BOE Meeting 12-16-20 Part 1/2

001okay so call to order and would everybody please join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and his okay so thank you uh for those of you that are joining us remotely we have a bunch of presentations to get through tonight hopefully you uh saw the snowman singing snowman if you haven't follow cm super what's that what's the at cm schools underscore super on twitter and it's uh it's really quite good so i'll just leave you with that little teaser so whenever ron you and the crew are ready okay i'll uh ready for the super tense report yeah okay so um um looks like bill i uh you've disabled it says disabled screen sharing so you'll need to uh enable those if you don't

002mind yep um i'm gonna um you know i'm to begin um with okay um i'm going to begin with with a a presentation that um is going to let's see here um all right i'm going to begin with a presentation um that is a bit of a follow-up on um on a conversation we had last time where i where i discussed the probability that there would be some testing in in schools in suffolk county at present um you know the infection rate in the county uh believe it or not today i believe uh hit 8.2 percent so we do have um the highest infection rate we've seen in a long time um and the testing in the county um has been ramped up pre you know we we essentially started having this conversation with the

003department of health earlier in the year and you know once once we knew um that we had to to do this we really started to come together and put together a plan to see how we could make this work for our schools so i'm going to present that so that the community can truly understand you know what it is we would need to do as you know we did put out a willingness to test survey um because if we have to test as you'll see in here we will need to reach a certain threshold of willing testers um to be able to keep our schools open so i'm going to go through this now and i'll show you what that looks like um so to begin um this has been months and months of of

004challenge you know we're we're you know about 10 months into um dealing with either the you know pending pandemic or living through the pandemic um and and the ebbs and flows that have uh presented itself you know we saw a little bit of a reprieve over the summer where things loosened up a little bit and now we're on the other tail end we've talked about some of the unprecedented challenges whether it's you know trying to continue to educate our children and the the stress that is on teachers and administrators and staff to make that happen uh but the impact on our students themselves and their families um when you know things like um you know having to follow uh along on um you know the google meets and things like that uh from you know

005a a remote location is it's not as easy um as you know you might think or maybe it's more difficult than than anyone imagined um but clearly it has had an impact on students it had an impact on families and an impact on staff and what we've tried to do throughout this process is ensure that our communication is as good as it can be so that everybody truly understands that we are doing the best we can to meet the demands you know increasing demands of the pandemic to educate all the students in center merchants as best we can um you know i think that early on you know when we were building plans for this um we had a certain perception of what this might bring a perception that we were going to go back

006to march and what i mean by that was that the perception was we're going to put a reopening plan in place and in the governor's own words he he was saying in august they're not going to trust the school district this is an issue of public health parents are going to want to understand the information for themselves he was basically saying parents push your districts challenge them because you need to know that your kids are going to be safe in schools and many people thought that we'd be closed in the second week of september well i think we've learned a lot since then and i can tell you i've been actively involved in conversations at the county level and with representatives in the governor's office about the kinds of things that we've put in place

007for our schools and you know just november 16th a couple of weeks ago in a press conference the governor turned and said what i'm saying is we've learned a lot since then and schools are actually the safe place and what we hear a lot in albany now is that we need to keep our schools open a couple of weeks ago about three weeks ago i posted my five reasons why on my personal twitter account my five reasons why i thought school should remain open and why schools actually have to remain open i think that students learn more when they're physically present in school and and i think that that's because that's what school is meant to be and that's what our kids know that's our teachers know and we can be truly most effective when

008kids are physically present in school so that's what we're striving for whenever we do our reload our look back periods we're trying to make sure that we're doing every week everything we can to increase the contact time and increase the in-person time for kids in schools i think kids are safer physically and psychologically in school than not i think they're safer physically because in schools we are doing an amazing amazing job of maintaining social business keeping universal masking and ensuring that we're doing hand washing and following the basic protocols that keep kids physically safe outside of school kids are free to gather more and potentially not follow those protocols as they do when they are in school and we are teaching them consistently about those and reinforcing those protocols i believe psychologically they are also

009safer so physically and psychologically from a mental health standpoint kids that are in school are engaged and they're interacting in positive ways with others in school in a school setting and i think that that's more normal and therefore i do believe that they're safer psychologically as well we know and i will show you some data in a little while that there's a lower transmission of this disease in our schools and if there's a lower transmission of of covalent in our schools keeping our schools open keeps teachers safe keeps kids safe and it helps to reduce community spread all that's out there right now is talking about the idea that it's small family gatherings where where the community is really starting to happen more now i believe it fulfills i would never in a million years

010call our teachers daycare providers but it fulfills school fulfills a community need for child care for our essential workers so they can be doing the things that they need to do for our communities it also keeps our workforce productive and our economy viable keeping schools open allows parents to get to work it allows them to to be productive in their work and it keeps our economy moving and that's something that's critical especially when we're seeing um you know the shortfalls in state revenues and things all related to a slowdown of an economy so the governor put together his micro cluster strategy and basically it's a close look at trends in communities so they are monitoring those trends and they're detecting spread levels across new york state and they're identifying small locales by zip code or

011even smaller neighborhoods that have higher infection rates and they are looking to identify where there is community spread of the disease once they identify an area of concern they create a specific area of focus for the viral transmission and they zero in on that and they call it either a yellow an orange or a red zone once those cluster zones are identified they implement restrictions accordingly based on how significant the spread is and the infection rate is so this could be the pausing of non-essential economic activities and you see in yellow there the transition to remote education limiting mass gatherings etc these are some of the things that we've seen we've all experienced but this is a process by which the governor decides how he's going to move places into yellow orange or red zones

012and then in any of those zones there's a clear emphasis on increasing community testing and improving compliance and enforcement so they will supply they will provide supplies of ppe to those communities and they will ensure that they increase testing to determine how significant the the um the infection rate is and also to identify any asymptomatic um patients so that we can minimize spread according to the guidance um schools in a yellow zone must and this is again one when the micro cluster zone is identified any school in the yellow zone must test 20 percent of in-person students faculty and staff over a two-week period immediately following that designation so if we were identified we would have two weeks to test about 370 people if testing revolt results reveal that the positivity rate is lower then

013the school no longer has to test until such time that they would be that zone would be identified as orange or red which have different testing requirements but if we can prove that our schools are safe and our infection rate is lower than that of our community we would be able to move on keep our schools open and not have to test any longer um and essentially the last bullet indicates that that's a sufficient demonstration that in-person instruction is not a driver of or a vector spread um you know again i i talked earlier about putting together a plan um this is a plan that i developed with a colleague of mine um hampton bays was the first school that needed to test as a preemptive testing for heading into a yellow zone so i

014worked with lars clementson he and i spent a weekend really just drilling into what it would take to actually bring testing into a school and we we developed this plan it's a 10-step process for schools to follow to implement school-based testing one of the things that i was striving for in this was make it very manageable to follow very easy to follow i wanted it to be replicable and i wanted it to be scalable to any size school district and i think we accomplished that when you look at the plan i'll just i'll just pull it up quickly um and i'll just it basically it it starts with a a description of the the micro cluster zone initiative it talks about red zones orange zones and yellow zones and in specific this this this is

