well above the state average. And so what she did was she said, can I go observe? And so we arranged it where she spent the whole day, the fifth grade teacher spent the whole day in the sixth grade teacher's classroom. And at the end of the day, she had pages of notes. I asked her, how did it go? And

099she's like, wow, those kids work hard. They really worked hard for the teacher. But it didn't stop there, right? So the sixth grade teacher then went and used her strategies in the fifth grade classroom and co-talked with the fifth grade teacher. And then after that, she would regularly come back and provide some feedback as to the implementation of those strategies. And that takes trust, right? So that's the level of collaboration that we had because of the length of time we've been working together there. RTI response intervention, my go-to researcher is Dr. John Hattie, as everybody's well aware. I know my colleagues, people who have worked with me. He's up to 1,500 meta-analyses that his research encompasses. And response intervention is a very, very high-impact strategy, so we've heavily focused on that. And when we look

100at intervention, we... There's different components of that intervention that an intervention has to have for it to be highly effective And one of them is directive, right? Students have to show up So we've really focused on like the master schedule as well to make sure that everybody gets that intervention that they need The other one is it has to the intervention has to be research-based It has to be administered by a trained professional. So we can't just go like a literacy parent in there and give them a group. We just hired you here, here's your books. We really have to take the time to train them. And so, because that's one of the characteristics of a highly effective intervention. It has to be targeted so whenever we can do kid by kid, skill by skill,

101that truly helps. And so we had to really look at the way we collect data and make sure that it was kid by kid, skill by skill. It has to be timely before we were waiting until November, December to provide an intervention. And we're like, no, if it's... If it's September 1st and they're already falling behind, let's get them into the intervention group. And it really has to be systematic. And so all of these things we've been truly focused on. And I think that's really what's helped us there. Another thing to note is that dedicated staff, I think at Freeman. Our staff is super dedicated. We believe that it's not my kids or your kids. They're all our kids. They're willing to work before school, after school. I've never had a shortage of people willing

102to help out at Freeman. So that's, I would say they're highly, highly dedicated overall. We practice the four agreements because we want to have a positive school climate in the workplace. And that's a book by Don Miguel Dries. with the four agreements, be impeccable with your word, don't take anything personally, don't make assumptions, always do your best. And that really helps us. We've adopted that years ago. And if there ever is an instance where one of us breaks it, we address it, we address it, we move on. But I think that's really helped us. But I can't say enough about our dedicated staff. Also, our English learners are making our English learners are making the progress is green or high on LP levels as well. And I think that's due with, again, going back to

103the intervention, kid by kid, skill by skill, what skills are they lacking, what extended, we'll have tutoring groups as well for them once we identify them. And we're constantly looking at the data, we call it the data spreadsheet, where right away we're seeing, we highlight our English learners a certain color so we can really look at each grade level and see, okay these English learners are falling behind here. What are we going to do to help them? And we do all that during our collaboration time. So that's a little bit about our strengths. Okay I'm going to press, there it is. Two years ago I did have somebody resign and then somebody else and then somebody else. That's how it's been for two years. There was just a lot of resignations on a short span

104for various reasons. Some teachers moved on to be administrators now. One's a principal, one's a vice principal, and retirement. Everything just happened right at once. To give you an example, in fourth through sixth grade, five out of six teachers are new to Freeman. And so whenever we talk about, for example, RTI, it's very complex what we do. It takes a while to learn the way we do things, the way we analyze data, the way we collect data. That's been a struggle. I was blessed with having a stable staff for so many years, so I didn't really know what that was like until the past two years. The next one is this one we can't control really, but it's important to note that it's a challenge. Students who qualify for free reduced lunch has increased the

105rates. And the reason I say that is I'm going to say this without generalizing because I don't want to generalize any group, but especially I grew up... high poverty, family from immigrants from Mexico. So, but I didn't experience some of the trauma that our young students experience. I think the higher rates, the more trauma, the more likelihood of instances of trauma that there could be at a school. So really focusing on trauma-informed practices is even more important. And even more extended learning opportunities, too, such as tutoring. Additional tutoring services becomes very, very important. The last challenge... is the absenteeism rates, the chronic absenteeism rates are still extremely high. Coming back from COVID, they were 47.7%. I think we got it down to 33.3%. 27.7% was where we were at last year. This year, I think

106we're going to be a little bit higher than that as much as we've tried. We do lots of things at Freeman to try to promote student engagement. We teach them what engagement looks like at Freeman. We also constantly provide incentives to students, Jump for Dollars, Otter Pops, constantly the attendance trophy that visits each classroom who has the highest attendance rate for the week. We constantly my weekly messages. I try to always include messages to parents about attendance as well in our families. But there's more work to be done because if we're trying to get kids to learn at high levels, it's hard when they're missing more than 18 days of school. We really need to focus on that moving forward. Thank you. Thank you very much for the thorough presentation. Who would like to go

107first? I would just like to, if you can show the years of experience slide. I want to highlight the long-term, you had teachers at your school and I think that really goes to show the leadership you have given to that school and you sort of laid out, I think, pretty clearly some of the reasons that you have had staff there so long. So I want to thank you for providing that environment for our teachers and for our students. That's it. Thank you, Trustee Brubaker. Appreciate it. Thank you. Going around. I see the ladies. Hi, how are you? Oh, hello, Trustee. Thank you for being here. Similarly to your colleagues, I think, you know, my interest is in how you see the issue of chronic absenteeism. Again, more time in schools, more time engaging with what

108we have to give to our students, the better for them, better our results. What is engagement like with parents? What do you see on a daily basis that that needs to be improved or that needs to be engaged because to me it seems that it's not just what we do on campus but something has to change in the community. There has to be more time somehow engaged in the parent maybe outside of the school system. Yeah, it's um and again it depends on the family dynamic right there's different I guess I see both extremes I see parents who are Know you're going to school, you know, no matter what you're going to school and that's kind of how my own family was with me as well growing up but then I also see families that

109I for One reason or another struggle just to get their kids to school. I know my previous slide. I said dedicated staff There was a time when I would see my counselor coming up with a student in the morning. I kind of pulled her aside and I'm like, you're not supposed to be driving kids to school. It was a student with attendance issues. And she's like, I'm not, I'm not. I just go knock on the door. And then she walks to the home and then walks that child to school. And she did it for a while just because this child was having attendance issues. I mean, whatever it takes. But then at the same time, I know that particular family works late as well, so it's tough to be able to make sure the child's

110ready. There's also been times where transportation has been an issue. Another family lives over by Beamer, but they go to Freeman, and when it's rainy or the weather is... I mean, the mom told me, she's like... I can't bring my, I can't walk my daughter because they don't have a vehicle in the rain. So when it's really bad, I just can't come to school. We can't. And so that's another barrier that some of our families unfortunately face. Yeah, you know, again, along with the reduced lunch percentage, the poverty issues, right, lack of resources. But what I hear you saying in terms of maybe some of the cases that require more... It's not a regular school interventions that are necessarily helpful. We have to do things outside of the box in order to get our students

111to school. That's kind of what I hear you say. Yeah, I'd say that's fair. That's a fair assessment. We have to find a way. If I found the way, the rates would probably be a lot better, right? Even though they're getting better, we have a lot of work to do. We've tried a lot of incentives. We've tried, there's Dr. Doug Fisher. He has levels of engagement. We've tried teaching students as well about just what is engagement. Are you a level one, which is disrupting, or a level six, which is driving? And there's just a different continuum. And so, yeah, we've tried different things, but we have to do better to get kids to school. Thank you. All right. So I want to acknowledge that you bring up a very difficult subject, which is teacher turnover.

112You know, it takes a lot for a principal to come up and share, hey, I had a lot of turnover. There's been some positions that have been hard to fill, and I've heard it from other principals here tonight as well. And, you know, talking about that issue and how it translates into, you know, student learning and how it affects them. I think it's something that we as a board kind of need to keep in mind and start really looking at that data. But I also want to acknowledge the challenges that it makes for you as a site leader and how... Sometimes you come in in the morning and you have to figure out, okay, what positions do we need to step in and put in the sub? And I know you've personally been in a

113circumstance where you've had to sit in and be the sub for the day. So I want to acknowledge that and everyone here who stepped into that role in a one to two second balance act. So thank you. What I do want to see in the future is some data. maybe all in one spreadsheet on what it looks like, you know, in terms of teacher turnover at the different school sites and which school sites may be affecting, maybe, I don't want to say suffering, but maybe experiencing more teacher turnover. And then also the years of service that we have our teachers in, you know, what that looks like. And I think the last time we met, we heard from Spring Lake having a little more years of service compared to the other school sites that were

114presented that night. So thank you very much for bringing that up because that can be a little bit of a difficult subject to bring up. I don't have any questions. I thought your presentation was very thorough and I want to say thank you. Thank you for your service and dedication to our district, sir. So I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge you as well. And I'll give it back to my colleagues in case they have any other questions or comments. Thank you for sharing everything. I am curious about the chronic absenteeism. We heard from some schools where they're sharing that based on their observations, some of the absentee, like the absentee rates are impacted because of illness. Are you seeing a similar thing or is it more transportation like the story? Yeah, I mean,

115illness also. Also this year, you know, there's the political climate also sure played a factor just from my interactions with families as well. But yeah, illness definitely, definitely is a factor as well. Thank you. Like my colleagues, I also just want to take the opportunity to thank you. It was really nice hearing you share not just what was on your slides, but the stories that you have, right? The experiences that you shared with your staff. It's really clear to me that you know your staff really well, and I am sure that just the same way as you respect and honor their knowledge and service, that they feel the same way about you. Because it's seldom a one-way direction. So just thank you for everything you've done. Thank you, Tristan. We had the pleasure of working

