001I hear you. >> We're gonna go ahead and call this meeting to order. Welcome everybody. Thanks for coming in tonight. Very vibrant crew. Um we'll start with roll call. Director Assad Lucas here. >> Director Badestelli here. >> Director Goldstein here. >> Director Marsh Holen here. >> Director Potter >> here. I will entertain a motion to approve the agenda. >> So moved. Second. >> Director Assad Lucas. >> I. >> Director Badestelli. >> I. >> Director Goldstein. >> I. >> Director Marsh Holen. >> I. >> Director Potter. >> I. >> Okay. Rise if you're able for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> Okay, we'll start off with
002a superintendent update. >> Thank you. Given that we had some extra time in work study session, I was able to provide you all with an update on some of the more pressing and important items in the district. So, I don't have anything further to add at this time. >> Thank you. Okay. On to board of education comments, recognition, awards, and visions. Director Potter, >> I have no comments at this time. >> Director Marsh Holen, um happy October. Um, and thank you to um the staff and the PTO's right now. We just did two of our school fund runs last week um for my kids. So, I know those are a big undertaking and staff takes a lot of time after school to help with those. So, thank you. Um, and I wanted to give a
003shout out. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but uh Horizon was in the Broomfield Days parade this year, and I haven't seen them. I don't know if they've been in it before, but it's been many years. So, um, congratulations to Legacy and Horizon. Um, they did a great job. And that's all I have. >> Thank you, Director Bastelli. I feel terrible now after Courtney and and Director Potter and uh, Superintendent Gdowski were so brief because I'm going to take a long time. So, the first thing you >> Yeah, I'll I'll use it. Um, I attended the Legacy Marching Festival on Saturday. Um, and I was able to give out awards for the semifinals at 4:30ish with Amamira. And then I was able to stick around and watch the finals and that was a lot of
004fun. They are they put on quite a show. All of the different bands that are in those semi-finals. Um, Horizon High School's band was in the finals and they put on a fantastic show. It sort of had a bandit theme and they took a lot of contemporary music and uh, incorporated it into their performance. Um, Fossil Ridge High School won and congratulations to them. They did a great job. My personal favorites were of course Horizon because bias. Um, and um, followed by I thought the Fountain High School band did a really fantastic performance. I was also able to help out with the finals with Courtney and Director Potter, I'm sorry, and Superintendent Gdowski and uh, Mayor Jan Coleman. um because Mayor uh Castriata from Broomfield was supposed to be there, but she wasn't able to
005make it. So, the funny part is when I was introduced, I was introduced as the mayor. Um so, for 5 minutes, I got to be a mayor and that's enough. I'm never going to do it again. So, um yeah, that was my funny story, my five minutes of fame. Last night, Apac um they had an orange shirt day gathering and this one is a little bit more heavy. Um, Orange Shirt Day is a day of recognition about the impact of Indian residential schools on Native American communities. Um, we watched a documentary called Sugarcane and it was about one such school in Canada. For those of you who may be unaware, the Indian residential schools were federal programs in Canada and the United States that forcefully removed Native American children from their famil family's homes to
006attend boarding schools. The children were denied the right to speak their home languages. They were denied the right to practice their faith and learn about their home cultures. And they experienced numerous forms of abuse and neglect. And many of those children didn't return home. And while Orange Short Shirt Day mourns those who never came home, it also celebrates those who did while recognizing the scars left behind that continue to impact Native American communities to this day. The last federally funded boarding school closed in 1997. So it was not that long ago. And there were at least five federally funded uh residential schools here in Colorado. And I would like to take a moment to thank Apac for inviting us into this night of recognition and for sharing this vulnerable cultural history with us. Um this
007history is a burden we all carry as a society. Um, but as Tink Tinker, I think is what his name was, he had a fantastic name. Um, an elder of the Oage tribe and a guest speaker said last night, "When Native Americans can heal, our society can heal." So, thank you. >> Thank you, Director Assad Lucas. Good evening, everyone. Um, thanks for being here this evening. I look forward to hearing from our schools that will be here to talk about um their UIPs and the great things they're doing in their schools. Uh this has been a hit the road running kind of time period with the mill override campaign. um just knocking doors, making sure we get the word out of what um the district plans to do. I was able to attend a couple
008city council meetings with uh Superintendent Gdowski and uh and Director Bastelli at the North Glenn city council and then direct uh Superintendent Gdowski again with the city of Thornon who both cities voted unanimously in supporting the MLO. Um, and I really appreciate a lot of the comments made by the council members from both cities, but one of the things I really appreciate most, um, is just the highlight of the when we invest in our schools, we invest in our communities, which I know Mayor Coleman has made multiple times comments. So, I really appreciate that. able to attend to the Thornton High School SAC meeting uh yesterday um as a community member this year, not as a parent. So that was a little uh little different, but um they continue moving towards goals and doing great
009things for their students and for the community. talked about current programming but also what the new build of Thorn High will provide for students. So, it was really exciting to see that. If you have not seen the um outcome or the rebuild, please visit the district website. There is a short video of it and um it's gorgeous and it will do wonders for that community. I had, as we all did, had the opportunity to meet with principles and building leaders to address strengths and goals of achievement, talk about any concerns um that we can help support. Um and with that, I wanted to acknowledge principal appreciation month, right? Or we Yeah. and um principal appreciation month because without strong leaders in our buildings um our students aren't able to get what they need because our
010strong leaders pick strong educators and that is what helps um build achievement and growth for our kids. had the opportunity to present the preliminary final awards of the Legacy Marching Band Competition. What's really cool about this is, I guess I didn't realize, um, or it didn't occur to me previously, that many of these students who participate in marching band and dedicate a lot of their time go on to get scholarships or go on to participate at higher ed in marching band. So, one of the students from that I know now personally that attended Legacy and was in the marching band at Legacy High School his four years um participates in the CU marching band and it's really cool to get a to get to watch him and um know that his hard work throughout high
011school has paid off and he gets to carry on his passion. And so probably an opportunity that many of our students get. So their hard work does not go unnoticed. So I also just want to take um a moment and praise our working relationship between our district leadership and our teacher association. Um, you know, being part of the IBS committee for a few years now, I've been able to witness great work and hard work and sometimes um conflicting work, but always come together work between the district and the association. I I think what has really highlighted this for me is what is currently happening in Colorado Springs. Um and when leadership, district leadership does not prioritize students and does not prioritize um the growth and achievement and success and well-being of students. we see the
012fallout of um what that h what occurs and again who is impacted the most our students. So thank you to Adams 12 leadership, thank you to um District 12 Education Association for always putting students first. Um, that is all I have for this evening. So, thanks again for everyone for being here. >> Thank you. All right. Um, couple weeks ago, we haven't been here for a few weeks. Went to the eighth grade career expo. Um, that's an annual event that's sponsored by the Adams County Economic Consortium. And the person who, um, puts her time and effort into this extensively is Andrea Odabby. Some of you know Andrea. She's a STEM launch mom and she also is very involved with the Mil Levby campaign. And if you've never been to the eighth grade career day expo,
013it is quite an operation because it's not just for Adams 12, it's for every eighth grader in Adams County and it's two days because there's so many eighth graders and the it has to be totally orchestrated. It's at the fairgrounds and so you have the exhibi you have the the dome then you have the outside between the dome and the exhibition hall and then you have the exhibition hall and you have the buses and it's all timed. They drop off the kids by the dome. They go into the dome and there's a section there with um like I think that one was more like uh career uh higher ed and and and some businesses and then you go and career and technical and then you go into the middle and that's where all the fun
014toys are with like um mechanical engineering, the firefighters um all the construction folks bring their toys to play with. And then you go into the exhibition hall and there was um I saw uh police and um sheriff and um medical um EMT and that stuff. And they have like 20 minutes in each room, which really isn't enough time, but it's kind of speed dating. You go to where you're interested and you learn about it and you and um I just got an email today. It said I guess the the person who was the most impressive was a student from Thunder Vista >> and uh they made a note of recognizing him. And then I think the school that had the most positive um interactions was Westlake. >> Yeah. >> Yep. So both Adams 12 schools.
015Like I said, it's every eighth grader in Adams County. And I really have a lot of fun with it though because I was an eighth grade teacher and I used to be the teacher on the bus that took the kids through this. And the evolution of this event has been phenomenal because it's spread out more and it's in a bigger space. Um I got to say hi to the new FiveStar Leadership Academy. That's uh parents and community members that meet once a month to learn about Adams 12. Um and I went to Westminster City Council and talked about um our mil levy override and they're going to bring it back on their agenda. Um it's my understanding that Broomfield also um endorsed our mill levy. Um I'm going to be I did the first day
016and I'm going to be doing three more sessions at Northland High School with Junior Achievement. I'll talk more about junior achievement in a CASBY report. Actually, I was invited to visit Random's new career technical education center and Random is in Westminster public schools. Um the Random High School has been re renovated and it's beautiful. Some of the it's I think the the building part of it is mostly um is what you see the most of. They haven't quite filled it with kids completely yet, but the programs that they're offering are really um awesome. They have flight simulators. They have um a lot of electrical stuff to play with. They have a medical robotics class where the kids were making models of robotic arms that are similar to what might be used in a surgery. Um
017just really great opportunities. Um we met with the principles. Um I was invited to the Bobby Rmbrance. Well, I think we all were, but um through our work emails, but I decided I was going to go. And if you want to know what that is, Bobby Y was a place in the Ukraine, I believe, that um during World War II, and this is always kind of personal for me, but um during World War II, as you know, the Jews were persecuted and mass murdered. And this was one place where that occurred. And um before they were um executing people in the gas chambers, they were having them dig pits and they would have them take off their clothes and then they would shoot them into the pit. I know that's really graphic, but that's what
018happened. And um so this was the anniversary of this um just to reme a remembrance of it in Bobby Park, which is a park in Denver. I had never been there. Um, and I never really realized what it looked like until I saw it on a map. It's actually a Star David and there's a hill in the middle part of the Star David and there's a seating area and we all sat there and um, AG Philiser was one of the speakers and then a renown violinist who is um, Jewish and Chinese uh, played for us and she played her song. uh she said, "You'll recognize it." She didn't say what it was. And she played it and it was it was the theme to Schindler's List. Um and it was just very moving. And she
019had a guitar player playing with her. And um you know, it's one thing that you know, if you don't if you know Phil Weiser, his mom was born in a concentration camp 5 days before it was liberated. And you know, if had you know, he would not have ever lived. And you know, I was fortunate enough that my family u well my stepdad's family was totally wiped out, but my family was already here. Um but anyway, it's just that's just something that you know always is something very personal for me. Um I got to meet the new city or county manager, Deion Stroer, over at Adams County, and we had a lovely conversation and had a lot of ideas of how we could partner together and maybe you'll be seeing some of those. And I
020had my CASBY board meeting last meeting, which is actually an agenda item, so I won't go on any further. So that's my report. Now we're on to general public comment. Good evening. The board welcomes public comment to learn about the preferences and concerns of the Adams 12 five-star community. Each speaker will have three minutes. Please use the microphone and state your name and city of residence before beginning your comments. Please give any handouts or information you would like to share with the board to Lee Koka. A threeminut timer will be set for each speaker. Please keep an eye on the timer and kindly conclude your remarks when your time has expired. Our first speaker tonight is Melissa Ryan. There's a lot more people here than usual. Little nervous now. Okay. Um I came here today
021safety issues that I have with the schools. Um on Thursday, September 25th, I received an email from Sentry Middle School where my youngest son is currently an eighth grader. This email stated that they were making parents of aware of an off list that was written by a student and posted onto social media. About 90 minutes after that email, I received a call from the eighth grade counselor that my son's name was on this list. I immediately went to the school, spoke to my son, the counselor, the school's resource officer, and vice principal. That day, I immediately felt anxious and fearful for my son's safety. Once I saw a copy of the list titled made an OP list of my ops, my fear grew for my son, the other students on the list, and the teachers.
