Board of Education Meeting

001team board of education to order for monday january 10th can we all please stand for the pledge of allegiance [Music] the mission of region 15 a collaborative community committed to excellence is to educate every student to be productive ethical and engaged in the global society through proven and innovative learning experiences supported by a strong community whose decision making is based in the best interest of all students uh next on our agenda we have student representatives hannah and alex all right so we wanted to just talk about these things that have happened in the last meeting so one thing i actually started today was a program that um i'm an author of for science national honor society we run like midterm tutoring so it's a great way for like upperclassmen to do that and we were

002still able to keep it like over safe and like provide snacks but just not like in the playground itself and we also do that for math on our society too but one thing we would like um the student body that's concerned about has been the long quarantine times and the um for the lack of a better word inefficient way for students to be caught up on so normally right now the quarantine times are at least five days but so that's at least a week of learning um so that leaves students unable to get fully caught up and when they are back and they are having to get caught back up with this new work they're also having to learn new stuff on top of that so they're almost left behind for almost a whole month

003essentially of knowledge where it's bad for it's really adding to the stress of students that's also coupled with midterms and i've seen a lot of my friends and a lot of my classmates like startled my decision between like lowering the risk of risk of co-disclosure by staying at home but also trying to keep up with their classwork and a lot of us have like ap classes and they're like trying to keep up our grades for college um so with all that in consideration alex and i wanted to like urge the administrators to consider more like concrete plan for students to continue their education while safely we understand that yes virtual learning does have its negative sides but we do believe that the student body does need a way to both quarantine and get the education

004you need so i believe that there can be a balance where there can be an option of at home learning while still maintaining the integrity with its own academics um but then we would also look at the note it's talking about um our sports season from humber high school um boy oh it was girls basketball um we have a 7-2 record and one of our juniors claudia schneider actually scored 19 points at the last game against um o'clock up cromwell and then we also want to talk about the boys wrestling team with their double double-digit victory over both bacon falls and terryville academy as well as the boys basketball team that won 64-6 in the last game so pump rock academics has been it has a strong show for the winter season all right thank

005you very much um i would are you guys going to stay for the whole meeting or you know you're you're welcome to leave you know um oh sure go ahead i just want to say in 10 years i was probably one of the best reports i've heard and i uh appreciate uh your honesty and maybe it wasn't the easiest thing to kind of come in here and sort of maybe be critical but also provide some you know some examples or solutions um so i thought you did that very well uh and i think this is the type of thing but at least i want to hear in terms of feedback from students i mean i'm always interested in sports statistics and what goes on say with the drama club or with music but academics are

006very important so if you feel that um they're being uh you're getting stressed about them um there's an issue thank you for bringing out some more attention and i personally will follow up i'd like to have more information um you know from this table about what you spoke about and i don't know if this is specifically applicable to you guys but like in the past like maybe bring some stuff from the other school potentially not just high school i don't know if that's their role or not um but just because like i only have experience in milbury so i would love to hear what's going on right in all of the regional schools not just and uh if you're staying for the remainder of the meeting we can talk to you a little bit afterwards

007too about some of those concerns as well okay thank you um next we have presentations center for school change superintendent smith and dr chiapetta so i go first so we have with us um would you like us to start dog all right we can hear you um so theresa nelson and dr ramos um from um the partners for educational leadership formerly center for school change that have been brought in to work with our administrators uh really at our summer retreat as we start to look at how we move forward how we kind of move away from that idea of acceleration but more purposeful planning construction working with individual student needs based on where they're at even leveraging some of where our student reps brought in that there's not a one size fits all for all

008students based on what their needs are and so how do we do that from the administrative level and so i'll hand it off to patrice and john and have them come and talk a little bit about what their roles are thank you uh dr smith and good good evening can everyone hear me excellent excellent well certainly good to see you this evening we appreciate your giving us a little time to talk to you today my name is john ramos and i am what i like to call a recovering superintendent um and a staff associate with the partners for educational leadership great to be with you tonight uh let me please allow my partner to introduce herself good evening everyone it's a delight to be here i'm patrice nelson i'm a long time program coordinator with

009what was the center for school change is now partners for educational leadership and it's a real honor to co-facilitate all of the work in region 15 with dr ramos but also to work with all of the administrators in the in your district so i'm delighted to be here tonight to talk a little bit about that i'm going to get right into telling you a little bit about partners for educational leadership just so you understand some of who we are when we were started what are our approaches and our focus um the center for school change which was our previous name um we changed because to sort of more aptly describe the work that we do and how we do it um but center for school change was found was started with support from the graston

010memorial fund way back in 1994 and we are a non-profit organization and as it says on the slide our mission is to improve teaching and learning to reduce gaps in achievement and to promote equity and in school ensuring that each and every student is able to achieve at the highest level so there's a lot more information about our organization on our website so i've included that link here um you'll have the presentation and you'll be able to sort of check us out a little bit more if you would like just as our new name indicates our focus in working with districts and in completing our mission is to partner with districts and with other organizations and our primary focus areas are leadership systems and improvement strategies which are core areas for addressing the improvements in

011teaching and learning and reducing achievement gaps and promoting equity whoops i didn't mean to go to that so i apologize i didn't mean to take you to our website um just stop share and start again because that was a little hiccup so what happens when you put your cursor on the wrong place so our approaches to teaching uh to our work are listed on um this particular slide and um and each of these bullet points really gets to ways um that we enter the work conversations that we have in doing the work and emphasis we have in doing the work so one is as we as just marching through our focus is on systems so any area of work in a district we're looking at we ask about how is this connected to other areas

012in the system how do we maintain coherence with district goals or system goals so that something isn't just taking place in isolation because we know those aren't sustainable the partnerships that we engage in are tailored we don't come with sort of one size fits all to any community and a lot of our conversation as we enter into a partnership is what are the needs of your community what are the particular mission what's your mission what are your goals how do you see this work playing out and that partnering work continues throughout all of our work so we don't just come in set a contract and then just take it from there it's constant conversation interactions so that we're best meeting the needs of the the district the administrators the staff and the community we focus

013on continuous improvement so we know that you that each and every district in connecticut region 15 among them has many many many assets you have high performing students you are a high performing district so the purpose of the work is to continually respond to the needs of education of your students to just continuously improve building on all the assets that you have we work with clients as we talked about before as we partner to co-construct strategies so we may provide information provide resources provide material provide strategies but the idea is how do they best fit the needs of your particular district and then um all of our work is grounded in um scholarship and what's leading in practices around the nation around the world um and so we have certain expertise and those are listed

014here and we draw on that expertise of our colleagues and one another to sort of to share with all of our districts this year we have partnerships with over 40 districts in connecticut i'm giving you examples of some of those districts that are listed there so and that work um includes coaching work strategic planning accelerating learning as it does or some of the key components of the accelerating learning framework designing or articulating a portrait of a graduate or vision of a graduate professional learning for leaders on a number of topics instructional rounds and systems review capacity and coherence reviews for example we also organize and lead facilitate institutes networks we have three networks running at the moment the superintendence network a network for assistant superintendents and direct directors of curriculum called the systemic instructional improvement