116with the teacher who you used to lead, Ruben Ayala. And he had a few best things to say about you and your leadership and whatnot. You were ahead of the game with PLCs. Can you speak to that? I noticed when you had a professional environment. could be touched on that but you speak to what PLC's look like at your site and how you hold that time secret. Yeah so we try our best to meet weekly because it's so important to meet weekly and really we focus just on the four critical questions what's We look at all the standards, we deconstruct the standards, we get it down to the skill level. When you do look at all the standards, there's another researcher named Bob Marzano who stated that if you were to teach all the standards

117to all the students, with 100%, right, it would take 22 years. So we'd have to extend schooling K through 22. So really PLC is about identifying which standards I would say are most important. And there's a book by a person named Larry Ainsworth called Prioritizing the Common Core that really gets into that and how to do that. And so really doing some of that work with our staff is extremely important. Just identifying, getting clear about what are we going to build our interventions around? What skills are going to do our kids need for the rest of their lives or to help with other subjects? And then from there, really collecting data, creating common formative assessments as well together across the entire grade level, bringing back that data. And then we have something called, we call

118it a DACA4, Teacher Analysis of Common Assessments. And right there is where we fill in the data. And it's a protocol really to try to identify who... What strategies did we use that gave us these results? So teachers just put it on there And then from there they create groups and then I the data really tells you who's going to work with which students So if a teacher just knocked it out of the park They're gonna take the reteach group, right? And then we're going to talk about what did they do to really get these students to learn this skill at a high level And so that's kind of what we've been doing. And then I appreciate that. That was very... informative, but I would like to also circle back to absenteeism and the rates.

119Are you seeing any specific intervention of moving the needle? We assess that there were several factors with, we're changing culture, of course, it's going to take a couple of years. There's transportation, there's socioeconomic, there's illness, but what are you seeing that is moving the needle to getting folks in the class? I think... I think what really is helping us is the constant communication. We have our wellness meetings, our tier two meetings, and everybody's at that table. Our counselor, myself, there's an RSP teacher that attends as well. There's the behaviorist, a social worker. And sometimes, you know, we're talking about a student there. I'll just step out. Let me call his family right away or right there on the spot. But that constant communication with that family, and it depends on each individual family, that's why

120it's hard to say. I had a student who, when he was on time, Or when he just showed up, not necessarily even on time, but when he showed up, he would get a point. We put him kind of on a little incentive contract, and he would get a prize, and he was so motivated by that, and it was working for him. So really, yeah, I can't say. I would say if I had to pick one thing, it's just that constant communication with families as well. Thank you so much, Dr. Gonzalez. Hi, Dr. I really like how you talk about your staff, how you say about their level of trust, collaboration. And I don't doubt about you do that. And also, I would like to you mention it and they feel the importance of that. And

121I also, I like to echo what the Trustee Mojica said. say about your samples. I picture in my mind all these examples. It makes total sense about the students who came to your school. And it makes sense because that area is growing up. They build more apartments for some population and makes me a lot of sense. And I would say thank you. I always hear a lot of good things about you from the parents. I have the opportunity to talk and we appreciate you always are available and open to come to explain to us the data. So, more than once in a time, the superintendent says you are one of the expertise. Thank you so much. Thank you, Trustee Garcia. Thank you. Anyone else? Okay, seeing none. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Great

122evening. We're going to move on to the next one, and I think it's Gibson. Well, Dr. Gontales is going back to his seat, and we have the principal from Gibson Elementary coming up. I believe this is your last day, right? Is today your official last day? I cannot imagine. I've known you since you were a classroom teacher, and it's been amazing watching you. grow professionally and seeing the impact that you have made with so many students and families. The community of Freeman gave him a farewell with a band, a live band, potluck and all kinds of gifts and to show their appreciation and love towards Dr. Montales and he's going to circle back. to go to the classroom and those kids, those students that you're gonna have are so, so lucky because I know you're

123gonna give it all because you always do. So thank you for everything you've done. I'm not gonna say goodbye, but we're gonna keep in touch. He's a Raider fan, a Horniner fan, so we'll keep tabs on that and maybe we can get together sometime to talk football. do some more socializing that we haven't been able to do in the last years. But best of luck to you and thank you for everything you've done. We appreciate you and you will always be remembered here and know that you have made an impact and that your impact will continue to grow. Thank you. Tied. Nope, don't need to push a button. Okay. Good, Amy. Let's see if I can use this properly. So I'm just going to go over through some of our things here, starting with our

124strengths and strengths concerns so my biggest thing over the last three years stand in my third year is has been building relationships and rapport with teachers and staff students and parents one of the things that's been really important is our making sure we have a positive school culture, increasing the staff cohesiveness. The staff, I'm sure most of you know, before I came had gone through a number of principles. And one of the things that I asked when I came is, what do you need from me? And what they wanted from me was support with students and specifically support with behaviors with students. So we've really worked together. We've made a plan on how things are handled, what's handled in the classroom, what's handled by me. And the teachers have come to trust me, I believe,

125that I am going to be there for them. So we really have an improved staff cohesiveness right now. The culture has been much more positive. We have gotten to use our SEL second step lessons more. more regularly. We have been using them at least weekly and we've also had support of our counselors for implementing our second step lessons in the classrooms. We have specific classrooms where the counselors will go in and do it weekly. We have had five brand new teachers this year, three interns and two who aren't a pip in the step, so they needed some support. They're awesome. But they were open to support and working together and I had the counselors working with them a bit for that. Our teacher collaboration process, our PLC process, has been a journey. We started the

126first year slowly. Teachers were not necessarily into it. The second year we moved a little further along the line. And this year I think we've made a good jump into making it more of a natural part of our learning process and our teaching process. Our teachers, I'm going to go to that slide. Sorry. So our teachers, we were told we could have 18 hours of collaboration this year, and I worked together with teachers to see how they wanted to do that. In the past, we'd had about a half a day or a full day that we would have release time, be about four times a year. And the teachers themselves came up, said we would like to do this more often. And that is the idea of a PLC, that you meet more often. It

127doesn't have to be for a long time to look at student data, look at it along the way, don't wait four or five months between it. to talk about what's going on. So they said, can we figure this out where we can meet an hour or two hours several times, you know, at least once a month to do this. So our TK through third grades met nine times during the year, two hours each. Our fourth through sixth grades had a little more trouble with their preps and such and working it out. But they met three times for two hours each and then another four times during the year for three hours each. They're really getting to looking at the data. They've looked at the I-Ready data, teacher-made assessments, curriculum embedded assessments, summative assessments, and moving

128forward and working together as a team to make sure that they're doing what's best for students. Pop back again, sorry. Slides aren't in the order that I... Okay. Also, our ELS support has been really great and support from the EL department has been great. Unfortunately, this year our English learner specialist left and went to work for Cousters. So that's a huge loss and we're working on getting a replacement for her. But she was very instrumental in coaching with our new teachers. She was also part of our guiding coalition for our PLCs, so we've lost a member of that as well. But she really did support those teachers who were new. And she also helped us to really focus on reclassifications. So one of the things that she came up with was every staff meeting, we

129would share our collective experience. and the things that we have learned over the years, especially those who are more experienced and have had a lot of training in different levels of implementing ELD and student engagement, etc. So we would share practices that we had learned or that we are doing in our classrooms with the whole staff and discuss how we could implement them in different grade levels. So that was really helpful and I think it really moved both our integrated and designated ELD forward. That's increasing the effectiveness of our ELD and ALD implementation school-wide. We also hold that very sacred, making sure that that time doesn't get interrupted, that it is happening in every day. Sometimes there are interruptions, and then we need to make up that time. For the key challenges over the last

130three years, the biggest one, we have four SDC classes, classrooms on our campus, autism spectrum disorder classes, special day classes. We added a fourth one this year. There was a lot of trouble getting somebody hired for that. It's not an unusual thing. just us, it's not just Gibson, it's not just Woodland, it's happening all across the state, across the nation, that there is a shortage of special education teachers. If you ever look on EdJoin, you'll see some people are putting $10,000 bonuses to hire special education teachers, and they're still not getting any takers. So it was a struggle. We finally, by March, I've got someone who came in and she's an intern doing a wonderful job. Parents are happy, staff is happy, students are happy, most of all. So that's been difficult. Also our program

131specialists have been spread very thin, not being able to have the level of site support that we would like to have seen because I had two interns actually in the SDC classes. They were also case managing. So because those people don't have credentials, they can't do the actual case managing for those students on IEPs. So not only, you know, where they're doing the regular program specialist job, they're supporting interns or actually these, one was a PIP and one was an intern, and then also case managing. So having to be on campus for those IEPs and stuff. So the support was kind of spread thin and it was... Nothing of their doing it's just how it was this year Also hiring paraprofessionals for both general ed and special ed has been very difficult this year. I

132I had one literacy para who was there consistently throughout the year. I tried three times to hire another literacy para. I offered the position to three different people. Three different people accepted it. Three different people called me several days later and said they could not take the position due to medical issues. So that one literacy para position went unfilled all year. So I am hoping that we can get... people in those positions. I have taken a proactive stance and tried to recruit paras, specifically parents who come and they want, they're interested in helping out at the school and like, hey, we have a position. You might be able to fill it. So I have gotten a couple, actually I've gotten two, parent twos, SDC paras that way, parents who've... Decided yeah, this sounds like a

133good good job for me. So that's been good and then I also a couple of the New teachers that we had this year. I recruited those two. So I think you most of you probably know Victoria Fernandez Her daughter was a sub for us and did an excellent job and I said, hey, have you ever thought about going into this? So she has taken on the fourth through sixth grade SDC class and done a wonderful job. So trying our best to keep her. Student mental health has been a serious issue this year. So we were very good this year about meeting in our wellness teams. Our wellness team met every Monday. Principal, counselor, psychologist. We had representatives from NVIH, social worker or mental health clinician. Our behaviorist was there every other wellness meeting because she

