001[Music] all right i'm going to go ahead and call this uh business meeting of the board of education order if we please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america to thank you uh two quick things before we start one i want to remind everybody of the school norms i know we've got a lot of teachers here who know them but parents i want to remind you of them as well uh what we teach our kids are we how we teach our kids to be be here be safe be honest care for self and others let go and move on i hope we can hold ourselves to that same standard tonight the other thing i want to point out uh is our policy 9324 which
002is conducted meetings so in the event that a board meeting is interrupted by a person or group of persons uh who are under orderly conduct of the meeting unfeasible and or cannot be restored by removing them we will have to remove everybody from the meeting and we'll all be watching from zoom so we would rather not have that so i'd remind everyone this is a public meeting of the board of education we will be taking public comments later in the meeting and that is your time and opportunity to address the board otherwise please we've got a lot of business to do tonight and i would ask that we all behave ourselves and let that happen all right with that we're going to move on to the next item on our agenda the consent agenda can
003i get a motion to approve the consent agenda miss downey is there a second mr kelly all right all those in favor of approving the consent agenda all right uh mrs kwalski you oh sorry hey you were yes okay great that passes nope we are because we are all here in person we are going to uh try to do hand votes tonight uh so that is past 7-0 so next up is our public hearing i will talk about policy 9325 right now so we we will get actually we get comments first from the ghs student government uh the gea and then pta council then we'll get to our community comments and i'll talk about the policy there so why don't we start with our ghs student government representative foreign thank you good evening board members
004my name is javi sarah and i'm the senior class president at ghs i would like to begin tonight with a sincere thank you to dr jones chairman bernstein and ghs administrators last week the plexiglas dividers were removed from our beloved student center the effects were immediate and our student hub is thriving once again where students can now engage in fluid conversations form new friendships and take advantage of the much needed break from academics that lunch provides we had shared our concerns about these dividers and we're grateful that the administration was open to hearing our voices and receptive towards safely making this change in the student center on this note of positivity our red claw red cross blood drive was extremely successful on october 8th ghs students and faculty donated 30 pints of blood there were
005many interested donors who were ineligible to donate and our vp of community service cali wolf is optimistic that we'll get even more participation for the next drive in april students and staff now know how the process works and more students will be eligible as they turn 17 the age they can consent to donating and 16 when they can donate with parental approval in the spirit of bleeding red our homecoming week will begin monday november 8th the themes for the week are sleepy monday throwback tuesday western wednesday senior dress-up day thursday and red and white friday a student survey of over a thousand students indicated that kids want a homecoming dance so that friday november 12th there will be a semi-formal dance with all these exciting events to come i'm eager to attach that ghs is
006reinvigorated our school community is becoming whole once again and i'm hopeful that this will only continue i'd like to thank mr mayo dr jones chairman bernstein and all other board of education members for their often unappreciated but nevertheless tireless efforts in providing grand students with the best educational experience i'd like to emphasize that their hard work is making a huge difference at ghs thank you for this opportunity to speak with you tonight i will now pass the mic to our student body president kwame blatant is the mic work okay it is good evening board members my name is kwame wating and i am the student body president of ghs in my position it is often easy to identify prevalent issues amongst the student body and passionately advocate for change however in the same way that
007i will continue to speak for the needs of my peers i would also like to consistently recognize and thank the administration for collaborating with students and listening to our concerns last week students were ecstatic to see that the plexiglas dividers were removed from the tables in the student center and they wanted us to speak clearly and enjoy lunch with our friends similar to javi i'd like to thank mr mayo dr jones and the board for considering our feedback and making changes as the color of the leaves start to change and the familiar fall breeze returns to our town increasingly more students are staying indoors on campus whether it be during opens or lunch the student center is expectedly being used more and with that increase comes new concerns and ideas over the last year a
008committee of students and faculty has been discussing potential ways to reimagine the student center including changes to the layout and furniture however the committee is not the only place where these discussions are being held in clubs classrooms and locker rooms students are talking about ways to improve their space too there have been recommendations to re-establish grade level sections improve cardinal cafe options add outlets and more flexible seating and increase the number of trash cans as a member of the committee i'm excited to work with the administration to update the student center according to the wishes of the student body looking for looking forward javi and i understand that there will be midterms since january at ghs something that we both agree is a great way to demonstrate mastery of a subject as well as a
009prac as well as practice taking important cumulative exams nonetheless it is important to note that half of the kids have not taken a midterm in nearly two years while the other half have not taken a high school midterm at all in light of this we plan to come up with initiatives that support a seamless transition back to midterms for the whole school with that being said thank you for your time tonight i look forward to seeing you all in a month's time thank you very much all right next gea comments though good evening board members cabinet parents dea and all my ga friends here today and all that are watching at home [Applause] and to our entire school community like to start off with thank you to mary keller and her health service team for
010all the hard work they have done keeping everyone safe i know mary and i have been working hard advocating for saliva testing site in fairfield county but unfortunately we have hit one roadblock after another i am asking help from our school board and our community members with this cause there is only one site and that is in meriden and it's 56 miles away one way for our teachers to travel for a saliva test hours are limited and travel is long causing hardships on some members any help with making this happen here in greenwich would be much appreciated board members you're always asking at these meetings how can i help when issues arise in our district well we as teachers need your help because i really don't understand how we arrived at this place in time
011last year we were thanking teachers for our heroic efforts and hard work today we have a small but loud group of individuals and parents have taken it upon themselves to target one of our distinguished and highly respected educators even to the extent of following her on private sites and visits some teachers have received threatening emails even called criminals or even worse how can we allow this to continue aren't we all entitled to a safe workplace free from harassment and intimidation including teachers we cannot allow our friends and colleagues to be harassed bullied and threatened this must stop now can we send a message to the community that will support each other and not tolerate behavior that goes against what we want to model for our students and children care for self and others be honest
012let go and move on can we do that i think we can can we oppose these special interest groups and all others who harass are dedicated educators for doing their job for telling the truth for shedding light on problems we face including inequality and inequity i think we can and should we must protect the benefits of fact-based learning and diversity in our schools affirm our commitment to the values of academic integrity and honesty that have been the hallmarks of american educators for decades gea is asking the greenwich board of education for your help can you please take a stand against these threshing threatening and harassing behaviors against educators thank you all right folks we've got a long meeting so if we could bring that to a close thank you our next speaker pga council meme
013good evening i'm mimi duff president of pta council representing the 15 school ptas and the families of all of our members the number and density of the reports being presented tonight speaks to the amount of work being done in the district to improve our children's educational experience we applaud these efforts and look forward to learning more tonight and we will continue to ask that materials be distributed earlier to help continue community engagement in the process we are particularly interested in hearing about the curriculum review the achievement report including the specific action items to address lapses that are highlighted the tech program summary and the out program updates we appreciate there is so much great work being done within the district between implementation plans program reviews etc we ask that you continue to provide greater transparency
014and communication district communications that go to parents via emails can also be posted to the district website and facebook pages for instance for greater visibility and this will help us at ptac refer others to those pages we're excited to learn more tonight in these reports and also hopeful that the board will approve the old greenwich ed specs as presented we have a lot of specific questions about tonight's reports and we are we will be listening closely and gathering those questions to present to the various stakeholders we will work with the district to get more information following tonight for future meetings we look forward to hearing the updates on the big ideas math implementation which began this year surely the district can learn from any bumps in the road which may have occurred with the rollout
015of a new program and apply these lessons to other program reviews within the district what's going on in ptac our committees continue to work with the district in many areas including but not limited to academic excellence alp diversity equity and inclusion curriculum enrichment digital learning and facilities ptac is able to provide meaningful feedback from our school reps and aims to help improve communications coordinate efforts and to advocate for our students where necessary you will hear from a couple of our p-tech reps tonight in fact chairs excuse me if you don't know what p-tech is or what we do please check out our website to learn more or check out our library of resources we've also been busy working on smart goals for the year and look forward to sharing them in the future earlier this
016week we co-hosted a virtual board of ed candidate debate with the league of women voters greenwich and the greenwich alliance where we had more than 250 folks dialed in the debate was recorded and the video can be found at the league of women voters greenwich website in closing i'd like to say a special thank you to this board of education i know some of you are ending your terms but your titleist service has been greatly appreciated thank you also to those that are continuing on in their terms and to our superintendent and finally thank you to our many teachers and other educators that are on the front lines working with our children daily we're all in this together thank you thank you very much all right so next up is our community comments uh per
017our posted meeting notice we're going to take one hour of community comments now and then the remainder after the business portion of our meeting so policy 9325 covers meeting conduct three minutes are allotted to each speaker we ask that you be respectful if you want people to respect you please respect them what we will do is take people in the order they send up agenda items first and then non-agenda items following the agenda speakers may offer objective criticism of district operations and programs but we encourage members of the public to address complaints concerning individual district personnel through the proper chain of command speakers should address themselves in a civil manner with the due respect and dignity and privacy of others who may be affected by their comments it's not the board's intent to stifle public
018comment 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 speakers unsure of the legal ramifications of what they are about to say are urged to first consult with their legal advisor look we want to hear the comments you want to give us the comments if you are not respectful if we have disruption we'll have to ask people to leave we do not want to do that so i would ask again that you please be respectful during this portion of the meeting so that we can fit in as many speakers as possible during this first hour so the first speaker is kdu good evening i'd like to start my comments this evening by once again welcoming
019our district's new coordinators and i look forward to the presentation of the alp report this evening in concert with our alp facilitator bonnie o'regan it was with excitement that i anticipated the start of our new school year however the idea of a forward-facing curriculum highlighted in past presentations was quickly overshadowed by an apparent lack of transparency and communication when many parents learned an open house of surprising changes made and implemented in our alp program it is in the spirit of collaboration that i would like to pose the following questions in what board of ed meeting was a vote taken to approve the changes in the middle school advanced science program this represents a curriculum change and is subject to the board's approval and why was the placement letter that parents received exactly the same as
020letters in the past shouldn't parents have instead been provided with a letter explaining how this new program would work when were elementary alp teachers informed of the change to include social studies into alp english we're teachers provided with adequate time to train for this change our well-loved programs such as the fifth grade shakespeare play and the secret garden on the chopping block and if so why the report shows a sharp decrease in 2e students in alp why is this a problem of simply not identifying outplay students as to e-learners or are two e-learners not being recognized appropriately with regard to the programmatic changes factors such as larger classes slower pacing fewer natural breaks and more independent study skills needed by students are all extra challenges for our tui community the report also refers to a
021seat quota of 50 students per middle school in out this has never been my understanding of the program and to my knowledge our district has never had a defined limit for qualifying students our district is fortunate to have a well-regarded and nationally recognized specialist and gifted education while the distinct focus on curricular writing per area certainly has merit it is equally as important that our district leverages and considers this expertise as it points to the philosophy of gifted education and how advanced learners actually learn as our board looks to some eye-opening achievement results this evening it is perhaps even more pressing to ensure that the needs of our advanced learners are being met these recent issues point to a lack of planning across affected areas communication and transparency thank you and in my opinion necessitate
022a more coordinated approach and communication campaign moving forward thank you for your time thank you very much [Applause] all right uh the next week is shelley shaw and arena india mike i think arena is on zoom irena if you get i mute yourself you should be able to speak can you hear me right now i think so you're good thank you thank you good evening to the members of the board of education administrators parents and everyone else present my name is irena angelova and together with shelley schack we are co-chairs of the alp committee of p-tech we are addressing the beauty tonight as help p-tech co-chairs the advanced learning program in greenwich has tangibly benefited its students since its inception alp has cr has earned national recognition and is at the forefront of enhanced educational
023opportunities throughout the years p-tech has had a valuable working relationship with bonnie oregon and is looking forward to continue that with her and the new up leadership team of mark d'amico tara fogle mike reed and bj marcus we appreciate the our program and are focused on preserving its excellence there have been changes to the our program over the years and in the last academic year of 2020 2022 and the current academic years of 2022 there have been covet related changes given the recent changes we have reached out to many parents in the community and collected their feedback we have forwarded the parent feedback to the new app team email address parents concerns center on transparency and communication around the following topics number one what is the op curriculum in elementary and middle school and how
024are we ensuring its excellence number two what is the up qualification and selection process at the elementary level and what is the middle school advance the displacement process number three what is the mission of the our program and what is the charge by the boe to the our program who is the program for number four what is the organizational chart of the app administrative team and what is the makeup of the building advisory committees how is the program staffed across different schools what is the guidance of help class sizes number five how are we ensuring fidelity diversity and equity in up we have already begun the year with great conversations between our communities team and look forward to continuing to work together to identify and and help clarify parent questions and concerns around these topics
025already we're encouraged by the alp informative newsletter that came out this week and that address many parent questions will continue to advocate for transparency and communication that will keep parents informed and engaged in the help program time very much thank you very much all right the next speaker is jackie holman we're not calling on somebody that doesn't have their name up so we're going to move on sorry we're not seeing her name we need to see her name so that we can recognize her all right we're going to move on if she shows up we will try to call her later the next speaker is keith steinberg michael do we have a keith steinberg online i'm not sure he's coming around got him here thank you just so we can speed this along after keith
026is alicia borelli alicia bergeron good evening my name is keith steinberg i've lived in this town for over 25 years when i started a family i chose to move my wife and kids out of eastern connecticut and back to greenwich because this is where i want my children to grow up my son has had an incredibly positive experience at north miami school and we are so ever so grateful to the teachers administrations and support staff who give him everything he needs every single day i listened to the boe debate the other night and heard the greenwich patriots group being singled out by the moderator in fact there it seemed there were many incorrect statements made about the greenwich patriots all over social media posted by groups who claim to support our schools to clarify to
027my knowledge greenwich patriots are not anti-vacs they are against mandating an experimental covert vaccine if you choose to get this shot and have your children vaccinated that is your choice but it should be just that a choice people have had severe adverse reactions and even died from the vaccine others have not how do you know which group you will fall into the vaccine pushers have become a cult that censor any information that doesn't fit their narrative this should concern all of us chronic patriots are a group of people who care about and support each other they support medical freedom and a parent's right to decide what is best for their children including medical choices like masks and curriculum content thank you for your time thank you all right michael i think i see jackie humming
028now so jackie if you could raise your hand at all jackie if you should be okay can you hear me now yes we can go ahead please earlier this week my son was forced to wear a school supplied face mask sourced from a chinese company that had been plagued with counterfeits the mask smelled foul and it gave my son a headache and it was probably contaminated with chemicals from what i could tell the irony of course is my son has a mask exemption due to a medical condition he absolutely should not be wearing a mask but he wears it because you've created such a toxic hostile environment in the school that he'd rather sacrifice his health than get chased down the hallway and hauled into another disciplinary meeting with your brown shirts the bullying about
029masks is relentless and reinforced with disgusting bulletin boards full of propaganda and misinformation designed to brainwash the students you need to stop the indoctrination into the false belief that masks do anything other than serve as a reminder that our children lost their voices and lost their right to breathe you were all smart enough to know that a little piece of cloth does not stop an airborne virus but you've chosen to turn a blind eye to the science on masks you know this is not about science and it's just about control and if you haven't figured that out by now i feel really sorry for you just to be clear you've usurped my parental rights and you're now personally responsible for indoctrinating my son into your delusional anti-science views on masks the fear you've created for
