Superintendent's Workshop 12 p.m. 1-10-22

001welcome it is monday january 10th this is the superintendent's workshop of the school district of indian river county we are located in the joe and idolette junior teacher education center and at this time i'd like to recognize the superintendent to give us the different items that you have to bring to us thank you madam chair i appreciate it and if i haven't said on so already happy new year to each and every single one of you uh we're looking forward to a absolutely outstanding new year and as such one of my new year's resolutions is to ensure we as a district keep the main thing the main thing in order to ensure that i hold true to that i'm going to move the last presentation to be the first presentation which is the mid-year data

002review and as the staff brings up this presentation this is a data set that looks at k-8 performance and reading and math this is our i-ready data next time we come together i'll bring information regarding our secondary schools but this is the opportunity to give you an update as to the progress that we're seeing over the course of the start of the school year through december 17th and i want to draw your attention to what has been a very very struggling time over the last two years and if you think of a kindergarten or a current second grade student when they were in kindergarten they were sent home in march of their kindergarten year last year which would have been their first grade year we had students return at a percent of 62 in terms

003of returning to brick and mortar and then over the course of the year we moved ourselves to 85 percent of students starting that second semester semester we celebrated that we were excited about that we also dealt with the ins and outs of quarantines and students having covet and teachers being exposed and having to quarantine so to say by any means that last year was a regular school year would be drastically incorrect when we started this school year which would be in this scenario this child's second grade year we had schools for the first month five six weeks of school hovering around sixty percent attendance because of the delta variant the last three years have been absolutely complex hard to deal with when it comes to the teaching of our children and i say all that

004to bring our awareness to the reality in which we're currently sitting right now we're in the midst of a another spike we had a total of 221 staff have po test positive for covid from august 10th to december 17th which are is our first semester currently when we left on friday that number was at 65 just one week back so you can see there is a drastic increase in how fast people are being identified as positive so we are not out of the woods when it comes to the impact that this pandemic is having on the quality of education for our children so as i set up the last three years i kind of want to go through and make a comparison to where we were prior to the pandemic and where we are now

005and where we're seeing the biggest impacts so if you look at the data set that's on the screen now you'll see this is our growth from the beginning of the school year through december 17th and you'll see in k2 in reading significant improvement you'll see significant improvement in each of these data sets three five our lowest 25 percent which would be our fifth graders and our our students who have been retained and you see significant growth for them as well you always want to see your lowest 25 uh growing at a faster rate than you do the the total set because they have more to grow and that's exactly what you see in this data set you'll see in the coming slides that this is very comparable in terms of the growth from the beginning

006of the school year through the mid-year point so we're proud about the growth even despite the obstacles that we faced at the opening of schools with the hard start and the shutting of schools and the percent of 60 65 of our students being in school because of the delta variant when you look at math it's very comparable once again you're seeing growth you're seeing growth at all levels minimal growth in six through eight which is very typical when you look at previous years and we'll see that in the coming slides but you see lowest 25 percent almost tripling that specific growth and that kind of talks through some of the data and disaggregation of that data that we're using really to drill down and be specific on how we're providing instruction for students and we're

007going to really tie our next presentation which is dr maine's data presentation into some of that as we move forward in the coming slides math is going to be a larger impact across the state across the nation you simply cannot climb a ladder and then miss certain rungs of the ladder and just jump forward we have to teach those prerequisite skills and we're seeing this compounded impact on the students who missed those rungs of that specific ladder so we're moving uh we're seeing a dramatic impact in math now let's go back and compare us to 1819 from 2122 and you look at our k2 students you see um in 1819 when school year started it was at 26 and then 23 uh when we started this particular school year and then you see a growth

008of 34 percent in 1819 a growth a growth of 29. the growth of 29 given the opening of schools in a student who has had a disruption in every single year of their school experience is the reality that you're going to see across the state so there is very specific action that needs to be taken to ensure that we're recouping the impact of these kids talking about learning loss and thinking that it's done and it's something that's already been resolved is not a reality there's additional work that needs to be done when we have children in our schools and ultimately across the united states that have had been impacted every year of their schooling experience now you see it begin to level out in grades three and five and six through eight as a reminder

009these are the accountability areas so we don't wanna um say everything is fine because when you just look at accountability we're doing okay we wanna keep our focus in on our k one and two students but when you look at 18 19 in reading you see we started 37 and grew to 52 in 2019 and this year we started 38 and we grew 15 a two percent difference but only one percent off where we were pre-pandemic now two things i want to point out one of which i already have which was the rocky start that we had it wasn't until october the first week in october that we hit the attendance that we had pre-pandemic which was 91-92 and that still needs to be improved upon but it was until october that's the first nine

010weeks so to be one percentage point off where we were with that start is something we should celebrate not be satisfied with but acknowledge the hard work that our teachers and administrators are doing the other is that this district in 1819 took this assessment the third and fourth week in january going into february now the intent of this data is to in drive instruction to modify instruction based on the reality in where students currently sit this is an informative assessment what is it informing it's informing instruction we've taken this data during the month of december so when we come back this week or last week we already know we already have disaggregated that data we've already made those shifts and changes to to those assignments so when you're looking when you're comparing this data set

011there's about 20 to 25 more days of instruction in 1819 in comparison to 2122. um so we have already regrouped our students we've already made those shifts and modifications to make that move and to finish this slide when you look at 1819 for our sixth through eighth graders once again we're the exact same place in reading than where we were uh in 1819 uh with basic same rate of of growth so in reading in grades three through eight were right back to where we wanted to be and as i said when i took this position that's not where we want to be it's just recouping the loss of the pandemic and setting such a higher expectation in terms of where we want to go now when you're looking at math once again you're seeing the

012compounded impact of the pandemic play itself out in a much larger and more aggressive way in math so you see where we're a nine percentage point difference in k one and two um when you look at grades three through five it is now a ten percentage point difference but you see the rate of growth as we started is still typical so we're growing even with the challenges that we've had at the beginning of the school year and less days to instruct in comparison to the 21 22 data set you're still seeing us growing at a very good clip in the same thing with six through eight it's very comparable in terms of the amount of growth but there is still work yet to be done when you're looking at math so some of the trends

013and implications of this data set board members these actions really have taken place we took these assessments the first second third week during december and we challenged and worked with principals really to desegregate this data regroup students to re to re-identify where are the gaps where do we extend the opportunities for learning for students just not giving them more time but identifying the actual deficiency and filling that time with the appropriate intervention based on the data that work has already been done uh we will be meeting with our principals once again this week even though the struggles that we're in right now we're not going to take our foot off the gas extended learning opportunities we have continued what we call our a2 interventions which is before school during lunch after school interventions not an

014all-call intervention or hey come if you will but very specific to the needs of those students so we are also looking at what we're doing going into summer so in the coming months we're going to provide this board with a summer school update and we're going to be looking at extending the learning in a very drastic and severe way for our k one and two students as they go into the next grade level because without that additional time for the appropriate students we're never going to be able to close the gap we'll also be looking at our extended learning opportunities through our partners we've all celebrated the amount of support we as a school district receive from outside organizations who support our mission and align themselves with our mission we need to continue to work

015to be more specific in identifying and making sure that outreach that is being provided is being exposed to the right students that's going into the summer that's going into the school year so there's additional amount of work that we need to be done so we will be able to as we move through this year i'm very comfortable in where you look large scale in terms of the growth that you'll see at the end of our school year based on what we're currently doing but make no mistakes about it we're not out of the woods there is additional work that needs to be done for the next three to five years truly to offset the impacts of this pandemic so our next presentation is really to begin to look at how we're using data it's a

016follow-up presentation uh to request from board member uh jones regarding some of the data sets that we use and how we're really using that data set to drive instruction but i'll pause right there and answer any question board members may have board members anybody one quick question and i and i may have misheard you so i just want to clarify for the learning losses did i hear you say that you were going to pull certain kids during lunch to make up some of their time did i hear that right yes which is a a typical practice that we have been doing looking at the time that we have available to provide very specific interventions uh to immediate remediate those specific skills that's being identified through the data and just a question because i admit not

017being the expert on this my concern is that in what are already tough moments that when we pull kind of like the free time the lunch time that the kids have um the impact that that potentially has on you know either well-being or behavior issues and that we be attentive to that i i think that is in the onset or the development of that is a non-negotiable expectation that this is in no ways a punishment but ultimately crafted in a way in which it's a reward so when you go in to schools and you see these students having this opportunity they see it as a celebration with a specific teacher with a lunchtime buddy group uh being pulled in the cafeteria we have to continue to be very vigilant on how we're providing these opportunities

018and when you just say you're gonna you know you have to have remediation or you have to you lose the kid uh at you know from the very very beginning so i i think our principals have done an outstanding job in doing that when you look at some of the after school programs that are that are taking place once again that's an opportunity for celebration very specific interventions taking place and the kids look forward to participating in them and when you look at the learning gains that we're going to experience this particular year we're going to celebrate that ability to be so specific and meeting the needs of kids and maximizing the time that we do have can i ask a follow-up on that it's kind of out of order but i'm going to ask

019um i used to do lunch punch groups which is what we refer to it as and the kids loved it they would come with me and learn science skill and and love it for lunch but that's elementary are we doing that middle school and high school that way or very similar approaches you know you know the the names the names change yeah not lunch punch i'm sure but it's not it's not lunch but we we do maximize that time as well okay and that's positively accepted by middle schoolers absolutely and it really is you know you know we're not you know twisting their ear to go okay got it dr jones thank you dr moore for starting out with something that is very important um and this may be more when dr mcmahon comes up

020but with the with math and we go into summer school i think we all learned that you know if they're not doing well during the regular how do we make this a little bit different in summer school and i know last year we did the crossover mission with the athletics and the math and so forth so i just encourage you to continue to look at programs that the kids will be interested in because summer school's tough you know going after the whole year and with these what these kids have gone the last couple of years but when i did follow up a crossover i saw some gains but i just like looking at different ways to approach it so thank you thank you mr barefoot no i mean dr dr morris heard me talk in

021fact we had a breakfast when last spring with the learning alliance talking about the possibility of adding another arm to their initiatives focused on math and it was a good discussion i didn't produce necessarily any results but my experience is yes you've got to be able to read but if you don't if you're not proficient in math you are going to be behind the eight ball forever so it's important as early literacy is math is right up there as well it just kicks in at a little eight uh later age uh age point uh so i think anything we can do is is is is it's necessary if not required uh you're right math literacy is just as important as what we consider literacy but it's actually called math literacy when you're teaching it in

022schools um question i have is are you going to come to us like with specific interventions i don't mean tell us you know what products you're using but that would be nice what interventions do you have right now since we see the urgency here with math how urgent are we getting other than lunch punch groups what are we doing through the chair what we've done is we we have our tiered instruction the most meaningful way to offset declines in data is to get it right the first time which is core instruction so having the ability really to introduce the the concept fully teach it and as you implement that new lesson you're specifically differentiating the students as you introduce that new concept so filling in the gaps that they have as it relates to the

023introduction of that new topic and then continuing to embed into the school year a consistent dose from day one to day 180 to address their defined deficiencies that may be one year or two years or three years below the grade level in which they're currently in that's tier two instruction and then above and beyond the intervention which is tier three intervention so a lot of work has gone into really doing those implement uh those strategies which are built into the schedule with absolute fidelity not using an intervention curriculum that is beneath the standard or using an intervention standard that isn't addressing the actual deficiency of the student but taking the time and that's some of the data set that we have to ensure students are appropriately approached uh appropriately placed students are receiving um the

024appropriate intervention based on the defined deficiency and that we're monitoring and pulling students up to the standard based on the data so the constant regrouping in the evaluation of the growth the other impact of that is to really ensure that you're you're very public with your practice this isn't something that you you sweep away and put into a closet and you never talk about through common planning teachers are having the conversations on the impact that they're having with their students through the core instruction through tier two through tier three to ensure that we're seeing that particular growth and when they're not seeing the growth it's not a bad thing because you're able to ask for help in support or to problem solver to connect them to some other services that they may need one of

025the things that we're seeing as we problem solve and this is some of the power of dr mcmahon's data it's not the instruction that's the problem it's the attendance that's the problem it's not the instruction that's the problem it's that i don't have power in my house it's not the attendance or it's not the instruction that's the problem it's that i'm scared i don't know when i get off the bus and my mom and dad are going to be home so it's really ensuring that we're having the appropriate conversations uh to get to the root cause of each and every single child so i i think the problem solving that's taking place over the last two years is one of the my points of of privilege and pride in terms of what we've really been

026able to build uh and not only in terms of the data but the kinds of conversations that we're having to accelerate the growth of students okay with that being said then what supports um concerning parents do we have with helping their student with if they're behind for example i remember when i was teaching elementary school you know when your math facts were pushed to practice at home and then next thing we knew no no math facts no practicing flash cards none of that so where are we with things like that now i think the answer to that question madam chair is really goes back to the open and honest communication with parents and when you do this one overarching strategy um you're really teaching to the middle right versus saying these are and to be

027very specific to answer your question how the protocol in which we're having conversations with parents has drastically changed the expectation around uh grades being reflective of the child's ability to mastered standards in the classroom has drastically changed so not only are we using data to inform instruction for teachers to deliver to students but as a result we can be much more explicit with the defined needs that where children are struggling to give that information to parents so whether it's just multiplication facts or or whether it's whatever the concept is we can be more specific because we're using the data to not just you know here's your participation grade or you filled out the homework we have to continue to be very very explicit in what we're teaching and where children are are mastering it i

028think some of the work that we've done with the addition of a parent you know coordinator really helps that offering and improving the communication and opening our doors and now that our our schools are open you're seeing higher levels of communication and understanding in terms of what's happening in our classrooms so then are our progress reports and report cards then um the ones that we're using right now currently uh appropriate for giving parents these updates on what their child's is behind on and is handling that that absolutely not that's right let me be clear because if the expectation is for us to communicate uh four weeks four and a half weeks into a nine week grading period uh and if that's the expectation we have we as a board and me as a superintendent has

029set a very very low bar one of the things that we negotiated with our contract is to ensure that grades are being entered on a weekly basis so any day of the week at any time of the day a parent can go on the focus their parent focus and look at where their student is where their grades are so they have that information available at the palm of their hands versus waiting four or five weeks to know and you know what a shame if a parent has to wait on four and a half weeks of progress to find out their son is is not progressing in a class so and that's one of the things that we've put into our contract and that just once again increases the level of communication uh by using the

030technology that we have available for us and teachers and and parents need to be able to work together and that is one way in which they can communicate with each other regarding the progress of their children okay thank you anything else okay i have a question oh i'm sorry mr rosario i didn't realize you were there i'm sorry thank you i apologize i'm not in i am i'm just not feeling well but um i do have some questions um with regard to this and they're really just um some of my comments are really repeated i suppose um something personally that i'm going to share an experience that i've had with my son that i have noticed with regards to math is that he's always had that was always his weakest area and he's always struggled

031with it we changed curriculum i don't know how many times i've shared this with dr moore before um and this year we actually changed the curriculum to something called math you see i know that dr moore is familiar with matthew c it is um a it has been a night and change difference and i think taking a look at the math curriculum and how we actually provide this information to our students makes a big difference so what i noticed is that the prior curriculum that he has used over the last i don't know how many years became very confusing to him because they would teach a lesson and there were some examples to practice that new lesson skill and then there were probably five to six pages of scaffolding examples that included work from previous

032chapters there weren't enough activities or there weren't enough examples to allow him to master that new skill for that new lesson so by the time he goes on to the next lesson he's learning a new skill with very little practice in that new skill and then doing multiple pages of scaffolding from previous assignments so he's still not mastering that learned new skill so you're finding that these kids what i was what i realized is that they're stuck because they're not mastering the skill that they have originally or what they were originally supposed to learn math you see is one of those curriculums that changed the entire trajectory for my son and i know that there are children out there who need the same kind of support because what matthew c does is that they teach

033a there's a lesson and there's probably six to ten pages of just work and skill practice for that new lesson so there is no reason no excuse not to master it then of course after that there is some scaffolding but there's more skill work than there is scaffolding and i think that plays a big difference his um his self esteem in math has increased his interest has in increased his desire to learn it there's no more emotional meltdowns there's no more confusion he goes through it easily um and it it has been a game changer for us there's a lot of manipulate manipulatives that come along with it that can also help for the visual learner for the tactile learner excuse me so i think that there's quite a bit of work sure um i

034hear in the in the area of math but i also would like the district to take a different look at it we need to not give everybody the same work not everybody works the same way and if you have children who actually need to master the task until they get it so there's no more frustration and they don't wind up eventually falling behind then our approach needs to be different about it so i would just ask and challenge especially now that i know that mr meyer is going to introduce where we are in the math curriculum coming forward in the new math adoption process that we take a different look not just at um at at the areas that that are needed of course but in how we're actually providing that for the kids how

035we're giving it to them something else that i have not heard in the presentation is differentiated instruction i am a firm supporter of differentiated instruction we have not heard that there is going to be specific training on how to differentiate instruction for children children especially in the area of math need to be given leveled assignments they need to understand how they're being grouped by ability or need they absolutely should engage in data specific this uh discussions with their teachers so that they understand where they are and where they need to go or where they need to be by a particular date or time and all of that together is not easy but we can't do it out of looking at a book and saying okay the teacher's guide says differentiate this way that's not how

036it works there needs to be some serious training behind it so that there are certified uh coaches in our schools that understand differentiated instruction so i think combined with that and the effort of opening up more opportunities for parents and parental workshops and math skills i think are going to help i know that there are many many parents who have come to me and have said they don't understand the math they can't help their kid they have no idea what the math is about so how can we help parents help their kids and that's a gap right there that needs to be addressed that's an area right there so that when the child goes home the mom or the dad or grandparent or the aunt or the uncle is not saying sorry i can't help