015what i would refer to as a is a dynamic source document dynamic because it gets updated all the time i spent some time over the weekend updating it again with the most recent guidance and you can see here you know it's very difficult when you watch the county and you try to see oh well as i indicated 8.2 percent in suffolk county testing um just yesterday well that sounds like we should all be in a red zone however one of the factors that the governor and to this is hotel is hotel excuse me hospital capacity um hospital capacity is an important driver if hi you know we are very fortunate to have 11 hospitals in suffolk county those are all that's a lot of beds for people and therefore as long as there is hospital

016capacity it could prevent a particular municipality from moving into a yellow orange or red zone as it as it moves forward there is information about the testing i talked about the yellow but in an orange zone 20 of in-person students and staff over a month would have to be tested and that's 10 per month excuse me 10 every two weeks in a red zone uh and that is perpetual now so if a zone is labeled orange they would have to test every month 20 and so it's ongoing testing testing every week um and that would basically mean that we'd have to test about 100 students of staff a week uh to to keep ourselves open same thing for a red zone except um it's 30 percent over the course of a month and the testing

017has to be spread out over um 15 over two weeks so there's clearly a need for testing in suffolk county i've cited some of the information and and most interesting things that that the data points to with regard to suffolk county and its impact um but some of the things that we've put in this plan are a willingness to test survey that has already gone out to our community at present we have well over 400 probably close to about 500 people that are willing to test in our school community that would be enough if we were designated to have to test 20 um the next process would be a consent to test that would that could be paper and pencil or would have to be or we would use a digital consent and all of

018these documents it is a source document because everything in here is a link to a document that another sort resource that provides support but essentially the process is pretty simple uh it goes through a 10-step process and there are stations involved and what i'll show you is that and actually i will go to a map so i could talk a little bit about what the testing site would look like the map is is very clear you would walk in and i'll follow my cursor here you you'd out in the hall you would come in you would basically get a screening we would take your temperature we would determine that um you were we had consent test we would go inside we would answer a couple of screening questions basically uh everybody that's in school is

019asymptomatic what we are doing in school is looking for asymptomatic individuals to test because again what we're trying to determine is people who are symptomatic typically are staying home these days and they're taking care of themselves and they are going to get tested however when people come into school if they're asymptomatic that's where we have concern because asymptomatic spread is a significant driver in in the spread of this disease students would then or staff would come in they would go to this station right here station two they would be asked some screening questions and then they would be invited over to station 3 where they would be able to and they would just complete a demographic information they would go to station 3 here station 3 would be a very shallow nasal swab that would

020be conducted by an rn one of our nurses and the nurses would be able to literally in five circles one way five circles the other way and be able to take that bring it over to station four where they would put um where they would put that with a reagent and that reagent and set it an egg timer for 15 minutes the students or staff would wait over here socially distance for 15 minutes and then they would actually be able to get their test read they would come back they would sit at an education station and at the education station they would be told of their the result if they were a positive they would be as escorted to an isolation room just like we would do with any positive or person under investigation for

021covert symptoms we would isolate them if they were negative they would be told basically that you know you're doing a good job continue to wear a mask continue to socially distance that kind of thing and then they would be escorted out this would be all people if if we were supported by the south canada department of health it would be all suffolk county department health nurses otherwise it would be our own people our own staff members with an rn overseeing this entire thing one of our own people and then the data gets reported in real time at station 7 by one of our clerical who is now already cleared through what's referred to as the eclair system and the eclair system is the state repository for it for um for where the testing results go

022and basically um i'm going to exit out here okay um so so basically it is a very it's a it's a very simple program um we have a testing and schools tracker built into there as well and in that testing in schools you can see this is where we have tested um over the course of the last couple of weeks since the 19th of november we have administered in suffolk county through this plan um almost 3 000 tests uh and we've had about 40 positives for a 1.44 positivity rate that's what you see over here and i could say that typically we're shooting for about 200 tests in any given day to be administered but i can say that east islip in one day tested 501 individuals so it really is is one of those

023things that sounds like how can you be doing a medical procedure in a school and this seems you know unreal it really is something that is uh once you observe it um and i have been to most of those testing sites just for a quick drop in to see how everything's going um it really is one of those things that you look at and say this is this is actually quite manageable um and not very invasive at all for uh for our students or our staff so it really is nothing more than what some of us are referring to as an aggressive nose pick um which some of our students are used to um these are some frequently asked questions um where will the test come from new york state department of you know one

024of the most important things is this has to be free to all our students and staff and the new york state department of health provides these rapid tests to us they are um they come to us for free and we just provide uh you know we just repurpose staff a little while to to be able to administer this testing um again who will administer the test um schools are responsible provide appropriately trained staff to test and the the test is actually this binax now test that there is a new york state department health training presentation and any individual that goes through the rapid testing um protocols and training presentation is permitted to test um and again no no person um would be tested by anyone who is not an rn and that that would be

025very clear if we had children parents that wanted to be there with their children we we will be working out a way that parents will be permitted to join the appointment with their children and be tested with their with their child um so that's something that hopefully you know alleviates any concerns for younger students that that parents might have um after the test administration how long will it take as i indicate it's about 15 minutes it's actually exactly 15 minutes as a timer set um and we you know are able to deliver the results immediately um our own staff as i indicated earlier we'll be reporting the test results in the new york state database and if somebody wanted to go as long as they were testing within the same testing window as us and

026they said well hey listen i'm willing to get tested but i'd rather do it on my own they could go outside to any other facility get tested and then bring those results back to us and it could count towards our um our school results so with that i'm again a quick overview what i'd like to emphasize is that this really is a very very manageable plan uh the plan that we put together that i that i showed you on the screen is actually being used statewide now suffolk county really took the lead on this because we had such strong relationships with our local department of health who like who i really commend um and and the people at the at the county level that supported us so now we do have um a situation where

027you know suffolk county is being looked at throughout the entire state as a leader in this because our plan is very strong so i i would be willing to take any questions from the board or you know perhaps given the nature of this george maybe even from the community if yeah i'd certainly be fine with that i appreciate the thorough you know presentation and certainly the document you put together on and i know how hard we're working to make sure that it's a safe and comfortable thing for everybody i just am keeping my fingers crossed that we don't ever have to implement it well well i i'm i'm i i think it's a matter of when george and i yeah i know you know i know i think that i think that the way the

028rates are going i think that we're going to be looking at um you know probably more more more testing than not in the county yeah and we're prepared and we'll be and we are 100 we are 100 ready to do it if we had to um so please know that yep safely and comfortably and um so appreciate all your hard work there so bill i know um we're gonna break protocol a little bit if anybody has any questions on this specific presentation um that dr masara just gave us please i know i wanna i know for me he answered both of my questions and i thank him for that first that it'll be the rns who'll be doing the swabbing and second that parents will be allowed to accompany their children because especially for an

029elementary school kid or even a middle school kid or high school kid most kids have their parents with them when they have any kind of medical procedure or anything so i appreciate that as well thank you do we have anyone who's got uh don't see anybody okay and you know what i mean even even later on if somebody gets to us we do have you know three presentations to get through today so i'll move on and if anybody in the community does have any questions if they could you know save them write them down and um be happy to or even call me in the office anytime i'm happy to speak to anybody about this stuff um thank you yeah you got it let me go to the let me see what the uh okay

030i'm going to go over to um this is a presentation that um rainy angolia has put together um our assistant superintendent on the school climate survey that we have recently pushed out so rayna do you want me to i'll advance for you arena whenever you okay i'll let you know uh good evening everyone um thank you for this opportunity to present to you so for about a year or so uh well about a year ago um we uh started uh participating in lycee long island consortium for equity and excellence and and basically um those workshops we we have a center merchant team that is involved in those workshops and um they they basically get the gurus of all different areas of program and instruction um and bring them to eastern suffolk boces uh to work

