NVUSD Board Meeting August 20th, 2020

001to order uh the nvusd board of education is holding a regular virtual board meeting tonight that all can participate in remotely you can join via zoom specific directions and how to participate are located on the board of education webpage on the district's website at nbusd.org board the open session part of the meeting agenda begins at 7 pm i'm opening for public comment and closed session items there are no public comments at this time vice president gonzalez matas thank you mr ruiz so i'm closing um our public comment of closed session items so seeing that there are none the navajo unified school district will now turn into closed session see you all at seven thank you all right let's get started good evening everyone my name is elba gonzalez mares and this is the napa valley

002unified school district board of education the nvusd board of education is holding a regular virtual board meeting tonight that all can participate in remotely you can join in via interpretation in spanish is available for tonight's virtual board meeting to access interpretation from a computer click on the interpretation icon on the bottom of your screen from within the zoom application on a mobile device click on the more button on the bottom of your screen and choose language interpretation from within the zoom application this is a separate channel that will allow you to hear english to spanish trans translation concurrently please note interpretation services are not available when you join our meeting by calling in our interpreters for tonight's meetings for tonight's meetings are maria is and claudia lindgren claudia please translate the directions on our english

003channel so our spanish-speaking families can hear a specific instructions on how to participate in the meeting are located on the board of education webpage on the district's website nvusd.org board can we please start with an attendance roll call from vera morales yes trustee martin absent trustee gonzalez mares president trustee jankowicz president trustee water president president trustee shank rusty gracia president student board member magana president quorum present thank you thank you ms morales thank you for joining us tonight in our virtual napa valley unified school district board meeting held exclusively online we continue in uncharted territory as we deal with the proven 19 pandemic i would like to thank our employees our families and the entire nbusd community for how you have supported each other and come together during these unprecedented times this meeting tonight is

004in accordance with the open meeting rules in the state of california per the governor's order i'm going to start tonight with some basic instructions on how how we are going to be using zoom and involve the members of the community all board of trustees and the superintendent are on video throughout the entire board meeting staff members are present but without but by audio only members of the community will not be on video and will be muted except during public comment during public comment any member of the community that wishes to speak must raise their hand using the raised hand feature in zoom you will be unmuted and will be provided three minutes to speak there are two ways to make a public comment within the time allotted for public comment on on an eligible agenda

005item to comment by video conference click the raise your hand button to request to speak when public comment is being taken on the eligible agenda item when it's your turn to speak you your name will be called out you will then be unmuted during your turn and allowed to make public comments after the allotted time you will then be renewed it instructions on how to raise your hand are available on the district's website at nvusd.org board comment by phone you will be prompted to raise your hand by pressing star nine to request to speak with when public comment is being taken on the eligible agenda item when it is your turn to speak the last four digits of your phone number will be called out you will then be unmuted during your turn and allowed

006to make public comment after the allotted time you will then be remuted instructions of how to raise your hand by phone are available on the district's website at nbusd.org board in addition community members are allowed to submit comments via email at publiccomment nbusd.org up until 8 am this morning public common received after 8 a.m the day of the scheduled meeting will not be read into into the record however the public comment will be announced as received after the deadline and it will be become part of the meeting archive as long as it is received before the meeting is officially called to order for every agenda item i will prompt the meeting participants who have joined us via zoom for public comment please follow the instructions just provided when you would like to comment on an

007item before we begin i would like to thank everyone for their patience as we continue to navigate this new technology so sorry to interrupt um our interpreter claudia i need you to mute it's causing some background noise that's disrupting the sound valvia sally i need you to mute there she is okay thank you speaking of technology here we are we're still navigating this okay so we have been called to order and conducted our attendance roll call we will go forward with our agenda i would like now for please um trustee jankowicz to report on closed session items good evening with respect to student discipline every item of business to be discussed in closed session pursuant to edcode 35146 and 48912-200 government code section 49060 and 49078 and the family rights and privacy act student matters

008the board recommends for the readmission for student zero eight two zero two zero two zero a and i believe we have a roll call vote for each individual student correct trustee martin absent trustee gonzalez marres hi trustee django woods aye trustee water aye trustee ortado hi trustee shank hi trustee gracia hi thank you the board recommends for the readmission for student zero eight two zero two zero two zero b roll call christy martin absent trustee gonzalez mares aye trustee jankowicz aye trustee water aye trustee urdado aye trustee shank aye trustee gracia aye thank you the board recommends for the readmission for student zero eight two zero two zero two zero c okay trustee martin absent trustee gonzalez mares aye trustee jankowicz aye trustee water aye trustee urtado hi trustee shung hi trustee gracia aye thank

009you the board recommends for the readmission for student zero eight two zero thank you board voted in closed session to approve a settlement with sw allen construction regarding a dispute overpayment for services performed in the amount of eight thousand dollars on a motion by trustee shunk and second by trustee grazia the board voted unanimously with trustee martine absent the board voted in closed session to approve a settlement with alpha g painting inc regarding a dispute over payment for services performed in the amount of 16 334.97 on a motion by trusty water and a second by trustee shunk or voted unanimously with trustee martin absent in closed session the board voted to approve a stipulation and settlement agreement with the office of the state controller in the matter of the appeal of 2016-2017 program audit of

010california clean energy's job act under the settlement the district agrees to repay the amount of three hundred and thirty nine thousand one hundred and seventy nine dollars and seventy six cents in eight equal annual installments which is a reduction from the claimed amount of three hundred and ninety nine thousand thirty five the settlement was approved by unanimous vote and that includes my report thank you trustee jenkins we're now on to our flag salute trustee gracia would you please lead us i'd be happy to uh manny if you can put the flag up everyone can please stand follow me or join me i should say in 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 a nation under god

011indivisible with liberty and justice trustee gracia we're now on to item e3 this meeting is recorded for live streaming and archiving on the district youtube channel for a detailed review of any meeting agenda item the archive video can be referenced located on the district webpage at nvusd.org the public can join the virtual board meeting remotely via zoom participation instruction in the process for public comment can be found on the district web page now we need onto item e4 approval of agenda motion passes thank you and uh now on to approval of minutes i'll move to approve a second all those in favor aye aye thank you sorry did you catch that vera who said who did her first and the second yes thank you thank you all right on to item e6 recognition of visitors

012and employee organizations um dr matheny do we have any representatives here yeah i think i see um uh president gail young of nvea um would you like to raise your hand gail and greet everyone tonight manny if you can unmute president ian hello all um first day of school so exciting i am so honored to be part of napa valley educators association and the wonderful job that my teachers and counselors and nurses were able to do today um they just they rose to the challenge of all of the things that are taking place with fires with covet with having to learn a whole new way of doing instruction and they they're doing an awesome job i've heard a lot of wonderful things and i'm really glad that this is all taking you know that that

013we can do this it's all about the kids and i'm really glad that we have some really fabulous teachers and we work for a good district that understands the needs of what our students need and what our teachers need thanks thank you mission um vice president uh gonzalez manas i do not see um csca or knapp's presence this evening thank you dr masetti and i think we have um one um before we proceed i think um trustee grossi would like to note something for the record uh we may need to return back to an item really quickly uh vice president gonzales okay the way that we reported out the motions from closed i thought that they happened differently than how we just reported them i i thought different people first and seconded those motions we

014um first and second in closed session do we need to first and second in open session as well no it was a reporting um i think a reporting so trustee jenkins if you could go back to the sw allen ant right and the um i had shunk and um david u first and second for um the first hold on let me go back and then i thought i had cindy and you for the s for the painting let me go back to look at the proper names okay are you talking about the alpha g painting david as i recollect i had the first on i think that one and the second as you said on the other okay uh my apologies um i then will make a motion that we change you to the first

015on the settlement with alpha g painting um do we conduct roll call again for that item i think to be clear let's just restate it for the record and we don't we didn't roll call on that that was just a statement of the vote right no it was a roll call oh okay right but it's sort of the equivalent of a correction of the minutes which normally wouldn't be a real fall item but however you would like me to proceed please let me know what you'd like me to do let's just do the roll call and check all the boxes in case the viral guide is on the real call yes trustee martin absent trustee gonzalez hi rusty jankowicz aye christie water aye christy urtado aye rusty shank hi christy gracia hi thank you [Music]

016great thank you um item f public comments on non-agenda items members of the audience may address the board on any school-related matter that is not on the agenda the board will not take action on any issue raised during this section of the agenda inasmuch as the board action is limited to posted agenda items speakers are requested to limit their comments to a maximum of three minutes are there any comments that were submitted via email there were no comments today submitted via email thank you dr mercedes mr reese do we have any public comment items on non on public comment um for non-agenda items do not have any comments at this time vice president gonzalez modest great thank you item g we're on to reports board of education and student board representative who would like to

017start um well it was the first day of school and hearing from my peers it went pretty well um as for the seniors including myself pretty anxious but you know that's kind of the only thing i really have to say so far so good thank you representative i attended the google classroom presentation on 8 11 and then on the 12th i attended seesaw on the 13th the supporting distance learning presentation the 14th was the navigating the district website and parent portals then on the 17th i attended the welcome back for district employees on the 18th the facility and technology committee meeting and then also on the 18th the sixth grade orientation at silverado mills i wanted to give a shout out to all our parents students teachers administrators and support staff who have worked tirelessly

018to get us through our first day of virtual learning i know this was not how we wanted to open the school year but we were forced into a distance learning model nvusd met that challenge head on by spending the summer preparing under an ever-changing set of circumstances that preparation has paid off today with students returning to classes for virtual instruction at my own household we experienced a few bumps this morning as we got our children online for their first classes i expect that i'm not alone and having had a few bumps today but i know that things will get smoother and continue to improve as we adjust to this new school year i wish that the pandemic was the only concern facing the napa valley but as a community we are now threatened with wildfires

019power outages dense smoke and even ash i know that these additional challenges will make our distance learning tasks even more difficult but believe that by continuing to work together we are capable of rising to even this challenge to those who have been displaced by the fires i hope that you are able to stay safe as you seek new shelter our thoughts and prayers are with you thank you trustee gracia i think uh trustee urdallo was going to say something and i spoke before so i don't know if you wanted to go next oh i was just welcoming our student uh back um but i would like to uh uh expressed my appreciation for all the work that um that our teachers have done to prepare for this uh that our uh classified staff have done

020for this so uh mike pat dr masetti please send along uh my thanks and appreciation for all the hard work uh that's been put into making this first day of school possible thank you tristan trustee water well um i too attended the welcome back and i also over the last two weeks attended a couple of webinars with ucsf uh talking about schools reopening in the age of kovid and we talked about uh children's mental health and i really appreciated what um what uh soup what assistant superintendent pat anders jennings said um when we were welcoming the teachers back about you know teachers you know paying attention to our students and personalizing it and you know being trying to you know make it make it personal get to know the children even though it's on a

021screen and uh as many of you know i started working at napa high 20 years ago and worked there for 15 years before i retired and i loved it i was so excited to be working there but i also felt very put upon because i didn't have my own classroom and i was trundling around to six different rooms um for my first year there and you know something that's an absolute picnic to what our teachers are going through right now and i really want to salute them for being so adaptable and flexible and i know they're doing the best for our kids so i thank you very much thank you tristan our trustee jankowicz and i too welcome back everyone this is the beginning of the school of year like no other each year brings

022positive change and i know this year will be no exception um i too want to express my gratitude to teachers staff and to the students who i know are going to embrace this as an opportunity for learning and i think we're going to see really good things happen this year um i too went to um some webinars the policy update discussing the uh title nine and other csv a polyure coffee for faculty and attended the facilities and technology meetings thank you trustee jenkins trustee shank i think jose and robin have covered everything i either did or thought um i i did have the pleasure of watching napa junction continue to rise out of the ground all summer and the work being done by our classified folks and getting our campuses ready for whatever comes so

023uh you know i i think we're as prepared as we can be there was certainly activity on a number of our campuses uh from a facility's point of view throughout the summer as there is every summer so you know i don't know what else 2020 will throw at us or even the early part of 21 but i think we're up to the challenge thank you trusty shank um yeah echoing what everyone is saying i think for a first day of school unlike any other uh we thought kobe was gonna be it but um there there's more to to face right once again we're facing and battling fires and not just here in our napa county but across our sister counties which many of our um families and our staff um have homes and friends and