037so if we could um dr moore consider some of these areas here in our approaches moving forward um hopefully the combination of all of them together will really make a big deal and really we can eventually see some growth in this particular area okay thank you mrs rosario we have done a um amount of work and really transferring how we look at teaching and learning within our school system really to ensure that data is aligned to the needs of of learners and really use data to problem solve to get to the specific need of students so we have a large number of dashboards it has become our way of work here in our school system we've had the opportunity over the last two years to share how we're doing this work with other districts we've

038had the opportunities to go out and present um to to other organizations on how we use this data i know doc jones has met with dr mcmahon and and we thought this would be a nice way really to walk through how we are as an organization learning um and how we're acting and responding to students based on that learning so dr mcmahon mike thank you as i just didn't do my need to be closer good afternoon board members there we go so to start um it seems like a basic question what is our student enrollment something that's often posed to us and it's an example that sometimes even the simplest of questions requires several follow-up questions so without having you to guess these all three are correct all three of these represent our student enrollment

039the first is all enrolled that means that anyone who's stepped foot has been enrolled in our schools has encountered that number now why would that be important if we're talking about discipline data we want to know all enrollees if we have a student who has a lot of discipline problems and then for whatever reason transfers out of our school district we still want that discipline data to be counted in what we're doing and how we're aggregating the data the next is currently enrolled oftentimes we want to know the kids who are in our school seats right now how many are there apart from this we also have survey two in survey three in full year enrolled all still dealing with the currently enrolled but different numbers and it deals with different times in the year

040and then finally these are our non-charter students why would that be important our strategic plan specifically is addressing our non-charter schools in the work that's being done within those schools so again not to belabor this particular question but it does speak to how we have crafted our data displays within power bi power bi is actually a business intelligence tool through microsoft in education we're starting to find some school districts are starting to get on the ball as far as using this tool it is a data visualization i'm going to show you in a little bit some of our dashboards that we have created but in essence our philosophy that has gone into the creation has started with multiple views uh for data top kind of that 10 000 foot view if you will it's that

041district level it's looking overall performance we might look at some broad categories of aggregation for example grade band we might look at elementary might we might even break down elementary k2 versus 3-5 we might look school-to-school performance sub-group performance how different race ethnic groups are performing are ed economically disadvantaged versus our non-economically disadvantaged the target audience for these type views are cabinet district staff principals from there we go down to what would be a school level view all of our power bi dashboards have specific data restrictions so when a person logs in depending on what those restrictions are depends on what data they see so if i'm an assistant principal or principal i'm looking at my school's data this will allow me to aggregate where we are by grade levels by individual teachers as well

042as the subgroups that we traditionally do evaluate and then finally student level views it is important to know trends at a school but it's also important to have ample data from student to student so that we can make those changes as ms rosario pointed out the ability to differentiate instruction comes down to understanding the individual child and individual child's needs and so our dashboards do allow for users to evaluate where each individual student is in terms of standards instruction curriculum and performance and then finally one last kind of view is this public-facing view you may be familiar if you've looked at the data that we have supplied for african-american achievement plan through our through our website in the past it was a large number of spreadsheets that were just massive in order to give all

043the data by school by race by grade level and so instead of doing those uh spreadsheets we actually have a large number of public-facing dashboards on our website so members of the community can log in to not even log in they can access our website and i'll show you those dashboards as well and obtain i-ready data discipline attendance multiple other pieces of data so this public facing is is meant for that it's the ability for members of the public to aggregate by school by grade by subgroup for the various performance so this is an example of our dashboard so this is what we call goal tracker this would be an example of that high level district level view i'm going to click on the next one it's going to just basically take this and make

044it bigger and then i'm going to go back to explain what this is so this little view is here it shows you by school by school grade component and i just have elementaries picked here so that's why you don't have social studies or graduation but it allows us as a district to look at the current state of um of our schools now what are these numbers this actually is a multivariate regression model that is giving the current performance based on unit assessments based on iready based on comprehensives towards school grade i'm going to say this word and a lot of statisticians don't like it but it's kind of like a prediction and even i have a title here predicted component grades basically it looks at past years performance and then uses that data to predict

045where schools are based on their current year data and so this gives us an idea ela achievement the current percentage of students who are demonstrating through unit assessments through i-ready through comprehensive the ability to achieve at a level three or higher so going back this would then you have your district view here your schools log in and they see this is just at vero beach elementary she'll see her 1819 1920 21 22 goal that we set and then where they are currently all of this data updates daily so as students take new assessments it feeds into the model automatically and then down here it starts to get into a little bit more of that that deeper dive into where the students are at that school we divide the where this 42 percent is we start

046to show okay there's a third of the kids here that are actually demonstrating very positive um sorry go back oh boy now i messed it up here we go um so the green would be kids that we feel very good about demonstrating uh progress towards the standards the yellow or those bubble that means that they are within plus or minus five points of where they should be to achieve and then the red are those students who are not demonstrating uh the scores uh requisite to get a level three or above for that achievement and then it's kind of cut off here but that's learning games you have your bottom quartile and it goes to the math and the science then the school view this is another little view we actually have a running record of

047where this gold tracker was so they can log in here and they can see this is our first data com of the year and then the first of every month so it's october 1st november 1st december 1st january 1st so you can see that while first of october based on the fall i ready probably minimal unit assessments this school was was predicted at 40 percent of their school grade and over each month they're climbing towards that dark pink line which is their overall goal uh to become an a or wherever that goal was set for them and you can see it kind of around all here you generally have a bunch of different filters and slicers they can tear this data apart and then at the school they actually have the ability to look at

048the individual students and i've kind of blocked that out so that we don't reveal any personal identifiable information but you can see they have the grade they have all their subgroup information their unit assessment all their i-ready data what they've accomplished in the the past on fsa this is all by by grade level and then you have all of these filters in which they can start to filter and see okay is how are my ese students doing you can't see here but they can actually scroll over and they can see their teachers they can see what's what course it is and all of this could be exportable if they wanted to look at it in excel so currently active we have 16 apps and not to get too much into vocabulary an app is a

049broad category of data so take attendance for example this would be an attendance app within the attendance app we actually have two dashboards one of them is student attendance and one of them is staff attendance within the dashboards we have several reports so for student level attendance we have one report on the average daily attendance the ada 92 percent of students came to school today those kinds of statistics we also have a categorical page where it looks at the percentage of students who are chronically absent the percent of students who are adequately present and so then we have a habitually truant report so you have 16 apps in these broad categories that break down into 58 dashboards which then break down into 160 total reports that we have available to us all right so let

050me i'm going to show you now because of the fact this is being broadcast live i can't just go into our power bi in navigate around you're going to see students information so what i've done is i've taken two of our dashboards and i've removed the student name and id and just put in a blank index um and so you can actually see how these dashboards function and it i selected two because they're they're really two different um purposes for these particular dashboards so the first one is our middle school acceleration dashboard the ms excel it is a school grade component the state of florida monitors the ability of districts to accelerate students who are on or above grade level at the middle school level so for this it's kind of complex although it's pretty

051easy to understand who's included essentially any eighth grader who is a level 3 or above on math is included any student in 6th or 7th taking an algebra geometry is included in this but there's a lot of things for a principal to do to determine whether a kid is in there they have to look at their current schedule they have to look at their last year's fsa scores and in that it could be algebra eoc it could be seventh grade fsa so what we've done for them is taken all of that work out of their hands and went ahead and aggregated where these students are so this table here correlates to this number up here two years ago when we started to look at this we realized that we just weren't putting kids in out

052we weren't giving them the chance to be accelerated these are kids that are level three or higher some level fours and fives they for all intents and purposes were on or above grade level and so what this number was when we started two years ago was i think it's like close to 200. it was 200 students that we were not affording the opportunity to take algebra when everything else showed that they should be so currently right now we only have three now i've looked at these three the two here were in an algebra class switched out uh the ace uh student um if i'm not mistaking um came to us without it from out of district but point is they're monitoring this and this is drastically lower than the 200 that we had to start

053with so this is an example where all we need to do is say principles look at these kids these kids need to be in algebra and so we're not asking them to do step one step two step three step four step five of all of these filtering and aggregations it's just there and then they have the ability to monitor uh those students who are enrolled in the eoc so they have their weighted average they can scroll through here and figure out okay they have their i-ready data they can make sure that students who are enrolled in that algebra course or geometry are actually on pace to to perform and then our next one is a bottom quartile dashboard dr moore hinted at this before that that sometimes um when we are uh looking at our

054data it's not about our instruction or curriculum it's just simply are the kids actually there to receive the instruction and curriculum and so this dashboard is specifically designed for our bottom quartile students so there is no need for principals to restrict uh okay just want to look at ela bottom quarter is done for them and what we've done here is provided them with a broad uh spectrum of data to help problem solve where their one of their most vulnerable populations is performing so across here this is from that goal tracker i showed you in the powerpoint this is just letting them know by grade level and again this is district view if a principal logged in they would only see their 345 for their students if it was middle school six seven eight so it

055shows where on that gold tracker their bottom quartile is performing it shows the i ready both fall and winter so they can see if there's some growth that's occurring shows their i-ready usage so students are they actually using the i-ready platform and where are they in terms of passing their lessons it has their unit assessment scores and whether they're falling below expectations right around where we expect or above expectations and then down at the bottom you get a little bit of that kind of engagement data your discipline as well as the suspension days for context this suspension days includes aspire altos out of school suspension it's basically anything that's removing them from that tier one core instruction and then we have the attendance and this has been eye-opening as we have shared this you can

056see district wide just simply by colors monday fridays worse than tuesday wednesday thursday so schools have started to intervene in that maybe do a dress down day on a monday rather than a tuesday or wednesday it could be something something as simple as identifying that bottom quartile child and on a thursday saying hey come see me at lunch tomorrow that alone encourages them to come to that school on that friday and then obviously the the categorical data with attendance and then where those kids are these are teacher names the course period and how many of the bottom quartile students are in there i'm not going to show you here just to not to believe it but you have the student list so they can actually see who those students are actually i did i'm sorry

057i did hide it i was afraid i didn't but this is a student level view so instead of the name i just added this index it'll show each individual student all of that same data how they were in usage how they were in attendance and discipline we then mimic that same data in math and then we also provide them with all course schedules so that's principals can actually with one click of a button look to see where their bottom quartiles are across all courses so maybe they're doing some interventions they're pushing out through a science or a social studies course they have the ability to actually identify where those students are scheduled for that and then finally our public facing this is on our district website so i haven't logged in that we're not on

058a secure site we're just at the accountability and research page and then we click on reporting you have the ability go to dewy's edge stats our school profiles are here and then we have power bi dashboards and so these are the ones that are currently available student attendance to discipline graduation iready the the student and staff racial ethnic distribution this is um going towards uh making sure that each of our schools have adequate representation of african-american instructors student enrollment you're going to find a wealth of information esc numbers um primary exceptionalities data lre is going to be on a separate page but there's a lot of information within that student enrollment and then finally unit assessment performance so i'm just going to click on i ready since that data was presented earlier each of these

059dashboards are the same format you're going to start off on this first page that gives information it talks through our strategic plan what what specific targets this dashboard will address it also brings in our joint plan and african-american achievement plan it identifies which targets this dashboard is actually meant to address it gives you a little bit further information it talks about what the data is any other kind of commonly questions we try to address here we actually go through all of the headers and explain those a little bit more detail and then this one just has a one school type to cross school crosswalk so if they want to look at elementary and identifies which schools are elementary and then you go to the next page they're not all going to be this format some

060of them actually have visuals but the general formats we present the data and then you have a variety of filters so if we just wanted to look at 2122's iready data if we wanted to look at just the winter data we can come in here and select that if i just want to look at ela or math if i just wanted to look at individual school if i wanted to look at multiple schools i can i don't have my control key on my keyboard but you can hit control and actually select multiple so they can drill down individual grade levels will look good eighth grade you know it actually gives them all of that data right there they can filter it at need and they can come in here and actually export this to excel

061if they so desire so with that um go back to the powerpoint i just have one quick little slide and i can open up the questions i probably clicked on the wrong one there we go um just where are we going next there are a few other public-facing dashboards we're currently creating lre advanced coursework um extracurricular activities there's about five more i think five to seven more that we're going to create machine learning power bi does have some powerful machine learning abilities so that multiple variable regression i use in goal tracker they actually have a built-in ability to kind of learn what is contributing to scores we're also going to start creating some dashboards designed for the teacher view so the teachers can have access to this of course what goes along with that is

062a bunch of training professional development making sure that they have the ability to access and so forth and then obviously miscellaneous enhancements as time goes on and over the course of seven years we created a number of powerful dashboards what dr mcmahon has been able to do in just two years uh supersedes what that entire team has been able to do and it is absolutely amazing and i know we're in the pandemic and you're not supposed to go in schools but i you know board members call dr mcmahon call mr bass mr meyer myself uh go into a school and talk to the principals about where their kids are and their say the time that dr mcmahon and team has saved is amazing because they can drill down to the teacher to the student and

063ultimately to the impact of instruction so when you talk about an organization's intelligence what dr mcmahon has done is really accelerate our level of understanding on the impact that we're having on kids in classrooms and how do we learn from that how do we really disaggregate not just the data but our behaviors our organizational behaviors that are focused in on kids so when you look from a superintendent's perspective of indicators that you know are going to bring success we don't necessarily have a data point but when i sit and listen to principals talk at such a deep level of where their students are and the problems that they're having i feel encouraged when i know principals aren't sitting in their offices for time hours after hours and the principals who are on the board you

064remember as did i when scores came out you'd have your high lighters and you're trying to like your grade and you had four different color markers on your hand by the end of the day and you made a prediction and it never aligned to what the state was saying i i think doctor what was your your regression study on your your predicted grade like .00213 or it was really good it was really good as i see constant reminds us so i you know i i came in interviewing for the position talking about using uh data as a as a super power so this is a a super power on top of a superpower as to where we are at uh one of the things that he he pushed out uh or mentioned vaguely is how

065public we are uh with this data and that has also been a a foundation of my superintendency we will be transparent and we're going to be very very public with our practice uh the volume of data that is available to everybody in the world that is on our web page is probably more than anybody else and our willingness to say you know here we are with all of our warts and all of our our our beautiful spots um it this is who we are it is something we as a district could be proud of and as you mentioned we're going to continue to grow on that um so in a very very short amount of time uh we've done a tremendous amount of work which is going to pay dividends for the years to come

066and with that dr mcmahon we'll answer any questions let's start with mr barefoot this time i think it's impressive great great job thank you miss rosario it's fantastic now that uh members of the com today my question though is i think you're frozen hello okay am i good okay thank you so um i think it's wonderful it's a great start it's fantastic that now members of the public can have access to the data but when they go on to the website do members of the public need a password or a username is it limited to only parents pers the school in which their child goes to how does that work and how are we getting this information out to the public sure thank you for that question it's a great question no there is no

067password there is no restriction i didn't for sake of time i went ahead and directed the website directly there but you could go to indianriverschools.org click on departments accountability and research and it's right there there is no restriction so what i showed is is what everyone is available so just like in the past we had the spreadsheets also uh we've always been very transparent with the data it just might not have been as user friendly so we have been hundreds of of spreadsheets every throughout the the school year um still available on the site but instead of forcing them to go there it's just click on the particular subject and there's a dashboard um a follow-up question i noticed that there was a section on one of the screens that said um i believe it

068said non-charter school are we able to see charter school data on there on power bi with the data that we have yes so for example i ready not every charter school does i ready the one school that does do i really pays for it individually so we do not have access to iready data for charters unit assessment data they do not use our unit assessment so we don't have data on that however the student enrollment dashboard where we do have access to who is enrolled at charter schools what are their subgroup information you can get charter schools uh data for that so where we have the data we do display okay and then we know that there are a plethora of areas that really show student engagement and student achievement their learning gains etc what

069i've noticed on many of these screens are uh it's focused on ela and math i didn't see much in terms of i did hear you say that they can disaggregate the science and the social studies but i just didn't see it i don't know if it was that there was a limited screen you shared with us but is there you know science civics social studies data that is on here as well for the community to you take a look at yes there is ireti only addresses ela and math so the particular one that i had just clicked on was i ready if i had clicked on the unit assessment dashboard you would see unit assessments in civics u.s history biology science and then of course ela and math so where the data is available we

070are providing it just for sake of time and and to show you a snapshot um i just hand selected a few and with that said if you ever do want to get a deeper dive i have no problem sitting down with you at your convenience and showing you what we have yes i would love that thank you very much you're welcome okay thank you um dr jones thank you very much for this presentation i became involved when i was mentoring some students at crossover and had permission from the parents to go into the staff portal and focus and so forth and you know those screens especially for students with graduation requirements and so forth are just so essential i would have loved to have this as a principal instead of all those green sheets and

071so forth but one thing that keeps popping up everywhere i go and dr morey you mentioned this earlier and that's attendance and if the students aren't there and there's not the engagement and it's instructional delivery and i think that's where we really have to work with our parents because you know if a parent calls a child in sick they're market as excused but the missing instruction is absolutely crucial so i know we've said 90 attendance but even with that you know you're missing 18 days a year minimum okay 10 180 days 18 days so that's four days a nine weeks every other you know week it's just somehow we have to push that as far as our students and that just is the foundation for everything to me as far as if you're in school

072and you have any questions you can ask the teacher and so forth you know differentiated instruction we've talked about a lot you know our math teachers in high school may have 25 students you know and we have the layering and we have the scaffolding and we have the tears and so forth and that's crucial but the students need to be in class and that's tough right now because there's a lot of illness out there so let's continue to push that as a district because i i think that's important so dr mcmahon thank you very much for doing what you've done thank you appreciate it and thank you dr shiv yeah thank you thank you for being uh the guy in the district who understands how to do data because every time i look at data

