October 12, 2021, Board of Education Meeting

001okay we are adjourned well we're not adjourned wow that was the fastest meeting eliot everybody thank you for showing up yes i might need a cup of coffee sorry about that welcome we are starting our board meeting for today october 12th thank you everyone that has joined us in person as well as on zoom we always appreciate everyone's attendance uh time and opinion i also would just like to point out uh the entire board is here except for james herndon today so he is not with us um but um he will be missed but we will go on so let's start off with a moment of silence please thank you and for all who are able and willing to stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states

002of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty [Music] okay and then just looking at the agenda do we have any revisions are we ready to approve any okay and so all approve of the agenda chair as approved all right and the minutes from our last uh school board meeting as well as our board work session were there any corrections to the minute i believe there was one before but that was already him yeah before it became correct so we can move on with the minute so let's start with the highlight of our meeting as always our spotlight and i'm going to welcome up dr holly berkins she is the principal at glenwood elementary and i think this is the first time you'll have met holly in

003person so holly so glad to have you here and then excited to hear all the great things going on at glenwood well thank you for having me here this evening good evening dr fuhrman and members of the board i am dr holly brookins and i'm the principal at glenwood elementary this is my second year uh here is principal and i have enjoyed every moment of being at glenwood it's a very special community and i'm very proud to be the principal there so this evening we are going to spotlight for you the glenwood annual african american region which is held at langwood during black history month uh and was started several years ago by our instructional coach jill chultzma along with dr christie beam the former principal at cleveland and so you're going to be seeing

004a video and hearing ms tolzma explaining to you what it is that you're seeing good evening board members dr berman and the greater decatur community as part of our district's goal to advance racial equity through developing cultural humility glenwood hosts an annual african-american read-in each year in february this event supports our work around increasing cross-cultural knowledge and engagement and improving culture for students and staff in an effort to make literacy a significant part of black history month the black caucus of the national council of teachers of english created african-american readings almost 30 years ago they've been happening all over the country every year since inspired by this word glenwood wanted to bring this experience to our students the purpose of an african-american read-in is to celebrate the work of african-american authors to lift up african-american

005experiences and to explore the beautiful diversity present in literature with the help of members of the district equity team we focus on selecting books that reflect the vast experiences perspectives and stories present in this rich literature each guest receives a selected book in advance to read to a class this gives students the opportunity to listen to excellent literature while also engaging with black community members that lead and contribute in countless ways to our community our first year we had the honor of welcoming former decatur mayor elizabeth wilson to read to ms jolly's second grade class even with last year's challenges we were able to host our second annual african american region virtually dr maria carstarson former superintendent of atlanta public schools was a special guest reader at our second annual african-american read-ins this year our

006third annual african-american read-in will be held on friday february 4th 2022 this event will kick off our month-long celebration of black history we are in the process of securing a special surprise guest speaker and reader we'd love for you all to join us more details to follow thank you so much we are hoping that this year we may be able to host this event in person however if not we will absolutely do a phenomenal job of posting it virtually are there any questions well thank you so much for putting that together that was great that was really nice to see and i'm glad that you were able to continue it even during these different times that we're going through right now so the superintendent shared with me that um when we have the spotlight with

007the schools we will also have some artwork showcased so i also wanted to just thank you and your staff um for bringing in the artwork and just lighting up our our boardroom today we really appreciate that thank you so much guys you can see it right over there miss neil howarth is our art teacher and she is just phenomenal with the kids they are always doing very exciting uh and beautiful projects in art so we're very pleased and proud all right well thank you so much thank you dr bricken hey all right all right so now we're moving on to public comment but as of a few minutes ago we didn't have public comment in this so do not okay so we will move on from public comment onto superintendents all right thank you um

008let's see next do i let me see if i can figure this out okay it just would be a mirror let's see all right all right [Music] should be able to figure this out thank you does anybody have a joke looks so intimidating up there on that screen oops yeah my email it's a lot there we go okay thank you lex ben all right well greetings board members greetings everyone um here in the audience thank you for being here tonight got several comments to share tonight and um just so the agenda i'm going to go over some general updates share some celebrations and also talk about our student advisory team that is going to be starting to meet i will have our first meeting next month or next week and then just talk quickly about

009concovet updates so i wanted to provide the board with some general updates about some of the work that's been happening particularly that i've been engaging in throughout the month since the previous meeting so first of all um i did complete the aspiring superintendent's academy for female leaders offered by aasa it was a phenomenal experience getting to engage with other world-renowned superintendents from around the nation meeting researchers meeting other superintendents having one-on-ones with mentors it was an awesome experience and just learned a lot got to network with a lot of amazing people so it was one of those experiences when you sit in a room and it's all female leaders you kind of you can let your guard down a little bit and really just talk about issues that impact female leaders so that was really

010refreshing um and then turned around and went to the new superintendent induction that is offered by the georgia superintendent association and noticed the stark contrast from new superintendents in georgia of the 16 that were in attendance only two were female so that is something to call out is how can we grow and develop female leaders women make up about 75 percent of the population of workers in education but only represent 25 percent of superintendents so there is a discrepancy there so really consciously woke it woke me up to what are the efforts as a superintendent that i can do to help other female leaders grow and develop those skills so just one of those things that you realize the difference when you're in a room and then you come back and you're like wow okay

011lanita knight attended our second session of the budget and finance institute offered by gssa it has been a very intense uh institute we have learned a great deal and it has been very helpful as we start taking the steps and initial planning for our budget season coming up and it's been very helpful to learn from some experts in the field that are cfos and districts across the across the state as well as some other expert superintendents so that has been very beneficial our last session is the second week in november and i'm really excited for that session because we do a lot of hands-on activities in the last session to get up and gearing up for the call for the budget season so we'll be able to kind of go through some spreadsheets with the

012team put in numbers start planning out our account um not planning out the calendar but putting the numbers in and getting some projections so that'll be a really great session and then um i learned this from a leader that i used to work for in my previous school district and it was sharing um the books that he read um with the school system so i'm actually reading three books at the same time um so one of them is i think helped me develop my understanding of as a new superintendent how to manage and collaborate with your board and that is one that was recommended by valerie wilson from gssa this book building a great school board and superintendent's teams and that has been really really informative um the second book i've been reading this for

013a while now how to be an anti-racist by dr um abram and then our third book is actually a book that we are reading as an executive as a full cabinet called dare to lead and we are doing that as a cabinet book study and um each month one of the cabinet members takes a lead and leads us through a session so some really great learning in the district that we are all engaging in there um did have lots of various stakeholder meetings in the past month our teacher advisory council meeting met um and some of the highlights from that meeting are just the overall shortage of substitute teachers um so what i'll do as i go through these stakeholder meetings just kind of talk about some of the themes that came up so substitute

014teacher shortage is is impacting our schools on a daily basis um so i've got some ideas on what we're doing to try to ameliorate that issue the other issue that our staff advisor or teacher advisory council talked about is just this overall feeling of being very overwhelmed with doing education doing the work that we normally do in a school year plus on top of that all the added layers that we have with covid coming up with your lesson plans to engage students in concurrent learning or helping your colleagues cover classes because there's a higher number of teachers out and higher number of students out working collaboratively on unit lesson plans as a team to make sure that everyone's covered so just this very very general feeling of being overwhelmed by our teachers i also met

015with a classified staff advisory committee same same there they echoed the same thing that just there's a general feeling of being overwhelmed as a staff um and i'll kind of share my comments about this a little more personally about that feeling but um that is one that is shared also in our classified staff our bus drivers our school nutrition workers custodians maintenance workers paraprofessionals clerical staff are all part of this advisory team the other issue that they brought up is just also reminding me as a superintendent to make sure that we pay attention and review and look at our salary schedules for our classified staff to make sure that they are competitive and i was glad to be able to share with them that miss baroon and miss walker are looking into those and we'll

016be presenting some information to the board in the upcoming month um for principal oh i'll skip down to the principal check-in so i also started a monthly check-in just with my principals just to hear from them on how things are going in the system they shared that same feeling of being overwhelmed and being just really put to the the hard work that they do and the long hours and i remember what it was like to be a principal and i can't imagine being a principal in the times of covid i remember 5 30 in the morning you get up you've got your text message from two teachers or a teacher that's going to be out that day didn't have time to put in a sub is dealing with a sick child so you immediately start

017at 5 30 thinking okay how do i cover this teacher's classes how do we put together make sure that there's people in there so the students can learn that day but then they get to school and lo and behold three or one student or however many students may have tested positive or got notification that a student is tested positive so then they have to get to work on the communication protocols and the contact freezing and supporting that process and what they shared is you know for the most part they go through that and then it's the day's over so then they've got to do all the rest of the things after the teachers have left after the students have left so i feel that with my with my principles as well um the sub issue

018as well came up with that group um i also had our sclt meeting our first system charter leadership team meeting and that was last was that last night courtney no oh you're sorry courtney now i have two courtneys in here courtney burnett that was last week was it last week okay gosh his time is flying by um the system charter leadership team is a principal as well as one of the members of their school leadership team serve on the system level team and this team it was great to meet these this group of leaders and another layer of our governance system here in our charter school system and we are getting them geared up to start looking at our charter reviewing the charter talking with the members of their community people in their schools about