015network and um we also have a network that's focused on diversity equity and inclusion directors of those areas in different districts around the state so that's sort of the scope of our work um and um i'm happy to answer any more questions about that as we move to the sort of the end we'll build in a question and answer period but that's a little bit about us and now i'm going to turn it over to john who's going to talk a little bit more about tonight okay so thank you patrice so you can see what we're attempting to convey to you this evening bullet one we pretty much can check off now uh and our idea is moving forward is to talk specifically about region 15 the partnership's purpose uh the focus areas and the

016connection to the district goals and the kinds of work that we've done up to this point and then as has been indicated we'll provide an opportunity for q a so we're going to jump right in i'd ask you to just take a moment to to take this quote in and then we're going to move immediately to a video take maybe a minute and a half or so appreciate it if you would give it your attention uh i have a friend her name is heather penny she was a fighter pilot on september 11th 2001 a 26 year old fighter pilot who was sent up they didn't have weapons on the jets she was ready to ramp her jet and sacrifice her life to stop a commercial airliner at that point if one more head headed towards

017washington and she had some thoughts today which i find uplifting she said that day revealed to us the true greatness and character of the american spirit ordinary everyday americans were true heroes in the face of unspeakable horror yet today we live in an america bombarded by angry partisan rhetoric we are a nation divided how can any hero come from that but she said the legacy of 9 11 should not be trauma fear and hate we witness better than that in the heroes of that day let us live into their legacy their spirit beautifully said heather that was such a powerful video we and in tandem with the quote uh we thought we would begin that way and we as you might imagine shared this information with your administrators early on in our time together and

018if we go to the next slide i want to talk a little bit about this idea of transformation the transformation in this context is a shift it's a substantive effort to continuously improve in order to realize ongoing growth at and at a minimum standards level achievement for all region 15 students please allow me to ask you to consider this question when you made a substantial shift in your personal or professional life what was the key to your success i can imagine that some of you are thinking commitment some of you are thinking perseverance among other qualities that you brought to the task in this work a sense of urgency a belief these are the variables that lead to the required commitment as opposed to simply compliance in region 15 transformation is related to adopting the

019strategy of acceleration as the district strategy for ensuring all students meet grade level standards the sense of urgency is around an understanding that while region 15 is relatively high performing there is always a need to improve and while many students are achieving some are not of course that reality is more poignant now due to learning loss and stress related to covert moreover the sense of urgency stems from a powerful question we must ask ourselves given the exponential changes over the last 20 10 years in business technology and other arenas are we equipping students with the 21st century skills that will be necessary for them to fully participate in tomorrow's infrastructure and economy are we preparing them to do life well as they do life well as the years quickly unfold in tandem with a sense

020of urgency districts must build capacity and our partnership with your district is designed to achieve both so now patrice maybe we could talk a little bit about the capacity sure and i'm just going to pause one second to go back and say that that just what you heard from john it and seeing the video and that question on transformation that was posed to the district administrators at our very first session and it led to some really thoughtful and provocative conversation about the role of leadership in transformation about putting that quote plus that little teeny video quip which is so poignant together and um and that's the lead into this piece on transformational change and that all came from a foundation of the two main initiatives that the district is focused on addressing in region 15

021this year so this particular slide actually comes from the superintendent and assistant superintendent and their presentation to district leadership about um those initiatives purposeful planning and differentiation and so in thinking about addressing them um and and and leadership and growing leadership capacity to be able to address them that piece on transformation was sort of a starting point so people could begin to think about their own leadership skills and their own capacities but also to then gain group and grow in understanding of these two pieces this slide appears every time we come and work with district leadership it's a way of grounding the work in what's the focus for the district so this isn't coming from partners for educational leadership it's what's the focus of all this work why are we here um with those in

022mind we co-created two objectives for the work for this year and that is in every one of our meetings and in all of the work that we're doing with administrators we're working on growing a capacity in instructional leadership practices to support teachers in ensuring all students meet grade level standards and in developing a deeper understanding of those two practices to address learning log lags purposeful planning and differentiation and those two practices are actually crosswalk to the accelerated learning framework that the center created to talk about acceleration as a strategy for addressing learning loss so differentiation crosswalks to scaffolding learning and we'll talk a little bit more about how we address that and purposeful planning includes addressing core concepts essential concepts and designing tasks academic tests for students and so in the act of sleep planning

023you're taking on those things so that's the sort of crosswalk we met even though we focus on these two areas as we do the work so what have we done so far in august isabelle stevenson our colleague um introduced the administrators to the accelerating learning framework um focusing in particularly on the parts that were most relevant to the region 15 goal areas of focus and in terms of leading transformational change which is a second strand so you can see we have two parallel strands running at the same time in this work isabelle talked about how do you scale up for excellence what are some practical next steps in doing this in relationship to the parts that are of most relevant to region 15. we've met with administrators once a month september october and november um

024in addition to school visits in november which i'll talk about in just a few minutes um but but this chart captures what we our focus was in each of those meetings so john shared with you the introduction to leading transformational change the initial kind of conversations and then um and and talked about the shift of leadership work to the instructional core because we know that that's where learning takes place and leaders have so many demands on them so this was a way of refocusing the work or re-emphasizing something that all of the leaders in your district know that the the core work takes place in the classroom between students content and the teacher so that was the leading transformational change part we actually talked to the administrators or the administrators talked with one another about

025how to support teachers in purposeful planning and we began at that point something that we've carried on throughout every session and that was to begin to use data and the data that administrators collected for that meeting was simply to attend purposeful planning meetings and to um think about to consider their role in meetings and to consider what what were some themes in all the meetings in the dis purposeful planning meetings in terms of the focus of the conversation the needs of teachers in those purposeful planning sessions so that they could begin to think about their role in supporting teachers in the work of designing instruction going forward we also talked about differentiation in relationship to scaffolding just a brief overview at that first meeting in october we actually took on the distinction between differentiation and

026scaffolding with an emphasis on not just their differences but where they overlap which is on achieving the same all students achieving the same learning targets in every lesson and so we then talked about the administrators worked on identifying what differentiation looks like in practice and they examined different lesson plans and they also looked at a video of instruction and um sort of identified areas of differentiation it was just a way of sort of having coherence and grounding everyone about what we were talking about in terms of transformation um we defined transformation for region 15 which john already shared with you and and took on that question of um what conditions make it possible for transformation to occur and and then an issue that in terms of transformation and leading transformative change how do you stay

027focused on the work i missed all of the different demands that are on you every single minute of every single hour every single day that you're leading um a school and so those were some of the the core conversations and um the kinds of resources that we shared with administrators and finally in november we began the month with school visits and these were focused on um gathering sort of data across classrooms on grade level standards and objectives on the focus on grade level standards and objectives so we talked about that in the accelerating learning framework and what you would focus on in purposeful planning on differentiation and scaffolding on observing that in the classrooms so these were um opportunities for the administrators and other in the district and john and i were privileged to participate

