10-25 WCS BOE Meeting

001all right good evening this is the october meeting of the wyoming board of education before we start i wanted to say kind of repeat what i have said each time as of this evening we still have a mass mandate in this district um it has various parts to it that i guess are kind of confusing to some so for this evening the mask would be in place because we are in the building and we have visitors and children so with that i will go ahead and call this meeting to order and ask for a roll call this is here mr mcmahon here mr thomas mr gene here this is all here thank you please join me with the pledge [Music] your remarks through the two and a half minutes dr whiteling will keep track if

002she stops you please finish your sentence you don't have to be abrupt and leave immediately we are here to hear everyone and that is the purpose of this so i just want to go over the um the policy and that and the protocol we've been following first and foremost is that this is a public meeting this is not a public meeting but a meeting held in public and the definition of that which i've been asked to explain people have been asking me to say this is what this is this is a regular meeting of the board of education all of our important work all of our votes everything we do has to happen out in the open in in a meeting that we have scheduled that we have announced and that we have a published

003agenda for so that's what this meeting is tonight this is not a forum this is not a dialogue we had a wonderful session just a couple days ago on anxiety we've got our community conversations coming up first one is in november those will be dialogues those will be back and forth this is however a chance for every citizen of wyoming to make a statement and the statement because this is an official meeting is recorded and um and it becomes a part of our minutes so what we will ask of you tonight is um absolutely if you are a resident of wyoming or an employed and or you are welcome to speak we'll say two to three minutes at the most please offer your information and no the board will not engage in a dialogue with

004you what we normally do is we write down if someone asks a question and then afterwards someone in this group takes that question on and gets back to you or sometimes um in fact i would say most of the time people really just want to have an opportunity to speak out and that's what this is all about so um just a couple of more of the rules please state your name and your address before you begin as a courtesy let's make sure we are kind to each other and we also not to disparage special employees or children finish your last statement once you've been told your time is up um the last thing would be then also to um we will we will not react so just so if you're aware of that we are

005however taking notes and we'll be paying attention to everything that you said all right we have a list and i think what i'd like to do is call the first person and the second person so that they're ready to go the first person is cynthia niece and she will be followed by erica grayson and we have a microphone set up right there good evening my name i am the director is college counseling at wyoming city schools since 2012. i truly love my job because i have the privilege of working with high school students when they are the cost of entering the world as adults and making their mark as important as that one is my most important job is that i'm a parent my daughters attended wyoming city schools starting in the second grade and

006they are now juniors in college my son is currently in eighth grade at the middle school as a parent i firmly believe that we cannot turn our backs on wyoming's belonging and inclusion collaborative because our children are going to leave our homes and they are going to leave royal me and they're going to be making their way in a world that is increasingly diverse and complex there's no going back nor should you want to like other sponsors moments in our past pushing through these challenging times with positive action is only going to make the world a better place for our children therefore it is imperative that we give them the skills to navigate these complexities just as it is imperative that they know how to write a grammatically correct sentence analyze text or solve algebraic

007equations okay maybe not that bad part [Music] these lessons are difficult they are nuanced and they need to have it in an age-appropriate manner which is why the training and guidance that is a part of the belonging and inclusion initiative is crucial to do nothing to pretend the world is not a very different place than it was even five years ago is not an option if we want our students to not only be prepared for college and careers but to thrive in college mr webber dr whiteley board of education members thank you for your commitment to moving wyoming city schools forward and for your courageous and steadfast leadership during the most challenging years facing public education in our lifetimes [Music] erica we will have nikki dewitt [Music] i'm a 17-year resident here i have two

008graduates of wyoming city schools and i have a current junior first off i want to thank mr webber superintendent the board administrators and teachers and counselors for all the work that you've done you are so appreciated to the board i want to positively acknowledge i support your efforts on diversity equity and inclusion to our community i acknowledge that we may not agree on what's best for our lives children but what i'm hoping we can agree upon is to keep politics out of the decision-making process and how we interact with our school board thank you [Applause] [Music] if you do not know me i started the color of our program here in 98 and i finished until 2009 and then we started the middle school program back up in 2016 when my daughter and her friends

009were in sixth grade and i wanted to try color guard and i continued to this day to coach both the middle school and high school team but i didn't come tonight to talk to you as a coach i'm speaking tonight as a parent but also as a spouse and teacher in this district my husband is in his 26th year teaching this sister he his many colleagues who've talked him for that period of time and some longer than that many of these people we consider our friends in those 26 years we've been through multiple building principles multiple board members and superintendents the previous two superintendents are not the best fit for our district [Music] over the course of their 10 years relationships between the board office the board and the teachers broke down it was slow

010at first but with during the last administration it increased quite a bit i saw my spouse and his colleagues go from being able to have input in how they taught their classes to being told to teach certain ways and not giving but not given any tools to assist them they were simply told this is what you have to do figure it out on your own this was frustrating for all the teachers the building administrators who had the enforcers for the students and the parents there was always something new that had to be done and things were constantly changing even in subjects like math or math does not change its math i saw my husband struggle on a daily basis lose his love for teaching i saw the same for many of his problems to the

011point where many were considering another career or another district to watch these people i care about struggles so much about something that they sincerely love to do was so hard looking and it really boiled down to one person and it wasn't just the teachers parents also had issues the previous superintendent didn't answer calls or emails or answer parent questions multiple times parents tried to get information there were meetings scheduled and were pushed to the side or ignored trust was completely broken down with our predecessor and the district both the staff and the parents we lost good teachers either because their positions had been cut and not replaced which made class sizes larger or some teachers just gave up and left and some retirement ages hadn't planned to retire but just said to give you an

012idea my daughter's 8th grade social studies class was so large she had to sit facing the window instead of facing the teacher because it was not that was the only way her desk and that is not what we argued the distrust was so bad that a group of parents and teachers started meeting to see if as a cohesive group we could find a way forward and find a way to work with the board in office then our previous superintendent announced for retirement this board in front of you please nice enough they took the time to listen to the district questionnaires were sent out and focus groups were done what did we as the residents of wyoming want from our next superintendent they spent an extensively amount of time listening to all of us nikki you're

013allotted tom in all the years i've been in this district i've never seen someone willing to work with us [Applause] [Music] hello [Music] so that's exciting um number one um you've all heard me speak in favor and support the board um as nikki just did tonight i want to raise my voice and support the teachers we have extraordinarily gifted skillful dedicated teachers here they have my gratitude my respect and my trust this board supports this administration this administration supports those teachers and these teachers support our children the vitriol and this information being spread by folks who want to tear apart this chain of support is heard and felt by those on the front line attacks on this board this administration are ultimately attacked on those teachers and it is not long enough i wish i

014could throw a force field around to shield them from this but since i can't i'll use my voice and my boat instead number two why do i say trust because i trust them to be the highly skilled professionals they are which includes the ability to navigate rough waters and to help our children learn to do the same so my second point is i trust our teachers to develop and implement age-appropriate curricula through which our kids hone their reading writing math speaking thinking and interpersonal skills there's been an awful lot of talk about crt there will be more tonight i'm sure but we all know we all know that it's propaganda and it's pandering and it's based on white fragility and fear of losing power it is not being taught to our current partners it's not

015being taught at all in this in this district it's you know i went to law school it was caught in laws that's where it's period for those who think that they should be sitting where they all sit in the pit or wherever you sit in the morning uh so that they can stop this fictitious sport are going to be sorely disappointed i hear when they realize that you guys actually made spreadsheets not a kimberley credential so my point too is thank you for volunteering your time to read those spreadsheets to listen to and engage with the best superintendent this is just disrespecting his ages and support our teachers in developing implementing the curriculum they actually teach in the phase of them having to defend against the curriculum they do not point three and this is

016related to one and two you all have fielded personal attacks that have been coming your way for many months with a professionalism that is particularly impressive in this environment if those who think that crt is the greatest evil facing our schools we're being intellectually honest they would say that what they are really upset about is not crt since again it's not actually being taught here what they are really upset about is anyone daring to think anyone daring to things in the course of the day or the course of a curriculum have i thought about how this lesson this moment this event is being experienced by black kids by trans kids by gay kids by kids with disabilities and by white kids [Music] responding to this false narrative being propagated nationally and locally it is i'm

017poor to continue to support our teachers and asking how i thought about this lesson this moment this event is being experienced by different kids differently and how can i use this lesson this moment in this event to do what i do best which is have a partner developing happy excited engaged my name is marin stevens um levington drive as i was attempting um senior night friday night since we were working on college applications this weekend i was just reflecting on how thankful that my kids were in why are those in schools and i've recently come to understand the role that superintendent and the board and the significant time commitment you each personally put into so enables want to say thank you we've helped us safely navigate through the pandemic i had my 2020 grad you

018know in my senior now um as i'm comparing their experience to that experience of other family and friends i'm just so thankful for the experience my kids have business within this district i appreciate our children are being taught a thorough accurate and fact-based history following ohio state education standards i want my children to continue to be in schools and communities that respect the humanity and dignity of every person and in a learning environment where their voices are affirmed and valued and they have a sense of belonging and so i want to thank you for all that you're doing for that thank you [Music] i'm gonna put the microphone down if you don't mind i'll just speak loudly i don't like the reverb all right my name is marty skidmore i live in 59 central terrace