134was only there very other Monday. We also had our attendance liaison and our expanding mind site coordinator this year, which was really helpful because we could see students who might be holding it together during the school day and then they were... having meltdowns in the after-school program. There was one student that we suggested to the parent that maybe it was too long of a day. He also had some diagnosis that went on this year and turned out to be very positive for him. But to understand what's going on in that after-school program too, as well as how the students are behaving in school, was really helpful. Also the implementation of Second Step, I mentioned that once last year. I would say we were sporadic in implementing our Second Step curriculum and this year we made

135sure that everybody was doing it at least once a week and those people who needed support, our counselors would help them with that. In about three minutes. Okay. Let's see what else I have on here. Chronic absenteeism. Everybody's been talking about that. So our chronic absenteeism has decreased. In 2022, we had a 44.3% absentee rate, 2023, 38.2, and 2024, 26.9, which is still very high, but it has been coming down. Some of the things we worked on as a staff is making sure that we were providing opportunities for more in-depth student engagement. Some of the things that we did had to do with what are the lessons that you are presenting in class? Are they the types of things students want to learn? We talked a lot about we're competing with video games. We're competing

136with a lot of fast-paced things to have lessons where we are talking at them. The sage on the stage is not the way students need to learn anymore. I had a little boy who actually was the same one who could make it through the after-school program. But he was in my office a lot the first and second year. This year he has not been. But I was asking, what is going on? What's going on with you? He goes, I just want someone to teach the way I want to learn. And I said, well, tell me what that looks like. He said, I want to do experiments. So we've talked a lot about how we can increase the engagement for our students in the class. We also talked a lot about student mental health. I do

137feel it's very difficult to be a parent these days. It's more difficult to be a student. They have so many things going in their lives, social media, all of those things. And mental health is real. And I had some staff who didn't feel that it was. So one of the things we focused on a lot was, you know, what is the lens through which you are looking at these students? You are looking at these students through a lens of, say, a middle class white woman. This is not the same lens that these children have. A lot of these children are from historically underrepresented and marginalized families or populations. So we need to think about who we are. what our biases are we're bringing to the teaching. And so we've done a lot of work on

138that. There needs to be more. Also, some of the struggles we're having are social media and cell phone usage. I was happy to see the cell phone survey go out. We have a lot of things that are happening at home with students on their cell phones, and then they're brought to us at school. You know, this child is doing this to my kid at 3 o'clock in the morning. So a lot of that is interfering with the school day. So really trying to work on that, making sure that cell phones are put away during the day. I bought little cell phone holders where the kids had to deposit them. So we've been dealing with that a lot as well. Over the past three years, we've also had a lot of staff and student personal tragedies

139and losses. We lost our nutrition supervisor who had been there for a very long time, very quickly, tragically unexpected. We've had some students who've lost their parents. Several of us this year, I know we've talked about the SIPSA, have lost family members as well. Being able to navigate all of that and be responsive to that has been something that I've had to work with as well. Let's see. All right. Carnic absentee and design. I know I mentioned that a little bit. Some of the things that we've done that the staff has wanted is for me to bring back a lot of things that they used to do before COVID. So it's taken a while to do. One of the things that I've told them is I'm happy. I'm happy to bring whatever you want back.

140The issue is I can't do them all myself. So the staff has really stepped up to support these. We have awards ceremony monthly that we... invite the parents to. We have our PBIS rules, safe, respectful, responsible, and that's what we choose two students from each class that has some of those characteristics, and then we present them in front of the whole school. My feeling is that we need to reward and award and honor more students, so we do a pledge every Monday, or every day, not just Monday. But on Monday I implemented awards so that a teacher could give an award to a student every Monday. I had a spreadsheet where they put down what they're awarding the child for, and it could be anything. There are children that have a lot to offer. They're

141not necessarily those things that we are looking for as far as academics or something. But find something. There is something that those children are doing well. So I think that that's helped increase the... or decrease the chronic absenteeism. I've made phone calls home to parents when I know it's a child who's had a lot of absences and I see that they're coming up for an award on a Monday morning. They need to be there first thing, 8.15. And so I'll call, you know, 7.30, so hey, so-and-so's getting an award this morning. Can you make sure he's here on time? He's going to get it presented in front. So I think that's made a lot of difference as well. My librarian has been great in having the library open during lunchtime for those students who don't

142necessarily like to be in big crowds or maybe just need a quiet place to reflect. So that's been really great as well. Expanding minds, my slides on expanding minds didn't get in here, but we have some other, let me go forward. Talked about that. Okay. So we've worked a lot with educational partners to bring... outside the class opportunities for the students. But Expanding Minds should have been before this, so I'm going to talk a little bit about that. So Little Heroes is one of the things that Expanding Minds brings every day or every year. It's fun, engaging physical activities for the students. They brought the media bus, which is interactive digital music lessons or sessions. Bollywood, which is dance classes introducing cultural movement and rhythm. They do farmer's market monthly and then they work with

143Yellow Farm to Forks in our garden and growing and harvesting vegetables. As far as educational partners that we work with, we work with the Mondavi Center, Sierra Nevada Journeys, Walker Creek Science Campus, our sixth grade science camp. Okay, yeah. Anyway, there's a list of things that we do outside of the classroom that we bring in to make sure that students are getting a lot of engaging. opportunities. One of the big ones, and I know some of you have come to see us, is our Autism Awareness Day or Week, and one of our special needs teachers leads that. Thank you very much. Any questions or comments from the board, starting with Professor Villagran? I want to recognize and appreciate the crucial conversations that you mentioned, and having with your teachers around bias. It's important too. recognizing,

144you know, highlighting it might the lens that that they're seeing the students and you know I know for a lot of us it's hard to recognize that what young people are going through is not what we went through, right? We try to judge them based on what we went through and it's just not the right way to do it because their reality is different than reality and their feelings are their feelings regardless of how we feel they should feel. It's like how we feel they should feel is irrelevant. It's how they feel, right? Or their perception of whatever's going on which is affecting their learning. So again, I just want to commend you for... being intentional about doing that and you know support you continue to do that and The more you do that the

145more that people are aware You know most of the devices right now the ones that come to mind when people think of bias You know those things are just right there But there's other ones that we don't even know about so we have a conversation like oh wait, that's a minus Yeah, minus two So again, thank you for that. Thank you I have to say also having Dr. Sasha come for the anti-bias training, my teachers were really happy with that, really loved it. That was good to hear. Thank you for your presentation. I'm really impressed by all of the extended learning opportunities you have. In the slide that follows the one that we have up, you have raising salmon. And I'm curious to learn a little bit more. Do you mind sharing? So our fifth

146grade teachers go to, you have to go to class to learn how to do it. And I can't think of who it's through at the moment. But they get salmon eggs, they have an aquarium that's given them, and the kids raise them during class. So they do journals, they have to watch the growth cycle of them, they have to comment on them, and then the culminating activity is releasing them. So that's been going on for several years. I've actually had teachers do it in other schools that I've been at as well. Hi, thank you. So I would like to hear about the social media and all your mention about those particular cases. How is the, do you engage with the parents to know these problems? Do you have any type of ELAC, PTA presentations? Yeah.

147We've talked a lot about it at school site council and at ELAC. Last year I tried to get something going where we could have a presentation for parents. Because a lot of them will say to me sometimes, I didn't know my child could look at that, or I didn't know that they were capable of doing that. I wasn't able to get that going, but I would like to still work on it this year, just kind of some social media training. Sometimes, you know, we're all busy. We don't always know what our kids are looking up with those little mini computers in their hands. I know, I know, but for me and as many of my colleagues are, But our moms, we know the importance of the power engagement as well about the mental health, which

148I agree how important this is. And I think we are a team, right? We have the school and the parents. Yeah, thank you. So those are my topics. Thank you. I just want to echo the, I'm impressed by the anti-mice training sort of. and the focus on mental health that's a topic I'm especially interested in and I agree there's a lot of challenges we have no idea that our kids are facing right and so making sure we're letting our kids have the emotions that they have and helping them work for those to be able to focus on their schoolwork and like it's kind of hard to to do one and that would be less than the other part. I have to say also I've never been in an elementary school that's had full-time counselors or

149even part-time counselors. So that's been a real positive here in Woodland and the support with NVIH providing mental health clinicians as well. Thank you so much. Hi. Thanks for being here. Thanks for taking time to do this report for us. Just a couple of questions. I know you had mentioned hiring paraprofessionals for both general ed and special ed and difficulties. Is there any other insight you could share with us in terms of how to be able to achieve getting more paraprofessionals? Well, it's not an easy job. That's for sure. Especially the paraprofessional tools, the special ed paraprofessionals, because we have SDC classes. So we do have some times where students can be aggressive. It's definitely not their fault. It's part of their disability. So it takes a special kind of person to be in that

150position to begin with. And preparation, perhaps. Yes, and preparation. So I think the district has been really good over the three years I've been here. I've seen more training for paraeducators. The literacy paras go to trainings, and the para twos go to trainings, de-escalation. Gupri Kaur has done a lot of that, and they have actually asked for more, the SDC paras. So I think that's a really positive that the district has been providing for them. Okay, second question is around, again, the topic of mental health. And that was above a bullet point. That had to do with social media and cell phone usage. Do you see a correlation of anxiety or conflict in mental health and cell phone usage? I think for some students there is a correlation, but for others, I have students who...