031with pretty much every district on uh in suffolk county um participates at some point so uh you could forward you can continue so one of the outcomes from our leicester experiences last year was the concept of an annual school climate survey and um so the department of education has a school climate survey and which is supported by the organization that that's quoted at the top uh school climate refers to where the school fosters safety promotes a supportive academic and disciplinary physical environment while encouraging and maintaining respectful trusting and caring relationships throughout the school community so it really is um the perception of how kids feel their perceptions about the school environment their perception about their educate their academic components curricular components um but it also um has a separate survey for the parents and for

032both instructors boys and and non-instructional do you want to watch amazing race at eight okay i do [Music] so uh long island consortium for equity and excellence you know they really um pushed you know the schools encouraged the schools to kind of start this as a you know an annual practice and just coincidentally it is um part of the typical self-study needs assessment and school improvement process so you know the goal this year really was to get a baseline for cinema riches uh the survey is voluntary it's anonymous um it's really it's really for students three to twelve they don't typically survey younger students they certainly could if they wanted to um because they're there there are links for elementary students middle school students and high school students um typically third and fourth grade is

033when students start to be able to participate in these types of things the questions are organized into the three domains engagement safety and environment uh ron you could go to the next slide thank you and this this is a sample report um of what the data looks like it's a breakdown by topic so within engagement um they talk about language competence relationships participation and safety it's emotional safety physical safety bullying substance abuse emergency readiness and management and environment physical environment instructional environment mental health and discipline and on the right side is basically a scale every question is scaled through the strongly agree to strongly disagree range so in all of these topics they're asked a series of questions and the response is always strongly agree through um strongly disagree and the next slide [Music] so

034this is just another the the data when we get the results and this is um the great thing about the platform that we're using it allows us to disaggregate the data in a very a variety of ways so we can disaggregate by the domains the three main domains by the topics by the questions themselves and then break down by gender race ethnicity grade in school and um with the work that we're doing uh with diversity um and equity i think this information will prove very useful in some of those conversations as well so when we get this sample data and we get this uh this data report we'll be able to look at this it will basically um be relevant to every all of our initiatives and in varieties of avenues including you know the

035the you know the the uh diversity committee um that we started this year um so before i go into pear just to backtrack on the survey the survey is currently available there's a link on the main page of the website um the there's all kinds of informational documents on the you know within that within that webpage it's it's open right now i'm going to keep it open for a while since it is the holiday season i know we've uh surveyed uh quite a bit this year um so if we can encourage you know everyone encourage a few people to take the survey it's anonymous the data is being kept in-house in the future if we ever want to become part of a comparative study that's always an option but this is really just cinema riches

036information that's going to stay with son of riches and it's hopefully going to inform um [Music] you know where our challenges are with areas we need to improve we get a tremendous amount of feedback every day from our teachers our parents and our students but we know that maybe some people are hesitant to you know to really speak their minds um you know person to person so this is just another avenue um where people can safely communicate their thoughts um and ideas and um we can use that feedback to grow and to set goals and grow as we try to do every year so you notice as part of this the school climate survey there there is a piece of of social emotional so these things are interconnected but this next piece um really focuses

037on individual students so this survey is from an organization called partnerships partnerships and education and resilience pair and they're out of harvard university um so and they are completely focused on social emotional health so we have talked about i know um the health and wellness committee has talked about um in a very specific sel screener and this would be for grades three to twelve um and basically what it does is it creates a social emotional portrait um and it will have you know um we will be able to get compiled data for the school but we will be able to um see individual data as well for students who um we may not know that there's there's an underlying issue we may we may not know a certain feeling that they've been having and it'll

038help that early detection process that we're we're really um trying to tackle you know with our counselors in our cst processes so any student student who participates in this um again it's we it is not mandatory um there is an opt-out um option um but we know that you know the more that we know about our kids early on the more we are capable of um helping them um this presentation is on the website and all of these underlying areas these are all links to additional resources um uh from pear the other element of the pair piece is that this this data piece will become part of their data profile and will be alongside their data profile in in write reason technology again this is not data that we are doing anything with outside of

039cinema riches in terms of um you know data that you know we send assessment data to the state and all that stuff this is only centimeric's only data um and this particular uh survey is is um it it will be given to individuals they will have an id number it won't be any person there won't be any uh pii information um but they will have an id number so if there are things that um come up in the screenings that we can talk to the students and obviously inform the parents and so on these are the types of topics that are covered in the pair survey in the in the sel screening um you can see they're a bit more specific than the the school climate um but there is somewhat of an overlap um

040like you know like the last bullet sense of belonging there's going to be an overlap in the school climate survey and that um but this is very specific to individuals and how they see themselves in school versus school climate where it's like how they perceive the the their environment in the school um so this is i would say definitely a more self-reflection piece versus you know evaluating and communicating attitudes about the environment um in school you go to the next slide so you know when i think um you know school climate and social emotional learning you know they are um truly interconnected you know when i think of school climate and scl at center merch's you know i had a lot of trouble with this page because it it was really busy and it was

041busier at one point because i had so many things up there because our students are truly involved in some amazing activities and sometimes it's just their positive interactions with themselves with their teachers um and these are the things that we build on here um you know student activity in action there's a million things i could list under there from sports to extracurriculars to community service um and those things build positive school climate um our counseling supports the leadership um student uh created um you know wall murals and you know work posted um so i i tried to just put up some general things but we could all name probably a thousand things underneath all of these topics um that truly build our positive school climate and our goal really is to make sure that positive

042school climate continues and that you know especially in these times where school climb it it is really hard you know to maintain it it's it's um you know incredibly challenging i think our kids our teachers our parents our staff are all doing a phenomenal job um trying to you know to still embrace you know with school is very different this year and it may not be like the best time to survey people because there there is that you know kind of you know that that challenging kind of stressful environment but all the more reason to get the feedback at this time um because we know we'll continue to grow um and we know the more positive school can be for kids we know that they'll be more successful so this um you know the quote

043in the cloud um you know really i think summarizes really well uh what what we're talking about and what we continue to try to do um these visuals i actually borrowed this from a teacher who did a pd session this week um at the middle school teresa horshevsky um a lot of the work that trevor mckenzie does really he's a he's an english teacher but a lot of the work that he does it does a lot of professional development work throughout the country um on inquiry but the work that he does is very very social emotional oriented um and um if you look how all these i think this visual really paints a beautiful picture about how all these elements can work together um and how you know we are working on all these elements

044to make sure that they exist in our schools so our kids can have the best experience possible and these are just some of the resources um that are available out there some of the things that we've um used in our pd sessions and we'll continue to use with our students and staff um in terms of keeping creating positive school climate and making sure that we have um you know a very comprehensive sel program for individual students and for you know whole school programs thank you very much thank you raina appreciate that okay yeah thank you irena um you know i think that it it'll it'll be interesting to see how the data you know plays out the school climate survey in such a you know kind of a peculiar year um this will be the

045first time we're administering that survey so it's going to serve as a baseline um but i i you know i i do you know think that the date is going to be a little bit different you know just because of the fact that we are this is a very different kind of year um but certainly we're going to glean what we can from it um and try to improve what you know our practices um as best we can so thank you for that marina that was a great overview of that all right so we do have um one more um presentation that i'm going to get to here ron while you're bringing that up uh on the surveys are are the parents automatically going to get that information on their on their kids or is