022In total, there were 36 names. Four of those were teachers. Now, to my points. I'd like to thank the students that saw this social media post and reported it to a trusted adult at Sentry immediately or through safe to tell. You were very brave and smart to act so quickly and thanks to you, the school was able to take immediate action before anything further happened. I'd like to thank the school for an immediate response to the reports. I'd also like to recognize how reassuring it is to know that students trust the teachers and staff at Sentry so much that they didn't hesitate for a second to speak up. I think that speaks a lot to a positive environment and culture created at Sentry between the students and staff. Now, I am coming to the board
023of education to request that the student that made this list please be offered help so that this doesn't happen again or go any further. I am also requesting that the student be placed into the online schooling option through Adams 12 to finish all grade levels. I feel it is in the best interest and safety of all the kids and staff who were written on this list that felt threatened and scared from that day until this day. I want to make it clear and known that I want this OP list writer nowhere near my son now at Sentry or into his future high school. Um, additionally from that point since I have another little bit of time here, um, then the following f the very next day on Friday, I received an email from Mountain Range
024High School saying that there was a student arrested for having a gun um, on school premise in the parking lot. It's just terrifying as a sta as a parent to read these especially backtoback that I hear from another parent this week that um Horizon had a bomb threat. I just want to make sure you guys are taking the school safety and accountability of these kids. Um this op list I feel like is just a start to a much larger issue. Um and I don't know this girl's intentions. My son says he doesn't even know this student and he was scared. So thank you for your time. I hope you truly listen and take action to protect your students and staff at Sentry. I want to know that my children attend a school district that is
025proactive to red flags and not reactive to a school tragedy. So, please be on the district and leaders that you need to be and prioritize the student staff by removing the OP list from the school. [Music] >> Miss Goldstein, can I just jump in real fast? So, Miss Ryan, I just want to let you know that in terms of how we deal with a specific student, the board's delegated that responsibility to me and then in turn to other leaders in the system. I've been kept up to date about the analysis that's going on in the situation you've described as has Mr. Si Scott Simon who's in the back. Scott, can you raise your hand? He oversees our middle schools. So, we're taking it very seriously and either Miss Wulmer, Mr. Simon, myself or someone else
026uh in leadership will be in touch with you and other parents soon to let you know uh what the resolution will be >> and you guys have respon like you added Simon to the emails the school added you. I do appreciate that. That's why I wanted to come here today because I just need you guys to know how seriously I'm taking it. So anything I can do to get my voice out there, my my child heard is what I feel is important to do. So >> completely understand. You bet. >> Yeah. So thank you. >> I just want to say thank you for speaking. I also have a middle schooler who attends Century. So, yeah, >> it was a rough day. So, thank Yeah. Thank you for being here. >> Right. Our final speaker is
027Vicki Quinttoay. All right. Thanks. Thank you for letting me speak. My name is Vicki. I'm a Thornton resident and I came here today because I realized that the last time when a bunch of us spoke, there was a huge misconception about the people that were coming up to speak and protect our little girls and boys. The last time I spoke after we spoke, there was someone that came up and assumed that the people that were speaking to protect little girls and boys in schools were against the LGBT community and there could be nothing further from the truth. These people that spoke, which I know some of them only have love and are trying to protect all children. That includes the LGBT community. And anyone in this room who believes that someone that came up here
028that day had hate in their heart, go out with co go out with us to coffee and let get to know us before you judge us. Um, there's been propaganda pushed that conservatives and Christians are bigots, Nazis, white supremacists, and we just heard the story from Miss Goldstein that about what Nazis actually are. If you believe someone is that, then you're going to think that it's okay to assassinate them. I know that I know thousands of Christians and conservatives and that is not true. The propaganda that has been pushed and the idea that all conservatives and Christians are bigots and Nazis is pushing violence in our schools, in our churches, and an assassination of a man named Charlie Kirk. We had we have had violence and shootings because of this propaganda. Charlie Kirk was assassinated
029because everyone assumed that he was a Nazi because that was what was pushed. There are teachers in our school district that are pushing celebrating his assassination. If those teachers are saying those things on social media for all to see, what are they saying to the students when no one is watching? I did leave a message with the superintendent's office wanting to know that those teachers were taken away from our children so that we do not have school shootings and violence on our schools. These teachers are promoting violence by saying that it is okay to assassinate someone that you disagree with. I deserve to know that these teachers have been taken out because I do not want any further shootings in our schools. I do not want any further violence in our schools. Just as the
030last person had talked about, this is why this is happening. We need to stop the lies and the propaganda and come together. And like I said, I will have coffee with anyone any day and discuss any of these things. But I want to know that these teachers are not allowed to influence our children. They're authority figures. These children look up to them. If they say they're going to celebrate an assassination of someone because you disagree with them, there will be more school shootings. Thank you. Vicki, I just want to touch base uh and perhaps I can have you connect with uh Bo Fbert sitting over to my right, but I'm not aware of a a phone message from you. And so I just want to learn more about uh when that was sent and what
031information you share because when we do receive information about teachers who allegedly have said inappropriate things in social media, we have a protocol where HR and others look into that. So I just want to make sure that we follow through. And so if you could connect with Bo, that would be really helpful. Okay. Is that all the public com? Okay. Thanks. All right. Board committee liaison reports. DAC. Do we have anything? >> I do. I for for full discretion. I did not attend the DAC, but I did review their notes in their uh meeting presentation. Um, and if uh whoever did attend wants to hop in, they can. I'm looking at Dave. Um, it's appears they discussed specific interest group assignments. There are three key interest groups that the um the DAC um has created,
032one around charter schools, one around the um school accountability committee liaison, and a third one I'm not I can't recall off the top of my head. Um they also reviewed SAC information. They're looking at sort of a consistency approach. Um whether they're not particularly whether or not there's a web presence. Um they looked at uh the current SAC liaison totals that they have in place, whether enough of the schools are covered. Um and they do did still have a need for some sack leaison at some schools. Um and they also talked about some of the major themes in the sack. some of those themes made sense given they um you know the setting for the sack meeting one was North Glenn High School so obviously any updates to North Glenn's um facilities as a result
033of the bond was a I think a big topic for them so that's what we discussed in DAC thank you do we have a fact report sorry yes back um met and um Aaron went through the quarterly reporting It was still more uh introductory meeting and explaining um how they report to the board um and and what they report to the board. Um and then uh John Paul from our uh outside audit company um introduced himself and um gave a report as well. And again, I think the fact that we continue to get pretty clean audits and um I like to tell everyone that our finances are very transparent. Um and this just really showed that. Um and then they spent the rest of the meeting working on the monitoring reports. Thank you. Okay, on
034to board business. The first part is the school unified improvement plans. I see we have some folks here in the audience. I was I know I have to do a motion. I just was wondering if we wanted people to come sit up where they're going to sit. >> You bet. Come on up, principles. And then I'll do the motion. uh principles and executive directors. If I could have the principles, high school and middle school principles and executive directors in the first row and then the uh elementary executive directors and principles in the second row. And it looks like we have an awful lot of people from Northmore here is what I'm guessing. Just given that Sarah's wearing the same shirt. Uh if we would have known you're all coming, maybe we would have done Sarah
035all by herself and let you all sit up there together. But thanks for being here uh to support Sarah and your school. All right. Now, I will entertain a motion to approve the unitified improvement plans for Adams 12 schools in priority improvement and turnaround as presented. >> So move. >> Second. >> Okay. Now, Mr. Bana, it's your turn. >> Good evening, board members. Superintendent Gdowski. Um, we're going to be presenting uh some school UIPs for you as well as the district UIP. um state law requires that you approve these prior to us submitting them to the state on the 15th of October. So in terms of the school UIP review, uh re UIPs for schools that received a priority improvement or turnaround rating must be reviewed and approved by the the board. The full you
036have received the full UIP, the executive summary and the progress monitoring or PM tool for each school. So you can see all of the information that's been provided. At this point, what we'll do is we'll proceed by level. We'll start with high schools. Um, we'll then have the executive director give a brief overview talking about the work at that level, any information they can share about the schools here tonight, and then we'll hear uh briefly is a few minutes from the principal about the high level work that they're doing around the work that they're doing, what they're trying to address, the action steps that they're taking, and their how they're going about monitoring that work this year so they can improve outcomes for students through the hard work of they and their staff members. So,
037uh, as I mentioned, we'll start with high schools. And so, I'll turn it over to Lee Peters at this point to share, uh, an overview prior to hearing then from Mart, uh, Charlie Ariana. >> Good evening. Thanks for having us here tonight. I'd like to just share where we are as a high school team. The goals and plans we have through our UIP is not necessarily new this year. This is the beginning, the third year of what has been a pretty consistent plan at the high school level. What you will notice as you get into our UIPs is a goal around sense of belonging for our high school students and the need to support them attending regularly completing classes and credits towards graduation. It is a growing issue in our high schools for students feeling
038like time is not well spent at the high school level and we've recognized this and our plans have surrounded have been in the area of surrounding students with support from the adults in the building and connecting them with other opportunities for co-curricular activities and meaningful coursework. So that's a very consistent goal across all of our high school and you'll see those in the UIPs. In addition to that, we've got some consistent academic goals as well. The first being a pretty clear commitment to collaborative planning for our adult educators and the need and benefit of teachers coming together in department teams and common course teams to look at assignments and assessments and ensure they're aligned to standards as well as high school level coursework. And again, consistent through many of our high schools right now is
039an effort by our administrative teams to be part of that instead of telling teachers to do that to come alongside and support them through visiting and participating in those common course team meetings, department meetings, as well as visiting classrooms and providing actionable and timely feedback to those educators. In the same way, we expect our students to respond to timely and specific feedback. And so as we work together to address some of the issues we face, one thing I'll just point out is we have a specific intervention for nth grade students that we um have through the first semester of the last two school years to address those that are failing classes and in the nth grade year are no longer on track to graduate. And each of our five comprehensive high schools are utilizing a
040little bit of extra staffing that we've received to provide opportunities for those students in the nth grade year to regain those first semester credits and hopefully be really close to or at the six credit level at the end of that nth grade year. So with that summary of all of our high schools, I'll turn it over to Mr. Ariano. >> Good evening board members, Mr. Gdowski. Uh thank you for the opportunity to present my executive summary to you guys. Um, just let me first start off by letting you guys know that I'm very disappointed with my data. So, again, I'll shoulder that myself. I kind of broke this down into some of the controllable things that can happen inside my school as well as some of the uncontrollable things. Um, Mr. uh Peters have kind
041of outlined some of the things that we're doing inside of Thornton High School and I'll talk about one of those in in particular, and that's the vision for instruction. I think we're moving towards a really clear and consistent vision for instruction. I think we're on a good path. I think we need to continue that. I think one thing that we can adjust, especially inside of our PLC's, is that grade level instruction. I think that we think that students at Thorn High School can't access grade level instruction. I think that's wrong. I just think that we have to be able to scaffold for students to do that and that's going to be continued work that we, you know, want to complete. In addition to that, he talked about a little bit about the walks. So again,
042inside of my major improvement strategy, uh, number one, my uh, progress monitoring tool, we made a goal of a thousand visits to classrooms. So when I told staff about this, they were like, "Oh my god, good luck to you guys." Well, we've completed over 300 already in the first five walks or excuse me, five weeks. And again, we go with the model kind of like what gets inspected gets respected. So again, I know you've probably heard some push back from teachers saying, "Why are you guys in my class so much?" Well, the reason why is we're in priority improvement and that's why we're inspecting classes. Um, we have some targeted approach just because we know in high school we don't have a lot of benchmark assessments that we can use to indicate what's working and
043what's not working. This year we've implemented inside of our math and our English classes some SAT PSAT prep work. So being able to really look at those on a by b by bi-weekly basis to see if kids are progressing towards those standards and what we need inside the SAT and PSAT. Let me be just really real with you. We did our first PSAT assessment in math. My students were shocked at the actual like the problems that were presented to them. Like they've never seen things like this before. So that's a good thing that we're seeing this in September and early uh October and not in April. So I'm really excited about that work. As far as our major improvement strategy number two, that's our effective culture and student supports. Uh we touched on this a
044minute ago about our freshman foundation class. So we're in our third year. The last two years we really focused on that sense of belonging and the social aspect. This year is really going to be about the academic so uh excuse me academic uh sense of belonging. Really focusing on how does that class support the work that we're doing inside the building. One of those pieces of evidence that we're going to be using is a common writing structure across Thornton High School. So again, we've recognized inside of our evidence-based reading and writing that we don't meet the mark. That'll be a class of supports as we as we implement that inside of our freshman foundation classes. One thing I'm really proud of this year, I really am excited about our RISE program. So, if you guys
045haven't heard about this yet, this is for at risk seniors. Again, typically seniors at risk have a couple options. They have the opportunity to go to pathways or vantage point. Well, we recognize that we have a lot of multilingual learners that can't access that that uh academic pro uh academic um those academics. So, we we worked with the district to create something at Thornton High School. We have 31 kids in there that are about a year to a year and a half behind. Set some goals with those kids. It's almost like an elementary style environment where the teacher moves, but the students stay in the same classroom. So, I'm proud to say that I set a goal of 100 credits for those students to recover in the first year. They've recovered 33 already in the
046first five weeks. So, again, the kids are great. I'd love for you guys to come out anytime to see the classroom. It's a great environment. It's a it's a very communityfilled environment and the kids are just so excited about it. Again, I've set that kind of goal with them that, hey, you're the first class. this works. Hopefully, we can convince cabinet that we can continue doing this. Those are some of the controllables I talked about. One of the controllable, excuse me, the non-controllables I want to talk about is my mobility rate. So, just to give you guys a little bit of data, I had 351 kids come in my building and out of my building last year. So, being able to track those students is very difficult to find out where they go, whether that's
047going to another school, if they're going to drop out, if they're going back to their own their native countries. So, we in the past have not been able to really get some I call them cheap points inside of our UIP. we don't get the dropout rate. So, you always want to stay below the 5%. Last year, we were fortunate enough to fall below the 2% and get the meats category. This year, we are not. So, we went back into the approaching category. And some of those points really hurt us, especially with Thorn High School because we consistently consistently revolve around that 42 score. So, again, I talked about some of those controls and uncontrollables. Um, I think if I had to ask you guys for any type of support, I think we all know that
048relationships are the number one piece of success inside of a high school. I just ask that you continue to support the initiatives to retain and and and attract quality educators because I know firsthand that that's the most important part. Thank you. >> Thank you, Mr. Ariano. Uh does anybody have any questions for either Lee or Charlie? >> I don't necessarily have questions, but um being a former and probably future Thornton parent. I know the good work that goes in. And um I did not I was not able to go down and see the RISE program classroom yesterday at the sack meeting. I had to leave a little bit early, but I do plan on coming and seeing the kids in action because what we learned about it, it was it's pretty amazing and a great
049opportunity for students. Um I think too is just educating the parents who were at the sack meeting about graduation rates and what that means. Um uh you know I think there's this they did not realize that if a student takes more than four years to graduate that it actually hurts the data. They just thought as long as they graduated. Um, and so just helping understand that as well. And we, um, and then also, uh, yeah, just having a newcomer center at the high school and taking, um, those students growth and achievement in as well where they are. um and not turning them away and giving them those opportunities. It might hurt some of that data, but at the same time, it's giving these students an opportunity that they otherwise would not have. And they might
