Board of Education Round Table Meeting - Public Session

001y okay we will enter public session can I get a motion second by Sher sorry about that the uh first item in public session is Personnel action this is um the appointment of our next superintendent for the district Mr Kenneth Rizza um can I get a motion to approve um the appointment of Kenneth Rizzo for superintendent of schools motion by Sherry a second second second bying and I would just like to publicly share um okay all right I will pull the vote and then I will share my comments Derek you vot yes Kim yes Penny yes Cher yes Frank yes and I'm a yes unanimously welcome to the m in your community um [Applause] [Music] M Mr Kenneth Rizzo quickly Rose to the top of a strong School of candidates his distinguished career and dedication

002to the public education system has set him apart with a wealth of experience in a steadfast commitment to Foster an educational Excellence Mr res Rizzo will undoubtedly contribute in advance the Berlin Central School District educational opportunities and our community welcome [Applause] and if we could call you up here to congratulate you in person and take a few photos that would be excellent thank you thank you [Music] do you want a group picture yeah sure the table [Music] on CL that up here let me hop [Music] I didn't prepare speech expect this part but um first just want to say thank you I'm thank grateful to the Board of Education I'm grateful to Dr Dr long for the opportunity uh to be here today in the community uh the community stakeholders who I met with interviewed

003it was kind of a blur but being here on school campus I just really excited about the small school field being here I only far by my family is everything to me and they've been so supportive I'm excited to introduce them and I to hi Mom and Dad if they're watching in Florida they asked as well my father-in-law everyone else out there possibly um it's like to be M year this is a huge step in my career able to come a community that is committed to Excellence something I always committed to myself and education to help children which is what I stand for is what's best my students so I'm excited to introduce my family to to me to you should say I'll start on the right there with my um was my youngest child

004it's Bennett uh Bennett in third grade in h Park my old son Nicholas who is a senior at evil Park High School and we going off to sien next year following my footsteps um and my middle children this is Parker rzo Parker is at sixth grade at Alo Middle School my daughter Madison rzo who's in eighth grade G to be in high school soon we were not at B gin and then my our youngest uh daughter is Ella Rizzo who was born on January 15th something I wanted to work in an interview but it was it was hard to work into an interview with the board it was time wise up um not a lot of opportunity but we uh we're blessed we're surprised and blessed and we are absolutely done having children so I'm

005youngest at five as well so I guess it's meant to be and then my wife of course Sarah ISO we've had high school and just been together to my rock since I was uh teenager and we grew up in Columbia County went to conic Hills I grew up on rout 22 May recognize that street um one4 Street 22 in Hillsdale North Hillstone New York so not very far from here um been very familiar with the district um you know passed here many times jimy Peak and skiing and we Al often frequent nor great restaurant nearby live in a park now so just it's familiar to me um and I'm excited to learn so much more about the community and get to meet all the wonderful Educators and parents here and I was a teacher for

006a long time myself 14 years in the classroom I find myself in that experience and and Leadership just listening and working with people collaboratively that's what it's stand for and just helping kids so I'm excited to be here and just thank you again for the opportunity to to position work with you Paul thank [Applause] you moving forward is um presentation so we're going to start with the Berlin midle high school and Elementary School data update all right good evening how was everyone um congratulation again to Mr Rizzo we're very excited to welcome you here to Berlin and excited to work alongside you we're here to present an update to the presentation that we presented in the fall um for our data and our action steps moving forward this school year so um um review our

007Administration team which is obviously the fer of berland elementary school um J T principal at the middle high school we have Mr David bur principal this is Megan Reynolds the assistant principal and the athletic director and um Mr Tom Olen who is our pupil Personnel department chair so these couple slides are just a review of our Berlin Central School District mission statement our strategic plans are four pillars of student achievement engaged Mountaineers Community Partnerships facility and fiscal responsibilities these four pillars is what we pretty much you know guides our decision making and our process and our our rules in all of our buildings in the district so our presentation this presentation offers recent student data for the 2425 school year as well as an update on the action plans presented previously um the slides are

008just organized in a way to emphasize some of our achievements and our improvements in both schools all right so I will begin just by um showing some recent data so we chose to show our I ready exam data because in the fall we showed our spe testing data from the year before this is the most recent data we can sh show you um I always kind of preface this with this is only one piece of data that we are showing you so I'm going to show you the data but then I'm also going to talk about a lot of the things that we're doing to improve our Student Success um you know throughout a lot of different modes and and systems so this is our I ready data I'll show you that reading and from

009the last two years and then this year to date so we've had two Diagnostics assessments one we in September and then one we just did in January so this would be the January so this is also just showing you it's showing you our I ready um growth Target so I ready will um after the first diagnostic they'll identify a targeted of growth for each student and this is showing the percentage of students the previous two years part A sentage of students who met that targeted growth and then this year it's really the the students who are on track to meet their targeted growth so can I just make one clarifying point I think and certainly correct me if I'm wrong the reason the colors are up there is because that shows the same cohort of

010students right we did that with the stfe testing just to show the last three years where those those are the same kids so the kids in kindergarten then in first grade and second in second grade um right just to kind of see that same Cod or and how they're progressing or you know how they look Beyond you know throughout those three years so that's our reading scores and these are our math scores again same process we used yeah so I did get time to review this okay the 26% stuck out like it was one and four of our kids are needed the grow right and I think that that's where we kind of look at and we use this as a stepping stone to say targeted like what are some that we kind of dig

011a little deeper into that data and and look at those assessments and this is that's why you know it's useful to do assessments three times a year so hopefully we're taking this number and this data and then the teachers looking at that to Target those skills that our students are still struggling with um it gives us time to kind of build up those those skills that students might right yeah so but it's a is it prated or is it the complete year the data that far thus far it's just this far yeah it's only to January so we would have January till our final assessment in May June um would show the actual growth and it doesn't mean that these students are not going to they're not making growth it's just that they haven't hit

012their targeted growth yet so they might be very close it's just they haven't hit that targeted growth yet and we wouldn't expect them to hit that targeted growth until the end of the school year so when I look at this the 67 I think the last one was 92 in so 8% right they right and and and I already they identify a Target growth so it would be you know in a year you would make a Year's grow so with wherever they um perform at the beginning of the year God bless you then that year growth that's where you would expect them to grow this year but they also identify um like a extended growth so kids that can make that optimal growth Target and a lot of our students will jump up and actually

013make you know hopefully even make up especially some of our students who might be one or two grade levels behind it's nice to make that you know typical growth which would be a year but we really need those students make up more than that because we need to you know get them kind of more on track to the grade level so so Jody we would we would see so we would see probably a jump in in much of this 25 by the time we hit right absolutely yes and the target targeted growth is one year that the usually a targeted growth because you would think what's expected for a student to have that growth cycle within a year so thank you all right so out of the students who um are not showing so these

014are the percentage of students not showing progress so these aren't really this is the percentage of students that aren't show hitting their growth Target but these are some of the students that when you look at the September assessment and the the winter assessment have it made at least progress towards their their growth Target yes so I kind of identified those things just and then broke it down into some of what are out of those students who aren't making the growth what are some of the things that might be impacting them so we looked at students with attendance fore attendance um so what you'll see is I I did a percentage so the one out of six would be if there were six kindergarteners that didn't make haven't made progress 70% but that's one out of

015six of those students so there's attendance issues students with IEPs that typically may not make the progress that we would typically see um year to year and then also our students with some um social emotional learning goals or struggles so just to identify some of the things that might be impacting them from making that growth or making that yes yes yes it could be one it could be that same person who has all of those needs yes so um oh sorry I did put this in here so our mtss support students that are currently um taking part in our mtss either academic or or behavioral seal um as a tier two or a tier three so outside of the classroom um support so those are just some of our numbers I know that Tom and

016Sam are going to kind of really dive deeper into the mtss so I didn't spend a lot of time going through that I wanted to identify some of those students that we are providing that academic and social supports for within the school day um these are just some of our attendance rates these are attendance rates per grade level so then I wanted to obviously I've identified some of our strengths and some of our weaknesses and then I really want wanted to identify well well what kind of things are we doing to you know improve attendance so we meet every week as um a student support team and once um every other week we talk about attendance so we have a spread sheet that we input student attendance on um we keep notes on those attendance

