April 12, 2021 - D65 Policy Committee/ Working Board of Education Meeting

001[Music] okay we're ready rebecca okay so uh the time is 603 and we would like to call this policy committee meeting to order due to the governor's executive order suspending certain open meeting act requirements in order to comply with the state of emergency the district 6 of education will be conducting tonight's policy committee virtually you could do the wrong deal okay uh it's april 12 2021 roll call hernandez here lindsay ryan here mendoza here [Music] okay so the um the first item on our agenda today is the press plus policy review issue 106 which is a five-year review um the items are listed on our agenda these are all standard recommendations that are made to us by aisb and we are accepting those recommendations if there are no questions regarding the press plus five-year policy

002reviews um i recommend that these policies be presented to the full board for approval i did have a quick question i i know there was a hole on the uh there was a policy around equity and um i know it was being held for further uh exploration just wanted to get a little bit more um i mean the the current language or the proposed language really looks at um making sure that we we're inclusive of all folks regardless of gender uh gender identity um but again it's being for further exploration just wanted to get a little bit more context on that you can speak to that go ahead let me go yes okay so i actually had mentioned because the week we were reviewing the policy we got um the feedback from chicago therapy collective

003that we're working with around our lgbtq plus policies and procedures and we literally just got the feedback so wanted to make sure that we had some time to thoroughly review and vet it before we made any changes so i asked a deal if she could we could put a hold on that for now um so we'll be able to share it with our committee um next week great thank you for sharing this any other questions okay so um do we have to have a second for that motion adila no i can go ahead and just do roll call um yes okay lindsay ryan yes mendoza yes okay so this motion passes 3-0 okay next we have a couple discussion items um the first one is policy for um four five five the use of the

004credit card and procurement cards and um i think we have this included in our packet in an effort to help mitigate our spending and to have better oversight over our financials this is something that we are going to review i think rafael you have um some information for us on this yeah if uh the board remember back uh i believe in february we had uh uh an audit from common dual review of our p-card uh process and uh based on the review there was something that was recommended that they were it will be helpful to our field p cards and to make sure that the procurement process is followed and provides a better process for internal control of buying that way the approval is granted in the front at the front of the buying process

005instead of after the the purchase has been made and we're just looking to pay credit cards now once the purchase has been made we have an obligation to pay the uh the vendor but by limiting the number of credit card we can do the due diligence on the front end instead of waiting until the purchase is paid so we took the recommendation and uh now instead of having about 70 cards floating out there there will only be five p-cards that will be issued by the district and the individuals who have those p-cards are the superintendent of course they purchase an agent because uh that person is responsible for making emergency purchase on behalf of the district if that uh if that becomes necessary the director of uh technology because of the same reason there are

006times when technological equipment has to be purchased without uh having the time to be able to go through the regular procurement process and then the director of building and grounds for obvious reasons things in buildings break down and when they tend to break down they tend to break down quickly and we need to get them fixed without having to go through the uh the regular procurement process and then the last person will be the uh director of nutritional services and in that particular case we have some of our some of our children who have allergies sometimes and we need to be able to buy food for them uh very quickly uh if they have allergy that they need to to eat and we can either run to the store and buy something and use the

007peacock for that so instead of 70 we're coming down to five and i think that would be very very helpful in protecting the financial interest of the district and creates a solid internal control process for us rafael can you also please share um i know most of our staff have been trained to use the system but can you just go over your timeline and what it looks like not assuming assuming that people don't know right so what we've also done is part of the process is to create a training system for everyone who needs training there will be training that is scheduled for may 14 whereby folks who need uh procurement refresher training will be provided that and that training will be led by the purchasing agent with support from the accounts payable folks or

008the people who actually pay bills and it will also be uh we also have the business manager there telling folks about what uh budget classification to use the right one to use and how to select the right one and we feel that this will provide folks refreshers who are used to using pcard instead of using the regular upper cabinet and i think they we have an outline that lays out what the training will consist of and then depending on the outcome of that training and the feedback that we get from the survey we may schedule additional training in the future to provide additional support down the road okay one one of the reasons that we had um have brought this is just for the for the larger purchases we know that in terms of efficiencies

009um you know it could be time consuming and slowing down the process and that's not um that's not our intention i think more more so towards the the larger purchases for there to be some more um thought put into um as well as time and um you know we've had we've had some conversations and uh one of the things that um i wanted you to talk about dr horton is being able to do this with while maintaining efficiency through the um through the proposal of a committee system and i'm hoping that you could talk a little bit about that absolutely thanks rebecca so when i came on board i know one of the top priorities for the board has been to uh be sure that we are very transparent uh in our decision-making process and

010we also wanted to be sure that we give the board uh opportunities and apple opportunities to have discussions publicly about spending and decisions that we're making within the district so something that i would like to uh i've spoken with um you know with with anya about this president uh anya and what we wanted to do was to look at creating what we call these committees of a whole other districts have these and these committees of a whole what this entails it takes uh week there's a couple of ways to do this i'm going to give you an example um what we can do we can take we can have a curriculum committee slash policy committee that will meet once a month it will take three board members that will be members of there will be

011a member of that committee and then on that committee you would have um i would as along with myself and we would have key members cabinet members and the direct reports that will come to a meeting once a month the time in a day will be selected by the board uh when we when we will do that when we will do this and it'll be it'll be an open meeting it'll be recorded uh and and uh so that people can look at it who can attend and we will discuss all the decisions there's a document that we will create it's called a curriculum report and it would have a report from every member on cabinet all of their direct reports you'll have any any funding that we're looking to spend uh and it'll be laid

012out with the funding source what the money's for uh all of those all of the details and along with that it would also have in this uh rebecca a copy of any professional development it's gonna happen within the district or out of the district that require travel and all of the details of that of those particular pds would be laid out into in this report and so we would have this meeting and the the the committee members will have an opportunity to engage in conversations um and and to be honest while i know a lot that's happening in the district it's also a lot of huge benefit to be able to talk to the the actual individuals in the departments that are uh pushing out the work just to ask questions uh to talk about

013you know even uh even recognizing some of the work that they do i think uh we struggle as a district with sharing with the community all of the work that our administrative staff does it's a lot and this is an opportunity to do that and also being very transparent with the work and where we're trying to spend and then we would then go into a policy meeting like like this is now committee meeting and we'll discuss policy so that same three will be over curriculum and policy the next week we will then have what we call the buildings and grounds and the personnel committee um and our these committees are already running i have them running right now in the district internally uh but we do them uh with just administration and so we the

014personnel committee will be we're going to close session because there are a lot of personal things and personnel right that we just can't talk about publicly with three three other committee members of board members that will be on that uh we'll have discussions about positions and some of the other key things that would happen and personnel and then we would come out and open to go to go into buildings and grounds and buildings and grounds is something that we're doing right now also where we're going to be talking about the work that's been done in our campuses there's so much work happening at our buildings and it's important that the community and our board uh have an opportunity to to kind of know to really know what we're doing uh and also to talk about

015additional big projects that's coming up and they can have a discussion around uh what projects are we going to address next and what will be coming up the next month then the following week it would be uh the structure that currently exists right now it would be a working it could be a working board meeting which i want to talk about if we do this right the working board meeting can actually be uh it could actually be eliminated if we do this the right way um but there's more conversation to be had and then that financing the finance meeting still happens with the three members of finance and i know there's some uniqueness that the board wanted to put in place around that all of this must happen within the first three weeks of the

016month so that when the board meeting arrives all of these things would have been discussed publicly and then the committee will decide to advance these pieces to the board for the board to in the board meeting to vote on or to have discussions if board members have concerns or want to get more discussion they can tag it get it to us and then a deal on myself we'll make sure that it's available for discussion um at the board meeting and then this is a way for us to also uh be sure that the community can see in here because there's so much work that's happening with our board uh it's an unpaid it's almost it's like a thankless job for some um but i know there's a lot of hard work that happens and i

017think it's important that people see um and hear the conversations and how much the board pushes us uh you know as administration and not to you know to do the work right so that is really what the structure will look like and then and again these committees it won't be it won't be the same three on every committee it'll be a combination and of course in the president of the board we'll just we'll talk with the team and decide what members will be on what committee but we're talking about three committees potentially and potentially it could be downsized to two plus the board meeting uh and have these discussions publicly and so i think this is uh just an opportunity for us to do something here in episode 65 around transparency that that just don't

018happen in many places and it's so necessary for us especially with us going down this road of addressing our structural deficit uh student assignment planning here's an opportunity for us to really lay that so um are there any questions i would just love to kind of have a discussion right now if possible go ahead joey i i think it's great to so these are board committees as a opposed to administrative committees um and i think it's great for the board to have the opportunity to to differentiate the work it gives cabinet members kind of target people to engage with a little bit more deeply or in more detailed fashion in a smaller smaller group setting perhaps rather than the whole board because i think it gets cumbersome when all of us are together here and

019i think it's absolutely a great idea to have a facilities um conversation or committee especially with the student assignment work going on and the discussions around our buildings um i think it's going to be very important for that to be public so thank you for considering facilities as a part of that grouping [Music] and then also you you mentioned that this is a practice that's used at other other school districts so it's not like we're creating something new uh it is a practice that's used um elsewhere and again i think it would really allow us the time to have more more time open in public where the community can participate actively and just be well informed so you know it um it always surprises me that people uh feel surprised when certain things come up

020um you know that are listed but i i know that sometimes even our own board book and finding information can be cumbersome to to the general public so i think it's it's it's a good idea and i think it addresses some of the concerns that were brought up by our finance committee so i don't know this the could you um provide some information just in terms of timeline like how this isn't in in reaction to this specific um request for changing of a policy um in more so just something that had been in in the works and when you we could expect that change to happen so i'll tell you the works has been when i came on board and realized um you know and this is i don't want to take this the wrong

021way but business here in our district from an administrative side it was just um it was really open and um i've had some conversations with with board leadership and they told me they agree and we have to do some things to tighten that up so right away i went into my experience um working in other districts where we these committees of a whole is really tighten up the ship my team probably won't say this in public but we've um we've really gotten really tight on how we do contracts and making decisions around spending and when i tell you uh every month i'm communicating with key members of the district regarding different things that they're doing and i get feedback saying well you know we're happy to see that you understand and you're reading what we're

022doing um it's really like my job right so i just want to make sure that um this process again the board works so hard and we're pulling you for committees and being a part of these other decisions when i think the most important part is to make sure that you have the leverage uh to do the governing at a in a way so it doesn't overburden you um you know again it's a job that don't pay but extremely important and uh we're doing some some meaningful work so for the timeline uh rebecca i will revert to the school board it's a it's it's board committees i would lean on on you all to tell us when you're ready to launch this and um and then we'll make sure that administration is prepared okay but you

023you had mentioned to us the the this discussion being presented at our reorganization meeting in may yes right so um busy did you have something you wanted to add yeah i just wanted to add on the record this is something that i've talked to devon about but um i do think one of the things that we want to consider in this process and i think what the potential of it is is can shift some of the have deeper conversations but also think about the larger board role i do think that the board role is substantial um and i am concerned that if we continue to add pieces without getting efficiencies that um we are going to make this a position that is inaccessible to people who have full-time jobs and i think that will critically

024hamper the perspectives that we can have and so i think this is an important move in making sure that we continue to make being a representative on the board something that everyone can access and can participate in it's already difficult that it's an unpaid position and it takes a lot of time and so us figuring out how to do the work smarter i think is a critical piece to that but that also means that we have to like set this up right so that it doesn't actually mean that people end up having to give more time than they are currently um and that's been some of our conversations as we've been trying to to think about this is how do we make sure that um we are not creating a situation that only the only