151don't really have cell phones and they don't have that social media. It's just that they are kind of bombarded with it every day because you can't get away from it. I don't think their use of it, but maybe use of, you know, other kids around that it's penetrating their life. It's impinging on their life. And then one of the students I have has a brother who has some... severe special needs. And so there's some of those things. There's just a lot going on right now, I think. And the social media doesn't help, but I don't think that it's the total cause of everything. What other mental health issues do you see that are... making impacts on their students? Anxiety. The kids with anxiety and that it's difficult to separate from their parents. It's difficult to

152be in school, especially if they're having some learning disabilities as well. They're very aware, you know, if they're not achieving at the same rate as others. We try to combat that, but... You know, we can't combat it all necessarily. Definitely observing cues, what it means when they need extra help or how they approach, how they feel about themselves. Right. And one of the nice things about the literacy parents is they're there for all the kids. So it's not, you know, not necessarily students who are on IEPs, so they're not coming in and kind of targeting a student. And we try to keep... those paras who come in to support students with IEPs so that it's not just necessarily, you know, I'm crowding around that one student and helping, but we might help in a small

153group so that it's not necessarily pointing out which child's needing that extra help. Yeah, so those paras are not, they're being used in such a way where they're not to... identifying students not identifying necessarily that I right this means a particular yeah inviting other kids back to you know work in a small group etc that seems pretty key in terms of you know the type of the type of process which you would use in terms of how you bring parents into the classroom what they mean for the students they said always observing right whoever comes in and giving it meaning And my last question on the extra, on the extended learning opportunities, I see Bookmobile out there. Can you just talk a little bit about how you've been able to use the Bookmobile? Have you

154been able to target students that might need extra help and try and get them there? So we have been very fortunate. excuse me, our librarian used to be a librarian at the Woodland Library, so she has a lot of connections. But the bookmobile, I believe, was instigated at the district level for many schools. But they have come and targeted basically fourth graders. Fourth graders have gotten to check out books. They came two times this year, I believe. And a lot of it, my librarian will take care of that. And then we visit the Woodland Library and they have a STEM maker space that the kids love to use and stuff too. So really just trying to get the kids used to that, you know, there is a library, there are these resources other than computers

155that you can look at. Yeah, I'm just wondering how does Google help supplement what's already there, you know, whatever library abilities you may have, you know, what is it? How does it work together with our own library? It's just bringing an extra resource where kids can know that they can access this outside of the school day. Thank you. I just want to commend you for your use of your cafe specialist. I recently went to your sixth grade promotion, and I was very, very impressed of how the cafe specialist was utilized to translate the ceremony. The room was filled with family and friends and also teachers and staff were very much engaged in conducting the ceremony and I thought that was very well presented. I just want to give you kudos for that because it seemed

156that everyone in the audience was able to understand what was happening and your café specialist was very thorough in the translation. So I was really, really excited. Not sure that that specific use of the café specialist is being done in the ceremonies at other school sites, but I thought that was a really great practice. I just wanted to share that. Thank you. I watch from a distance, so in full transparency, some of my little cousins go to your school. And they have different needs. And this school has definitely done a lot to bring them in and bridge that transition that they had. But as it relates to the extended learning opportunities that are listed on here, I feel that you guys are doing a really, really good job. Oh, thank you. I also have to

157say, like, with all of the Measure Y dollars that have gone to make the school improvements, I'm bringing it up as it relates to this because I feel that it has helped. Absolutely. I feel that the community and the parent involvement from my observation of just, you know, not just being a school board member, but also participating with my little cousins as an active family member. I feel that the excitement and the community participation has increased at your, just speaking to your site. Yeah. So. That's a question. I agree. It's my observation. And it looks beautiful. You know, when places look nice and you know they're safe, you know they care about your kids. So that's really important. So I feel that you touched on all the areas that I have questions on, but I

158did want to tack on the Kaftai specialist's great use of that specific position and then also the increase in participation. of our families as it relates to our facilities. Superintendent or any others? Go ahead. No, no, I'll put it in your . Something that just keeps getting stuck in my head. Can you talk about the Ruby Bridges Walk to School Day? That's in November. And so that's getting kind of cold around that area, if not wet. So the pictures look like you had a pretty good turnout for that. What did that look like? So each year, in fact, I've already signed up for it for this coming year. PG&E is one of the sponsors. So they send us swag. The little guys in front are all wearing little beanies, purple beanies. They had flags. One

159year we had little backpacks, different things. So, you know, we talk about it. There are teacher resources leading up to it, talking about segregation, desegregation, you know, the fact that some of this is still going on in spite of the fact that, you know, we would hope it wasn't. And then we do our pledge every morning and we walk from the back of the school around the front of the school. We all gather, and then we just talk about how she had to walk in with all these people, and what a brave person she was. Okay, so it wasn't that they were all doing a community walk to the school. No, no. We walk around the school, but the teachers have led up to it with lessons that they've done in the classroom. And we

160do it on November 14th every year. Can I chime in on that? Sure. Thank you for bringing that up because I've seen this done at other school sites, and I don't think all schools do it, but I've seen it at another school site, and I think it was Spring Lake, where they did it where they encouraged the students to walk to school on the given day. But I like the way you did it because not everyone can walk to school, so this way they're able to all participate together. But I'll stop there. Well, just to piggyback off this, the way I had seen the picture and the thing that sparked and why it was sticking in my head is there's a school in either the East Coast or Midwest that used a Biden parade to

161combat their chronic absenteeism. So their PE teacher started a route where he can pick up the majority of the students. And when I saw this, I thought, are they walking to school? Is this something we can use to combat? So that's how my brain works. The cod's returning. That's why I asked you to speak on it. Thank you. OK. You're welcome. All right. Anyone else? All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. So I just wanted to time check for the board. We still have three more plans to go. So if we try to keep it within a half an hour for each plan, we should be able to meet our 9 o'clock deadline that we set. So we're going to give 10 minutes to the principals to present, and then we'll have

162about 20 minutes for questions. And if we keep that, we'll be on track to what we agreed to. Right-hand principal, again. Good evening superintendent, board of trustees. I'm Allison Everett, second year principal at Whitehead Elementary. I'm going to share a few of our strengths and a few challenges. So one of our major strengths as a wayhead team is our engaged and collaborative staff and this is both formal and informal collaboration. It's our second year implementing PLC's as a team and so teachers meet about three hours a month as well as three release days throughout the school year to unit plan, to unpack standards, to create assessments. Then they teach and then meet together after that to look at the student data or the student work and figure out what did students learn, what students did

163not meet the standard, and then plan from there, either reteaching or putting students in a small group or figuring out how to increase some of the learning. There's been a lot of buy-in this school year, more buy-in around our PLCs. We do a survey for staff about mid-year to check in what's working and what's not. And many of the groups really appreciated the time together. They really enjoyed looking at student work and student data together and many of them either met or were on track to meeting their SMART goal that they set at the beginning of the year in their PLCs. I would also like to share that informally it's a very collaborative staff. They really like each other and they work together really well and it's kind of a principal's dream to walk into

164a team that gets along and cares for each other. I watch them support each other with resources and with best practices and around student needs. And I also hear that they share with me kind of how they've helped each other out. So for example at our staff party one of our brand new teachers who teaches a combo class wants to come back, wants to teach a combo class, shared with me how much she appreciated some of the veteran teachers literally pulling her out of her classroom to have lunch with them so that she could become part of the team. And she shared how much she grew as a teacher around practices, but mostly around confidence. and that was really wonderful to hear. Another strength I'd like to share is our PBIS structures, our Positive Behavior

165Intervention and Support structures. We've been very intentional about making sure we have this solid system because it's the foundation for academic, a safe and positive school culture is the foundation for academic achievement. And so our PLC team, or I'm sorry, our PBIS team meets monthly to look at student data, to review surveys, to discuss patterns of behavior that we're seeing and figuring out how we can address those school-wide. So for example, we notice when students come back after a break, they need reminders on some of our behavior expectations. So our PBIS team put together what we call our SOAR reset. So when we get back from winter break, from Thanksgiving break, from spring break, we go through our SOAR reset. And it's usually about a week long of activities and reminders for students and teachers.

166Over the last three years our PBAs team has designed behavior expectations for all areas of the school. So we're clear with students on behavior expectations for the classroom, the bathroom, the cafeteria, the office, etc. We participated in YCOE's PBAs cohort to learn from what other districts and schools are doing in Yolo County and share our best practices and hear from them what's working. We've re-ramped our SOAR tickets system so for positive behavior students will earn a SOAR ticket and we work to make it very public so students see earning tickets and then spending tickets the fun part right. So there's monthly we host SOAR stores where students can buy school supplies or fun little toys or crop charms things that they enjoy and also big ask from our students more and more treats. So monthly

167they can buy a S.O.R.E. treat. Depending on the weather, popsicles or hot cocoa or lemonade, they really like the lemonade. So they can use their tickets for that. And then it's public, so you see behavior equals reward. And then we've also increased our SOAR tickets to school-wide events so they can use them at the Harvest Festival or the Field Day or other activities and that helps also inform parents on this is our plan for positive student behavior and this is how students can use it. On our school safety survey, students have shared a vast majority that Whitehead does have clear rules for behavior, that good behavior is noticed, and that teachers make sure that rules are followed. Also, as a result of our PBIS work, we've seen an increase in the dashboard indicator for student

168suspension, so we went from yellow to green. I'm going to share a few key challenges. One challenge is around chronic absenteeism. So last school year we did see a decrease in chronic absenteeism and now this year we've seen an increase kind of back up to that, well, 34% level. Not where we'd like it to be. We continue to work with our attendance liaison who works with myself and parents to communicate specifically about needs and supports. Our wellness team discusses specific student needs and sometimes we can figure out maybe the student needs a referral or counseling, maybe academics are hard and so an intervention, refer for intervention, just discussing specific needs and seeing what we can do to address them. We have various rewards and incentives for attendance. A monthly perfect attendance award, our fluffy feathers

