001laughs all right good evening all um as it is now 6 32 p.m we'll begin our diversity equity and inclusion meeting for December 12 2022. on our agenda for today our number one updates on District Dei goals number two Dei initiatives number three District action plan and then questions and comments from residents I will turn this over to Dr Irvin thank you I'm going to start by talking about some updates in terms of the Dei goals the administrative uh starting with the administrative I just want to say that we are continuing to look at policies and as we're reviewing policies um we've also I have some documents to share with you folks Mr Johnson if you recall you had asked us to talk to psba to see what kinds of resources that they have available
002so um Ms Walters did that for us and I'm going to go ahead and share a couple of packets with you of some of the different services that they offer these came in pretty recently so I did not get any one of these I did not get a chance to review this thoroughly yet we're happy to take a look at it and make some recommendations about what we think makes sense um and then this is their toolkit we some of you may have seen this before the toolkit is the piece um that we used when we had uh Dr Bennett here with us but this this smaller packet is specific to reviewing policies with an equity lens so we'll go through this um and see you know what you know what help that this can
003provide in terms of helping us narrow them down as you recall we're not doing policies this month because our schedule is kind of unusual with the reorganization meeting um and then this meeting and the policy meeting there weren't like enough times to have pre-meetings before so we will resume policy in January and hopefully we'll have some tools from psba that we can use to apply to that because at the at the current time we were mainly just doing language changes and updating and things like that and we would like to try to get in to some of the more meteor policies that where we're speaking uh specifically about students access you know any of those kinds of things so that's kind of where we're headed but I wanted to make sure that you had both
004particular like I said the smaller one so from the administrative standpoint I think that's one of our you know the biggest things that we're trying to get taken care of right now these are all things that are building that structure that we can use to move forward um in terms of the professional development goals I did want to share with everyone the outcomes of our race uh the power of an illusion Workshop we had about 130 teachers voluntarily participate in this they did receive Act 48 credit um for their participation it was six hours because each video segment was about an hour and then the discussion sessions were or after that about an hour we also did a survey for folks and we're still going through a lot of the suggestions and things but overwhelmingly
005the responses were that it was very helpful uh very informative that folks enjoyed it very much and overwhelmingly we need more of this um we want to go we want to take next steps one of the questions that asked was like what would you like to do next um and then there was sort of an open-ended thing at the end where folks could add comments and things so we're going to meet with the team hopefully here before Christmas I just talked to Miss Ross about that um and one of the things that's been really really great about this whole thing you know is we've had some participants who have stepped forward to say like I'm into interested in getting more involved you know at this leadership level the folks who helped run the workshops which
006were primarily teachers and administrators are all on board for continuing I've had multiple conversations with a couple of the different teachers uh thinking about some ideas for what we'll do for the January in-service which as you know is going to be centered on Dei so what we're starting to do is build that at our own capacity within our staff which I think is super important with 10 buildings you know one person you know it's great to be able to push that out so um I think as we continue to go with this um you know and move forward with different initiatives we'll continue to grow that Cadre of leader teacher leaders um particularly who are in the classroom who are then you know some of them are Department chairs or grade level chairs and things
007like that so they're they're bringing their experiences back to larger groups we also are thinking of running the workshop again in January one of the questions on the survey was what if uh if a colleague asked you about this Workshop what would you say and I mean again it was multiple choice but uh it was overwhelmingly people said you should take it you know I mean you should definitely take it so we felt really really good about the results um in fact people were writing things like I wish that like I know everybody's really busy and time is so precious but we a lot of people said that they wish the discussion sessions were longer um and also a lot of good compliments about the teachers and administrators who are leading them um as you
008know we had some things online and some in person and um they both seem to go well although the the in-person group those folks generally on the survey talked about how great it was to be in person um but I also got a lot there was a lot of compliments to the groups in terms of how they organized the zoom meetings because they did smaller breakouts within Zoom also so that it would be more comfortable and people would have more opportunities to speak so I'm super excited about how that went and we're looking forward to you know doing it again but then also where are we going to go next and you know what this was this was specific to race you know we know that we need to look at uh spreading good solid
009information about other identity groups and um you know there's other topics that have that were uh listed as suggestions as well so sorry is was there a common response of from the people that participated of what they would like to see for the next a lot of different suggestions suggestions I mean there were some people that wanted to continue some of the conversations they felt that you know because we did a session a conversation a session a conversation um they kind of wanted to maybe have a whole big debrief which you know honestly is one of the things that we've talked about with the the leadership team was for the January in-service should we prepare something in particular for those people who participated in that because we want to have some different opportunities for choice