024and and loved ones so this this complex um fire is is happening again our in our backyard in our neighbors backyards and i want to thank all the fire personnel and emergency responders who are day and night fighting this fire and protecting our families and homes and in in businesses um i also want to thank our nbusd community um thank you and gracias the first day of school i'm sure did not go without its usual glitches instead of kids maybe not finding their classroom is more about where do i click and where do i go um so i'm sure it's the the technical difficulties that it runs on the first day of school but it was really cute for me to see via social media even my own staff just sharing pictures of the kiddos

025you know at their desk in the kitchen in the living room you know teenagers chilling with their hoods on somewhere in their pjs some saying they didn't have to wear their shoes today um so just seeing lots of smiles actually and i think that shows the resiliency that our community um is going you know showing us and uh and i think it made me think of like it takes a village to raise a child and i and that has new meaning to me it it really uh it really does it takes a village um to raise a child so um and and and the usd is is here and we are taking this um head on uh on everything we can possibly do to provide the quality education our kids uh deserve um i had

026the pleasure to uh speak to our napa county board of supervisors to advocate for um um funding on the cares act to child care dr masetti um couldn't uh uh make it to the to the to the the public comment is a little bit set up very differently than ours and uh couldn't quite get in um but i fortunately was was was able to get through and share uh thoughts about how important child care is and how much is impacting our our staff and our families and efforts to support that work is is quite important because that's although it's uh it's a different kind of crisis right we have the physical mother nature crisis and then we have the system crisis child care is one of those and it's something that we need to address

027as a community as a whole it's not an nbusd only issue it's a community-wide issue and it requires everyone to be involved in resolving and solving and creating solutions for something so important as the um care of our children um i too participated in the morning welcome very quick and sweet because work needs to happen and uh kind of like stay out of the way so um really really a pleasure to to uh be here with you uh all tonight and um and i guess kind of a good sign that we don't have um um a thousand people tonight so it looks like things are going smooth uh in a much more doable um meeting for us all so that's um all of our thoughts and comments i guess from the student board representative and

028our board of education so now on to board representatives reports with curriculum and student support committee that's uh with myself trustee gracia and cindy water we did not have a meeting now onto facilities and technology committee when our meetings are an hour and a half plus you all know how difficult it is for me to condense so i will do my best i'll speak quickly we had previously distributed 4 000 chromebooks to elementary students and we distributed an additional thousand chromebooks last week secondary distribution takes place at the sites and students can schedule pickup school is in session base station installment 24 completed 10 to go programming and testing i believe started today we have completed phase 3 of our camera work and are deploying phase 4 which is the last large phase we are

029anticipating functionality around october we will be asked to approve the request for additional repeaters this is a needs-based ask it allows for us it allows for appropriate radio coverage to ensure safety low-cost investment with a high rate of return additional security for our students and another important investment in tech facilities for the betterment of our schools and our children camera access just some clarifications our sro agreement allows for requested access but protects student privacy this is not unfettered access cameras facing public space work as one kind of operational unit and do not have an expectation of privacy the mou clearly delineates between the two and again important investments to help ensure safe learning environments we will all inhabit these schools again the purpose of this committee is to update us on technology facilities in the

030progress of our measure h dollars to understand project status structurally and financially to have a long lens regarding the work that still needs to be done in our district and to have a deep understanding of the correlation between our facilities and the learning environment we want to provide for all of our students our current project goals are roofing repair work hvac and site work which includes paint passive travel phase one project sites include mbla bel belair elementary and northwood elementary phase two includes mvla donaldson way elementary alta heights elementary and silverado middle school our goals are achieved when we address critical long-term issues and improve the overall health safety and image of our campuses a constant in our meetings that we need to prioritize funding and staff for the long-term maintenance of our sites this

031is and will continue to be critical work we as a district are appreciative of our community's understanding of the important correlation between the upkeep of our schools and students level of learning and engagement budget update on the uip allocation the updated implementation plan twenty seven million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars fund 21 and fund 20 and 35 both measure h funds we discussed change orders versus allowances versus contingencies and to close out the meeting we got to review the impact of our bond dollars at work napa junction is moving seamlessly and is on target as projected to open in august of 2021 we are in the design build selection process for the ac ms student common area proposals are being accepted interviews conducted and as trustee gracia can personally attest to moving of the

032library makes a phenomenal difference in the use of space by using the design build method we are able to separate out dsa submissions for efficiency as well as lockdown pricing in advance of market shifts and that concludes my report on the facilities and technology meeting thank you trustee jankowicz um now on to uh finance committee i will we have a meeting scheduled on october 14th which is also on my schedule my flight from uh dubai uh home but that's not happening so i will be grieving process there trustee you'll get back on a plane soon um all right um now on to policy committee we have a meeting actually next week august 27th and um special education committee community advisory council we have our first meeting on monday so i'll be reporting at our next

033meeting thank you city of american canyon liaison representatives i think we met before our last meeting so there's nothing to report and uh we already have the next one scheduled for the end of the first week of september like the 8th or something so we'll have something to report probably on the 10th when we meet muted myself city of napa uh liaison representatives we've not met we met previously and reported um i believe last board meeting so yes thank you town of youngville liaison representatives we have not met and will not meet until january of 2021. great thank you on to superintendent and executive staff dr masetti yes so good evening uh napa valley unified school district trustees and community and before i get started with the prior with the primary content of my report

034which of course will focus on the first day of school i wanted to take a moment to recognize and thank the napa valley community foundation and the gordon f and marion j davies endowment fund who notified us that nvusd was just awarded a twenty thousand dollar grant to strengthen our district's avid program including funding for teacher training college access student activities and parent engagement experiences we greatly appreciate the generosity and support from the community avid is an initiative linked to goal number one of our strategic plan student learning achievement and access so any support to advance that goal is much appreciated tonight is a special board meeting because it coincides with our first day of school for the 2020 2021 school year and as you all know today's first day of school was not a

035typical one as many of the trustees have described although it was challenging to visit schools today and not see our students on campus filled with the first day of school smiles curiosities jitters and excitement today could be described as historic our entire school system launched a full day of virtual learning and most importantly i would like to mention that this launch as the trust many trustees had noted was accomplished despite fires evacuations power outages and smoke all while the pandemic persists in the background our envy usc community is just so strong it's unbelievable to observe and watch the fires and evacuations in our community have caused unsurmountable stress worry loss and trauma for so many today during a school visit i spoke with an employee who lost their home yesterday and she still felt compelled

036to be at work to serve the students at her school site she didn't want to let the kindergartners down through that interaction i was humbled and reminded that the nvusd community is dedicated resilient and so hard working i want to thank vera morales who prepared me and the assistant superintendents for our site visits today given the uniqueness of this year we wanted to make sure that our our sites felt supported by the leadership team here at the district office so our executive cabinet team split the schools across the five of us and we dropped off lunch for our principals and assistant principals and we left treats for our office staff at all 28 of our schools what did we observe while we were there we saw principals assistant principals office managers and other office support

037staff problem solving providing customer service removing barriers to accessing distance learning one student one family at a time while we know that our teachers were tied up in zooms and holding class for all of the 17 000 students that we serve everyone was calm focused steady and determined to make the first day of school a success even if nvusd students were at home at a distance um in fact according to our preliminary attendance data even with these unbelievable conditions of fires evacuations and smoke we had a very very strong attendance in showing today on behalf of our students our data is still preliminary and we're working through the attendance systems in this new format but the majority of our students attended and some schools had very very high attendance rates so we look forward to

038show sharing that data once it's more confirmed in the very near future i want to thank you to the teachers the support staff and administrators who work so hard to be ready for today there's still so much work ahead that will require stamina discipline and ongoing learning but i can guarantee that every member of the nbusd team is up for the challenge we will continue to do our best every day and improve our work every opportunity possible our communications team put together just a short very very short video that i'd like to share they captured the site visits and some of our students learning on day one from home so i'm going to quickly share my screen and hope that it works here [Music] so [Music] my [Music] um sorry about that so um with

039that um you know uh it was a great day and given the circumstances it was a great day and so i want to thank everybody for their hard work um so now let's listen um to the highlights about the work happening across our divisions led by our four assistant superintendents who i know were um busy delivering those lunches and doing lots of other things throughout the day to make sure that we had a very successful first day of school here in the napa valley unified school district we're going to start out with assistant superintendent pat andre jennings um who oversees the instructional services division um good evening thank you dr masetti and a good good evening trustees um i will i have a presentation later on in our agenda that i'm looking forward to giving

040you to give you a little bit more information about how we prepared um to launch the 2020 20 2020 21 school year so i will be giving you a more more full presentation at that time thank you so much thank you pat um next we have assistant superintendent dana page who oversees the human resources division good evening vice president gonzalez morris board of trustees and dr masetti well first let me say thank you for those photos of students because i just realized in watching them how much i have missed seeing their faces and we all really needed to just see that so thank you also last friday we reached an agreement with csca which means we have agreements with all three of our labor groups in place yesterday we held two meetings for csca employees

041to go over the mou and clarify the expectations for work and working conditions during this pandemic we spoke to more than 300 employees in these meetings and we continue to field emails and calls and clarify and resolve issues for individuals it's really exciting to see our school site staff and students join everyone else in returning to work and learning i feel like we've been plan uh preparing a party for months and finally the guests are all here though i want to commend the many instructional support staff people who are filling in additional pandemic related needs while we see what kind of instructional virtual classroom support will be necessary during asynchronous and synchronous learning time this week they've helped families verify their data fill out free and reduced lunch forms and enroll students they're helping with

042health checks and material preparation and more many have also reached out to me to offer to do everything from child care to delivering meals and supplies to families i appreciate the tremendous show of flexibility and team spirit among our many classified employees and of course all of our employees in these really challenging times so thank you this concludes my report thank you miss page and we have assistant superintendent rob mingwala who oversees business services good evening thank you for the opportunity to provide an update for my division cabin the executive director of the business services department is leaving the conversion of our financial system to escape which will provide a better experience for all employees they are also actively working on the unhonored actuals which will bring which we'll bring to the september 10th board

043meeting manual reads the chief technology office officer of the technology department is leading the deployment of thousands of chromebooks to support distance learning and ensure that every student employee that needs device has one chris gross the director of accountability and enrollment department converted to our paper process to an online process both for an enrollment and for our data confirmation this creed created tremendous efficiencies and it is very customer service oriented peter abboud who will you hear he will hear from later tonight the director of data services and assessment has worked very closely with the instructional services and to identify assessments that will support our blended learning platforms and provide teachers with actual data that they can use remotely thank you thank you mr manguela and lastly assistant superintendent mr mike pearson who oversees operational services

044uh good evening vice president uh gonzalez morris mbsd board of education trustees dr masetti and members of the mvsd community thank you for the opportunity for to provide you with an update with operational services before i report out i want to again acknowledge all the employees who comprise the maintenance and operations department at napa valley unified and i appreciate the shout out from some of the board members today too mmo employees continue to meet the challenge of ensuring our school sites meet specific health and safety guidelines through an incredible amount of hard work dedication and flexibility mno employees have done an exceptional job preparing our school sites which welcomed back teachers earlier this week i can't thank each employee enough for taking on the responsibility of providing safe spaces for mbst employees to return to

045work tonight my report will focus on food service and transportation and today was the first day of distributing food to mbsd students grab-and-go meals were offered at seven nba locations napa and vintage high school mcpherson sheer snow and phillips elementary school and american canyon middle school approximately 1200 meals were distributed today which is an excellent start giving that students now have to provide their id number to receive the meal we do not have the waiver with the united states department of agriculture where we could distribute meals without any kind of id requirement i would like to recognize our new director of food service julie chesson i think julie has seen her yep she's there also welcome julie to the board meetings for a successful start to the new school year in our food service program

046additionally food service and transportation are teaming up to deliver meals to students in yachtville and lake berryessa region today 20 meals was distributed in yachtville and unfortunate meals could not be distributed up to lake barissa do the evacuations finally transportation did deliver meals to the homes of 66 special needs students and thank you to the director of transportation terry guzman for organizing the trips and drivers to deliver the meals food service and transportation are going to continue expanding their partnership in the near future as we offer home delivery to more special needs students and students who attend our community eligibility provision schools and then finally uh as i always like to do after something like my first time going through things the operational services team did today conducted a deep briefing to discuss uh what