017issues we really keep track of student absences we know that 10% of days is a chronic absence so that's a big Target flag for us we want to make sure that students um aren't close to or exceeding that 10% um absent so we we talk about that we put student data into that spreadsheet and then we go through and really as a team talk about you know students that are showing up on that some students who are really just hovering and we communicate through some attendance letters um we have some students who have kind of hit that 10% we feel like we maybe need to do more reaching out to parents um you know we talk a lot about the elementary school that attendance has a lot to do with the family Dynamic most of

018our students especially our younger ones really want to be at school they're just might be challenges that prevent them from being here so I think that's why we you know we feel strongly about communicating with the families regarding the important of attendance including the letters the phone calls and person meetings and then we do some things to provide support to the families um and help with getting kids to school so ideas for structured routines at home we you know we meet with with parents and give them you you know some ideas we meet with the students and really talk about how they can help themselves get to school on time and improve their attendance um you know we we've had incentives at school um usually it's done more on a a child to child basis

019um where we find that maybe it is a student motivation that's keeping a kid from coming to school and being able to check in with someone when they in the morning and check in at the end of the day and you know we've kept monthly charts and they col her in every day or at school or even really we've been focusing a lot on on time too we talk a lot about attendance and K not being at school but you know we really look at students who are chronically late and when they're late missing some of those you know much needed interventions that were providing them and they're missing them because they're coming into school late so we've been able to kind of do some reach some Outreach for those types of things some of

020our social emotional supports that we have and I just kind of you know I kind of put a little blurb up there about you know social emotional learning we know it's important um because it equips students with the crucial life skills like self-awareness empathy relationship building responsible decision making um it reduces negative behaviors and it Fosters a positive claster and school environment or while ultimately preparing students to feel and be successful in school um so one of the things that we did to support our our teachers um we do have a book study so some of I I kind of ask the teachers to share some of their takeaways from a book study um it's called that one kid by Brian menler so and it focuses a lot on helping that one student maybe having

021that one student in your classroom that you can't connect with or or um you know help as much as you want to and some of the things that they felt like they've learned to help them moving forward um you know you don't control you you don't control if a student is disrespectful to you but you do control how you respond so looking at some of the things teachers are doing and how they're reacting in trying to help with those Behavior managements were meeting students at their Island what are the things that they enjoy and how do they incorporate them into that their day uh celebrating successes and positive interactions and sharing them with your community of the school and listening and leading with intention some other things um that we do I think I already

022talked about our our student support team meeting um I talked you know that's our school psychologist our school counselor or CSS coordinator and our PPS director so on top of talking about attendance we also spent a lot of time talking and brainstorming um and collaborating about students our most struggling students our behaviors um and and coming up with some possible interventions to assist with those we communicate with families about strategies to use at home to also support Behavior needs I think we all know that um very important key to helping students become successful is building relationships and communicating with families and making this you know a whole initiative you know at school but also at home and then just building up some of our tier one tier two programs so our classroom lessons through second

023step our restorative practices you know our classrooms have you know um clear and consistent expectations they have classroom routines um they'll hold circles if they need them a lot of modeling um our teachers do a great job of obviously modeling what's expected and how to be respectful and appropriate behaviors and then we also have some tier two interventions which we we hold many lunch groups and scheduled counseling sessions and then also um you know on call crisis management as as needed through the day all right so when we talked in the fall we I I had identified some of the action steps so these were some of the things that we were going to work on this year um you know as just targeted things that we wanted to make some improvements on and really

024wanted to find um some improvement within the within the school day with so we talk about working with the Questar Specialists um work with my the literacy leadership team and then mpss again Tom and S will kind of go a little bit deeper into some of those those things so for our Questar we we decided we were obviously we were continuing with our youly I know that I we all talk about these acronyms and youly so I just kind of wanted to give a a little bit of a background of like what is it why is this important just to give you some sense of you know being able to understand and and better relate to what you know our action steps are so we you know research consistently shows that it's a systematic and

025explicit phonics instruction I know we've come full circle and in a lot of years previous it was kind of Co language and all just let's read books and throw books at students and let's you know and it's kind of now come back full circle say no ST these students really need that systematic explicit explicit phonics instruction and youly is a program that our K teachers follow it's a 30 minute um instruction block every day and it's very routined it's the same system every day um and you're building on those phonic skills so um you know I just Ed studies indicate that phonic instruction particularly when delivered systematically significantly improves reading skills in kindergarten and first grade students compared to those who do not receive this instruction and then phonics instruction can be particularly beneficial for

026students who are struggling as well with reading and helping them to C words more effectively so that we began last year so this year we're just continuing kind of getting more comfortable within it um we are also having emically has come and observed those lessons and giv teachers some feedback and helped guide them with that as well also we're working with Kim um as part of the P3 literacy instructional best practices with part of that is pic awareness so we have to make sure that we're hitting those pic awareness skills so I I talked about us implementing um the hity hity is a fic awareness which fic awareness is it's basically identifying and the Sounds in the words so not not connected to the letter names it's really just talking to kids and having them

027manipulate sounds through just verbal command or ver um asks and phic awareness is found um foundational for phonics instruction so in order for students to then progress and take that phonic instruction that tmic awareness really needs to be built up and our prepaid classes already Implement that phic awareness so we just felt like it was what we should do is continue with that integr in that first and um that K1 two classrooms as well um how can it be taught it's just a focus on activities that blend in segment sounds using rhyming and syllable identification combining phonemic awareness instruction with phonics and site words and just providing that explicit instruction I think it's really important that we just found that you know we're doing it every day and for a certain amount of time and

028it's a routine structure and I think sometimes as a teacher I always felt like oh we're just doing the same thing over and over and over but we found that students love it they look for it when you don't do it and it's it's just something that you know they don't have to focus on what is going to be expected to me in this lesson they just can focus on just what the lesson is about because they already know exactly what it's expected of them and the routines so we have gotten the manuals in teachers hands already to just kind of look through and experiment with but kally is coming March 26 to train the teachers and the information of that implementation of that so that we can go full force in September some other

029things that Kim's working with us on is our Ela program our Ela program has expired this year instead of jumping in we felt like February wasn't enough time to get us really um educated on a new Ela program or continuing the create Ela program we're in we just really need to look at what's out there so she's really helping us spearhead that um she'll be meeting uh during the one of the April PD hours to introduce that and introduce um some programs that are out there and then she'll be meeting with grade levels in May to identify some of their strength and their needs we're looking at our diagnostic testing right now we use I ready looking ATL I know people will talk a little bit more about ISL if they're utilizing that in sixth

030grade um really looking at its ability to better Target or Identify some of those targeted skills so I already might say oh this student is low in phonic well that would be you know a very wide range of things where we're finding thatl really breaks that down a lot more so that teachers can really um you know hone in on those specific skills that students need to improve on and then I also am using her to coach some of our teacher support their Ela instructions some classroom management strategies so I have to say has been a really huge benefit for me this year she comes once a month and it's great because she can work with those teachers and then she can follow up with them the following month so that's been a great benefit

031for me definitely um as the principal this year we're also working with Colleen Masters to work on the MTS um she's really focusing on the mtss math updating the beginning middle and end of the year assessments um helping teachers meeting with teachers to meet some of that tier one instruction needs how to different she skills and she's been working with our Stars program teachers to to also um differentiate their instruction and use the envisions program where it's appropriate for their students and then for science we're also um working on integrating more of that Ela into the science curriculum and then also supporting student teachers with those required investigations some of the other action steps we talked about building community of reader so how can we do this we're building relationships with people who share a

