001okay so we will get on with our agenda um mr hilton you have a student here that we'd very much like to meet and um if you could introduce your student and then mrs anderson will put a picture of the flag up on the screen and as soon as you see the flag feel free to begin the pledge of allegiance mr hilton welcome prestigious board members and others um i it is my pleasure to introduce a sixth grader today lee gutierrez solis so without further ado lee hello good afternoon would you like to please join me for the uh okay yeah sorry please please arise and join me for the pledge of allegiance ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands
002one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you they may have questions oh no oh there's no doubt we'll have questions for you lee cool cool okay but it's not a quiz oh so yeah um thank you very much that was a wonderful pledge and we very much enjoy the opportunity to hear from our students as they lead us in the pledge of allegiance at our meetings um would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself sure i would absolutely love to uh i am lee i go by they them pronouns my favorite particular subject is uh ela i am currently in a few after-school classes and i really enjoy being here with you today thank you lee i'm going to ask the board members to express their thanks
003to you as well for being here and they may have a question or two okay of course thank you okay um reverend davis do you want to start yes i would love to start hello lee how are you i am doing well thank you for asking that's good i'm pastor davis and i've seen you around washington when i come visit what's your favorite subject my favorite subject in particular is ela though social studies is a very close second all right ela and social studies is a good combination and i know you're doing great work continue the great work and i'll be seeing seeing you around keep up the great work lee thank you very much you don raymond would you like to continue yes lee my name is raymond thank you so much for taking
004the time to be with us and to lead us in the pledge of allegiance thank you for your leadership we appreciate it um just wondering have you thought about i know it might be a ways away but have you thought about the future in terms of college where you want to go what you want to study yes i have in fact um my entire plan is to go to a four-year college over in sacramento and then take fourth as my job as a therapist nice like a mental health therapist counseling no health therapist yes all right yeah there's a great need for that and you'd be commended for for wanting to do that to help others so you must have a big heart right that a heart for others and to serve others so that's
005awesome and thank you once again and it's nice meeting you nice meeting you as well norm would you like to continue absolutely welcome lee now you and i have a couple things in common my middle name is lee and my career has been in counseling so i'm glad to see young energetic people heading into that field and it's a lot of rewards in that field a lot of challenges so i wish you well in your future what's one of your favorite books to read one of my favorite books to read is actually percy jackson and the lightning lightning face okay i'm not familiar with that one i'll have to check it out and thanks again for joining us today my pleasure lee you said you wanted to go to college in sacramento which which um
006college or university are you looking at i have not found a particular college that i am interested in just yet though that that is quite far away and i think i'll start looking at in around eighth grade is there a particular reason you're picking sacramento i have met i have many families close to sacramento and i think it would be well off if i stay close to where i was originally from before i think that's a really good idea college or university studies are difficult enough when you don't have any family around so congratulations um on all of your success so far and you seem like a young woman who has her future planned out and wants it and knows exactly what she wants to do we look forward to hearing more about you and
007more from you as you work through your public school career here in yakima and want to express my appreciation once again um for you being here and leading us in the pledge today yes thank you very much we understand that um you probably have uh other parts of your life that are tugging at you so you're welcome to stay and listen to the presentation that we're going to hear this afternoon about washington middle school but if you have to leave we completely understand thank you very much i think i will be staying though i am going to leave off screens that way mr hilton can come and continue the presentation excellent i think mr hilton's got his hands full with her oh okay um next on the agenda is [Music] a bittersweet piece for us
008don davis has been a member of our board for well i'll let him tell you i think it's about eight years and this will be his his last meeting of his current term and um so to this afternoon this afternoon we are bidding him a fond farewell superintendent green do you have the video ready can you hear me yes would would you like to do the land acknowledgement first oh that would be good yeah after i made after i made special mention that cruziel is not going to be here i apologize for that norm could you read the land acknowledgement please i would enjoy doing that and before i start i'd also like to acknowledge i noticed in uh the recent herald that virginia beavert who is probably the main person to preserve ishikan which
009is the yakima language uh we'll be celebrating her 100th birthday tomorrow so i think that's uh i'd like to acknowledge her and her work as well as the yakima land acknowledgement today the schools of the yakima school district rest on the ancestral lands of the 14 confederation confederated tribes and bands of the yakima nation the people of yakima nation inhabited more than 12 million acres across adams benton chelan douglas franklin grant kittitas clickitat and yakima counties today we honor those native peoples who are tied to the land through history legends and culture we acknowledge their descendants who live in the world today we thank the caretakers of this land who have lived here and continue to live here since time immemorial an acknowledgement is a simple powerful way to show respect and a step toward
010correcting the stories and practices that erase indigenous people's history and culture it also honors the truth as a school district we will continue to build upon our relations with the yakima nation yes please all right thank you it's uh my distinct pleasure to be here this evening in person with reverend davis director davis coach husband many titles that he goes by pastor davis we're very honored to have him with us and it's my pleasure to acknowledge him for his service here with the board so many tremendous things have happened over the last several years strategic planning process equity policy and so much more so it's wonderful that the current board has left their legacy of which he was a large part so today i would love to present him first with a card from our
011executive team first and foremost you hang on to that a pen i have your next this is his photo from uh here in the district office acknowledging his time and serving on the board also his placard on the back so hopefully hopefully you can see that there you go sir you want to set it right there that's good one of the great things that has happened with this current board is uh all of the hard work over numerous years has finally resulted in uh being acknowledged as a board of distinction this is the first time from my understanding uh president rice you made this known to me that this has happened in the history of the yakima school board so this is actually a certificate of uh distinction for you wonderful and last but not
012least we have a uh a parting gift uh from your fellow school board members if you'd like i can hold this while you go ahead and take a look inside that's a great reaction so not only is it important to acknowledge people uh in person when we can do that and it's been extremely difficult during this time uh but we've actually prepared a video that we would like to show in just a moment after which we would ask fellow board of director members to please make a few comments followed up by any final comments that you would like to share director davis okay so we'll go ahead and go to the video ms robin donald joseph davis and it's just a pleasure uh to be able to serve and see the inside operations and now
013that i'm on the outside to be able to continue to bring innovative things back into the school district and partnering with the school districts to bring those things in and i'm looking forward to continually working with the school district and with those on the board to make sure that we continue to bring equity and justice to our students into our communities there are several things that i'm most proud of that i've accomplished while i was on the board one is hiring a new superintendent and dr trevor greene two is participating in the strategic planning of a vision for the school district to accomplish and three is to bring racial equity and justice to all students in within the yakima school district and within the county getting the community involved and opening it up to the
014community where we can empower those students and their parents and loved ones to be able to be mentors for those who are trying to get out of gangs those who are to be men uh mentors for young men and young women who are maybe struggling in education and to be a support system it takes a village to raise a child and i believe that if we all come together with our different expertise within the community we can overcome those trials and tribulations that we are seeing now and i believe that we can do this together we can do together better than what we can do separate [Music] thank you that was a nice tribute um don do you have anything that you'd like to share before the rest of the board weighs in yes but
015i thought you guys were going to go first and then out okay all right we can do that i would appreciate that we can do that absolutely um i saw that graciela joined us i think she's still here yes i am graciela would you like to say a few words to don sure don i really enjoyed serving on the board with you i think that um what i've i've learned a lot from you i've especially appreciated the passion you brought to our our our board meetings and particularly around uh student needs and and ensuring that our students needs are are put first um i appreciate that you know you you're one of the champions in um moving forward the equity work that that we've done so you really have appreciated all of the the perspectives
016um and and and thought leadership that you've brought to the board um and will miss your your presence and and passion on the board and um um wish you the best in in in your next endeavors i i know it's passionate you are about community involvement uh we we this won't be the last time we see you um i hope that we'll see you in the audience at other board uh meetings uh on topics that i i know you're passionate about so wish you the best it's been a pleasure and um i'm i'm sure we'll stay in touch thank you so much for all you've done for yakima kids thank you graciela raymond sure reverend davis i'm going to miss you man i've been working together for a while it's a few years i do
017just wanted to say i appreciate you as a board member but also as a friend i think over the years we've been we've developed a a good relationship a friendship and i surely am blessed to have known you and have worked with you in the yakima school district uh so i do appreciate you know that passion you bring for education for public education for social justice uh for equity uh that that i know that that passion has rubbed off on the just on the district and the board and and and myself more so i know that uh no matter the situation no matter the discussion no matter the action that we're we're planning or whatever you always had the yakima school district students best interests in mind you know sometimes uh you know the methods
018were unconventional but you always had he always had the best interests of students in mind so i really appreciate that you just want to make things happen right and sometimes you know the systems are too slow or it takes too long to get going and and i know you you know just over the years you like to you know get going and make things happen immediately for students so you know i just want to highlight some things you that you've already highlighted you know you've helped the district make some great strides and and equity and inclusion i know for a couple two or three years there that we were kind of stuck right and it had a lot to do with the pandemic and so forth and so on but our board was stuck right
