April 12, 2022, Board of Education Meeting

001thank you oh good evening and welcome i'd like to call to order the cse board meeting for april 12 2022 at 6 31 pm thank you for joining us this evening at this time i'd like to ask everyone to join in a moment of silence and reflection at this time all that are able please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge united states of allegiance for which it stands one nation underground indivisible with liberty and gentry board members are there any revisions to the agenda for this evening um i actually have one revision to the agenda this evening madam chair um i forgot to add to the agenda for discussion item for the board um superintendent search so i make a a recommendation that we add that to the discussion items thank you may

002i have a motion to approve um the um revision to the agenda a move to approve the mission of the agenda thank you may i have a second second thank you all in favor of recruiting proving the agenda for this evening please say aye thank you the agenda for this evening is approved our next agenda item is the approval of the minutes from the regular board meeting on march 8 2022 and the work session minutes from march 22 2022 there were several corrections made to the minutes after the packet was published board members have you had a chance to review those updates and if so may i have a motion to approve the minutes from the previous two board meetings um and if not are there any questions or um update about the updated minutes

003i move we approve the minutes from march 8 2022 and the work session minutes from the march 22nd 2022. may i have a second all in favor of approving the minutes from the march 8 2022 board meeting work session and the minutes from the march 22nd board meeting please say aye aye thank you the minute from the march 8 2022 work session in the march 2012 22 2022 meeting our proof that was a mouthful yeah at this time we will move on in our agenda to the spotlight section this evening we have several spotlight presentations and i will ask dr fermi to please introduce our spotlight presenter okay welcome thank you madam chair um this evening we are going to start with our school spotlight which is claremont elementary i'm going to ask our claremont's

004principal uh dr armour to come up and share the spotlight for claremont welcome dr armor thank you good evening to our superintendent dr fuhrman our board members and all guests in attendance both in person and virtually my name is curtis armour jr and i serve as the proud principal of claremont elementary school our 2022-2023 theme is challenging limits and transcending barriers and i can truly say that our school community has done just that both academically and socially claremont elementary school is an el education credential school e.l education's approach to curriculum promotes both challenge and joy and learning clermont in partnership with el works to empower students staff and families to contribute to a more just and equitable world this year's claremont board spotlight focuses on el core practice 24 engaging families in the community in

005the life of the school we are excited to share how our equity work at claremont encompasses the entire community in creating a school environment that celebrates encourages and affirms our diversity enjoy the classic equity team is an essential component of the school community team members include teachers support staff and administrators but volunteers refer to their desire to identify and boldly address barriers that disproportionately impacts student learning and the school climate the equity team is committed to supporting staff professional development educating students and welcoming parents into this partnership as we strive to create ethical learning environments we collaborate with the black history committee instructional leadership team and administration one of our key initiatives is our equity allowance program the purpose of equity read allows is to respectfully engage students in conversations about various aspects of diversity

006equity and inclusion including race gender ability religion and culture in an effort to promote an understanding and appreciation of all people for who they are representation matters acceptance and understanding of differences in our world start by normalizing the differences exist and that is okay some titles exclusively identify differences and other titles are more implicit in their approach to promoting positive imagery representation and interactions among people of different cultures to take off to our ethnic readables this year began with a free business of the colors of us by karen katz upon reading the code of us students were asked to create self-portraits using the standard crayon selections unfortunately students discovered many of their skin colors were not represented this allowed all students to realize a shared problem thankfully friends of the world were only a teacher's

007death away not only were students able to identify plans to create self-portraits that represented their skin tone but they also advocated for the addition of these plans to the fairness teacher supply list by writing letters to the school principal dr armor wow look at our student activists leading the way for change dei committee along with claremont pta sponsored the town hall titled how to be bridged the opportunity gap between black and white people in the town hall sent my other venture created i know every child enters our elementary school as a potential philosopher doctor scientist environmentalist geologist farmer artists writers this is about the children so the question is how are the children doing we believe that each child is inherently able to learn and have a natural desire for knowledge we believe that each

008child thrives intellectually socially emotionally and immersed in nurturing and respectful learning environments we choose to profoundly elevate our expectations of intellectual potential of children of all races and each child works towards achieving his her higher aspirations my name is ellie latson and i serve as a first grade educator at turbine elementary martial career month was first from the event that i created as a first year teacher back in 2016. while teaching my students about the historic march on washington citizen i had a [Music] [Applause] it was important to give my students power and a moment in which they felt powerless for the first time in their lifetime many of my students were seeing the true ills of racism and white supremacy in our world there were many moments when my students will address their fears

009about police brutality unfair immigration laws and even their impression of what our new president would mean for the future of black and brown from this i knew i had to do something march on with that something this is that looks fueled by the necessity begins our use of platform brotherhood should be heard this year for march on the claremont we not only invited families to tear up on that launch but prior to the event welcome them to have a meaningful conversation with their child to find out what issues their most fascinating marks for families were able to work together on the program for the quote that they would curious that's in the home to our classroom assessments led by the guiding questions what are you marching for not only strengthen our collaborative efforts to degrees

010but enlightenment student of the diverse cultures values and concerns of the peers around them students are able to connect each issue like a new colorful puzzle that illustrates the complexity of what social justice truly is the finished product of marketing clear month is not simply hallways filled with statement posters that highlight our progressiveness but says the commitment of these students that exercise advocacy inclusion and an urgency to disrupt equitable systems by simply using their voices claremont heart of study for black history month since alabama artist anything i chosen because she did not go to offensive art school but was a woman who worked as the chief for the northwestern program watching two art classes at night any reason wonderful artists that children can relate to and see themselves in her artwork anybody knows where the

011visions is african-american everyday life as seen in the picture three on one showing a young girl surrounded by women getting her hair free english is also known for leaving off the faces of people in her hard work as a way to engage with viewers i've interviewed them somehow the scenes of her work students created their own annually styled best portraits leaving off social features sherman has been surrounded by the things that love just like the annie lee painting's passion showing a woman showing off her precious shoes collection hey claremont we strive to engage families and the community in the life of this school we know that embracing our diversity can help us all to grow and to learn during hispanic heritage month we celebrate learning about hispanic american leaders during our morning enough second grade

012students also made slides of different spanish-speaking countries and shared facts about each place some students actually had ties with the countries that they made like for example their heritage we had a couple of students from mexico who wanted to share some of their heritage and some of their traditions from their family we reached out to clermont families and asked for students to submit videos and share facts about their culture and their heritage so that we could learn from each other it's important that students are exposed to different traditions and we want them to think globally about how they are all connected to our world my name is monica nelson music teacher at fairmont elementary and for native american heritage month our students learn the cherokee water song the song is near here to our hearts

013we were given permission to actually perform this piece as a celebration of water and all that it brings as i taught the students i made sure they understood the importance of water how it cleanses how it brings new life how it nourishes the earth um in addition to learning the song we also read the book we are water protectors written by carol lindstrom and we learned about how to protect our water how to cherish our water how to respect our water and how this is a tradition that has been going on long before us but it's something that we need to continue i believe the students were really impacted by this song and it's a song that will hopefully be embedded within this for years to come thank you dr armor thank you okay our

014next uh speaker tonight our next spotlight will be and is a teacher at renfrew middle school and she will be sharing a project that they recently did in her language arts class the community in action research project where students selected a topic of concern that impacts them and their community students then crafted presentations to educate rms students and shares share ways the students could get more involved in these issues finally members of the decatur community came and viewed the student presentations and gave wonderful feedback on the students so ms reed [Music] good evening i'm vanessa reed i'm a 6th grade ela teacher at renfrew middle school thank you to dr furman and the board of education for having us here this evening a few months ago sixth grade went from middle school ela students took

015on an assignment called the community action research project the idea was to marry persuasive speech and our district's mission to make the world a better place students were asked to find a challenge at school or in the dictator community and not only teach us about the problem but also propose solutions students pursue their topics passionately their concerns range from garbage in the streets to cyber bullying to yes even the infamously brightly colored planters that line out the avenues then students presented their ideas not only to the renfrew community but also to the larger community of rms administrators community leaders and wilson center staff finally they received valuable feedback from our guests the projects were outstanding our students compassion concern and caring were humbling the adult audience members were left with the reassurance the next generation

016already has things well students uh tonight i present to you one of those exceptional projects the students julia robinson and sylvie sherman created not just a website but a call excuse me felt about kids and gender identity tonight these students offer up not just he her and hopes to educate our community's leadership about the issues that many students face and ask that we keep these children in mind when making secure decisions thank you hi i'm julia robinson and i'm filming cameron and we are the creators of notre dame we are sixth grade silver team students at ringfield middle school and this is our project why do we do this we got this idea from one of our founders slogan sherman sylvie was randomly misgendered as being female when she is with what she is so

017she easily could have identified as non-gender conforming and doesn't present herself as very feminine this gave her the idea of this cause sylvia has always believed in equal rights and respecting others identities and now it's just time to take action we are one of our founders julia robinson preferred to pronounce she her julia has always felt strongly about equal rights this is not her first time speaking up for what she believes in she's participated in black lives matter protests and enjoys speaking out for what she thinks is right julia enjoys singing drawing acting dancing and playing volleyball for eight our other founder sylvie sherman preferred to pronounce her silly also participates in a lot of equal rights protests like black lives matter and women's rights she enjoys ultimate frisbee ballet and writing tangibly slash horror

018stories slogan julia met in sixth grade and instantly clicked leading to a beautiful friendship and the creation of our website not to her our first interview is from our friend alex sylvie we'll be reading for herself and i was ready to craft what gender are you labeled as and what do you identify as people perceiving us females that are gendered and how many times have you been misgendered at your middle school definitely over 20 times have you ever experienced gender dysphoria death times 1 million and have you ever witnessed friendly with gender yes many times including my friends with gender and you all the time what's one thing you would do gender-neutral vessels gender dysphoria is when someone is feeling uncomfortable and dissatisfied in their assigned gender and maybe their actual gender agency which can

019lead to a lot of anxious and sad feelings next is a response from our own middle school's 6th grade counselor megan hudson our question julia and i sylvie are working on a website about generations and we're wondering if students have ever come to you if they've been misgendered or have had problems with their peers or teachers misgendering them or even if they have had concerns with other people's genders or also if they disapprove of the victims being separated and other issues regarding gender segregated things like certain activities to boys and suffer from please let us know if this had happened and what advice you have given that day so correspond yes students have come to me and continue to do so regarding gender issues many are exploring their gender identities and often want to be

020called by different names and pronouns i've also had a handful of students who are who feel as though they've been this gendered by tears and teachers and that that definitely causes them strength stress and have come up and our general rule at read from middle school is that students who are uncomfortable going to the rest of their assigned gender at first due to issues with identity etc are able to use our adult youth sex bathrooms in the building as long as they're in communication with us first so that we can have a conversation with them offer support and let other adults in the building know in case they're ever seen going to this bathroom i'm not sure i have any general advice for students in this category but i do have a couple messages from

021you which is you belong here we see you and support you i let this student take the weed on identifying their needs and advocate for them and help when and wherever i can to make sure they feel safe at risk for the school our purpose our goal is to make students and people of other genders than female and male feel comfortable in their school environment and community we don't want students to feel alone because of their parents and teachers discouraging their identity and enjoy what's important and comfortable for them what we have done and what we will do we have interviewed many people who deal with these problems as well as help people to deal with these problems we've searched for and brought resources for not only students but also just for people who may