047went well what needs to be improved and how we're going to address these areas concerns as it relates to the food distribution we had a really good meeting and we are ready for uh monday to implement some new things that's concludes my report for tonight thank you mr pearson that that concludes the executive staff reports thank you everyone we're now on to item h approval of consent agenda move to a proof second first by trustee gracias second by trustee ortado all those um roll call please yes trustee martin absent trustee gonzalez mares aye rusty jankowicz aye rusty water aye christie hurtado hi christy shank hi mr gracia aye student board member magana hi we're moving now to item i presentations and discussion items one uh item i.1 instructional services launching the 2020 2021 school year

048and getting back to learning presentation thank you mr ruiz can you share the slide presentation good evening vice president gonzalez martis trustees and dr masetti today was launch day the first day of school the planning for this day began when schools closed in june during the months of june and july the covet 19 response task force and district leadership worked to define how school would reopen this year you have seen the various iterations of that planning and today that planning resulted in a successful launch our presentation this evening will walk you through the steps uh taken to successfully start this new school year tonight you will hear um next slide please sorry tonight you will hear from matt manning and peter hartneck the directors of curriculum instruction and english learner services for elementary and secondary

049they will share with you the work done with site leaders and teachers to strengthen our delivery of high quality distance learning terri lynn rossetti the executive director of special education will follow she will share about how we prepared to improve our support for students with special needs and sarah knox the director of intervention and prevention and mike mansway the director of student services will round out our presentation based on the feedback we received from our efforts in the spring we knew there were several actions we needed to take to be prepared for this school year next slide please as we began the work of preparing for the new school year we knew we needed to provide more robust tools you will hear tonight in a separate presentation about those new and improved tools and platforms

050that were purchased to increase student engagement and lessen content delivery we also heard from our teachers that they needed additional professional learning to be prepared to teach in a distance learning model and we also heard from our parents that the spring was challenging and they felt ill prepared to help their children with virtual learning next slide please we also received additional requirements and expectations from the california department of education the cde that needed to be implemented this year the new requirements include expectations of daily live interaction with students that attendance be taken each day and that students receive a minimum of daily instructional minutes for kindergartners that's three hours per day for grades first through third that's three hours and 50 minutes a day and for grades fourth through twelfth it's four hours per day

051the state also requires that instructional minutes that were not accounted for during the synchronous or live instructional time would need to be documented on a weekly student engagement log for example a student in grades 4 through 12 has they have a requirement of four hours of daily instructional time during the course of the day with the schedules that we have students receive approximately two and a half hours of instruction synchronously from their teachers and then their provided classwork for the 90 minutes or so for their asynchronous learning time so more specifically for a high school student they would be assigned an additional 30 minutes of asynchronous work for each class period they attend on a given day next slide please the cde also required that school districts ensure that students are engaged and that districts

052provide additional support for students in need director mansway will share the proactive efforts we took before school started and the plans we have moving forward to ensure that all students are engaged in school that they have wi-fi connectivity and that and that they have the specific supports that they need to be successful additional funding was allocated to the district to assist with some of these extra expenses associated with these efforts at the next board meeting you will learn more about how we plan to meet those needs in the learning continuity and attendance plan this plan will replace the lcap or the local control and accountability plan so for tonight you will hear about how we provided more robust tools how we prepared our instructional staff and how we prepared our families for this new school

053year next slide please i will now uh pass my present the presentation on to the incredibly talented and hardworking team of directors from in the instructional support services division who will share how we prepare to launch the 2020-201 school year next slide director manny you are up thank you very much good evening so uh this summer leading up to the start of the school year we spent significant time preparing for both the two and a half hour synchronous learning block as well as the asynchronous learning time so for the synchro synchronous learning time that's addressed on this slide a group of district academic specialists and teachers work together to create exemplar lessons for both english language arts and math uh in an effort to support teachers at the start of the school year so the

054team developed these lessons as a template for use by teachers who would continue working as grade level plct teams to develop those lessons ongoing throughout the year last week and into this week professional development was provided to teachers focused on the use of these lessons and that was provided to us to teachers in all teachers across all schools uh grades k through five throughout the district so these exemplar lessons contained embedded support for english learners such as enhanced vocabulary instruction in both the english language arts and math lessons and language frames are included to support the use of academic language for students throughout the lessons the nbst wellness playbook contains lesson support for teachers as they build social emotional learning into their classes uh intervention teachers will be providing small group intervention support based on

055mtss team decisions and recommendations along with uh designated english language development instruction will be provided by those intervention teachers next slide please so with regard to the asynchronous learning time suggested schedules have been shared with families uh regarding how they can use the additional asynchronous learning time throughout the day for the for the time that the students are not under the direct instruction guidance of the teacher um so we have we've intentionally built in opportunities for both offline and online learning during the synchronous time um part of this time students will be working on dream box math and imagine learning which you'll hear more about from sarah knox and peter abboud in their presentation and we were able to offer expanded daily pe lessons with our elementary pe teachers so students in grades tk all

056the way through fifth grade can provide can will have access to a daily lesson with their pe teachers and this these lessons will have students getting up moving and connecting again virtually with their peers and their pe teachers so we're excited about that expanded offering uh fourth and fifth grade students will continue to have weekly music classes mystery science lessons that teachers may assign will provide students with more hands-on activities and learning and that will be partially away from the computer screen as well so daily reading expectations and strategies such as choice boards or what we might call may do activities uh with a variety of online and offline activity activities are another element of the asynchronous learning time that teachers are building in so i wanted to just share one success story from a

057site today i spoke with a tk teacher this morning who had just finished her zoom class with her students and during this this first day's lesson she was able to think quickly in providing on-the-spot tech solutions for her families and students as the students were logging in she had most of her students in class with her today which was exciting and she was already teaching them using a mix of both direct instruction and the independent work time that we know will make the virtual learning successful so as part of her lesson she asked the students to step away from the screen and go find something red in the house a red object so while they were off finding their red items she was able to quickly help a few other parents gain access and then

058engage with all of her students in a dialogue about the items they had found i would call that a successful first day so i just want to applaud this teacher's perseverance and i know that that perseverance and success is being replicated throughout the district at both the elementary and secondary sites uh so with that i'd like to pass to director hartneck to talk more about secondary sites thank you very much director manning um there is a tremendous amount of complexity in the secondary education with students having between six and eight classes on their school roster um with this complexity um comes the need for strong communication and collaboration between all of the school leaders as we were planning for the opening of school today august 20th 2020. i'm proudest of the collaboration collaborative spirit amongst

059our principals and site leaders in general this has been a truly all hands on deck situation and our leaders have truly risen to the occasion in our professional learning week secondary subject level roundtables in mathematics and science help to inform our district leadership of the specific needs of our teachers both in intermediate also in the long term our secondary learners principals and assistant principals leaders assist principles and assistant principals uh have been leading direct district-wide work groups with administrators and teachers to help us determine best practices for instruction both synchronous and asynchronous the specific needs around physical education and visual performing arts as well of the logistics that has brought us to the first day of the 2021 school year all of these efforts have been collaborative and shared amongst the secondary sites at the

060district to learn from each other and to find those best practices to support families and students in addition to the distributed leadership evident as we collectively open school we have also been bringing teachers and staff together to evaluate myriad tools to support distance learning many of these tools will be focused on supporting the engagement of teachers and students in the virtual realm there's also a wide variety of specific supports for our students with specific learning needs to that end i will pass the presentation to my colleague executive director of secondary education services terry lane mercedes good evening everyone in the special education department we are committed to continuing to provide all services to students who are eligible for special education to the greatest extent possible in light of our current public health guidelines this year

061we have added curriculum that will provide consistency for students between phases one and two as it can be used for both in classroom and distance learning collecting data on progress in both settings after spending two days in professional development teachers have expressed excitement about the implementation for students in our mild to moderate classes or resource programs they will be adding ixl for english language arts and math for students in the functional skills classes they will be using unique learning system which provides lessons aligned with core standards in a modified format our speech therapists will be using a program called slp now which collects which allows for distance data collection and boom cards which allow them to target skill based lessons as we settle into school we will be adding workbooks for pencil paper tasks for

062our students with mild to moderate disabilities and hands-on tactile kits to support our functional skills students additionally as we start the fall we have been given approval from our napa county public health department to meet with students individually for special education assessments and progress progress check-ins or individual student services on an as-needed basis this is our first step towards the governor's recently released guidance on bringing students back in small groups next slide please the week of august 17th we also held professional development targeted for our special education staff including information on adding emergency learning plans to our ieps as we move forward supporting families with video conferencing for iep meetings and electronic signatures the emergency learning plans will describe the how the services in each iep will be implemented during any emergency where we are

063not in school buildings for more than 10 days so right about now we are focused on increasing communication with staff and families as a district office team we have modeled this through our increased job-a-like meetings with both the executive director and the coordinators for families we held a parent training to support our new electronic iep signature format in addition we are working closely with our community partners to support families i had the opportunity to meet with the staff at parents can last week they are committed to continue to support our families alongside the district so that all can fully participate in iep meetings moving forward we look forward to our first selpa community advisory committee meeting on august 24th the special education team will also continue with monthly parent trainings to support in specific areas

064of request for example we are currently working on a series to help parents provide positive behavior supports in the home learning environment i will now pass to director knox who will share more about the professional development that our certificated staff participated in thank you director recetti good evening everyone in addition to my role in the instructional division i'm also a proud mbusd parent of a 6th grader who started middle school today so on this most extraordinary first day of school i just want to extend my sincere appreciation to everyone in our organization for remaining dedicated to our students and families in the face of so many challenges and i was really pleased to see that dedication highlighted and illustrated in the napa valley register today so as part of our reopening plans we organized a

065week-long opt-in distance learning lab for educators that took place last week we offered a 106 sessions in various topics and content areas for teachers and we were thrilled and um and overwhelmed with with gratitude because we had over four thousand three hundred and sixty we had three four thousand three hundred and sixty three sessions attended by our teachers um and staff the most attended session last week had 183 people in it um and our average session rating was a 4.5 out of 5. so we um we felt like that was all great but what we really were working to get out of that week was increased teacher confidence and that really is priceless one of our teachers in the feedback forum said that in her 25 years in the napa valley unified school district this

066was the best professional learning that had ever been offered but truly we just wanted to set our teachers up for success um and we felt like we were able to tap into our own talent and collective efficacy because we had 90 of the presenters during this distance learning lab who are our own nvusd educators and staff we really do have a talented workforce here we also wanted to begin developing innovative approaches to professional learning in this you know coveted environment so offering it all week long instead of on on one specific day gave people a voice and choice and allowed them to customize their professional learning based on their availability during the week zoom made it accessible to all and we had the ability to record to the cloud and memorialize sessions which meant that

067the learning is not going to stop and now that the week is over we've had over 600 sessions and counting viewed since last week from the recordings we selected specific sessions and used those recordings to provide consistent essential training sessions across our system over the three professional learning days this week as well so i wanted to provide just a few more teacher quotes from the week um thank you again for giving us this opportunity it was great to see how many of our co-workers are so well prepared and willing to share with the rest of us their knowledge i hope we can repeat this very soon i was able to realize that all teachers have the same feelings as me and that we are in this together we will make it work next slide please

068next slide in addition to preparing our educators with teaching and learning tools we are prioritizing mental health and wellness for our students staff and families our team of social workers has worked hard to develop a distance learning wellness playbook that includes attendance and engagement resources to support students who had difficulty in the spring with attending class staying engaged during these challenging circumstances it also this playbook also includes resources for wellness and telehealth crisis related protocols that have been modified for covid and it also includes community building and relationship building activities and scripts for teachers to be able to use as they start to develop a community in a distance environment which can be challenging in addition to the distance learning wellness playbook we developed trauma-sensitive schools training and delivered that to all administrators and teachers

