001okay i'll go ahead and start the webinar and we'll give ourselves a couple of seconds let me know when it's all set okay looks like we're ready to go so this is the january 25th 2021 regular board meeting for the district 65 board of education due to the governor's executive order suspending certain open meetings act requirements in order to comply with the state of emergency the district 65 board of education will be conducting virtual board and committee meetings i'll take roll call it is 707 pm hernandez here lindsey ryan here mendoza here hertha here help him present ken here tanya booty here this you get the next mission i do i'm sorry uh i moved that the board of education approved tonight's meeting agenda as presented second hernandez yes lindsey ryan yes mendoza yes cartha
002yes halpern kim yes tanya rudy yes motion passes seven zero all right so that moves us on to our district update with our high five all right so good evening in the tradition of celebrating hard work and exceptional performance i am pleased that in this new year we are able to continue recognizing our incredible d65 team for their efforts as part of our high five celebrating excellence in district 65 staff recognition program the high five staff recognition program provides us with a unique opportunity to publicly acknowledge the very hard-working members of our team and to engage our community in the important work happening in virtual and very soon in person classroom schools that can that's a hand clap everyone i would like to thank byland bank for their sponsorship of the program again this school
003year this allows us to generously recognize our incredible team members while keeping the program at no cost to the district or taxpayers with their sponsorship each recipient will receive a hundred dollar gift card and a frame recognition certificate as a reminder the nomination form is still open all members of our community staff students and parents are invited to submit a nomination via our online form located in district 65.net hi-fi and our fast five community newsletter is where it's posted i'm sorry additionally as we will have a joint board meeting in february four d-65 staff members will be selected to be honored for the month of march so please feel free to double up on your nominations for the month of january two amazing d65 employees are being highlighted tonight we have the player avert the
004pleasure of virtually welcoming maria and honoring matthew who unfortunately cannot attend this evening's event i will now share a little bit more about each of our nominees and will do a virtual round applause at the end this person that we're recognizing tonight the first one is very special to me this is uh this is my right hand and this is for maria venezuela maria actually serves as my executive assistant and served the d65 community for 27 years maria was nominated by fellow district 65 staff member sarri salt sarah salas who shared that maria has served the district for more than 25 years she has had a positive effect on her colleagues by stepping in to help when it's needed her dedication is evident and her willingness to go the extra mile to support the district
005she is a real team player and i can vouch for that maria i can wholeheartedly say that everything that sarah has shared is beyond the shadow of a doubt true i want to thank you for all of the help that you that you have offered me daily from managing my ever growing and evolving schedule to keeping keying eyes on multiple tasks and assignments to ensure that i in our community do not skip a beat maria you are an exceptional colleague and a phenomenal executive assistant thank you for your commitment to district 65 and for supporting your peers next we will highlight mr matthew evans special education teacher at rice education center as i shared earlier unfortunately he could not attend tonight's celebration however hopefully he will view the recording of tonight's meeting and hear all
006the wonderful things that we have to share mr evans has been a part of d65 family for five years and was nominated by his colleague fellow rights special education teacher janet wright jenna shared that matt evans is a teacher of high caliber he is open friendly humble and helpful to all colleagues and students mr evans is never too busy to share his technological expertise with everyone he is creative in scheduling and devising documents that are useful to all teachers mr evans is an excellent classroom teacher and provides a model for structure lesson planning and delivery of instruction he has a wonderful kind way with students who are having a rough day and is often seen listening to students and offering counsel in his quiet calming voice i highly recommend mike matt evans for recognition of
007his role in district 65 thank you mr evans your high five level professionalism is not only reflective in the way in which you meet your students need and offer guidance to your peers but that same level of professionalism is a standard that i hope all of our staff members strive to emulate across district 65. my favorite part of the evening is this one it's time for some virtual high fives on the job well done your certificate your certificates will be sent to your buildings when you return in person and your gift card will be sent electronically let's give let's give some electronic and virtual high fives thank you on behalf of the school board and our entire leadership team we want to thank you thank you for always putting the needs of your students and
008families first can i get a round of applause for these incredible individuals does anyone have anything that they would like to share i would just like to say a personal thank you um it's lovely to be able to personally extend that gratitude and appreciation to you maria and um matt i hope you all you you receive our virtual appreciation and acknowledgement as well i want to note that in both nominations um the mention of um trust and collaboration and ability to rely on one another which i think if you know kovid19 has taught us nothing else it's the intangible value uh that we offer to one another in community and to be able to sustain that um while we're remote and still let our team members know that we care and that we're here to
009help is an incredible virtue and so thank you so much i'm glad that we have the opportunity to celebrate y'all thank you thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to be here and because there's i just wanted to share this i didn't have to but there's a family in me who will be really happy to have the gift card so thank you so much for helping me thank you maria your beautiful soul and thank you for joining us this evening matt if you are watching a recording of this meeting we thank you as well thank you i would also like to take this time um to kind of just share um with with the community and with our staff and with our board we have an agreement with our wonderful union with dec
010that's amazing it was over 20 bargaining sessions i want to say more like 23 to be exact uh that the union deck has really worked hard the teachers were in there working with us uh to make sure that we can come to an agreement with a with a beautiful plan to get our staff and most importantly our students back in school safely again thank you for that for everyone from us from the team on our side who was water bargaining and also for the dec members it was grueling and tiresome but together they stayed um it wasn't always an easy process but we they grinded it out and came up with a really good plan i would also like to say some of the things that is happening that's really our district we have favor
011i i'll use some of dr green's language um on monday this on this past monday we received a call from amita health to uh get our staff vaccinated so just last week we started with vaccines for staff for the first dose with an anticipation of getting stabbed so many staff members vaccinated every week until everyone who chooses who's returning to be vaccinated and then for those who cannot return we have plans to get them vaccinated as well so that is that is a really an honor and we're excited we thank amita health uh saint francis for coming through for us in the clutch that's extremely important uh and then i would also like to say this may not be well known but we are also providing child care for uh for for some of our
012staff who who reason couldn't couldn't why they couldn't return was because they had child care concerns so we've worked with um the ymca uh and beatrice davis has been working with them and they have a really good plan um to make sure that we can provide child care for for our staff who who want to return to but had those issues receiving child care our unions our teachers our staff our educators um we we thank you and we love you for your support and commitment to really uh making this a really great opportunity and then finally i would like to thank our medical advisory group there are there are quite a few individuals on that team but they have come through with information and knowledge that has really given me the confidence to say yes
013we'll open on february 16 and i thank each and every one of them their names can be found on our website and uh hopefully we will be able to get you'll get a chance to meet them and some of the forums that we have coming up uh this week with our staff and with our community again um i i really can't say anything better um than the information that uh february 16th we do plan on returning and because of our teachers we're able to do that and i hope families and and the community really respects and appreciates uh the work that everyone has put in for this so thank you thank you for um those superintendent comments um do we have any board comments this evening yeah um rebecca um yes so i just um
014that's all great wonderful news um thank you dr horton for sharing that news um i would like to take a moment however to express my condolences to our community on the passing of our educator um lasagna torres from washington who lost her life tragically and not only that i wanted to just take a moment to um express my condolence to all of our community members who have lost somebody we've lost a total of 104 of our community members the in these last 10 months and um i just wanted to take a moment and um some of those members are our parents um our relatives and so i just wanted to take a moment to express my sincere condolences to those who have lost somebody thank you i think joey and then sergio thank you anya
015um i i also wanted to echo dr horton's uh thanks to the medical advisory board um i got to join them for a couple of sessions where they just provided a lot of confidence to the district's plan to a lot of the work that had been done in preparing the buildings for whether it's the air filters or prepping the common spaces so that children can come and be successful and safe at school they provided a lot of information in terms of future metrics and decision making that the district can take into consideration should covid spike in our area they they provided a rationale for why we should look jointly at the macro data around us but also the micro data at each school site and again provided a lot of confidence for that and i
016just wanted to thank dr johnson dr ogbo dr renee dr robinson dr schrantz dr siglin dr soglin and dr wild and to the parents uh rebecca langan and maria morales who participated um because they're they they were a great working group um and while we have an opportunity to open up our schools um i just want to acknowledge that we have given many people the choice uh students and families the choice of whether or not they want to opt their children into the hybrid learning program i just want to extend thanks to our educators because we didn't have the opportunity to give our educators a choice um we were able to give our educators an environment that we mitigated for that we prepared for and planned for and put them in a position to be
017successful but it's going to require the execution of a plan and the best thing we can all do as a community parents and students alike is stick strictly to the plan wear a mask socially distance wash your hands that is the best thing for our teachers who are coming back into the schools and for our kids uh while everybody is getting vaccinated it will not be the time to loosen up on our behaviors in the environment just because uh school is opening and hopefully the community every school community can wrap around and take care of our kids and our educators until everybody gets vaccinated so we can continue to get through this together thank you thank you [Music] thank you uh board colleagues and uh president uh tanya budi and uh superintendent horton for the
018updates and uh and thank you for all our high five winners i mean again we're so proud and proud of you and all the work that you do on behalf of d65 students and families uh just wanted to had a couple of thoughts that i wanted to share one i just want to make sure that we acknowledge uh the parents and community members who've reached out to us as board members right in this very very difficult time and what we've heard a lot is that again we we all agree i think none of us are um here on this board can say that we we think that uh uh this is the best situation to be teaching children in right we oh i think everybody in this institution wants our children back uh you know
019just as bad as the folks who've reached out to us but at the same time we as a board i'm very proud of this board want to want to make sure that we're prioritizing equity and elevating the voices of folks who haven't been able to reach out to us who don't have a luxury to reach out to us through emails or they're trying to call call us or again really trying to prioritize you know the voices of folks who have been left out right because to be honest you know the loudest voices don't aren't necessarily the most representative and we all again want our kids back but we want to make sure that they're safe so i appreciate our superintendent uh in making sure that we got together the medical advisory board uh made up
020of different folks in our community in the medical community to to help us plan uh again i really i really appreciate their help and echo joey's sentiments in regards to [Music] helping helping us affirm our plans and how again we've been planning from the very get-go to make sure that kids come back safely um but at the same time again i just wanted to share that again there i would lo i want to ask community members who are reaching out to us to continue uh reaching out uh as we continue to try to deal with some of the pandemics that were here before the covert 19 pandemic and those are the pandemics of economic insecurity for a lot of our families access to quality public health and health in general for many of our marginalized