025people who can be bored presidents are um you know or or board leadership are folks that have flexibility and don't have full-time jobs that they don't you know have control over or whatever that looks like because that then limits the perspectives that we can get and the voices that we need on our board so i just i want us to continue to have that as a focal point and how we set this up and i'm not on the policy committee but um i wanted to chime in on a couple of things if that's okay rebecca yeah certainly go ahead um so one thing is absolutely um i agree and second what biz said when i first came to the board one of i my children were very young and at the time i actually only

026had two children as opposed to three um and they were i think four and two um and so a critical part of being able to volunteer for the board was to provide child care and i recognize that that presents an equity issue not everyone can afford to pay to volunteer but i was thankful that i was able to do that and able to be present um but yeah i think we don't want to um extenuate that that issue and we continue to want to make these opportunities to bring diverse perspectives and voices to the board accessible and so the other thing i wanted to mention is you know one of the things that we um charge dr hortonwith which you mentioned dr horton um when he first came aboard was to bring systems and processes

027to our district particularly at the administrative level and i and i appreciate the the watchful and thoughtful eye that you've had as you've um acclimated yourself to to the district and to bringing that perspective and i think one of the things that uh our venture down the path of doing policy making through an equity lens has um demanded of us is to truly adopt a commitment to transparency and inclusivity and we've had to think about you know what are the systems that we need to adopt as a and best practices that we need to adopt as a governance body to help us down that path and some of those initial there are some ways that district 65 stands out um in the in the state and some of those ways are really um positive and

028notable such as our commitment to racial equity and some of those ways are probably dysfunctional that we needed to correct and one of those dysfunctions was that we didn't have um district 65 governance body was not known to be one that did a lot of um self-reflection and retreats and so one of the things that we tried to add to our work was to do more regular um self-reflection and self-evaluation and retreats to add best practices to our board work and we focused on you know monitoring purview monitoring board agreements and things of that sort and i think this idea of considering dr horton's feedback about committee structures is a really important best practice for us to consider how do we incorporate in order to continue to um our commitment to adopting best practices for

029the sake of transparency and inclusivity as a governance body um and so i i really appreciate the the discipline that it invites our governance body to lean into um to increase our um capacity for for oversight and adoption of best practices that exist to help boards do this work in a way that distributes um distributes leadership and decision making and um you know we've we put a lot of energy into making sure we have agreements and we have best practices that we're applying to our work and i think we have to you know this is an opportunity for us to trust in each other's professional capacity to distribute the leadership among the the board which is something that we um you know encourage as a culture of work throughout the district right deprivatizing practice and

030distributing leadership and being collaborative and so i really appreciate the opportunity for us to do that at the board level and i look forward to being able to have a more formal documentation and robust discussion about this at the reorganization meeting in may okay thank you for that so in in terms of these uh potential amendments are we for uh 455 um i know that i'm gonna turn to my finance uh chair uh partner um are we are we reverting back are we requesting that we revert back to the aisb recommendation um i know that we we will discuss this further um but for for now um that's that's the language that we would like to request be amended yeah i mean i i strongly recommend that we stick with the iasb recommended limits for

031pcard purchases um you know it's similar to the the press plus review right those are those are guidance documents that the state board of education office gives to us as an individual board um with policy expert lens uh to recommend what is best practice um and we just you know we just looked at a list of them um that that was great um and here we have one that's a financial one where district 65 amended it individually to be looser and i think i recommend to my board colleagues that we amended and put it in line with the iasb recommended one as soon as possible so the amendment there says that the only thing that we're changing in this policy is item number three each card holder other than the superintendent may charge no more

032than um five hundred dollars in a single purchase and no more than a thousand dollars in a given month without prior authorization of a superintendent and i think our current language allows for 500 in a single purchase and 3 000 in a single month right so that's the the language that we are requesting that that be amended okay um i did jump ahead of myself a little bit with 4.60 which we talked about a little bit but um again it is related both these items um have been brought up in just our effort to have um you know better control over our finances and uh for um four point uh point six the purchases and the contracts the the language that we are requesting to be amended for that is related to contracts in excess

033of 25 000 to change that from 25 000 to 10 000 as part of um item number one from from that item which again i think uh will will be um initially more com you know um maybe you know slow down a little bit but i think it would give administration just um you know the need to to have these purchases be more more that thought out um i think that um you know i we did receive some counsel from legal and just you know how how that will affect our efficiency i know it being a large school district we probably do regular you know expenses that that are that are in that range but it would be helpful to have some better oversight over those those larger expenses and you already did talk a

034little bit about that um correct raphael uh yes i did uh my my thinking really is that whatever the board uh pleasure is we were carried out as an administration and i think there's a there's a couple options for this one as well and i'll acknowledge the scrooge in me when i was recommending the change in this policy to tighten it up because right now the way that our our purchasing process works at a board level the internal control is that as this policy states anything over 25 in certain categories has to be put out to bid in its proper fashion but there's a lot of things that are exempt from that so purchases that can be made where the board's internal controls don't work because we receive it as a part of the bill

035list or as a part of a p-card bill and what we're asked to do is to approve it after the fact and then we lose the ability to have the conversation in front of the purchase being made and that we as a board lose we lose transparency and we lose governance uh oversight for certain things when it happens that way and so um my recommendations are to to tighten it up and to lessen those thresholds but i also understand from the advice that we've gotten and from conversations that this might create a damper on efficiency within the district and so for me i'm asking you know when we talk about p cards for example the reason why the p cards have gotten too loose for me is that we ask teachers to be well prepared

036for a school day and they have to plan for their lessons not just a day in advance but a unit in advance and they have to have a vision for the year ahead of them to be able to execute their plan and i think we have to ask the same thing of administrators with regard to purchasing power with use of credit cards right um i don't think it's too much to ask if we're asking for teachers to do that in the classroom to ask administrators to do that when it comes to what they need to buy um because for a lot of it can be planned in advance as it relates to policy for for colon 6. um i i think and dr horton you did this in our last meeting there was a memo

037that had contracts um tally didn't put into the um in the fyi section i think there's a lot of places where we spend money that might be exempt from the policy of needing approval that we need it to be shared with the board and the community transparently we do we do beyond diversity and seed and we have contracts with groups where we bring in trainers professional development technology and i think things that have a high price tag there needs to be notice given to the board of the purchase being made so that we can understand the rationale for the expenses and at least give give a chance for us to ask questions just in case there's something that doesn't need to be made and if that can be done through the committee structure dr horton

038i'm i'm all for that so long as what i'm asking for is is a behavioral change in the way that we are operating and as a board member the only avenue i have to impose that changes through policy but i absolutely would prefer it to happen as a matter of administrative direction for the superintendent joe you are on you're on the money with that um we've made some changes and now the piece dismissing is uh you know the process we do the superintendent review reports it stops with myself and a few key team members what i'm what with a committee structure they won't they will no longer stop with me and they will actually make it to you to the board um as as a request before any money spent um contracts professional development it

039will all come to the board in that committee structure and there will be time and all board members will get the packet there'll be chances for opportunity there'll be opportunities to ask questions um find out like send us back for more information and by the time we make it to the board meeting we could have everything answered or maybe it's table to the next month um because we may not be able to gather the answer but it will be voted on by the board so there's gonna be a change of culture for us as a district we we we've we've teased into that and the team can tell you we've teases that somewhat this year already so this will just be a different way we have to plan two months in advance at a minimum

040in order to get things approved i did i just want to step in real quick and just talk a little bit about how again you know making sure that we have the flexibility administration has the flexibility and somebody who works for the state of the state board of education and knowing that the federal government is uh sending unprecedented amounts of money to school districts uh to invest in evidence-based uh strategies around uh you know but to help students uh with uh to recover from uh copic 19 uh regards academics as well as social emotional uh needs so making sure that there is that flexibility for our administration in order to find those evidence-based uh approaches um is critical right uh and um knowing also that even with current funding streams right a federal land state

041uh there tends to be at times uh where school districts aren't spending all of all of those dollars uh there's carryover right or there really isn't carryover because that has to be reverted back to or sent back to the state or the feds right so making sure that one not not only do we have the flexibility to spend that money to benefit our students and our community members but also making sure that we're spending it effectively uh to and and uh to meet the needs of some students right and and not make and making sure that we're also thinking about blending and braiding funding so i look forward to that committee structure to have those conversations and and just uh as an aside um i know the governor's office should just shared what's called the

042illinois uh education renewal plan and it's a guidance document for school districts this is for you joy uh but again for all of us as as school boards uh of you know members as well as administrative staff is the the guide is being uh was released at the beginning of the month and it's it provides guidance around how to utilize those uh funds that are coming from the federal and state government through the uh um american uh recovery uh act uh as well as one that's her two s3 funding but also uh is it's a living document that'll really talk about how not you know once those are limited funds but what do you do with the current funding that you have that you receive from the state and federal level and how do you

043blend in braid funding to ensure that we're meeting the needs of our students and families so again i see the committees as being a place to have those conversations around blending and breaking funding and ensuring that we're you optimizing the funds that we currently get through state and federal funding as well as the ones that we collect through you know property taxes and all that thank you said hill so at this uh given the information that we received around the committees there's currently no amendments that we have for the language for um for that item um again i think that we just you know want to see you know better oversight better planning and i look forward to that conversation um in may and the that brings us to our last and final item which

044um doesn't have any immediate um recommendations for amendments but i did want to bring this um based on some conversations that we've had in the community with the city of evanston's um equity and empowerment commission and just um feedback that we've received from the community around language access so we have um conversations that we've we've started we do have our students that have been identified as english language learners but we also have a lot of uh students that aren't aren't receiving services that aren't in um you know in an english language learning program tweet and so we you know we wanted i would like for us to revisit the services that um that we are offering to our our english uh language learners community as a whole not just the students i know that there's

045a part in the um in the policy that addresses parent engagement but you know just you know some of the examples around the the need that we have for translation and just you know currently we only have one translator um on board and just refiguring um out how we could provide better services and i i wanted to make my colleagues aware of information that was shared with dr horton from the dupage federation that does work around language access with cities across across the state and so i wanted i wanted us to our administration to revisit that policy and also um at you know potentially at the next city um city school joint meeting that we have that that be revisited so you know there's the the population of our students that we know that are

046english language learners and they're providing the services um but if i'm correct there's um there's an option to opt out of those services is that is that correct i think maybe that's uh for for romy um you know just you know if if if a person is if one of our students is not yes they can identify they would they can waive their services if that's right yeah right so when when they waive the services um but the family still needs language access um you know that's not that's not built into the policy um how we how we um provide services and ensure that those households are are given um you know language access um resources and certain services so i would like for us um to revisit that and how we could do a

047better job as a district ensuring that we have um you know a language access policy that addresses the needs of our community um and i was i was happy to see that um during in your weekly update dr horton that there's already some of that work um that's underway so that came after this um you know this agenda was sent out i don't know if you could provide a little update on that and i know that we did already put you in touch with the dupage federation so if you could just provide a brief update on that so i shared it um with melissa and i i want to melissa who else did we include in that in that share with you page yeah i think at this point in time we're trying to schedule

048that meeting um and then get a time and and get some participants and what i did tell uh what i did say though i can't say this you know we speak about our funding and equity and what's important to us um we're going to go for the gold star in the services and we will add that to our budget proposal for the board to look at and give you some details so you can give us some feedback and and make a decision on that we want to make sure that we're offering offering the top-of-the-line services for for all of our families so i can that's what i can tell you so we've reached out to um to set up the meeting so that should be happening shortly i just wanted to chime in real quick

