001approve the agenda thank you jen second second it's ruth all in favor okay comments from the public there's no one in the room is there anyone with a hand raised feature no no there is not okay thank you consent agenda is there a motion to approve thanks mandy second second thanks jen all in favor okay board chairs report all right mine is relatively short i just wanted to say that i hope everyone had a good break and took the time to refresh and recharge and i want to thank dr smith and the whole staff and the families for making the transition to masks optional go smoothly it's a wonderful and welcome step and i look forward to hearing more about it tonight earlier this week the board of ed met with the board of selectmen
002and board of finance uh to tour some of our facilities looking specifically at wilton high school in middlebrook uh the lighting that's outdated and dim the ceiling tiles that is showing their age the threadbare carpeting and while we didn't see them there are three elevators that need replacing to keep up with code the tour was followed by a tri board meeting where we all agreed i think that all the work is needed and overdue long term the middlebrook and wilton high school projects and the elevator replacements all in will be around 5.2 million dollars the car the cost of course is the challenge and there will be more discussion on how to phase it in and continue to find cost efficiencies in the short and immediate term we have approved our budget proposal a total
003year to year increase of 3.3 percent including 458 thousand dollars to begin the maintenance work so i encourage everyone to be involved in the budget process this spring the board of education is advocating for our budget proposal because it both supports our program needs and begins to address the middle brook and wilton high school renovation projects we can't diminish our programs nor continue to defer maintenance the board of finance public hearing on the board of ed budget proposal is wednesday march 23rd i hope everyone marks their calendars and lastly tonight i want to take a moment to remember helen martin who is principal of driscoll school beginning in 1969 way before driscoll and miller were joined in any sense of the word she was principal for over 30 years she had a memorable commanding presence
004and style and her dedication to students and their families was unparalleled she inspired everyone from first aid kindergartners to teachers to parents and she was a great community spokesperson helen martin focused all her immense energy and talents on implementing her vision of a thriving vibrant and happy elementary school thousands of our students benefited from their start at driscoll she was one of the founders of wilton's reputation for educational excellence so i hope in the future we can plan something appropriate in discovery and i'll work with some of the staff on that so thank you that's my report superintendent's report great i have just two sets of uh acknowledgments um first we received um news a week or so ago that our six national merit semi-finalists are all finalists so that's great news so we want
005to thank uh avery baumel uh catherine campbell gavin fusco edwin gregory ria ragavan and ria ronawa we want to congratulate them and wish them best of luck as they proceed with the the national merit contest and then also within the last week or so we received the 2022 scholastic art and writing award announcements for our high school and middle school and as always our kids did very well so we want to congratulate one of our high schoolers alexandra giller who won a gold key and best in ceramics for the state of connecticut so that was like top of the top so she's going to participate nationally you have a number of others who also earned gold and silver awards so charlotte casaragi and grassy graphic designer and the silver award jessica fang for painting earned
006a gold award colton hall for ceramics earned a silver award bernie huang and painting earned honorable mention jordan huff earned two awards in ap 2d art and design silver and honorable mention for photography kayla kennedy earned a gold award ceramics hunter martin in photography also earned a gold award as did cindy rodriguez meredith mabyed in the mixed media category earned a silver and amira srivastava for sculpture also earned a silver at middlebrook we had three award winners lindsey ferguson earned a gold award derek wang ernest silver and sam mcdonald under silver so congratulations to our artists um and you'll be hearing a lot from me so i'm going to leave my report right there all right that's wonderful i'm not sure if we have student reports are they able to be here so i'm not
007sure yeah we can we can wait till next time yeah i don't know where the wires got crossed we were expecting a group of students so what i would say is if they appear we'll just pause the uh um yeah um and i i did you have to excuse me i did have a covet update because it's not an item on the agenda again if you'll if you don't mind um i'll just i'll do my little bit here because i think you know this is it's a good news report so if you allow um so you know to your point and i think we were going to hear from our high school students the report across the district has been this week has been very very smooth and so kids have been excellent to each
008other you know they've taken the transition in stride on the coveted front our numbers have been very good so we had i think a total of 12 cases reported across the week i think the monday we had eight coming right out of the break uh tuesday we had zero reported wednesday we had four today we had zero report again and so that's all very good news um on the you know broader scale the dph was reporting for wilton something like 11.7 new cases they lag two weeks so um we expect that number to decline and um kovadak now is much more dynamic they were reporting you know eight new cases per day per 100 000 so the numbers are all very good and leading us toward an opportunity to as expected to roll back further
009mitigation strategies so in the update we sent out tonight we informed parents that we're going to revert back to our typical transportation routines so this will be welcome news for many of our elementary parents who use our afternoon transportation to facilitate play dates and things like that so we'll you know begin to implement that probably monday so the the principals will put that information out about you know especially for new parents who might not know how to go about using enough at school dismissal manager if there's another mechanism so that's really good news i think the next milestone date we're looking at is probably march 14th and so we just again you know out of the abundance of caution want to give the full two weeks to see if there's going to be any change
010in coveted numbers but we're looking at walking back all of the mitigation strategies in music and pe and so we'll revert to you know kind of pre-pandemic practices in those classes and then we'll look at repopulating our cafeterias so we'll have some change probably on that date i'm meeting with the principals in the morning i ask them to compile you know their list of activities that are still presently disrupted by covid rank order them and so we'll just work on a plan um to begin you know phasing in you know all of our um kind of more normal non pandemic activities and on march 14th or begin now for march the we're going to talk tomorrow so i mean i think the first change that we've already you know been able to make is the
011buses and then i would look at um the cafeterias probably beginning on march 14th um but we haven't in fairness i haven't had a chance to speak to them yet right um and certainly the you know the coveted numbers support that right now do the kids in the upper schools at least still have access to um outside areas during lunch if that's something they do yeah that they're important yep that's all moves in the right direction absolutely okay um committee reports anybody meet yet we skipped last time do you want us to go oh that's right i'm sorry yeah i'm sorry go ahead that's okay um teaching and learning met back in february 8th um we talked about a few things one of them was the middle brook schedule which we're going to wait until
012next week to see what happens um i think it's just to update the rest of you at this point if a decision is not made by next week everything will stay as is just not fair for the teachers they're not going to have enough time to plan the curriculum changes or whatever that would have to happen to accommodate a block schedule so they are working and working and they had another great rendition of a schedule and um but there's holes in it and right so they're trying to outweigh the pros and the cons of you know how many you're going to make a huge change and how many things that we want to get are we going to get and how many things are we going to give up or still not be able to