019what do they like about our charter that's in there what are things that they may want to see change or what are some innovative practices that we could incorporate the next time around so really starting at that ground level when it comes to looking at our charter for next year and using our system charter leadership team and our school leadership teams as an essential component of that uh oh chamber of commerce that was a great meeting i have been attending the dekalb chamber of commerce meetings and they are very informative and it's been a great network to really connect with and hear about opportunities outside of decatur for how the school system here can engage with other resources um through the cab chamber so that has been really great um and then i also meet

020monthly with several of our community members doug faust and gail rothman and i always have touch base once a once a month have lunch and chat about what's going on between the systems um and also andrea arnold our city manager her and i also have a weekly meeting not too much to bring you up to date on there but um i did meet with um elizabeth alango she is the head of school for the global village project school which is housed in the methodist church the presbyterian church and her and i have had a really great opportunity to connect and learn from each other as system leaders she's really she serves as kind of their superintendent and has been amazing to touch base with her and get to know some of the challenges that they

021face and how we can collaborate as two school systems kind of right next to each other so that's been a really great great meeting there um also have been to several community events um also a couple high school football games i tried to go to the softball senior night but sadly i got there and their game had been canceled from the other school but it was nice to see the girls out there um throwing i'll tell you those girls have some strong arms i was watching them just balls i was like wow they've got some i've got i've got some training to do if i'm gonna try to go out and throw another pitch in the parking also was really excited to go to the decatur track team's inaugural 5k event at legacy park that

022was really amazing they did a very small one this time but next year they want to gear up and do a much bigger 5k they're looking at changing the week and doing it some closer to halloween and maybe having it be a costume themed event and it's a good way for the track team to raise some funds for what they do um also got on my bike and made a loop through porch fest um it was a little crowded so i decided to hear the vans a little bit and then make my way home but it was a nice event it was good to see people out and about in our communities i also want to share that we are working on a partnership with kennesaw state um they have a new dean dean epps

023and he reached out to me over the summer and we have several really exciting initiatives that we're working on with the school of college of education from kennesaw state one is an alternative teacher certification route for classified staff and what we're looking at for this one it will start we're getting interest right now we're working on all the details and we're hoping to implement this next year but what we're looking at is giving classified staff who may not have the financial resources that other people have available to help them grow into a higher level position so what we're looking at is it'll be an online academy where they can stay late after a after work engage online in the learning the thing i like about this partnership is we also as a school system get

024to help design the program what does it look like if we know equity is at our heart if we know culturally relevant teaching practices are at the heart of what we do they'll incorporate that into the program so they'll be delivering teachers certified teachers to us that know our system that have been trained and what we believe in as a school system and then also what we're looking at is paying a stipend for them to complete the program so that they can help pay for some of their tuition so it's not as much of a financial burden for those staff members they also have several really cool programs one is an avatar lab that you can use for teacher professional learning an interactive research lab so if you've got a problem of practice that you're

025trying to figure out how to solve this problem you can go and use their interactive lab and they also have several mobile technology supports one is an ice team and then a mobile maker bus and we're looking at how we can bring those here to city schools of decatur for our students to engage in some enhanced technology and engineering activities um and then just lastly just continuing all the other work with my staff i've got a great team i've completed all of their pre-evaluations with all my direct reports which includes executive cabinet and principals um reviewed all the annual goals for my wilson center staff and also with the principals reviewed their baseline data and their school improvement plans um continue to have one-on-ones with executive staff members and then we have initiated our data

026building our data culture and we will be delivering the first session of that tomorrow with principles and then they will be redelivering those kind of like a train the trainer model and redelivering that information to their staff on work days so some celebrations um all the milestones data is in and calculated so we can share some really great results and some look at some areas that we have some opportunities for improvement um and you will see across the board our reading levels are really good so for eighth grade seventh grade and sixth grade eighth and sixth grade we ranked second in the state when it came to students percentage of students reading at or above grade level for seventh grade we were fifth and then reading is definitely our strong point as you look at

027the data across these levels you will see our reading is strong english language arts is not as strong but still really high i'm very proud of where we are as a school system achieving in language arts and then math you'll notice a pattern is a little bit not as high as the other ones but still a really good you think there's 180 school systems in the state of georgia so to be even in the top 20 is an amazing honor so doing really well in these areas overall milestones assessment scores for our elementary schools huge shout out to our elementary school teachers look at our reading levels in third fourth and fifth grade we are first ranked first in the state with the percentage of students reading above or at grade level or above excuse

028me um in fourth grade third grade and second and fifth grade so really a huge shout out to our elementary school teachers and this is it measures here in third grade but we know that foundation has been laid in our early elementary schools in kindergarten through second grade and these aren't results just the teacher that they had at the year these are results that build up over time so just a huge shout out to our teachers for the amazing jobs that they do we are seeing results in our students and it's a huge celebration i'm just going to touch on this quickly the teaching and learning team is going to dig into these results a little bit more but we do have our official sat results and we saw a huge growth in our sat

029results when i looked at the data i found that we were number one in the state for a school district when it comes to sat scores someone else said we were second but i have to double check that but we i might when i looked at the chart and sorted it we were number one um but i think a huge celebration here is paying the debt to our black students we saw major growth in the achievement scores for our black students and to me this really speaks to the foundation that has been laid and the very dedicated work of dr hadelson and her team to get the equity work as part of what we do each and every day it is not something we just do to check a box equity work is the is

030the food that we eat it's the water we drink it is what we the life that we see through so this is where we start seeing how we pay the educational debt is when we look at these overall achievement results for our students of color so huge shout out to dr huddleston and her team for the hard work over the past five five years lily four it probably feels like five um so she has just done a great job and uh kudos to everyone in our school system because this is the work of an entire system not one person um so thank you board as well for your support and backing of our equity work we wouldn't be here today if we didn't have the support of our school board some other big celebration we

031have our oakhurst elementary they won oh i've got a tape of their blue the national blue ribbon school award this is a very prestigious award um it's not an easy word to be given um it was a lot of work by this by the team at oakhurst a lot of work to submit the application i mean it's a huge honor for ocrs to be awarded a national as a national blue ribbon school for high achievements i also want to i'm not going to steal all the comments i know tasha's got some additional comments on the health points the debate team that our debate team is doing really really well they um advanced into the nationals um that's a huge huge win for our debate team which is some renfrew students and some high school students

032i also want to give a shout out to mr duane sproul from our career academy at the high school and he completed a successful review monitoring and risk assessment which is great news for our school system and he received lots and lots of commendations particularly as it relates to the achievement levels of his students when it comes to their end of pathway assessments also great accommodations in there about really using local labor data to help to have great cabinet members like lanita and adina to support him with those programs and participate in providing that data and input we will get our full report in january but it's a huge accomplishment for mr sperle and his team at the high school and then my last congratulations i think is celebrating um eston and several other team

033members who helped him write a grant to get over thousand dollars so that yeah dana's like to get money so that we can provide every student that has home insecurity a chromebook and a hot spot so they can engage in learning seamlessly so that's a huge one so thank you esten and the team that supported you with that um okay so i have selected my superintendent student advisory team and this is the list of students that i'll be meeting with i'm going to meet with the high school students on next wednesday and or tuesday and middle school then following day i am so excited to get to have time with these students they were amazing applicants i'm really excited and just engaged and really um energized me to hear that they're excited to have participate

034in decision making as a school system we know students they've received the education they're the ones they're our product so we have to make sure we really understand how our everything we're doing impacts the students at that level so really excited to get input from our students one of the tasks that i'm going to charge them with is developing a student bill of rights so we as a school system have some understanding of what are our students need what do they expect from us as a school system i did also want to shout out we selected our parents advisory team and our health and medical expert team that are coveted advisory teams as i'll tell you again i was looking through their um submissions to participate in this these individuals are just i was blown

035away with their qualifications they're what they do for a living the decisions that they make these are some really highly qualified individuals and i'm honored that they would serve and help support our decisions and what we do as a school system to make sure our students are safe in the classrooms and as well as our teachers so the format of these is going to be kind of a round table so i've already got some questions that are coming in from parents we know we're looking at the possibility of younger students getting vaccinated soon you know weather's getting colder so we want to get some advice and input on how might we modify our lunch when we can't eat outside on a daily basis we want to be ready before we have to make a decision

036that we've talked about it we've thought through it and we've kind of had that input part in a general way so that we're not caught off guard if we make a decision and it's not a popular decision we want to be ready up front um to get that advice from these experts um the first person on the health and medical team she's actually not a parent here at san diego valenciano and she's the director for the dekalb board of health i felt it was important to have her serve on this team as well and was thrilled when she said that she would participate and just be that extra expert person in the room so really excited for these teens they also start meeting here in the near future and like i said there'll be a

037roundtable discussion we will be sharing links so people can watch the meeting have like a webinar and they can hear the conversations for themselves we'll publish the agenda and any recommendations that come out of these committees and last thing for covet updates i did want to share some data with us with everyone and particularly the board about where we are with staff vaccinations so we currently have 920 active employees on our roster we have a process that they have to complete and upload their vaccination information um we still have about 50 we have only about 50 have completed the process so far but based on the data that's complete um the numbers of teachers that are or staff that are fully vaccinated is really high for those that have completed the form but we have