049and and as a practitioner as a bilingual educator uh and if you're a bilingual educator watching this you may know this situation um but um what that would happen a lot of times is that i would be taken away from my students uh to interpret for instance in an um into the individual education uh uh program meeting right uh for to you know verify and you know share information around a student in their special education needs or possible special education needs so what happens is again i did it happily because i really love my you know the students and families and communities i work for uh but again i i i i was not i'm not a certified i was not and i continued not to be a certified translator um and as a matter

050of fact now um there is some um a law that was passed uh january first a mandate um around special education to have qualified interpreters at iep meetings so again making sure that we get ahead of the game and and i appreciate having this conversation uh now right because again uh the state made the mandate you know you know when the mannequin's effect on in january uh but again they they haven't provided the they're going to provide a little bit of guidance as well as certified trainers that that the state will select where uh you know that school district can reach out to to to get uh qualified or get qualified trainers right um and you know what a beautiful thing that's going on here in evanston too i know one of the weekly updates

051talks about how um we've had parents and uh they went at our middle school uh through the learning cultures work uh with esl families and uh they have the translators and and their training parents who saw a need uh i think it's a nichols middle school around needing transparent translations during report card pickups and how important is it for it for parents to know how their kids are doing uh in any language right in regards to academics and so that they can help the kiddos uh but for a long time that has again that that has been an issue um so uh you know you know again there are all these wonderful things that can you know help you know kick to to augment uh some of the these great merging brown breaking practices around

052engaging in it and and having inclusive and engaging conversation and and and communication with all parents refugee parents you know i've seen you know when i've gone to report pick up the chute i see you know arabic parents right uh who may need help and there might not be somebody there right uh again making sure that those folks are informed uh and knowing they know what they're how their kids are doing uh whatever we can do right to to open up the lines of communication and information for those parents to make sure uh that they know how to help their child and then guess what what we'll see them in regards to academics and social emotional and feeling included in in in our schools is going to really pay dividends at the end of the

053day for our school district so again uh whatever this is something i think that has been always a a board priority but i'm so happy that we have your leadership dr horton and that you're reaching out and and and really trying to make this happen in regards to inclusive communication uh with our families thanks for the resource though sergio that was really great they were very responsive uh melissa can you share a little bit about where we are sure yeah um rebecca to your point earlier i mean this work has been underway um for most of this year i mean i think that we became a acutely aware of our gap in language access um and our ability to support translation especially this school year with a pandemic i mean we know that it's been

054an issue in prior years um but this year especially there was increased need to translate you know curricular resources and um all of these different changes to policy and procedure and just our reimagination of schools so this has really been a joint effort um across several key departments so our multilingual department and amy correa and manuel um as well as our face team and and communications department because we see it sort of being very triangular in how we support the need for for translation so um what we've been talking about recently is needing to take a multi-faceted approach to it um one of the things that we recognize is that we have to create a more consistent structure for our translation and our interpretation and services in the district and how those are managed right

055so creating a more streamlined process where we could really take advantage of the resources that we do have in the district while those are very limited i have to give a huge huge shout out to manuel our district translator he is incredible i know everybody on this call on our team has tapped him at all hours of the day and the evening and the weekend to step in and um his skill and his ability to interpret translate to do it simultaneously you know we've come to realize um on the a couple occasions he hasn't been around like it really takes somebody very special to be able to do that and so again i just want to sing his his praises and also devon alexander and ellen or kiaga i mean they've again our team is

056doing incredible work we just need to increase that bandwidth so how do we create efficiencies within our system also again the second point is increasing that bandwidth right so knowing that um our spanish-speaking families that is our greatest need there are um i think i just heard over 87 languages spoke in the district so we know there's a lot of language uh access that we have to be able to provide but our spanish-speaking families um are what we're really trying to hone in on at this moment um so how do we increase bandwidth for translation that's both at the district and school level because we know what's coming out of the schools is really critical to families as much as i want to think that people pay a lot of attention to what is happening

057at the district we know that people are reading communications from their child's teacher from the school so focusing on school uh level interpretation and the last piece of it is really a communications piece and how do we create dedicated information sources for spanish-speaking families so i've been talking to some colleagues in other districts and actually have a counterpart out in tennessee who works for a very large district i've been working with um and she shared some insight to me out of how they've built out their interpretation and translation services in the district and really focused on providing dedicated information sources so tapping into families where they're at via social media via text messaging uh via podcasts you know how do we take some audio so we can listen to different news sources so that is

058all work that's underway right now um and we'll have a proposal to dr horton in the next couple weeks and as he mentioned he can share that to the board for consideration because it will require some additional resources that we just don't have right now thank you melissa uh go ahead biz i melissa i just want to make sure there's two things in that broader plan and i think you know i think we're at a critical moment um where the city is talking about this i hope 202 is talking about this like so i think we can all move if we coordinate we can move forward together with something that doesn't have one group not serving folks as well like let's figure out what the cadillac is and all do it and advocate through whatever

059channels and committees we have but i also want to make sure that the that we're thinking about a strategy for ptas and and parent groups that are getting information out maybe independently from the district but are as a critical part of how people feel like they belong and engaged in their schools so i know that that's something that people have been kind of piecemealing so you know solving school by school um but having at the very least some best practices recommendations that we would provide um for schools to be able to use for their own ptas and events and things that they're happening i think you know we i think one of the challenges here is that some people are doing it this well in our district but everybody's not doing it well and so

060once we figure out what we think is the ideal format and strategy then let's figure out all the different communities we need to engage in that to make sure it's a consistent experience because once we foster that belongingness it is what we don't want is that people start feeling like they can engage and start participating but then they turn over here and that's a negative experience or they turn over to this piece of it and that's a negative experience because we haven't made sure all of the touch points are are at this level so i think just wanting to be thinking about not just what we as a district communicate and what schools communicate but then parent communities that are affiliated with our schools making sure that they're connected into the system as well yep

061definitely that makes sense thanks best right i think our our instructional uh policy is you know pretty set but i think one of the things like you said melissa that we've learned through this past year you know is the the parental the community uh piece of it and just you know we we need parents and we need our community to fully understand and you know be on board um to fully support our students so um there isn't any amendment to the to the um to the policy we just wanted to make you aware of the things that uh that are currently at work and like i said i do hope that the city um school liaison uh or the committee will have a more robust uh conversation around that um and that was our last

062item so without um any further business i will um go ahead and adjourn this committee meeting at uh 6 54. you're muted you're welcome though how did you know you're with breeder thank you um all right so we can go ahead and call to order our working board meeting [Music] so uh we will re we are reconvening an open session for our working board meeting at 6 54 due to the governor's executive order suspending certain open meeting exact requirements in order to comply with the state of emergency the district 65 board of education will be conducting virtual board and committee meetings like the policy committee meeting we just had um and before we get into a roll call in the business of our meeting i do want to start us off with our land acknowledgement

063and acknowledgement of the contributions of the enslaved we uh passed the resolution to read this at the beginning of our meetings at our regular born meeting in march and so this is the amended language that we passed we take time to acknowledge that the land that we meet on is the traditional homelands of the council of three fires the potawatomi ojibwe and ottawa this land also served as an important meeting place for miami ho chunk the menominee anoka sac fox peoria arapahoe cheyenne and other tribal nations this land has long been a center for indigenous people to gather trade and maintain kinship ties located at the intersection of several great waterways the region has become the site of travel and prosperity we acknowledge evanston and john evans are tied to the massacre of the arapaho

064and for cheyenne and westward expansion upon which jen that it is now illinois illinois and the chicago land is still home to thousands of native people who are actively present struggling for sovereignty self-determination and justice the genocidal acts of settler colonialism extended to the peoples of africa and their enslaved descendants despite illinois eventually prohibiting slavery slavery was an accepted practice before and after statehood the vestiges of slavery remain present throughout the united states and directly affect the descendants of enslaved peoples descendants who helped define the african diaspora rich and heterogeneous communities descended from african peoples the genocidal patterns of violence against peoples of african descent and indigenous people have been replicated to exclude and harm people from many intersecting marginalized identities in the united states these patterns of violence demonstrate that the pursuit to end

065state sanctioned violence against black and indigenous people of color and people of color writ large is a daily struggle for liberation from content from continued social political and economic anti-black racism and oppression today we acknowledge that we are living breathing loving grieving laughing and sharing space on unseated territory once honored and maintained by indigenous tribes that colonialism and imperialism have claimed for the sake of profit we acknowledge the lives lost but in seoul the displacement of millions of black indigenous people of color who still thrive maintain and organize may we learn to honor the historical and contemporary presence and power of the people and their belief that we must be caretakers of the lands and water for for the livelihood of future generations the land that surrounds us is part of who we are it

066reflects our histories it is within district 65's responsibility as an academic institution to disseminate knowledge about indigenous peoples and consistent with our commitment to equity we will work towards sharing truth and promoting healing for the sake of our children it's important to understand the long-standing history that has brought brought you to reside on this land and to seek to understand your place within that history land acknowledgements do not exist in the past tense or only in the historic in a historical context colonialism is current is a current ongoing process and we need to understand our present participation we encourage everyone consuming this message to continue expanding their knowledge and reducing their harm through awareness of local mutual aid models for survival and engagement with online and local resources such as the chicago american indian community

067collaborative and the shore front legacy center so let's move ahead with uh roll call here here helper here hernandez here lindsay ryan here mendoza present tanya buddy here i move that the board of education approved tonight's meeting agenda as presented second kim yes kartha yes help her yes hernandez yes lindsey ryan yes mendoza yes tanya voody yes motion passes 7-0 so next on our agenda is public comments um any member of the public wishing to submit comment to be read at the april 12 2021 board meeting was asked to email their comment to the board to board secretary kareshier at district 65.net by 5 pm this evening please note that it's not customary for the board to respond to specific public comments at the board meeting the best way to correspond with members of the

068board is by emailing school board at district 65.net and tonight we do not have any public comments section okay so we have just uh two discussion items this evening um i believe we have kylie offering the first uh presentation for discussion our achievement and accountability report yes thank you i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen all right thank you everyone i'd like to start off by saying i'm really grateful for the opportunity to come and present our second year of the re-envisioned achievement and accountability report as a reminder this report includes not only a report in english but also reports in spanish reports both for the district and individual school level profile reports these reports include both the quantitative and the qualitative data about our students experiences i think that they also provide some

069insights for the community into the different accomplishments that are taking place in our schools that contribute to our learning environments we know there are many things that create the fabric of our schools and we develop the format of these reports with that understanding and recognition in mind we've received a lot of positive feedback from our school community members regarding the individual school reports as well as positive feedback regarding the inclusion of school accomplishments as well as the student educator principal and community accomplishments in the district report i'm really glad to hear from parents that they see a benefit in having individual school reports that are tailored to and unique to each school these have they report to us that these have made the data more easy to review more accessible and have also helped them

070to better understand you know the information about their schools so i'm really pleased that that's the case additionally i want to thank and honor all the important contributions that are educators and principals and community members have made to make the learning environments in our schools robust opportunities this year we added a couple of new components to our district report firstly we have a page of information about the influences that the pandemic had on our data and on our data availability i'll be going into that in more detail in today's presentation we also updated the reports to reflect some of these important notes and references to the changes because they do influence what's in these reports and profile reports we also were able to add this year a letter from the superintendent so i'm going to