169attendance award for the class with the highest attendance for the month. And then also rewards for students who have increased attendance, gift cards and kudos and we're glad you're here kind of rewards. And then we do our best to work with individual students and build relationships with families. So for example, we noticed a family whose attendance had decreased especially as it got colder and we knew mom walks with her two kiddos to school and she had one kiddo that qualifies for busing because he's in the STC class and then another student who has an IEP but did not qualify for busing because he wasn't in the STC. class so I was able to work with Tony and our bussing department and get transportation for that family so mom had a consistent way to get both

170boys to school each day. So that didn't move the needle school-wide but it moved the needle for that family. So attendance is definitely an area where we will continue to work. Another challenge that we've seen across the years is low academic achievement. We did have a small increase in our ELA score and our dashboard indicator increase, but across the board, scores are stagnant for math and ELA. So some things that we're working towards implementing to combat some of that... That challenge is instructional rounds, so we can, as a staff, work to identify and define high quality instruction and then work to implement some of that school-wide. and also help teachers to see, you know, they're not in a silo, we're working together to support all the needs of our kiddos. We're continuing our PLC work

171and then we're working on supplementing some of our math work with a program to kind of give teachers more tools and strategies for Tier 1 instruction but also Tier 2 math support in the classroom. And the third challenge that I'd like to highlight is our increasing special education needs and numbers. So over the last three years, we've increased from 56 students on IEP to next year we'll have 100. The great thing is we've been increasing an SDC class each year, which means next year will be the first year we'll have a continuum of TK to sixth grade SDC, meaning families will get to stay at Whitehead their whole year. They won't have to move to another school. And that's great in that we can build relationships and get to know students and families. The challenge

172though sometimes comes around staffing. So we've had a hard time filling some of our pair positions. Our new STC class for this year, we didn't fill pairs until November and so that meant pulling staff from other places to make sure we could keep those kiddos safe and also meant lack of consistency in that class until we could get everybody in the right spots. We've also had increases in RSP caseloads the last three years. Our RSP caseload has been over max and we've been unable to fill that our additional 0.5 position and so again just kind of stretching resources. So this is again something we'll continue to work with our special education department on. Thank you. That was perfect. Down to 32 seconds. Yes. How long was the break? 32 seconds. All right. Time to get

173started. Thank you very much. Questions or comments from the board? Who would like to go first? Seeing none, do you want to proceed to the next one? All right. We'll start with you, Trustee Rodriguez. Hi. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for coming back. Thanks. Appreciate it. Just wanted to hear more on the data about students with IEP increasing from 56 to... 100, it sounds like now. Just if you can talk a little bit about what accounts for that increase, what does that mean for you as a principal and the staff, and how you engage parents. I'm assuming this is going to take more staff, more folks with IEP, more students with IEP, more staff. Just talk a little bit about that process for you. Yes, so two years ago we had just

174one STC class, an upper grade STC class. Last year we added a TK1 class, and then now next year we'll add. middle grade so first and second so we'll go all the way up so that's a 30 student increase in SDC but about 30 students depending on the size of those classes and so that accounts for the numbers also in increasing RSP students we've qualified over 10 students for RSP services last year and so working with parents through that IEP process is key and you know it It's a lot of IEPs to sit in on, but they're all really important because that's where we can build rapport with families and find out what their needs are and get to know their students better and get to know them better. So as a school, we can

175have a systemic approach to making sure we're meeting the IEP goals and also connecting with them as a family. It sounds like a lot of the families need a support system, right? Are you able to effectively get families referrals to support systems outside of the school system? We've communicated with parent supports that are there, but we haven't actually connected with them. They'll make that step, right? But we've mentioned the regional center or working with the pediatrician for further diagnosis as needed. So we can connect them with what are some of the available resources out there, but they'll take that next step to follow through on that, if that makes sense. It's usually the role of our social workers that work with the family and then they follow up. But our site staff, they just don't

176have the capacity to do that. But our social workers that work with our schools that are on the wellness team, they follow up because they're experts on those types of resources. All right, so I do want to acknowledge that you have had a special education need or increase. at your school site and it has been significant. And then you guys are seeking the Horizon services as well. Sorry, I didn't speak to that much. Horizon is the county's program for social, students with emotional disability. And so they're housed at our site. So they have two, a lower grade and upper grade class that we work with on integrating into our school. Great. So do you foresee any special ed vacancies upcoming in the new academic year? Can you talk a little bit about that? Not this

177coming school year. I will not. So actually, we are fully hired for next year, which is excellent. very little staff turnover this year. In two years I will have a vacancy in STC because I have a teacher and a visa. So I will need an STC teacher for the 26-27 school year. Thank you very much. Is this an appropriate time for me to remind the board that on May 18th or 19th I sent a Friday update weekly update to the board announcing that we have received a community schools grant. Oh, yes. We have not received an award letter yet, so we can't start acting on it until we have a formal letter saying we're receiving a sign. So I'm kind of on pause, but we're hearing it's coming. But Whitehead, there's four schools that will

178provide services. That is Whitehead, Dingle, Woodland Prairie, and Lee Middle School. So that's going to be a big help regarding the questions you asked in our social workers. working at those sites. So, more to come on that. At this point, that's all we know. And we are not going to start acting on it until I see the money in the account. We'll keep going. Trustee Rebaker. I'm curious, since you're sort of in a kind of unique position of seeing this pretty large increase in IEP students, if you have... If you can sort of speak to if you have seen that affect your chronic absenteeism because what I'm inferring but I wasn't explicitly said is that some of our chronic absenteeism is with our students who have disabilities and so therefore are more prone to illness

179and things like that. If you have anything you might want to add beyond what your colleagues have already shared tonight about ways to address that given that you have this sort of change going on in your demographics. Yeah, I don't know if I could speak to that directly. Ken shared that we see higher chronic absenteeism in lower grades, so TK, kinder mostly. And so we saw it, we did see it with a couple students in our TK, kinder, SDC class. And so, you know, those families are, there's a variety of supports that might be helpful for one it was transportation for others it's just reminders on the importance of education for some it's just kind of motivation around making sure kids are there you know why to keep a kid home or why not to

180keep a kid home I guess. Thank you. I have a question. How long have you been on Y-HIT? I finished my second year. Okay. Alright any other questions? Trustee Richard Kelly. I'm liking to see all of the stuff that you have for extended learning opportunities. I know that it was a challenge coming into Whitehead. There had been a lot of inconsistencies and some behavior and whatnot. I'm so excited to see Whitehead has stabilized and the feedback that you're giving about your staff and how engaged they are and how responsive. It's also a challenge having a Horizons program on your campus. It's like a school within a school. Even though those are WGASD students, some of them aren't. Some of them are from Espartos. Some of them are from Davis. But that also presents a challenge.

181And I just want to commend you. for the report, for the information, and the tough situation that you have come up on top with. So thank you. Thank you. Are we ready to move on? Okay, thank you, colleagues. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. All right, I am going to ask that we do not take a bathroom break and then keep powering through. And if anyone needs to use the restroom that you excuse yourself individually, we'd be okay with that. All right, thank you very much. And the next one is Prairie. Thank you very much. Good evening, Superintendent Ortega-Lampkin, President Valquista Zavala, and Board of Trustees. Today marks the completion of my fourth year as principal at Prairie. And we have been able to build a very strong collaborative team that believes that

182all students can learn with the right supports. So I have some of our strengths and celebrations. Starting with some of our SBAC scores. So our English learners have shown measurable growth in both math and language arts as shown on the California dashboard. And as well our students who are reclassified as proficient in English have shown growth in language arts. They are outperforming all other student groups on campus. They are scoring 7.3 points above the standard. So they are doing a fantastic job. And that's in third through sixth grade who actually take the SPAC, that's 98 students we're talking about. And compared to, they're doing relatively better than other students, other RFIP students in the district. We also showed growth overall in math on the California dashboard, improving from the orange level to the yellow level.

183We made an increase of 5.1 points, earning us that yellow. And even students that were below standard, we had a shift in more students nearly reaching standard. So definitely some... improvements in math to celebrate and also our FEPP students also make growth as they're not performing above standard like they are in reading but they also make growth in math which is significant. As some of my colleagues have mentioned we I also have seen a reduction in chronic absenteeism over the years and that in a large part is due to our wellness team which many of my colleagues have talked about that meets regularly and you know we talk about individual students and what their needs are we keep very careful documentation of the students and you know Everybody has individual needs. Each student gets a

184case manager. It might be the attendance liaison. It might be the reading intervention teacher. It might be the counselor, depending on the area of need. Actually, our reading intervention teacher is one of the people. She's always advocating for the attendance. She'll bring to the team, this student is not improving in the reading intervention, not showing growth, and it's because of their attendance. And we'll talk as a team as to what we can do and really... out, you know, reach out to the families and help families understand that we're here to support. You know, what can we do? And the staff is willing to do, go above and beyond, whether that's meeting them out on the curb, giving positive incentives, you know, just for that student. You know, a lot of it falls on the parents,

185but if the student is, no, I have to go to school today, Mom, because I'm going to get my prize. And, you know, our attendance liaison brought pizza for the student. We'll go pick up, go walk across the street and pick up students and bring them in. So a lot of those efforts. A huge area of focus for us at Prairie has been this reduction of perception of bullying and harassment. physical aggression, verbal aggression, just in a number of surveys, staff, students, families see this need to address that it is a problem on campus. This spring, on the California School Parent Survey, which is part of the Healthy Kids, we saw a significant reduction. So in 2022-23, 42% of our families said that bullying and harassment is a major problem and that declined to 26%