030my son to exercise his right to breathe without getting bullied by teachers and staff is simply unacceptable but you haven't stopped the bullying at masks you've generated so much fear that parents rush to get their children shot despite the known and unknown risks from this experimental still unapproved gene therapy like the risk of myocarditis which has affected so many people teenage boys in particular that a warning label was added to the package label in fact the shot has been suspended in several other countries over the myocarditis risk yet you fail to mention these risks in your weekly emails as you continue to act as a surrogate sales representative for pfizer you've coerced our amazing teachers staff and administrators to take an unapproved shot just in order to keep their jobs sadly some have already experienced
031adverse effects from the jab and they felt compelled to take it because of you and now they're worried about getting a second dose but your threats of unemployment have scared most into submission what a terrible position to put somebody into what kind of monster tells someone who had an adverse reaction to the first shot that they'll lose their job if they don't get a second shot how could you do that have you considered the devastating impact your mandate has had on the lives 30 seconds teachers our staff and our administrators you're destroying their lives but more practically speaking you seem to have no concept of the legal repercussions of your mandate either how much longer before the district gets slapped with the lawsuit and now the threat of a vaccine mandate looms for our children
032aged five and up we know you'll promote whatever mandate is pushed by the state since you accepted the tainter esser funding from the biden administration but you need to know parents will fight any mandate and we will win because god is on our side god bless america thank you very much all right folks we need to move on otherwise people won't get a chance to speak the next speaker is alicia borrelli followed by peter schwartzenstein sportsteam hello members of the board and everyone that came out tonight my name is alicia borrelli i'm a graduate i'm a greenwich resident i have three children one child is a product of the public schools here another child is a sophomore in the high school and then i have a daughter that's in private school is the board still
033denying that crt and sel are part of the curriculum because we know it's still a part of the curriculum even as i speak tonight there's a teacher in the high school that teaches civics that pressures students to pick a democratic position over republican position in the classroom shame students for things they had nothing to do with asks other students to find righteousness in victimhood this has got to stop this is your job srt crt and sel are very much a part of the greenwich curriculum and it's your job to root it out and find it instead of denying it it's time to rectify it sorry we are in our third school year of having our children degraded and demoralized by forcing them to cover their faces they have lost years of natural immunity programming that
034the future of their physical health depended upon they have spent years breathing in dirty air carbon exhaust and micro particles from absolutely questionable mass materials they have lost learning they have lost a childhood of smiles these are the years of their childhood they are never getting it back have mercy on them already wear a mask if you'd like please unmask our children please pull your mask up thank you this is how our kids feel prepare to take a position as a district against a vex mandate for if the state declares such a vax mandate will not happen here the greenwich public school community will not comply whether you all realize it or not the resistance will be seismic people will move people will fight complying with the state backs mandate would be a catastrophic injustice
035if not a crime against humanity i beg i beg any of you listening to me to do the right thing at this point please stand with your community the most basic needs of our children are not being met being valued feeling accepted and being protected and i don't mean from a virus that holy wholly doesn't affect them but from the restrictions that are oppressing them as an educator as a as an educator i agree parents should have limited control of a curriculum and schooling i know it takes a ton of time and resources to plan and execute i understand it can it can and shouldn't be altered every time a parent has an opinion this is not that and you all know it the masks have to come off a child facts mandate will never
036be tolerated here and there needs to be a thorough investigation into crt and sel curriculum and any educator that disseminates such thank you for your time time thank you all right so the next speaker is peter schwartzstein followed by cara philbin hi good evening my name is pete schwartstein i have two kids in elementary school and public schools here and one kid who's four he's going to be in kindergarten next year and i just wanted to talk about my family's experience with the advanced learning program without our experience has been really positive we've been amazed at how much the alp teachers at our kids school have really come up with creative and engaging ways to challenge the students and i was at dinner tonight talking to my daughter and i just said you know i'm
037going to say a few words about al tonight at this at this meeting can you just tell me a couple things that i should share and she said app is a challenge it makes my brain work harder and i thought that was a pretty good summary and kind of amazing because it was just a couple years ago my wife and i really were struggling to get my daughter enthusiastic about reading she was not the kind of kid who came home and was devouring books she would never talk about books that she was reading and if you fast forward to today she's not only like loving reading loving the books that they're teaching in her out class uh but she's talking to us about it and she's really showing us that she's understanding the material and
038it makes me think back i spent a couple years as a teacher in spanish harlem in new york and i was teaching seventh grade language arts i had students who really came from a wide range of skill sets and levels and the challenge for teachers is obviously you want to differentiate your teaching you want to reach your students where they are and really be able to you know meet their needs and bring everyone up to the grade level or beyond grade level um and the hardest part for me as a teacher was seeing those kids who were ready to even take the next step of reading books that were above grade level i didn't have time or the ability to really focus on them because i had so many students again at different levels i
039was trying to teach and you think about coming off of kovic florentine and how many levels like we're probably at a place where there's more of a broad range of levels of these students than ever before at least in our lifetimes um so all this is to say that you know as a parent i'm concerned because a lot of the time it seems like differentiation is done via technology via the ipads i personally think the kids spend too much time with technology and ipads and screens um but one of the things we've found with our daughter is the alp teachers really put a priority on pen and paperwork on real books getting kids to love books not just love the act of reading um 30 seconds so you know just to conclude i know there's
040going to be a lot of discussion in the future about alp and i just want to be one of those parents who doesn't shy away into the shadows and i want to say we love this program we think it's done great work for our kids we think all kids should be challenged but we as a community as a board of ed as a as greenwich public schools should really be challenging all our students the best we can preparing them for college and beyond and i just want to say thank you for the time tonight thank you very much all right the next speaker is kara philbin followed by roger rosendahl my four children represent a diverse spectrum of learners and ages in the greenwich public schools two are in advanced studies and one in special
041education one is in high school middle two in elementary this enables me to have a strong understanding of the successes and failures of our schools our town ranks top five percent in resources yet our english scores have fallen to 19 and our math scores are only 65 percent this is the result of an early literacy literacy program that was not science based and a math program changing every three years more recently i've heard building leaders and teachers note that they are encountering behavior issues never seen before and especially in the inability to follow instructions and directions i suspect this is because every year the students are learning less and less from teachers and more and more from technology one-on-one human interaction and the ability to teach empathy is being lost in 2011 our test scores
042were in the 90th percent the current eighth grade class one of the most struggling grades were the first to receive ipads they are the case study and when i hear the younger grades are struggling even more with behavior what has changed for them is even more screen time we spend so much money on technology while our buildings are crumbling over the past year i've noted the superintendent's focus is not academics just look at how she spent the esser federal funding 2 million academics 8 million social emotional learning social workers ruler training which will infuse sel into our core academics and propose before and after school health care clinics our strategic plan was barely one page academics and 10 plus for a 10 plus page plan more recently she issued her goals which did not include
043one measurable goal not even to close the achievement gap parents are asking for transparency and to be valued members of the community yet she continues to implement curriculum pilot and change programs without board of ed approval or public comment this lack of governance has just now resulted in a complete and costly failure despite an 8-0 vote to leave the advanced learning programs intact the superintendent infused social responsibility lenses biases and perspectives into the elementary english program and merged the advanced science program and students learning english if this school district continues to make decisions that are absent transparency accountability and community voice and this district continues to infringe upon parental rights and family values future enrollment in the greenwich public schools will dramatically decline and the landscape of education in greenwich will transform community members pursue
044non-public and non-private school recently i successfully held the current super accountable to ensure all families in gps have access to their right to an independent education evaluation an achievement not shared by any current or past boe member we need leaders who will listen to the students in the community that is why i'm running as a write-in candidate cara philbin for the board of ed to continue my advocacy in the official capacity vote for two meegan goleta writings and this is not a proper form for campaigning thank you all right the next speaker is roger rosendahl followed by jen benzovango good evening and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you tonight i have to say looking at that board and watching how much time i have to speak it's intimidating you know and then
045having that nice lady tell me i've got 30 seconds left uh i frankly i find it kind of chilly in my free speech and i would ask that you may want to you may wish to revisit the policy standards for speakers i recognize you need time constraints and budget especially for old guys like me who didn't weren't raised online going websites so who am i my name is roger rosendahl and i've been a 20-year plus resident of greenwich and i did but no longer have children in the public schools but i was personally a beneficiary of a smart of smart dedicated public school teachers and i would like to see that benefit passed on to others i'm an old guy i was i personally experienced the watts riots i walked through the martin luther king
046riots and rodney king and i lived with an african-american family in galaxy mississippi when i was monitoring the fairness of their elections i marched on the pentagon the united nations i got students released from macaque in prison you know was tear gas i can't tell you how many times i was sort of an activist in my youth and mainly on the left tonight however i represent no political movement i'm speaking tonight as an american who has experienced a extremely high quality public education and has been here long enough to learn that we have a great country i'm here as a patriot what is what does that mean well a patriot loves america and as such opposes children being taught to hate america or worse that they are either [Applause] victims or oppressors a patriot accepts
047a history full of flaws slavery was abominable 30 seconds so was genocide we're not perfect but we've come a long way a patriot also loves freedom including the freedom to make one's own choices for better and for worse i've had that freedom made a lot of mistakes i'm a patriot i'm not fringe i believe my thoughts reflect the mainstream of america thank you tom [Music] [Applause] thank you all right the next speaker is jennifer benzovango followed by erica jacoby say those names again jennifer benzengo jen you're online i think you just need to meet i'm here can you hear me yep you're good to go okay great good evening chairman bernstein dr jones members of the board colleagues and guests my name is jen benzovango and i am the proud principal of old greenwich school
048i want to begin this evening by thanking you for your support as we navigated uncharted waters over the last 20 months i have heard from colleagues across the state and country envious of our ability to bring children back to school safely into the building last fall and while i may remind those same students to keep their masks up over their noses they can still see our cheeks rise and smiles feel the love of our teachers and know we are here for each and every one of them with or without a mask i am here this evening to ask for your full support of the old greenwich school ed specs and feasibility plan which you will soon hear is a request for a safe ada compliant building with adequate hvac and air quality our committee's proposal
049is not for a building with excessive extras or bells and whistles it is the bare minimum of what we need to provide a safe learning environment for all of our students teachers and staff you've heard me speak before of the portion of our building that sits well below sea level and has flooded sewage into classrooms three times since july i also won't speak tonight of the lack of ada compliance and the number of times we've personally carried children up and down stairs from the playground to the nurse's office on the second floor or the accessible entrance of a loading dock door near the dumpster for any child teacher parent or visitor with limited mobility what i will discuss is our responsibility as a town to maintain our schools i am the owner of an antique
050home built in 1780. i know what it takes to maintain a home of a certain vintage and our school is no different its construction began in 1899 and the sound beach public school as it was aptly named opened in as an antique building its care and maintenance is complex but necessary this landmark building requires your support to make the investments necessary to safely function as a 21st century school building did you know our attics have heat sensors if the temperature rises over 140 degrees a fire alarm is signaled and we need to evacuate the building for the attic to be inspected by the fire department this has happened more than once in my six-year tenure at old greenwich as you can imagine heat of this magnitude trapped in an antique attic space while certainly a
051fire hazard also reduces the life of the roof significantly the same roof that leached during a storm in september resulting in falling ceiling tiles in a 5th grade classroom although not quite as old as my school today is my birthday and as i blew out the candles on my cake just before this meeting 30 seconds one wish i wished for a fully funded renovation for our school that provides no less than the 24 and a half million dollars referenced in the proposal this evening over 14 million dollars less than what was recommended by the initial master plan in 2018 we've worked hard to present you a proposal that meets ada compliance health and safety standards and appropriate air quality for our students and staff please help make that lone birthday wish come true and vote
052in favor of the necessary renovations for old greenwich school thank you thank you jen and happy birthday from the board all right our next speaker is erica jacoby followed by carolyn peterson hello yes erica you're good to go thank you good evening chairman bernstein dr jones and members of the board of education first and foremost i would like to thank you for your efforts in keeping our youngest learners in school over the last year my name is erica jacoby and i'm here speaking on behalf of the old granite school parent body as this year's pta president in full support of the old greenwich school renovation project i am the proud parent of two old greenwich school students with a future dolphin joining his sisters in two short years like many old greenwich families we relocated
053from new york city before our eldest daughter was set to begin her pre-k year we chose old greenwich selecting to pay a premium to live on a third of an acre because of the village walkability proximity to todd's point and the true sense of community for us it was and is an ideal location to begin to establish roots when we began to tour schools for kindergarten we quickly realized that old finish school serves as a cornerstone to the overall community despite having inferior facilities in comparison to other school options our belief in the public school system as well as the desire to stay true to our initial path of being part of something bigger of a community we enrolled our daughter at old greenwich at times i've questioned my decision never because of our amazing
054teachers or even the curriculum but because of the building that is simply failing in 2017 when my daughter fell from the monkey bars and injured her ankle i raced to school she had been carried upstairs to the nurse's office by a teacher only for me to carry her back down the crumbling front steps and off to ons last week i watched a second grade boy hobble up the front steps on crutches with his mother supporting him to ensure he did not fall this was just the start of a seven-year-old boy's day i can only imagine how he fared navigating the stairs from his second floor classroom to the ground floor cafeteria art and music rooms multiple times in the day how different these situations could have been in an ada compliant building in 2018 my
055same child then in first grade came home on a rainy day without her backpack explaining to me that her classroom had flooded with sewage from the toilets and she was unable to return to retrieve her belongings three years later and not three years later and nothing has changed the wing of our school has flooded with sewage three times this year in this last storm bringing damage to our third floor from a leaking roof having our custodial team work through the night is not a long-term solution it's an inexpensive temporary band-aid last year many of our children sat in their classrooms during the coldest months windows open winter coats and hats on for the duration of the day during the warmer months the air-conditioned units remained in the off position the situation only highlights the school's
056continued need for a proper ventilation system to provide our children clean safe air 30 seconds our children teachers and administration deserve better on behalf of the parent community i'm asking you to vote in favor of the plan presented tonight this plan presents only the minimum investment required to fix the major issues but no but by no means is sufficient to truly modernize our 100 year old building thank you for your time thank you very much all right the next speaker is carolyn peterson followed by lindsey kiernan carolyn if you unmute you should be able to go hello thank you hello my name is carolyn peterson and i am speaking tonight in support of the old greenwich school renovation expansion project i have spoken numerous times in this forum to support this project while i have
057done so as a parent at the school as pta president of old granite school as a realtor and a member of the ogs feasibility study committee i do so this evening as chair of the ptac facilities committee this is a newly formed committee this year which has grown out of the responsibility to advocate on behalf of our school's infrastructure it must be noted that the budget presented tonight is pared down to 24.5 million a decrease of 24 from the original master plan we hope that this represents an effort to listen to the feedback and work as collaborative partners old greenwich school has had not had a significant renovation in 25 years and we need to make sure this one is far reaching there are many goals for this project but i will speak to two
058of the most important safety and capacity safety old greenwich school was built over 100 years ago a lot has changed in old greenwich since then when the school was built in 1902 women did not have the right to vote civil rights leaders helped our society create and protect opportunities for all the american with disabilities act written over 30 years ago is one of those pillars of our civil rights we cannot ignore the responsibility we have to make old greenwich school ada compliant we should be approaching this issue with pride that we are finally going to fix this issue capacity based on the model program for spaces as outlined in the ed specs old greenwich school is currently 22 percent smaller than suggested the plan is presented tonight only provides a net gain of six percent