050not meet the benchmarks that the state expects or holds um at the time frame that they do, but they they get there. So um so thank you for your work. >> I guess I just had a real quick question on the rise. So um director Assad Lucas brought it up in work study and it sounds really great. Is it mandatory or are is there a set that they're feeling that they have to get into it or is it voluntary? >> So this is the first year that we're doing it. We modeled it after the Ohana program in Prairie View. So the first year we really had the counselors really select students that were attending school may maybe had a traumatic experience that happened the first couple years that set them off. And again typically these
051students are about a year to year and a half behind. Um so we actually had 31 students excuse me we had 35 students that we originally started with that were between that nine credit and 11 credit mark. And when we talked to the students about it they opted themselves into it. So it's voluntary right now. I do have a feeling that that's going to build just again hearing about the program and hearing about the excitement around it. It's going to build. I have a feeling that's going to become an application based kind of a piece once we get there. >> And all I wanted to do is just acknowledge what you said about mobility rates having a detrimental impact on, you know, where things land with the performance framework. And I wish that there there
052were different um approaches to that that took into account mobility rates particularly with our title schools. Um so I just wanted to acknowledge what you said there. The other thing I wanted to um say is I'm I was really excited to hear about the RISE program as well because I see that as one instance of trying to provide a you know multi-tered systems of support. So um as I'm listening to folks talk I'll be especially curious to hear about how MTSS is playing out for your schools um or difficulties you might be having if you are planning on mentioning that and uh you know what we can do to support you all more effectively in that space. I just want to say thank you for doing the hard work and to be persistent and I'm
053going to come visit >> with a Thornton shirt. >> I will. I have a couple. >> Scott, I got one for you. >> All right. Next. >> Thank you very much. At this point, we'll transition to Scott Simon and hearing from about the middle school level and then from each of the middle school principles. Thank you board for allowing me to speak about our important work at the middle school level and more specifically about our middle school work at our three priority improvement schools. Uh middle schools will continue to work on implementing uh performance management tools. Each school will have three major improvement strategies. an instructional major improvement strategy, a improvement strategy based on helping and increasing a student sense of belonging as we heard in the high school. And a third major improvement strategy
054that's co-written by the district to support the implementation of a highquality instructional material, my perspectives uh in our English language arts classes. Our instructional major improvement strategies are designed to build consistent grade level instruction and expectations in each of our middle school classrooms. In major improvement strategy one, schools have implemented their sprint cycle work to implement a catalyzing practice that will be consistently seen throughout their building while supporting teachers through observation and feedback cycles while also building upon their collaborative planning structures. All of this work is in service uh of all of our school's goals to reach the 55th median growth percentile in both English language arts and in math. Additionally, we'll have a major improvement strategy that is more uh school-based in terms of autonomy in terms of the uh building and increasing the
055students sense of belonging in each building. Finally, all of our schools are imple implementing my perspectives a highquality instructional material curriculum and English language arts. This is a second order change initiative for our teachers and leaders. While acknowledging this work has been challenging, I could not be more proud of our ELA educators, their instructional coaches, and our building leaders have as we have uh begun this work. I also want to just publicly thank our three principles in the middle school level in priority improvement. We know that being a principal is very lonely work. Being a principal in priority improvement and turnaround uh is extraordinarily lonely. and I just want to appreciate their hard work, their dedication to their schools. Uh we know it's difficult, but we are also confident in their leadership and their plans
056to change outcomes for our kids. With that, I'm going to pass the mic to Mr. McCarthy at Thornton Middle. >> Thank you. And uh thank you for allowing me to speak. Um I don't feel real lonely right now. Um, as Scott went through our major improvement strategies, we also ha we have uh a data culture and instruction uh MIS, a student supports and culture MIS and a talent development uh MIS, which also includes how we will be implementing uh my perspectives this year. Um, we were really disappointed when the data came in this spring. We had indicators that the data was going to be better. Um we had improved map scores. We had improved other things that I'll talk about in a second. Um but after um a brief time of morning um we got
057back to work, revisited the plan um and also looked to see where we had successes last year that we could um amplify for this year. So last year, um, we were able to move up our scores, not to the 50th percentile, which was the goal, but we moved all of our grade levels in all content areas on CAMASS growth. Um, ELA, we moved the school 9.5% uh percentile points. Thanks, Dave. And, um, six percentile points in math. So, while that's significant, it's not good enough. Um, but I think it does show us that we're on the right path and that the strategies we began to implement last year and really become proficient at are starting to pay dividends. On the culture side of things, um, we've reduced suspensions at our school by 20% over the
058past two years. And as of uh the end of September, um, we had 29 suspensions this year compared to 89 last year. So, we continue to really drop those suspensions. That's a that's a tribute to um my team's work at keeping kids in in class. It's a a tribute to the increased skill level of our teaching staff and um I think our students wanting to be in school and developing that culture. And it's not just about not suspending kids. when you don't suspend kids, they get to be in school and learn. And so that has a a larger impact. Um, another piece of the culture that uh I think is really critical is um this year we have all of our core classroom teachers are returning teachers. So all of our teams are intact. We
059can continue the work that we started last year as opposed to starting again in the work this year. And I have actually never experienced this before as a leader of a school and it's a really cool place to be actually. Um and then uh in terms of retention, we're seeing that that unfold in other ways. Uh we monitor we rank our teachers in terms of the supports they might need in classroom management at the beginning of the last two years. Last year at this time we had 15 teachers that we thought uh were in dire need of intense coaching around classroom management. This year we have four. Um eight of those teachers were with us all last year and came back and we saw steady improvement and they're starting off well. So again this is
060a testimony to the work that um our coaches and admin staff are doing and the power of retaining good quality staff. Um, I'll leave it at that and uh open for any questions, but um again, thanks for being here. >> Any questions or comments from those 15 educators that needed that more intensive work to the four? How many of those were the core educators that you retained? >> Two. Okay. And I just also want to give shout out as a former Thornton middle parent school parent. Um appreciate your work and what you do for kids. So thanks. >> I too want to thank you Marty for all the because I know we've had conversations. It's not easy. >> So thank you for being persistent and hanging in there. >> It's not easy but it's definitely
061worth it. Yeah. >> Are are you seeing similar um shifts in students in and out or >> Yeah. >> groups? Yeah. >> Yeah. We I don't know the number because it's not a metric that um matters in our school performance. Uh but we serve the same community that Charlie does and most of the same families. Um, I will say like these aren't exact numbers, so don't quote me exactly, but we were projected, which means we had signs that 75 or so students were going to be enrolled at the start of this year. Um, in the first two weeks, 100 of those students were not enrolled in the school anymore. and then two weeks later 80 well 50 to 60 other students had enrolled. So in terms of percentage of school population I would say it's
062probably pretty similar to Thorn High School. >> Thank you Matt. >> Hello everybody. Thank you again like everybody else has said for welcoming us here tonight. I look forward to the chance to tell you about what we're working on at Shadow Ridge Middle School. So, similar to what many of my colleagues have shared, we are definitely in the space of continuous improvement. Um, I want to name first some of our root causes that we're looking at and some of our uh ways to tackle those through our major improvement strategies and then like Mr. Ariano, a couple things that are kind of bubbling up that demonstrate a bit of a pattern I think as well. um we need to really focus on our math and ELA growth. We were very very disappointed as well. Similar to
063what Mr. McCarthy said, um after a brief period of mourning and reflection, um really looked at what we were doing and it is the right work and I'm very confident in that. I think some things that have played into the challenges with not seeing the growth that we want to see are some of the staff turnover problems that we've had. We had a very intact staff for a very long time and that's been a bit in flux. Um, just as a different mental exercise, I was sitting down and looking at what staffing had looked like over the four years. This is my fourth year as principal had looked like and it had changed radically over time. So, that was interesting to see. Um, regardless of that, we're really leaning into what we have labeled the
064RAM way. um some formative practices that we have made consistent across the board that's been in place for a couple of years and I think at the end of last year or through last year um we must have lost a bit of our eyes on the prize and and lacked some consistencies there. So we're doubling down on that um in terms of what we are looking for. our three major improvement strategies. Our first is around grade level instruction in math and language arts with a goal of getting a 55 uh median growth percentile which demonstrates a year's worth of growth over a year's worth of time. Um I think that's definitely attainable and we have the pieces and parts in place. I think what had been not completely lacking but not as tight as I
065want it to be and is now is the observation feedback loops and the sprint cycles that we've put in place. So we have short bursts of energy devoted to small components of the RAMway and the teaching and learning that we we want to see happening that we put in place and we observe teachers frequently on that. Excuse me. Target then the interventions that we want to do and we have implemented learning clinics with those teachers that are tiered based on what their needs are and then we come back to look at where the improvement is and then kind of rinse and repeat with different things as we're working through that. um grade level content and rigor is huge and the high-quality instructional materials that we have through my perspectives have really helped shed some light
066on where those gaps were and continue to be. Um and then also we are are looking at sense of belonging. So one of the big changes that we put in place this year we had some different challenges with declining enrollment and that combined with our our budgetary crisis at last year. We had to look at creative ways into how we could run a school. One of the ways that we landed on was a bit of a hybrid model. We walked away from the core model of middle school teaching where it's more of a junior high model. Students still travel with their own students. We don't have mixed grade classes, but we have an advisory every single day taught by um a core teacher where we focus on capturing kids hearts, which is a program that
067we've implemented last year, which is we've seen a lot of success with in terms of reducing exclusionary practices and building a stronger culture of belonging as well as dignity um and belonging lessons that our counselors have helped implement. So through those we are looking to improve our sense of belonging. Um I really think that we have got all the tools in place to do what we need to do. There are challenges within and outside of our control. Um but the ones inside our control we're really um locking down on and and seeing the improvements already. We are much lower in terms of and that's been a multi-year goal for us in terms of exclusionary practices with suspensions. Um we have much different tools in our toolkit where um through the the leadership of the um
068department that Lori Bailey helps lead. We have put some learning modules in place for students so they are in the office working and learning some things and doing that before we get them back into class so that they don't have to go home and and waste that learning time. So I feel like we're equipped to make the changes that we need to. There's still a lot of hard work to do, but um we stand ready. So, if there's any questions or comments, I'd love to hear them. >> Anybody? >> You said that your staff was pretty new. It had changed radically over the past four years. >> Yes. >> How how new can you estimate this year? >> Um, we had nine new teachers this year. And so, we're a bit we're on the smaller
069side of things, especially for the size of building that we have. We have under just under 600 students. So, we're at 589. Nine new teachers. It was about 15 20% of our staff. >> Okay. Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> That was could also be a similar question of mine, but I guess to kind of piggy back off that, do you have any unfilled positions currently? >> No. And we're very thankful for that. It's a lovely thing. Um, but it is so important to get the right people in there because >> as Marty alluded, having to retach and we we are happy to do that, but it's it makes such a difference year two, year three that you have with a group of people where you're speaking the same language and doing the same things.
070>> Yeah. I've been into your PLC and watched your PLC's work and it's very intentional and very focused. >> Thank you. Yeah. >> Thank you for your work. >> Yes. Thank you. >> Yeah. Miss Stone. >> All right, Sarah. >> Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me, although I hope you don't have to have me again. Um, we I with the risk of sounding like a broken record, we're all uh in very similar spaces in middle school. Um, we are working on our math and ELA growth. Also pretty disappointed. We um barely crossed the line into um improvement last year by just a couple percentage points. So, we ran the risk of falling back under. Um, and have it been my first year, unlike these guys, veterans here, um, we made put a lot of different
071practices in place. And while it was only, it really was our third or fourth year at Northland Middle in the transformation network. Um, I would say it was the first year where we really started to implement some of that accountability and consistency. And so it felt like a first year all over again, which caused a lot of um angst and um new learning. Um as a new principal, you kind of want to just go in and get the feel for things and not change a bunch. But with the sense of urgency we knew we were under, I felt like I needed to make some big moves. And I think it's pushed us in the right direction, but there was still some um sort of restraint from other teachers last year that we worked through. So,
072I'm hopeful that continuing the work we started next year or last year this year will continue to grow um where we're at. We did barely just slide back down. Um we too like Thornton High School have around that 40th 44 percentile and so we are just barely under. So, there's a lot of um opportunity to get back up into improvement for next year. We have been focusing on our formative practices in the classroom. um what students need as far as best practices, the consistency um around making sure every expectation is present in all of the classrooms and that if it's not there's accountability for that. Um it looks a lot like accountability at Matt school where we do many clinics and they get invited to come and they get the learning that they need differentiated
073for their whatever wherever they are lacking and then they set a goal and it becomes part of their normal observation feedback cycle. um grade level content and rigor. We have the same um type of um I don't want to say problem, but I can't think of another word where teachers assume that our kids at Northland Middle can't perform grade level. And so we're very happy to have the ELA resource. My perspective is to be able to not have to debate what grade level is, what proficiency looks like that that just become get is given to us and then we can help our students rise to that occasion. Um, and then the other around grade level rigor and content is we had um I had 12 new teachers this year. Um, we have a high turnover
074at North Glenn Middle the last few years. Um, we were at a point I worked at North Glenn Middle 11 years ago and the turnover rate was non-existent. We were in performance. Um, I've seen our kids be able to do this work and it's been really challenging to find people that want to work at Northland Middle. Um, as we talked on the panel the other night, there's just a lot of challenges with with Northland Middle and we don't have the luxury of getting a very deep pool of qualified teachers. And so, we work with what we have and some are really great and they come out brand new, coachable, and then there's some that don't really make it. And so, we are starting over fresh. um every year and so that keeping that grade level
075content and rigor consistent over the years that has become a barrier for us in that space. Um and then the last one is our sense of belonging. We've been focusing on academic sense of belonging as well. That has been um something that they we haven't focused on. We used to do a lot of practices um at North Glenn Middle like honor role where we have a whole kning ceremony where they get kned for being on the honor roll and that has gone away. So, we we're bringing that back this year to really try to show the value in getting good grades and what that means. Um, so you're all invited. It's at the end of October. Um, I was hoping to get a real horse. So, if you could help me out with that, I
076would. Um, that's the support I would appreciate. Um, we really are going big over there. So, we're doing a lot of practices in the SEAL space to try to get students to feel like they belong, not just with each other because that is so difficult. Um, but if they maybe feel a sense of belonging with their academics and in our school with our school pride, maybe that will open the door to support each other. That's it. I that brings back memories because um several of us have a history with North Glenn Middle one way or another. And I was part of one of those nighting ceremonies not a long time ago. I got to wear one of those felt little thing. You probably still have the same ones. >> Yeah, I think so. send send
077us calendar invites. >> Okay, sounds good. >> And just a follow-up question. Um, you you had mentioned that your IEP percentage was 24% of your North Glenn Middle School students. Is that correct? >> Yes. Yeah. How how has that shifted or changed since last year? Do you have any sort of percentage numbers there? Or the year before? >> Yeah. I can't remember the exact percentage from last year, but it was similar to this year. It didn't rise too much. It just definitely didn't drop. Um we have been given the max amount of learning specialists you can have from the um sped department right now which is five. And um one of the things we tried to implement this year was a spectrum of needs uh which means that it involves pullout classes for kids that