028as well to to sort of gather collective data looking at themes across schools within a school and then later and we met we used a data protocol to analyze all of the data the collective for themes and talk about implications for practice implications in terms of supports implications in terms of bright spots and ways of amplifying those throughout the district and then also identifying specific leadership next steps um in moving the school forward on school and district goals in terms of transformational change we posed the question that john posed to you how do shifts happen how thinking about your own personal life or thinking about your own leadership how do shifts substantive changes and how you do something how does that happen how can we use that that knowledge that we have that experience and

029build on it to support changes and evolving practices in classrooms and schools and and then we consider the question of urgency which is something that is a huge part of transformative change so that's what we've covered so far and we'll pick up on that and um as just to reiterate a little bit of what i said before we focus a lot on what's happening in the district we check in with your superintendent and assistant superintendent and their what they've heard hearing from administrators so that our next meeting specifically addresses the their needs and moves the work forward so some key ideas that um in this work that we're doing so i'm going to actually read some of these um and then sort of punch out some key ideas but the idea of taking on accelerating

030learning or two core components of accelerating learning of addressing learning loss is purposeful and it's aligned and it's only valuable and that's why it's so valuable in region 15 because it's aligned with your own mission and vision for high quality teaching and learning and that mission and vision is focused on advancing the learning of all of your students and achieving your district and school goals that demands disciplined continuous improvement process and that improvement process is grounded in collecting data collective inquiry and discussion of that data and that's an executed through routines like school visits or opportunities for administrators to analyze and come together and discuss high performing school districts and this comes from research and from practice high performing school districts are always actively engaged in this kind of continuous improvement effort guided by sort

031of collective inquiry one of the quotes we use is from a book of by a long time educate educator and researcher whose last name is wellman and what he says and what sort of guide the work is skilled groups cultivate purposeful uncertainty as a pathway to understanding before jumping into planning process processes so hence the sort of focus of the data collection efforts is to say what are we seeing here so we're not just planning with our own assumptions in mind we're actually looking to understand what are the the gaps what are the bright spots what are the needs what are the advances that are being made in our schools as john said in region 15 transformation is related to the adoption of a strategy of acceleration and i would might add with a particular

032focus on purposeful planning and differentiation but that's the focus to ensure all students meet grade level standards and finally building leadership capacity enhances the instructional expertise of existing school leaders school leaders are second only to teachers in impacting learning and so the opportunity for leaders to continuously grow and develop and build on the assets and the experiences that they have as leaders and your leaders are well experienced and bring so much to their leadership that is importance in in ensuring that as you continually grow as a district that the leaders are able to um to sort of bring their new understandings to making that possible um and so i just want to emphasize this is a growth and development model and not a deficit model it's not that the partners come in and say there

033are some vessels that we're going to fill it's rather we're looking at all of the assets they bring and saying how do we continue to build and grow from all that they're putting on the table the kind of processes we've already emphasized a little bit um that make this work work regular routines so regular administrative council meetings data collection in the form of classroom observations or observations that principles made of purposeful planning for example we do a substantial substantial amount of time providing resources in the form of tools protocols materials that the administrators can use so that they can further examine and understand the data or the questions that we put on the table for them or the questions they're raising themselves and finally having opportunities for group discussion and sharing different experiences brings it

034keeps it at a system level that is there is coherence and alignment across the system and then we end every meeting with this question what's one thing you're going to do as a result of this meeting as a way of ensuring that the content is actionable and not just something that stays in that meeting room so that those are it in a nutshell and i'm going to turn it over to john to leave so did you in some questions so thank you patrice so i think now uh dr smith superintendent smith we are able to entertain a q a so thank you both i appreciate your thought partners in this work we appreciate the perspective that you bring uh any questions from board members for any of our questions alone great well cool steve first

035and then sharon disappointed clarification can you hear me right now all right thank you so i just have uh just a question though make sure i have sort of a summary understanding uh so you are where the center is our facilitators right so you're not coming here sort of saying exactly uh how to do it but you've helped us help ourselves this would that be an accurate statement i think it is so that's the idea is we are partners not uh we're not coming in to direct anything at all you have a tremendously capable uh leadership team there and um our job is to just try to help help uh navigate through this new territory um so that um you can continue to grow i saw i think on the slide where it spelled out

036each month in november i mentioned classroom visits and using specific tools so would you um be suggesting like certain sort of tool kit and encourage administrators to use the best you know tool for the situation or do you kind of come in with some specific tool sets to give them so i would say that we do provide tools and resources but those are the those gen those aren't in the form of saying to an administrator let me see if i can backtrack a little bit our we do provide tools and resources and materials to support any of the big ideas or the um its core understandings and those are meant to meet the needs of administrators but in terms of the classroom visits i think the only sort of tools that we brought so the

037visits themselves were questions were in the form of questions um that um that as we met in each school we listened to what the focus was for the for the administrators and um raise some questions i don't know if you would really call those tools but sort of opportunities to consider certain things at the end when once all that the school visits were over we provided a tool in the form of a protocol for analyzing the data and a protocol so that all of the administrators could efficiently and effectively gather themes across school within schools and across schools um in terms of the observations and then look at the implications that for that in terms of addressing the the goals going forward and in that instance if there was a specific thing that came up

038that they were particularly interested in pursuing they they might say to us do you have anything specifically related to i'm gonna i can't remember exactly what came out of it but let's say specifically remember to related to differentiation strategies for example um different ways people might do that or tools for purposeful planning that kind of helps focus on differentiation strategies in which case we would then provide those um or or find them and provide them so that's one of the ways that we actually do bring new information in we don't just kind of come empty-handed each time okay thank you thank you hi sharon thank you so thank you so um this question might be for mr smith i just was curious i have a couple questions how um this work may continue to transform

039or pivot based off of the results of the curriculum audit and how that will play into some of the information that will be coming down through this program so the idea of all of this work is kind of that through lying that cohesion between what's being taught in the classroom what our written curriculum says what state standards are how we measure success these are a lot of big questions and so while that audit is really looking at what is our written curriculum and what is being taught in the classroom and those do those align and how do we know it what types of activities are students doing are they more compliant what does engagement look like they were collecting data and they're going to report back and then work that teresa and john are doing

040or working kind of from the other side of district administrators when you walk your schools and you talk to teachers and talk to students how do we know what's being taught in the classroom how do you ask good questions how do you see where the apps are so we're doing both an assessment of where we are and building capacities uh capacity within administrators to support the work moving forward what that audit will do is kind of help us prioritize where our biggest kind of return on investment for those assets are we can't do everything at once so how do we figure out one where we're at and that's what that audit is going to help us do and then start to prioritize that these are the things that we're going to focus on first have

041the biggest impact and that will kind of shape some of this work going forward from the administrative side it will also shape some of the work happening in our classrooms but the audit is kind of about helping us better understand where we are from kind of a macro lens and then regardless of where we are building capacity of administrators to promote student growth moving forward my other question is based off the work that's being done and it was through the whole partners for educational leadership at center for school change is any of the work that's being done differentiated to support the instructional coaches that are now in role because i've heard a lot of talk about how you're working within the leadership so i'm assuming that that's not only tackling some of the teachers but