019with school back in session and hopefully the worst behind us it might be easy to forget just how frightening much of the past 18 months have been this is the first time i've spoken at a school board meeting in my life but i just want to use this as an opportunity to publicly thank you thank you for not excuse me for i've not forgotten what the stakes were for all of us one year ago particularly before a vaccine was available thank you for striking the right somber tone of messaging in the aftermath of george george floyd's murder thank you for providing age-appropriate resources on our district website from people who have dedicated their lives to anti-racist work thank you for not shying away from the word anti-racism and for not allowing others to caricature you

020as something that you are not thank you for handling the national strategy to inundate time strapped school personnel with school with public records requests with such grace and professionalism thank you for not allowing teachers and students to engage in anti-racist work to be thrown under the bus leaving them vulnerable to harassment from community members who have already shown propensity to do so thank you for trusting our our teachers to handle topical content professionally and with providing them with the support when needed thank you for taking a science-based approach to decision making thank you for knowing that while kids learn better in a five days a week schedule that there are other considerations as well it should go without saying but you know what else is not good for kids being cavalier with a deadly disease

021that is documented to have long-term effects or being cavalier with a disease that could leave them orphaned before graduating thank you for putting safety measures in place that also protect our teachers for not only should we remember that they have families of their own but keeping them healthy is in the best interest of all of our kids thank you for realizing that our students are more than just a test score thank you for everything [Applause] [Music] hi um i'm elisa campi i'm relatively new to wyoming in that we've only lived here for about four years again this is also the first time i'm speaking at the school board the reason why i'm speaking is that i would just like to express my support for the board and for tim weber i am expressing my support

022in the hopes that you feel it during these very difficult times where you may not feel supported your steadfast leadership during the pandemic is inspirational as a physician i applaud you for following the advice of medical experts in keeping our kids our teachers and thus our family members and the vulnerable community members that were in contact with safe so i really appreciate you for that um one of the reasons why we moved to wyoming and why a lot of you moved to wyoming is because of the schools and it's this educational excellence and the forward thinking of the board the teachers the staff which is why we choose to live in wyoming why we chose to live in wyoming and why we are so proud to send our kids to this school so thank you

023[Music] and i just want to say that we agree that racism is wrong and that we agree that we all want to have a robust truthful telling of american history and i agree with cincy means that i want my kids to be able to face the challenges of the world with um with grace and strength our conflict is a worldview conflict i want my kids to be able to face the challenges of the world we believe racism is wrong we feel our students should belong but the worldview that emerged from the civil rights movement sought to redeem the to redeem the promises of american equality and freedom this civil rights worldview seeks to unite people of all colors and backgrounds with the desire to build a virtuous society that aspires to reach the ideals that

024forth in our declaration constitution the worldview that comes from the critical movement and has been taught in our entire academic institutions for decades this worldview sees all societal discrepancies due to race and intersectionality our ohio attorney general david yost eloquently calls the civil rights perspective the king consensus and the critical perspective the contra movement is our motivation to unify our divide build up our tear down as a white woman who's married to a black man with four kids i'm living what sociologists would call the realization of the civil rights movement and the american dream to unite people and to live in a society where people accept others um it's this it's this contra king racial ending of america's values that people oppose and don't want to see in our schools but it is here the

025board asks where can we improve our conflict our curriculum content do we have books and learning in classrooms that specifically deal with whiteness and racism and white supremacy how can we go beyond the kindness aspect of our curriculum and social emotional learning to teach students to be anti-racist the recent addition of the flex period is the implementation of social emotional learning to encourage anti-racist behaviors at the september planning meeting our high school principal said one of the great things about having a speaker come into the flex period is she's going to be able to soft roll ways of support social emotional without even talking about social emotional kathy the reason i have opposed the idea of anti-racism is that ibrahmax can be himself the author of how to be an anti-racist says the only remedy

026to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination the only remedy to pass discrimination is present discrimination the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination this conquering worldview does not end discrimination it perpetuates it and i would like to know why we are not encouraging the civil rights pink consensus worldview in our curriculum that's a question thank you [Applause] [Music] followed by melissa hello i'm well that's all but i'm here speaking to you as a mother of a parent as a parent of a man i am my mentor is a great and conscious daughter who navigates a world where diversity is complex and she is also the minority today her best source of information for how she addresses a complex sport of diversity is from me but she spends most of her waking hours of the day

027at school so to navigate that world it's important that she be introduced to concepts of diversity educational and interpersonal such that she along with her peers can learn those concepts together my daughter is often in a place where she is educating others this happens in things such as math or things such as interpersonal relations with people who are diverse i can be okay with my daughter helping someone learning math or someone helping her along learn that but i'm often afraid you're both just learning how to do it and you're trying to teach each other that's generation the saying is true with concepts of diversity i'd like the teachers to be accountable today i want to express my support for tim and the board and the teachers who do this every day i want to express

028my support for the process of procreating a safe and inclusive education this includes not only aspects of interpersonal relationships but history that is thermal inclusive and recognizes all the efforts this is not something that i believe is happening in the school system this relates more to aspects of race as it relates to legislation and policing and that's not what i believe is happening in this school i encourage us to focus more directly on aspects of history because it is those aspects that are more important and are more not just for people who are minorities but people who are not such that they're learning together rather than having daughter or any children teaching each other how to manage it it can help but we really need experts to do that and i'm today thankful that there's

029such great support doing that for our kids please continue [Applause] [Music] my name is amy webb and i live at southern london and i have three children in the district i wanted to get up and thank the board for their service and commitment in terms of diversity equity and inclusion in our district so that all of our children have the opportunity to succeed as i said i have three daughters and one of them has a disability her needs often require special consideration and problem solving to have equitable access to education as well as to clubs and other extracurricular activities and i appreciate the district and all the efforts they have made to make sure her needs and her rights are being met what i know about providing an equitable and accessible education for my daughter

030and for all children is that it starts with open minds and open hearts long before a ramp is built or an accommodation is made while we all know that critical race theory is not being taught in our schools it concerns me greatly that many people in our community liken any discussion of diversity equity and inclusion as critical race theory and even worse categorize these teachings as quote radical liberal policies just last week when speaking with one of the non-incumbent candidates i was shocked to hear her describe some of the children's books in our district that teach about diversity as quote divisive and part of a liberal agenda in addition to being a special needs mom i am the children's book author and i write both set center on you guessed it diversity inclusion and equity

031i can assure you that children's books of this nature do not divide in fact they do the opposite they help our children and relate to each other and build bridges of friendship and inclusion further i reject the implication that children's helps about diversity equity and inclusion and teaching these things in general in our school are part of a far-left radical ideology it is not these teachings are in fact moderate moral teachings that can and should be embraced by people of all political affiliations i know this is possible and the reason i know this is possible is that just two weeks ago i was a featured guest on the george w bush presidential center podcast talking about diversity equity and inclusion my first book when charlie met emma was selected by former first lady laura bushby

032on her 2021 summer reading list along with other books like mama and me this is your time by ruby bridges and stella by starlight by another cincinnati author sharon draper all books that focus on diversity equity and inclusion and all embraced by a republican former first lady i am thankful to the board to whoever for all that you don't succumb to fear-based rhetoric that is divisive i applaud you for your commitment to a high quality education for all wyoming students [Applause] hi my name is melissa erickson i live at 115 lyndon drive i have been a wyoming resident for the past nine years i have a daughter at elm and a son at the middle school i would like to thank mr weber and the current board of education members for being exceptional leaders when

033it has come to keeping our children safe during the pandemic as both a physician and a mom i respect the fact that they have continuously followed the science and recommendations put forth by public health experts second i am here in support of wyoming city schools mission for diversity equity and inclusion i have heard recent concerns that some parents are opposed to current diversity efforts labeling them as critical race theory however two recent experiences i've had point towards the school's promotion of inclusion and belonging at a developmentally appropriate level the new principal at the primary schools has offered evening listening sessions for parents last month i had the opportunity to ask her about the efforts that were currently being done at the primaries she reported they were working to create a space where each child feels

034safe and free to take risks this was in part facilitated by each classroom each classroom in the primary reading two books all are welcome and the coffee bean for kids in the middle school my son's 6th grade science teacher exposed students to breakthroughs in medicine and science specifically made by female scientists and scientists of color many of whose achievements were ignored or suppressed his take home message was that these scientists not only had to put in the hard work to achieve these breakthroughs but they also had to do so in an environment that at best was not set up to help them succeed and at worst was actively working against them these lessons do not represent critical race theory rather these lessons represent a commitment to teaching our children that they can help others feel

035that they belong that they have the power to make a positive impact on our world and that working to reduce obstacles for historically marginalized groups benefits every single one of us i am grateful we have a leadership team that supports teachers who facilitate discussion on difficult important topics to help our students grow develop and learn to think for themselves thank you all right rhonda evans and then scott sparrow hi everybody my name is rhonda evans i live at 1410 springfield pike i have three kids two graduated up up through the wyoming system and i have a senior right now i have we've been here about 14 years and when we first moved here we had several challenges in the in the school district but with everyone i feel that the school district has really worked