073i i wonder if and when your hands got on it um this is complex and i've just gotten on and started messing around with it a bit since you started talking about it i didn't realize it was there so thanks um a couple of things on it i know that i'm gonna have to mess around with this a little bit to understand it there are a few things um that if it's not a second language to you or a little hard to follow so my question with that is have we done or will we be doing more public-facing trainings for anybody who wants them yeah i think we have several ideas uh for principals whenever we have a new dashboard comes out i actually do a voice over video demonstrating it so there is the

074possibility of doing some of those just as a general how-to we're going to start creating some written documentation that will go along with the website so all of those will be again public facing will be right there one spot we do have some documentation right now it's geared towards users so it talks about log in to classlink first we'll clean that up so that it it makes more sense to a public viewer but it also helps them if you want to download this data set to excel this is how you do it and it's step by step with screenshots yeah because one of the things that happens is for those of us who like looking at data or are used to or trained in looking at data we kind of know how to navigate some

075of it or we know the questions to ask and one of the challenges that is that if data is not a comfortable language for you you don't always know the right questions to ask and then it just gets frustrating sure um so i assume all the principals and the teachers and anybody who would use this has been or is about to be trained in it in the public-facing world oh yes yeah we um we have a dashboard that's actually um it's the account it's our department's dashboard and on it we track how many uh times they've accessed reports i think we're over 24 000. oh wow just this year we also track how many trainings we've done how many uh school visits um we've it's extensive yes how many we track who logs on and

076how many times and so forth every two weeks we send that out so that they have data um supporting you know how often they're on it so because i'm sure as i dig into it more i'm going to have additional questions of course that i don't have yet because you know you can expect that um in this we only have it right now for this year is it possible and are we going to do any historical data in order to see trends so with that he said that i missed it no it's fine and i i did not and it's a great question um the public facing typically has three to five years of data on it um some of them we're starting we're building it we're pushing it out um so like the enrollment

077student enrollment that has five years worth of data that they can cycle through um the i ready we just have the two years although we can add to it and we are we've got a workflow and all of our tasks that we're doing so oh because i of course the ones i went into were discipline and attendance and i only saw it for this year so and that might have been the one dashboard that that didn't have the five year that you clicked on but the design and the desire is to provide that multiple year data for it what we're finding is that it does it's a it's a lot of work to create them but to maintain them they're not you'll find that with the disciplines automatically broken up by month uh the student

078enrollment dashboard you actually have a filter so that they can actually select where we were in september versus where we were in december each month we're saving those so it's a lot of once we've created it it's hands off and allows us to create more it allows us to build those enhancements yeah i'm sure as i dig in a little more more one of the challenges i sometimes have when we do data is that we present either straight numbers or sometimes percentages with often without a corresponding analysis so for people who don't read data sometimes the information um is isolated or doesn't tell the story that data can tell when we do the full analysis will there be any pieces any parts of that yes dr moore is tasked it's the coordinator of accountability and

079research and probably it's that last word that i have not attended to as much because of the first word accountability um and so the desire is yeah we actually have a place on our website for research where we're going to start putting out one to two pagers of of information that that kind of share some of that analyses that we find so yes there is that desire and unfortunately i don't have anything to share with you right now no no that's fine i just i'm i'm happy to know that it's coming thank you right he keeps talking about my team a team member for that reason and there's your team team of one okay yeah because often in that sometimes when we present data the difference between the number the percentage the proportion the comparison

080tells a different story than when we only see a straight number or a straight percent so i'm hoping that we'll be able to make some of that more available because this on first glance is hard to read until you become familiar with it so i look forward to to those pieces of it um and i think you already answered my other questions thank you okay thank you i i have a couple um first of all where was this when i was a principal um i'm so old that i remember before we had electronic data so you know that we've come a long way however sometimes it can be very overwhelming and i think that pd part not only is important but also you know think about it when you have something in your house and

081you're trying to figure out how to fix something where do you go nowadays everybody goes to youtube so having short little videos is what i like and how i learn to be able to fix things and so you're shaking your head yes you plan on doing that the little videos i have about a dozen of them okay accountability research dashboard um they've also been emailed out every time a new dashboard is put out we give we provide a video okay so you're going to do that for the um public-facing one okay awesome um scissor data so i just looked at the safety what's the e stand for again environmental um yeah student information report and that came down from the doe this past week when it came down with the graduation report and it's interesting

082because that data doesn't really correlate with what i just saw here so i'm curious how those two correlate but also that data was very telling to me and i think would be very powerful to include in the power bi for parents because number one problem was vaping and i didn't see that on here so the other thing with the state level is number one problem is vaping and then drugs and marijuana and then you get down to bullying a huge difference between vaping and down to bullying but yet we hear about bullying all the time not so much vaping hopefully i see we got it back on the front of the website so thank you it's that's an issue that i just think is unbelievable when i saw the assessor data that just came down

083so i'm wondering how cecil dater is going to be embedded in this for a public view and um the attendance data i think is important to include in that too because when you look at attendance reports and compare it directly from the student that's been missing notice that we we shined in a lot of areas when that graduation report came out but if you notice we didn't really talk about attendance data because you know there was an area that we didn't shine so much on that and that's something that we need to look at is how we're going to get the kids back in school all the time so that we can make sure that we're addressing their needs so those are two things i think are very important to put in the public facing

084dashboard and when you do uh right now teachers who've got a lot on their plate and we always say that you know they do it's tough to be a teacher right now so how do coaches use power bi to really help drive instruction and differentiate because mrs rosario had a good point about we're not hearing much about differentiate we know it's happening because of this um but i know that teachers sometimes don't have time to get on here and do all this they got lesson plans to write and they've got things to but they want to make sure their lesson plans are directly going to hit what the kids need and differentiate for kids so how are our coaches helping our teachers with this with power bi so first just in regard to the assessor

085assessor is a very very small subset of our discipline all of our discipline data is on our discipline dashboard we can take a look at how to include maybe sester as a filter but for example fighting not every fight is a sessor right people don't understand that it has to be to a certain level yes exactly so with our discipline the both public facing as well as our internal one it's all discipline regardless of whether it was sent the assessor or not so just want to clarify that but i can definitely look at how do we you know can we disaggregate that unfortunately and give me a chance to look at the data to find out but a lot of times those things are so small that it's going to be asterisked right i saw

086a lot of asterisks i also saw that one high school didn't report anything and i thought that was interesting um do charter schools have to report um everyone is by law you know required but maybe they don't have enough of this uh a subsection yeah it would be asked if it's less than 10 if they don't have data it would be empty so it's less than 10 in every single spot then if it's an asterisk yes i thought that was interesting and just and it wasn't just a high school there were other schools too um okay and then in sorry the second question was it was about um coaches helping oh i'm sorry teachers so one of the the dashboards i did not show is our grade level app it has course grades um on

087it has a variety of other there's one particular dashboard we have a k2 and a three to eight what it allows the users to do at the very top is to select a general outcome measure like they're fall i ready or they're winter i ready so we can select kids who are below grade level and then below it the data is broken up into scarborough's rope for literacy where it talks about the print concerns versus the comprehension concerns so you can select say fourth grade all the kids below grade level and all of a sudden you start to see the percentage of students who are struggling with print knowledge concerns phonics phonological words it allows you to do a small group for them exactly okay yes they can do it by teacher they can math

088we have it broken up into that algebraic algorithmic versus the spatial visual geometry skills are we doing the same thing with our early learners with phonemes phono data as well which has a lot of measures in that regard as well um right now the uh miss flood um in our department is working at creating a pre-k dashboard that utilizes their pre-k assessment that has a lot of that information as well so i mean teachers know their kids but sometimes they don't think they know everything about them correct and i think the biggest thing that this has done is saved work so every coach to your point i still remember to this day i got it was maybe year four or five you were principal doc jones um got a binder of data and literally five

089days later like with all the schedule changes and what can i do so while we don't use binders we have that you know might be spreadsheets with these dashboards it's all tied daily to enrollment so every morning five o'clock they all update so every day you can bookmark certain reports and you see a fresh look of who your students are and where they are with all of that data loaded into it so every each of the monthly coaches meetings we're a part of helping them problem solve our team now includes a data coach um miss jody houston she goes out and visits school leadership teams with me as well and and we actually help train them on how to use it but the time saving that this has done the ability just to click a

090button you now have an excel spreadsheet of your students with all of that data there that they don't have to maintain has been enormous right it helps them to focus on the actual coaching and people might have weekends back people might have weekends back thank you the public-facing dashboard i'm going to say that you know sometimes our website's great because it has a lot of stuff on it but sometimes it's frustrating for the public because if you go to the search bar and you type in something you're interested in like power bi i did it it comes up to you denied access to that so i think we need to look at how our website is keeping up with all of our other technology because i think sometimes that is frustrating for you know we're

091saying we're being transparent we are trying to be transparent but i think it's sometimes it's hard for the public to know where to find stuff and it is located there but how would i know unless i watch this to go to departments accountability power bi i don't so my question then is could we on the front page of the website and fix the search button by the way for lots of things not just for power bi um but i want to that section is one that i noticed that when people tell me hey i can't find something i'll get on the phone with me i'll go and i'll find it for them and say okay go here go here go here what if i know i want to we had a button right there about

092just a plain thing not a whole thing but just access data and then from there it takes them to what they need to do i i would like to see that a little cleaner for our public because i think sometimes like transparency oh what is that you know and project re-envision what is that i've got to go to all these things which it would be easier for the public to say you know what is that attendance you know i think we need to be a little easier with that stuff but i'd like to see a button right on the front page to power bi because i think it is powerful to have this it's important that lots of groups have it because they need it for grants they need it for working with the district

093they need it for naacp information people want it when they're running for elections you know things like that so i think it's important that the transparency is great but we need to be friendlier with how to get to the transparency so can i address that real quick we will do that um literally these have just been put live sure within the last week or two so i know some of those other things we just hadn't gotten to yet okay it's just a great point for in the future thank you uh dr schiff follow up question on the graduation rate one where i do see there's different years it says graduates then it says grad den can you tell me what that is yeah and that that is actually defined on the first page but that's

094just the denominator that helps you know how many are actually in that particular cohort and then the new num would be the numerator in the cohort so i'm just going to pull one randomly because i'm looking at it just so i understand how to read this 2018-19 graduates um i'll just okay white graduate 698 grad den 761 okay total number eligible does that that so that would include anybody who started that year as a senior or no certain see certain categories are out of that that's what i want to get at so the state of florida in 2012 switched to the federal adjusted cohort graduate rate calculation methodology sorry i had to sit there and think through that um and the idea is that now if everyone is subscribing to the federal methodology then no

095matter where you are alabama arkansas florida it's the same percentage and it what it does it looks at first time ninth grade enrollment and it tracks over the four years anyone who came into your school and it removes anyone who transferred to another school that way by the end of that fourth year all the students theoretically are accounted for and so we then get the percentage of that adjusted cohort how many of those obtain a standard diploma or what percent let me repeat this back and see if i understand of the cohort who came in in ninth grade tracking them through to 12th grade anybody who remains who did not transfer out for any particular reason any of those who remains is considered then the full cohort yes and no i mean in a very

096high level yes but there are also other things that go into that for example if they transfer to an adult ed that actually counts as a non-graduate for us if they transfer to a private school or home education or to another public school in or out of state that does not get factored into our graduation rate what if uh what if they voluntarily leave school to go get a ged that counts as a non-graduate as a so that's counted in our data as somebody who could have graduated but didn't correct and the idea is that when they switch to the federal that one of the um that's not me defending it this is just how it's done is that it is standard high school diplomas um so it used to be where special diplomas and

097some of these certificates that we would have given in the past would count this is a standard high school diploma so ged in this regard does not count as a graduate actually counts as a non-graduate as a non-graduate okay so anybody who leaves depending on the category may or may not be counted but if somebody leaves to go get a ged or complete in some other way they are counted as a non-graduate okay thank you dr jones my last question um how do you guide principals to look at this and on because they can pick it up at 5 00 a.m you know new data and dr moore dr mcmahon how do you guide principles on what to do when they take a look at the state at the beginning of the school day what's

098their focus it's a multi-layered answer a the the power is in terms of its its use so understanding the application and their ability to really to improve the quality of support that they're providing teachers um on the flip side is accountability so as we go through the data com process or i visit schools i need to give every level of assurance to the board in the community that our principals have a deep understanding as to what's taking place in classrooms um so i can speak explicitly about what's going on in schools because we sit as a team every other week and we'll go through attendance we'll go through academic outcomes and then i use that uh to visit schools and ask questions and if if i know for the entire district and the principal doesn't

099know i'm gonna have a problem yeah exactly but you know that that's not something that we see so we sit in problem solve literally every friday regarding what we're seeing in schools and what the data is saying in the practical application so what we've done is streamline the support so the support coaches is getting is also aligned to the support that assistant principals and principals are getting so we're all dependent upon the same process we're not doing this 22 different ways we're all speaking one language and and the growth of principals and teachers and administrators is absolutely uh something we all should be proud of and the streamline is a key word there because sometimes there's so much it just helps when you have the streamline to support the coaches in the district thanks there's

100a follow-up we've visited 53 school sites this year so far and we've done 58 trainings above and beyond the school visit so when we do go to the school it is very much a coaching model where we walk them through what are you working with okay let's show those dashboards and i will say for you guys to see this first it's overwhelming 160 reports like that's a lot of data we didn't release them all at once we've built each month added so to a principal a lot of them are just second nature it's that new one that comes out okay let me dive into that and to dr moore's credit the accountability is every layer of our district office is using them so you can't not use power bi you'll be thank you all right

101thank you so much this year i'm going to shift over to mr meyer we're going to flip back to the beginning of the agenda i have a question i have a follow-up oh i'm sorry i'm sorry i had my my pen up sorry i'm sorry i'm looking for emoji hands sorry about that yeah that's okay when my hand is raised it's it's not i don't think you guys can see it um um two things that i that came to my attention i'm on the power bi website um one thing that i noticed with regard to the student discipline referrals is that these are just identifying the discipline referrals that have been submitted what we don't see is a differentiation between those that are in school and those that are out of school makes a big

102difference can that be changed so the referrals an odr is an office discipline referral that is when a member of the school has observed a behavior they would like administration to observe um as far okay so as far as suspensions go is that what you're referring to in and out of school yes okay so those are all there we do not all suspension and out-of-school suspension okay so our in-school suspension this year is called aspire we don't have the traditional in-school suspension um so when you look on it you'll see a spire that would be your in-school suspension and then the oss is the out-of-school suspension and then our alternatives to out-of-school suspension the altos is also there all three of those should be on the public-facing discipline dashboard now i'm i'm looking at a

103school right now and i don't see any of that okay so keep in mind it's filterable so if you filter for a school and you don't see that data that means they have not administered that particular um whatever it is that you're looking at you're not seeing well i i i guess i would imagine that even if there is no data there you'd still have a column that would show altos or out of school suspension or aspire and it would be blank or it would have those two asterisks to show that there's no data but there's nothing here that shows any of that i'm in vero beach high school right now so i think uh if you could take a look at that um maybe it's i i don't know i don't know how maybe

104it's just not disaggregated not included i'm not sure i i can definitely take a look it it's what we find with with this general thing is that it might be a filter that you selected and and as you dive deeper deeper deeper into it the particular students that you're looking at do not have it i don't know because i can't see where you're at but certainly i'll take a look at it this morning when i was looking through them vero beach definitely does have aspire they have altos they have out-of-school suspension it was on there um this morning but i'll take a look at it may i it's on page three three of four i see at the bottom where there's an arrow you can go to the right she's live oh there it is

105she is correct very good mrs behrenborg i love data god [Laughter] see that right there makes such a big difference um okay and then my last question is is it possible to separate or to add another toggle down or something for just the freshman learning center that came up uh in another conversation um not related to this but it did open up um the desire the need for that um because as you probably are hinting at just because you're in grade nine does not mean that you're at the freshman learning center because if you are a retained ninth grader that you are at the main campus um until you earn those credits for uh to be considered a tenth grader so um certainly that is something we're looking at while it's not wholly accurate if

106you did filter for vero beach high school and then grade nine the bulk of that data will be the freshman learning center however it's not a as clean as what you're hinting at and it is something that we are looking at adding i think it would be i mean if we can do that i think at least having that option they function as its own school you know their their discipline and how they handle the discipline at the freshman learning center is very um uh unique to to to itself i suppose and oftentimes very separate from the main campus so that would be interesting to um take a look at if we could do that that would be great thank you all right thank you board members and now we're going to go back to

107the top of the agenda which is the math instruction materials uh presentation conducted by mr meyer as we turn it over to him he will give a presentation but this is an opportunity for us to look at the resources that will be used in our classrooms and we are probably not probably the first district really to have this conversation so although these materials have not been selected or identified from the state our desire is to ensure on day one we have materials in place and are we're abil we have the opportunity to begin instruction immediately uh given the fact that april 1st is the deadline for the state to provide that list we're being very very proactive and this affords us the opportunity really to have conversations on the right end of decisions so with

108that i'll give it over to mr meyer for his presentation and follow up as he concludes thank you dr moore uh and you set that up very nicely uh as we went through last spring with the ela adoption we learned a lot about florida statutes and a lot about how we can be innovative here in the school district to be best by our students so what we did if you recall back in august was we brought for the first time the instructional materials plan to the board and within that plan it outlined a timeline of which we would go through it also brought the rubric that we would use to evaluate the book so this presentation will serve as an update to that timeline so one of the first things that we'd like to do

109is just review that timeline process we do have uh a an update on the products that are bidding for consideration by the state and for districts i'll provide an update on those and then brief the board on what our next steps will be so this particular uh committee and structural materials committee for math was formed in early september we held three uh committee meeting proper dates there september october and december there was also the textbook extravaganza and display in this very room where all the materials were available with the vendors to answer any questions that the public may have and on december 3 that december 13th meeting the rubrics were counted tallied up from staff and this rank ordered list which i'll describe here in a minute was determined and the products that will be

