001Good evening. Good evening, Pres President Manelli, board members, community colleagues, um, and our superintendent. This evening, we are so proud that our elementary building leaders are here to present and share the impactful work that actually encompasses our vision, beliefs, and core values and brings it to life on a daily basis. And it's guided every single day by our mission of ensuring excellence for all students through equity that encompass the first uh two slides of our presentation. Um you will hear tonight how our daily work is grounded on our four pillars. Slide number four uh relevant learning which is focused on tier one and everything that happens within our learning spaces, our data literacy, our equity and family engagement. each of the action plans that you will hear tonight. Um the details of actionable steps towards
002achieving the established uh goals grounded on data that we have deeply reviewed over the past couple of months. This analysis has identified trends of strength and areas of growth. These plans turn our pillars into meaningful outcomes for our learners. From our ongoing review of student data, a clear trend emerged that you will be hearing a common thread across all plans and it's the importance of embedding ory in instruction. Oricsy is a fostering of languageenriched environments that ensures that each student not only hears key vocabulary but is able to apply it, understands it, is able to read it and write it with the goal of building thoughtful responses, improving reading comprehension, strengthening writing, and reflecting on their thinking. You may ask why? Why is this important? Just know as we all know every single assessment is
003reading is now a reading assessment where a child truly needs to think about and really understand what he or she is being asked. So it is truly important that our children read, write and speak and think every single day in our classrooms with the ex expectation of now upcoming New York inspires with the portrait of a graduate our own portrait of a learner. We are expected to align in the that we are expected to align within the coming coming years. Developing oracy is critical. By intentionally incorporating all language modalities into our teaching, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, our students will gain the tools they need to express themselves in both speaking and writing, and engage deeply with the content they are being taught. I leave you this evening with these amazing principles and assistant principles
004to share their action plans and how we are making this work come alive. Thank you. >> Just a quick clarification. For whatever reason, it must be the room. Everyone who's watching on Zoom can see the slides. >> Oh, great. >> It just doesn't like that. >> Well, that's that's good. So just so you know then we are on slide eight which introduces Park School. >> So Emily and Ellie it's yours. >> Good evening everyone. It is our pleasure to share with you our action plan for the 2526 school year. just to give you um a little bit of an introduction to the format of how we're going to introduce our work with you today. We've chosen to really focus on one key lever action step that really encompasses the work that we'll be doing this
005year. Um each of us have listed our goal number one and goal number two under the same pillar for example teaching and learning. So I'll start with our goal number one and it reads by June 2026 we will develop student oracy and disciplinary literacy through explicit instruction in vocabulary and language structures. Evidence of impact will be measured by growth in NWA map reading and language usage domains with a 2% decrease in the below expectations components and a 2% increase in proficiency levels. That is our academic goal for the year. Our goal number two is more of our SEAL and school climate goal and it reads by 2026 we will decrease the number of minor behavior referrals by 5% from last year as evidenced by level one referral data. And the key action step or the
006action step that we've chosen to share with you tonight is about a vocabulary protocol that we are going to be using. And I think you're going to hear this throughout the presentation tonight. Park School will have a vocabulary protocol that actually has been modeled already um as a buildingwide approach. So every week we deliver a new word to students. The word is embedded in some kind of real relevant authentic learning experience. So, for example, we learned the word heritage uh this past week because we are celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. So, the protocol is very simple. We define the word as an entire school community. We say the word in a sentence. We show an application and when possible, we give a visual representation. This work then becomes memorialized and charted in the building. Teachers will
007continue to do this process as the curriculum unfolds throughout the year. They will um they would administer a very similar protocol in their classrooms, but the choice of words will be pulled from tier 2 or tier three lists. the difference between the two. Tier one are very basic words that um are spoken children use in their everyday language. Tier 2 words are more um academic words. These words are taught explicitly. Um and tier three words are very connected to a discipline or a content. For the purpose of modeling, I've chosen tier three words. for example, the word heritage. In terms of our seal in school climate, we are going to continue to partner with WJCS, the West Westchester Jewish Community Center to support the work that our social workers have done um at Park School.