046there some process to request that or what do you envision there so for the for the sel piece um they're going to um pair is going to have individual reports so the parents will get the individual reports and that and you know it's it's different but similar to something that i had done in a previous district where we implemented universal screening uh for social and emotional instability um where we um we did the same you know and we use that as a baseline all right um okay so the the next presentation is is a presentation um that we're basically referring to as pandemic effects on the academic social and emotional well-being of students in cinema riches um you know it's very clear that you know like i just said we're going to have a a

047baseline on social emotional or of school climate but it's going to be a baseline that is in some ways perhaps not entirely accurate because it's such a peculiar year but it's important data because we really need to understand how kids are feeling about what their school environment looks like and clearly the pandemic has exhausted we know that the pandemic has exacerbated mental health issues we know the pandemic has has created all kinds of stressors for kids for staff for everyone um and so one one of the things we wanted to look at was what does that really what what are we seeing as the impact so we ask the principals to dig into their data um in a number of areas and i'm going to go through those areas a little while but i ideally

048we were trying to see where could we pull data that that shows us something and and what does that data actually mean for our kids you know in terms of an overview what i can say is that oh boy sorry about that in terms of an overview um there's there are several studies um that look at you know oftentimes we look at what's referred to as the summer slide you know the couple of months um you know in europe kids are off for eight weeks in in you know america they're sometimes 10 to 12 weeks um and so there's questions about the um the different models of education and what does that summer slide really mean um so based on data from that and based on um other situations whether it be natural disasters and

049things like that um a group of researchers kuffels leading them um basically came up with a model for what it would look like in terms of the law what he referred to as learning losses for kids because of the pandemic and essentially their statement was that students are likely to enter school with more variability in their academic skills than under normal circumstances so for instance you're in a first grade classroom and your kids come into you on a reading level from c up to j maybe in in your class wide range that that that might be now kids coming in from an a to a k you know like kids could be just a much wider range and a lot of variability in the readiness levels of kids um and i always choose the word

050readiness above ability because i think that that speaks to kids more so if we talk about ability that's static that means that that's what kids are capable of if we talk about readiness we talk about a continuum of learning where kids move along at a pace that's suitable for them so it's important to to understand that distinction but however the research that they looked at yielded these projections where students would fall in 2020. and basically what they said was that they would come in with about 63 to 68 of the learning gains in literacy relative to a typical school year so that means a loss of anywhere from you know 37 to 30 32 to 37 percent of the gains that they would normally have gotten in math and again literacy is everywhere kids are

051walking around they're reading things that they're they're constantly learning literacy skills in their everyday life they're constantly reading math is a little bit different math is something that is put in front of you and you practice and you learn and you learn so sequentially so math is a little bit different so not surprisingly the learn the losses in math are much more significant kids are coming in with 37 to 50 of the learning gains in math so knowing that that that's what that's what the pandemic that the researchers are telling us the pandemic effects are um some of this research came from this article here accelerate don't remediate an instructional framework for meeting the needs of most vulnerable students after covert closures this was in the journal of um instructional instruction leadership and instruction and

052i actually this was the article that uh i'm an editor on this journal and i was assigned this this article to proof um and basically uh edit and come up with the the final version um that we put towards the editorial board and it was uh ultimately published in that peer-reviewed journal so but the the interesting thing about this accelerate don't remediate i remember when i first got this article i thought that's interesting you know and what an interesting idea and and it's so in line with my philosophy of setting high expectations for kids because part of the premise in this article was that when we have kids who are coming in and maybe have lost something in a previous year's learning what we need to do is not lower expectations not say that well

053if we want the exit outcome to be a jk reader for a second grader well what why would we take that and say that instead of that we'll have we'll change the exit outcome to an h we don't want to do that what we want to do is keep the bar high and we want to try to accelerate the learning essentially the researchers are suggesting that the model that we need to use is to not try to catch the kid up on every little fact they missed the previous year but just accelerate the learning and what they find is that because of the resilience factor that kids have they actually can catch up as long as you put those supports in place for them the uh some of the other factors and this comes from

054some research through international baccalaureate are the idea of this idea of whole child education so to support development it is essential to maintain the commitment to providing holistic education and not be pressurized to focus predominantly on academic results and this comes from cardinal who basically is indicating that if you can focus on the social emotional activities you can recover the the motivation and engagement and learning that helps students positively adjust to the to these new academic demands and challenges so again in a nutshell there are some key things that are important to mitigate the effects of these pandemic losses and according to cardinal there are five things that can really help first off we need to explicitly work toward development of skills that support resilience again that idea you you heard that when reina was

055talking about um some of the um the supports in terms of the pair the work that pair is doing um through harvard but resilience is critical kids need to learn to be resilient if they are going to overcome challenges a positive school environment and again repetitive here if we are creating the positive school environment where kids are welcome kids feel challenged kids are challenged appropriately and they're they're supported by their teachers and that positive school environment they're supporting each other in their learning and they're taking ownership of their learning that's a positive school school environment that's something that gets kids over a uh and it helps to mitigate the impact of pandemic losses using assessment support support teaching and learning this is what we are doing every day we are utilizing formative assessments to find

056out where kids are and address them along a continuum of readiness and if we are using them well and what i would argue is that as difficult as has been one of the things that one of the benefits we're gonna when we come out the other side we are going to be better for it our teachers are going to be better for it and our instructional institutions educational institutions are going to be better for it because we have learned to take traditional teaching and utilize and leverage technology like never before and now we can utilize those assessments we can utilize the data that we get from those assessments to really target the readiness levels of kids and support them better student agency and having kids take set goals and and um and implement goal setting

057in their learning is a critical component that can also um you know mitigate these uh impact of pandemic losses and then finally differentiation making sure that what we are doing is creating personalized learning environments again targeting the readiness levels of kids based on assessment data we have so that we know where kids are at and where we want to get them to so if we can get a baseline understand how far we think we can take kids and push them to that goal i think that we can we can certainly um do wonderful things for our kids so just a couple of these areas um the focus on on resilience according to cahill and and his group of researchers there are four areas higher levels of social competence problem-solving skills sense of autonomy and self-efficacy

058and sense of purpose hope or meaning are the four areas um that you need to focus to teach resilience and then obviously the the positive school climate we talked about that uh positive school climates can over time mitigate um the disaster related impacts of uh academic performance whether those are natural disasters a pandemic um summer slide um all of those types of things have tremendous effects on on bringing students forward um so rain anything did i miss anything on those and you know what this this is something that rain and i worked on together so brandon on those two slides did i miss anything there i i want to keep this and i think you know the the the presentation i just said is is the what and and this really kind of summarizes the

059why um you know why we're we're trying to get as much information as we can from all of our groups to to see what we can accomplish here in terms of uh making sure we can you know uh give the most appropriate supports for our kids yeah and and um and it's always i i like to lead with the research to show what's happening out there and why it's happening um but but so here's the first area that we looked at we looked at behavior referrals in our schools um and so you know hey we want to see well you know what's happening with our kids um you know and i i can remember um early on my wife and and i you know forgive me for always going to my my own anecdotals but

060i learned so much from my own children um you know when i was in a in my quarantine for 18 days i learned a lot about teaching and learning watching my wife teach virtually second graders and watch my four children have to learn everything from organic chemistry as a junior in college down to sixth grade literacy and math and social citizen science um so it was amazing to me um to take that learning and then come back to work and and think about these things but my wife had asked me about a month and a half ago she said you know our 16 year old doesn't want to go to in-person school and she said i don't get it i couldn't wait to be in school i loved being in school when i was 16.