110put forward for consideration were then placed into the lobby and online for view by the public so here today is our presentation to the school board this is the continuation the process of what's coming uh on january 17th there will be the notice of public hearing there will be a public hearing on january 24th here at the regular scheduled school board meeting and then i will bring to the board uh the presentation or another presentation but the adoption of this math instructional materials order which begins that 30 day calendar contest period window this is what dr moore is referring to and that we want to be in front of things we would like to have all of these steps conducted completed prior to that april 1st which is the deadline for statute for the department

111of education to release their adoption list if you recall last year we were sort of sitting and waiting in that with only one product brought to the board and unfortunately our elementary ela product was not on the list we then pivoted to our alternate product and began that 30-day contest window with our alternate product which was that hmh into reading of which there were uh concerns from the public and we were then in june uh before we could really do anything so this process that we brought before the board back in august allows us to conduct all parts of the review cycle required by law you have the there like i said the public hearing on the 24th statute requires us to have the public hearing and the vote for adoption at two separate meeting

112dates and moving to only one official meeting a month we've had to amend the timeline briefly and that's attached to this documentation as well but it still puts us well within the range to allow any potential petitioners to have their 30-day contest window there in march and then you know of course then we would know whether or not any materials that someone may or may not petition would make the state's list right about the same time so that's going to be really advantageous to the district so you may be curious about the products themselves and here is that rank order list and it should be said uh and reset and restated that this in no way shape or form means that the office of cni or through dr moore were recommending to buy any of

113the the products at the top right now what this means is the content experts have met they've reviewed these materials and this is the rank order list based off of a content review and a content review only the reason we've done this as aforementioned would be to allow the public to petition any of these from that march time frame and to see what the state of florida will do we still need to get bids the specific bids for the size of our district from these companies we would take the financial considerations in consideration with this content evaluation and then of course the ultimate is the state's approval to bring to the board in april a final recommendation so just because you may see something at the top now does not mean that that is going

114to be where it lands in april but it is intriguing uh looking at the some of the specificity uh of the culmination of the scores in each level in that you will see in most of these there's at least two products sometimes three the content experts felt were comparable and their quality for students so here in elementary you see a close running between savas and big ideas you see a close running uh a tide actually here in middle school between mcgraw hill and savas with a pretty close second i would say there with big ideas and then algebra nation and then what we consider to be these high school courses algebra 1 algebra 2 geometry those are very close from the top 3 with 76 74 72 between mcgraw-hill savas and algebra nation and then

115with our advanced this would be your calculus precalculus statistics things of that nature many times some of these courses may only have one or two sections in them at the school so we wouldn't be buying uh very many of these books but that that's right now uh tied as far as the the content consideration there so you may be thinking to yourself you know these last two why did we divide those into those groups uh and that's for continuity purposes so in discussions with the committee you think about elementary school grades that's k through five that's six grade levels all right you wouldn't want to force the parents to learn different materials teachers coaches it becomes difficult for principals everybody to have to deal with multiple publishers during that time frame middle school the same

116and then the consistency once you get into your eoc courses between algebra 1 out of 2 and geometry and then same thing with the advanced electives for for those math departments that are attempting to bring that continuity between our highest learners we feel that there may be some advantage in breaking that into those groups so that we would consider a vendor as a whole across the board for those ranges it doesn't obligate we're not obligated to do that there's no board policy or statute that would require us to do that so once again as the rest of the chips sort of fall with the evaluation from the state and the cost we'll bring a proposal to dr moore in april that would finalize what the exact book would be for the exact course of study

117so like i said moving forward with the process i would just say i appreciate the commitment from our staff i think miss pasura ms perez and all the math content experts within the district did a phenomenal job of giving their time past normal hours to read review math instructional materials and this time around we really did have a lot more involvement from the community which i'm certainly appreciative of there are community members that met with us prior to uh the development of the rubric their committee members that have been with us uh every step of the way which have uh helped us in selecting the materials and i'm very appreciative that we had their input along the entire process we are aware just being completely transparent that there are some concerns from some of our

118community members about some of the products and i think that's outstanding i mean we wanted them to be involved in the process from the beginning but i would just remind everybody that the appropriate time for the petitions uh moving forward would be in that march time frame um and and once again you know some of the concerns are things such as you know the critical race theory i don't think it's an appropriate time for me to debate the merits of that at this juncture because the state of florida uh will also consider that and if the commissioner of education and his experts were to bless off on these books and i would certainly feel like the complaints that we're hearing would not rise to that level that we would be concerned with that's certainly i

119think a big reason of why when the hmh into reading last year we heard some of those complaints the district was able to defend those uh and one of the chief defenses that was you're complaining and you're saying the same things making allegations against the same statutes that the commissioner has already signed off that these books do not violate so you certainly want to leave all the doors open for the district i would not recommend removing any of these from the district's opportunity to select them in april because we don't know certainly with the advanced elective with only a couple of options if we were to remove one and the state would be to remove the other we would be left with only one choice so certainly keeping our options open and allowing more information

120to come out about the price and the content i think is the right decision so happy to answer any questions at this time okay thank you i guess we'll start with miss rosario first can we take down the presentation and thank you that way i can see when she has her hand raised all right um i have thank you uh mrs barrenburg i have um many concerns uh in particular with savis um it might be a little too much premature at this point to go through all of my concerns but um i just caution the district that just because an item may be approved at the department of education level doesn't necessarily mean that it's okay it doesn't necessarily mean that they um have uh i dare to say properly vetted or that their committee

121members may have missed certain items that violate law and i just want to be careful that we select items that we don't repeat what happened last time with hmh and that we actually even if there is a tie we select materials that would give everyone the opportunity to learn their math skills without having to worry about all this other stuff in in this world of social justice and social everything um i just think that we need to be cautious about that um i also would like to just remind the public that if there are if there are any parents out there community members who want to review the documents in all of these texts they are on our website um at the i guess in the search bar and mrs berenberg is right i've had

122the same concern with regard to searches when you put in keywords in the search bar but for this one you could put it in under instructional materials adoption information and then you will find all of the publishers and all of the public accesses access links there some have a password username some do not some are just free access so it is important that the community become aware of what are in the books so that when you fill out a um that appendix h form if you have any questions in mind you'll be aware you're not going to just go by what someone tells you or hear say look through the pages yourself there's plenty of time now for everyone to search through these pages give your feedback to the board members to all of us

123because we are the ones who make that decision at the end of the day by voting these materials in or not and we need to hear from our constituents on all levels we don't want us to ignore everything um i also don't want us to miss most important things so um i think at this point i'm gonna leave it right there thank you okay thank you dr jones thank you mr meyer and the committee and miss basura i did the science adoption in 1718 it's a lot of work i appreciate it and i appreciate you pushing up that timeline for us it just is a nice place to be in january and i hope april 1st we will know from the doe what's on the state adoption list if all this goes forward we have

124a lot of work to do in math a lot of work to do and i care very deeply for those teachers who are teaching math on a daily basis they are the ones doing the work so i will be following up with a lot of the math teachers because you know the instructional delivery the student engagement where we are with k23568 even in our algebra eoc a lot a lot of work to do so i will be following up with a lot of math teachers and i will also be following up with a lot of parents um i want you to do the job you are assigned to do you and the committee and we do take input but again we have to look at the day-to-day math instruction in what is the absolute best

125product for our students thank you hey doctorship nothing okay mr barefoot i just say ditto to what dr jones just said okay um the one thing i'm gonna say is um [Music] the public has a right to speak to the doe and the commissioner's office if you have a concern and that's where at this point in this whole process that's the time to do it is now not to wait until march and do petitions to the district level because you know our governor has promised us that our materials that we adopt will not have crt in them and i think we need to hold them accountable for that and the way to hold them accountable is to contact your representatives in tallahassee so i think that if you have a concern now is the time

126to bring your specific concern to the people that are looking at this and the specific concern meaning um when i had a specific concern in the ela adoption i called and asked who's responsible for this adoption who's responsible for coordinating this and i got that person i was able to speak to that person and i think anyone in the community has the right to do that and i would urge you that if you have a concern that's where you bring it up is to the doe take care of it now bring your specific concern as to what your concern is because this is when the textbook um publishers can remove things and change things they can't later they can do it now though they can make those adjustments for different books because if a book

127is 99 wonderful and there's that one percent that may be a concern you know i have a concern about why are we throwing out a good book that has 99 because i think we could find something in every book that we have a concern about if if it's a personal concern so i think that now is the time that people are concerned they need to to get on the phone with tallahassee with the doe with making those objections known and be very specific in your concerns so that's all i have to say thank you mrs barrymore i couldn't say that any better and now the next item on the agenda is miss dampier who's going to review entitlement grants that will be coming to the board on january 24th good afternoon through the chair we're

128very pleased to bring forward four grants that we have as you may recall back in july we brought forward about 10 grants that we normally bring forward that are added to the budget book and these are the grants that have come in between the first semester so we wanted to make sure we brought these grants forward so if you have any questions please let me know most of the majority of these grants come from treasure coast are for our cte uh courses so this is going to support the work that we do with that hearing none um oh sorry dr jones sorry who's writing all these grants do we have a really good grant writer or what you know usually it doesn't come on to people because especially staff um as i thought through the

129chair we have added the responsibility ms emerson in terms of innovation looks to identify opportunities and as you all know um she's worth her weight in gold in terms of the innovation and creativity that she has brought and opportunities i do think as we begin the process for next year's budget um there are opportunities to enhance that work through a line item or a single position which is a grant writer so we've met our strategic plans of it was 2 million and 2.5 for this in terms of increasing grant opportunities but we need to be more intentional doing that so that's that is a great comment thank you so can i make a comment about the weight and gold comment for a woman that's not much cold but i think her weight plus yours dr

130moore well then we're fine we're really doing good for knoxville okay i've got new years that's another new year's resolution thank you very much for noticing my weight gain um our next item is and also at the request uh a update on esser uh all essers and i'll turn it over to mr fake and chief financial officer thank you dr moore through the chair to the board uh dr jones to answer your question s or three could not have been completed without the help of a of a young lady who works for for richard and that's karen malice she was instrumental in all three essers also coordinating with the charter schools helping me keep those folks in line in getting their documentation in time for the timeline for all three essers so it's just a

131quick overview of where we are on the esser as you know there was three major portions one two and three our share was three million thirteen million and 30 million no changes there in the allocations for the district quick review there are three based on three separate federal acts enacted in march of 20 december of 20 and then march of 21 for the last one which is called the american rescue plan act which is where we are today forester one we have uh completed all the applications and expended all those funds esther two we're right in the middle of it we hope to expend all those funds by the end of this year so we'll be a year ahead and for s43 it ends september 24 but we plan to be done by september 20

1323. that's just a quick little snippet of exactly what each of the esters are for they're basically all the same is to address any and all issues relating to the covid hat on and continues to have on elementary and secondary schools in florida in order to in order in order to improve their education esther two basically the same thing except they took this grant and broke it up into five parts five separate applications again where where karen's help came in extensively lump sum advance a balance a piece for academic acceleration non-enrollment and of course technology the non-enrollment section was about half a million dollars and was stressed that if students could not be found who were in the prior year you had to spend a significant amount of money to locate those children and get

133them back enrolled we had approximately six that could not be located this is the last one as for three american rescue plan this is the biggest piece the hinge on this one which is different from esther one and s or two is once all the applications are received and submitted to doe doe has to go before the legislature and get a budget amendment approved uh something they wrote in the general appropriate appropriations act for this funds and then we will approximately get two-thirds of the allocation after that then they have to go to the u.s department of education to get the balance one-third the exact timing of that allocation and release of funds is currently unknown we anticipate the two-thirds to be released prior to actually they're getting in heavy duty into the session we

134hope to have it maybe by march the one-third we don't expect until the end of next year as we discussed esther 1 was approximately 3.4 million we've already expended and collected all those funds it was used for counselors success coaches technology applications half a million dollars of charter schools custodial supplies and of course indirect all those funds were expended in a prior year after two that's pretty much what we're using every bit of this year 13 million 11 million for us almost 2 million for charters we either got committed or expended approximately 95 or 12 12.7 million we hope to have all these funds expended by the end of this year last piece unexcused best esther 2 13 million those are the five components advanced lump sum you see the pieces it was broken out

135between transactional teachers and indirect costs remedial learning we use extensively for textbooks technology assistance was also for technology applications and software purchases lump sum it's where we put in the counselors more technology additional textbooks and of course non-enrollment we also were able to use the textbooks and you say well ron how were we able to use textbooks for the non-enrollment well since we only had six kids we couldn't find states said if you've located all your children you can use the funds however you see fit so we put in for the textbooks the key items here with the textbooks was the textbooks cost you over three million dollars but your allocation was approximately 1.3 million so you didn't have enough current funding to fund it you also we did not have enough money what we

136would call in reserve other than tapping in the fund balance to cover that so we use s refunds to bankroll that that initiative this will also allow us to put some money aside for future requirements for the textbooks so we won't be having to tap into general fund for math and social studies in the next two years s for three 30 million dollars 26 billion for us 4 million the charters very similar to the other three other two essers not a whole lot of differences other than they did put in if you want to do any indoor air quality work that would be allowed this time so3 is a period of 21 to 22 through 2324 technically it ends in september of 24 we hope to have all funds expended by june of 24. as

137we already mentioned two-thirds will be released whenever the legislators meet the balance is once received from u.s department of education no yet no word yet exactly as to when those funds will be released that's why these funds are not critical for ongoing operations we do not need these funds to continue these are for ongoing if we get it approved we'll utilize it if we don't we're okay for this year there's the three four component five components for s for three one of the requirements for the american rescue plan was approximately twenty percent had to be addressed for learning losses that's for us as well as charter schools what met that requirement was reading coaches math coaches success coaches and of course the eight period day instruction balance could be broken up between various parts of

138the application we kind of lumped everything into student support mental health services which we included the counselors graduation coaches and et cetera one unique thing about this one is we had three million dollars for hvac work to allow us to increase the air circulation in schools raising chillers dampers and et cetera we also have approximately 1.6 million for laptops and of course a million dollars for indirect any questions okay dr jones oh one thing i've discussed with mr fagan dr moore is what happens when these esser funds go away and the sustainability of the positions that we had not only for mental health but um you know even with um the hvac or anything that we're doing to the chair for the hvac that'd be a one-time purchase that's capital that would help us put

139some money into the general fund to use for however we may want to see fit so the main thrust of all this is we're using for current expenses in order to build up fund balance right okay you're already getting the reoccurring revenue to cover most of these expenditures so you'll get them again next year this money will go into fund balance and we'll slowly burn that out over the next couple years that's also what we'll be helping use to fud richard when we're buying textbooks for math and social studies we'll bring this money in secure it save it use it in the next couple years can we use some for the laptops this year mister laptops the same scenario we have a box proximate 1.6 million in our for this 23-24 that's the refresh cycle

140for them so there's another example where this money would be the seed money to continue on with that refresh thank you dr chef yeah um mr fagan and i went over a lot of this fairly extensively so i'll repeat a few of those things here uh just for benefit of others uh one of the things was and you alluded to this in your presentation that some of these are required where we have to spend them and some of them are not so in some of them we're spending them because it is one-time cost and we don't want to um we don't want to assume recurring costs on one-time money right so some of this for example like in the mental health we're paying for positions we already have correct that yeah yes ma'am to the

141chair we're paying for positions that we already have that we've already allocated for but through which we can be reimbursed through the esser money though in future years we will be able to sustain those from our regular fefpa budget correct yes ma'am very well making sure i understood right yes ma'am you know i i feel like i'm seeing if i pass the task um the other thing we talked about well you explained the textbook and how that worked which had been one of my questions um the other thing we talked about was indirect costs which appear in a number of different categories at different um different amounts but a fairly consistent rate can you just repeat some of that so that everybody else is perfect to that conversation yes ma'am through the chair your indirect

142rate is based upon the maximum amount allowed based upon our indirect rate that we submit the doe that ranges somewhere between four and five percent it's also based upon your allowable expenditures like you don't you can't collect indirect rate on capital expenditures so the three million dollars for each hvac work you can't collect the indirect on i can't tell you why that's just the rules that you cannot do so the rate varies somewhere between three and four percent so that's why it kind of bounces around between the three uh between about five hundred thousand on s or three and a million dollars on the three million based upon what we could calculate to being allowable expenditures that equate it to approximately 1.1 million dollars so instead of taking that money and just bankrolling it back

143into the district we used it to add additional things to the grant in order to be reimbursed for such as such as we we increased the number of positions we could put in the grant indirect cost is basically to pay all the administrative oversight instead of instead of hiring staff to manage the grant we were able to use current staff to manage the grant so no additional indirect need was necessary well and one of the things that we talked about which will also i think come up in the next presentation is how um some some of this money has been specifically identified for mental health supports for for students which includes learning losses and other areas in which mental health deficiencies may appear because this is one time only money there's a limited amount that

144we can spend on that but my interest is that we use as much as we can to build and support and enhance our mental health supports throughout the district can you say a little bit about how we're going to be able to do that with these funds or we can wait for the next presentation we'll talk more about that the grant was written so that whatever whatever services we are providing currently to students to help with mental health needs counselors psychologists social workers mental health anything that's in the grant that i could put in there is a direct benefit on the student services side of the house those items were in the grant today there were they were in the budget last year in the prior year we added a few things this year we

145added two more counselors we added another social worker this year as for three we're adding another position for homeless in another position for esau though once those funds are utilized the reoccurring revenue from the state will allow us to continue on with those services plus we'll have a little nest egg built into fund balance if we find a couple of other needs we need that since i used extra money instead of the general money will have some in the bank that we can say okay well we need a couple more positions we need a couple more services we'll have those funds that we can implement and push out thank you that was that covers most of the things about which we talked um and if i have other questions we'll come back i can stop