019what direction we go and i think uh you had a lot to do with what the direction we went in so thank you for that um i i truly believe that you have made pathways you know with your involvement with equity and inclusion the strategic plan and the other initiatives that you were part of that you've helped create pathways for all yakima school district students to be successful so i want to thank you once again i'll miss you i think the board and miss you the school district will miss you but the good thing is you'll still be around you'll still be involved i want to thank you for the the honor and the privilege of working with you uh together as as i mentioned the board and you had a lot to do with
020that accomplished a lot in the last few years to to be able to to help our superintendent and the district provide leadership through a pandemic was uh was that that alone right it was a quite an accomplishment and your voice in that was very important and and so i was glad to hear your voice in that um of course the strategic plan i know you were involved in that and had some had some say you're again your voice was involved in that equity was huge we went through a few months of equity training to develop an equity policy so appreciate you for that and you know just your passion your leadership so i appreciate you um and also you served also as for a number of years as a region eight was the director right
021and you were part of that as well so thank you for your work uh for wasdea as well so you definitely have are leaving your mark and you're definitely leaving your mark within me as well and i'll continue to to carry that passion that you've had for all students well i well we i know we all board members have that passion and that energy i think you're just you just took it up a few not just for me anyway so appreciate you i'm blessed to have known you and thank you so much and let's keep in touch and thank you for for all you've done for our students and our board for the academic school yesterday thank you so much thank you thank you raymond norm hi don so much so much has been said
022and and i don't want to repeat all of that i just also want to just thank you for the years and years of service and energy and devotion you've given to this task i'd like to just compliment you on one thing that i've noticed is your tremendous ability to get out and be in the schools and be with kids and be with teachers and really make yourself visible out there and and i think uh you've probably done that better than any of us and uh um again i would i i will miss you on the board and wish you well and whatever comes next thank you norm don i'm going to miss you on this board even though we haven't always seen eye to eye you have opened my eyes to new ways of thinking
023and i appreciate that very much your um determination for us developing an equity policy that includes racial and social justice is not not to be minimized your work with us us in this area was pivotal in our development of a policy your passion for student voice was pivotal in making sure that we had a way in our district for students to raise their voice to share those things that they're passionate about those things that are important to them and as a result we have a hundred and i don't know twenty hundred and fifty member um superintendent student advisory council and you were a big part of making sure that that came to be um i wish you the best i know that you will continue to watch us and we will no doubt know when
024you want to tell us something about what it is that we're doing or what you think we should be doing there will be no doubt in my mind that um you'll let us know um but i wish you well and i want to thank you for your years of service to the yakima school district to its staff and to its students so thank you thank you and now the floor is yours i don't know if you're going to be able to manage that or not well i i think i will be able to raymond's start and graciela stop bringing me to tears and then norm and then you and you're right martha we it sometimes we didn't see eye to eye but we saw it through and that's the most important thing and i'm not
025i i may be off the board but i have not left the job does that make sense i may be off the board but i have not left the job and the job continues and i have each and every one of y'all sell numbers so and i know where y'all live so when it's when it they brought me some tissue but it's it's uh you know martha and raymond and graciela you remember the stuff i went through and i had the great support and encouragement from the three of you all the attacks all the persecution and i've had raymond asked me how are you doing it how how are you going through this and even you martha asks how am i withstanding this and i have a friend by the name of scott wilson and
026he wrote me something and he rewrote it yesterday and sent it and it says i would rather please god and have a few people upset with me than to please a few people and have god disappointed with me and that's what carried me through that adversity y'all remember that those attacks you remember that and then my sister my older sister sent me something that dr martin luther king told us in new orleans and he said intelligence plus character is the true meaning of education and that's what it's about and i'm gonna continue to work with you guys to fulfill the equity policy the racial justice you know all of that and also bring creative programs to the students to enhance them and i just love this administration uh the whole cabinet but i i i'm
027gonna miss the monday meetings in the tuesday business meetings sitting up there but i'll be sitting out in the audience i want you to know that okay and you guys have my support 110 on the next day after the election guard opened a big window from heaven for my c 3 the son of david restoration ministries along with real madrid foundation in game on and the seahawks and the mariners we're going to be doing stuff in the yakima county together to enhance the the young people and their families in the in yakima county and beyond so i just wanted you guys to know that god has given me more work to do and uh i'm i'm up for the task and he has aligned everything everything has felt fault is falling in place matter of
028fact i have a meeting that started at four o'clock with with the challenges uh it's a group that started in the 70s by the black panthers to do game prevention intervention on the ground and do education and mentoring so i i'm gonna i'm gonna miss the monday meetings but i'll i won't miss you guys because i'll be seeing you guys and you know just keep up the great work and know i'm available whenever you need a ear a listening ear and i'm here thank you guys for all the support and all the love and i love the praying hands cynthia's going to cry when she sees those praying hands and she sends her love too as well as my mother-in-law thanking you guys for the support and you know i i i'ma let you guys
029get back to your business because i know bill hilton is in uh itching to get his presentation done bill i love you and i'll be seeing you thank you guys thank you don i'm glad i'm glad you and your you'll be thinking of us whenever you see that gift on your bookshelf um we we heard that you have another place to be so if you if you need to leave we completely understand martha do you mind if i just add one thing no go ahead okay so just very briefly uh reverend davis i want to acknowledge uh your work on behalf of our executive team uh it's so nice to be able to honor somebody while they're still alive instead of do it after they're gone so to be part of this and to have
030a celebration of all that you have meant to the district is tremendous i i just want you to know that if i were to open up the conversation to the rest of my team we would go on for another hour so just know that there is that type of feeling towards you and i know that you and i will connect at another time uh i think the mark of a great team is to have very different perspectives uh there was a famous coach who once said surround yourself with smart people who will argue with you and there are five smart people on the on the board who were able to disagree but agree around what was most important for students and i think what was most mentioned about you was your passion and i think
031that translates into love for kids and there was never any doubt of the love that you have and continue to have for our students so thank you so much from the bottom of my heart and from our entire executive team and i think they just closed us out because i know i asked you i said are you going to stay around for the rest of the meeting and you said heck no i got things to do so that's great you do those things but if you would just take a short look we have some photos that will be coming your way later this week and i'll make sure i get them to you but here's a sample from hector over at barge lincoln uh the reader board thank you reverend don davis fortitude the word
032of the month and then here we have julio welcome bienvenidos thank you gracias don davis and we have several more that will be coming your way so thank you reverend davis i i want to say thank all of you guys and now you guys really got me crying and i will i'm gonna cherish this for the rest as long as i have breath in my body and i can't wait to have my wife and mother-in-law see this in about a week because they're gonna be teary but thank you guys and i really do have to get to this meeting but know this i'm here for you guys okay whatever it is i'm always available don't hesitate to call love you thank you don best wishes and good luck with your new adventure excellent the next
033item on our agenda is the swearing-in of board members which was a result of this most recent election superintendent green wonderful thank you uh president rice yes when we have a change of one person we have an entirely new board and we have two people to swear in this evening uh once again graciela villanueva we're very pleased that you were able to come back here in the uh wonderful position that you've been serving in and ryan beckett is going to be new to the board and i'm sure he'll be excited to find out that he's going to make just as much money as don is leaving the board so this is certainly a position of love and commitment so we thank ryan in advance for being a part of our new board i will start
034out if i could with uh graciela if you would go first and we have never done this virtually but we'll stumble through here i will uh i've broken this down into about five different segments and so i'll squeak and then silence myself and you can we'll get through this um all right wonderful and you might want to bring your hand up to the square all right uh i graciela villanueva do you solemnly swear i do solemnly swear that i will support the constitution of the united states that i will support the constitution of the united states and the constitution of the state of washington and the constitution of the state of washington and will faithfully discharge the duties of director and will faithfully discharge the duties of director of yakima school district number seven yakima
035county state of washington of yakima school district number seven yakima county state of washington to the best of my ability to the best of my ability thank you that's it thank you do you feel different i i do i have this whole new level though thank you so much wonderful we are only uh regret is that we could not have uh everybody here doing this in person so thank you graciela all right director beckett are you ready yes sir wonderful we're excited okay here we go i ryan beckett do solemnly swear that i will support the constitution of the united states that i will support the constitution of the united states and the constitution of the state of washington and the constitution of the state of washington and will faithfully discharge the duties of director
036and will faithfully discharge the duties of director of yakima school district number seven yakima county state of washington of yakima school district number seven yakima county state of washington to the best of my ability welcome aboard and before i yes celebration hands up for both director beckett director villanueva and director beckett we have for you um and we'll get this to you we have a couple of magnetic name tags that you'll get too so you can wear them on two different outfits if you like and just leave them there we have the wonderful uh name plate that will so people know who to be angry with not so know who to appreciate and then of course we will uh put up your uh photo here before the end of the evening it'll be displayed in
