001All right, it's six o'clock and we'll call this meeting to order and we'll start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Do we have someone from the PTO? I'm not sure that we do tonight. Is there a PTO update that anyone's received? I think she was coming. Okay. I know there's a lot of traffic. Everyone's out. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and open public input per RSA 18974. So we'll start the clock and open public comment for the next 30 minutes. And we'll go ahead and move into approval of the minutes. Okay. So we have two sets of Can you guys hear me? I'm always like
002away from the mic. Two sets of meeting minutes from February 3rd. We have our public meeting minutes and our non-public meeting minutes. So just leave a minute to see if anyone has any comments. I'll give you a chance to review those. I'll make a motion to approve the minutes from our February meeting for both public and non-public. Second. Okay. Any comment, questions? Okay, all in favor? Aye. Aye. Great, moving along. Great, so let's, we'll do our principal reports and we'll start with Main Street School. Oh, or Lincoln Street School. We're getting the tech. We got tech. Ah, love it. Okay, great. We'll move aside. Good evening everyone. So we are going to run through some of our data that we've collected for our mid-year assessment, particularly our I-Ready assessments and some of the results from
003those. Just a few reminders, our I-Ready data is based on end-of-year skills. So when we're looking at numbers and percentages, we're looking at where kids are at towards those end-of-year goals. This visual on the right is... So on the right hand side, that visual represents the big diamond in the back is our quality core instruction for all students. So that is our tier one instruction. And then as we move towards the right, ways that we address extended learners and then accelerated learning opportunities, and then we move towards the left, and that is where we provide some supplemental instruction or what we consider our Tier 2 instruction, and then moving along further to the left above that is our intensive intervention. which is considered our Tier 3. When we look at those Tier 2s and Tier
0043s, we're really talking about, well, first of all, I'll take a step back. Our quality core instruction, we're looking at 80% to 85% of our students make gains just with our good quality Tier 1 instruction. And then... Our Tier 2, we're looking at 10 to 15% of our students. And then our intensive interventions, we're really looking at like about 5% of our students. And when we talk about our Tier 2 and Tier 3, it's in addition to our quality core Tier 1 instruction for all students. Also, we include our UA teachers, music, art, library, our interventionists, and also special educators to run targeted small groups at the Tier 2 and Tier 3 levels, as well as our extended learners. And then many of our staff have been trained in research-based programs specific to what the
005students' needs are in both reading and math. So we start with our whole school reading for Main Street School. This is mid-year. Our students this year took the mid-year iReady, both reading and math, in December. And so if we look at this, we're looking at in the fall. or excuse me, in the fall, we had 43% of our students that were on or above. And then in the winter, that has shifted to 65% of our students. When we look at the yellow here, those are what we would consider one grade level below, but it's a continuum. So many students would have fallen. closer towards the green and are making nice progress towards our end-of-year goals. And then the next slide, we can take a look at and break it down even further by grade level.
006And when we look at national norms, we typically... look at 20 students falling in the 25th percentile or below as potentially at risk. In Exeter, we set our cut score at 30%. This includes our special education students and our multilingual language learners. And so if we're breaking it down by grade level for reading at Main Street, We have 87% of our kindergartners who are above the at-risk classification mid-year. Again, that was in December. First grade, we're looking at 89% of our first graders are above the at-risk classification. And then second graders, we're looking at 84% above the at-risk classification. And now we switch to looking whole school at math for Main Street School. And we have shifted our percentage quite a bit, comparing fall to our winter data. And so we're making some nice gains
007towards those end-of-year goals. And then here is broken down by grade level in the area of math. Again, we set our cut score at 30%. And so in kindergarten, we have 92% of our kindergartners are above the at-risk classification. First grade, we have 96% of our first graders are above the at-risk classification. And then second graders are 87% above the at-risk classification in the area of math. Think I have one more slide And just to touch upon you know the we do look a lot at our I ready scores for various reasons But it's not the only assessment that we use to make decisions for instruction A couple of the other universal assessments that we use is something called the Cadence. We use it at Main Street three times per year in both areas of
008reading and math to measure student progress. Cadence is a little bit different. administration. It's one-on-one with the classroom teacher and there are little dipsticks of different skills along the way. And then we have a couple of progress monitoring tools that we use particularly for with our Tier 2 students who receive additional instruction opportunities and that's in Hegarty, Inspire, those are the names of the programs. Hegarty focuses on phonemic awareness, Inspire focuses on phonics. And then our classroom teachers are already always looking at grade level created unit assessments in both content areas to help us assess where students are at. And then our multi-language learners are just the window for access testing is just ending actually in a couple of weeks. The access testing gives us some more information as far as their skills, and that