146for now mr barefoot well i think it's like every business has received govern money from the government and if it would had to be as you outlined here specifically allocated a certain area and it's already an ongoing expense of that business which is what we have here than to use the allocated money from the government for that and stick the rest of it away in the general fund or you know for a rainy day fund where you have a lot more flexibility and how that money spent that's the key every businesses i sit on a couple of other boards these kinds of conversations and you're doing what obviously uh makes sense for the medium to longer term should you need funds for related or other related purposes to the extent that you know you can

147move money around so money's functionable in the budget do you want to move it to a large extent so i want to move into the most flexible fund you have exactly thank you sir mrs rosario's turn unless it's something that he just said is it something that mr barefoot just said or can mrs rosario go she can go okay mr rosario um i i have similar concerns as some of the other board members that i have shared multiple times and that is with the same idea that the sustainability over time of these positions that we've added under the or with the esser funds that after all is said and done in the next several years that these positions may sunset or that we wouldn't be able to move forward with these same positions because we

148can't afford them um so that that's a concern of mine um i don't know and and clearly the idea that we're using astro funds to purchase textbooks that we were somehow deficient in is is also very concerning the purpose of the esser funds were intended to help keep schools open during the pandemic help keep schools functioning help keep schools or teachers in schools and then students in schools um at the very beginning it was opening virtual and then making sure that everybody had laptops and wi-fi capability i mean some of those things those were important for the esser funds uh to be used with extra funds because that that's what the purpose was um but some of these other things that have been added um are worrisome i worry about where we are going i'm

149not saying that math coaches or success coaches or reading coaches are not important they are counselors are important graduation coaches drop out prevention those are all important but to be sustained over time with the funding that we would receive outside of the esser funding what would happen then what will happen after 2024 for example um do those positions sunset through the chair no ma'am in order to there will be no there will be none of your concerns there are no substantiability because the funds that we're basically using s or for are for our position let's use an example guidance counselors prior year they were funded by general fund we moved them to esser so i now i move the funds that were used at a general fund to fund the counselors i now basically put

150in a savings account they're sitting in general fund that's why you have a 24 million dollar fund balance at the beginning of this year at the end of this year should have a slight increase in fund balance as again and then going in the next year's budget the revenue from the state and the escrow fund will allow us to continue into 20 22 23 and then we'll have a little bit higher fund balance at the end of that year that will let us allow us to continue that sustainability in the years so there are no positions in which we don't have recurring funds for as mr fagan just said to mr barefoot we're putting it in a flexible account so we can have the maximum level of flexibility to spend based on the needs of

151kids so the the creating a scenario in which we're concerned about funding positions is is not at all accurate we have every position is aligned to recurring funds okay so what happens then in the future if we don't know where the you know worst case scenario there's another shutdown worst case scenario um if these funds are placed in our general fund how are we identifying is there a separate category how um so that we don't touch certain funds in case of this emergency that may come down the pike i mean i i don't understand how that works through the chair if you recall when the pandemic originally hit there was concern regarding the fte that the district was going to report because students just kind of vaporized you had several several districts that lost five

152six seven ten thousand students they were just gone state held is harmless they came in and said okay we budgeted it we they have funds in reserve we're going to hold you harmless on your fte you're not you'll get a gain if you had an increase but if you lost students we're going to keep you whole now i can't predict that's exactly what will happen into the future but i would have to look back to the government back to the federal government that if another incident were to happen there would be some safety nets that they already have because i'm not mistaken they have about a half a billion dollars that was put in reserve for this year in case the same thing kind of sort of happened okay plus our fund balance that we're

153going to be putting away now if you had a major hit to rfte you had a major event that you did have a dip well then yes naturally you may have some budget reductions but building up the fund balance will help soften that blow over the fuel of the future can't predict everything but it's not like you're spending every dollar today to where next year you're dependent 100 on your reoccurring revenue but you had things at sunsetted we're going to have a little bit of a safety net there to guide us through the next couple years and just to add cause i feel like i want to defend mr fagan's leadership we set a budget on an annual basis so as we go into the upcoming year is clearly defined what revenue is covering which

154particular expenses so we don't expend a dollar until we we know that we know that we know where that dollar is coming from it's not funding and hoping it's funding uh with every level of assurance we are in fact in in a good place this is a district under mr fagan's leader leadership that its financial rating has improved that doesn't happen without solid fiscal management so where this district is now because of the pandemic and because of our ability to navigate public dollars with as much flexibility as possible what we have done and i've said this to you know in a number of times we've been able to right-size the the district we've been able to create a financial plan that allows for refresh of technology if you're not refreshing your technology every five years

155uh as the district was not doing you don't have technology if you're you're not securing over the course of time the state does not give you enough money or enough funds for the appropriate resources to teach children textbooks in the in all of the resources that come with them so teachers can make their lives as complex as their lives are as easy as possible with the the absolute best you know curriculum we're now able to do that so we're using this in a way that's really going to ensure over the course of time we're building and sustaining a district with a positive flow of cash versus moving from being reactionary to what is broken or what we don't have funds for so this is an exciting time for us as a school district where we're

156going to have options and decisions and discussions uh in the in the coming you know months and years about what we are securing to innovate instruction for our students thank you my last um statement um is uh one that i've shared with a with uh dr moore and mr fadean hillsborough county has on their website an incredible uh page dedicated to just as their funding uh training i guess videos have been uploaded there along with uh detailed expense reports and how they have engaged their community in using extra funds now i know hillsborough is a much greater district than we are um i i love their they're just a larger district they're not a greater district i'm sorry they're just a larger district they're not a greater district larger larger in number um but i

157um what i what i love about their model is their transparency if you get a chance to go on their website and and check it out please do so um so mr fagan and dr mora after multiple conversations about this what are we at indian river county going to do to ensure greater transparency on our website with regard to the astra funds through the chair um we have two things one we're looking at that website to see if we can mimic some of their items um [Music] a lot more moving parts on theirs versus ours um on our monthly financials we've never missed a beat on every one of our financials there's a page dedicated specifically to all federal grants including all the grants especially all the cares and so right there in black and

158white how much did we get how much have we expended and what is the balance so that's a small piece and a 27-page document so we will bring that more to the light and look we'll get with technology and the webmaster to enhance that on our website great thank you um yes mr barefoot just to reinforce this conversation these are restricted funds coming in for a specific use from the government replacing what previously had been funded out of normal revenue anybody running a business this is a 325 million dollar business anytime you can replace money you have to spend anyways with restricted funds freeing up that money to move elsewhere for another use whether it's a one-time use or to enhance over a period of time that's what you do that's business 101 that's what

159we're talking about here this does not require a whole lot of conversation as far as i'm concerned you're running a business you're doing what you're what you're supposed to do and you're providing flexibility down the road should you need to spend money that otherwise you might not have because you're putting it away it's think of it as restricted funding coming in and you replaces what you would pay for anyway and if you're really good at it you'll you will end up putting away a lot more than you will need to spend down the road so you're constantly going to be able to build on that general fund balance which which you've done a very good job of doing for the last couple of years thank you mr bagan um so i have a couple of

160comments one is i appreciate you very much because i think part of the reason why you're getting this question over and over again and i wrote down the same question because i know i discussed it with you earlier about when you fund positions how do you how do you maintain that over years and i think the reason why three of the board members especially who are concerned about it is because we went through it before when i was first on this board we had a lot of positions that were in the millage uh dr schiff you understand um so we were concerned because at the if we didn't get the millage back under the referendum then we had i think it was 15 people that were going to not have a position and they were

161critical positions so that's i think the reason why this concern is there so um first of all thank you because um i liken it to if you have a car loan that's a low interest car loan and you have a high interest credit card which one do you want to pay off first and i think you know anyone understands that you want to pay off your high interest loan first so that you can save money in the long run so we're looking at the long run here which i appreciate because i don't think we have done that so much in the past the other thing i want to say about that is um having been a principal when you have teachers that will complain in a faculty meeting that you didn't pay for something or

162buy something that they really really need and you try to show them your budget i actually would project my budget and show them hey i can't because there's no money in that particular bucket when you explain school finance to someone that really doesn't understand school finance and they don't understand why you can't pay for something then they see there's nothing in the bucket they say we'll just move the money from one bucket to another well there are rules on these buckets so we appreciate the fact that you know the rules to the buckets and that by using the esser bucket money we can now free up other money to go into different buckets that needed the money but didn't have it in the bucket before so thank you for filling the buckets basically and that's

163all i have excuse me i just wanted to follow up on one thing this was um from before and you again you explained it to me privately and i just the way these monies um that are federally allocated then go pass through the state before they get to us uh there's a process by which that happened and particularly in sr3 which we're still waiting for you have on the slide about the legislative budget amendment is required and when it's complete two-thirds of the allocation will be released and such and we had a conversation about how that was going to happen and how the applications had to be made so as of now our application for sr-3 has been made to the state right to the chair yes bound that allocate once all of those allocations

164are put in by each of the districts then it will it will go to the legislature for a budget amendment after which then two-thirds of those funds will be released to us and then at some point following that we'll get the remaining one-third but we don't know any of that time frame or when any of that is going to happen correct do the chair yes ma'am thank you just wanted to make sure everybody understood that publicly that the sr-3 funds are not funds we currently have we don't know when we're going to get them there are a number of steps that have to happen before they even get close to becoming funds that we can expand and i just want to make sure everybody understands how all that's working to the chair yes ma'am that

165is the 64 000 question 64 million exactly dr moore um thank you madam chair the the next is an update from the crisis management presentation and let me be let me just set this up this way this is an item a great item that dr schiff brought the tuesday prior to the break and one of the practices that we do as a leadership team is we at the end of each board meeting is debrief um where do we where can we improve what do we have coming down the pipe and i really wanted to ensure as i started this meeting that we're keeping the main thing that we as a board and senior staff and superintendent are talking about the most important thing the care for our children and teaching and learning for our children

166so i pushed really hard to get this presentation on the docket for today and keeping in mind we had three days until the end of the break and then we also you know so and then we came back last last week and we already had professional development schedules so there's a i put a big burden on staff to meet this timeline and i want to thank them for meeting a very quick turnaround it may be you know four weeks since we've last met but the reality is we have been off for two weeks and we had to close schools and two of the first three days last week were actually development which is being conducted by a number of the individuals who are presenting today so i don't think this is going to capture all

167of the initial requests but i think it is a a large chunk of it but we wanted to provide some of the mental health social emotional support that we are providing students um as quickly as possible to the board and then we'll listen take uh any feedback and then follow up as need be so i think we're gonna start um with ms dampier and she'll set it up and then we'll go through the presentation and once again thank you for staff putting this together so quickly through the chair thank you so much we're so pleased to be able to offer um to present today about the supports that we have for health safety and well-being for our students and staff within the school district of indian river county today we're going to have three sections

168of the presentation the first one will be school safety and we have mr teske here who will begin with school safety and then for that particular section follow up with dr lewis that will complete that section talking about the school safety that we have on behalf of student services and the supports we provide there next mental health dr lewis will do an overview of the mental health services that we provide for our students as well as the last section which is student success we were asked to provide how are we ensuring that our students are ready for graduation and i will leave that section and then afterwards we will have a session for question and answers so without further ado i'm going to turn it over to mr teske a happy new year everyone board

169members dr moore so uh normally we cover these topics in our closed safety sessions that usually have occurred in august and september forgive me if i'm a little vague with some of my answers because i do have to keep confidential security and safety in mind as this is a public meeting so i will do my best to answer your questions as i can and if not i will follow up with you all afterwards if you have a specific question that i didn't address just starting the big picture the emergency management plan we've had a plan in place here since 2013. unfortunately the aftermath of sandy hook forced many districts to react differently indian river county school district has been proactive since then with an emergency management plan in place and as you can see crisis

170response was one of the main factors within that emergency management plan that we developed prevention preparedness crisis response the recovery planning and then training the last revision to this plan was in july of 2018 occurring after msd parkland where as we all have lived through senate bill 70 26 and 70 30 has created good changes for school districts around the state of florida but i felt this was important because crisis response crisis management has been a piece has been something that we have trained our staff and our principals on uh since 2013. this is just a refresher slide for everyone that we have trained all the way down to the lowest level within our staff schools and facilities from custodians to bus drivers all the way up to principals directors and cabinet members we train

171on annually to meet safety needs with our co-drills these documents are displayed in our classrooms and are accessible for for teachers and staff to use there is an annual training requirement that's involved for all teachers and staff we do online module training as well as hands-on movement trainings with our drills with our staff and this all ties into the emergency management plan which is a confidential document that we have referenced during our closed session meetings with with the board each year so i wanted to share with some with with everyone the professional development that the security department offers to the employees of the school district of indian river county we offer trainings and drills and professional development on general security awareness how to recognize and scan perimeters and report suspicious persons and activities behavior detection

172for school bus drivers as we mentioned back in august and september tsa has deemed school buses a very vulnerable and soft target it has been a priority and a focus for us for the past three years we've completed three levels of tsa training with mrs idalet and her wonderful staff we're developing a baseline of student behavior moods and appearance and attendance things that would trigger an employee to try and report and assist and offer services to a student detecting proper notifications when these changes occur main focus this past year has been reunification procedures with law enforcement working alongside the sheriff's department and our city municipality police departments to plan and modify our renification protocol drills these change every year based upon threats and locations but we we do offer training for our schools on reunification

173procedures you all have also taken part in active shooter awareness active assailant active shooter your online trainings with the vector safe schools modules they could be classroom based school based facility based there is a teacher staff training module as well as an administrator director district level training module that we are required to take sata which is our security enhancements through assessments this is basically teaching teachers and staff principals key personnel what to look for on a walk through a campus tour a visit how to read and develop a risk assessment what is vulnerable on my campus what is a strength what is a vulnerability and then tying it all together with an after action review report these are confidential documents confidential assessments and only shared with district staff and law enforcement all of this tying

174into the florida school safety assessment tool which was submitted and each year that you have been briefed on at that time for the office of safe schools identifying initiatives and directives receiving feedback from the board that that was incorporated into that document so that's a recap of just some of the professional development that the security department can offer our our staff we also have held town hall meetings or we can attend meetings pta meetings school advisory meetings we can attend that upon request from from principals if they have a parent base who is interested in something specific looking back to 2018 we were required under senate bill language to have an outside agency come in and do an audit inspection of our safety practices and protocols reviewing our crisis response and crisis management protocols we

175contracted with safe havens international and in 2018 they conducted a physical security assessment of our 23 public schools charter schools contracted separately on their own the purpose of the assessment was to identify opportunities to improve physical safety and security at each school across the district they also did look at district facilities as well too the district used this information to enhance the annual school hardening grant application that was due we took their their feedback and have actually completed some projects that were put into that plan of action there was an on-site evaluation and an off-site evaluation that safe havens conducted and if you'll focus to the top portion of this slide i just want to reiterate the purpose is they they did look at prevention and mitigation and preparedness dealing with crisis and crisis response

176they did review our emergency operation plan which we referenced and called the emp which dealt with a crisis plan and a safety plan it was in place safe havens reviewed any documents relating to safety and emergency preparedness that would be given to staff or teachers they reviewed guides and procedures and manuals that related to student threat evaluation as well as bullying and suicide prevention they reviewed our policies written policies on student behavior which would be our student code of conduct they reviewed our student disciplinary action plan they looked at data crime statistics they received from local law enforcement agencies and then they looked at results of school and district surveys which included school safety for students and parents they were looking for trends from students staff and parents things that we may have missed so

177the offside evaluation actually occurred off campus that occurred before during and after the evaluation itself it took them a lot of time to to complete that it wasn't a one or two day event they conducted a district level assessment in addition to site visits where they specifically looked at and interviewed key district personnel local emergency management and public safety agencies to gain a better understanding of any safeties or concerns so they wanted to see if the school district was reporting above were they working with law enforcement were they working with the emergency operations center have they referenced fema was there a trail of certifications testings for staff in the event of something catastrophic happening they look for preparedness in emergency situations the public safety response capabilities of the district how we communicate with law enforcement

178and each other what technologies we were using looking at our camera systems and our access control systems they interviewed law enforcement for the school resource officer program where we staffed properly before hours and after hours events during athletic events did we exercise our drill programs did we practice our drills did we receive feedback how do we train staff for safety security what what training programs were available do we have a threat assessment approach for students did we address bullying prevention student supervision procedures and practices was there an anonymous threat management approach a reporting system how do we document before during and after incidences for safety efforts and student safety security and emergency preparedness measures for our school buses did we have a plan in place so their uh feedback was an intense binder it took

179hours to go through i've summarized it as best i can to not you know reveal any any sensitive information but this this was their conclusion although we have identified a number of opportunities for improvement our analysts were highly impressed with many of the measures that were implemented by the school district of indian river county we feel that all of our schools can become even safer environments that are more conducive of learning with the types of improvements described in this report by building upon these many improvements that have been implemented the district the goal is both realistic and attainable and that was from from les nichols the purpose for showing this was that crisis management crisis response was part of this evaluation it is something that we have had in place that we continue to work

180on and become stronger in in the event of something happening in our district i'll turn this back to mrs dampier now this is a continuation of the presentation looking over the school safety measures that we have in place in terms of our incident reporting we have a state system that those incidents are reported and that is our school environmental safety incident reporting system which is a incident-based system and this encompasses when we have situations that arise in which i'll read from here threatened intimidation are defined by cesar as an incident where there was no physical contact between the offender and victim but the victim felt that physical harm could have occurred based on verbal or nonverbal communication by the offender and then it gets into it includes nonverbal threats which involve for example brandishing a