013get right so that's what they're still working on um i know for some of us that seems like this should be an easy task but it truly is not so i know our public thinks is going to think that this why can't you do this but it's been um it's been a lot and they've really been trying um so jory i don't even know if you're on i sent him to the basketball game to help with the staff so he's not on we'll find out next week we also talked again about the wilson high school reading materials eric mendelson was able to compile a list for 11th and 12th grade and we talked about posting it someplace on the website so that you know everybody have access to and just a reminder it's not an
014exhaustive list there can be changes there can be additions but at least it's a great starting point for people to have one place to look at and the last thing was about professional learning chuck had a great presentation about just going basically truly every line item just trying to explain to us you know what the professional learning ideas or options opportunities are for each school so it was nice for us to have a better understanding of what that was um and tomorrow begins the digital learning and stem curriculum um review review so it's our first of three that's it great thank you um the uh business ops did not meet in policy did you meet we met um previously we didn't meet this week but we met also oh okay yeah so go back to
015february sorry yeah um and we continue to work on a dei policy that's being shopped around to some different administrative constituents in the various buildings and others and um in addition we did a review of the bylaws just to see if practice conforms to um actual writing and um that was the main focus of our abilities okay thank you um on to review and discuss uh hall of fame which i think is uh yeah good news so um great news and tradition that is now how many years have you so this is we started i think four years ago was the first hall of fame and uh we had chris yes chris finkelstein's legacy here um we had one class inducted and then of course kovid interrupted that so i'm pleased to announce we have
016another class of inductees and if you'll allow me just for the good of the order in the public i'm going to take a couple minutes and it's a big deal remind people what the hall of fame is um and then i'll share with you who the who the inductees will be so our policy reads this way from time to time members of the wilton public schools community have distinguished themselves in ways that brought great honor and pride to our community this includes teachers students and staff members who have in some way achieved notoriety in their chosen area of expertise such individuals may have attained a national recognition or in some way been recognized by their peers for outstanding achievement those fields may include but are not limited to education business legal service politics and government
017military service athletics theater in the arts philanthropic endeavors and community service to honor these individuals a hall of fame will be established induction into the hall of fame will be reserved for only those individuals who have truly distinguished themselves and shall be regarded as a highly coveted honor to be inducted a candidate must be nominated in accordance with the following procedures uh which is are detailed in policy meet a rigorous set of criteria and pass rigorous evaluation process by the hall of fame review committee inductees will be honored with a personalized plaque that will be displayed in perpetuity in the hall of fame hall of fame inductees will be announced annually by the chairman of the board of education um or the superintendent in this case so um so the standards are high um and
018we had you know reached out to the community and um solicited nominations the committee is comprised of um the debbie as board chair uh myself the principals the pta presidents and then two at-large members of the community and so the process is to review the policy to examine the applications to ensure that each of the applicants kind of meet the standards and then really to discuss you know the you know whether or not each of the candidates fit and so we have um two categories one is hall of fame and that's really reserved for alumni of our school and then for staff we have a service with distinction award and so in this class we have two hall of fame and two service with distinction recognitions so the first is longtime resident volunteer and varsity
019golf coach jack majeski so jack is being recognized with the service with distinction award he was nominated by one of his former students andrew samye and so we had a neat moment right before the holiday break in december andrew was home from school and so we invited them into the high school invited jack over didn't tell him why we were asking him over and andrew got to inform him of his um nomination and induction this is wonderful and you know i personally i've met jack a couple times i don't know him well but he is revered and you know andrew is one of these young men who spoke so eloquently about jack's impact on him and his colleagues and so we had a number on the committee who also were very familiar with jack's philanthropic
020activity so i think he i don't know if he founded the wilton ambulance corps or wilton cert but he's been heavily heavily involved in kind of the emergency response community here in town he's been coaching our golf team for 10 years he's a navy veteran of the korean war and just very present in the community here's what andrew you know wrote about him he wrote coach not only teaches the game of golf but he imparts life lessons and important values he instills the importance of good character as his priorities include not only improving golf skills but also teaching respect hard work and balancing priorities coach's legacy of service extends far beyond the walls of our school and then andrew gordon kind of just lists some of his accomplishments so we're thrilled to be able to
021recognize jack majeski with this honor our second recipient of the service with distinction recognition is our current eighth grade writing teacher mr paul schluntz and so paul again like is unbelievable so he was nominated by a group of colleagues at middlebrook i don't know if you know paul is a 43 year veteran um here in our system i i don't think he's quite the longest serving at this point i think he's like the second longest serving but you know paul yeah um it's close though so he is he shot my son i thought he would have been the oldest yeah but there's another and so he again i mean to to know him right you just you just know what he is about as a human being and um as someone who is you know
022just incredibly influential on the lives of others as a teacher as a coach as a friend as a mentor i had the very good fortune of having my um now freshman daughter in his writing class last year and we had a moment this she's going to go nuts when she hears about this she and a couple of her friends were at her house at the summer and they were talking about this transition to ninth grade and talking about paul and some of the other eight red teachers and they all were like weepy and so she still she'll write to him he writes back i mean just this is what he does right he makes these indelible connections with kids and they last forever and so um you know he's he's incredible um one of the
023nominators is a columnist for forbes magazine and so you know she wrote an article about him back in 15 titled um the five essential leadership lessons from a beloved teacher who has inspired thousands and i looked at these i thought these capture kind of what he's about so and these are interesting like kind of his lessons so for paul this is what he says teaching that the greatest pleasure reward and value are found in those endeavors where we apply ourselves fully from the heart in an attempt to grow stretch and learn and become better feeling and sharing the thrill of seeing someone else succeed because of what you did knowing that the truly great moments in your life are watching others thrive and shine and in that is the great thrill and the same time
024sadness because it's impossible to give to words to that amazing feeling or express it adequately um and then two more most of the time people appreciate things about you more than you realize and then his last kind of lesson is when you have faith in people that makes them stronger so his whole orientation is to other people and right what an incredible service so our next um hall of fame inductee is lieutenant john g core who that's a name you might know john g core is a class of wilton high school 1962 who was killed in action in vietnam one of the most distinguished recognitions a student can receive coming out of wilton high school is the core award and that was established in his name um some years ago and so there's a whole