059more space leaving a shortfall of 16 old greenwich school has experienced a significant influx of new families in these pandemic years the school needs the space for this growing population thank you again for your support of this old greenwich school project on another note and while i have the opportunity i must also make a comment on behalf of north miana's school's current work it is imperative that we continue to work with speed and efficiency returning those students and staff to one building i encourage all parties involved to keep this in mind while continuing to work expeditiously to make that happen thank you thank you very much all right the next speaker is lindsay kiernan followed by michael joseph mckenty anthony good evening my husband and i moved to this area seven years ago to ensure
060our children had the best education felt safe and were treated with respect it's not easy or cheap to move to greenwich as many of you know and we work hard to ensure to give them the very best we love our elementary school old greenwich so i hope that you guys approve that um shortly but have been incredibly disappointed with some of the decisions made from the board of education and dr jones we're now 19 months into a pandemic and kids are still forced to wear masks with zero evidence or studies that masks work when this was brought up in the beginning of the school year the head nurse yielded to the cdc but didn't provide any detail if you actually look at the cdc website the large-scale study that was done proved that distancing hybrid
061models classroom barriers and most notably requiring masks were all found to not have a statistically significant benefit therefore none of these measures are effective yet here we are a month and a half into school requiring our kindergartners who are trying to learn how to read to mask up for seven hours a day i don't think it's unfair to ask the board to provide the actual evidence that masking works no more yielding to the cdc please provide the studies to the parents who can examine them and decide for themselves if their children should or should not be in mass of course if you agreed to take funds from the government in exchange for following their guidelines that is a whole other issue that the community needs to be aware of as masking our children for the
062for an exchange of money is incredibly unethical speaking of choice we're all aware that the vaccine will be approved quickly for children ages 5 to 11. i couldn't believe it when i heard the vaccine was being given at schools in greenwich for kids 12 through 17 with a parental slip in hand this is something that should be done with a parent present although my children will not be receiving the vaccine i would ask that you not set these up in elementary schools during the school week it's not fair to our children who are as young as five seeing their peers getting a vaccine this is a private decision that should be made by parents especially with a .0001 chance that the chance that the kids are actually getting sick let me add a lot of
063kids that have already had covet whether they know it or not have antibodies that have been proven to be better than the vaccine i carried all three of my children for 10 months and i don't remember any of you being there to help me carry the weight so there is no way you have any right to decide if my child gets a vaccine 30 seconds that was that has been tested for a month the parents and children of this town deserve better we want to trust the education that our children receive and have faith that the people making these decisions want the best for our children and their future please give the parents back our rights we deserve to make decisions for our children regarding their health and well-being thank you all right so the
064next speaker is michael joseph mercanti anthony followed by it's listed as lesko brandon it may be the other way around hi um my name is mike mcconnelly anthony as many know i'm a candidate for one of the open seats on the board of education this november i have 23 years of experience in public education as a teacher an administrator and possess a doctorate in education from the university not an appropriate form for campaigning so if you can please no proper comments they i mentioned all this because i believe firmly that boards of education benefit when you have different perspectives present it's good to have the voices of lawyers pta veterans and other professionals on the board i would say because it's also essential to have members of education backgrounds as well yet regardless of perspective
065we all must agree that gps has no greater asset than its talented teachers they know too well the challenge before us tonight the board will be looking at last year's sobering and covert cause achievement data which demonstrates significant drops in performance several grade levels particularly in transition years shows double digit could show double digit declines moreover the performance gap of our students in our title one schools has widened into a bit of a chasm i caution the board not to look at this as a short-term problem this is not an issue of remediation but of acceleration there's a key difference here in a remediation program schools identify a specific gap in learning and go back to fix it the problem there is that while you're remediating in one area the student is missing further learning
066imagine a fifth grade student now now reading at a third grade level because of covet the achievement data suggests that we have a number of students in this issue if we move the student forward at the same place as before the student will always be behind what's more when that student gets to middle and high school there is a danger that progress stops as the curriculum shifts away from reading skills and towards the study of literature it is not hard to see a student in this scenario left permanently behind i don't mention this to scare anyone but to stress to the board the importance of ensuring that our code response programs are favoring acceleration not mere remediation we need to make sure programs are in place to accelerate students growth in both math and literacy
067such that these gaps do not become permanent fixtures of this annual report thank you for your time thank you all right next up is carl higby followed by kim fiorello welcome back to the circus um hey so i'm glad all the teachers are here because uh you know actually i recognize a couple of you guys as when i ran for the rtm one of the things i did was try to help people in the community some of these people have reached out to me and done my best to help them you know get a couple bad apples in there that every once in a while every group has i'm glad you're here uh i'd like to know what are these carl could you please address the board these are comments to the board not oh
068yeah okay thank you so what are the exact threats that everybody's worried about interactive so oh it's it's not interactive thank you okay so you know it's it's interesting because here's the thing if you guys have threats against you i'm the guy you call call me first because i'll stand in front of you in fact here's my cell phone number right now carl could you please address this okay so here's my cell phone if someone threatens a teacher you call me and i'll be the first person to defend you okay but since it's not a give and take and i'm supposed to address the board and you guys don't ever give anything here's peter bernstein's cell phone number cause he doesn't answer emails here's tony jones's cell phone number okay maybe you can call them
069maybe they'll start getting involved if you have comments you'd like to make i do other things i'd like to make please move along yeah i have a ton of comments on me because you don't get back to our emails so you know and also your your phone numbers are being passed around right now as well uh maybe you'll listen if we get enough people calling you i want to know when are you going to take these masks you saw the high school kids who came up here they're so happy to get the barriers down they're getting their humanity back when are the masks coming down all right they're not answering so go ahead and call them on that one um are you gonna mandate vaccines for young kids and things like this i mean our
070teachers they have they're working their tails off to try to interact with these kids and they can't they can they have no emotional connection through these plastic barriers through these masks and now you're forcing them to get tested every week i mean this is garbage this is garbage this is we're on what 600 days of 14 days to flatten the curve i mean it's time to get over this stuff man i'm i really think that the education is not in your foremost mind it's control i just watched two high school kids thank you pleading begging thanking that you just took down a bunch of plastic aquarium barriers in between them shouldn't come to that these are kids are supposed to be running around outside eating dirt getting sick sometimes not getting sick sometimes you're dehumanizing
071them and i'm going to ask you again get the mass off my kids they hate them they come home crying it doesn't even seem like you guys care because there's been no further movement on this since the last seconds so you know what i'm glad i passed out the cell phone numbers are those two right there please give them a call let them know how you feel i don't care if it's 6 30 in the morning while you're having coffee putting your kids to bed but you know what if my kids are distressed over this you're going to be distressed over this let's go brandon all right thank you very much next speaker is kim fiorello followed by gail horiton good evening kim can you please pull your mask up thank you okay sorry on
072the house floor we speak without our microphones well when we're at the market from school you have to have your mask up it's an executive order from the governor so please put your mask up that's fine i will observe your rules here that would be the governor's rule you can take it up with him and you know that thank you um i only speak about the rules in the house and we don't come to the microphone with the mask on well not the house you're in the school thank you all right nevertheless uh so i am state representative kimberly fiorello i represent parts of greenwich and stamford i also serve on the education committee in hartford and i wanted to take a moment to share with you and also the parents in the audience here
073on the education committee we do discuss education policy that impacts all of our towns and parents and i urge that the vigilance of parents i think my timer is not going just fyi oh all right so um the the vigilance of parents to understand the bills that are being passed is vital whether it's an act concerning social emotional learning inclusion of computer science or financial literacy as part of graduation requirement which may be good or bad we do have a model curriculum coming from the state that is a you know it's it's take it or leave it but these are often one-size-fits-all ideas um as a legislator i do see many of these ideas i come across and they will come down to impact connecticut uh sorry impact greenwich as a state representative i hear
074from so many parents and especially on the stanford side there's a great level of distress stanford schools cancelled the ap classes for history for english literature for chemistry and biology this year and it was just before the kids returned to the schools and the notifications went directly to the students and not to the parents there was great uh frustration and confusion as to why parents were not notified first stanford has also canceled midterms and final exams with a note saying they're not sure if they will come back lastly westhill high school is doing a pilot program for equitable grading and many parents have reached out to me because they don't understand what what equitable grading is and i think there's definitely a a trend of the administrators dirty professionals in education skipping over um explanations
075to the parents as a resident of this town i strongly urge our board to put education first and to resist the urge to go towards agendas that move away from core classical education competencies for k-12 there's a great push for that coming from hartford so i urge the parents to stay vigilant and for the board to also stay vigilant tonight i'm sure that greenwich schools thank you very much our core classic competencies thank you our next speaker is gail lloridson followed by clerk ogawn to hear though he's right good evening um in june i spoke against uh highly political critical race theory in our school curriculum i was gratified to see at tuesday's board of ed debate that although the democrats seemed unsure if they support crt in schools not one of the candidates claimed
076support of terms such as white oppressor white fragility white rage and white guilt which are pillars of critical race theory i was also pleased to hear the incumbent kathleen stowe disagrees with sexualized curriculum content claiming that examples which were publicized at previous meetings were in fact one-offs and did not exemplify approved curriculum and i look forward to seeing the comprehensive policy changes these stated philosophies will bring to greenwich public schools although not one of the candidates claimed to support the group called the greenwich patriots it seems to me they actually agree with these curriculum issues which i just mentioned which i believe are primary to the greenwich patriots mission therefore i want to congratulate jackie homan who in spite of the slings and arrows of radical antagonistic opposition has clearly gotten her message across republican
077candidate michael joseph mercanti anthony hasn't i'm sorry we don't do the personal attack thing so if you have something you'd like to address to the board as opposed to candidates doctor something or other doctor market anthony has an impressive collection of education degrees and experience it's easy to see how he might be competitive a shoe-in for a board position no this is absolutely appropriate for publishing this is not a this is not a i've got four minute 14 and i'm sure the democrat party appreciates his 18 political donations to democrat causes in 2020 i'm just wondering why he's not running as a democrat turn the microphone off please thank you this is not appropriate comments for the board of education so if you could please sit down so we can hear from people who are
078here to address the board on matters before the board you're talking about a local election if you're talking about policy that's fine you're talking about individuals then please stop talking about individuals okay ma'am i'm gonna have to ask you to stop please when i talk about policies that's fine in favor of covering the vital airways of your children and their own children with bacteria-laden cloth for eight hours a day i spoke on this topic at the september board of ed meeting the studies supporting this mandate are weak lacking in scientific controls and they are few on the contrary there are hundreds of studies which prove the masks do more harm than good you have the power to say no to this and any government mandate because a mandate is not a law so stop hiding
079behind that excuse black's law dictionary 11th edition says a mandate requires two-party consent you just have to say no but i understand this is a business decision this mass mandate is one of the strings attached to 10 million dollars in esther funding there is really no other reason for it shame on you thank you very much all right folks we've got other speakers we're coming up against the hour so the next speaker is clearcare gallon followed by francis novay okay uh good evening my name is claire kilgallen good evening to the board dr jones and guests um i wanted to speak on a few topics that are on your agenda tonight one is the alp program and i've had two chil i have three children but they're all different kinds of learners and uh they've
080had the two older ones have had a great experience going through al i have to say that and um that's coming from new lebanon if that helps anybody i am concerned though about the change to the 6a science which is the advanced class now being a regular class with an optional advanced learning pathway i'm concerned about the where the differentiation is and really for some students like my son who shall remain nameless um this is his only advanced class he's a different kind of learner from his siblings and he will never i don't well i won't say he'll never but he's not he has till now never been in an advanced class so to have him place into science which is something he loves and then have it not have happened to be happening is
081is concerning it's not just concerning for my own child i think about all the other children who sit in the same boat not everybody's an english student not everybody's a math student some kids love different subjects so i'd appreciate getting some information on that with regard to the enrollment uh report um i i'm always concerned about it because i know how it gets used against the the board in in budgetary matters and i see the decrease the projected decrease of of the 88 students in elementary school and let's put that into some context children are not widgets um but over 11 elementary schools and six grades that's that's that would be 77 if you divide that that's about 1.1 students per class so it's certainly not going to impact the number of classrooms needed and
082we know that the enrollment report is only as good as the assumptions we don't have statistics on the inflow of new york residents their birth rates the the assumptions really do impact what we get from an enrollment report and we know from history that it's only good for a few years at best um and only a h it only uh i'm glad that it refers to some development projects but it only refers to a handful of them and you know they're coming in fast and furious just like the 230 units coming into the jc catchment area and i appreciate your support for the master plan for old greenwich it should absolutely go forward this investment is overdue and it will improve all of our property values and just as a good news you know what
083new lebanon got built we're already at 313 of our 374 student goal and that's only since february 2019 with a pandemic thrown into the mix thank you to the board this is probably the last time i've seen a meeting and i appreciate your service all right thank you the next speaker is francis nobe followed by mariah mcleodrick hello can you hear me yes go ahead please hello this is francis funobe speaking in my role as mom of three gps students well and truly working through the first marking period i recently read an article about praise called the necessity of finding more ways to praise the article was published by edutopia an education innovation nonprofit founded by filmmaker george lucas the article shared new research that echoed previous work which recommends students hear six praise statements
084every 15 minutes this new study found that as praise to reprimands increased on task behavior of the entire class improved and for students with emotional and behavioral disorders the difference between receiving zero praise and a one-to-one ratio of praise to reprimands was a full letter grade moving from an average d grade to c and completely avoiding public reprimands and using a more positive proactive approach had an even more dramatic effect with these students achieving an average b grade in the classroom as i reflected on this article for my own kids i also thought about this boe meeting and why so many leave public comments disheartened discouraged and dismayed where's the praise where are the glows for my three kids and their fellow 8590 other students in our district 900 teachers come to school taught my
085kids something new showed them grace and kudos for their efforts administrators staff bus drivers and groundskeepers keep our school running my fellow speakers even if your comments are pre-written i challenge you to add one piece of praise to your comments tonight it may be more effective we can walk away feeling stronger more connected and more engaged with that piece of positive news i recently had the privilege of hearing general colin powell speak live earlier this year before he passed general powell said don't show kindness in passing or to be courteous show it in depth show it with passion and expect nothing in return kindness is not just about being nice it's about recognizing another human being who deserves care and respect care for self and others starts today thank you very much all right that's
086one hour uh we will resume our community comments following the business portion of our meeting we're going to move on to our monthly reports starting with the superintendent thank you chair bernstein um just a couple of items tonight first of all to student government i just want to say thank you for the suggestions that you continue to give us we are listening and it is very helpful for us as we manage the district so thank you for that um i had the pleasure today to be at jc for united nations parade which was absolutely outstanding great job jc i believe i believe they had 67 different flags it was really representative of the world and thank you to our alp team on their newsletter that's brand new for us that will be issued every quarter
087and i also want to say a special thanks to a team that is working on the cardinal stadium opening and i think it's going to be a great event i know joe will probably talk about that later and last but not least just as a reminder for our esser funding we have sr1 sr2 crf funding we also have arp which is called sr3 of that more than 9 million dollars 20 must be spent on learning loss that does not mean that we are not spending more than 20 on academics and i just want to be sure and there's a really good short video of about four minutes um if you want to know kind of what the focus is for all of those grants that have been from the federal government that's all for me
088all right thank you miss downey and dr johnson sorry um i just did we have a north quick north mianis update oh because it was referenced so sure i can do that um for north mianis everything right now is still on target moving along as a matter of fact i had a wonderful email from principal schmidt today um because all of the shelving and and the um it's all starting to arrive and looks beautiful so everything is on schedule we hope you know in early december to start getting that move ready um and we're not quite sure how that will work because we have to tie that into the exact whether it's going to be a friday saturday sunday monday whether it's going to be two grade levels and then a one grade level and