069over the past two weeks we will also continue to provide ongoing professional development in this area because throughout the school year because we feel like it is a top priority during these these challenging times that were that we're in right now next slide please we also convened a summer work group that created a blueprint over the summer for mental health and well-being for all that we provided administrators and site mtss teams multi-tiered system of support teams so that they could have a well-developed social emotional re-entry plan that would give them the best opportunity to create safe and supportive school climates as we reopen for 2021. this blueprint also provided a straw design for this ongoing multi-tiered system of support teamwork including a focus this year on screening and identifying students who need services so universal

070screening for um for social emotional wellness and um and mental health the um the blueprint also provided specific a specific outline and straw design for coordinating services across our organization and um also um with the community slide please so i'm now going to toss it to my colleague drew herron from child welfare and attendance who will discuss our attendance outreach efforts to engage and support students thank you actually this is mike mansway and i'm going to be addressing this okay hi mikey thanks thank you very much and good evening and happy new year everybody mike mansway director of student services um and drew is here virtually um participating in this as well so so uh i do welcome you all here uh before i share what we're doing i i want to tell you i

071met with all of our assistant principals this afternoon after our school day concluded um i asked them to assign a temperature for the day if 98.6 is a normal temperature what was what temperature reading would they give today and pretty much universally they all said they all started with a fever today but by the end of the day everyone was around 98.6 so so i think that speaks to our perseverance and how we go about solving problems um you know we have we we've done a lot of great work we have a lot of great plans but none of this matters if we can't get kids to school and uh so we had a pre-school year strategy of identifying those students in the in our spring distance learning experience who were not engaging and we

072worked with sites to identify those kids and we came up with a list of about 700 kids we enlisted the support of our parent and community liaisons and their job was to make personal contacts with each of those students and families and so so we're still working on that we haven't gotten through all 700 but we've gotten through a lot of them um so far based on these contacts what we're learning at least what people are sharing with us the most frequent mentioned barrier that that comes up is some kind of technology issue whether it's equipment internet access or even a need for better understanding various learning platforms when it's possible the apparent liaisons are providing on-the-spot support with things like immediate i.t referrals and setting parents up with the appropriate parent engagement sessions and

073so on could i have the next slide please manny so with that that was our preschool strategy now that school's open we we have a an opening school protocol and basically for the first two weeks of school we're in full court press mode and that means um every day each school site is identifying students who are not there who are not engaging and and they're reaching out to those students daily um so each day they're identifying they immediately reach out to the students or families who aren't engaging with the hope of identifying whatever barriers there are and what support they need of course there will be some who are unresponsive and for those who are not responsive they get referred to child welfare and attendance office for follow-up and that's drew's team and drew and

074his team will make try to make contacts via phone email if they can get a hold of someone set up a virtual meeting if those attempts are unproductive then we do conduct home visits with child welfare and attendance folks and or social workers and we have coveted protocols in place for those those home visits so these efforts will hopefully lead to a personal contact and and just so and i'm sure we all know this research shows that a personal contact um is the most effective single effective way to re-engage families with school so if no personal contact is made um of course we will leave information at the family's door um after two weeks of this full court press mode then we will resume our regular attendance system which includes things like ssts sarts and

075sarbs um and with that i'm gonna i think take it turn it back to pat andrew jennings uh uh thanks uh director manchuy yes and i did wanna actually add a little note that we do recognize that uh some of our families due to what's going on right now with evacuations and um just um all that's happening that they may not be able to engage and and so we are taking a very sort of a compassionate approach um to those families that may have been impacted and been evacuated evacuated especially in the uh the lake berryessa area so engaging and preparing our families we knew that distance learning to be successful we recognized that parents need to be prepared as possible to assist their children at home and last week we offered a parent learning

076series that included 25 sessions both in english and in spanish that were co-facilitated by parent liaisons teachers site leaders and district staff some sessions were like an overview of the distance learning schedules and describe what distance learning would look like the school year others detailed how to access google classroom or what is seesaw what does it do we had several classroom teachers who not only taught during the distance learning educator lab um but also taught uh and and presented sessions in the evening they were doing double duty both working day and night to make sure that our parents had the information that they needed um and it paid off we had over uh we offered over uh we had over 2 000 parents participate in the sessions and it was great to see parents modeling

077for their children the importance of being a learner they asked good questions and we often ran well past the scheduled end times just to make sure that parents were given the information that they needed and had the time to ask those questions and finally i want to mention what a tremendous job our teachers site leaders and school staff have done to prepare for for today uh countless hours have been spent uh by teachers insight leaders to learn the most effective way to implement robust distance learning i particularly want to comment on the successful virtual apparent forums and orientation school sites have hosted for their school communities all in preparation for today launch day next slide please fires power outages and evacuations did not deter us as we began school today district leadership was out and

078about at school sites and today some of the things they saw instead of a principal or teacher sort of calming the kindergartner who was being left for the very first time we witnessed a principle maybe calling a parent on the phone and walking them through uh how to get onto google classroom so it switched up a little bit but the day is still the same um today was not flawless but the new school year has launched and we are currently soaring into what will be most likely a very unusual school year next slide please this year has started but we have work but we have work ahead i'm looking forward to sharing more with you in the coming board meetings about our literacy initiative and our equity work thank you that concludes our presentation thank

079you um any questions from the board or comments i have a comment i really like the part about 90 of the presenters were our homegrown talent i saw uh i saw jody ortiz from donaldson way in one of the slides and i've visited her classroom and volunteered there and and we have lots of teachers like are very good so uh thanks for that i have a couple questions what is a mystery science lesson so i can respond to that a mystery science lesson is a program that we purchase for all of our school sites um and it's there the lessons are begin with a teacher directed element of the lesson and then there's usually a video that accompanies that and then students are directed to do some uh hands-on learning or just some some element

080of discovery on their own so we're all of those lessons can be pushed out into google classroom so we're adapting those for our online virtual setting and i wanted to add a little bit to what um director manning said is that mystery science is a good example of something that sites individual sites had purchased um and it was kind of hit or miss whether which sites had mystery science or didn't have mystery science and so we made a decision at the central level to provide mystery science to all of our elementary sites given that we are still in the process of piloting a new science curriculum so we wanted to make sure that they had some tool that they could use and that it was you know district wide for elementary okay uh what was

081our pe solutions at secondary and are we already curtailing it due to smoke director um harneck do you want to respond to that in terms of what the we're doing for pe instruction at the secondary level sure absolutely you know at this point with um with people being at home a lot of the work has to do with uh creating plans that allow for students to engage in some sort of physical education that is that would align to what they're able to do at home and this is wouldn't be necessarily dissimilar to what would be happening if we were in a in person but still in a phase 2 phase 3 environment where we're not able to necessarily hold um classes inside and so you have a limited amount of sports um and activities that

082you're able to do and so a lot of what we're sort of forced to do now is talk about things like nutrition which is is very relevant um but also to to develop plans for students um to have uh workout plans have daily exercise plans and things like that um that will be a different way that we um interact with physical education um but not necessarily um less good um and i think the similar uh a similar question could probably be asked trustee gracia around visual performing arts because there there's a number of um of questions around how do you have you know a vocal um quartet or or a chorus in a zoom environment how do you have um a um you know an instrumental uh program uh over zoom and so we are

083looking into a number of programs that have been selected by the teachers that should support them in that um in that in that realm um and so a lot of the the instrumental people at um secondary level are going to be utilizing something called smart music which we've had a partnership with the nap valley educational foundation um as long as well as with our own um you know resources to support both the middle and the high schools in that regard to support students and being able to have some independent practice that's um that's being given some very good uh very immediate feedback um and then some of the secondary particularly at the high schools um the choir and the choral programs are being given some different resources to be able to help them uh take

084in what what they're able to get with zoom and to be able to curate that into something that is performance based so the students have something that can um really uh be a product of of their work throughout the semester and the uh the the coral um the directors are very committed to that and it's something that we've been working with with all of the directors to make sure that we have equity as well amongst the different school sites and i appreciate the question thank you very much appreciate you going into the vappa because that was going to be my next question so that was a good a good choice there thank you um i do have one more how do we support our iep students who have gross and fine motor skill goals in

085our distance learning environment that's a very good question trustee gracia um uh director rossetti i am here there you go um our occupational therapists are working with students who are eligible for those services and they are working with them either via zoom with support of identified tools that they are going to be distributing home to those families for students who need those individual check-ins or individual services they will be making appointments with them on an as-needed basis i i have a quick question comment i've had numerous phone inquiries about our uh 144 144 instructional minutes i have received screenshots of school schedules that have implied other districts were executing all synchronous instruction rather than our schedule which also has a asynchronous portion as pat just described in regard to the view that i have had

086time to research looks like they too have asynchronous minutes and they are interjected throughout the school day they don't make it clear on the schedules that are being presented visually and um i just want all the the individuals that have contacted me to know that and that we are committed to not only transparency and how we're doing this work but to the beneficial aspects of our approach our teachers are teaching bell to bell there is a smaller class size that allows for more personalized engagement it's difficult for students to sit for countless hours six hours in front of a computer and the asynchronous opportunity allows for creative and independent programming options and and pat do you have any comments on the um instructional minutes um yes i think that the model that we have created

087does allow like you said that the for students to have some time sort of like if they don't want to do the the asynchronous part in the afternoon maybe they want to do it later on in the evening that they have the option to do that the other piece is that because our teachers are teaching bell to bell right now with the am and pm cohort when we do transition to in person it will be far more seamless than if you have a schedule where you have all the students you know going full day you know all day long and then pedagog pedagogically it is not as you brought up it is i have spent a whole day in zoom and it's exhausting and i would not want any of our students to experience six

088hours of zoom even if it's all synchronous with a teacher um it's it's still quite draining and i don't think that that it's a an appropriate approach necessarily for um for students in terms of increasing their learning okay great i i appreciate your insight i had a question um i if you could just elaborate more um on the situation of where child welfare gets involved i'm really concerned in in that area um we have a lot of families um and you know it's hard to tell how many right and i know you have data here about potentially you know 70 700 students who identified in terms of you know being at risk of of not attending their sessions um and so i don't know if you have a breakdown of of how those 700 went

089in terms of contact if we were able to contact all of them um and again this is i saw one of the slides it's all hands on deck and and that just not only means our nbusd community but um i know we you know there's experience here in the room with working with our non-profits but there's also many other organizations like charles start that does home visitations and they do work with um you know children 0-5 but those kids also have older siblings in the district and they provide additional support in terms of trying to you know be there for the family um under these circumstances right we have to remember that around what 54 percent of our kids are enrolled in the free reduced lunch program um families are in in that low income

090bracket if you're in that low income bracket more than 30 percent of your income is going on rent so they're you know rent burden um and then loss of job and so on and child care um i just wonder at what level and and i and i love how you said it um [Music] um our assistant superintendent andrew jennings about compassionate approach because i think we're going to need a lot of that um i've already through a network that i um we are doing work around the mental health of our parents and uh with the first five napa network with a cohort of leaders and um one of the uh we had conducted empathic interviews and one empathic interview was a mother who straight out said how concerned she was that she would eventually be

091that person that would have child welfare called on her because she's got no one at home um really to look after um her making sure her her kiddo um you know or not i don't know exactly the situation but she's just really concerned about that so instead of she's more fearful than positive at this point and trying to to to navigate that um so i'm really worried about that i don't want the word to get out because you know already someone in a group already shared a mother shared this concern and this fear and i find that really concerning because we want this to be a place that our parents can trust um and and feel like their kids are not going you know the immediate thought of this parent is like are my kids

092going to be taken away and we don't want that to be the message so how are we continuing to be more proactive i understand with the parent liaisons but i just you know i want us to also keep thinking of working outside the box right and in partnering and and um continuing to to work with more with others um so that's just a real concern that i have i really really worry about that having families um reach that level where now they're being referred to child welfare um and um vice president um gonzalo smartest i wanna clarify when we say child welfare and attendance we're talking about our own district staff that's made up of social workers and attendance clerks that would follow up with families and like i said a very compassionate approach it's

093really about finding out what the barriers are and that's the expectations from the state is that we work with families to find out what the barrier is for the students to from students from to accessing the education and if it's child care that they need then we can you know have referrals for them for child care if it's connectivity issues we can see about getting them what they need for for technology um so that's when it says i think sometimes uh i think the the child welfare it's like as if it was a referral to like child welfare protection yeah and that was not that's not what we were saying we're saying our own child welfare and attendance department that they would be followed up on those so so there you go i think the

