001all right good evening I'd like to call to order this regular meeting of the Boston Spa Central School District Board of Education for September 20th we all rise for the pledge I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America to the Republic for which it stands under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all I'd like to welcome everyone welcome those in attendance here in the library welcome those watching on the live stream for those in attendance if we have to evacuate the room the emergency exits are in the back Corners behind me that lead outside and the entrance that leads into the hallway at the front of the library so I just want to start and say um I was really happy to see last night there was excellent attendance by
002parents and caregivers that meet the teacher events at Wood Road and Gordon Creek last week the Early College High School meet the teacher event was also very well attended and upcoming are the meet the teacher events at our other schools all of our schools and classrooms are looking great and many thanks go out to all the teaching staff and the support staff at our schools first on our agenda is recognition is there any recognition tonight okay so next is our student government and we have Emily and Ben tonight welcome thank you good evening I'm Emily krasnicki I'm the treasurer of student government and I'm filling in for Katie tonight as she is currently in Avril park for a tennis match the high schools had a great first few weeks back starting from senior Sunrise to
003football games and getting back into the swing of things on Friday our football team will be playing at Shen tickets are selling out fast so grab them before they are gone on October 16th we will be kicking off homecoming week our spirit week themes will be announced soon on October 16th we'll be we will be having our annual Powder Puff game at 6 30 and save the date for October 20th for the street fair from 5 to 6 30 in the Bus Loop thank you to everyone who made our students first couple of weeks successful and we look forward to the rest of the school year thank you wonderful thank you do we have any questions for our Student Government Representatives no we do not so if you wish you can excuse yourself from the
004rest of the meeting thank you very much we are now at the first time in our agenda for public comment do we have anyone signed up for public comment we do not have a motion to approve the minutes for the September 6 2023 meeting so moved any amendments or additions not hearing any all those in favor I opposed abstentions minutes are approved next in our agendas are superintendent's report thank you Mr furnotza to tonight we have three separate presentations from three of our buildings in the district and so first up I would like to welcome Sarah Johnson from principal at Malta f good evening it's fantastic to be here this evening with all of you thank you so much for the opportunity to share with you our Malta Avenue building goals for the 20 25
005so first we start at Malta Avenue um we always start when we're creating our building although you know a variety to ensure that we are fostering a school jerk that supports learning Improvement and ensures student and staff wellness and then Fosters a sense of community and belonging for our students and staff so from this shared vision and with the shared purpose we're then able to create our building goals in addition to our shared purpose we have our two core values that really ground Us in all of the work that we do with a variety of stakeholders and those two core values at Malt Avenue are you are and we try to ensure that all of our decisions all that we do are grounded in these core values and then our building goals for them so
006our goals this year directly directly relate to our shared vision and then to those two core values our building goal process uh so we started this process in the spring our building leadership team Mets and created a survey that we sent to all of our staff members um really just asking our staff members to share big big and then our building leadership team met and from those responses we categorized the responses and started the creation of a building so goal one we get very excited about the malta way at Malta Avenue so this is is our first goal we have many responses from staff members about continuing with this work the multi-way goal is a line to our district goal of the family and Community engagement as well as our district role on diversity equity
007and inclusion and this specific goal is by June of 2024 students at least and then demonstrate behaviors that reflect the maltaway and we're using a variety of assessment tools to measure this so this goal very clearly aligns to our shared purpose you know our students emotional physical and safety are our priorities we know that students are not going to reach their full potential welcome and we believe that by teaching them all to way we are eliminating distractions that might we know again we've been looking more and more at the research that is now out there on the impact that safety and belonging has them so goal one the multiple way you know just a little bit of background last year as a building we really started to Define what is this what does this mean
008when we say follow the multi-wave what does it look like for our students and do so we teach them alter way through our character education program through our social emotional learning curriculum and through our school-like expectations and that was a lot of the work that we did we did this year we're continuing that work and I promise I will not read through every single um objective and action step um but the big big ideas we want to make and follow our school-wide expectations these are expectations that we exclusively teach in the bathroom um so we teach them very explicitly what those rules are and then we reinforce it in a variety of ways this year we're also working our family handbook that will send home to family so that again they're understanding what it means
009to follow along the way and they're also clear on our our next big objective for the multilingual we want to take it a step further and make sure that our students are able to Define what bullying is and then additionally and equally as important ensure that door that are so so um and you know we are going to take it a step further this spring and do some role playing with our students where they um and to make sure that we're able to and then finally our character education program the of our various character education words so that they fully understand the importance of these words and they demonstrate these words and we'll do this through things like our school-wide meetings we also are really working to intentionally recognize our time who are demonstrated so