078need it plus the co-op model um you know along with all the other extension type of classes and it's just ran us really thin. I think on paper when you just look at numbers of how many kids you think that five adults, you know, they that case load seems approachable, but then when you look at the needs of the actual students, you're stretched even more with it. And so we're working through what that could look like. And I just hope that it doesn't mean we can't offer our spectrum of services that we need for all of our kids because we don't have the staff to provide that. >> Yeah, I think that's an important context to understand. Um, so that's why I asked that question. >> The other thing I was going to say, two
079things. If you can get a horse there, I'm going to be there. >> We're going to >> Yeah. Second thing is I just want to express appreciation particularly for the middle school um principles and teachers here because I've always said I could probably handle high school. You know, I taught college. They're not that different. I could probably handle elementary school, although they would be telling me I need to do my job and stop playing with the kids. Um but those middle school kids are intense. And I have an eighth grader right now. you don't know who they're going to be from one second to the next because of the hormones and the life changes and everything else. And my heart goes out to you and I just have a very profound sense of appreciation because
080I know it's not easy. So, >> thank you. >> A few things. So, first off, just to piggy back off the horse, I have recently learned that you can adopt a horse from the Dump Friends League for a small fee of $250. Um, I would love to house that horse afterwards. However, I've been informed if I bring home one more pet, um, it will not end well. So, if you can find a home for it, I would be glad to help with that. Um, so second of all is what we talked earlier about attendance and the importance of attendance. And I'm guessing this probably is reflective of all three schools. What does your attendance rate look like? >> It's very similar to Marty's and Charlie's. We have um a huge migrant population. We lost a
081lot of students as well. Um and we believe that they are the newcomers. We had we have 200 we were last year we had 211 MLS in our building out of 600 and this year we were slotted for the same amount but um not as many have shown up. However, we have um received other students in the meantime. So it's very similar to Marty's data. >> Do you feel like attendance rate has impacted >> some of the scores? >> Yeah, 100%. Right. Yeah. I think kids that, you know, don't um attend and then it's very spotty. It's really hard to get them um just on a on a role in certain classes to be able to um learn and then reflect their learning on those assessments um correctly. >> You want to give the microphone
082to Marty? He was raising his hand. >> Thank you. >> I was just clarifying, are we did you did you want information on attendance rate or mobility rate? I mean I guess both in a way like >> yeah attendance has been really difficult. I I mean historically at other schools I've been at be prior to co I would have been disappointed if our attendance rate had dropped below 96%. >> Um we've been stubbornly at 82 to 84% over the past five years. over the we saw we've seen a slight uptick in uh September. We're up to 85. So um that's been I think a place where I would ask for all hands on deck help with ideas or resources because I don't think it's a sol we don't have a >> great solution yet. >>
083Yeah. Okay. Um I I don't even feel like seeing this because I know it's already happening, but I see um your free and reduce is 82% and here on this first day of um the federal shutdown and knowing what we have coming down at the state level, state budget and um having to write that uh with the free meals um obviously >> if those go away, you're going to have a bigger impact. I would imagine kids who don't have full bellies are even harder to teach. So, um, >> often before lunch was free, we were paying for student meals because they would sit there hungry and they wouldn't. So, we really appreciated that. We don't know what we'll do when that goes away. >> And I I mean think that we need to think through
084that if if I know you said, Superintendent Gaddi, that we we may be losing that in the middle of the year depending on what the state legislature does and um, you know, even what happens at the federal level with SNAP. So just something I want to I know you guys are monitoring so again I don't feel like I should have to say it. >> Yeah I'm food I'll just say the key thing in our state is what happens on November 4th at the ballot box about retaining uh revenue from existing taxes and perhaps extending some uh revenue measures on higher income earners to reduce deductions that they have to pay for this. So, we'll know more I think soon after election day about implications here >> and we'll learn more about that in a little
085mo in a few moments because we have a special guest to tell us. >> Okay. >> Thank you for your work. >> Uh secondary principles, thank you so much um for everything you do. I mean, it's just I can tell how hard you work and I can tell you're tired. Um, do we want to shift the folks from the back to the front? >> Certainly. >> So, I'm just going to see if the board members uh if you have a desire for the secondary principles to stay until you take action on the motion or if you're okay with them exiting now that they've answered your questions because they may uh benefit from getting home and getting ready to get back in the saddle tomorrow bright and early. >> You are free to go. >> Thank
086you for being here. >> Thank you. Okay, back row. Move up to the front row. I sound like I'm at a swim meet or something. That's how they do that when they're heating swimmers in swim meets. >> All right. Does seem like a little bit of dosey do. Um, thank you uh, members of the board for allowing uh, us the opportunity to share how we're supporting all of our elementary schools and particularly those in priority improvement this year. I'm Toby Bassoff and I'm here with Terresa Gilbreth and Amanda Boy. Uh, we're the team of executive directors overseeing our elementary schools and K8 schools across our five-star district. We are focused on ensuring that our schools are grounded in a clear vision of consistent highquality learning experiences for every student. You heard Lee, you heard Scott
087talk about that. It's consistent across all all levels. Our goal is for strong instructional days to build on one another so that all students experience both academic success and social belonging. To achieve this, we are working closely with school leaders to ensure their unified improvement plans are tightly aligned with district major improvement strategies and goals. This alignment ensures that school level efforts are connected to district priorities, resources are deployed strategically, and supports are coordinated effectively. Teresa, >> in cooperation with CDE, we are leveraging performance management tools in all of our schools, uh, which is a tool that leaders use to monitor progress towards their end ofear goals. These tools help schools focus on meaningful growth and allow us to identify patterns across classrooms and schools so that we can respond quickly with targeted support. Throughout
088the year, we are bringing together school leaders and their teams to engage in instructional walkthroughs and providing feedback in order to gain instructional and continuous improvement. In addition to these structured se uh sessions, our ED team is conducting monthly one-on-one site visits with our all of our leaders to monitor implementation, coach our principles, and to support their staff in problem solving challenges as they arise. We thought you really wanted to hear from all three of us on the elementary ed team. So, um, again, I'm Amanda Boyy, but really through these practices we've talked about this evening at all three levels, um, we're emphasizing ongoing and bite-size feedback to support continuous growth. With these structures in place, we're really confident and with the leaders that we have in these seats, we're confident that we're going to
089see measurable academic growth and improved experiences for our students in every school. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Kristen. >> Thanks, Amanda. >> Good evening, members of the board and Mr. Gdowski. Thank you for welcoming us tonight. Um, at Mali Drive Elementary, we unfortunately slipped from performance into priority improvement this past year and we have um like like our colleagues after some time of mourning and um disappointment, we've really driven in sorry, we've really um gone into the data with a deep dive to look at what systems were working well, what systems need to be changed, um and what efforts we need to make to get back into a performance and to make every day just right for all of our students. Um we have two major improvement strategies and they are
090aligned to our district major improvement strategy. Our first one is around intentional planning and collaborating to make sure that we are offering um instruction for each student to ensure rigorous access to grade level content for all students. And our second major improvement strategy is um intentionally planning again individually and collaboratively to make sure that we are fostering um a a great sense of social and emotional and academic belonging for all of our students. We have um kept well I'm sorry let me back up to some of our performance challenges that we've identified um with our reading growth. We have had consistent difficulty with our fourth grade cohort who are now our fifth graders this year. Um demonstrating growth at the 50th percentile or higher. Um this past year their 2025 CAMass data was at the
09138th percentile. Um, we have also identified that we have 60% of our students in grades kindergarten through third have been identified with a significant reading deficiency and are currently on read plans. We also recognize that our um all of our students um growth and achievement in math is not where it needs to be. It's currently at the 51st percentile and our fourth and fifth grade CAMASS growth and achievement in math for 2025 was at the 26th percentile. Some of the um strategies that we have put in place for the last 3 years that we believe are working and working well. we are continuing with and tweaking um especially when onboarding our new teachers. So we have five um new classroom teachers this year and some of those implementations are around meeting weekly for DDI that's
092datadriven instruction where our teachers meet as a grade level with administrators and our instructional coaches to come up with um data cycles in reading and in math. and then um making sure that we are looking at that data on a weekly basis and identifying what students are making the appropriate growth each week and which ones are not um and what we're going to do about it. The other system that we are continuing is weekly collaboration where our teachers meet again with administration and our instructional coaches to um look at our grade level content and our lessons and our units and um ensure that we are planning for rigorous instruction and um with that also getting into some lesson studies where our teachers are either uh video recording starting their lessons and then looking at them
093together or we are um offering support so that our teachers can go to each other's classrooms um while they're teaching those lessons and and be able to further their collaboration. Um, a couple of things that we've added this year that I'm really excited about is we are in year one of implementation with um, capturing kids hearts and already even though it's October 1st, we have seen such a dramatic improvement especially in the area of behavior and attendance and I'm super excited to to tell you that um, the last 30 days our attendance rate has been 91.45% which is a 3.62% um um improvement compared to this time last year. And in terms of behavior, at this point last year we had 17 suspensions and this year we've had two. We would like to get to
094zero, but um we we are really seeing a difference in the climate and culture and sense of belonging at our school. Um another thing that we did was we um we went to our third grade team of teachers at the end of last year and they are um a really um high performance team. So they they collaborate very well. Um even when they have their own time, they're constantly looking at data and and um collaborating together. And we asked them to loop up with their students to fourth grade this year and within 2 minutes they were like, "Okay, yes, we'll do that." And so, um, we're super excited that that that cohort of students and that team of teachers went from third grade to fourth grade this year and they are doing so well and
095it's incredible to see what a difference it makes like day one starting and h already having those relationships built um and they are knocking it out of the park. We um we have our fifth grade students who are who were our fourth grade students last year. Um our social emotional learning specialists are doing lots of push um sidebyside coaching and pushing into those classrooms. So offering a lot of support that that cohort of students um is our highest impact of of co of students in terms of IEPs, 504s and um behavior improvement plans and they are they are doing well. Um so I'm happy to report that. >> Thank you. Uh questions or comments for Kristen? Um, thank you for being here and all the work you do. Really appreciate you. Uh, a couple questions.
096So, you said, um, the fourth grade, so now fifth grade this year, but it's fourth grade cohorts, um, their scores, right, were the one. Was there any indication with that specific cohort from in third grade that there was some struggles or do you think like it is more possibly related to the emotional uh social support things like I guess I'm asking you to make some assumptions. >> Thank you for that question. I I um I'll address it and you let me know if if I'm like going the wrong way. So that cohort of students I've had the privilege of working with since they were second graders. Um and they have always been I would say our toughest cohort. >> And when we look back at when CO was and that they were kindergarteners and first
097graders during that time. So their start to school we recognized was not a typical start. Um, we also recognize that year after year after year, as rigorous instruction does, it gets harder, especially when you have students that maybe aren't hitting the mark in second grade and aren't hitting the mark in third grade, and then by fourth grade, it's it's super difficult. Um, we also had last year, unfortunately, our enrollment did not come in as high as we wanted it to. And so, um, by the end of September, about this time last year, we reduced that cohort from three rounds to two. Um, and then right after winter break, one of our teachers, one of the two went on leave. So, we had a substitute teacher teaching that classroom for most of the the second semester.
098>> Well, and that was actually going to lead into my second question, which is related to that is um you talked about having five new classroom teachers and how many of those were third through fifth, which you know has to focus on testing. >> One of them is in third grade. Okay. None in fourth, none in fifth. So we have >> last year, right? >> I'm sorry. >> So So that new one was >> I'm sorry. This year. So last year >> last year actually all of our third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers had been returning teachers. Yes. >> With the exception of the one going on on the extended leave. >> Yes. Um I should point out though last year we had three rounds of fifth and um one of our teachers was a
099returning teacher who had been in the business world for quite a long time and wanted to be a teacher. It was her second year with us. Um she after lots of coaching um year 1 she was doing such an amazing job last year and around mid October um some of her business colleagues approached her with an offer of a lot more money and she was having a hard time um making ends meet and um so she resigned in October and we were not able to hire um a qualified teacher until January for that third round of fifth. >> Well, and I asked this because I think and especially I mean at all grade levels, but really at the elementary level, relationships really matter and just building that like and I love that the third grade
100teachers are looping up this year. I mean, I know I think some people have feelings about, but I I love that I I had personal experience as a parent with a teacher looping um and the growth that those students made, including my own child, but um was pretty amazing. So, yeah, thank you. >> Thank you. It sounds like you've analyzed this very methodically and you're going to be fine. >> Thank you for your support. >> Yeah. So, if I could, I just want to jump in here. Uh, I could do this when everyone's done, but I'll just jump in now. It's often so frustrating to me to hear the rhetoric and the narrative around public education and the folks who are critical about various rates of achievement and grade level performance by students. I hope
101uh that you're hearing from our principles and I think the educators that are here in support not a bunch of excuses but a lot of brutal facts that really do have impacts upon what we can achieve with our students whether it's mobility rates, teacher turnover, higher incidence of students with disabilities, kids who have real challenge in their life that affects behavior. Um, those are real facts that have legitimate serious implications on how present kids can be and how much growth and achievement we're able to provide each year. There's that reality. I think often people like to label uh schools where our achievement isn't at the level that they think it should be as failing and they like to label our staff and leaders as deficient and incompetent. And I'll just say uh by way of
102background and I could say exemplary things about lots of the leaders who've been here tonight, but many of you may not know that car that Christian was a Cardo principal of the year during her tenure at Riverdale Elementary years ago. And she was selected for that honor because of the really the strong and consistent growth and achievement that school did. Um a very competent person as are all of the leaders here today and the colleagues of Sarah that are in the back. um and you can be really strong at your craft and very competent, very passionate, and that doesn't mean that you're immune from having real struggle in terms of getting uh your students in your school to the place that you want them to be. So, I just wish there were more people who
103were often slinging arrows our way, not just at Adams 12, but at public education more broadly, because I think the honest discussion we were having here would just be refreshing for some people to actually pay attention to and listen to before they're shooting off their mouth about what public ed and and is not. So, thank you, Kristen. >> Thank you, Chris. Sarah. All right. Well, thank you. Like everyone said, thanks for having us tonight. I'm Sarah Roberts, proud principal of Northmore. My assistant principal, Keelia, is here along with, as you can see, numerous staff members. Um, I would like to express appreciation to them because they are the champions of Northmore. I want to acknowledge that seeing our SPF drop was unexpected. uh we were very close to a performance rating and this really did
104prompt us to take a deeper look at what are the root causes. So at the same time I would also like to recognize that our staff has built a welcoming, respectful, caring school community as you can see. Um very heartfelt to to have them all walk in. Um they do consistently put students at the forefront of their work. So through our review um admin instructional coaches, our ILT, ourselves, um our executive director Toby and other ESC partners, we identified some inconsistencies starting with our tier one practices. The performance management tool has been invaluable in guiding our work and keeping us focused. We realized that not only did we need a clear focus, but we needed some strong support from administration and instructional coaches. So, our main focus right now is strengthening that tier one instruction.