025community that organizes around that and they select a student every year what was written about john was as a student he was both a prominent and versatile athlete who excelled here at the high school in football basketball and track he was the star quarterback on the football team that won the 1961 wcc championship and then earned praise from coaches and officials for sportsmanship and was widely recognized for his strength of character and integrity and when you hear the core committee talk about you know what he [Music] valued its character and integrity that they speak about the most so when lieutenant court graduated at the high school he attended the university of bridgeport and majored in physical education while he was at ub he also had a distinguished athletic career and then upon graduation in 1966
026he joined the military and graduated from the united states marine corps basic school in quantico that was in june 67 and then he left for vietnam later that month in 67. in six months of service in vietnam lieutenant corps was awarded two purple hearts although i read he was eligible for a third a bronze star with combat v a gallantry cross with palm and a national order of vietnam fifth class so he was heroic and clearly decorated and someone that this community can obviously look up to so we're thrilled to be able to honor and recognize lieutenant core with the hall of fame induction and our last inductee is retired u.s air force colonel jennifer fulmer she's a wilton high school graduate of 1985. colonel fulmer retired from the air force in september 2015 after
02724 years of honorable service during her last assignment she served as chief advanced strike requirements division headquarters air combat command with duty at balling air force base in washington d.c this position serves as air combat command's requirement lead for the air force's 70 billion dollar top three priority long-range strike bomber program colonel fulmer received her commission in august of 1991 through the rotc program at the university of northern colorado she commanded the ninth bomb bomb squadron in garrison and combat and has served in a variety of operational and support positions prior to her last assignment she served as vice commander of the 379th air expeditionary wing in southeast southwest asia that wing included strike intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance mobility aeromedical evacuation and command control assets which support operation enduring freedom colonel fulmer is a command
028pilot with more than 2500 flight hours 90 combat missions over afghanistan and iraq during operations enduring freedom and iraqi freedom so another highly highly highly distinguished wilton high school alumna who is clearly deserving of this great recognition the induction ceremony will take place at 6 p.m on tuesday may 24th in the zellner gallery the public is invited the last time we had this event it was one of the truly the finest events i think i've personally participated in so i'm really looking forward to this next one um and clearly we have some you know some great inductees uh so um our student delegates or amazon oh they are they're okay great all right good okay good timing so anyway that's really wonderful news and um a great tradition to have started and we'll see everybody
029may 24th perfect all right so students um so thank you for uh coming to us tonight i i know there may be a couple of conflicts tonight so i appreciate your time we asked you here because you wanted to hear student voices last year we heard student voices maybe a little bit later in the year but you know sort of moving through uh rather extraordinary times and then this year was another um extraordinary time uh different and challenging in some ways and and hopefully you know wonderful in some ways so we wanted to sort of hear your perspective on the year what you've learned from your experiences what you think went well what you think perhaps if anything we could do better could have done better what you're looking forward to so i'm kind of
030casting a wide net but it is about sort of you know how are how are you meeting the challenges of this particular year so whoever wants to start go ahead don't be shy we just need somebody to unmute yeah i can't read names so so i think this year compared to last year especially with everyone there it's been a lot more engaging i think um i'm able to see my friends every single day which is really really good for my mental health um i forgot the questions but i am really really looking forward to let's see um we're having our junior prom um in may so i'm really looking forward to that thanks joy great thank you go ahead avery what do you have to say yeah i was just going to say that i
031also think it's been really great to see all of the students kind of coming together to do things to get us that little way back to normal i know there are certain things that everyone gets really excited about so i know the seniors um really wanted to have the jungle back as a space for us to sit and hang out and then seeing everyone like making sure we were following the rules in order to get that space um it's just been really great to see that everyone is really committed to following those rules and making sure that we can maintain those spaces um in a safe way um especially because like in past two years those have been kind of a little bit crazy um but i think everyone like the entire school community has
032really been trying to do what's been asked of us and make sure that we can have those like littler things like do i mention the problem which is like a huge thing that everyone's been really looking forward to um last year and then again this year but even those smaller things like the jungle or tables in the cafeteria um have just made such a difference and um i think everyone's been really excited about like getting those opportunities back slowly as we get to a more normal state of being great yeah um here do you want to go yeah go ahead skyler uh so as a freshman i know i think me and all the freshmen can agree it was really really nice to um join the walton high school community in a way that we
033were able to meet people from other grades and not be so confined to like a single group of students and just be able to travel around the school and really get to know it for like what it is instead of um kind of a less uh like a smaller version of it which is kind of how it was during coven so i think all depression really really appreciated that and then i think since we've dropped the mask mandate a lot of my friends have noted that it's just the school seems so much brighter being able to see people smile i think people really love that yeah so i can go next uh just as a quick assign i'm sorry for my school i'm sorry for my boundaries i'm still in the school because i'm some
034late night club so if i glitch out or anything sorry about that but uh so i'm shawn and i'm a sophomore this year and i think i've been placed for my position right now is a rather unique one because i didn't actually know this school before covid or before the pandemic hit and so i've actually been able to quite visibly see how like this year changed more than last year and in agreement with all the other students who spoke who spoke i think the biggest thing i've noticed is like just the sudden research of school spirit taking pride in wilton high school and i think like avery said this is seeing the little things like in the cafeteria just talking to people new connections with teachers and i i also see it in bigger things
035like homecoming prom well i'm not impromptu i'm assuming prom and even you know just like the sports games like the fci championships are going on right now i'm pretty sure they sold like an insane amount of tickets like something in the 1000s so just the idea i didn't think that the school coming out of the pendant i would say we're out of it but you know with the lifting of the mask mandate and things like that just been a sudden research of a school community amidst teachers and students alike and that's something that i really didn't notice last year and i'm really happy we had back this year as a sophomore going to junior year in terms of the mask mandate i also believe that the masked mandate went really well i think that students
036are respecting decisions whether to wear masks or take them out irrespective of their own choices and i also think as an important note that well something i've noticed that even students who don't wear masks are still careful to you know observe protocol they're not reckless with code protocols is what i would say and so i would say that irrespective of wearing masks or not wearing masks students across the community are still concerned with and thinking about safety procedures that will then apply to the rest of this year and the future beyond great great any questions from from us thank you guys yeah thank you thank you for coming any updates on who's winning the game does anyone have a twitter can i can i just ask one question um if you were to sort of