038about half who haven't yet sent it in which puts our overall vaccination rate for teacher or for staff at 48.7 of the 462 completed you can see that nearly most are fully vaccinated or plan on being fully vaccinated by the end of the month um nine exemptions requests and we did have five respond that they do not plan to get vaccinated and we are reaching out and making efforts to understand why those individuals may have may or some may choose not to get vaccinated to see what supports we can put in place there student vaccination rates we have just over 2 700 students that are of the age to be eligible for vaccinations of that 14 36 are fully vaccinated which puts our student vaccination rates higher than our teachers currently that we know of

039which is um close to 53 percent so i think that's a really good percentage there and we did start weekly screening assess uh testing this week and just through the assessments um we've only found two positive students so i think we're that's going well and showing us that our um that the rates of covid are declining but we still have to be diligent vigilant about wearing our mask and following the mitigation protocols because what we've seen with delta is this virus can get out of control very quickly so it's very important that we maintain a high level of rigorous mitigations in our schools those are the rest of my comments any questions or comments from the board i'm excited about the partnership with kansas state particularly the alternative teacher certification program um i did i

040went through an alternative certification program through metro research here in georgia and so it is the um it could be a great opportunity for um our staff and then the student bill of rights i'm also very excited about that i think it will be a very empowering process for our students um i'm most excited of all the committees i think they're all great and i love that you're getting input from all around but i'm really excited about the student advisory committee and i think we should do more to hear directly from our students and incorporate their input and feedback into decisions that we make i think that's great yeah awesome thank you so much dr fermentum so as you can hear there's a lot happening so much happening in our district as well as our

041schools and i will say it is nice to be back in person and to see somewhat more normalcy than we've been we've seen in this past year even seeing kids walking to school and even sitting in traffic you know that definitely was something we used to complain about um but now just to get get stuck behind the bus you know i'm just grateful to sit behind the bus you know and knowing that our kids are going to and from school um i wanted to thank mr chris billingsley for writing to the board regarding the dhs jrotc and uh for the work that you do with the students thank you so much so the jrotc prepares you to students for responsible leadership roles while making them aware of the benefits of citizenship so thank you colonel

042johnny richards for all that you do as well she mentioned the oakhurst elementary blue ribbon high performing school that that's major and that is definitely a reason to celebrate and also thank all of the teachers and staff at oakhurst for all the hard work that they do so as many of you know we have a voting coming up on november 2nd so we will have some new board members possible uh change and commission we also have senior tax exemption and east loft so these are just two important initiatives that you will see um on the ballot and so it the senate bill 292 is what our senior exemption is so if you have any additional questions or any uh want to learn more about that we have a whole link on our website to it

043but you will be seeing that um on your ballot and east los that stands for educational special purpose local option sales tax um and so this was approved by the voters in 2016 and it will expire june 20 22 so it's up for renewal and essentially what this is is a one cent percent sales tax on all retail purchases and so and then that will go to the school districts in the county so you will see that as well on your ballot i had the opportunity of meeting with a few stakeholders myself the past couple weeks met with um president lizak over at agnes scott that was a great meeting it was very nice to meet her and just talking about a way that we can collaborate more um with that campus is such a

044um a staple in our city and um so that was a great meeting also had the opportunity of meeting meeting with all of our potential new board members um and so that was exciting to just start to set ground and a path with them and create relationships with them we will look so different and in just a few months um so that was that's that's been on our plate it's been pretty busy but it's been good it's been good stuff it's been nice to be able to actually sit in front of somebody face to face um so many of our meetings were virtual uh for such a long time um national principal month just wanted to show appreciation to all of our principals again you went into explanation on how hard they're working and how

045overwhelmed i'm very sure that they are feeling um and so i definitely want to give them a special shout out for all the hard work that they do and the extra mile that they go we know that you go the extra mile we can see that you do more than what is asked of you and so we appreciate you not just this month but every month and also want to say happy national custodian day that was on october 2nd so again in in you saying that they are feeling overwhelmed um therefore they are our one of our first responders and the reason why our numbers continue to be low and one of the reasons why our numbers continue to be low is because they work so hard to make sure that that everything stays clean

046and sanitized and and they're showing the care for their students in that way um with the bus drivers as well making sure the buses are safe just you know everyone and so i do i do feel and i do understand the overwhelming feeling that people are feeling us as board members have felt it as well and we aren't necessarily in this every single day like you are and so um just want to have some recognition for that understanding that how this is feeling for you and if there is anything that we can do as a board to help ease that um i welcome uh the conversation to find out ways that we can help ease that because we want your you want we want you to come to work every day with a joy with

047the joy of why you even got into this career in the first place and um i know that kovit has a lot to do with that but if there's anything we can do to help with that that's that's what we're here for um and she did mention also the surveillance testing this week so um i'm glad we're able to start that um and just keep up numbers um even closer than we've been keeping up with before and thank you to the nurses and to the council and dr huddleston for getting um for putting all that together uh my daughter said she got tested today and you know she explained to me how unhappy she was with that because she doesn't like things up her nose but other than that i'm glad that we can keep

048track of that for our students um so i think that is all for my board comment uh cheer comments today board members did you have anything that you'd like to share or questions no i um i know that there have been many of our students um and staff involved in the um taking down of um the cannon um on the square and so we know that the the cat county commissioners voted to remove that and so kudos to those students and community members who have been involved in that effort i did want to just also thank the principals and the teachers and the staff for supporting all the extracurricular activities and i have heard from so many parents how much that has meant to their students to be able to be back in meaningful activities

049outside of the normal school day where they've been able to connect with peers that they might not otherwise see during the day and just how much that has meant to their kids and it also adds to their excitement about school in general and so i realize that's a lot of extra effort from our teachers and our staff and our principals so thanks to them for enabling that to happen and for it to be able to happen safely i don't have a comment the same thing about just enjoying all the kudos because your reference to the senior exemption uh reminded me that um holy smokes we have a vote we've done nothing to promote vote on the senior exemption and um we need to and it's like tomorrow i mean literally i think the polls open

050um probably voting starts soon so i just sort of i don't know what we need to do but i mean in order to pass the exemption the first time around we had quite a campaign five for five those five both yes and all the initiatives which you were a big part of before you're on the board but um we haven't done that and i'm wondering what we need to do and what we can do in the short time available and i know that we have to be careful because you can't use school funds to promote uh political activity but i wonder if we could talk about activating the committee that developed it maybe some of our candidates who were involved in that and and uh see if we can get done to send something up

051and make sure that people know it shouldn't be controversial but we wrote ourselves into our seniors to get the word out yeah i got a phone call about that today um and i thought we had talked about it a while ago and trying to do pr around that and other things kind of the priority yeah we do need to maybe circle back with that and see how we can at least get something out and what that can look like we can all kind of take a piece and run with it all right so moving on with the next steps in our agenda we are um the consent item we have the personal report school nutrition financial report and the board training plan do we have a motion to approve the consent item i need to

052approve the consent items right i would favor uh cheerful eye okay so now we're moving on to our action items for information and discussion okay thank you yeah so um before i call dr beam up to start her presentation um i did share with the board the monitoring report for that shares my interpretation of the ends policy 1.2 academics and foundations so any input from the board on my interpretation and if there needs to be any edits to that information are we going to discuss that that's what this yep discussion questions and i can take notes and i have a few comments okay so um one of them i'm sorry these aren't real frame welfare thoughts on the policy 1.2 academics and foundations policy is to the extent possible given an equitable allocation of available

053resources all students will graduate have maintained their highest academic intellectual and personal potential and be prepared to thrive in life beyond high school so my first in one of the comments um one of the comments i interpret preparedness i don't even know what the comment is i guess this is um i didn't feel like some of the things that were embedded in this sentence up above that were discussed kind of before we came up with it captured in the superintendent's interpretation it's not that i disagree with anything that you put however for instance as i interpret prepared to thrive in life beyond high school to mean that all graduate students have met the established criteria for graduation set forth by the school district command seemed a little bit circular in the class and not really

054to capture the thought yeah and why but that is for me for me as i was reading this is you know trying to measure this idea here is very difficult so what i what my thought process here is that if we have set up a school system where our students are meeting criteria that we believe will make them successful and if we graduate a student then we are saying because you're graduating you've met all the criteria that we put in place therefore you are ready to thrive in your next step i feel like that begs the question what's those criteria yeah and this is supposed to be sort of a statement principle that says we need to find some criteria criteria just to say that you've met whatever criteria we said that quite get it

055and i know that in preparing the thriving life behind high school i mean the discussion behind that was we need to make sure that we're preparing kids you know to live a good and full life and that might mean going to college it might be going to art school it might be going to trade school it might be doing none of those things but doing something else yeah but they need to have the tools both character wise and skills and knowledge they're going to be prepared and to live their best life i know it's all flowery but that was kind of the point but somehow or another i don't think just saying that they've met whatever requirements we said any suggestions on what or things that should be added to that i mean i don't

056have a proposal how to fix it right now so would we or are you suggesting to you that we would put some of those some of those steps in that in her interpretation section right yeah like specific right here of what that looks like to you to be prepared beyond high school well my suggestion would be yes that there would be some text and number one i don't think it's essential that we always talk in terms of measurable goals very important to come up with measurable criteria but we can also agree that there's some concepts that are a little bit hard to measure and i think that the goal is a mix of both and so i think that you can say i interpret this to mean things that you can't immediately measure and then