036with us to get past them and especially since tim has come in on board i feel that we're heard like never before i am a kidney transplant recipient so when we were going through the pandemic and they were deciding what to do or what to not do for the kids and they were constantly communicating with us that meant a lot to me because i could not survive covet however whenever i had a question or i had a concern over something that came out i would send an um an email and i'd hear back from tim and at the time it was adam both of them which helped a lot um also as far as the diversity and inclusion part of it obviously i'm diverse so there's no if and or but whether it's going to

037be important to me so what i also think is important is that we understand that i know some people are concerned about learning history in perspective but if we only know the euro-centric version of it that we don't understand the impact that it has on students of color the lgbt community women disability people with disabilities and there's more disabilities than just physical disabilities so that's why understanding history in perspective is important i'm not going to address the crt because you can't address something that has no definition but what does have a definition is that we want to make our students strong students ready to go out in this in into the world and have an understanding of what they do and how what they say affects people other than them and that we just can't

038make them see one word one vision because even if you get what you want they still have to go out there and they're not going to be prepared either and i just want to thank everybody on this board tim dr whitley whiteley and all of you i don't know how i would do it you have a pandemic you have political issues that are seeping in here and you still have the strength so i want you to know that i appreciate everything you do hello everybody i have a very short statement um others before me have done a great job conveying uh their feelings about the issues of the day um my name is scott sparrow i live at 75 oliver road i've got four kids two have already come through the schools and two that

039are continuing their high school career now when amy and i moved into wyoming back in 95 over 25 years ago we believed in the schools even though we didn't have kids and we believe in the schools now and the leadership that this body and the administration is shepherding our kids through both challenges of health challenges of scholastic preparation and challenges of social preparation so my statement really is in support we really appreciate the decision making the collaboration of experts and members of the community in devising our approach to the covid pandemic as well as in approach to our issues around social understandings so we really appreciate the past years as well as how you're approaching this current year and how it evolves as the science changes as the um the pandemic progresses and recedes we

040appreciate and understand that things are going to need adjustment and we hope that you remain open to that we're very thankful that our kids can have face-to-face teaching even though masks are required it's a great compromise from our perspective we think face-to-face is just so much a better approach for everybody and we appreciate the fact that you're taking a strong stance to make safety an important balance point we also have confidence in the scholastic rigor of the program here at wyoming um we feel that our daughters were prepared uh for college and getting prepared for life in a diverse world and we fully expect our our boys to be likewise prepared so thank you very much we appreciate what you're doing and we appreciate the continued support and leadership all right thank you that completes

041our recognition of the public i appreciate all of your comments and um we do that every month at our regular meeting we have two very special presentations for everyone tonight because we are looking um we're finally getting the pandemic to not take over every part of our lives and we're actually looking at student growth which we're very excited to uh present tonight so i'm about to turn it over to tim for the two presentations we began this conversation before tim was even on board this this board knew we had a direction we had to go in we have brought him on board because one of the things he does best is data evaluation and with that strong purpose of student growth and so with that in mind i'm going to turn it over to you

042because this is what you do well okay all right great thank you thank you genie uh and we can start to make our way up but before we we turn it over we're gonna start with our our primary schools uh and presenting some some really important information um you know we've talked a lot about goals and um what you'll see here is a great example at our primary schools and our middle school about how these goals turn into actions specifically around our goal having to do with teaching and learning and so when we talk about teaching and learning we talk about creating great opportunities for students that personalize instruction and we're at a critical point where we need to be intentional and purposeful in terms of meeting students where they are and helping them to

043move forward you spoke a little bit about those conversations as i was coming in in the summer of 2019 where we recognized we we did have students that we thought were were looked like we had trends where students weren't growing to the capacity that we thought they potentially could could grow and then you throw a pandemic on on top of that as we look at the fall data that we're looking at right now our internal data as we look at report card data that we've gotten back from over the past 20 months it's clear that there are gaps in student learning and so this need to focus on data again to be intentional to be purposeful to identify what what students know and what their next steps are is really really important that's important for

044a primary school student for a middle school student for a high school student and so um that's what we've got here today we've got some examples of what that looks like this is just one example of how this works at the primary school and at the middle school but it gives you again a a good view on how a goal turns into an action so at this time i'll turn it over to our our very new brand new primary school's principal this is gina kirschner so much i'm really excited to have two of our primary teachers here with me we have tracy kroger who is a reading specialist at elm as well as jen crimer who is a third grade teacher at elm we have three buildings and 33 classrooms across the primary and this

045is really something that's being replicated across all of those so this is just going to hopefully give you a sample of how this is being brought to life for one team and for one particular student at our primary so really what we've been doing is is some things that are the same and then we've also made some tweaks to really kind of hone our process and make sure that we have really intentional data that allows us to come up with the best solution for our students um so what we've been doing for many years is is benchmark screening assessments for every student we do that three times a year in the fall the winter and the spring in kindergarten first and second grade we are we well actually let me back up and say in

046k4 we've been giving map and the map assessment is it's important to note that that's being read aloud to our students in kindergarten and first grade so it really measures their listening comprehension how well they understand something read aloud to them so in response to that one of the things we did this year is for our kindergarten first and second grade students we added a layer of benchmark assessment called aims web aims web plus is an assessment tool that allows us to really dig deeper and find out what their word attack skills are so we're not only knowing understand we're not only assessing how well they understand what they hear but also how well can they actually read the words on the page okay so that was one edition that we made and one of

047the things that happens is once we get that benchmark data we use that as a way to kind of flag kids and say oh we have something that we need to look a little more deeply at and the next portion of that is something that we added in this year which were some really great diagnostic assessments to help us really pinpoint not only okay yes this child is struggling as a reader but what about the reader do we need to intervene on right to really get down to that root cause of a student's difficulty and we know that can be a lot of different facets it could be phonemic awareness phonics fluency comprehension but rather than just taking a guess we've done some diagnostic work to really find out what is the problem so that

048we can address that and then that ultimately leads to a really targeted intervention that is efficient and makes good use of our time and good use of our teachers time so this is just a little snapshot just to give you the kind of idea of what we did so based on that benchmark assessment we took a look at our kids that were flagged in some way and we did some deeper dive into why were they struggling right and you're going to see some fall percentiles there that are kind of all over the map we have some higher ones and we have some really really low ones and what we always do from there is take a look at okay what is going on for the student that is making them score this way or perform

049however they're performing in the classroom so you'll see there that there's three different columns one for an assessment called the tower two which just really measures their ability to read sight words efficiently as well as to do some phonetic decoding you'll see one that's the past which is the phonological awareness screening test that helps us really pinpoint how well they're able to hear and manipulate sounds in words and then finally the core phonics survey which really begins looking at just letter names and letter sounds to reading cvc words like cat and dog all the way up to reading multi-syllabic words kind of in this sequential order to find out where they begin to break down so we got a lot of really great information about all of our students across the three primaries that were

050flagged by those benchmarks and ultimately that helped us to decide what do we do for these kids rather than just throwing everything at them how do we really take a step back and find out what's the just right intervention that's going to move them forward and so we really started thinking a lot about how do we respond to the data and it can be tempting especially in third and fourth grade to jump right to comprehension because ultimately what we want are kids understanding complex text right but what we also know is that like you see up there in that top corner there's a lot of components that go into a skilled reader right and it we know that comprehension is the ultimate end goal that we want but we know that if we have some

051of those word recognition pieces missing it's going to be really hard to get to comprehension if they can't read the words on the page fluently and effortlessly so we really took a step back and have been doing some work about phonological awareness and how do we get those building blocks of hearing the sounds and manipulating them in words and then how do we actually get them to be able to decode and encode those words properly and all of that leads to comprehension and so jen and tracy are going to share with you an example of how we brought this to life for one particular student so you can see how we're already seeing some pretty big growth so this is the data profile of a third grade student who has been receiving reading intervention since

052first grade the data profile in first grade indicated the need for a very broad comprehensive reading intervention including decoding comprehension strategies and fluency second grade data last year reflected the same need as aims web plus at the second grade level does not assess decoding or phonemic awareness this year the data for this student revealed a critical need in the areas of phonemic awareness and decoding when this particular student was given the tower 2 score the score was found out to be found to be in the 18th percentile and this student was then given the phonological awareness screening test or that past test as well as the corephonic survey and as you can see on the past test the student hears and manipulates sounds at the basic level much like that of a student in the

053beginning in the middle of kindergarten the student's core phonics survey results also indicated that the student was not yet able to decode basic cbc words at 80 percent mastery or higher much like that of an early first grader and because of these results it was clear that the student needed direct explicit and systematic instruction in both phonics as well as phonemic awareness after collaboration between gina jenn and the rest of the team this student's tier two intervention in the reading room was aligned in order to meet these needs and a tier one intervention in the regular classroom was determined gina has purchased the hegarty phonemic awareness program for reading specialists to pilot this year so the student was assessed with the bridge the gap curriculum intended for second through fourth graders based on this assessment

054the student was not yet ready for these activities the student began hegarty activities in the primary curriculum instead after a month the student was reassessed and was ready to begin second grade activities through bridge the gap on the screen is an example of where the student started with phonemic awareness the entire hegarty program uses hand motions to represent sounds and words for example a student would say cloudy and then he would say cloudy without e what's left is cloud the student has made great progress in hearing sounds and manipulating sounds because of these hand visuals in addition as part of his tier two intervention this student receives explicit systematic instruction in the decoding and encoding of phonemes as well as cbc words each day the students practices or auditory drills with phonemes visual drills with