071begin with some of the limitations of these reports and i will say the limitations are fairly substantial so as a result of the pandemic and the transition to remote learning this year's report looks different than last year's report there are several data sources that we didn't have available and we had to make adjustments to be able to provide our best available information so since assessments were not given in the spring we have included the winter assessment results and where possible we've included historical winter data for comparison purposes we also um adjusted our attendance data to provide the attendance for the period where students were in person pre-pandemic along with updating the years prior so that it was comparable it's really important to recognize that these data do not provide a comprehensive view of the learning

072that took place in school year 2020. the learning did not freeze did not stop when we transitioned to remote instruction and i want to really recognize that our teachers made that leap to remote learning and students continue to grow learn and progress the data we're using here do not reflect that and that is a critical limitation that we have to acknowledge we know this incomplete picture is not fully reflective of school and student progress during the 2020 school year in a normal year we wouldn't try to use winter results in a summative fashion to try to understand outcomes from school year winter results are really more progress monitoring help us understand patterns of student performance um and that would be the use case for that uh you know we would we would in a normal

073year be looking at a larger picture of the pattern of student performance and really trying to use spring scores to be a measure that we look at to understand the culmination of student learning across the full school year all of these limitations mean that the data has to be viewed with an understanding of what they can and can't tell us they're the full picture of how students whether this pandemic and how our student and school outcomes have have transpired may take us several years to really fully understand certainly this is an incomplete picture of kind of pre-pandemic outcomes that's not just for our district that this is going to take several years but also nationally really deeply understanding what has transpired we need to be very careful about the assumptions that we draw using these

074kind of limited pre-pandemic information here and the data that we um have collected this year so further discussion and foreshadowing about that will also be part of the presentation today um but i want to just make it clear from the outset what this data can and cannot do for us there were some data that was not affected by the pandemic specifically our five essentials survey which took place before we transitioned to remote learning and also the isil data so those are the key considerations regarding interpretation of these results with that being said we can delve into the data a little bit so here we see information about the making expected gains measure from our map assessment this is winter to winter making expected gains for school year 20 um 2020. so this chart shows the

075percent of students who met or exceeded their individual growth targets on the map assessment in both ela and math a student's individual projected gains are based on the typical growth of students who had similar prior assessment results the data provide us with valuable information about student growth patterns both over time and for different populations of students here we only have one year of data that is because in school year 2018 the winter map was not consistent and that would have been needed to show multiple years of data because this measure is a growth measure so it takes a student's prior score and it takes their current score and it assesses whether or not they made those growth targets so without having that kind of initial score you can't you can't calculate this measure and so

076that is why we only have one year of the winter data included here as another reminder this making expected gains measure reflects the nwea map measure of making expected gains the nwe calculation of making expected gains which provides us with the most accurate reflection of student progress without any unintended distortions of the data now in the data i'm going to talk about some of the pattern that we see so in the 2020 school year at the winter administration of the map assessment 62 of all of our students met or exceeded their individual growth targets in english language arts in math 52 of all of our students met or exceeded their growth targets the data shows the gaps by race so for our uh in ela in for our black students 57 of students met or

077exceeded their expected gains and 57 percent of our latinx students met or exceeded their expected gains while 68 of our white students i'm sorry 66 percent of our white students met or exceeded their gains and 72 of our asian students met or exceeded their gains in math which is the chart below you'll see that 47 of our black students met or exceeded their gains and 48 of our latinx students met or exceeded their gains this is compared to our white students 55 percent of whom met or exceeded their gains and our asian students 61 percent met or exceeded their expected gains these figures are moderately consistent with what we see in our historical spring results so even though they only reflect the winter expected gains this is a pretty consistent pattern that we have seen

078in the past with our spring scores so this table is also a measure from our math assessment this measure is an attainment measure that shows the percent of students whose risk score places them at or above the 50th percentile typically as our attainment measure in these reports we would show the college career readiness benchmark scores that score is a spring calculation which relies on the spring writ score so without spring assessments we were unable to calculate that metric therefore we have shared this metric which shows how many students were at or above the 50th percentile students who are in the 50th percentile are performing at the typical or average range for students who are in their grade level and so this is an attainment measure that we have kind of substituted as a result of

079the pandemic but we still think it provides valuable information for the community and for our our board colleagues and our our schools and students so another important thing to talk through with this metric is the fact that here we see that we have multiple years of data however i want to reiterate that during school year 2018 the winter assessment was not consistent was optional and therefore these winter data from this school year do not represent a full um picture of our entire student body or our entire student population so these these data are not representative of all the student performance and that this has to be considered when looking at the data cannot tell a clear picture of student or school performance because it's not fully complete right it's incomplete now we decided to include

080it because we wanted to provide as much information as possible given the um current circumstances of the situation and wanting to be as transparent and informative as we could be but we do know and we recognize that there are limitations to that year of data this will be especially true for the individual school reports so the individual school reports in aggregate right in aggregate the data is a little bit uh more um complete because it pulls all the kids from public schools but in the individual school reports it will be even more potentially not representative so that being said we're going to talk about what we see here so in the 2020 school year 69 of all students were at or above the 50th percentile in english language arts which is the top chart um

081that is the same as the prior year's administration in winter in math um 65 of all students were at or above the 50th percentile which is slightly lower than the prior year where of all students were at or above that's a small fluctuation so we'd want to see if this is a larger pattern as part of a whole so this data also shows some substantial gaps by race and demographic group so in english language arts 43 of black students and 48 of our latinx students were at or above the 50th percentile this is compared with 90 of white students and 83 percent of multiracial students who were at or above the 50th percentile in math 21 of our black students and 34 of our latinx students were at or above um the the i'm sorry

08232 i'm sorry 32 um of our black students and 46 of our latinx students were at or above the 50th percentile while 86 percent of our white students and 77 of our asian students were at or above i'd also point out that we we see gaps for our students who qualify for free and reduced lunch as well as our students who are students with ieps and our english language learners we also include in the report our illinois snapshot of early literacy also known as our isil data this is kindergarten readiness data as people who watch the board meetings may recall we had brought a presentation back in august about this data where we had done a deeper dive analysis to better understand the downward trajectory that we were seeing in these results um what we

083found when we did that deeper analysis was that in the kind of overall trends of the data was that there were a couple of factors that seemed to be driving the decline which were related to the early learning skills of alphabet recognition and letter sounds and also changes to our test administration so that's important to note and i am happy to answer questions about that although we did cover it in fairly um deep detail back in august we also have our dra assessment data included here this is a literacy assessment that is given for students in grades kindergarten through third and what you see here is kind of the district level data shows uh you know the progress over time for different groups of students here we see a moderately large decline in first grade

084uh between the 2020 school year and prior school years i'd like to note that starting this year the dra assessment is being used as a diagnostic assessment which would be used with some but not all students um that would be used with students who where teachers see the need for a deeper understanding of students literacy development and therefore this will be the last year that we have the dra assessment data as a kind of district metric we have also in the report attendance data which is not pictured here um you can see that in the report i've not included it due to time limitations but that attendance data is also really consistent with our data over time i'd like to also highlight the section of the report that includes the accomplishments of our students educators

085leaders and community members it's really remarkable and invaluable to acknowledge kind of the diverse array of learning and experiences that support our students in development the accomplishments in the report and i encourage everyone to read them they span many areas including the arts stem civics community engagement sports team accomplishments and student-led mentoring and advocacy we know that this is only a small sample of the many accomplishments made during the 2020 school year by our students and our educators and our school leaders and we hope that they provide the community with a small window into the experiences and the learning that's taking place in our buildings i think it's also really important to take a moment to highlight how our community in district 65 banded together in response to the pandemic the supports from our school

086leadership teams our school leaders our educators our community members and our community partners were invaluable in this time of unprecedented crisis the responses were really remarkable and should be acknowledged and celebrated i would love to take a moment to also suggest to all the families and community members listening to tonight's board meeting to take a moment to check out their school reports the data included in the school profile reports is consistent with the data reported in the district report in order to provide transparency and clarity of information the school reports are tailored to each school and reflect the kind of colors logos mascots on the school norms and values of each individual school i hope that the school profiles serve as a useful and meaningful resource to our school community members our families our educators

087and of course our students um in the in the next year the reports will be even better because we will have a lot more robust longitudinal data to be able to offer versus this year where we do have some of these limitations i also wanted to take a moment and i included this in the memo to highlight some of the things that our school district has implemented this year because i know this data is from last year and a lot of questions may be happening about what are you doing right now and i think that's really important to take a moment to share some information about a few of the critical supports that we've put in place to encourage and foster the data and evidence use that will drive school improvement so one of those

088practices we've recently begun this year under dr horton's leadership is the school reality checks and these we've mentioned at a couple board meetings but i don't know we've given a lot of detail and so i'm going to indulge a moment and just share some more detail with the board members um some of the things that we've done uh for these reality checks is to create these three time and gear opportunities that bring together the school leadership team which are school leaders and our assistant principals to come together with colleagues who are in other administrative roles and departments to look at and reflect on real-time data one another and to really dig in in a deep way um across a broad range of data and so here are some of the data that we have looked

089at during the different reality checks and we'll look at in our third reality check meeting this ranges from academic data to school climate culture data indicators this table here just kind of highlights some of those things this is not of course the only opportunity and the only time school leaders are using and looking at data they have a robust system of professional learning communities or plc's in their schools where they're digging into data with educators and school teams are really working together to reflect and learn from what's working and what needs improvement in the classroom and in the school community as well as other opportunities for the school leadership teams which are kind of broader group membership in the schools to to dig into data riley can i jump in really quickly the most important

090part um one of the more important parts with the reality check as kylie mentioned i want to make sure that it hits home that we have central office members in these meetings with led by kylie's team along with the school leadership team i've sat in quite a few of them myself our key cabinet members as well to engage in these discussions because we know schools are on the front line doing this work and we make decisions in central office a lot of times without being in the building so we want to make sure that we are connecting with them and reflecting on how can we better support them and decisions that we have made that may not be beneficial or things that we are doing that's helping so that's one of the major parts of

091the reality checks yes thank you so much for raising those important um additions uh we this is a great opportunity for a facilitated conversation um we run a really tight protocol uh and kind of generate ideas and and offer that opportunity for reflection so i also wanted to take a moment to foreshadow a little bit some of the data that we've been um utilizing this school year and what you may see moving forward so uh one of the great opportunities that we'll have ahead will be kind of a return to having access to our spring assessment data um our our schools have done a fantastic and really remarkable job at supporting the collection of assessment information um during this school year uh they've been able to successfully implement the fall assessments as well as the

092winter assessments and are looking ahead to our spring assessment window for map once we have the spring assessment data we'll be able to kind of look at that longitudinal picture over time to really understand um the patterns another thing that i want to highlight and kind of foreshadow for the the team here and for the community is that um the map assessment which is uh something that is provided to us from nwea has been renormed as of july 2020 that means that this assessment data that we're showing here is under the prior norms moving forward starting with all of our all the reporting we've done this year uh to the board and also all of our future reporting we will utilize the updated nwea norms so just to share for our community in a bit

093of a clearer way the norms are the measures that help us to look at kind of the distribution of the scores so where a student's individual score lands in the distribution they do not change individual student scores or growth targets um the historical data doesn't doesn't alter that data is the same but it updates what ritz scores create those kind of um you know here's the 50th percentile here's what being in the bottom 10 percentile looks like here's where uh you know you meet the college readiness benchmark those measures change with the new norms and so our scores are put against those new norms and what we've done in the research accountability and data department is we've gone back and updated all of our years of historical data so that moving forward in our future