037our foyer and uh welcome uh welcome aboard we're glad to have you here as part of our new board and graciela we're glad to have you back uh president rice unless you have any comments do either of you have anything any comments you'd like to share i'll just say that i'm glad that i have the opportunity to continue to serve the community of yakima and to represent our students needs and to ensure that our students needs are put first thank you graciela if i could just say uh thank you especially to superintendent green for some of the help with onboarding thus far and that i'm really looking forward to getting to know everyone better and i'm excited about this opportunity so thank you thank you ryan um as i've told incoming board members in the
038past there will be a slight grace period where you can say i didn't know about that i'm new but we won't allow you to do that for very long because there's there's no rest when you come onto a school board you hit the ground running at 60 miles an hour and today is no different than that so welcome look forward to working with you and serving the students and staff of the yakima school district with you as a member of our team [Music] okay next we'll get onto our school presentation we have washington middle school presenting today typically it takes about three years for the school board to um get around to all the schools when we could get around to all of the schools but we have been doing this virtually for the last
039almost two years now it's it's always one of the [Music] most informative things that we do as a board and on a personal note it's one of the most fun things that i do as a board member is to get a chance to interact with staff and hear what's going on in the schools and so today it's washington middle school's turn mr superintendent do you want to kick this off or just move to principal hilton i'll take less than a minute to kick this off president rice i certainly want to thank not only principal hilton for his uh tremendous work and preparation and efforts at washington middle school but also would like to thank our executive director charlotte ellis for her work as well in supporting bill we know that teachers truly make a difference
040in the classroom but the leadership in a building is paramount collectively across across a system for teachers you can have a a good building with a good principal but you'll never have a great building without a great principle so we're grateful for the time and effort that he puts in on behalf of uh students at uh washington and the last thing that i'll just share is personally on a personal note uh when i was uh doing my internship years ago i was blessed to have spent a significant amount of time under the tutelage of bill hilton so when lorenzo was out on on different attending different events i was able to fill in and work very closely with bill so i want to thank him for the leadership teachings that he bestowed upon me during
041the time that i was with him at washington so without further ado bill the time is yours all right thank you very much i'll get the presentation going here oh all right well thank you very much now i've lost everyone hold on i'm good all right i can't see everybody drives me nuts um welcome to washington middle school we have several staff members here they're gonna be sharing some different um information with you um we're just kind of gonna move through here i know we've already been here quite a while we really worked on our mission our mission is to be an inclusive community of staff students and families our mission is prepare and empower students to be community career ready through the values of pride we really rebranded we really focus on being positive
042responsible inclusive determined and engaged with our students um and they're really buying into that well we did rebrand along with um our leadership structure this year so we have started the mtss team then we've branched down into three main areas for this year our instructional which is our ilt our social emotional and then our behavioral we really need to do some work around all three of those areas so we broke it up shared the leadership and you can see the different staff members that are involved in that each one meech individually then we meet as a big team and you're going to hear from several of those today the leads of each one um of course we've aligned with the yfc strategic plan um we use a lot of different data which we're going to
043share with you i i don't know if you've been shared with the powerpoint that we have today so hopefully you have it in front of you because we're going to be going quick um demographics we're very very high um hispanic latinx population of about 94 percent um our free reduced is over 90 percent we have a lot of transitional bilingual we have a high migrant and we are the newcomer hub for the middle level so we have about 26 newcomers for this year and then they transition from yellow one to two and with that i'm going to turn over to nick and he's going to start talking about some sba and then he's going to turn over to gehan all right uh so on the screen right now you can see our sba data i
044can't even tell if i'm on screen so hopefully um the data is a couple years old obviously because due to kovad we did not test over the last couple years so even if we broke down by grade level those seventh and eighth graders are now high schoolers so basically kids every year take the sba test proficiency would be if they are a level three or four um so you can see an ela about 29 of our kids the last time we stayed tested were proficient math uh just over 23 and then science is just an eighth grade test 26 at the bottom there's a new indicator out from ospi that is an overall framework score middle schools get scored in four areas attendance student growth el progress and i'm forgetting the other one off the
045top of my head but there's four areas you get a combined score from one to ten red and orange means we've still got some growth to do but that line is the bottom five percent of the state where we used to fall under which put us into a required action district or school of improvement um so we started to creep out of that in a lot of areas but we still have some work to do there i'm going to pass it over to gonzalo guillen for some quick behavioral data and then i'll be back with some staff data so if you can see we have our behavioral data highlights from washington under mtss behavior and attendance um we're combining those we know that they work together so they go hand in hand so overall we're
046at 85 percent attendance this year that's an increase from the beginning of the year which is at 80. we've been doing home visits uh in fact i did two today um our first community engagement board was last week um we're working with the cis partnership and she's doing really good at helping me connect with some students she did a home visit this weekend for me and then we're doing tiered structures to increase the attendance so we're working with our students right now to see what we can do to help them attend their different classes if you see the discipline data for two months first two months we went from 2019 we didn't do 2020 uh because it was a really weird year so our data is a little more accurate for 2019. we had 350
047total referrals out of 78 students that were sent to the office for 2021 we had students we're going to be there were 145 students that created those 350 referrals so this year we have 78 referrals out of 48 students so less students less referrals looks like overall most of the students are following the expectations that's due to our pbis system and i want to thank some other factors that we have in there we're doing uh part of our pbis is pride so since we're the lions we're working on pride and we have that throughout the building and all of our teachers follow that reflections we also incorporated that as part of our pbis so when students are having difficulty with their classes they're sent on reflections and we keep all of that data and that
048way we can identify which students need tier 2 supports and so far we've had 13 disciplines that have dealt with suspensions this year so our suspensions are lower we're starting to identify our tier two students a lot quicker and our discipline overall and attendance is up and discipline down so those are the trends we want to see and i will turn it over to riplan again all right uh so the next one this is our uh ees data um so we're asked to show some of the indicators that are readiness to change um so if you have positives on those answers that shows that a staff is ready to change or ready to try new things or willingness to grow the big thing we wanted to highlight in here is because they're hard to see
049when you just snip one is we also get data called an iverse they gap which is basically trust between staff members and what our staff thinks of each other and their willingness to support kids and over the past three years our iverse day gap has decreased every single year which is a really positive trend to have it says that you should be worried if there's an iverson gap of 25 percent that means that a lot of your staff doesn't really trust their team partners or the others in the building to do the work we've never topped 25 but you can see up there that it's going down every year and getting a lot smaller which i think there's some things in place that we have to build trust within our staff um and we've got
050a great staff that's working together as a team um we don't just want to show you all of our positives we did pull one of our biggest declines in our longitudinal data was our perceptual data about professional learning communities so from 1920 to 2021 there was a pretty big decline in how our staff felt about working on a team so we took that to make one of our school improvement goals this year around uh high functioning plc's and for professional learning communities so we do want to share that we are using that data even if it's negative to help build on our school improvement plan and that's going to lead us into our school goals hello i am jennifer i am the ilt leader for the mtss group and we have four school goals as
051mr mifflin just told you our goal number three comes from some data on the survey but also at the end of last year we put together a staff survey and over and over we saw the need for stronger plc groups so kind of going out of order but making the connection that is one of our goals we just gave a survey last week that's continuing um assessing how staff are feeling just kind of having a check-in point so that's one of our data pieces that we don't have on this presentation but that we as an mtss team will be looking at so um the other goals are goal number one is to meet a lexile growth goal um to engage students in academic progress which is the social emotional learning and then goal four is
052100 of our families are going to attend at least three school sponsored events we do family nights every month and different content nights a different content takes each month and runs a family night um part of our plan for these goals each small team and each content team has created goals for their teams that fall under those four school goals and so i can speak to math more specifically but to meet the literacy goal our math team right now is working on three reads and as a team we bring our three reads that we've been doing in class we bring student example we talk about what worked and what didn't work for our new teachers as well as our veteran teachers but one of our growth goals is to make sure we're doing these three
053reads and helping students and seeing how they're growing through challenging word problems so that's like a very specific example the math read 180 has their goals for lexile growth and how they're monitoring students but during our small team we are really looking at what these core practices are and what it takes to make the core practices work in our classrooms and in our small teams so we do this not only in content but also in grade level so the examples on the screen or the links could be for content and grade level all right so a little bit about our school-wide literacy uh focus um we really focus on our literacy because we notice that our kids are reading at if you look at our lexile scores there we average um at least two years
054behind so we really have a plan on having um all of our contents uh support schoolwide literacy and by grade level so they come up with commonalities we have writing every day with washington writing posters and writing expectations school-wide really using annotating and interacting with text promotion of daily reading and then our core practices that interactive text piece and there are some examples of the things that we do with that we use that as walkthrough tools not only as admin but we have staff actually we'll go into other classrooms and they're kind of collecting data and actually giving some ideas on how to improve with their classes as well um and then i want to turn it over to amy and our social emotional [Music] good evening i'm amy marcus and i'm our seo lead