008We are continuing to work with our secondstep curriculum and our social workers from WJCS will be providing ongoing support to our prek teachers specifically and our teaching assistants and specialists. And again, vocabulary embedded in our second step curriculum will also be highlighted and taught. Good evening everyone. Some of the evidence of teaching and learning and social emotional learning in school culture that we are gathering are closely monitoring student progress through the NWA assessment, sharing artifacts from our morning message to highlight instructional practices and student engagement. Students sharing their work as as part of our effort to build confident and ownership. We also review lesson planning and conduct classroom visits to ensure alignments to our goals. Our grade level meetings provide opportunities for collaboration reflection on student progress. In addition, we have seen a strong participation
009on our parent workshops which is supporting our home and school partnership. also closely monitoring our second step completion data to ensure consistency in social emotional learning. And finally, our special area teachers are holding regular check-in meeting with our students to support the overall well-being and connection to school. Thanks, Ellie. Okay, I'm going to move on to our data informed practices which is our second pillar and the action step here [clears throat] is really looking at our data. So um as you all know we are using [snorts] our NWA map growth and fluency data to to monitor students funological awareness and their vocabulary development specifically. And we use the results to identify patterns, but also more importantly to inform our instruction. The great part about this is that not only will it inform our classroom instruction
010now that we have a buildingwide protocol, we are also going to be using the data to inform our work when we introduce new vocabulary each week. So when we start to see patterns in their work and uh areas that need to be addressed, whether it be a tier two or tier three word, we will use the data to really present it as a school. One of the things that we're going to do this year is continue to invite our literacy and math consultants to come in and work at Park School. Teachers have already decided if they want to partake in a literacy or a math. Together they will work with our consultants to go through our professional learning community cycle with teachers. They will together as grade level colleagues identify a problem of practice within
011either their literacy or their math work and together we will come together to work on action planning around uh that that problem area. The great thing about having our consultants is that part of our PLC work is also about improving our learning and honing our practices. So, it's not just making decisions based on the data, but it's actually growing as educators and growing professionally in our in our pedigogy and our action steps with children. So, we will lean on the work that our consultants will bring to our to our teachers, but also more importantly and how that impacts our students. In terms of our SEAL and school climate data, our PBISEAL committee will continue to analyze our tier one referral data. And what we do with this data is analyze, look for consistencies, look for
012patterns and also identify where we need to either push in for more support with our social workers. Sometimes it's at a classroom level and sometimes we even look for patterns that we can address as a school building. And again with our assemblies and the work that our PBIS team is going to do, we can respond to some of that data that we see or some of the challenges that we see in the building via our school assemblies as well. for our data informed practices. We are having ongoing professional learning communities for our teachers and also our teaching assistants and they meet regularly to focus on improving student learning. We also hold professional learning communities with our literacy and math consultants to deepen the instructional practices. We also gathered teacher and teaching assistant no problem [laughter
013and gasps] um teacher and teaching assistant feedback and service to reflect on the effectiveness of our professional learning communities for the social emotional learning and school culture. We are regularly reviewing the referral data from teachers to monitor student needs and trends. We're also using the Panorama survey data to understand student and staff perception of the school climate and reviewing the Desa data to help guide our SEAL supports and interventions. Okay, I don't know what slide number this is, but this is the equity slide. Thank you, Maria. It's slide number 11. Ensuring that students have equitable opportunities to demonstrate their learning as Maria pointed out earlier, but this includes using all modalities is the work that we do with equity. Our equity work this year is deeply connected to the work we do to the work
014we're going to be doing with Oricsy. It's important to note that while we are going to be teaching explicit vocabulary through a protocol, the work that we do with that is really in in service of comprehension. Or better yet, it's really the impact that the the work that we do with Orisy will have on comprehension. How students hear a story, how students respond to when a teacher asks a question about what they've read. It's all about how they demonstrate their learning and making sure that students have various modalities to demonstrate their thinking to their teachers but also to their peers is critical. This is what's going to deepen their understanding because we're going to provide students with multiple ways of expressing themselves through listening, through reading and writing, and through speaking. Our students are not
015only going to have the the ability to explain their thinking further, it actually provides students with scaffolds because students then are able to utilize different motalities to demonstrate their thinking. It reduces the barriers as I just mentioned and again it honors the strengths that students have. In terms of our K uh SEAL and school climate, we will continue to do the work that we started last year with our kinder leaders. Our kinder leaders are going to continue to model and promote the attributes of the Park School Scholar, including the attributes of kindness, leadership, joy, and curiosity. Evidence for equity. We are going to continue conducting classroom walkthroughs to ensure equitable instruction. Our director and administrative team will continue to do the walks to provide observations, feedback and support. We will also be gathering feedback from