094reporting we're having apples to apple's comparison this way we can have valid and reliable data for the board to really understand um kind of the full picture and for our community members so that that has that work has been done and moving forward um all of the kind of recalculated information will be provided we will go back and update historical data so that it's it's valid reliable and accurate um another thing that i would like to highlight is related to state assessment data um we are waiting to see what will happen in terms of how the state will analyze the state assessment data from this school year and based on how the state recalculates or addresses incompleteness in that data and missingness in that data we may have different kind of uh information to share

095with the board and with the community so we will we will update our process once we see what procedures the state will incorporate in order to account for that um lastly we anticipate no implications for our five essentials survey we actually just wrapped up the five essentials survey at the beginning of this month um i'm excited to report that all of our student and teacher survey data collection at all the schools we met the threshold so everyone will be getting reports and it was really successful even in the remote context so we do not anticipate any kind of disruption to that important school climate data so i know it's a lot of tables i always come with all the tables and all of the facts and figures so i know i've thrown a lot out

096at all of you and that my my memo is somewhat lengthy but i am excited to take any questions that you may have and i look forward to our discussion thank you thank you kylie thank you um there was one or i there were a couple of slides that i personally had a lot of questions about the first was the dra slide specifically because i recall we had an early childhood or early literacy report a couple of years ago that had some promising trends um for the most part in terms of how the early literacy framework was impacting learning for kindergartners and first graders um but the dra data that we saw today um was much more discouraging than that data specifically it looks like cohorts of learners outcomes were declining over time and i'm

097just curious if you all have any specific thoughts about what would lead to that trend and what are the corrections that we are putting in place to respond to that thanks for the question anya i think i want to point out a couple things in relation to the dra data that i think is important for understanding the data that's in the report um specifically one of the things that's impacting the data from the 2018-19 administration in comparison to the 2019-2020 administration is that we applied different assessment windows and one of the things that kylie has mentioned is that we've been adjusting some of our assessment cycles over time in school year 19 we administered the assessment between january 17th and february 1st in school year 20 we were trying out a different assessment model where

098we were removing the fall assessment and as a result of removing that fall assessment relying on spring data the kind of the input that we had was to move that winter assessment window earlier and so our dra assessment window and from school year 1920 actually started on november 20th in comparison to january 17th and it went from november excuse me it went from november 12th to december 13th whereas the year before we had gone from january 17th to february 1st and so really if we look at that that window between november 12th starting in sy 20 and the january 17th in the previous year is about six weeks of instruction that you know has an opportunity to occur prior to assessment and i think one of the reasons why we see the largest drop in

099first grade is there's a really sizable amount of learning growth or reading growth that occurs in that first grade year and we move kids from a dra four at the end of kindergarten to a dra 18 at the end of first grade and so first grade is that point when all that fun that a significant amount of the foundational work in k is taking traction and kids are really becoming you know it's beginning to click and we're moving forward as readers and so that six week shift in the assessment cycle i think really shows up in our first grade data when i look at the other grades k second and third we do see a decrease but i think that's a decrease within reason around that six week window this shift in administration and then

100in regards to our practices going forward um we assessed with map fluency this year because we really in one that's our universal screener going forward and we found that to be i think an important shift for respecting admitted assessment time um and we are tracking the progress of our grade levels carefully using that data but that data is uniquely different from our dra data we do continue to have some concerns about our second grade cohort but i do believe that that is much more grounded in the kind of the that the timing at which the pandemic hit and we've our educators been working hard using the data that we have through map fluency and our unit assessments to really focus in on tier one their core instruction and small groups and so we'll continue to

101monitor that the growth of our cohorts using map fluency and we're interested to see what the spring data will look like for us for all of those cohorts thank you that makes sense and i may have missed this detail but is that assessment window change explained in the accountability and achievement report i don't believe that shift in the assessment window specifically is addressed the memo does address that we have shifts in administration but we didn't speak to that one specific one directly okay i i think that that could be useful information to insert if that is possible um because that that um looking at the cohorts that was a really concerning decline between the kindergartners of that previous year to the first graders of the following year agreed yes thank you for the recommendation thank

102you yes we'll work to get that updated and um you explained in a lot of detail the isil data in the fall and so i wasn't sure if we were looking at that cohort of isil data or if we were looking at um a new cohort of isil data so i appreciate you um highlighting that this is the cohort that had the shift in the the categories of isil assessment that were administered to them correct yes that is correct yeah thank you um because the jeh data was so encouraging i was hoping to see that show up and we're looking at two different cohorts yes it's absolutely right you're totally right it's two different cohorts um from two different points of time also because the jh report was this year fall data and this is

103last year fall data and so it's two different cohorts two different time periods and two different assessments so it's a lot of reasons why um that pattern is not reflected there so yes thank you that's a great question and so i think the other um [Music] analysis i wanted to hear from you all more about is um from the first page of data which is the making expected gains in math and um ela um the overall sorry i'm trying to pull the the graph up so i can look at the specific do you want me to put it back on the screen president tanya booty uh sure actually could you put up the uh or above grade level graph which is not the same don't don't have a seizure while i go really fast here

104okay this one yes that one um you you mentioned that um there's a small change in in math a small decline um [Music] in the overall students who are at or above the 50th percentile yes right here right and and so you mentioned that that the goal would be to make sure that's not a trend over time um what do you all consider small versus large variants and outcomes that's a really good question um so i think you know it's really important to look as a whole um you know we have to dig in deeper to the data how many students are we talking about are there fluctuations in the population um you know there's no specific uh you know five percentage points is is a lot and this many percentage points is not it's

105really specific and unique to um kind of the the deeper view of the data was the decline the same for all students was it at certain schools was it at all schools so um there really is um no like one percent is a lot you know one percent is not a lot um obviously we want to see all of our data trending upward and not downward and so anytime anything goes down i definitely want to say okay we're going to have to look at this as a kind of longer term how does this look in a broader amount of data um in winter as well it's difficult uh to see whether that's part of a larger picture because you really want to see how does it happen in the spring like what what does it

106look like in the spring is there more growth and kind of improvement by the end of the school year in here is a very is a data period that's really more formative in nature and so um i would be really reluctant to uh to um uh not want to look more at this data but i also would want to look at like how does it look over the course of the school year because from the winter administration there's there's several more months of learning that takes place and we want to see what happens during those additional months of learning so i don't know if that's like a really satisfactory answer because it's not like a it's not a cut and dry thing it's it's part of a larger picture but when the declines are substantial

107like for example with isil data we all saw that we were like oh we need to look further into this there is something happening here and so we did a much deeper analysis we did we looked at kind of different cohorts of data we ran five or six different models to kind of understand and unpack that data we ran multiple scenarios to see what was driving that decline so when we see something that is really disconcerting of course we delve into it in a deep way thank you i mean i think that um you know the the answer is you know there's a lot of different factors that influence um how how we analyze the data and i think overall that makes it this report is i i really appreciate the multiple ways of representing

108um folks um levels of achievement in their buildings and in their work um but when it comes to the data of this report you know there's a lot of opportunities to feel confused or to feel um frustrated because we just have a gap in in data and i think um [Music] you know i appreciate that there's a certain amount of flexibility and nuance that we just have to approach this particular report with um yes thank you so much and i feel those feelings too um i also wish we had kind of everything at our disposal to really understand the progress of our students and um demonstrate their growth and learning over time i i also wish we had a more complete picture unfortunately we're doing uh all we have in our power to build as

109complete and comprehensive the picture as possible for our community so i have a couple of other nuanced questions for this nuanced report i'm wondering um given that we can't that that all of our data isn't super reliable because some of the gaps caused by the pandemic are we utilizing with our school leaders and our instructors other types of assessments and balanced against this data such as unit assessments and other types of other ways of measuring student student learning and if we are see some head nodding are doing that i would i'd be curious to hear what some of those trends are in terms of how we can think about that data in comparison to to this data to give us an idea of the wellness of instruction and learning acquisition so stacey can you paint

110the picture of the assessment structure um but you know the interim assessments and things like that what has existed and how you've built this last these last couple of years of this last year sure so i think um and one of the things we've talked about is that we have been moving around and really trying to strengthen our overall assessment system in many ways and you know coming into this year we made a very strong commitment to make sure that we have our three times a year universal screeners in place with map and so that has allowed our leaders to rely on and you know really all thanks to our educators and our leaders because administration in a remote environment definitely took a degree of commitment um and so we've committed to this three times

111a year universal screener and that's k-8 in our k2 it's map fluency and so we're taking a look at our foundational skills and once students have demonstrated a degree of mastery on their foundational skills they move into their early reading skills and then we pick up with essentially map reading for the remainder through our grade 8 and in math it's k8 map math that gives us three very important pieces of assessment data for every child that we have and we get that data right away and so that data's been feeding into the reality checks and that's one level that's a universal screener for every child in our district um with the exception of low incidence students for which it's not appropriate um and then the next layer of assessment that we have this year is

112that we have our end of unit assessments and with our math with eureka and actually our reading our literacy assessments we have pre-assessment so there's a pre-assessment that is given to give educators some information and keep in mind that these are in many cases learning tasks and so kids are taking on learning tasks they're giving us data and information about where they are in regards to their learning and that's being used in our plc process to help inform planning for navigating the unit within the structures that we gave to educators this year we gave them pacing documents where we said we need the we're expecting that this many units will be taught and these are the start and end dates and there's autonomy within those that bank to plan your instruction to meet the learning

113needs of the standards that are identified in the units and so the pre in the post gives educators some information about where kids are in those skills and helps to inform the planning and then the post gives us information about how successful our instruction was so that we can continue to use that information to inform interventions going forward and also professional learning and improvement and so those are the layers in place we're you know going to continue to build out because there are a couple gaps where we still are weak as we look forward we need to strengthen our diagnostics in some other places but in our tier one system we're in a much stronger place in regards to regular information for our students thank you stacy i would also add that we've worked collaboratively

114with the curriculum instruction department to bring some of that data into a data dashboarding system to really make it more accessible for our school leaders and our teams to kind of investigate and interrogate those patterns of performance and to be able to look at that data in connection and in conjunction with other data so that instead of having lots of little data elements separated all over the place we've been able to kind of generate and create this kind of one-stop shop for folks to go and kind of look at these multiple measures across across their schools and so that has kind of empowered and created a really strong foundation for using multiple measures there's no one magic assessment that tells us everything that we need to know um to be able to serve our students

115right we need to use a lot of information simultaneously to really understand a full picture i would also like to because when you're doing this work it can get overwhelming and as we're speaking to to board members and family members and and having a common language we want to make sure that it connects so if possible um well not i know it's possible i would like for uh mr little and dr kilgotti to kind of talk a little bit about the system's work not in detail but connecting right into the assessments how we use that data uh and then also the plc work that you all have been leading to connect with stacy and um kylie's been speaking up when you do that also take the time to explain what tier one is i i

116understand what ticker one is but i'm not sure that everyone consuming this meeting does so i i can do that um tier one is like the high quality instruction that all students get access to um in in kind of a standards it's aligned to the standards aligned to the grade level expectations all students have to be able to access a rigorous year one instruction and if students aren't making um and demonstrating growth and progress they may receive additional interventions to help them be successful and so those would be at tier two or if there are more significant interventions needed that would be at tier three and so building on that the the value of work that we've done in what we refer to as in our system three plc work is really thinking about what

117the curriculum is asking for and then going a step further which is what do we want our students to understand what are we looking for them to achieve in that period of time how are we going to measure it and then what what happens when students are not achieving it or following suit or and how do we accelerate for example in those cases and so it's really important in our plc work our teachers have really brought together these professional learning communities i mean our principals have worked to build these professional learning communities to support our teachers and going beyond what the curriculum um expects we want to move away from say i taught the curriculum to i i'm focusing on what students are learning i'm using data to monitor that and then being able to