042it's also having some focused discussions and how you know this purposeful planning is impacting the coaches that are now our goal so it goes through lines so the work of the center is looking at building capacity within the administrators there's another layer working to build the capacity of the coaching and while that sometimes overlaps um we're differentiating those needs as well because one of the things that's important for administrators to do is to build structures where teachers can be successful and figure out what it is to support teachers from a structural level where the coaches have a slightly different role because they are content area experts and so their support goes to specific teaching strategies around content standards where an administrator may not be an expert in all grade level all content standard but they

043should have a general knowledge of what those standards look like how we measure them protocols on how we have conversations about how we measure them where students are at um and then what types of interventions we're going to do to help students that are struggling or challenge students who are excelling can i jump in yeah please so there actually is a little bit of an overlap because while um patrice and john work with us and the administrators um some of the administrators like the department chairs um and myself we actually work with the coaches so we have taken a lot of the slides that patrice and john has shared with the admin group as a whole and have shared those with the coaches and even um the department chairs and the directors actually shared some

044of those slides with the entire teaching staff on our december 3rd professional development day where they talked about the difference between differentiation and scaffolding so there kind of is like this through line between like working with the administrators then we're working with the coaches and then working with the teachers so we're trying to like filter all of that both up and down very helpful so that kind of leads to my last question so thank you for the time um i was just curious could trees talk a little bit in answering steve's question about um i don't want to say performance indicators or metrics but i'm really interested if there's a formal feedback mechanism through those different layers administrators coaches teachers to really understand how they're kind of um don't say receptive to this or how

045they're integrating this and how they're feeling about it where they where you may need to actually adjust some of the discussions to better support the purposeful planning if you speak to any of whether there's metrics or benchmarking to kind of your finger on the pulse of of how this work is being integrated down through the different layers yeah there's probably a couple of different ways you know you want to go start you're going to start so i would say the one of the best mechanisms that we have is though every week there are purposeful planning meetings where coaches and administrators sit directly with teachers and that is the best tool we have to say what's working what's not working both not both from a curriculum and instruction standpoint is the pacing going too fast is

046this instruction assuming too many prerequisite skills of students and we need to slow it down do we do we underestimate where students are at and we need to speed up like that work happens weekly and then that work then [Music] at a friday meeting our coaches all meet together as we're reading specialists to talk about where we're at as a district that we see trends across grade levels trends across schools and then as we look forward so while teachers are purposefully planning uh the friday or thursday prior to those meetings our coaches are perfectly planning based on the feedback and priorities and then kind of the other layer are those walkthroughs and observations that we're doing as an administrative team to see like how does that translate in the classroom again we're not looking at

047in a deficit model but more like what are the patterns we're seeing across uh schools and grades what is we have a lot of conversation what's engagement look like how do you know students are engaged what kinds of activities uh translate to higher order thinking the students know why they're doing the activities so we've talked to students to ask that same thing exact question you know what you're doing and why why this is important just ask them you know so there's those are some i guess yeah yeah and i would even say conversations with principals so for example i called patrice and john um after our last session and said as josh and i talked with the different administrators one of the things that came up was what it what does engagement look like and

048so we did say to john and patrice at our next meeting which is this month i think like two weeks can we start that discussion about what is engagement what does that look like what does that sound like does it feel like when you walk into a classroom so while that wasn't if we planned stuff out in august that wouldn't have been one of the things that was on that plan because of the feedback that we received from from administrators we said that's something that we really need to tackle in addition to that um i need almost monthly with the department chairs and the directors and so we get feedback from them about how purposeful planning is going like what are they hearing from teachers in their departments and like where do we need to

049kind of flex or change um you know the plan one of the things that came out of that was well that december half day we started the conversation about differentiation scaffolding teachers really wanted more in-depth discussion about what scaffolding is what that looks like and so the department chairs and the directors decided that they were going to put together a professional development to go a little bit deeper in march when we have that next early release day so a continuation across the school year of this discussion about what's the difference between differentiation scaffolding and how do i do that in my classroom no matter what i teach and so um so we really have been having the conversations with teachers with the coaches with the department chairs with the administrators to kind of um i

050guess triangulate like the work that we're doing and how do we make sure that it really is reaching all of the different groups and what they feel they need that's great thank you so much thank you oh one thing here when i picked up at the beginning it was a topic brought up about learning loss is learning loss your main target that you are after and where it's coming from whether it's the teaching isn't the subject that is the time spent i'm just wondering you know learning laws so i think that learning loss is an interesting conversation because i think it makes some assumptions about where students should be and where they are and so i think that we moved away from kind of the term specific learning laws and that's where the term differentiation

051comes in because while some students have had major struggles or gaps in understanding that have been exacerbated by the last 20 months other students have learned and so the assumption that all students have had equitable amounts of learning loss kind of paints a broad brush and so that idea and that focus around differentiation is who is each one of our students what's the content standard that they're expected to know by the end of this year and regardless of where they are to move them to that standard and if they're at that standard that's where that differentiation comes in is we don't want them to just be like well you had less learning loss than others and you're okay so therefore um we have to pay attention we want those students to thrive and excel as

052well and so while some people learning loss to me it's just a really broad brush that makes a lot of decisions and while a lot of those assumptions are true they're not universal and so we've shifted to that idea and that's really where the idea of purposeful planning came in back in april i would say it last year is that purposeful planning demands that we know who our students are and where they are and then we plan for our students and that that's where all the work was kind of surrounded this year and really come from that piece is that you saw our data presentation we looked at some of the assessment data that we had and while we saw some similar trends across the district and across the state they weren't universal for every

053student and that's where we don't want we don't want universal solutions we want student-centered solutions okay thank you so i i just i wanted to thank our guests for providing some some context to some of these words we've been hearing about all here with purposeful planning and differentiation appreciate that time um i have maybe sort of like going back to the beginning of the presentation and just asking maybe a basic question i was interested in the conversation about um belief versus compliance and um you know i can feel talking with josh and with kerry that there's there is a sense of urgency and there is a belief that we can we should be on this path and i guess i just wonder how's it going [Laughter] um you know bringing everybody along in this work

054well i'll tell you like i'm not whether i was like 10 or 25 like i'm not a big because i said so kind of person you know i think we have to answer that why question um i think we have to understand where we are which is part of that audit that came in in order to understand where we're going and where we're going has to be something that people believe in and it can't go because i said it or carries it and that might get us a week or two or it might get us part of the way there but if you're only doing it because i believe it or because kerry believes it or because we tell you you have to that doesn't really create investment in the work i would tell you

055that you spent a lot of time cultivating the why and helping people understand that sense of urgency and i guess in anticipation of this addict's question about what data do i have to support the conclusion that we're moving in that direction um i mean i would tell you that um some of the soft data is that our administrators really are engaged that our teachers are engaged when we said we're going to bring people around to their classrooms they open their doors and they said come in and they engage in this conversation and i would say that there was some apprehension especially in the beginning of the year around kind of the planning sessions and that i'm going to be away from my students for a period of time to plan and i don't want to