016evident and e efficacy meetings visit to guide our improvement for the seal and school culture of care. We track part participation in kinder leader meetings to engage student learning. We're collecting feedback from students from assemblies to understand their experiences. Review the PBIS goals to monitor schoolwide behavior and gather service from PBIS committee members to assess the effectiveness of all our initiatives. Okay. The last the last pillar is family and community engagement. So my goal this year as the building leader is to be more transparent with our family members about the learning that students are doing in the classrooms. And by that I mean sharing the work, the vocabulary protocol, but also sharing the words that students are going to be learning throughout the school year. making sure that parents are able to bring that protocol
017back home or even ask their child questions about words that they're learning in school. So this week in our OBLAS, you'll see a picture of the chart that we have hanging in the school building describing the meaning of the word kindness, which was this week's word. In terms of our seal and school climate, um we're going to continue to collaborate with WJCS again to provide family groups and workshops. For example, we have one on Friday um starting this Friday where the social worker will be presenting on uh just typical four and 5year-old uh situational uh discipline and behavior positive re positive ways to reinforce positive behaviors at home. So that will be the work that we'll do and again we are looking for a parent member to join our PBISCL committee. So that is also
018um a goal of ours this year and the evidence that we will be gathering for the family and community engagement is tracking the Oblast that we're sending to families and monitoring the school announcement to keep families informed. We also will be gathering feedback from our math and literacy teacher leaders to on family engagement. We will be reviewing feedback to capture parent and family reflections and guide our future planning to ensure minimal engagement. Now we're going to move with um our next school, Brooksai. Thank you. Good evening everyone. Dr. Veles and I are happy to be able to present our school goals for this year as well as our action steps and it seems like fairly recently that we were here presenting our progress at the end of last school year and we're back. Um, and
019I think it has a lot to do with the fact that our summers, uh, while we we appreciate the summer, of course, um, we as school leaders are anxiously awaiting that opportunity to have less distractions and time to really look at our data. And that summer is so pivotal and I know some of you were able to make our summer admin retreat and we thank you for that. You got a glimpse into how we look at our data, begin to craft the goal, and then that's just the beginning because then we tweak it, we come back, we talk about it, we adjust, we refine it, and we want to make sure that it's meaningful, that it's achievable, that's a high lever goal in school improvement efforts. It's also important to us that our goals are
020not out of uh left field, but that rather they build on the work that we already started the previous school year and what has proven to give us results. So we hope that you see in tonight's presentation and I think this is across all four of our schools continuation from past year's work as well as well. Our [snorts] first goal is rooted strongly in the correlation between oracy and reading comprehension. We believe that we can increase students reading performance by developing children's oral language proficiency and academic vocabulary. And the action step we'd like to talk to about tonight, even though we know that there are a number of action steps that will help us to reach that goal, is really professional development and [snorts] equipping our teachers with knowledge of content and of pedagogy. Specifically,
021we want to make sure that teachers first know about the connection between oracy and reading. We want to make sure that they know how building Orisian students will help to strengthen children's access access to text and understanding of that text and that they know how vocabulary acquisition accelerate is accelerated when it's taught explicitly. We also want to make sure that we're equipping our teachers with how to design explicit instruction of vocabulary of tier 2 words, which is what Emily was speaking about prior from how to differentiate between the different tiers of vocabulary to how to select the words that we're going to teach to how to teach teach them in a systemized way. So, it's important to emphasize that the more intentional we are about how we are teaching vocabulary, the more results we will
022get from our students. >> [snorts] >> Evidence of this work will live predominantly in our professional learning communities in which teachers collaborate in learning the content and working on their craft. Applying the new learning from those professional learning communities in the classrooms and most importantly coming back to work as a team to share how it went to solve problems of practice to refine that instructional strategy and go back in and give it another shot. The proof is in the pudding and the evidence of this work will also live in student writing in students use of vocabulary orally and in the student data. Now professional development is a very strong lever and it's not only respective to an academic goal but we're also tying it to our second goal which is that climate goal that Emily
023was explaining at Brookside. Our goal that second goal will be focused on attendance. And while we're proud of maintaining our percentage of severely chronically absent students to less to 3% over the past three years, we recognize that almost 30% of students at Brookside have at risk attendance. This year, we will be focused on decreasing that at risk attendance percentage. Now, how does professional development play a role in improving attendance? We can help to improve attendance especially of students who have at risk attendance by providing continued training to teachers on how to design engaging and meaningful instruction for students so that instruction is differentiated for students with learning activities that represent cognitive challenge and provide choice for kids. This then hopefully drives the kids to come to school, to finish that project, to work on a