010you may see pictures of Malta man himself who gives our big shout outs to our students our next Big Goal this year will focus on classroom management and classroom culture again this really relates to our district goal focused on DPI fine as well as so how will we get there um you know well first one back again the focuses on welcoming third there are students that is our priority from there we know that our students are willing to learn they're going so to get there the big piece this year is is really creating opportunities for our staff members to call to creating and intentionally designing activities to Foster belonging as many of you know we have an incredibly talented staff at multi with a lot of experience a lot of veterans teach so we're creating
011more spaces for teachers to share with one another and to really talk about how we can we have a great book club or a book study this past year on a book called notching up which allowed us to think very creative new um with a book study and right now we're selecting a book to kind of run through that next step and then we'll share our goal number three is focused on curriculum enhancement this is tied directly to our district goal of developing our K-5 curriculum and identifying areas for improvement so by June of 22 4 our great level identifying areas of level and then begin that implementation again related to our Malta Avenue vision and our purpose we want to ensure that we are providing the best possible education so how are we going
012to do this first we are going to be having district-wide grade level meetings this year to get everybody together to collaborate I find those areas mine similarly at Malta Avenue we will have the likely grade level meetings where we can really drill down on our Learners at multiple a comprehensive Improvement Improvement plan at every third level to talk about ways and and this this goal for academic growth we are also excited about this goal um this again links to the district-wide goal of K-5 curriculum uh so just a little bit of background about academic work with um you know our students as you know take multiple assessments over the year and from those assessments we're able to see achievement score and worldly scores um both incredibly important employee are students at multiv ore very well
013in terms in terms of you we have phenomenal student s yes we still want to have high achievement scores but we want every one of our one of the Learners to to grow by the end of the year so again in order to do this we're looking specifically on and the goal for June of 2024 is that each grade level will increase their percentage of students who meet or exceed typical growth on their IRS course and this will be compared to their previous cohort scores in June of 2023. 3 so what does that mean exactly this is just a quick Glimpse at our i-Ready scores from June of 2023 this data includes all of our general education classroom doesn't include just be very clear um but what you'll see on the left um I've read
014this course um the First Column next to the great is the percentage of students who were proficient okay you'll see that again our students do very very well um in kindergarten 87 of our students were provisioned in advance um in the 70s in grades one and two or in very close to 80 percent so yes we want those scores to continue to improve but we also want that next column to improve as well the next column is students typical growth during the school year um and this is so I ready when our students take the assessment iready is able to develop a a level for the students to achieve by the end of the year to make what we call typical growth forever 54 of our students met their typical growth score so our focus
015is going to get is how can we get in first grade with that cohort how can we now get at least 60 percent of so how will we get there how do we achieve this goal um first of all you know a lot of it is grade level meetings meetings with teachers to look at our students the achievements well for our students this past year on areas that We additionally will be looking at our beginning of year assessment scores and looking at our interview s where every single and then talking through ways to make sure that each student those who are at the top of the class no score scoring at lower levels how do we ensure they all make out of it growth a lot of this will also be in collaboration with um
016having Skelly to in bringing in our curriculum coaches to help our staff members really drill down on individual student needs additionally we'll have an academic achievement goal for the year our academic achievement goal has to do specifically with students oral reading fluency proficiency so 85 percent students at every grade level reach their oral reading limits agency again our students are doing very very well on oral review the First Column is there therapy so how their ability to decode works our students are incredible readers at home value um so then we're looking at their oral reading fluency and our goal is to get that third column is to get all of our grade levels to five percent again similar objectives to our last goal how do we get there really look at our data looking at
017where our students are at and then supporting and as they call the win law to retarget instructions we know that fluency all right last but not least I promise we have one final goal uh estimation this is directly related to our district goal focused on and our Big Goal this year is is really sort of sort of worse the global is that we're going to be and belonging for our students staff and families and this year what we are focused on is first figuring out how we measure that and how do we measure a sense of belongings again we know this is important because when our students feel a sense of belonging and they feel safe we know that they perform at a very very high levels so the first goal is to really vote
018for the first time I should say a parent so simple and then start to do some research and develop a few think about ways that we can intentionally improve this idea of a sense of goal again we're going to also look at what we're currently doing including our you know our newsletters that we send to families the events that we have for Fame students and think about what else we can do men of our goals at Malta Avenue again thank you so much for listening listening hi uh for your goal of classroom management and you're doing best practices would like a handbook be like an up outcome of that to give to new teachers to say that really really what we believe our classroom management and then that kind of becomes part of our book