061and i said honey this is very different than anything you can imagine because if you look at the data we're talking about 110 referrals in one mar the first marking period in the 1920 1919 20 that 2020 school year and this year three referrals we're talking about 61 in the middle school and one 56 in clayton huey and 17. for only 10 students have been written up so interesting data but school is not operating like school typically is kids are not being kids in some ways we didn't come up with the magical elixir that got kids to behave the pandemic did this because we put masks on them and we socially distanced them um so rainy you want to go through the this slide yeah so the building administration you know we asked them for

062numbers but we also said you know give us some anecdotal information in terms of what you know the rationale like why do you think the numbers are what they are um you know i mean the density especially at the secondary campus the social distance pro the social distancing um it's reducing student interaction you know we have regulations everywhere um where you know we have you know bathroom sign in and we're really really limiting students you know in terms of movement whether it'd be typical in the hallways at certain points of time to have more movement um and you know it's it's definitely a very limiting environment um and you know from the positive set the from the positive side you know i think our our students even if we were not you know really over

063communicating the boundaries and the rules and limitations and all the protocols um you know the especially the older ones who are old enough to understand like what's happening in the world like they they are kind of um operating um because they know that they have that sense of self that they have to be more careful you know they're on edge and that's not necessarily a positive thing but they've developed this this different sense of responsibility um so that's what i see the positive part of different sense of responsibility um they're on a little bit more on alert um and it could even be protective mode um but now it's it's kind of built into them but they have to be more careful and um so maybe following rules is built into that um in a

064stronger sense of being a responsible young adult um you know some of the things that i think that have helped us you know the building administration regularly communicating getting on the loudspeaker our teachers and staff reminding students of protocols and so forth definitely have have an effect on um you know the the protocols that are being followed and um that you know i think that their their behavior is definitely um also a product of just you know understanding what being well really is um so you know we're seeing these positive behaviors so some of it is because they're limited and they're afraid but other parts of it is because they you know they have this greater sense of responsibility which shows that they're they really do um you know react well to stressful situations yeah

065and and i would say over the summer you know when we were building our plan you know we were thinking oh my gosh we're gonna have to put discipline protocols in place for kids who refuse to wear their masks and we had all these thoughts about what could possibly happen and and you know we've been looking at our compliance in mask wearing and social distancing and all that and what we're seeing is you know even masked breaks that we thought you we would have to do oh my gosh how often should we do mass breaks we're gonna have to do it every half an hour with little ones the little ones don't even bat an eye you know the kindergarten kids can put a mask on and leave it on all day because they're just

066resilient it's common practice now so very very interesting um the next thing we looked at was attendance and you know and so attendance you know we were scratching our head a little bit on this one because um it was it was curious to us um some of the the way the numbers played out so the metrics we used you know were variable on here um you know so we used the one month full day absence of clayton huey you can see um doesn't look like a huge difference the 550 to 500 a little bit of a reduction in absences again there are instances where children are not in school you know we are parents are doing what we're asking if we you know if a kid's got a sniffle they're keeping them home because they

067don't want to be putting their child in a position where they could potentially um be spreading any kind of disease in our schools so they're keeping them home but there's an option to log in at home so the absences are down a bit um and we see absence down about 50 um over the course of that one year however what we are seeing is the number of students with excessive absences the absences are happening with certain kids so we had in in an instance where there were only four kids with 15 or more absences um now we're seeing 20 kids with 15 or more absences so it you know do the math on that you know right there that's that's you know 400 absences right there roughly between those kids with with 15 absences um

068in 2020 2021 already in clayton huey when we look at the middle school we have the one month full day absences at 257 down to 93 again that looks like a good trend because kids have the ability to attend school um you know um you know even though they're not physically present um however you can see excessive absences are also significantly up um so when you see upwards of a you know 45 increase in excessive absences that's that's cause for concern and you know you see the the trend in the high school one month full day absences um from 41 down to 36. kids are finding a way to get into those classes and attend class it's a remarkable decrease in full day absences however we do see a slight increase in the excessive oh

069that's me calling guys guess what i'm calling about so feel free to check your text messages look at the funny snowman whatever um but uh but that that would be me calling you to let you know that yes indeed tomorrow will be a uh good old-fashioned time-honored tradition snow day in america um for santa mauritis um so i did hear a couple phones go off and i saw my my cell phone light up um so we are seeing you know an increase in in the excess of absences um you know one of the things one caveat to all this is while we are seeing the decrease in the um full day absences one of the concerns we have is the level of engagement that they're actually in when they're in the remote classes so i'll

070let rayna as she talks about the pandemic effects on attendance the observations and supports touch on that yes so and and the reason one of the reasons why we ran the data two different ways is because you know it is you know great that the kids have the opportunity to be present physically or remote um but we also knew based on our cst information our attendance letters and the volume that we're hearing from the buildings that those numbers did not line up and that's why we ran excessive absence that's a period by period thing so there's the daily absence and then there's a period by period absence so those period by period absences can really rack up quickly if you have a full day access um so even though they may have that option that

071opportunity to be present um whether they're in class or remote um the the real voice is from when the teachers are struggling with kids who may be present on the screen they're logging in um but it's present versus engagement um that we're hearing from them that that is the challenge where um they might be handing in assignments um but when they're calling on kids in class um they're realizing they're not engaged um so you know we're trying to figure out you know like we yes they are logging in but it's the engagement that we truly care about i mean that you know being present whether you're physically there look you can come to class and put your head down and we address that so we're kind of finding ways to address this as well it's

072you know if you're not interacting when you're you know or at least responding in some way when you're you're in your live synchronic session remotely um you know where are we equating that with maybe putting your head down and not participating in class um and you know the the the power of being in person you know teachers are really feeling that because it's you know hey reminder you didn't respond to my question during class like it's very limiting when you have just that that element of virtual interaction um so we are continuing with our communication regarding attendance um a very you know our attendance at the secondary campus in terms of we get we have those attendance letters that go out um automatically um and we have been doing a lot of outreach with our

073cst uh teacher counselor outreach for students with with attendance concerns okay all right um child study team referrals um and so you know here first trimester we're seeing um no change in clayton huey in terms of that however at the middle school we we have a hundred percent increase in the uh child study team referrals so lots of these lots of concerns there over many of these things are are some of those things where we talk about those you know mental health conditions and kids being exacerbated and those things start to impact them in terms of their ability to learn in school um clearly at the high school going from 88 to 126 there's a reason for that and we are seeing that um you know the pandemic is having an effect on the number

074of referrals we're seeing for child study ron i don't want to interrupt but i'm going to can you just explain what a child child study team referral is yeah so you know when we see a kid and thank you for that robin i appreciate that if we see a child struggling in some manner um you know and we try to and typically they could be you know some behaviors that are are you know what we're concerned about could be failures it could be kids you know acting out in a certain way um it could be them going to a counselor and saying you know i'm thinking about this i'm thinking about that i'm really struggling with x y and z it's really gathering up all the people that work with the child to you know