032love for reading um exposure to new words and Concepts through diverse texts or just being a part of a reading community so we're doing that we have a lot of programs going on you know we're just finishing up our Dr suss week this is National reading month it's March we're doing a March Madness bracket where everybody's reading books and they're voting on books and at the end of the the month we'll have a celebration and a big vote and to see who the championship is so um you know we're encouraging teachers to find time within their day to have a dear time so really just making sure that we're communicating to students and showing students that we feel reading is important and also just really getting Tex into kids hands so some of the benefits

033of this is you know enhanced critical thinking skills in increased vocabulary deeper understanding of literature so connections a sense of belongings and exposure to perspectives and the opportunity to learn from other interpretations of text um we also have some PD going on so I talked about our writing instructions so we've been focusing on two of our book studies one focused on our WR the writing Revolution um so the writing Evolution isn't it's not a program C to say like you would say oh we're doing the writing Revolution as our writing program it's really just a way of thinking about how we're teaching students to to write so it's you know explicitly teaching the strategies for planning and revising and editing um a strong and consistent positive effects on writing skill has you know a strong

034positive effect on writing skills it's embedding writing instruction into content and having students write about what they're learning in English social study science math and it's teaching sentence construction skills so I mean they're they start with the basics of like let's build a really good sentence and then they just kind of build on from there so you know till hopefully you have a well constructed paragraph so it's really just that construction of that paragraph in those sentences and how to work that into more of our content area and then another book study we're having is our student centered instru function I think this is um you know to build our engagement from students we know students are hands on they're working with their hands they're you know it makes them more engaged and motivated so

035you know student center learning creates a collaborative environment that students are able to participate in the students are encouraged to think critically about what they're learning and consider how they want to learn demonstrate knowledge they're adding more student choice in their instruction and student centered learning looks different across grade levels and there's a wider breath of activity to choose from for Student Center morning all right I think that's it for for me we got a lot going on but we're making really you know great strides I really feel like you know we're trying to support our teachers and the things that they're feeling that they need support in and also doing that as well for our students [Music] I've invited uh my core department chair to join me because the uh group for sure Bob

036straight from the state social studies conference came back app come on down Bob man represent sence apprciate that Nate Ellis Ariel Gilbert Anda so thank thank I do appreciate it like I said it's a team effort so I wanted them to be part of this so this year n and Ariel decided to uh come to me and ask we could do a test pilot ofl um for the sixth grade my building is not thrill I'm ready it's four-letter word in the the middle school high school so they wanted to go a a different route they did a lot of research and they presented I went to Morin we agreed to give it a shot and it's been um something that very successful um I did a very um profession profal survey of the students uh

037if feel like iel and I ready I sat down and talked and they actually gave me feedback and actual reasons why they like ISL so much better so I was very impressed with that one of the things is to test them is shorter actually um it takes less time to test a student um the questions uh they feel are a little more relevant and easier to understand and from your perspective both you the data that you receive a little more concise and you'll go through it okay so um our M school is something that we're focusing on because we are U grade level wise in math in ela we are behind in terms of you'll see uh when I say behind low grade level uh so one of the things that we are working on

038this year and next year is building up our uh academic uh success and instructional uh success in 6 seven8 grade for the foundational skills so if you can see sixth grade 10 students grew a grade level or more from the Flor um we were very excited about that in math because uh the all uh struggle but it shows Improvement but if you look 39 students are at risk meaning that they are at uh what's called below grade level and in sixth grade we have 46 students so that's uh something that once we got this data that we looked at uh to make modifications and I'll explain how we did that later this is this is January um so if you look at the seventh and eth grade 28 students are at risk and at a

03942 and 38 at a 45 uh for e8th grade so obviously our focus is on finding out the root causes um and working on what the root causes are and then an action plan and that's what we're doing in our team meetings but other thing that we have this year that we have not had in the past six seventh grade we have a lab in ela and that you want just quick okay do that later okay I'm jumping ahead uh great mind like so you'll see that we are concerned in math so if I look at this seventh grade for example there's 42 kids so 11s January that is correct to that one test yes well if you look at them we had uh a combination of things from abente ISM the students um struggling

040in terms of learning the curriculum [Music] um we had other concerns in terms of um I believe I'm not mistaken that we had students that um we consider rush through test not take their time uh so the test taken wasn't the where it should be so red flags came up on a couple of different things that were're addressing the kids do know they've been taking ready long enough and they've told us that they rush through to get a lower score so that the lessons they get are easier to do so so we question the validity of that data to be completely honest because it's a snapshot of data from September to January nothing in between right so like it's just two data points right when we talk about a little bit later you'll see what

041we that's one question I know but there's no yes if they did but they don't rush because they're continuously monitor right so there's no rushing you know it's uh it kind of remarkable said that they more not putting effort in so it wouldn't be as difficult so these are discussions that we're having internally uh to be honest that bothered us a lot so we're changing our approach and trying to do something things different again I excel when we do the I ready it's spread out in terms of like periods one through four when we give the ey Exel it's right within the period um and the students uh attention span is much better differentl than I so the ELA little better but obviously we have concerns um but as you see 19 students uh the

042grade levels Rose three fell in sixth grade where we go down to seventh grade we have 25 students and then 34 out of 45 five uh are below grade level 8th grade so again we're we have been meeting as team we have been examined um the scores each student we'll speak about ntss in a little while um we do question the validity of the I ready exams but again we own it so we're not going to make excuses we're going to look at it and improve um we have changed some things in terms of how we're deliver instruction and we're trying to get the students more engag uh with the you know in terms of taking the I ready in the future graduation rates came out officially so as August 24 we're at 89% overall

043New York State average was 86 students disabilities was 55% that was 6 out of 11 students and then 75 excuse me 79% for economically disadvantage um some of the students students with disabilities fell into economically disadvantage um so it impacted both of those uh subps so areas that we're working on when we speak about rigor and um you know is basically saying that our expectation in the classroom of our students need need needed to rup and our expectations of what the teachers were delivering and doing and what the students how they going to perform the expectations have changed so it's basically changed the culture of both buildings and we are well on our way I get tell and I think you speak to anybody in the building we are all swimming in the same direction

044certainly when I got here it was not that way we are now I think uh as we continue to go you're going to see uh the increases and you're going to see the achievements grow so we do professional development three Wednesdays of the month one of the things that we have done with uh compared to last year with professional development we've been much more targeted with what we do last year we were doing so many different things now only doing a few things but really trying to get strong in them and try to develop them and we do it as a whole group but we do it as a department um data data has never really been used the way we use it now thata is used in all our meetings data is used to

045drive our decisions and our you know in terms of instructure so you take theel you take the I ready and we look at it and we're looking at thata we we strong and we are areas that we have to work in and sometimes we are surprised by it and that's a good thing so then we work together so we develop those uh strategies differential [Music] instru we know that one size doesn't fit all there's a lot of talk but not a lot of action now we are really targeting what we're doing in each classroom each teacher is responsible so when I do meet with them have dat meetings with them they are telling me what the students needs are and how they targeting them with instructional uh strategies is much different than they used to

046be um we understand that special education staff is spreadin we work very closely with them because special like kids uh need the assistance that we're providing and sometimes to think outside it's not just you know this is the lesson this is what we have to learn so what we are doing is we're targeting the needs of the students and figuring out how to uh work with them you know we have students that an auditory we have students that are visual so all those things are Incorporated in the lessons now npss I know Tom and Sam are going to speak about it I will tell you we are finally on the right path uh it was all over the place and actually really was not an ntss program here in words but not in Deeds now

047it is part of the culture um from what your interventions are and what's expected in them to track of student progress that goes back to the data we are constantly looking at it and then for the students we in our meetings we are developing plans and coming back to the plans to see you know assess Where We Are make adjustments we were getting the families involved I can tell you in mtss meetings we have families coming in if they can't come in we get them either on the Google meet or on the phone that hasn't happened before so we're trying to get team effort with the families bronic absenteeism um we are still struggling with chronic absenteeism however things are changing we have Incorporated a couple different things um we are meeting with families bringing