021families so again my ask is that again for families who are reaching out for their own kids to make sure that we're reaching out for all of our kids and then we again part over the reason why i ran to become a board member is because we did not have a voice my community didn't have a voice uh in these conversations because we one we didn't know how to navigate the system uh we're not sure how how to engage power uh but i've learned and but i need your help and we need your help so the folks who have reached out to us who've been upset with us who supported us too uh you know make sure that you stick around because we have so many battles to continue in regards to this equity work
022because this is a journey and again we are still we'll be dealing with a an economic pandemic and particularly that's impacting our most marginalized families we're going to be dealing with the public health access pandemic definitely a mental health pandemic right but to be honest i really think again give we know the research around children and children are resilient and they're as resilient as the adults around them right so we have to get together and talk to one another and communicate with one another as a community and meet each other you know in the middle to make sure that our kids are successful and they have the best outcomes possible you know once we return back to school so just wanted to put that out there again thank you for your patience thank you for
023your grace thank you for pushing us as a board to make sure that we're accountable to kids and in the community again this is what we signed up for again what things that i've read haven't been you know again the most favorable or happy or made me happy but hey that's what i signed up for that's what we signed up for and we're here to work for you so thank you for pushing us thank you for your patience and we all deserve grace all of us as we move forward uh beyond this pandemic and um i believe that's all i oh and just one more thing so then we will be having some virtual cafes so you can engage us uh so i wanted to invite the community out for their cafe uh spanish-speaking families
024i know my colleague rebecca and i will be having a a virtual cafe at 10 a.m all in spanish so we welcome you that's all i have said gail can i add that the spanish cafe will be translated into english for those who um are monolingual and need uh english translation um and our um english cafe will be translated into spanish as well so we will provide those translation services thank you said gio was there anyone else board colleagues that wanted to make comments this evening okay i just wanted to um one uh echo the comments made by my colleagues this evening and thank you rebecca for encouraging us to take a moment to pause there's a lot of grief in this pandemic that we don't have the opportunity to process in community and it's
025important that we do take those moments to remember and to to feel what we we need to feel as a community so thank you for calling attention to that um i wanted to also take a little bit of time this evening to call attention to the the yeoman's work that has gone into um re creating a reopening plan as we've alluded to a couple of times now um thank you to our administration thank you to our bargaining units thank you to our families and thank you to our kids our kids have been patient they have been adaptive they they have been creative thank you to everyone for all of the the work and effort that has been going that has gone into creating a plan that um in an environment that is unpredictable that can
026also create some predictability in some measures of safety given so much that is out of our control and without the the guidance that we deserve from our national governments we've had to figure this out locally and that's really required us to be collaborative to to be trusting to come at this work in good faith on behalf of the stakeholders that we all value and care for and represent um and so i have tremendous gratitude to you all for your creativity for your expertise and for your commitment to pulling together a plan that's representative of a broad scope of needs and and priorities it i know y'all have been working since the fall um it's it's evident the the amount of detail and intricacies and thoughtfulness in terms of stakeholders needs is evident and i look
027forward to hearing from our kids and families about their experience of um these plans in action um so we yeah we will have the opportunity to have the joy of you know children's laughter and squeals and conversations in our echoing through our hallways and classrooms again and that is um that's a gift to to them and that's a gift to all of us in our community thank you um i also just we're going to have the chance to dig into this early childhood report that is on the agenda this evening but i want to acknowledge um the the particular joy that i had in seeing um some of those positive kindergarten readiness outcomes um there's definitely some areas of concern and work for us to dig into and i won't deny that but [Music] five
028years ago it was difficult to talk about our early childhood programs in hopeful and confident ways and reading this report tonight was really heartening to see the impact that um [Music] investment in our children and families at a young age produces um in that kindergarten readiness outcome and that is the metric for closing the gap an opportunity to achieve that those early predictors of kindergarten readiness mean so much and um i'm really proud of of the the shift and looking forward to digging into that conversation but i wanted to specifically point that out in our in my comments tonight that our community has something to celebrate and something to be proud of in our investment in racial equity our investment in racial equity is an investment in people and in people's experiences and it is
029a gesture of love and care to our community to say that we believe in you we believe in you we believe that you are worthy of our investment and we know that when we invest you will show up and and you and and the outcomes will show and um no one has to prove that they are worthy they shouldn't have to um institutions should value everyone's humanity because everyone's humanity exists in our community so thank you for the work that has in the vision and the commitment to building equitable systems that has produced um [Music] opportunities for children to fulfill their true aptitude every child deserves that so thank you i think my comment was the last board comment before we move on okay so when we move on in our agenda to public comments
030um any member of the public wishing to submit a comment to be read at the january 25th 2021 board meeting was asked to email their comment to the board secretary karachi a at district 65.net by 5 pm this evening in adela i will turn it over to you to read the public comments that we receive we received two public comments i'll start with a comment from lee clifford she submitted a public comment to be read tonight dated january 10th dr horton and district 65 board when i read the latest email delaying the return of in-person learning yet again i was struck by how deeply the superintendent and board seems motivated by factors that have nothing to do with the well-being of our kids you have heard how dire the situation is from teams of local
031doctors pediatricians and mental health experts you have heard tales of children on the brink of suicide struggling to get out of bed and log into zoom formerly bright and engage students whose lives have fallen apart as a result of your decision to keep evanston schools closed for 10 months i want to be very clear adults and children in our community have gotten and will continue to get coveted you cannot prevent this but the mental and health crisis unfolding in our community is now squarely on your shoulders it is particularly galling this administration and board is allowing this to unfold because there is nothing new or developing about the science of safely reopening a school this has been known widely since the summer i and many others have been writing this to you repeatedly for the
032better part of six months if there is fear in the community about returning to school you and members of this board are partly to blame as recently as last month your board president was misreading illinois state data and sending emails alleging that schools were super spreaders she had to be overcorrected by a local doctor that was she was misreading the charts now 10 months into the pandemic you can see that elementary schools have not been a cause of covet clusters or increased community spread but have the members of this board publicly corrected the misinformation they had been spreading in the community it is your job as our leaders to seek out misplaced fear and to convince the community what the data has shown that schools can be operated safely to that end i call on
033this superintendent and board to seek out medical professionals for medical advice teachers and parents may have valuable insights but they are not medical professionals as we now know your 60 plus person district 65 return to school task force that met over the summer during a global pandemic did not contain a single doctor or mental health professional which is shocking i call on you to have your new medical advisory panel consist only of medical and mental health experts with knowledge of how to safely open schools and the dire warnings of our local medical and mental health professionals about what isolation and e-learning are doing to our kids it now becomes inexcusable to delay school by a month a few weeks even a few days beyond when they can safely open i call on you to reopen
034schools immediately here in january 2021 it is way past the time for your team's focus to be getting less than half of evanston's kids to school four days a week for two and a half hours a day now the focus must be figuring out how to get every child and teacher back in the classroom for five days a week for a full school day in fall 2021. what is your plan to make this happen i call on you to release a detailed plan to the community for a return of all students full-time to the classroom in fall 2021. dr horton i truly believe that along with your colleagues the superintendent of chicago new york and la schools districts that you fundamentally understand how devastating a year of e-learning has been to our kids the next
035many years of your life the lives of the members of this board and the lives of the parents in this community will be consumed by trying to make up the academic progress rebuild social emotional health and re-engage children harmed by the decision to keep schools closed for nearly a year it is time right now that you reverse course and do what needs to be done let our children learn and reopen evanston schools signed lee clifford the next statement we have is from holly hoffman she writes in an open letter to the school board the past several years in america have clearly and unfortunately exposed facts that many had come to deny systemic racism is sorry is invisible fuel-powering american society the past year sharpened that focus in ways too numerous to delve into here in
036short we currently stand at an intersection of racial intolerance and gross mismanagement of healthcare and education all of this results from intentional deconstruction of many layers of government starting at the highest level while many people used to think that the government worked from the top down many more people are now awakening to the importance of good governance from the bottom up when voting it is imperative that critical thinking citizens consider the impact of down ballot choices whether or not one has fully children boards of education are vital positions in creating solid communities good schools are foundation for good communities and a well-composed board of education makes the decisions that keep schools serving their communities equitably fairly and with the students at the center of all their decisions the district 65 board of education under the
037leadership of president tanya rudy and vice president bis lindsey ryan and in partnership with the district superintendent dr horton has been under an ongoing and unprecedented attack driven by ignorance and white supremacy paralleling the national rise in animus driven by ignorance and lies this attack has been largely elitist racist and sexist in nature it is disgusting and i for one cannot sit idly by and allow it to continue without comment board president tanya voody has over 20 years of experience as an educator curriculum developer grant writer community organizer and social rights activist she's put her bachelor's and master's degrees to work serving children and communities in need for her entire professional life and works tirelessly to steward the evanston school district through these tough times she has been unjustly attacked for working to do what
038is right and equitable in the district vice president lindsay ryan likewise holds bachelors and master's degree as a professor program director consultant curriculum developer and tedx talk presenter she works tirelessly to dismantle racism develop leadership and educational equity teams and create environments supportive of all races and sexual identities the disgusting attacks on her as a district 65 leader were brutally racist and homophobic intentionally flying in the face of all that she stands for superintendent dr horton was chosen for district 65 at a time when children of color were notably underserved in our schools his career experience over 20 years included teaching and serving as an administrator in chicago east st louis and kentucky schools developing numerous programs benefiting students of colors and districts where student populations were 98 black and annual budgets range from hundreds
039of millions to upwards of a billion dollars his career has focused on improving equity raising maps forest staff bias training teacher pipeline diversity expanding student advancement placement enrollment improving college enrollment and persistence among many others he is driven to develop he is driven to develop an environment where students of color and diverse cultural backgrounds are given a seat at the table of success here in evanston the entire board is working together to navigate these difficult times and to make difficult decisions about what is best not only for our students but our community as well even in a perfect world no single answer will ever suit everyone in the community and no single policy will ever serve everyone equally but it is patiently racist to demonize those who are using their combined skill set to serve