089specials but all of that in the next coming weeks we'll know more but it's going fantastic right now mr share um dr jones the guys i don't know which esr it is yes or two or s or three i'm gonna miss the number the last one we had to send in submit a plan i think it was in august um where's that plan actually published right now it's sitting with the uh connecticut state department of education and we're waiting on approval once it's approved and we know what we have put in there which again we you know gathered community input from um and we know that they approve that then that will get posted and we'll share even more detail about that but it needs to be approved but our submission would be public right
090where is that i don't think the actual application is public because we continue to work with connecticut state department of education to make edits until it's actually approved yeah it is in the budget committee community thank you a lot of it's on the minutes it's from the budget no no i know that part that's why i was trying to just find out for the public you know from our public proceedings so are you saying kathleen that the full application that was submitted is attached to one of the budget committee minutes not the full application but basically all the things that we talked about at the meeting that she had received from the community and from our input at the budget committee meetings it's like sort of all detailed in the minutes but not the application
091itself okay so what we submitted is currently not public is what you're saying yeah okay i that's what i heard if is that wrong no it's all we submitted is not public that's correct and this is also remember we have another two years to be spending this grant so even what we put in now will continue to have edits um after we get through the first year then we'll be looking at the second year then we'll be looking at the next year so yeah i i've just heard people stand up here and make assertions about what's in that plan okay and i don't know whether what they're saying is correct or not because their people are standing up making statements maybe they're correct maybe they're not i mean i can foil the document which i'll
092weird to have a board member for you the document but okay i'll foil the document because it's a public document and it's it's not draft it's been submitted so you know there's no there's no there's no way that document is actually protected it just seemed to me that that is not i would encourage this board this is my last meeting effectively and you know i would just occur the board needs to be as transparent as possible because as i say i don't know whether what these people are saying is actually true is eighty percent of the grant used on non-educational issues i can't imagine that's true at the budget committee meeting yeah i mean i don't want to i don't want to know i'm saying peter the the specific but the the proposed numbers that
093dr jones gave us was broken down in the budget committee meeting minutes which are on the website which i understood that part because i saw the minutes thank you thank you for the clarification okay mr kelly thank you i was at the budget committee meeting being a member of your budget committee thank you very nice job in your budget committee the one thing that was a little confusing and i'll be general on my question we've received a lot of money from the government we call it sro1 lots of different things but let's take the category of just any money that's come from the government just for clarity sake i know the answer to the question but to mr shearer's point about being public on things so everyone knows about it and please be clear about
094this is any of that money that received from the government whether it be federal local state any of the government is any of that money tied to us having the kids wear masks or vaccines absolutely not none of it as a matter of fact when we started the year and we were under a mass order we you know we didn't even know what money we were going to have from the federal government um so we were ready to go for interims for ppe and all the things that we've needed so absolutely not so if say for some crazy thing we decided to uh uh break the executive order the law that requires kids in schools to wear masks if we broke from that and became rogue and broke the law and said you know we're
095going to stop the mask wearing would they take any of that money back from us could they take money from us we were advised by an attorney opinion that certainly that could happen obviously as a school superintendent i would never encourage us to break the law for risk of losing my superintendent's license well that makes sense i wouldn't encourage breaking the law either but uh certainly the the decision on whether the kids at school wear masks or not is not on on the board of education at this point uh if it ever becomes i think we've uh we've made in our policy that we'll meet immediately after the government governor's executive order requiring uh all our students and teachers to wear masks in school and visitors in the schools to wear mask like wearing masks
096right now once that's over then we as a board will meet immediately to make a decision we will wear that to swear that decision at that point is that correct that is correct thank you for the clarification all right miss downey um you ready for more reports well we're actually going to get into reports thank you so now we're ready for our reports of officers committees and liaisons so ms downey you're eager okay so we kind of got left off anyway um in terms of the ghs entryway um the committee has been meeting quite frequently um to work on things like hvac and the like we have a preliminary hearing before planning and zoning next week um and the rtm did approve the resolutions at their september meeting for us to go forward with any
097state reimbursement the most significant item for the board to be aware of is that after the design and talking to the architects and the planning and zoning and looking at the logistics involved in the project the committee has shifted the timeline for the project and it was voted on by the committee about two weeks ago to break the plan would be to break ground in june of 22 basically starts staging before school gets out break ground as soon as possible the day after school gets out because that initial phase of construction is going to be the most disruptive to the campus so best to do that during the summer time with a goal of having the project completed no later than the february break of 23 so then at least all the mechanicals and the
098really complicated things get done over the summer and the administration mr mayo and they're working on how that process is going to work when they return to school in fall of 22. my search well i had a quick question for ms downey but i also have committee reports um how will that affect i know that they'll also be having construction on the fields in the back over the summer will that cause any issues if you're going to break ground for the front it should not but they are the all the professionals are working together on this all right miss hershey said jt reports uh so i'm reporting on ces uh i was on the board liaison for that um they just debuted the workspace connecticut which is a new educational facility owned and operated both
099by ces and advanced two of the six regional educational services um and it was formed to create provide students and educators throughout western connecticut with a unique setting to enhance learning and create educational opportunities it's officially opened and hopefully soon that some of our staff will have the opportunity to go there for training and other things over the year i'm also stepped onto dtac which recently held its first meeting of the year where they reviewed the year's calendar shared some important dates and discussed the years this year's communications and school presentation plan um and i will share more information on those dates and deadlines once they are officially confirmed and the third committee i can speak on is cac the curriculum advisory committee which met earlier this week in two separate sessions both sessions focused
100on grades six through eight with the first session focused on ela and the second on social studies the committee is focused on supporting continuous school improvement and ensuring the district curriculum meets state and national standards and aligns with our greenwich vision of the graduate they're working on vertical and horizontal curriculum alignment of scope and sequence creating lesson plans vending materials and more more information about this committee and the work being done can be found in the curriculum management plan which the board will be discussing later this evening thank you dr francis um for the alliance i don't know if i'm on mike yeah uh just a little reminder that we've got turkey trot coming up which is a really fun uh event oop bent turkey trot coming up fun event i encourage people to do
101that and i will i will tie a little praise into this which is reaching out grants i encourage all of our wonderful teachers to share their innovative ideas and come up with new things that they would like support in carrying out in our schools and apply for reaching out grants it's been a really amazing thing that uh our alliance has provided for our schools and uh our teachers are really at the center of that and so i encourage teachers to look at and take ideas that they have and bring those to the greenwich alliance all right mr kelly thank you hey good news uh cardinal stadium grand opening october 30th uh it'll be a football game against new canaan everyone is extremely excited about this we have the pep band re-establishing itself we have dancers
102we have the cheerleaders are excited about it the players we have alumni we have groups that are gathering and meeting for this it's just it's spreading like wildfire that everyone's getting contagiously excited about this event we hope everyone could come to this thing we had a sneak preview uh on october 2nd we were able to open the stadium just the bleachers and and we had a great experience uh we were at the game most of the board members and we all just had a tremendous time i believe whether it's true or not i'm not sure but some of the football players did tell me in private that they were able to sneak past fairfield prep only because they were playing in their home stadium in cardinal stadium it was a very close game so we
103have the same opportunity against new canaan if we can get there and cheer our team on uh our our uh facilities manager dan what dan watson is doing a fabulous job we gotta have a shout out to randy feeder uh for working real hard on his project he's the site manager he's down there every day knee deep in mud he's got whenever i go see him he's done he's brushing dust off himself he's there every day for uh for 10 12 hours a day so these guys are really working hard to get this thing open it's going to be very exciting and i hope everyone can attend all right thank you very much mr i know i have you followed joe on cardinal stadium and then i go i'm talking about money like anyone cares
104okay so um budget committee uh we've talked a lot about the american rescue plan and all that but now we have to talk about the immediate budget coming up obviously the last next meeting which is the last meeting for some of my colleagues we will be having the budget presented to us and um the budget committee has been meeting and just hearing about some of the high level uh drivers of the budget but then i understand you guys got together last sunday and started to really pull together so we are going to be meeting and hopefully seeing a preview on it uh next tuesday october 26th and uh then we'll see a week later as a board so i just want to give you that update thanks all right very good we'll then move on
105to our discussion items of which there are many just reminding members we have a long agenda ahead of us all right the first item is the official enrollment report so dr carabillo i see you're ready to go yes i am so good evening mr bernstein dr jones board of ed members colleagues and community members in your packets you have a copy of the october 1st 2021 official enrollment update the highlights of the report are as follows our total enrollment pre-k to 12 plus was 8636 on october 1st 2021. this is a decrease of 182 students from the school year of 2021. the percentage of students with high needs factors decreased to 27.8 percent from 31.3 we believe this is due largely because of a lag and certification of students who are qualifying for free and
106reduced lunch services in order to address this lag for free and reduced lunch certification we have sent all schools a sheet with the families that are directly certified from the state and the names of families that are required to complete a new application for certification the schools are contacting those families and their goal is to to increase the completed applications which will help with our percentage of those students who receive free and or reduced lunch we continue to see an increase in students qualifying for special education services and that increase is consistent with the statewide trends we've been aware that the media states that many people left new york and moved to the suburbs well greenwich has not seen a really big impact yet there have been some small increases at og and parkway with
107their kindergarten enrollments but nothing yet of real significance what is interesting however is that we usually have some withdrawals from grade nine to ten and then a customary offset was with new incoming 10th graders unfortunately that did not happen this year but we will continue to monitor that to see if it is a pattern homeschooling increased last year however 22 students from the 41 homeschooled students have returned to greenwich public schools this year we have increased the percentage of students who qualify for english language learner services to 4.4 this year from 4 last year our english language learner population has remained steady over the past 5 years between 4 and 5 we do differ from the state's rate the state's rate has been climbing over the past five years from 6.8 percent to 8.4 of
108the students in the district our high needs students combined free and reduced lunch qualified special education or english language status as of october 1st 2021 is 2 393 students or 27.8 of our students we expect this number to increase some when family income is certified for free and re reduced lunch benefits the forecast for our enrollment in 2223 is expected to decline there will be k-8 declines in classes offset by the increases that will now occur at greenwich high school over the next 10 years it appears there will be a gradual decline in enrollment because of declining births which is consistent with national trends as you can see in the charts on page 10 of the report earths and greenwich have declined we are waiting for the birth data for 2018 and 19 from the
109state of connecticut to better predict our future kindergarten enrollment the retention of students those who come in or out of our greenwich public schools after kindergarten help to determine our forecast our forecast assumes the retention rates will stay the same migration is either in or out resident students moving in or out of private school or home school and the movements of students that are in and out of brigade who move into greenwich and out of greenwich on page 12 you can view the 10-year percentage of migration approximately 25 percent of our greenwich student residents attend private schools in connecticut in 2020 [Music] students from greenwich attended private schools 90 of them enrolled in eight greenwich private schools this number has been stable but we've continued to monitor them to see if the trend changes on
110pages 13 through 60 you have the report from dr peter proudo it's a 10 year projection using the cohort survival methodology factors that may impact the 2021 and 22 projections and beyond are the in-town migration from other communities recent real estate transactions here in greenwich were 50 higher than in recent history so that may have an impact there are several multi-family developments proposed in greenwich and that may have an impact our retention rates fall above or below historical patterns maybe we'll have more move in and fewer move out birth rates fall above or below historical patterns we don't know about the covid19 pandemic it may continue it may change that will have an impact and we are still waiting for birth data from the state and that concludes the enrollment report summary any questions all
111right members mrs hirsch uh thank you for that report um i was just wondering i know if you look at the figures from october of 2020 the report of the number of graduating seniors last year as compared to the number of incoming kindergartners this year that's a 109 students down so the total drop of 182 doesn't seem exactly that drastic except when you look at the downshift as you mentioned ghs in grades 10 and 11. i know i know we usually expect some and change in enrollment um but are we looking into why there was such a large migration i know when we got the preliminary report i'd asked if we looked at transcript transfer requests to see if we could determine where these students had gone uh and it was noted that you would
112be looking for that data so i was just wondering if you what you might have found we have not completed that yet karen but we will okay so i look forward to seeing that hopefully somewhat soon um because i know i've asked before because i think it's important for us to find ways to reach out and figure out why families aren't returning i also was wondering when we might get the enrollment data for 21 for students that attend the private schools because that might address that all right i will get that to you as soon as i find out what it is any other discussion okay miss kowalski sure so with respect to um dr calabrello with respect to what we're doing to take a look at where students are going what is it what
113is our process what in fact are we doing and when would we expect that report uh you mean where students are going when they withdraw from greenwich public schools yeah what's what's the process you said you're still evaluating and doing it so what what is the process by which you're evaluating there's a difference between transfer requests going to a different school within town and transfer requests for moving out of town or moving to a private school so it takes a while to go through that data at the high school we've just got finished going through a lot of the data for our senior class to see where they are last year's senior class so it does take time to go through all that data we have to look at their queue files we have to
114look at the transfer papers we have to see where they have gone if students move out of town and they go to a different school the school that they go to has to request a transcript from us so it's it's more involved than what one would think it is but it it does take time so when do we expect it i know we asked for it at the last meeting and i would like to put a timeline on when we think we're going to get this because it is concerning that we are a shrinking school district with costs continuously rising and i think it's important to understand the trend as to where these students are going and why they're leaving greenwich public schools we'll try to have that ready for you at the end of
115november and we'll get it to you then mr chair um and thank you for the report it was more detailed than uh the snapshot that we got in september it's great for the board to get this every year i just wanted to call to attention um and and i wanted to be sure i didn't read this report wrong um over the last three years we've lost 460 kids so all the ins and outs you know kids coming to the district from private schools coming from new york parent families leaving migrating to some other state maybe they go to a private school and they used to go to a public school maybe they moved someplace else in connecticut we've lost 467 kids and the projection in that year when this started was we would be flat
116as far as you can see so and and now we're on a projection of where we're reality down by substantial numbers and we're projected to continue down um i'm wondering you know maybe that's to the question of i know we have the data i know it's 467 individual records is there some way to put somebody on this because this report it seemed to have and i appreciate it a lot of you know particularly from jen lao a lot of suppositions about what might be happening but i didn't see where it says you know this is happening this many new families moved in from new york i know we have that data this many families left because their papers needed to be transferred somewhere else for a kid to continue their education so we have to
117know how many of those are i also know that the state of connecticut department of education maintains a database of every student in the state and they they're a source of a lot of data of where people went and and so on and so forth so they would know exactly if someone moved to another jurisdiction particularly in connecticut you would get that immediately i was wondering if you had anything that was more concrete than how this was report was written about educated guesses of where people went i don't have anything more concrete for you but i can certainly explore and see what additional data we can get for you mr sure well you don't have to worry about me because i'll be gone by the time you have it around i just i just the
118thing i would say is you know this is forget how many there are i this would be my advice to the future board and sonos superintendent this is a major strategic issue because when you have a flat budget at essentially 160 million and you lose almost 500 kids that means the average amount we're spending for kid goes up substantially i would think everybody would want to hang on to that money but uh i i would not encourage anybody to run around say okay let's go cut a budget if you're listening out there and bet and rtm land but at the same time if the school system can't explain what's going on you the board of education is not going to have any credibility uh with people who are asking these questions so i would encourage
119the board to get way ahead of that issue not wait uh for the question and then with these kinds of suppositions because with that crowd this will not cut the mustard so my advice to all of you is get ahead of this get real data figure out what's going on because it's a major strategic issue thank you so so and you know i just want to point out the replacement chart on page 11 where we look at the graduating seniors versus the incoming kindergartners and i know that charts elsewhere basically we are replacing classes of 700 students graduating at a time and it's a lot of diplomas to sign folks we sign them with a pen with classes of of 579 589 if you add up the last three years of replacement of graduating senior