010so kind of saying for those of you that have already done this we haven't we have a next step for you um and that could include folks that did it in early January as well which is which is our goal to do that um but you know more on these kinds of topics there were folks asking for information again on different kinds of identity groups um lgbtq was one that was mentioned um that they'd like to learn more about that and so yeah we'll um but 130 people a lot of different interests but again super super positive which um you know and even when it said why did you take this because it's important because I know that you know it's important for the districts it's important for students um we know that the district
011is emphasizing this and we want to be a part of that so I mean it's just very affirming to read all that so that was nice thank you very much [Music] yeah yeah we did the the ADL Workshop that we did that was I we had before last month just thinking about your [Music] Year all right so in terms of Dei initiatives um you know again right now what there's not a lot going on with the holidays we did uh I just did disseminate information about the inclusivity calendar as I do at the beginning every month um this year I also included uh an article that um was in that I always want to call teaching tolerance that's not what it's called anymore but uh it actually came from an early childhood journal from 1987
012and it was about using uh how the Christmas holiday is recognized in public schools and it was phenomenal I was thinking about look I wanted to write a couple sentences about thinking about um how Christmas is recognized in schools and what that impact is on different identity groups including Christians themselves particularly highly religious groups that don't embrace the commercialism of Christmas as well as students who have different faiths and things and so I included that in there and it was really nice because I when I wrote the email I said this is this is mainly for our elementary colleagues but anybody's welcome to read it and I actually had a secondary teacher wrote back and said that they loved the article so much they read it three times shared it with their family and then
013also use it as a middle school teacher used it in their Tuesday talks um with which is part of our anti-bullying program and and just felt it was really helpful um a couple of other teachers had suggested that it is maybe something we share with PTA so I'm going to do that tomorrow and send it to the PTA president um you know it was super respectful in terms of recognizing that you know Christmas is an important holiday in the Christian calendar and you know it's not something to be ignored but the amount how much how much of December becomes about the holiday and what that feels like for folks who don't celebrate Christmas or celebrate it in different ways that aren't and then also a just a whole thing about behavior um and how that
014you know Sienna is watching you and um if you are bad you don't get gifts which is you know folks who know child psychology know that that is actually not the best way you know we teach students to you know monitor their own behavior you know out of a sense of community and doing what's right not to get a reward and also about how that materialism can set up for um you know unrealistic expectations particularly from students of poverty who then get a message that I didn't get what I wanted and so therefore I'm not worthy or I'm not good um you know just just a lot of really really good information in there so um in terms of initiatives uh uh there's not a lot going on in the classrooms right now other than
015trying to make sure that we're recognizing all other holidays there was another good piece in that article as well about Hanukkah and and how in times schools try to equate Hanukkah to Christmas when in terms of you know the value of that religious holiday you know it's not it's not Equitable to the level of importance of Chris of Christmas and Christianity there are much more important Jewish holidays that just don't happen to coincide with the month of December so anyway it was good can you send that article to me I will certainly send that article it's like what is so like I said even in the email I said to the teachers I'm like yes I want to say 87. I I maybe I should go back and check but it was it was it
016was 30 it's 30 some years over 30 years old but you know this isn't new I think that that's one of the other things that so many people equate you know when we try to have these conversations around Dei that this is some new thing that's getting but you know this it came from an early childhood Journal um and then was republished in um social justice teaching so yep okay I will share that I can share that with anybody that would be interested in Reading it's great and so then um the last before the questions is the district action plan so what we wanted to try to spend the bulk of the time talking about today was the dashboard um so to the board members I did send you and I printed it out even
017though it was maybe somewhat more helpful for the links but I did send you guys copies if you'd like to look at that so as we were you know I've talked to Kristen James who will be actually building the dashboard and she and I and Dr steinhauer have done some digging online to look for examples and what we found is you don't see a lot of school districts that have the EI dashboards you see a lot of colleges and universities but interestingly their data is different so they're they are looking at demographic data they show demographic data for staff students um and then their achievement data generally looks more like um what major students of different identity groups are are selecting what their graduation level is you know they you know they matriculating or um