056give up that time but i do think we've seen an arc over the last five months or four months people understanding why we're doing that and seeing the results and that those walkthroughs that we did in schools hearing the language in classrooms kind of organic in teacher conversation that that creates that true life that we know those are the words that coaches use that administrators use we see that happening and not because someone's afraid we're going to check up on them because they believe that that's showing results in that classroom that when we have productive meetings around language arts instruction and teachers collaborate and then they try that in their classroom and they see results in their classroom but they build confidence in the system so i don't know that it's hard data at this

057point i do think there's a lot of evidence to support that we have work to do and then again i keep saying that it's not a deficit one no one's coming in and saying we're not doing a good job if anything it's easier to do this work now because none of our teachers should feel guilty or none of our administrators should feel exposed to having kind of someone come in and take a look because we know we're doing a pretty good job but we also know and this is part of the value of having you know john and patrice who are in 40 other school districts come and talk about best practice and things that are working and strategies that have worked there's not too many examples that we can throw at them that they've

058never heard of before that's reassuring to administrators and teachers when we talk about those things thank you so i guess kind of following up on that is the work that we're doing here it sounds like but i just want to have that we are building lasting processes here i don't know if we're at the beginning middle or end of our work with the center for school change or whether it's more of a continuous process but the work that we're doing is building a structure that we're carrying forward because i guess the structure should never be about carry or eye it should never be that this is work that should either of us go anywhere else like this is good work that happens in high performing districts across the country and around the world so those

059are the practices that if we want to kind of run with high performing districts that we need to be comfortable doing um and that's not that i want to test it out by leaving and seeing the stages you know but that is some of it is that this is not about my work it's about building that sense of structure and belief that these are good practices and building capacity and administrators and i do think some of that structure started a few years ago where we looked at um coaching and changing the reading consultants to be more of a coach putting in some math coaches looking at the department chairs and instead of making them only high school making them 6 12 so they can have that vertical alignment so so some of the structure and

060all and some of all of this work actually started pre-column um but you know we're continuing it now so sorry yeah i have a lot of oxygen here but just to kind of follow up on john's question the work is not really about learning loss or addressing a pandemic or it is about how do we make our region you know but you know a high performing region well into the future and that's where i'd say karen and i started that work together four years ago while it's been colored by a pandemic and maybe it's been altered a little bit in our approach the core foundation when i go back to the slide of the fuller slide of the eight characteristics of high performing school desserts those eight characteristics are embedded into this work and are

061independent of a pandemic and and differentiation and purposeful planning are important even if like learning loss was defined differently now learning loss is kind of ubiquitous because we have a whole nation of students that experience some type of trauma loss disassociation those types of criteria or student experiences existed before the pandemic they just weren't as broad so the foundational skills of understanding who your students are having a conversation about what's working in your curriculum again we probably altered that a little bit with the pandemic but it carries away building capacity of teachers through a twitching model started four or five years ago for four years and you know building capacity administrators and giving them kind of industry over their individual buildings and from an instructional standpoint we've started there before it's just been shifting based

062on if i may just um jump in with one other thing one of the pieces that's unique about region 15 is that and it seems almost contradictory but there are students who have lags in their learning just because of having moved to remote but there are also students whose learning is already accelerated so a big question in all of this work as we're differentiating or thinking about scaffolding something that teachers are considering and administrators are considering is in the course of any task or any lesson or activity how do we ensure that students who are at the standard right have an opportunity to expand and have their thinking challenged and to continue to grow in their work and so that's the form of differentiation so it's sort of like how do we make sure that

063their learning doesn't lag as we're taking making sure that we meet the needs of all students that every student's needs are met in the classroom and that's been a big focus of the conversation of the observations um and of uh identifying sort of opportunities to build on that in planning and that's something very unique to region 15 that you should be really proud of uh thank you to our guests thank you for wherever you are thank you our guest thank you to our administrative leadership for taking on this this transformation it's certainly exciting work um i want to go back to one of your earlier slides where um i'll use the term goal i don't think i don't think you use the term goal but the goal of this transformation is um for all of

064our students to be meeting grade level standards uh can carry or josh give me a baseline of currently where what percentage of our students are meeting grade level standards and where we have that deficit so we would be really specific i want to say like february 14th yeah so does the 14th uh just because we love assessment valentine's day we're going to share with you we'll have that's our mid-year map data that's starting this week so we're actually taking a snapshot now of where students are aligned to their standards so that we'd have that very conversation pretty specifically down to you know how we disaggregate that and share it in a public forum we don't want it to be i got a bible anyway but certainly like great bands or schools and talk about where

065we are when we went back to that october data presentation we had some pockets where you saw a dip from where we had been in the past and some of what that is is a temporary piece we'll finally kind of get a little peek into how differentiation is aiding our students when we look at where we are now compare it to a national norm and that norm happened outside of pogba that was a pre-pandemic so we can look at where our students were in september or october whatever and kind of where we were compared to the national standard and then where we are now and are we looking at consistent growth what we're hopeful is that we see an upward trend on this required that that's like is it working this will kind of be

066our first i want to put too much pressure on the assessment data um but to the first snapshot to see what is that is there that much of a variance between assessment periods like last two years notwithstanding but you know is that not as has that not been a stagnant number for us is that a number that fluctuates um well we haven't really given enough universal assessments across the district to tell you that answer you know i would think this is our second year doing full our second year doing the pull and last year was kind of part of the judge box so this will be really winter to winter we'll be able to look at student kind of year-to-year growth for the first time with their data thank you so for this transformation plan

067do we have a timeline in mind there's probably a couple of different timelines um i would say like there's there's not going to be a time where we end you know like this is this work is it just adjusts based on where you are so there's probably not a time when we say we've transformed and we're now at the point that we wanted to be at because when we get to that point there's a new you know there's a new the road doesn't end it just turns so um the short piece is um we kind of had an arc for this year uh we started the year with talking to administrators on kind of where do we want to be at the end of this year what are those milestones that we want to look

068for of how we know this work is being successful kind of some of those milestones around looking at specific differentiation or scaffolding techniques that weren't necessarily evidenced in our classrooms maybe teachers were doing them but it wasn't intentional uh so to understand the intentionality of some of this work like that's kind of where we are this year i mean i think some of it is when we left in in june we thought school conditions this year we're going to be different so there is like where i said there's parallel pads um some of this work shifts based on where we're at i don't i don't think we're going to go back into a whole remote teaching structure at the same time um i don't know where tomorrow brings so you know i think that there

069are some things that we could move faster again or we could be asked to adjust and that's part of the hard part about all this work and i think carrie and patrice both said that each time we meet with administrators we take that little assessment about where we are what we're doing and are there nuances that we need to give it to but i don't know if there's an end i think it's more of a we started now talking about like who worked in the summer and then how does this work work next year we need to lean into some of these things more or do we look at just as we differentiate for students if we understand scaffolding and administrative level the nice thing about schools is next year all the students shift so