186so which has a lot to do with a lot of the efforts so that's been a big part of our efforts. This is our second year where we as a staff committed to fully implementing the SEL curriculum that's provided by the district which is the second step and we had increase in implementation this year. We've also purchased the additional bullying prevention unit and implemented some procedures alongside with that. And interestingly, in surveys from students this spring, They said that they, you know, one of the questions is, do you feel you have strategies for problem solving? And a significant number of students said they did not. And do you regularly do class meetings in your class? And there were significant that said they do not. And in looking at the data, at the surveys and meeting

187with the teacher leadership teams, they said we would like some training on how to run an effective class meeting. So we are bringing in a consultant. called Positive Discipline in the Classroom. She's from San Jose. She's going to come here this summer, and we will have 10 teachers and two admin that will participate in that. And it touches on a lot of strategies, but class meetings is a big strategy, and then we'll have that team go back and take that back. So we're looking forward to... taking that to the next step next year and continue to implement second step but also regular class meetings and help students have those tools to solve problems on their own. We've also been implementing our professional learning communities. And so staff did a self-assessment last school year, 23-24, and

188then one this year, and shows that we are moving towards full implementation and staff are feeling more confident. And last summer, I took a team of teachers to the PLC conference here in Sacramento, and they came back just excited and motivated. those teacher leaders that took that on. So a couple of the two sixth grade teachers went and they came back and they started meeting, creating their common form of assessments. They gave the common form assessment, came and met together. All right, who are the students? They even went as far as to... trade students and you know by their need come so do like two or three days of intervention where they traded students among the four of them come back and see the results and they shared that with the staff and like all

189students can learn with their proper supports they can all learn and that you know they obviously are going to they have high regard for their their colleagues and that that sparked that united the staff in the effort. So that has been a huge celebration. That team also came back and said, and I think this is something we're very proud of that we did this year, they came back, a big message that they got from the PLC. conference was that students who received tier 3 intervention must also be getting tier 1 intervention and tier 2. They can't leave the classroom and get tier 3, which is maybe reading intervention or special ed, and not get that tier 1 and that tier 2. So we sat down as a leadership team and created a school-wide schedule and

190we blocked off time. So every grade level blocked off a time 30 minutes of ELA core instruction and nobody's to leave the room. 30 minutes of math core instruction and nobody's to leave the room so that we know everybody's getting that best first instruction in tier one. We also have our ELD time on there and then the time that the literacy paras go in so that the literacy paras aren't going in during that tier one because we don't want to pull anybody from the tier one. Everybody's getting that tier one. So we're excited to see if that has an impact on our students reading in math. Okay, thank you. All right, and some of the challenges, key challenges that we've had, high teacher turnover for the three consecutive years, and obviously we've talked a lot

191about that, and that disrupts instruction. In the 22-23 year, we had, and at World Arts Schools, we have 29 classrooms. We had seven teachers and one EL specialist that we had to rehire. 23-24, we had 11 teachers. And this year, seven teachers, one EL specialist, and our counselor who's been there for four years. So, yeah, she's moving on to the high school. So that's been a challenge and with that we've had a large number of inexperienced teachers. We've had students, or teachers, excuse me, on emergency credentials, intern credentials. We have students in the induction program and we do have a high needs student population, 90% socioeconomically disadvantaged. So that's been something we've really been working on and that's something we've identified as a staff and talked about what can we do, how can we attract

192teachers and retain our teachers and what can we do to make teachers want to stay. So we've done a really good job of assigning a mentor, somebody on site to each new teacher. Even if it's not a new teacher but new to Prairie, just for that social connection and help them have that sense of belonging. So that's been really helpful this year. We also hired some retired teachers to come in and coach to support those teachers. Also the work we're doing with our PLC, right, where we're meeting together. There's certain meetings where I'm there and I guide them. Where they're all working together and we're supporting those newer teachers so that they're on the same page Staffing shortages that have been talked about especially in special education So we we have a 2.5 allotment for

193RSP We were not able to to fill that 0.5 this year, which means our case managers are over caseload And we didn't have a psychologist this year and previously we had a fantastic psychologist so we had four psychologists from different sites helping. They did an amazing job, but it's really hard because there's a lot of communication that goes on in that case management. I'm very involved with all of, with our special ed team and on top of all of that, so that that's been a challenge. We have, of all the schools in town, we have the largest EL population, about 50% of our students, so 344 is on the data that you have there. which just goes to show how important that ELD and that integrated ELD all day long has to be happening. And

194the work that we're doing with our Promesa grant supports that. We've been able to send teachers over the past couple years to GLAD trainings. All of that is really supported. And lastly, just kind of a note that we're starting to notice this trend that we have When you look at our school suspensions, it's predominantly male students and also there are more male students on IEPs. All right. Any questions or comments for the director this evening? Who would like to go first? Trustee Richardson-Feller. Hello, my name is Thank you for letting me come and hang out at your school site. Thank you for doing that meet up with your staff That was awesome. They appreciated that So I am going to say thank you for all the things I love hearing about the on-site mentors were

195very clever in talking about your PLC's you had some really huge long issues to fill from Scott I mean you guys Between you and Tafoya, you have that large campus, you've got the large EL, and it's not just a homogenous EL population. It's a very diverse. If I'm not mistaken, you have the most languages spoken in the district at your school site. That being said. I remember Scott said that his dream among dreams was to have a community school on site so that all of the services that were needed for your students could be there. I would love to see that happen for your site as well. About the class meeting training, this is the bell that I'm going to continue to ring until I'm no longer up here. Is there any way in your

196contract or with this trainer that you guys can have it videotaped or make copies of the deliverable or consumables so that other people can share them within your site? I know you said you had 10 folks that were going to be at this, but you have more than 29 classrooms and teachers. It would be wonderful. My dream is to have a database of all of our training so people can come to it even if they weren't able to go to the training in person or on video. So I will digress and say, is there any way we can get this videoed? Just to add, we did make it public. So just, it is costly because we do have to pay for the teachers because it's on their summertime, right? So they're coming in. So it

197does get costly. And that was about as much as we could send. But I did open it up. So we have some other schools that are also sending staff members. And our team will definitely bring it back. I know for sure I can record that, right? When our team comes back, I will talk to the trainer about, you know, whether I'm allowed to record the training. But I definitely... feel we'll have some experts that can bring that back and I think that's a huge point. Yeah, we, I mean, that's... We have so many wonderful resources, but I don't want them to live in a bottle. I know that when we would go to PAVE as parents at Beamer, we would go back and we would present to the ELAC committee and the PTA, and we

198would tell them what we learned, and we would take extra copies, and we would hand them out, and oh my God, I went to this one workshop and it was amazing. So that we are not just using the district's funds for our own little... quick getaway you know what i mean we are actually bringing tools back to the district that live outside of us as well um and um it becomes contagious and infectious and people want to get engaged and learn more and oh well you guys use this training well have you heard about polybath well what about this i just want to see more of that here so thank you anyone else yes i would like to say thank you for all these um to go to the in the what are you doing

199training and all this exposure and how you see the improvement and how this impact in the students and I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else going on? Hi, thank you for being here. Thank you for your work. My question revolves around one of the challenges which is a large number of inexperienced teachers claim those are emergency credentials etc. What are you doing to try and bring some sort of capacity for those inexperienced teachers to be able to gain knowledge from inexperienced teachers? What are we doing? How can we help more in that area? It's an extremely important issue in terms of being able to work at a maximum efficiency and quality with our students. Yeah, I think a key is the PLC model and the collaboration time, right? And we

200as a site have invested in that time. The district has invested in that time. And I think that is going to make the greatest difference because they have that time. And when I facilitate those, I love meeting with each grade level and facilitating those meetings and bringing out the expertise in the room and then also clarifying, you know, what are the misunderstandings or how can we help you? So that's a big piece. Those mentors and in the district this year said in the past they've always assigned mentors if they're in the internship program or if they're in induction But they also said we will assign we will pay for a mentor even if they're on an emergency credential They held monthly meetings which were called the instructional labs where all the new teachers in town

201met just really building That community sense of belonging and you're not alone and let's talk about the struggles and we're here to support So that was big we've had funds to cover substitutes so teachers could go do peer observations. Some of our instructional coaches took them to other sites. Some there on our campus and then met with them afterwards to talk about that. We also as a PROMESA site, we do instructional rounds. inviting a team and we tried each time we have our core team that goes around but each time we tried to invite two more new people so they could also be part of that process to go around and see other classrooms we always bring that feedback back to show what we've seen all these celebrate the great things and share examples so

202that's been really helpful the The promessa also includes PD for the teachers and then also we've sent some of our new teachers to GLAD training which is pretty extensive training as well. So yeah, those... Yeah, I was just trying to get a better picture of how we address that issue and certainly not the only school that has that issue, especially schools that seem to have larger challenges and so to be able to... to supplement and support with experienced teachers, you know, that I think that's a very important part of us moving forward with the hard to serve populations. I agree. Thank you. All right. Anyone else? Questions or comments? Okay. Seeing none. Thank you. Superintendent, thank you very much. All right. We're going to have a real mentoring of this here. I don't know what

203it is. Are you still going by your... Do you have a new last name? I didn't change it. Good evening Superintendent Emily Ortega-Lemkin, Board President Deborah Valdez-Zavala, and Board of Trustees and Guests. Good evening. No, I didn't change my name. I am the Prague Principal at Beamer Park Elementary School, completing my sixth year there. And I cannot speak enough to the staff, the dedicated teachers, our support staff. who come day in and day out. That is one of the areas that I want to highlight. Sorry, let me move on. Didn't use a clicker. So some strengths that I'd like to focus on over the last three years. I couldn't fit everything on the slide, so I do kind of want to speak in a narrative form to the points that you see there. As my