181weapon and verbal threats of physical harm which are made in person electronically or through an any other means and this covers our multidisciplinary threat assessment team which is across the entire school district we have that in place we have team members that are part of this team including school psychology school administrator even our law enforcement school counselor that makes up that team and also in terms of just looking at our problem-solving measures threat assessment is again is a problem-solving approach to violence prevention that involves assessment intervention with students who have threatened violence um and then we have threat assessment you know again we're ensuring that you know we're we are are being attentive in ensuring that our students are are safe so um in this these situations we are always in tune to um even

182reports that come outside of our school district uh we want to make sure that uh students are safe um and just want to makes you know make sure you know that um you know all of these things that we have um in terms of our school safety efforts are are very imperative um in terms of our crisis intervention team supports we have that on as a school base on a school-based level as well as a district crisis level and so each school has its own crisis intervention team that is district-wide and this team is mobilized first to deal with a crisis impacting their specific school uh and the district crisis intervention team is mobilized if the nature or intensity of the crisis requires a broader level of services and we have our different levels of

183support that we provide and that is i'm sorry guys i went too fast and that these supports are on every level are presented here illustrated here in terms of group presentations structured group counseling that's including grief for trauma counseling parent supports a referral to our community resources we do have a mental health collaboration debriefing sessions as well and ongoing professional development is there and move forward with looking at our multi-tier system of supports framework that covers our academic behavior and social emotional needs of students and this is the uh graphical depiction here um illustrates this across the tiered level supports that we have this is as serving as a menu of those supports um and as you can see um indicated here of you know for example we have instruction um social motion learning instruction

184that is in place in terms our mental health supports uh as well um on that tier one level and as we move forward into tier two which is more supplemental um supports we're for example uh we're providing my example small group instruction and counseling supports and then as we rise up we have that intensive level on the tier 3 level which may require more community-based level supports i want to bring to your attention here that we have prevention intervention specialists um as well as district lead school counselors that were added and i want to highlight the district lead school counselors we have two that are supporting the school all school counselors across the district providing their professional development coaching and so on and our prevention invention specialists have also a special role uh in terms

185of making sure uh we are implementing part of that framework a positive behavior interventions and supports uh framework and that involves monthly coaching training supports uh you know progress monitoring as well and looking at that data and also our prevention intervention specialists are are helping us with ensuring that we are are supporting our aspire classrooms um also training provided for sel and restorative practices and as you see illustrated providing individual coaching modeling et cetera and our psychological services team uh definitely uh part of our crisis intervention supports we have school psychologists that are providing evaluations psycho-educational evaluations individual you know coaching multi-tier system supports framework they are problem solving with teams and ensuring students are successful looking at supports across you know academics and as well as emotional social emotional behavioral supports looking at our

186social emotional learning programming we have implementing stanford harmony on an elementary level beginning pre-k through fifth grade and as well as of looking at our supports for secondary we are have a second step that is another program for students in middle school as well as we have an online program of lessons which we are providing through ripple effects which is for sixth through twelfth grade to ensure that we are preventing recidivism this programming is very critical and important we have alternative intervention measures uh as well as which is new um for this school year we have aspire which is alternative school-based program to inspire renewed excellence program which again started the school year as well as our turner to out-of-school suspension which is all toss which started in 2020. these supports are are very um

187as you can see illustrated in terms of what they specifically cover um we're always looking at early warning systems some students under uh the alternative intervention measures area looking at academics discipline and behavior and problem solving around students of that you know are at risk for in terms of being unsuccessful academically we want to make sure those students are are identified and we're problem solving around those students in terms of aspire as well as you can see again this classroom is specific to ensure that again we want to have alternative discipline and so students are able to be able to reflect um during this time and and and look at you know whatever took place in that situation in terms of any discipline matter that they are able to learn other alternatives to their behavior

188as well as all toss again it's a program that as well that is that students are able to reflect into problem solving and even that has a component of prevention and mental health supports for that particular program all of this when we're looking at our district strategic plan our goal those programs that were highlighted have an impact on our out-of-school suspension numbers and we as you can see from 2019 2020 school year this number of 1461 suspensions compared to 2021 we had 126. now i know that some of this data you know we have to remember we did have a school closure that would impact some of those numbers so i just want you to be aware um that that would not reflect an entire school year um but for at this point for 2021

1892022 this is where we are at this point of 151 uh to date so our uh looking at our annual target of 365. right now we look like we're on target at this point moving forward with our mental health it's going to move kind of quickly i know i'm i want to i have 10 my 10 minutes i don't want to go over looking at this data from 2019 2020 school year this is the number of mental health referrals that we have we have and then we're looking at our baker acts which was 109. keep in mind 51 of 51 of those referrals are associated um you know with those baker act events uh i mean of the mental health referrals out of those um 214. um so looking at the data for 2020 2021

190we had mental health referrals of 358 and then we had a total of 139 baker acts which uh which was 39 of those represented 39 of those referrals um for this current from august 2021 of course to this current period of time that we are in you'll see that we are at 100 287 mental health referrals uh and have 41 baker acts reported uh to date um and out of those referrals are you know 14 um are of the 280 287 mental health referrals if that makes sense uh now just looking closely and i don't want to spend a lot of time here because it is very evident where the needs are in terms of our where you know mental health referrals are indicated here but i want to make sure i put a caveat

191that when you see high numbers in specific areas for men representing mental health referrals uh that always tells me the positive is that uh there is an awareness and students are getting the needs that um they uh you know that are necessary um and so you know looking at these numbers uh you could you can see that ninth graders uh is a definite area you know that where we see the increasing numbers great level wise um and if looking at uh the uh specifics of data in terms of school data you could see where the mental health referrals are being generated highly and then we're looking at our numbers in terms of a population of kids and 47 percent of white students have generated the number of mental health referrals as well as african-american students

192at 21 and hispanic students at 27 percent um and this is a continuation of looking at our mental health referrals for the 2020 uh 2021 school year still as you can see there were which was again high level looking at vero beach high school as having a high concentration of those referrals as well as looking at our population excuse me of our great level high at seventh numbers of referrals generated at the seventh grade level um and not ignoring all the other um i just want to highlight the the higher the number that is there but we have we want to be actively looking at all grade levels in in monitoring and looking at this data but again this is is data that is telling us you know where uh students where the needs are

193um in terms of race as well just as had reflected 48 of our white students uh are generated other mental health referrals as well as our african-american at 26 percent and hispanic students at 17 percent um in terms of our baker acts for the 2020 2021 school year um again as you would see it reflected the breakdown of our schools and where those uh bakerack events um were generated um and that again a vero beach high school was at 33 reported as well as we look at our sebastian river high was at 24 in oslo middle had 16 and gifford middle had 16 as well in terms of our grade level data we again we're seeing high numbers in terms of our looking at our ninth grade students as well as uh again a concentration

194in terms of race of 58 white students 22 percent african-american students when we talk about baker acts referrals and 10 hispanic students as well looking at our to date for this to the school year um you know we have again a high number of uh mental health referrals um generated at vero beach high school as well as looking at the grade level at this point we see that 6th grade has a high number of mental health referrals generated and i'm just going to again i'm going to say it again that these referrals indicate that you know students are talking and they're um we're we have an awareness that you know there's they needed the supports that they uh that are you know prevalent here uh so i don't again i don't want this to be

195viewed as negative it's just that uh we have to think about two um that the their you know adolescent um you know at that level um may again be more reporting of these incidences so we have 46 percent white in terms of race as well as african-american students at 29 hispanic uh 17 percent that were reported um now we're looking at again our baker acts uh for this at this point where we are for this school year uh and as you can see illustrated here um ninth grade students uh you know generated the 12 excuse me baker racks up this to this point um and you can see again just looking at the school data and where the referrals are coming in as well as the student population of kids which is similar to those

196previous slides um and this is the breakdown of our findings overall again you know what i've already indicated that vero beach high school showed a high the number of you know baker acts but there's been a decline when we look and compare between 2019 2020 school year and our 2020-2021 school year you see a difference in and we are at um nine baker acts uh to date um also we look we we know that our ninth grade students we are seeing a high number of baker acts um however um we're seeing that at this point we're at 12 at this carrot moment to date and then looking at race um we see that white students are in terms of looking at baker racks there has been a high number where if we look at 2020

1972021 school year we were at 81 and you know i just want to say that um some of this data uh looking at uh 2019-2020 was a a year where uh we had again we had that school closure and so it does not represent uh you know a total number of all however i want to say that we know that students you know have had needs and needed more support and so that's a very tough time in a difficult time um so we would you know that would explain to some of that more that that need as well um for mental health supports um and so i'm here with uh looking at okay what supports that we have um that we are providing our district um and so you see that we have um mental

198health specialists and school social workers that are delivering um those supports you know across um our district uh and that's through our tiered level of supports which we um reviewed at the very beginning of this part of my presentation so um and and this is just giving you what those services involve um what you know again back to providing that social emotional learning supports trauma informed care mental health um they're consulting you know with with school counselors and um they're working with uh even consulting with teachers and providing coaching and direct intervention services and they're coordinating mental health services for students you know in the community making sure that you know students have that ability to outside of the services that we're providing in our schools that we're able to ensure we're connecting them with

199those supports those community agencies to provide that additional supports for students who who really truly need it and so as we have um in terms of our mental health programming and a lot of this is is based on um the marjorie stoneman douglas act and uh ensuring that we have that mental health instruction that students are required to have which is a minimum of five hours of instruction which is delivered to grades six through 12. and so we are utilizing ever5 for those digital lessons to be delivered to students as well as erica's lighthouse provides for sixth through ninth grade uh this classroom based program that takes a deeper look at depression and suicide and explore strategies for good mental health and also it includes information about seeking help including school-based local and national referral

200services so again it's bringing awareness uh so for students to know where to get help when that need is necessary and they need that that level extra level of support also to add with that along with that with the mental health when we're looking at the dap when we're looking at the data we're constantly looking at the data and making data-driven decisions we just had mrs bass before the break looked at the data and made some adjustments to our mental health staff and where they're providing additional support so some of the days were increased at some schools based on the need and some schools it was reduced based on the need based on the data and so we're constantly looking at that data making those data-driven decisions to provide support for the mental health so

201just wanted to make sure that you were aware of that secondly we were charged with just providing an overview of student success you know our number one priority is to make sure our students are ready for graduation um and we're not going to wait until um 11th and 12th grade to be concerned about them graduating of course it starts at kindergarten but when they enter high school we want to make sure there's consistent monitoring of that and so we just fine-tuned a couple of areas that we needed to do but with that we were asked about the credits how many students who were who are not on track who do not have the number of credits which are the 24 credits and at sebastian river high school at this point in time we have 52

202students and at vero beach high school we have 90. this is not uncommon we went back and looked at our previous data as which is a part of our progress monitoring we used to do it in mr dr mcmahon talked about the paper and pencil and all of that now that we have power bi we were able to go look and compare to where our students were the numbers last year and this is just where they were at that point a lot of students and we're providing opportunities through edgenuity for some of these kids to you know participate during school before school after school to make up these course recovery opportunities those students who have less than a 2.0 again these students have been identified the graduation coaches as well as our school counselors they

203have a list especially now through power bi they used to do it hand by hand but through power bi that identifies the total number of students that we have at each school who are not on track based on they have less than a 2.0 so our our school counselors our graduation coaches they're working fiercely with these kids one-on-one some of them uh and working with the teachers as well as working with the parents to make sure that these students are on track to graduate by you know pretty much it's been sometimes even up until may where some of these kids are on the list to get to graduate so again this is not these numbers again are not uncommon because i've already checked with dr mcmahon because compared to last year in the previous year

204this is where we were last year but i believe that net share with some of these tracking practices that we have in place for next year is we're going to see a reduction in this some of the tracking of student progress as a school and as a district we utilized two new dashboards and dr mcmahon went over these two dashboards we used the early warning systems which really focuses on absences suspensions we every school team has access to this data they look at this data and they problem solve around this early warning system data as well as our graduation monitoring which is done by graduation coaches and our school counselors they're looking at this data they've also given us feedback on how we can improve on the dashboards to meet their needs and this information

205is constantly being monitored through our school teams sure can we do better yes we've had conversations with the principals and we have a plan in place to have that improved starting this month also we want to make sure our parents and our students have access to be able to track and be self reliant uh to look at some of where they're at uh through focus this is the they can look at this and see whether or not they're on track for credits uh what courses whether or not they've met the concordance score for uh reading and math if they're level one and level two it tells them how many credits they're shy uh it gives them a plethora of information that they can partake in and be able to you know monitor their progress as

206well and this is to be a focus our current practice has been that students are monitored and supported towards their graduation goals this has not always been consistent i've had conversations with our principals as well as our school counselors graduation coaches in the past our school counselors have met with all seniors in the fall and spring and then they've provided continuous support throughout the year graduation coaches they have a list of all the students who are not on track to graduate and they're meeting bi-monthly with all seniors um to ensure they're you know successful with graduation the new practice moving forward is that we want we don't want to start an 11th and 12th grade we want to make sure in ninth grade that we're monitoring students to ensure students are successful and we put

207a plan in place and i'm going to go over that uh in a few minutes first we have the principal role outline because it's very important that the principal is a part of this practice and leading this work in collaboration with those who are responsible for it school team collaboration to ensure student success so we want to make sure they're working as a team to make this happen because it can't be done just by school counselor we want to make sure that our schools are sharing the same information at the same time and it was so ironic last week we were on a call with all to the two high schools and one director knew something that another director did not know and so what we're going to do is make sure that we're having

208these monthly meetings so they can collaborate and make sure that they know their different reports that they found out that were available that can make their lives easy easier so we're going to continue to do that as well and then with our counselor lead where our council lead is now going to be facilitating these quarterly monitoring meetings with district staff which will include myself dr mcmahon he's already meeting with the graduation coaches and school counselors monthly about the graduation but this is also we're going to tie in mr brown who's our aim advocate he's been meeting with all the high school principals miss ainge our school counselor lead has been going with him and they go and they look at the students they've identified students on the early warning system list and they have a

209list and they go in and they meet with the principal the school team and ask what supports are in place for this student and then he's monitoring that to ensure that certain students who are really off track i mean they have several they're just not missing one thing they're missing several to ensure that they're success successful and ready to graduate that is something new that we haven't done and the principals have found this to be beneficial because it's there's a plan for success for this kid and every month mr uh brown and mrs ainge is going to meet meeting with all secondaries not just at the high school but at the middle school level as well to ensure that students were preparing them not just at the high school level but ensuring success at the

210middle school level as well so with this moving forward our new practice is to make sure that we are pulling reports um we're starting in january because this is where we're at and we're making sure that it's done consistently within both high schools january they're going to conduct records review and alter school student schedules if they're missing credits uh if they're missing they're not on track to graduate for specific areas the principal is now going to be involved in that process our school counselors and graduation coaches will be providing the list to the principals on the fifth week of the middle of the nine weeks and that list will uh contain the teachers etc uh who those students are those courses that they're failing and the principal will be meeting with the teachers as well

211to collaborate to see how we can ensure that these kids what's going on why these kids so many kids are you know fell into class and then from there our this will be a continuous cycle of collaboration it just will not occur as you can see again in april this process we will have letters going home to parents and guardians of students who still need their missing credits course recovery all of those things that we're going to make sure that those kids are on track for graduation so it's not going to be a one-time thing it's going to be a continuous thing and it's going to start 9th through 12th grade as you can see on the right hand side of the screen it says 9th through 12th grade we're not starting in 11th and

21212th and that's been one of our big ahas is to make sure that we're monitoring at the end of the ninth grade semester to make sure that we're putting those kids in the right courses making sure credit recovery is available for those kids and that it's consistent at both schools and we're doing it at the same time same time so one school is not saying it's happening at vero beach but it's not happening at sebastian or vice versa we're meeting and making sure and monitoring this and who's going to lead this work is going to be our district lead school counselor will oversee to make sure that this is happening on our school campuses as well as quarterly they will be having a meeting with a teams meeting with this district team to make sure

213that this is happening at the course at the end of the quarter we were also asked about community resources currently we have a crossover mission who's done a lot with our secondary schools they've done some tutoring offered tutoring on campus as well as kids can have access to go to tutoring on their campus as well and then the collaboration we've had with boys and girls club and that's elementary middle and high school that students we have transportation to take them to the boys and girls club to partake in these opportunities so um at this time are there any questions just gotta summarize all of that a lot of information but it was it was a big ask and that's why i kind of started with acknowledging the volume of workforce as i reflect back over

214the last two years you always have to monitor are you changing real life examples of prices management here at the mr johnson i was going to see when mr tuskey's phone does that it makes me a little nervous you evaluate the rate of change making sure that the organizational behaviors that you're changing uh are in fact putting an over abundance of strain on the organization uh we have aspired we've got pain we have the elementary counselors that were not in place prior to my arrival you have the the path program uh you have a a critical eye on what we're doing in terms of consequences for student behaviors that are now in place uh through mr meyer's office um we have the lead counselors that uh i saw you coming and i don't know if

215it's because i was a counselor myself uh or i oversaw student services in mental health in miami but it was a priority to get these systems and structures in in place so by no means are we anywhere close to being done i think we have really established that this is a non-negotiable in terms of educating the whole child it is a non-negotiable in terms of educating the whole child and if we are to ensure that our students are graduating which is how this presentation began by miss damp year and ready to meet the demands of the 21st century uh we need to ensure that they can problem solve that they have the grit they have the determination they can communicate in order to be successful this is part of of education in today's world and

216it is comprehensive and it is it is complex so the volume of work um i'm proud of the volume of work and i think where we are at this point with everything that we have done in really is to step back uh and evaluate just as we did with the student data so we began today talking about reflecting on the impact of instruction really looking at we have aim we have aspire are we seeing long-term positive impacts on the lives of children as a result of these particular programs and that really is the district review the feedback from principles in terms of implementation to shift or modify enhance ultimately the level or quality of support um so we're glad this is a item that was brought by dr schiff uh thrilled that this is a