070the scaffolding stay we need to adjust and our teachers understand it um do we need to go deeper we'll have new teachers how do we kind of to heather's question before this is a systems approach how do we uh bring in a whole new crop of teachers we hire about 20 features a year what's our onboarding look like how do we build these structures here we're doing a budget now how do we budget for some of these structures are they working on the network so well let me you know not to cut you off but i want to make sure my question the point of my question i understood so um clearly we're undergoing some processes to put in sustainable systems that just as in the example you brought up when we bring on onboard

07120 teachers we're not starting from you know point zero there are systems in place to help them grow and thrive in the system we've set up so with that in mind um when this plan was presented do we have a timeline for when we will get to a point where we have self-sustaining support systems the ones that we're talking about that we're currently designing and implementing you know what point understanding there's always tweaks and we're trying to continuously improve but what when this plan was presented by patrice and dr ramos was there any idea of like it's going to take us this number of years until we get to a place where like this is we're seeing the results this is where it's really paying off you know we're going to need to make this

072investment up front but we're at a point where we're going to be able to reap this on somewhat sustainable basis yeah and i just clarified so like um patrice and john didn't present the plan we actually presented the plan to them and said so like here's what we want to do based on like all the research that we read so when patrice and john talk about that acceleration model like that came from the u.s state department of education like they talked about the idea of acceleration they talked about the idea of having teachers purpose fully planned they talked about the idea of having formative assessment to drive your instruction they talked about differentiation that also came through the connecticut um state department of ed and then we kind of took that and said okay based

073on region 15 here's what we feel we need to focus on purposeful planning and differentiation so then we went to john patrice and said here's what we want to do and part of this work is to work with administrators to be able to do this so so that came kind of from us and and then they were the facilitator of that um so like i just want to make sure that they're talking to you okay so what i think i'm leaning towards with that is um i'm curious when we talk about continuous improvement as a goal which is a fantastic goal like absolutely let's do that we talk about acceleration absolutely but the very nature of those two things is it requires resources it requires energy um how sustainable is that you know year over

074year in the business world it's fine we'll just throw more money at it but in our world of education resources are limited so how sustainable is an acceleration and a continuous improvement plan um knowing that our resources are yeah like i'm uncomfortable with the word acceleration right because i think like our teachers and our administrators kind of run fast you know and so if if you're already running a five-minute mile getting to a 430 mile takes a lot of energy you know we weren't running a 10 minute mile i needed to go to an eight minute box you know and i think like that's the piece that like so that's where acceleration i tend i know it makes me uncomfortable i'm sure it makes our teachers uncomfortable everybody's kind of exhausted can't run faster but

075and to your point continuous improvement is to me a cycle it's a mindset it's a set of protocols it's not it's not like we got to a mountain and now we climb the next mile you know it's more uh we're running that five minute mile we want to run a 457 mile and how do we need to improve that it's not going to take like our goal is not to come to the board or the community every year and say well we're in the top 10 of our dirk it's going to cost x amount of money to go to the top six percent of the dirt it's more of these are the practices and the structures that high performing districts have and then it becomes kind of an inertia effect then like so when we

076hire a new teacher what kind of questions do we ask what mindset do we bring when you hire uh administrators or whatever the next you know it's to make sure the board understands that these are the kinds of people we want to hire the kinds of interviews and structures we want to have so that it's perpetual that it's not necessarily like a resource deficit model like there may be times where there's an adjustment like the technology we made big advancements but it's not going to be like i need another injection every quarter to move us to the next piece it's you know i want to talk specific budget numbers but you know there's a certain amount of increase you need to maintain inflationary rates um you know that you can't run on a zero percent

077budget every year because everything else goes up so it's just about maintaining the price of oil and those kinds of economic pressures but as long as you do that your structures should help build capacity of new people here it should help maintain the high performance people that you have the structures around investment in curriculum like those are already built into our budget so it's more about just focusing them than it is about some kind of like there's really not a lot of it takes x amount of dollars to create exomatic global test scores like it's more about you can throw a lot of money at projects that don't show results and you can be very efficient and still move things forward and while you can't do it at no cost um as long as you

078maintain kind of uh this is more of a pivot and i don't know that we took an extra a lot of resources to get to where we like today it was more about commitment so the resources like the biggest commitment we made is the purposeful plan it's about providing substitute coverage for teachers it's about maintaining the expectations that administrators support that work that our coaches plan for that work it's a commitment to that work but the actual dollar amount of resources that went into that quite huge right there is human energy and human capital and change requires energy too right so i think i what i heard you say at the beginning of that is what i think we want to continue to be mindful right like as we ask an entire organization to go

079along with this transformation knowing that um it's you know it took a tremendous amount of energy i think of our staff absolutely um so it's not always going to be that right like it's building towards something and that energy is going to have a payoff i think that's the point i think we need to distill out of this is that your one's always going to be the toughest right but that energy that we put in energy is a resource too you know doesn't have to be that consistent over here or you're here to make this work and i think some of somebody's questioned before but how do you know if this is working some of the energy that we're asking the staff to put into this is they're now reaping some energy back because we're

080leveraging the lessons across lots of classrooms so instead of each teacher trying to figure this out on their own whether it's analyzing data building lessons figuring out what's going on in their classroom they should be and it wasn't happening let's say in september and october but as we get more efficient at this there'll be an energy return from an instructional standpoint because it'll be more efficient for them to address these needs and we'll better align resources to the things we're seeing in the classroom before we had a lot of teachers working really hard independently to do this work and now we're trying to leverage those resources so i do think you're starting in that buying question of like how's it working i think as teachers see that this is more effective in the classroom it's

081becoming a little like don't say easier because there's nothing about the work that's happening this year and it's easy but teachers are like oh like that worked and i didn't have to figure it out on my own and other people are sharing that and our coaches are now saying that's happening in other schools around the district so like there is this um return on that capital that human capital that we've invested that we're starting to see well can i give another example of that return so um before this year i would say that um in certain content areas teachers felt like they had to do every single lesson that was listed there whether that was ela or math or science or social studies and one of the things that we've said this year is to

082really um use some formative assessment to know the students in front of you because you may not have to do all of those lessons based on the students in front of you so so you may spend a little bit more time on on one um concept and a little less time on another concept so that frees you up with some time to spend on things that your kids really need so i do think teachers are starting to feel like oh i don't have to do all of these lessons even if my kids don't need them like i don't have to do them we're like no you don't have to do those and that's the conversation that they have with the coaches or with the reading consultants or with the department chairs to say like my

083kids already know that so why am i going to spend like three days on it when they already know it and that frees up some time so i think um in that sense teachers are starting to see that they can purposefully plan for the kids that are in front of them it doesn't mean they have to do every single thing that's written in that curriculum great thank you and then just on your five minute mile i think the thinking of the acceleration and recognizing the fact that they are running a five-minute mile and that over time maybe the goal isn't to run a faster mile but right now recognize we're running a five-minute mile but we want to give them the tools to be able to do it without collapsing in the tools so they'll