094name is confusing i don't know if that's something that we can proactively work on i don't know how that works but um when i understand that now and actually i should have caught that but it's just it's part of this right it's there's so much information um i do know what you mean now but for a parent out there who doesn't understand all the different departments and titles it could be very confusing and so this parent thought she was going to be referred to the county child warfare department which is where my thought was going to so i think i made the same mistake as well in a meeting as someone's had and i thought oh our child welfare no oh no this is counterintuitive people are not going to be able to distinct that

095so it's just something to think about and um and i don't know how we can go around that it could be just a matter of terms and language um making sure we're speaking the same things but it's um it's a concern that i've seen um come up now thank you that's really helpful we the last thing we want is for parents to be fearful of us you know we really want to make sure they understand we're here to help and we we will do what we need to do to make sure they have what they need thank you okay i think those were all my questions any other questions from the trustees i just i really want to recognize the team orientation of the instructional support services division you saw how they came collectively across

096their departments to bring forth a comprehensive presentation around the efforts it took to launch school that we're not thinking myopically just about certain elements of students education in this robust distance learning format but we're thinking across the system we're thinking across student needs and that requires the departments and the division to really articulate special education working closely with curriculum and instruction you know general education you know student support services child welfare and attendance all those pieces intervention and prevention and so i just i want to recognize their work um they are all mostly new not all of them are new but most of them are new to their positions um and so they've just really really hit the ground running and we see the evidence of that and what i think has also been really

097powerful is their ability to collaborate with our site principles to build solutions that are actually going to work for the users out at our school site so thank you pat to you and your team you're welcome thank you yes we can't thank you enough all right um now on to item i1b envy usd blended learning and online assessment tool for the 2020 2021 school year and beyond all right that's me again good evening again um i my name's sarah knox and again i'm the director of prevention and intervention services um and i'm happy to join my colleague from business services director peter abboud who is director of data and assessment services to share the results from our recent collaborative efforts to provide effective teaching and learning solutions for educators during this during distance learning and

098beyond next slide thank you we entered this work with a shared vision which was to provide educators the tools that they needed to ensure high quality teaching and learning in both virtual and in-person learning environments for the 20 20 21 school year but also beyond that next slide and our ultimate goal um is that each student in our organization would be able to make at least one year's growth every year next slide we entered we in order to partner for success we began this process by listening and learning to practitioners including our site administrators working closely with them um as well as teachers on the front lines in order to engage in some planning discussions that were solution oriented we wanted to fix some of the gaps and the holes and curate the tools that

099we have adding new ones as needed and sun setting ones that weren't working for us anymore our goals for this process were to ensure collaborative decision making equitable access as pat alluded to earlier to robust teaching and learning and assessment tools across all of our sites and classrooms to achieve coherence across the system to carefully curate and streamline the assessments that we have and to make sure that those assessments provide us provide practitioners and our system with timely actionable data next slide please so first i'll be sharing more detailed information about each of our newly adopted learning platforms and how each of these platforms can potentially improve student achievement then i will toss to director abudh who will report on our new assessment tools next slide thank you so when we were looking at either

100enhancing or adding blended learning tools for the 2021 school year we thought about specific needs and then looked for solutions to meet those needs so the first need that we had was around increasing student engagement and active participation during blended learning so we selected several solutions selected several tools that were going to give us solutions to that need so the first tool that you see there is paradox and paradox is an interactive presentation tool that teachers use to actively engage students in individual and social learning paradec is accessed by students through clever and as clever integration and clever is our single sign-on that we use it's our gateway for students and teachers to access all tools and programs so in paradox students engage with content that's in that's in google slides presentations in real time

101either during synchronous or asynchronous learning so instead of just watching a powerpoint or or clicking through it you actually engage engage with the material that you're being presented the next tool is edpuzzle and edpuzzle is an assessment centered tool that allows teachers and students to create interactive online videos and embed open-ended or multiple choice questions audio notes tracks and comments on that video so instead of just passively watching a video you're engaging with it the next tool that is helping with engagement is cami and cami allows you to take any existing document including scanned pdfs ebooks publisher-supplied pdfs worksheets and more and students are able to write draw type annotate comment enhance that document and so again allowing students to be able to because we're at home we're in a remote learning environment interact with

102some of the the print materials that are not digitized yet last we have screencastify and screencastify is a chrome browser extension that allows teachers to record their screen their face their voice and more and share those videos those lessons and other video recordings with their students next slide please in addition to increased engagement we also had a need for increased security accessibility and usability and so we have several solutions that we selected and i spoke about clever earlier clever is that single point of access that enables students and their families to just jump right into a portal that will take them to all of the tools that they need for distance learning so we are all together collectively this year directing all of our students to start with clever as the gateway into their classes

103with zoom this year we all know zoom but with zoom this year we have purchased a licensed version as a district which enables us to have increased security or enhanced security through the single sign-on integration with clever um we no longer have time limits which we would have if we weren't on a licensed version and it allows us to record to the cloud which we also which we already have utilized during our distance learning lab one other cool feature of our licensed version of zoom is that we now have zoom polling where you can do quick interactive polls to engage the group that you're working with on zoo seesaw is the next tool that i want to talk about and it's a platform for student engagement so teachers empower students to create reflect share and

104collaborate using photos drawings text pdfs and links in these digital portfolios so with premium access this year we have unlimited space family access and clever integration google classroom is the version of our learning management system that our students in grades 2 through 12 are using so csaw and google classroom are the two main learning management systems that our students will be working in this year next slide the next need that we had was to increase differentiation through individualized and adaptive software platforms so that students all of our students can make one year's growth each year so we've added several solutions several several tools that will help us achieve that my colleague dr rossetti spoke earlier about ixl and unique and how those are specific targeted programs for our students requiring unique supports and services in

105special education benchmark universe is a tool that is part of our part of the suite of programs that we use for english language arts at the elementary level and we have we are purchasing licenses for steps to advance through benchmark universe which the online version of steps to advance which will provide scaffolded targeted online intervention support for elementary students needing unique supports and services that are not in special education the next program that i wanted to talk about is dreambox math which is new this year dreambox math is an online supplemental math program that is both engaging and proven to boost students math performance the dreambox platform provides students with individualized lessons and differentiates by accelerating or remediating based on ongoing assessments that it's delivering to the students this platform also provides our teachers with

106actionable data they can use to form small group and one-on-one differentiation for students last but not least we are moving forward with edge annuity and edge annuity provides tremendous resources to pro to support students sorry edgenuity provides tremendous resources to support standards based to support a standards-based approach to our high school courses teachers will be able to select standards aligned assignments and activities that support the work that they're doing with their students daily and i left one off so i'm going to go i'm going to go back imagine language imagine language and literacy is a little robot guy that you see there and that is an adaptive learning solution that accelerates reading and language proficiency for students in grades pre-k through eight and it is designed to supplement core literacy instruction by providing daily practice

107in all four domains of literacy reading writing listening and speaking so this year new this year we have licenses for all of our english learners in nvusd and this program can also be used for native english speakers as well to support students needing extra scoops and targeted support with language arts next slide we referenced mystery science earlier this evening and a final need that we had was to continue our next generation science standards program exploration we were in the middle or just about to be finishing up wrapping up a ngss curriculum adoption last year and so we had a need to to continue that before we moved forward with selecting science programs because it was going to be so challenging to to implement those programs that we were planning to adopt in this distance learning

108environment so we're continuing by continuing the course with amplify science and discovery education science tech books for middle school and high school respectively and then mystery science is our is our temporary solution for elementary science curriculum next slide and now i'm going to turn it over to my colleague peter director peter bood who's going to talk to you about our new online assessments uh thank you director knox good evening trustees and dr mussetti as director max said my name is peter abboud and i am the director of data and assessment services uh thank you for taking the time to listen to this assessment update i believe that this unique school year will present us with opportunities to strengthen our assessment system to serve students even more effectively you'll notice on tonight's agenda that we will

109be asking the board to take action and approve our recommendation for star assessments more on that later on in the presentation our classrooms have been physically empty since march and i know that we all miss having students physically in front of us while we did our best to provide learning experiences for students at the start of the pandemic we know that the reality is that many students have unfinished learning from the spring there is a strong need for assessment data to help teachers and administrators understand where the learning gaps are and to provide actionable data for teachers to utilize in their instructional planning some of the assessment tools we currently use do not provide this rich data students also need access to assessment tools that can be taken physically while in the in the classroom

110and also from home with little support depending on whether students are participating in remote learning or present on our campuses assessment tools are needed which are quick and do not cut into the already limited instructional time next slide please at this point we are still expected to administer the legally required assessments the initial english language proficiency assessments for california or lpac is still required for students who indicate a language other than english on the home language survey within 30 calendar days of enrollment the state is in the process of approving options to allow for remote testing i am pleased to say that over the last two weeks we launched a centralized testing center at the old river school campus and tested approximately 275 transitional kindergarten and kindergarten students while adhering to safety protocols assessing each

111student takes approximately 30 to 40 minutes each so we know that testing these students will greatly reduce the responsibility on elementary schools to cut students during the busy start of the school year in the absence of this testing center some of our elementary schools would have needed to test over 50 students in a short period of time there will also be the option to administer the spring 2020 summative lpac assessment this fall for students who have the potential to be redesignated as english language proficient i'm working with my counterparts in the instructional services division to identify which students would benefit from taking this assessment at this point we are also still expected to administer the cast cast as well as the alternative assessments and physical fitness testing in the spring and we are awaiting additional

112guidance for how to do this how to best to do this during the pandemic we are learning what we can about administering these assessments and are prepared to be flexible next slide please the star assessment suite includes star reading and star math assessments that are similar to the ri and mi assessments there is also an early literacy assessment which assesses foundational reading skills and numbers and operations star cbm or curriculum-based measures to probe deeper into specific skills as needed for our youngest for our youngest students and also star in spanish next slide please star assessments are quick and typically take 20 minutes or fewer to complete assessments are conducted online and can be easily completed at home additionally the start assessments program easily syncs with clever our single sign-on portal so no additional usernames and

113passwords are required for students or teachers rich data reports are available for students and teachers immediately after the assessment has been taken which has not always been the case for some of our assessment tools the assessments are also available in spanish a resource a resource that we know will be especially helpful at our dual immersion sites our current ri and mi assessments only provides teachers with a single data point as you can see from the sample report star reading and star map provide a number of data points including the scale square the predicted score on the casp a percentile rank flexi levels and more additional reports drill down to specific common core domains and individual skills and indicate to teachers the skills that are most appropriate to teach individual students based on their learning progression

114star also suggests resources and links to support teachers in planning instruction data can also be compared across our whole system tk12 next slides we are suggesting the following changes to our assessment calendar eliminating the ri and mi and replacing them with star reading and star math the ri and mi provided limited data was not quickly available to teachers to use for progress monitoring and was not given across the school district uh star reading provides multiple actionable data points instantly after completing the assessment and allows us to compare data across the system we are also proposing to eliminate the phonics inventory dibbles easy cbm and the idle and replace them with star early literacy our current early literacy assessment tools are time consuming to administer and access the data is delayed the star early literacy tools

115are quick and administered online and can be followed up with start cbm to dig deeper into skill gaps for students who score low on the early literacy assessment next slide please we will continue to administer the district writing assessment although we will need to determine the best way to do this depending on which reopening phase we are in during the spring semester we will also continue to administer the california healthy kids survey college board assessments like the s.a.t psat and ap exams will still be administered in the spring the college awards shifted the way that ap exams were administered so we suspect there may be additional guidance for these assessments throughout the year next slide our next steps include finalizing and publishing the assessment calendar to principals and the rest of the nvusd community which

116will include the start assessments pilot for this year we were on a short timeline to gather feedback on the start assessment suite so feedback thus far has been limited to some site administrators teacher representative instructional services directors and special education throughout the course of the year we will facilitate a thorough assessment committee to gather feedback on the star assessment suite and plan for assessments in the 2021-2022 school year in support of our district pool next likely thank you and that concludes our presentation thank you we'll now go with um questions comments i have a quick question on director knox's presentation peter was able to outline what was coming off the plate and what was replacing it for various things on the plate [Music] sarah's presentation seemed to talk more about the things we were adding