040and elevate those who have systemically and historically been underserved and mistreated in our community it is important to note that opportunity is not a pie a larger slice for someone who has had less of it does not mean a smaller slice for those who have already had more equity is about stacking the deck to help those in need of more assistance of re or resources get what they need to match others success this is true whether one is talking about racial sexual orientation financial educational or health considerations attacking the board and superintendent for doing their best and to make things happen is proof that we as a society still don't understand these basic principles it is in a word heinous we need black lives to be given the same chance to thrive that white lives
041have enjoyed for hundreds of years here in the united states black lives matter yet amid the ideological battle others are still willing to join the fray people like donald donna wang soo recently applied to run for district 65 board of education and offers a long resume of teaching and administrative work moving forward our district needs more board of education members with this kind of background like tanya would be lindsay ryan and lindsay ryan donna holds bachelor's and master's degree as well as multiple certificates from northwestern university we're all in this together and need to cease this endless aggression that energy wasted on hate would be so much better used to find solutions from everyone created creatively working together rather than enabling further racism and division thank you district 65 board of education members for all
042you do sincerely holly hoffman that concludes the public comments for tonight all right thank you yeah go ahead rebecca all right uh we're moving on to our consent agenda uh i move that the board of education except the recommendations outlined in the in the attached group motion and approve the following track movement appeals appointments leaves and separations dismissal of educational support staff december 2020 board of education meeting minutes destruction and the release of december closed session meeting minutes and recordings gift acceptance for dewey elementary school november 2020 list of bills and budget amendments and finally the october november 2020 treasurer's report second hernandez yes lindsay ryan yes mendenosa yes cartha yes helper yes kim tanya booty yes great the motion passes 7-0 sonny you have the next motion i moved at the board of education
043award the contract for the ejector pump replacement at dawes to adler plumbing and heating inc as presented second okay hernandez yes lindsey ryan yes mendoza yes kartha yes helper yes kim yes tanya buddy yes motion passes seven 7-0 i move that the board of education award the elevator repair at haven and king arts contract to d cursey as presented second i have a quick question before we do roll call um and actually i had this question about the plumbing as well but um we had talked a couple years back about looking for local specifically women and minority owned businesses to work on the smaller bids that we have as a district was there intentionality about making sure that smaller local entities had the opportunity to bid on these yes they were what we do whenever
044we have a bid going out we reach out to evanston naacp and let the folks there know that we have this big that we're letting out so that they can inform minority evanston based company to be able to respond to the people in this particular case for the ejector as well as the elevator we were trying to bundle it together to be able to get some economy of scale pricing but as it stood what ended up happening is for the ejector pump we only received we received four beds and the lowest bid was the one that we recommended now for the elevator repairs we we only received one bid so there were other people who showed up but only one bid was submitted so we try to engage local vendors to be able to to
045do the work but in this particular case the level of interest there just wasn't enough so okay do you know we can go ahead with the vault um hernandez yes lindsay ryan yes mendoza yes cartha yes hilton yes on your buddy yes all right and that brings us to uh the early childhood presentation all right dr dr spray i guess i wasn't expecting it to come up so quickly that looked like a really long agenda so any um do i have screen sharing rights yes okay i believe you said that out loud okay here we go all right good evening everyone i'm very honored to be here tonight to update you all on the work we have been doing towards the implementation of our strategic plan and share with you our students data that demonstrates
046the students response to this plan two years ago when i arrived at jeh district 65 kindergarten readiness data as measured by the illinois snapshots of early learning the isil showed that our students had been demonstrating readiness at an average rate of only 37 over the three years between 2016 and indicating an urgent need for a strategic plan to improve these outcomes in school year in school year 1819 the school and community engaged in the development of a three-year strategic plan to improve student outcomes and kindergarten readiness the plan was entitled equity and opportunity preparing our children for kindergarten and the world beyond and was presented to the school board on april 22nd 2019. the plan was intended to guide our major decisions and actions over the following three years we have moved quickly to ensure
047that our collective commitment to the plan was enacted through operational planning systems implementation and ongoing progress monitoring we made a commitment to share our progress regularly with the greater district 65 community and i'm excited to be here tonight to share the updates included in this report i thought it was important to review our school demographics i wanted to remind everyone that the demographics at the center are not like any other district 65 school one major point to draw everyone's attention to is our large special education population this is due to the fact that we are the only school in the district serving this age group only park school has one other pre-k classroom for students requiring very specialized special education supports all other students in the district with diverse developmental and learning needs attend jeh
048they are not dispersed amongst 11 other schools as will occur once these students begin kindergarten that unto itself necessitates that our school is designed and staffed more in the model of a therapeutic school the second thing i would like to point out is that each year an average of 70 to 75 percent of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch again this statistic is much higher than at any other district 65 school when i was hired at jeh there was an identified crisis in kindergarten readiness as measured by our students performance on the fall kindergarten isil assessment district 65 had not adopted the kids readiness assessment at the time so literacy assessments have been used to measure as the measure of readiness given the demographics of our school these data represented the beginning
049of what is referred to as the achievement cap gap and then an inequitable barrier to the future educational opportunity for our students we responded by developing our strategic plan over the course of school year school year 1819 to begin implementation in the fall of school year 1920. the plan had six overarching goals each having a specific set of strategies and targets that were supported by school data current research and educational literature briefly i share some highlights for each goal for goal 1 we created teacher professional learning communities plcs developing a culture of collaboration and collective responsibility these plcs meet weekly during common planning time and engage in the work that includes collaborative study of the standards our curriculum and assessment objectives regular data analysis to drive instructional decisions and a study of instructional practices that
050included peer-to-peer observations to learn from one another and to foster open conversations about instruction so far in school year 21 we have conducted over 135 peer-to-peer observations and an average of 25 leadership observations per week all of which is serving to foster a deprivation of practice that research has shown to improve student outcomes for goal two as part of every curriculum unit study plcs complete a culturally responsive protocol that asks them to intentionally plan for culturally responsive curricular implementation based on gloria lads and billings three pillars of crp cultural competency academic achievement and socio-political awareness staff has additionally been introduced to zoretta hammond's work on culturally responsive teaching in the brain and louise dorman sparks work regarding anti-bias teaching we have additionally made progress in our work to diversify our workforce and the positive growth
051and student achievement we hypothesize have been influenced by these factors goal three the family center and the early childhood center both use conscious discipline practices to respond to and develop social interaction and restorative skills between young children the early childhood center is additionally implementing the trauma-informed curriculum of second step to proactively teach social emotional skills for goal four we have supported staff through additional training in the foundations of early literacy and early in numeracy instruction through purposeful play music and rhythm last year teachers engaged in a lot a year-long study of the big ideas in early mathematics with the ericsson institute math collaborative staff has also been introduced to the importance of intentional instruction of phonemic phonological and alphabetical awareness through the use of the hegerty curriculum and other integrated strategies for instruction of these
052skills the family center has been focusing on language and early literacy development through the lina program with the evanston public library and an ongoing professional learning and coaching series with the erickson institute on language and literacy development for goal 5 our jeh family engagement specialist at the family center and the early childhood center have worked hard to engage families and create a vibrant family community they provide multiple monthly workshops and events increasing school involvement and engaging families in decision making the most significant change we have made in relation to goal 6 was the restructuring of the administrative team and the creation of the position of assistant director of teaching and learning to ensure that we have enough leadership capacity at the early childhood center to keep us focused on instruction the data i will present
053tonight i believe will demonstrate that this reorganization is paying off for our students so how are the children doing chapter one school year 1920 winter checkpoint data last year due to the covet 19 school closures we were unable to complete sorry let me head back last year due to the closures the school closures we were unable to complete our end of the year assessments so the winter data has had to serve as our end of the year data the data represented in the following slides were collected over our winter checkpoint period from january through early march of 2020. so our headline here is the jeh students were beginning to show signs of improved outcomes in response to the strategic plan i'll start with our family center data the family center winter data indicates that students
054last year were responding well to the sel language and literacy work that the center was engaging in the purple and green bands represent the meets expectations and the exceeds expectation ranges respectively physical development has always been a strong point but these data showed nice development in all areas prior to the coveted school closures this graph represents student data from the early childhood center our three to five-year-old programs it shows data across three six major domains of social emotional learning physical language cognitive literacy and mathematics development and compare fall and winter data to show growth the chart shows the percentage of students at our school who were meeting or exceeding expectations on the ts gold early childhood assessment by our winter checkpoints in early march last year the blue represents the fall outcomes and the green
055represent the winter outcomes last year data was beginning to show very positive growth from fall to winter and additionally we were seeing much larger percentages of students moving into the exceeds expectations range which we knew to be more closely correlated with kindergarten readiness as i have pointed out special education students make up about 25 to 30 percent of our school in a typical year as i discussed earlier this is because we are the only i'm sorry um as i just want to make sure i i'm still on the right slide i am okay sorry um this is because we are the only public school providing almost all special education services for preschool-aged children in the district special education programming is a very important part of our schooling at jeh our special education student outcomes also
056showed strong growth from fall to spring while these students were not demonstrating grade level performance at the same percentages as the general education students we celebrate their strong growth with some students moving into these exceeds expectations range this chart breaks down our data across the major racial ethnic groups allowing us to gauge our success in meeting the educational needs of the students in these groups across the six domains blue bars represent african american students green represent white students purple asian and orange latinx there are two major areas of concern based on these data and those are in the area of language development for all groups and math development for latinx students we immediately got to work with the bilingual team on to work on this math data and improve up to try to improve outcomes
057for our latinx students as we continue and we continue to work on this area in the current school year as for the area of language development our leadership teams looked at this and decided to take this year to do a deeper analysis of the trends and we will be designing this area into our school work plan for school year 22. this chart allows us to compare student performances performance across the big six domains at the same point in the calendar year over three school years what is encouraging to us about this data is that we not only see overall growth over the past three years but we are increasingly seeing students move into the exceeds expectation range which as i said before we know to be more closely tied to k readiness remember this slide