217a topic of conversation uh as you referenced you know reporting mental health referrals um yeah you're right that's not a bad thing uh it it sometimes it's stereotyped as being a bad thing and i'm glad you preface it every time that you almost said it uh we you know it is what it is so when you look at it there's work to be done absolutely but proud of the shift or the change of practice at school sites the level of awareness uh looking forward to receiving feedback and reporting in future meetings regarding the continued progress in terms of our effort around this work thank you madam chair okay i just noticed the time and um thinking that we started at noon i see a couple of you took breaks are we good to keep going

218after this do you want to take a break okay good okay thank you all right um dr schiff since this was your item to bring forward would you like to speak first uh yes and no um so thank you for putting this together as dr moore mentioned i know this is a fair amount to pull together and because of when it happened a relatively short amount of actual work time and work days um in looking at this in characterizing school safety and mental health what's clear is that there are if you will hard and soft safety issues right there's heart issues like mr teske talks about and then there's soft issues like mental health and student awareness and all of that my goal in focusing on this is to ensure that we're doing both and

219that they're part of an overall comprehensive approach to how we understand the well-being of students in our district i also please remind me when i forget this i want to switch my language from mental health to mental wellness because i think we do a disservice um when we don't do that what i um [Music] so i'm gonna go sort of some broad issues as well as you know dig down into some specific ones and then more specific ones i'll just send you directly so that you can address those in future presentations um broadly speaking what for me would be most helpful and i'll dig into how i how i would find this helpful or the specific ways of doing this what i would find most helpful and we talked about this a little bit prior

220to this meeting um is to understand the interventions that we're taking or the strategies that we're taking in specifically around mental health and its mental wellness and its relationship to school safety but what i want what i want to understand is less the yes there are the programs we're providing there's the trainings that we're doing but what i want to understand is the outcomes that we're producing and so what would be really helpful for me from this would be to see the analysis what i want to see is the analysis of if we are i'll this is a random you know if we are uh creating aspire as our version of iss what exactly are we doing for whom and what outcomes is it producing so that we know it's working or if it's not

221so that we can readjust our resources and our support in order to produce more successful outcomes that's my goal in this and so when we come back those are the kinds of things and and i referencing the earlier presentation by dr mcmahon as dr moore said um i asked dr mcmahon the same question the data in and of itself is less useful outside of the context of how we analyze it and understand it so for example specifically to dr lewis's point that when we see increasing mental health referrals that may be a good thing because there's less of a stigma or people are more willing to see help well we don't know that until we dig in right we don't know if this is a good thing because more people are seeking health or if

222it's indicating that there's a much more serious level of problem out there when we see this year more than double the mental health referrals in half the year we don't know if that's because more people are seeking services which we might classify as a good thing or because we're seeing the a degree in a level of problem that we have not seen before and we're not yet equipped to deal with those are the kinds of things i want to understand in these presentations so and when they come back i'll give more details of the kinds of things those are the things that would be helpful for me to understand moving forward are we using our resources as productively to produce the best outcomes so that in a time which we know post not even post

223mid pandemic post we don't know where we are right i wish we did i keep wanting to say post pandemic and we're not um we want we want to avert problems before they happen what we're seeing in the news what we're seeing in other districts is that children's mental health mental wellness is declining and i want to be the district that gets that right i want to be the district that anticipates and provides services and crafts our resources so that we avoid the kinds of problems that we see in other districts the least of which not the least but some of which is students simply not showing up or having problems completing their work all the way on a continuum to school violence and that's what i'm trying to get at in these requests so

224that said um to mr teske's work you know repeating the information that we got in 2018 from i'm blanking on their name right now safe haven what i'd be interested in knowing um we're in a different world right now so how does that information translate to where we are now three years later a quarter a third half or fully through a global pandemic those things may not be exactly the same so how do we analyze those to find out um and i don't wanna i have a lot to say about this and i understood that we put some limits on how much time board members take so i'm going to say some of it i'm going to let other board members speak and then time permitting will come back the kinds of things that are

225that i want to understand um is not simply our intentions but how are we out for example um in terms of our mental wellness staff and supports who do we have where do we have them what are they charged with doing what are their qualifications what outcomes are they producing so that we know we're doing the best job possible that's what i want to better understand it helps me less to know that we're providing a series of trainings or we're using a series of you know harmony scl or other packages what i want to know is is what you know is what are we doing with them is what outcomes are they producing what i also want to know is when we talk about things when we look at the referrals and i want to

226go back we looked at the mental health referrals and we looked at the proportion that was baker acted right what would be helpful to know moving forward is not simply the percentage but the percentage of the population right if you simply tell me that 47 of white students in 2019 20 21 of black students and 27 percent of hispanic students in that year were referred for mental health what that doesn't tell me is it's really the the proportionality right how is that related so we can as a straight percentage it's a higher percentage of white students but as a percentage or a proportion of the population we're seeing more black and hispanic students right you follow what i mean and this goes on over time in each in each of those what we see also

227in those reports when i when i when i want to see some some analysis is that while the percentage of white students stays relatively the same the percentage of black students on mental health referrals is increasing but the proportion of the population is relatively at least the data that we have publicized is about 17 and it's consistently higher than the 17 percent of our population i tried to dig down in some of them to school level demographics but i we don't have that data publicly facing and i didn't i i didn't i didn't have time to dig deeper so those are the kinds of things that would be really helpful to know um i'd like to to better understand uh caseloads for our school psychologists our school counselors our mental health supports when i see

228on one of the slides back here when i see that we have six mental health specialists and school social workers and then i see the list of the services provided that's a lot it's a lot for six mental health specialists and school social workers on top of the roughly 15 000 kids that they're charged with serving and providing services to so i want to better understand how are we doing that what are they doing what are their case loads so that we can best support them i know and we talked about this earlier that it's really hard uh that we have open positions and it's hard to get those filled right now and it's hard to get those filled with qualified personnel particularly when we're looking for highly specific specialized qualifications so i know that's

229difficult but there is a tremendous burden right now on our school psychologists our mental health specialists all of them and i again this is not to critique the work that we're doing it's to understand in advance how we can best create an umbrella and a comprehensive set of services so that we avoid future problems right so that we mitigate them so i'm going to stop here for a minute and i'll send more specific requests to you and dr moore and directly but those are the kinds of things that would be most helpful in understanding moving forward um sorry i'm not going to stop for a second because when we get to um something that i've been focused on is uh being prepared for graduation right and i know that this is this is a piece

230of it what i'd like to understand in that is that when we talk about the numbers what would be helpful would be to again to know the numbers as a percentage of the population right because again i think there's an issue of disproportionality here that is missed when we only talk about percentages of the population of kids who don't have enough credits or kids that are under 2.0 that's not the entire population that's eligible and it's not the the proportion of the population in the district so i think we have to dig down deeper to better understand what those numbers mean and what those percentages mean okay i'll stop here for a minute because i think you get the point um and if there's time we'll come back mr barefoot i'm good okay thank you

231uh miss rosario um yeah thank you i have um this was a lot um there was a time when pbis was first introduced to the schools that the portion of social and emotional learning that was required was included within the pbis model um now it seems that there is an entirely different curriculum for sel and how it is implemented in schools i i have the statutes that include social and emotional learning and all of the requirements for mental health so i suppose my question is and and every every grade obviously is different elementary middle and high school is different in how it's implemented but with regard to social and emotional learning specifically like stanford harmony or the second step how is that taught is it it's supposed to be the way that i understand it

232it is supposed to be embedded within the health curriculum or within the health program not within every class so if there could be a little bit of clarity behind this i'd appreciate it so i'll uh let me talk about pbis and then pam will kind of jump through through the health standards and you're you are correct there are statutes that define the um those characters under health that we teach and pam will go into that positive behavior support is not that positive behavior support is moving to a school-wide opportunity to encourage students and reward students for displaying positive behaviors so rewarding students for doing positive things versus having negative consequences for doing negative things so those are school-wide opportunities to help you know positive behavior support it is not a behavior modification program it's a

233behavior support encouraging students to do things that are positive for flipping the script in a typical old school environment you would you know you only saw the counselor or the administrator when you did things that aren't are negative so that is a a school-wide structure that is in place to create a positive culture and reward students for those positive behaviors now the characteristics uh that are required under the health curriculum which would be citizen citizenship respect uh responsibility kindness those kinds of things are embedded um into very specific curriculum through health which i believe is five hours correct and that's why i'm going to turn it over to mrs dampier right now as governor [Music] governor desantis updated the standards different standards for civics as well as character ed on july of 2021 and he

234was very specific and what should be taught we have a stand statute that says specifically what should be taught in elementary middle and high school and we've been working collaboratively with us with our cni department to make sure that that's being done and not to overburden the teachers we want to try to embed it into what they're currently doing and when that when that will be taught and what that will look like uh previously um character ed was in character counts you could do character counts and as a school you could be specific about the character teaching that now since there are standards and it's embedded it is required so we're making sure that that is going to be in our pacing guides moving forward as well as a time for when it should be

235taught throughout the school year and without the school with throughout the school day so that is being done mrs bashore is working on that with uh her team uh to make sure it's it's it's done at a specific time of the day that it's not just half hazardly because this is a requirement an expectation like dr moore said sanford harmony that's building community classroom community in the classroom a lot of times the teachers take a brain brain break just for the kids to get to know one another uh to build that sense of community and belonging in the classroom it's just questions that are led um there's question stems that may you don't have the kids what's their favorite color why why not to build that relationship with one another in the classroom and that

236is done throughout the school day and like dr moore said that is focusing on the class the school culture of um to enhance that so when you say throughout the school day what does that mean it could be every single period no for every single student is that only for students in need is it i mean because it looks technically the way that i understand that it's supposed to be through health not through every other subject as far as it is done through health but you can embed that into your literacy curriculum you can embed several standards you you're aware that um through um that literacy block so when will they do that throughout the day what i was talking about that can be done throughout the day is the social emotional learning with the

237samford harmony they sometimes schools take brain breaks to have the students to get to know one another and building that sense of community that could be done throughout the throughout the day that has nothing to do with character ed and what about the middle and high school middle of the high school the same thing a lot of we met last week as a team to see when that can be done especially in our high schools and our middle schools because some of the standards are specific to our resume writing leadership skills so some of those can be embedded into again the ela block and be taught through that and mrs basur is putting together a plan of when that will be taught um and where because it can't just be because every kid does not

238have all courses in high school so trying to find that that course that they do have and a possibility is that they're they participate in a module where it's required um and a particular time throughout the day so those were some options that we talked about last week at our meeting so um it is a requirement and we are implementing and making sure that it's done and it could be where it's a week throughout the month of may it doesn't say how long it just says that these things must be taught so it could be doing within a week to make sure our high school students have access to it yeah it's interesting because the statute you're right it doesn't indicate how long or how much it only says that comprehensive age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate

239k-12 health education that addresses concepts of community health consumer health environmental health and family health family life should include mental and emotional health injury prevention and safety internet safety nutrition personal health prevention and control disease substance use and abuse prevention of child sexual abuse exploitation and human trafficking and then of course it continues on to what that looks like with regards to the health education curriculum for the uh grades six through 12. so i guess my concern or my question i'm sorry you i'm sorry you you broke up you might want to back up about 20 seconds so i guess my concern and my question is ensuring that we're not taking away from the instruction of math skills for example since we've been on that topic quite a bit closing the achievement gap academically and

240not conflating that time with some of these other things that should be handled within the health education program not that they're not important but i i just don't want us to overlap in areas that will take away from children's academic needs and do it appropriately obviously within the right curriculum so if we keep if we we have a health curriculum then our health curriculum should include all these things in it that need to be included why have a health curriculum and an sel curriculum and pbis and this and that and the other thing it just seems too complicated just make it simple simple straight to the point easy get it all comprehensively in one curriculum and and set the schedule so it's not conflicting one with the other and that is our goal that's why

241we met last week as a team with cni all of us together and we're work that that's the goal to make sure it's not something additional to how what what are we currently doing and how can we embed it into the day and what are the current resources that we have to make sure that this is happening in our in our classrooms good thank you because in the same statute there's there's provision here that also needs to be taken into consideration is the study of hispanic contributions the study of women contributions to the united states the nature and importance of free enterprise um the the the teaching of um civics that we were talking about civics before the uh encouraging patriotism and the sacrifices that veterans and medal of honor recipients have made all of

242this falls within the same statute under what needs to be um you know taught for to our kids so i i'm glad to hear that it's under review i look forward to hearing an update on it um but the the more we do the more complicated it becomes so if we can simplify it like i mentioned and and and get the the real things uh or rather the prioritized items first um then i think else will follow along thank you that is the goal okay thank you uh dr jones uh thank you to dr schiff for bringing this up in december and to student services for bringing us this information so quickly we appreciate it pretty solid on the school safety issues that mr teske reviewed as a former middle and high school principal i

243know on state statute we're responsible for safe learning environment so i guess one question on there with zero tolerance when are students suspended out of school not all toss not aspire anywhere when does that happen through the chair depending on the the event or or the activity suspension is something that that's never going to completely go absolutely all the way there are behaviors that take place in a school and i can speak specifically as an inner city principal of three different high schools the principal has to maintain and keep control of his or her building and you know that because sebastian was very similar to some of the schools in which i left those kind of behaviors you will look at the code of conduct you know the practice that we wanted to put in

244place that i know that we have curtailed was a behavior leading to outdoor suspension in which that wasn't the appropriate response little continuous disruptive behaviors um very quick modifications could have take place you know we have eliminated that practice and have created the systems that we've covered in this presentation to help those students identify what those behaviors are and then how to replace them with positive behaviors that ultimately don't lead to that but when you're when you're disrupting the function of a school if you have a weapon that cesar data that we were uh talking about there's no intervention uh when you're conducting illegal acts in a school it's going to lead to possibly arrest although arrests are down uh suspensions will still be there and those are those those still take place and when

245i look at the mental health component i i was not surprised with the sixth and ninth grade as a former middle school and high school principal those years were the struggling years for the most part and i also believe that mental health referrals are positive you know for our students um working with our parents working with our teachers if there's a concern so i see that as a positive we talk a lot about climate and culture and then leading to student success and all those components are really really good especially the early warning indicators i mean i didn't have this kind of data starting to get there a little bit but those are crucial and man we were down we were down to that last minute on credit recovery for our seniors you know and

246making sure at that time uh at that time was fcat and pert and algae you'll see or whatever it is now but um you know i look at social and emotional learning it always comes back i was doing it as a teacher when i didn't even know i was doing it there's a welcoming classroom you can ask questions there's no bullying i mean all that's there i've said it a hundred times the art and science of teaching and any great teacher knows this you better know your content today the science of teaching because they can look it up on the phone in two seconds i was lucky i had to go to the library and look it up you know they could tell you you're wrong in two seconds but that art that relationship that

247you establish in the classroom in the hallway as an administrator in the cafeteria as a bus driver that is how you create and sustain your safe climates now you have an issue here and there yes you will but if they have even one person on that campus with whom they can speak on a regular basis that's what that's what makes our school safe and then the communication we have all these things but dr schiff thank you for the bringing this up because i know this is just a surface and we don't want to make more work because we know everybody out there is doing the work but it helps us understand it a little bit more and i appreciate that thank you um thank you i'm going to ask a couple things make a couple

248statements too first of all that one-on-one person that's kids of hope yes and when i put that into place in my campus that i took over and after school you know pam it changed the culture of the school so i i will continue to push kids at hope because it's a mantra that teaches adults how to relate to children without punishment versus positivity and i would like to see us go back to promoting that more just my own personal beef on our list thank you so here we are again looking dr mcmann and thank you again because here we are looking at power bi data and it can be overwhelming it can be overwhelming but it's also a very powerful tool and it really shows us where the areas of concern are and where the

249areas of growth are so we appreciate that as a principal when you have students that are coming to you in the office and i love to refer to them as my little frequent flyers when i had my little frequent flyers come i had to do differentiated discipline too not everything works for the same child again they're non-negotiables you know you go put it into scissor and you say all right what are my options as a principle for punishment but i always made sure that the punishment also had education with it we are in the business of educating we have to educate children on the best behavior how to behave in a group how to behave socially not every child comes equipped with that information so again drill down to the root cause of what the

250problem is for the child if they continue to come to your office for whatever reason so when i would do that you know one of the things i put in place was saturday school with the principal and working with a parent to say i'm going to be not only having them clean up the campus physically cleaning up the campus but having an hour with me on discussion and getting to know the principal and getting that one-on-one opportunity to get to know the child know that i care about them what i'm saying is sometimes all doesn't fit even with discipline so let me give an example of one of my beefs because you know what's coming dr moore and my beef is with vaping vaping is number one problem we've got right now a lot of

251people say oh it's bullying it's other stuff i'm going to give you the data you like data i'm going to give you some data so vaping though when i ask where are we with a student that been caught vaping which by the way is very rare for them to be caught so when they are caught with vaping what is the discipline and it's suspension so my question is is that working and i can tell from the data it's not because the state average there were 50 971 incidences reported in cesar last year out of those 8 000 of them were vaping the next one down was 6 000 was drugs the next one down five thousand was marijuana and then we get way down to two thousand that's bullying and all the rest were in

252the hundreds okay so if you look at our data and saint louis and st lucy here we go indian river i look at you pam and i say that sorry um so in indian river we had um i can't remember how many incidences were let's see there were a total of that in a second there it is the problem is they put the report in a to h and we are on the a to h page which we are i i don't understand how we got there all right 268 total instances that were reported to cesar last year out of that 165 of them were vaping that's our number one number two was down to 50 that was drugs number three was also 51 50 was marijuana and 18 was bullying those were just reported