055phonemes and encoding drills with phonemes the student segments phonemes like what blends them together to say when and then writes words with cbc patterns when given orally as this student progresses to cvc words with digraphs this student is learning to recognize the number of phonemes in a word versus the number of letters for example chin has three phonemes but four letters this becomes a critical skill in the orthographic mapping of words so tracy and i looked at the data that we collected to try to figure out what i could do that could mirror what she was doing in the general classroom so in addition to the core curriculum and guided reading groups i do a one minute phonemic awareness intervention and for the students student it's working on deleting syllables so i would say say

056tiger but now say tiger but don't say tie i also do a five to ten minute core phonics instruction and again for the student it's on short vowels and this includes a summary of the information that we've previously learned visuals where i give the letter or letters and then the student gives me the sound that goes with it auditory where i would give the sound and the student writes the letter or the letter for that sound and then a blending drill where the student blends the sounds to form nonsense words so then i would then present the new information which which includes presenting a new sound reading cbc words and writing cbc words with that new sound i do this three to four times a week and i collect progress monitoring data bi-weekly and then

057tracy and i both record the number of touch points we have with the students and the progress monitoring data every student in the primary at every building who has a tier 1 tier 2 or tier 3 intervention has a progress monitoring sheet that looks very similar to this the entire team has access to this data in order to monitor the effectiveness of any student's instruction as you can see both tier 1 and tier 2 interventions for this student are aligned with the assessment data which indicated a deficit in phonemic awareness and phonics and as you can see from the progress monitoring chart the student is making progress in both phonemic awareness activities which is at 80 percent or higher as well as decoding the cbc words at 80 percent and higher in both of the

058tiers of intervention and so again this is something very similar to what's happening across all three of our primaries and with all of our struggling readers really as a point of making sure that we are catching our readers and and giving them exactly what they need in real time so these data charts like this one the whole entire team can see these we're monitoring this and having conversations we don't have to wait all the way until january to make a change to an intervention or to switch up what we're doing for our students we can do it right in the moment when it makes sense for that child to make sure that every child is making the growth that they they need and deserve to become those confident capable readers i hope you had questions

059do you want to ask any questions or sure i have a question go ahead i always have a question uh mrs christian wait don't go just go go backwards for a this is going to be silly but i go backwards for a minute please and just review what is tier 1 what is tier two what is tier three and then if you would the role that each one of the teachers placed yes i'd be happy to do that so when we think about a multi-tiered system of supports we think of like a pyramid right so you have tier one is what we do for all students and that's the bottom of the pyramid then we layer on therefore multi-tiered systems of supports a tier two and tier two would be what we do for some

060students and that would be like what tracy kroger does in the reading resource room for pull-out intervention tier three would be what we do for very few students and that is a highly specialized intervention often um one-on-one or in in a in really intense in terms of the amount of times or the amount of touch points that we have with that student sometimes those are students that go on to get an iep or have special education services but not always so when we think about our multi-tiered systems of supports we think about always making sure that that tier one is solidly in place and then anything that we do that's a pull-out intervention is complementary or on top of that so that's why we know it's really important for our classroom teachers like jen to

061have a really solid tier one plan in place but then also a tier one intervention so that what's happening when they're pulled out to the reading room in tracy's case is in addition to it's like we call it double dipping right we double dip those kids to make sure that they get something in addition to that initial support and children can move in and out the third tier as much yes absolutely and so and and really the goal is for our students to get back to tier one to get back to a place where what we're doing for them in tier one instruction is all that they need and it doesn't mean that we don't do special things for them or tweak things and modify for kids in tier one it just means that what

062we're able to provide for them doesn't have to be taking place in another setting or in another more specialized way all right thank you would you say that this approach is one that works is the approach we take always but also could specifically be leveraged in places where either pandemic related or otherwise some student may have fallen behind relative to their progression right i would say that yes this is this is really best practice in terms of how we intervene for students and i mean i think wyoming is a bit of an anomaly we have kids that tend to perform pretty well but i think the pandemic is kind of is is kind of showing some skill deficits that are maybe more pronounced than we've seen in the past but if we look nationally at

063like nape scores for example for our fourth grade fourth graders across the country we have a crisis in our country in terms of literacy and and we have a very small number of children becoming proficient readers by the fourth grade and so these sorts of assessments and diagnostic tools are really based on the science and the research that's going into how do we pull ourselves out of that as a nation and so a lot of this comes from that large body of work that's being done in the service of helping grow all of our kids into confident capable readers all right thank you thank you i think i said a quick question how do we first of all i love the rope analogy i thought that was fantastic yeah how do we engage parents to

064let them know that these interventions are happening because it's not fully iep like you said but this these are excellent interventions that be great for parents to kind of know how their their kids are being supported absolutely i think those are great great really great questions um so one thing i've been doing is we've been putting these into our weekly newsletters to families so everybody that gets the primary newsletter has seen the reading rope they have seen all of these sorts of things just trying to give people little tidbits of information that help them really see what a monumental task it is that our children take on to become strategic readers it's it's really um there's a saying that like teaching reading really is rocket science um and it's because it's because reading is not

065something that we're hardwired to do it is truly something that our brains haven't adapted to it's really pretty recent in the history of humankind and something that is a very specialized task and so putting some of that information out there but also in the primary we're going to do a family literacy night in february where we're going to actually be doing some things with families inviting them in and showing them some strategies that they can take home and try with their students just to make reading enjoyable but also slip in some of these things because if you do it just right the kids actually think it's fun and that's always the the catch is to is to try to make it not feel like such a difficult task thank you i'll just speak to the

066great collaboration that happens as you can see with uh with the classroom teacher the administrator and the specialist too to all be on the same page with with supporting students and looking at all students powerful powerful stuff all right and so now we're excited about our middle school and a new tool good evening uh thank you for inviting us here tonight um i'm here um with uh one of our fifth grade teachers uh miss laurie miller is going to be presenting with me um and so coming out of the pandemic we did know that some of our curriculum was not able to be fully taught that we had some gaps and some holes in just the basic curriculum and and where we needed to go so the state of ohio developed a new assessment this

067year and we are one of the first districts that is administering this test it is the restart readiness assessment that we're given to our students in reading math and science science is only happening in grades 5 and 8. so what is this restart readiness assessment developed out of ohio it's basically an assessment tool that is made for oops that is made for grades three through high school but we are using it only currently in the middle school and it is composed of two tests a benchmark assessment which our students are currently in the process of taking and then there are checkpoint assessments that will be given to the students after we have taught the curriculum and see if we are on course these assessments were really developed to really make action something that we could

068do immediately and didn't have to wait for results until the following spring or fall and so when our students are administered these assessments our teachers are able to get the data immediately roughly within 24 hours so it's very actionable data and that is what our teachers need they need things that are actionable and in their hands lori miller is going to share now with you some of the results of the assessments that were given in science for fifth grade from the teacher perspective and how she's able to go ahead and use this within the classroom all right so um i went to jennifer and said hey let me try something new since i'm new to the middle school and she said okay um so this is what it looks like so we use the fifth

069graders as our own little guinea pigs because they tend to be more flexible than the 8th graders and they did an awesome job and so this is kind of a snapshot of what you get back so we're able to see each domain in whatever test it is so in reading you would see writing and non-fiction and fiction but in science you see the three main branches of science then you also see this little plus symbol which you can open up and it tells you the five items the students did the best on and the five items they did the worst now i love data i really do i can't i don't think there's many people in this room that wouldn't agree with that but i only like when it's something i can use it i

070want to be able to inform my instruction for the benefit of teaching and a lot of times what happens is you get your results from the year before in the summer when you're at home and those kids aren't yours anymore in fact i've been in fourth grade for 17 years so a lot of times those kids weren't even in my building anymore by the time i was getting the data back on them and to me that always felt like too late i i want it sooner than that so that i can intervene so here's some of the data we got back so you get an ost score which predicts how they will perform on the actual ost they'll take the another a second post-instruction benchmark test three weeks before the actual ost which will then

071allow us time to review any holes we see there's also checkpoints which allow us to assess each of those little tiny domains separately to make sure throughout the year we stay on track so um how adorable are my kids by the way well our kids um so one of the things we can see is our strengths um not surprisingly thanks to the strong primary our kids tend to be really strong readers they have a ton of background knowledge it's nice to be able to see the kinds of questions we did well in we can actually click now and open it up and it says here's the kind of question that they totally rocked right and so for me as a teacher what i'm able to do then is say well i don't need to spend

072a ton of time there and maybe my curriculum map needs to be adjusted because we are so awesome in life science it's really strong so they're coming to fifth grade with a lot of life science knowledge now i know i can pull back there and i can put my energy where it needs to be it also shows us the five weaknesses so as soon as i opened up the five weaknesses and believe me i was like counting down the minutes till i got my data um i opened each of them in a little tab next to each other and i was like oh my every single one of them required them to take information from a graph or a table or a diagram and apply their science knowledge in order to answer the question so