009is done in that winter window, January to March, for those multi-language learners every year. Any questions? Okay. Ryan? I feel bad. So at Lincoln Street, this is our whole school reading data from the winter. One of the great things about iReady is that we can compare apples to apples, so it's really nice to see all the striped reds, reds, yellows, greens, and striped greens and how they're growing. This really, just so you know, from winter to fall. We had in the fall, we had 121 students about, students, not percents, at risk. And in winter, we had 102. So we grew 59 students moved. And we want all kids to move over towards the green. In the green, we moved seven from like the yellow and the red to the green. And we also moved 52
010to the striped. So we love that we see all this progress right here that everybody's moving to the striped or the green. Yeah. So this is a really nice visual representation of each grade level for our reading. At the bottom is the same as Beth talked about in regard to our at-risk classification. And we are, you know, you can just read that part, but we're doing, the kids are doing amazing, the teachers are doing amazing. Math next. Ryan's going to do math. Just real quick, one more point on the reading data for the winter. I went back to last year's scores at this time, and this is about 4% higher as far as students that are in the green, whether that be the light green or the shaded or the striped green. So we're about
0114% higher, which when you think about second year of implementation of a reading program, that's really nice to see as the teachers are getting more comfortable with the program and, you know, really understanding that scope and sequence and moving at a pace that... You know, we feel like we'll cover more of the program obviously this year, but also I just think the deeper learning is taking place too. Go to math. Next slide. Perfect. And this is our math data. I won't read through all the numbers there, but you can certainly see the significant growth, particularly in the green. But also just as much looking at the very far right-hand side, we went from 13% of students that were in either the light red or the dark shaded red, and we're now down to 5% at
012the mid-year, which is not just, we always like to shout out, you know, our students that are making that incredible growth. in the green sections, but you know those students that are in the red they're making multiple years of growth to get out of those shaded sections. That really speaks to our tier 3 system, our special educators, and all the intensive work that's going on throughout the school day as well. And in looking at the whole school math data, you can see that if I can do my very quick math here, that's going to be 64% is in the green through the winter. That's 2% higher than we were last year at this time. So again, we're making growth not just from fall to winter, but also from year to year, which is really nice
013to see. And then if you look at the math, again, I won't go through the numbers, but if you look on the bottom, I'll read very quickly for those that may be listening at home and not able to quite see this. For our third graders, that would be considered at risk, which we define as in the 30th percentile or lower. We have 89% of our students that are above that at-risk classification. In fourth grade, we have... 93.4% of our fourth graders are above the at-risk classification in fifth grade. We have 93.4% as well of our fifth graders above the at-risk classification. So we're doing really great work in all tiers, that tier one level and that tier two and tier three. And, you know, in addition to that tier one math lessons that students have,
014we also have our math win model where students are able to get instruction where they're at. So maybe that is a second dip of some material that they haven't quite gotten yet. It also may mean exposure to some extension or deeper learning for that grade level. So we have a lot of work going on each and every school day. It's probably also appropriate to mention that we are midway through our second year of doing math league. in fourth and fifth grade, which we do through noetic learning. And that is about our top 20-ish or so students based on iReady data are invited to participate in that program. And that goes through, I want to say, early to mid-April, where they'll take a final assessment and have scores that are comparative at the national level. And,
015you know, there's a little bit of a competitive piece that the students that are really into math get excited about as well. So we're excited for that. I think there's one more slide. As students get into the intermediate grade levels, third, fourth, and fifth grade, we do have some more assessments that go beyond our local diagnostic assessment through iReady. So for example, Lincoln Street School is a selected school for NAEP, which is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. We had approximately 30 students take this assessment just before February break, which we did not choose the date, but they did a really good job of working hard, and they were assessed in either math or reading. Schools can be assessed or chosen to participate in the NAEP every two years. It had been a couple years
016since we were selected, so this happened to be one of those years. We're really happy with, again, the efforts that the students made, and the results will be reported as part of the nation's report card. We don't necessarily get a Lincoln Street School scores for our kiddos, but we'll see how their participation impacts the nation's report card. Beth already spoke about the WIDA assessment for our multilingual learners, which is an assessment in areas of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. That is just about that window testing when it was just about wrapped up and then lastly in the months of April and May all LSS students will take the NH SAS in the areas of English language arts and math and then our fifth graders Will also be assessed in the area of science So that's