120classes over 700 with what's coming in for kindergarten that's a difference of 368 students right there this is a trend that's happening across the state where enrollment has been declining for a while we've noted that in fact we've had those discussions with the bet over time uh but the other side of the coin where i see we have you know less students and and that is you know something to keep an eye on is that students with needs that number continues to grow and it continues to grow at a much faster rate than the rate of students that are leaving our special ed population is already up one percent from last year and that number is going to continue to climb and if you remember we were flat for a very long time and probably
121for all the wrong reasons so as we improve our special education identification process my expectation is that number is going to keep climbing so we have not added staff at a classroom level for quite some time i don't know that in my years on the board we've ever really added because we've been taking away taking away taking away we've cut our administration we continue to uh to find creative ways to do things like the math interventionists uh which we've taken positions out of havemeyer to do so you know i don't expect our budget's going to be asking for money for classroom teachers this year i doubt you're going to be asking for any staff because we we know the messaging but it's where the money is being spent that i think is the important story
122we need to tell to mr sharer's point dr francis sorry just um more of a little bit of a statement and i think maybe reiterating things that most of us know but just to be clear one of course if the numbers keep to drop keep dropping down at some point there may be some difficult decisions that need to be made but i think it's also really important not to be simplistic about these things that you know if you have a two percent drop in your number of students doesn't mean you automatically have a two percent drop in your number of teachers not because you have to really look at each individual class size and what those numbers are and as it was pointed out earlier by one of the speakers you know a one person
123change in a classroom is not necessarily going to put you over into being able to change anything in terms of your teachers so i think it's just important to remember that those are not a one-to-one correlation mr kelly kathleen thank you john um i was basically going to see what gay tom was going was reiterated there um also i guess gaetan you're now you're no longer practicing obstetrician maybe you can give us some um insight but um exactly so she can give us a minute-by-minute data um but a couple things one i think data typically especially in this world is usually good about five years out so i don't love that we show ten years because i think we really only know five but also and i haven't had a chance to study it but
124i would love to see this layered against the national average i know you're saying connecticut but you know birth rates tend to follow the economy so when i look at this this doesn't surprise me i guess when i start to do some of the math backwards um but i think it would be good to layer that just because that might be a big there's there's certainly things that are impacting greenwich and i hope we can outpace the national average but you know sometimes it's just hard to fight um the economy so please put that next time thank you all right mr kelly we uh we touched on this briefly in the budget committee meeting we had a member of the bet there and they seem to like the concept of putting together a forward plan
125of what-ifs if the trend continues we have to look at doing this if the trend changes and goes the other direction we should do this so i think instead of reacting to things that happen i think we should plan far in advance and have a what if what if what if if it goes down continuously then we have a plan where it hits a certain mark like a business projection if you have a production decreasing or increasing you have a approach the same way where you have things trend back we don't do anything if things go higher we hire more people if things go down we we maybe reduce costs in some way so let's put a let's get ahead of it and roughly put it together now and get as we go along and
126trend getting more specific with things just like we talked about in the budget committee meeting that seemed to go over well with the member of the bet that was there thank you miss downey and and while we're talking about budget um so our budget um for next year will be based on these projections is that correct correct dr johnson whatever when it's presented to us yes okay great um and we feel solid about the projections so i guess the question is our accuracy you know what have we how do we feel about that i mean we're still in covid and we don't know what we don't know so you know having the housing turnover and the way that it that it has in greenwich we haven't seen it yet some other localities around us have
127had a one or two percent increase so we just we don't know um you know the birth rate we're hearing that the birth rate is up but we don't have any data but that won't come to us for several years until they're either in preschool at the age of three or four or five when they you know start kindergarten four and five um but we don't know we don't know so they're always projections when we remind people that ms kowalski um i think someone made the comment that we're seeing across connecticut trends of decreased numbers within public schools can if we have that data i'd like to see the comparison as to where we see greenwich as compared to the other districts particularly our comparable districts across connecticut because i think that would be very
128telling so if we have that data i'd like to see it the other thing that i'd like to notice just it's a it's a comment and i think this uh dovetails with what dr francis was saying is the trend for next year is in fact that will go down another 100 students and that obviously shrinks us down to even more of a significant amount and i think we need to be prepared to in fact make some tough decisions along with the lines of what mr kelly said because we've got room and in fact some of our classrooms at the age i think in parkway the fifth grade classroom they have two classrooms there with 13 kids a piece i'm not sure why those weren't consolidated because under our policy that fifth grade class should have
129been one class um actually it's 12 kids should have been one class so i i don't know why we're not doing that but that sends them to me that sends the message that we need to think very long and hard about what we're going to do with the number of schools that we have and the upkeep it takes to keep all of those schools if in fact we don't have enough children to fill all the seats in those schools mr sharon um i think you're all making my point you need to figure out what's actually going on because everything that people have said as suppositions birth rates locally so on and so forth may or may not be in play i sat on this board long enough ago where we were doing a racial balance
130plan um malone and mcbroom came in and did a long-range forecast they did it using their standard methodology looking at birth rates at greenwich hospital guess what folks how many of you okay moved to greenwich uh from new york so they're assuming which is standard is that in your local community you can look at those birth rates we get lots of people who have kids in new york who are not counted in greenwich hospital and then they arrive in greenwich to put them kids their kids in school so suppositions don't help you need to actually have facts i think there's a bit of good news in all of this the good news is is if you look up the data uh we have the lowest class size particularly in k5 in more than 25 years
131so uh that's great if your kids in a k5 classroom in certain schools it's it's nirvana from an educational perspective so and it's within policy in most of them i don't know about the one at parkway it's within policy so by the way great time to come put your kids in greenwich k5 schools because we have the lowest class size going by a country mile and ones that we have lowest we've had in uh decades so there's a bit of good news in this enrollment report and um something to think about and take advantage of because it will certainly be that case for the next two to three years until there has to be a more detailed conversation about any adjustments from any continued declines miss hersh and we're gonna move on um well i
132mean it is interesting to note that there's a lot of new developments coming up in town so really don't have an idea of how many people will be moving in with school-aged children but that leads me to my question um on page six uh there was a note on basically the number of uh students families that were you know free and reduced lunch um i thought a few years ago families were automatically entered into the program at the state level um so i'm wondering now why schools are required to certify those families i know you said that you sent a list of parents that were certified and still those that still needed to um so i'm just wondering why they needs to do that instead i thought we were they were automatically entered and if
133they're not and in that interim are we doing anything to help the families while they're still waiting to be certified there are some families that are automatically certified by the state because of their socioeconomic status but there are other families that have not reported their status um in the past a year and a half because everyone has been receiving free meals so because of that many families don't realize that they have to continue to make sure that they have that socioeconomic status updated it's not that we certify them the town we do not certify them that has to all be certified by the state so um and they have to have that information and it's a data that is collected not only at the state level but also at the federal level so that's why
134we have our schools really looking at those families that we believe may qualify there are some families that we know through our social workers or through our guidance counselors or through the administration that they know that those families are struggling so those are the families that they are reaching out to that have not completed or updated their their um applications uh thank you that explains a lot and i hope we're also making sure to reach out to them in their native language yes we do all right thank you with that we're going to move on to our next agenda item which is the curriculum plan review cycle so mr d'amico take it away good evening chairman bernstein and members of the board of education we have submitted for your review a written document outlining the
135curriculum management plan for the future i'd like to make a few remarks and then i will have mrs fogle walk you through the redesign of the graphic first i believe we have a responsibility to our educators to provide them with the resources they need to engage in comprehensive planning as such this plan targets areas in need of updates second moving forward we will approach curriculum management with a much more narrow focus to start and complete critical work in a timely and efficient manner third my goal and my team's goal is to operate with complete transparency the redesign of the former curriculum council to a more focused and streamlined curriculum advisory committee allows us to be action oriented and accountable to the board the parents and most importantly to our educators much like the successful rollout
136of our big ideas math platform which is currently underway we will remain steadfast in providing support and being responsive to our educators during curriculum revisions and updates throughout this five-year cycle miss fogle thank you mr diaminko i'd like to take the opportunity to discuss a brief overview of the four phases of our curriculum cycle on average this happens every five years while this is cyclical in nature i'll start for you tonight with phase one this is when a program or course curriculum is marked as needing review after this the cycle continues to phase 2. where curriculum core materials such as textbooks or primary resources are selected or created depending on the course program or content area this is done in concert with stakeholders through the collaboration of the curriculum advisory committee once selected or created
137we move on to phase three where teachers implement the curriculum gather feedback and make refinements as necessary this is the longest phase of our curriculum cycle towards the end of the cycle nearing five years of implementation and refinement the curriculum will be more formally analyzed and evaluated to determine if it needs to be reviewed for renewal again as mr d'amico discussed our curriculum management plan is successful because it is delineated by priority targets for our work each year i'd like to show you an example on your screens now of the k8 targets here you can see that we have limited foci in each contact area content area for a given year this simplified view is outlined in our report for the k8 level as well as the 9 through 12 courses at greenwich high school
138next i would like to describe the intentional design of the curriculum management grid this has been printed and disseminated to board members for ease of viewing this evening please note that this grid has also been posted to board docs as an appendix for tonight's report i would like to draw your attention now to the k8 side of your grid this has deep yellow priority targets denoted towards the top here you can see that our immediate priorities for 21 through 23 are the middle level ela and social studies courses moving on to 22 through 2025 this work progresses to the lower levels first at 3 5 and then k2 overlapping with this work in a similar scope we move on to science for 2024 through 2025 again beginning year one at the 3-5 grade band and
139following downward to the k-2 grade band these are our priority targets for our curriculum management plan over the next five years at the k-8 level both sides of your physical paper follow the same cycle i described just a moment ago on the slide in front of you you can see a large version of the grid's key which describes the layout in greater details as you view tonight we have color coded this to show where each curriculum area or greenwich high school course currently resides within our cycle as well as a plan for continued monitoring and progress over the next five years with that brief review myself mr d'amico dr carabillo my fellow program coordinators as well as our greenwich high school program administrators are available to answer questions you may have specific to our content
140areas thank you all right miss hersh first of all i wanted to thank you all for this report the thought and the work that's gone into it the work being done in this area as well is already tremendous i know how hard you guys have have really worked on this and it's it's really incredible that you've thought through so many things uh the continual focus on improving renewing the lying on aligning our curriculum will help support and improve the educational outcomes for all of our students no matter what their interests or areas of need are and i also wanted to thank you for not just focusing on what some see is the core subjects but including the arts as well i know you didn't really go over it but i think it's important i know
141the committee meets only a few times a year but can you explain that the works that is being done in between and how teacher feedback is happening um and i know you've also discussed you know how materials are are going to be vetted throughout the year when needed thank you miss hersh i'm happy to take that question so as i mentioned earlier we did have a redesign from curriculum council to a curriculum advisory committee a more streamlined approach to making sure that we are transparent in the decisions that we are making the resources we are using and vetting between each of those meetings teachers have ongoing access to the materials that we are in draft phase looking at teachers can provide comment right on the documents there's also an anonymous google form to which they
142can provide open-ended responses they also have the ability to email our curriculum writers and our coordinator for ela social studies dr marcus i know you guys are also um working on forward-facing documents both for parents and providing teachers with unit overviews uh when will we start to be able to see those i know you have one for the big ideas math but will those be rolled out uh along with the curriculum and uh when you have six eight ela and social studies coming forward yes we will uh the the the idea is to go slow but to be thorough and to make sure that we complete on time with our target of the end of june 2022 for implement implementation with fidelity in the fall of 2023 that will include building out our curriculum maps
143completely with lesson resources on a daily basis for our teachers companion assessments that speak to the standard the mastery of our standards and then the forward-facing documents that we will be communicating home to parents so that all along the way they have a better understanding of what we're teaching in our classrooms i know my back is to you but i'm smiling really big hearing all that um so i just had two specific questions in reviewing the k-8 areas of focus i noticed that advanced science wasn't listed as an area of focus i know that you'll be working on refining the ngss advanced pathways and i'm hoping that the top this is topic we can discuss a few in the future based on the board's continued focus on an advanced science curriculum for middle school and
144i'm hoping it's something you guys are going to be working on absolutely absolutely miss hershey and i would just like to say i would welcome a deeper conversation with the board on just what the focus is for our advanced learning program in terms of purpose i think that's a a conversation that is overdue and certainly my team is excited to engage in that conversation with the board coming in next month i believe we'll be having that discussion on that report later and the last question that i have currently one tonight uh is for the high school when you look i looked at all the world languages and i see that every single world language you offer noted in the curriculum plan except for asl this kind of concerns me is it's the only world language
145that we offer that for instance doesn't offer an honors option and i'm wondering why asl has not been included in this curriculum plan cycle i will let adrian hirsch klein answer that question or christina shaw adrian or christina they may have turned off what we focus on they may have turned off i can get the answer to that question for you karen but i know that there are so many uh various levels of languages that they were focusing on those that had not been addressed lately but i will get that answer for you and i should have that for you tomorrow thank you you're welcome all right uh go ahead starting at the end ms kowalski so um is mark still on i am okay hi mark uh i hope you're feeling better by the
146way thank you [Music] um so i just have you know the the information is very helpful and i got to be a fly on the wall as i described myself in the meetings earlier this week with respect to the uh curriculum committee that is meeting and the work they're doing so my question is really when do you expect to bring all of these changes uh with respect to the curriculum to the board for vote so that's a that's a great question i i don't see this this work that we're currently engaging in uh in a in in the same vein that we did last year with the math textbook review uh what we're doing is we're completing work that was already started so we're not changing what the standards or what the learning targets are
147we're simply filling in the road map so that teachers have on a daily basis a plan to which they can start their their thoughtfulness when preparing for the students in front of them last year when i took over this position one of my key tasks was to take apart the k-8 curriculum that currently existed in schoology and look for areas of vulnerability look for inconsistencies middle school really jumped out to me as the the area we needed to focus on first and although the curriculum maps were in existence and the what we should teach was outlined clearly for teachers the path to get there was not i know there's a call out there by the community to have consistency and clarity between grade levels and schools with the ultimate goal of having all of our
148kids enter high school with a very similar educational experience having covered the same material the work that we are doing this year addresses those needs but again i would defer to the superintendent in terms of um a formal presentation to the board of course in the spring we're happy to give you an overview uh and to share with you our final uh project we will have that ready at the end of may early june happy to do that i'm just not i'm a little unclear as to whether or not that is something that the board needs to vote on so i would defer to dr jones on that more specifically what i'm hearing is there's a lot of content and materials that teachers are now that this committee is looking at to approve for use
149of purpose as a vet for for the education and i think that is prime target for what this board needs to be voting on and so i'd ask for the transparency on what those materials are and what is being used to supplement and add in as you know as the learning materials yes if you actually when you look at the chart the step in cycle and the color shading it's at that uh selection and creation where you see number two which is when you think back to last year how all of the math everything came to the board for approval so the first thing they do is review and they may review in year one and maybe nothing needs to change everything's still in place it's you know solid um and i'm are you following