073that was a trend right away and with that information i was then able to i had an assessment coming up two days later i went back to that assessment i added more questions that had these things in it so that right away i'm making sure that we're continuously applying what we've just learned which is that we need more work on reading those graphs and tables and charts and diagrams and food chains and food webs so this is really a helpful piece of information um now not only do i want to stop you know not only do i look at my curriculum but then i sit down with the fifth grade team and i say hey on that social studies test you have next week let's stick some more charts and graphs and tables on that

074because we need some more practice the other thing it tells you is a completion rate which you would never ever get to see when you actually administer the ost you have an idea of how long a student took on the whole test but this gives you a picture of the pacing so we were able to identify students who a couple of them went too fast um and the little thing comes that comes up and says like they couldn't have actually even read the test that quick and so you know well we got something to talk about there um and it also shows you kids who are going to struggle to finish the test so now we can intervene and figure out why is it interestingly enough most of the kids who struggled to complete the

075pre-instruction assessment in the amount of time they were not kids that are not proficient in science or not strong readers they tend to be kids who are really really bright gifted kids who sit there and like analyze the question and think deeply about it and they're like hey i have another question what about you know do they mean the hawk or do you think they mean the so those kinds of things are all teachable skills right we need to show them how to take a test like that what to focus on and what not to focus on we also get a item analysis which shows us you know the items the kids struggled with how those questions were worded we can then pull our own assessments and look at if we're using the same kind

076of wording a lot of times even a simple like vocabulary usage kind of thing can confuse kids on a test and then we can also see any kind of trends over time the more we use this we'll be able to see more of those kinds of trends but just knowing right off the bat that we need tables graphs charts diagrams help informs our instruction it allows us to make changes you know right of way it also allows us to take the data and break it down by gender and race so that we can compare how kids are doing and then offer the correct intervention another thing i noticed is i pulled up the data and i put it next to our ela map data and looked at the reading scores to see if there was

077a correlation one of the things that the kids could do is there is a read aloud option on the math and the science state test so they can anybody can put in headphones and have the state test read to them however very few students choose to do that the the thing the benefit to that is that it not only reads it to them so they can hear the words that they might be unfamiliar with but it also helps pace them so one really good easy fix is to say to those kids who took the test really fast or not you know not in the right amount of time hey why don't you use the read aloud option that'll kind of help you pace the test out so that you don't end up you know not

078finishing or finishing so quick you have time just to twiddle your thumbs and then it also shows our comparison to state district school teacher data which is also really helpful in the past you would see down to school data you would see how the school did but you didn't always have the ability to break down into teacher data so now if we have one person who's really strong in life science and somebody else who's strong in physical science those people can pair up and say what are you doing to teach that share that with me and then this is probably one of my biggest um takeaways so um earth and space science was overall for the fifth graders was much lower than the other areas of science so i pulled out the vertical alignment for

079the state because i was like it just doesn't make sense it's so different um and you know these my current fifth graders at the end of third grade would have been sitting on the couch in their pajamas because of the pandemic and they missed some things and as it turns out they missed an entire unit on earth and space science um and so i went back to well that when would they have had that before the pandemic then because that's going to be their base of knowledge that i'm working from and that was kindergarten so to have 10 and 11 year olds who haven't seen space science since kindergarten allows me to know that now i need to adjust my curriculum map because this is going to take us a little bit more time than

080i had originally anticipated so some of the things that i was able to do with the data so far um was one reorder restructure the curriculum map move around some things change the amount of time i was going to use on on certain things as well as adding in some more layers of building that background knowledge um even asking the kids you know at the beginning of a unit a lot of times you'll say what do you know what do you want to learn and the kids were like we don't know anything about space but we know about astronauts so there's a there's just a lot to build there i also was able to make new groupings for students like their lab partners rearranged seats in the classroom the next day started a morning intervention

081science support session which somebody should stop by it's really fun um 7 30 to 8 o'clock wednesday mornings um we are all in there just you know parents are super supportive every week i have like bagels donuts somebody brings me coffee it's it's great um and we've had as many kids as like 50 kids and i'm like we're busting at the seams with kids who are and parents who are willing to bring them early and send them with their breakfast and and do all of that so that's super super nice i've shared the information with my fifth grade level team the ela department gave their benchmark and then we started to compare the science data with the ela data so that's where we're at right now math actually gave theirs is giving theirs today and

082tomorrow and so we'll be able to look at all three across the line and see what kind of trends we have and then i also at my science department meeting talked to the team we pulled out the vertical alignments and everybody went back through and said okay think about where your kids were when we were shut down for the pandemic go back figure out what content they missed um for some subjects that's gonna be a different process you know a subject where like math where you have to have all of those pieces moving up but science is kind of taught in these chunks so we have to kind of go back and find out what that chunk was and pick it up as we move forward the other thing we noticed when giving this is

083that the kids haven't taken as many assessments as they have in the past typically our kids are um really good test takers in in general um but there was a ton of questions and and i have to say there's nothing more painful than administering a test in the spring and watching a student get a question wrong because they don't know how to use the technology and you can't help them because you're not allowed to legally and they'll be like but i just don't understand how to make the connect bar delete and you're like i'm sorry you're doing a great job honey but this time you're able to intervene right there they can ask you that question you can answer that question you can say oh let me show you and then you can take that

084information you can put in your lesson plan for the next week so that you hit it again and then you can go next door and ask the math teacher to hit it again right so that's some of the the really amazing pieces of information um we were able to gather what do we need to focus on what do we not need to focus on and also the ability to kind of look at where is the curriculum going to overlap enough that we're going to be able to kind of find that that perfect place where um for example using evidence to support an idea that kind of overlaps all the subject areas so if we're all teaching it and they're seeing it in multiple bells a day you kind of get more bang for your buck

085and so oh that that is us on the playground the other day we were trying to show rotation and revolution at the same time i will say mr webber did attend and he did a he did a pretty good job he did a pretty good job um i think he he had the earth at one point but that's a tricky position because then you've got the rotation and the revolution um but that was really born out of the idea that we were needing some background knowledge and you could see as as i was teaching it you could feel how how much of a struggle it was to really grasp those two ideas at the same time so thank you lori um and i really need to thank all the teachers at the middle school for

086taking these assessments on um this is uh is a new assessment so there's a lot of risk involved um in that you know we're not sure how it's all going to come out in the wash what's it going to look like but the feedback that we've received has been very positive and in terms of next steps our teams are going to be talking and sharing this data and so it's very important that the music teachers the art teachers understand where their students are in language arts and in math and how can we all come together to support support our students in their growth and so what's very valuable here is that it is actionable and lori immediately changed her instruction from these assessments [Applause] come on down of course of course of course go ahead

087maybe it's for for jennifer um i know there's some reaction kind of in the district relative to some of the data coming in and it was like oh my god i told you we were going to fall behind the pandemic if we did hybrid or what have you um this intervention that you described the morning intervention support sessions specifically for this area feels like an actionable and specific approach that does help address gaps or where students have either fallen behind or just want to have better preparation is that something that's already being implemented across all the other subjects or the other areas at the grade levels in a way that works or is that still being discussed great question i'm currently in the process of working with dr whiteley on some of these actionable interventions

088currently what we have is only in place for science in the fifth grade sorry i keep getting fogged up is currently in place at the fifth grade we do currently offer intervention classes at the middle school we have literacy for life we have also our math lab but we're taking this data and making it more actionable in timely reaction to the data that we're receiving so we do anticipate improving those programs a bit with the support of dr whiteley yeah well i have a love for data as well not quite to the data nerd level but i love that it's timely you can use it but also at the teacher level because inherently there's a little bit of accountability you know relative to how it's coming through but also perspective on how we can shift

089or adjust the curriculum maps and other things to adjust the spaces where students really need it so yeah i realize what you mentioned on the risk of it showing something that doesn't look good already or doesn't look the way it normally does you know kind of in our district but i appreciate you taking that on courageously and looking at it so that we can actually be better well what i have to say is that this has been some of the most exciting work that i've had to experience at the middle school the amount of excitement behind the data from the staff is very exciting people are looking at it immediately i know that the people were looking it up they gave the ela assessment last week i know teachers were looking at the data over

090the weekend it is that timely and so immediately i anticipate by the end of this week we'll be able to really get some plans in place so that you know tim and ashley and myself can meet with different people and support them in interventions with our students so it's very exciting and it feels like we have a nice momentum running we talked today to the students at each grade levels hopefully if you get a chance to talk to your middle school student they'll share this with they don't often share in middle school you kind of gotta prod them a little bit to get the information but one of the things that we talk to our students about is really looking at assessments we have a lot of anxiety amongst some of our students with kind

091of coming back in and experiencing school again that we talked about assessments being a way of showing what you know don't look at them as something that is i have to get an a no show what you know this is um this is your moment in time and we want our students to really understand that this assessment is often for us as the adult not so much for them but we want to know what do you know so that we can lift you up where you need to be lifted up and you know move you forward so absolutely yes um well you just answered my question i was gonna ask you to address a little bit um you know sometimes when parents hear assessments and preparing for a test it can feel like oh that's