019and so that yes we're able to share that with newer teachers and continue to expand on that you know as we continue um and what was goal five I just I you went through it fast I missed it sorry okay first because because we know that's such a great or strong and again our okay naming uh I think so I think I had that for goal for for academic growth but it did fall into another question so the grade four for oral reinfluency it would dropped from the 80s to like 64 percent and I wasn't sure is there was there a reason for that is it covet or is it but say to looking into your figure out and then based on that what so absolutely I think right now the answer is we're not
020quite sure and part of this year's work is to explore that work okay thank you so excellent um what is the makeup of your building leadership team no names just types quite a large buildings made up of we have two parents on our building leadership team we have a total of about on okay thank you just had a question about the survey thank you for laying out all the goals and the the way that you arrived at them as a as a school that was just great to hear the staff survey in May that kicks that all off is that like do you know what your return rate is or how high is that yeah what's the participation rate 18 and we have a stock including you know we sent it to all of our
021staff members and so we we absolutely wanted a hire a hire and that's something that our building leadership leadership is really talking about this how do we get from more stakeholders okay no that's helpful and then I just have a clarification question for goal one what does um what does Dasa stand for D.A prevent beliefs okay okay thank you it's the dignity for all students act thank you okay is the acronym I believe thank you and I'm sorry I just have a couple of questions uh roughly what percentage of our population student population our English is new learn new language uh students but we're I think currently seven to eight percentage of our students that's fine I don't need the exact between five and ten um and so uh for all of the goals are
022there specifically targeted resources and strategies for that population okay and then as part of the definition of the community is there is there a formal makeup of that I'm thinking of the village I'm thinking of the PTA um Etc is that documented or thought about it's part of that [Music] is Grandparents um you know support us from the village and come to our events and we haven't yet to find you know exactly okay thank you thank you very much for the presentation oh I'm sorry woman one quick question I forgot the maltaway is that similar to PBIS is that in lieu of it or and a rollout of responsibility so that school and then I think our sort of uniqueness is our structural education program at Malta Avenue which I don't necessarily know is either
023okay thank you and up next we have Dr Chaucer from Milton Terrace present her building goals [Music] okay thank you Dr duka and members of the board I'm really excited to be here this evening to share our Milton Terrace schools with you as you can see here with the pictures these are some pictures from the photo booth that our PTA set up for our back to school walkthroughs that happened a few weeks ago and as you can see by the smiles on their faces everyone at Milton Terrace is really excited to be back to school so as we do always with our district presentations this is just a review of our district priorities and goals and having a new superintendent is a really great opportunity for a school to kind of stop and take stock
024of where we are and so and make sure that our goals are connected to our district schools and so this is always good to remember and again here are the commitments that we make to our students and families when we are looking for that meaningful diploma so each year our Milton Terrace building leadership team ends our work by reviewing that Year's work and then identifying priority areas for the upcoming year so that allows us to save time in September because we kind of hit the ground running with our goals already identified last June we did the same thing and as you can see these were the priority areas that our building leadership team identified and they fit really nicely with the district's priority areas this year so as I said it gives us an opportunity
025to take stock when we have new leadership and so this is the goal building process that we use but we really were able to kind of think through exactly how we do make our goals so as you can see the district sets their priorities and then at Milton Terrace we take our building leadership teams end of the year um priorities and then we also look at data from the end of the year in June as well as September and then we created our four goals and you can see them there so our first goal at Milton Terrace for this year is around family and Community engagement and our goal is to increase our Milton Terrace family's understanding of our District's Elementary curriculum resources so under many of you know that over the last four years
026we implemented some new curriculum resources and as our teachers have become more familiar with them so have our parents been interested and so our teachers last year really thought that it was a good opportunity this year to really provide some education for them around what they look like how they work and how they can support our curriculum at home so some of the action steps that we're going to be taking is that well our first building leadership team is coming up we're looking to host parent information nights as we said and we're coordinating our work with our BLT with our PTA so this year PTA has applied for the National School of Excellence designation again about I would say 10 years ago Milton Terrace did get that designation and so we're looking to do that
027again and part of that designation application processes that you have to provide a survey to your families and really work towards a goal so those two really fit nicely together because we have to survey our parents for the designation and we also wanted to survey them to get information on which academic subjects they would like to learn about most so we're going to combine those two our next goal is around absenteeism so this is a big priority area for the district as you know this year and we envisioned this goal to be a two to three year goal for Milton Terrace so during this first year our goal is just to increase our general awareness of importance of attendance and identify our chronically absent students our school counselor has put together some wonderful Tier 1