048them in we're going through the data with them in terms of your child fin out this much we speak about uh negative impacts of being absent we get the families to help us because what's happening this I'll give you example I had a father taking his son to work every day rather than let him come to school and we spoke about the impact of that and he didn't I don't know if he really appreciated uh what was going on so now we s child uh I got a call this morning from a parent that the child said uh won't come in I said okay I'm coming out deputy delissio and I are coming out there we'll be there in 15 minutes this is like 7 in the morning that child got dressed right away so

049going out to the house is is very helpful we had another meeting with the family there's internal uh um family situation now that we know about it we're giving services to the family as well as a child uh when a child's absent not just that the student doesn't want to come there's so many mitigating factors that you have to bring into it and that's where we as a school are Central Source it's not just about the student it's supporting the families and that's for rer County and other programs that we incorporate in that are subgroups [Music] who and good night so the subgroups [Music] this is like aiss [Music] teachings so subgroups so the subgroups uh special ed economically disant students but all students uh kind of mic what we say focusing on them analyzing

050the performance GS and constantly tinkering with what we're doing ownership I've said to you numerous times increas in student voice in this building and student voice has been involved with the decision making I can tell you about this beautiful oven that I Rec the kids are happy to have Big Daddy's Pizza Big Daddy's [Music] Pizza members do have so while we're waiting for that they all have it I'm abely [Music] ownership one of the things that we spoke about and I certainly realized when I came here there was a lack of ownership um amongst the students and like I said that you know staff was going different directions because there was so much turnover here in the middle school high school so one of things we wanted to do was create that ownership amongst staff

051and students and we are definitely doing that um student voice is being used and utilized and Incorporated in several different things um student counil like I said to you before comes to me with uh several different ideas and we incorporate we use surveys so I have my department chairs here they'll tell you our department chair meetings and other meetings uh they Le the way in terms of what we are doing uh my my expression always is when we're here there's no titles let's just talk and let's I don't care who gets credit but long as we are uh together when we come out um so I think that's helped a lot because I think people do feel that they have ownership one of the things that I'll jump ahead on is I believe yesterday day

052before one of our subcommittees BLT is creating uh the environment here in terms of changing the building quite frankly we look at the building it's kind of St you know it's it's not a lot going on so we met as a subcommittee yesterday a fiveyear plan of what we're going to do to change the building to represent the students and student ownership so the first thing that we'll work on the summer is the front we're going to take uh our um what you call the plaques of our past teachers and we're going to put in a new location but this is going to represent only students and uh we're going to change the look of it and and what's there you want people to come in and see uh you know why we're so proud

053of our students but we also um have a new uh 3D machine what do we call it poster machine I'm sorry uh one of Morin's legacies that she's leaving here is our poster machine so we are going to print out several things um I'm kind of a nerd I go to different schools I think see things that I like I think pictures of it and I send it to Mor and I said what do you think this looks like right um so we're going to put things on the walls we're going to put things on floors um you know we're going to represent students uh with everything we do so we're really excited about that parent involvement we are working on it I will be sending out a uh a link this weekend with my

054newsletter that's uh asking people to survey how do we get more people in monthly Town Hall meetings in it it says what day of the week is best I have said I will come out on a Saturday and Sunday we'll do a pancake breakfast at different locations the libraries the firehouses that that's how it what it will take to get people to come you know so ask several questions once we have uh that completed I'll report out to the board what people looking for and then we will incorporate um we have really pushed parents to use schoy more so they understand you know where their children are academically uh absenteeism uh newsletters emails I do my phone calls um the other thing is the parent teacher conferences we changed this year because we had an

055open house that really wasn't being utilized so we went to a night parent teacher conferences to accommodate people that work during the day uh we have another one coming up soon and the staff is taking a different approach in terms of trying to get engagement from the parents to come in so uh that we know without the parent involvement and not teaming up with us students are not going to be successful it is imperative that parents families are involved so one of the strengths that we have is communication the consistent transparent updates uh constantly communicate through emails phone calls um Rachel tety certainly deserves a ton of credit because I don't see another District that does nearly the job that we do and that's Rachel in terms of Hosting things um so uh Rachel is

056very much a part of this and other thing that doesn't get recognized of Rachel is um she's a great partner for me a lot smarter than me a lot more creative than me so I'll give her an idea and she'll come back have a really uh solid plan or idea how to do it uh then she'll create um uh different uh Flyers uh I wish I could take credit for it but if it was me it' be stick figure so she deserves all all the credit for uh that shees Inc job she does Facebook she but everything Facebook everything uh and again I don't want to I do want to embarrass her uh she does an amazing job she really does so you know this's common theme here with communication I've had parents come to

057me thanking me in terms of how much uh information they getting now plus I have an open door policy I have two different parents come in today without meetings and we made sure that we sat with them we gave them what they wanted we want that people feel free to come here and if they have concern they can speak to me at any time I can tell you the other night I was on the phone at 9:00 night with a parent because she had texted me with the concern um is very important that they feel that there's a partnership there the teachers are communicating a lot more um they're reaching out to the parents and that helps because again you're communicating with the parent and they feel they communicate with you we can work together

058to assist uh the children and the community data checks data driven these been interesting um I I've enjoyed these feeings because not only you know when I look at it uh you know I see things that I might not have seen it's the teachers that are bringing points up to me and how it impacts them and how much uh um you know they might not have been aware of it but by looking at it and then what I call scaffolding using it over and over to compare so they know where they're at um and the department chairs have done a wonderful job they deserve the credit in terms of pushing that and making sure that our staff is using it m has been very good uh in terms of giving us an idea of who's

059going where and when uh giving us a a pattern of behavior giv us a pattern of when students are going at where they're going at so we can address that um it's interesting you know M has become a verb and an adjective in this building depend on how the student feels about if they're run whole P restriction or something like that but it's it's been uh something that I think we would able to use and I think we can use better you know I think we have a meeting with M tomorrow if I'm not mistake y you've heard me say this before as important as academics are we have a lot of trauma in this district and just to speak of that instruction which is very important just speak about that would be short sided

060we have an amazing amazing team of counselors Miss Harrison and and and Mr Shaw Miss paully we have a new person from rer County they are working and they are meeting the kids meeting the families um I had a student meeting today one of the counselors with the family student is struggling the mother's a child and we did not know that and that's why the student not coming to school they're struggling we came up with the plan well why do a student care about homework when he misses his mother you you know you can't say well you got to just put it in the back of your mind and do your no that's not fair so as a building we've become much more aware of students social emotional needs and our our staff this morning

061we heard a conversation yesterday our staff goes above and beyond most of our staff in terms of trying to help our students um so this is something that might be tucked away here but this is extremely important this something that we continue to develop working with Tom and and uh the staff United sta again when I came here because of the turnover staff was just doing different things in different departments we have worked hard to all be swimming in the same direction and speak the same language and we're doing it and I'm really really proud of my staff and I'm extremely proud of my department chairs without them that's couldn't happen um having Mrs Reynolds come in as many Ys and she has added to us uh to our team to our community uh not

062only as assistant principal but as athletic director um so I'm just proud to be you have being part of the team but our professional learning communities which would be the department meetings the data teams uh mtss if you go in there extremely organized we are speaking about students we are speaking about best practice and we're utilizing it and we're coming back and speaking about it we're doing different things now uh in terms of the force of Staff appreciate appreciation morale yesterday was a pretty neat day we had a faculty meeting and we had the jazz band play in the beginning of the meeting for the teachers and I think teachers enjoy Fant te the director of it I don't know who she is uh's wife the uh it was excellent so un Outreach I've spoken

063about numerous cons uh I spoke about two well two things I'll remember I'll remind you we have a non uh profit organization NCH New York State uh technology engineering Corporation we will be working with them starting in September once a month we'll have about 20 25 students going to them for steam different uh different topics in Steam and they'll be taking a survey of our students and they get professionals from those fields and they will uh work with our students try to get you know engage their increase their uh you know their interest in it they sering lunch we are going Nate myself Steve M excuse me and Miss cobber we're going March 12th next week they uh presenting to another school so we're going to go watch it ourselves uh but we're really excited