204colleagues have shared, I am the last one to go, so I'm going to highlight all of the things that you've heard this evening. Four years ago, we were graced with the opportunity to partner with CABE, the California Association of Bilingual Education, in receiving the PROMESA grant. At the time, we had no idea what this would entail, what it would look like. We just knew we were going to jump in. So with PROMESA, our teachers partnered not just at Beamer, but with our sister schools, since we have three dual immersion schools in our district. This brought us in cohesion as opposed to working in isolation at the three different schools and running three different programs. We took a deep look at the implementation of dual immersion practices at each site and did an audit of what

205our program looked like. So I would say that in itself with the strength, it's a strength because it brought all of the administrators together to really build our DI practices and look at our partnerships. So I partner with Dingle and Prairie. However, we are the only dual immersion school that is 100% DI. And that is a huge success and strength. And as you heard my colleagues mention today, it does require a lot of trust. to collaborate because as you know when it comes to teaching we take that on look of these are my babies however we heard Dr. Gonzalez speak today about that he quoted Hattie and I had a quote on my notes to speak to about teacher efficacy Hattie speaks to what research says about collective teacher efficacy and where every teacher believes

206that we can make a difference And at Beamer, that is our mantra. We have Beamer agreements. As a staff, I feel like I'm the rookie. I will say as a sixth year admin there, my staff has been there collectively 10, 15, 20, and 25 years. So for us, it is a collective effort. We believe that every day that every student who sets foot on our campus has the ability to achieve. And we teach in two languages. We don't teach Spanish, we teach content in Espanol. So that is a little key factor to keep in mind when we look at the successes and strengths of our program. And with professional development, our focus in the last two years has been professional learning communities. When this was presented to my staff, the first thing they said was,

207oh, we've done that. Been there, been there, done it. And I said, well, let's stop a minute. Let's take two steps back and look at what we're doing with PROMESA. Because PROMESA is the work we are doing to improve our best practices, research-based instruction, using the EL roadmap and the guiding principles of DI. So we really had to look at what is PLC or what is a PLC? It's a way of doing things. So we looked at those leading questions. What is it that we want students to know and how are we going to get them there? So in that, that is how we begin our discussions of talking about student achievement, looking at who our students are, identifying who our student populations are, and putting a name with a data point. And I would

208say that's one of the strengths at our school. If you have not been to Beamer, I invite you to come spend a day to shadow a child, co-teach with a teacher, or sit with me. I never sit still. Part of that, too, is the time that we spend on building relationships, not just with students, but with our families. At Beamer, you hear us say, somos familia. You can ask for anything at our school. Our front office is more of a triage. It's walk in, what is it you need? We can provide it. If it's not on the agenda, we know someone who can help. So looking at our professional development, that includes everyone, not just teachers. It includes our literacy paras. It includes classified staff, my cafe specialist, everyone who communicates and is in touch

209with students. they are imperative to the work that we want to do. So in speaking to our professional learning communities, PROMESA has been an instrumental guide to help us collaborate outside of school. We also have a DI leadership team that collaborates with myself, and it has afforded us the opportunity to provide and allow us to visit teachers through instructional rounds. One of the nice pieces about the professional learning teams, we've had 18, every teacher's had about 18 hours of release time. I've also given back approximately 11 of my Wednesdays for exactly the professional learning teams to dive into data. and we do mock instructional rounds on our PLC release time. That means a grade level will go and observe someone or another grade where we've seen growth in certain strategies or implementation of one of

210the six key Promesa research-based strategies because our viewpoint is how do we make progress by leaning on one another? Working in isolation hasn't worked, so now it's about sharing. the knowledge and the research when we see improvement in data points. And the data we look at throughout the year is our I-Ready assessments in English and Spanish and teacher common formative assessments. This year I also want to celebrate that we had a reclassification percentage increase which was over the last three years we looked at. Last year we reclassified approximately 19 students and we had 39 percent of our students were ELs. And this year we reclassified 34 English language learners. And in November we had to have a real conversation about where our ELs were performing as they were a group that was, had regressed on

211the data dashboard. And we'll speak to that on the next slide. But this year with target and intentionality, we really identified the ELs and our teachers with the professional learning communities also collaborated to identify what teacher was going to teach what level of students. And these became fluid groups throughout the year based on assessment, reassessment, and intervention. Tier 2 interventions is another area of success. It is a work in progress because not everyone is there yet, but we are a working team working towards that. I have to sing praise to our wellness team, as you've heard my colleagues talk about that. Homeschool connection is huge for us, myself included. In our wellness team meetings, a little challenging, we meet on Fridays because we share staff. We share our social worker, our behavior specialist, and our

212school psychologist. But the key factor is that we meet no matter what. If someone can't make it, we zoom them in because it's important that every week we keep a school-wide data sheet where we track and monitor students. Teachers also can complete a wellness ticket digitally, which we receive, and we review what teacher concerns have or what they are, be it academic, behavior, or social-emotional. It's hard to check your past year out. Okay. Beamer, according to our California Healthy Kids Survey, 90% of our students feel that our teachers do hold high expectations for their learning. I want to make sure that I add that piece. Coming to some of our challenges. We got real with the data. We've been real with the data. Post-pandemic, we've really looked at our instructional practices. We know that we

213are far below standards in language arts and mathematics. So what are we going to do about it? This has allowed us to really look at assessments more frequently. We change instructional groupings and we've offered over 11 interventions that are tier two supports this year with the support of ELOP and our site funds. These are after school interventions. One was before school. So we see that teachers are collaborating to make a big impact on the student achievement gap. Currently, our students remain in the orange area on our California dashboard. As I mentioned previously, our ELs did regress and it was a hard hit for us to accept that we had regressed to the areas of red. When we met in November, our goal was to come up with an action plan and that is where we

214each looked at every student and I always say know our students by name and by need. And some of them are duly identified. And that is the subgroup we really needed to focus on with intentionality. Because this year, as some of my colleagues have shared, at Beamer, another concern has been special ed. For the last three and four years, four, excuse me, I have a 1.5 position that has not been filled. I've had subs that have been rotating. So it brings in that inconsistency. And then it makes... It makes it difficult to monitor students and I become a case manager, which is another hat I have to wear. I, like my colleagues, sit in every IEP. I make sure that parents receive the information in advance and ahead of time because our goal is to

215really work with every family. So one of the areas of challenges is serving our special ed families and their needs. Rigor and alignment. is something that I added here. Because we are looking at assessments and looking at data, but we need to be consistent with what levels of rigor are we talking about. So that is where we started looking at the depth of knowledge and looking at different levels of tiered instruction. Some of us have really benefited from the instructional rounds. Our teachers go in and observe other teachers and give them immediate feedback. And we started discussing with my DI leadership team areas where we saw that there was rigor that was lacking. And we immediately said, how do we broach this conversation? So those are conversations that I have had to have in PLC

216meetings with the grade level team or with individuals. We also did a self-analysis survey last year on how we felt we were implementing PLCs. And we did it again this year. And the outcomes from that was shared with staff. this year. Last year we rated ourselves as a school approximately 80% of implementation. This year we went up to about 82% and what that leads me to believe is we still have work to do with PLC implementation and we have a guiding coalition and they know what their role is is to help support data analysis weekly meetings, collaborative efforts, and today we had some of my team, or this week, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at the PLC boot camp. So we know what we want to accomplish, we just need to make sure everyone is on

217the same page. School demographics. I had to go last. Don't I get more time? Okay. Here's experience. Professional environment. I think I spoke to Promesa along with my sister's school here, Kelly Chevening. Our teachers are also participating in Promesa PD, as well as some are attending the ATDLE conference currently in Sacramento. I sent a team of five, so did Maestra at Prairie. So this is exciting to receive them when they come back. to see what they've learned so they become trainer of trainers and some of the extended learning opportunities we provide at Beamer through our ELAP program as well as school enrichment is our after school program serves 228 students from TK through to sixth grade. We've had an amazing change of leadership with our ELOP and it's been very transparent. We meet also, he's

218part of my wellness team, so I bring in my co-coordinator every Friday so that we address concerns, behaviors, parent communication, and it just shows that cohesiveness. As far as school enrichment, we have a beautiful Palafo Código that came back to life after a pandemic. And it has grown every year. I think it was three years ago about 60 students, last year about 70, and this year 82. We foster a love of college culture and career readiness. Every Tuesday is College T-shirt Tuesday. If you ever want to come, please show your school pride and wear your T-shirts. We also raffle them off to students. This year we held a literacy night and a bi-literacy night. where Maestra Morales and myself sat there with our laptops, greeted parents, and showed them how to get onto iReady to

219look at student data. We also have co-curricular field trips. Our science camp youth advisory has been phenomenal the last three years. Those are students fourth through sixth grade. They meet with me. And student council, we have teacher advisors. And from our student council youth advisory this year, we created our conflict managers, which taught school-wide PBIS, school-wide rules and expectations. And like my name, my colleague shared, we did that at the beginning of the school, after winter break and after spring break. And we have some student clubs. We have our Harry Potter club that's grown every year. It started with six students three years ago, and now we're up to 24. Rubik's Cube near and dear to my heart. Kids wanted to play. They wanted to just play with hands-on. So we do have a Legos

220club, Rubik's Cube club, art club, and chess club. And these are some of the opportunities that our students have at Beamer. And we do this every day. Our students keep us coming back, our community. If you have not attended an event, our Get a Mess this year, we celebrated 40 years of dual immersion. And that in itself is an accomplishment. And I thank all of you for your continued support. Thank you. Questions or comments on the board? We'd like to go first. All right. Seeing none. First I want to say I love the idea of physically showing parents how to access the iReady data because I know as a trustee I have people saying well I don't know how to access anything and to be perfectly honest my husband is usually the one that does