092what we're gonna just now be teaching to a test and what i love that i'm hearing and even in the video clip that i see with the hands-on learning that a lot of it is focused on improving instruction for children individually and i i think that's great but you you did address the idea of you know and knowing that kids feel you know there's a point where we can do too many assessments too much testing but i think what you're describing seems like something that helps a teacher in real time help a child better you know it's about growth really it is about achieving and finding out it's kind of like those individual sports my kids were swimmers and and swimmers anybody in swimming knows it's about your time it's not about the person next

093to you and that's what we need to look at these assessments as you know it is their personal experience and it's their personal growth and we just want every day we talk to our kids about getting one percent better every day ask your ask your middle school students about that too they like to joke about that um but we're dead serious about that one percent better every day is our expectation for them and when we achieve that together we're unstoppable and so it's it's a very exciting time our teachers are working hard our students are working hard i could not be any prouder of the middle school and in the growth that we're going forward with so thank you thank you for your support i just have a quick one yes it's just uh is

094that on it's just a quick thank you as well for both of you all to do that we've talked so much like we were saying about the growth and the gap so to have the actionable steps is wonderful and getting to hear you speak before lori i love just when you're talking about all the teachers overlapping and i think you would use the example of even going to the art teacher to work on something for symmetry because that was something that looked like kids were struggling with and that was helpful for me to hear too and um so it was a thank you for doing that and being able to use that real-time data it's helpful to hear so i don't know if that's something the more we can work together and team up and

095ask the ela teachers to pull articles about space and work together the the better it is really for our kids so thank you thank you can i just say one thing about that like one thing i think that in a primary situation you're very you're self-contained and so if i'm the language arts teacher and the science teacher of course i'm going to read the science material and teach language arts skills at the same time when you come to the middle school we're departmentalized and so we're trying to do a shift in our thinking a bit because these are all of our kids and we all are really in a sense reading teachers right we're exposing our kids to all different types of types of reading and so anytime an art teacher can you know talk

096about something with science or a social studies teacher can put something in with graphs is beneficial to the student as a whole and so that's one of the things that is new for some of our teachers to start thinking about and so again we're all growing we're all one percent better each day and that's something that we're continuing to to grow in so well thank you both thank you yeah and i'll just expand on a little bit love love the conversation thank you thank you to to our primary and our middle school teams who are here and and honestly those conversations are happening throughout the buildings and and just today i was going back and forth with some uh some language arts teachers at the middle school about the the work that they're doing which

097is phenomenal um great conversations and the conversations as we're talking with kids are shifting and they're shifting to this is a tool that helps me be a better teacher for you and that is it takes the risk out of it we heard messages of belonging and how do we develop this great climate culture in our classrooms that's a part of belonging and how do we make kids feel comfortable and how do we make them know that the real purpose here is for for them to grow and and we're trying to help them so really powerful conversations and just to show you kind of how that's packed together in teaching and learning we talk about three things we talk about curriculum and are we aligned in what we're supposed to teach and we're building curriculum maps

098so there's great conversations happening across teams we talk about assessment how can we make sure that we assess in a way that helps us understand where students are and what their next steps for growth are that's what you saw a little bit of here tonight that's just one one sliver of the work that's happening and then we talk about instructional strategies we've talked about mike rutherford before and how do we share and have conversations about the instructional strategies that actually help support students uh the most so all of that works together but understanding that that's one piece of the work that has happened in all of our classrooms it is i don't know who said it it is rocket science being a teacher because then we have we have goals for belonging and how do

099we make kids fall in love with school while we're doing all of this work and how do we communicate this came up tonight too how do we communicate and connect with families so that they know what's happening and how to support their students as they make their way to school or as they're working at home so um just couldn't be more excited about the the real work that's going on to to do the best job we can for students right now so really appreciate those teams for being here and to to dig into the work a little bit and to show us how those goals become actions at our november meeting we will have a high school team who will be here they're going to talk a little bit about the dan jones center for

100research and innovation and they're going to be talking about how teachers collaborate classrooms teach classroom teachers collaborate with our media specialists with and also with our innovation specialist to embed stream science technology research engineering the arts and mathematics into into instruction and we are blessed to have the research innovation center so we'll we'll give a snapshot of what that looks like just a small little little piece of that i guess in closing for just this very first part of the meeting that's all right then it gets it'll move this is we've talked about being excited about being able to to get back to the goals to be better each and every day and i'm excited to have staff members teachers and administrators and and and support staff in our buildings that are really um dedicated

101to that work the past 20 months has been difficult it's been difficult for students teachers families and for school districts to focus on on the work and so i'm excited about what what happens here tonight i'm excited about as we move forward really putting all of our energy and our time into the things that you see happening right here i had one one question and one comment um i know we referenced the discussion that the middle school is having with dr whiteley relative to reapplying what's happening with science across other grade levels when the high school comes back is it possible for us to just understand next month the update on where we are with some of that reapplication just to see how broadly and how quickly we can get that happening that would be

102great um one comment i wanted to make i remember years ago i was walking off the track and i'd been running and i saw the sign that says did you get better today and i realized it was there at the field because i guess teams when they're practicing or whatever the whole point is getting better i wanted to acknowledge the folks who've been working in this because what i heard today was a bit of a growth mindset approach to am i getting better am i learning versus did i get it perfect and you know we've been having this conversation since 2018 you know trying to understand what the top ratings and those kinds of things were really built upon and was it something that was solid and sustainable or not and the conversations we're in

103today i think are the best looks at data the best engagement of that data that i've heard you know in the times that we've been been working and i want to credit all that to you tim because others have already sung your praises but um i do think it's an example of progress and an example of looking at the gaps that we see and understanding what we don't already know it's ironic that i feel like this is also an example of how taking an honest look at what our historical and actual truths without a fear that it will make us feel bad allows us and actually equips us to change and to do the work to help our students get better and focus on helping to become the people that are prepared academically in all

104of these spaces and so i wanted to say to you but also the others that i appreciate you're not being afraid to look at these truths for fear that it would harm our psyche in some way because we could continue boastfully talking about how great we are without dealing with these truths but it wouldn't actually help us be better by dealing with what's current right now in support of that future so i just wanted to thank you for the approach but also for empowering the leaders under you to look at this with an expectation that we are going to be better uh six months from now and we are going to be better a year from now but also equipping them to take those steps to really make that progress i with the 10th grader

105and the 7th grader i'm excited about what we're seeing and what i think it enables for our future so thank you for that good work um i'd like to add one thing to what ilia said so beautifully and that's the example and as you mentioned one sliver of what's happening in your leadership and what you've been able to do during a pandemic how everybody here and just listening to the comments of so many people that spoke in support no we know as you're bored and many of us in the room know you return phone calls there has been a lot of angst in the community a lot of division people will send you an angry email you call them personally you have not stopped connecting with people giving your time and i hope you know

106going forward as we see these presentations and moving forward that our community will come together we'll come together as a board to support you because you're a fantastic educational leader yeah all right thank you i i can't not say something there but i will say people are working really hard throughout the entire district and and in my mind it's everyone's wanted this this this great focus that that we're getting to right now uh it's just about alignment and so it's it's been the work to align people to be moving in the same direction to be focused on the same things to be making sure that we all we all have that vision so i feel like the vision is there and uh and the passion is there to do uh to do uh great things

107for kids so i'm excited about moving forward terrific thank you we're going to go into the business not part of this now the board committee reports and actually this will go a little bit faster because finance didn't have a chance to meet tonight we did not we are uh scheduled to meet next week all right citizens advisory uh did meet once just to get started you want to bring us up to date on that virtually on october the 5th um and then the groups is it not working oh not coming here now you're i am working can you hear that okay we um met virtually on october the 5th and then the each group was able to break apart in their separate groups for their studies so the work is getting started and they're able

108to discuss the strategies to carry out their research for each topic all right thank you three three groups of community members and administrators and board members all working on three different subjects focus on primary facilities one study bullying another study and standards based grading practices at the primary levels of third study all right business advisory did not meet i'm now on superintendent committee sorry the belonging committee okay i'll speak to that if i can uh care if that's okay um so we did have a belonging inclusion collaborative meeting that was on october 12th and what we did is uh if you remember we split up into teams much like the citizens advisory committee has done uh to to make sure that we're continuing with the work uh and so we have three teams that are

109that are now meeting uh separately working on on their studies one is on curriculum resources one is on examining our discipline data and one is on communication strategies and we did modify the name of that committee to belonging committee because we thought it was more reflective and inclusive of the work that's actually being done across the the nature of our our great diverse community thank you community engagement is there anyone who would like to i would say our big thing was we worked concessions together as a board office and leadership so it's just a lot of people but it was senior night so that was um a big one and then i was thinking about that too or like there were a lot of community engagement but more of it um as a parent experienced

110as not a board member but like wsma did porch fest which is amazing and a wonderful thing to walk the street and hear the music of the students so wcia did the poetry slam that's very good right and then gene you i think you you spoke a little bit about the october 20th we had our first parent partnership series event and that was with dr jonathan dalton speaking about angst and worry um great none of us have any no worry no no and actually that was part of the program is it's a normal part of a person's experience but it's when it when it prevents us from um functioning as when it really becomes a big concern but our goal in a partnership program is to have an expert on a topic and then allow