017kind of just a snapshot of kind of what's been going on in with regards to NAEP and WIDA and what's coming up with New Hampshire SAS Any questions? like how is when iterative right child is sort of starting to sort of begin to yeah i well i think there's a couple pieces to that i think the first piece is um the i read a data um that we get for whether it be fall or winter or even spring i mean it was one data point right so we compare that data point with what the teacher's seeing in the classroom what the student is demonstrating in class work and on unit assessments and all those other pieces just to make sure that our listeners at home hear that it's you know we try to They call
018it triangulator data, you know, use those multiple data points to make decisions. With regards to the MathWin model, that is fluid. So every six weeks, a session ends. Teachers will take not only the I-Ready data, but they'll do, they do kind of like an end of MathWin mini assessment is kind of like whatever the focus was for that six weeks. And, you know, the... Data from that will be used as well as well as the classroom data and so teachers will come together and there are collaborative teams So all of fourth grade is going to meet together and they're going to look at the student data They'll have also just you know Observational feedback to you know as far as how did the student was soon focus were they working hard and all that goes
019into? The next group you know as far as the next piece so a student may not The student may be in this section for the first six weeks, but then the next six weeks they demonstrate that they're here. But then the next unit may be in geometry or have a geometry focus which is not an area of strength. So the student may, so they're always moving back and forth. And our teachers do a really good job of just individualizing that instruction. Yep. Yeah, we do look at those trends. Absolutely. I know that there's a little asterisk for a few years there as we're coming out of COVID and just kind of the different experience that some of the students may have had. We're kind of out of that bubble a little bit more. We did
020a little bit more of a deep dive with that cohort, you know, and following them vertically in the fall data. We kind of held back on doing that for the mid-year just because of what it is. Just a mid-year piece one assessment was taken right before the holiday break one assessment was taken right after we feel like the the end of year Doing more of like an apples to apples comparison The data is a little bit more meaningful than the fall to winter but yes we do follow the cohorts and can kind of look at where that end of year piece is where students finish up and What that looks like is students kind of come through the system from K through five And certainly we'll make sure that we have that again as we
021go into the fall and we do our next data recap. Thank you. Thank you. And since I'm done with this part, but I do want to just say since I don't see Sarah here from PTO, PTO put together an absolutely amazing staff lunch today. And I just want to make sure that we recognize them because it was wonderful as teachers came back after a busy meeting at Exeter High School. Our gym was not only just immaculately decorated, but there was... food enough here for probably the entire SAU. And we did our best to make a good dent in it. But we're very grateful to the PTO for that. So thank you. So we are going to actually move things around a little bit here in the agenda and actually move our non-public session up to
022this point in the agenda. So we're going to call non-public per RSA 91A32A and C. So I make a motion to go into non-public. Second. Okay. All in favor, aye. Aye. Aye. Great. So we're going to go into nonpublic. We good? Great. We came coming out of a nonpublic at 7.03. So we're going to turn things over. To the central office report. Thank you. I have a few updates. Yesterday I had the privilege of visiting the Water Street Housing residents with two of our kindergarten classes from Main Street School who perform songs from their Purposeful People SEL curriculum, songs about kindness and responsibility. and other wonderful topics. They were, I don't know who enjoyed it more, the kids or the residents or the employees. It was just a really wonderful way to start the week
023and the nice weather certainly helped. That walk was a wonderful walk with those students. Today, SAU 16 had a professional development day for our educators. Topics included everything from AI to best practices in multilingual instruction, restorative classroom management, writing instruction, elementary math instruction, movement breaks. I started the day with a HIIT workout. There were also yoga sessions. It was a really wonderful day. One of the nicest things about it, probably the nicest thing about it, was that most of the presenters were SAU 16 educators, and so it was just really wonderful to celebrate the professionalism and the depth of knowledge that our educators have. Yesterday, our new Director of Safety and Security, Stephen Cooper, began. We're excited to have him join us. I think board members received a little bit more information about his background,
024but it's nice to have him on board with us. And then I wanted to make you aware of a parent donation to Lincoln Street School, which was matched by a parent company, Blackbaud Giving Fund. So Lincoln Street received a donation in the amount of $1,200 to be used for a need that is identified by the principal. That, because the amount is under $2,500, that one does not need school board approval. You'll see under new business. that there is a donation approval. I'm actually going to ask the board if we can table that. We do have another donation coming in a larger amount. I just don't have all the information for you tonight. And I also want to present to you the list of certified staff for your, and I will ask you to make a