064it's not opportunity we have but another one is the uh connect Comm connect that we were part of that Suicide Prevention uh they have a grant Federal Grant and we're going to work within for mental health for suicide prevention and it's free and they're going to come and they're going to train our staff uh being a principal of uh having two students die by Suicide uh that's something I take very seriously and I'm excited that our staff will be trained in IT training to recognize how to work with kids um and this from the community all these things are free so we appreciate it very much building leadership team The BLT is leading way again um one of the things I'm excited about is the farm um to table initiative where we I have a

065couple of Grants filling out right now that to try to get money for to build Farm uh Farms build Gardens and try to get uh a greenhouse where students will work on these things and we will take the food and use it in our kitchen hopefully um I was excited before the meeting when Penny told me that she may have an opportunity for us so hopefully compen or uh company we could get this to our students so our building leadership team is doing a lot of things I will probably in June report out for the year I'll give you a report on so this is where I asked my department chairs to come in going to speak about that so first I'll have Ela and math want to hear um so I'm going to start

066uh Ariel and I work really closely together to make sure the nap and Ela program is Al line especially in sixth through eth grade um but also with some of our supports in high school as well so put together um a little it's it's only like six slides I'm pretty short um slide presentation it's linked in with Mr Burns uh Mr Bley asked us to speak on this so we're just going to talk about a few of the things that we did this year um starting with scheduling um we went to our teachers last year and said what do you need to be more successful and unanimously they said we have all the tools we just don't have the time um they they didn't know what else to do they didn't have the time to

067give the kids what they needed um so we work together with Rachel Harrison and Dave our teams and our department and try to figure out a way to help teachers get that time and we've established Labs every other day all year long at the sixth grade level every other day for half of the year at the seventh grade level which sounds a little bit weird so first semester um some of the students receive lab every other day and then the rest of them receive it for the rest of the year every other day um and then e8th grade unfortunately we didn't have availability in the schedule um or teaching capacity to fit that into the schedule absolutely So when you say a lab you think like a science lab like hands on exactly right and

068kind of very similar to that right um they need time to practice and play and to get outside of the standards right um the state gives us this much curriculum to cover and this much time so this gives us an opportunity to reach more of the tier 2 level stuff some projects um group work station work uh you need I have uh my sixth grade math teacher I can speak to does an amazing improve skills yes improv skills and I going get to that a second U but it also gave us an opportunity for a place to put um the skill building froml from our new program I know everyone's so excited to to learn about an arei very excited to talk about next but yes the the labs are really to build skills but

069they're also to give um to give the students the tier two intervention as well that they need so it's kind of in conjunction with the skills and mtss supports and to meet students where they're at does that make sense not just homework or anything like that every six every other yes for the full year and you're going to see EXL how that my Exel instuction instuction so it's not traditional instruction for the grade level but instruction does occur during that period the instruction might be small group instruction on a skill that students are foundationally weak with uh but it also might be a skill to advance another group right um so again we might have a group of kids in there that are really really Advanced so we can work with them on a different

070topic or a different skill we're also working with students in another little group and we're doing station work and we're giving opportunities and options and um different ways to look at um the standards and the skills that they need what is the SI in the lab the aage class the same as a regular class period so whatever our class sies are if there's 15 17 18 kids in the class it ranges from 13 18 somewhere in there um it would be the same size they're not smaller they're not larger they're pretty much the same size if you go into a classroom for lab you see what station work so it could be like four stations and based onl or I ready scores they know that different skills that we need to work on so station

071one is working on this skill maybe three or four students there and based on their scores they need to work on that station two is another skill that the the diagnostic tests say that they need to work on and it goes around the room like that and it's really targeted interventions um there's teaching but there's also uh a lot of Hands-On engagement so it's not they're sitting down they're moving around and it's a lot of work they can give small real life application Lessing right they can um deviate from a regular lesson but like connect to that lesson right and just reinforce and as we start to get our data they can make adjustments in the lab to really meet the students where they're at and I know Ariel so excited she loves so here

072you go so this year we were looking up to be able to piloto in sixth grade using it as our screener and one of the things we're finding probably the biggest parts of it is that we get real time assessments so you saw assessment thank you you saw saw that um you had an assessment that was done in the fall and then when that was done in January well with um withl we're actually assessing kids every one to two weeks takes about 10 minutes and I get a capture of where the kids are and it's not a shock to me in January um when I got the scores in January I was like yeah that's I expected because that's what I've been seeing and I can also um look much sooner and Target the skills

073that the kids are needing earlier on instead of waiting until January to see those skills and it's been really helpful like we talked about in the labs to be Target those skills and move kids around and because of that we're seeing a lot more growth um it's also been helping with different sh in the classroom um we talked about how I ready is really the kids are just sick of it by the time they get to seventh and eth grade and that this is something that they're really enjoying more um it's really more towards like the state test skills so they're really um doing really a lot of good things with that and it's different stand standards and the skills that are so right so like I ready is more the um the standards where

074withl you're getting all those skills that they need to have so like we've talked about um like you could pull a sixth grade skill you pull a fourth grade scale from Central ID and you can implement it different ways so what do you use for assessment in 9 through 12 actually the really nice thing about EXL is it goes 912 so um we we've been using it um some of the English teachers have been at the whole nth grade they actually used ANL and then we've been using it with our mtss I ready doesn't do the 912 so that's why if we getl um which we're hoping for next year it's something that we can use right on through have so yeah a couple things so um I already does move through the end of

075eth gradi and actually has a new component of algebra uh I'm not 100% sure does it go a little bit higher than nth grade for ELA as well or is it St eth grade for start eth grade so a lot of I ready assessments stop at that level um ISL does go beyond math as well which is really neat um but it also is something that we can use to Target CER levels we do currently use I ready for mtss courses and um AIS courses at the high school level though because a lot of those students aren't at aath grade level that's why they're in those courses so we are utilizing I right now at the high school level it just kind of ends that sense uh okay daty uh this is something that um

076I'm a little excited about uh so in my technology role um I was hearing a lot from K through well three through eight teachers um they're worry about the state assessments and most importantly bullet point number four down there uh which is the giving us the test practice formats to prepare the kids for testing they were afraid that the barrier wasn't going to be the content but the barrier would to be the delivery of the assessment and the computer-based testing was a huge fear um datam has this kind of corner like cornered in a market for La term there's not much else out there um so we traded it out because we all know where our budget was we traded it out um with another program so we didn't waste any money or anything and

077we grabbed this new testing software um that gives all of our teachers previous year state test data to drive instruction and that is every previous year state test data so um including high school so it actually captures near York state regions data as well um so it takes all this data it opens it up to our teachers so they can view uh the statistics and the data the P values like we were just looking today um at where some of Ariel's students were um in according to where the uh students were with the state right so she uh gave kids an exam today well earlier this week um and we were going through the data question number one 77% of her kids got it right only 39% of the students um got it right last

078year on the state assessment so it's real time data for our teachers as they give that assessment um when we rolled it out to our teachers we didn't roll it out as like everyone has to use this we kind of Let It Grow organically and now that the state assessments are coming and they're starting to practice with it and you I hate to speak for Ariel and sixth grade team but um today as we're meeting there like wow we can even use this earlier on in the year now um so it's going to grow uh organically as we see the power and the data and how we can use that data to inform our instruction moving forward it also gives us all the state test practice questions which are so hard to come by um

079and it links them to our standards um so like tonight when I was ping up standard um like there was a standard that the kids were do and then next to each standard that I test them on next say they were really struggling with it there's a link right next to it and it gives me like 20 lessons that are connected to what my students might be struggling with I could find different ways to teach um to that standard so I thought that was really Co to and my region teachers were excited too because um you know we have had an opportunity to really meet and sit with Administration and go and dig deep into the data and now that the dat is in this software all of my teachers have access to the Regent

080scor from the previous years so they can do look backs and see which standards they struggled with the most and students struggled with the most what they need to work on as a trend as a teacher um so there there's just like so many different data points and reports you can run with it uh we're definitely not experts in it by any means uh the program is so robust and we're just learning and scratching the surface with it now um so that's something that math and have been pil that's 3 through eight as well yes so we have brought that down to the elementary and that is also regions wise it is all subject area so we met with all departments on that um quickly I had a very long day today but my highlight