105And that starts with uh clear and highquality learning intentions and success criteria, really thoughtful lesson planning and consistent schoolwide behavior supports. We plan to address this by having classroom teachers with support from instructional coaches and administration plan and implement targeted small groupoup instruction for enrichment and intervention. Sorry, there is like a bug all around me. It It didn't bother me until now. Okay. Based on based on our student data and academic monitoring. So, and academic monitoring is really teachers walking around doing laps giving real time feedback. Uh we progress monitor our map through MAP and Dibbles data, our benchmark unit tests, read plan checks. We are doing three and six week sprint cycles depending on the calendar. Um, we are continuing those year-long sprint cycles that will include classroom observations, coaching, participation, and giving and
106providing bite-size feedback. We are continuing to build on our PBIS practices addressing systemic gaps that we have identified in just recently we did an inventory. We will continue with our professional development and staff practices that will focus on trauma-informed practices, culturally responsive teaching in hopes to improve our social and academic belonging that aligns with the district UIP as well. Tier one instructional and behavioral practices including engagement and belonging strategies through the 3:1 positive redirection, positively phrased directions. uh we are using Kagan structures which is collaboration among students which will promote student voice and we're really hoping with this clear focus and ongoing monitoring that using the PM tool continuing our sprint cycles we are really confident that we will see improvement in student achievement and growth scores because we are this close to getting back
107into improvement and it would be really lovely to go back to performance where we were years ago before my time but here. So, thank you so much. Um, I just want to say thank you and I want to thank everybody else from Northmore that came out to support. They weren't supporting you. You were all supporting each other and and it shows that you're all committed to doing the work that needs to be done so that you won't be back here at this time next year or we'll be celebrating. >> I know. >> You can do it. We can do it. We can do it. >> Yeah. >> Well, and just to piggy back off that, I think again kind of going what Chris said, what Lori said is everyone being here tonight with, you know,
108having to be at work in less than 12 hours. Um, >> and we had conferences last night. and conferences last night goes to show your dedication to your kids and ensuring that they get what they need. So, thank you. Really appreciate Sarah team, everyone. So, thanks. >> Thank you, >> Susie. >> Okay. >> All right. Well, thank you guys um for the opportunity to get to share about the improvement plan for Rocky Mountain Elementary School. Um like you've heard so many people say tonight, we were not anticipating being in priority improvement. We were within one percentage point last year away from improvement and unfortunately now we are within two percentage points. Um, and that was disappointing and I think our internal data progress monitoring would have led us to think that we were on the
109track to bump into improvement. Um, so we spent some time as a school diving into our priority performance challenges and really identified just overall growth and achievement in both math and uh, reading as our focus areas. We talked a lot with our instructional leadership team about kind of those root causes of why we may have seen um that performance below the 50th growth percentile, just below the 50th growth percentile in read or in literacy. And um you know, we were so close and so that kind of tells us like what we're doing is probably a good practices. And so continuing some of those practices around lesson internalization, you know, giving students feedback, but just needing to get to a place where we're doing that more consistently and and better to be honest. Um, we took
110a huge dip though in our math instruction and that was also very shocking and we spent a lot of time talking about why is that? Why is there inconsistency in our tier one instruction specifically in the math space? And so we talked a lot about, you know, implementing our new writing resource last year and really plowing ahead with our main focus in that planning space through our PLC work and really just thinking that the work we had done the prior year would sustain us in the practices around our math um instruction and it it just it didn't. So this year we have um you know we have similar major improvement strategies. The first one is really around consistency to support rigorous and relevant learning. And through that, we're going to continue with practices that we
111had in place around meeting collaboratively with our teachers twice a week. Those are facilitated by um one of our two instructional coaches, depending on which grade level they support. And the real focus within that is getting to a deep lesson internalization space. And we are prioritizing one planning a week for literacy and one planning a week for math. And through that work too, we've also spent some time at the start of the school year to really clarify our vision for instruction. We have 13 new certified staff at Rocky Mountain this year. Five out of six in our primary grades are new to our school and some of them are brand new to teaching. So, we needed to take a step back and really identify what is the vision for instruction in both literacy and math
112this year. through that. Um, like I think Kristen talked about, we also do lesson study at Rocky Mountain and we've done this practice for a few years now and find a lot of benefit in it. So, it's teacher videoing lessons. We struggle to get subs to do live lesson studies, unfortunately. So, we have to use video. Um, and our teachers really like the idea. It's daunting at first to think about recording yourself teaching and then showing that to your teammate or a vertical team, but at the end of every session, they always get so much out of that. So it's embedded professional learning without it having to be led from anyone at the school. It's being led by colleague to colleague. So we're continuing with that and by the end of the year teachers will
113have the opportunity to do two lesson studies. Um we also uh know that we need to increase the amount of feedback that we're giving to students. So in the moment of error we can correct some of the misconceptions and we've created a schoolwide professional growth goal this year. and our whole school will be working on academic monitoring and feedback to students. Um, and then like you've heard too, we're using sprint cycles to monitor our progress. So, the instructional methods that we're really training teachers on what we're um, you know, we're sprinting out into classrooms and we're looking to see those in action. We're giving teachers immediate feedback and then we're also collecting that feedback on a data tracker and then every week we put that data into our weekly update for staff so that people
114can have an idea of where we are as a school with implementing those. Um our second major improvement strategy is around fostering a sense of academic and social belonging for our students. our students. I think there is a pretty strong sense of social belonging and we need to really work on that academic sense of belonging and having students really own that learning piece and see themselves in those rigorous spaces and um grade level towards grade level standards. So within that goal, we really work on having tight procedures and routines. At Rocky Mountain, we really strive to say this a lot, high expectations with high care. And that's what we really believe every day. And so we know though that that comes through really intentional planning and preparation for our students. So strong classroom routines and
115rituals, having high behavioral expectations. Um you know really having um that ongoing attendance. I like you heard tonight our attendance is also just chronically stuck below 90. I think we've been at like 88.6 for the last few years and it's really frustrating. Um and so we every year try to focus on how can we really build that sense of belonging for students so that they're wanting to you know be at school and really motivated to be there. Um this year new within this goal we have implemented some student leadership opportunities through student council having student ambassadors and then we're bringing it back old school to having classroom buddies. And so we have strategically paired grade levels together so that older students and younger students have the opportunity to come together monthly and read together, do
116projects together, um work on that kind of sense of belonging across the school. And I think that we had our first round of those and the kids had such a great time. The teachers thought it was really meaningful and I am excited to be able to just see that as a consistent practice throughout the school year. Um and then within this goal is also our opportunity to continue that piece of monitoring of students. Um we want to make sure that we're getting student voice in the room, having practices that really elicit student voice and and getting students to like apply their their thinking and learning out there for others. And so we're implementing habits of discussion across our school as well. And um that's what our sprint cycle is on right now. Um and we're
117seeing some success. We had a little bit we were I think we were looking for too many things. the first two weeks we were looking for it. And so we had to this PL day we had to spend some time coming back to the basics of what are the habits of discussion one through four and and spend some time really getting granular. So we're trying to leverage those sprint cycles. Um we aren't new to the PM tool so we use it, we love it as well and that is our kind of guiding force to track our progress and our goals over time. I know what challenges you face in particular that are a little unique um being that I live down the street from you. But um once again, I appreciate you what you're doing
118and and I want to just say all of you and the secondary principles too being very intentional and thoughtful and uh thinking of this in terms of your school and what you need to do to improve. >> Yeah, I agree. Rocky Mountain obviously holds a dear place um as my mom worked there and you know my my stepson was on that scale of of the SS I mean wasn't SSN but close. So um it was it was the place we chose to send him and I think he got amazing support there. So, I appreciate it. And I just want to acknowledge as someone who also has a fifth grade and a first grade kinder age, um, you guys have, you know, they were kindergarteners during the pandemic or they were born in the pandemic. And
119I think that just needs to be reflected because that's those were two really challenging sets of kids and everyone in between. So, thank you. Yeah, I mean to echo what's been said in the in the work you do and I I comment on this I think most years I've been up here that all of our or the majority if not all of our schools since I've been on the board are title schools and um andor schools that have pretty similar demographics of students of title, which means that these students, you're meeting them with however they're showing up. And these are some of the most high need students, um, highly impacted students. uh you know a story that I share a lot so I'm sure everyone here has heard but um but I think it just
120reflects on how you guys sitting up here in front of us other schools that have set in front of us for our secondary schools is um when I was doing a school visit at my child's elementary school but I was there as a board member and went into a third grade class that and I knew the student and you know the teachers in doing instruction. I think it was math. And you know, students were engaging except for this one student had his head on the desk and she wasn't really she wasn't pushing him to engage. Um, find out later because the student's grandmother called at 5:00 a.m. telling him that they didn't have a choice to send him to school, that the police had been at the house most of the night. father who had
121severe mental health, drug addiction, being arrested in front of the kids, got hardly any sleep, obviously comes to school with little sleep and the trauma of father being arrested um and the disruption of family and she wasn't she had to meet him where he was. trying to push him to do his math worksheet was not going to it he he wasn't going to retain any information. It wasn't going to work. So, she met him where he was that day so then he could show up the way he needed to academically the next day. Um, and that's what you guys are doing, you know, and again going back to this is what people don't see with public education. This is what people don't see when you're in front of us is how you are how you're
122meeting kids where they are socially and emotionally in order to help them academically. Um so thank you because this work is not for the faint of heart. And so you guys I appreciate you beyond words. So, um, thank you for showing up for kids and meeting them where they are to help them succeed. >> And I guess I will just, um, second or third, everything that they've said so far is what I see as a group of principles who are working really hard to address what you know you can't address. Um, and as uh, Amamira pointed out, there are a lot of factors that you can't given the context of your schools. So, um, I've been to Principal P's school. It is a beautiful, joyful place, and I'm just not so sure that the performance
123framework is capturing that space. Um, so I just want to uh second what they said is I appreciate that even now you are looking at what you can do and trying to move the dial just in that space even though the um sometimes I feel like your constraints are bringing those walls in closer and closer. So thank you for what you do >> and you will move the dial. >> Ready. Okay. >> Director Assad Lucas. >> I >> Director Bastelli. >> Hi. >> Director Goldstein. >> Hi. >> Director Marsh Holen. >> I. >> Director Potter. >> Hi. >> Thank you for taking the risk of sitting in the hot seat. You can You are dismissed. >> Thanks all. Thanks, North team. >> Thank you, Northmore. >> Sarah, next time we'll have some bug spray there
124for you. Um, >> take a minute. Okay, we're gonna take a five minute break. Whatever. still made a big impression with her horse stuff. >> Dave Bay, are we ready? >> Certainly are. >> Okay, so first of all, back to item number two, district unified improvement plan. I will entertain a motion to approve the district unified improvement plans for Adams 12 five-star schools as presented. >> So moved. >> Second. >> Okay, Dave. Well, thank you very much. I, you know, it's great for you to hear from the schools and kind of what their focus is. And what I'm hoping is what you heard from them, you can see that line up directly to what we have in the district UIP. First, some context in terms of our UIP for this year. Um, we received a
125an improvement rating this year. Um, we were 4/10en of a percent below the cut point for performance. Um, you can see that reflected on the image of the performance framework there. Uh, obviously we have some work to do to get back into that per what we call a fully accredited rating or analogous to a performance rating. Um, this is the second year of using the online UIP simplified template and this is our first year as you heard schools reference their progress monitoring tools. This is the first year we are using a district progress monitoring tool. It's something we're requiring of all schools to really more closely monitor things on an ongoing basis as we go throughout the school year. We feel like that's best practice for the schools and that that should be best practice
126for us. And now I'm going to turn it over to Megan so she can talk about some higher level thinking related to the work in our district. >> Uh thank you board for allowing us an opportunity to spend time with you both in the work study session and now to talk about our theory of action that we started with last year as we were establishing what are our commitments and our goals as a system and what are we hoping to achieve um for our students as a result. And so really what we want to do is we want to remove any barriers that might be in place for students um and create opportunities for them to be able to develop to their full potential. Um and that's that's really where we started our work um
127last year. And with that we've just been enhancing and you've heard as we had an opportunity to spend time with our principles this focus on continuous improvement and excellent outcomes for our students. You can you heard principles referring to these strategies that they're addressing um with their schools whether it's collaborative PLC's deprivization of practice um high leverage um inclusion first instructional strategies and planning to that grade level standard and how critical that is for all of our students. And as a result, we have landed on our two major improvement strategies, which you also heard several of our schools have adopted those same strategies, which are to implement instruction for each student to ensure access to rigorous and relevant grade level learning, as well as engage students in learning partnerships that foster a sense of academic
128and social belonging. Last but not least, as part of this development of our plan, we talked about breaking down the school year into arcs of learning. As you heard principles talk about their sprint cycles, how do we make the change and the complexity of second order change concrete and tangible for our teachers who are navigating a lot of things um within the school context. And so we really spent a lot of time launching the school year talking about that strong start. How do we teach students the routines and structures of how to engage in school and get the most out of that experience? How do we implement those instructional routines for our students? And then as a result, building leaders developed their PM tools. And as you can see, is they move over the course
129of a school year. What they will do is they will determine the next priority for each additional sprint cycle based on the progress that educators are demonstrating within the school and the impact that it's having on student learning as a result. And the other strategy that we utilize this year is really breaking down the school year in how small the moments are that we get with our friends um to move the dial for them. 29 instructional days, 49 instructional days. And what's even more interesting about um as you look at this is that we actually have more instructional days on the back side of the school year um postassessment than we do pre-assessment with many of the accountability measures um that we're measured against. And so it's critical for us as well to have that
130finish strong um at the end of the year to serve as a catapult um to that strong start to the new school year. And so a few of our high-level summary of action steps um that we had an opportunity to discuss a a more in-depth level um during our work study session over the last two opportunities that I've had to spend time with you. is professional learning tied to the new teacher project also referred to as TNTP about trajectory changing schools tied to coherence, consistency, and belonging. Implementation of sprint cycles at all schools to focus on instructional improvement in small cycles. Implementation of progress monitoring tools at the district and at all schools to monitor school improvement strategies. implementation of my perspectives ELA curriculum resources at the middle school level, continued partnership with the Colorado
131Department of Education transformation network who I just I would be remiss without saying they have been critical partners with us um in our work in Adams 12 engaging in the comprehensive school observation feedback of tier one instruction by learning services. So making sure that our people that support educators in this field um in this building are as close to the field as possible. Um and then training and resources targeted at improving attendance and discipline outcomes including school engagement at five target schools um that Lori Bailey and her department are working at um working closely with so that we might scale up uh those practices and build that out across our system. And so Dave's going to talk about our progress monitoring. >> Um in terms of the the um the UIP itself, oftentimes the plan
132is written and does not generally often see the light of day after the fact. So one of the reason that we really adopt this progress monitoring tool is to keep it front and center on a daily basis and monthly basis and quarterly basis as we get all sorts of data coming in to see are we achieving the outcomes that we hope to achieve. And so in terms of progress monitoring, the school and district staff will be uh collaborating to monitor the implementation of our major improvement strategies through a number of ways. First, this is the district PM tool which you received along aligned to our two major improvement strategies you so you can see what the action steps we're taking over the course of the four quarters. Now, the one thing we'll acknowledge is we
133may think we know what we're going to be exactly going to be doing in quarter 3 and quarter 4, but we're going to have to look at to see how things are going. Can we accelerate what we're doing? Do we need to make adjustments? So, we acknowledge this plan is dynamic and we're going to be looking at it consistently to then make decisions about stay the course, keep accelerating, or we need to take a step back and think about what makes the most sense as we're engaged in the school year. There's an academic roadmap data tracker. This is something we're putting together. Uh we referenced it a little bit at our meeting today where we were looking at monthly attendance for every school and every level in the district. Thankfully, we've seen positive uh data
134through August. Going to be putting that together now that we're through September to look at the same income or outcome in terms of September. We've seen declines in exclusionary practices in terms of out of school suspensions. So, there are some data that are tracking. We're going to be looking at survey data. We're going to be looking at growth data for dibble 8 map a variety of other measures. Um so we're going to be constantly looking at this so that we can really say is what we're doing working and if it's not what do we do next? So this implementation of those data trackers is going to be very important. And then lastly collaboration with the district accountability committee in terms of monitoring what we're doing in terms of our major improvement strategies. They're going to
135be engaging in attending instructional leadership team professional development. An instructional leadership team is the principal as well as key staff that are leaders within their building. There's training for every level related to that. So DAC is going to be involved in attending those and monitoring them. We're also going to engage in some of the monitoring related to instructional coach training. So they'll have an opportunity to attend those sessions to see what's going on in there and how it aligns with our plan. And then lastly, another aspect we're looking at is nailing down progress monitoring tool sessions at schools. Each school will have quarterly progress monitoring sessions with their executive director. And so we'll work with executive directors and principles to get DAC members to attend a few of those meetings so they can see what
136that really looks like as we go through this process. So these are some ways that the district accountability committee can see the the real boots on the groundwork and what's going on in our system. And so we find that to be very important in terms of progress monitoring our UIP. Um, at this at that point, I'd just like to open it up to any questions you may have regarding anything you read in terms of the PM tool or the UIP itself. >> Anybody have any questions >> or com? >> I just sort of have a question for Megan and Dave. After hearing some of the conversation that we had with our principles, is there anything that occurred to you that um you sort of went, "Oh, I'm going to put a thumbtack in that. I
137want to return to that later because it seems important for this." Was there anything like that that came up for you? I would say um because of the structures and systems that we have set up, we are very close um to this work and have been incredibly close to this work. um for quite some time. And these are also the individuals that advise us um uh we spend time uh as close to their planning as possible um with the executive directors and um as you heard many of them talk about that we're in partnership with them to help them improve their goals. So uh they're they'll reach out to us at any time if they're like this isn't working for us. We need thought partners. need support and part of what we understand and know
138about the dynamics and complexity of what's happening at their school is what informed um our academic roadmap in our district UIP. >> Thank you. >> Can you identify the five schools that Lori's working with in terms of attendance because it might be helpful just for people to know if they're out visiting those schools to ask more the principal or teachers how are things going? What what are you doing different? >> Okay. I'm going to do a test and see if my brain's going to work. Okay. Horizon High School, Thornton High School. No, Thornton Middle School, North Glenn Middle School. >> See, I'm going to fail. Let me just walk over here. >> I'm going to fail. >> I believe she's going to give us an update in a minute or two. >> Yes, she is.