058when i share the k readiness data our response to the k readiness data from earlier years was to track more closely the data around early literacy skills of phonemic and phonological awareness and pre-phonics so sound symbol correspondence skills last year we piloted the use of the hegerty curriculum for for phonemic and phonological awareness in 7 out of 20 general education classrooms here you see the encouraging results in this area of early literacy students exposed to the program had higher overall achievement with 86 percent meeting or exceeding expectations the hegerty curriculum also addresses alphabet knowledge including sound symbol correspondence which the district which district 65 readiness data had indicated was a particular area of concern for our students this year we are implementing the curriculum across all classrooms and we are hopeful that we are going
059to see similar results throughout the school improving k readiness in this area for literacy of literacy for all students so chapter two we'll look at school uh school year 2021 fall checkpoint data the data presented on the following slides were collected over the months of september through november 2020 this past fall our headline is jeh students demonstrate improved overall outcomes latinx students need targeted supports i'll begin again with the family center the fall data from the family centers zero to three programs show some encouraging and grow encouraging growth in the area of literacy with more students in the meets or exceeds range than even the winter of the previous year language scores appear to be on track with 86.66 percent meeting widely held expectations in the fall of school year 2021. family center teams continue
060to have monthly data review meetings to review students data and plan for individualized instruction this year's fall data at the ecc cannot be [Music] directly compared to data from previous years due to changes forced by the covet 19 crisis these changes include smaller sample size differing assessment environment and differing assessment components our school leadership team convened in the fall to establish guidelines to determine which objectives from the ts gold observational assessment we would be able to collect effectively in a remote environment the following charts represent data from these from the areas we were able to assess in the domains of social emotional learning math and literacy excuse me this chart represents student data in the area of social emotional learning at the fall checkpoint the data is disaggregated by the racial ethnic groups of black
061the blue bars white the red bars green sorry asian is the green bars and latin next students represented in the purple bars the sel data from this fall shows similar trends to the winter of school year 1920 with more students moving into the exceeds expectations range there's a great deal to celebrate for our black white and asian students latinx students were lagging in our fall data which we are evaluating and monitoring closely with our bilingual team in the area of math the data presented in this graph shows continued proof improved indicators for our black white and asian students in all areas we believe this overall improved performance is due to the year-long professional learning series and math instruction that teachers participated in last year and additionally to improve data collection and progress monitoring practices our
062latinx students are continuing to demonstrate this trend of lagging skills in the area of mathematics which has caused us to intensify our oversight of professional learning around math instruction with our bilingual team this is the second data point we have had that is pointing out this discrepancy there is no intrinsic reason that the children should be performing lower than their english-speaking peers as the majority of the students our latinx students do receive instruction in spanish so this fact is leading us back to analyze the instructional practices for teaching mathematics in our spanish classrooms our fall literacy data showed continued improved indicators again for the black white and asian students in in all areas that we were able to assess during remote learning these objectives represent all of the sub skills that were that earlier k
063readiness data indicated were areas of relative weakness for our jeh alums we are incredibly proud of the growth we have been able to achieve for our black students who have shown overall strong growth with these skills but have additionally moved increasingly into the exceeds expectations ranges our latinx students are doing well in many areas but lagging in two areas and we now are working with the bilingual team to ensure that these areas are addressed during instruction and monitored closely we have additionally purchased new authentic spanish language texts to supplement each curricular unit we implement chapter 3 school year 2021 k readiness data our headline here is that jeh students show significantly improved readiness in response to the strategic plan this table represents k literacy readiness data of jeh alums as they entered kindergarten over the
064past five years as measured by the district's literacy assessments school year 1920 saw a noticeable dip in readiness that revealed important information that that the jeh team has responded to that year there were some changes to test administration such as a smaller sample size due to the adoption of the step assessment at many schools and the reduction of number and subtests administered by schools that were still administering the isil all of these changes could have had an impact on the results that would cause the data to drop still the news reinforced the urgent need to implement our plan one of the major takeaways from the data analysis was that jeh students were not showing preparedness in alphabet awareness this was presented at district 65 presentation to the school board this past september students in this
065school year 1920 sample were students who went through the programs at jh prior to the adoption of the three-year strategic plan the kindergarten students represented in the 2021 data were the first students to have gone through both preschool years at jeh after the administrative change and leadership in school year 19 and the first students to be have to have been taught since the implementation of the strategic plan and we are very encouraged by these outcomes where we have where students have shown an increase of 40 percentage points when compared to the average over the previous four years so that's those are the students in green all the way to the right this chart compares jeh alums sets of green bars with other students across the district the blue bars who have had preschool experience all
066children here have had some preschool experience these data are broken down across map literacy assessment sub-components of listening comprehension phonics and word recognition phonological awareness picture vocabulary concepts of print and sentence reading fluency our big celebration here is that jh students are narrowing the gap when compared to other students across the district many and many students who come from more privileged backgrounds the one area that all students across the district performed poorly on was the area of print concepts and we are currently working to understand how those skills are measured on this assessment and begin analysis of our instruction of those skills this chart represents jeh students performance across all subtext subtests on the map literacy assessment as broken down by the expectation continuum celebrations here are the large numbers of jh alums who were
067performing in the exceeds expectation range across sub skills as discussed earlier we will be doing a deeper analysis of the map assessments assessment expectations for print concepts in order to evaluate how we are teaching those concepts at jh overall however these stem these data demonstrate a dramatic improvement in k readiness for our jeh students the big takeaway from this report is that just one year after the initial implementation of our jeh strategic plan both preschool ts gold data and map k literacy readiness data indicate that we have begun to provide improved outcomes for our jeh alums this is important because significant research shows that students who arrive in kindergarten demonstrating readiness are much more likely to stay on track by third grade and throughout their educational career students who are on track in the third
068grade remain on track and are more likely to complete high school and enroll in college while we still have a ways to go to achieve all the goals laid out in the plan and our latinx students are continuing to lag in certain key skills we have organized the school and established systems that allow us to identify these problems and respond with targeted interventions in a timely fashion our next steps will be to continue building a culture at jh that is collaborative and data driven to continue to drive all strategies in the strategic plan we will continue to provide strength-based anti-bias respectful and inclusive learning environments we celebrate our achievements to date but remain intentionally focused on maintaining this growth ensuring that all students at jeh over the years are individually prepared for kindergarten and the
069world beyond i want to extend my thanks to our families and the community for their support and partnership in this work thank you to the school board dr horton and district 65 leadership for your continued support and commitment to the plan a huge thanks to our teachers and staff who are on the front line implementing these strategies and affecting positive change and of course my deepest gratitude to my administrative team angela johnson at the family center jesse block and theresa lee at the early childhood center for leading this work i would not be here reporting these positive outcomes if it were not for the hard work of all of those involved thank you so much for your time and any questions i guess i can stop sharing any questions [Music] thank you sharon yeah we
070this is a discussion item for us tonight so we may have a number of questions and comments do we come back to that later is that how it works no no no okay yeah um biz um i want to start as someone who has worked with jeh long before your tenure sharon i think while i'm big on accountability i'm also big on credit and i think you are should be getting some tremendous credit for the progress that we're seeing here um you have invested in really important things and and you can see that that that progress is coming and so i i'm grateful for your um leadership and stewardship through what we you know what we all know is is a critical critical piece to addressing the opportunity to achieve so um as as you
071mentioned like these these are this is really hopeful so i want to just take a moment and like be in that hopeful place and celebrate um because i think while there are things that we've identified that are still challenges that we we don't get to celebrate progress in this area enough and so i hope we can learn from what you all have done um at jh but i do have a couple of questions so um so first thank you but now i'll ask more questions the first is in light of the pandemic um what do we need to be thinking about in terms of transition plans for kids that will be going on to kindergarten next year how do we need to prepare kindergarten teachers for whatever gaps that that may exist and what we
072are able to deliver in this more remote setting i think that's going to be a really critical piece to make sure that they recognize you know the kids are not necessarily coming in with all of the pieces that they may have before and what what kind of supports do we need in place so if you all started that planning yet i know you know i know we have a while but kind of what we anticipating are some of the the bridges that we're going to need to get our kindergartners fully where they need to be well i we did last year of course just before the schools closed we had started developing partnerships and had some meetings with kindergarten teachers and we're really working to develop that partnership that did sort of fall by the
073wayside um when covet hit but again we would like to be opening these discussions with the kindergarten team and i think it would be a great idea to try to get that going before the summer we are busy scheduling kindergarten transition meetings right now that's a little bit more around special ed and students with significant mtss supports going on but we are starting to plan for that right now um and additionally i think um you know a lot of what we're seeing well we'll see how things are going when students get back in school and what kinds of gaps we're seeing once they once they arrive and we'll be able to sort of chart differences between the students who are continuing to learn remotely and those who are in person and that will help us
074to be able to better advise kindergarten teachers as to what to expect one of the things that we're all very concerned about just in terms of having students come back into our building in a couple of weeks is just around students um more functional and social social emotional experiences abilities with one another learning to interact understanding how to do school a lot of students are missing that very important aspect of preschool education right now so um we're gonna see you know we're very mindful of that as students re-enter this the building and really have a lot of supports in place to try to shepherd them through that transition school's going to look different than it did in the past it's going to be a lot more structured which may or may not be easier for
075the children we'll find out but those are some of the things that we'll be wanting to discuss with kindergarten teachers i think in terms of the academic aspect of the education for students who have been able to engage which is not all of them unfortunately we have been doing able to do a pretty good job of maintaining that and in some ways the parent the family school partnership has been stronger than it ever has been before because the parents have been there by their children's side every day and they have a much stronger sense of what goes on in the classroom the objectives that the teachers are are presenting and how to teach it right so they can reinforce and work as real learning partners with their chil with their children but some of the