111families to break off into groups to talk about the ways that they are working through some of the issues that students face we know we have these incredible resources in our district our families and so we want to make sure that we're tapping into those resources and having those folks share uh share strategies so this is a the parent partnership series is something that we're looking to continue with two at least two to three three events a year um talking about those those biggest concerns that families have for for their students and the um the first community um conversation will take place before our next meeting so certainly coming up there's another thing coming up the high school is doing the diary of anne frank i noticed when i turned around to look at the

112uh the screen there their sets are all up there they obviously are on their way so that will happen before i also received a letter from karen reiber which i'm going to pass around to the board members i particularly like that this is on stationery from avon lake ohio because as i look around the room there are a couple people from northern ohio who found their way down here smart move and but karen thanks us for all the she thanks the teachers she thanks the community and for all the support she's had throughout both her career at the middle school and the high school so i'll pass it around to everybody all right thank you let's uh facility committee so i'm on that one too okay well i would say well we did not have

113a meeting but the two biggest things were the new track getting laid so that um it looks beautiful that the lanes would get there that it's blue and it's wonderful and then also the new tennis courts and if you did not get to see the video that was sent out about our wonderful superintendent and our new city manager getting to break in those tennis courts they were it was really wonderful but that's been years in the making as well getting that um the funding and the timing of getting those tennis courts up and going so that was i would say is our biggest facilities but do you all am i missing something i think our next meeting is scheduled for next week i just can't remember the date not either actually it's coming up a

114good cooperative use of of money from both the schools and the city but also just a good use of planning and thinking through what is best for both those groups uh planning and goal setting did not meet policy review will be meeting november 10 yes and we have plenty to read for that and student achievement then just a a brief update here we did meet on october 8th and what we did our student achievement committee reviewed the data insights document from the ohio department of education and again that showed the initial data that was provided about school district report card data across the state and what the the the most concerning negative impacts were from the pandemic and so we reviewed that and reviewed strategies such as the ones you you heard today and in

115terms of how we're not only taking a hold of state assessment data but the data that we have in the district that's actionable which came up with both of our primary and middle school reports today so just just to ask again the ohio data that we have now we we did not do a testing last year or two years ago last year we allowed or the state allowed some people to opt out of the testing so the data we're getting is i mean the reason they did not give grades or they did not give rankings it's it's loose right so some of it is some of it's some of the messiness that i spoke about is participation rates because when a student doesn't participate it counts as a zero for that district and there are

116participation rates that are all over with different different schools different districts some of it is the learning mode that schools were in as you look across the state you had different learning modes and some like us change during the course of the year so that obviously impacts the school districts in many different ways so a lot of moving parts that were part of their initial message to say because of those variables we're not doing some of those things that we would typically do the information is still available for school districts to plan uh to plan from which is exactly how we're utilizing that information so it's in in my mind what you what you heard tonight and what is happening across all classrooms is how do is the are the conversations about how do we

117use this information to help us know our curriculum assess students in a way that's going to help me understand the uniqueness of each child better and then utilize strategies that are best practice and most impactful for kids and that's just what good teaching and learning looks like and so our focus our goal is to is to focus we look at assessment we absolutely do but it's really to think about what are the needs that kids have in the classroom what's good teaching and learning look like and let's let's go there and everything else will come all right thank you all right in the board of education report there's only one item but this is um we we need to actually approve the moving of the um kaya grant memorial entrance and we talked about this

118last time so now we'd have to do we need to do a formal vote um so if i may please may have a motion to um accept the board of education report you may have a second second we have a roll call mr buckner yes mr thomas yes mrs g yes mrs eller yes mrs broderick yes all right thank you then the the memorial entrance will be moved at and be on another side of the dan jones family champion center all right thank you the treasures report thanks jeanne item a approval of the minutes from the regular meeting on september 27th and the planning meeting of october 12th item b approved the statement of revenues and expenditures for month ending september 30th item c the appropriation adjustments those were all student activity related and then

119one for the foundation donation that is listed in item d so item d there except with appreciation the two donations and item e approval of the report please all right thank you may i have a motion to approve that report so moved and i have a second uh roll call mr thomas yes mrs g yes mrs yes mrs broderick yes mr buckner yes thank you all right superintendent's report okay we have several personnel items you can see the first one here is the recommendation to approve a resignation for one of our educational aides that will be moving number two is recommendation to approve new personnel and this is in terms of a primary clinic aid and teresa gray will be or is at vermont primary school number three recommendation to approve college application bootcamp readers

120and so these are individuals that really support students they read student applications give feedback to students great opportunity for kids to receive feedback number four a recommendation to approve uncomplete unpaid leave for these staff members number five recommendation for extended day services and this is for this intervention specialist to support students with special needs that are in need of of these unique services number six recommendation to approve the rescending of this non-athletic supplemental contract jets club and it's it's due to some changes at the university level on what what the opportunities were for students it's not what it was before the pandemic and so that change has caused the rescinding of that the number seven recommendation to approve these non-athletic supplemental contracts you can see there science olympiad math counts student council great opportunities for

121students and you'll see lots more coming up number eight recommendation to approve these athletic supplemental contracts the two that you see there a nine recommendation to approve these volleyball camp workers this is from camp this past summer and similarly number 10 to recommendation to prove these football camp workers that work during the summer and what i love about the the next page is the length at which you see these incredible student clubs and so 11 12 and 13 are recommendations to approve these renewals for student clubs that are offered to our students from the primary schools the middle school and the high school and then looking down at number 14 it's a recommendation to approve these new high school clubs and it's it's pretty amazing and our students i had my first conversation with high

122school seniors this past week and so they spoke about the wonderful opportunities that they have not just within the curriculum within the school day but in terms of clubs that they have available to them and so the participation and the opportunity that students have to follow a passion that they have in a district our size like this is pretty is pretty phenomenal moving on uh item b is a recommendation to approve the maintenance agreement with love grounds maintenance this is a three-year contract uh we are coming off of a previous three-year contract with love and so it would be continuing uh to provide their services right and we did look in other possibilities so this is by far the best joyce okay good um oh that's me i didn't need a motion to approve the

123superintendent's report sorry so moved all second may i have a roll call mrs yes yes mrs yes mrs broderick yes mr buckner yes mr thomas yes thank you all right um mr tim uh do you have an update for us i do i do it's 8 47 i promise i won't go too long but i do have a few things to to share um first is adjust the appreciation that i have for our teachers and all the work that they're doing to focus in on utilizing data at all of our schools it looks different in every school but that effort is there and it's intense and it's it's meaningful and again trying to really focus in on curriculum assessment and then instruction everything is is connected and so just want to share my appreciation for

124the work that's happening throughout the district the next topic i i wanted to speak to just a little bit is about is masking and specifically our our universal masking plan i have gotten a few questions um about the um covid levels in in our community in hamilton county and and things are moving in a better direction so i uh it makes sense uh to be thinking about okay well when when will things be at a certain level to to which we might be modifying our plan so i wanted to speak about that just a little bit um if you recall back to the summer we were looking at a list of data points as we were considering a universal masking plan those are the same data points that we're continuing to review our administrators are

125reviewing that our science advisory team is reviewing that information those things include local state and federal guidance and i'll speak to guidance here in a little bit because we've seen a change today on a different topic covid 19 transmission rates local vaccination coverage legislation that is changes the scope of how we look at certain protocols and then our school-based data and our district-based data and so how many cases are we having here in wyoming so right now we're having those conversations about how this data is is changing and what's what's promising and what questions we have about that data so what's what's great is is we're seeing a decrease in cobit transmission in hamilton county that's really good news we're excited about that we're actually seeing students ages 5 to 19. their covid levels are

126going down that was secondary to adults and so we're seeing that change now it's still high but it's moving in in the right direction and we've talked about trend if you think back to to the summer we also know that we have growing vaccination rates for our students and staff particularly at our high school also thinking about our high school we you know we've been reviewing cases positive cases and our high school has minimal numbers of cases particularly in again in grades nine through 12. so given that information um again we're always you know wanting to to look to identify the right time to modify our plans if needed and so what i would propose is we right now we don't have a november planning meeting that's that's typical we don't we don't have november

127planning because we're attending a conference and so i would propose we look to early november to schedule some time to pull together to talk about those those five data sets that i'm speaking of to see where we are in that time because in between now and november 10th um we might continue to see that that trend down which is great which is exactly what we want to do and i'd want to review all of these other facets november 10th is not a typical tuesday it's a wednesday i don't know i would be looking at the morning time frame but i i if if we're able to i would propose that we come back and just have at least have a conversation about what what we're seeing love to make sure we can get a look

128at the most recent data um what are what are the things that you would be considering changing too you know so today we have what we call universal masking is it something you would say that people don't wear mask at all or to their choice or what are the considerations or the options that you may have that's that's a great question it's a hard one to answer right now without i wouldn't want to speculate on what that would look like without looking at the data i know that obviously the the high school data looks better as we were just reviewing cases today and so it it you know pulls up the question of does the does the middle school data look the same as the high school does the primary school data look the same

129as the high school and if if that is the case then that might be one thing if it's not the case it might mean another um with the entire high school population eligible for vaccines it could be that that's having some impact among many other things one of the things i've wondered about too is would we be able or willing to have a different policy in high school versus middle or elementary or would that be constructive for clarity and consistency and those kinds of things so those are the kinds of questions in my mind as we talk about a session on november 10th and so i'd love to make sure we can get together and talk through the data as soon as we could well i was just going to say the the state even