081was at 1:30 Ariel coming into my office walking behind my desk with her laptop look at these scores she goes look at the provement look at this she's showing it to me and she's breaking it down so I was excited because she was excited and she was using that data for her students to improve with her students so I really appreciate it's nice because it gives us one more piece of data besides like I Exel and this is another tool thater so every teacher has access to you did not force anything out there a lot of changes this year it was a new program kind of got it last minute we were waiting on data which sounds ridiculous but a lot harder than you think than you would think um and so by the time

082we received it um it wasn't something we could drive out as an initiative correctly so we thought we would put it out there and let the teachers kind of play with it this year and our goal will be to hopefully grow it next year what percentage of teachers actually use um right now today uh real data real time data I've seen seven assessments given already administered um I know for a fact there's more assessments created because I'm working in my tech role uh with third grade on creating assessments and like tying them together as for instance grade but I know I saw fifth grade be the test like fifth grade look like you were all over it the other day so as an administrator I can kind of see where everyone's at right um so

083people using it it's starting to grow but I have actually only seen like six or seven assessments given it so far so questionary school yes yes I plan to use it but like n already said uh the curriculum is this big and this much time to teach so I just can't spend the time just practicing the whole test I have so much to cover so but as we get closer in April that's what I plan to do I plan to uh for my own test and just have them practice as much as possible but I was looking at fourth grade how they in fourth grade to see the the skills that they were strong with and what they need to you know work on and I'm able to see from this point right now what

084I think their strengths are based on the data I have and seeing oh they are improving based on my Assessments in the classroom or other assessments such as I ready that we using right now this is a new tool so people aren't 100% comfortable with yet as they get more comfortable and be part of our culture yeah it's a little coment too I know if you like trying to assign stuff a little it's not user friendly it's not it's not it's it's going to take you got you have to have the time to sit down and and play with it yeah and learn and the other nice thing about it too is um it looks just like theate test for them how it looks on the computer so it's just more exposure for them to

085take it this is what it's going to look like because you know the past several years you know they are coming up with take on the computers it's still fairly new and New York State's only support that they Val for four Samplers per grade level per content area and 10 questions each on them after the kids take the assessment there were no results given back to the teachers so the kids take the assessment they click Send and enter and that data went out into the world and nothing came there so the teachers had no idea what was going on um so this at least gives them a look at that assessment includes the social emotional learn that's I don't think we we didn't purchase that so we purchased there's like there's like 50 things that

086dates up we just purchased the C okay yeah everything costs everything of course especially the software um so just a little bit I don't go too much in ntss because I know you'll be hearing soon um so we started the year without a cordinator as chair we work with um the consultant Letta to fill classes as soon as we possibly could we had a PD um about an audit mtss and we passed this information forward it was a great day of information um a lot of people learn a lot of things the schools are doing that we can Implement here um Stan was hired so she isor um so we've been working really closely with her to continue our program at the middle school high school focusing on um our grade six a we really

087want to build that up and then Contin this it grows and last but not least just looking to the future our hope is to hopefully expand labs for all our middle grade levels we're seeing huge growth in the sixth grade and even um small growth in the seventh grade with the kind of hybrid Labs that we have we're looking at continuously improving our curriculum alignment between all grade levels as Matt was saying he's looking down at fourth grade Ariel trying to look down at fifth grade like everyone's trying to look back and connect all the grade levels together and using things like data me to align everything um and to work with our department chairs and to work with our Elementary School we're always looking to continuously improve that um and to um little chainless

088PL our math department only build our financial literacy program to meet the New York State Standards uh New York state is um changing their standards for sure graduate you guys have seen all that um one of those things that my department has to absorb is the new financial literacy program for all which I think is amazing it's great it's just you have to fit it in there right so um we currently have a consumer math course so I'm working with um our consumer math teacher in Hudson Valley and hopefully my hope is to get us a Hudson Valley accredited financial literacy program with him as the instructor um and even kind of bridging some more business type classes as well um so that's from the math side of things talked about earlier that we're expanding

089the ISL for grade levels um we definitely want to be more consistent with our mtss providers and then building on the 612 using the strategies from the science of greeting we talked about um the K5 programs that they're doing and we want to continue that as we move up from the 6 you have any questions I will tell you we are building Rachel Harrison and myself are building schedule for next year now uh the lab 678 all year is the main focus one of my main focuses uh so I anticipate that the last because it been so successful this year to be able to do that schools social studies department is currently today they started uh the first day of the state conference Thunder was still my thunder um yeah so we've been at the

090new social com it's been fantastic they came from there here um and I wasn't sure if I was going to be here so I I sent this during one of our breaks today but U I just wrote out a couple of things in social studies we are not the social studies classes that you would have even attended a decade ago here in Berlin um we're constantly motivating uh we're in constant movement our classrooms are really active nothing's really as stagnant um there's not stand deliver lessons um now there is a place for that in a lot of what we do but there's also no place for it all the time um so that that's not what's happening um we do teach on a timeline choice is really abundant in that timeline so um to tell

091you how large the curriculum is and I sat in a bunch of meetings today where they're expanding the curriculum it's amazing how much Choice teachers have to shape the curriculum fitting the community that um that they're teaching in um we do work with I had a meeting with um Questar today in particular a woman named Jen Risco comes into her building she works with our um curriculum um she she helps us um increase with student rigor she sees things that maybe we don't see um in in because we are kind of in our own uh you know own school here she sees all the other schools in the area what they're doing she helps us increase rigor raise expectations um we do that through through the curriculum um it's not NE necessarily through an increase

092in workload I think sometimes when people think they hear increase in rigor it means like you know I'm sending a kid home with like three essays to write tonight kind of thing no it's about increasing rigor within that curriculum set um we have consistently the whole time I've been working at at ECS for a while now a long while um we use data to make decisions about social studies um it's the thing that we've always done um whether it's you know with things like datamate um or just through our AIS programs which um if you don't know what that is it's academic intervention services if a student doesn't uh do well there isn't doing well in class they get pulled in there if a student is not you know didn't pass the Regents they're assigned

093that course 100% of our students who were in that course um pass the January region so that's fantastic um that was in US history um so it was it was great there were great students to work with I I taught them this year but um but every year we have High success rate uh we build Equitable rubrics based on the curriculum and over time we've had better and better uh we've gotten better and better adjusting those rubrics to fit the expectations of particular students we've got to the point where we streamline rubrics um down to the point where we can identify different student needs in those rubrics and then re-evaluate how we're assessing their reading or they yeah they're reading their writing how they're answering maybe multip choice questions and things like that we do

094differentiate for each student in every class and our curriculum allows us to do that which is pretty fantastic and that's you know 6 through 12 we have a pretty Dynamic team right now and it's it's pretty exciting to work with does anybody have any questions cool thanks next all right so since 1996 the science standards have not changed um we are now faced with M list the New York State science learning standards um our focus is more on the science and engineering practices that they're putting forward so when our kids go out into the public or get a job or whatever they're going to do in the future they're more focused on what they're doing than just like pulling facts out of their head which is what our old Kil kind of taught him to

095do so um now for elementary intermediate bio Earth and space physics and chemistry there are all um prescribed per se um investigations that the kids have to do so um in the past you might remember in biology um beaks of finches and those types of things kids talk about them all the time um those are gone and these new Labs that we're doing or investigation sorry um are pretty open-ended so they're given a problem one of the new ones for biology is that birds keep running into windows and dying um so the kids have to now build something to help the birds to live longer um so these are taking a lot of um materials I guess you could say um there's a stream table that you need for earth science um but it's teaching

096the kids to design their own experiments so when they do go out into um the workforce or college they're ready to do those kinds of things critical critical thinking yes not just facts that you could Google and and that we are working with um Stacy from Questar to uh Implement these kind of like Bob said talking about other school districts what they're doing um and one little plug I want to put in here you don't even know about this yet um renter County Soil and Water Department has reached out to us we are Mick and I um going to do a study on eels in the Hudson River um so this is fairly new uh we are seeing them when the RPI Engineers come to school and we are actually going to do citizen science