221that so it took me a while when I raised him to figure it out so that's awesome and I really like the idea of being able to do a digital wellness sheet because you know in the moment that's such a I assume an easy thing to just get on and do and get support as quickly as possible. I'm wondering if you, and I know each situation is unique, but if you could walk us through sort of like what the follow-up might be if, for example, there's a mental health concern. Our wellness team, as I shared, meets on Fridays, and that includes my EL specialist. This year I was fortunate to have a Title I teacher, intervention teacher. my school counselor, my school psychologist, my behavior specialist, which this year changed three times. We also have

222our, I have my speech therapist come because like I shared, I don't have a special ed teacher, so my speech pathologist joins. I invited our virtual case manager to join us via Zoom and my cafe specialist and attendance liaison. Did I say cafe specialist? It's a big team. So we meet every Friday and I bring snacks because feed them and they'll come. And Fridays, what we do is we assign tasks. Every week we rotate. So it's not me. It's every week someone else who wants to be timekeeper, who wants to be note taker, who wants to be facilitator. So I sit as an active member to the team. Our intervention specialist. also manages my wellness tickets. So we have a digital form that teachers can use to enter concerns that they have based on academics,

223behaviors, attendance, and that is a Google document. And it comes to my Title I teacher intervention specialist and myself. So at wellness, we review those tickets and we prioritize them based on when received and what the content is. If it's something as simple as Students not doing homework. Okay, we'll have you follow up with a parent. Have you invited them to after school interventions? Something like that. We always assign who is accountable to do that and by when. So we do have who is it assigned to, like a case manager. So it's not always the principal or the counselor. We all take turns. And as Dr. G mentioned tonight. We've been in meetings where I'm like, hey, Daniel, my attendance is on. Can you call that parent? Because again, this child is out or this

224child has been late every day this week. So we also incentivize all of these things with our PBIS. We celebrate monthly assemblies to get our parents to come in. I've held coffees with the principal this year. But to follow up to the question of the wellness tickets on our wellness team, we assign based on need. So if there's a loss in the family, say there's... grief counseling that needs to be provided and that student or that family may not speak English, my counselor is monolingual, I may have to jump over my school site counselor and put in an NVIH referral to our social worker, which it comes to Caprite here at the district level, and we make sure that that parent gets that connection in that moment because... 52 is a little different now with,

225you know, trying to remember everything. So if I don't do it then, it won't happen. But we document it in there and we highlight who's going to do it and we have no more than 24 hours to do it in. So that is the accountability piece and we're really big on lateral accountability at Beamer. We said we're going to do this. Who is going to follow up and is it done? So that is how our wellness team works. That's great. Thank you so much. I appreciate the details. All right. You're welcome. Anyone else? I like that when you say about the highest petition. Hola, director. Hola, buenas tardes. About highest petition. And I would like to say, not just you are, I see more often, you are a role model for the kids to say,

226it's okay when we're bilingual, but we start being perfect in the second language. And you are being a perfect role model for the kids as the other. principles I think is a really key to the students see you as a role model and that's impacted to our kids and I would like to hear a director about the interventions it are so the teacher needs to be volunteer or how this works can you tell us more about it? Gracias, thank you. As far as interventions go, we have used our I-Ready data throughout the year to highlight what students require additional support to close that achievement gap. For example, in second grade, we might have students that are still not fluid with phonics or CVC or blending. So the focus becomes after-school support because what we also,

227and you've heard from my colleagues, is the most neediest student should be with the highest trained professional in that classroom. So literacy paras are not to be working with the most neediest. They can support. And this year, my Title I teacher has also trained our literacy paras in not just literacy, but biliteracy. ¿Y qué significa? So interventions based on need, I always ask the grade level teams, is anyone willing to teach an after school intervention? And we know that the tier two systems within the school day, we do that as well. So students are getting that tier two support, reteach, small group instruction. But that after school is really targeted and every teacher has the opportunity. I just can't force them to do it. So this year we have 13 teacher interventions. Thank you. Thank

228you for the leadership, my directora. I try to be neutral, so this is going to be my 15 years as a partner at Beamer, and you are doing a really good job because it's a community. Beamer is a community, and I appreciate all your work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any more questions or comments? Hi, how are you? Hi, good, thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your work on this. My questions have to do with the challenges you've had over the last three years. The fourth bullet point indicates that instruction is not aligned to rigorous grade level standards. I wanted to see if you could kind of help us understand what has happened. that this has been a challenge for you. And also specifically, we're talking about implementation of PLCs.

229It sounds like the teacher's feedback is indicating some challenges there too. So if you could speak more in depth to those two points. To this bullet, when we started talking about professional learning communities, It wasn't just a time to talk about what's working and what isn't, or talk about students or what's coming up or what filtered. It was really intentional with that agenda and an outline and modeling. And the first initial PLCs were facilitated by myself, my EL specialist, and my Title I teacher. So the three of us would guide the discussion based on data. But that's also with the assumption that everyone understands what data is telling us. You may look at it and see one thing. I may look at it and see something different. So for me, the consistency of understanding what

230the data is showing us and what do we do with it. Same thing with standards. Do we understand the essential standards? Have we impacted enough that we have a clear understanding of what the expectation is? And that's where this bullet point came from. Through this school year, we've really taken a deep dive. And for Beamer, being a DI school, in our PLCs, each site administrator, myself, my directora Valencia, directora Chevenin, We have facilitated the Promesa Professional Learning Community and professional development in the area of writing. So I'll speak to the area and the cohort I supervised and worked with. For the district DI teams in schools, I led the professional development for TK, Kinder, and first grade in the area of writing. So when you bring teachers from three different schools, to one site to

231talk about standards and expectations. And what does writing look like at your school? And what does it look like at your school? And what does a four look like above expectations or standards? And what does a one look like here? We were all over the place. So what we really needed to look at was focus on what are grade level standards and what is your definition of rigor? Which brings me back to the depth of knowledge, right? There's a wheel. Do we stay at level one, which is just repeat, label, identify. We want to get our students, even in TK and Kinder and First, we want them writing. And in order to write and read, we have to understand those level standards that build upon each other. So that is where this bullet came is

232we needed to really align what our expectations were with what the state standards essential standards are and we took it one step further. This was a challenge, but I will say we're working towards success because we designed another Google Doc. That created a cross-grade level articulation. Part of our PLC release time was different grade level teams coming together to look at what is third grade doing and what is fourth grade doing and what does the third grade group need to teach so that those fourth graders are going to be set up for success. So we established cross-grade level articulation in our PLC time. Then it was genius. We said let's create a Google Doc so we can see from TK through sixth grade What are you teaching in writing from the beginning concepts and understanding

233of print to writing thesis statements in six? So that's a lot of backwards mapping. So with that is really being aligned not some of us All of us. So that's where I can speak to as far as our school and where we're going because my grade level teachers in second through fourth and fifth through sixth meet with my colleagues in the area of writing, but that has been a big focus for us with our literacy plan, or I should say bi-literacy plan. So for us, it's really understanding what those grade level standards are and making sure that we are ratcheting our instruction up. So I hope I answered your question. But you feel that there is buy-in in terms of using PLC? Absolutely. And I think that that is, if I can put something in

234an email and I make you accountable for understanding or the deliverables, then I am allowing you that time to collaborate and I need a deliverable back. So teachers will submit what they worked on during that time because there's only one of me. So when they have PLC time, they're in different areas, but I'm going to Dr. J's model next year. We're meeting in one location so that you can talk to second grade if you have a question about what does it look like next year or what are the kids needing to know by the time they get to the next grade or the previous grade because there is power in that. So yes, there is buy-in. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Thank you very much. I don't have any questions or comments this evening. All

235right. Thank you very much, Director. Thank you, Superintendent. Thank you to everyone here staffing us this evening. Do we have any other questions or comments as we conclude on this topic? I just wanted to thank all of you for being here this evening. You know, you took more energy and probably some extraordinary lengths to be here and to share this information with us. We're here too, with you. And the reason why we ask, one of the reasons anyway, is because I think as a board, we're deeply committed to trying to improve the quality of education throughout, especially with those segments of our population that are not doing very well. And if we are not engaged Here, at this level, in terms of information and dialogue, it's harder for us to make good policy decisions. and

236we need to have a better depth of understanding in order for us to really maximize our potential as a board and create policies that support you all of you out there and I think an important connection is to hear from you is to continue this dialogue is to continue to build our understanding as a board but as a district because I think You know, to get to this point, to hear this information, to have you come in, this has been building for many, many years to try and, you know, feel like this board can get the information and can create an environment where we can... truly connect and understand to the best of our abilities in order to create better policy and to support you all out there, to support our superintendent. And we haven't

237always had the board to make it happen. But I think we do now, and we'll continue to have this dialogue, I hope, and we'll continue to try and work together as a system. So just thank you. Thank you deeply for your time and your energy. It will all matter, and we are going to improve the quality of education in this district come hell or high water. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any other questions or concluding comments? All right. Thank you very much, Trustee Itolega-Zuantica for bringing this item forward. I think we have one more session and that will be added to a regular board meeting. So that will be recorded, correct, Superintendent? The next one on the 24th will be a regular board meeting. We'll only have the fourth, no, five. We'll have five

238secondary schools. for our two middle schools, our two high schools, and Tashkent High School. Great. Go ahead, Trustee. Just a quick question to the board. The research that I reviewed did focus mostly on elementary schools. There's some that does apply. Some of the research does apply to the high schools. But would it be helpful if I prepare something similar focused on the high school to kick us off? Yes? You see some nods? Okay. Thank you. All right. Do we go ahead and wrap up with the include? Yeah? All right. So it is 8.35, and it says that I can adjourn this meeting. Thank you very much.