024writing piece, to borrow new books, to beat the buzzer in a math game, and so on. So when we view the school day through a student's eyes, we're more likely to see how deliberately we are engaging them in school experiences that are of interest to them. Dr. Veles will now speak to our datainformed practices. Good evening. [clears throat] >> As part of our capacity building efforts, we are focusing on two key areas. Oral language development and student attendance. For oral language, lead teachers will establish clear routi clear rubrics for student discourse. These rubrics will make expectations for speaking visible to students, providing equitable access for learners from diverse backgrounds, including English language learners. Evidence shows that when students have structured opportunities to practice talk, they improve not only in speaking and listening, but also in
025reading comprehension, writing clarity, and problem solving skills. By applying these rubrics across contexts such as math explanations, literature circles, and classroom debates, teachers can give precise, consistent feedback while students gain the ability to self assess and set personal goals. This creates a shared language for what effective oral participation looks like, ensuring alignment and continuity as stu students move through Brookside. In the area of attendance, we are implementing evidence-based practices grounded in the success mentors model. Mentors will meet with atrisisk students on six week cycles, providing regular check-ins, goal settings, and celebrations to build relationships and keep students engaged. Research confirms that consistent mentoring and relationship centered approaches reduce chronic absenteeism, which is a key predictor of academic achievement. At the same time, our family engagement specialists will communicate attendance directly to families in a clear
026and a supportive way, providing strategies for improvement. These conversation will focus on removing barriers and connecting families to resources, not on punitive measures. By reaching out early when patterns of absence first appear, we are more likely to prevent chronic absenteeism from taking hold. Celebrating progress at the end of each cycle reinforces positive habits and underscores the importance of consistent school attendance. These initiatives build both engagement and the foundation for learning. Students are present, supported, and given the tools to express their thinking effectively. Rubrics for oral language and structured attendance supports are not standalone actions. They are complimentary strategies that create equitable access, strengthen relationships, and ultimately lead to higher levels of student achievement. Moving on to the next slide, we're moving on to our goal on equity. Our next set of action steps highlight our
027district's ongoing commitment to inclusivity and equity. In oral language, the emphasis is on creative creating learning environments where students voices and identities are affirmed. Teachers will foster inclusion by integrating discourse practices that honor cultural identity and provide multiple entry points for participation. This not only helps students feel seen and valued, but also builds their confidence to engage meaningfully with peers. Research on culturally responsive pedagogy shows that when students linguistic and cultural backgrounds are incorporated into classroom discourse, participation increases and achievement gaps narrow. To deepen this work, we will also continue to incorporate layered text from our equity leaders and integrate culturally relevant math tasks during our three reads time. This will ensure that oracy development and content instruction are aligned with our broader commitment to equity and representation across the curriculum. In the area of
028attendance, inclusivity means that all students, regardless of their current absentee percentage, will have access to improvement initiatives. Attendance supports are not reserved for those already struggling, but extend to all students in ways that promote belonging and collective responsibility. Success mentors and family engagement staff will ensure that students feel supported rather than singled out, which research shows is critical to sustaining attendance gains over time. To measure progress, we will collect evidence at multiple levels for oral language. This includes agendas from equity focused professional learning, classroom observations, the use of studentfriendly rubrics during classroom discussions, and targeted instructional walkthroughs. These artifacts will demonstrate how inclusive discourse practices are embedded in daily instruction. For attendance evidence will include team meeting agendas, comparative attendance data across cycles. Panorama data results capturing student perceptions of belonging and engagement. Taken together,
029these data points provide a holistic view of progress showing both how inclusive practices and being implemented are being implemented and how they are impacting students in outcomes in tangible ways. And our last pillar within family and community engagement, an action step that enco encompasses our work towards achieving both goals is partnerships to accelerate oral language proficiency in children. It's just as important to provide training not only for our teachers but for our parents as well. And parents should be given the practical research-based strategies in creating a languagerich environment and engaging in meaningful conversations at home. The link between the school and home and reinforcing the vocabulary being taught in school at home can be very powerful in developing the oral language proficiency. And I promise to practice anything that we learn this year in parent
030workshops at home with my 18-month-old. [laughter] We'll know that we're implementing this action step when we have parent workshops on the specific topic, when we receive free feedback from our parents and our wonderful PTA on changes they hear in their child's oral language at home and of course in our panorama data which captures parents feedback on workshops too and how inclusive they feel in our school community and the learning experiences we offer. In terms of the attendance goal, we will continue our partnership with the United Way program, which is already servicing 150 students at Brookside and counting. And we're also excited to partner with the Rose Institute for Learning and Literacy this year. This initiative is going to provide additional reading support during the school day to a subgroup of students. And we know that