076things that we're very concerned about is that not all of our students are able to have the supports at home to allow them to engage consistently in remote learning so there will be gaps there and as i said before just like sort of the functional aspect of how we do school probably i would imagine in kindergarten teachers are going to experience uh you know see that students are going to need more support around that those basic skills um as students haven't been in school yeah sharon i'm hoping that in whatever transition plans you all make that that really struck me when you said that we're going to still have kids that are going to be doing remote all year so they're going to go into kindergarten without those social skills and without the kind of
077understanding of how school works what i would be concerned about when they arrive in kindergarten is if our teachers are not prepared for that that's going to be disciplined and that there would probably be a likely racial disparity in that discipline when they when they are in kindergarten and so i think we want to have some more proactive strategies for kindergarten teachers about what kind of onboarding they're going to need to do about school at a higher rate than they may have in the past because there might be some of those students that that don't ever have that in-person instruction before coming to school and i think that's a that's a very good point and i think additionally um it's a discussion to be had with school leaders um as well because as school leaders
078are going to set expectations for the teachers and support the teachers and if we need to shift the focus slightly in the early days of kindergarten in the early months of kindergarten to help accommodate for this you know they need to be aware of this as well so i will make every effort to make sure i'm communicating this with my colleagues my school leader colleagues as well as i know that the cabinet is well aware um and additionally we we've been talking and there's been some discussion about extending some of the summer programs if we possibly can provide a little bit more of our summer jump start program that could be another thing that helps but if it's continued to be remote it's not going it's going to help them the same way so it's
079just such a critical part of learning at this age is learning how to respect other people's boundaries and your own body agency and all of those kind of things and so um we want our elementary schools prepared that they might have to do more of that coaching and support than they've had to do in the past um another question i had is um you know we've you've identified a couple of areas where latinx students are lagging and i know that in the report you identified some strategies already that you're employing to address those things do you feel like the strategies you have are sufficient do you need additional support to make sure that we are closing the gap particularly for latinx students i don't know that we need additional support at this point i think
080um you know this last last winter when we looked at this data away we were looking at it in the spring i think you know the first response is well what's you know going on and lots of analysis well why the data could be wrong or this or that that's kind of the usual response but the teacher teachers did take it very seriously and they were at that point engaging in the math uh series at erickson institute and so bringing a lot of new strategies into the classroom um i just think that this fall with all of the transition and differences in the way you know in student lives in school life that math instruction in our latinx classrooms maybe wasn't the main focus for all of them and now that we're taking a look
081at this data and we've done so much study around the fact that math is a tremendous equalizer it's also a wonderful way to teach language skills in early childhood because there's so much language involved around explaining describing attributes sharing that it really helps foster language development for young children in the discussion about and observational discussions around objects that they're sorting and classifying and so forth uh describing attributes of change shapes so i think that there is um definitely a belief there and there's skill that has been developed i think that we have may perhaps we hadn't made time as much because we're focusing on other things but the team definitely sees right now that there's clear data indicating that we need to focus on this that team has made as a focus of their second
082cycle of professional learning communities at the school focusing particularly they've honed in on one skill one area in particular quantifying that they're going to focus hard on and they're going to do some intentional study together and do deeper um progress monitoring i do think i do believe that our team has the tools they need and they have the skill and they definitely see the need at this point and i think with leadership support and guidance they will do the work and i think we're going to see some improved outcomes i really i do believe that where everybody is committed to it and i think that as i said at the end of the presentation the celebration here is that the our preschool teachers have gotten developed strong enough skills now at collecting data and looking
083at data and using it to inform the instruction that they can we can see now that they're this isn't just one blip from last winter this is starting to look like a trend that we have to attack and we will great um the one thing that that has emerged not the one thing one of the many things that has emerged a lot of our conversations later but i want to make sure is said while you are on the call is a need for a larger translation strategy um that we have really um not been serving uh our latinx community in that way and then our larger community of non-english speakers and um i think that this is something that's going to need to happen on both the parent and pta side as well as the
084district 65 side i just want to make sure that when those conversations are happening that you and par and your team are a part of those conversations as we think about our earliest learners and their families and how how language ends up being a barrier to access and and sometimes success so i hope that we make sure that you're a part of those conversations moving forward but um i i just again sharing i think there's a lot of progress here and i'm grateful for for your leadership because it's really promising thank you uh sharon again just kudos to you and the team for again putting in the hard work uh and again just looks like we have a lot of whole friday night as a big early childhood advocate somebody who's you know just been
085a convert past couple of five six years uh it is just phenomenal to see that you're applying some of the best elements of what early childhood means right uh you know so so again it's just really great it gives me a lot of hope to see uh you know the improvement i know with our latinx students you know there's some struggles that you see there it seems like you guys are going to work on it um as my colleague lindsey ryan just shared you know again you know making sure that we thought really think about uh making sure that and and i know i think that the ecc team the jh team does a really good job in trying to communicate with families at that uh latinx families uh at the same time also thinking
086about you know shared leadership and utilizing b pacs and the the head start policy committees to to work with parents right to really kind of figure out those policies around language and how to best communicate and how to best share uh you know really leveraging those relationships uh you know working with our you know with our face uh director devon alexander as well to kind of work with those with families just to make sure that we're reaching out and and again uh get get making sure that they're they're at the table right as as you move strategically uh to to continue and sustain these improvements that you're seeing and really elevate uh latin next student's academic performance as well as social emotional uh uh development uh one of the things that that i do i
087see uh and and biz brought it up uh was the transition piece right like i've been since the get i think the transitions are critical uh and and the kindergarten teacher should know uh how to receive all of the wonderful things that and build on the wonderful things that have happened in early childhood right and i think i've seen the you know previous you know teaching strategies gold data that's always been really pretty well even prior to your arrival right but for some reason we weren't our district wasn't able to build upon it in the transition from you know um in a pre-k to kindergarten so and then it's the same thing you know again we should definitely really think about across the system right from grammar school to middle school making sure that we're
088uh that uh you know sixth grade teachers are prepared to build on uh uh what would have the kids have done in in in grammar school and then eths you know those 19th grade teachers being ready for our eighth graders for our incoming right so so for me i mean it's just in particular our most marginalized communities who again who don't have the supports who don't usually have the tutors that we can hire to kind of help with those transitions right it's just really critical so and one of the things i appreciate on the report was you know okay so what are some next steps and then really thinking about kids and the kids assessment because that's what the kids assessment was meant to be is kind of this help helping with that transition piece
089right by you know creating this observational assessment that not only measures you know reading and math uh competency but also social emotional development and then really kind of draws a line between cheating i i see possibly drawing a teaching you know the the drawing line between teaching strategies gold and the success that you're seeing uh with ensuring those transitions and and that success that you created is built upon uh uh in in subsequent years in the k-12 system so again i appreciate that piece uh again given that you know and and just some thoughts in regards to how again i think about early childhood right and it's about children working together sitting at tables together uh you know interacting problem solving with one another right uh and you know i worry about how again that
090now you know we're gonna bring kids back in a hybrid model but again they'll have to be socially distant right so it kind of almost it's counterintuitive to how early childhood works and and i think you know as we move forward right uh i i just you know that that's the concern that i that i have in my mind it's like wow you know what what we know and love about early childhood right is children interacting learning how to behave with one another and respect one another and work collaboratively you know now that we have to socially this have to work you know we have to be socially listed have to wear masks hard to see kids smile hard to really appreciate how you know that how the teacher is expressing themselves you know that
091that i think is a challenge right so i just i just want us to be mindful of that uh because again school's not gonna look like it used to look and that'll be for quite a while this is across the system so you know as we think about that you know i asked my colleagues here as we think about how education will look like and the parents out there who are pushing us to open open schools up you know again school is not going to look the same as it used to i mean kids will be laughing because they'll try to play but they'll have to be socially distant they'll have to be uh separated they won't be doing too much collaborative work uh i mean there's ways to collaborate right but it just making
092sure that we're mindful of that right because that i think is is a challenge and and um but i think a challenge that we can overcome as long as we are trying to be creative and build upon the learnings from remote learning uh and and uh and then again some of the best aspects of early childhood so but thank you for the work that you're doing you're welcome and i i think that you you've absolutely identified the challenges that we're facing you know that all being able to focus on all that social emotional interaction and that developing is is such a i i guess a loss that we're feeling as we're getting ready and preparing the classrooms um what is kind of giving us heart um in in the early childhood classrooms is we're thinking
093a little bit more about like montessori style models where which is another which is not the we have not traditionally been a montessori style school but montessori programming really kind of sets up sort of separate but equal spaces for children to allow them to to work to alongside one another but not as much together so that is actually how the classrooms are going to look a little bit more that kids will have their own equipment they will each have their own little yoga mat that they will move around to find their own floor space and all kinds of markers to help them be a little bit more mindful of their body and space and their relationship to one another they will be able to share experiences alongside each other they'll be able to talk about
094them but yes like just thinking about how we're going to have our pers our dramatic play areas function when only one child can be there at a time is very hard for a lot of us to think about but we're we're working on it we're trying to figure out systems and as you know we have any updates about being able to have more children playing together over time we're definitely going to look for those opportunities but you know there have been a lot of success with montessori programs over the years and i have i i do talk to you know i meet regularly with the early childhood centers across evanston so the private programs that have been reopened and there are some positive reports that are coming from the experiences students are having at these
095centers that are open um that are having to do everything we're going to have to do and they talk about um well first of all how the kids are doing a great job wearing their masks so people can relax a little bit about that that's pretty much a universal report um and also that the kids sound like a lot of the children are really responding very well to kind of these clear limitations that we're putting on them that that aspect of uh clarity of of what we want and how far they can move having those limitations in some ways is setting them free it's it's interesting that's just some feedback that i've heard from some of my colleagues um so i'm trying i'm i'm hopeful that it's not going to be as dire as some