150where i am sorry page five and it's down on the bottom right corner teeny tiny [Music] and then if you look at the top under our heading where it says step and cycle color shading okay and when you look at number two that's when it comes to the board so when we are selection and we're we're going to select something or we're creating something that's brand new it's coming to the board which it always has in greenwich where we've really i think struggled a lot is in the review for renewal step in one because we were reviewing almost every core area every summer so we were really struggling to get anything completed and mark you can add to that because it was one of his early tasks to go in and really look and see
151what we had fully completed uh in our system and he didn't find very many areas that were completed yeah that's correct you know i i think i used the term last year with the board that i found us to be in a position of consistently being inconsistent in terms of the resources that we have available to our teachers outside of the areas where we have a textbook as a primary resource and that concerns me i look at when i when i when i executed this task last year i looked at it through several different lenses but the most important lens was that of a brand new teacher to the greenwich public schools teaching for example 6th grade social studies there should be a primary resource for all of our teachers especially our new teachers or
152teachers switching grade levels but even for our experienced teachers we all need to have a common starting point because later on should the board request a a thorough analysis of why our scores are improving or declining i'd like to be able to say with certainty whether it's a curricular issue or not but if we don't have that level of consistency and uniformity across our schools that would be challenging to do so just for clarification sake we're in step one review i can't even use for renewal that's what we're saying i'm sorry which were you talking about a certain the chart itself or the step we're in because i'm one i'm just curious you're saying that the the selection and creation piece after that comes then that comes to us for a vote i i do
153believe once all of our human once the work for middle school is completed where we have literally the daily lesson plans i think they will come to the board um so that you can see the work that has been done and we will hopefully have teachers here again for you presenting that work and why it's so important and when is that expected in the timeline karen i would anticipate that in late may early june and again i want to go back to what uh miss hersh asked which was how are we how are we giving teachers the opportunity to provide us with feedback we want to give them as long as possible to review these documents test drive them in their classrooms in terms of um alignment to what they're currently using so that ongoing
154feedback loop is cons is considerably important in this process and so i i don't want to accelerate that timeline i really want to give the the teachers an opportunity because we plan on releasing uh the materials as they're written in batches so the teachers and as you saw in the curriculum advisory committee received the first batch of lesson plans now we're going through an intensive review period and feedback before we send out a second batch of materials for the teachers to review again i'm also trying to be cognizant of the fact that teachers have a lot on their plates and limited time to look at these materials so we have to be thoughtful about using our wednesday afternoon professional learning time for these types of professional discussions all right well we we've got a couple
155other i think miss donna you were mine doesn't really mine's kind of jumping around so i don't know if someone's got something that directly follows up which because peter's had his hand up so if you would like to follow up and i'll come back to me we've got other hands down here as well superior if you can jump in quick and then we'll come back down um by the way i just want to say i'm on the curriculum committee with karen hirsch the work that mark is doing is um is great it's great work the prior head had a philosophy an educational philosophy that in curriculum management if you go look this up by the way do a little wikipedia reading board members of what curriculum is and how it's structured there's also books in
156the library at havamir that can do that her philosophy was curriculum management should end at the lesson plan and the lesson plan should be all sorted out by individual teachers um that left the teacher in a situation where they had to develop their own resources but it also said got at the issue of why is every classroom doing something different so what mark is doing now i think is fantastic because it's going to get at what this board has long said i want consistency classroom to classroom that's good uh secondarily it's going to give teachers support instead of the teacher having spent all this extra time doing that so the work that mark is doing is great and i would encourage you guys to be as supportive as you can with the work that he's
157doing with the the coordinators um there are two things that if you haven't been around you wouldn't know um which i've raised this question the in the curriculum committee the other day um everybody's operating on the assumption which under our policy is required oh by the way that flows directly from state statute that these curriculums particularly lesson plan up were actually approved by the board i can tell you a lot of these were never approved by the board okay and that's a statutory obligation it's a policy obligation in our board that's part one so i would not be encouraging all of you to be in the safe harbor thinking this all got approved prior and i just because i'm new to the job uh i assume it was all approved and what i'm implementing is
158just what was there that's a bad assumption okay so somebody's gonna have to clean that up and the board will have to find a way to clean that up the second part is is that uh on all of you as board members under statute have a responsibility to approve textbooks and instructional materials okay just go look it up or go talk to the attorneys so on and so forth you're going to find out that that's what you have to do uh so mark is bringing forward a set of standardized instructional materials um you probably have two steps you got to do or yeah first step is you got to approve the curriculum if you so choose to do it which i'd encourage you just take it as it is because it's what's already out there
159and the second thing you need to do is you got to go through the step of improv approving the instructional materials um the other thing that you guys are not necessarily thinking about is um if you've been on the board for a while there was endless discussion about pilots okay there's a reason you have a pilot a pilot lets uh the superintendent and the uh administrators go out and try something out without full board approval so as mark just said he needs to test in the classroom what this developed actually works with the teachers on the ground and that's where if you authorize a pilot uh he can go do that and he doesn't have to keep coming back to the board for approvals before he puts it in front of a student and then
160everybody's cool in terms of all the compliance um issues that they have to deal with so um this is a great plan there's lots of ways the board could support this there's already policies in place that you can use and deploy to support this and make his work easy and make the work of the coordinators and all the teachers who are working really hard and the outside consultants you could just do it in a way that's really compliant and it's easy for you to do if you follow those things that are already in place in the board policies which are tied to state statutes and it keeps the board out of jail all right miss tony i just said mark i know this is like high school related but looking kind of through the schedule
161for the high school it felt a little mish-bosh like you know kind of it was hard to see how the sequencing was of math english social yeah all the different subject content areas at the high school i don't know if anyone could speak to how that schedule was created in terms of the plan at the high school the schedule was created based on the core courses that were offered by that the students needed for graduation first and then the courses in the content area that many students chose to take as their on what's the word called um that were not required but they had to have so many credits in an area like so many credits in history so many credits in english so many credits in wellness health and wellness so that's how that
162was designed so each content area focused first on their core courses for graduation and then they added the other courses that could be looked at as they move forward over the the curriculum map time thank you all right dr francis and we should move on so this is i think a little tricky because as is often the case i think with alp it's hard to know exactly where to place some of these things and this subject comes up both in this report and in the alp report but um i was first very excited as many have have spoken to in terms of our previous meeting where we were learning all about uh the lessons plans being created the uh forward-facing uh information the articulation i mean all of these things are really fantastic things that
163we've been asking for for a very long time so i'm very excited about all of that and pleased to see that sort of looking at the issue in terms of the advanced science pathways i'm a little confused in terms of what that means uh you know it sort of doesn't end up under the priority targets or the major focus and then when you look at this it looks like those science pathways for advanced have already been completed but then when you read about it sort of in the alp outline it sounds like it's sort of like the the advanced science has sort of all gotten mixed into the regular classroom and that these pathways are not really a full separate curriculum but more of sort of optional or additional work that's being done outside of
164that standard curriculum um and you know i was for full disclosure quite involved in uh in encouraging the board to vote and support and advance sixth grade science because we'd had you know the introduced in the elementary school and we'd had seventh and eighth grade advanced science despite the fact that many of us felt that the curriculum was certainly not up to par for those things we still felt like the gap in sixth grade was problematic so i think the first step was getting that created and the second step was was ongoing push from the board before i was on it and then once i was on it to try and get that curriculum up to snuff and it concerns me a bit having heard at the prior meeting that uh you know the high
165school standards for ngss were being used for this course but then to sort of get the impression that right now what's being done is really not a separate uh you know uh accelerated and enriched complete and identifiable curriculum for the middle school advanced science but really more something that's going with the these on on level uh curriculum with some additional work which i think is not at all what we expect of our out program for any of our programs and so i i'm concerned about trying to understand that because it looks like these pathways have been created and and the goal is for the next few years to implement them and i i'm not sure that's that's a curriculum that we would want all right with that i think we will move on i know
166they'll be future there was sort of a question all right are those are those really pathways or are those a full curriculum or what does that represent and has that been determined and are we implementing something and what is it that we're implementing we've had a lot of discussion about that so mark or tara i don't know if you want to take that but i think what we've discovered is what the board of education when you made that decision in 2014 um i think what the board of education thought we were doing because again this team's brand new so they're just asking questions and learning um is not what in fact was happening we have the same curriculum you would just dig deeper but when you ask what dig deeper means you don't get the
167level that you were looking for when you were talking about in 2014 and i think in the app report they'll probably address that a little bit tonight if you want to wait and move on and i don't know if that's correct tara or mark but that's correct we're going to go over it in detail in the alp report great thank you all right well we will we will move on then closer to the alp report and take on the achievement data report so dr carabillo mr damico i'm not sure which one of you is going to kick us off and it is nice to see you again i haven't left to i haven't left yet so tonight we're reporting on the achievements of greenwich public school students from the school year 2021 as you are
168all well aware we're currently in our third school year of the covid 19 pandemic and have had to pivot on an ongoing basis due to the many challenging and disruptive days weeks and months since march of 2020 in spite of all the challenges we have seen resilience in our students teachers and school community to make the best of our learning opportunities while we are pleased that our overall scores are somewhat similar to the level of performances in past years we have focused on the areas where performances have dropped and have identified strategies to mitigate acceleration of learning for our students our content specialist will be presenting the data from the state assessments and will share some of the strategies to enable students to accelerate their learning next slide please the state of connecticut state department
169of education of connecticut has now shared the data in three different categories correlating to the way students learned in 2021 fully or mostly in person learning where more than 75 of their days were in person second way hybrid learning where only 25 to 75 of the days were in person for students third fully or mostly remote where less than 25 of their days were in person you should note that students were able to take the assessments either in school or remotely regardless of whether they were attending school in person or not we are going to share with you all of the state data from the last five years although there were no scores for state assessments in 2019-20 with the exception of lost links but the state has emphasized that these scores should not be
170combined nor should we make direct comparisons across schools and districts next slide please everyone's initial thoughts are to compare data from past years but remember what we have been all through in the past 20 months and how this data is fundamentally different and now i present mr reed to you and may we have slide four good evening everybody um i'm mike reed i'm the math coordinator for the district k-8 and um thank you for having me board members and community and i'm about to share with you a few slides the subsequent math data will serve the purposes of showing you our sba scores over the last five sba assessments uh so next slide please so this slide illustrates uh overall sba math data by grade level and following cohorts of students while previously noted there
171is an expected dip in scores due to cova 19 related issues in general you can see we have positive trends in our sba performance prior to we believe that as we return to more normal teaching and learning conditions in conjunction with our new math program we will see a return to our upward trend in performance in grades three through five our students continue to perform well in the areas of operations and algebraic thinking and numbers and operations in base ten in grades six through eight our students continue to perform well in the areas of number systems and expressions and equations next slide please this slide illustrates the comparisons between our district title 1 and non-title 1 schools the disparity is clear but not unexpected i'd like you to understand the following first our title one
172schools had the highest percentage of students on remote both all year and day to day our numbers mirror the national data which evidences uh that the pandemic had a much larger impact on our needier populations our focus this past year was rightly placed on sel we de-emphasize standardized testing which is a deviation from our standard procedure and in general we were unable to make our usual strong connections with our kids due to masks lack of opportunities for extra help during lunch or before and after school loss of other after school activities and social activities such as intramurals and community gatherings and many of our kids learn and produce for their teachers not for the grades or their parents satisfaction so they lost this connection from my perspective if anything this is validation of our teachers
173historical work and how amazing it has been our kids need our teachers all the time fully vested in them next slide please as you can see in this graphic prior to our 20 uh 2021 scores our general trends were positive we know that being in front of a teacher in person has a dramatic positive effect on student performance our title one schools have been impacted the hardest by kovit has stated earlier with regard to teacher-student and teacher-teacher connections big ideas our new math program could not have come at a better time because through this program we will be focusing on strategies that have the highest impact on student achievement up to two years of learning for one year of input based on dr john hattie's meta-analysis most specifically what the program brings for us is
174teacher clarity so before starting a new topic we're making the learning target very clear and then students will have the opportunity to learn explore to connect their experiences back to the success criteria um classroom discussion which coveted really hit very hard which has almost um uh sorry greater than two years of impact for one year of of instruction and this is your students being encouraged to talk to each other and solidify their understandings and honing their abilities to reason and construct arguments so there's great benefit from that without going into further detail other um high impact strategies like direct instruction feedback and space practice are also embedded in this program so as stated earlier our title one schools were impacted most by kovit and as you can see the highlight in this data table is
175grade three and the improvement and the minimal loss in grade seven grades four five six and eight saw drops however we've identified these areas and are targeting operations and algebraic thinking and numbers and operations in base 10 which tend to be more of a struggle in our title 1 schools next slide please this graph illustrates performance of our non-title 1 schools as you can see the performance of these students dropped but not more than 10 in any grade we feel strongly that our alignment both horizontally and vertically with big ideas math will help to regain the performance loss due to covid our focus on mathematical vocabulary will support a better understanding of content as well as easier navigation for students when they have to answer questions on the sba big ideas also provides daily space
176practice which is embedded in the program you may remember known as spiral practice and that gives students the opportunity to practice things that they've learned prior next stacy will speak to our sba math and special education next slide thank you good evening so while in 2021 we did see a drop in the number of students who met or exceeded the standards as expressed earlier we do believe that covid impacted the students overall test scores it should be noted that granite special education students still continue to outperform within the state of connecticut and with students back in the classroom and receiving special education services we believe that we'll get the scores back up to the baseline in addition i just want to point out that our special education teachers have been participating in the big ideas
177math program training so that they can support our students in the classroom and really support the learning that's happening and i'll turn that back to mike reed next slide please so this is our ell sba math data and if you note here the total number of ell students are falling the el student population is declining as a result of the pandemic some things to note is routine visa services were suspended at the start of the pandemic and this curved international families from moving to the u.s in addition some families who have moved away from our school community have told us that they can work anywhere since work working remotely has become the new normal for many international and fortune 500 companies still other families return to their home countries to take care of aging and
178or sick relatives next slide now turn it over to dr marcus next slide please thank you mr reed my name is dr benjamin marcus i'm the interim coordinator of ela and social studies k-8 this slide illustrates overall sba ela data by grade level and following cohorts of students similar to the sba math results there is an expected dip in scores due to covet 19 related issues in general you can see we have positive trends in our sba performance prior to 2021 we believe that as we return to more normal teaching and learning conditions in conjunction with additional literacy supports we will see a return to our upper trended performance in general students across all grade bands tested by the sba show a need for teachers to focus on interpreting and reading for informational texts understanding
179this additional sports and strategies are being implemented to support students in this literacy area furthermore this area i'm sorry this year a number of our schools have received additional literacy staff members to support students and teacher growth additionally in later slides i will go into greater detail regarding the sba ela data for fifth and sixth grade next slide please this slide illustrates the comparisons between our district title 1 and non-title 1 schools like our sba math data while the disparity is clear it is not unexpected i want to revisit some of the sentiments that mr reed conveyed while discussing the sba math results given the challenges of teaching during the covet 19 pandemic our students and teachers have made incredible strides and have experienced many successes given the challenges of last year regardless of these