018so forth and uh so not necessarily the kind of data that we have so the first thing that's on this handout that I just sent you here um this was from an HR Group but it talked about like if you are designing a Dei dashboard some things that you need to to think about and you sort of go around this wheel consider your target group so to me I think that's something that Tim said before the meeting what do we want to highlight like who are we informing with the dashboard because thinking about that is it for the students is it for the families is it for the board to check progress on the plan you know what I mean or you know or it could be multiple of those things but so who are
019we targeting for this so that we know you know what we should include and then the second piece is then what data and metrics should we include in there and then they talk about labels carefully and visualizing the data in a user-friendly way and then the rest of the circle sort of goes around with kind of like how to build it and and how to maintain it but I think that thinking about the target group determining the metrics what and then kind of visualizing what it would look like and I think what we can do is when we get number one and two Kristin James and I can sit down and do some different mock-ups and then share those with you with the different kinds of data that we have um and then underneath that
020from the association for institutional resource these were best practices in design considerations for Dei dashboards it's kind of some similar things who should be represented how should groups be labeled which is something that we can talk about um pde does have labels around particularly the ethnic ethnicities that they use which is to which is what the district generally uses that were aligned how should data be disaggregated and then you know what story do you want to tell so I thought we could start by talking about that so um when I again when I was looking at some of these a lot we're from business and industry but we did see some from schools so there are there are the ideas demographic data I mean which is just simply that's something that would remain relatively static
021I mean we could update it every year um we could include things like the different ethnic ethnic groups that make up the student population we have available information on levels of poverty through our free and reduced lunches um that that can be available to the public um we have that by district and also broken down by school um same with the demographic data um we have uh we could we could look similarly for the staff um you know we could do demographic data on the staff if that's something that that you think would be meaningful to put up there so so there's and but then as we know and we've talked about this even uh when we were in the task force right there are some there are some identity groups that we don't collect
022information on and lgbtq is certainly one we don't ask students or families to report that um so we don't have that data available to us I mean unless that would be something that we would want to collect and I'm not sure that that's like really a path that we want to go down um I'm just not sure if like we don't want to impinge on people's privacy in fact I was talking to Dr Thompson today about a survey that we're going to use with Outreach as part of that voluntary screening process and he wanted to ask he had a couple questions about um the choices on there and we are going back to outreach and asking them to add prefer not to answer as an option under both ethnicity and um gender to make they
023had for gender they had male female other and I said well I still think we should transfer and we decided to ask them to do it for most so I don't know what your thoughts are on on the demographics for me and I would like to have involved Justin's input um I feel like the demographic data is something we definitely need um I do like the idea of including poverty levels um I was also I know when we initially started talking about this we were looking at identity-based harassment to have that included in some way on the dashboard so that we would have a reporting of that and um in my mind I do believe that we should prepare to have the target audience be our family or students and the board okay and also
024I don't know if there's a way to include because we have been talking about our student outcomes report and the fact that our students from a diverse background did not do as well understood me outcomes and I know if there's something that we could include on the dashboard with that information right so you got ahead of me which is great um so that was the next question that I was going to have in terms of what kinds of student data we certainly can pull some data from the student outcomes report that's relative to um to uh yeah historically underperforming groups we would generally I think if you guys recall and and since Dr Davis is here he could probably weigh in I believe that for the optional tests like the excuse me sat act that
025data is self-reported so um and because it's not universally given I feel like it's a little bit I would probably lean towards saying as much as I confessed at my last ever student outcomes report that I'm not a fan of pssa data I feel like the pssa data has some things going forward in that almost all of our students in three through eight take it versus we don't have all of our students take the SATs we don't have all of our students and the especially because some of those identity groups are so small you know that that their performance levels can be really impacted just based on the number of students that are taking it or at least with in this case so we could pull say for example those those pssa graphs or charts
026out from the student outcomes report and have those reflected on the dashboard and we had we had talked about I think if there's fewer than 10 people on a data set yeah yeah one some of the stuff that we looked at in the um task force that I thought was really helpful was overall demographic data um achievement data disaggregated by and I know that you know different data sets have different levels of information about the demographic data we talked about discipline data so data both who is there a higher incident of say students of color being disciplined and how and then also um sort of a database of incident reports that we would be able to separate that out and pull that out and we also you know potentially talked about climate survey data um