022not be in school cnu a few of our solutions to the problem is generally gender separation is to one provide gender mutual restrooms to all educator schools two have teachers always ask for students prefer to pronounce the names and lastly three create school-wide curriculum with pe so you won't have to be separated by gender friendship students can also visit the student success center in room 125 but they must remember to fill out a council council or referral form because they can get very busy transgender and children who don't identify with the gender they are assigned at birth amongst the highest rates of suicide depression and self-harm race but we can do something about it what you can do is really easy takes a short time to simply ask somebody their pronouns which might make them

023feel more comfortable about their identity know that people can and are respecting two actually acknowledge their pronouns and use them that way they can feel more safe and seen and last don't assume my gender one thing that i like to do is i will call them by their name until i know their preferred pronouns those are just a few of the ways that you can make them feel more comfortable we suggest looking at the gender cool project the genderqueer project is a run project run by kids 14 and is a way for adults and kids to explore pronouns and is a great source for kids who are different gender than the one they were assigned here are a few common examples of genders assigned male and female not a dynamic this is a non-binary flag

024non-binary means that though you were born female slash male you feel as though these don't correctly fit you and as a person and use they them than them etc cinder fluid this is the gender fluid class being gender fluid means that more than one generation on different days you might be feeling more masculine and on others you might feel more hey gender this is the agenda flag that commonly means that you don't identify having a gender or you are gender-neutral next is bygenesis this is the biceps bigender is when you have multiple personas that can include a female persona a male persona intersex intersex means you are born with the physical traits of both males and females and lastly transgender this is the transgender flag having the wide meaning of you don't identify as a

025sexy or signed up first thank you for your time do you have any questions i don't have any questions but just thank you for a phenomenal presentation i'm i'm taking a gender and education class right now and you all could easily teach my class and i cannot wait to share what you all have shared with this community with my professor so thank you [Applause] i also wanted to share that um you know our mission in city of school with decatur is to our students to make the world a better place and we can see that our teachers actively involve our students in passion projects and social justice work so that we can actually make the world a better place so thank you vivian and thank you students that was excellent making the three our next

026presentation is a presentation from a student max v lindergrin is max here come on up max max is going to present a summary of his project that he presented for the regeneron science project um honored to be here and i'd like to present like a free summary of my research and i guess what it took to get here and like how gore can help others it's here in the future so my name is maxi lindgren i'm a senior at decatur high school and i was selected as a finalist in their general science talent search um where i competed with like a bunch of other talented students and presented my research so essentially in a classical system like the sharpie that i pulled up i can hold this sharpie up at any height i want and

027it has an energy that's just directly proportional to that type so this is nice a lot of it says it kind of makes sense here and but what i worked on was a quantum system so if i have a set of stairs and now the sharpie can only be on one of these stairs so this leads to discrete heights which lead to discrete energy levels and the tricky thing is these energy levels get really really difficult to calculate as systems get like bigger essentially so with like realistic systems that we'd actually see it's basically impossible to calculate these energy levels at least with classical means uh and these energy levels are like really pretty useful to know um because they determine like what color the light that we see is and a bunch of other

028like really really useful things so recently quantum computing algorithms have been developed that can much more efficiently calculate these energies so here there's a sharpie on every level essentially what this means is there's a each one of these levels is a possible energy state so what one of the algorithms and the algorithm that i did is essentially it puts a box somewhere on the stairs and then it shapes the series after that it measures okay is there an energy still left on these stairs and because we know the height of the box we know where the energy is so what i did i took that algorithm i modified it so that cover up two energy states instead of just one so instead of there being just one energy left there were fuel energy funds and

029this isn't very useful for actually finding like where the energies are but what it does allow us to do is figure out okay there's what's the probability that this energy on two moves up to three or four in the states or vice versa and these uh these like transitions are very important because they actually control like the rate at which uh a photon or like a beam of light is produced uh instead of like the color so for nuclear physicists these are really important um as well as for like designing more efficient solar handles and leds that's what i did this is kind of a very simplified way so other question is like how did i get here what can i do to actually like build up to this so the short answer is dual

030enrollment uh the long answer is a lot of dual enrollment that i maybe didn't have to do so when i went into uh high school i knew that like i wanted to do physics i really wanted to know like why things happened and how things work at a very fundamental level so pursuing for me pursuing like quantum mechanics was like the best way to learn that however to do that i needed first like a decent phase in like normal physics so what that meant was taking a calculus big physics class as fast as possible so hater high does not offer a calculus basis there's a heidi physics which is advanced physics but it's there is no like calculus in there um so my next goal was okay how can i take calculus as fast as

031possible um and that's where the dual enrollment comes in i did want to take free calculus at the caterer high i had to pre-reference this but peter high was relatively flexible so like they didn't want me to move off of my map track so i went to college essentially and i took pre-calculus um and then calculus um through georgia's dual moments okay and also i was able to take a physics course like a characteristic um which i probably would have ended up doing anyway so as a consequence of this i was like kind of introduced to dual enrollment and i was able to like fully pursue this like through dual enrollment so i took like several high-level physics courses through goal enrollment and this ultimately led up to me being accepted to the research science

032institute in the summer of my uh between junior and senior year this is where um i met my mentor and like we came up with this project and i like started my research um i without uh without dual enrollment and i guess without the kind of physics background that i had built up that i would not have been accepted so phil roman was obviously pretty important to me so it was really quite sad when uh the georgia um state like that and legislature um like drastically limited goal enrollment so now freshmen cannot take the enrollment this would have made my freshman year very different and a lot more difficult um and it also uh would have meant that i couldn't have like actually gotten anywhere near the amount of like civics courses that i had

033so and now the question is like what can dhs do to kind of make up for this uh in my opinion the short answer is like letting students take the courses that they want um that they're capable of taking um i know it's like a pretty big administrative change but um i i took three calculus in my freshman year through dual enrollment uh if i had the option to take it through uh decatur highs like i took the decatur high pre-calculus course next year and it was it was a good free calculus course i feel like i've learned a lot i covered a lot of the holes that the um the overall meant for calculus course even though it's like fancier and it's a college course um in my opinion that the teachers at decatur

034high are very good and the courses are very good um in general so like if if i could have taken them i would have taken them uh i guess that is that is the main thing i i feel like i i would have loved to be more of a part of decatur high school um i really enjoyed decatur amazing the students there are also amazing and i feel like there are students at decatur high school currently who like could have achieved a uh like similar thing to what i have done but these either they didn't know about the dual enrollment opportunities which they were like pretty kind of in the lease and not advertised too much um or they just didn't have the motivation or um potentially uh they were dictator high made it seem

035like it wasn't an option so i i just wish that like more students could replicate what i have done and more students um like future students can like actually do what i've done and have a similar level like that i think max thank you so much i'm so glad you brought that and hol i think one of our board members maybe have some questions for you but thank you for bringing the visual because that really helped me understand your project so brilliant well done congratulations yeah i'm also open to answers okay i was gonna ask if there's any reason why it's limited to two boxes full boxes can you scale that so you can technically um so i guess you can technically find a rate of transition um if there are any number of states

036left in the system but you end up needing to go or to get a really precise uh basically you need really precise measurements um after you isolate the system um which are not exactly feasible with current quantum computers and it also um it gets essentially the number of transitions will go grow um really quickly with the number of states present because it's like they need to be used in the other states at least in theory and this makes it kind of difficult to do the calculations to actually isolate it in addition to um the results getting really noisy um but there's like noise in a way that you can isolate the transitions with difficulty the other issue is um the way the algorithm works it can only uh it can only get like whole number

037multiples of energy difference so if you have some really weird system that ended up having like five states that were all like this distance away from each other then you could isolate all of them and maybe find all the transitions there but those um those systems are like very rare in nature so it can it's hard to isolate um like kind of an arbitrary selection of states uh specifically um and then also it gets really difficult to um actually calculate like the transition rates between them so i just want to point out um we went through the classes that you took and the things that you did before you came to this research project i i tutor been taught calculus-based spectacular space physics at georgia tech and i cannot you know [Laughter] there was a

038substantial amount more learning past classes that you took that you had to do to be able to do this so that's pretty fantastic yeah can we read your paper um there so i can i can send it uh dr ferment and there will also be um a pair of papers that i'm publishing on that will have like similar information so kind of the first one is like building the systems that i use and then the second one is actually like doing this algorithm thank you great job [Applause] all right at this time we will move on to public accommodation dr fuhrman do we have any members of the public signed up we do actually we have let me count one two three with ten people signed up to speak this evening okay and so we

039like to share this at every meeting and it's a little wordy but it's important so please bear with me the following information is included in the board policy manual and members of the public also acknowledge this information when they sign up to speak this serves as a reminder for all speakers and members of the audience the opportunity to address the board doing public comment is limited to district parents students residents employees businesses and organizations persons wishing to address the board during public comment must sign in before the public comment period begins and in doing so will be asked to state their connection to csd and or the city of decatur to allow time for the board's other business public comment will ordinarily be limited to one hour or 20 speakers at the board's discretion the

040comment period may be extended for a specific amount of a specified amount of time or a specif specific number of additional speakers the time limit for all speakers will be three minutes a person speaking during public comment will not be permitted to yield the floor or transfer unused time to other speakers comments during public comment should be addressed to the board as a body and not to individual members at the chair's discretion persons violating this policy may be asked to step down speakers should be courteous and professional speakers are not to list complaints about specific personnel or individuals connected with the district in a public session the board will not allow abusive language threats comments jeers applause or shouts from the floor disruptive persons will be asked to leave the meeting room the chair may

041terminate public comments that are profane vulgar defamatory or disruptive speakers may not address the confidential the confidential student or personnel matters but may submit such concerns to the superintendent in writing members of the public will not address persons presenting public comment or speak to the substance of any comments made during public comment however a member of the administrative team will follow up with persons speaking at the board meeting dr fuhrman would you please call our first speaker and care yes our first speaker is laura bolman well i just want to address our students and principals from equity to identity to energy what happens indicator matters and it clearly matters most to our young people so thank you so much for coming tonight and sharing with us good evening hi my name is laura bulman i'm

042on to hamish and margot but tonight my goal is to name not blame or shame but to raise awareness around the national shift in early literacy and reading instruction from balanced literacy to structured literacy reading is not biologically biological it must be explicitly and systematically taught research tells us that 95 of children can learn to read with structured literacy our data does not reflect us our practices indicator are not fully aligned to the subtle body of research that is referred to as science of reading or structured literacy without the right practices we will not achieve excellent and equitable outcomes 18 states have already passed signs of reading legislation and georgia just announced a state congressional committee let's not get too far behind we are making some significant investments in foundations phonics and letters and then

043undermining our own efforts with strategies like those sent home to my house through arc use the first letter use the picture here's the levels reader it is within your role and responsibility as a governing board to ensure that public dollars are wisely spent so that every child in every classroom learns to read contradictory practices are wasting public dollars hindering our teachers ability to implement the science fully straining our special education and intervention teams with struggling readers across the grade levels and ultimately leaving children below proficiency the key questions that i would be asking if i were in your shoes tonight charged with serving the 5 children in our school why are we investing in contradictory instructional practices why are we falling behind marietta city schools gwinnett the cow fulton that are moving to adopt the

044science of reading fully are we delivering evidence-based reading instructions to all children with equitable outcomes across all demographic groups how are we responding to covet learning laws with research and science as we did with public health mitigation how many more families have to leave csd because of reading struggles each child is certainly invaluable but they also cost five thousand dollars lost in state funding every child every year simply put are we following the science i will conclude by stating the obvious guessing strategies like that are not reading when we know better we must do better thank you our next speaker is elizabeth hogan hi good evening my name is elizabeth hogan i'm a parent of two csd students a seventh grader and a fourth grader at faith i'm also a former csg teacher i began