028and tier two resources for our school and so we're going to be creating a team that will then be looking to use those Resources with our chronically absent students and also our students at risk of becoming chronically absent and I talked about on the first slide some of the data that we use to kind of identify our goals and so this is just one example of some of the data that we're able to use our district CIO Margaret Giller provided us with this wonderful resource it's called Tableau and we're really able to look at attendance by school and by student we're able to look so this is for Milton Terrace so this is last year you can see that you know what our most absent days were I mean you would assume they're Monday and
029Friday and they are but we're then able to drill down right to the student and look to see like which students are absent which days like if they have patterns and really then able to focus on those families and really providing them individualized support so that's one piece of data that we'll be using our third goal is around curriculum development very similar to Mrs Johnson's and really this will likely be a one-year goal but if we don't meet it we will roll it over to next year our goal is that we're going to increase our growth on the i-Ready end of year Ela and math assessments by 5 per cohort so that's by grade level so some of the action steps that we're going to take is that we're going to celebrate some of our
030last year's growth because just as Mrs Johnson showed we've had some great growth and so I want an opportunity for our teachers to really see that and feel good about the individual kids growth that they were able to work with children on and then also learn from that so we're able to look at data and really drill down with that Tableau program that I showed you to individual teachers and which standards they taught really well and the kids did really well on and then which standards that they're really needing to focus on and that's really wonderful professional development for our teachers because if you provide let's say a building level um proficiency or you know that kind of data you don't know really where you fall in that it's just the average so you may
031have done really well on that or you know really poorly so this program really helps us to work with each individual teacher so we're going to use some of that data we're going to give some professional development from our teachers and we're going to work on common substitute plans I know that sounds a little you know silly but Katie's shaking your head so when when our teachers are out that's a real loss of learning sometimes for our students so we're really going to work on a common substitute template so that our students can always receive that continuity of instruction so this is some of the data very similar to Mrs Johnson's from the end of the year last year so as you can see at the top let me just get my page here so
032as you can see at the top this shows the reading so the top line is our um all of our students at Milton Terrace's end of the year reading scores and then right underneath it is their beginning of the year last year so you can see where they grew so you know obviously they want to be in green so you can see they were there were not many in green and then we went all the way there what also decreased was the number of students that are significantly below grade level so at the beginning of the year we started with 59 students significantly below grade level last year and at the end we were only at 19 which is a huge win for our students and our staff and then in math you can see
033the same thing we started with 63 students significantly below grade level and then we ended with only 11. we're able to really focus then on that individual data by student and then really hone in on exactly how to move each student and our last goal is the one I think I'm the most excited about so this is um really to strengthen our SEL instruction so we're really fortunate to be piloting a new instructional module at Milton Terrace this year that's going to enhance the district's SEL curriculum that we already have so over the past few years like many schools across the world we are seeing a number of students who are struggling with behaviors and you know just finding them challenging so at Milton Terrace as you may know we house the district's self-contained population
034for students with emotional and behavioral challenges so in that program they use a very scripted program that explicitly teaches students how to regulate their own emotions and how to select strategies to then calm themselves down and kind of work through problems that they might have two of our teachers at Milton Terrace a social worker and a school psychologist Eric Greg rebelding and Colleen German actually wrote the social skills curriculum that our self-contained classrooms use and they've had it published so some schools in Michigan are using their curriculum so one thing that we noticed over the past few years that in many cases when our gen our special education self-contained students push out into the mainstream in many cases those mainstreams those General special education students are much more able to cope with their emotions than
035some of their gen Ed peers and it's because we think because they have these strategies so last year we met with Mrs Mountain Lauren said can we just pilot these you know these few lessons and just kind of see so it's going to be the beginning of um before they teach Second Step second into steps doesn't start until mid-october so our teachers are teaching these modules now and just teaching them how to kind of regulate their emotions as you can see here to kind of stop and you know take a self-checking and then pick a strategy to kind of work themselves through it and the top as you can see there that's the second step program and this is just a little bit more explicit this is where those other instructional strategies come in just
036to give them a little a little meteor of the second step program so we have currently trained all of our staff members last June we did half day trainings and they went really really well we trained everyone including our recess monitors and um all of our Tas and teachers and we just finished training our new teachers as well we connected this work to our summer book study so over the summer we always do a book study at Milton Terrace and we we had 100 of our teachers participate in it this past summer and we connected that work to that and all the materials have been distributed and the lessons have been started so we're really really excited about that we just put out a teacher survey to our staff to have them fill in we