117and i didn't get a strong sense of what may have been coming off the plate thank you for your question um so because the because we had not had a lot of um tech online tech tools in place um for the you know that we're gonna support with distance learning not a lot of things came off the table the ones that did were more of the assessment tools that peter alluded to i guess some of the things that you could say were coming off the table were more site specific implementations of things like for example st math was something that that we as a as a school at northwood were using for math and that was a program that was used probably at a handful of school sites and so it was more um it

118was more sort of spotty um spotty or patchwork implementations of various solutions that had been decided at the site level and so those things fell off and were replaced by coherence and consistent um consistency across the organization in order to ensure equity of access to all of these programs because a lot of the schools that had those programs um were funding them with parent club funds and other things that you know other schools might not have access to so we wanted to ensure equity of access to tools that were going to help students be able to work at their own pace and have individualized differentiation whether it's you know going going above their grade level and working above their grade level or you know working a few grade levels below their own and so there

119weren't there weren't a lot of things that that um that fell off as a system i guess to if that answers your question it does and thank you uh i i guess i'll close with just two comments uh when you're working remotely everything in varying degrees takes a little bit longer it's just not the same thing as being in person so i want to encourage you and it sounds like you've gone down this road to be thoughtful and assess the value of each incremental tool or assessment because it always seems to take a little bit longer than you think um and you know as we're communicating with the various audiences teachers parents students make an effort to be clear what's mandated what's optional and how to choose if there's more than one tool that accomplishes

120some goal because what i don't want to hear six months down the road is the board made us do this the board generally speaks ex cathedra relatively infrequently and generally not on instructional tools so uh uh i you know we've gotten off to a good start trying to communicate and provide a mental model of what all these tools are doing to our parents and i would just encourage that sort of communication to continue as we go through the year because mostly you gotta hear something three four five six times before it sticks uh and i uh uh imagine that's going to be true of our parents thank you trustee shunk and i just wanted to add um i i completely agree with you and and we will definitely work to continue to communicate um the

121how and the why of of each of these platforms one of the ways that we um that we kicked off this year by doing that was by including this this description of each of the the platforms and the tools um in our parent guide that was just shared with parents so it has a a detailed list and in in the parent facing version it also talks about frequency of use and um and goals related to usage yeah i i i think i remember seeing that and i i think it's great to be explaining to people because you know they're the parents are at home trying to you know go to work run the family do do everything so anything we can boil the ocean down and simplify it for them i'm sure will be much

122appreciated absolutely and a lot of those tools that the engagement tools that i spoke over ones that are going to be teacher facilitated during um synchronous instruction so i know it seems like a long list of tools but a lot of them are not going to be a student having to you know try to figure it out along with their parent by themselves so um we are definitely looking forward to um to monitoring how these tools um you know support our teachers and students and um and save you know evaluate their um their usefulness for us as an organization thank you and i'd also just like to add thank you sarah and director knox um that the part that we were missing was the the support for the asynchronous learning time and so the majority

123of these tools are for that time we didn't have things that students could do at home that supported the ac asynchronous learning time and so that's why those were there and and i want to also echo what um dr director knox said around we will be evaluating you know routinely the use of these tools and and um the effectiveness of them before we you know as we as we go through the year and as we plan for for next year so i have a couple of questions um i didn't quite understand the edgenuity program what was that exactly and how do the teachers and students interact with ingenuity so edged annuity is a for it's a platform that's specifically for high school and so their teachers are able to select standards align assignments and activities

124from the platform and then assign them to students that it's in the assignments that they're providing are going to support the work that they're doing with the students so again it's supporting that asynchronous um learning time with the curriculum um instead of students having like a textbook they're working on i see peter wanting to chime in i saw him turn on his screen for a second um i'm sure director hartnock um has something to add onto that layer but essentially it's providing them something that that can be a curriculum to assign um during for the specifically for the asynchronous learning time this is gonna be something that uh director uh assistant superintendent andrew jennings will be bringing forth um but really uh and i think i do agree with um director knox in her assessment

125that this is a support for that time in the asynchronous environment so it consider yourself an am student in the secondary environment and what are you doing during that pm time and so um there's a there are again a number of ways where we can um accomplish that uh one of them is teachers providing you know resources um on their own um i think right now we're really trying to make sure that our teachers are focusing on what's critically important which is instruction and and to not necessarily have to be burdened by planning for something that they've never experienced before because that that is a tremendous ask as trustee water mentioned earlier in regard to the workload on teachers and so we're really hoping to provide something um for a temporary basis that allows for

126them and and this will be used in uh trustee rossi i think this is a good question because it will be used in a non-traditional way the the ingenuity is traditionally used as a standalone something you might you might use in a homeschooling or in a credit recovery environment but as a supplementary resource it can be very valuable in this kind of environment because it allows for you to choose um and it doesn't direct instruction it doesn't necessarily say that you know teachers have to do something in a very prescriptive way but rather they're able to say i want to engage in this topic and the standard that my grade is assessing and is required to present to students and to provide them with a number of resources be that an additional teacher providing additional

127instruction around a standard and again when i say standard that that's we have to remember that that that's how we look at things now and so when you think about an english class you think about standards being you know um uh reading writing speaking and listening and and those are critical elements to to being an educated person when you think about history it relates to analytical skills and you can provide a number of verbs there that that relate to those analytical skills and so what ingenuity does is it provides a number of resources and again be it a teacher providing a lecture be it an assessment around a certain um uh skill in regard to the standard that is being assessed in the uh curriculum um and so it's not necessarily content based but it

128does again provide a tremendous resource for what happens during the second half of a student's educational experience and i can provide something that's a little bit more um across the system that it's a little bit more um equitable and it provides a very similar resource and and uh and very high quality as well and i appreciate the question thank you uh so my next question and i might be channeling my inner trusty water here but where uh in all of these applications are we getting novels into students hands uh and rather than just excerpts so that they can participate in uh reading actual books uh i can speak to that as well um one one of our big uh interests in in moving forward is to provide students with all the resources that they need

129to be educated in this environment and that requires that us to really look at and analyze the resources that we have and sometimes that means the resources that we have in print do not match the resources that we have accessible to us in the online forum and so there there are a number of resources that we have to support what you're talking about and there are uh very clear and important opportunities for students to engage in expository texts and shorter texts but to your question students do have a an incredible experience when they're able to engage with their um peers and with their teacher around longer texts that have um typically um socially relevant meanings and that's why we read novels is because we try to present you know these ideas that are explored by

130these authors and relate them to our modern times and it's sort of a combination between our english department and our history department that being said to cut it short it's really important that our students are able to read broad things and our our plan includes distributing novels to all of our students on a rotating basis so they're able to read long texts but also what was mentioned earlier is that we have a plan around a literacy initiative to make sure that students during the middle of the day have time off the screen and able to engage in whatever they're interested in be that you know texts that are in the literary canon text that should be in the literary canon or text that they are interested in and to add on to that director hartneck

131students also have um if they are not able to go to the library or they're not able to have independent reading which you know as a former high school english teacher along with um with trustee water at napa high school we you know we know that independent reading um daily independent reading is very important to our students and so we have soraa which is an app that students will be able to access through clever that's a library app that enables them to discover and check out ebooks and audio books from their school both for class assigned reading so they're getting full text as you alluded to and also for um for fun for reading for fun which is also equally important and i just want to reiterate that um i look forward to bringing off

132um to you a comprehensive literacy initiative that we'll launch in the fall so you'll hear more about how are we going to get books in the hands of our students and how um director hartnick's been working with the library services coordinator kate mcmillan to make plans for students to come and exchange books and and make sure that the libraries are accessible so those things will happen and we'll be able to present that um that plan to you uh hopefully soon i look forward to that presentation as well then i have one last question what is the district writing assessment who uses it and why do we have it you took the words right out of my mouth we used to have one i want to hear about this well and i think what uh director

133or dr abud was referencing is uh we had a district right writing assessment for uh k through two and a long time ago i want to say probably about four years ago there was a true district-wide writing assessment for each grade level um that had i the for the time i've been in instruction that has not been the case so the idea is to bring that back so that we are able to evaluate evaluate and sort of see the progress that students make with their writing over the course of their time with us in nvusd um we have the one of the reasons we haven't had the district wide writing assessment is the amount of time it takes to score um examples like that so we're going to have we're going to be working with

134department chairs and and um plc's to see how that that work can be embedded in the work they typically do so that it it's it's not something that we do at the district level and have this writing assessment and gather the data and nothing ever happens with it but it's part of the instructional practice of teachers all right i'm a little confused because i thought the slide said that we had one and we were keeping it but it sounds like you're saying we haven't really had one and we're implementing it so we where we're kind of are we we had one for kindergarten through second grade it was slated to happen in the spring it didn't happen in the spring due to covet 19 in school closures but for the past i don't know three

135or four years i know for sure that there was the the k2 district-wide writing assessment and the reason why they did the writing assessment k2 is because there were there weren't very many measures for student um to see where students were at those levels because there was no cast score or cast assessment for them so that's why the district-wide writing assessment was done kindergarten through second grade and the plan was to continue it i mean to have that k2 assessment continue and then my hope is to increase it to be k through 12th grade or k through 11th grade we'll we're still working on that and we'll work closely with uh dr abu and so did you also just say that the writing assessment has to be hand scored in the past that's what they

136did they actually they would bring teachers together they would um calibrate against um against each other um and score all the they would have a group that would calibrate and then they would have the students take the writing assessments teachers would bring turn the papers in uh trustees trustee waters is like giving some guests they would they would come and sit also in the room together and uh they would grade this they would go through and look at the rubric and and look at the writing and give it a grade and they would fill out a little bubble on the scantron and then the scantron would run through a machine and machine and that's how they would get a score of a one two three or four maybe one for like a score for conventions

137and another one for content um and so we i know we can do something far more uh uh efficient as we move uh forward in the year 2020 so that's the plan okay so we're going to explore a way that's a little more efficient than lots of people sitting in a room and taking laborious time to great papers to score it was great it was interesting it was uh instructive for the other disciplines to see what um english teachers did the tests the you know i i can tell you all about it if you really really want to know um you know uh trustee gracia we can do that one day was read twice yeah yes and um yeah i do i do know it's something that we need to look very closely at it

138does sound like there's room for improvement and efficiency there it was it was really fascinating um it went through various iterations and um i'll tell you about it and i think the key is to make sure that it's connected to the to teacher practice and that the the score like the the scores and the assessments are used by teachers to improve student outcomes and not just something that's information assessments that scat the information that's gathered and then nothing comes of it other than just say you know good teacher bad teacher you know like as a sort of a stick like it should be used as a tool and that's what an assessment should be it's a tool not a stick any other questions or comments um i'd just like to say one thing before we

139move on so i appreciate all the questions and the deep engagement um i i want to just make some connections for the community and for the trustees so the work that you've heard over the course the last two presentations this evening is really the result of your decision and support as a school board to restructure um the instructional services division which also had an implication for restructuring across the business services division and so i just kind of want to remind you that there was a lot of intentionality in sort of how we restructured in order to be able to render some of the outcomes that you heard tonight when we work with this intentionality around student achievement at a centralized system level um systems tend to get better results and so it was alluded to

140um by director sarah knox um i appreciate joe shunk's question it is important that the instructional team check the analytics and the usage of all of these throughout the course of the year analyze a return on investment do follow-up focus groups with teachers to really determine whether or not there's utility and impact there on student achievement so all of those things are important but i do just want to highlight some sort of big picture organizational shifts that i hope you've observed amongst the team across the two presentations and that is that we are creating equity and access i shared here two years ago when i did my 90-day um listening and learning tour tour that i was um i was uncomfortable and dissatisfied with how haphazard the access to different instructional tools were across the

141district you know the imagine learning is one example or a district that's almost you know over a quarter of our students are english learners and i i was just dis heartened to hear that only some english learners had access to a tool that is proven to really help with english proficiency and when asked why it was because there was so much left to the site to determine whether or not we were going to have something that was going to be available to students and so then that becomes a contingent upon principal decisions it becomes contingent upon funding we have variance in funding site by site and so these are kind of the big picture ideas that i really want um you to connect tonight's presentation to and then you to continue to connect as we