057you can say that's hard to measure anything that we're going to get at the criteria that we've done but we can at least acknowledge the goal which is this larger goal of preparing kids to function well in life do you mind if i pick you back on that for a second because i'm trying to dig into this and understand where you're coming from and i do remember some of these conversations because when we were creating this policy we talked about this at length and this is making me think of some of the conversations we had about students when they graduate to be have a plan to do something and like lewis said not all kids are going to go to you know a four-year college or a two-year college or some might go into the

058military some might start a trade but we want them to do something we want them to have a plan and so maybe we can find some criteria to determine whether we have enabled students to have a plan and whether or not they execute that plan um and that includes graduating but not just graduating like actually taking that next step and engaging in what life will bring to them um does that does that hit on some of what you're saying okay okay do you know if we have anything like that in the high school right now almost like an exit survey or interview that lets us know not what our kids are planning on doing after graduation nothing i'm aware of for general education students so students that have iep they do a um i if

059they have special needs they do a transition plan so they actually start working on that in eighth grade their transition plan they write their goals what their career goals are what their next steps are whatever training they might need they start working on that really early um now for our high school students that the non-iep students i'm not aware of anything but i think i think like um i know that counselors have sessions starting senior year i just got a text from principal lost and she says they do a survey and exit survey with all seniors yeah there we go thanks for trying to do something that's actually very realistic and a good way to measure them what are we what are our students doing mm-hmm and honestly it could lead to some beefed up

060and we've discussed a little bit that in my opinion some counseling mm-hmm appropriate goal that could lead to additional either resources or programming ground counseling make sure the counselor is available to make sure that these kids have a path yeah a related thing if i may it's just i think it's the same bullet and again it's not that i disagree with anything in the bullet it's just the thoughts that have been part of the discussion and we spent all this time thinking about you know attain their highest academic intellectual and personal potential and you know if i don't recall sort of it started as just you know we want high achievement good school boards are supposed to push high achievement so we're very interested in my achievement so well what does that mean so that

061that's what this name type even but additionally there's a when i first ran some school board long time ago part of what motivated me is that at the time our metrics and the way we measured stuff was how many of the kids what percentage are confident and we celebrate the 75 percent meant the base level of confidence from subject to another it was a long time ago but um i didn't like that because it seemed like we're going to retire i mean we need to have a certain that we're going to achieve kind of the minimum level and then we need to make sure that the kids who can achieve more than that are also achieving the highest level of their potential and so we do a lot better job with that have for a

062long time so that now we kind of look at people we're making sure that they meet their growth targets across the spectrum so it's not just about minimum level and it's not just about how many gifted kids you have or whatever things about everybody all up and down are getting everything that they need that's a concept that's really important to me that we're serving the whole spectrum of serving every kid personally i would kind of like to see call the health it's not that it's not there yeah no no this is why we have these conversations some of that same thought is over on that table like and on page four part of the evidence is that um kids think and solve problems using both periods and critical skills and the data is what percentages

063students are scoring in the highest range and i'm not sure if that captures all that we need to be capturing because not every kid is capable of scoring the highest range what we need to make sure is that those are capable of scoring in the middle range aren't growing in the in the lower rings right we need to make sure that everybody's people right right so and this one was really about those you know when you look at how the eight these exams are broken down and when they talk about so you'll see more about the levels of achievement level descriptors but really if students are doing the you know the highest range um the exceeding range they're really digging into that deep critical thinking component so if we're having more students in that component

064in that range then those students are thinking critically um are using those problem-solving skills so that's part of just the way those tests are designed um helps you ascertain are our students move into that highest level of critical thinking and problem solving so that's why i selected those ones and really kind of choosing out not just proficient but are they moving into that highest range of achievement where the test is capable of measuring those higher levels of critical thinking and problem solving and that honestly sounds appropriate to me i i would have a related question though that a lot of the scoring like if i look at um understand the history of the world exam scores a push scores an ib personal project and that leaves me wondering what about the kids who aren't iv

065well nyp is for everyone okay yeah so this is this covers that yes okay yeah all students complete the middle years program okay and they all do a big culminating personal project i had one that i've got um [Music] on the page i think it's page 60 of your packet page five of this manual that demonstrates an understanding of respect for human and intercultural differences and multiple perspectives i really feel like that belongs more in our character and section isn't there a learning like a knowledge component of that as well as a character component tell me more about why you think that well it demonstrates an understanding of and respects intercultural differences in multiple perspectives part of that thing is the curriculum that is designed through which we do a great job of making sure

066that kids have learned about other cultures and have have learned about their cultural differences and through doing that have you know developed multicultural perspectives but it seems to me that there's that's clearly an academic component that should be called out as an academic component we also have a character goal which is just the knowledge was good so for this one is the board feeling like it's it's this is really trying to lean more into the content we're teaching the students will lend it to creating students that the end product is that they have that opportunity to understand different um and respect humans and under intercultural differences i think so yeah i'll tell you not humanities anymore but i can't remember ins or um individuals yeah yeah that is achieved you know through at least that's

067that class okay gotcha that makes sense all right that helps okay anyone any anything else i have just a general comment um and this because we're talking here about highest academic potential but also intellectual and personal potential and generally i feel like the data that we were presenting was very quantitative very much grades and scores and that kind of thing but i would like to explore also some qualitative data around particularly the intellectual and personal potential and that may mean um are our students exploring other things like are they participating in the arts are they participating in sports are they participating in some enriching activities are they um or even within a class i think you mentioned that some have culminating presentations that we you know give our students an opportunity to not to take

068their learning and how do we enable them to um apply that to the real world and then grow intellectually and personally from that so i'd like to explore adding some [Music] qualitative data information like supporting do that because i don't think it's all about just greater test scores i think there's a lot more to this and how we want our students to grow from these other aspects yeah i agree in that and that is actually one of the key components of our building a data culture is understanding it's not just the numbers it is some of those qualitative data pieces that we need to make sure we're looking at and understanding and unpacking on that subject um one of the things that we've talked about just you and i and our conversations the other day

069was the emphasis that i would put on when we talk about personal potential building leadership qualities in children and and the students to see and to me i've always thought the extracurriculars to have a very heavy focus on developing those opportunities for kids to be leaders and i feel like if that's called out in a goal then we can as part of the evaluation we can make sure that the people leading those programs for maximizing the opportunity it's not always done but it could be yeah i don't know if it fits here i know there's another policy about building care yeah and it might belong okay from an equity perspective if we look at that i would like to also like it goes back to a conversation we had maybe a meeting or two ago

070about wanting to see that we have participation across all groups and that we're really encouraging all students to participate and not just um assuming that they will sign up on their own you know sometimes we may need to really make sure we're kind of taking a holistic look at ensuring that we're really providing this opportunity to all our students and that's being taken advantage of and that's all our students are having the opportunity to grow from it okay can you um a good clarification in terms of the qualitative data and and what ted was looking for because it still sounds kind of quantitative to me of how many kids are participating in sports how many students i was wondering what what specific information was regarding extracurricular so it seems like it will still just turn

071into numbers in terms of how many kids are participating in these different opportunities that we offer through extracurricular activities yeah i mean it's a good question um maybe it's about what we are offering ensuring that we are you know and i know that we are doing a lot of this already you know i know that there are 100 different clubs at the high school literally and that we are offering um music in school you know band chorus orchestra and then numerous opportunities for kids to participate out of school we are encouraging our high school students to participate in community service which is what gives and also a growth opportunity and that's we're giving value to that you know our seniors who do i think it's 60 hours get to wear a cord at graduation so

072i think it's looking looking at our programming and so not just counting numbers i think it's important to see who's participating but also uh look at what we're offering and are we offering opportunities in these various areas to develop um these intellectual and personal potentials of these kids um in order for them to you know even have the opportunity so maybe that's part of it it's looking at our offerings and seeing if there's maybe something we need to add to that or some of the metrics that we had talked about and i don't know if we ever landed on any of them but some that have been thrown around were things like every kid should have something their amplitude and so what percentage of our kids and white and black have found something and do

073we have something for everybody so whether it's football band or debate um there's something that another one that i know that some like west point i think uses it's important not just that people participate but they grow in their participation it's not something where they just show up and so how many kids have something to participate in year after year and increase their involvement in and that's a measure that west point looks at that says this kid's going to be stick to something and be committed to it and grow in it and that's the truth that we want to so how many of the kids are we have uh haven't for how many here have multiple year participation that kind of thing those are the kinds of things that we talked about at one time

074um i was what was i going to say oh i think you're definitely going in the right direction dr fuhrman as well when you start meeting with the students because i think hearing from them and making sure that what is being offered is still what kids want to do um i think sometimes as adults we think about the things we did in high school like of course they're going to want to do that and with technology and everything the way that it is um you know it's kind of hard to keep up with it but they do keep up with it so i am curious to see if there's there's something that we're missing there and more that we can um and implement for them and that in that regard um and then going back