075work as a team um and the mental health and the mental health professionals lead this um and trying to problem solve the best ways to support um the student to make sure that um you know the the supports that we put in place do what's necessary to bring them back to where we want to see them be ready yeah and and this um you know this team meets weekly um so there may even be um certain kids that are um you know called or you know reviewed every week to look at progress and so forth and it may also be you know that you know typically if there were a few behavioral referrals or you know the beginning of an attendance issue um that they may not you know traditionally go on to child study

076right away because the tennis issue is going to be solved one way so we're trying to really streamline all of the issues through child studies so that definitely accounts for the increase and we're trying to hit these issues as as early as possible um so if it's a tendency we may have let that first letter go out second letter go out for the communication because that sometimes resolves itself but in this environment with all the challenges we don't we want to hit things as proactively as possible um you know and we know just you know from you know from our counselors and just in conversations and how busy their schedules are you know like their social emotional needs overall have increased you know just the stress of this whole scenario whether it's in school or

077outside in school um and you know we're trying to make sure that i think you know we talked about the importance of being connected um because if they're connected they will more likely to engage in you know in academics and and that's really hard for kids right now and kids who didn't typically connect with academics they connected in some other way whether it's athletics or extracurricular um and they don't have those avenues and they don't have that same motivation because that piece of their typical school life is not present right now um but i can tell i can tell you that the supports and the communication you know we're doing individual zoom meetings with families when needed in terms of um you know uh home visits to make sure you know if we can't communicate

078with families we would we will go to the home and and see if they need supports and see what's going on um and you know if if there's if there's a need for outside agency support you know we've been making those connections for families as well um you know to the extent that we can we have you know advertised opportunities for students to connect to the school activities there are some virtual clubs and things that i know the secondary campus has a list posted on their website um and you know unfortunately you know those things are limited but those could be potential motivating factors for kids who are struggling you know with the current situation the hybrid situation at the secondary campus um you know but they've really just been pushing like every single kid

079if the needs a specific motivator what is that motivator going to be for that student great all right um academic performance um and clearly you know this is part of where uh you know i started was that hey the academic performance we were anticipating that there would be um that bit of a slide sort of a you know a um a significantly greater impact than the you know in the summer slide um than a typical june to september given what we went through in march um and you know so if we look at at clayton you look at the number of students that are not meeting grade level proficiency in literacy okay and i i thought i had the word literacy in here but i remembered that i wanted to make sure that i was

080emphasizing that this is strictly literacy um kindergarten to grade 2 17 more students are not meeting grade level proficiency in 2020 versus 2019 um and that's cause for concern um in grades three to five it's 20 um so you know obviously kids have not made the progress um that we would typically expect um and so their learning trajectory has been altered by the pandemic there what we chose for the middle school and the high school is this idea of multiple failures um in you know and you know for lack of a a better way to you know to put it that's just basically students who are struggling in any particular class um in in the you know for the first quarter um so in 1920 in the middle school there were 11 students that had

081more than one class they were failing in the first quarter and it's 52 in uh you know this year 45 in the high school versus 89. so that's pretty significant um and that is something that we are obviously looking at and we're concerned about and i can assure you that you know melissa and courtney and jeremy and marissa are having uh conversations all and the child study teams are fully engaged to have these conversations to try to determine what can we be doing to support these students um you know so that so that we can you know get them back where we want to see them uh can you just go back one slide please because i have a couple of questions so when we you know took a look at the data and the

082attendance data and the child study team and so forth um did we go all the way back to what was it march 13th of last year when the decision was made to close schools for the rest of the year because i'd love to see if there's a correlation between these percentages and the percentage of students that are higher have a higher absent rate than others and some of the students that were referred to the child study team for those social emotional needs you talk about um you say you want to um you want to combine the data and anxiety i'm just curious right so we we have 17 kindergarten grade 2 20 grade 3 to 5. right an increase of 41 uh 41 students and then another 44 at the secondary campus do those correlate

083to students who were experiencing these attendance difficulties in the spring of last year when we went to fully remote um well we we would have to disaggregate it and look at every individual case and match them up but but i would suggest that um a large majority of these kids that are in the multiple failure would be those kids that are probably in child study team now it's it's not an exact answer but what what we did look at and one of the reasons why we chose multiple failures because the because of the discrepancy from year to year where like singular failures it was it was more similar from year to year in terms of the amount like more typical um so you know we took that as like all right a student who was

084maybe failing like only one class last year is now having multiple failures under this scenario so that's why we thought that that was um like that was the the measure to use because it did show the difference between um last year under you know typical circumstances versus this year um the other anecdotal piece that i would say is that um you know to correlate you know say the academic performance and attendance which we know has a strong correlation the kids that are not connecting and not coming to school um are typically um you know are the ones who are having multiple failures right and i have a question also um with the child study referrals that the child study team referrals there was an increase significant increase but we had it looked like the discipline

085we were down a lot so is that there's no correlation to the child study referrals and behavior um how is that uh like how does that correlate or not correlate because i don't see it well you can be referred to child study for a lot of different reasons so you know sometimes it's just you know is there a discipline issue there could be a discipline issue but not an academic issue like in a discipline issue that can't be resolved you know um with you know a consequence and the student moves on like that student may be referred to child study um or it could be just an academic issue they don't have to you know fall in their attendance discipline and academics to be referred to child study necessarily it basically um it's referrals of

086teachers counselors administrators like kids that we need to develop individualized plans for to make sure that and to make sure that they have the right support so they don't have to hit all those categories necessarily to be um in under that you know the work of that team right so if we if we're implementing you know when we look at response intervention and how we're going to intervene you know typically you have a tiered system of interventions right and and so you have different levels of supports that students would get um and you know you'd have your level one supports that are you know oh okay so like there's uh you know maybe a um you know counselor support or or something like that then you know level two interventions would be a little bit

087more intense you you probably have more remedial support and you know smaller group and intensive counseling um you know and then you get your level three supports that would obviously be much more significant based on the needs of the individual child and child study team would be making determinations on the level of support needed for an individual case basically you can you can kind of move the the levers on that little equalizer a little bit you can increase the frequency of interventions you can free increase the duration of interventions you can increase the um the ratio you know teacher to student and all of these things are levers you can push to try to make sure that you're putting interventions in place for kids that are most appropriate okay so my other question rayna with

088regards to these numbers the increase in multiple failures i'm sure you've had these conversations is there something that we could be doing um you know as a board of ed or as a team to provide teachers with additional support for this hybrid and remote platforms um because we know i know how much they are have packed into a single school class period as it is and some of the other responsibilities that have shifted just due to the remote platform being part of our learning you know attendance wise and so on and so forth so if i don't know if you've had those conversations but if there's something that we could do to support them um you know it's certainly something that i would love to know and have a conversation about absolutely um and i

089think if i don't know ron you ready to move on to the next slide i might have a few answers or yes okay um i mean it's interesting and it sounds i know we talked about it but one of the asks and it um it sounds pretty simple you know in our world of education it's like extra help it's a built-in thing but you know extra help was a struggle um having the ability to offer inputs and extra help i mean you know how if you get that extra help that day you have the problem in class you go to extra help it's it's immediately taken care of where the way we had originally had it because we didn't have the in-person extra help that's going to be a game changer for you know a