031unique opportunities like this in which students are building one-on-one relationships that are safe and reassuring with educators can help to strengthen their self-con confidence and of course boost engagement and another driver for them to want to be in school. Thank you. We're going to pass it on to our colleagues at Claremont. >> I think they're good. [laughter] >> So, good evening. Uh Louie and I are so excited to share the work that we are doing at Claremont School. First, I want to thank the board of education for your support, for working with us this summer, for really dissecting um what we are doing well and the areas that we potentially need to look at um to make some growth. I also want to recognize that the goals that we have set um today to share
032with you as consistent as we are, we know that uh we cannot achieve any of these goals without the work of our teachers. Um they have the expertise, they have the wisdom um and the experience to bring this work to life for us and with us. And so, as Miss Ordo said, a lot of what I'm going to share is a continuation of work that Claremont started last year, but I'd like to share some updates on our instructional priorities and some new initiatives as well. If you recall, last year, our teachers reviewed uh student data. We then targeted and identified areas where we wanted to focus our improvement efforts. and we worked through our PLC's um to develop two particular strategies that I shared with you last year. One was the RAD strategy uh for
033literacy which is to restate answer find a detail and another detail and the second strategy was for mathematics which we um call the three reads protocol which was introduced to us by Dr. Valz and is working really well. So, we want to continue those two efforts and but building on last year's work, there are some enhancements. Um, I should note that fourth grade teachers shared with us already that they've observed students entering this year familiar with these strategies, ready to use these strategies, and that prior exposure has helped teaching and learning be and feel more cohesive and consistent across our classrooms. That's really positive. Now in terms of Orisy, it was described so beautifully um by Maria Meyers and by all of uh my colleagues before me. But you might be wondering, so what does
034that mean for third and fourth grade students? For us this year, the it's going to mean explicitly teaching students how to have accountable talk conversations with their peers. It's going to be using high lever words to use in discourse which then will also support their writing. So through our PLC work, we're going to work with teachers to develop what we're going to call structured talk protocols and comprehension protocols that will connect not just to all areas of our curriculum, reading, math, science, social studies, art, music, PE, all parts of our day, but especially into the two focus areas of RAD and the three reads math protocol. So that's one part of ory which is all really language use. But the second part we're going to work on is vocabulary instruction. That's really important. We have
035always taught vocabulary on a daily basis. That's not new. However, in recent years, we did seem to lose a consistent protocol. And as Miss Ordo stated, um, we want to be really explicit and intentional with our instruction. Now, um, my colleague, um, Miss Msias told you that there were revisions recently to the units of instruction at Park and Brookside, and now there is a protocol that is being used in early elementary. And so we thought at Claremont, although it hasn't made its way through uh revisions uh to our units yet, that we probably should use this same protocol and and this would help us collaborate across the grades. So how do you use this protocol? We're going to identify what we call tier 2 words that was already explained to you, but I want to
036just share another word with you and that's high utility words. So what we notice about students reading is that the way that we speak on a daily basis is not the way books are written. So it's we we could do a lot of oral language speaking with children and it's very helpful but the types of words we use in our daily speech are not necessarily the types of words that children will encounter in book language which is a different type of language. And so what high utility words are are words that we see frequently coming up in their books and their texts. Words like conclude or describe or consider or dashed. Children don't really speak like that when they're eight and nine years old, but the books that they're reading, those words come up frequently.
037And so what we want to do is make a list of these terms and be um intentional and explicit with when we teach them, how we use them, create vocabulary word walls in our classroom, and then make sure that after children learn a word, we're now going to use it not just in speech, but in our writing. So I wanted to try this with you. Are you interested in in me trying this protocol with you? Yes, you totally are. I I do I do want to apologize to Claremont teachers because you would do this so [snorts] much better than I'm going to do it right now. But I'm gonna try. I'm gonna give it a try. So, the word that I just saw recently that came out of the Magic Treehouse books that our third
038graders are reading where the characters are Jack and Annie, the word was dashed. So, here I go, boys and girls. The word is dashed. Can you say dashed? >> Dashed. Jack and Annie dashed down the hill towards the treehouse. Dash means to run quickly or suddenly. What means to run quickly or suddenly? >> Another sentence we could say is the puppy dashed across the yard. Or Maria dashed across the room when she heard her name. Can you think of a way you could use the word dashed? Raise your hand if you can think of a way. Melissa, >> I dashed tonight's meeting. So, [laughter] >> and I saw Melissa dash in the room to attend this meeting. [laughter] So, boys and girls, today we learned the word dashed. What does it mean to run quickly
039and suddenly? >> Dash. >> Okay, quick, right? That didn't take 15 whole minutes to teach, but it was quick. You could teach it even before you get to that word in the text or after you've read the word in the text. That word goes up on the word wall. And now as we're getting to write our own Jack and Annie books that may not take place in the time of dinosaurs, but it might take place in the Bronx Zoo, which is what Miss Patrice's class wants to take place in. I'm sure that if the alligator escaped from the zoo, you will find Jack and Annie dashing across the zoo. That was fun for me, BY THE WAY. [laughter] >> [applause] >> BUT IN ADDITION to uh academic growth, our second uh focus this year is