075to i found very interesting when you were talking about the iep pipeline um and the path i guess not the pipeline but the iep path yeah and then having the experience with my daughter and ivy there was something very similar and so i'm wondering if there's a way we can really talk about those kids that we always talk about in the middle yeah um that some kind of program is also directed toward them and we already have the metrics for it it just goes it's already labeled it's labeled for iep or it's labeled for ib um but the outcome sounds incredible just starting starting to focus on the students and their goals in eighth grade you know all the way through yeah um and and so that could then lend to what lewis was saying

076um what what what can we find in eighth grade that they would love to do or that they're passionate about or that they're interested in or that they're good at and then being able to foster that all the way through high school um so that would probably be that area too and we could just really explore what that would look like all right do we have any more questions for dr fermin in this uh area um i think this is a really good start and a great conversation and i think that this is why we need to revisit these once we get these done we revisit these annually because i think we'll continue to evolve our expectations and our our thinking on this like part of this is about emerging technologies and and seeing whether

077our students are prepared um you know and are technology technologically literate that simply even that will require us to revisit this every year because uh you know the job market changes and the technology changes and the careers change and so we also need to make sure that we are evolving as a school system and preparing our students for the future um and then some other basic things that we probably do but it'd be nice to really call it out and and check to see because there are certain life skills and if we're saying that we want our students to thrive in life behind beyond high school there's some really important things about just money management and just basic life skills that we may want to look and just see what courses we offer that cover

078those kinds of things just so that our kids will thrive so i think it's going to be an evolving i don't think we'll get at least i don't think we'll get this 100 percent the first time no yeah yeah i think we're we have a good start um and i think this conversation you know this could be a work session at some point talking about yeah no this definitely was my first stab at it to kind of see where i was landing and get your input as a board on where you were interpreting these so that we can move forward and take the next step in the right direction yeah so i'll take this back to the drawing board and bring it back at another board meeting okay so now i'm going to turn it

079over to dr beam and her amazing team and they are going to present a deeper dive into some data as well as um the work that her team is leading when it comes to um accelerating student learning color and addressing the ends that are kind of it's the way to address the ends that are outlined thank you dr b thank you good to see you all again madam chairperson members of the board dr furman on behalf of the department of teaching and learning thank you for letting us i'm assistant superintendent of teaching and learning and i'm here with my amazing team and they are amazing as you will see um we have dr kristen gibbons director of instructional programs courtney simon who you may not have met she is new to us this year and

080she is wonderful we are so happy she is here she's our director of english language arts and social studies and we have heidi watley director of research and analytics and julian science director of math and science so as a result of tonight's presentation as you will understand the purpose and structure of our csd instructional framework you'll be able to name our instructional outcomes that we plan to achieve by 2026 and the action steps that we will take to achieve them so our instructional framework sorry our instructional framework defines our core practices in regards to instruction it shows what we expect to see in every classroom from birth to grade 12 across the district we start with our inquiry-based instructional programs we move to our high leverage practices that we have identified to be most impactful

081our core practices for equity including critical literacy and numeracy culturally responsive teaching and strong formative assessment practices that allow students to become leaders of their own learning through goal setting feedback and feedback so that students know where they are know where they're going and how they're going to get there so then we move to the most important part of the framework our core is what we do is our standards our teachers and of course our students been through our mission i could never get that thing to work through our mission vision core beliefs strategic priorities our theory of action city school of educator defines the expectations for teaching and learning we provide meaningful motivating rewarding rigorous relevant effective learning experiences for our students our department exists to make those promises a reality for each student

082in every classroom we are charged with ensuring that we need the boards in policies we are responsible for the 12 indicators that you are just discussing under academics and foundations we also work to ensure equity to the end to end the preferences that have created the disproportionate outcomes and work to implement our iv program with fidelity so that our students embody the characteristics of the learner profile including being principal caring reflective thinkers in order to achieve these lofty goals that we have set forth we have created the framework for equitable outcomes and specifically our department is leading the work and the pillar the center pillar accelerating student learning which we are here to unpack for you tonight we have set three aspirational goals that we intend to meet in the next five years first all

083students will meet or exceed predicted gross scores next city schools of dictator will eliminate disproportionate outcomes based on race and finally we will work to ensure that all students exemplify the csb graduate profile first let's look at how we develop this plan our decisions are always data informed and research based so heidi watley director of research and analytics will lead us through the current data that informs our work thank you christy good evening i'm going to give you some highlightable data on our assess on some of our assessment tools i'll highlight some of our points of time and some of our opportunities for growth as we look at the data so we continue to leave the state of the metro recent our performance on the gmat test here you see the third grade reading performance

084there's a link on the slide if you click it in your presentation you can see all the ela math and then the reading lexile performance the the pattern is the same for all this prime media data much higher than theresa we're much higher than the state this next graph is a summary of our end of grade tests in ela math science and social studies this graph represents the percentage of students proficient and distinguished for rates three through eight it's aggregated by grades but disaggregated by subgroups so what you're looking at is the content areas across the subgroups in 19 2019 and 2021 so you'll see the black subgroup in both years and then the white sub group in both years and then all students in both the blue is english language arts the yellow is

085math the green is science the red is social studies the percentages of all students scoring proficient and distinguished in language arts and math was similar to performance in 2019. there were 10 percent left students scoring distinguished and per sufficient in science that green bar over onto all students and 5 percent um less scoring proficient in social studies the red bar you can see that the sub groups perform differently with the black students increasing in 2021 in social studies and the white students decreasing social studies and you can also see here that um we still have a lot of opportunities for growth in terms of working on our paying our educational debt this this next slide is our um end of course tests and so there the number of tests was reduced so there were only

086four tests that we gave in both years 2021 we had extremely low participation we only gave 218 tests while in uh 2021 we administered 1506. i mean in 2019 administering 1506. so in some of our areas you'll see the bars are missing because we had less than 10 students take that test and that happened in u.s history you can see that we have a number for all students that do not have a number we do not have more than 10 in either of our subgroups there so we exclude that because then we can start identifying systems um the results were that 10 10 fewer students were proficient or distinguished in american literature the same percentage were proficient and distinguished in algebra from the students who took the test black students performed more similarly to the

087white students in algebra this this next slide is our math data from spring 2019 and all 2021 this is a test we just took we typically do not compare fall to spring data in this manner but we wanted to show you the last fullest map administration where everybody took it and then the most recent one where everybody took it so we're looking at percentile data here um not the writ or the or the growth because we wanted to the percentiles tend to remain similar across administration so you can see here that the dashed lines represent 2021 um and the solid lines represent 2019. but for grades six through ten the differences were not dramatic but across all the subgroups we did see lower performance in second grade in reading um and higher performance in fourth

088and fifth grade in 2021 so that's a little bit interesting data um this next graph is the same same data but for math and as you can see by looking at the dashed lines they are lower than the solid lines across the board and the great in this graph the grade levels are go across the bottom so each line is a great level so you can see that that's consistent across grade levels and the cross-section for having a bit more performance in that and last and finally this is a real point of pride our fat scores on the overall sat scores increased from 1170 to 12 27 for black students increased their their total score by 85 points so if you look um at the blue and the yellow together makes that total score um

089but they increased over 40 points in both areas in english evidence-based reading writing as well as mathematics and on just a note when you look back over the years of data the the pattern that you see for 2019 20 for each population is about the same so like the white student average scores are around 1200 and the black students average scores were around 900 000 for many many years so this is the first year of these kind of you know boost in that black subgroup which is really nice to see um so next you will hear from dr julie mcfadden our director of mathematics and science and she will share about our priority initiative thank you very much thanks heidi and good evening it's nice to see all of you um based on our goals

090the instructional framework that you heard about from dr beam our data that heidi just shared with us our best department has developed five priority initiatives that will guide our work over the next five years each of these priority initiatives are broad goals that take purposeful planning and follow-up to ensure we're making progress so in order to help us evaluate that progress we've identified benchmarks toward each broad goal that we will work to meet each academic school year tonight we're excited to share with you our progress towards these for our goals by highlighting some specific examples of the benchmarks for this academic school year i'm going to begin with priority initiative one which is creating and implementing a tiered coherence curriculum map this initiative is closely aligned to our focus on equity and when we say

091tiered curriculum maps we're referring to the varying levels of support provided to students all students receive tier 1 support this is that basic level of differentiation that happens in every single classroom some students need more intensive academic or behavior support and may show a need for tier 2 or tier 3 interventions and support this first initiative states that our curriculum map should include materials practices standards for every level of support coherent test two definitions the quality of being logical and consistent and the quality of forming a unified whole and we have both of those definitions in mind when we think about coherence in our curriculum first benchmark that i'm going to highlight tonight states that we will work to align resources assessments standards and practices to accelerate student learning and this year we're working to

092ensure that the resources and assessments our teachers are using are closely aligned to standards as well as high leverage practices that support student learning one example of that is the work to roll out georgia numeracy project in city schools of decatur source of numeracy project was developed by the georgia doe based on work from the new zealand numeracy project it's an evidence-based program that supports teachers with identifying students number strategies and numbered knowledge and using that information and supporting to our students with developing strong numbers last school year during a pandemic we work to train all of our k-5 early intervention program teachers these are the teachers at the elementary level that provide those tier 2 and tier 3 supports across all seven of our k-5 schools this year our eip teachers are implementing georgia