090bulk of a bulk of students who need that immediate extra help so that's one piece that i think that that shift in the last look back period is going to be very very helpful um at secondary campus um i i think the other piece and what i'm hearing you know from the buildings is you know they're really developing and you can see on this slide um they're really developing these individual plans for these students um those who are referred to csu with multiple failures and and some of them some of them you know the feedback from the teachers and or the counselors involved in these um kind of group zoom meetings with students and families um is it's simple things like you've been missing your first and second period class because you're not setting your

091alarm you know some of the measures are very very simple time management skills you know for some of our younger students is still you know you know a major um area of their life that they need to attend to and need to be you know specifically you know instructed um [Music] very specific goals um it's weekly counselor check-ins to make sure that they're completing their classwork you know beyond you know the teacher communication piece um and some of it is more you know very specific traditional uh academic supports like you know you're going to get ais support and and so forth so those are some of the things that we've done but i'll certainly um you know talk to the group in terms of what are the things we can do collectively uh to support

092yeah please please please do that right because like that slide in your last presentation said if we have to if there's something in the environment we need to improve we have we have to be able to provide that support for the for the teachers as best that we can um and again i know i listen i know firsthand this platform and uh from the education side as well so i know how much they're packing into a period and i i just want to make sure that we're as supportive for them as possible so that they can provide the best support for our students as well yeah i agree 100 and you know that your perspective on the parent and the board and the teachers it's it's i mean they are the 100 they really really

093are packing in the material and balancing you know the new managerial parts of the platform which are challenging as well and knowing that you know they're you know trying to keep on top of their content right and get kids you know preparing for the next the next level the next next year at this point you know yeah yeah you know um we had the health and wellness safety committee today and i just shared a little story that i always start every period off i ask the children how they are they're sixth graders they're not generally forthcoming they're not going to tell me in front of a group of 30. you know so it's like hey we're good we're good and today one young lady asked me how i was and that generally does not happen

094um and you know i had a moment of reflection there and i said you know overall i guess i'm okay you know and even watching some of this stuff now it's amazing what we've accepted as a reality for us we're talking about um as part of the testing protocol the number of hospital beds that are available and we just accept it as part of our reality now and when you look at it it's it's to me it's just so such an extreme thing to have to think about um you know and that's kind of what i was saying before where where i hope we don't have to implement the testing plan it's not that i don't think we're prepared whereas we're so prepared for that it's that i hope the numbers don't get that high

095i hope that everybody is safe i hope that we can start providing children with an education that when this girl asked me today i realized how much i missed it having all 25 students in my class you know this is the time of the year we by now we'd be firmly established in our relationship their relationships with each other we'd have some group work going we'd have holiday music going on in the background and uh you know today was a full remote day and it really just hit me really hard and then have to sit through all of this stuff and see the struggles of our children and of our teachers and um of our community it's just uh you know it's a tough tough thing so anything that we can do anything that we

096can do um you know i certainly want to make sure we explore that and provide it to the best of our ability i appreciate that george you know thank you for for all of those uh presentations but like i said it's just so so tough to sit through it for me at least you know i'm not speaking for anybody else but you know i think the the good news is and and you know if we go back to where i started with with the resilience piece is that if we remember the accelerate not remediate peace that we really need to focus on that and not not lower the bar and not accept that kids aren't where we wanted them to be but bring them to a place and and and i also believe that when

097we get beyond this and when we get on the other side that we truly are going to be better at what we do um and and when we are in person and we are leveraged leveraging all the things we learned here um i think we're gonna we as a as an educational institution we'll be better for it um and our teachers uh have learned so much during this time that they'll be able to carry the kids and and do just that and accelerate not just remediate thank you ron these these negative impacts especially from the the pandemic are really crucial and and i'm glad you guys identified them i'm glad you've identified actions but but they're really important so i'm assuming after the next marking period we'll go over these again in february or march

098time frame and see what they look like we yeah these are things that that we we are keeping you know constant watch on um you know we've we've talked about these in our administrative council meetings and we talked about these with the principles and you know all the time uh you know rayna most significantly has a lot of these conversations um but yeah we will continue to track the data and monitor it and um continue to you know push to you know put plans in place that are going to benefit our kids yeah absolutely so we we're um you know we're about an hour and a half in and and the superintendent report's almost done um we do have we do have some some committee reports um you know i'll just you know very we'll

099do these as quickly as possible um you know the um legislative committee met um um you know and yesterday i actually um was kind of gonna follow up today but we didn't we didn't catch up today um but we met with um legislators all of the long island delegation that was available yesterday as a superintendent's association and we really you know again it's about building a partnership it's about talking about the things that are most important you've heard me talk about the flexibility that we need some of the flexibilities we need our legislators are certainly supportive of that um and you know i think that you know to a person they were really receptive um there are some new electeds that actually made it into the meeting also so that was good and so we

100do have a couple of things coming up the um the longwood legislative breakfast um we did send an invitation out so we'll just figure out how many of the board members want to attend and that will be another opportunity to ask some questions of some of our electeds um and continue the advocacy all right um ricardo you had a couple do you want to touch on yes yes thank you um dr yes we have two and i'll try to as mine indicated i'll try to make them as quickly as possible we met as a technology committee on december 1st and predominantly what we looked at was we created as a committee a technology survey and it was um directed to the staff and we had some very important questions to try to determine from the

101staff in terms of their use of technology students comfortability with technology and it was a very simple google survey that we had it was eight questions and the major findings of it were the following we had 76 of the respondents that felt very comfortable with technology the teachers feel comfortable utilizing technology in their instructional program percent of the individuals that responded felt that technology met the demands of their instructional program meaning that the technology that's available to them by the district is able to meet the instructional needs and i just wanted to uh step back for a second because we had a hundred responses for this survey we have roughly 140 individuals within the cmta unit so that's a really good percentage of responses we received which is roughly about 72 the other piece that

102we looked at was a sort of a commentary section where we asked the teachers if they had the ability to sort of improve on the technology that's available to to them what would they look at and some of the things that they identified is additional tech personnel sorry kerry um smart board replacements uh we know that we have quite a few smart boards across the district that are at the end of life so we are going to have to look at replacing them at some point and one of the number one comments i think that almost everyone mentioned is that they would love to see more chromebooks in the hands of students so we are looking at that i think the the community is aware that the board of education generously supported the purchasing of

103450 additional chromebooks a couple months ago over the summer we purchased another and over the spring and summer of this year we actually had 199 donated so we are actively working towards building our stock of chromebooks across the district which is a great thing and the other piece that we looked at the other question that we had for teachers was really how did they feel how comfortable the kids were with the use of technology and the information is kind of interesting in the sense that at the elementary level which i guess it wasn't too surprising to us as a committee but 40 percent members that responded felt that their students were felt comfortable meaning 60 of the students did not feel as comfortable as 40 of their population at the middle school which is not

104surprising 81 percent felt that their students were comfortable utilizing technology in the instructional program that were offering and at the high school which is was a little surprising to me 67 percent felt that they were comfortable with the use of technology i actually thought that that number would be a lot higher during the fact that you know most of our high school students are so uh computer savvy and technology savvy they always have a chromebook or you know uh some type of tablet or a cell phone that they're using to navigate through their lives but that was the um the findings from that particular survey future gender items that we're going to look at as a committee is a review of the end of life hardware across the district we know that one of the