037look back and you know your can you imagine like 10 years from now what would you say you might have learned from this experience or what was your biggest challenge or what might have had the biggest impact on you oh you can go sean okay so if i look back at this in 10 years i would honestly say that the thing that stuck out most of me or the thing that i have learned the most is about you know the perseverance of what people can do when they're together or just like the result that everyone has when they put their minds to a certain task and again like like i said i came to the high school in the pandemic and as a freshman obviously i was sad that you know i don't get to
038experience what high school is like but i still think that the idea that we got through the entire school year you know we were remote some parts we were in cohorts other parts and then we finally were back to full students in person i think the idea that we were able to navigate that and navigate that the ups and downs that came with it and the idea that as a school community we came together teachers and students alike like i said and rode the wave of the pandemic and of the virus i think that was really incredible to watch or incredible to be a part of i think if i look back on this 10 years that's not the most proud of myself my peers and just the entire community for doing it great thank
039you i think i'd also um talk about like spirit and resilience and just sort of the way that we've all come together to make this a more positive experience or at least as positive as we can make it um especially in the beginning of the year i think it was very weird to be back like everyone in person a lot of people felt that way and then we sort of got back into the swing of things and what stuck out to me the most was just how much people were trying to make this like engaging and exciting and bringing back the traditions that we've all missed so much and so like especially during spirit week and homecoming and all of that like people were just a hundred and ten percent every single day whether it
040was like showing up in fun themes and decorating school and things like that um and i think that kind of having those like really exciting moments where everyone's able to sort of come together and show our spirit and have that community together um it's always fun in any year but especially with code i think it was something that really allowed us to sort of get through this year was knowing that we had this community and that we're all i'm so proud of everything we've done and will continue to do and i think when i look back i'll remember that excitement um the most great thank you yeah i definitely agree with that i also think kind of remembering that we have the ability to adapt to so many um things that we were put through
041is something that i think i'll really remember in 10 years if you told me five years ago that's um the idea of learning all online or learning in cohorts would have happened i would have been like oh that that doesn't make sense how would that work but as a school and as almost as a nation in the world we were able to adapt these changes and do the best that we could and i think overall they worked really well and we're now able to as avery and sean said have bring back our school spirit bring everyone back into school and do some of those fun activities and so i think that's something that i'll remember for a long time well wonderful and thank you okay yeah thank you so much and um go find the
042game so thank you yeah thanks for you wonderful job representing your classmates uh as always so we appreciate you taking the time tonight yeah very thoughtful thank you very much thank you for having us yeah thank you for having us thank you so much great wonderful okay um curriculum update um i asked kevin just uh very quickly to sort of update us you know because we do have these monumental things going on in the world and how are our students being presented and sort of what's the what's the pulse and and what are teachers trying to accomplish um so is that for chuck perfect yep so check's gonna take this piece hey good evening everybody can you hear me okay yes okay so i think as we all know all too well um russia's invasion
043of the ukraine has dominated the news over the past week headlining newspapers and news shows and we can't and probably shouldn't shield our students from seeing or hearing about the harsh realities of what's going on in eastern europe and whether we like it or not they are watching i don't want to overstate this but if you think about it these must seem like very terrifying times to our students they have experienced so much the past few years with the pandemic and various other social difficulties and problems and then add to that a war in europe and public potential nuclear conflict it must seem at least to some of our students like the world is on fire when there's no safe place i think in fact it would be hard to overstate the precariousness of the
044moment of this moment for our students and in fact for all of us so the question becomes how can teachers and parents support students in understanding current events especially when those events are unfolding in real time and may involve disturbing or distressing information and perhaps may also involve misinformation with disinformation i think that the answer begins with an understanding that will have to depend on the age and developmental levels of the students and what their needs and questions are we also need to recognize how difficult we can be to try to help our students make sense of a conflict that we ourselves are trying to make sense of in a way it's almost as though we are being called on to be instant experts on the geopolitical conflict and international relations so i think it's
045really important to allow ourselves some space and grace around this topic and to rely on what we know about how to help children process complex and unsettling information we're very fortunate in karen wilton to have teachers who have some experience doing just that whether it's navigating big authority social issues or even local tragedies and crises our teachers have the knowledge and the various tools resources and supports at their disposal to help our students through these difficult trials so what might that look like for our younger students at the elementary level they frankly just do not have the background knowledge necessary to really understand the complexities of foreign affairs or foreign policy decisions their social studies unites focus on local and to some extent state government when students at this age see and hear things either
046in the news or from older siblings or even on social media and especially when those things involve violence the first job of the teacher and the parent is to reassure them that they are safe and to reassure them often and i would actually go so far as to say that that applies to students of all ages but our approach with this particular age group is very similar to our approach to what happened on january 6 to 2021 and that is to reassure and discuss discuss issues as they arise taking care to shepherd the students in and out of the discussion safely for older students teachers have been trained to use protocols to safely frame discussions about current events since they unfold things such as the breaking news protocol from the book called the civically engaged
047classroom where the safety and safety out protoculturally anti-defamation these tools can help students to identify first what people are saying thinking as well as what sources of information they're relying on what we know for sure and what we still don't know and these sorts of activities can set the stage for further discussions about what comes next the thing about crises is that they not only illustrate the depths to which humanity can sink but they can also illustrate the heights to which to consume in other words helping students to see that there is not just darkness but also light and darkness by changing the emphasis focusing on life instead of death lightness instead of darkness students will encounter stories of human spirit that can inspire us especially in difficult times and this is how we try
048to approach many challenging topics including the holocaust as well as on diversity equity and inclusion also for our older students we can begin to leverage their background knowledge to explore some of those geopolitical and foreign policy issues but again we need to be mindful of their readiness some students may need to focus on other things folks and i can give you an example one high school teacher shared with me that her seniors were very concerned about being drafted into the war and so she felt it was important to try to address that issue first because that was the top most in their mind before they started talking about history or politics i think as you can imagine certain social studies units or courses lend themselves more easily to working in these types of discussions but