096p is as some people are predicting and that um we're going to have some positive experience and we may actually learn some techniques from this experience that we want to hold on to in the years that come in terms of your your earlier comment about the fact that you know the ts gold data has looked pretty good in the past but then students get to kindergarten and they're it's not transferring i do believe that a lot of that so we did some intensive crosswalks in my first year here looking at iso looking at the kids assessment which i'll come back to nts gold and really looking at the criteria in each of those assessments and how they line up and what we did discover is that in the teaching strategies gold assessment the exceeds expectation
097range was more closely aligned with the kindergarten readiness so this brought out a lot of discussion about okay well how comfortable are we pushing children into the exceeds range we don't want to push to the point where we're stressing them out so we just started pushing a little and trying to monitor and see if we were intentionally teaching certain things if we could move them in that direction without putting too much pressure on them do it in a developmentally appropriate manner that was fun and playful and musical and rhythmic um and so that is what we've had our our sights set on and i do and we are as you saw in the data moving more students into that exceeds range and if we can continue to do that i i'm hopeful i mean we
098only have one data point that is very encouraging from k readiness so i'm hoping to see the same again next year um or something similar maybe better um that that is going to have an impact you know if we're teaching into that range that we will be preparing the students for kindergarten thank you i i wanted to chime in um again my incredible gratitude um for the impact that your leadership has had sharon um sergio and i actually were both on the early childhood task force that create help to create the strategic plan that or not i can't it's not that's was it called a strategic plan i can't remember what it was called but we helped to create the document that was handed over to you for you to make the three-year plan that
099you presented to us and i wanted to acknowledge the thoughtfulness and some of the additions that you made to the plan we specifically last time gave some feedback about um including more data about zero to three progress and i noticed that in this report you included a lot of data about our zero to three growth metrics as well as three to five um and i did have a question when you mentioned family center in the report were you referring to the entire doorway to learning or to early head start measurements so i would i was the entire family center which includes the home visiting program and doorway to learning which is more the early head start programming on site um that data includes uh ts goal data for for both and all of the teachers
100for both of the home visiting program and the doorway program are participating in the millennial language program with the in partnership with the evanston public library and have been receiving the training in language and literacy development from erickson institute all teachers at the family center last year teachers and classroom assistants all staff really um received training in conscious discipline so last year there was a little bit more focus around the social emotional learning and this year it's it's moved more deeply into language and early literacy development maintaining the work around social emotional learning which is you know it's been a little bit harder this year to implement a lot of the strategies that we worked on teaching last year because the kids said the family center was open for about a month and a half
101um in september through october but ended up closing down when we decided to close not to go forward with the special education programs and really um shut down the schools and get the the buildings in late october but we have been really working to try to uh work look at the data the family center um you know the way we work with data there is a little bit more individualistic so there's there are monthly meetings where the data is the classroom data is pulled so we and we look at observational data for each student it's a much smaller program right so it's easy you can we can do this more fully on a monthly basis and teachers meet with with angela johnson and sarah sheik and sheik knight and they they go through all the
102data and they make plans and goals for the upcoming month um for each student and so it's so it's a little bit different it's less global way of looking at things so they do have the opportunity to do that periodically but it's more like focusing on their classroom and trends in their classrooms or with the groups of students that they're working with at home visiting so forth well thank you for including that um group of children and families that we have an impact on i that's a you know incredible predictor of long-term access of opportunity and resources so thank you for for for you all's intentionality but also sharing that with us tonight um i did also have some questions about the trends and outcomes for our latinx learners and and their families um i'm
103curious i know that we have um is it considered a dual language preschool classrooms is or are they considered it is part of a dual language program right so dual language has many different um i guess aspects of learning so there are you know there's in the elementary schools we have two-way immersion programs we can't really do that at the ecc we have more of what's called like a transitional bilingual education program um it is that is a type of dual language program and we we are unable to do twee because we don't have we can't it the grants put a lot of limitations on the number of english speaking students that we can have in and we'd had we we just can't meet the grant requirements and do that and at any rate it
104you know in with the young children having it more of a 90 percent model in their language language one their home language is recommended so you want to have a very rich opportunity for them to start learning school and start learning early literacy in their language one and then gradually start to get you know exposed to it so by the time they get exposed to language too so by the time they get to elementary school then they they have a little bit more stronger base on uh in english language too and are better and have and their language one skills are stronger in early literacy skills are stronger in language one and they can start to transfer that when they get to the tweet program so we are it i mean it is a type
105of dual language program but it's more of a transitional bilingual program than it is it's not a tweet program okay so that actually leads to the other question that i had which is are students being assessed in their language one or home language yes yes they are okay and all of our instructional materials are available in language one um but some you know as we've been doing unit studies and really looking at the texts that come with um so that so we use creative curriculum and teaching strategies gold um observational assessment is linked into completely integrated into that curriculum they go hand in hand and so anyway as we've been doing the um unit studies about of the creative curriculum units we go through all the texts and the teachers look at them and make
106decisions you know a lot of those units are designed to be taught over eight weeks and we due to the pacing schedule of the district and our building and things we have to get through we don't always have a full eight weeks so they have to make certain intentional decisions about which books they're gonna you know which sections they're gonna teach in which they're going to cut and in having those discussions and looking at the books and the texts they sometimes have asked to have a different text provided because some of the texts are not authentic language spanish language texts they're english texts that are translated into spanish and they want to provide you know richer culturally responsive experience literature experiences for the students and really make sure that they're listening it to a story
107that's written in language one right um so we've been working hard to do that and for every unit um the teachers have been researching at supplemental texts that we've been purchasing and providing for the students to ensure that they do have those rich language experiences um i'm wondering if i lost track of the actual core of your question there though did i hit hit on what you were looking for anya yeah yeah i was curious about the exposure to to home language and if that was a a barrier in assessment outcomes the other thing that i noticed that i'm wondering if you all talked about or had any solutions ruminating about was that the um the fall data from 2019 um indicated that uh latinx children were not meeting outcomes in two areas and they
108happen to both be like subjective measures of social emotional outcomes and so i wonder if y'all had talked at all about the subjectivity of the assessment and if that was a factor in how those outcomes were showing up you're talking about the data from just this past fall yeah there's this the slide that was from 2019 it was like it was too social and emotional um measures so um i have one from just this past fall that has four different social emotional measures um and then there was one from last winter if that's maybe perhaps it was the winter one i'm excited i'll look back just um so it's actually put together i'm wondering if you're thinking about this the slide from last fall which i can share again real quick if you want this
109and any correct me if this is not what you're getting at but i know when romy did her presentation about racial disparities in spad language was and was one of the categories that we were concerned that there was maybe some bias in identifying students there is that related to what you're saying anya um yeah not specifically for spread students but just the subjectivity uh yeah just the bias can easily bleed into that assessment yeah yeah so one i think it was about um understanding of limits and yeah so this slide right um i think limits takes care of needs those are subjective measures right yeah so i mean this is an and i guess an ongoing issue around observational assessments that you have to have pretty clear rubrics about what it is you're looking for
110with strong checklists and identifiers of behaviors that you might be looking to observe so these four areas were were chosen because the the leadership teams both the school climate team and the school instructional team looked through the assessment and tried to identify areas that we might be able to observe in remote learning and then they put out a list of things to watch for that people might observe and that in combination with the markers from the assessment teachers looked at to try to identify this there is a certain amount of subjectivity to this as there would be in anything and i would say in the social emotional area it is um probably one of the harder areas that we had to assess on you know trying to do it remotely but here they were talking
111a lot about you know following the routines and whether the students were that follows limits and expectations um you know whether the students were following classroom routines well whether they're learning how to deal with the microphone and respect the rules around the microphones and turn taking and things like that and that taking care of needs some of that was about how independent they were becoming with some of this in the few months that they had to do remote learning and the question on layered on top of that has any like cultural rings been applied to the rubric so how one community may define taking care of needs or following limits would be different than another so that i think ex is exact that did actually that has come up in our analysis of this data
112right so the the bilingual teachers and i can stop sharing because you've you've seen this um the bilingual teachers did talk about the fact that the children are at home with their families and that there is a tendency within their culture and the bilingual teachers who come from this culture as well um to help and support the children more and african american teachers or um have also shared that it's kind of the opposite in their culture that there really is from an early age a tendency in the culture to want to foster independence and that was something that we you know it's like it's one data point right now in a remote environment but these are some of the conversations that we have had around why this may be going on so we say that
113it's an area of concern they the the latinx students have historically performed well in social emotional learning so it's not an air we don't consider it to be an area of crisis at this point but it's an area of concern that we want to watch and monitor right um but it may you're absolutely right it may be grounded in um just some cultural differences of home life and how um how we raise our children in different cultures so for that you know for that reason i never want to look at our data as anything that's judgmental it's it's not there to judge the students to judge a culture it's just there to give us information about how we might respond and support the students right so it's there to inform our practices and let us
114know if we need to watch something a little bit more closely or if we do need to be analyzing for just that question that you've asked anya is are we being culturally responsive in the way we're thinking about the data and the way we're responding to the data the way we're supporting and it may be that when we go to the next round we determine that either they've improved or there are other reasons and it's really not an area of concern but at the moment we're looking we're looking into it deeper so you know we work when we see that kind of a discrepancy we have some concern and we're going to look into it thank you i appreciate that i think um in my experience as a black woman i find that data is
115often used to pathologize um us as individuals and as a community and you know it's it's valuable for us to take time to deconstruct that you know data has some objective measures but there's also some subjective um elements of how we analyze it and how we how we use it um and i you know i hope that we can have these types of conversations at the the board level to be thoughtful about how we're consuming data um and how we're talking about our kids and our families and thank you i appreciate you um deconstructing that for me and the team for digging into that data in a thoughtful way um and i think the other question i had was about um representative leadership which in some ways you answered that we do have instructional staff