027where I think best practices in any survey would be that prefer not to and I would also wherever it's possible where we're designing the survey ask us to not only give binary um options and then other but to be more just inclusive and expansive and even the ways in which students can either respond or self-identify and then you know links to resources which I think we have in disparate places throughout and we had talked about sort of as as a board and with Dr steinhauer sort of in thinking about the goals for the year you know there there's definitely this interest in seeing some of this um Dei data academic outcome data sort of reported out in a way that's more accessible for students and families in the community um but that there was probably
028just like a whole built out section of District data in general we talked about a sustainability dashboard and I think we can look at how I can all live see I know PPS has like one page where it's just you know District data and they have just a different dashboards right it's not it's not limited to Dei right and we did see that as well um when we were doing our research and PPS was one but there were other large school districts I kind of had a whole data dashboard and then you know you clicked into I mean it would look like basically maybe electronically or putting up our student outcomes report is some of that we have those District facts and figures section on the yeah you know we can talk to Christian that
029would that would be like a pretty major overhaul um but I think we could start with this dashboard and then maybe in the summer pull all those different things together and make a whole you know about the District page or something yeah she's very she's very good at building stuff out and and visualizing that so I can give her some things to look at so one of the questions that I have is some of this data is relatively static you know would change probably need to be updated every year in terms especially like the demographic data um the achievement data if we decide to use the things like um pssa data for example we only fortunately take that once a year um but something like the discipline data is going to be ongoing right I
030mean it can change from day to day to day so would you how how like what are your feelings about the you know the schedule around putting that up would would every quarter be okay would we be looking at you know updating it yeah I mean I don't think you want it to be identifiable right so you need to have a big enough right I just wondering if monthly is monthly feasible without making I mean I guess that it would depend on how we report it out if we reported out by school or District so this summer we took the opportunity to update um the system in which we were capturing discipline data so that we were able to tease it out and we're using a system now that allows you to apply multiple tags
031kind of to an incident which has been really helpful right because it could be any number of different things right um you know it could be bullying but it's also identity-based bullying right so and that was where we were kind of finding trouble because unless you were digging into each specific incident it's like if it wasn't spelled out and somebody chose to code it as bullying but it could have been somebody called somebody else the n-word but then they just chose to you know it was just coded into the system as bullying so we would have missed that so what we tried to do now is kind of is like I said it's almost like a tag system so you can tag incidents with multiple things so but I mean one of the things that
032we're very fortunate around here is our kids are pretty good and while we certainly have those incidents that you know and when they're reported you know my belief is that they are being responded to and coded incorrectly but you know would we be able to say like oh from January to February it went up by one and we know that was the student was involved in that so that's why I suggested quarterly but I mean you know I mean we can do whatever I I we we haven't begun you know we when we built the system I you know that was a a team of Administrators who worked with tech to do that so I don't know what the logistics are for running the reports but pretty much anything in PowerSchool you know there's a
033you know you could run a report and uh like the data that I got for the task force the discipline data that we did have at the time all came right out of PowerSchool so I would be okay with that being quarterly why don't we for January we'll give you we'll create a mock-up okay and then just put it in front of you give you time to look at it and then you know you can identify things that you think are missing or things that you don't think we need what we'll give you a mock-up for that that would be I think that's a good start yeah so I want to go back to the demographics then just to be clear so we do we want to do students and staff or do we want
034to just do students I like to chime in on that okay okay may I chime in on on the staff question sure so where we get the demographic data for our staff it is self-reported we do do a biannual or Yeah by every other year report to the EEOC of the data that we have but again it is self-reported there will not we will be able to kind of monthly run that it's a very heavy lift because the way our systems are so it's actually very manual so I don't think that it's realistic to do a monthly demographic update for staff but I could get I can get that year but do know that that is that is uh yearly and there is a little bit of a caveat with some of that with the
035EEOC reporting if you can't if they don't self-identify me at the report we have to make an assessment which means you have to look at you and guess so just be aware that that we don't we don't have that big of an issue but just be aware of that so I would probably take some of that data out but it is not impossible to get it but there are some limitations I will say on that I think what was super helpful too is that we can source that data like you know on the dashboard we can say what the source of that data is because that was something that I noted if it's not our own crunch you know if we're if it's our power school I mean we can still indicate that though but