253so again if we're looking at data and we're saying how are we going to bring our suspension rates down and how are we going to educate our kids and our parents on what's best for them vaping is a problem for us and i know from the local rule being taken away last year by the legislature that we have 300 places that you can purchase vaping materials in indian river county alone and out of those 300 they can now put all these beautiful colors and all these wonderful flavors next to toys and bubble gum i just found out about that yes ma'am so it's a big concern of mine i just had a group come and speak to the local treasure coast council local governments and all their jaws dropped because i don't think people realize

254what a big huge issue this is and i am only harping on one issue i realize that but i'm going to tell you i see everfi was one of the things where you're getting lessons from do they have vaping lessons or can we use either those or set up a counseling session so when a child is caught vaping i think we need to involve the parents because i think parents are are not aware of how dangerous vaping is did you know that one vaping little pod has 20 cigarettes in it and these kids are are consuming 20 cigarettes a day of nicotine that's huge and i don't think parents realize the nicotine that's in there plus all the other dangerous chemicals as somebody pointed out to me today that we're not even discussing that are

255in there and doing harm to their bodies it's a huge epidemic so could we look at maybe changing from suspension automatically of vaping just one area that we can look at to educating involving a parent the parent has to come to school sit with the child look at something on vaping and have a discussion about it something like that we are addressing this situation i mean vaping definitely is on our radar um we currently have a anti-vaping campaign that is in progress it started this week i saw it on the website very good so we are actively addressing the matter um and so i uh we have um the first week that we have teen brains are still developing um which is a part of this week two we'll have looking at 74 percent of

256high school students in florida uh do not vape this is just what we're going to be doing the uh our our plan in place looking at e-cigarette aerosol it's not water vapor week four the long-term effects of vaping are unknown so this is just this is what we're going to be um moving forward with as well as uh we have like a little this even this week uh doing some campaigning at some of the schools um in the morning and just you know again so we can bring some awareness because students need to be aware of of the effects of this and i'll jump in as well um prior to break mrs bass went to every uh secondary school and met with the principal and their school teams and this is how this blew up

257to where we're going to do this anti-vaping campaign and we included some community members as well we've been on uh some calls to collaborate and work with them uh to provide resources and and supports as well as providing some sessions for parents mrs bass is going to be sending that information out as well of different modules students can participate in looking at some other resources that we can have on campus so it's educating them not just after school but during lunch time and some of these other opportunities as well as showing them videos they need to see the videos to see how this affects the brain as well as the lungs etc so this has been on our radar it has not gone unnoticed and we have a lot of things planned for this nine

258weeks to push this out great i'll talk to you about that personally later okay um do you know the youngest child that they've actually caught with vaping materials and wound up getting some sort of help and just so you know we were originally focusing no we were going to focus on middle i mean just middle in high school and the principles when we went over we were going to focus the elementary principles say we said we need this in elementary school as well because we have years old seven-year-old was caught so i think we need to be woken up from this because it is a much more serious concern i think um when i'm hearing um teachers complaining that our ap and ib teachers complaining that kids are vaping by just doing this they can't

259smell it they don't see it so the teachers aren't catching it and this is going on all day long so i think it's a serious serious problem for us and i in addition to everything that was shared in terms of what we're doing on the proactive side i couldn't agree more looking at a a different a very specific consequence when caught uh that includes partnering with the parents is something very very interesting i know we spoke earlier today but i was very intrigued so we will be following up on we need to educate our parents because i don't think they realize how dangerous these are i agree thank you that's i'll get off that soapbox um dr schiff yeah i want to respond to that and and circle back around to something because i 100

260agree with you about um the severity and the seriousness of vaping as as the only one sitting on this panel who's the parent of a teenager right now i can almost guarantee you that all of our presentations and our warnings and our cautions and our fears spoken in adult language do not reach kids right they just don't i have teenagers circling in and out of my house on a regular basis i guarantee you the things that we talk about because we understand them in a particular way and because we've been there and we've done things and we're adults do not reach teenagers so unless we can do unless we can craft presentations or whatever it is in a way that reaches teens we're banging our heads against a brick wall is my concern the other

261thing is that if you are out and about in this county at all you know that adults are doing this just as much as teens are they're modeling the behavior yeah if you go into restaurants if you go into bars if you go walking on the street you will see that adults have these in their hands and they're doing them regularly whether it's nicotine or other substances because you can't we can't detect it we can't smell it all of that so while i don't just i completely agree with you i completely agree with you and i have that conversation on a regular basis with my teen but i can tell you on teens being who they are in that stage of their physiological biological psychological and mental emotional development cannot hear a word i'm saying

262about it they need to hear it from another student they need to hear it from another my child can hear from another adult but on but but kids teens are biologically wired to be pretty sure they know everything at this point anybody who has ever lived with one has had this experience so i would suggest that as we think about how best to do this this not be another adult powerpoint presentation with a bunch of people in the room about how bad vaping is um because i don't think that's the way we get at the issue well i know that we have there's some youtube videos for example because that came up uh where students can see other students talk about the effects of vaping what it has done to them um so that's the

263a real great approach for them to be able to see just hearing from their peers uh that what it's done to them there was a presentation at sebastian high school this was probably three years ago i was a guy named j.c paul and he came in to do a thing about bullying and he did an assembly and he did it in a way that he so spoke to kids that kids who usually check out could actually hear him and then he did a leadership workshop with them in the in the gymnasium the time and he pulled like certain kids i have no idea what the long-term effects of that were but i know that because of how he spoke he could reach kids in a language they could hear and not all of us are

264really good at that so i encourage us to spend some some time and attention thinking that through i'm also really aware um you mentioned mrs b mrs bass is putting together this presentation i'm i'm or doing i i know she's doing something with it oh that it was the the uh trunk the um i'm not a football person what's that uh tailgate the vaping tailgate thing i know is coming up um but you know again i hear about how stretched thin our resources are and how much is falling on our you know our mental health staff and our social work staff and our psychology staff to do everything from intensive individualized services with kids who really need it to seeing them once to mental health referrals to outside agencies to dealing with vaping to you

265know to to truancy to all of this and i'm concerned and this again is something i'd like to have brought back in future um presentations i am concerned about the degree to which we actually have the staff and the resources to do this i know it's hard to hold on to people in this area and it's hard to attract them but i i really have a concern that we um we don't have simply the human the human power that we need in our schools whether or not it's a good thing that we're getting more mental health referrals the fact is when we double our mental health referrals we're not doubling our staff to deal with those right so if last year we had 300 and something or other or what i don't remember 5 14

266i don't have it in front of me and this year at halfway through the year we see 287 but we're still either at the same staffing level or less than because people are out or because they're on other things i'm concerned that we don't have the resources right to deal with this so i'm hoping when we come back um that you can tell me more about that and how we're situated as those referrals go up if it is a good thing that people are seeking help how are how are we able to meet those needs as more than just a one-off sit-down and particularly dig into the kids who need more intensive services and how we are coordinating those perfect and we look forward to bringing that i think as i said when we began

267as we close this is one of probably a number of conversations because this is a priority for us as staff and you as a board so we'll took a lot of notes and we'll be able to bring that information and keep this conversation at the forefront which is exactly where it should be absolutely okay and then our final item items uh we will turn it over to mr bass who has two items to present to the board that will not come for approval until january 24th good afternoon doubt will have nearly as much conversation about these two items first one i have is the out of field report which is something we have to bring you you guys to get approved each year both in the fall and in the winter october and february we

268will actually be bringing it to you on the 24th right now our out of field report has got 67 teachers on it which is down from the fall which was at 90 teachers and also comparative to last february it was at 90 teachers so we are making progress keeping in mind about 36 of those individuals are solely needing esau which you have a window of time to get that three years so that's the first item i have for you and then the second item i have for you is the salary schedule uh some amendments to the salary schedule we originally approved this back in july there are three items that have been amended the first is the pay schedule for cwa that's the direct result of the negotiations that took place earlier in the year

269the second items on page in six and seven there were mental health specialists social work positions that we bumped up in pay due to not being able to competitively competitively attract individuals in those fields with our neighboring districts also there's a contract procurement uh coordinator position that was placed in there that was something new that i do not believe we have field have we no we have we have not pending that was the job description that mr fagan briefed the board um prior to the break so we put it in there in anticipation and then the last item was the instructional placement salary schedule to make it a little more competitive again for attracting teachers coming into the district those with the years of experience so those are the three changes to the salary schedule

270and those are my two items anyone have a comment just one thing i would like to say one word or i guess it's a term esau it continues to be an issue are we offering enough esau classes yes man i feel like i feel like we're offering enough they're um you know we're seeing a lot of times that i'm not going to say that it's not the urgency to get it but you know i think it's human nature when you're you have a window of time it's not a small window people procrastinate a little bit and you know if you think about it it is very easy for particularly beginning teachers to procrastinate um with something like that simply because they are so overwhelmed because they're in this new demanding profession i think we're offering

271enough stuff and offering support but this is something we just have to continuously work on and i don't want to mislead there's been significant work and i know staff is watching the level of accountability and i think what we observed observed when i when i first arrived were teachers that had been on the list for forever and a day and the numbers not growing because basically you could be out of field and the intentionality of bringing that to the board is to ensure that we don't have instructors out of field for extended amounts of time so there's processes in place through mr meyer's office to ensure that students are being appropriately placed and b principals are being notified and held accountable for the number of staff at their school sites regarding out of field and

272then ensuring that we are we do have the offerings having the offerings and then connecting the those who need to take them because they have been on the list for an extended amount of time is that that ying and yang between accountability and support so that list has drastically reduced where we currently are exceeds our strategic plan target for this particular year even the report that we published on monday even though it doesn't go to the 24th but over the course of just last week i think with six names uh where they complete the coursewar coursework that those names will fall off as well when you see the item that comes to you on the 24th it'll be at least six six less so uh significant work being done aligned to our strategic plan so

273just just proud of that effort and it'll continue to go down okay thank you all right unless any board members have any final comments a couple of things if i may i guess i when i when i went into my box and saw this thumb drive the amount of information on that thumb drive was overwhelming and it just seems to me that i know it was requested by one of us but if we have a request like that i think there's got to be a way to tailor it because i think my i know it put a tremendous amount of work on the back of staff and people to go out and get information i don't know what in the world we need information and emails from september through the end of november 4 on

274between everybody and their uncle but i i think frankly it was it was inconsiderate it should have been tailored in a in a more in a manner that could be dealt with more easily that's just a comment that's my opinion number two as i mentioned the last meeting dr moore and i were invited to speak at the other night at quail valley and we have another one coming up and i would tell you and dr moore was the star of the show as you can imagine um there were roughly 100 people there it was supposed to last an hour and it lasted an hour and 15 minutes and if it hadn't been for the bar was open and dinner was being served it might still be going on and the thing that was most refreshing

275about it there were a couple of things number one the whole q a was focused on educational outcomes there was no questions comments about all the noise the political conversation that we've had to deal with here about crt and equity and you know on and on and on there was also a suggestion and some conversation about is there a way we have a number of 501c3s in the community that focus on children a number of services everything from the homeless to the boys and girls club was there a way to get organized better organized not the school district but the community as a whole so that the strategies of these organizations were better aligned with the school district's strategy and as a result of that suggestion and some conversations i know ms emerson was there

276and as in most things she's willing to take a lead along with wanda lincoln and if you know wanda wand as well first and how to get things done to see if we can't bring the district uh and these various organizations together in a way that would get more benefit more leverage than maybe we're currently getting which is substantial but you just look at there's so many of these organizations and they all do good work but there's there's probably too many of them and some consolidation and better coordination i think would produce better outcomes but i i wanted you to know that it was refreshing to sit down with a group of people who really were interested i mean the number of comments i got over the weekend and actually i got a phone call

277on driving over here today people were amazed at one the challenges that were faced yes progress has been made as dr moore pointed out but it's only relative to other parts of florida the fact of the matter there's probably virtually no student in the state of florida that isn't behind where they would normally have been were it not for the pandemic and the expectation for these kids when they get to college or vocational school or out in the real world they're potentially in for a shock and so i think people recognize that certainly dr moore made that point very clear and it's why a lot of the extra effort put into math or what we talked a little bit dr moore did about pre-k we talk about the literacy challenges and the good work being

278done by the by child care resources the learning alliance and all these there's just so many things that need to be done that ultimately will i guess improve the path for these young people as they progress through elementary school and middle school we've got a lot of work ahead of us but it was meetings like these that i think the community and you're talking about by and large a group of folks that aren't paying a lot of attention public education in indian river county most of them they're they support their schools their children's schools and many cases their grandchildren's schools but it's financial support it's easy to write a check it's not so easy to offer your comments and your support and your advice and your wisdom and your experience and i think the more

279opportunities we have to be out in the community and talk not to the folks that show up here because these folks aren't going to come here but they do vote they do care what's going on they recognize that education is a real challenge in this country it's not just here it's everywhere and i think a couple of them said you you should be very feel very fortunate you have someone like dr moore at the helm so i don't want him to get too puffed up over there but but no i'm not worried about it but at any rate it was very it was a very productive evening we'll i hope we have another one and any opportunities in any of you with the organizations that you're associated with uh and we sort of approach it

280the past the present and the future that was the theme and i talked a little bit about the past what he inherited and then where we are now and then what the hope for for the future is and i thought that it was good and i thought you all should be aware of that and any opportunities that you identify where you can get out and tell the story complimented supplemented by any of you would be well well worth the time spent right thank you any any other since we only meet now one business media month so i wanted to give board members an opportunity to speak if they wanted to at the end of this anybody else dr jones i'd like to thank dr moore and our chair for putting together a workshop that if

281you look at everything there it all somehow related to our students not always directly but indirectly and i was very very pleased with that i did did want to share i wasn't able to go to this um presentation before christmas because it conflicted with another event but it went to storm grove and dr moore was there and dr jacobs and um and bieber was there and it was the um chorus director and he has started a uh if you will an inclusion esc chorus class like we did at sebastian and it was just absolutely wonderful they did a little presentation from their holiday presentation and it was just great seeing the the interaction of the teacher with the students and um how much fun they were having and learning and i don't think we'll ever

282be able to say enough about our graduation rates congratulations to kindergarten through 12th grade i know as a high school principal i'll be going yay but i know it took everybody to get us there and just looking at how we were in the state and and again everybody had the same analysis this year and uh i know we've got work to do but i was very very pleased with that and um i'm just very cognizant of staff work and i appreciate what came into this workshop today because i think we get a lot of work done here where we can discuss it and be ready when we have to vote so i appreciate that thank you dr chef you know i don't think in this whole meeting we actually welcomed our new attorney yeah so

283thank you for being here um thank you for uh this was mostly an observational meeting just the way it turned out but you know don't think they always go this way but glad you're here happy to see you thank you for being here look forward to working with you thank you um right and there was something oh gosh there was something that you just made oh and and what i'm also noticing this is the first time that we've gone to a monday and that after having been here for four hours or more i was here earlier for meetings to not now be going into a potentially three hour or meeting tonight feels like we were able to focus so much better on the information that we had today that i'm kind of looking forward to

284seeing how this goes so yeah i feel like we are like we still have energy we are refreshed we're focused we're not saving the rest of our energy to go through you know the evening or figuring out where we're going to eat so i think i might be liking this new structure so thanks for that okay um it's rosario are you good yeah i just wanted to piggyback on that um i i also wanted to remind everyone that the original consensus was to combine superintendent workshop and impart some of the board discussion items so that we would be here for you know one day just like today and then the superintendent would tackle on a little bit of time after his workshop for any discussion items that we had because we still have a space

285holder in our board meetings for discussion items and essentially on that last monday of the month where we would have our meetings it would just be the meeting and not the discussion session this month i think looks just a little bit different i'm not sure if there is anything i see dr moore's head shaking yes only because it is the first month but moving forward the hope is that we would meet just like today for all discussion and workshop items and then only just the business meeting on that last monday um and if we don't have anything to discuss on the last monday of this month on the 24th i think it is if we don't have anything to discuss or if there's only one or two items if we again put it onto our

286business meeting um that would eliminate coming in during the day on that day dr moore would you like to follow up on that that is um correct so at the end of this month so i as i staffed out work in december november and december because we moved to the possible just having one meeting a month on december the last week in december at our attached outwork so to not over burden the staff and reorganize their work i kept it the same for them this month so as we go into next month we'll follow what was agreed upon at our last ford meeting um and mrs behrenberger myself will work it out push out the information uh in terms of the judges okay and i just like to say and then the last thing i

287just wanted to confirm if dr moore can confirm that it is indeed inaccurate uh correct that the martin luther king parade events have been cancelled here i have not looked at my email for the last four hours but not not that i'm aware of we're looking forward to having that monday but i i i will i will check oh i i heard it was canceled i don't think so okay i got okay you'll give us direction where we meet and everything okay all that we're working on our we're in a good place we're looking forward to it okay thank you for bringing it up because i i thought it was canceled so i appreciate that um i just like to say well so what was the response because it's hard to hear through the chair

288it is it is still on so the day that we came back there was a individual communicated to us that it was canceled that that individual was mistaken so we pushed back out the invites and still should be on everyone's calendar to take place monday and i'll follow up with additional communication okay so we'll hear more then right obviously absolutely okay so welcome ms chaddock we appreciate you being here and um thank you for taking on this task and i'd like to say a thank you to um peggy poiselle for filling in um i know we're looking forward to having miss suspend back i know i am because there's a lot of administration stuff behind the scenes and i appreciate you filling in and doing your work and also you may not know sarah milleman

289has also been filling in for some of that so we appreciate that um cheers curious dr jacobs facilitated our board protocol item and and did all that will we be receiving um something in writing that is the final document or well you can take it through the share we're going to bring that back before the board so as we prep for the upcoming week of the january 24th if your time is appropriate uh to approve that as an item now okay that's why i wanted to find out if we're going to put that on the agenda all right unless anyone has an objection this meeting is adjourned it is 407. you