105things that you have to continuously look at in technology is the replenishment of technology most standard chromebooks the end of life is usually free we try to push them to four years but technology is definitely not made the way it used to where you would have a laptop for seven or eight years and you so utilize your desktop now the end of life is roughly about three to four years so we're looking at that we're also looking at the use of software across the district and how the redundancy of the software meaning are our teachers utilizing the same software that pretty much does the same thing and can we reduce the course of that and possibly even reallocate those funds to better support the needs of our students and the needs of our teachers in

106their instructional program so that was the technology committee which was conducted on the first of december the other committee is the diversity equity and inclusion committee which met on december 3rd and i'm happy to announce that it seems like every time i have a committee meeting the membership continues to grow and the membership is growing um from the perspective of students which is great to see we've had i believe it was seven to eight students at our last meeting and i think it's continue it's it's going to continue to grow especially as the word gets out that um that we're looking at great work and we're looking at uh um analyzing what is being done in the district and trying to improve it which is some of the things you heard today during um dr

107masara's and miss angolia's presentations but some of the things we looked at we did have we we are continuing our book talk regarding a book called stamp that looks at um the history of racism in the united states and looking at uh presenting an anti-racist viewpoint and endorsing it and really having ownership of that viewpoint within yourself and within an organization the other thing we looked at is dr masara and i back in november attended a really interesting webinar and it was entitled uh bridging the equity divide through board policy and what we did is that for the committee we presented the material that was presented to us at the webinar and predominantly it was three documents that the webinar presented to us and and it was sample uh policy sample regulations and sample definitions

108that were created by the new york state um school boards association so we looked at that in in the hopes that in the future as a committee we can possibly build something like that for senator richards and bring it to the board for um for review and and possibly adoption and it's it's a it's a way to sort of look at the committee from the perspective in the beginning of the committee when we began the committee in october our first meeting we looked at the definition and the perspective of dei which is diversity equity and inclusion and what it meant to us and what does it mean to a school district now we're looking at data and we're looking at actions that can bring about reality into the definitions of dei and make it a

109viable tangible entity within our district so we looked at that the other things that we looked at is we talked about the no place for hate designation which is a designation that is provided to districts by the anti-defamation league we uh i think when juan and i originally talked about it i think we had sort of like an aggressive timeline and when i began to really look at the logistics and the and the specifics on implementing it uh we realized that i think we might be under the gun in terms of trying to implement it this year so we did come to a decision as a committee to put everything in place this year for full implementation in 2021-22 school year which will be september of next year and i think we feel very comfortable

110with that the other thing that we looked at is the development of a dei specific survey i know that rainer talked about the school climate survey and of course the uh sel survey that we are going to look to do in the in the community but when you look at the school climate survey which i think is awesome i mean it looks at so many different components from whether or not your buildings are clean whether or not um bullying is taking place in the buildings it looks at so many different great things but there is a there is a portion of it that looks at dei specific things like in the student survey i believe there's nine questions that look at dei specific things and in the student survey there's 12 particular questions that look

111at it so i don't believe that the committee's intent would be to replicate that but maybe look at some of the things that this goose climate survey didn't touch upon so that we can create a survey that uh of things that aren't touched upon and the survey would go out to students maybe six to twelve we haven't decided yet as well as parents as well as staff to get their perspective on dei as it exists in the central ritual school district the other piece that we looked at is i'm going to join a professional learning community uh and it's um something that was created by boces it's boses actually hired a director of diversity equity and inclusivity a woman by the name of april francis taylor and what she is doing is she is going

112to conduct professional learning community uh conversations once a month with individuals within different districts that um are responsible for sort of facilitating the dei conversation in their district and the purpose of it is to just sort of get an idea of what other districts are doing to get resources to get understanding and to kind of share ideas so that uh maybe we can glean some things that other districts are doing successfully and um sometimes you don't necessarily need to have to reinvent the real to do something that's productive especially if data is behind it that shows that it has been productive in another district so i'm looking forward to that the first meeting i believe is january 6 so and it's i think it's the day before the next dei meeting so i'm looking forward

113to reporting back to the di committee in terms of what was covered during that meeting and future agenda items is going to continue our book talk on stamped we're going to continue uh reviewing uh a draft survey and continue our conversation around building an equity policy regulations and definitions that eventually we would love to present to the board for its consideration i think that was it right thank you ricardo you're welcome george all right thanks ricardo let's see what else um reina anything or kerry or any other committee reports the um health and safety committee met sorry on um it was last thursday we met and we just briefly went over the status of all of our emergency drills that we have to have done before the end of this month as well as um

114the future drills uh we are so far in compliance uh i think the buildings had a few more that they were finishing up this week and next week one bill each building i think had one left um we are reviewed the strobe light system that the committee asked for information on unfortunately it's cost prohibitive right now at about 60 000 for the district so we do have the proposal on the back burner for future um review and um i think that was pretty much it am i missing anything on that one ron when we do when we do the drills we do it for one cohort we do the same drill for the other cohort correct they do them uh twice a week each cohort gets the same drill yep um rain anything uh we

115just uh for facilities we haven't met but we're gonna schedule our next meeting after we get the bcs back from bbs so we're just waiting on that and then we'll schedule the next meeting got it all right and i'll do it possibly of terms with all of these initials yeah yes yes yes you know it's yeah i know george you would you were meant on this committee meeting earlier today unfortunately i was not able to attend that one um and i know i know courtney's on told courtney maybe just give us an update um this is much later than i think she probably anticipated so i'm not sure she's still there i'm still here i can't turn my video on though for some reason but i'm still here okay so we've met uh you guys

116could hear me okay yes okay so we've had three meetings we have about 16 members i'm happy to say that i think we have a really good representation of different stakeholders throughout the district and community members um our focus is just uh we're reviewing our current wellness policy and we're looking at how to enhance it we too uh want to align a lot of the initiatives that mrs angolia spoke about uh tonight into our wellness um policy or future changes to our wellness policy so some of our agenda topics have included professional development focused on social and emotional learning initiatives for our staff outreach to students and families especially pertaining to a lot of what you heard about earlier regarding child study team and how we're reaching out to our students during this challenging time

117using those sel screeners helping our staff and students learn more about self-care um and looking at the resources that are in our community um that can help build awareness on overall wellness not just physical wellness or health or you know physical health but social and emotional wellness as well thanks court no problem thank you thank you all right um [Music] if anybody wasn't aware we will be having a snow day a traditional snow day tomorrow um so please enjoy it but stay safe if you go outside you know stay with your family social distance but build a snowman and dress it up like a centimetres pride and send us a picture that's taking positivity everybody's looking for forward to that spontaneous break i know we're we're going on break next week but uh an unanticipated

118one is always a treat yeah i almost wish we got the call in the morning no exciting a.m this was pretty sure i'll tell you what i put it on social media i put it on social media first and i'm and i'm hearing that that some of the teachers are not happy that i didn't put it out to them first and i said it's the only way to build your fan base you have to your followers up by putting it on social media first and you know within an hour they got their word so but but i understand there was some chatter behind the scenes about about me not not letting the staff know first it was a surprise to me and i thought you were a loyal follower george yeah i keep my uh

119i keep my personal account separate from my uh volunteer professional account i follow you but it's it's on the down low ron you know what i mean we'll build you an alias yeah you know what if i had if you follow too many people it's impossible to keep up with your timeline so all my spots are taken right now so then i visit i'll add you you know i think maybe we'll take this offline george because i don't know i really want to have this conversation there no but the snowman was great ron and i hopefully everybody gets a chance to see that so uh certainly certainly appropriate