118assist um the student to make the adjustment necessary so that we are improving their outcomes deliberately it it can be a mistake and we focus simply on what the curriculum asks us to do rather than what we see students presenting is there a feedback here i am so sorry and kind of piggyback off everybody when we're talking about um system six which is instructional feedback and professional learning we've heard a lot from kylie about the quantitative data and when we're talking about system system six we're not only talking about quantitative data we're also talking about the qualitative data and one of our qualitative um all of our qualitative data is housed in west stone right now and um our principals and our admin teams at this point have done over eight thousand roughly around 8

119892 observations and feedbacks right now with our teachers so that way when we are in our reality checks they get to explain that qualitative information to us because we are presenting the quantitative information to them so those are our checks and balances we get to see the numbers on top of the fact that they get to explain what they're seeing with their qualitative data i don't want to put you on the spot under leaving a little bit can you are there have you had the time or have you met with your principals so talk about some of the trends you're seeing around the practice so we know curriculum has been like at the center of everything that we do but it's what's written what's taught what's assessed are there trends that you've been able to

120capture and that would help lead us with our professional development so that you can share you wanna go first on the league that's great man i know you're saying something really great right now but you kind of may want to take off with you but so i was going to say that in our review of friends thank you um what i was going to say is that you can really see across in some of our informal initial feedback from principles we can see that there is a high level of attention to let's say the social emotional learning environment a lot of the principles have talked about the way in which they see relationship building happening in the classroom space on the flip side there are areas for opportunity um the focus on standards the objectives

121of those lessons how do we really accelerate the learning that's happening in the classroom these are just some a few of the trends that are emerging um these circle back to you know the way in which they're planning together and has allowed for principals to start to see the the instructional needs that are happening and how we can then inform pd as a result of that and i'd like to say just piggyback just a little bit um it's just the fact that right now like you're saying by them playing together and having that planning opportunity one of the things that our our principals are definitely seeing is the fact that they're being on pace with our lessons we're seeing a good pacing that everybody's kind of keeping up with the pacing guides and it's coming

122from working together and being coached by our principals do you have any data on um i should have any data about intervention so i know we're speaking about tier one tier two tier three uh supports are is there have you all and you have it it's okay um we'll get to that have you identified any um trends around what interventions were so providing uh in the classroom for teacher for students around two or three that you may see consistently i don't have a comprehensive analysis i do know that many principles that focus on small group instruction as part of their intervention strategy so i do know that um in our recent review of their um what their what's emerging i don't have anything comprehensive right now but i do know that small group instruction has

123been a part of what the building coaches have been focusing on as well as getting support from the types of strategies that the instructional um content facilitators have also provided some support around small group instruction and how to accelerate what are the strategies that are being used in the classroom okay thank you so i just wanted to build on what you had addressed dr horton i think that was part of my question is were there trends around especially around best practices emerging from these reality checks and i think as we move forward it would be great to have regular updates about what are the trends and i really like the idea of individual school leaders meeting to talk about their school data and what's working in one school can that be transferred to other schools

124right so opportunities for that kind of data and idea sharing um so i would love updates about what are the emerging best practices that we're trying to um seed in in all the other schools and then the other thing i guess i was curious about um is now that students are back in school you know half the students about half the students are back in person and half are remaining online with those unit assessments and and smaller blocks of assessments could we have enough data at the end of the spring to see if there is any significant difference between the online and um in person because i know that was a huge concern and that you know a lot of people assume that online was was far inferior and things like that so i'd just

125be curious to know if we'd have enough data at the end of the spring to compare the learning of those two groups so these are both excellent points and i want to give them both justice so i want to start with the first part of your your wondering which is related to how do we foster those kind of network learning opportunities within the schools um this is really kind of a hope that we have for these practices um and in fact we're already seeing it take root even though this is a very this is the first year we're doing this um we've been able to foster connections between schools where something has worked really extraordinarily well especially related to schools addressing how to create increase inclusive opportunities for their students with disabilities we had several

126schools that were really um remarkable in the amount of change that they had been able to accomplish for their students to be able to provide them with more opportunities in the least restrictive environment and we were able to kind of connect those practices um for the learning and uh the the the um ongoing improvement for other schools that we're trying to do similar work and so we're already seeing that um happening organically we'd like to make sure that that is fostered more um intentionally as well and so yeah and then i will put it for reports so that we can see that there's you know that kind of um a fact or impact yeah great thank you yeah no problem um related to the other question about what can we do to understand and analyze

127different student experiences who were in different um you know learning environments and had different opportunities i think that's a really important question we also need to do some quantitative analysis of the data from this year to really understand in the fall we did multiple different analyses of our assessment data to make sure that it was consistent reliable and that it was effectively measuring um in in relation to because we were implementing the assessments remotely which we had never done before we wanted to make sure those assessment results were meaningful and were reliable and so we conducted several analyses of that um i think that we are going to be doing a lot of applied internal research and analysis of these different um the data that we've collected this year to really better understand student outcomes

128um and so certainly we will take that into that is already part of i think what we hope to better understand um you know and and to learn from i will also say that we've had some internal conversations about some of the practices that have been implementing this year implemented this year that were really successful in terms of supporting and fostering connections with students that we don't want to forget right the pandemic was was a terrible crisis that we we faced in this nation and in our community um but there were also things that happened during this period that were new opportunities for our students and our families to connect and engage with their schools and with their educators we don't want to lose those powerful positive lessons we want to make sure that we

129maintain those lessons learned and continue to include them in our practice even when we're all able to get all students back um fully in our schools and so i think there's tons of learning um and and work to be done well i look forward to hearing more thank you so i think i heard a focus on a number of shifts in practice and i want to try to summarize them and then i have a follow-up question which is i heard you know the focus on applying the universal screeners three times a year in order to improve tier one and and be more specific with the tier one instruction and tier one instruction is for for everyone right um that we are doing going into greater depth as a institution in analyzing this data on a

130regular basis not just for instruction in classrooms but also for consideration of our instructional leaders in the building um increasing levels of observation and support and i know we also made the shift to um having you know more specific and um greater amounts of professional development with our mondays um and we also added the instructional coaches to each of the buildings last year yeah we made that shift this school year we made the decision last year correct so we have like a lot of metrics of change that it sounds like we are investing in um our tier one instruction and that also will translate to tier 2 and tier 3 interventions um i we also had the previous year the focus on the seven priorities um and prior to that we had um the strategic

131plan and we also were leaning heavily into relying on the early literacy framework for seeing improvement and um our outcomes and accelerating um learning for our black and brown students so i i hear that there are metric measures of um growth opportunities and then plans that are being put into place to pursue those growth opportunities and then we also have a pandemic um i am curious what now with with the data that we have and and having had a year of being able to do reality checks with quantitative and qualitative data what is our theory of change that we should be looking for data indicators as a board to measure how we are accelerating learning for black and brown students um because i will admit that it is heartbreaking every time i see this data

132that i i know does not capture the full aptitude of our students with marginalized identities and i will shout out that i was really excited to see that there was some anti-racist data at shoot some data that was not predictable um by by race and so that was really exciting to see and i'm curious if um there is learning there as sula was mentioning if there's learning there for other folks and we saw that really exciting data out of acc a couple years ago for for black students and i'm just curious what our theory of change is we've certainly seen a lot of um shifts in in practices but i would like to see the shifts and outcomes too as i i'm sure we all would um if i could just add on you i

133think what you described is part of what um i think we've been looking to achieve is some type of a comprehensive movement in a direction towards uh transformative change i mean we've certainly had um a number of initiatives and attempts and starts and stops i think what what we are engaging in now is somewhat of a doubling down in some practices that are not new not um within themselves uh capable of of helping us to transform this um disproportionality that we're seeing but i do think it speaks to a comprehensive plan within our miracle system within and speaking specifically to a system to support the different mechanisms needed and changed what i'm hearing tonight are a number of um actions towards instructional leadership towards practice with instruction instructors uh towards a tighter framework on what

134is written taught and assessed uh essentially for me that means removing excuses right so i think you know in the past couple of years uh i've noted that there are a number of things that we have going for us as a district and yet we are kind of stuck in this um hamster wheel so to speak and part of what i think has been very helpful is that there's now this comprehensive plan to absorb all of these different changes i think the professional learning model that we rolled out this year one was to acknowledge the the wealth of talent that we have in the district but also trying to acknowledge the need to differentiate um to support the different levels of capacity that we wanted to see across um our buildings i still think we

135have a ways to go in terms of consistent applications with fidelity um but i think what what this team is attempting to do is to remove some of the um the fuzzy areas away from and distractions away from our building leaders away from our teachers trying to streamline for some efficiencies and ensuring that our supports are coordinated in a way that is not a distraction not a disruption but is an assist and and a um and a shared um understanding of the direction that we want that we want to go in so i can't articulate a specific theory of change just yet it screams for our steps moving forward for putting all of these pieces together in our next phase of our strategic plan work one of the things i'm working on now has been

136kind of developing an rfq or rfp so request for proposal or quote um i don't want to uh engage in any process that kind of over surveys our community any further than what this pandemic and what this virtual world has somewhat resulted us in we've had to kind of find out and check on each other at a distance or through you know different means um so i'm really looking to partner to some with someone who can respect what we've attempted to do and help us really develop a quality assurance system around all of the different audits and walks and and um initiatives that we have had the the fortune of putting in place but now we need to build something that's a little more coherent if i if pressed on a theory of change i

137think it's something that we alluded to two to three years ago around elmore's instructional core and really spending time thinking about teacher content student and the relationship there within um and spending time ensuring that our resources supported our building leaders in their instructional leadership building a support around them so that their schools could function in ways that were still safe healthy happy places for kids and or teachers i think we also would be remiss if we did not talk about teacher efficacy as a huge piece to um really understanding and embracing the power of what can happen when when strong teachers are are in classrooms with students and so i think we've done some um pretty extensive reflection and examination of all that we have put in motion in the district and now it's about

138um continuous improvement program evaluation and really monitoring and making adjustments uh on some things that that relate to building capacity um ensuring systems for collaboration are in place um student agency and voice i think the panorama survey this year really getting a sense of students from grades fifth through eight's perception of you know educators and leaders who have been trained in equity and and been made aware of belonging and and supports to hear students perspective has been very important so we've got some some newer things to really kind of consider but i would say more so than anything is trying to really just coordinate those resources into a forthcoming strategic plan because instead of us starting from ground zero we're kind of we we're we're on the verge of really getting some traction and so

139we want to make sure that we invest ourselves in a process that doesn't take us to ground zero but looks at where we are where we've been and where we're heading and does that in a real coordinated fashion so i feel like i said a lot and it probably wasn't as coherent as i would have intended but we're doing some stuff yes as i saw your hand and then joey uh well trash i need to get out of my head because literally you just i had a whole section of notes and questions and you just addressed most of them so thank you um but you know i think what i want to drill in on is the this i it seems like the work that we've been doing by building has been really important for

140us to understand kind of where strengthstone challenges are but i that differentiation for our educators in this next phase that elevating and escalating the skills of the teachers who are doing it right and using them as coaches and mentors um because we do have some people who are having phenomenal progress and so i think where this intersects for me kylie with the data is i know we don't always see it by school drilled down that way and by teacher but i hope that somebody is seeing it by school and by teacher so that we can say here's where we need to get as many people connected with this excellent educator as possible and get the mentoring and coaching going and then here's where we need some real capacity building and support and accountability for educators