045at claremont elementary in 2005 and moved to glenwood elementary in 2011 when we reopened it at the k-3 i was an early intervention teacher at glenwood i left csd after the 2015-16 school year to begin working for reading is essential for all people i'm wrapping up my fifth year as a teacher trainer of structured literacy and of the orton gillingham private tutor i currently tutor six csc students and have tutored over 22 csd students in the last four years i'm one of many local og2 here live miles long of csc tonight i want to give a brief history of reading instruction in csd over the last 15 years and highlight the positive steps the district has taken in regard to reading instruction and the next steps that the district has to take in order to

046teach all of our students to read research shows that by following the science behind how our brains learn to read we can teach 95 percent of students to read proficiently when i came to decatur in 2005 with a bachelor's degree in elementary education and a master's degree in early childhood education and five years prior teaching experience i didn't yet realize i had no clue how to actually teach a child to read this is a major downfall in teacher press programs decatur was using lucy hawkins reading workshop lucy dawkins is a pillar of the balanced literacy camp balanced literacy is rooted in surrounding kids with books of their own choosing spending up to an hour of independent reading time from book boxes and whole group teacher-led mini-lessons on how to use meaning syntax and visual clues

047to figure out a word you can read this is known as the three queuing system the system has been disproven in hundreds of research studies over the last 25 years the three queuing system effectively teaches students to guess at words instead of decoding them at some point decatur moved to a new popular advanced literacy curriculum fountains and pinell the same structure as hawkins but with smp obtained pretty sets of leveled readers in the same three queueing systems no phonics or phonemic awareness curriculum in sight we watch students continue to fail over and over again at glenwood elementary and my co-teacher and i went to the atlanta speech school and were trained in wilson foundation we brought it back to decatur in 2014 and we were really happy in 2016 when decatur adopted foundation this was

048a great step forward in 2018 decatur and def partnered to train k2 teachers in structured literacy through reef i was lucky to be able to train two of those cohorts and this training was a game changer for teachers in the district many of those trained teachers are effectively teaching structured literacy now they're buying the codable text for their own money and they continue to email me and other trainers with questions they were happy when ccsd finally dunked down the symphony but they've been disappointed that although american reading company states on its website that it doesn't use the three queueing system outlined in the teacher's manual look at the picture say the first letter say blank and continue reading this is memorizing pattern and using pictures to figure out words it's straight up through queueing arc

049also utilizes long periods of silence sustained reading another disproven balanced literacy tenant we have to do better as a district we have to have those educated in the science of reading making curriculum choices we have to use research-based practice to ensure that all csu students learn to read thank you thank you our next speaker is kate ready thank you good evening dr fuhrman and members of the board first let me express my gratitude for the substantial contribution of your time as board members strengthening our community at one of its most fundamental building blocks education my name is kate ready i wear many hats as we all do the ones i'm wearing tonight are as a mother of a third grade child with dyslexia and as a public health professional working at the national level on

050equity oriented systems change i came tonight to briefly share our story and to highlight some of the encouraging work and leadership in the district around dyslexia and strengthening reading skills for all of our children last spring my husband and i made the difficult decision as strong public school and cfc advocates to withdraw our son from city schools of decatur and enroll him in a private school 40 minutes away which can provide an intensive remediation approach through the phonics-based structured literacy he needs we are hoping he will return to public school after a couple of years he is already reading at grade level after just a half year at the appropriate amount of support after speaking with 45 people last spring leaders in csd at the school and district level parents of children with dyslexia reading

051experts and representatives of seven different private schools i learned many things one of which is that this is a complex systems challenge teachers are not taught the science of reading in the majority of education programs in colleges and universities and therefore have to rely upon seeking additional training after they are busy with teaching and their personal lives to understand how to teach all children to be strong readers and especially how to teach one out of five children in their classrooms who have dyslexia over the past year i've reached out to our principal at glenwood elementary dr holly brookins to see if i can help decatur become the model school district for all children that i know it can be dr brookins and dr christy beam district lead for curriculum have both been extremely receptive to

052my offers to organize parents in support of the district's evolving literacy efforts they have also each shown leadership and their understanding of the need for all teachers not just those in the special education department to be trained in this structured sonic space approach dr brookins and dr beam have each sought out grants to fund training for many teachers to learn the science of reading dr brookins has become a champion for literacy within our school and the district and i am very much encouraged by these preliminary efforts in order to truly be the model school district i know decatur can be we will need more than this patchwork training approach we will need a truly systematic plan with a corresponding strategic and evaluation plan i believe we can get there in the near future and provide

053all of our children with the one of the most fundamental building blocks they will ever establish in life the ability to confidently read thank you thank you our next speaker is emily beard they sent the theme here it's great to see all of you thank you for the time i appreciate your personal contributions as board members and all that you do for um so this is a very personal story my son miguel is dyslexic we tried multiple times to get him support here in decatur um starting at college high school when he was two again when he was four and then again as a claremont kindergartner um he was denied his five of four multiple times despite multiple disabilities and so we've been told um just you know whispers and um boldface that decatur kids

054really have to fail in order to qualify for special education um so we hired a tutor um one of these og tutors we've waited on a waitlist for a long time and i started to learn about structured literacy and i was confused when i started to learn and then see how we were implementing things like razz kids for example and the guessing and trying to get our kids to queue um that those were part of the curriculum in kindergarten the worst part though i think about being a parent and a struggling reader is the confidence piece and this is where the tough oncology nurse that sees heartaches day in and day out had to pull it together every day but mikey would put himself down on the table and say i must be the stupidest

055kid in my class because he was being asked to do things that were not appropriate for his reading comprehension level this was not structured literacy i'm pleased to say now that we have moved on to the skank school that mcgill is there he was one of 15 kids from csb that was in csu's attendance good zone attending skank this year they're 13. add to that numbers attending speech swift tower stage and other schools we are sending busloads of children outside of this district to get the support that they could be and should be getting in our district dozens of kids are being pulled out of these neighborhood schools and driven all over atlanta to attend these costly private schools and because we do need to talk about equity i want to think about the kids

056that are not having that opportunity the kids indicator that are never going to access balanced error i'm sorry structured literacy support because they don't have the opportunity to be identified or the opportunity to attend schools like my kid does i'm told that there are more than 75 people in our school here in decatur high school that should be a call to action for every single one of us in this room so we have 75 kids in our high school who cannot read on a functional level so it's budget season and i know that you all can do the math but i just want to highlight the impact of all of these kids that are leaving the district so our family um is just one of at least 30 by my account i certainly don't know

057i know a lot of people in the cater but i count thirty three kids that are siblings but if we say let's say five thousand per kid for um 30 kids that's 150 000 a year if those kids as many of them do leave in fifth grade and don't come back that's over a million dollars so um anyway in closing i would just like to know i think most of y'all know me as a friend and as a neighbor i'm a cheerleader for this town i love these schools i love our teachers i love our administrators um and i'm just really sad that we're at a point where families like ours with you know slp leaders and pto presidents and girl scout leaders the boy scout leaders are leading um and that we are um

058you know doing so because we feel that this school system is not meeting our kids where they need to be so i'm designed unfortunately that our family will be the next one that's gonna be packed up and moved we've decided that that's our best option to educate our kids to get out of 303 home and go somewhere we can afford less taxes and afford to send our kids to schools that will support their needs in terms of reading in particular but i'm an optimist and i love this town and i believe in each of you and i believe that we can do better and i believe that with the team that we've put together and some of the information that we've provided that we can do better for our kids so i thank you for

059your time as our discounter thank you thank you our next speaker is megan swingley um hello thank you for having us i'm megan swingle i'm a parent of two students in csb and one student at the skank school i'm also a parent volunteer and the communications chair for decoding dyslexia georgia a statewide grassroots organization led by parents where we empower families and inform policy makers on best practices to identify remediate and support the one in five students who have dyslexia reading is the doorway to education and it's shocking and extremely disappointing to me that csc continues to invest in balanced literacy in 2022 when decades of cognitive science research show us that a structured literacy approach is the most effective way for all children to learn to read not just those with dyslexia but all

060students i have a copy of nancy young's ladder of reading and writing that i will share with you all after this presentation so you can take it with you it is an excellent visualization of whose structured literacy supports while some students will learn to read regardless of our actions for the vast majority structured literacy and the explicit sequential teaching it provides is essential to success in fact research shows that even strong readers are helped by a structured literacy approach and certainly not harmed i want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to the decatur teachers who take time away from their own families to spend their nights weekends and precious summer days training in structured literacy practices like orton gillingham and letters the balanced literacy curriculum and materials csc continues to invest

061in are at odds with everything our teachers are learning in their structured literacy training and hinder their abilities to implement what they're learning in their classrooms the stories you've heard tonight including from emily are but a fraction of the number of families who have outright left csv or who have supplemented their child's csv education with costly private tutoring csd seems far too comfortable denying special education services for the purported reason not yet failing is not far enough behind to qualify while knowing full well that these families are making sure their child doesn't fall behind by paying for private tutoring outside of school hiring private tutors paying for costly psycho-ed testing even hiring advocates to help ensure a child's right federal rights to a fair and appropriate public education is a privilege that not all families

062can afford i hear a lot of talk about equity in our schools but take a deeper look at our milestones numbers and i know you all are well aware of the achievement gap crisis that is anything but equitable only 14 of students who are economically disadvantaged are reading proficiently and for our black student population who are statistically more likely to be under diagnosed for learning differences only 33 percent are reading proficiently and above there is nothing equitable about a culture of learning in which families who have the means can supplement public education with private tutoring while students whose families can't afford it fall further and further behind it's far past time for csc to fully embrace the science of reading train all k through five ela teachers in structured literacy practices and eliminate the failed

063balance literacy programs that are exacerbating this achievement gap crisis we are facing thank you so much thank you and i do have coffee something for you there's a whole thing about structured literacy on the back too that you can deploy it later thank you thank you thanks so much our next speaker is maddox thank you dr fuhrman on the board for the chance to speak i'm maddox thomas i'm a member of decatur high school's varsity debate team and i wanted to speak quickly some of our achievements this year we've remarkably won outright two tournaments uh demons and stanford uh i'm expecting place in the state of georgia congressional and policy debate as well as at the stanford debate tournament and have one of the strongest pools of middle school debaters as well as high school

064debaters that we've had in decades probably i i think that a large part of this is due to the amazing group of visas we have here we have the entire varsity debate team at this board meeting today which includes two juniors as well as our four graduating seniors this year and the amount of dedication has been incredible as well as the support from our coach but unfortunately in order for us to capitalize on this momentum actually build a stable and continuing program within dhs and rms we really need more institutional support and that's why i'm here today uh there is an approved course and i believe you all received a letter i don't know if you've had the chance to read it yet there's an approved course in the georgia state curriculum it would be

065a fantastic opportunity for decatur high school to in-state this course as part of his curriculum possibly to hire teachers that could teach both at renfrow and the high school or combined series of classes we can also use the support we've been able because of the pandemic to travel outside of the state to turn into california michigan but as virtual debate winds down hopefully we'll be able to travel in person again but we need some work to redesignate the debate team as an actual academic team rather than the club and get the support we need to be able to travel more easily out of the state because the current bureaucracy needs to do that within the csc it makes it functionally impossible for us to do so we're traveling maybe twice a month outside of the

066state to tournaments to represent decatur on national scale and it's very difficult to do that but we would love to be able to continue that i want to be able to bring more people into the national travel partner debate team because before i started in freshman year we didn't have any representatives on the georgia circuit or on the national circuit now we have this chance and we have about 40 people showed up to our end of year program from middle school and i believe if we take this chance to really in state debate within the curriculum to provide a better stipend for debate currently we have vivian dawson and beth mcmahon who are excellent coaches and teachers in the district but who will eventually retire and in order to attract new talent and people who