093numeracy with students receiving tier 2 and tier 3 support this year we're also working to train all of our tier 1 teachers on using georgia numeracy in the tier one classroom so that all students have that strong foundation teachers understand the number sense and number knowledge are able to help support that number development in elementary school i've had the opportunity to be invited to a number of eip teacher teams meetings this year to look at data from their initial implementation and have targeted targeted discussions about students mathematical needs and some best next steps one teacher shared during a collaborative planning session this not only gives me insight into what the students know it also gives me the way forward oftentimes our assessments will identify gaps but maybe not offer ways to move forward with students

094i cannot highlight this role out without mentioning the name of stacy foster she's one of our amazing eit teachers at claremont elementary who's been using georgia numeracy for a number of years with her own students she has decided and graciously agreed to step up as a teacher leader to provide um input and insight and just her shared experience with teachers about how it's worked with her own children of her own children in her classroom so i just wanted to make sure that i called up her valuable participation in this i'm so excited to continue working with our elementary math teachers to ensure that we're aligning our resources assessments and practices to accelerate student learning indicator the second piece that i want to highlight the second benchmark states that we're going to identify priority standards and

095map those standards vertically and horizontally the cova pandemic has had immeasurable impacts on education as a whole and city schools indicators called into question everything about the way that schools have functioned historically but it's also offered an opportunity for change one of the positive outcomes of last school year was collaboration not only between teachers on the same grade level at a single school but collaboration across schools commentating guides have not always been the practice at our elementary schools across those schools we have one middle school and one high school and so that collaboration has historically happened in our secondary schools historically our elementary schools have really built their own internal pacing guides and their own internal assessments that they're using last year we listed this work to the district level so that we could offer

096parent-facing communication guides um so that parents were aware what second graders would be learning what third graders would be this year we've decided to continue that work with the support of our k5 ela and math teacher leaders these are teachers who have volunteered to step up for a stipended position that come together before every six weeks and collaborate to provide high quality resources collaborate on common assessments so that we're ensuring that our second graders are being measured and being assessed in similar ways across the district these teacher leaders are just amazing and represent every every one of our seven k-5 schools in the district and we have a few goals for them the first is to facilitate collaboration across all of the k-5 schools to develop those common pacing guides and assessments the second is

097to build and support collective efficacy across the district the third is to develop teacher leadership within our district and the last is to ensure equitable outcomes for all students and city schools at the cater through highly rigorous and standards-aligned tasks and assessment demands next you're going to hear from miss courtney simon our director of ela and social studies thank you good evening foreign meeting you board members i'm going to talk about priority initiative 2. priority initiative 2 addresses the utilization of consistent standards aligns core materials in all classrooms we have a curriculum evaluation cycle in csd we are currently in the implementation phase for k through 5 english language arts and the collect and the collect and study phase for grades 6 through 12. this evening i want to share with you the work we

098are doing in k-5 in benchmark a we are committed to foundations a structured findings program in grades k-3 and adopted the american reading company core literacy program in k-5 addition we have provided the opportunity for our teachers to receive orton gillingham training we are so excited to share that over 20 teachers chose to use some of their summer vacations to attend a full day two-week training program currently we have 20 additional teachers engaged in the same program on saturdays and we have six staff members working to become certified og educators we also have a group of teachers and leaders engaged in a deep dive into literacy instruction through a two-year professional development called letters which means language essential for teachers of reading and spelling this speaks to the level of dedication of our staff and

099their belief around the importance of structured literacy education we have just initiated our second cohort for paraprofessional literacy training because we know what a valuable resource we have in our paraprofessionals here at the city's rules of decatur next you will hear from dr bean concerning our progress with priority initiatives three thank you all right priority initiative three really it deals with building that data culture here in csv we're developing and implementing a simplified comprehensive and consistent approach to assessment that will allow us to access and utilize data to inform our decisions in regards to programming and instructional needs i'd like to highlight a couple of those benchmarks as well first is universal screening universal screening means that we administer high quality assessments to all students to determine intervention and enrichment needs our multi-tiered system of

100support give all students access to a great education in the most inclusive environment possible this access is provided using universal screening and progress monitoring data it starts our students in the least supportive environment and then adding or removing supports as needed in other words we're giving each and every student just the right amount of support that they need to succeed research has consistently shown that universal screening improves the representation of underrepresented or historically underrepresented students engaged in talented programs by relying on an objective test rather than more subjective referrals from parents or teachers this year we welcome erica godfrey to our department she is our district intervention specialist and mtss coordinator she's doing an excellent job not only on monitoring the daily intervention programs that are happening in our classrooms each and every day but

101she's also already implemented several of the programs that we discussed last year last spring um in city schools of decatur to provide our students with maximum opportunities for success decatur high school has held saturday health sessions for several years now and the k and in grades k-8 we just completed our first session this past saturday the middle school students followed the credit recovery model just like the decatur high school did whereas k-5 students engaged in hands-on math and literacy enrichment activities to support grade level standards we also completed our first k-12 academic interception program during fall break teachers delivered direct instructions small groups of students in mathematics and literacy with a space beams lesson with lessons this intervention was designed to support students that met certain criteria with math and the milestones test a total

102of 398 students were invited to participate of those 81 students registered and attended six out of the nine teachers saw an increase in performance in both ela and math and the high school middle and i'm sorry and high school students were able to provide the provided time and attention to complete apex course recovery extended school day tutoring will begin october 19th we're excited to report that we will have service at all schools k through as well building coordinators are working to identify students who meet the criteria and rescue tutors to serve for 90 minutes tuesday through thursday this summer we will again provide students k-12 opportunities to help them prepare for the upcoming school year in k-8 and with credit recovery in nine through 12. this past summer we serve over 500 cse students in

103our summer program okay next we will talk about a new priority initiative number four and you heard existed about this from dr banks last week we are definitely we partner across departmental leads to foster inclusive environments where every student and staff members feel that sense of belonging in city school educator research shows that when curricula includes stories history characters from various backgrounds portrayed in positive manners then students thrive that's why the critically perceived the curricular popular i am so sorry the culturally responsive scorecards are tools that we use as part of our curriculum review process the culturally responsive scorecards are designed by nyu at the metro center to help us determine the extent to which our curricula are are not culturally responsive the departments of equity and student services and teaching and learning are presently

104partnering to initiate an equity audit in all csd curricula a curriculum that misrepresents history and does not introduce opportunities for students to engage positively in their learning with a disservice to students the consequences of such curriculum can be disengagement a lack of connection identity issues low self endless self-esteem initiating and collaborating with the equity and education task force which is a group of community stakeholders we will they will help us eliminate such practices by supporting schools to design and establish anti-racism and social justice expeditions and units of inquiry at k5 and participate in collaborative process to evaluate the presence of handmaker's recommendations for equitable and representative curriculum across use now we will hear from miss christine evans our director of instructional programs and she'll share some highlights from priority initiative number five there you are

105good evening and we have made it to our final priority initiative for our department which is focused on evaluating and ensuring equitable programs policies and practices and you're already familiar with some of these benchmarks from dr bean's previous presentation at the board work section which he shared about spanish program evaluation and all of these other items i'm going to be highlighting our first benchmark under this initiative tonight which is forming our equity and grading this year we are embarking on an analysis of our current grading and grid reporting systems and practices at the end of this year we are really hoping to have recommendations for a common k-12 reading scale with clear easy-to-understand descriptors recommendations for a common k-12 gradebook tool as well which will be open in real time to students appearance and also

106recommendations for development of written district-wide policies practices and procedures perfect we have a great deal of evidence showing a need for this work to be done at this time we currently use a variety of grading scales across our grade bands we also utilize different grading platforms with different report outfits across great bands we've had parents report to us that they're not sure what is reported where it also makes it very difficult for us to pull grades easily for all students for monitoring purposes and to summarize achievement and performance we have noted that grades for students of color on average are lower than grades for white students at every grade that's not every student in every class but on average we do see that we also have parents and students having expressed difficulty and frustration with

107the present grading system we have heard in our department as well as in the equity department some parents feeling unclear on what different grades need despite school's efforts and best intentions to explain we have had parents say that they feel they do not truly understand how a student is doing at a given point in time but they feel there's room for subjectivity and bias in some of our current grading practices and procedures and we've identified discrepancies between the size grades and student performance on standardized assessments finally our most recent accreditation report identified effectiveness of grading practices and communication of grades is a growth area for our district and they did suggest that we improve the way that we grade and communicate grades in a way that makes sense to students and parents uh we will

108be using grading for equity by joe feldman to ground and guide our work we're not going to be using it as a prescription but rather a guide for reflection and discussion all of our task force teachers instructional coaches and principals will be receiving a copy also i recommend if you are interested in the book you go online it has a website the first chapter is available to anyone and that also brings me to who is involved in this work we just created an equity and grading teachers task force to give teachers a vehicle to participate and keep them at the center of this work intentional efforts were made to create a balanced and diverse team that represents a variety of grade levels programs subjects and demographics i'm not announcing that theme tonight because we're still

109waiting for confirmation from team members that they are on board there was an application process a selection committee additionally principals and instructional coaches will be providing feedback and participating throughout the year through their already scheduled monthly meetings parents and students will provide feedback as well through the sclt and the superintendent's new student advisory committee and finally a cross-department committee of wilson administrators meets regularly to discuss the process and progress of this work and we look forward to sharing with you all the progress and eventual recommendations with that i'm going to turn it back over to dr beam to close us out so as i said i have an incredible team i get to come to work with every day so that makes it a wonderful place to be in this book how to be an