130today did some changing in terms of quarantine which i think you're going to talk about so between now and the 10th we may have other sure we have wanted more data and then we already have the one bill that went into effect october the 13th that changed some of the ways we we can look at data so things will happen so specific being specific to cases i think is very accurate information that might be the most actionable we use that word a way that we can adjust if we if we think that all the other factors it's all of those factors working together that really help us determine when's the most appropriate time and so that would be a great opportunity for a conversation i think so the other topic speaking of changes that came

131from the state level today there was an adjustment in quarantine practices and so the ohio department of health was speaking to a change in and quarantined protocols and specifically the they're they're calling it i don't know if it still named this mask to stay and test to play i've got to say that slowly ask to stay test to play okay and so what what and this comes from the studies that were being done around students who were remaining in schools not quarantining outside of the schools and ultimately what the transmission rates were cover transmission rates were for those students and the good news is that there there's positive there's been a success in that they have not seen transmission rates that uh would warrant those students to continue quarantine outside of school and so the

132the changes in the guidance specifically say that due to that data showing minimal transmission of cobit through close contacts schools may now incorporate quarantine guidelines that allow students to stay in school with masking testing and other protocols so what that what that optional guidance would say is that what it would mean for us is that students that are close contacts in a school setting would be able to remain in school and may be able to remain in extracurricular activities i say may and we'll get we'll get into detail about that because i'll have susie share some of the specifics of the information that was shared today and so this connects with one of the goals that we've talked about we talk about two main goals how do we make sure that we're providing the safest

133environments possible for our students and how do we connect kids within school learning and there's a challenge obviously we all know there's a challenge with quarantining that kid's being pulled out of school and so i wanted to talk about this this change of guidance um and and then answer questions that you might have about how how that works or what that looks like so i'll turn to susie if you have some of the very specific details there's there's two pieces of this this is for students that are close contacts in a school setting and what would happen to those students in a school environment and then what would happen to those students that are also participating in extracurricular activities so it's probably important to note that this was a recommendation recommendation today from the ohio

134department of health that really only applies to k-12 schools so anything that happens exposures outside of schools there are no changes currently to to quarantine rules there so masks to stay is purely talking about applies to participation in the classroom so what would happen there is that all direct contacts may remain in the classroom environment if they wear a mask for 14 days after the most recent date of exposure if they self-monitor or parent monitor for symptoms during that time and if they start to experience any symptoms they immediately isolate and they test and then the students and staff can discontinue these steps after seven days if they don't develop symptoms and if they test negative between days five and seven so those are like that four bullets specific to mask to stay just to

135summarize it's 14 days with mask unless you test at day five to seven and confirm you're not positive yes okay currently we are universal masking so a lot of that the school's policy supersedes that so for example at wyoming right now we're in mask so it wouldn't right which would mean people wouldn't have the course it wouldn't matter exactly except for like the students who like say if we had students in the beginning of the year that quarantined because they were exposed say at lunch when their masks were off is that right do i have that right they would not necessarily need to quarantine now yes so any change here would really only apply to our students who have had to go into quarantine which in wyoming that has been a very small number when

136compared to other schools but yes those students would now be able to stay in school and not need to quarantine at home for school based activities and i'm not talking about extracurricular activities yet but i'm talking about school-based activities which would be classroom setting lunchroom all of those things unless exhibiting symptoms in let yes and once what if symptoms were to show up then it's an immediate testing those are all of those things we we do in our current communication around close contacts whether you're quarantining or not we talk about that most recent exposure date we talk about monitoring for those symptoms and do taking these steps already but yes so then we talk about extracurriculars and so test to play really recognizes the issues with maintaining distance and masking in some extracurricular activities so

137we think it's likely i mean this just came today so we're still kind of digesting it but we think it's likely that there are a number of extracurricular activities where you can keep the same protocols in place as you can in a classroom so that the classroom environment would apply to those chess club or different things like that there are some extracurricular activities that we have such as sports or drama or some different things where maintaining that distance and and staying masked is not necessarily those are two that come to mind quickly but um so that is where test to play comes into place so with test to play those asymptomatic contacts who now um can remain in the school setting they may also continue to participate in extracurricular activities if they wear a mask

138when able so in this application of that that is this would include transportation locker rooms or anytime that the mask will not interfere with breathing during the activity or create a safety hazard so wear a mask when able test on initial notification of exposure so as soon as you are learning that that you've been potentially exposed you're immediately getting tested um and then testing again on day five through seven and if it's negative at that time then they test out of this these protocols at that point it's probably important to note that um the testing was not like a do-it-yourself at home sort of a test yeah it is antigen or pcr so both of those tests are applicable in this but it is something it's a proctored test so you're going to a hamilton

139county site or some other location some point of care location to to get that test and susie who pays for that the testing that currently we haven't really gotten to that place of that but currently because it's an outside organization that uh it would be the the the parent there's so many places you can go to have testing free so i mean this is the state this is this determination was made today correct this is ohio department of health of recommendation yes that just assume the hamilton county will hamilton county is working with it right now to address their their guides so the way that it would work for us and within our plan is we would continue to contact trace like we always do and we would notify families of close contacts just like

140we have done and we would share the the protocols that susie has shared and all of that direction would be provided to families and then what we would do is we would follow up with any student that's in that test to play realm and and make sure that um we're helping them kind of navigate that process and and do the things that they need to do to support their safety number one but then to be engaged in those activities that they can in a safe way okay so for clarity prior to this changing guideline say there's a volleyball player and they could they're close contact they're identified they could go to class but not initially go to the sport was that how it was before but now they can if they follow the protocol um

141what are proto it's i'd love it to be simple like that but you know but we can dig into that example i mean you would if you're identified as contact you know then we would be looking at vaccination status and some different things but but because it is a sports exposure that you know sometimes if you so i'm assuming with this case we've said that they're a contact and they're they're not vaccinated so that um so yes in that case so they were quarantining from everything they were not coming to school they were not participating in extracurriculars this would change that so they would now come to school and um and they could they would immediately test you know as soon as they learn that they have been identified as a close contact if they

142immediately test negative and then they can continue with the sport and then they would need to test again you know in five to seven days and then they would be all right thank you two things it brings up one um in the sporting place we say that the kid would have to wear a mask in this world where people weren't wearing masks on the buses and all of that it just reminds me like in the places where sports aren't using the official like busing and all the other stuff whether it's volleyball teams whose parents have to take them in various places it would be helpful to just reinforce for the coaches and the parents and people connected with this that that masking universality should happen in those spaces in the same way that it does

143on the bus when they're going with the cars we experienced this with our seventh grade volleyball team and other stuff and so it's been a beneficial thing for us as our seventh grader then found out she had it that our 10th grader could still go to school because they're wearing masks and that wasn't a disruption for her so thank you that we're wearing masks so that's already benefiting our family with only having one of the students disrupted from the learning so just a reminder if we can support you know those coaches and parents with reminding them on that and the second point i expect we're going to have a conversation around in this new world of not having to quarantine why at the high school would we not be able to go to a place

144where students don't have to wear masks and thus if they were exposed they would so it would only be in the case of the exposure because all of this whatever so as we come back to the conversations in the early november and then in late november i think it's going to be helpful for us to just look at that question and understand what are the data say and what is our our i expect that's going to be a legitimate question that people are asking about when we come back together well and i think you know we've got a few more questions to answer this this is brand new this comes out today uh heinz was just placed on on the website that the county is still you know scrambling to to get their guidance there

145we've got a few questions to answer but i would like to move forward with carrying this out with families and staff members when we're when we're ready which won't be long but i want to make sure that we've got answers to all the questions that come up and i do think that the november 10th um opportunity to talk allows us to talk about both of these pieces so so we'll have our own data in terms of what do we see in terms of this change in in quarantine guidance but then also what are we seeing that with all the other sets of data and masking and how did the two intersect like you're saying ellia i think that would be a great opportunity for that discussion all right is there anything else to update but

146i can't i can't not talk about um we've talked a lot about really really deep things um and this is this is important uh just celebrating our kids it is you know we're at the end of the first quarter we're at the fall time where where we've got music demonstrations and concerts from for our kids we've got our our student athletes are participating in all the four the fall postseason efforts and they've been just phenomenal as athletes but as representatives of wyoming city schools and so very very exciting primary students are going to have a halloween parade that's a big deal that's a big deal yeah yeah so super excited about that we've got a play as genie shared coming up they seem simple but it's a big deal teaching learning climbing culture and creating

147a place that kids fall in love with no matter if you're in first grade or 12th grade is important and so we're excited about those things as much as we are about anything else great thank you all right may i have a motion to adjourn this meeting rather long meetings may i have a second all right thank you um they have a rule called mrs eller yes this is broderick yes mr buckner yes mr thomas yes mrs g yes thank you so uh normally there is a side wager going on among some of the people about the under over did we just give it up tonight and you just knew it was going too far all right thank you to everybody who dedicated their time to come out and attend a board meeting yes thank

148you very much and stay to the end thank you yourself