084do that right now we're running a five minute mile in the rain so they're not like sucking wet they can actually do it with a smile on their face and then do it again the next day i think that i think when you said five minute mile i was like okay i recognize that they're doing that and that this is maybe something to help them do it slightly easier i would say easier but uh without just collapse at the end of it i've never done more than a 90 minute while i'm going to put it out there that was my career i know this is really great i want to be conscious that we have a long night still with an executive session but i know that you had a question there sure and it's

085maybe to piggyback a little bit off of that and it's more about the social emotional piece of this right so i don't think i would ever say like i've never seen it 2022 is going to be harder than 2020 like but i feel like now right like i felt like 2020 2021 when everyone was kind of on the same playing field i feel like 2022 and what we've had this school year has brought all the same challenges plus a lot more so it's not that i'm not worried about breakthrough like that's not what i'm saying but at the same time like what's that give and take on making sure our students are like okay like to speak to some of those things i feel i feel in my own home too right when a kid

086is a day of school there's really nothing to help and support them it's like i'm less worried about grade level standards in some aspects as they're more worried about them like you know it wasn't just like one year and okay you're not going to get to see your friends it's like still in that social distancing now social distance more because there's another thing and now they're scared and they're nervous and everyone's in a different space and time so just how does that play into this because i think that's a really important part so in some ways that that idea of purposeful planning helps us better address that because before as cherry said we had staff because they're really dedicated we're saying here's my curriculum i need to teach all this curriculum this year now they

087can sit in a room with a coach that's had this conversation with dr chupetta and others to say you know what let's take this stuff out because we're going to see it again next year where they're going to get the opportunity to see it again this stuff is the only year that we teach it so we've got to focus on that but we got to tone it down because whatever students are missing school or people are stressed or we need to take a pause and focus on some other topics um and to do that not again in every teacher's got to figure it out on their own but that opportunity and that's even where some of that assessment data if we give this assessment this week and next week when we find out that our

088students are really strong in these areas we can we don't just spend a week on it it's been bad don't spend any time on it you know because there's no way to create more and even from a teacher's standpoint we started talking about this last april that we were going to pull teachers out of the classroom we didn't want teachers to have to then create like lesson plans to leave behind we wanted to have like we're going to pull you out to focus on instruction not what's happening when you're not there and so we went through a lot of work to put together structures in place so when the teachers aren't there there are valuable things happening taught by people who are ready to teach them you know and again it's not perfect at every

089day so we've made some adjustments over the fall um but to understand that everybody's in that mindset not just our students we can't our teachers and other staff members are feeling all those same pressures everybody else's and so to say you know that's why that's why i'm really like conscious of that acceleration i think that everybody is already pretty saturated um and at the same time you only go to third grade ones or second grade ones we can't say well that was like covered years so you didn't learn anything in second grade and that's not what's happening we have to be able to show that but let's figure out who our kids are and how we teach them and that's even the answer to what happens when students are on corners not every student has

090the same experience and some are out for a day and some are out for 15 not anymore we've shifted away some of that piece but you know not everybody's going to have the same experience and if you're a whatever a student who's really comfortable learning independently you're very different than a student who struggles and that's regardless of your age or grade or anything else so that's where that idea of differentiation who are our students what do they need and that what they need isn't just an academic piece it's a social emotional that's when you talk to our social workers or uh guidance counselors and how we're working this week actually but one of the whole um those planning needs was focused on how do you adjust to the emotional needs of your students and like

091through content how do you how do you do those things together um i'm trying to like a picture in the wall there but i'm like can you talk a little bit to the wall when we were in that conference room and they had the teacher's head on the wall [Music] during a purposeful planning session the teachers said here's some um behaviors that were seen in the classroom and so the conversation around purposeful things like okay if you're seeing these behaviors what are some instructional strategies that we could do to minimize those behaviors that get in the way of learning so some of the things were like putting kids in smaller groups maybe the teacher pulls one or two students so they listed the instructional strategies that they could try in their classroom to minimize some

092of the behaviors that they were seeing and that was the conversation with the principal was there the reading coach was there and uh you know a certain grade level of um teachers that said like we're you know like we're seeing all of these things how do you know that's impacting what we're teaching what do we need to do instructionally to kind of minimize that and so they have that conversation and it's posted all over the conference room wall um because that was the work that they did and they went back and they they implemented some of those and then they came back and had a discussion like did those work do we need to change some things so it's this fluid conversation about trying different things to meet the needs of students not only academically

093but social emotionally behaviorally all of those things kind of come into play when you're trying to teach um anything really okay all right i'd um like to say thank you to miss nelson and dr ramos um for joining us for this presentation um a lot of what you said um made sense to me um based upon what we saw when our administrators did their school goals um i think as a board we all felt that they were all working together and all had a similar uh strategy it was really great to see so now i can see where how that might have been facilitated by you guys so um thank you for all of your work with region 15 and we look forward to seeing the results of that um effort so thank you so

094much for for joining us tonight our pleasure thank you thank you have a good evening you too um next we have approval of minutes um they have a motion to approve the minutes december 13 2021 regular meeting motion to approve the minutes of the december 13 2021 regular meeting thank you john sir a second second oh okay heather heather dwyer ii thank you any changes discussion yep if my name could be correctly i guess you want your name spelled correctly i do i do and i want my cake oh i see it all right so do we have um uh all those in favor of um approving the minutes as amended by steve hi i need your case all right thank you very much next we have information and proposals uh board committee reports policy

095and curriculum committee mr steve siriani thank you madam chair uh just first read for some course changes are [Music] i don't try to put you on the spot you have an estimated cost of preparing for these courses and the course of themselves yes it's it's in the uh i don't know no i don't mean i don't mean the writing of so the entire thing for a year in other words you have to hire nobody you have to have no space you have to have a curriculum development you have to have books you have an estimate estimated cost uh don't uh we the books costs are in there and the curriculum writing is in there in terms of space and teachers that is not in there specifically um i don't believe we will be hiring teachers

096to film this course for a second so um the state actually wrote the curriculum so we have the curriculum that the state has put together which has in it all the resources that we need what i want to know is the state pay us for doing this [Laughter] and it says here the connecticut state department of education so it's not even by the lawmakers actually it was it was it was a law scene was passed on and gave it to me but they don't fund it they pass the law but they don't fund it they put it on the backs of the poor property owners into the community so this is not only in the region containing the state which is very unfair to everybody so every taxpayer if they pass the law they have

097doing that [Laughter] um any other questions for steve okay uh next we have financing facilities committee mr john cookson no report at the present time since our meeting is wednesday night next we have pto advisory with heather dwyer our pto advisory met on january 6th the topics that were discussed included questions speculation crystal ball gazing regarding the january 7th snow day that's how the meeting started and then there were some more questions and clarification of what was involved regarding the evolving state policy from contact tracing and quarantine to testing and vaccination i think there is interest in how those changes may impact both vaccines and vaccinated students [Music] finally i you know i don't usually mention all of the projects this is a meeting of all pto presidents and i don't usually mention all of