049we encourage teachers to use their professional judgment in deciding whether current events should take precedence should take precedence over current curriculum i know that at both the middle school and high school teachers are either in the midst of or are planning for activities that will help students process current events in ukraine including geography history the politics of the region the conflict chronology and i think most importantly how to use media literacy skills to access and evaluate information and just anecdotally it seems as though media literacy is the most pressing challenge for our teachers and students right now students are getting some pretty unreliable information on social media especially tiktok and it's just disheartening to see how these platforms are being used mostly by adults to spread misinformation but again fortunately our teachers are on top
050of this and are working hard to make sure students have the knowledge and skills they need to come effectively with this unfortunate situation and lastly i just wanted to share with you that i spoke earlier today with tim zemo and she and i are planning to develop a communication to families on how parents may be able to talk to their students about things like war and what's going on in the ukraine and we'll try to get them out within the next few days questions chuck um is there a way that we can also provide perhaps in that um in that discussion going out to parents some tools for them to help their children with media literacy oh absolutely to add that to the conversation so parents have some tools to help their kids navigate that
051at home as well that's a great suggestion now loop from fran and on the discussion thank you any other questions or comments the only other piece that i would add is we have families in this community who are either russian or ukrainian and they have extended families and so you know over the course of this week we've heard a number of stories about close connections and so i think you know you heard you know from chuck just thematically this idea of sensitivity you know so sensitive to the topic sensitivity to our kids and their readiness to handle this information but also sensitivity to our community members who are being directly impacted i know that one of our social studies teachers at the middle school actually reached out to some of our families from the ukraine
052and russia and tried to invite them into the discussions classroom about what's going on which i think is a wonderful way again to kind of um think about how we can look for the silver linings in that very difficult situation you know kind of demonstrate for the kids that we can we can always have hope yeah yeah well thank you i i just wanted to get a glimpse um you know sort of into the school world in the midst of you know this this global crisis so thanks for putting that together so quickly and and please send us updates you know if appropriate um yeah yeah and once again please thank our outstanding teachers thanks thanks chuck um digital learning update great so we have the amazing friend kampar with us who's going to take
053us for a brief walk back in time to set the stage for actually what's going to happen tomorrow this is something we've been working on for years and hopefully you'll see the through lines as we've built our program here but friend welcome and thanks for taking us through this tonight well thank you and good evening everyone we have a presentation that we're going to show and actually harrison is going to share it and actually also help me out with advancing it so um this basically is as kevin was saying a story of where we've been where we are today and where we're going and before i actually start i wanted to thank lots and lots of people who are really part of the story our very talented staff in our library learning commons our tech
054ils our student interns our i.t team led by eric hawkinson and of course our teachers who are been instrumental in this story so going on to the next slide i'm going to go through an introduction and then take take you through six goals that we've put together in terms of moving forward with our plan and then highlight some things that are going on currently within our schools and within our work so let's start with the next slide which will bring us to our story so even though it seems like a very long time ago we're going to go on to the next slide and we're going to basically begin with year one of our digital learning ready access program so that was 2017-18 and those were the years where i've come here and i was
055very proud to announce that wilton public schools was was a ready access digital learning district and we rolled out the one-to-one we rolled out a whole plan before i actually go into the curriculum and the other parts of it i actually wanted to invite my colleague eric hawkinson because without what he did none of what i'm going to talk about would be possible so eric if you'd like to talk about the infrastructure thank you fran the infrastructure is something that we've been working on for the last five years the year before we started our digital learning and ready access program we were able to address some of our access issues with firewalls and some switching and are increasing our internet bandwidth to start to put down the foundation and what's happened uh over the last
056few years is we've been able to strategically upgrade our wireless and our our switching and our infrastructure and our computers to allow them to become a foundational piece to support the ready access digital learning program so every year we have updates that we work on strategically and we use the budget to maintain manage and and move that mission forward so um with our infrastructure it allows us to to support uh the work of the district so thank you fran sure all right hold on a second because people have forgotten two minutes when eric started here we had an archaic system and so he this was even before we'd engaged him you know kind of full-time he walked every classroom every corner of this building and then when we fully engage them they ran miles of
057cap5 cable and eric is selling himself short because he sat with me and laid out a 10-year plan to upgrade our infrastructure with costs with devices and part of the vision even you know pre-2017 was to move to mobile devices and so part of the strategic plan was to do away with all of the desktop solutions that teachers had and replaced them with laptops and eventually moved to chromebooks and byod here at the high school so the infrastructure that that required you know i mean he just totally glossed over that um you know my first year you know i can say this lightly now because we're in light years i got a petition from the high school in 2015 entitled technology because they were so fed up with the crummy conditions of our infrastructure and
058our goal at the time when i first met eric was to stop talking about technology we wanted it to live in the background and so and i just i emphasize this point because we've just come through a pandemic where we flipped to fully remote we leaned on all of our digital devices last year and it hasn't been perfectly smooth but frankly we're not talking about technology right the infrastructure and what's not working because it works beautifully we laid out a plan to have wireless at the stadium wireless outside at middlebrook in the high school and again depending on how many cars are in the parking lot using it it's there right and that wasn't even it wasn't even a thought in 2015. so i just we just need to recognize that because of the work
059he did we could jump right into the demands of the pandemic and that is not what happened in many many school districts so sorry for the interruption but no no please needs to be said of course i totally agree and like i said what what follows here would not have happened without that foundation um so when we rolled out we rolled out a curriculum as well we rolled out a district-wide digital citizenship curriculum based on common sense media units in k-5 that were really specific to technology digital citizenship and you'll see later we actually have begun doing computer science and stem classes as well along with the literature and the things that we normally have done we also have a theme throughout the entire time and i'm going to just say you'll see it around
060the room here it's been students as leaders students were critical in our planning and our execution of a really solid plan that was and you'll see later recognized nationally our tech interns not only were part of the deployment of the devices they helped me with planning going to workshops for parents developing the website developing the faqs and actually just giving us advice onto how best to do this so you'll hear more about this but our students became really our partners in this entire story so going on to year two you'll see that we're going on to 2018 and 19. and many of you will remember a lot of conversation about the libraries and how those needed to also evolve with our philosophy and how we believed things actually should function within what we call the