180challenges our title one school scores were on an upward trajectory prior to the pandemic considering the major impact that covet 19 has had on our community this is a major testament to the hard work and dedication of our teachers next slide please in describing this upward trend let's look at the cohort data by here overall the trend in sba ela scores is positive it is safe to say that given historical trends that without the covet 19 pandemic our title one cohort sba ela scores would have continued to increase thereby decreasing the achievement gap the fifth and sixth grade experienced more coveted quarantines and remote instruction than other grades which had a direct impact on face-to-face instruction as we know face-to-face instruction is most impactful on moving student learning outcomes moving forward buildings are working with
181their staff to support student outcomes where possible the district is investigating augmenting augmenting schools with additional supports to increase literacy interventions also building data teams are assisting to identify individual student challenges and the appropriate interventions instructionally there is currently a greater emphasis on the direct alignment of lesson objectives to standards and assessments thereby ensuring that instructional practices are fully aligned to state standards next slide please this graph illustrates performance of our non-title one schools as we can see the performance of these schools students dropped but not more than 10 percent considering the major impact that covet 19 has had on our community this is again a major testament to the hard work and dedication of our teachers i will now turn it back over to dr stacey highland taller for discussion of our sba ela
182data as it relates to special education next slide please so ela continues to be a strength for our students in special education as compared to our math testing data and we continue to signif significantly outperform the connecticut scores for students with disabilities while there is a drop it's very similar um that the percentage is similar to years 2016 17 and 18. reading skills continued to be an area of focus within the district and within the special education department um we've been working in conjunction with dr marcus in the literacy as well as additional training for our staff in providing high quality literacy instruction to our students with disabilities i'd like to turn it to adrian hirschklein who will report on the sba ela data as it relates to the english language learner population next slide
183good evening everyone our percentage of english learners in grades three through eight who never exceeded the achievement standard on the sba ela grew or remained steady for the last few years but then as you see decreased by a small number of percentage points um in uh quite possibly as a result of the pandemic with that in mind though we continue to outperform the uh the state percentages in this area nearly a quarter of our elementary l's and half of our middle school l's were remote last year which may have contributed to this drop in terms of where our program is doing well even despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic esau specialists worked hard to build relationships with our students so that they can acclimate to their new school environments help them readjust to
184a new school year this year and personalize the learning for them using the strategies and supports that we know as an esol program work to help students acquire english as well as access and understand new content in terms of next steps our next steps would are to collaborate with our general education ela colleagues to develop an updated set of reading units that are aligned to the common core and kelp standards which include reading writing listening and speaking objectives that are targeted to our students english language proficiency levels we did begin this work this past summer at the elementary level by examining which common core and kelp standards are being addressed and which need to be reinforced i will now turn it back to mr d'amico to discuss next steps next slide so who doesn't like
185a good slide with an rco phishing correlation given the results that have been shared thus far tonight we know that there are specific pockets of students who we need to support and skills they need to recover it's essential we know these pockets of students through extensive analysis at the school and district levels we found that the lincoln gps benchmark gives us significant diagnostic information as you know we have transitioned towards that and away from star that said we wanted to assure you that we are not losing any information in the transition from star to link it because the correlations for linkit are very similar to star and in some cases higher next slide alrighty and i'll take it from here as you know i'm tara fogle the k-8 science coordinator tonight i wanted to start
186with a quick review of the ngss test itself since it's so new to our district only having performed twice thus far the test assesses students ability to reason with natural phenomena through the lens of a science and engineering practices these tests are given to students in grades 5 8 and 11. the tests span across all disciplines of science including earth and space life and physical as well as touching upon the engineering and design process while we never know the exact content that will be assessed on these tests we do understand the platform and the student skills that are required to meet success next slide please you'll notice here that there has been a limited impact in 2021 we are incredibly fortunate that my predecessor as a coordinator of science was early to bring ngss practices
187and instructional best strategies to the gps teachers well before the ngss test was first given in 2019 we're proud of the strong outcomes that our students have been able to maintain in science despite some more gaps in ela and math i attribute this to one unexpected positive outcome of covid while we did have less time for hands-on collaboration in the classroom in one way this turned into more time for other skills specifically increased time teachers had to spend on our digital tools the ngss test is heavily focused on the use of graphs tables and and variables to study novel phenomena students historically struggle with this the stem coordinator of last year secured student licenses for explore learning which is an online platform called gizmos it pushed for continued use of tuva labs which focuses on
188data literacy we believe that these tools help students to practice test-like experiences and can attribute to some levels of our success here as we look at the information gathered from our platforms we can see that our overall drops in performance are incredibly small seven percent in grade five five percent in grade eight and we stayed the same in grade 11. these are our students who have experienced mgss instructions the longest we do see that some of our title one elementary schools are underperforming and we know that there is a stronger correlation between reading performance and science specifically on the grade 5 and gss assessment in fact in initial data analysis we see a stronger correlation between sba reading scores and ngs than we do sba math scores in ngs this is congruent for both five
189and eighth fifth and eighth grade title one school performance on the ngss is similar to some of the underperformances notice noted in reading at grade level 5 to which my college colleagues spoke earlier in addition to their points about student success and teachers working with them in person in classrooms and how critical that is there are a few additional considerations to be made in science critical skills in the use of non-fiction text and exposure opportunities in reading for information occurs largely in grades four and five our current grade six or here the tested fifth graders have had largest large disturbances to their learning environment during their fourth and fifth grade school years my professional learning for the three five teachers this year will be to focus on strategies to increase students with their ability to
190read for information and grapple with more complex non-fiction texts next slide when we look at the ngss in our special education and english language learner population we have some strong success here as well the supports for spanish speakers and special education students that are embedded into our primary resource materials and science allow teachers to provide access and aid to both of these populations my predecessor was an incredibly strong advocate for special education and esol representation in curriculum creation and adaptation meetings during during prior summer curriculum institutes we're excited to say that in our middle level curriculum every single unit of instruction has embedded assessments and learning activities with supports for both of these populations and next i'm going to turn it over to ms adrian hirschklein who will speak more about that population of students
191hi everyone again so gps celebrates a history of significantly outperforming the state of connecticut on the state mandated lost links assessment which is given to our k-12 english learners each winter this slide shows the percentage of students scoring proficient or above proficient overall since 2017 which does account for proficiency or above across a combination of performance on four subtests which are listening speaking reading and writing uh the test consists of those four sections the second part of this slide shows the percentage of students meeting a mastery standard to exit our program to achieve this standard on the lost links a student must score proficiency or above on three measures the reading subtests the writing subtest and overall in a typical pre-covered year we historically exit approximately a quarter of our students annually next slide please
192in addition to the percentage percentage of students who achieve proficient um and mastery standard on the loss links this assessment also looks at the growth rate or did students meet their individual growth target which was based on the prior year's proficiency level the growth rate is the percentage of students with a score last year and this year who met their individual targets in both literacy and the oral subtests so if for example 20 out of 40 students met their growth targets that means there's a 50 growth rate the literacy score is an average of a student's reading and writing scores and the oral score is an average of a student's listening and speaking scores so this data shows that growth stayed level in both the oral and literacy subtests over the last few years the
193other thing important to mention on this slide the acronym you'll see an acronym apta which stands for average percentage of target achieved and that speaks to the growth targets that our students strive to meet according to their english language proficiency level so for all l students with a lost link score last year and this year so we're talking about students who continue in our program apta refers to the average percentage of the growth target achieved by them the average percentages of the growth targets achieved in the oral and literacy subtests didn't experience wide fluctuations from one year to the next i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to miss bridget barry who will begin speaking and addressing uh high school standardized test data good evening bridget berry here with a few words on
194the s.a.t evidence-based reading and writing that's the connecticut school day s-a-t as with some of the other scores last year our sat scores were down a bit and the evidence-based reading and writing and here's our plan now that we're back to a near-normal schedule this year ninth and tenth graders recently took a school-wide psat which we will analyze and target those needing additional support that support will come through classes and through programs such as the sat academy which will be additional after school instruction for identified students 9th and 10th grade english and social studies students also recently took sections of a release psat as benchmarks which teachers will analyze and follow up in their plc's as part of that follow up teachers will use sad comparable stems and practice questions and continue naturally with close
195reading work with passages also in english classes students do individualized khan academy work grammar that's as tested on the sat writing skills just want to note as kwame mentioned earlier students did not have midterms or finals for the last year and a half and were not in regular practice with stamina demanding tests such as the sat up next to talk about the sat math is mr berman good evening my name is andrew byrne the greenwich high school mathematics department continues to closely monitor student performance on both the grade 11 sat day and the final graduating class averages in addition to ensuring that all classes are aligned to sat content and skills the department has adopted benchmark and monitoring practices in each class to work with individual students to increase their performance teachers are also working
196collaboratively in professional learning communities to identify resources and tools to help students achieve on this assessment greenwich high school will be identifying students based on psat performance to participate in an sat academy here students will have will be given additional instructional time after school in core sat concepts by a skilled and certified teacher it's now my pleasure to introduce mr ralph mayo who will talk about graduation rates all right ralph i think you're on uh yes peter but i can you can't see me i don't know oh wait a minute here we go i got it okay good evening everyone um chairperson bernstein dr jones members of the board of education i really do realize that uh this meeting is uh going to go very long tonight but before it ends i wanted to say
197one thing to the members of the board of education thank you thank you for your service thank you for all the hard work and thank you for caring so much about the students that attend the grange public schools and you can tell you care by the the questions that you ask and the way you push us to get better so again i know some of you won't be here for the next meeting so thank you for your service and for the others that will remain thank you for continuing this continued service it's been a pleasure uh tonight i'm going to talk about um our graduation rates at grants high school i have with me uh junior adele our director of counseling and mr entalata our vice principal as you can see uh from the chart
198our graduation rates have been fairly flat over the last four to five years this is not acceptable to us we are not in alignment with the district we compare ourselves to and this is something that uh we are going to work on this year and uh next year to improve these uh rates uh to so that we can uh be proud of that like we are proud of every other thing we do at uh grants high school so um our school improvement plan is focused on making uh these gains for uh all students so um i'm gonna i think next slide go on to um our ap uh participation our ap our participation continues to grow uh we're extremely uh excited about that uh we'd love to have uh more students enrolled in uh ap
199classes and at the end taking those tests and getting uh threes and above so i think uh this is a bright spot and our report for tonight is that our petition uh our participation rate continues to be at uh all-time highs uh next slide and then uh you can see the uh ap scores uh three four and fives by department here in art music english math science social studies and world language and each department chair will be talking about their scores as we move on in the presentation next slide please okay it's my pleasure to introduce mrs julie nixon and mr patrick taylor who will begin the discussion about our scores in both art and in music julie hi good evening everyone can you all hear me yes good okay so um i'm not going
200to take up a lot of your time but the art department offers five different ap classes um we have seven teachers four of us teach ap so we have a very big program for our department we started to offer ap classes to give our students the opportunity for rigor and to go more in depth in their art and the scores and submitting their portfolios we encourage and we support but i'm going to say to you what we say to our students which is a test score cannot define their creative level or their thought processes or their ideas so my ap teachers wanted me to explain that a little bit because art is a very subjective subject and it it sometimes happens that we'll have a student that gets a lower low score like a three
201on an ap portfolio and will win a gold at scholastic so it's that kind of a subject you know so we're very careful about the scores and how we talk about the scores with our students i can go into depth if you want for our 2d art and design ap computer art and ap drawing in the year 20 2021 we had 12 students submitting ap portfolios all 12 scored 3 or higher eight scored three two scored four and two scored five in 2019 2020 14 students submitted ap portfolios 13 scored 3 or higher in in ap photography 20 20 21 we had eight students submitting portfolios three scored four three of the portfolios scored four four scored three and one scored two um in ap 3d we have ap ceramics and sculpture as well we
202didn't have as many students submit in 2020 one it it's very difficult to do ceramics during covid because the clay dries out and we we weren't able to fire in time so that particular program got hit hard by covid but in 2019 2020 we still had five submitting portfolios they all received threes and fours we also have an ap art history course which um our ap art history teacher wanted me to explain that she stresses to students that scores do not define them and it is more important to her that they leave with an open mind and respect across cultures they uh in 2020 2021 13 students took the exam seven students scored three or higher four scored two two scored three one scored four four scored five uh in 2019 2020 11 students took
203the exam eight students scored three or higher three scored two four students scored three one scored four and three scored five so in ap art history they study 250 artworks for a three hour exam and in the studio classes it's more of an investigation of a particular concept so the kids are really able to go into depth and have their own idea that they explore um throughout the year so does anyone have any questions about ap art questions until the end thank you julie okay so i should stay on okay mr taylor good evening everyone uh in music we just have one ap course it's in music theory and for those unfamiliar with the term music theory refers to the study of music um other than performance or music history so it's essentially the nuts
204and bolts of how music is composed and how it's analyzed and so students it actually starts from scratch but goes quite quickly into basic composition and and then the ap test the students are expected obviously to do a bunch of multiple choice type questions on on general knowledge in the subject but also to do an oral aural section um in which they're they're listening to melodies played and writing them down and perhaps in the scariest part of the exam all the students are expected to see a melody printed in music notation and then sing it after having only been given the starting note so it's a it's a rigorous course it actually combines two courses that you'd see in college both music theory and what's called ear training and so it's a constant tug of
205war uh to allocate time to make sure they're they're feeling good about their skills in both those areas um looking at the scores for the last five years they've been they were consistent up till the the pandemic we definitely took a hit prior to the pandemic we um we enjoyed uh scores average scores well above the state average and far above the global average um but we've regressed a bit to the state average basically almost on the button for the last couple of years through the pandemic but that was you know we had student very difficult to um especially the piece the oral piece to be fully remote as some students were um and and and to be able to um you know have the daily exercises that we do in the classroom um singing
206for example i couldn't hear them sing in real time and etc so um i don't have any doubt that we'll spring back um but uh in the short term uh it was it was a little bit rough though we've always had students excel every every year they're students with fives but uh average score of three for this past year is not indicative of what normally happens so so hopefully that's a little bit of information for you and let me know if you have any questions thank you next mr um um all right i just forgot your name andrew byrne mr burn i'm sorry that's okay um my name's andrew burns i'm here to report out on the advanced placement math scores uh the math and computer science department's results continued to be solid there were
207a total of 259 exams given in our department last year we had a total of 151 students sit for the calculus av and bc exams with all but 23 earning a 3 or higher and in addition we had a total of 55 students up from 44 last the previous year and 27 the year before except for one of the two computer science exams with all but one earning at 3 or higher moving forward our teachers will continue to collaborate innovate and explore opportunities to provide our students with the best preparation for the advanced placement exams we have returned to pre-pandemic teaching and assessment practices and we will no longer allow students full access to their calculators and a note sheet during exams we will continue to explore the use of ap classroom as a necessary
208tool and resource for both teachers and students in addition the department is quite proud of the growing interest in the computer science department and is hoping that this will be a trend for all our courses in the future it's now my pleasure to introduce mr john deluca who will talk about science good evening everyone um so again my name is john deluca i'll be reporting out on ap science uh we have five different ap science uh tests uh that we take and courses that our students take biology chemistry environmental science physics with calculus and algebraic physics as well so our all of our ap courses were on a positive trajectory uh prior to uh 2020 the the pandemic in fact um all but one had achieved five year highs in that one was ap physics