067are willing to spend the countless hours every week coaching debate running through the paperwork we're going to need to put a competitive stipend for doing that work forward which we just currently don't have support for thank you thank you thank you our next speaker is lisa johnson hello hello my name is lisa johnson and i'm an 18-year resident of city of decatur i'm a sixth grade teacher at renton ford middle school and i have a student that attends csd um i would like to discuss the equity and grading task force recommendations that are going to be presented later this evening many teachers at restroom wanted to participate in the task force and apply there was a minimal minimal number of spots for each csd school which makes sense um for example there were only four

068spots for run from middle school faculty out of the 16. many staff members wanted to participate and have years of experience teaching in an iv school and within the csd system and feel that their perspective was not adequately adequately reflected in the survey results i realized that the task force worked very hard they dedicated their personal time and conducted a lot of research from september to april and i am not trying to minimize their work but many of my colleagues feel that this process may be moving too quickly and not as transparently as it should for this proposed massive undertaking many retro are asking why a change is even needed i believe that the ib grading system we are currently using is very equitable for the middle and high school students secondary education and requires

069a more nuanced grading system teachers use the georgia standard when creating each and every unit of assessment the id assessments and the grading processes not only allow teachers to incorporate the georgia standards but also allow students to see growth on each assessment the one through eight grading system works for middle and high school academic levels and the continuity helps to transition from middle school to high school also having a more nuanced range of one through eight versus a one through four allows for more specific feedback that can lead to growth and allows for more student success for example an ivy rubric band of five 6 shows mastery but also allows for a more personalized assessment lastly there has been talk that a new grading system could be implemented for the next school year which would

070be a massive undertaking and is causing great stress for the teachers teachers are very overwhelmed right now and if a new system is put in place for fall 2022 and we'd i'm not saying that it is but we're hearing these things when are we as teachers able to create the new rubrics when will we need to change our unit structures if the board decides that changes are necessary for csd grading policies i believe that the information gathered this year should be fully analyzed and discussed by the board and rolled out in a thoughtful and meaningful way next school year possibly school and content meetings in the fall of next year and then how to implement them in the spring of next year so that if that is the decision that all faculty students and families

071can be prepared for the 23-24 school year thank you our next speaker is ayanna robinson good evening good evening members of the school board thank you so much for your time and this opportunity my name is ayanna robinson and i'm the mother of the fabulous sixth grader through julia robinson and also of an 11th grader and i'm also the chair of the renfrow slt and i too am coming um like the person who spoke before me to address the equity of grading task force that's in place um and we realized i realized that there'll be remarks about what's actually happening but just want to put some things out there for consideration realizing that you are technically not required to respond but just again um as an important stakeholder in the conversation that's happening i want

072to make sure that parents are also a part of this process i did learn about the equity and grading task force during the course of an slt session with renfro and um began my own kind of period of self-discovery to learn more about what it is what the impacts will be talk to teachers um and just did my best to learn and understand more and as i'm sure that you're hearing there's a lot of concern about the peace and scale with which we're moving but also concerns my parents who feel as though we've been kind of the left out stakeholder in the process and so i would love to give um just the opportunity to make requests that as this process is continuing on that there'll be consideration as to how to include parents who

073will also have to be honest very different opinions than my you know high school or middle school student will have i ask that um that we also get a clear understanding of what are the core issues that we're really trying to fix with these changes and have we thought about the impact of what some of these shifts will need for students who are part of the ib program at some colleges do require effort grades at a certain level in order to accept id credits as part of their college you know package also um you know many of us chose to move to the city of decatur because of the ib program and so really want to make sure that we're not losing any fidelity with any of the ships that will we will make we

074choose to pay the high taxes and to live in three zero zero three zeros for that very reason we also talk about our ability and as there really are distinct differences between k through five what's needed in middle school and what we need for our high school students i also would like to question a little bit around the the timing of something like this we are making large decisions in the school district even looking at a new superintendent um search and so feel like the types of decisions that will be made of the skill and magnitude if we are moving in that direction should also be taken into consideration with looking at who will also lead us through this effort i will also say in conclusion that um just as more information is made available

075please put in the newsletter i'm one of those avid readers of the weekly newsletter that comes out and so we will be watching this but this is something that's very important to not just the students and to the teachers but also to the parents who are actively engaged in the education of our children so thank you very much for your time thank you our next speaker is keon zindanya i am uh good evening uh thank you for your time for offering me a chance to speak uh i'm kian sonorandi i'm a 12th grade student in the boston debate team for decatur high school and i was also going to talk a bit about the benefits the debate can bring to students and the ways you can help them both achieve what the school um would

076like them to achieve as an iv school to become global citizens and the ways that can prepare us for our future within college and within um the broader world so i've seen a debate in seventh grade uh halfway through and moved to first the atlanta debate league in middle school and into the state and national circuits throughout high school throughout these last four years of high school and some of the things that are necessary from a support perspective are necessary to achieve the benefits debate can give currently um and before i joined the debate team the debating within renfrew and this indicator was focused on the atlantic debate league and while this has some benefits there are some skills that are not accessible through this that would be accessible should the school board give increased

077support for national and state level tournaments addition to a lot of research skills where these national and state circuit tournaments allow increased outside research in bringing in outside augmentation which isn't really available and these digital skills have improved me in the way that one i work with school assignments uh research assignments research projects i'm able to find the data i need and uh put the put that data together in a way that i otherwise wouldn't be able to and through becoming a global citizen i have to go to research um critical events in the world whether that be in any part of the world and understand those things but i can use them in a debate and understand how they'll be used by other debaters in a debate um these support supports from the school

078would make that more available by allowing us to go to these national and state tournaments and additionally those um those larger level those higher level tournaments will allow decatur students to represent together both outside of the state with teams from all 50 states and even from outside the country in some cases um i believe there's a team from taiwan for example the debates on the national circus and intermingle with ideas from other areas of the world these ideas would be critical to become the global citizens that the character wants us to be as they allow us to understand what other what others within the world think and believe additionally debate office will offer portable skills that are available especially at the national and state tournament uh national state circuit deployments where there's increased level of

079level of debate increased amount of arguments being made and being able to critically think and manage these skills which are necessary to understand uh what is true what isn't true how different facts about the world interact with each other these skills are critical to becoming global citizens and are available as national and state circuit tournaments which this which this school indicator as of now have not given much support to and should give more support too so um i'd like to finish off with if you all as an iv school district want to create global citizens it's critical that you support the debate team to be able to go to these high-level tournaments and be able to learn and be able to create students who can get these research skills and affordable skills thank you thank

080you and our last speaker for this evening is pam b lindergren dr berman and members of the board thank you for the chance to speak my name is pam b linderin and i'm here in my capacity as a parent of my ex a former slp member at save a private mass tutor and the decatur citizen to speak out about the decline i've seen in science and math opportunities for technology kids in csu and speaking as someone who wants csd students to succeed to ensure the future of the cater itself obviously our family is very proud of max and i'm concerned that he's had to do so much on his own i'm also concerned that other similar kids without parents who know as much as my husband and i do about stem opportunities and without the

081means to support them by languishing kids like max need to be identified and consistently supported in action choosing not to do more to support kids like this is not a mutual decision in other words choosing to maintain the status quo to put these kids worse off than those in other school districts around the country who do get support that might sound like a bold statement the conventional wisdom after all is that advanced students turn out okay but it's backed up with a more than 45-year research study by johannes hawkins university that study looked at kids with high ability in math matched for demographics and followed them to see how their lives turned out how many kids without opportunities to do advanced work were found that have worse lifetime outcomes including fewer advanced degrees and fewer

082patents doing nothing not providing support shuts the door on lifetime opportunities and it needs to be consistent support we've seen so many programs disappear just within max's time and csv for example the advanced math program designed by ms newton at fifth avenue that max and his cohort some of whom are here today benefited from seven years ago is no longer available because the international ib program shut it down in addition you've heard max talk about dual enrollment and how much he has benefited from that those dual enrollment changes were changes to georgia law but as far as i know cfc has done nothing to fill in the gaps what i really don't want to happen is for students to slip through the cracks or to give up either because of lack of support or if

083they don't know what they don't know for example i'm not seeing the same level of general awareness of step opportunities at dhs as i did at my high school nebraska you can't have a goal of participating in national science competitions if you don't know they exist you can't have a goal of participation of earning national merit scholarship money if you don't know that the psat is the first step of that you can't make it into the competitive college you're qualified for if your counselors are still overworked that they miss an important step in the application process there are 400 students per counselor indicator on high this is an abomination and it's an equity issue what matt did to say was that ninth graders still can take dual enrollment classes or joint enrollment if the parents

084pay that's clearly an equity issue the active means can help homeless talented kids from less well-off or historically marginalized families will continue to suffer i hope the board will look further into these issues cfc has so many talented kids i'm happy to help and point over what i thank you thank you i'm sure that concludes our speakers for this evening thank you thank you to all of the csd community members that came out tonight um to speak during public comments we appreciate you all coming to take your time and sharing your thoughts with us i'm at this time i'm going to turn the um meeting over to dr furman thank you first i've um always like to give the board an update on things that have been going on with myself and my team over

085the past month since the last board meeting um did want to highlight that sergio perez and i did finish our capital outlay facilities course that was very interesting for me i learned a lot about what we need to be looking at for our five-year facility plan and getting that updated as we move through the next the next semester next school year also i attended the learn for life quarterly meeting this is a really great group it's all the metro area superintendents along with a a group of business partners and nonprofit organizations and learn4life is really focused on helping the superintendent see problems of practice and understanding how you can support each other through that process and you can scale projects from smaller you know successful little projects to bigger projects one of the main focuses

086on this last call for the learn for life program was talking about the success of students in eighth grade math particularly how the access to algebra one in eighth grade math is a huge determination of student success in high school so that was really interesting and something that i'll be working with dr beam and her team on talking about how we can expand access to algebra one in eighth grade um also i was accepted into the courageous conversations about race affiliate training i'm really excited to participate in that training and deepen my knowledge about the use of courageous conversations about race and how i can further enhance our equity work in the school system also with collaborating with our gsba partnerships on developing our work plan to update and kick off our strategic planning process

087for city schools of decatur as well as our policy review um and i will be providing monthly updates to the board on where we are in those processes with the timeline and action steps that you can anticipate coming um stakeholder meetings this month our previous month uh met with teacher advisory council and the classified staff advisory one of their main questions was about the bonus that was coming from the state as well as changes in pay for the upcoming school year also met with the student advisory team they have been working diligently with my with me on updating or creating really a list of what students in city schools of decatur want to see as it relates to our core practices for equity as it relates to accelerating student achievement and building up and sustaining

088a positive culture and climate um so they've finished going through all three of those pillars next the next meeting we have will be may at the may meeting will review a final draft of all their recommendations to create kind of a final product that i will then share with our sclt committee and then i'll bring to the board for consideration and review monthly principal check-ins um had our last monthly principal check-in the friday before spring break and i could tell the principals were like can we just go but it was good we touched base on a bunch of different um tying the bow on some staffing issues so that was really great um metro resa board meeting that is the monthly meeting with all the metro area superintendents and just kind of talking through problems

089of practice and that's a great meeting as well also the quarterly decap chamber of commerce meeting that is a really great networking community meeting i really enjoyed attending that and one of the takeaways from that is i've got several dekalb chamber members that are going to participate on our strategic planning committees as we start kicking those off in the fall so i think we've got some great contacts to bring in some additional resources and connections for our for our school system also attended the decatur education board meeting um and mr rockman is doing great work with decatur education foundation and i'm excited to continue partnering with her on that work we did hold our class our fifth class for our leadership academy program and that was a focus led by ms holt on the state