141because as we look at this data my guess is year to year we have some teachers who are in the highlight column and some educators who are continuing to struggle and need more need more tools to be able to do what some of the other teachers are doing so i hope that from a from a district level that that you all are figuring out ways to best differentiate that professional development and support now that it now across the district when we have kind of the clarity within buildings that maybe we didn't have a few years ago we we would argue also that it really builds off of how our school leaders are able to really support the principles beyond the evaluation system the evaluation system has value and i don't want to denigrate that but

142i will say that the coaching and the instructional leadership in terms of really giving consistent feedback um to teachers and teachers ask for you know in talking with meg that's a big ask and so the thing that we prioritize this year which you've heard a lot about which is really building that muscle that was not really developed around weekly daily feedback around instruction you know instruction is really argued to be a leading indicator for outcomes and achievement and so to everything that's been said we could look at the data in a sense of what's hap what what we can predict what the data will tell us based on what we start to see in our instructional rounds and our instructional domain and that's where really the change is going to come where principals then start

143to really develop their coaching skills which is i would argue across the board and principles with mitchell is an undeveloped skill that we have within our system of like how do you really coach and support teachers beyond the evaluation system so i i appreciated dr green's summary there because i think she did bring it together but i would say that part of that is i would just add to us today that the the coaching of where those differences are in life really is a high priority for our principles and connecting that then to a school improvement planning process and the professional learning that has to happen to accelerate that work and figuring out how we leverage the talent across district right it may not always be that you have the right coach and mentor support

144in your building from another educator who's doing it well but maybe the third grade teacher at another school can really give better resources and support to third grade teachers across the district so i don't i don't know how you know where we are in the phase of that work but i we do have a lot of talent here so it's not that we have to go outside always to get the best um you know the best curricular the best instructional tools we have people who are doing it really well but i know that sometimes our are functioning by building by building decentralizes some of those things to the point where we don't get to to take advantage of the things in other buildings so just making sure that's part of our larger district vision that

145is actually been something that we uh kind of pump the brakes on this year for obvious reasons um are two things i'm excited to see us move forward next school year um instructional rounds um which we really want to leverage that as a resource for teacher teams to um i think we've made tremendous gains in terms of deprivatizing our practice and it and making it okay to you know um let my practice be seen and learn from um and i think that you know a practice like the instructional rounds led by teachers to to peer observe and see what each other are doing is one way that that happens in buildings across because you're talking about from building a building you know sometimes the kindergarten teachers don't know what the third grade or vice versa

146so even within the same building sometimes that's kind of a nebulous mystery uh that's unfolding and then the other piece would be um what they're called collaborative um ccd so collegial collaborative visits under leave and i a few years ago started on kind of these consultancy protocols with principals so that they could really kind of unpack and share um some problems of practice but also some successes and some some solutions for one another and so um we see that as some some pretty um important starts and stops it's funny to be at a place where you can see two to three years of things that you've been doing and how it just continues to build on each other in small ways um it's not yet a tidal wave but we know that we've invested in

147some learning some partnerships and some investments to really try to capitalize on certain practices and so those ccvs i haven't decided yet if i kind of want them in a feeder pattern or if i want them in say some apples to apples kind of comparisons but really giving leaders and teachers opportunities to to see each other in action that's really a next edge of growth for us um and and if you know the zoom world has taught us anything is that you know we might as well look and learn from from each other um and so we know and that was one of our biggest obstacles historically right was that we couldn't get in each other's buildings because of sub limitations or whatever else so i hope we capitalize on the technology that we've had

148to use this year to figure out how we could have um stronger collaborations across buildings even even if it's now an educator's recording their lesson and somebody's watching it not live and giving feedback um or being able to see what the you know particularly as we talk about some of these curricular shifts and around equity right let's see how the teacher you know at kingsley in third grade is addressing the um you know black lives matter curriculum and use that as a tool and a template for other third grade teachers if we have somebody who's knocking it out of the park so i'm excited with both what we've been able to invest in professional development and the plc's this year because of the structure and maybe us being able to reimagine some of the ways

149that we thought we had to observe each other previously that we now know we can use other tools so thank you i just want to express an appreciation for this conversation um i think you know we've had lots of conversations about um kind of piecemeal conversations about how one program or one curriculum or one assessment or another might help to accelerate learning opportunities and close the the gap and opportunity for our most marginalized students however i really appreciate us being able to have this conversation about comprehensive systems changes that um not theoretically will make an impact but that are actually occurring um and that need to be rolled up into um some more singular quality assurance um reflections but i really appreciate the the level of um thought and the theoretical underpinnings of the conversations

150that we're having about what's you know school looks like and i think um i appreciate hearing the shift and how we are really leveraging the talents in our district to to a greater extent right like leveraging our school leaders as instructional leaders um you know leveraging our educators as coaches and mentors and you know collegial support social emotional supports to one another um you know as a as a former teacher who was a perpetual new teacher when i was teaching um these are the kinds of systems that i would have dreamed of having the support of and so um i i really appreciate the extent of this conversation and i i do feel hopeful for our most vulnerable learners um you know black and brown students students with iep students with who are who have

151free and reduced lunch um who on the at and above grade level charts we're not achieving at the the levels that we know that they are capable of and that their them and their families are investing their their time and energy to to achieve um any other questions or comments colleen joey you had your hand up earlier did you still have uh inquiry yeah i think a lot of it's been captured in the conversation and you know i just want to go back you know i remember kylie when you redid this report a couple years ago it didn't have a lot of this life that this report has you know you start out with a lot of positive stories you start out you know terence was talking about the you know the um the qualitative

152information and it's that's the that's the life of the schools right that's the that's what sews the relationships together and i think it's more important now than ever to remind people that those things exist and those people exist and those experiences are happening in our buildings with our people and so thank you for for capturing it the way that you have um the entirety of it so i i preface there before i get to the like ah what you know what is this conversation about you know for me and you know the i look back at the past uh four years and i think about the work we've done with the equity work and we've invested in training all of our adults with beyond diversity and seed and our data point at the time or

153that i was introduced to at the beginning was our high suspension rates for for black and brown students and that exclusionary practice and one of the outcomes that we looked for in our uh training of the adults and to the equity work and restorative practices in our buildings was to keep kids in the building so they can be available for high quality instruction more right and when i think about some of the stuff that we've been doing the past you know a couple years you know stacy's up against a new set of research for uh foundational skills and that's like rocking the primary literacy world which is a high need area for us we're revamping with new resources new programs middle school math with the same vision to try to lessen the predictability of race

154and student outcomes as they go through it and i wonder where the space is here for a type of program evaluation that isn't site specific that isn't teacher-specific um right where we have these holistic approaches attacking the entirety of a grade level or a section of our population to report out on where we are in that journey and i i go back to the example of the the equity work we started by training the adults like you know bringing in education the data point for suspensions was still there we get into restorative practices which is still about training adults um to try to change behavior and the data was still there and eventually we had a vision for data getting better and suspension rates come down and um you know i would still love to

155see in the strategic plan world dr green you know here's our plan for the next five years as we try to tackle these practices institutionally with expected data points along the way that we can then in this report report out on are we with that target or not are we ahead of it and if if we are great if we're not here's why we think not right knowing that those goals might be beyond the scope of reasonable prediction but but it comes from a place of we you talk about i want to celebrate our teachers but i also want to realize that education is something where people stay in a similar place for a long time and research has changed what we know about teaching reading right so how do we get to our educators

156to help them to learn better and do better with what we know is now out there right and i think that's what i'm looking for future you know i think uh i got with from this report what i expected um which was lots of good stories similar data to what i expected and wanting um to have a discussion about institutionally how we can do better but i i would love to see where that fits into both the strategic plan for the board but it has to obviously be paired with uh program uh alignment and your ability to track that progress and have a vision for it forward if that makes sense yes thank you thank you joey um did anyone else have any questions or inquiries about the accountability and achievement report okay um thank

157you kylie thank you everyone for um taking the time to compile this and share with us i think you know it would be useful for us to continue talking about how we monitor how we're going to have ongoing discussions about the systems changes and our growth targets and how we will um report out on that in a in a public fashion um because we want to honor the amount of work that it takes to compile a report like this and [Music] have those conversations earlier on rather than um once we we received the final final um work so thank you all um i do want to move on to our last discussion item um anya i just had a really quick comment to make um i know that since we changed the reporting format it

158would be helpful if there was some sort of way to find out if parents and community members are actually finding the changes helpful um i don't know if that's you know every time there's a gain of access to the to the file um you know or just i i know that everyone surveyed out but i guess i would like to know are these are these changes in reporting especially the school ones are they helpful to the school communities and you know i just i think it it would it would be helpful to know um if and get some feedback um maybe incorporated with some other you know some other information gathering system that we get from families um thank you uh i agree um wholeheartedly right we're we're doing this work um to to support

159the community and we want to make sure you know when we re-envision this report we talked a lot about making sure that it was inclusive and meaningful and making sure that it was reaching everyone and i also want to just acknowledge although my department does a lot of work to put this report together this is really the collective work of everyone on this team but it also is uh there are a lot of people who contribute um you know our principals share uh the experiences of their schools our fantastic district translator has helped make sure that we have this report um in english and in spanish for all the different versions melissa is fantastic at helping us word smith um some of the the text into digestible amounts of information it really takes a whole

160host of folks i can tell you um rebecca that the anecdotal things that i've heard have all been positive i think that i've heard from school leaders that they've been able to use this report in different ways in their school community there's always room to improve though and there's always room to grow and further develop and i think the the timeline in particular is an area um to to improve um and and we'll continue to learn about uh how people are using it i i do agree with dr green you know we don't want to over survey the population we've had a lot of um requests for information and feedback this year but i will say my door is always open i want to hear from you all um and so uh please um take

161advantage of sharing your voice and letting us know um your thoughts and feedback so thank you very much for raising that really important point thank you thank you both um i would like to move us on to the next and final discussion item for our working board meeting um beatrice and melissa can you share with us about the calendar the draft calendar yes and i think melissa is going to share her screen yeah i will be interested go ahead and get started so we just had a couple of um slides that we wanted to just walk you through very quickly um to support the board memo and actually this conversation is very um timely because we just talked about all the important work that needs to happen and in order for that work to happen

162you have to have a sound academic school calendar so um that's really the goal as we're preparing the school calendar is to have a calendar that supports um instruction and to the best of our ability that also meets the needs of our community so i'm going to start with uh melissa if you want to scooch there thank you so we have a few objectives we need to make sure that our calendar is of course in alignment with what's required under illinois school code so we do need to make sure that we have 176 days of instruction one thing i just want people to keep in mind is that our school calendar does also inform our work calendars and so that does not say that that the contractual obligations drive the school calendar it just it's

163simply a note for people to be aware of because there's an impact but again the goal is to have a sound academic calendar and then if it has an impact in other areas with bargaining groups then we would of course have to address that with them we did try to make sure that we have engagement from our school community when looking at the different types of days that we may have an observance or breaks also looking at our alignment with the district 202 calendar that's something that we've tried to maintain some consistency with even though we've gotten away a little bit from the start date we've been trying to make sure that we have some consistencies with with our breaks and also just thinking about the impact that covet has had on our district this

164year and trying to make sure that the calendar we're bringing forward um especially because it's a little later than typical that there aren't that there's not going to be a significant amount of change um for this upcoming school year listen you want to move to the next slide yeah thanks beatrice so um as she had mentioned we did do some community engagement around our calendar planning to uh inform development so we did do a calendar survey at the direction of the board uh back last spring actually um and into the fall and so we had a survey available in english and spanish for two weeks uh earlier in march we had just over 2 700 total respondents um as you can see the breakdown of our respondents for the survey we're mostly parents and caregivers