025motion to approve this list. So I'll pass that out to you now. And I don't know if you want to take a few minutes and do that now or wait for new business, whichever. I think we can take a minute. Okay. Yeah, we'll just get it. And in the event that you are in support of this list, I would just ask that you make a motion to accept the recommendation of the superintendent to support the list as presented. I'll go ahead and make a motion to support the list as presented. I'll second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Thank you. I also wanted to take just a moment to recognize one of our school board members on her last evening with us, Beth York, who's been serving our school district for the last three
026years and has served on a number of committees. and correct me if I miss any, safety and security, strategic planning, and superintendent evaluation, as well as being our vice chair and has stepped in from time to time. So just wanted to take a minute to say thank you and appreciate your dedication. We know it takes a lot of time, and we really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. And on behalf of all that I know Patrick also shouted you out at the last meeting but on behalf of all of us it's just been a pleasure to work alongside you and just want to underscore what Patrick said I always appreciate your sort of really great analytical mind and independent voice and commitment and especially I think to the strategic planning process especially throughout the past
027few years. Thank you. This has been wonderful. I will miss this group, and I appreciate all the things that I've learned and gathered from this process, too. So thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks. Missy Beth. I'll do the shout-out next week. I'm going to just keep shouting everyone out. And then just one last thing under the superintendent's piece. I just wanted to acknowledge that we recently lost a beloved member of our school community, Ms. Finnis, who was a teacher at Main Street School, and I've asked Principal Catarat just to say a few words. Dear members of the board and Dr. Bryant, it is with a heavy heart and deep sadness that I speak to you tonight personally to share the news of the passing of our beloved kindergarten teacher, Susie Finnis. Susie passed away recently, surrounded
028by her family. Over the past 20 years, Susie has become a deeply cherished member of our school community, touching the lives of countless students, colleagues, and families. For so many of our children, she was their very first introduction to school, a role she embraced with endless patience and a joyful spirit. Her warmth and unwavering dedication to our youngest learners have left an indelible mark on our district. More than just an extraordinary educator, Susie was a truly special person who brightened every moment with her signature smile and her energy. Matter of fact, she would often say to her students, you are all superstars. We're all heartbroken by this profound loss, but we're also deeply grateful for the love and the joy she brought into our school every single day. Keeping on in the tradition, we move
029forward with entering the school days on Friday mornings with a dance party. Please keep Susie's family in your thoughts and prayers during this incredibly difficult time. At this time, I would like to ask that we share a brief moment of silence to honor and remember Susie. Thank you. Thank you, Beth. Thank you, Beth. And then from the finance office, I am covering this evening. So if you have questions and I don't have answers, I will bring them back and I will get back to you. Is there anything you want to highlight about the financials in particular or any questions on the finances? Thank you. Thank you. Great. We'll move on to our board report and committee reports, starting with our equity committee. We met last, let's see, I think our last meeting was on February,
030looking back, I think it was February 12th. Yes, February 12th. And it's here. We talked about one of the things that came up was just how folks are doing with the purposeful people. program and how students are really liking that and some good feedback that the staff are getting back from that which is great and so it seems like that's also been integrated into all school assemblies so that that program is really connecting well there's also a discussion around heritage and history months so like how can we incorporate those in different ways than altering the day-to-day curriculum and having that mentioned there, but figure out how strategically to account for different months around different heritages and histories outside of the classroom and things like that. And there was also... This was interesting, the way to
031make sure that birthdays are equitable as well. So especially those children who have summer birthdays and may potentially miss out on those celebrations, which can be very special, obviously, during the elementary years. So lots of good things to talk about, and I think our next meeting is coming up probably in the next week or two. So that's all from there. Great. Thanks, Tim. So we're going to move on to the policy committee. And neither Patrick nor I could attend. So please, I did read through the policies. But if there's anything that was named during the committee that would be helpful for the board to know, please chime in. So just in reviewing these, I think there weren't that many. I think they're all revisions. The first one is policy EEAE. And this current policy name
032is the School Bus Safety Program. I think one of the biggest recommended changes is to change the name to the districted. provided, this is a mouthful, the district provided pupil transportation program. Sorry, Heather, that's a typo. It should just be district provided. Great. That's even better. The district provided pupil transportation program. And that's because it's not just for school, but all district provided pupil transportation. So I think that's the main one. You'll see in the policy that there's some clarity on the designee being the director of transportation as the operational lead. It updates some of the information around the use of contract carriers for school activities only, so sort of excluding homeschool. you know, 24-hour reporting for emergency evacuation and evacuation drill deadlines. So there's some tweaking to the policy, but I think the big