209um the algebraic ap physics which had achieved five year high the year before so the onset of the pandemic certainly impacted um uh our performance there um we we really think uh the lack of uh hands-on activities uh labs really compromised uh the delivery of of some of the material and while uh we were able to find some excellent online resources it just certainly didn't wasn't able to replicate what we do in the classroom um the testing practices changed as well those were kind of a moving target for us now that we have pretty much returned to pre-pandemic instructional practices the teachers are really thrilled to have the students back reestablishing our labs our activities the classroom instruction as it had been in the past they're looking forward to continuing to use the revamped ap
210classroom that's available to them as well and we're hopeful that our scores will begin to look again like they did pre-pandemic uh it's now my pleasure to introduce my colleague lucy orrecco hmm hello can you hear me yes we can great good evening i'm lucia recco i'm the program administrator for social studies and i'm going to tell you about our ap scores this year ap participation participation in social studies remained high in 2021. uh we continue to have the highest number of ap exams taken of all the programs last year we had 878 exams uh which were taken um you you can see i believe we've been provided the the mean scores for all the subjects so our various um ap ap subjects include apus history ap psychology ap european history ap micro and macro
211economics apus government and politics and ap comparative government and politics all of our mean scores did take a slight dip from the year before except for ap comparative politics which was at a four-year high um all means however were significantly higher than the connecticut mean for the subject as well as the uh global mean um there i'm going to echo some challenges in preparing students for the for the ap exams um for instance it was difficult to replicate the assessments in the hybrid model uh with what they would experience on the real ap exam um in order to make the ap or rather make the assessment experiences equitable teachers allowed for open note exams online which made it you know tough to assess um a student's true knowledge of the content um and an open
212note exam didn't necessarily require the same depth of understanding as an exam where you can't use any memory aids also teachers reported that there was a lower student engagement in the digital format and difficult to build rapport with students um that were fully remote um and some teachers noted that the the students who were fully remote um had lower scores um also uh which was unique on the ap exams uh in 2021 um was that the students couldn't go back to previous questions which is contrary to what we tell students to do as well go back and check your work or skip a question and come back to if you're having trouble with it also teachers um you know tried to adjust to a different ap exam format from the past uh for instance the
213aps test did not have a long essay question which our students usually excel on it only had a dbq question moving forward um we're happy to report that we've returned to instructional strategies and assessments that were used in 2019 and 20 the ap test in 2022 will be in the previous format and paper and pencil um so teachers are giving frequent formative assessments without notes without memory aids so they can give the students feedback there's definitely a greater emphasis on writing skills for those short answer and essay portions and a regular use of practice questions and model essays so students can see how the scoring is is done i'm now going to introduce miss bridgette berry who's going to talk about uh english now next is christina shaw to talk about world languages i thought
214i think we skipped brigid oh okay thank you i won't take it personally for the ap english lit and comp and the language and composition tests we are proud that the number of students taking the two english ap courses continues to grow as ralph indicated even though last year's scores were a bit lower than in past years we still had 50 percent of our students score four or five on the most challenging ap lit and comp exam and our langan comp score is up from 3.49 to 371 with more students taking the test that's from the last real test in 2019 and i'll explain that a little bit of context on last year's test you've heard parts of this from the others but and you don't know these unless you're close to the tests in
215response to the pandemic the 2020 tests were digital and comprised of one essay and no multiple choice the typical test is three essays timed essays and 55 multiple choice so it was a real humdinger the 2021 just last year they were full tests but they were digital and taken at home with that test when students were consulted about it afterwards they mentioned frustration as has been mentioned with not being able to annotate and not be able to go back to previous questions many said they realize an answer to a previous question and answering a later question but they couldn't go back in addition some students struggled with the timed writing as they hadn't been given as much timed writing practice in the remote hybrid learning going forward the 2022 test will not be digital if
216and we can imagine that college board runs digital exams in the future they have promised corrections such as letting students return to a previous question within a section which would make a difference and now that we're back on a more normal schedule teachers will give students more practice with timed and sample tests also again midterms and finals this year will give students practice with the stamina demanding tests i'm going to introduce now miss christina shaw for world languages good evening everyone i will be outlining for the community our world language ap scores and talk about next steps for our students and our teachers during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 our ap scores in chinese actually went up in both the number of students taking the exam and the mean score so we were
217very pleased with that for french our highest mean in the last five years uh was actually in the year 2017. the numbers increased in 2019 and 2020 and uh we had a mean score of four but in 2021 we did see a dip in both scores and in the students enrolled still i would like to point out that the score in french the mean score was higher than the national mean score german scores were the highest in 2020 in the last five years in both numbers of students taking the exam and the mean score at an incredible 4.5 in 2021 we did have a dip in the amount of students taking it and also had a dip in the mean score but this mean score was actually higher than in the previous years of 2017
218through 2019. in ap italian the number of students taking the test did drop in the years 2020 and after peaking in 2018 however our mean score was uh the highest that it had been in the past four years at 4.6 now our ap spanish program is our largest offering two different types of ap courses ap lang and also ap spanish literature in ap spanish language our numbers have been exceptional uh peaking in 2019 with 143 students taking the exam um in the last five years we've never had a mean lower than four our mean state study uh for 2020 and 2021 despite the pandemic challenges uh reaching a mean of 4.15 and um over 130 students taking the exam in and 111 students taking the exam in 2021 for ap literature which is a quite
219a difficult course 2020 did see the lowest amount of students taking the test and a drop in the mean score but in 2021 because uh by the end of the year we did have the students in person the number of students taking the exam jumped back to its usual numbers and our mean also was at its usual rate of about four overall in the world language department we are thrilled with the consistency of our world language ap scores over the last five years they of course have been the expected dips in the last two years to keep our scores moving in the right direction we have recently purchased and trained our staff in the use of a virtual language lab as i mentioned at my last presentation to the board this technology will begin preparing
220our students earlier in their world language um career at our high school for the tasks that they are expected to take during the ap exam in speaking teachers will also be engaged this year in professional development with actful which is the american council on the teaching of foreign languages in the creation and use of benchmarks and rubrics so thank you so much for your time i believe that dr carabillo has a few words that she would like to say so i get to end our achievement report on a very high note which i believe is very high and this is our community results from our survey back in the spring of 2021. for our gps staff we had 729 people respond and over half of them 56 of them have positive perceptions of our social
221and learning climate in their schools and that's in spite of covet 19 so i'm extremely happy to hear that next slide please for our students valuing school at the elementary level we had 1490 students uh i'm sorry i forgot to say next slide thank you we had 1490 students participate in grades three through five and two thousand three hundred and forty-two students respond in grade six through twelve and this is for the percentage of students who feel that school is interesting and important and 55 of our students feel that way that's pretty exciting to think that that was during our covid yet they were in school they felt as though it was positive and they felt as though they were valued next slide please students belonging again it's pretty stable uh we're almost where our
222uh [Music] where our target was of 62 percent we were at 59 of the students said that they definitely feel valued members of their community now as expected our elementary school students have more positive responses than our secondary students but we have seen that over the years that we have been doing this survey and then the last slide which for me really states and shows that the board and dr jones and the administrators and the teachers have really worked hard at communicating with our parents and developing that home to school connection we had over 2643 families respond to this survey so in uh last year in 2021 89 welcomed parents and children's learning they thought that we were the partners we were welcoming welcoming the parents as partners 84 of parents said that they had
223many opportunities to express their concerns and opinions about their important issues concerning their child and the one area that wasn't as high as i had hoped it to be was the area of how confident are you in your ability to support your child's learning at home well i think we've put a lot of things in place this year with our forward-facing curriculum that we have for parents with the information that we have given you at the first board meeting and at this point meeting so we are very happy but we are still going to continue to work to make sure that parents really feel that they're connected with their teachers and with the school and our partners in learning that's it for our report and next up is questions all right questions from the board
224his first uh thank you to all of the presenters a lot of people who have stayed up late to be with us so we appreciate that all right miss hirsch i was gonna say i know that uh many of us are gonna look at the report and sort of focus on the learning loss that may have occurred during covid and i know that's important but i'm looking back slightly further i know that there's we all know that we have an achievement gap and it's not just here it's nationally and if there was a perfect solution for how to fix it we would have already done so but we have an incredible opportunity to address this issue in conjunction with combating learning loss that we've experienced by using some of the s or funds and i'm
225hoping that soon we're going to get a plan on on how that how that's going to be those funds are going to be used to support learning loss and the achievement gap but looking at slide four i thought it was important to note that i know we don't have data for 2020 as students weren't tested that year and in 21 they had to focus on what was missed during the second half of the second semester uh from the year prior plus learn all of the nude gray level material i kind of assumed that the test didn't take into account that students had likely most likely not gotten through the same lessons uh as in the year prior before taking the test that would be something i would have to check on karen i'm not sure
226i'll have to check with ajit at the state and i will find that answer out for you thank you because i'd assume if if it was testing on things that the kids hadn't gotten to because they were still trying to make up for stuff from the year before that could also account for some of the dip in the scores um so i was just going to say i mean overall the reports showing us trends and test scores comparing scores per grade year to year and however in the past i think we've also looked at the growth and learning rates following a grade level score from year to year to see how that grades test scores improved over time and you can sort of extrapolate that information when looking at the bar graphs but i was
227wondering why that information was not necessarily included in this report because i think that would be as equally equally as important seeing where you know the second graders are as they move forward to the next year uh you know they all have different needs in each grade so the grade to grade doesn't always uh give us the information that we need and i know growth is kind of a big topic so are we going to be able to get some of that data if i might just jump in we don't have the same level of data that we would normally have from the state and as a reminder go back to that very beginning of the slide where they say we're not even really supposed to be comparing and that's there are lots of reasons
228why we're trying to still look at it but what i would say is we're going student by student and looking at every individual student's growth and where they are and that goes back to what they were talking about earlier tonight with linkit well i was going to say we don't have the state testing data but we do have link it i know it was new last year but mark i think was saying it was comparative to where star testing was i mean i would just love to be able to see that because i think that's not from 2020 well i mean for some of it yeah but that's what i'm saying i'd like to see the growth no i'm talking about something else and then i guess the last question i had i had sent
229this previously but i was just curious because on page 13 this in school sat it was noted that cobin negatively impacted the class of 2022 uh their sat scores but i wasn't sure if that included the data for the class of that the graduating class last year took the in school of school day sat in september of 2020 while the class of 2022 took it uh in the in march i believe so was that data included or was it just for a class of 22. and i did get the answer did you want to answer that or i'll let you answer it yeah i did reach out when i saw your question today and it is just a class of 22. okay well then i'd like to see the data also for 21 just out
230of curiosity i think that's kind of important for us to be able to see i know they weren't told that they were going to be taking the in-school sat or the school day sat and only had about a week or so preparation but i think that would be just sort of an interesting uh data point for us as well uh so i would also like to um just emphasize i think the growth date is important and and while it may not be perfect to try and find ways to look at that because i do think that's a piece we've been talking about for years now and while we've sort of switched from one system to another and i can't remember peter sure the the one we had before but then we had said well we
231could do the state system instead but i think no i know that's gone but i'm just saying we had talked about we had talked about wanting to continue to look at growth the other thing the other thing um that we used to see uh i'm starting to sound like you back in the back in the old days we used to see was um the the comparison to similar districts um you know not not just the state because i do feel like we are a well-funded district um and while we have diversity i think it would be useful to look at those numbers as well we did have a lot of conversation about including that this year and again we worked with the state trying to figure out but because our data is also different and
232in one prime example we were one of the school districts that was face to face from the beginning so our district was actually the dis one of the districts that was working with the state on how we were going to account for attendance for kids who were full remote and kids who were in person and then the kids that would jump back and forth and so the way we were calculating early on we already had our system set before the state ad actually put it out so if you're comparing to other districts it depends which category they're in and how they were counted and in the end it it was too confusing and we were advised not to use it but i agree going forward it's a great you know that's a great thing for
233us to do all right anything else astounding um i just want to come back to like the achievement gap issue and talking a little bit about our funds um since we have the american rescue plan funds i'd love you know it's it's early in the school year um and because we talked about percentage of it has to be used for learning loss and i know there are some targeted things you've already put in place but i'd love to hear not necessarily now or come in at the next meeting what you think we could use some of those funds for to help really target those students immediately you know so hang on one second did you want to spend time yeah i actually can i mean if we had our three title one principles actually here
234i think they would be able to tell you because they're already doing that work and they are very committed to it and when you talk about you know accelerating their learning they had all really i think it was in the middle of covert or pre-cove had gone to a whole workshop on accelerating learning all of our elementary team did um but they are very much i know exactly what they're doing their teams are in place it also goes along with the work we're doing with our special education and pcg where with mtss and they're making their leaps and bounds ahead on that as well but just to follow up if you do think i mean because we have i know we put in our application for arp funding there's a lot of money left so
235if there you know again there's ideas and if ideas cost money we do have this pot of money so i i don't think you should be shy about it for this particular purpose this is what it's designed for absolutely and i think as we're building the budget right now you'll be able to see some of that as well because you know some of the items that we have funded and i'll give an example is a math interventionist out of arp our elementaries have said they've needed those for years last year we funded the first task by shifting positions out of habemeyer back out to the buildings this year with arp we were able to put the other half in our principals are going to overwhelmingly want those to stay so we're going to have to
236look at what are some of the things that will be in our arp that should be long term for us as part of our budget process so i think you'll hear more and we'll talk a lot about that in november okay miss kowalski sure thanks um so one comment and then i i think a couple of questions so my first comment is i realized there is in looking at all of these graphs you see significant slippage over the last year and sure one could argue it's attributable to covid but what i'd also like to point out is that in some of these graphs and certainly not all we were not on an upword we were not on an upward trajectory with respect to how our achievement was progressing we were flat and we were even
237declining already in several of these grades and i think that that needs to be said that hasn't been said tonight that is obvious from these charts and i think we need to take stock in the fact that this is not just covet related we were slipping in various categories across grades that's comment one the second thing that i'd like to point out tonight is while we've heard all of these things with respect to where testing is and how many kids have tested where what i haven't heard is a plan what is the plan what is the plan to one address the achievement gap that's happening on the western side of our town and how we plan to make up the gap that we're now experiencing so that we can get up back up to the
238levels that we're at and exceed those because we were on a flat or downward trajectory and i'd like to know what we're going to do because i don't i haven't heard a plan on how we're going to attack it that's what i'd like to know what it is yeah i mean i think that's that is another presentation that was not the intent of tonight to bring you what we're doing i think that's what christina was just asking but i will say you know you need to go back and really look um at 2019 and look look at what western had done they had closed the gap and that is our middle school and that's a reflection also what we were doing in elementary because you don't take a child who moves in in second grade
239that does not speak english and have them on grade level in two years or three years it takes a couple of years and it takes all of these individuals that you heard talking tonight about the different content areas um they have closed the gap if we look then and i encourage you to go back and look at that and i think that's probably one reason mr weinstein was a principal of the year because the work they're doing in that building is phenomenal and i think we're doing it at all of our buildings um certainly and i think it goes back to what christina was just asking maybe having a presentation on our title one and how we're approaching title one how they use the data and what we're actually doing would be a great discussion
240i i think it's absolutely critical i think that we need to figure out how we're going to get these kids back to the levels that they need to be and that's important because it's already the end of october and then you go into november december and january and now we're already thinking that it's it's may and i don't think that we can have another year where we're