165um we know that you all took in a lot of data as part of the last presentation but we did want to make sure that the results to the survey um were available for board review and also for community uh review and full transparency so those have been included in the board packet um i will say that while all of the we very much appreciate all of the individuals who took time to respond to the survey and to share their feedback um we did find that none of the responses were overwhelmingly in favor in sort of one direction or another enough to really sway our planning and make a big change to the calendar at this point in the year um but again those are available in the board packet and happy to take any

166specific questions on those we also did convene a calendar committee so we did invite representatives from all five of our bargaining groups in the district as well as parent representatives from abc bpac and the pta council participate along with school and district administrators so we were able to resu to review that survey feedback together uh as well as look at some options for next school year um i will say that we did have a pretty deep discussion around the potential of starting school a week earlier um it was a conversation that i think a lot of um committee members were receptive to to our parents our staff but there were just some logistical challenges with doing that at this point in the year and the proximity to the the start of the new year um

167that was uh largely in relation to you know summer camps our district program summer programming has already been planned we have permit applications for the summer um starting school any earlier than the date that we are proposing um would require uh impact bargaining with uh our our district 65 educators council so there were just a number of challenges in addition to summer work projects going on it was just difficult to move um at this point in time but it was something that uh the group was receptive to further discussing um you know the impact of that and and what benefits and and challenges may need to be worked through um i will say that the calendar that we are bringing forward this evening um is the calendar that was uh recommended by our committee so

168i did include the calendar at a glance at this slide it may be a little bit difficult to see it is available in the board packet and will also be posted on our website tomorrow so our first school that we're proposing for k-8 students um i will mention the jh early childhood center sets their calendar based on our calendar um and just in accordance with their grant requirements and and such so the day that we're proposing is wednesday august 25th 2021 um we are proposing our first day of school on a wednesday and that is what we have historically uh done when there are five mondays in the month we've started on the fourth wednesday of the month and um that is largely in response to um just adhering and upholding our contract with our

169district 65 educators council um we are in agreement as beatrice mentioned uh for our holidays and winter break so our winter break that we are proposing is december 24th through january 7th um we do recognize that's just a little bit challenging the way that it falls with everything being a little bit later this year and so taking a full week in january rather than an additional weekend in december um that is an alignment with what the high school did approve and our decision is you know really thinking about our families and that many of them um do have children in both districts so potentially doing a different break could be um problematic for a decent population of our families um and the last day of school is uh june 6. so again as beatrice mentioned

170that's 176 days um everything else is pretty much the same in terms of um historically observed days by the district and something that we took into consideration as a result of our our survey feedback so in terms of the next steps uh we will be bringing this draft calendar to the board on april 26 um for hopefully for approval and then our work will continue melissa and i will be convening the calendar committee again in the spring we when we met with the committee they felt that getting back together in may would be a good time so that we can start planning for the 2022-2023 school calendar and our hope would be that we would bring that to the board actually sometime in in the fall so that if there are some more if there

171are some significant changes to the calendar from the way we've been doing in the past it gives our our district and our community time to know what those changes may be and any logistical challenges that we can problem solve and work through them um ahead of time and so our hope again is to have the committee meet in the spring bring forward a calendar in the fall that can be considered by the board um and really just to con continue the conversation so that we can make sure we are meeting the needs of the district by having a school calendar that supports the work as well as professional learning for educators so our work will continue and we'll have the 2022-2023 calendar available in the fall and i think we're just going to open it

172up to uh questions and conversation now yeah joey just to be clear our in our contract with our district educators council school cannot begin before august 20th correct right it says that if we were going to do that beforehand we would get together to do some problem solving around that okay but that that's why after the august 20th date we have the two and suit days and then the first day of school right yes have we ever started in the recent past before august 20th um i can't think of a time uh i've been in the district almost 17 years and i i think that's past the recent past well past and recent past i can't think of a time when we've started prior to no okay thank you so historically we um reviewed the

173calendar for the next year along with the draft calendar for for the following so like two years calendar um i appreciate that you mentioned we will get the following years draft in the fall um [Music] i think we'll we'll definitely need it pretty early on um for the board's consideration but also for our community to consider how they need to um think about their planning um summer programs and um and as such um i think we talked at length uh last year about the fact that this calendar has the last day um falling on a monday um and we talked at length about alignment with the high school and so i appreciate that we were able to solve that problem and get the the breaks to to fall in alignment with the high school and

174um is i guess in the line in in connection with uh joey's question about starting before the 20th um how have have we in recent past had final days that fell on mondays and how has our community been able to accommodate that have we had really low attendance on those final mondays um like how does that how does that work um i have to go back and look someone else looks like they were gonna answer but i'd have to actually go back and look um on you to make sure i'm getting that information and to see if we can get what the student attendants look like on the last days of school for the last few years i know we've definitely had school the last day of school fall on a monday before because i

175always bring it up and complain about it and i know one thing that we always talk about when we do that is that we do have those uh emergency days built in in case of inclement weather we have to close school i don't know if this is really the appropriate place to talk about talk about it but i do wonder now that obviously we have been doing school remotely for a year um more than a year and i know the state allows for remote learning days in louis taking snow days but you have to apply for i guess my question is going forward do we anticipate that instead of um closing school if there's inclement weather do we think we will use sort of this infrastructure that we've built around remote school so we wouldn't

176have to necessarily add on those emergency days i would say ideally yes i would love to do that but i will want to work with with our committee as we look to design it but i do believe that would be the best direction to go moving forward and also i i don't think isbe has changed the guidance yet with respect to the school calendar i think we're still required to have those five emergency days um so that is something that you know we want to still plan for in our calendar and then in the event that they change that guidance then we can adapt it i think the the monday ending also sunni was different before we had to change and have a full day of school um there was a time where it was

177just an hour on the last day of school and i think like a monday that's just an hour is different than a full day and it's changed some things yeah but i know that even since then we have had the last day fall on a monday before it's not ideal obviously but i also in the past i think there have been other days that i felt like we could take those as attendance days to avoid having that last day fall on a monday with this calendar i'm not sure that i see that opportunity right i also had a question melissa about um on the on the calendar itself the one that goes on the website the one that's miniaturized on here for us i think that would be a really opportune place to put the

178new start time for middle schools yes all over because there's other times on there but like hey this is when early release dismissals are and by the way school starts at a different time too um again i don't know aesthetically where to fit that in but i haven't seen any communication yet and um people are planning definitely yeah and um terence um and anda leave and stacy and i met with all of our middle school principals last week to discuss that and there will be information coming out starting this week but as you mentioned it's really got to be a steady stream and really putting that in all places and you know communicating in every way we possibly can think about it um so we can definitely add it to the school calendar and joey

179you um brought up a point i did forget to mention and um my notes is that we are still finalizing the trimester dates um and working with the cni and rad departments just to figure out based on um you know student schedules and assessments and such so when we bring that back to the board we will have those assess or those trimester dates listed on there is that a necessary component for this calendar for people you know i'm not sure that it's necessary in terms of approval but i do know that there's a lot of planning um related to those trimester dates for um again our cni and our rad teams i don't know if anybody else could speak to that better than i can but um good to include on that at a glance

180because it's just a one-stop shop for all of that information so this is a very good suggestion i was just saying you could take that off if the trimesters are internal and dates that are important you could put the middle school times there for a while and put the trimesters on later when you've got them yeah well we can be creative and getting it on there for sure i'm bowing out of aesthetics now so um i have a question that i think i've imposed posed internally before but that i'd like for us to discuss in this uh public platform which is um you know we had as a system um a lot of time this school year built in for plc's and pd and um the calendar that we're proposing for next school year um

181goes from having that weekly time to um reflect and collaborate and deepen practices and learning to a monthly allotted amount of time and i'm just curious how as a system we will plan to maintain some of the richness and relationships and learning that have been established over this year um with that weekly time with that shift to doing that monthly well i'll say this it definitely hurts to not be able to do that the team will tell you i was going to go about having more time to do it but when listening to the committee you know it's not a dictator world we want to hear what the committee had to say so and in the surveys so we decided this year's next year has been enough changes so we wanted to give it a

182run for the structure that we have but within our schedules school schedules which most school districts will have in our middle schools especially they will have schedules that would allow plc's to happen within the course of the day and also there are elementary schools that do that do it very similar so ideally we want to uh as we're talking about scheduled master scheduling for the new year um trying to be creative uh as creative as possible to find that time it's going to be tight and we we also know that the way we currently do our schedules now i'm just going to say this part schedule should be done before we do budgeting and i just that has just not been a normal thing so position control has been hard so that impacts how we

183find time within a day for our teachers to be able to have plcs and things of that nature so um we're gonna work quite a bit we're going to work pretty hard to uh to get something done within this course of the school day i i think the principals now also will will uh the one i've been to the schools and they're telling me about the value of the plc's for their school so i know they would be a lot more they're going to be a lot more interested and committed to finding time great that's wonderful to hear and i'll just highlight that um i think it was about three years ago that sunny and i went with the team of some of you all here as well as some folks from dec to a

184teachers union reform network meeting that was focused on social emotional learning and plc's and that was a really valuable opportunity for us to you know be in a multi-disciplinary learning space and i'm encouraged to hear that we have been able to make that space and our thinking about how to continue to support it even moving back to um the schedule that we were working with prior to the pandemic um are any other questions about the calendar from the board just a quick um i just wanted to have a quick kudos to the team for engaging abc bpac and different again different parent groups as well as other community members i think as we move forward on any decision making right i think this is part of my day job is uh i i do work

185around family community engagement at the state level but again whenever we can whatever opportunity we can when it comes to decision making around curriculum or calendars or what have you you know whenever we can partner with parents and have them as a partner at the table it's the best practice that i know you know again going back to a couple of meetings back and how the family doing game is going to bring in the dual capacity framework from care and math you know ultimately that's what we want to do is that we want to have um the voice of parents and particularly those parents who haven't been part of the conversations who don't really navigate have have had the resources to navigate the system to be part of the conversation like folks from deepak or

186abc uh you know that that to me is is a great example of how we should be moving forward when we engage community uh in regards to uh being partners in how we change outcomes for the better for all students particularly marginalized students and another thing to um you know kind of slightly related to the calendar i know many of our holidays are religious holidays that are observed right um i had seen a really great post on one of the parents facebook groups um around ramadan and uh just making sure that we uh again acknowledge uh those students out there who again and and again you know communicate with our teachers right in in for the sake of inclusiveness uh making sure that uh uh you know we we acknowledge that diversity as we move

187with poor with this equity work and celebrate uh um the uh um um just the diver the diversity that we have um you know culturally um again ramadan and i believe starts this week uh again we have uh again we have all types of folks so you know again we have folks who are trying you know asian immigrants as well as uh you know arabic folks so whenever we whatever we can do to uh acknowledge that um you know um within our communications uh and just put a little note maybe out in our fast five for instance uh again it's always good to see yourself right it's that for me that that piece around uh windows and mirrors right and we think about multicultural education is that you know we want to learn about our

188you know we want to see ourselves reflected uh you know in schools uh as well as while we're looking outside and learning about others uh whatever we can do to incorporate that in our communications uh around our calendars would be welcome thank you said well thank you melissa and beatrice for um preparing uh the presentation around the calendar and we'll look forward to seeing that on our um regular meeting agenda for approval later later this month um and thank you everyone for hanging in there for these important discussions this evening um with no further board no no further business before the board i'm going to adjourn our meeting this evening at 8 51 and