036frankly our student data is the same basically I mean it's self-reported by the family uh so you know well and I think it'll be good to um go through this process and in real time continue to identify like what are gaps in our data that we would like to have and is there a way that we can get it I didn't want to give um I don't want to give Kristen too much without knowing you know kind of what that would look like and then again sort of sitting down with her because her world skill is knowing oh this would look good in a bar graph this would look good in a pie graph you know I mean this would be the best way to see you know maybe that's a good way to do
037the the staff and student demographics as pie um so that we're pulling things out from percentages we can look at I mean the the data that's in your student outcomes report from the pssa that's disaggregated actually comes straight from their site it's a screenshot so we may want to make that look differently you know what I mean so that it could be more Interactive um you know we will have some some different ideas about those kinds of things I just wanted to kind of get an idea really of the thing and I like the idea of the links to resources as well we can include that so that is super helpful thank you so much well I know it's seven o'clock um and I believe do we have any commenters in our audience good evening
038I'm Stephanie fedrow Byram from 245 Park Entrance Drive I was planning to be brief but then a couple of things came up during the discussion that I wanted to also comment on um speaking of the how the holidays are celebrated I just wanted to share that my kindergartener came home with an assignment over the weekend and they fill out a paper and each student shares their individual holiday tradition and I really appreciated that and also she's been talking quite a bit over the last week about different ways student her classmates celebrate I have a sophomore and a senior and there was never anything like that that came home so that was she said Mrs take cautious class so I was really embracing myself for the opposite no no it was it was really nice um
039and then quickly when you were talking about um the surveys and the demographic questions and like male female other um I would just encourage you I think Val mentioned just to look at some best practices around how those are formatted other may not be the best use but there's some good examples we will that conversation happened today so that we haven't had time to get that back to to outreach and come up with something better so I appreciate that yeah and I noticed uh my senior as she was filling out college applications there were some really interesting ways that the questions were asked um but then for my prepared comments um uh I'm speaking to encourage the board to push forward with this Dei work um there's a group of students that's begun meeting to
040discuss Dei issues in the district related specifically to lgbtqia plus and race uh they've shared a number of concerning stories related to the culture of the schools so I just want to emphasize how important this work really is um it's not just trendy it's important um and it's um yes semi semi-organized their third meeting is in a couple of weeks it's it's very much student-led there's a facilitator who is helping teach them how to organize and Advocate and hopefully you'll be seeing them show up at some meetings in the near future make contact with those people I'm happy to put you in touch there are there's uh ranges between 10 and 14 students right now from elementary school actually first grade to seniors which is really cool it's really cool um all right I'll be
041okay I'll be fast so anyway it's really important work it's important to start early not to shy away from starting at an elementary schools when it can have a really long lasting and important impact um I also encourage you to to get that dashboard up and running um and um I think it will provide important data that the district can use in designing and implementing Dei related programs uh and I think it will also encourage you mentioned if you should include lgbtqia incidents I would encourage you to I mean it's certainly not mandated that the students would have to report but to have that option I think might actually encourage them um to report knowing that their issues are being um tracked and acknowledged so Stephanie I would also as Dr steinhauer mentioned encourage those
042students that you're working with to please come to Future Dei meetings it will be more than welcome they're they're planning on it okay yeah do we have any other commenters in the audience hi Kyla Rickard worth I live in word three and um I wasn't going to comment but uh this it's really exciting this this group of kids that we're getting together and um we're just kind of putting out feelers right now and um we are slowly getting more more kids interested and um we started like separating them out from the parents so we've got like they can just kind of run their own thing and it's it's really amazing to just sort of set it up and step back and watch and um so yeah I'm really excited that we shared with you that
043that's going on and it's been just like amazingly um just being in the room with them um one student commented after after the first meeting uh she said that it was just nice to be able to like talk to other people that understood like that was like a totally novel thing um and one other thing I didn't want to mention was like I was actually quite surprised with some of the stuff that came out it it sounds like there is some bullying going on um on a very like basic level like even the kids wouldn't really necessarily identify it as bullying they said that it was like a lot of ignorance on the part of teachers or like just they kept saying like people just don't know they just don't know which you know like
044um on one hand obviously we're all learning but on the other hand it was really heartbreaking to see these kids like have to be the ones to like teach older people and they said that if they do bring things up um there's a lot of defensiveness and like you know nobody likes to be told that they're doing something wrong but um I think that like the the um teacher training and that kind of stuff is really really important just to just to become aware of some things that might not be on some people's Radars so um that's all anyway thanks thank you Mr Stengel do we have anyone online it's 706 so I will end our Dei meeting and we will meet back again in January thank you [Music]