061learning hub of the school and so we began by redesigning miller driscoll in 2018-19 that rolled out we have a beautiful llc at miller driscoll right now and we began doing the planning for cider mill it was going to be a district-wide plan which we actually did put together our curriculum continued and we added transdisciplinary experiences in our k-5 classes which basically integrate several different curriculum areas and include lots of skills application project based and we also had a global classroom experience in fifth grade where our students in fifth grade actually worked with and collaborate with students across the world that year we were recognized nationally like i said as the best library program in the state we won administrator of the year dr smith won the state award and also later went on to
062win the national award we um presented at isthian castle and won 10 awards for our video production and also were published in several different high visibility journals so going into 2019-20 as you can probably imagine the momentum was high we basically continued the transformation of the llc introduced cider mill and when that was unveiled it was just unbelievable it was beautiful we had the board of ed actually come in and actually take a tour of it and do one of our meetings there we also started the year with a breakout edu with all of our staff members to begin talking about what we were going to bring to you guys as portrait of the graduate we also that year then implemented a class in ninth grade for digital literacy that all our ninth graders take
063and we continued refining units so that we have coding and design in our k5 classes and we did our pre-assessment for our digital literacy skills that year so going on to oops nope it wasn't year four it was here three and three quarters so so let's go on to the following year and you'll see that we did get to year three and we had that high momentum and we basically stopped a lot of things and turned things on its heels as the rate of change shifted and it became instead of every year the change was about every week and a lot of people might say it was actually every day so you'll see that even by week we began by having to engage in massive amount of pd for our teachers securing online tools curriculum
064and ebooks and audio books and then beginning to procure some of the things that made it possible for us to have the remote learning hybrid etc like zoom zoom by the way in march 27th of 20th was the first board of ed meeting on zoom we didn't have it before then and so we provisioned it and we sent out guidelines expectations strategies on its use we had policies procedures and then by the end of that period of emergency lockdown and e-learning we had we adopted a new learning management system schoology which brought us into that summer of getting ready for a brand new year that was going to be very different than what we originally had planned so going into the next two years and i i kind of put them together um remember going
065into last year there was lots and lots of preparation and a monumental feat on the part of our teachers in order to get ready for it they had to learn a new learning management system like i said schoology they had to learn how to use cameras document cameras and zoom and also negotiate remote and hybrid learning they had to intentionally create courses for that online environment you don't just put up things you have to actually organize them you have to have updates learning targets assessments and curate resources in order to do that we ran multiple parent workshops for schoology and for the tools so that parents could be partners and we created modules on digital citizenship on zoom schoology and other tools for students and for teachers so that they could be referred to formally
066we ran 60 hours of professional learning but that was formal on paper that's what it looked like in actuality there were many many many more hours we did as we continued going through the year unearthed what i call collateral benefits those silver linings that came out of it one i think is our wtv team that basically had to become the eyes and ears during the pandemic and everything was streamed so our sports and our you know everything was then went from very little streaming to everything being streamed and that as you've seen has carried over so there were good things that actually carried over into this year that we have to keep in mind um so going into basically what is this year um we're beginning to it starts feeling a little bit more normal
067right so we've adopted the portrait of the graduate we're doing the good work of that in terms of our curriculum reviews and and refresh and we are now looking at standards through that curriculum review that we're going to engage in beginning tomorrow the connecticut state has adopted the iste standards the asl the american association for school librarian standards adopted in october computer science standards connecticut was the first state to adopt them and recently remote learning standards for grades 9 through 12 to provide opportunities for some students that might want to take a remote learning course we have weekly production meetings with our wtv kids now so that we can review projects and really kind of make sure that we're managing all of the things that they're doing are wonderful wilton educational foundation people have given
068us a grant and we are beginning to add the resources that we need in our maker spaces across the district you'll be very happy to know that in our libraries circulation has gone way up this year for both text and ebooks so the text has come back and then we have done a lot of work with the portrait of the graduate and the capstone at the high school as students have been putting together their e-portfolios so that's in a um real quick the last five years incredible amount so i'm going to go on to what we are now resetting as our our new normal and what our next chapter in our story looks like and we've um in this the digital learning goals really are based on an established framework called future ready schools the
069state has actually adopted this and in the next year is going to have district cohorts working on their planning documents for digital learning based on these pillars that i'm going to actually talk about so the first one is digital learning goal one is curriculum instruction assessment so in this area our goal really is to continue writing and implementing and refining our curriculum for information media digital literacies and stem literacies the way that we're going to do that is through our curriculum review that begins tomorrow there will be three meetings part of it is reviewing the research looking at best practices and gap analysis and you know in terms of my goals is i'd like to see a pathway for stem careers to be formed so that we have a sequence for computer science information technology
070and digital media as well as implementing some assessments that we had to stop because of the pandemic and pick those up again we'd like to build on what we've already done for transdisciplinary learning projects and make sure that they reflect the attributes of the portrait of the graduate and continue developing assessments in areas like computational thinking so going on to goal two that's a continuation of what we've been doing for professional learning as you can tell we've done a lot our tools are being used way more than they have in the past i just put in like a little graph in there so that you have an idea of in schoology the stats of the use of this year there are different elements in schoology so you can create a page you can create a
071discussion you can create an assignment so like all these different elements are different things that are kind of tracked in the usages and so as an example our teachers across the district have created 131 195 pages in schoology that's a lot of content so all the pages may have like resources in them information you know their lessons in terms of assignments straightforward those are assignments 120 0009 and then for discussions interactive type of discussions that take place online students may do at home or even maybe in the classroom over 25 000 so going on to goal three this is one of the areas that i think is just so important we found more and more over the last couple of years that our parents are critical partners um and especially as it came to you
072know remote learning and and what we were doing we really really needed to do this but think about even past that think about you know this idea of having to teach students media literacy i have a stat from one of the studies that 80 percent of middle schoolers in a recent study couldn't tell the difference between an ad and actual text eighty percent couldn't tell the difference which really basically tells us that although teenagers are really really good on technology they haven't really learned how to use it effectively in terms of um things like media literacy and so we have an obligation to make sure that our youngsters know how to do this better and the best way to do this is to collaborate with some of our partners so one of the things that