090and federal programs obviously we've been doing lots of work and getting our final budget presentation ready for the board to review this evening we've been doing internal staffing hiring as well as going through our transfer process and that has been quite a task because as we follow the moving pieces making sure that we've tracked all those that ended up being um quite a process to make sure all those positions were filled um and i just want to let the board know we are still moving ahead with the central office staffing audit phase one of that is complete the consultant is going to come and do a second round of reviewing and interviewing staff members and then we'll be presenting a final report for that to get to all of the schools over the past month

091it was great to see our students in action and visit with teachers just we have so many wonderful things happening in our schools um two community events i was able to get to over the past month at the talley black history wax museum that was really phenomenal just so fun to see the students acting out various um situations from historical events and then the middle school also did the grade i got to get a sneak peek of their performance at the high school so great fun getting out and seeing our students and teachers in action i did also want to update the board that we are going to be kicking off calendar input survey i will send this out in the friday follow-up but just want to give the board a heads up on that

092this is coming out soon and we'll be open for the next month a survey on um two upcoming calendars so the 2020 through 24 calendar as well as the 2425 calendar and what i've done is presented several options for our stakeholders to consider so standard the standard option is pretty much the type of the calendar that we have in place right now um using that same format with our breaks with the two early release days prior to the winter and the fall winter break but then we've also created some other options for people to consider one option so you'll notice on both of those calendars and when you get the link with different color coding so option one for both the two years creates a monthly early release day um i think that's and we've

093already started some early release we've seen the benefits for the staff on holding parent conferences i think we can enhance opportunities for our teachers to attend essential professional learning training when we have regular early release days incorporated um in our calendar we've already been talking with the city and they are ready and willing to support us with providing extended child care hours when we know those would be necessary for families that would need to have extended child care time if their students were being released early and then option two is kind of it's a little bit of a mix it's also some early release days but then also looking at the opportunity to embed some digital learning days one of the overwhelming things that we've heard from our students in the advisory committee particularly at

094the high school level is that they are really wanting time in their school day to get like the work of the work done meeting with teachers being able to follow up on things time to catch up and study so this was one of the things that may be an opportunity to embed some of those so these will be out there for review i'll send them out in the friday follow up the survey will be open for one month for feedback and depending on what the feedback comes from the community we've already gathered that feedback from the staff at each of our school buildings um we may have a second draft so if we maybe see the overwhelming responses hey some we like a little bit of column a and a little bit of column b

095we may try to come up with a third option for people to review um we've got time howard needs to approve these calendars i wanted to get ahead of this and make sure those calendars are out early so that we can do a good job vetting the calendar options for the upcoming school years um budget so one of our big action items tonight will be the tentative approval of the fy 23 budget so i just wanted to remind the public and the board of the timeline that we've gone through when we started the budget process i was committed to making sure that we were transparent with the budget process that we were clear and very communicative of the whole entire budget process from start to finish so we have had we've been presenting to the

096board and to the public since november on what our budget options are we started off with not a really great looking budget and really having to consider some really drastic cuts but we were thankfully i think one of the saving graces was the updated budget from the from the state that really helped but we did have to make some other difficult decisions when it came to setting our budget for this year um but we have hosted several town halls we've presented at slt meetings we've presented a board readings um and we've made all of those presentations available for the public to review on our website as well as through the friday follow-up and we've also kept our link out there for parents to provide input or stakeholders to provide questions on our finance website so

097i did want to then also just rewind all the way back to where we started this conversation in november which was a review with the board of our vision and our mission our core beliefs and strategic priorities as well as our theory of action that all fuel and drive our framework for equitable outcomes for students through those three pillars we identified several priorities so for equitable outcomes for students we wanted to we identified performance objectives of increasing student achievement addressing the educational debt to our historically marginalized students and improving mental health supports we had two budget priorities which was increasing the number of school counselors as well as increasing equity personnel so in our budget that you will hear more details when miss broome presents is we have updated our allotment formula for counselors and

098we have adjusted that from one to 599. one counselor for 599 students we've decreased that ratio to one counselor for 250 students and we also updated our allotment formula to create a new position called game changers and this has all been as the net zero cost for the district um and these 11 game changer positions are allotted out there we've selected several game changers i think up to nine already game changers to fill these positions and they will be really focused on targeting intensive supports for what our historically marginalized students really need to be successful what are the extra things that these students aren't getting that they haven't been getting that need to get we've been partnering with dr banks in the equity department she's going to be collaborating with principals to make sure that

099they are really doing the work that's needed to address the needs of those students we've also increased staffing at our student center and we added another full-time social worker so those are some of the priorities that we have addressed in our budget also for our district priority of reward and recognized staff to attract and retain a diverse staff of exceptional quality we identified competitive pay to attain and retract teachers and then we also said we wanted to build staff capacity and have pipelines for advancement so our budget priorities were competitive compensation and staff development opportunities some of the things that we've incorporated into this budget is the two thousand dollar pay increase from the state also there is a 5.4 pay raise for school nutrition and bus drivers we've also created additional opportunities for advancement

100we've added additional leadership roles at decatur high school in lower elementary and i want to point out with this particular one one of the areas when we hear exit surveys for staff particularly staff of color is they feel that they don't have opportunities for advancement indicator and i'm proud to say that of the five new elementary assistant principals three of them are administrators of color um also at the end of 2022 and we will look at our fund balance and if our sufficient funds miss broome and i will look at the possibility of recommending a cost of living increase for other staff members if those funds are there and then the following goal area was operational excellence and our goals here were to enhance safety and affected learning environments and maximize financial stewardship and increase

101operational efficiency so financial stewardship i think we have done a great job with this budget of really doing more with less creating budget cuts where we could updating our allocation and staffing model so that we can really address the needs that we have as a school system and maintaining that mill rate i think was very important for this budget season so that's just a highlight for the board of some of the enhancements that you'll see in the budget prints presentation so i did want to address that i've heard some of the comments and i did want to remind the board that uh one of the goals that i have had in my evaluation for this year was to build a data culture um so the goal that was written and put in that was adopted

102into my evaluation system was that by june 2022 uh the superintendent would have built the foundations for a data culture that is responsive sustainable promotes equity and inclusion it's user-centered holistic and aligned to take root and flourish by clearly identifying csd's data culture beliefs values norms resources and spaces and we've been using an anchor text called for good measure as a guide for building a strong data culture in schools and i want to update the board on the four steps that we've that i've made sure have been completed for this process and what is coming up next because this is where the equity and grading tax force was kind of married into this work to help improve our equity work he worked with admin staff and our superintendent staff and then this was brought to

103our teachers at the schools to identify the why why is this important and i've included two quotes at the bottom from this article in the anchor text that we've been using and the first one is that many districts are data rich but information poor and there's a lot more to that sentence but we have lots of data here and there and here and there we have pockets of data but we have no system to really pull it all together so that administrators can review and evaluate data over time to create information and to have information-based decision-making on how our students are doing in the classroom in real time a teacher could do it they're keeping their grade books in various ways we have no consistent way to do that and that is a priority that

104we have that data available in a way that parents can access it students can access it administrators and district administrators can access that data the other quote that i really love from this article is that information is power and that power should be distributed across all stakeholders with intentional efforts to empower marginalized populations when we look at how grades are given to students it is not clear what that is the teachers have a lot of information there and the teachers are making good decisions and doing good work with our students that is 100 true but we also know that we have students that are falling through the cracks and until we have a better system to monitor that data on every level and at every aspect we will be failing and continue to fail students

105and i tell every board member that we will never address our equity issues until we address our grading issues in city schools of decatur so the things that we have done we started with the y then we had groups define the foundations of building a strong data culture we went through several iterations of getting that information reviewing that information giving feedback on that information then we also identified what structures are in place in city schools indicator to support a strong data culture and what should we keep doing basically and what do we need to add or change that we're not doing um and then we also gathered feedback from our csc theory of action from the teachers so we gave the teachers a protocol and we said what data should we gather what should we

106be looking at to monitor student achievement over time um and that's the next phase is to take that information and then to really use that to build this foundation and create recommend and help inform my decision um after i see the recommendations from the grading and equity task force and then the final piece will be to draft our beliefs values norms resources and spaces and i will review and share those with the board so that's kind of the update on where we are with that that's just for the board before you hear dr beam's presentation a better understanding of where this is coming from why we started this work and why it is key for this to happen at this time i also wanted to update the board on the naming process in october the

107board adopted a new policy to rename to redo how we named specifically school facilities so we are in progress of that we've had a survey out there it closes on friday for options for the suggestions for the new name for renfrew middle school so that survey has been out it will close on friday on april 19th our school leadership system level leadership team will come together review the recommendations of the names and then they will pick three at least three no more than three names for the board to consider um for our new middle for our current middle school a new name and then the board will vote on that on may 10. and also did want to update uh the board on the hiring process for time for uh renfrew middle school um we

108are in the midst of doing stakeholder input sessions i met with a group of teachers at rent road this afternoon i have another meeting tomorrow i have two on friday to gather the input from the teachers on what they want to see and the next principal at renfrow i also met with the students and that was very insightful on what the students want to see in a principal at renfrow so great information there and at the next slt meeting there's going to be a little bit of a variation on the slt meeting from the typical format so that we can gather more staff or more parent input at that meeting the candidates are being selected right now what we do is we look through who has met the qualifications and then we take those applicants

109and they get a writing prompt the qualified candidates that get a writing prompt those are scored blind scored by a team of staff from renfrow middle school a team from central office the qualifying candidates based on that we'll move into round one interviews those are scheduled for april 27th then the top three candidates move on to round two interviews that is another and both of these are done with a panel of team a panel of staff from rental office and then i joined the interview team in round two and then the interview team will recommend to me um two to even three of the candidates and kind of give me their perception on who they feel is the best fit and then i hold final interviews on may 11th and we'll check references and then

110make the final selection um sometime around mid-may lots of congratulations and celebrations um for this evening i don't know that i'll get all of them but did want to shout out this long list of staff and students for all their amazing work we've got lots of wonderful things happening every time i start putting this list of congratulations and celebrations together i'm like gosh it keeps getting longer and longer we have amazing students we have amazing staff that go above and beyond to support what is best for our students and just want to shout out to this group of people and i'll cut it short there because i know we still have lots of on our agenda so thank you dr fernandez we'll move on to the chairs report and um don't have as much to

111share during the chairs report since last week with spring break but i do want to welcome back all students and staff um back from spring break i hope everyone is refreshed and ready to close the year out with the bang um i do want to thank all csd's media center staff for all of their hard work last week was national library week and we're so grateful to have such wonderful staff and resources in cst so thank you um to our csd media center staff and that's it for my chairs report all right so we will now move which include the personnel report school nutrition and financial reports may i have a motion to approve the consent items one through consent three one two three thank you man have a second second thank you all in

112favor please say aye aye thank you the consent agenda items one through three are approved we will now this evening our first action item is the fiscal year 2023 tentative budget approval and ms broome chief financial officer will present the tentative fiscal year 2023 budget before the board takes action this evening good evening adam chair vice chair members of the board dr berman community and colleagues today we will review the fiscal year 23 proposed tentative budgets for school nutrition special funds capital and general funds the board will be asked to approve the tenancy budget including the 50 cent meal increase for the school nutrition program food nutrition proposed fiscal year 2023 budget for a previous discussions and presentations the general fund supplements the school nutrition program approximately 900 000 a year in order to reduce