139>> Good evening, board. Uh, Mawane Elementary, Thornton Middle has just joined the team. Uh, Shadow Ridge Middle School, Silver Hills Middle School, Horizon, and Legacy High Schools. >> Okay, thank you. >> Thanks, Lori. Phone a friend. >> Paul is telling me that was six. >> We just added um Borton Middle School. Yes. >> Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you for partnering with those um schools that you know it just shows what a a lot of teamwork here you know from all ends. So with that I expect to see progress which we will. >> Director Assad Lucas >> I. >> Director Bastelli I. >> Director Goldstein. >> Hi. >> Director Marsh Holen >> I. >> Director Potter >> I. >> Okay. Now student attendance update. >> I have Fert Kane and Bailey. All right,
140good evening board members. Uh, tonight as we talked about uh in our work study session earlier is really a night of synergy around our core work. And so I will indulge uh you in uh hearing some things you've already heard before tonight. I think it's important that our regular audience also hear some of these details. Um, but we know as you've heard tonight around all the really intentional and thoughtful work that our uh schools are doing that presented you to you tonight along with 40 plus others throughout our system. It really only matters if we have our kids with us and attending every day. So attending to uh student attendance uh is every bit as much a priority as all the other pieces you've heard tonight. And so we're going to share with you some
141historical attendance data uh here in Adams 12 and throughout the country. Uh attendance has been a really uh significant challenge as we've emerged from the pandemic. Um we'll give you a recap of some recent attendance interventions and their impact. Uh we'll tie uh some of our goals in our academic roadmap specifically to our attendance work. And then you already just had a nice preview of some uh new approaches we're taking on emphasizing uh school level innovation and intervention around attendance. First of all, I'll just orient you that we do have a policy around student attendance. It's 5020. Uh it talks about uh students can have up to five excused absences each semester. You see some examples there uh that include a notation around documentation. We talked in work study about some of the variability that
142comes with that. Uh and then uh just noting within this policy that all exclusions such as suspensions, threat assessments, other reasons where we're intentionally uh taking students out of the classroom are considered excused. Also want to be clear, we're uh all level set on some key definitions. So you've heard the term chronic absenteeism tonight. It's called out in our academic road map. It's a bit of a tricky data point. It fluctuates a lot and that's because we calculate that based on a student missing 10% or more of the days they are enrolled for any reason excused or unexcused. And what makes this kind of a fluctuating data point are depending on when a student enrolls or disenrolls or how many times they're absent versus how many times they're attended, they can go in and out
143of being chronically absent as the numerator and denominator changes in that calculation. Uh but it's important to note that chronic absenteeism fundamentally is 10% or more uh absences uh for time enrolled. We consider by definition a habitually truent student to be a student that has four unexcused absences in a month or 10 across a school year. And then you'll also hear a calculation tonight called average daily attendance. It's another goal within our academic road map. And that's simply the total number of days of student attendance divided by the number of days school was in session over specific time. So I wanted to ground you first in some data that we've been tracking over the last several years as uh we've been keenly aware that student attendance has been a real challenge. And so what you
144see before you is a monthby-month average daily attendance rate uh going back to 2023 uh through last school year. And you can see over those three years, we've been pretty flat to be frank. Uh there have been some months when we've been slightly below, others when we've been a little better, and some where we've been same year-over-year over that time. Obviously, what this suggests to us is those percentages are well below where we were pre- pandemic. And also the work that we've been doing over the last few years is not really having the desired impact we'd want to see of consistent improvement over time. Just to bring you right up to date, we continue to track this and Dave and his team give us a report every month. Uh we were happy to see uh
145one of our stronger increases over this time in the month of August. You heard some principles report tonight that they too early in the school year have seen some positive trends in this space. We'll continue to monitor this, but we're obviously happy to see that in the month of August, uh, we saw a good uptick. And I suspect Dave and his team will be giving us a September update here within the next day or two. I wanted to break that down for you, all of that data more specifically as you look at uh, by level. Uh we talked a bit that some of the uh more concerning aspects of our attendance happen at the beginning and end of our school uh students career. We see pretty high percentages of kindergarten non-attendance and then we see
146similar uh high percentages of nonattendance with our seniors. But you can see here again really encouraging especially at the high school level to see uh much better attendance in the month of August and improvements across all three levels. I'm going to hand it over to Lori who's going to talk a little bit about some of our more recent attendance initiatives um and then we'll talk uh more specifically about the work we intend to do uh moving forward aligned to our academic roadmap. >> Thanks Bo. Good evening again board. Just a high level recap of some of the initiatives that we have engaged in over the last about 24 to 26 months as it relates to um initiatives to impact attendance. Starting back in the 2223 school year, our intervention services team engaged in a cohort
147with the Colorado Department of Education um to really explore root causes of chronic absenteeism. And we just really felt that it was important for the team that is closest to that work have some of the deepest learning. And so, uh, that team engaged not only with our partners at CDE, but then also with several neighboring districts, which has allowed for, um, improved collaboration between our nearby, uh, district neighbors because we do have so many students that transition from one district to the next. Moving forward to August of 24 last year. Um Adams County, our commissioners declared that um September was attendance awareness month and then board also de made that declaration uh with us last September as well. Um, we've had continued work with the Adam Adams County Collaborative Management Program, which is a consortium
148of stakeholders within our community who come together to ensure that our students and families have the supports that they need so that there's not penetration into the judicial system for those families. So, generally speaking, those families are somehow system involved, but the purpose of that team is then to ensure that the families don't become deeper involved. And so with our work inside that, um, we were able to provide $3,000 worth of awards to incentivize, uh, student attendance at our 26 of our schools. So schools could request some, uh, dollars to support with either rewards or programs or incentives, things like that to improve student attendance. From December to or excuse me, September to December of last year, Marie McKenzie and Matt Schmidt and I engaged in a partnership with the League of Innovative Schools and
149Digital Promise uh with multiple school districts across the country. And that learning really just affirmed the learning that we had done the previous year with the Department of Education about best practices and really where the most impactful strategies uh live, which is in our school buildings. In uh May of this year, I took over the leadership of the educational subcommittee of that collaborative management program in Adams County. Um and that has really continued that countywide work. So, working very closely with all of our neighboring school districts and including additional partners such as social services, CASA, um uh Griffith Center Community Reach Center and other organizations in July of this year. Then we also as a district um engaged in the Dr. Dr. Cordova's every school matters initiative and her challenge is to reduce chronic absenteeism
150by 50% by 2027. So we are part of that initiative as well. This fall we were also granted the additional um gift of an intervention services case manager position and as as it's been shared earlier tonight that individual works specifically with six of our schools to really identify and strategize how to improve student attendance at each of their buildings. So, we're looking at what's working, what's not working, and how we can have sustainable systems within those buildings um to really address student achievement. We hope to take those lessons then that we learn in those buildings and apply them to a more uh a broader swath across our district. This fall, I just want to celebrate and highlight that our student family outreach program utilize district vehicles to pick up our students that are experiencing homelessness
151um or are other imp impacted in other ways so that they could attend that first day of school. So we had 10 people out driving district vehicles picking kids up from home to ensure that they were at that first day of school and then again on those second and third days of schools to make sure that they were connected from the very first moment of their education this year. Additionally that same team has created a grant-f funded transportation liaison position. So that person helps navigate the organization of transportation for our students that are experiencing homelessness or housing instability. oftentimes once we get notification of a student coming to our system that's experiencing um housing insecurity it can take up to 10 days for us to get a kiddo on a bus route um but not
152with this transportation liaison position now kids are in seats within 24 to 48 hours of their enrollment with us so it's a huge impact getting them those kids to school additionally our family outreach liaison across our system engage in routine phone calls with our students that are demonstrating chronic absenteeism so again there's that personal connection and that personal touch. We want you at school. So, it's not some random district's person that's reaching out making a phone call. It's somebody in their school, someone that they know that makes that direct connection that says, "Hey, we want you here today." And then again, we've had the county commissioners this year declare September attendance awareness month, and we have just received notification that uh we now have $6,000 of funding for assistance and incentives across the system. So,
153we'll be implementing um that same program that we did last year that will help us incentivize our schools and support our students to attend every day. All right. So, I won't belabor um our uh we've had an opportunity to get a preview of this, but our attendance goals uh live within our academic roadmap underneath priority improvement number three about high expectations for every student grounded in bold student centered goals. And as we talked about earlier, um we have five-year goals that we've established that we're after as a district and they're pretty bold. Um, but we'd like to get back to where we were pre- pandemic. Um, and we would also like to reduce that chronic absenteeism as a system. And so our one-year goals are highlighted underneath the one-year goal category. And um, if your
154eyes are like mine, this page will be much better for us to um, take a peek at. Uh, but we'd really like an opportunity this year to move our system to a district-wide 89.1% attendance rate at elementary, get back to that 92.5 attendance rate that you heard our leaders talk about today, middle school to 90% and our high schools at 85%. Um, some of the things that we're working on with our schools is really implementing at least two proactive tier one attendance strategies, um, such as holding threshold, um, greetings, check-in and checkout with kids, um, strong start routines and positive family communication, attendance team meetings um, monthly to analyze trends and plan responsive interventions at the school level where we have the closest connection between staff and student staff and families. And then school staff
155receive professional learning on datainformed attendance strategies um as Lori was um referring to um in her presentation. And then overall um if we're successful uh in five years um as we continue to improve our strategy year-over-year, we'd have a district districtwide um attendance average daily attendance of 93%, elementary at 95, middle schools at 93, and high schools at 90%. Um and these will reflect our sustained implementation of what we know are high lever strategies um that build those relationships and that sense of belonging for our students. When we look at chronic absenteeism by the end of 202526 academic year uh we will reduce chronic absentee absenteeism by three percentage points across the district. And some of the benchmarks and indicators of success that we're working towards is all schools um use attendance data to identify
156who are those chronically absent students and implement tier 2 supports things such as home visits, empathy interviews, wraparound service referrals um for those students, leveraging our family outreach liaison and rapid round facilitators to support schools with that outreach for students that are below that 90% attendance mark and schools documenting interventions and progress in an early warning or MTSS tracking system so that we know what we have tried, what has worked and what we might try next um to support students that are experiencing chronic absenteeism. Our five-year goals is really to reduce chronic absenteeism to below that 15% um districtwide reflecting a full implementation of our MTSS process and prevention systems um that keep kids uh within schools. And this would again indicate that consistent use over time of proactive approaches at the school level, effective
157targeted um interventions and strong collaboration between educators, families and student support teams as a result. Is this you? Yes, >> I think so. >> Thank you. So, we wanted to highlight some of the attendance interventions that are currently taking place within our system. You've heard Megan reference the individualized plans that our family outreach liaison are creating at the school level to engage those individual students. The reasons that students are not able to attend school vary across the board. Is it transportation? Is it language barriers? Are they staying home to watch younger siblings? um is it that there's a misunderstanding of there was a suspension from school and the family thinks that the student can't come back. So, a lot of just misconceptions that we have to bust through in order to uh reconnect our kids
158back to school. The middle school and elementary school teams um almost all of them have initiated strong start initiatives through their initial sprint cycle this year. So, really just creating that sense of belonging. When school is a place that kids want to be, they tend to attend. Um, it's very difficult for an elementary school student that doesn't have the ability to drive themselves to school to get to school, but when we're, you know, pulling mom out of bed and saying, "Hey, mom, I want to get to school today. I want to be with my friends and I want to learn." That's a pretty effective strategy. So, just knowing that those students want to be there, um, really is a huge motivating factor. As we spoke about already, we're partnering with five now six schools to
159really identify what can we do within that building to develop a sustainable plan and network within the building that is intentionally addressing attendance. We can't say when we get done with behavior we can talk about attendance until attendance is our priority. It will never be a priority. So really making sure that those teams are intentional, strategic, and data driven to ensure that they're really addressing those attendance challenges with within their school. Getting a little bit more specific, I'm going to highlight a couple of our schools. One example is Suki Elementary. Their attendance team has embedded um addressing chronic absenteeism also into their performance management tool. So, it's not only a part of our district's strategic plan, but it's part of their performance management tool, which makes it a priority and a conversation for every person
160in the building. They are very very data driven and they are uh focused on tier one systems within that building. So getting that universal foundation of what do we do in our school to ensure kids are attending every single day. Another school I'd like to highlight for you is Hunter Hunters Glenn Elementary. Michelle Riley, the assistant principal there, um started off with just really diving in deep about understanding policy 5020. What does our policy say? and she reports that when she had a clear understanding of what the policy and what the statutes say and tell us, that really helped her develop systems within their building that have resulted in a pretty powerful team. Um, they have data collection that's focused on analysis. They are really, really strong with their follow-up. So, we've connected with the
161family, we're following up, we're checking in, making sure that we have that personal connection. And they're also just really, really focused on uh making sure that everyone from the front office staff to the custodian to every one of their teachers know and understand their students and their needs and welcome them every time they come to their building. And then finally, at a high school level, our high school uh Northland High School come to school program, which many of you have probably heard about for many, many years. Our Trincy's court magistrate is actively involved. They focus specifically on students that have 70 to 85% attendance. So, these are kids that are there just not attending all the time. I was at the council meeting this evening uh with at North Glenn High School and just really
162unpacking with a student. they identified um my teacher keeps calling me by my given name and not by chosen name. So when they call me out for attendance, I don't answer because they're not using my chosen name. So something as simple as just clarifying the why behind the student is either not going to school or is not responding in that attendance call out was really really powerful. So it's an incredible program that has really seen some substantial success at North Glenn High School. questions that you have for us >> questions anybody >> or comments >> I guess so one of my questions is when um we had our principles up here some of them had talked about mobility um how does that how did mobility relate to chronic um absent he's a absent he's absent
163really great. >> Oh, absenteeism. Oh my gosh, it's really late. Anyway, how does that relate? Like, so because I know until you get um evidence that they've enrolled somewhere else or, you know, moved somewhere, you have to still count them as a student, but if they're not there, you're counting them as absent. How how often does that occur? And does it is it maybe more often in some schools than others? >> It it is it's a very frequent occurrence and I think there's a couple of different contributing factors there. So if I'm a student that's experiencing housing instability and don't know where I'm going to lay my head from tonight to tomorrow night, obviously that has an impact on whether or not I attend school the next day. And that's really a lot of the
164work that the intervention services and student family outreach teams are doing right now. So if the student has been been identified as experiencing housing instability, they have a right to attend their district of origin. So if they started with us and they are in an area with which we can transport them, then we work with our transportation team, neighboring districts and outside organizations such as hop skip drive to provide transportation doortodoor for those students on a regular basis. That's also why our student family outreach team uh reserved as many of our district vehicles as we could and they are driving around picking kids up and getting them to school as often as they possibly can. So to your first question about how often does it happen, it happens a lot. Um and it does really