040going to be around uh social emotional growth as well. And we're going to continue our focus this year on schoolwide behavior. And so we've already started to renew our PBIS program. We're deepening our ex implementation of the second step program and working with our PBIS uh student ambassadors to ensure that we are really supporting schoolwide behavior and expectations. And we believe that together these initiatives will ensure academic growth, consistent instructional practices, and a strong positive school culture. And we're excited to see this impact on our students and staff. Mr. Charvet will now share with you how we're using our data to inform our practices. >> Thank you for seeing. Good evening. I'm going to make sure that I don't dash through my part of the presentation. Okay. Um we would like to share how we
041are using data at Claremont School to continue to guide instruction, support student growth, and make strategic decisions. Our continue goal this year is to use data to identify areas of growth as well as areas that we may need to revise. We want our instruction to be responsive and targeted to student needs regardless of their setting or language. In order to achieve this, we will continue to use NWA MAP growth results as a key tool. These results will help us plan differentiated groups to meet individual students needs. In addition to map data, we will review student work samples on a regular basis. This will include student work from RAD and ELA through its protocol in math and daily vocabulary instruction. We will also like to examine overall student performance and growth trends to compare previous testing
042cycles. By breaking down this data by strand or domain such as language usage, information tax, operations and algebra will help us identify specific skill gaps. We will also identify students who are above, at or below benchmark and discuss strategies to for targeting instruction or interventions. Finally, we will like to apply the same analytical approach to school culture and behavior. Our culture of care team reviews infinite campus referrals in minor reporting forms to identify trends and patterns by time, location, and type. This inform strategies to better support positive behavior and student well-being. By using a combination of assessment data, student work, and behavior patterns, we can make informed decisions that support every student's growth and create a strong, positive school culture. Thank you. Uh we're now going to talk about our third pillar, which is equity.
043[snorts] To support our goals this year, we're going to ensure that every student feels heard and supported, which means that one of the key goals is to ensure that every student has a voice in these accountable class talk discussions that we're going to support with. We will embed scaffolds and visuals and sentence stems and language supports which will make our discussions more accessible to our multilingual learners and our students with disabilities. We will monitor this through classroom observations, partner talk, reflection sheets. We will track student participation over time to know who is speaking and how are students discussions evolving. Finally, we'll ask teachers to reflect on how effective these supports are, thereby giving us ongoing feedback to refine our approaches. On the behavioral side, we're going to expand our PBIS checkin checkout program. We're going
044to continue working with our student ambassadors and in training our support staff. As you know, data only tells a portion of the story and progress reports, referral trends, feedback surveys, everything will show us if our supports are fair and effective. Together, these efforts will create classrooms and a school culture where every student will participate, grow, and feel seen. Because equity is not just a goal. It's a part of how we teach and care for our students each and every day. In terms of family and community engagement, one key area this year is to continue to grow our academic partnerships with our families. We know that when families are engaged in supporting literacy, oracy, and math practices at home, student growth accelerates. To support this, we provide families with resources such as uh conversation starters strategies
045like RAD through rich protocol and also through workshops and newsletters. We will monitor this area via attendance and participation, family workshops, newsletter engagement and feedback from families as well as examples of student work at home shared with teachers. This approach will help families extend the learning at home, build confidence in supporting their their children, and reinforce classroom practices in a consistent and meaningful way. Now, on to family engagement in behavior. Equally important is supporting positive behavior through strong family partnerships. At Claremont School, we review PBIS expectations with families and provide strategies they can use back home, ensuring consistency between school and families. We will monitor this area of success by reviewing infinite campus major or minor referrals to track reductions in behavioral incidents. Whole post assemblies where we reinforce leadership skills with students. Poll points
046awarded to students for demonstrating schoolwide expectations as an increase in points will indicate reinforcement of positive behavior. also comparing referrals and pull points data over time to measure the effect effectiveness of PBIS strategies and interventions. Through these academic and behavioral partnerships with families, we are creating a connected learning community that reinforces growth, engagement, and positive development both in school and at home. I would like to pass it along to my colleagues at Roosevelt. >> I would like to say Mr. Charveet brought his Pawpoint tickets for everyone that was actively listening this evening. And you can cash them in at the school store. [laughter] >> You're going to give them out right now? Should I? No one's going to listen. They're going to be waiting to get their [laughter] motivators. Okay, fair. Hopefully, you'll be actively