113the general fund supplement an increase in meal price is projected to earn the school nutrition program approximately two hundred and twenty six thousand for fiscal year twenty three the school nutrition revenue budget has been revised to include the additional revenue from increasing meals by 50 cents revenue also reflects a reduction in federal and state revenue and an increase in revenue from sales finally all students eat free having this federal program within this country food nutrition expenditures have been adjusted to reflect increases from inflation and reallocation of approximately 226 000 from general phone supplement to the school nutrition fund the largest expense for school nutrition fund are food and salaries total expenditures balance out with total revenue and a little under three meals special revenue proposal for your 23 budget special revenue funds are grant funds

114received by federal and state sources the grants are reimbursable meaning we must spend the funds first for the guidelines of the grant and then request reimbursement this is your proposed fiscal year 23 special revenue funds budget the total expenditures balances out with a total revenue of approximately 2.7 million capital proposed fiscal year 23 budget block 5 will expire on 6 30 20 22 and slot 6 will begin on 7-1 20-22 although we anticipate on receiving 8 million for fiscal year 23 the funds will come in monthly and therefore we must space out our slot this expense the capital funds budget starts with approximately 2.7 million anticipated to be left on slot 5. although the 8 million will come in monthly and we don't anticipate on spending the 48 million in one year for budgeting purposes

115we have included the amount of the 8 million that is allocated to the different expenditure categories we have reallocated allowable expenses such as textbooks software and communication from general funds to slides if we were to extend the 48 million this would leave us with an end to fund balance of the approximately 2.7 million we started with general fund proposed fiscal year 2023 budget as you are aware the general fund budget is the largest and main operating budget with minimum restriction the fiscal year 23 budget calendar has been extremely extensive and very detailed our first budget meeting started in november with the budget timeline and priorities and we have met consistently twice a month since this time we have to set salaries and benefits to ensure our salaries are competitive review the budget process and factors

116that influence it discuss staff and allotments and enrollment projections we have amended the fiscal year 22 budget based on state amendments and the board decision to give all employees a 2 000 supplement which was distributed on march 31st and i want to thank dr berman for donating her state earned bonus back to the district a preliminary budget was presented to you as a march board meeting and workstation today we will review the tentative budget and request your approval of the tenants of budget with the inclusion of the 50 meal increase for the school nutrition program our board approvals attentive budget will be advertised in the local newspaper and on the district's website a public budget hearing will be held at 6 15 pm on may 10th prior to may board meeting the meeting will allow

117the public to address and provide their input into the fiscal year 23 tentative budget prior to the voice approval the board will vote for final approval of the fiscal year 23 budget and tentative approval of the military at the may 10th board meeting comments regarding the budget can also be submitted via the district's website under the budget feedback link on the signings page we will have three public military hearings in june and i'll be tax military in june and of course the dates are all dependent on where we receive the certified tax back this county let's be your 23 general fund revenue and assumptions include austerity being fully restored property tax projections are based on georgia state university forecast we typically receive the certified digest from the tax assessor's office close to the end of

118may military is being proposed to remain the same at 21. school nutrition meals will increase by eclc tuition will increase by 5 and we are anticipating a drop in enrollment which will reduce revenue by approximately 778 000. a few of the general funds fiscal year 23 highlights includes a six percent increase collectively between instructional and pupil services no proposed increase in military rates an increase in fund balance from the current year where 3.4 million of the foreign fund balance was used to balance the budget for fiscal year 23 we are only projecting using approximately 473 000. the budget also includes a step increase for all eligible employees in addition to a 5.4 increase in salaries for nurses bus drivers and a 2 000 increase in the teacher's salary schedule also included in the fiscal year

11923 budgets are budget are operational increases in recruitment equity decatur high indicated career academy budget a five percent reduction in our operational budget incorporation of a new staffing plan increase in business support budget to compensate for increases in insurance premiums decreases in expenses decreases in tests of 300 000 for supplemental budget increases in administrative support at the lower elementary school this slide shows the bond balance percentage history since 2012 for board policy the highest fund balance percentage should be about 15 and the lowest percentage should not fall below four percent we are anticipating increases in the fund balance for the next couple of years but this is the year 23 we are anticipating a 7.19 percent fund balance which is equivalent to a little over 6 million employers this slide shows the military history the

120military since 2005 has ranged from 18.66 to 21. there is no proposed increase to the military of this year 23. this is the proposed fiscal year 23 tenant of general fund budget the initial budget forecast in december projected an extremely low fund balance however with the restoration of austerity reductions and positions and operating expenses and competitive increases in services such as food nutrition program and tuition we are projecting and ending bond balance in looking at our multi-year budgeting we are anticipating an increase in fund balance each year for fiscal year 23 we will use approximately 473 000 of the fund balance as shown at the bottom of the screen highlighted in blue because the year 24 we anticipate on increasing the fund balance by approximately six hundred and nine thousand and an increase of almost

121two million in fiscal year twenty five just the year twenty four and twenty five includes a step increase for all employees schedulable employees and a three percent increase in operational this slide shows the budget history by function we have continued to consistently increase instruction in public services since 2018 school ant-man has also consistently increased and with the addition of administrative leadership support at the lower elementary schools this function has also increased business support increased by 10 of business calls such as insurance and workers compensation increase this slide shows the recommended fiscal year 23 budgets for all funds general special nutrition and capital funds i think we i would be interested in seeing an estimate of what the digest increase is i think in these calculations we're looking at something on the order of eight percent

122and i know those numbers will firm up um and then what portion of that digest is you digest versus growth and expense because while it's fantastic we have the millage flat that is not the same as as everyone knows i think is holding the taxes for us and so we'll want to be able to communicate that pretty transparently in here i think looking at these numbers we're probably somewhere in a five to six percent tax increase if i'm if my estimates are right so we should just be transparent with the public without that we are asking parents to pay more for uh for nutrition and we are asking eclc to pay more in uh tuition we're also asking the community to support a little bit more as well so we should just kind of put

123that clearly in there that's yes once i receive the test that's just i'll break it i'm interested in the school decline numbers moving forward state reported a 14 percent decline in public school numbers we've talked about that and then um when i was looking i it's your fault or the nutrition's fault because i started looking in because cobb county did the nutrition number so i wanted to see what theirs were and cobb county is reporting that aps says they're expecting a seven percent decline overall at five percent down decline the cap said flat new york city schools said 38 000 kids didn't come back in the spring um and then there's an ajc article that's just like the masked mandate is really impacting it so i'm just interested in that and how that impacts us

124moving forward because we we only had like a one one and a half percent decline so we've been that obviously impacts things quite a bit with the must-have year what we're projecting is 770 in red where it is decreasing enrollment right 777 thousand for fiscal year 23 602 for the 24th 3888 for the previous 25 yeah and those numbers were based off of uh the enrollment projection study that we have done through cooperative strategy and they're seeing a downturn in public school um enrollment across the nation because of dq's birth rate right right and i knew that that and then the i think it's like an ajc article and then i started digging into budget everyone's going different ways yeah right now yeah right okay yeah are there any other questions before we move um

125to the approval process happy to see the seven percent yeah thank you so much for all the hard work that you all put in into that so we can get to this place today i really appreciate you thank you all right so may i have a motion to approve the tentative fiscal year 2023 budget including the nutrition budget which includes a 50 cent increase on all meal prices the capital funds budget the special funds budget and the general fund's budget move to approve the energy detention which includes all meal prices the capital fund's budget the special funds budget and the general funds budget thank you may have a second second all in favor please say aye aye the tentative fiscal year 2023 budget including the nutrition budget which includes a 50 cents increase on all

126meal prices the capital funds budget the special funds budget and the general funds budget is approved the board was provided monthly data reports from each school as information only we will now move on to our discussion items for this evening dr fuhrman will begin this presentation and chair also thank you board members for your approval of the budget tentative approval of the budget that will allow us to move forward with setting our budgets at the local levels and school levels so we can move forward with the important work of how we are going to support our students going forward for the next few years i also want to thank miss broome going through a budget season as a new superintendent was very daunting but she's there with me the whole way and really helped every

127time i was like wait what about this what about this um so i've had to say to her many times sorry i'm being a pain but she has been very patient and understanding and just want to give her huge kudos for the hard work that she's done thank you okay so i'm going to introduce um dr beam if you want to make your way up to the podium dr beam is going to share with the board an overview of the work of the grading and equity task force as i shared in my superintendent comments this kind of has kind of grew out of and in addition to and in collaboration with the work that the board has tasked me with which is building a data culture in city schools of decatur um and i want

128dr bean to have the opportunity to share the the work of the team the rationale and the progress that they've made so far as well as i think she's got some questions that have come up um through some of the surveys in town and the um round tables or groups that have had opportunities to look at some of the recommendations so you can answer and clarify some of that information so thank you dr b yes well thank you for having me tonight and allowing me to present the purpose of this presentation okay the purpose of this presentation this evening is to share an update as dr perman said and to address some of the questions so i've heard the question several times today several times as to why we need to do this and i

129will just say that first it's our data i'd like to remind us about our data that we have seen and the trends that we see in our data based on our state national and international measures of student success these data represent our students and they're not reflective of the hard work that our teachers are doing in the classroom and so we need to make the adjustments to our classroom instruction instruction and assessment practices to reflect so that these test scores reflect what is happening our students and what our students are capable of so i'll remind you of the disproportionate outcomes we see consistently between black and white students on all of our measures here's our midterm mathematics data for math for grades j through eight this is gross data percent of students um no i'm

130sorry the star achievement data students that are at or above grade level in mathematics and this was from december of this year this year the school year um and then these are our awards for reading you can see our students again do not arrive at these achievement levels they arrive ready to learn to read and then what is happening in our classrooms does not mean that some of our parents have pointed out so that's why we have made adjustments to our spiritual so then we have move on to our georgia milestones assessment system that is our state required assessment system that is of course the basis of how our student success is measured and how our system success is measured through particular rpi these are students um that were proficient or distinguished so go back

131to that site dr b okay i mean i think i want to make sure you explain to the board what they're looking at on this slide so these those these are the 2021. these are the percent of students at proficient level okay we're proficient or distinguished so at least proficient and you can see the different colors so the blue part the first column you can see 2019 our black students and then the third column is 2019 aren't white students and then the second column the white 22 and then i think what's really or one of the things that's um also important here is if you look at the all columns you can see that you know overall we are a highly proficient high performing district and so overall i think you know kudos to us

132but when you dig into these subgroups we see that there are major issues that require urgent you know urgent uh intervention so here's our high school in the course data um it's important to remember you only see um in you don't see all four subject areas because we did not have enough students participate going back to 2021 for elementary school we were at or above the state average about 75 percent of our students did participate which is right about where the state was and overall we were first in the state for reading in third fourth and fifth grade so and that's overall until we again break out our subgroups but in high school we did not have that level of participation so that's why we did not have enough students to be statistically significant in

133[Music] biology and us history for our black students and then by white students in u.s history but it's not just disproportionate outcomes we see other outcomes that are that that show that we need to better align our classroom instruction with the expectations that we're held accountable to so we can see here these are results of at math exams and the percent of students before three or better on these exams where someone has differentiated that between districts that pay for everyone to take the test and districts that require that the students pay them yeah no there are there's not one reason for any of these results yeah that's for sure you've seen that chart before where there were three it's like statewide csv live states where no here um here you know we have ib results

134for our diploma program and our career program not to pick on our wonderful biology teachers by any means but biology is the subject that city schools indicator has selected that all students take iv biology so it's the ib biology for all 11th and 12th grade and then if we look at our gifted data which i know we speak to you about our gifted students we can see that there is a need to increase the level of rigor in our classrooms because our gifted students in k2 are scoring at um 80 of them are scoring in the 90th percentile in math on that and then in six to eighth grade it's only about 40 percent are still scoring in that gifted range and thanks for reading so well again on the surface our data is exceptional