055um i'm going to share a little bit yeah i want to go back up here because you guys aren't staring at my name badge um i'm going to go over share with you a little bit about what we are doing to reach that goal that we have um just to remind you we want to engage 100 of students in their own academic progress goal setting and profession or personal development around seo um to reach this goal we have our research based social emotional learning curriculum which is character strong i'm sure you guys have heard of that um so all the all of the students school-wide participate in character strong one of the big wins i think that we have this year is that we actually have four days of advisory tuesdays we use for our
056organization goal setting this is where students do grade checks and go on skyward on wednesdays we address our college and career readiness standards through zello and on thursdays the sel standards with character strong fridays we use for goal setting and relationship building another thing that we're super excited about this year is we purchased an adult social emotional learning curriculum called anchored sel this year that our staff has been participating in we got a half a day on october 8th to do the work and we have had some um we call them wham's focus mondays to do the work as well as a team and that has been really successful so far as for school-wide implementation we've had maggie schulze you might know her she is a pbis coach with our district she's helped us with
057some sel and behavior mini sessions at the beginning of this year where on tuesday we would meet for an hour and she would give us some information and we would you we would take that and try to implement it and then the next week we would talk about it and then looking forward our next steps would be working on school-wide implementation across content so that will be more next year if you're looking at the castle model thank you i'm gonna pass it on to mr nicholas good afternoon everyone um i'm gonna take a quick shot here so i can see you so hopefully you guys can all still see the presentation because i like seeing who i'm talking to they've all just been talking to a screen and i'm just going to take my mask
058off because i'm talking to a computer um one of our key initiatives um in addition to character strong and now i'm in trouble because i need to go back and advance the screen one more slide there so you guys can see it there we go up one and then come back here one of our key initiatives is our pbis program like every other school in the yakima school district we are a pbis school for those that are new to the board if you're unaware pbis is positive behavior intervention and support it's where we take a common set of expectations a common framework and we use it to help grow positive behaviors in our school and it has been enormously successful for us we have been at that for some time um you can see an
059example of some of our expectations we just had the rebrand with the washington lions so we are now the washington pride we are positive we are responsible we are inclusive we're determined we're engaged we paint bright bull's eyes on each one of those expectations and it encourages students to grow in that direction um and as you can tell from the signage we have signage everywhere so the students know how what's expected in the hallway in the restrooms in the classroom when they enter a classroom when they leave a classroom on the buses and because of that common set of expectations students know exactly what to do at the right time we also as part of a pbis system have a robust recognition system so when they exhibit those positive behaviors we're able to recognize that
060with a point system we use that as the washington waypoints or their washington pride points excuse me at this time and we use a particular set of software to do that and i'd like to demonstrate it to you here in just a moment but let me just encapsulate the last part of this page here we have a robust tier 1 system and a tier 2 system and we're going to kind of explain both of those to you so i'm going to click stop sharing at this point and i'm going to share a different page with you this is our pbis rewards program that we use in our pbs tier 1 system so pardon me for just a moment let me click share give you a tab and let me grab the pbis rewards tab all
061right this is what it looks like from a teacher's perspective on pbis rewards um several years back we went through the process of getting approval to pilot this software in the yakima school district and hence since then several of the schools have picked up using it as well it it tags along with and supports the pbis program so well it allows us to give students a digital currency we give them digital points we reward them for positive behavior so like for instance here talking about rewarding a student this is mr hilton's account as you can see there william hilton um you can also see he didn't meet his point goals for today which is you know not so good but we'll work with them tomorrow um to reward a student if we're using a teacher
062laptop you can search for the student or if you're a teacher your groups of students are available to you we can also use the app on our cell phone and all it takes is simply scanning the badge cards of every student as they go by so the little bar code we can click whether they were responsible whether they were positive whether they were inclusive engaged and we can automatically give them a digital currency to spend students buy into this because having that digital currency to manage allows them to do things like raffle so if i were to click on the raffle page here they could go and you can see some of the things that are available to them right now and most of these are donated goods but you can see we have books
063lotions fun things helmets sports gift cards crystal crow kits everything you can imagine it is available to them in here for a raffle so they can purchase points and enter the raffle the raffles are drawn on the concluding dates and they get to see a prize and some or they get a compensation for their good behavior in addition every student side gets an sel check when they log in so the student is able to check in and say you know what i'm feeling angry today i'm feeling stressed i'm feeling calm and all of their teachers get a little heads up about their feeling not just for that but the students once they click on that link we were able to get some tips on how to calm down how to re-center themselves some good social
064emotional learning we also run our check-in check-out program through the pbios rewards program so students our tier two students who are on check-in checkout plans their teachers again get that notification and we can keep track of that data digitally as students move from class to class and that really assists us as a tier 2 team to monitor success and to graduate them out of the program and put them gradually over into self-monitoring the last thing i'd really like to highlight about p bias rewards is it's not just for kids but we can share a teacher rewards as well and i just clicked on the teacher rewards page but because i'm on a tab screen there it probably didn't click over along with it but it's a whole page that is devoted so the teachers can
065recognize each other we can tell you know what thank you so much for working with me today i appreciate it and we give each other points and we have raffles for stuff and rewards for teachers as well so it works out to be a nice system to really recognize positive behaviors and if i were to make one request well nobody's going to came me off here this would be a wonderful program to buy for the district so you know if you want to support something that really helps us this would be awesome and it would be super appreciated let me stop sharing this and let me go back to the original tab with our program and i want to wind up the pbis section with a page about our tier 2 supports now when we
066talk about tier 2 supports let me grab the washington school board presentation here there we go with our tier 2 supports you can see some recognition here our points our point totals from p bias rewards how we peaked out in october and we're still of course building in november um some of the the expectations that we were rewarded for but i'd like to draw your attention to this one um this is just a few snippets of our student screener that we run every year we try to run the screener at least twice a year sometimes three times it's a way for us to really get a temperature check on how our students are doing and get them to self-identify some behaviors that could cause problems now if we look at some of the things on
067here for instance like bullying and grief and loss you can see that the majority of students do not need help the the phrase exactly is i'm all good no thanks and that's the kind of golden colored ones but when students identify that they need help with grief or loss when they need help with feeling sad or depressed when they need help with bullying we're able to to like get a direct response from those students that they're reaching out for help and we can pair them with a counselor we pair them with a group we get admin to pull them out and find out what's going on with the bullying behavior and it's been so helpful to really reach those students before those behaviors become extreme and exacerbated because of the conditions they're going through interesting
068also from our survey equity and inclusion this was a couple of questions that we added to this year's survey whether kids feel like they've ever been treated worse because of their race or ethnicity because of their sexual orientation because of their gender identification as you can see the majority of our kids do not feel that way they feel very strongly that they've never been mistreated because of those things however those that did identify that way that they had suffered because of a distinction we're able to like then pull those students aside and nurture them and provide them with the support that they need which has been really helpful perhaps the more curious uh question here and as it is a team we just really regret not asking the gender identity of of the students who
069responded but this question was do you believe that boys and girls are treated differently in classes and it was almost a 50 50 split so it just would have been really cool data to know whether each respondent was a boy or a girl when they responded that way that'll be something that can be on our next particular question at this point we'll turn our program over to ms hernandez thank you for your attention all right we are here to talk about the mentoring program and what it's doing for our school so we have this new mentoring program it's called lion ames mentoring and some of you are a part of it and we greatly appreciate your support um last year mr misslin and i had multiple conversations about how we could help some of our
070students um that were just struggling that we didn't think we're going to they'd be in a different position if we could have helped them differently right if we had different resources and so through lots of conversations and additional staff members jumping in and helping with ideas we've created this mentor program and we jumped through hoops we thought it was going to be a lot easier we're both very organized people we thought it was gonna be a lot easier than it was but we're here and we are running he is running a very successful program um we had teachers input who they thought in our school could benefit from a mentor and this mentor would be an outside the school person that could come in and check with them they can email them the parents are
071totally on board and involved in the process as well so it's not a blind side or secretive thing and through this we're hoping to increase engagement students have conversations and make comments to us constantly about how excited they are that their mentors coming to see them at lunch or that their mentor checked in with them or their mentors coming to the basketball game today and they're just very excited about this new connection in this new support person so we have 44 students that have been connected with 44 community members um and just a another add-on so as part of that they're working on building strong positive relationships with kids you can see kind of the top left each of them was provided with a journal that they could work through the ties to the district