037want them to take about last year's class and kind of think about how they grew over the course of the year so then we'll have that data to see at the end of the year if they're seeing a change in their students and that's it any questions for the last goal for the SEO is there a way to measure that like reduced um referrals or anything like that and I put any thoughts on that that's a great question so I did look at that but honestly a lot of the behaviors that we're seeing are not necessarily referral behaviors they're more like in-class behaviors that are just getting in the way of instruction but not necessarily that a behavioral referral would be written for so I do have that data actually I used it to make
038the goal but that's why we also gave the teacher survey just so that we you know so we asked them to think about your students at the end of last year and their ability to self-regulate their emotions and then we're going to compare it to the end of this year just because I don't know perhaps the behavioral data will show in the referrals but I I'm not sure that it would because like I said it's not always that significant so we can definitely look at both okay thank you foreign I love the idea of the common substitute plan how will that be broken down will it be broken down by grade level by time of the year can you just elaborate a little bit more about the goals for that yeah that's that's a great
039question we're so lucky to have this common curriculum and so before we had it everyone was kind of you know doing their own thing so that would have been very hard to do but actually our teachers came up with the idea last year and because we have that common curriculum it all looks the same like we have three blocks for our literacy curriculum we have one block for remember our math curriculum with a supportive block um sometimes so it would be by grade level and we'll have like all of the links to log in like they did they just really sounded like they've got it really down great I'm gonna ask the same question what who makes up your building leadership team as well so our building leadership team we have representatives from every bargaining
040unit and every kind of um yeah I guess every group and we have a parent member and CSEA bsta and our teaching assistant Association thank you and I will make a slide about that for the end of the year because we usually do that and we forgot so great question one follow-up I do like um for the curriculum development where you set it all five percent per cohort so using the smart criteria you know set something and see how see if you hit it see if you don't hit it whatever but at least have that is something to shoot for so um good job with that thank you yeah it's good to follow kids cohort to cohort instead of looking at third grade one year and third grade next year because it's a different group
041of kids so really to to follow them as they go I had a question about goal one the family and Community engagement you had mentioned the the pts the PTA survey is that um is that like a survey that's already been designed or is that something the PTI is going to be coming up with and is it specifically related to what topic parents want to see or is it a more General survey so as I recall in the past because I I created the survey in the past so in the past they had part of it that had to be used and then you could create part of it if it's still that way then we would create that part and if not we would just draw from it what we could but they really
042encouraged the national PTA really encourages buildings to base it on what their building needs and they really just want to see us using that survey information to then you know do something with it over the year so I'll ask my same question as well about the non-english um as a native language uh speakers for each of the goals do you just have a um resources plan to make sure that they're included absolutely most of our students who test into needing those special services for enl go to Malta Avenue so that's where all of our services are so we really don't have many students enl students I don't think any at Milton Terrace because they were able to provide all of the service there okay thank you very much thank you [Music] and thank you very
043much for the presentation in our final presentation tonight and lizewski from the middle school will be going over their goals so good evening everybody thank you for having having all of us tonight thank you for having me um similar to what you've heard this evening our goals are aligned with our district goals they align very well that we are in year three and many of the goals I'll talk to tonight year two and year three as we move forward as a middle school and they're very much centered in student achievement and allowing our students to find their greatest potential and talent in our Middle School so our Focus continues similar to what you've heard with the elementary schools back in the spring we worked with our BLT surveys with our staff as well as drop-in
044conversations we call them in our library with folks to listen to How the year went last year and what we need to do to improve as administrators in an overall school we took all that feedback and we began creating our goals around that feedback as well as what and as well as building on what we had already been working towards as a middle school over the past few years and I really really we found our Focus would continue with academic Improvement IB implementation as well as climate and culture and how we build it and make a more positive environment in our middle school as you've heard me present before our focus and our our theme in the middle school last year we began a theme of a village of friends as alluded to by my
045colleagues you know we came back after a couple of very odd years with students who had not really made a lot of friendships or been able to cultivate the friendships that they had before our our blip um and so with that all said we felt like there was a we really needed to bring come in very strong with what we expected from our students um and how we actually behave and treat each other in our building and so a village of friends really was something that was obvious to us that that would be the theme that we would use and what we did was we used that theme to implement our IB learner profile traits which as a is a way that we teach character education within the um Middle School this year we'll continue
046that theme and we're going to focus actually starting this Friday with our very first IB learner profile trait focused of being principled so our four main themes out of the out of the I the 10 IB principle uh pardon me IB learner profile traits this year we're going to focus on principled Inquirer balance and being reflective over the past couple of years we've really focused deeply on academic Improvement specifically focused on students who were in our tier two and our tier 3 AIS Intervention Program and through our multi-tiered systems of support um with that said this year we are also digging down deep into how do we strengthen our tier one instruction that instruction that happens right at the classroom level we've been working on our IB units of study which I'll talk to in