047listening to to Roosevelt. We are a Princeton plan district. Everything that happens at Roosevelt is just as important what's happening in preK classrooms and across all of our schools. So, um, first of all, I just want to thank the board for your support. I want to also thank you for supporting us having a full-time dedicated assistant principal at Roosevelt, Mr. Derek Drienzo [applause] who has been working around the clock to help us launch our clubs that are coming next week and increase our attendance and just equitable access to our enrichment clubs both before and after school. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for helping us as a district elevate our expectations for our students and in just the conversations right now that we're having. I hear it in everyone's presentation that
048we are driving more equitable outcomes for all of our students no matter what across all grades and it's so exciting to be a part of this work. Um so I just want to start um by saying that again if you know about Roosevelt you know Roosevelt is about student leadership. It's about student voice. It's about empowerment choice and even service learning. Even just today, it was so exciting to hear our students make presentations to students in Mexico and Ecuador as we celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month and see that they were able to share their own research, their own passions, their families, their stories through this beautiful cultural exchange that was such um an application of their literacy and language development. and in both languages. Um, so we're going to everything that I'm going to share, if
049you want to turn your attention to slide 24, is a continuation of what you've heard from my colleagues in terms of our emphasis on vocabulary and language structures. And of course, with the Princeton plan model, there has to be cohesion across all of our district. And so I'm going to walk you through what you would see in our classrooms right now with the hope that what is one best practice in one classroom becomes a best practice in every single classroom across Roosevelt School. So let's talk about teaching and learning first and how we're approaching vocabulary in all of our classrooms. So, just in the last week, you walk into a self-contained classroom and the day starts with students all taking turns talking and sharing about their own lives, their own families, and embedding the vocabulary
050of the week orally. step into an ICT classroom and before you even get into the classroom, there's vocabulary with visuals outside of the classroom with tally marks so that the students can get excited about their own use of vocabulary both orally and in writing. step into a dual language classroom this week and you would have actually seen how kids are using their independent reading block now and identifying unknown vocabulary words and then coding the vocabulary words into tier 2 and tier three and then being able to explain and justify how they knew that the word orbit for example was a tier three word because it's not something you might use every day. It's more of a scientific vocabulary word. Step into a GenEd math classroom and see math vocabulary posted around the room with spec
051specific examples of equations. And then the three reads protocol which is now across all of our schools being used by our students so that they can break down what is this math problem really asking for. And there might not be just one answer. There might be four different mathematical questions that could arise from that math story and students are generating their own questions about the math story. What might this math problem be asking? Students are taking on the role of mathematicians and thinking like the creators of the curriculum which truly helps. Learning is done socially. We are seeing more and more students helping each other learn the vocabulary and the language structures. We know that whether you're a multilingual learner or you've been in the United States of America your entire life, all of our
052students benefit from the explicit vocabulary instruction, learning from each other and that positive social peer pressure to level up. And now that would bring me to our next slide. You can turn your attention to slide 26. I'm sorry, slide 25. Taking the teaching and learning that's already happening in our classrooms. How are we going to ensure now that our teachers are reaching every single student and not one student is at a plateau across all subject areas including our specials areas. It is about data literacy. It's not just about the principles or the APS or the directors understanding data trends in our district. It is bringing it down to the classroom level. That is the most important work that we are doing. And so in fifth grade, we have no shortage of data. As you can
053see from the list of evidence here, we are using everything from NWA NISLAT data, state exam data over time since our kids have that multi-year data, benchmark assessments, formative assessments from the classroom, and even conference notes that we can look at from when the students were even in prior grades. So, there's no shortage of data, but how are we using that data? And what you're seeing at Roosevelt now is that every single teacher has developed their own data literacy so they can have a better understanding of well okay yes we collected this data but what do we do with it and thanks to our team our MTSS team and our structures in place we're now able to have meaningful conversations about what our students need to be challenged and make sure that every single student
054is getting what they need in each content area. For example, um last week we were in math PLC's and ELA PLC's and we were analyzing all of these different data sets and one teacher just had an aha moment and shared, well, now that I have this data, I know that I can pull a small group in math and I can support that small group that has similar needs for 4 weeks and I can look at the growth that they're making. I will be the AIS teacher during when period the what I need block in math. So it was very exciting to see that all the aha moments that the data is not just collected to say oh yes we did this we collected this data it's being used to drive strategic small groupoup instruction in
055our classrooms and I want to give a huge shout out too as we move into equity because the data literacy now the next slide 26 data literacy is what enables us to actually get have equitable access and equitable outcomes for every single student, including subgroups like students that are duly classified as multilingual learners and within IEP. And what's happening with our equity work is we're looking closely at the data and we're not shying away. We're looking at the data from when they even at Claremont and at Brookside and Park School so that we can see which in this cohort of students have already had AIS cycles and maybe are not exiting out. Which groups of students did maybe these interventions not yield the results that we had anticipated and what do we need to do