072character words of the month are character strong character dares and goal setting they're working on setting goals with those students and then supporting them personally socially and academically as of today we're actually up to 47 mentors our original goal was 20. it was actually kind of hard to get some students that wanted to try this out at first and now that they're seeing people like dr darling bring pizzas in for lunch i have a lot of them asking me if they could get a mentor as well but we have some pretty cool relationships outside um one example i'll give is we have a mentor and mentee that go every saturday to the ymca they play basketball they go to lunch he takes them home that that's a student that was identified for needing support and
073i don't want to give too much information but it's led to some change in that student um academically personally and some bigger changes that we're working on outside of school um so at this point i should have grabbed the sign-in sheet but i looked at it the other day we had over a hundred adults that had come in to visit a student in the building some of those are the same person visiting multiple times for that kid but it's just great to see the community come into the building and work with those students and then we have one last school-wide initiative that mr hilton's gonna go over all right put it back on i don't know how to do it all right um so our staff plc's which we've talked about quite a bit um
074already or not a lot but it'll give you an idea of what what we're doing this is some examples of some of the work that we're going this is ongoing um to really get our plc's to be high functioning plc's we really started the back to school days building those norms a lot of team building activities really starting to work on their action plans what are they going to do that's going to impact student learning and doing a cycle um trying something testing it seeing if it's working we have some standing agenda items um you know focusing on kids looking at the data a lot of team um and staff surveys for feedback we did one at the end of the school year we just did another check and we're looking at that and making
075some tweaks and then we have some upcoming professional development for our plc is using some district expertise and esd and with that questions how do you put that over it's not going to happen what [Music] all up there we go all right so without any questions from the board or our illustrious other leaders that are in the presentation any questions from board members i do have one could you elaborate a little bit more on the personal development plans and what that entails please nick you want to take that one oh no hold on amy's coming hi were you referring to the seo goal for the students personal development plans yeah okay so as a part of their college and career um readiness um instruction they go through a program called zello and in that program
076they do various personality um assessments and that's how it's supposed to be doing various personality assessments these then pop up some interest that might interest them and then they start working well if that is something that i want to do what is what are some things that i can do now to make sure that i'm on track to getting there yes thank you that's awesome that student middle school students are already thinking about college right and planning for college so that's awesome to hear yeah thank you thank you any other questions from board members i have a couple of questions early on in the presentation uh let's see you shared some attendance data and some of the whole you talked about doing home visits and community engagement boards and your attendance uh statistics have increased
077you can share some of the reasons that you've heard around barriers to students as regular attendance so i don't know again if you want to take this but i'll let the ian take it because i've heard a few too if you somehow put them in so part of the question was linked up but i think the main question is what are the barriers for the attendance correct yeah yeah um a lot of that we're seeing um they range from the family being mckinney-vento all the way to parents not updating their information so we do a phone call every day when they miss and those phones are not making it through we're trying parent square so i tried to look back and see which one of the parents are not getting that information a lot of
078them just have information that has not been updated recently um a couple instances we've had students that have moved back to mexico but we didn't have any policy in place to remove them from the role so we wanted to make sure that we did that correctly so that was the two home visits that i did today those students were disenrolled not just by hearsay but we actually had signatures from parents let's see i think a big one that i'm noticing a lot of is that parents are just some of them are very apathetic as to the attendance and the importance of it so once i have a conversation with them about how important it is for grades and making sure that when they get into high school that you know they're up to grade level
079that it's going to help them they tend to get them in here more i did some home visits on a friday that we had off from school so a lot of the kids didn't expect anybody from school to show up that day and out of those home visits they'll get 10 five of those kids started showing up not regularly but at least they we saw them again we saw the whites of their eyes is what they like to say so you you mentioned mckinney vento is it just kind of your your best sense of do you think that bikini bento related challenges is increasing in our family and your experience um some of them are a lot of what i see is a lot of them just don't have the transportation um so their transportation
080is spotty um i know art and transportation is trying to work it to where we can make our radius a little bit smaller so they can be included in our transportation system but currently it's you have to be within a certain size um so that's where we start and then if that doesn't help with mckinney-vento then i refer him to javi vela and he starts to get the resources together for the kids but that all that takes time and so since it's the beginning of the year but one of the great things is a lot of the kids that i was chasing last year not literally chasing but following i see them every day here now um so a lot of it just had to do with colgate last year and this year they're a
081little bit more apt to coming on a regular basis it's just it's kind of like our um our discipline data the ones that are missing are the ones that are missing a lot so it's just usually the top five percent those are the ones that we're going after right now and focusing on to try to get them in here and what would you say that there's more kids that qualify for making you bento now than in previous years um they could be sometimes what i do will notice is that their address that's in there is completely wrong so i'm having to find them on facebook having to find them through uh officer pepper got me a phone number that was updated and then once i can start making that connection then we can start to
082give them the resources and some of them are doubling up families and and they just don't update their information well thank you for all of your work that's you know amazing work too to reach out to families particularly those little students who are in that higher higher percentage five percent of students who are having a lot of challenges um attending school regularly so thank you for all the work and i try to be as supportive with the families instead of coming at him with you know why aren't you doing this or that it's just like what can we do to help but you might want to thank me later after i submit my mileage um no no other questions but just want to thank you um principal hilton and your team and all of the
083great work that you all are doing um you know the last couple years has been especially challenging and you know we don't have a lot of data to look at as board members but know that so many of our students are really struggling with social emotional issues with mental health issues and so i really appreciate that we have um that you all have a really strong focus on ensuring the wellness of our kids both emotionally and mentally i think if a kid is struggling um with those things it's hard to learn it's hard as adults to pay attention if you have some some of those challenges going on and so this intentional uh focus of ensuring kids wellness i think is really gonna um set us up to set you all up to for some
084good student achievement stories in this first year um as we transition back to the in-person school so thank you for all of your work and um i can't wait to come back in in three years and hear more about uh this presentation of first of all we'll see you more between that but uh those times so thank you so much for all your work now one thing we didn't highlight here is we do have um we put in a lot of extra support this year we have a full-time counselor on staff um rcis has a lot of outreaches of course the college bound mtss so we have about in our advocates three other advocates we have in the building to reach out for attendance or just really supporting kids in their social emotional along with
085academics um we're trying to really build a strong foundation that for support for kids here i'm sure every building is but we've been reaching out and having that thank you graciela are there any other questions or comments from board members yeah and this is norm i just like to compliment you on what you're doing i i really think when you you're really on the right track when kids feel safe and supported in their school they'll be there it's the place they want to be and i think that's showing uh the fact that your kids the data seems to show that they're feeling safe and supported and so i think that's going to be a big key in the attendance as well and and i i really am a big proponent of a lot of the
086programs you've implemented so congratulations on doing pbis with energy and fidelity and and working the program really hard we have a great staff that work together to get it done i wish i could take credit for it but it is them that shared leadership and let them take initiative has been really good we have a wonderful staff here thank you norm i thought you had a few comments so yeah i just wanted to say that i really appreciate the new logo right the lion that was awesome to see that in the presentation and and thank you to the leadership of mr guihan and the students i i saw that and you know i i look at the i was looking at the word pride and i kept thinking it was actually you know having pride
087in oneself accomplishments but it also has a double meaning i believe that's what i heard right that that students are part of this lion organization or club or or pride right and everybody has their role and everybody and but the prize there to help these these students to get prepared to learn um you know all those things that we heard you know in preparation for the next the next step in their educational career so i was very impressed with that i was just thinking about that through the whole presentation the concept of pride and the values right associated with that because oftentimes in our society you know pride being prideful is is frowned upon but if we're prideful for the right things and those values are the right things then it's okay to be prideful
088it's okay to be boastful and that just helps i think students be more successful also i i saw it interesting and it was great to see that most students replied or responded to the survey that they've never been treated worse due to ethnicity race or ethnicity i i found that to be very interesting and again it was great to hear that that's not an issue for them at washington middle school so i just want to thank you mr hilton and your team you know as garcia board member graciela mentioned we we've gone through some very challenging times with the pandemic and and all that has resulted with the pandemic right the mental health challenges and just attendance and so forth but you know we appreciate the work that you and your team are doing to
089continue right to figure things out and and do the best possible find the best possible ways to provide a quality education to students at washington middle school and and thank you so much for that your leadership and we appreciate you guys thank you raymond um ryan i don't want to um let you go and and and not have something that you'd like to add i know this was probably a baptism by fire hose for you today correct but i wonder if you have any questions for staff or if you'd like to share anything well thank you martha principal hilton i just want to say thank you uh that's a lot of information i am scratching down a few notes uh for some questions that i need to formulate better down the road but um it's