135and overall our students perform well we dig deeper there is a sense of urgency that our policies and practices need to be revised so that all of our students are achieving these success that they are capable of and that they serve so commonly accepted research clearly shows that our assessment practices drive our instructions it is our responsibility as a school system to ensure that our grading and our reporting practices are clear transparent and accurate so first as a reminder that we shared with the board back in i believe september maybe october why did we put the form this task force so dr fuhrman has shared a lot of that with you already but we're currently in csd we have different grading systems that report different output clips and we cannot easily pull grades and monitor

136student progress on an ongoing basis district data demonstrates that grades for students of color are lower than grades for students for white students at every grade band which again suggests an issue with our policies and practices not as students parent difficulty and frustration with the present grading system has been reported to our equity office some have noticed that our system leaves a great deal of room for subjectivity and bias our recent cogna accreditation report identified our grading practices to be a growth area they suggested that we have improved the way that we grade and communicate grades in a way that makes sense to students and parents multiple data sources indicate that there are frequent discrepancies between the assigned class grades and student performance on standardized assessments there's also concern about the conversion from the high

137school one through seven scale to the 100 point scale that is reported and it's required to be reported and utilized for hope scholarship and zeal miller scholarship so since teachers are the ones in charge of grading students dr fuhrman asked that teachers lead the process so we provide an opportunity we've also provided throughout the process opportunities for administrators coaches um to provide feedback through the process we've gathered feedback from students through the advisory council student advisory council from renfro and decatur high school and we did present and all provide an opportunity for feedback to the fclt the teacher team was charged to provide a high level over or high level recommendations for a common district-wide grading scale to provide clear easy-to-understand descriptors a common gradebook tool and then district-wide agreements and expectations so that parents

138can understand parents and students can understand the grades and the purpose of grading so this team our equity and grading task force is a recommending body it is not a decision-making body so we are still in the process of gathering recommendations it consisted of 16 teachers seven elementary teachers and nine secondary teachers from across a variety of great bands schools content areas demographics and as i said the purpose was to study and analyze how we currently grade and how we can improve our grading systems practices and procedures to make them more consistent transparent and equitable so we have tried our best to have a very thoughtful and thorough process in this and in that since october the task force has been able to analyze and discuss our current grading systems and reporting methods of prospects

139brave bands and schools we've other local and georgia systems we have read and discussed our grounding resource which was grading for equity by joe feldman we reviewed and discussed the renpro indicator high school feedback on writing and reporting system we had two meetings with each of those groups we aligned what we read discussed and have done so far with the student feedback um in the documents and and um sessions that dr fuhrman had done with admin counsel and then we held two rounds or the the team held two rounds of focus groups at each school to share their initial work and draft recommendations with rationales with their teachers and to gain their feedback then consider all the feedback from the teachers instructional coaches school and district leaders to revise those recommendations so our final steps

140are that the task force will have a final opportunity to review those recommendations and we will give them to the superintendent for conservation tomorrow and then the superintendent will make final decisions on which recommendations to implement and this information will be shared with stakeholders in may i'll now try to address some of the questions that we've heard from the community recently first do we have to teach and assess georgia standards this is absolutely yes this is not something new and has absolutely nothing to do with ib or the purpose of this task force as a georgia public school system we are required to teach and assess the georgia standards of excellence our charter clearly states that as a charter district we are fully accountable for our students performance on state and district measures our accountability

141measures particularly math and gmat are standards-based assessments if we are not very intentionally teaching and assessing standards our students are essentially being held accountable for what they may not be being taught in fact in an article titled closing the achievement gap published by the association of supervision and curriculum development in 2001 quite a while ago clear and public standards are what students should learn um they are crucial to improvement they are the guide for teachers administrators and parents themselves and students themselves to uh know what knowledge and skills must be mastered so that has long-standing research that has been common practice in education for the last 20 years in addition to what we are required to teach we also have requirements um of what we have to grade also ib assumes that we are teaching

142standards and this is directly from iv that the standards are the learning outcomes that specify the knowledge and skills that we're required to choose so um you know the id provides us that student centered lens that um extra lens that go deeper that we like to refer to as standard slice here in the city's blueprint decatur so we do have requirements that we have to report to the state of georgia as a public school system so um we are required to to report a 100 point scale um in grades 9 through 12. it has to be a numerical 100 point scale through our student information system which is the infinite canvas so the conversion from one to seven from the one to seven to the zero to a hundred and between the two platforms of

143manageback and infinite campus create unnecessary opportunities for error it's also important to be cognizant that we are required by law to report things and that's not an option so there's another question that are we getting rid of ib and no there's been no discussion of that um and that has not been any you know within the passport our framework el education and international baccalaureate assume that we are teaching and assessing our content standards so there is no conflict this can be clearly seen in quotes that are taken directly from our ib middle years program subject guides specifically mit is flexible enough to accommodate the demands of most national and local curriculums and in response to national and local requirements schools may add criteria and use additional models of assessment so are we required to use

144the ib rubrics and the ib one through seven grading scale for all assessments for final grades to be an ib school no absolutely not uh we are required to report iv boards to our middle years program students at least twice a year ib diploma program and career programs do have some internal internal assessment requirements for subjects and iv can be used in conjunction with any other grading system in fact according to our ib organization's southeast representative no other school system in the southeast that she knows of uses the iv rubric or the 137 scale for all grading in this part in this presentation which was from the ib conference of the americas presented in 2016 in toronto one school explained that effective practices mean finding the balance between ib grading and other grading requirements while

145there are no formal reporting formats or there's no required format for iv similar to el education as used in our early elementary framework ib recommends multiple avenues for recording student progress including progress reports parent conferences and student-led conferences so do the iv rubrics assess georgia standards no they don't the ib rubric just has ib objectives and if they do not specifically meet the georgia standard and the csd again the expectation is to go beyond the standards teaching standards so here's a chart that shows the four criteria that are assessed in three of our ib middle years program subject groups as mentioned id expectations can be assessed separately twice a year or they can be incorporated as we teach and assess the standards of excellence and those are things that schools on a school level department

146level will determine the best way to do this once decisions you know big high-level district decisions have been made about our grading policies so let's look at some examples that illustrate the importance of assessing content standards that are measured by our state and local assessments which are the current measure of success for students and our systems let's take a look at math students need to meet and what is reported to parents but there's an obvious lack of specificity as to what exactly the students are to know and understand for example or to communicate so here's an example on the left you can see one of our georgia standards of excellence in which students must show proficiency in algebra 1. so in this case the teacher must design an assessment that would allow the student to

147demonstrate proficiency and the totality of the standard obviously standards are written in teacher language not student friendly language so we have to break it down into learning targets so the student clearly understands the expectations then the teacher would develop the lessons to ensure that the students successfully mastered the learning as you can clearly see it's the georgia standards excellence that provides the specificity of what the students should be able to know and do but they're very clearly aligned with iv criteria as i pointed out on the right another example you can see the criteria currently assessed in middle years program secondary science now you can see the level of rigor and specificity demanded by the standards and then here you can see how the two could fit together again that's not something we have that's

148beyond where we are at this point because that is a decision that could be made if we decided to use the irs that full society society and assess and embed the assessment rather than just separate so why is all this important some of the practices are laid out in the book grading for equity by job feldman which is supported by best practices by other leading experts such as marzano zaki nikkai and shaqui include that grace should be clear a clear current picture of what a student knows achievement should be reported reported frequently and separately from work habits dispositions and efforts stakeholders should know the purpose of grading and reporting what will be communicated what is not communicated and what other information is available clear learning goals unite curriculum instruction and assessment and they are the

149basis for a sound grading system when a student is clear about the goals they are better able to regulate their own learning assessments of student performance and the associated grades that result should be clearly aligned to targeted goals grades should be based on adapting students a student's current level of learning or accomplishment not an average performance over time so thank you for allowing me to present and share this information i hope this update just addressed the community questions and i look forward to continuing to work with our community to improve teaching and learning for all of our students who study school educators part of that includes learning and part of that insurance is ensures that we are preparing our students for standardized measures and instituting ensuring that our students are well prepared in our classrooms

150to succeed at our current measures of academic success in accordance with a statement from the leadership conference of civil and human rights in data obtained through some standardized tests are particularly important to the civil rights community because they are the only available consistent and objective source of data about disparities in educational outcomes even while it's necessary to be vigilant um to ensure that the tests are not disputed thank you questions i'm sorry questions or comments for dr bean i have a question um and we started we started the presentation out kind of discussing the clear and rather egregious disparity in how our black students underperform their white counterparts right and then we kind of went on to talk about how the school system may make an improvement by shifting away from the one to four

151or the one to eight grade system to a more traditional standard grading system you didn't say say it explicitly so i don't put words in your mouth i think what i'm hearing is maybe there's different practices in how teachers grade and there's some subjectivity and how teachers grade namely effort grades and that sort of thing and that could be contributing to some variability and how in time student outcome i don't know if i see this the connection directly here to the race component unless we're saying that there's some element of bias there's some element of lack of teacher training and that is how specifically the race component is to be addressed here because if it was just that there's variability in how teachers are grading i don't know if that addresses the race issue directly

152other than just kind of scratching the surface a little bit so i think this is a reasonable thought process um but i don't i think maybe there's a couple more stones to kind of overturn here to really uh really close that which every time i see that data i get nauseated and you know i if there's going to be some classes that you just can't if you just can't give a grade of 90 or 91 or 92 there may be some continued subjectivity and grading so how are we to kind of close that loop there or rectify some of those differences um i don't know if i quite understand how just going to a different grading system altogether is going to address that that particular variable of race i don't know if i understand that

153so the the purpose of the task force was not to move to a different system it was moved to a consistent system because we have various systems throughout the district currently in an elementary school it's a zero through four at high school it's a one art at middle and high school it's a one through seven so one through seven the state law says we have to convert we have to determine a passing score at four through twelve and then at nine through twelve we have to report in the miracle grade so in addition so currently our grades are put in middle and high school are put into manufacturing but what is really reported to the state are numerical grades that include eoc for end of course test this is the 47 in the course and

154those are never even i mean most parents don't even see those they're not reported so it's not a trans system um in addition a lot of parents have required that they just don't understand it and that there's not enough grades being provided and information is provided also we have no way to pull and monitor i mean there's just we just don't have a good way and system to monitor the grades on a regular basis um also we have no way to see and monitor are these are the assessments that are being provided and the practices in the classroom align to the standards because if you're not choosing the standards you're being measured on the standards so our assessments are knowing and understanding but are we clear on what the students are knowing them so i

155think it's a nuanced level of intentionality it's not i am not up here saying that our teachers are just you know teaching whatever they know their standards they know their content but if we're not clearly being intentional and assessing that um we're not going to to you know pay that debt that we owe and there are quite a few um you know studies and i'll be sure some of them are up here closing the team that guys learning from schools exposed to opportunity gaps things like that that say start with standards clearly you know how your grading is very important again assessment assessment is what drives our instruction if we know what we're assessing we know what we're you're absolutely right there's no perfect assessment system and there's not one answer to the problem but

156this is the foundation that i think will move the needle pretty rapidly and i'll add to that as well dr beam um one of the issues that i've seen in decatur since i've been here now for four years is asking principals how are kids doing are the kids okay are they at the level they should be they can't pull the data because of the system that we have in place we're not able as a as district leaders as school leaders to see well how are the kids achieving how are all the third grade students doing in math at this moment you should be able to pull a report that says hey 95 percent of my kids are doing great and of that 95 95 you know that it's equitably proportionate to what our demographics are