165impact student attendance and student engagement. And so that's really why we try to provide that consistency and why that uh transportation liaison position was created. So, if the student has moved out of district but wants to attend their district of origin, um then T can help then navigate how we structure that, who's paying for what, where the pickup point is, what the agency is that's going to pick that student up, whether it's a yellow bus or a private car to get them to and from school each day. And so if you know they've lost a number you know they moved have to uh change addresses but also have lost that contact number or email whatever was it's almost having to wait until they maybe reach out again right because if there's no way to contact
166them and where are you so we can we can come to you. So, okay. >> You'd be surprised at some of the tricks we we utilize. We every person that's on their contact list. We go to their homes. >> Uh we look at siblings. Sometimes you get information from a sibling that may be attending. Um but the the team really doesn't stop at anything. We we've had somebody stock them on Facebook. Okay. We know they're in Texas right now. That at least gives us a place to start. So, um we really do try to stop at nothing to find those kids. >> Yeah, you guys do great work. So, thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you. You know, I the statistic that kind of blows me away is chronic absenteeism is 10%. That's two days
167a month. So if a student is absent two days a month, they and and that's all the learning they're not getting. So, and I just I know when I was a student a century ago, if you weren't I noticed actually in my college, I was skipping class a lot for a while there and my grades showed it, but when I started going back to class, that showed it, too. So, it's half the battle's just being there. >> That's the issue. Yes. I sometimes had issues. Okay. Thank you. All right. Um proclamation dyslexia awareness month. I will entertain a motion to adopt the proclamation declaring October 2025 dyslexia awareness month as presented. >> So moved. >> Second. >> We have a very special guest today. Um somebody we haven't seen in a while. I bet you
168miss those first and third Wednesdays. She's not saying anything. Okay. Anyway, uh we have uh the Honorable Laura Mitchell here um along with Bill Penny and Stephanie Frankenfeld to talk to us about why we need to pass this resolution. And they brought swag. Good evening. >> Thank you for letting us spend some time with you talking about um some of the literacy teamwork as well as being part of the dyslexia proclamation that was collaboratively written between A12 Kids um dyslexia parent group and the literacy team. We want to just take a few minutes to highlight some of the work that our team does in compliance with the read act that helps support our students with significant reading deficiencies as well as students who are showing characteristics of dyslexia. We know the importance of making sure
169our students who have significant reading deficiencies are given the appropriate instruction as well as interventions to help them become successful readers. And so we would like to just speak about some of the things that we are doing as a district um to support our struggling readers to help them um become proficient. The first one is around the teacher and administrative readac training designation. All of our kindergarten through third grade teachers, interventionists, instructional coaches, administrators at the elementary school and learning specialists from elementary through high school have completed the readact training and had the designation on their certificates. We do have 47 new hires that will have until August 1st of 2026 to complete this and we have seven staff that were approved for extensions. We are entering our fourth year of using benchmark advance for
170reading and our second year of using benchmark advance for writing as our core instructional material. This high-quality instructional material is CDE approved and supports all students in the five areas of literacy. Phonemic awareness, um, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Our district applied and is participating in the early literacy assessment tool, the ELAP project. And by participating in the ELAP project, we are supplied with the online resources and tools to support the Amplify Dibbles 8 additional edition assessment, which is an improved interim and diagnostic assessment for the readact. This is our fourth year of using Dibbles and teachers, instructional coaches, and interventionists are continuing to learn how to use the data gathered from this assessment to support intervention planning for students. Dyslexia screening will be required in the 2027 2028 school year and CDE is scheduled
171to give us guidance in 2026 um which will help us in setting up our dyslexia screening systems. In preparation for this coming change, we are studying best practices in dyslexia screening. And it's helpful to know that dyslexia or dibbles 8 is designed to screen students for reading difficulty including dyslexia. And additionally our vendor for dibbles 8 provides additional measures that we are studying for potential use for dyslexia screening. We have implemented some changes to our instructional interventionist program. One key piece is that we are really um encouraging collaboration among our interventionists, administrators and coaches and teachers. This is emphasized because we want to ensure that decisions about which students are receiving interventions at school are based at the school data and the student needs. And additionally, we are conducting um some comprehensive professional learning for
172the entire intervention team that's being focused on the district's literacy vision which supports scientific and evidence-based reading instruction. We have introduced a professional learning opportunity to support in-class small groupoup literacy intervention that couples a CDE approved supplemental foundational skills resource with initial training and ongoing support. The resource UFI foundations can be used by classroom teachers in small groups with students who have been identified as having an SRD or a significant reading deficiency and have a read plan in place. This resource is not a replacement for benchmark. Um but we are excited with the opportunities that we will have for its use. 20 schools have opted into this professional learning throughout the months of August and September of this school year and we will offer another on-ramp for schools that are interested during second semester. To
173support this learning for teachers, we trained our academic interventionist team in how to use the resource so teachers in every building will have a strong model to observe. And now, Bill Penny, one of our literacy coordinators, is going to speak to another layer that we have in place to support our students. >> Hey, thank you, board. Um, it we thought it'd be helpful to talk a little bit about the certified academic language therapy training program and what it is and what we're what what we hope to use it for. Um it all started really as a lot of the coordinators and literacy leadership uh with ourselves and some of our neighboring school districts. We often talk about what are you doing to support uh striving readers and what systems are you putting in place? Um
174so what that looks like is us talking with Boulder Valley, St. rain uh southwest or south central uh bos bosis um and and including Jeffco as well um just to help understand so that we we're not actually trying to reinvent the wheel with everything. So in some of those conversations uh in particular with uh St. Brain School District, we realized that they had set up a rigorous training program uh to train and certify and credential uh dyslexia therapists. Um so just so you know, that's what my training is. I have a certified academic language therapy credential. Um, and what that is is a um, if you've ever seen like a speech language pathologist and you see their credentiing through ASHA and they'll you'll see their like initials afterwards, that's basically what it is. So, it
175provides uh, credentiing. We have to take entrance exams in order to get into that association, that professional association, and then we have to do uh, regular continuing education uh, in order to maintain our credentiing. Um the training is fairly expensive and robust. Uh St. Vin their logic in doing it was that they had trained all of their staff um who were working with striving readers um in Orton Gillingham. And then they thought, okay, what we're going to do to support kids with dyslexia is we're going to call them in over the summer and then we are going to work together and we are going to go ahead and uh do like a little mini dyslexia boot camp and everything's going to be good to go. as they had their staff in working with kids over
176that summer, they realized that the instructional practices were very disparit. Um, and it really depended on teachertoteer what the students were getting. Um, so meanwhile they were talking with places like children's hospital like what would you recommend? And it was from that that they recommended that certified academic language therapy. Um, incidentally that's actually how I got my position at Children's was getting in this program. when I was originally seeking my therapy, they recruit uh Children's will recruit therapists out of this program in order to staff their uh learning specialists uh and outpatient therapy in children's. So, from some of that conversation, um we had definitely helped them a little bit with their uh doubles aid implementation and then uh they called us back and they're like, "Hey, I don't know if you know this, but
177uh the Caramel Hill Fund is offering scholarships in DPS. Maybe you could send a few people uh you know just call them. So we called them and uh long story short, we were able to secure 10 spots uh for 10 of our teachers to attend the training. So what this looks like is about it's about $10,000 per teacher for just tuition alone. Uh and then uh Carmel Hill also funded uh all of the materials that we needed and is training is providing the money for me to train to now training credential as part of my role here as a coordinator. So it was a it was one of those situations that was really like how could we pass this up? Um, by the time we were able to send out the applications uh and invitations
178to apply to it, it was the last day of school after school and we still had people calling from their vacations on in Mexico and one was calling from Hawaii and doing their vacation and going down to the little hotel business center to submit their application. They were very motivated. Everybody did a really good job this last their first year of training which is the hardest part of it and they got their first layer of credentiing uh called it's a practitioner level not the therapy level yet and they're eagerly into their second year and they're on their way. Um we have seen very promising feedback in terms of uh what the impact has been for their own instructional practice. A lot of teachers have been talking about how they feel like they're now able to
179teach a lot of our other resources better with having this type of rigorous uh professional learning um in addition to things like math uh some of the the the things that they're teaching uh and some of the areas that this is impacting not just in literacy. Um so just so you know we had about 109 students who were in groups with our traineees this last year. uh 81 of them were were at the start of the year and through the to the end of the year uh because we uh have you know just high transiency in some of our schools and so a lot of those the students who had left um that was that was again we had about 81 stay the whole year uh let's see what else would you need to know
180about seven of the traineees are learning specialists working with students on IEP and then we have three who are noniep roles And we were basically doing trial roles to figure out what it would be like if we were able to meld this that capacity builder's expertise with this type of training. Um, one of them is a literacy coach, one of them is a uh uh English language development teacher and then the other one um was a a inbuilding uh interventionist. And so, um, long story short, we're in the process of looking at future visioning for this training. Um, as part of it, we were able to, uh, get one trial position to have an academic language therapist as an itinerant teacher. And so what she's doing is she's going to some of the places where
181we know we have a student or group of students with high needs that we don't necessarily have that prof professional capacity to meet and she's working with those students directly this year. The other thing too is she's also been involved in training this cohort with us. Um she's was working up in uh one of the dyslexia private schools in the area and we kind of recruited her and sniped her. um and she was very excited to be part of that. So we we don't know I think like you all of us we don't really know what the future holds in terms of funding and things like that. Uh whether this is going to be a professional learning opportunity that maybe we could just offer to any of our educators for current positions that are currently
182staffed or if this could be something that might be a special role that would straddle the special education world and the general education world. Um, one of the biggest myths of dyslexia is that it's cognitive. It's not. It's just how the sounds link to the letters and how quickly and how we teach the kids how to read. That's really what it centers on. Um, obviously it's more complex than that, but in a nutshell, that's what we're looking at. And so, we have a we have a vast uh array of students who uh will show dyslexia like tendencies. Some of them are going to be in the general education classroom and they won't show up until sixth, seventh grade because of how well they do in their subject matter and then others um are going to
183show up right away like we can see them from kindergarten from the from the get-go. Um so we need to be prepared to handle that type of uh support for all students. Um and just so you know that dyslexia prevalency rate is around 7 and a half% to about 17%. Um it just depends on where you put the cuto off. But that's what you know what Children's Hospital diagnoses at is right around that 7 and a half% mark. Uh that would that would um actually qualify for the diagnosis, but then it's much higher if you just take signs and symptoms of dyslexia or related disorders. Are there any questions about the program? >> I I have one. So, in the past, in order to get a diagnosis of dyslexia, you had to have a doctor
184do that. >> Do you still? >> Yes, you still have to have a a trained doctor do it. Um, so when I was at the hospital and I was diagnosing students or patients at the time, uh, I was working under a team of doctors and we would do rounding in order for me to be the diagnostician. And so we do not have the authority or the capability to really offer diagnostic um that that level of care for students, but we really don't have to wait for a diagnosis to act. Um the other thing too is it's just important to know uh Children's Hospital has done a really good job around lowering how much they they charge for a for an evaluation. It's much close. It's like $350 for an evaluation. Um, and so I do
185have hopes of someday having some type of funding that we could actually give to children if and families if if they are feel like they need that next step but they don't have the money for it. But that's kind of down the road a little bit. >> Thanks. Um, anybody else have any comments or questions? >> Yes, >> just Oh, sorry. >> Sorry. Go ahead. >> I'll just do one quick thing. Uh beyond just quantity of kids, I think you said 81 who were served year round, 109 total. I just know from a results standpoint, I had uh one teacher who wanted to chat me up non-stop at Alan Hollandbeck's retirement party last year talking about just the amazing progress that her students had made. uh a number of emails that came in, same thing
186from educators who've been 20 plus year veterans and they said, "I've never seen such outstanding results from a quantitative assessment standpoint and just more observationally based." So, this is making a huge difference for lots of kids. >> Thank you, Chris. Yeah, thank you for recognizing that. Well, and I just want to add, you know, I think it was pretty amazing to watch the work of honorable Laura Mitchell um through the years that we were able to work together. And as a mom that's like looking down this scary barrel myself, I have a whole new level of appreciation and gratitude for the level of advocacy and work that you put into this and and the whole team. Um, and it's not only with my daughter, but with other families as well. Like I've just heard so
187much relief like it's going to be okay and they have not had that before. So, thank you for advocating in all the ways at the state capital. I mean, with the district, with everybody. Thank you for being that voice for those kids because I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the resources that you fought for. So, thank you. >> Okay. So, now both of you are going to make me cry. and we all know you've missed me. Um so um just to kind of tag on to what they started um the reason why the screening is so critical and especially K through three is that even though like Bill said some of these kids are so bright like my daughter they don't get identified until sixth grade which is really too
188late to be able to have the most impact from intervention. So that's why the screening has been so important and something that I've um really fought so long and hard for because if we can get them in kindergarten and first grade and you start knowing those are the signs, you can start giving them the repetitions that they will need and you have them some of them will be reading with their peers on grade level by ca by third grade and can keep going. Um there are a lot of um comorbidities that they you know and other things that can can challenge some of these kids because there's other things going on their brain that even you can't fix. And so they just need to know that it might take them more time and more iterations
189even when they're learning material. But um so that's I got involved in this work. Um, we formed Colorado Kids identified with dyslexia in the fall of 2018. Um, just some parents who, you know, thanks to social media, we found each other and, um, we're all up and down the metro area and we started trying to work with the legislators on screening. Um, kind of, it's great that we're finally doing it and it's going to be the fall of 2027, but it was a long time coming. Um, we were hoping for a lot sooner, but here we are. Uh, in the meantime, I just want to say that Adams 12 has done so much work and listened to me and, um, talk about the things that we needed to do. And so, we have some really
190great people that are here. We adopted great um, instructional materials. Um, and we just keep building on that foundation and keep working, finding ways to get our teachers trained and bring experts in. I mean, when teachers are saying things like what you shared, Chris, I mean, that just it makes me very emotional because this is what I'd hope for for our students. Um, so the passage of that bill this past term, um, it's going to Adams 12 is so set up to do this. Just as Bill said, you've got Dibbles. Dibbles is a great, highly recognized tool for doing this kind of screening. Hopefully, it'll make it easy on our teachers to pick up like another level um, in re reviewing data and and looking for these kids. But I just think it's going to
191be so helpful when they know the kids they need to keep an eye on. Um, and get them the services that they need. Um, hopefully we can continue to have enough people to do that work. Um, but uh, let's see what else did I um, I know that years ago we did a little dyslexia class that I was so happy that I was able to get us to do. And so it may be time to kind of r raise it up. Um I think Trina and then them put it together, but um maybe update that. I don't I think it's probably out there somewhere and people could access it, but maybe start bringing that to the forefront and finding places to put it into some of our PD so that our teachers can again start
192getting their feet on the ground on what dyslexia is, what it looks like. Um, and then you know going along with the proclamation, I mean we've been doing this year after year after year and I appreciate again the board and the superintendent support in doing this. Um, so the governor again signed the statewide proclamation um sometime this weekend and we lit up the city and county building in red last night in Denver. We've done that for several years. Um, it is wear red for dyslexia and this the month of October is dyslexia awareness month. And so we want to do everything we can to try to keep building knowledge and awareness and help people, you know, when they see their kids struggling, you know, they know. And it's not something that can be so negative.