116that is representative of the backgrounds of the students who are being educated which i appreciate and i'm aware of how do we also have um that type of representation in administrative or decision-making um roles for example the team you referenced that decided which social emotional skills would be measured and how the rubric would look yes definitely in all of our school leadership teams um they're very diverse and well represented well represented across all racial ethnic groups i've worked hard to ensure that where um i would say we have that we have there's still opportunity for improvement in our school would be like an administrative uh um diversity right so that i mentioned that um both in around our goal too which is to strengthen um to strengthen cultural responsiveness and and welcome diversity within our
117school and um goal six was which is to make sure our resources are supporting all the other goals we have really kind of consciously worked to try to diversify our staff our teaching staff was pretty heavily white when i got here and we have really when we've had opportunities you know we're not asking people to leave who are doing a good job and have worked you know hard to support our students but as we've had positions open up we have been really careful to try to provide opportunities to diversify the staff and we have been able to really increase the number of african-american teachers in the school from so the classroom teachers when i arrived there there were only two and now we're up to five african-american classroom teachers at the school we have also
118been able to increase the diversity on our leadership to our administrative team um in that when we added the position of direct assistant director of teaching and learning i was very fortunate to find an african-american leader with a very strong background in early childhood education and urban educational leadership miss teresa lee and she has brought very valuable perspectives to this to the school and strong leadership for our our for for everyone at the school but in particular for our black teachers um and strengthening their voice and um their advocacy for the students within the school and i think you know i hypothesize that some of the improvement we're seeing in the data is related to this strength this diversity so students and families are seeing mirrored in their teachers and their leadership seeing themselves mirrored
119in their teachers and their leadership and i think that is incredibly important on many levels if for no other reason to help bring that cultural understanding to the school and to the students um and so where i had we haven't had an opportunity yet would be to increase um latinx leadership in the administrative team there just hasn't been an opening or an opportunity at this point but i think that's something to keep in mind um in the future like and to look for those opportunities because i do think it's meaningful to the families and bottom line i think it's meaningful to the students so we'll be looking for we'll look for those opportunities the moment you've got me white woman in charge but over time there may be other opportunities okay thank you [Music] i
120just had a comment and a quick question um thank you for that report it's really heartening is someone um coming new to the board um i'm here to celebrate all the work that was done before i got here so it's very exciting um i just wanted to highlight something i heard in your report that i think is really important as someone who has done a lot of faculty development i'm always thinking about that how do you develop a culture of continuous improvement and what you said about deprivatizing the practice is so important and i and i see dr horton putting things in place to do that at the k through uh eight level as well but the opportunity for educators to really get feedback and work together and have eyes in the classroom right not
121just struggling on their own or working on their own but working in that really collaborative process so i just wanted to highlight how important that piece of deprivatizing the classroom and really thinking about the classroom as a public and social space so i really appreciated that part of the report and i hope we can continue um and then my question was whether um there are plans to track those that first cohort like you know you have the kindergarten data but will we also be looking at the third grade data because you mentioned how important that third grade those third grade assessments are for you know continued um academic success so are there plans for that to follow that cohort into third grade yes i hope so kylie klein are you still on the call i
122definitely want to work on um tracking the students and um we have had some discussion you know so they've been changed over the last couple years and and read and i came in and they were we were looking to try to see if we could track some of the students alums from years earlier it was a little messy because at the early childhood center they didn't always put the student numbers with the students and so we're being much more careful to make sure all of that is represented every place we need it so that um yeah kylie and her team could help us to track the students because i really that would be very meaningful for me to see how the students continue through the and i think for the district really for up for
123all of us to see if this really does make the difference that i believe it's going to make in helping to close the gap really provide opportunity for our students so but the only way we'll really know is to start tracking just as you mentioned um and in terms of deprivatization of practice yeah i'm a huge believer in it and as i know dr horton is as well and that is something that was you know a little we we had a bumpy start with it it was challenging yeah sorry and i the we had a hard time getting going with that my first two years and this year this was a gift that coveted gave us because suddenly everybody was thrown in the water trying to figure out how to swim keep afloat what the
124heck what are we doing in the classroom nobody had the sense that they knew it all anymore like there was not that and and everybody was ready to learn from one another and additionally did not have to find classroom coverage in order for people to visit one another's classrooms because you know there was a an assistant somebody who could could manage um doing the online learning while somebody else popped into a lesson in another classroom so really gave us an opportunity to start this culture and i would say people were really people loved it and the paraprofessionals were involved in these visits as well and there's a lot of learning a lot of discussion around it and i would say now we're going from here on forward we're always going to be looking for those
125opportunities once we get back in person with those challenges of classroom coverage and so forth are going to continue to exist but i think people will be now that we're understanding the motive the the value of it um people are going to be more motivated to try to figure it out so thank you and a big shout out to kylie and your team for the data rich reports that we've been seeing it's been really helpful and impressive to see the data year to year too thank you i just want to add that when we were on the early childhood task force we did review the five e's of the previous year and um your work was was cut out in terms of developing trusting and collaborative collegial relationships and i'm sure that it's much appreciated
126to have that that shift based on the previous data that we have seen there we you know our 5v data is not we haven't made tremendous growth in that area yet we're still in the average range but i'm i'm hoping well we'll we'll see what i'm hoping this year that uh we'll see some improvement that all of this work is going to start to show up in the 5e data this year they've delayed the they haven't sent the survey yet it's not coming out until april this year so we won't probably know until next fall um you know how we've moved if we've been able to move that data but yeah um that is something that we really have been working on our school climate team has really been working very hard on issues of
127uh of trust and um there's been a lot of change right so that always puts people through a lot um and i think last year was the first year we were really implementing the plan and there were there were bumps along the way i'm not gonna like but we've come through it um and i i feel that the teams are stronger i'm very proud of the teams and their work i'm very proud of their just their learning around data they have all kinds of jokes about me and my data but i think they they are really starting to um value it know how to look at it know how to look for it and understanding the importance of how they collect the observational data and how it can really drive their you know inform their
128instruction and there's and they're happy to start seeing these improved outcomes for the students thank you we're all so proud of you all thank you yeah joey i just wanted to start by saying thank you um you make preschool um it's not just fun but you make it sound very academic in look but i'm sure it is very gentle in feel and that is a skill so thank you for bringing that to the early childhood center um i was looking back at the past couple years of this report and you have clearly been on a journey um in bringing use of just the ts gold use of the assessments that you've had the whole time and the data and kind of bringing everybody together it's clearly paying dividends for you and your team as adults
129but also for the kids and the outcomes so thank you and since this is a relay and you're about to pass the baton from your building to many buildings um i think the question sula asked about like kind of flagging kids to track them uh track them the wrong word but to monitor their progress later i think it's um it would be great if we were able to uh keep an eye on cohorts as they go through and make sure that kids who were exceeding expectations when they were four that the kindergarten teachers who received them know that they received a kid who is exceeding expectations and can continue to do so in that new place um especially because of the high population of students you serve with various learning needs um you know sometimes
130all a teacher might know upon receipt of a child is that maybe that there is an iep but that kid with an iep may have been exceeding expectations the year prior and early childhood and we want to make sure that both both messages get passed on so we can celebrate kids both in their exceptionalities but also in their achievements uh but i would love to see an opportunity for us in a future uh year or two to check in on these kids and see if the the metrics that are in the right place as they leave your building um kylie as we hand over to the elementary schools if we're able to sustain that um maybe our new sis has an ability to flag them so we can run a report and make it easy
131but uh if not uh uh we'll just put some post-its on some files or something thank you i definitely am all about a longitudinal study i would love to follow and see what we can learn from it i would be curious the next time we get the early literacy program update if we don't necessarily have to wait for third grade data but see if there's any way to track that data when we are looking at the outcomes from early literacy i to me i mean kylie could answer could speak to that but it seems doable to me right if as long as we have the student numbers and we can sort that way we should be able to follow them through kindergarten first grade second grade i think you know one thing that has been
132challenging over the years has been just sort of changes in assessments that were used at kindergarten and primary you know so when i arrived here we had been using the isil in the district a kindergarten um and then there was a shift towards this step and i'm not sure where we're at and then oh and there was also the developmental reading assessment the dra that was used and and all of these are you know teacher administered one-on-one take a lot of time um and then they started bringing the step in and i'm not sure if we're still using that at all but i know this year we've just just used the map and you know if we can try to find some consistency it will be easier to do longitudinal comparisons and you know if
133there's a lot of changes and assessments and then at third grade previously so we in the early grades we had isil and the dra and then when they got the third grade they got their first map assessment and yet that's another set of data so you know if we can try to keep that clean over at some years we should be able to chart some progress track some progress yep if i may um add to what sharon has just shared she and i have worked very closely she's a data lover i'm a data lover it's a great match uh for us so we work very closely to try to you know really interrogate the data and be thoughtful and strategic and look at longer term outcomes and we're doing some work together uh to to
134make sure that she can disaggregate the data in meaningful ways and you know one of the challenges that we've had is the lack of consistency and it is really a hindrance in terms of our ability to to look long-term and you know unfortunately for this year we're also going to have some ramifications related to um the the pandemic and kovitz so for example we were very excited about the kindergarten readiness data from the kids assessment um that assessment from this year won't necessarily be as um as productive for us as an instrument uh it will still be meaningful for our students and our educators to look at how kids um uh stack up on the rubric and where they're at developmentally but because that data won't necessarily be all collected in the same early window
135of of the beginning of fall that that ship has sailed um and so we won't necessarily have that as an as a longitudinal indicator so i think that um sharon and i will continue to work together we'll continue to try to stay the course dr horton has a strong vision for making sure we we stay the course and under his leadership and guidance i think that we will be very well prepared over the next few years to to be able to really produce some thoughtful and robust analysis the other thing we have to be very cognizant of is um you know as we talked about earlier not necessarily making um too many conclusions on the basis of single indicators we need to have multiple measures and we need to know that the students who attend