097where we report all of our members to DEC about the eels and we're gon to make traps to capture them and go count them'll be fun how did you get Environ yeah so Environ it's one of the clubs that Nick Nick tul and I do um the kids this year are faced with the current issue of protecting uh the forest of the ader andex so they have to come up with like protecting water the forest oh there's one other thing um but they reached out to us and said you know with all these water things that you're doing why don't we throw in some current research that's going on because they're right now they're really concerned about the eels in the Hudson River so we're going to test our tributaries up and up down the

098Hudson here now yes aw um I do want to say that each School District had the opportunity to uh take in early June the new Earth signs and the new uh biology reges exam or one more year stay with the traditional one that we've done through last many years uh we met as a group we worked with Stacy she gave us the the data in terms of from other districts around Capital Region and the majority of those school districts we are uh aligned with we are taking the older traditional exams in later June we are not taking the new exams this year doing this for a long time I'm never comfortable uh taking a reges for the first time I rather other people do it and then we could figure out what they're asked for

099because we really don't know what they're going to be asking for on it um so we thought it a little smarter in science for the 8th grade curriculum they only released five questions for the kids to even practice so when we went into it last year we had no clue there was manipulatives you had to move around and like make a water molecule and the kids had to know that it was like bent and it they had to move the certain blocks into place so now that we know that we're preparing them to know how the molecule looks and moving different things around on the state us so after the June reging for the new signs we will do a lot of work next year to prepare we don't know what's going be we've started

100all our investigations we're testing them out this year looking for any problems we we might come into um the biggest thing with them is that you cannot modify them so if we have kids with IEPs that get like reduced questions we can't ruce the questions they have to go through every one of them so we just need to give them extra time to do that which I think eventually is gon to get back to State it's not it's not appropriate so I I do anticipate the future that will be fixed but right now it's that's director thank you very much thank you to my department shair and just you know everything really that we discussed uh continue to look at things modify things and Literacy for ccan Maries uh if you go to our phys

101class you see that they give quizzes uh and writing assignments as well as other subject areas so we are uh working in terms of being part of the culture that literacy is in every subject area any questions umate for this David um we talked a lot a few times um I love that you're having meetings with the student council what I was curious about was how were you reaching all stud um I love the hands on stuff that we were hearing about science um I'd like to hear a little bit more about that your plan is trades wise uh just handson investigative was very curious um I think that we're looking at that especially uh the portrait of The Graduate was mentioned you're going to see a lot of that coming up so um i'

102just like to kind of hear a little bit more about what your plan is there sure so first of all I go to um all the different grade levels uh speak the students um uh from the lunchroom to the classrooms to the hallways uh student council is at the middle school and high school where they're representing all the students by going out and doing surveys with them speaking to them and then coming to me with conversations based on what the feedback is um and also we also work with staff who represents the different uh grade levels um you know in terms of what we can do for for the needs of the students and when we say that we we're talking about every level six through 12 uh students with disabilities um students that um

103you know uh uh need assistance uh with food with clothes uh with different programs they need in school I've set students up who uh don't have a dentist to go to Hudson Valley to go to the dentist uh it's only $10 so we set that up um we work with the counselors with the kids families I can't tell you how many meetings I have with families uh I've been private to work with them from academics to social emotional stuff like that um I think we're getting very good uh representation throughout the building again very visible iiving one all over the place um you know between in school and outside of school uh students M from receiving um and they range from what we call different groups in terms of f if you remember um they

104come and uh speak to me um so I think we're doing a really good job of getting the representation we are reaching out to them to uh give us a little more uh in terms of things that we're looking for in terms of student voice so that's going through the classrooms targeted uh uh projects that we have or initiatives um so I feel comfortable in terms of that I feel the communication is there and of course um as far and I hope I answer that in terms of the representation um you know going yesterday to sixth grade and reading to them to go to uh the life skills class and being the judge to go into the high school and play the sh tank uh you know it's just like visibility is the key visible

105build relationships you're going to get the hands on you've heard me speak about that a lot we need to develop uh CTE programs that our students need we have a a great demand and Questar can only take so many of our students plus don't cost money so we are trying to develop uh those programs right now um from self with web design to trying to figure out um how to get for uh students that want to work on cars Havey equipment those seems be big demands not seem they are big demands on schools we are currently working with community members how they could work with our students to give them these hands-on experience um we are suffering right now in terms of we have good amount of our students that need the CTE programs and

106these gazon programs that we're not able to offer so we're trying to do everything that we can to figure out financially it's going to be challenging so we are trying to think outside the box how we can fix that and how we can do that um part of one of the BLT groups is internships so we have one group that has come to us from Evo park that's offering us services or um I want to say carpentry uh and electrici stuff like that so we're trying to figure out how we can incorporate that into our program uh we are are reimaging what we're doing it's a big conversation internally of not being traditional traditional is not working with us our our student needs and demands beg us to do something different so how can we

107incorporate these Hands-On programs with what the state is requiring because if we keep going down this road what we're doing right now we're not going to reach all our students and then reach all the students needs we have to create this um and it's not fair you know we say that we want to uh meet all the students needs but if we're not giv this to our students we're not meeting all our students needs so we speak about the students you know I have two boys with I so we speak about meeting the needs of those students we do a great job in that um we speak about meeting the needs of students that may be honors exceptional uh uh Learners on both ends but what do we do with with the stud who hands

108on large percent it's a very large it's a very large percentage you know I come from different schools where the a fouryear college was a must in the community okay this community I'm not saying a fouryear college is not a must but we have students that don't fit that profile and that's okay we have to meet what they are looking for if they want to do heavy equipment in that that's a good life we have to figure out how to support them in that if they want to work with cars we have to figure out how to do that again Questar has wonderful programs but we can't send all our students there one they're not going to all be accepted and then two the money right so we have to be uh we have to

109be appropriate of how we're looking at this I can tell you internally we are talking about several different ideas of how we can be creative without have to spend money that we don't have and I don't want to sacrifice other programs that are in need because then we'll have a a problem with there so I'll be more than happy at any time to sit with anybody or the whole board to speak about what we're talking about and how we're looking to do it I'd be very interested in that know I think the board members as a whole talking about I have built CTE programs in other districts and it doesn't no it does not what we're looking at graduate seeing a lot of different different things coming out um and it's not it's not traditional

110and you know what when I when I read the portra port graduate I actually was excited because I think I think it's more realistic I think it's very realistic uh of our students in the state certainly in so I'd be interested in definitely hearing from the counseling perspective of the counselors and what um definitely thank you that'll be ex we can add that as a future the board as a whole is thank you sorry thank you as we transition to the mtss slideshow um in Tom and Sam I just want to say how refreshing it is to sit here and hear about for a long time and that's not a knock that's a good thing um teaching and learning um for for the last several months year and a half we've been talking about a

111lot of other things and it's just fantastic to hear administrators teachers Department shairs excited about what we're doing for kids how we're doing it and when it's not working for kids what we are doing to make it better so to everybody presented um and I think we have a segue now into our next presentation that ties in very nicely to what you a little bit throughout DA's presentation and where we are with mtss what the plan is forward and what our hopes are for the future all right always following Dave and lowering the mic so Sam and I and I was planning to introduce her to all of you but I think everyone is just so excited to have her here and all of the wonderful work that she's doing that Mr Burns has stole

112my fun the last regular board meeting Ariel stole it tonight so here's your third introduction to Sam Higgins and uh in my ongoing quest to demystify all the acronyms we use we've heard a little bit about mtss throughout some of the presentations tonight it stands for multi-tiered system of supports and we're going to talk a little bit about what that means what it entails and then we'll get into a little bit more about why we're doing this audit and what that's going to look like um so just an overview of mtss it considers all aspects of a child including academic behaviors social emotional functioning Etc so it's different from the RTI model that was previous because we're looking at the students as a whole so we want to aim to address these areas through a