073we're doing right now is i've begun working with the wilton youth council they're doing the entire month on raising awareness of digital media social media in general they're sponsoring an author diana graber who's actually very very good she's going to come in and to do two workshops and then we're going to follow up with some book studies along with that we're also collaborating with ptas and septa and doing workshops in march on providing tools that will reach all learners and as always you'll see that um we had i think i counted there must have been eight or ten workshops we did just last year and we've got several more upcoming so i like to continue those types of relationships so going on to digital goal number four a design spaces for innovation is one of
074those parts of the framework which i think we've been doing really quite well we have our um plans um we are at the point now where we'd be ready to do more with middlebrook and the high school when the funds become available but we've implemented beautiful spaces i think at miller driscoll and cider mill and we've begun making some changes in the other two schools as well to 4b providing flexible learning experiences the first i i just really kind of need to explain that this is really brand new the connecticut state department of education released new standards remote learning standards last week so really off the presses so we're at the point now where i think we need to take a look at these standards in a smaller group do a little bit of research
075and studying and see what kinds of opportunities these may hold they're specifically for high schoolers and it could be a course it could be more than a course it depends on really what the group that we speak with decide would be best at this point but just so you know the i worked on the team that actually put the standards together and the state was very intentional in ensuring that the way that we proceed with it is um quite you know slowly pilot small pilot initially and then see how it works and then continue it's not a program where you're going to scale it largely right in the beginning then going to number five i'm going to speak to student data privacy but then i'm going to have eric speak about this goal and the
076next goal on robust infrastructure so student data privacy as you all know has been really really important part of what we do in terms of vetting apps and resources and making them available for all students and teachers we have now an online system called learn platform it really makes it much easier and much more transparent for everybody to see what's what's not only available but what has been vetted and what's been approved and able to be used so with that i'd like to have eric talk about the rest of it thank you friend for the district data management systems we've spent the last couple of years uh can we go back one just for district data management we've spent the last number of years cleaning up a lot of our data in the district and
077centralizing our our data into our student information system which is powerschool we're using powerschool to then feed a number of other systems across the district so it allows us to update overnight all of our instructional tools our our google accounts and a number of other systems to allow students and staff to have access to the tools they need every day we've also had a relatively robust cyber security training we've had trainer teacher training we're doing spoofing and spam training we've started with multi-factor authentication for staff and we're all doing this to better secure our systems across the district so the goal was really to make our data move seamlessly between systems but also to make sure we secure it we move on to goal six in the robust infrastructure dr smith thank you very much
078for uh your comments earlier about our infrastructure and where we've come as we look at our budget going into this next year and in the future we want to continue to manage and maintain the systems and keep our equipment life cycles moving forward we have life cycles of three to ten years depending upon the types of equipment that we're using and our technology support has gotten to a position where the majority of our tickets are closed within 24 hours so we really appreciate the ability to manage maintain and continue supporting the district and uh having a robust reliable infrastructure really um allows us to help the district uh manage and maintain um its its systems and the day-to-day activities thank you grandma sure so we're going to go to the highlights portion of the presentation
079which is just a couple of things that i wanted to highlight in terms of the work that we're looking at right now in the next few months and then i really wanted to kind of take you into a snapshot a week in highlights across the schools in terms of what's going on with these areas so going to the first talked about the curriculum review but let me just give you a little bit more of a preview of some of the work so beginning with tomorrow we're going to talk about issues and trends and how that really is going to inform what we need to look at in terms of you know are we you know does our program meet the needs of our students based on what is going on in the world so there
080are going to be three issues that i'm going to be previewing for you here the first is what is deemed and i'll just go to the next slide because this way you can look at it the first one is really called the new normal the new normal so what's happened in the world in the last couple of years based on the fact that you know we've we've all had to basically go online essentially what the the studies say and this is not going to be any surprise at all is that by 2025 the world is much more tech driven it's tella everything what has really been ushered in is this idea of more tele everything telehealth more health visits up to up 20 in terms of those types of visits online shopping lots more of
081that i'm sure a lot of you can attest to that more remote learning and remote work remote work is really changing a lot of things at this point and that has become something where it's being talked about throughout all businesses and more and more um businesses are opting for either having remote workers or hybrid workers workers that do a couple of days in the office and and the rest on remote there was a an acceleration of adoption of lots of different technologies as you know video conferencing online learning lots of different e-commerce type platforms so that has happened so i guess the question then becomes with that changing landscape how does that change what our students need to know and do the second question is specifically about stem literacy and what's going on in the
082future of work so automation is changing the types of careers and jobs that are available to students as they graduate from here or further the there was one study that basically said that by the end of this decade 50 of current jobs would be eliminated based on automation we're in a new phase right now which is called the fourth industrial revolution where all these new technologies that are emerging are doing things that we probably we previously would have never thought they're diagnosing illnesses they're conducting surgery and there's even a 3d printing of a bridge going on right now and the types of skills that employers want really have to do with critical thinking communication presenting things um clearly and being able to work with others and problem solving and the final one is this overall
083question of what does it mean to be literate in today's world and think about some of the things we just talked about with about the media literacy and misinformation disinformation the technology has gotten more sophisticated so algorithms and filter bubbles are what we live in and so sometimes it's really hard to see anything but one point of view so going on to the next one you'll see a chart that basically talks about those top 10 skills and you'll see that it's analytical thinking learning to learn does this sound kind of familiar with something else that we've been working on um resilience and you know reasoning so the work that we will be doing with portrait of the graduate really will actually um tie into this very well then um i do have kind of a
084i'm not going to go through it you know piece by piece but we have the beginnings of stem experiences throughout the district but they but there is a need to take a real close look at it take a look at what's missing and actually make it so that it is a really a real pathway for students and i have some information again there's enrollments for engineering and technology courses there's good news about the ap computer science course data structures and you know students are opting to take these courses and then also doing well if you go to the next slide you'll see that the actual ap computer science test course our students have done well with them but again the question for the committee is going to be is this you know it's a track