136jh are unique in their needs and so we also have to make sure we have appropriate comparison groups because we don't want to put out messages that don't honor the growth and the learning of our students and and don't acknowledge the fact that the students served at jh have you know um needs that are not necessarily the same as students who are not served at jh and so we have to really be thoughtful about the methodology we choose for that sort of longitudinal analysis and make sure we have a comprehensive plan and i know that sharon and i will work closely together with all the colleagues on this call to make sure we can bring that analysis to our community it's very important thank you [Music] yes honey yeah so i think that just does
137then lead to the question i think this maybe is a question for for stacey um that's something that i think we have noticed over the years too like the the [Music] assessment um you know so what what is the plan for i know kids is gonna is required so that will continue on but what are the kindergarten assessments that we can routinely expect to be seeing so the you know there yes we've been moving through things um this year with kovid we have really done three times a map we have three times a year map assessment we are committed to staying the course on that three times a year map assessment um as far as kind of that next level of diagnostic around reading and math we have not landed yet on what that next
138layer of one-to-one assessment would be step is a very strong assessment and it gives us very good information but it was also a pretty significant learning curve and we're really trying to get that route right balance of time and information and so that next layer of diagnostic on the one to one is a question that we have not yet resolved but we are committed to the three times a year for map assessment as our screening instrument and then we're shoring up the next layers of assessment with some work with donna cross and folks across the different departments over the remainder of the year and the goal is to get to a consistent solution that we remain with and that is all in addition to kids i mean we've been working with a group of kindergarten
139educators to really determine longer term whether we stick with the 14 required competencies with kids or we expand and those relationships i think are quite connected because if we commit to a broader range of the um indicators for kids then um that will also influence what we choose to collect okay thank you for that and i guess my my only um sort of comment on that is that you know we are talking about kindergartners uh and assessments and so as usual i know we're always trying to be mindful of how much assessment time we are um we're imposing on all of our kids but i think especially our youngest kids i think you know and one of the things to realize about kids is kids is purely an observational assessment and so one of the
140values of that is that we're gathering information from authentic teaching and learning activities and there isn't kind of quote unquote necessarily a test administration it's about elevating those learning standards and observing it within the process of our daily learning and play and activities and so we are though suny i do hear you clearly aware of that and trying to find the right balance both for our educators and our kids and i i completely agree the kids assessment is much more akin to the ts gold assessment in terms that it's an observational you're not sitting a child down in front of you or in front of a computer i mean the map um is you know sitting a child down in front of a computer but it is a pretty limited period of time so it's
141not as invasive as some assessments but but the kids um you know it it does follow the same um model that ts goal does and being an observational assessment so kids are just doing what they're doing in the classroom and you're observing and then you're taking those observations and kind of running them against a rubric i did not include the one kids piece of kids data that we have back in this report because it's only for the students the only data we have backer for the students from 18 19 19 20 who were who finished at our school before we started this um strategic plan so it i just it what it just didn't seem to tell a story we had the one data point and it didn't tell much of a story but i
142look forward to being able to analyze that data more in the future as we have more data points thank you i think it's my turn now yeah thanks um so i wanted to take a moment to recognize and thank um district 65 um for bringing us new leadership um i think it was long overdue and it's just such wonderful news that we get this evening um to see our kids doing well and thank you for asking how are the kids um because they they might not um be doing part you know as well as we would like them but now we have a better picture and so sharon i want to thank you i know that the the road here hasn't been easy but i know that you have been relentless in um and just
143honoring our children and um our educators i think for the first time and since i can since i can recall jeh is not operating in a silo so the fact that you're bringing in our bilingual team that you're referencing them and that teachers teachers feel like they have the support of our administrative team k through through 8 i think is a huge accomplishment and so um i want to thank you for that and for and for bringing in um professionals to work on um professional development for our youngest of um of educators i think it's made a difference and we could you know we can see it um through the results this evening so um you know board and admin thank you so much um for for honoring our kids um i did want to
144um i there's one data piece that's missing that's really important i think that's very unique to early childhood especially jeh through our head start grant we do collect information on parent engagement and perhaps that's something that can be included in our next report um i think that our parents are an incredible piece to the success of our of our of the learning that takes place at je agent we don't have those indicators and um in k through um through eight but we do have it through the head start program and so i just i'd be interested to see um what we could do with with those with those indicators and also celebrating our parents and encouraging the success that's supposed to be um you know that's that's supposed to be hand in hand with the
145education of our our head start uh kids and their parents um so i think again it would be great to see that um that information in the next presentation and i'm excited about the work that we're doing with evanston public library i know that they've been our long-time partners but we have we have several of our families that are registered already um both for the spanish and the english uh session so that's definitely something to celebrate um i do the the language and the the math portion and this is why i bring up the parent engagement because our our parents are the ones that are are teaching our children their language um as well as you know reinforcing what's learned in the classroom and i think that something that i pointed out in the fall
146is the the decrease to the spanish language being spoken in at home so in evanston um we have a long um now a long history of latino families living in this community um you know four or five generations now of families and so the you know the the prevalence of you know families that are solely speaking spanish in in in the homes that number you know that's that's decreasing and so i'm i'm curious um if that could potentially um have an impact on on the scores that we're seeing tonight i do know that some of the tests are um solely given in in in the language um in spanish you know for for example when children might be more proficient in english and i think that's up to us to find a creative way while
147we can't do it because of our granting limitations we are a two-way immersion district so whatever you know creative you know roundabouts that we can do um to not only support the entering into the two-way immersion program that many of our early learners are gonna step into but i think also again that parent component is so important because they're they're the ones that are going to be supporting and reinforcing what's um what's being taught in in the classroom so i just i just wanted to point that out i know it's something that um again you are working on um and then finally the the the connection with the doorway to learning um it's not just the the doorway to learning that we have at jeh but we also have a delegate that happens to be
148um in our fifth ward um and you know the you know as i don't we didn't really get a lot of information tonight and i know that it wasn't part of the um the data that you collected but i think as much collaboration that we can have with our early childhood educators again because they're you know they're the ones that are communicating with families uh with parents so i think the more cohesion we can have around the training of our of our educators so depending on you know the ones that are going to come from um our early early childhood programs uh that it could be a seamless transition uh once they come into um our head start or um you know uh a school for all and all you know the programs that we
149have um at jh so they're more just comments and again you know an immense amount of gratitude for for the work that you and your team are doing well thank you so much and i i can't speak to a couple of things for um first of all i do think that you uh bring up a very good point about the fact that some students uh you know who end up in the spanish classrooms actually they're at home they're speaking a little more english and you know how we tease through that the other thing that we want to examine in this data that we haven't had a chance to fully do to fully look at is um you know we also have students who are spanish-speaking from spanish-speaking homes whose families opt not to put them
150in you know they sign the waiver they want them immersed in an english classroom so those students also are included in that bilingual data as well and so we do want to that was one of the things that the the bilingual team asked that we try to break down further um and we're going to try to do in upcoming weeks is really taking a look at the students who are predominantly spanish-speaking who are in the english speaking classes how they're doing as opposed to the spanish the ones who are predominantly spanish speaking in the spanish-speaking classrooms and then as you pointed out um you know sometimes there are students who really are a little more proficient in english and the teachers do who are in a spanish-speaking classroom the teachers do have the option if
151they know that the student is stronger in english and they just feel like they're not getting accurate results when they're tr when they're probing with spanish probes that they they might switch to the to an english pro to to collect that on that student so that they can compare and look and use that to inform their instruction as well so teachers do because the because all of the materials are available in english and spanish they do have that option it's not true for students who speak other languages but at least for english and spanish we can do that but we are trying to do a deeper analysis about the students who are regarding the students who are being not being taught in language one right who are in the what the english speaking classrooms um
152to see what we can learn from that and how they're doing on some of these tests as well these sub sub skills as well um and then in terms of the families yeah i think that that i we do have that data um i think i didn't focus heavily on it like that we take attendance at all of the um family events this year of course they've been lower but um you know they're they're still attended and we're still perform providing all the opportunities but that's that does exist the head start is only one of our programs but our family engagement specialists try to collect the data on all families who attend events um and in terms of infant welfare society so i don't oversee that program that's a separate program um you know they
153are a grantee a partner um with with the grant but i don't oversee it so i i do have contact with them as a collegial through the evanston early childhood council but i don't i don't oversee their instruction or their uh data assessment i mean katrina jones may be able to who is our grant manager may be able to provide some of that information for the board if you're interested in seeing that all right um so i think that everyone has had the chance to contribute um when we have the opportunity or when the occasion arises to talk again about um our early childhood outcomes i think it will be useful to include um any information or feedback or outcomes about transitions and how how we are working collaboratively between early childhood and school buildings
154to transition children and families and share information particularly how how children transition in the fall of 21 i think is of interest and those longitudinal updates would be much appreciated sounds like uh sharon and kylie i would like to dig into that too um i think getting some updates about the those data points that were outliers for latinx students um and yeah learning more about any opportunities that may have arisen to have bilingual latinx leadership um [Music] and including the parent engagement data would be really interesting and i think in particular when we were on that early childhood task force one of the things that was notable was that we had family programming in um preschool for all family programming and um the family center and family programming in like the visiting the welcoming center
155like we had several different pockets of family programming happening so i'd be curious to also hear about how we are being strategic about offering programs to folks in places where it's accessible and how it's meeting you know strategically meaning families needs um given that where those programs are all in one building that would be helpful to streamline it for families um so thank you so much sharon for taking the time tonight and for kylie for helping to pull together all that data and um yeah we we are proud of you all keep up the good and deliberate and thoughtful work all the work sharon did all the heavy lifting it's really it's really her kudos to her and her team thank you they have worked hard high five to them high five dollar yeah all
156right well um with nothing for no further business before this board i'm going to adjourn this meeting at 9 28. thank you all have a lovely evening