047our second goal which has strengthened a lot of our classroom instruction and brought cohesiveness to what students are are learning in their core content areas as well as their electives but we're going to really be a lot more intentional and what are we doing in our practice and how are we analyzing what we're doing in our practice in our everyday classrooms to improve instruction and ensure that all students are mastering the curriculum that we're teaching them on a daily basis and so there is a huge focus on making sure that every student Grows by at least one year but we will continue continue with our AIS model with a push-in model with student for our tier two students and what we mean by a push-in model is we have our AIS provider working with our
048regular education teacher in tandem during a regular classroom instruction so when a student and who needs a little bit of an extra push needs that help during the instructional time there's an extra teacher the AIS provider during that time that live moment to help them to get that aha from from the core instruction that's occurring during that actual lesson we will also continue to help our students that are a little more fragile that are what we call our tier three students who need a lab or a pull out type intervention they will continue also getting that support we have found this model over we're going into our third year last year was our second year with this model and we found great growth and great Improvement in student achievement especially in those fragile fragile Learners
049we saw great growth especially in our math and our math push and model we do know that we need some work in our reading um we also want to also want to involve our community and help parents to understand the value of i-Ready last year we had some really serious conversations with our instructional teacher leaders along with our our teachers and our core content areas about the importance of i-Ready i-Ready gives us a lot of great diagnostic data that helps us to look at our practice look at what students are doing and and look at not only performance and and proficiency but also growth it's not something that is just a check mark that needs to get done instead it's something that we need to take seriously and really boost the students up and help
050them to understand the importance of when you take it do your best so we really get a snapshot of what you're doing so we can help serve you better as your teachers in your classroom we began really working with our math and English teachers to help promote that ideal we continue that work this year and we're that's going to be a huge push and a lot of communication is going to be coming home to parents with letters and actual the we the um I already updates they were going to be getting those at the very soon the meeting beginning of the year middle of year and of course at the end of the year we really want to open up that communication and make sure that everybody understands the importance of that assessment because it
051really gives us rich data to help us improve instruction and in turn our students and finally I alluded to our academic academic Improvement when we talked about tier one instruction there's going to be a lot of work within our core area instruction we actually are doing a formative check-in that is going to be systematic across our five core areas and every every rotation we have four day rotation at the middle school just like the high school at least once in every rotation our core area teachers are going to be getting a formative snap of what they've been teaching and how the students are mastering it and within our content planning time we're going to take time out to talk about how the kids did and what do we need to do to to make sure
052we Loop that information and that we don't see them mastering to make sure that we improve their understanding and overall when kids are feeling um they're being they're being accomplished within your classroom it's that happiness that goes on and they continue to want more and build more on their on their achievement IB I've been up here many times talking to you all about the international Baccalaureate program we're going to continue that work we're very excited we're getting so close to to petitioning for authorization and our goal is in Fall of 2024 that we will have our IB visit and we will become authorized this year we have to focus on making sure our IB units are Tip-Top and and I call them I keep telling the idols we got to scrub those units and make
053sure that they're shiny for when our authorization visit comes through um they're also we are also working on making sure all of our teachers understand how to align their assessments and their rubrics together to make sure that the instruction that we're giving is very clear very precise and very very intentional all of and I already got ahead of myself I apologize um and within the IB unit structure every every uh core content area and every elective area has to have at least six IB units planned taught and reflected and by the close of this school year as I said we're scrubbing those units and making sure that that happens we continue our work with the IB 8th grade Community project as as many of you have heard about we're very excited about our year two
054pilot of this program and this has been such a great opportunity for students to really shine and we've already started our classes I myself are I'm pushing into one of the classes this year so it's really great to be there firsthand and be there close to the students and we look forward to really great things and building that IBU IB Community project out to all 8th graders as we start the fall 2024 next school year um I've already talked to you a little bit about the learner profile traits we continue to work on that making sure all students know how to take care of one another in a in a way that we would see as a village of friends and again we're going to be focusing on four more IB learner profile traits this
055school year and I've already alluded to our assessment in rubric work we had training over the summer in August and we had over 25 teachers participate in it they're going to be serving as Liaisons to their colleagues as well as ourselves the the teacher leaders myself as leads on this and we will continue to make our IB assessments as well as our Ivory brewvix very clear and defined with certain criteria um our climate and culture we have worked this is year two um we launched last school year A Student Success guide we sent it home to all of our parents in our August mailing of last year we sent it out again this year because we found last year it was a great success we knew that as we started the fall of 2022 we