085for some students but is computer science and stem a such a limited track or could it be bigger we talked about the portrait of the graduate the next step in this is actually drafting i can statements which we're going to begin doing very very soon so that hopefully we'll have drafts to work with teachers on and get their feedback on by the end of the year we will be convening a small group to take a look at those remote learning standards that i spoke about and then i'm going to get to the snapshot which i'm very excited about so beginning with miller jiscal okay so what's going on in miller driscoll this week so remember i did a snapshot i didn't do the entire year i just wanted to see what was going on so
086this week miller driscoll students are learning how to code they're using blockly and coffeescript which is actually a form of javascript and they're creating their stories with book creator you may know that this week was read across america wednesday students were listening and responding to read alouds to each other with a school from alaska they're using flipgrid to actually respond to each other and of course we've kicked off women's history month which is this year as well as wilton reads cider mill okay so first they are talking about a visit that they had right before the winter break from a the wilton library robotics team came in and spoke to the fifth graders demonstrated how they actually problem solved and used the design cycle and created their robots and then had the fifth graders actually
087test them out the coding unit that they're in the middle of they're doing basic coding concepts problem solving and creativity and they program their own sprite and then this is actually really exciting and i think if we're able to do it we'll go into it a student team a group of students and this is what i'm talking about in terms of the student leadership went to the leadership at the school and said they had this great idea they wanted to create their own website and the website was going to be about games and games that they really like so um it became came a conversation and they brought me in um there were people with from the school that talked to them and we talked to them about digital um and safety information so they
088have an entire section now in their website about screen time and appropriateness rating their games using common sense media and really taking a look at and making good choices in terms of how and when to use games which i thought was brilliant because this is coming from students to students so this was this week and then going to middlebrook they procured the resources to fund the ar vr system from middlebrook pta thanks to them and 3d printing labs from weff and there they've been working on that this week they launched women's history month kicked off read across america with a wordle game and our sixth graders were introduced to the sif method of evaluating sources for accuracy authority and coverage and finally snapshot of the high school this week they have been working and you'll
089see the pictures in the spaces back on the side there collaboratively they have these great smart tvs and they are researching creating original infographics and using think link to create hot spots they've been doing 3d design and using tinkercad and they've been doing lots of research and inquiry the um that's basically the snapshot of all of the schools so i did that very quickly but i just wanted to kind of give you a flavor for the types of things that are happening um and um you know there's just a lot more that needs to be done but i am really proud of everybody and everything that that they've been doing so thank you with that if you have any questions it was interesting to kind of recap what we did in march of that that
090heavy lift that must have really i i'm sure we've all forgotten how that went but that was amazing what how fast that happened and how fast you got up and running yeah it was um it was a feat everybody chipped in but it was a definite um you know it was a lot of work and a lot of people's lives just amazing i have to say i'm excited for the discussions to come about stem pathways and kind of broadening out and maybe coalescing around an understanding of what exactly stem means and more of this idea of problem solving and not necessarily you know a finite um you know disciplinary skill so i think that that um that work will be exciting to see how that works out this is going to be their little totally
091and it was disheartening for me to hear that 80 percent of students can't discern the difference between an ad and tex so um how many kids did we ask well it was impressive and not our kids wasn't there it was a national survey wasn't it yeah so but i feel better and it was our kids and i was like how many did you ask but justin but just in general to for there to be kind of like a greater understanding and the you know the the need to partner i think with parents in the community at large um about how much information is out there and having helping our kids make sense sense of it and absorbing it and in a proper in a proper way sometimes our kids have it and we don't even
092realize that they have it and so making sense of what they're saying to us and being able to relate to them one of the other studies basically says that most teenagers get their news from social media and it's primarily not even facebook it's tick tock um snapchat and instagram yeah i would believe it yeah um are you there's a whole lot first of all this is like a wonderful fire hose of information but i'm just wondering you know there's a lot about use and creativity etc what about the leadership piece you know like the future facebook creators and you know the the kind of idea of manipulation responsibility um profit manipulation algorithms all of that any any sort of the entrepreneurial type of aspect of it yeah or even the specific obligation that kind of
093goes along with the societal obligations and responsibilities yeah now one of the things that i think we definitely need to talk about as we look at this curriculum is a lot of the new technologies whether they be you know what we're talking about with the filter bubbles but yeah artificial intelligence there's a digital ethical component to it that really needs to be part of the curriculum it needs to be talked about yeah um because well i was just reminded of the medical field and you can do things but should you right so the same thing with technology it's great but there's always right and are we going to get to the point and i think we're probably almost there where robots are going to be more intelligent than us there's going to be smarter than
094us we'll have um you know but these are things that yeah i know you even thought about it kind of ethical moral dilemmas yeah and there are policies that need to be basically you know there's gatekeepers that need to be there you know we we've watched the tech giants um go to this place where the filter bubbles are taking over how we think and what we think sure um and we really need to have a way that i'm just wondering for these kids are we teaching them yeah i i i honestly think it's it's taught but it's probably at this point we have to look at the standards the computer science standards have elements of all that um and as do the iste standards but we we need to make sure that all our units
095have conversations and discussions basically yeah just okay all right well terrifically exciting work and yeah good stuff any questions comments and so you this is a curriculum review that has a whole committee is that it yes starts tomorrow i started my list of questions i will save them for tomorrow okay that's great interesting time all right well thank you it's a great introduction and a great kick thank you thanks for starting here okay let's get to the graduation date yes so on behalf of dr o'donnell in the wilton high school community i am asking the board for a motion to set the graduation date for the class of 2022 as saturday june 18th 2022 any time it's one o'clock two o'clock in the afternoon right no so two there's always that early afternoon or yeah
096so i would save the day [Laughter] i would it would be my honor to like so much gonna say all of the parents of the class of 2022 thank you i think i speak for us all we're very happy with the proposed graduation day june 18th excellent so second yes all in favor yes all right seven out of six congratulations we'll see you at graduation on the 18th of june yeah that's great okay it was so great last year was it yeah we've got our dates for our next meetings there are no public members here uh lucille any online she probably another amount okay then this meeting is adjourned and um thank you everybody anybody i do it's not good okay you