110anti-racist ibrahim kennedy says that americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies in people rather than policy i am grateful to come to work each day to work alongside educators that recognize that our students are not deficient they are extraordinary and it is our job to examine the policies practices and breakdown any barriers that are preventing our students from excelling in our country i have complete confidence that with your support that we can achieve these outcomes that our students deserve thank you great job dr beam and her team any comments or questions from the board for dr beam and any of the members of the team good question um what would the common grading tool mean for the ivy rubrics that are currently used sorry are we coming with common iv rubrics or i

111can't imagine that this common grading school will do away with the ivy rule but what will that mean all right so we've been having conversations with um our ib regional um director and our um and casey who's an ib support here um and just what our best practices with ib and so we are digging into that that will be part of that so really the answer to that question will come out of the findings of the team or the recommendations of the team iv says that we need to report the results of this of our rubrics at least twice a year to id but they do not make any kind of you know there's no requirements as to what grading the summer scale or anything else that we use those ids and then um pastor

112gibbs had um commented about students of color typically score lower um and grading and i was just just wanted to see if we could clarify what who students of color are right is it predominantly black students or is it that that next students yeah including all of those i pulled that data for um for a person to look at and we were looking at black person's life particularly thank you i want to thank you i thought it was a great presentation i thought all around and um i really appreciate it very clear i counted very few acronyms which meant that i understood the whole thing and uh but i really appreciate it i thought it was a terrific overview of all that you've done you gave me a great deal of confidence that you've got

113it under control so thank you for that and um i was going to comment on the id um i'm so glad that you're going to look at the grading i think that the id grading framework is kind of nifty like they can understand it intellectually but not want to get a grade report and so you know when you get a grade before it's like there's too much information i don't know what to do with it so i think it's really something i mean i want a text id i love id but that report card is just me i just um i had a question when i noticed the shark dropped from 2019 to 21 21 which i assume we attribute to kosa i mean you're going pre coast to coast is there anything else i

114need to take from that or we i should you know what we there's a lot of different factors that could go into that i i think predominantly kova probably explains a lot of them um but i think we you look at that data and then the initiatives sort of build on that so all of the stuff that dr mike hasn't talked about is needed would much of it still be needed if we didn't have this year gap we don't know right but i i think like it is what it is and so we can't look at it and say why but i think the biggest discrepancies though that we see are in high school and the reasons for that are the the dramatic number difference in the number of students that took the test so

115dramatically one and this is just a comment that i wanted to mention it might be a question i'm not sure but one of the things i noted as we look at this and one of the goals is that we're going to put it close together i know that if i fully learn that i could recite it because i was supposed to be able to repeat the free learning objectives you were we had a self-assessment and i took it out [Laughter] but one of my things we used to talk about is that when we talk about closing the gap i made a comment at one point that the black students had increased and the white students actually decreased from social storage studies uh to have some remote which one was you know that's just some kind

116of blood in the data but um one of the things that we talked about and this came from ron ferguson i don't remember exactly which book you know but it was um that when you talk about closing the gap that when we set the goal to close the gap that's not really what we're trying to do it's equity with excellence not just equity right and so the specific way that he had recommended setting goals around closing the gap instead of measuring the gap instead what we need to do is figure out the baseline for white and black and then set growth targets for white students and faster growth targets for the black students and so the end result is that you close the gap and you set those growth targets in the way that you're

117going to do that but at the same time you're making sure that it's closing the gap with both groups of students increasing and i i don't think that we've been doing that but i've always thought that we should be and i want to just suggest it yeah so our first goal is that all students will meet their growth meter exceed their growth target which we are given each year so yes if a student is you know wherever a student is performing they should show a years of growth in a year so um that's especially important for our gifted students and our high achieving students who typically do not show a year of growth because they're already beyond the standards with the disproportionate outcomes i think our um i think our sat data is a great

118example of that what you saw is that we saw an increase in the scores of the overall scores of the black students and that brought up the entire district so yes our goal is that we bring our black students achievement up to i don't think that is an example of what i was talking about because the example that i would have would be that we would actually have growth on the white students and fast growth and black suits but we have these flat scores of bullying students and nice growth of black students i am not suggesting this problem i think all the data shows is going great so this is not a comment about anything that's going on it's about how you set targets and goals and so the suggestion would be that we have

119a the individualized every student i noted that i think that that's good that's kind of the first point that i was talking about oh yeah um but it would also be that when you're talking about specifically the disparity specifically the subgroups that you in fact have targets for both groups i have a question um because i remember that we were a part of the dyslexia pilot yeah they started that last school year and i was just curious is some of this og training and are some of these things a part of that pilot it absolutely is and in fact one of the things i was going to ask that for furman students if we could do another presentation for you i love talking to you so much that we could do another presentation on that

120we are actually um quite significantly ahead of our targets on where we should be with the dyslexia pilot we actually achieved last year what was required by the state of georgia through household 48 this year and yes in addition to the requirements um being a part of the cohort for identifying students with characteristics of dyslexia we're going beyond that with our um foundation tier one instructions structured phonics program for all students in k three and yes the push the not push because i mean these teachers volunteer like this was not stipended they spent two weeks this summer and they're spending their saturdays doing this because they believe so strongly and how good this is for our kids and yes so that energy training which is great for all kids also is incredibly impactful for students

121with characteristics of dyslexia yeah that's exciting because we that's something that we have have had on our radar for a long time to focus on dyslexia and have a more systematic approach to how we're going to address so it's absolutely i mean we're doing such amazing work and dr berkins that you've heard from she works she is incredibly passionate about that um she did a lot of work with that in atlanta public schools and she has brought that work to us and her expertise and you know she's written grants to help us pay for these things and so um we appreciate her so much and the resources that she has brought as well um i think it's just you know i like i said i think it's really great for all kids and the letters

122training um i have been a part of that it is it is intensive i learned so much about the science of reading and how we talk you know how we teach reading and thinking about how we thought we were supposed to be teaching reading and it's just it's really amazing and exciting work wonderful and i have just a couple other comments i think the collaboration across the seven k through five schools and particularly i know with math that's fantastic work so thank you for doing that it gives great opportunity for best practices to be shared i think it's wonderful um also i love that we're taking this data driven approach because i i'm excited to see how we can actually measure what programs and initiatives are making impact and not just thinking that they're working

123but knowing and showing those because these are significant investments not just in in time but also in money and we need to demonstrate you know through our community and to our students that we are putting these resources in the right place because they're all finite and so i think this data-driven approach is very significant and i'm excited to see how we're able to use that to really recognize what's working and what's not so thank you for that also um [Music] another comment that was you know this wasn't so much information in this presentation it was really a very very good one and this was exciting work um but i just wanted to note i'm excited about the paraprofessional training because that goes back to an earlier conversation about how we can grow talent from within

124and there are a lot of we do have amazing paraprofessionals who uh it would be nice if there was a track for them to also continue to get training and some may want to be classroom teachers so i think that's great yeah we absolutely do and i think that that is one of my like warm my heart initiatives because i know talking with paraprofessionals they feel sometimes undervalued and they don't feel like we invest in them and so the fact that our reading coaches um you know now it's being led by gail hardwick have have invested that time and and really provided the paraprofessionals with a deep dive into teaching literacy to our students because they are a a big part of that classroom and um for them to have that knowledge and i was

125just speaking with one of the paraprofessionals today we had a paraprofessional attend the two-week summer training so you know and she is interested you know in becoming a teacher and she was super excited to get the email about the pathway that we're providing and so i think it's a just a wonderful opportunity for our staff thank you for that as well thank you all yes thank you dr green this was a incredible um report on the initiative that you that you set forth were just very clear and concise you know configuring backing on what lewis said i didn't feel that there was anything that had me lost because you did such a great explanation um and i just love also how um you are all evidently in in the part of this work that you're

126passionate about i can tell the way that you were presenting it that you were presenting exactly where you were supposed to be so i do appreciate that um and there was one comment you made about the scorecard of our curriculum when is that when is that supposed to be so it's called a culturally responsive scorecard it's actually a tool that was created by nyu um and we have used that we used it in our um ela adoption this past year and it act it was actually that i was one of the primary deciding factors when we got down to the final two curriculums [Laughter] it's getting late yeah it is we got down to the final two because what we can see when you use the culturally responsive scorecard um it looks at at various

127components but one of the components that looks at is who wrote these books is it all white men that wrote these books well in one of the the programs yes as a matter of fact it was and then do we have those you know diverse authors and then the second piece that looks at is who is actually represented in the book you know and are we seeing positive representation of a diverse you know culturally diverse people um in fact i was speaking with a teacher the other day and she said i just wanted to tell you like we are recognizing this we've got all new classroom libraries for our k5 classes and they can see the difference in the books like she said i can see myself in the book for the first time since

128i've worked here so you know it's great and it's not that we haven't had you know books but just just you know in the classroom libraries that we are putting a conscious effort to diversifying that to be colonizing you know the the curriculum and the work that we have that we are showing all people are valued here is just really important to putting it in the forefront but i can send you a copy of that um yeah yeah yeah there are quite a few um you know it's great for um evaluating a whole curriculum because it does look at you know various pieces like social justice and how is that represented how are women represented in the book are they always shown in the kitchen or i'm not enough you know in the workforce awesome