090very encouraging it's very exciting it's very energizing and i appreciate getting to uh getting to hear your presentation today and i look forward to being able to uh to see you guys in person in your building down the road someday so thank you we have an open door policy following covet protocols where stacy but yeah we love to have people visit our building um and kids like to see people coming from out i mean those who have been in the building know that our kids are pretty welcoming and they're not afraid to ask you questions so please come on anytime thank you ryan principal hilton and your staff i commend you on probably the most um informative and kind of like machine gun fire kind of presentation that we received today there was a lot
091of information in that presentation and like ryan i'm going it's going to take me a while to digest it what i was most impressed with however was your your implementation of pbis and how that is being leveraged to make sure that you've got students who are attending so your attendance is up and your discipline numbers are down and that's very encouraging um especially considering the the 20 months that we all have experienced and so i want to congratulate you on that um and thank you for for a great presentation today it was it was really well done and and full of information that we can use to dig into a little bit later superintendent green do you have any closing thoughts here i appreciate bill hilton our principal acknowledging his staff and i think that's
092another great leadership quality is recognizing uh the boots on the ground so to speak with those who build the relationships most students don't care what you know until they know how much you care and i think at washington especially with the mentorship program in addition to the variety of other outreach efforts that are taking place our students know that and that's a direct reflection on our teachers but then also on leadership for recognizing how to support staff in initiating great programs and having the flexibility to do so so thank you bill thank your team and thank your staff wonderful presentation thank you superintendent green mr hilton i know that um you all probably have life that are are um pieces of your lives that are tugging at you for one reason or another you're welcome
093to stay but if you need to leave we do have other things to take care of today if you need to leave we completely understand all right i appreciate that thank you for the opportunity today hey martha i have just one thing for mr hilton i had i've served as a mentor in the past it's been a while so i'm raising my hand to volunteer as a mentor if you need any more so just wanted to to offer that to you raymond give us a call tomorrow because i think we have another young man that we're looking for a nice male to to mentor we're one short all right i'll call you tomorrow i i've been working i worked with a student there years ago and now he's in college he's graduated and you know
094i have contact with him so it's awesome to see you know the impact of that program it's a wonderful program so i'll give you a call tomorrow let's go proven success yes sir sign you up there you go bill one more thing martha go ahead so bill before you leave i think uh uh what just happened there is a wonderful example of the opportunities and and i know that uh director navarro took full opera well advantage of that opportunity being in on this conversation is there a um a number or an email that you could drop into the chat for those that are maybe here this evening or is there something that we could do to access i know we have i'm not sure how many people on board looks like eight at the moment
095but there may be a way for you know some of those that are watching and thinking about serving as a mentor to a young lady or young man uh how they would reach out yup i'm gonna put oh look at that nick's already in there oh no wait a minute his email is not in yeah all right so if somebody is watching it would be mifflin m-i-f-f-l-i-n again m-i-f-f-l-i-n dot nicholas nicholas ysd7.org you could also reach out to central office here and we would put you in contact with washington middle school bill hilton's number of the principal is 573-2303 again bill hilton 573-2303 thank you for letting me that's actually nick's number mine's all one but that's okay oh thank you one okay sounds like we have some media opportunities here thank you bill thank
096you to your staff for for hanging out there with us tonight as we went through um the beginning of the meeting that didn't have much of anything to do with you but a whole lot to do with us so um thank you for your time tonight and thank you for all that you're doing for your students in washington well thank you for what you guys do for our kids here in yakima have a good night thanks you too okay next item on the agenda are reports from members of the board do we have any um board members who wish to report out any items of interest to other to the rest of the board this evening yeah i don't want to go into any big depth tonight i think we've had a pretty long meeting
097but we might want to save a little time in our retreat to maybe provide a summary of the some of the things that we did at the conference at the state conference so i had i attended some breakouts that were pretty interesting one was was kind of a renewal and review of policy governance and one was on dealing with hot button issues which i think there's some valuable information out of that and then one was i'm really interested in mastery based learning and uh moving beyond just seat time and of that kind of way to earn credit but really looking at mastery based learning and there's there's some things happening on the state board around that issue and in some school districts that are um taking a close look at that so and i i'm
098not sure i'm not clear on what we we are doing in this district around mastery-based learning so that would be a topic of interest later on but i just wanted to mention that that there were some nice nice things that were part of that conference thank you norm um we do have our first retreat coming up in january um it will be an onboarding opportunity for ryan but as well um we have other stuff we need to take care of in the retreat but if board members are interested in adding to the agenda um please let barb and i know and we'll put that whatever you add on to the agenda okay and raymond yes so i just want i also want to just a brief report on there was the conference it was a
099good conference good workshops one thing i found interesting is that i went to several workshops on equity and inclusion right and there appears to be different different definitions of of equity still so i'm just i found that interesting i know one one was based on structural racism or inequities right based on you know policies or racist policies and so forth more in line with the work that we did right with candy and and singleton but also there's also the the definition that we had considered a few years ago in that equity is that all students get what they need right to be successful so if they need a little bit more instruction or or there's more money or whatever then they they would get that so as part of you know an equity approach so
100i found it interesting i think it's probably a combination of the two right and so it's just some some food for thought i guess and and something that kind of spurred my thinking in terms of you know what what are districts thinking about when they say equity and inclusion and how are they uh realizing that in their individual districts so just just some interesting good stuff information and all the workshops that i attended even though there was some technical difficulties i think they got those straightened out but overall good good conference so i just wanted to report on that as well thanks thank you raymond any other reports from members of the board trevor so martha were did you want to talk about the presentations or you want me to talk about those two you
101could talk about them please okay um so since you did mention wasda and i won't put this in the superintendent report but uh i was uh uh invited to present at a couple of occasions and it's very nice that i think that yakima is starting to get a better reputation and uh we're sharing many things out there with the state that have been well received i was invited to be on a panel uh through gene sherrod who is an institution in the state of washington uh he he served on advising the governor around educational items in the past our current governor and also led all of the esds at one point and uh he combined with john steech out of the center for educational effectiveness and i i was on a three a superintendent panel
102of three of us uh to address outlier schools in a study that had been funded through the gates foundation it was a wonderful opportunity to hear about the great things that are happening in outlier schools across the state i was there representing roosevelt the work that happens with nancy smith and her staff which has been just phenomenal and there is a quite an extensive study on these outlier schools which give a a blueprint of what is working in the state and i shared in that presentation that i do believe that if every school director was able to read that refer to it and understand what is working out there across the state with high needs populations in different areas uh that we would all be gathered around these type of studies so i have requested
103that from gene sherrit and john steech and i will have that forwarded to all of you i know there's an eight page eight page uh a shorter version but uh you'll get all of the details so make sure that you get that and then i had also the opportunity to lead a session uh bunker frank of course who you know uh was there martha was there as well online and then i was able to join with john mishra who is out of ospi i would share his title but it's the longest title i've seen in my life i think has like four or five different uh areas that he's overseeing but one of those areas is around modified calendar so that presentation did focus on what is happening in the valley here in our area
104around modified calendar of course we are not yet to the point where you know we are in that status but i was able to uh share clips around uh what's happening in toppenish what's happening in in highland and uh and other areas and again that was uh very well received and put us in a very good light with ospi in accordance with uh superintendent reichdahl's push to consider modified calendar and we are one of 21 recipients in the state uh of a grant to research what that could mean to our district and i know that uh will serrat will be presenting here in just a few moments on an update around modified calendar i just want to make sure that all of you knew that we were well represented not only in our attendance and
105sessions but also in presenting thank you trevor any other reports from members of the board okay next we have a superintendent's update mr superintendent jumping right in november's a character word as many of you already know is fortitude in spanish that would be firme the definition is strength of mind that enables a person to encounter danger or bear pain or adversity with courage in spanish fuerza de la mente que permita una persona en frentar se al peligro oso portalo and the trait is resilient learner the characteristic is apprendice for the remainder of the report this evening we have a variety of shareouts uh two on the coveted reports the ysd statistics through stacy and also then the county report through jewel i would also ask stacey that she add to her report some of the
106impact that we're seeing around covet within our own system and what that means as far as closures so we'll start with those two stacy please thank you superintendent greene good evening board of directors thank you barb we could go to the first slide please so again this is through uh tuesday of last week the last couple weeks up through tuesday and of course we're out of school wednesday through through sunday here but uh we did have a little bit of a breakout at gilbert and and roosevelt um they were in the 12 percent over at gilbert prior to us leaving as well as roosevelt at 7.8 in lewiston clark at 7.8 for an overall quarantine of students at 3.43 percent next slide please so we have we have administered down at our static site down
107at central services 625 tests over the last two weeks with 40 positives which is an increase of 2.28 percent and the convenience of that is just to let you know we had a teacher from one of our elementaries who felt sick during the day told their principal took off and went down to our site down there and ended up testing positive which allowed us to jump right on that provide uh immediate contact tracing and and secure the site in the area and so that clinic that we've been putting on for testing has been uh very uh beneficial and to the next slide so a couple of things that are changed we are below 300 per 100 000 over a 14 day period and so we had said that that aligned with opening up last year