098the things that they are doing at the individual schools that since it's a new year i just wanted to um you know express some gratitude for you know a lot of the uh school improvement projects and staff appreciation events that have been going on i think those ptos have been doing some heavy lifting making our schools uh you know warm and welcoming places to be so i just wanted to express some appreciation for that the council is scheduled to meet again on february 3rd thank you very much and next we have smart report this is heather a few rogers to report i just wanted to make note of the fact that the peak years for starting tobacco products are in sixth and seventh grade so ages 11 to 12. over half high school students report

099using their devices for substances other than nicotine so we are always looking for student reps sector reps members uh community members concerned parents to join our local prevention council we meet once a month on the fourth tuesday of each month um you can go to the smart website to check it out ask me any questions if you'd like to be a part of it we are always looking for people to join us thank you thank you very much um next we have the superintendent's report to bring in smith it's like weak a lot of things in already tonight i guess the first thing i would say i don't know how many are watching at home or our students with twitter accounts there is no delay called for tomorrow at this time we're starting school on

100time um the weather actually is started the weather forecast is going to get colder throughout the morning so a delay they put students out actually you know if you have access to the app you know check that to make sure where your bus is running feel free to transport to school but uh a delay is only going to put you out there in colder temperatures not warmer ones many of the districts that are calling the ladies have a lot of walkers uh we do not so just any rumors that might be out there um the second piece i would say maybe a piggyback now that is right now every school district has its own unique circumstances so there's a lot of kind of general comments being made across the state in the nation around schools

101and i just think that it's really difficult to listen to some of those messages and translate that locally we live in very special communities those communities have very different kind of contexts than a lot of other places just like we don't have a lot of walkers that may delay schools tomorrow we also have um resources and some specifics things around class size or bus drivers have been really good about coming to work some of the delays cancellations challenges faced by some of our uh neighboring districts while tragic don't necessarily translate here so i just like a little sense of warning around like watching the news and just assuming that same piece is happening in our schools and i think the third part is we've been in a prolonged response and i think everybody said tonight

102we have really dedicated it doesn't matter which group of employees and staff that work here at region 15 our schools are open because our teachers come to school our administrators and our custodial staff work to make sure our schools follow mitigation procedures that we take care of our students that even if we have students we've worked hard to go to the shortest quarantine that fits guidelines based on epidemiologists i talked a little bit about this with ptos as well is that our job isn't necessarily interpret those guidelines from an epidemiology standpoint but we do have to apply them from a student standpoint and so reducing quarantines to what's safe making sure that we have options for students if you have areas to improve on the best way to provide quarantined instruction is to make sure

103that only students who need the quarantine are actually out doing what we can to keep students in and keep them safe and that's really where our focus has been and then to differentiate our approach based on who students are what grade they're in and what families need so we're not going to stop that we're just going to continue to pivot over the next you know three weeks to whenever else maybe you can mandate kids to work coats to school i understand that everything has been extremely dynamic but i feel that right now a lot of assumptions could be made based off of the community infection rate and there's really been i know you're very very busy but there's really no information out there as far as what number of positive cases have been presented throughout

104the district so i got a little distracted before this meeting started i wasn't able to check it may be updated as of today so we shifted so the way we're collecting data and we worked the end of last week and over the weekend updating how we're going to post that data um there's some challenges into how it's collected there's a big shift to home-based testing reporting as we move away from just the idea of like what contact transcends and really the shift has been moved away from uh and i have no epidemiologist so i'm just translating my understanding but it shifts from trying to figure out where the virus is and contain it to more of a universal precaution one of our nurses described it really well and many of you have been through like

105bloodborne pathogen training and we treat any kind of blood spill as if it has pathogens in it and that is the ship that we're starting to make in schools it's happened outside of schools that being said we can do like reported cases uh and at least by school start to give that we won't be able to give kind of quarantine numbers or contacts but at least uh reported by school we can start to put some of those numbers up there and see how that works for a little while and i would just say from a community standpoint again those are only going to be cases that are reported i don't know any case that hasn't been reported the difference now versus before is we often got those reports from the department of public health and

106now it's all celebrated right so i should say oh it'll vast majority it's going to be selling so that's the only piece i can't speak to right now again i think we live in pretty compassionate responsible communities so i think that we have a pretty good report rate the other challenge there too um it may depend you know and that's what's starting to happen you may take a day or two before someone tests uh you may have been out for a couple of days so i think people are working through some of that on their own um and then the other piece that's kind of a new challenge is um the test for improvement may come back negative but your family may not get a flu test and so you have more pieces of flu

107starting to move around so we're going to try um it wasn't updated yet today i have not had any conversations as to how our data collection went by school but we're going to start collecting it by school and then reporting so if it's not tonight it may be in the next days yeah nothing else to do so it's fine we definitely started collecting the data today um all right next we have board member comments okay um next we have there's no next we have comments from citizens the board of education will recognize citizens of middlebury and southbury and citizens are asked to state their name their town of residence and to limit their comments to three minutes in accordance with region 15 board of education bylaw 9325a speakers are asked to express themselves in a

108civil manner with due respect for the dignity and privacy of others who may be affected by their comments well it's not the board's intent to stifle public comment speakers should be aware that if their statements violate the rights of others under the law of defamation or invasion of privacy the speaker may be held legally responsible any comments no okay mr nelson anyone on online okay all right thank you next we have business requiring board action i may have a motion for approval transfer entry for the special education tuition move that the board of education upon recommendation of the finance committee approved the transfer entry for special education tuition in the amount of 160 000 as presented between the private and public tuition accounts just there was placements between two and the other one is additional

109outside services for special education okay any questions nope all right so all those in favor i have any names extensions passes and may have a second approval of a motion for approval of transfer entry for special education the board of education on recommendation the finance committee approved the transfer entry for special education tuition and the amount of 278 thousand dollars as presented cody just wanna yeah all transfers are really inside the special institution yeah hold on a second get heather okay go ahead mr martino the transfers were inside the specification budget themselves now like it's going into special education tuition and it's coming from where like to me a transfer is like this transfer is from there's two tuition lines that exist in the specialized budget one is for public pressure once you're private the

110surplus exists in the um in the public line total next one especially especially placed on these private specialists all those in favor uh any names any extensions it passes thank you um next announcement or future meetings um it looks like our um finance committee meeting separated wednesday is going to be canceled okay all right and monday january 24th policing and curriculum is a meeting at the high school media center at 6 30. also on monday january 24th we have our regular meeting with the board event at high school media center at 7 30 where we will have a security update discussion and student fees discussion um next may i have a motion to move into executive session with possible action master bargaining agreement with possible actions thank you miss rogers have a second welcome beautiful

111board of education break into an effective session for the purpose to discuss the ea right agreement with possible action and we would like to invite in mr smith mr martino and attorney boy all right so we're going to move into