056need a reset in the middle school again as I alluded to in the beginning Village of Friends theme we knew that our students needed to kind of learn again how to treat one another how to be a great friend how to be a great Community member in our middle school and so we created a Student Success guide that was very clear on our behavioral expectations and how was how we work as professional students in our school we taught that explicitly to all of our grade levels again we did it this year we've just finished all of our grade level assemblies and students are doing a fantastic job of of making sure that they're upholding the expectations of the middle school we want to be sure I would love for to say a hundred percent that
057all students students clearly will follow it but I'm also a realist and been an educator for many years but our goal is at least 85 percent of our students by by the end of this school year are upholding everything and doing all the right things to be safe respectful and responsible ready to learn in the Middle School some of the things that we're going to do as I said we've taught it we're going to continue to hold our students and ourselves accountable to those agreements we are going to continue strengthening our partnership with the PTA our community I've had opportunities to go out into the community already to talk about the eighth grade Community project and what's great about the middle school and going on we'll continue our communication through blasts we've also invited we
058also will continue our work with BLT I know there's questions about who serves on it we do have parent members we have staff members teacher assistants aides our PTA President is on our as well and she's one of our School Aids serves on our BLT and will continue to work on our BLT goals this school year and then finally a big project for our counselors is working on our chronic absenteeism uh it's also a district goal but we're really going to do some root cause analysis and really focus on 10 students to start the school year each grade level six seventh and eighth will have 10 students that are going to become our students that we're going to really look closely on look over over time as to their why their attendance has been so
059poor and create plans we were doing this before before covid we began this work but we want to really get get our hands into it a little bit more as we move into this school year create those family connections and have a formalized formalized plan for each student with specific check-ins with parents with meetings to make sure that we're doing all we possibly can to get our students here every single day because we know when they attend they will achieve so there's some real work that's already getting started by our counselors we're working on a form a more formalized letter and working on our actual Improvement plan for for for absenteeism with our counseling office so that's one of our huge projects this school year questions sir I would love to share my results with
060you yeah absolutely yeah absolutely yes sir for your goal one of you know it's an acronym check again AIS model can you explain what what that is um so the AIS program I'm I'm the AIS program is a is something that um we work for it's it's academic interventions and supports sorry my I had a little brain blip um but it yes it's something that we work through in grades K through 12. okay thank you um if I miss this I apologize up front but when you were talking about um the community project and when we saw the video last year it's so impactful and I've been fortunate enough to be going to the Early College High School where they have the students showcase their projects I was just wondering if there was a potential
061to do some type of showcase where board members community members parents could come and hear from the students directly about those Community projects so if it happened and I missed it it's okay it did actually happen we did have a showcase it was a showcase International night we had it in May so it was kind of that busy time of year for everybody we did have a few board members attend so I thank you all for coming for that but please we'll have again we already have it planned out for in May I don't know the exact date off the top of my head but it's already on the books and yes they will showcase their work so Holly yes it was the combined the international piece as well as the showcases and besides seeing
062the wonderful presentations on the student projects for many of the international presentations there was a food component oh well I got to eat too I just want to I just want to note that and it was definitely a wonderful evening it was it's a great event thank you this isn't directly and there's a new sign and I love that attendance matters is being showcased and focused on and the theme of chronic absenteeism comes up and I know it's a district goal but if at some point we could get a snapshot of what some of those reasons are the most common reasons for absenteeism because it could be helpful maybe there are some Community issues that we need to address and so if we could get an update on what some of the reasons are that
063would be really helpful and that's part of our root cause analysis protocol that we're gonna that we're going to use on each student with with our project that we're doing at the middle school it's great wonderful thank you very much and that concludes our three building level goals presentations the next meeting we will have the other three District buildings I present their goals well thank you and again thank you very much for the thoughtfulness and the uh the president the presentations and um I think is as was mentioned we'll have to figure out a mechanism for sort of a review and then sort of a kick off and springboard into the following year sort of thing as we we have a Continuum of uh these goals from year to year perfect next up are our
064committee reports we do not have any committee reports my understanding is the next meeting we're going to have the audit committee meeting is that right yes yes so on 10-4 there'll be a audit committee meeting and again I believe that's to go over one of our external audits correct thank you correspondence items Institute of matters and one phone call Also regarding student matter and correspondence to the board since the last meeting the board received one communication regarding a student matter and was copied on an email to the administration regarding a student matter and next up are our announcements Mr Williams just a couple of things tonight the reminder for Friday is a half day of school for the students they'll be here in the morning in the afternoon the staff will be participating in staff