193It's those kids have really powerful brains. I have a kid to prove it. and um they will do amazing things for the world um even when their identification intervention comes late. Um so what I want to highlight in addition to the proclamation that I hope we'll get through tonight and it was I really like the wording that we did, we just keep iterating on it year after year and I think this year we've really got some good words in there. Bill, I sent him some notes and he made it sound great. Um so um on October 21st at 6:30, if you haven't heard about it, um the district has been very kind and partnered with Colorado Kid, um Adams 12 Kid. I kind of dual-headed um trying to re-energize Adams 12 Kid and and get
194that momentum back for our parents. Um but we're gonna um be um showing a documentary called Left Behind. It's about some parents in New York City that recognize their children's struggles and have created the first public school in New York City in the school public school system to support dyslexic students and how, you know, it just tells the story of these kids and these parents and how they do the same thing that we're doing. Um, and that's going to be with the Reading League of Colorado, which um really works at educational opportunities for a lot of educators. Um, the International Dyslexia Association, the Rocky Mountain branch, Denver COID, and Vertical Skills Academy. Um, so with that, I've been talking with Stephanie and Bill and we have some really great conversations and trying to build um
195a partnership on how to support our families and hopefully provide some resources, try to help supplement some of the team um both manpower and funding if we can um to keep moving on this work. Um, but we've also talked about after this meeting that I hope will be very widely attended from lots of districts. We're trying to get people from C Fort Collins. Anybody who knows anybody in 27J, Boulder, Mapleton, uh, Adams 14, Westminster, please, you know, let them know. Um and then um after that we've talked about in November that we'll announce in that meeting as well a date in November when we want to have more of a district specific Adams 12 kid meeting to re-engage that group and start to build some supports for our parents and um helping them and their
196kids um have feel like they're not out there all by themselves. Um, and I think that was, you know, just the early intervention thing. That's why the screening is so important. So, I look forward to us being able to to get kind of, you know, on the ground and get going. And with that, I hope that you will approve recognize the proclamation tonight. >> Thank you. >> Any more comments? >> Well, it's great to see your work come to fruition. I know how I know how long you've been working on this. >> It's one of those things where you just kind of I was telling him earlier I said you don't always get to pick what your passion is and it kind of falls in your lap and then here you are and it's like
197you know what seven years later and you're still you know giving it your best. So >> that's why they call it passion passion projects. >> Yeah. Thanks. >> Any other questions or comments? Are we ready to vote? Director Assad Lucas. >> Hi. >> Director Banastelli. >> I. >> Director Goldstein. Hi. >> Director Marsh Holen. >> Hi. >> Director Potter. >> I. >> Okay. I'll sign it with this new pen. Thank you. Thanks for coming in tonight. >> Don't be a stranger. Okay. Next, a resolution on the healthy school meals. So, I'm going to entertain a motion to adopt the resolution in support of healthy school meals as presented. >> So moved. >> Second. >> I brought in a special friend to um go over this with us because it's legislative and um why not have
198an expert tell us. So, Representative Lorenna Garcia, thank you for coming. >> Thank you. And uh we just want give us the highlights of what this um potential what the ballot initiative ballot initiatives are. >> Sounds good. I don't have anything fancy for you to look at. I apologize. Um so excited to be here. Hoping that you will take a public position in favor of propositions LL and MM. As you recently discussed briefly, um you all understand the necessity and the importance of feeding kids, especially through the school day, especially in a district where a large portion of your student body is in low income, where their only source of food is when they come to school. LL is specifically intended to request once again to voters if we can retain the funds that they
199have already contributed to the program. However, we're more than what we had initially estimated. When that happens, because of Taber, we are required then to return those funds to the taxpayers unless we go back to the voters and ask permission again. And so that is what we're doing with LL. I want to just stress the problem with doing that is that we do it every single time that we have a revenue generating ballot measure. So consider this also my my little plug on why Taber is not great for Colorado or for voters. That's LL Proposition MM. The reason why we have Proposition MM is because healthy school meals isn't fully funded. We have not been able to fully realize the grant programs to help every district that has opted into the program with the renovations
200that they've needed with increasing um lunch staff pay with making sure that they can source locally, have more fresh foods. And so what we are really wanting to do is make sure that we are increasing the revenue for healthy school meals so that we can fully realize the program that voters initially voted for when they passed Prop F. What this the way that this works is that it's going to further reduce the the deductions that people who make 300K or more can claim if they choose a standardized deduction. The other thing that MM does which is absolutely crucial specifically for the extension of the families in which your district serves as well is when HR1 passed at the federal level. It requires it what it did is it reduced the amount of money that the
201states would receive to implement the SNAP program. It made the states have to pay uh double what we were originally paying for to administer SNAP. For Colorado, that's $50 million. You know that our budget is already constrained. In addition to that, HR1 forced Colorado to have to cut $1.2 billion, which we did in a special session with an executive order and dipping into the reserves. We are also facing another $843 million budget cut next year. If we don't pass MM, that will skyrocket to 84 $893 million that we will be in the hole because we are Colorado and we will not let families or children starve. So, we will do what we need to to make sure that families are fed, but we don't need to do that if we pass MM. And if we
202pass MM, your district will benefit. Your district has already benefited from the healthy school meals program. You have had upwards of a 30% uptake on foods on on students who are eating in schools. We saw your attendance presentation is fascinating. Um, props to all of you that do that amazing tracking. We also know that when when students are able to eat healthy, good, yummy, nutritious foods, it increases attendance rates. You all know the reasons why we need to we need to pass LL and MM. So, I'm not going to keep talking your ears off and it's late. I just hope that um I can walk out of here with a unanimous vote of an endorsement for these two propositions. >> Thank you. Any questions or comments? >> Director Assad Lucas. >> I. >> Director Batistelli.
203>> I. >> Director Goldstein. >> Hi. >> Director Marsh Holen. >> Hi. >> Director Potter. >> Hi. >> There you go. Representative Garcia. >> Thank you for what you do. I know it's not easy >> for you. Thank you >> and have a good evening. Thank you and thanks for waiting patiently. >> Lori and colleagues, I uh I just want to make a suggestion. It has been a really long night. Uh lots of heavy and detailed uh information to process and consider when I look ahead in the agenda. My recommendation or my suggestion would be that you table the 1.0 monitoring report. that's really datari and very complicated. We'll invite Dave back if you uh accept this recommendation, but I'd hate for you all just to skate over it just because we're tired and it's
204late. I think uh coming back to it at the next meeting uh with a presentation and some opportunity for more uh thoughtful uh question and answer would be just a good step. >> Is there any objection? Okay. Do we need to make a motion? >> Motion to table. Motion to table monitoring report >> D monitoring report 1.0 schooling graduates dropouts combined data report. >> So moved. >> Second. >> Director Sad Lucas >> I. >> Director Batiselli. >> I. >> Director Goldstein. >> Hi. >> Director Marsh Holen. >> Hi. >> Director Potter. >> I Any objection Mr. Bana? Okay. All right. Um I'm gonna enter I'm gonna go on. We don't have that much left. So, I'm going to entertain a motion to um reschedule the October 7th, 2025 special board of education meeting to January
20514th, 2026. >> So, move second. >> All right. The reason that this has been brought up is because on October 7th, the education foundation is having a an event that kind of conflicts with this one. And so we don't want to take away from um >> either. So we want you know to support the education foundation and we also want to support the classified association. So we talked to well Stephanie talked to Paul Williams and and it's fine moving it to January which will be kind of closer to when we meet with the teachers too. All right. We have to vote. >> Can I comment on this first? So, I'm a little bit concerned about moving this because of a conflict with another event that we have had many, many, many, many board meetings that
206have fallen on the night same nights as other events. I mean, I can think of one earlier this a couple weeks ago where it was like the cost of fundraiser and we had a board meeting and I'm concerned that if we set this precedent that we will move and reschedule board meetings or special board meetings for events that that's going to kind of just set you know this tone of well whose event is more important to go to or you know they moved it for this event but they didn't move it for ours and the special meeting has been set for a while before >> and this was at the request of the classified association. >> Okay. But it's it's doesn't change the fact that it's setting a precedent um moving forward, >> but it's
207basically their meeting. >> Okay. I'm not saying that I don't agree to move it. I'm simply stating that I am concerned that if we move board meetings so that we can attend fundraising events that it will set a dangerous precedent. And I would just like that to be a consideration for future events because I don't want one organization whether it is the five-star foundation or CASA or any of the others organizations we support to feel like well the board moved their meeting for this organization but they wouldn't move their board meeting for ours and I just want to be mindful of the perception that that may give and put that out into the universe. >> Well, I think I mean if an organization came to us and said we're having this um there's a an
208event going on and we want to be a part of that event or we want to be a part we'd have a discussion about it. It's not saying we're not wouldn't be willing. I think that's what happened here is the certified staff classified or classified staff came. Boards are really hard tonight. um came and said they they wanted to be part of the found foundation event and so asked so we had that discussion. >> Yeah, I think it's mindful um not board driven. I mean I think that's what you're what you're saying. So >> yes, exactly. I mean, it was not shared with me that this was asked by the classified um staff. And so, like again, it it really was like Alexis said, it was just being mindful of best practice and the standard
209we're setting and not who asked for it. So, thank you. Okay, call a vote. >> Director Assad Lucas, >> I. >> Director Bastelli, >> I. >> Director Goldstein, >> I. >> Director Marsh Holen, >> I. Director Potter. >> Hi. >> Okay. CASBY updates. Um, I just wanted to take a few minutes just to fill you in. Um, since I'm on the Casby board of directors, what are the things we talk about at the CASBY board of directors? And I'm I'm going to go ahead and motor through it. Um, you know, we have our business that we talk about, you know, the CASBY budget and all that kind of stuff. We spent a lot of time talking about um the fall conference and the regional meetings because a big concern of um the boards, the CASBY
210board is that um the neither was well the fall conference was fairly well attended. It had representation of quite a few school districts plus a few extra people. Uh both air and I attended but and the regional meetings were not very well attended. Um, and so we talked a lot about, well, how can we make it so that people attend because there's a lot of valuable information for board members to be had at these meetings. Um, air and I both went to the regional meeting, but we were the only two from here and there weren't very many from other um, school districts in the metro area because we were all lumped in into one region um, our region and then the big districts. So, we just tossed around some ideas. you know, should we put
211it put the two together? Um, should we change the time of year? And we also like to line things up with the legislative preview because the the fall meeting is based around the resolutions that we pass that we want to push our our legislative agenda. So, we we we made some change. We're we're going to talk more about it, but we did start the conversation. The other interesting thing about the CASBY board meeting was that the second day was held at Junior Achievement down in Greenwood Village and it was very lovely to go down there. If you've never seen um what's down there, first of all, you'll see that our superintendent is one of the uh people who have supported it. It has a um a room that has assimilation on helping kids find their
212um interests and you know Junior Achievement is an organization that helps pe uh kids f you know with business and and future goals and so there's a lot of hands-on stuff. We have the um business park at um American Furniture Warehouse here in Thornton. They also have a a business park down there and they're both very tech techno technologically um fascinating and have kid the kids do assimilation of learning how to do budgets and and anyway they it does fit the um financial literacy standard that has re or the legislation that's been recently passed by the state legislature and uh like I said it's it's a beautiful building um beautiful view and I think it's a great place for a kid to spend a day if they get the opportunity to go there. So, any
213comments or questions? All right, minutes. I'll entertain a motion to adopt the minutes of the work study session and regular board meetings of September 17, 2025 and the special board meeting of September 2020 24th, 2025 as presented. >> So moved. >> Second. >> Any um Okay. >> Director Assad Lucas. Hi. >> Director Batistelli. Hi. >> Director Goldstein. Hi. Director Marsh Holen. >> I. >> Director Potter. >> I. >> Okay. Consent agenda. I will entertain a motion to approve the personnel actions as presented. >> So moved. Second. >> Director Assad Lucas. >> Hi. >> Director Batistelli. >> I. >> Director Goldstein. >> Hi. >> Director Marsh Holen. >> Hi. >> Director Potter. >> I. >> Okay. Future agenda items. Our next meeting is October 22nd. Um, you can see what's listed here. Um, are we putting
214the monitoring report back then, too? >> Yes, please. >> Okay. All right. Um, and then our meeting after that is November 5th. Um, any comments, questions? >> Okay. I will not be at November 5th's meeting. I will be on my way to Dublin. So, >> Oh, that sounds like fun. Enjoy. Safe travels. >> Good. South Dakota. >> Oh, I was like I thought you said dead wood. I was like, >> "What are you?" >> All right.