129thank you so much well i want to just echo the thanks dr beam and your team you guys did a great job on the presentation until you were practicing so thank you for all the hard work and putting all the hours in for this presentation really really good job and just thank you for all the work that you do leading this important work in our school system this is one of the reasons we exist is it for teaching and learning it's part of our core business what we're here for every day is to make the make sure our students are getting the best chance at being successful and you guys are the heartbeat of that so thank you thank you thank you so much all right all right okay okay so um the board in

130your packet uh you had received a draft of a recommended policy um about naming of our schools which are the just talking about the naming of facilities where students attend class every day i have a couple recommendations for change for you guys to consider before we take this um to see if there's going to be a vote um first of all is the name of the policy um it really it should put in the draft that it would be policy 2.11 naming and renaming of csd schools the correction for that would be policy 3.5 j5 should be the correct because it really does fall it is a policy under the authority of the board and i had put it under policy 2 which is executive limitations so that would be one recommended correction um and

131then in the body of the language the last two sentences um in the kind of the meat of it where it says the committee shall um starting with that sentence delete that sentence and the next sentence so the policy would end um if you're reading through the it's one two three four the first five lines of the body and then it would the recommendation to the board period those next two sentences would be deleted and then the last recommendation for change is on number two that the following shall apply um we would add school buildings where children attend um and take out the word consideration and then it would read so the whole thing would re-read school buildings where children attend will be given names of local communities neighborhoods streets and and or landmarks so

132that is the policy that is up for um discussion and possible votes for the board okay discussion guys um that's good question to clarify are are we considering are we keeping the committee shall be no we're taking seven members or that's going on too that's going out too because that will be part of the administrative regulation that talks about what the team that will look like we'll participate um also we wanted to because we don't do um i'd put a board member on there as a recommendation of the committee but it makes sense we don't do board members on committees so that taking that out and then just really letting it be a committee decision you know letting the ar speak to more of the policy more to how it happens less of a prescribed

133board i have an policy suggestion okay so i think that those are both good good ideas amended the proposed changes i agree with the other is the fourth and it says you know we've got this policy and says buildings can be named after you know communities neighborhood streets in landmarks and then there were four says in the event compelling reasons to do so arises the restrictions may be waved by now on the board and my i would propose that we delete that okay not because the board can't change its mind about a policy because the board could always change its mindset policies board policies so we're supposed to have this living policy document that will amend as needed and so there's no reason for us to tell ourselves that we can change it understand the

134second point though the truth is that this requires a unanimous vote support which is not typical but also i'm not sure that that's a cricket i don't know that one board should be able to bind another and require the unanimous vote to change policy okay so i think it's kind of misplaced and i would suggest you just delete okay and if we ever want to appear from this policy or you should always want to hear from the policy they'll just make another vote and thank you anything you want to agree with them my only comment is if the committee is necessary if if the the only names that can be given are the community the neighborhood the streets or landmarks how much discussion you know if they say westchester you know the only possible with

135that criteria the only possibilities would be westchester scott um you know i'm not sure what that you know it's a very limited conversation and so i'm just wondering how much a committee is necessary with those four criteria and if you don't you know should the policy say may and i mean like we don't need a board to say there's going to be a committee how if you could say that the superintendent may uh appoint a committee we might have a consensus that it just makes sense but with the name where it potentially will be only one name makes sense and then and others to instances there may be a situation where we do want to put a committee together because there could be you know a numerous numerous amounts we don't necessarily want to tie

136our hands to having to have a committee maybe but just suggesting that that's possible as needed but the only thing is with that criteria if we have we've limited to that four criteria didn't have numerous unless well you could have i guess depending on where it's located just for example retro has i know that you have a new um game and uh anthony yeah yeah but it's only you you only have so many possibilities with that four criteria i just don't know what circumstances you would have you have to decide whether to name a claremont with an e or claremont county that's right you know just one of the opportunities would show up with that criteria that's true i think also too if you think about it with with how we are as a community

137just wanting to be involved in in that process whether it's you know a choice between two names or four names but just having that stakeholder um involvement this probably was really where my head went when it came to conducting just making sure that everybody felt like they were part of the decision that was made and i i agree with that um and but i was thinking about the process because this was limited to just those committee members versus like the tally process for the survey with a survey where everyone would have an opportunity to participate and so if we came up if you have that four criteria then everyone can vote on whether it should be the street or the neighborhood or landmark and so then the community has an opportunity to engage in that

138process with those four options and where i interpret this and where my mind was when i'm dropping this is that the committee would say hey let's do a survey of the community let's let them submit suggestions for the name and then we can look through them decide are we going to do like a vote like they did with sally like hey what's your choice um so i think that's and then give three recommendations to the board to select i think it's more about having a committee for me get that stakeholder engagement decide hey what is the steps that we may take it's just that stuff the four criteria really it could potentially be a you know a waste of stakeholder time because he only submits so many yeah there'll be so many streets it's just

139in one neighborhood are you thinking there's something we could add to it or or broad or you want to broaden that language i think i think you know because i know we want to um avoid names of people and so um i don't know what else there could be you could say that in the negative that we're we're not going to name school buildings where two children attend after people period leaving the other this this state's positive every one of these four things and you could state it in the reverse to say when i think it's clear the way it is i agree it's limiting but we're saying it's a superintendent we're leaving with the superintendent that she may appoint a special committee she's not required to she could decide just to do you know

140take suggestions from the community and then have a vote not have a committee i mean so that i guess that um could be the approach and how was it done with tally does anyone remember i mean i remember there was a there were we there was input from the community and then there was a vote from the community it was non-binding i recall but it was pretty obvious i thought it was just the one without the most votes did we have it did we have it oh it was it was served up i know the recommendation of the board yeah we all agree yeah courtney ran that process do you remember courtney what was the process for naming of tally was it just an open vote or yeah we did a survey we allowed people

141to submit suggestions and um and that yeah totally yeah i mean it was pretty clear that that was the obvious favorite so there wasn't really and that could be maybe how we approach it then if if in the future for naming schools if it looks like something that's going to end up being a little more involved and needs more intense attention then a committee can be formed if we feel it's necessary i like the option of having being able to have a committee i mean sometimes you you want to get wider variety of stakeholder input particularly if a lot of the voices that you may want to hear aren't being elevated or aren't are kind of being overshown by a certain group you want to make sure that you're getting those multiple perspectives and i

142just i worry that if you just leave it to x you know a simple process that sometimes that's where you don't get to hear and lift the voices of marginalized individuals i think it's all fine i think you can always have a committee though right what do this thing says about sure yeah it's always your price right nothing taking out the verbiage that doesn't tie our hands necessarily to what that committee looks like um interesting steps and then so do we just want to delete that into that sentence that says when a facility is to be named da da da da take out that whole sentence you take it out or ciao yes any strong feelings from show cell work for me i mean dana you strong feelings one way or another may have heard

143[Music] policy j5 as amended based on this discussion in a second we need to say what the amendments were for a minute all right share both eyes we okay all of the adventists all right and lastly the monthly data report those are just for information yeah are there any questions from the monthly data report [Music] i'll just make a comment um i have after you know kind of going back and forth on a couple things we will we have kind of landed on a very uniformed report format so going forward you will see it's more they will be definitely more uniform going forward so that that data it'll be easier to kind of track as you look through the different schools my only comment i sent to you ever already but i'll say it here

144in the meeting that i think that the data is really important and i would like to see it presented so that we can see trends and so that we can see what again what impact we're making when we do establish uh new programs or interventions or changes so i'd love to see like are we headed in the right direction yeah and so my plan was at the mid-year when we do our big major updates on our full improvement plans and our district improvement plans that we share that trend data just kind of in the intermediate give you those touch points so you can just kind of track it over time um as monthly check-ins and then in january we'll give a nice summary of all the data um performance and then again at the end

145of the year these are really good i mean i think we've never seen anything this uh this robust for each personal score so you're doing a great job yeah this was really good and again you know talking about how much principles have to work i also want to be cognizant of not creating too much of a burden right and our principles so let's you know somehow get the information that we need and then make sure we're also not over burdening reporting and they use a team to do these reports it's not just a principle we do it yeah i do really like getting this report though and i haven't focused on it as much in some private meetings for whatever reason but it's very very good information yeah i'm also interested in trends but yeah

146um you know this is really hard this is just this stuff i have to give my sister a shout out she um she's a teacher in pennsylvania and she was telling me um about what her school does because she's on a club and i was like oh i like that will you share this support so yeah yeah and i like um you know i don't want to overburden folks but i think it is easier to spot the trend when we get the monthly report um and then the last time i said that you know last name that you know pretty much everyone was giving us the same information but i think having the uniformity will help um because i was particularly interested we discussed this earlier um about seeing the um disciplines that are broken

147down um by subgroups consistently um and so that will be helpful all right future date anything that we need to point out shane anything that you need from us for future dates now or i can call the orders let's call it the order just to order all right calling to order a board meeting at 8 45 adjourning at 8 45 tuesday october 12th school meeting thank you so much for joining us guys