108right to leave last january and so uh i think we're jewel show you in a minute i think we're about 291 maybe under that so we're updating our quarantine protocols which has been a concern as you know we we have leaned on the side of safety with any student who had a symptom or adult having a symptom that wasn't vaccinated by immediately quarantining them for five days and that has really helped us out but beginning december 1st we have aligned with the doh guide as well as yakima health district guidance and the the changes probably most significant changes um will be the quarantine of non-close con contacts based on symptoms and the new guidance is not one page in link that's about four pages long and we're trying to figure out how how to make
109that a little bit easier to read in in addition to that it um it is a flow chart for everyone not students not separated by students and staff but a flow chart for everyone combined so it's simply one flowchart not for one and then a different one for for the kids it's an opportunity for our health services team to evaluate cases on more of an individual basis uh for example again we're removing the five day mandatory quarantine for all symptoms as you know we were very stringent on that and it was very consistent throughout our district um so now we're going to um uh a symptoms as well as b symptoms and then there's different guidance through the health department based on how many symptoms and whether you have a or b symptoms so again
110it will it will have our health services staff um taking a closer look at what type of quarantine protocol will be in place for each individual person we're going to work with kirsten we're doing a media release on this uh again on wednesday december 1st to the whole community as well as on our website and most likely through uh parent square uh next chart we do have in place uh on-site immunizations we continue to work on those uh we do have scheduled both the the flu as well as the colby vaccine at adams elementary december 9th from 4 to 7 p.m we do have two more times slotted through community health and through horizon pharmacy but we don't have the sites located yet and they'll also be from four to seven p.m offering both the
111covet vaccine as well as the the flu shot and just just so you know hot off the press um we do have to test uh for athletics as well as for activities prior to participation in events and one of our students at franklin in boys basketball did test positive today prior to the basketball games and so basketball for franklin and their intramural opponent was uh were canceled today uh for this week and again we'll be testing prior to the games uh next week so again being able to test that quick not have the kids play and being able to provide appropriate contact tracing and quarantine again helps us keep going in person and keep our activities and sports moving forward any questions i can answer any questions from board members okay i'd be happy to
112turn this over to my my colleague or trevor would you like to yes stacey i do have one question barb if you could take that off for just a sec still thank you uh stacy i i know that a couple of weeks ago we had a community member that shared the concerns about the length of time and i know i spoke with at least one one director here about what we were doing so i'm just making sure that we all understand that now that it's under 300 we are at a different level which is not astringent and so it would actually address the concerns that were brought up at that point yes in fact i have connected with um that parent that spoke at our last meeting and updated her on the changes that are
113making uh making their way forward on december 1st which do address her concerns uh connected to her her students uh symptom connected to colvit and the five-day quarantine yes thank you so much you're welcome i think my colleagues in the dark over there joel jewel are you you're ready to roll yeah yep just got dark that's all i got the light back it counts so this is in the county um if you notice the last five days are pretty even it's because they didn't report daily cases until today um as of last wednesday so that's split out over the last five days um all at 35 which is really quite lower than what we've had so that's really good um you notice the stair step down from daily rates per hundred thousand like stacy said
114we have 247 per hundred thousand in yakima county as of yesterday and our seven day rate has also dropped to 109 which is really good um i was looking forward to us to get below 100. we we're close we're getting there uh cases by vaccination status in november we've had 251 breakthrough cases but a thousand cases um for people who are unvaccinated zip code rates again are going down and went up a little tiny bit in 9891 but statistically it didn't change but the others have all dropped this week hospitalizations are down also um we're at 20 today and we were running you know more like 25 to 30 before that so 20 is is a good number um hospitalizations by vaccination status again 15 people with breakthrough cases were hospitalized but 55 without vaccinations
115were in the hospital during november this is the death rate by vaccination status so they've changed how they put it out but now it shows all the months of 2021 and so in november we've had four breakthrough deaths and 17 deaths of people who were unvaccinated overall the rate is about 85 84 unvaccinated versus 16 percent vaccinated um who's been going to the hospital we've had one person um zero to 11 but our highest rate is 65 to 79 age bracket with 27 and then 35 to 49 has jumped up quite a bit this month school age cases as a last week on tuesday or wednesday sorry um like stacy said they've gone down we had 40 new students and that number has been quite a bit higher before this and 17 new staff in
116the county and over time you see it's dropped down k5 dropped quite a bit this this week uh or last week middle school dropped some and high school stayed pretty much the same statistically but they did drop a couple of numbers and then percent of people getting the vaccine we're at 58 initiating the vaccine sequence as of last monday and the difference from the beginning of the school year to now um 12 and up initiating the vaccine and again we don't have numbers of they're not presenting numbers right now of how many people five to 11 are getting the vaccine so 12 and up we're at 72.5 percent and then fully vaccinated they've had both their shots has been two weeks after the back last shot 51.9 percent of total population of the county and
11712 and up that's 64.9 percent my forecast i was off a little it went down a little further than i than i thought it would this week but that's good so hopefully the peak after thanksgiving as people had gathered last week to to get together that that peak doesn't go up too much so hopefully we just keep going down and i'm not sure but we'll we'll keep keep our fingers crossed any questions from board members for either stacy or jewel jewel they i you said that they are not reporting um vaccinations for ages 5 to 11. is there been discussion either at the state board level or at the county health board level about reporting that out or no i haven't seen any indications stacy do you know any of that no i i do
118not know but um we meet with them um every other week martha so i can ask that question see if they have any updated information around that it could be that because um individual physicians may be administering those vaccines that that information is a little slow getting out or is not going to be reported so if you could ask that would be great information i think for us to know i'd be happy to do that thank you okay thank you both for your timely information i think of community and families are going to be excited to hear that um the quarantining requirements are changing and um hopefully we get to keep them down at that level and don't have to go back to where we were thank you so much dr green yes thank you
119stacy uh for the update and uh thank you jewell uh i do hope jewel that uh you're able to keep us surprised of the omnicron variant i know that that's uh there's just some talk about that right now being pretty mild but in the next few weeks i'm sure that we'll hear more about that correct absolutely okay thank you i knew you'd be all over that so thank you i am yeah absolutely okay so uh next item is uh and i mentioned earlier the modified calendar and the opportunity that we had to share what's happening in the region uh you may recall as a board but maybe not that uh the last time uh will sarat was here in front of us he was preparing with our calendar committee so i've asked for him to
120give us a brief update on progress or any other insight that we would that would be of interest to the board will thank you dr green hello board members and special congratulations to mr beckett my uh southwest rotary compadre um so yeah i i have just a brief update tonight the the team has met several times our our uh dip net if you will out to the community on different calendar options and feedback is healthy we've got five participant groups that are currently being queried um so far 784 participants on that thought exchange we've had we've had 12 833 different ratings on that in that tool that will be open until december 19th and then um i've got some work to do with uh kirsten to take all of that information and package it in
121a easily understandable feedback um however we package that graphs or whatever the case may be so that the board is apprised of how people answered and whether or not it was students or community members or parents specifically or instructional staff or support staff those are the groups we queried and i and i believe the year is also conducting uh their own survey for the cba where it says that we're going to reach out to all of our members and see what their feedback is on the calendar this this next three weeks between today and before we go out for winter break i know that building administrations are busy planning and presenting to their individual parent groups and students and staff around the um what a modified calendar looks like what intersession the purpose of intersessions
122are so there's a big effort going out right now before break to make sure that we get the feedback we need to be able to prepare our option for the board for january for the first reading thank you will are there any questions to the board um will is is the thought exchange open to school staff as well so what yea members for example could weigh in on the thought exchange absolutely and they have been okay good all right well i'm looking forward to seeing what that what that result is absolutely thank you will a pleasure thank you for that information will i know that there was some misinformation out there earlier uh late last week i had heard that there was a belief that only 11 people had responded but to hear that we
123are near 800 as far as responses thus far and i believe it doesn't close for a few weeks now so we're we're gonna have some healthy information to uh sift through thank you for that update will and i'll move on to the uh balancing the high school numbers uh this is just a brief share out that uh one of and it's nice to have i see we have principal diner uh here with us this evening we did have a meeting a group of around nine or ten of us which included both of our comprehensive high school leaders as well as our our secondary leaders across the board to mull over the issue of uh how numbers are influencing the services that we're able to provide as a system as the board may recall i mentioned
124about a month or maybe even longer that we had some outside organizations that were willing to provide services as a result of the extensive funding that has come from the federal government and we were having challenges receiving those services at both of the high schools due to lack of space so we did convene a group to come together and talk about the different possibilities of what it would take to balance the high school numbers at specifically eisenhower and davis so that there wasn't such a wide variant currently we're looking at a 500 student difference at both of the two schools while i don't have anything to report to the board as far as concrete moves or suggestions i did want the board to know that that is certainly something that we are looking at and
125we will come forward relatively soon with some recommendations as to what we can do to more fully balance those numbers so if there are people observing tonight i see that now we have seven we are having conversations uh about what we can do to better serve our students by balancing numbers across our system are there any i know i've been a little bit vague in this but i did just want you to know that that is in the works if there are questions that i could answer i'd be happy to if i can't answer them at this time i would be happy to come back with those answers at a later date do you have any questions i have one question um it just occurred to me has that issue and the consequences of that