065development activities on Saturday the village is hosting the the the the exciting long-awaited event where they're going to sell the birdhouses so that's coming up on Saturday students did decorate them throughout the district as well as the middle school students built them everybody's wanted to know when they can get their birdhouse back where the birdhouse is going to be that type of thing so it is Saturday 10-4 at the Elks Lodge um next week we're going to start our adult fitness program back up again it's been in Hiatus for a couple years but we'll have our co-ed soccer beginning on Monday night in the men's basketball starting on Wednesday night I'm on Thursday the high school has a college fair during the school day while the students are here in the building so that'll be
066on on Thursday the 28th in the morning at 9 A.M and then the high school meet the teacher nights that that night and you've already referenced the meet the teacher nights and your next meeting will be on October 4th thank you any other announcements okay old business old Business from The District you not have any old business whole business from the board okay then we're on the new business of motion to approve resolution number 190 Award of bid copier paper so any discussion not hearing any all those in favor I opposed abstentions resolution number 190 passes I have a motion to approve resolution number 191 authorization of petty cash funds so most second any discussion not hearing any all those in favor I opposed abstentions resolution number 191 passes I have a motion to approve
067resolution number 192 adoption of goals so moved second okay and I just want to have a little clarification on this so this is um goals that the board of education is adopting for themselves for the 2023-2024 school year from the New York State School boards Association it's the best practice for a board of education to have goals looking for continuous Improvement and things to track during the school year so um these will be part of the Board of Education part of our district website but we also have a couple of slides where we will just um be able to share them for the community now so first board members will complete professional development opportunities and topics including artificial intelligence diversity equity and inclusion measures of academic achievement board will successfully support of the district goals
068as defined by the superintendent there will be an assessment of board committee activities and a goal that the committee results are effective for the 2023-2024 school year creation of a board mission statement which will be facilitated by the board Communications committee again this is an NYS SBA best practice development and publication and materials for the community promoting and explaining the board's role within the school district and that will be on the board area of the district website as well an inactive board member participation as Liaisons to community groups and the district school PTSA and ptas so are there any discussion around our forward polls okay not hearing any all those in favor I opposed abstentions resolution number 192 passes I have a motion to approve resolution number 193 placement of students with disabilities so I
069moved second any discussion not hearing any all those in favor aye opposed abstentions resolution number 193 passes if I have a motion to approve resolution number 194 placement of preschool students with disabilities so moved second any discussion not hearing any all those in favor I I opposed abstentions resolution number 194 passes resolutions number 195 through 209 are recognized as a consent agenda for the purpose of Board of Education action may have a motion to approve resolutions number 195 through 209 the consent agenda it's almost second any discussion not hearing any all those in favor aye opposed abstentions the consent agenda resolutions number 195 through 209 passes and I just want to recognize that we have some of our new appointments in attendance tonight so uh Kathleen Corey is here who's going to be joining our
070Special Education team and uh was there anyone else okay well welcome Miss Corey so glad to have you with us and certainly welcome to the other appointments as well do we have any other new business okay do we have any representation from the associations do we have any PTSA PTA announcements yes uh mostly from Malta Ave students families and staff are invited to the mall to drive in this Sunday starting at 6 PM for a pre-free private showing of the Super Mario Brothers movie uh also the book fair has been announced that will be taking place on October from October 16th to the 20th more info on that to come uh and also there are four open positions that are in need to be filled on the PTA for for certain committees uh the they're
071looking for a apparel sale chairperson a silver Graphics are fundraiser chairperson uh book fair chairperson and a Hoffman's car wash chairperson uh for Gordon Creek the book fair is ongoing up until Monday started this past monday it goes until this coming Monday and then two upcoming meetings one uh for Milton Terrace coming up on the 27th at six o'clock in the cafeteria that's also a pizza party as well and then Wood Road is having a meeting on the 27th as well at 7 pm and that's going to be held remotely on Google thank you we have something yes um I wanted to mention that the Ballston Spa Education Foundation is in search of board members and they are hosting our meetings have now moved to Tuesday evenings at the district office and they are hosting
072the second Tuesday in October which I believe is October 10th they are hosting a come and just sit in the meeting and see if you're interested type of meeting so observe the meeting to see if you're interested to become a board member it is a monthly commitment with um extra responsibilities during fundraising times and presentations to the board and things like that it's a great committee and they do a lot for the teachers here at Ballston Spa and you know if you are a Community member and you're looking to get involved in your free Tuesday evenings this is a great opportunity to come and see what we're all about thank you very much and any other our other partner okay then may I have a motion to adjourn oh I'm sorry we're at the second
073period for public comment do we have anyone signed up for public comments okay they may have a motion to adjourn so moved all those in favor I opposed we are adjourned our next meeting will be on October 4th