056to change our approach for the specific students? How do we enlist their families? How do we enlist ENL teachers? How do we enlist specialists, teachers, clinicians, and all work together to support our students? And something new this year that I would um ask my colleague, Mr. Denzo, to talk about is how he's supporting PBIS so that we actually have a structure where I can work with our teacher teams and do these data literacy based PLC's, professional learning communities, while Mr. Durenzo is working with our students on the culture building and the climate and the student empowerment piece. >> Thank you, Katie. I just want to take this opportunity to thank the board and our wonderful superintendent and the entire administrative team and of course my building level leadership colleagues for welcoming me so openly and
057warmly. It has been an amazing experience and I'm so happy to be here and I I feel the love all the time. So, I just want to thank all of you. Um, so I'm so happy to have the opportunity to talk about this. It's something that has been passionate to me for a long time as an educator. I believe strongly in front-loading positive character education in an attempt to decrease minor behavior incidents. Um, so what we did was we put together a plan where I would work with our students on positive character education while Katie takes the opportunity to run PLC's with our teachers and our teacher leaders. Um I we created a system where each month we have a focus something that you know lends itself to positive character education. This month happens to
058be anti-bullying. Um and for that entire month we try to focus everything that we do throughout the building and throughout our school community um around that one focus. We have a schoolwide readaloud. We have a schoolwide activity. our teachers have opportunities during their culture of care time in the morning to dedicate toward kind of like bringing this focus into their classrooms. Um, I really think that having the presence of a very strong positive behavior system open in our building allows our students to become as involved in it as possible. If you're in Roosevelt, you will most likely hear some of our students running around using the term PBIS, talking about anti-bullying or whatever the month's focus is. They're very engaged in it. They're very um involved in it and they're very invested in it. We
059are giving out um positive leadership and character education awards to students who are exemplifying the qualities that we are hoping that they will. Um, and I do want to say that, you know, one of the things that I was most excited about to come and work in Austining was how much you we value our our students. And as a new building leader in Austining, I am really getting an opportunity to see in action what those values are and how they look. And it really is amazing. We really do have some amazing students. Um, we also are very dedicated to providing our students with a voice and agency to speak up for themselves and to advocate for themselves through student reporting forms, through student council, through opportunities like Katie mentioned earlier when our students today have
060the opportunity to present their research projects to uh students in other countries about Hispanic heritage. Um, we really try to give our students as much voice as possible so that they really feel present and valued within our community. Um, we also are do um facilitating a check-in and checkout um protocol for some students who are identified as needing some extra support um whether they're coming into school or leaving school. Again, giving them um the agency to kind of advocate for themsel and giving them the opportunities to speak up when they need to. We also have some excellent uh before and after school clubs which we are just about to launch next Tuesday. Um they are we've given our students an opportunity to voice what clubs they would be interested in as well as um some
061activities that they would be interested in during the school day. Um we have also come up with a way to offer additional enrichments throughout the school day to students who are exemplifying the qualities that I mentioned earlier. We are Did I don't want to miss anything? Um, yep. I think that one more thing is having um front-loading positive behavior and character education I think really sets expectations for our students and having an effective and open PBIS system lets students know that they're going to be held accountable and it gives them the opportunity to take education and enact it and the hope is that it leads to kind of like positive behavior all around and I do think that we are seeing the effect of that. I know it's a little early, but I am very
062confident that it's going to be successful. >> And finally, we know that no matter what we're doing at home, we have to break down the barriers between the homeschool and we have to make sure that our families are partners in this work. So we will be generating studentled videos and studentled scripts and guides so that they themselves go home and actually teach their families and their cousins and their aos and their aas and their neighbors all about using RAD and using the three reads protocol and the mathematical vocabulary and the science sentence starters and the conversation starters to really make sure that our students are so proud of what it is that they're learning and that their families can also learn and reinforce and support because I truly believe that every single family wants to
063help their child grow and learn but sometimes there are barriers in the way. So we are [snorts] constantly reflecting on how we remove those barriers to ensure that our families know that they are valued. They are their children's first teachers and we have so much to learn from them. So that two-way communication piece is key and we will continue to ensure that we're not just using Oblast but we're also using text message platforms and um backpack mail and the students themselves, right? Anyone in here who's a parent knows if we get our an invitation that our student our child brings home and says, "Mommy, I want you there. please come to this, then there's going to be more of an effort to do it. So, we really want to leverage this piece at Roosevelt of
064student leadership, student voice, student agency to really work more closely with our families. Thank you.