033one is the first one I named. I'll just go through all of them. There's not that many, so I'll go through them all, and then we can discuss. The second is policy code JICC. This is also... This is a new policy, rather. This is student conduct on school buses. And so this includes the jurisdiction of district transportation. So it's both to and from school, but also school-sponsored activities. Clarifies reporting lines around the vendor drivers to the director of transportation and building administrators. It's also aligning with RSA 1899A. So this is around sort of suspensions, transportation suspensions. And then this is another one where... I guess, is this the model policy of student contact on school buses? And the committee is recommending to align it with EEAE, which we discussed, that we also, we call this
034policy student conduct on district-provided pupil transportation. So anything I left out there pretty pretty straightforward And then this next one actually I may ask you to because I had there were no track changes in this one So I wasn't actually sure which parts I read the summary, but maybe you could sure go through it there were such significant changes around the the current policy that it didn't make sense to track change it we just Created this new language Can you just give us a little bit more commentary on why there were so many changes? Sure. So it's all around the 306s and specifically around both physical and emotional health needs of students. So if you look at the current policy, I believe this is the one that it's pretty short. It's pretty general. And so
035the new policy really outlines what the expectations are based on the 306s. So those bullet points in particular under each of the sub lines for physical health, emotional mental health, and prevention and intervention. Okay, great. That's very clear. That's clarifying. Good to know. Okay, and then the last one is policy code JIC. This is around student conduct, and this was a minor revision under the revised New Hampshire minimum standards for public school approval. And it just, it's really about ADA compliance, so it's about offering a verbal option. When necessary, I think that was the biggest change right? Yeah, it was a minor change but significant So I will open it up to you all if there's any questions or comments Okay, but anyone like to make a motion I'll make a motion to approve the
036revisions and the new policy as recommended by the policy committee second Okay. All in favor? I have a discussion for a moment. Oh, any discussion? I guess the one question I have is about EEAE, about using the word program at the end. Is it supposed to have the word program? Because I know in the next one we have... District provided pupil transportation. Do we need district provided pupil transportation program? Oh, good one. It's a lot of words. So you're recommending that it change to district provided pupil transportation and just cut the program. That's what we have in the next one. We need contact on district provided pupil transportation. We don't know that we need the word program in the title on the other policy, the EEAE, just to strike the word program in the title.
037That makes sense. Do we just amend the motion? Yep. Do you want to amend the motion? Sure. Do I have to say it all again? Just as amended. As amended. Make a motion to approve the policies and revisions, new policy and revisions with the amended title for EEAE to remove the award program. Second? Second. Okay. All in favor? Or any discussion? Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. All right. Great. Thank you. There's so many updates here. I have to scroll back and forth. Hold on. We're doing so many things in our schools. I get back up to the top. Great. So our next committee is safety and security. Beth and I are both on that, and there has not been another meeting since our last board meeting. So the next committee is Strategic Planning
038Committee, and that's you, Beth. There has, we have also not met. There's, you know, we presented to the joint board like we talked about last time, and so we're in the data gathering phase for the KPIs and baseline data. So we'll hear more at the end of the year. Great. Facilities, Patrick and Beth? We have not met, nor had a need to meet. Okay. Wheelwright Trust, Tim. If not met, no need to meet. And then sabbatical, this one, Allison's going to give us an update. Thank you. The Professional Growth Fund committee met on February 4th, and we reviewed a number of professional development requests. We received 31 professional development requests in total, and the requests totaled almost $26,000, $25,870.21. And we have $18,000 in... that fund and so the committee worked really diligently to ensure
039that every requester received at least partial funding for their request. We had some requesters who had more than one request so we took a lot of things into consideration as we considered the request but they were really, they were thoughtful and the, The applications were thoughtful and also the conversation on the committee was thoughtful. So the next step is that the educators would seek building administrator approval to participate in the event, knowing that there is this funding set aside through the Professional Growth Fund. It was a really great experience to work with that team. That's great. Thank you. And I think negotiations, is there? Today is voting day. We have another hour or whatever it is, half an hour to see if the Warren article passes but otherwise negotiations are concluded. Okay. And then superintendent
040evaluation, Beth and Tim. Yep. So the 360 will go out April 7th. to the staff and teachers who will receive that survey and during our next meeting on April, I think, 12th, we will do our assessment of the superintendent. So we'll need to make sure we have that time allotted for us to meet and discuss. Great. Thanks for that. All right. I think we had one item under new business on the agenda, which was the donation approval, but we're going to move that to our April meeting. Is there any other new business? All right. Is there any old business? All right. Hearing none, I would like to make a motion to adjourn the meeting at 725. Second. All in favor? Aye. So adjourned.