126imbalance and the possibilities for the future been brought up with our student advisory council to get their input and thoughts on why they that imbalance is exists and what might be done about it yeah wonderful wonderful question um we we do have now the ssac the superintendent student advisory council up and running uh it had its uh first session uh was about three weeks ago followed by a additional session around the fellowship we are approaching the um i would say approaching the opportunity to address that with the group i think in the late start that it was for us to have that group convene that it has not happened yet but that is on our schedule to bring that at least some of the ideas of what we can do while we're also being very
127cautious about not putting items in front of the public that may need to be decided at the district level we certainly want anything that is out there that people are weighing in on to be authentic and not be something that's predetermined so uh the answer is that will be forthcoming and thank you for that question uh for that comment director walker any additional comments or questions all right so the last item to share with you is around the equity audit and the equity audit we could anticipate that we would see some outcomes around our systems including the balancing conversation be manifest through the equity audit we have sent all of our data into the outside organization that is conducting the audit and the next thing that is happening is starting on the 8th uh 8th
128through the 13th we will have focus group interviews that will occur throughout our district that will involve students staff parents pair educators teachers just a wide variety central office personnel and there will be an opportunity for a board involvement in this process as well we will most likely look at um interviews with the board uh two members at a time and if we can get all of you then it would be one person would uh would be interviewed uh by himself or herself if all board members are interested in being interviewed for the equity audit it is certainly not a requirement we are doing focus groups with everybody else except the board because of the circumstances of convening a quorum and wanting to uh stay within that threshold so that starts and ant starts on
129the 8th ends at the on the 13th i believe and then the full report will be ready for the board to receive in late january any questions about the equity audit next steps that i could answer all right i will turn it back over to you president rice thank you thank you dr green next item on our agenda is are our action items first one is um approval of yakima professionals professional technical association agreement uh anthony anthony murrieta i'm sorry i was just trying to find my uh button it's all right anthony do you want to um fill us in fill us in on the ypta yeah yes i'm sorry i was just trying to get my computer um we've reached an agreement with the yakima professional technical association um we reached a four-year agreement
130um this will provide stability uh for our members uh and the district moving forward um the increase to the 2021-22 school year is a five percent year two would be three percent or ipd whichever is greater year uh three uh two percent or ipd whichever is greater in year four ipd uh there's also been a change to this uh in addition to the stipend of 150 per month for those employees who have a master's degree we do have a group of employees that filled in as counselors in this particular group and i would like to thank the members of the yakima professional technical association who voted on october 11 to ratify the collective bargaining agreement as amended through the tentative agreements reached uh below the two bargaining teams during the course of bargaining i'd like
131to thank specifically margaret delong and anita sosa who are the co-presidents rosemary martinez and maria sanchez as bargaining committee members and janet beck there are wea mid-state representative as well as the district's team of director chris miller dr jenny rodriguez ilda para assistance to the assistant superintendent and olivia martinez of hr you have any questions any questions for anthony on this agreement okay four-year agreement that's quite an accomplishment anthony congratulations thank you very much um we are also dealing with a labor shortage so this is something that i'm hoping we'll be able to correct that and be able to provide long-term stability to the district thank you the board is being asked to approve a bargaining agreement between the yakima professional technical association and the yakima school district do i have a motion so moved
132moved by norm seconded by graciela is there any discussion barb could you call the role please yes miss via nueva president rice aye mr navarro jr aye mr walker aye mr beckett aye motion passes 5-0 thank you very much next item on our agenda is approval of personnel actions anthony anthony you're still muted anthony i can share this too thank you very much sorry i'm just trying to get my screens so i can have them all um uh sorry about that um what we have uh uh is the human resource department submits personal action monthly which includes new hires leave of absence resignations retirements and terminations and non-renewals of certificate employees what we have are no new hires no leave of absence resignations or retirements and one non-renewal okay all right um the board is
133being asked to approve this evening um uh personnel actions for not for non-certificated personnel do i have a motion so moved move by norm seconded by graciela is there any discussion okay barb could you call the role please ms via nueva president rice aye mr navarro jr aye mr walker aye mr beckett aye motion passes five to zero thank you um next we have um i don't know trevor if you want to add to what you've already said or is this new information on uh equity work uh yes uh president president rice this is uh actually new information uh or information that was brought up uh multiple months ago we had conducted as you are all aware uh extensive work around understanding uh what equity means to us as a district and it resulted ultimately
134this last year in the development and approval of an equity policy since that time our work around our further work in leading a district which uh the board has a tremendous role in setting the tone for what is important not only for the superintendent for myself but also for the principals and subsequently those the staff members as well all the way to the classroom so the greater knowledge that we have around how we can effectively address not only what is outlined in our equity policy but understanding the current uh state of uh what we can do to influence and make sure that all students truly means all students is a paramount importance uh in since the last year we have seen marcus pimpleton dr pimpleton move on and the work focused around our student voice
135has fallen upon marcelo's scamballery who's done tremendous work in the two of us collaborating but mostly being led by him at this point and yet there has been a bit of a void in the departure of dr pimpleton and our opportunity to remain focused on our equity policy and what that means so as a result i have reached out to aaron jones who you may recognize the name having been a candidate for superintendent of public instruction uh losing a very close race uh to chris reichdall several years ago uh and has since become very steeped in work around the state but also around the nation uh focusing on anything from confrontations that rise from inequitable practices to uh groups of students and adults that rise to a level of disruption to simply working with boards
136and others on what we can continue to do and grow and how we continue to grow as a district uh the work with aaron jones is set to begin in january which would be a simple phone call a 30-minute phone call with each of the board members uh to an introductory uh conversation to get to know her uh to know you and understand a little bit more about your perspective and feelings around where we're at as a district and then that 30-minute session would then be followed later with an hour-long session in person uh with uh aaron jones uh before we would then engage at a later date collectively moving forward but since this is a new board i did put off any of the work until we made sure that we had a new
137board in place or knew that we would have the board that we had previously in place so now that that has been determined um i would like to proceed in january and have barb anderson reach out and schedule those appointments with each of you so we would be talking about again half an hour phone call followed by an hour in person meeting are there any questions or concerns that i could take at this time i do have some comments so as we know and just from my report from the wasda conference it seems like equity is like a living something it's alive right it keeps changing and informing and and so and i'm noticing that even at the national level it's it's starting to you know there's other voices in in the discussion now whether
138they be for or against i mean it's all it's all part of the same discussion so i'm just wondering you know and i've made mention of this during our last um board study sessions is that if we can get i know we studied the work of candy and singleton so and now there are other other thinkers and exemplars in the field that that are um have a different voice or similar voice so i would like to to hear from those other voices those other exemplars and thinkers in the field that are again because this topic seems to be changing and growing and just every month it just seems to be doing that so uh it's it's so that's just i just like to hear perspectives different perspectives uh different thoughts that way you know it
139just gives me more uh more information to form my own thoughts and to than to agree or disagree with making with our district and we're doing what's best for our students so just wanted to mention that i i greatly appreciate that uh transparency raymond and i i do believe that that is the initial purpose of having these conversations with aaron jones having not worked with our district in this capacity it's definitely to seek to understand the perspective of the board we do not want to jump into something that is a cookie cutter or design for any other district which is why she uh is requesting that we meet in this capacity to truly understand what those perspectives are and i would hope that exactly what you shared here tonight is something that you do share
140with aaron and i'm sure you would share much more that would allow her to really understand the needs of the board and how to move forward so thank you for that any other questions from board members okay all right so we can look forward to phone calls from barb setting those appointments for those phone calls with aaron um last item on our action is i think we've already talked about this tonight too um board retreat agenda items i know barb is starting to put together a list based on things that have been brought up at meetings but if there are board members who wish to ask for a specific discussion topic or general study area for consideration at the retreat uh please let her and i know so that we can get that on our
141list barb when would you like to have that information to you by before christmas um the retreat is on january 10th so you know by the end of the year within you and i can work the first week of january to finalize it so by the end of december okay all right so board members heads up any items that you wish to have included or considered for the board retreat on january 10th now would be the time to start thinking about that and getting that information to us okay we've reached the end of our agenda mr superintendent do we have a need for executive session uh we do have a need for executive session this evening i recommend uh 20 minutes and it's the purpose of potential litigation meeting council uh we have an uh
142requested need for executive session for 20 minutes for um potential litigation do i have a motion moved by graciela seconded by norm barb could you take the role please yes mr nueva hi president rice aye mr navarro jr hi mr walker hi mr beckett aye motion passes five to zero thank you um do you all want a five-minute break before we begin yes okay so in that five minutes barb will set us up for um moving to executive session and we will reconvene at um 5 50 5. thank you all for the time that um that you took this afternoon and for the time that the board needed for its discussions is there anything else for the good of the order okay all right seeing nothing i am adjourning the meeting and we will see
143you next monday have a good week everybody