142monitor the impact of the work that the instructional services team is launching last comment um you know the centralization around assessment as well there has not been a lot of support around the centralization of assessment and so when dr boot alludes to the fact that we created quickly a testing center to make sure that all of our students that we're moving through assessments that all the students that are supposed to get assessed in the state mandated assessment this is the elpac again i'm going i'm focusing on english learners we're making sure they're all having access to the same testing protocol vis-a-vis coming through that testing center um and then the central office is actually monitoring that those get accomplished and just in the short two years that i've been here i've already i had experienced

143um there not being consistency on execution of assessments across the schools so this is building the infrastructure to ensure that equity and access to not only the instructional tools but then to also make sure that we have um you know k-12 vertical alignment you're hearing about an assessment now that's going to have a power and impact k-12 vertically so we can talk about students you know whether they're a ninth grader or a third grader we can talk about their instructional levels and start to have those kinds of conversations not only across schools because of that equitable access but then also vertically k-12 so this is a big organizational shift and i don't um take it lightly and it would not have been possible without the heavy lifting that's been happening in the instructional services division

144but also in partnership we didn't move over um data and assessment services over to business with the intention that often and our instructional team has obviously shown tons of competency but a lot of the time the data systems fail because there's not sometimes the technical knowledge to launch those things with a lot of precision and and um and strength and so putting it technology getting the technical backend nice backbone of these platforms and these assessments strong in the business services division so then the instructional services can then you utilize that with teachers and students in order to move the student achievement needle that was the that was the exact thing that we were looking for to capture through the restructuring that you approved last spring so i just really want to illuminate that for all

145of you and for the organization at large so thank you to the teams for their hard work over the last couple weeks again new in their jobs doing extraordinary work leading organizational shifts right out the gate so i really want to recognize that so your comments brought to light another question that i have which is if we approve this star assessment program later this evening what is the rollout plan um i can speak to that dr boone yeah so good question and uh like i mentioned in my presentation it's uh it's been a short timeline so we don't have a fully detailed rollout plan quite yet but we do know that it will involve rolling out the assessment calendar communications to principles with other assessments what we typically do is identify a site coordinator at

146each school to help rule out and coordinate the assessments of the sites and so we would ask for sites to identify that person and so there would be training and support that would come centrally to those folks um we would also be working with our district academic specialists who are um specialists in literacy and supported assessments in the past um and we also get as part of our um part of the package with star assessments is there is a there are a number of coaching sessions and access to resources that they provide us over the course of the year and so we'll need to sit down and be much more detailed about that rollout plan but we we've already started those conversations and recognized the importance of of intentionality behind how that rollout looks like

147and then once we do approve if we do approve this this tool how long do you think it would be theoretically before we would have some initial assessments completed so the recommendation from sara from from renaissance learning which is the organization that that produced that is to give the assessment up three times a year which is initially how the ri and mi was administered and that's pretty typical with what other school districts who use the tool do my my goal is to have that first round of assessments happen in early to mid september so that we can have some beginning of the year data early on and then have a middle of the year administration as well as an end of the year administration and that would just be the baseline for all students tk12

148and then um and then we would have the option to administer the assessment more often for kids who are taking advantage of intervention programs or if you wanted to do a little bit more progress monitoring but the baseline would be three times per year peter i'm assuming that that data will help us determine whether students have matriculated to the appropriate programs and the right level across the entire math curriculum to help us assess gaps how we create create you know program continuity to ensure successful outcomes you know kind of all that generic stuff do we have the right approach we have problem solving woven into our curriculum at each grade level are those the kind of um will will that information be able to that the assessment gets be able to support those kind of

149concept ideas uh absolutely and i think uh and if you and i can always um i can share with you the sample reports that come from star assessments but um there's data there that's specific to um domains in the common core standards down to specific skills in the standard and so we would very easily be able to see how individual students are doing what they know what they don't know what makes sense next for them in terms of learning progression and then we can also look at larger groups like classes schools uh grade levels across the system and just and use that data to see how we're doing as a whole and i'm assuming that will be compiled at some point and presented to us during one of our math workshops or reading workshops as

150as we progress with that we can definitely bring it bring it to those yes absolutely thank you yeah we'll be making it now that we have um quality uh k-12 vertical assessments in this way again across the organization with consistency and coherence we'll be regularly reporting out to the school board um around uh progress and so that's that's again the other the other plus of the tool um one of my frustrations as a superintendent when we lack this in our system is that we're always waiting just for the one-time event of the summative state events summative summative state assessment events that tend to be towards the end of the year and that isn't usually that meaningful i mean it's important to look at and summative state measures accountabilities are one type of measure but we're

151positioning the organization to be able to look at um assessment and student performance formatively along the way and that's absolutely critical so we'll find a mechanism to start making it practice to be reporting to the board and how we're using the tools to measure progress throughout the year dr masetti yes i just wanted to add um i um you know peter was speaking earlier about how we sunseted reading inventory and math inventory which and phonics inventory which are products from hmh and in addition to sunsetting those assessment tools from hmh we are also sun setting a few programs that we were using like read 180 system 44 and fast math which are all going to um no longer be used um in our organization and so that's one of the things that um that was

152actually used system wide and that will be sunsetted as part of this so i recalled that and i wanted to point it out as part of this thank you sarah right does that conclude our questions and comments fantastic without being said that was a lot of work um thank you for making it so clear and um informative and educational at the same time at the end of the day we are a teaching institution so appreciate it okay um we are now moving to j action items j1 business and operations j1a contract between nbusd and promethean for professional development services for the 2020-21 school year second first night trustee gracias second by trustee water all those in favor aye aye aye any abstentions or pose motion carries thank you item j1b expanded learning mou between nbusd

153and ncoe i'll move to approve it first by tristi gracia is second by trustee schunk all those in favor hi hi hi i just want to comment that this item was a new and improved mou on the topic and i was glad to see it strengthened good president gonzalez mars i think we need to make sure to get the student vote i would just say that trustee gracia thank you i'm tris um student board representative yes aye thank you all those in favor aye aye and abstentions up or opposed motion carries thank you items j1c star renaissance online read and mathematics assessment almost to approve before we continue i'm practicing here is my first board meeting any public comment on this item please excuse me there are no public uh comments for this item vice

154president gonzalez gonzalez thank you i just rewind back all those in favor all right thank you i did get a first and a second there right yes okay thank you teamwork item j2 human resources j2a request to hire school social worker less than fully credentialed it's all moved first by trustee gracias second by trustee schunk uh student board representative hi all those in favor hi any abstentions or propose any public comment on this item there are no public comments vice president exhaust minus next time i'm going to switch the order public comment first thank you items j3 instructional services j3a agreement with uc berkeley history social science project for professional development services for secondary social science i'll move the item i'll second i have some concerns about this item that i'd like to talk about

155before we vote okay go ahead i'm concerned that this appears to be an attempt to rewrite history and change our instruction away from a fact-based approach history is not a changing field as it has already happened and the facts are all rather immutable i majored in history as an undergrad and believe that attempting to rewrite history to prevent to fit present feelings and narratives is an attempt to inject propaganda into our history instruction and paper over the facts history in the united states and around the world is full of many events that have both positive and negative effects on the people who experienced those events the events of the past need to be accurately portrayed and not ignored similarly we cannot overly focus on any single side of an issue but must present it in

156a fair and balanced way some parts of history are particularly ugly but not all of history is if we don't present a realistic view of the past then we'll never really understand how we got to where we are now rewriting history to ignore or contravene the facts is completely inappropriate i worry that this agenda item is attempting to move history away from my facts-based instruction so i'll be voting no on this item [Music] can i make me make a comment of course trustee jenkins it may be true that history does not change but perspectives should evolve especially as we consider whose voices and stories have been favored for decades it's a privilege to believe that our history has been accurately represented because for many their stories and narratives have been left out of the national

157conversation and education for years how many biographies of historical figures do we have on our shelves but the same events these historical figures experienced look very different through the eyes of other people from history giving our students different perspectives and ways to look at history as a strong reason to frequently and critically evaluate and update our history curriculum this collaboration could be an important tool in expanding and balancing the perspectives and stories of history contemporary relevance prompts all of us to remain abreast of historical developments germane to the content already taught and to look for new topics around which to develop curriculum i believe it's a needed approach and could be empowering for all students well said um yeah and i i'd like to add a little something um why do we study latin does

158anybody know it's not just for vocabulary it's not just for grammar it's not just to make people think we went to uh a fancy prep school in new england um one of us one of the si um effects of studying latin people who study the classics tell me that we become aware of how much we don't know the texts that are available to us to read are actually just a fraction of um what was written and you know and it's lost now and i was thinking um and uh trustee gracie and i talked about this um you know in a very friendly manner um i did go through this curriculum and uh it comes from uc berkeley and uh i admit i went there too um so i was i was very interested in it

159go bears i yeah go bears um you know one of the things they have in there that's really fascinating is um okay i need as you all can tell by my accent i used to i grew up in the south the american south i will tell you if i hadn't read gone with the wind when i was nine years old i never would have known that uh lee surrendered at appomattox i mean they just managed to just brush that over and um and say what you will about gone with the wind it was very clear that the south lost lost that lost that one and um and you all know that i'm part native american so when i was my father grew up on the reservation and when i would read about the theory of

160the frontier frederick jackson turner the frontier was now closed it was over well yeah yeah actually no there was some very troublesome indians still cluttering the place up some of them were my family i mean it's it's just all in your perspective and i don't look at this i looked at a lot of really interesting lesson plans first of all they've got a protocol for deliberative discussions which we should probably all take out and study because it'll keep us from getting into hair pullers when we disagree i mean i looked at that and i thought this is a good thing everyone should be using this particularly in the next few months and it's great for high school kids to to have it and i would really love to hear our student to hear carla's perspective

161on this too and they even had one lesson plan that's about george about washington high school in san francisco and the controversy about the mural with the dead native american and with george washington buying slaves and should it be covered up and it's a wonderful lesson plan and you know it would a teacher here could use our local discussion about the um uh about alan about um alan shepp's uh mosaic fountain down at the hat building that has caused so much local controversy it's been vandalized a couple of times in fact so um i was looking at this as as a tool um to uh that that really could enlighten people and the different less and and you know i'm also in many ways i'm i'm a cultural conservative i think that um i want

162to make sure that the projects do not eliminate the possibility of a research paper being written you know i don't think that they're this is meant to be slavishly followed i think that these are suppose these can be jumping off points there's it it allows for a lot of creativity with teachers and um the other thing that um yeah there's just such a variety of things of lessons in there so intriguing and um i also i it really reminded me of you know my teaching days and and how i would um like the novel beloved i love teaching that novel because the experience this is when a work of fiction can complement um a historical document and if you don't think you can handle reading a big fat novel by tony morrison well you know

163you can read the poem the middle passage by robert hayden in which he constructs using three or four different historical documents real documents and i think that this could be i just think this could be a real opportunity for our students and and make it relevant to uh i think our i think young people particularly today would um respond to it because and that doesn't mean that we're not going to learn um you know 1492 and 1619 and 1776 i mean those are all those are all the facts that we need to know we need to know those years and we're not educated but i i i went i spent a few quite a few hours wandering through this and i was thinking well i i would enjoy taking part in that and they have

164this they have something where students can contribute their coveted diaries and they'll be immortalized in a file and it's not just berkeley it's a sac state is involved in this too so there's just there's there's just so many um it's very interactive you know so i i would recommend anybody um going through this and uh and i i i want to if if we do adopt it i'd like to have um i'd like to keep sort of keep track of it and talk to my history teacher friends and you know see see how their experience is i mean i'm actually pretty enthusiastic about it but um i uh i agree that we need to have um we you know certainly we need to have writing and that sort of thing i mean it's not just

165going to be all standing up and speaking which is great okay but i'm interested in what does carla think okay okay well what do you think jose um in my undergraduate years at uc davis i was a research assistant for three professors and as many of you know my my degrees are in psychology primarily but one of one of one of the professors i was an assistant for was a history professor and i've mentioned him before he just passed away last year his name was uh dr juarez and um he is what was considered uh an expert on historical theory and an expert on the catholic church in the southwest and an expert in the history of the southwest um so as as a psych major i probably received some of the best training in