157but when we can't look at data on an ongoing basis to inform our practice we're waiting for the autopsy and then all of a sudden we're surprised that we have an achievement gap and our students aren't achieving equitably we're not seeing those equitable outcomes because we're waiting until the end of the year we're waiting half a year we're not monitoring that data ongoing to make sure that it matches the achievement so that we can provide interventions in an immediate way instead of waiting until our students have failed the assessment at the end of the year i mean i think one practice that's clear i mean currently we're reporting effort grades up until 12 weeks so the first three months of school parents have no academic information that's that right there is not you know what

158research would show would be you know acceptable practice to be like on dr carmen's question so it seems self-evident that having this information having this information earlier and having it be consistent is going to help us do the interventions and the things that we need to do none of that gets quite to the specific question of race that she asked right like this does look like it's going to become a much better way of us more accurately measuring that we have an achievement gap which we already know and so i guess the the other question is when we're capable of measuring it more accurately what other things are we then going to be doubling and tripling down on to make sure that gap gets close because just measuring the gap isn't sufficient to close it

159so again our assessment drives our instruction so our practices our policies and our instruction is what we're being held accountable on and so there's lots of other districts and i think i have shared the comparison data of data of nearby districts that don't have the disproportionate outcomes that we have and why do they not have the disproportionate outcomes we have when you look at forsyth county when you look at beaufort city it's because they're teaching and investing toward the standards um you know it's an interesting um conundrum if you will in in decatur because we have all these wonderful um exercises being affected i'm sorry you just mentioned something right there that i want to i don't want to have missed yeah because we in this presentation we've talked about grading but what you just

160said right there was that we are actually going to alter instruction and that there is going to be 100 yeah i wanted to make sure that didn't get missed this isn't just about tracking and measuring it's about actually changing the way that we teach any of it it's also going to be clear it's not about throwing out what we're doing and and necessarily changing it was about examining and making recommendations there are some great things that are happening it says what's happening in my classroom may not be the same thing that's happening in your classroom and what's happening at this school may not be the same thing that's happening in that school with a great band so it's about building consistency and building on the great practices that are happening and then getting rid of

161some of the practices that aren't effective and so once we have a common system and some common groundwork and we have inner inner radar reliability for example we are able to see where we need to plug you know where we can work to close this gap right now it's too inconsistent we can't play better what i want to touch on with hans that you said is you know it's about changing instruction and what the students need and until we have readily accessible data we don't know which teachers need to improve their instructional practice because it's there's no data for us to look at so as we look at this not until this year or end of the year right and yeah so go ahead i was just gonna say i'm just a little over two

162years out of the classroom and the ivory rubrics were very frustrating for me and um for most of my parents when i i came to csc i was a special ed teacher and so i co-taught classes and then i also had resource classes with just students with ieps and particularly for that demographic of students the ib rubrics were very challenging and there were conversations back then about can we alter the rubric and have just a special ed rubric right um and then most of my students were students of color or black students um and we know that bias does exist in the district and i'm not saying that i don't know i'm not saying that this is just one piece of trying to address this larger issue of disproportionality um but i know that bias

163has played out in the grading using those rubrics um i think that it is um it makes it more uh easier to be able to figure out where the gaps it's you know we're and i don't want us to teach to the test no one is proposing that i don't think but if we know that these at the very the standards are what they're supposed to know at the very least and so you know we it helps us to identify where those gaps are to you know have interventions and things like that and so i was excited i definitely could empathize with miss johnson's johnston's representation of teachers who are concerned about the timing and what that will look like for them in terms of having to come up with new rubrics and that if

164this is something that um the committee and dr fuhrman decides to move forward with that there will be support for creating those new rubrics creating those lesson plans because that will be a lot for folks that have to turn around on if if we suggested that they have to have this by august i'm ex i'm excited about the possibilities of these changes and um you know how it would contribute to us closing these gaps um but it's not this is not it um this is not the only solution to that problem part i understand your question a little bit when you get it so you included it but it's important we have to teach to the standards we have to we may hate them we may need to go to them and complain like you're

165making us teach teach teach reading the wrong way you're making us teach math the wrong way but until we do that if we want to get funding as a system we won't exist that we've got to yeah and i mean you're i think you pulled that out because it's such a good one about the way for secondary science that one versus the other one so so have to teach the standards step two [Music] we're not teaching to the test but you are including that into the rubric so that all of those statistics you pull up are end of the year teachers done a great job they've connected with their students they've taught with this rubric they've made connections test is taken holy crap here what in the hell just happened yeah that yes there's some

166biases but there's also just like a what the hell did i just do i apologize i would work on that but but i mean that's like what just happened and part of it is you've pointed out from the data there's not enough of the standards in the rubric so this isn't just i wrote down this is not just a small fix the rubric sort of undertaking this is uh and it's not about the scales but that's not the issue the only talk about the scales is to create again those high level district-wide expectations what is best practice what does research say is best practice and research for example actually says that less gradation is more equitable because you can get better inner reliability when grading scales were one were zero to 100 when they were

167created they were to rank students so you didn't know who was the 86 student who was the 92 student now it's we're writing on criteria we're waiting on standards so all we need to know is do you know you're saying this to you are you proficient or not are you exceeding or not so if it's written in the rubric can you go there and you say you know listen john you know like you are really struggling to you know not to overdo this but develop a model demonstrating the interaction between unequal heating and rotation of the earth you know well not do you understand the idea you get a fish you know on your report card it's about the learning it's not about the grade it's not about the test it's about the learning but

168all of those tests should measure to be an accurate reflection of the learning and so we see what is happening and i will be i would be happy to to lead the charts on let's let's change our educational system let's change standardized testing let's change the the standards themselves i will be at every doe committee i try to be involved as much as i can but in this moment this is our current measure of success but at the end of the day we've got to get them together are our measures of success this is what we are charged to do as a public system and we should do it well for all students and what we're seeing is we're not well and i think to piggyback on this is the last point that i will

169make is that i think and i'm not trying to tell you how to do your job dr b i think that the creative way to utilize our time would be concurrently for the task force to be saying you know if we redo this rubric if we redo these grading scales what are we going to do if in two years if that's as long as it takes to get meaningful data we go back and we still see that same that same race disparity then what what will we do and we have a plan ready to go because that disparity especially in reading has been for those of us who grew up in dekalb county and grew up in atlanta it's been around forever and here in decatur we have a such a diverse community and such

170a diverse population of students we have an opportunity to really do something and actually watch it change over time so i mean that's you know i think here we have an opportunity to not only identify a problem but to i to make a meaningful change but i think you have to probably do them concurrently and um you know like dana said you know we cannot ignore subjective grading standards cannot core ignore biases we all have biases we all show up with them um and that's some part of the puzzle here that we cannot be afraid to speak out loud in the open thank you yeah tonight yes there is there is definitely not this is not a one one size this is not a this is the solution by any means it's just one piece

171of it um as we talked about you know aligning our curriculum aligning our resources providing our teachers with the high quality resources that they need um providing them with the training that they need all of those things their pieces continuing our our deep equity work our creative conversations all of those things are going to contribute and make a difference you mentioned timing we've kind of talked about timing around about but nothing really concrete is that because we're still waiting for dr fuhrman to look over um you know what you all are suggesting or what are you suggesting as far as a time frame to make some of these changes yeah the timeline that we have presented is that the task force would work from october to april and the final recommendations on the scale the

172tool and the the practice you know common practices would be given to dr herman in april so that is our last meeting is actually tomorrow um and so then those will be provided and then i assume the rest of us will get to the assignment that district leadership will work with dr berman and decisions do you have a thought process yet about when we would implement these if you agree to some or all well it's going to depend on how like the level of change and how drastic that may be um it also is going to be you know what type of supports of resources when can we carve out time to train teachers and to get them ready to implement a change um so it's that's to be determined but i'll be reviewing the

173recommendations talking with district and school level leaders um and you know once we decide on what the answer it like what the next step is for like what the grading might look like there is a change um based on the recommendations that come in then i'll be ready to work on the timeline and we've been laying the groundwork for the last two years especially in the k5 so we have created we've had a teacher team and we've been working for the last two years and our coaches and our district team to create common pacing guides common assessments we've been working on a year we've said about six weeks ahead so you know it's not ideal but that's what we've been doing to be able to roll that out um and so we're i feel like

174we're on very solid ground in k5 to be ready to implement this we would then need to do the same thing with 612. it's much more complicated we have a lot more subjects we have a lot more teachers to work with um but again it's not we're throwing everything out the door we're reviewing we're revising um you know we're ensuring that things are clearly aligned our standards of curriculum in our assessment i would i would just ask because i'm reading the slide where you say that we'll be sharing this information with all stakeholders in may um we probably want to have in may a sense of what that timing is going to be like right like so we don't want to be sharing and it's going to be large changes and then a couple months

175later we'll tell you how we're going to do it and you need to be communicating what the changes are and how we're going to do it at the same time make sure [Music] all right our second discussion item is the superintendent search and so at our last meeting um in march we discussed bwp and associates mcs spearsman jacobson and the georgia school board association as potential candidates to lead us in that superintendent search and so we tabled the discussion because there was conversation about um whether gsba the georgia school board association could help lead focus groups as a another way to solicit community feedback we know that they as part of that process they will put out a survey for community members to complete that allows community members to share um what attributes they want

176to see um in the superintendent um but we all but they didn't with their package the 75 000 package that did not include um leading focus groups and so i was charged with um finding out how much that would cost and so um dr king from georgia's school board association said it was 750 to 1500 per session um and so you know the what will determine whether it was 750 versus 1500 is how many facilitators we would want per session we get two facilitators for 750. um and i provided you all with information about you know different scenarios where we could engage the community through focus groups or and or town halls and so you know it could potentially be up to three sessions and so if we did three sessions at the highest higher

177end of the scale at fifteen hundred that would be forty five hundred dollars um plus the initial flat fee of seventy five hundred dollars would put us at twelve thousand dollars for the georgia school board association mcpherson and jacobson and bwp and associates are twenty one hundred dollars i'm sorry twenty one thousand that's something twenty one thousand so um we had during the last meeting discussed um those you know three options with that information i'd like to have a recommendation and then we can take a vote i was impressed with um and you can consider this recommendation with dr king's flexibility to consider that i've enjoyed their feedback i know that basically if we say we would like this they will provide it with us and for us and of the personal touch of valerie

178i know that with you natasha have a personal relationship with her i as well as returning members of the board always have to reach out i think that if we ask them for something they will jump over hurdles to provide it for the city to cater them and their options plus saving a few thousand here never hurt anybody i have a motion um to approve the georgia school board association as the organization that will facilitate a superintendent search i move to approve gsba as the organization that will facilitate our superintendency may have a second offer all in favor all right so the georgia school board association will be the organization that will facilitate our superintendent search all right that is our discussion items and i think we're ready to move on to future dates all

179right so we have future dates listed on our agenda for upcoming meetings trainings and retreats one of our four dates includes the gsba conference in june um which will be in savannah please let dr fuhrman know if you all are interested in attending so she can register us for the conference and book our hotel rooms the note on that i've been to a couple of those over these last few years and um of course you covered we haven't had an opportunity to really go so if um if board members are able to go i would strongly um suggest that we go i think it's um what you learn you just i mean the person that goes can't really bring it back to everybody else i mean you just really have to be there um and

180i think it also give an opportunity for us as a board to connect on a level we haven't been able to again due to covid and with us being a new governing team this year so um if at all possible i would definitely strongly encourage that we go as a group if we can thank you so are there any other questions about any of our future dates for the work of the board all right well thank you all for joining us this evening the meeting is adjourned at 9 05 pm thank you oh you