113tiered approach so we have the three tiers tier one is your general instruction what all the children are receiving in the classroom then you have tier two which is just some extra support for those who need it often in small groups and then tier three is our intensive additional support and that is often in very small groups so when we think tier three we think about four or five students in those groups because it's very targed instruction and it's a multidisciplinary team we review concerns and make recommendations to support students and need within the system so the purpose of mcss is to provide support to struggling students in a systematic way ensuring all students are able to make growth so we provide a structure provide the structure to provide evidence based interventions to students in

114need and it's a very fluid system and targeted in order to close any gaps that are emerging quickly students needs are identified by a multi-disciplinary team to ensure interventions address the root causes of any identified difficulties so just some people on the team are like our school psychologists our counselors teachers any other support um students um Administration and then myself and we want to meet New York State obligations for the provision of supports to students who are struggling and to provide a structure to support support students and help identify students with learning disabilities in grades K through four for reading just to tie this into some of the things you've heard tonight we've talked a lot about benchmark assessments and Diagnostics you've heard about I ready and iel that is one of the tools that

115we would use to identify some of those struggling students and to draw on that data for the multi-disciplinary team to look at and say okay where is the student struggling as we look to identify what that would cause or that concern is it could be that the student is struggling with attendance and maybe that's why they're not performing academically well it could be that they have social emotional challenges going on it could be family situations so it's not necessarily always as it seems so really digging into all of those different sources of data academic social emotional attendance grades um and really getting a picture of the whole child as we investigate what those concerns are and then identify what interventions we're going to put in place to support that need so talking a little bit

116about the purpose of the audit now as you you might kind of gather from all of the different pieces that ntss touches it's a very complex system it includes a lot about Universal assessments the multidisiplinary team evidence-based interventions and a whole host of logistical challenges and other components um that all fall as part of the structure of that system to provide these supports so the audit the goal there is to provide detailed information to help us break down where we're where we're doing well where where we need to improve what some of our priorities are in terms of where do we need to grow first and maybe that's going to open up more capacity for other areas as well as developing a long-term plan on how we are going to improve this system over time

117in both buildings across the district I know the board has heard from a few different audits at this point um including food service and it so it is really very similar it's the same idea there we have a complex system that we want to look at to make sure we're operating the best way that we can and to help to generate some action steps going from so really looking to the value of those audits to provide us more information not to say that we you know we we want to beat up on ourselves to say we're not doing something we should be but really using it as a tool to help us move forward you know strategically so the overview of the audit so the audit is going to be an extensive process run by

118St Higgins and myself uh we're considering a great deal of information which we're going to get into in a little bit about some of the different components we're looking at and many of the different resources I know Nate Mariel had mentioned in their presentation you know that mtss audit um PD that they had gone to that they GR ious ly passed on and this is really what kind of we samiz sump our teeth into and really jumped on as an opportunity to to Really hammer out where our strengths and weaknesses are and develop the plan going forward uh We've even been able to connect privately with that trainer to get some additional feedback and really working with her to help us kind of conceptualize what information we want how we're going to gather that U

119following some of her recommendations as she implements this process herself what pitfall did she fall into early on in her process what is she looking to do going forward so it was a really great opportunity to connect with her and really talk through the ideas frankly steel any of her resources that she was very happy to share which is wonderful there's no sense in Reinventing the wheel and then frankly Advanced our timeline probably about a year not having to find and develop all the tools that she was able to so graciously provide to us so that has been a great opportunity for us so this is a little bit of an overview of our audit structure so really at the at the key there is our district capacity rubric and our self assessment rubric this

120this is where all of our information that we gather from these other areas is going to feed into help us to RAR cell in all of the different areas of mtss uh these are some pretty robust rubrics I believe combined there around 60 to 75 pages so it really gathered all of the information that we need from these different areas including some admin interviews best practices in mtss so general research on the system and what it should include a Readiness screener some data review and let say Su I mean a lot we have many different ideas of what we want to pull uh a teacher screener to get feedback from staff as a whole uh as well as looking at our current model in detail about how our processes operate what forms do we use

121how many students are we servicing all of those different components and Sam is going to share a little more detail on on what each of those things entails so for the teacher screener we sent out a survey regarding opinions and perspectives on processes and their understanding of the current system because we really want teachers feedback because they're the ones doing it and we want to have their voices involved so then our current model we're just going to gather and review all existing documentation of the processes students served identify the needs and goals the progress monitoring data student attendance um we've completed some admin interviews and this includes more detail for feedback um we're going to plan to complete this with the admin team and any non-admin faculty who represent groups that are heavily involved in

122the mtss process like our interventionists department chairs or any other teachers who are currently doing the mtss in the buildings the Readiness screener is the most detailed form that includes feedback on groundwork for the process at a larger level including our capacity our culture in the buildings and those people who are completing that are our building admins um Tom and then myself will be completing that as well and then our data review we're going to have a lot of data that we want to review like state test scores our I ready iel benchmarks from the entire school year um grades course failures attendance discipline any of those other things and then after we gather all of those then we're going to have the district capacity rubric and self assessment rubric that Tom and myself will

123be doing using all of the data um so these detailed rubrics rubrics will then be summarized into a report and then recommendations will be made for next steps moving forward um so we just created a timeline kind of going over this together looking at what we want to do and when um so by the end of this year we want to gather all staff in add an input and feedback for Relevant components and then we want to gather our data sources mtss materials and other data and then over the summer months we're going to complete an in-depth analysis uh data analysis on everything um by early fall we want to produce a detailed report of District strengths and areas of need um recommend next steps to bolster areas in Need by the later fall we

124want to review the report with the superintendent and instructional ad team um and then share the share and present to the board and then in the winter we would like to start enacting our next steps as informed by the process and uh Sam had just shared a little bit about um you know some of the work that we've already done in terms of the admin interviews I did it's a misleading name I did want to kind of draw attention to the fact that um we decided that it would be best to um conduct that more in-depth interview to get some additional feedback not just from administrators but also from those who've been heavily involved with ntss um including counselors department chairs um and really Loretta is one of them as you know you noted from

125n Mariel's slide where it noted that she was serving as a consultant in that role so getting feedback um in detail from those stakeholders and I will say you know I think we are currently already ahead of schedule at this point and the feedback we've been able to gather um and our next big question after we complete that over the course video will be the end of the year pulling all of our end of year data for us to analyze and one last thing I'd like to share as Sam and I noted out in my conference room and wrote all over our whiteboard about all of the different um types of analyses we wanted to conduct um how we wanted to cross reference different sources of data to see what the impact of attendance has

126on course failures and all of those different things as we sat there what we wanted to look at so we listed a number of different data sources that's not to say that we won't expand that as we continue to investigate and explore the data and kind of let it take us where we need to go so that is all I have for tonight anyone have any questions about rtss or the [Music] thank you I appreciate all of that I know other members do it's nice to kind of see where we are where we're headed and it does I like Dave's Dave's uh analogy of we're all swimming in the same direction I feel like that just based on presentation tonight I feel like everybody was you know together so that's nice right I like the

127swimming roll in the same direction ADR department chair very much appreciated on Thursday night at 98 to present to us and congratulations Ken congratulations speaking of THS night um next Thursday night's our annual math night sh annual math night C math [Music] class are excited we're trying to get a much bigger turnout last year was amazing we didn't get a big turnout the students work so hard it's very creative and a lot of time in into it so like uh tomorrow night I'll be sending out a phone call reminding people of it I know I believe Sunday something's going out next week we're really pushing because this is a student driven night we want to celebrate you can pie me or Mr burnsley or a whole bunch of other that's long I was supposed to

128do it last year I got sick [Music] within reason I mean there's some Stu like Rubik's Cubes 2 by two 3 yeah it's a lot of fun and you know it's making that accessible for all perfect thank you I'd also like to thank stru administrators to be here tonight important they're part of the team here to support the students and very benici it's not just the class it's a complete [Music] team okay can I get a motion to adjourn motion by Frank second second by Sherry all in favor be back