166history and research of history that any student could ask for and what he told me uh one of his one of one of the most important things he told me about history was that history is very often presented as a straight line from the past to the present what happens is that is that that line is narrowed based on perspective uh when i taught history at the college i was a history professor at the college and i taught primarily mexican mexican-american history i made my students buy two textbooks one was a standard u.s history textbook and the other was a history of the mexican-americans in the united states because you can't teach one without knowing the other um and i think that's what we're trying to do here we're trying to broaden the perspective of

167history i get really um annoyed when efforts like this are are are characterized as rewriting history or erasing history because you can't do that you know and so i would agree with you on that point david that you can't do that that you can you can uh relate to history based on your perspective um but so what i try to do and what so the the two major african-american diasporas that took place in the united states are very seldom covered in our history the three major immigration movements from mexico into the u.s not covered the fact that only seven of the 228 uh people who died in the alamo were actually native uh texans not covered um the uh the fact that that i live through and and there are pictures of me in my

168cowboy suits playing uh texas rangers uh the fact that texas rangers uh texas finally recognized the fact recently that the texas rangers were the tip of the spirit and leading to um uh uh mexican genocide uh in the 1800s so you know it's been and i agree with you uh again uh david that that there's a lot of a lot of really good stuff that happened in our history and that we should and and the the the issue becomes uh the belief that if we expand the perspectives if if we if we include new perspectives in history that you know that one side's going to be good and the other side's going to be bad you know at this point it's history you know it it it there they are facts um and and i

169can't imagine uh sending our students through an education and not allowing them to see themselves represented in our history uh in our history lessons and the contributions in 1985 at the college we started a movement to try and get a multicultural gender studies uh women's studies uh graduation requirement it took us 10 years and during that 10 years the resistant part of the faculty was really talking about the collapse of classical education as we know it because we were introducing a new perspective on the history of the united states when all we're doing is just introducing you know more truths um so you know i i it's not propaganda uh it's it's facts like you say it berkeley is what the fourth best rated history department in the country which includes private schools uh so

170i would trust that to put together a plan with with our input to represent the history uh to history to our students um so i will vote for this in fact i'll vote twice for this david so i don't i don't have a problem with expanding perspectives um you know any good history professor will tell you there's never just a single factor that leads to any historical action having been taken we don't live in a one variable world right there's always multiple things that are the cause of events in history my concern is that we just not move away from fact-based instruction and we maintain a relevant fact-based instruction i'm sorry as you've mentioned before history is fact you know you can't move away from a fact-based instruction if you're planning curriculum around facts um

171and and again um having been uh a protege of dr juarez you know i don't like uh feel good curriculum i don't think gets anybody anywhere what i want is fact-based curriculum because these classes you know much like the ones i taught at the college will qualify for credit at the university and if we don't prepare our students for university level uh instruction or learning then we're not doing then we're not doing them a favor and i would hope that as we move through this uh even after i'm i have left the board that we make sure that the curriculum that's developed through this process is uh uh robust that it's rigorous and that it meets the needs not only of the students who are going onto the university but our students who are going

172out out that's that's it i like to add um you know the way i see this item on our agenda is more of a of a necessary and essential complement that our history needs um that our current textbooks sufficiently does not portray all of the different perspectives that occurred during a specific time um i do think that what this does it is part of that quality of education of encouraging and embracing our students to inquire to ask questions and for us to be prepared to answer those questions and more so in the way of you go and figure out how to answer that question think about it and so i really like the analytical part of this of it's not just your your textbook but it complements it with history and the social science aspect

173of it many times i feel that the human aspect is removed from history and it's just facts and dates and numbers and memorization but there was a human aspect of it throughout history the entire time and that perspective and that story needs to be told and that complements it uh because it makes it real it makes me think of of you know i always saw history and my favorite you know books of history are are our biographies um because you you're i feel like you're traveling through time uh through someone's eyes and experience and put yourselves in their shoes um and you know in in in for one moment um like anne frank feel what what she felt and um and but we need more of those stories um you know as a as a

174latina in our schools you know i i i needed more more stories of of not only anne frank but more even culturally relevant as trustee ortalo mentioned there a lot of the history um i feel like is missing so i i think this this complements that yes we need the you know the history is is is awesome when you're when you're trying to grasp how you're learning these series of events that already occurred in the past it's fascinating um learn the facts um you know and for me the most important part that i connect with it is the human experience because that that series of events occurred because a human being made a decision a human being made a vote and that leads to where we are today and for me that's essential to one's

175understanding on how the world works um you know it's a story of our lives and um you know in in in it for me it's critical that we see it through the eyes of of others to complement that because i know as a student i never saw the textbooks reflect my indigenous side i never saw the textbooks reflect uh my latina chicana side of things um and i'm just one one um you know just one member of the community there's so many other ethnic groups and diversity that must be reflected here so having that comprehensive teaching is absolutely necessary because we're not only here to teach the academic side of things but also we are helping raise human beings of the future that need to have all the information they can possibly have to make

176the best decisions they can possibly make for themselves and for their families and for their careers um you know it's um and for me it's important to to add that what people felt what they suffered what what was earned and gained and changed and how people grew throughout the history um because a lot of it is missing you know i always struggled seeing an ap you know his u.s history book and um and seeing a chapter on latino culture and cesar chavez they portrayed him dressed up for quinceanera with a zoot suit outfit you know i'm like that's not how he that's that's not the cesar chavez i remember he's he was out there you know working and um in in fighting um for for farmworkers and so you know it's it's what complements that

177story you know in in in that kind of inquiry needs to be that kind of thirst needs to be met with some strong strong um you know energy and information um and flow of knowledge um that goes to that and for me i'm looking forward for this type of um support not only to reach our secondary levels but it's absolutely to reach from our tk through fifth grade um you know i love the aspect in here about amplifying our ethnic studies i think this is a strong component that will do that um because more and more we're seeing many of us being dismissed um and by history um and i think what this does it just complements it it doesn't deny the facts it adds to it it um it it it elevates people's existence

178that may have been erased um throughout the history books so i'm um thrilled about this really excited about this and can't wait for it to expand even further um and so because we want you know our students to be the very best and without you know getting to know themselves um through the history and where they came from it's it's it's it it does create barriers for students to be where they are and when we know that ethnic studies can provide that you know we i say this over and over i wish i had more of an ethnic studies program back when i was in um you know at napa high and a student in the school district than having to wait until my college years i think a lot of things could have been

179different from me um had that been embraced and and provided um so i'm really excited for this and i see it more as a compliment it's not taking away anything it's it's adding to it um because it's missing that color um so um just one more thing since uh dr masetti uh found it necessary to have a shout out to the bears i'm going to have a shout out to the aggies i'm going to have to i'm going to have to second that out [Music] numbered here trusty water yeah and as you know a naggy that was born out of uc berkeley yeah it's true um any other uh i know i'm our student board representative carla may want to say something yeah i just want to kind of add in a little bit of

180kind of a student's perspective because um i know for a lot of my peers this is something that would really interest them um and i thought of an example uh i know at vintage they used to offer a race and social justice history class they had that class and regular us history so you'd get to choose um and i think this year they um eliminated the class just for whatever reason but i know um my leadership teacher misalis she was she was the one teaching it and she was telling us about how i think it was one of the most like signed up courses on campus um and i think that just goes to show that students are hungry to look at that different perspective of history and i know for a lot of my

181peers we go to we find a lot of kind of more of the of that kind of history found through social media or through um kind of those outlets um when i think that's what we really should be learning in in the classroom and i think it's especially like in today's age this this could be really relevant and in such a small kind of not as diverse town like napa i think it's really important to incorporate these kind of studies um into our courses and show our students that there's more than just this small town that majority of latino and white population so you said something you said something you said in these times and one of the things that struck me about this this um there's a whole packet of lessons is that how

182it was able to relate the present to the past and i had a landmark birthday this past summer um i can i'm 70 years old and i and and you know you can do the math um i've lived through some strange times these are really strange this is this is very unusual and i i think it's i think um i i think i just sort when i was looking at this i was saying well wait a minute kids are going to like this because young people are going to like this because they're going to see that this is unusual to put it mildly and you're living in it and you've got to remember what you thought at the time because you're going to have a story to tell i think that's important too and uh

183you know of course um we had the flu epidemic almost a little over 100 years ago influenza and you know they discussed that too but i was i was really um intrigued as was how they related the present to the past and because it it it helps us understand our present yeah you said in these times yeah well said trusty water good i don't feel so bad about being 70 years old now i'm going to live through it okay um any other comments um i should actually ask for a public comment on this there are no public comments on this item vice president gonzalez thank you mr reece okay see now there's no other comments from the board and trustees um can i get a motion on this item also move no second don't already

184have him on the table you know okay i'll second it then you're right i don't remember who first and second let him let him do the first so come on david you do the first fight a second by trusty water all those in favor aye aye any opposed abstentions motion carries thank you all right now i'm tuned massive valley i i do want to say advice for the trustees that the opposing vote did prompt a very rich discussion so thank you for that um discussion i know the instructional team as they think about advancing this work um that that discussion will stand behind them so thank you see and we set an example by having a pot you know by having a polite positive discussion and just to recall the student vote please hi thank

185you miss magano okay now on to item um j-3b napa valley adult education course of study adoption i'll move diagram second oh um all those in favor aye aye hi student board representative hi call me comment public comment on the sidearm no public comments for this item thank you mr reese okay now on to item j4 school planning and construction uh j4a sorry um spc number one uh 16.3-20 inspector of record services by m m project um inspection at vintage high school path of travel up to field project second i heard of first by trustee shank and then a second by trustee gracia all those in favor student board representative bye comment on this item mr ruiz no political comments for this item vice president gonzalez mars okay thank you uh now on to item

186j4b request for inspector of record services by m m project at silverado middle school and redwood middle school field projects so i moved first by christie gracias second by trustee shunk those in favor hi any abstentions or student board representative hi any public comment on this item no pull the comments for this item vice president gonzalez matas okay on to j4c uh request for consulting services by ged for northwood dsa closeout so moved second first by trustee gracias second by trustee shunk all those in favor aye all right board representative hi public comment no pull a comment for this item vice president godzilla um now on to item k um we have informational um and items under this action do not require board action anything on this item nothing tonight no informational items tonight thank

187you item al additional suggestions and comments from board members and superintendent i just have one i'd like to highlight the fact that we have an updated landing page for our nvusd home page with the wonderful new logo on it yeah looks great it does is that the logo on your shirt trusty gracie it is the selfsame one also the logo in my water bottle all right yeah and your shopping bag love it um all right now on to item m for future agenda items i think we discussed it a bit at the time already but i'd love to hear um the results of our assessments with this new start program um when we roll it out you know dr boone and assistant superintendent of angual let's prepare to bring baseline results to the board in

188the early fall um and i've been um wanting to add this agenda but just sort of wanted to have the school start and so on but um i think just to follow up on our um what would you know our ethnic studies program look like across you know kate you know tk all the way through high school um we know there's curriculum you know already approved by the state and so on and um what would that look like um in terms of our instructional services yeah so trustee um um or vice president gonzalez modest we're going to be bringing forth um a comprehensive sort of launch um to the equity policy implementation um that'll serve as sort of our kind of umbrella initial launch around that work curriculum will be a component of that and

189when we unpack the component side within that you'll hear the work that um assistant superintendent pat andrew jennings and her directors will be leading around ethnic studies um implicit bias training so we'll be bringing that forth and also we're looking to erect a diversity equity and inclusion task force as well to advance that work so we will be bringing that forward but first we'd like to bring to you a comprehensive sort of plan and vision um for for the broader policy implementation with curriculum being a component of it great thank you that sounds really good yep all right anything else nothing you run a good meeting thank you you'd like to adjourn motion to adjourn i think vera caught who got it first in a second that all of us all those in favor all

190right all right student board rep hi all right so you're ready for class tomorrow thank you everyone have a great night and um have a great second day of of school everyone oh yeah all right