ASDB Board Work Session (04/08/21)

001we are live good afternoon everyone uh now is the time set for the work study session uh of the arizona state schools for the deaf and the blind board uh i begin with item one the roll call um sue k can you take the roll call sure can linda both uh i see her i see her on the zoom okay i'll move forward and come back around okay brittany buchanan president uh lynn davison present mike gordon is absent pv chance i see him on screen too dean howard president sue k knightful david nigro oh prison and then aaron wonders president and i'll go back to pb jams so this is leticia i just got a text from linda saying she can't open her picture her camera okay i don't know but she's she's present she

002you got a text from her so we're good okay um great thank you sue kay you're welcome linda we could we can work on that um i hope to to open that um open that up and and let us know when uh when you're able to do that um moving on to uh number two um we have the uh review of strategic planning to date uh so and again we have some some new board members i think this is the first work study session for for three of the board members and we do have a new board member that is a new for today and we'll go through a more formal uh you know introduction uh at the next board meeting this is a recent change uh but to you know review this to date

003you know this is the strategic plan is really the work of the board uh that's that's kind of what the board does it's a primary uh responsibility of ours uh to do long-range strategic planning to lead the agency over time and to build institutional stability the staff is charged with running the agency day-to-day implementing the various things that we would direct um you know but our our job is really to uh to lead the way and to provide the vision so so this is really the work of the board and and i'm really happy that everyone's participated uh in this in this project over time uh you know we've worked on this for several months now we've got delayed a little bit due to covid but you know if you if you've stretched back and

004again for the new board members you can view all of our work study sessions online if you if you look back uh you can see that we took a survey and we did some brainstorming in one session then we kind of went out and we studied a different strategic plans from all different sorts of schools and school districts so school districts in arizona schools for the deaf and schools for the blind in the western united states in california and colorado and utah and texas and some other places new mexico and you know we got an idea of what the landscape was i think there were a couple of dozen or so that we actually pulled and reviewed in detail and we were able to draw from that and kind of come to what what really

005mattered to us and and what mattered to asdb in the unique role that uh you know this this agency uh plays in in arizona we were able to again in prior work study sessions uh build some some pillars uh that these are really our our core values uh of the agency we were able to get some consensus on that uh and then we moved on uh you know to some some other uh the you know the priorities um and these are the the high level priorities that advance each pillar and under each pillar we develop some guiding principles uh and each of those guiding principles uh support um that particular priority again that's i think what we've referred to informally as the the top of the page so that that's been our work thus far

006um and you know that's that's kind of where we where we've been in this process again for the new board members um i'll move on to point to point three where we talk about today's task but i do want a reminder as a housekeeping matter if you do if a board member does need to drop off of the call please just send leticia an email so that we can properly record the time of your departure for the minutes we want to make sure we get you know an accurate record for that so number three explanation of today's tasks you know today we're focused on the objectives we've already had one work study session uh that's that's based on on looking at these objectives this is the again the bottom of the page as we formally

007call it and you know we've looked at these uh at the most recent work study session we had you know quite substantial feedback for the staff uh back in february early february they've they've gone and they've made some some substantial improvements i think to this plan which we all now have and we've had for over a week now so that we can uh review it in this work study session and provide some input on on each uh one of these sets of objectives and and you know to kind of again to orient yourself you know these are specific you know often quantifiable metrics by which we're going to judge the agency's performance uh in the future so you know today is not a discussion of tactical choices we're not going to discuss a particular action

008or we're not taking a particular action um we're going to be talking about setting the the groundwork or setting the metrics by which we'll know we have you know we have achieved or we know we've achieved progress when you know x happens when we see some metrics move in some direction and when we develop these metrics and start looking at them because you know frankly for many of these we don't have baseline data so we want to develop that um you know that that progress isn't going to be shown for a number of years for some of them because we just don't have uh baseline data for some of these metrics but the idea is that it's not that we're we're going to take a particular tactic or not or take a particular action or

009not we want to talk about you know what the what the strategic objective should be uh and then you know the rest of our work in in you know the coming uh months and years is going to be uh working on those tactics to achieve those those strategic goals and strategic objectives for each of the objectives uh again we're going to look at the the objective what it is what we're trying to measure what we're trying to look at the methodology by which we're going to measure it so we can be consistent over time and the potential limitations of that methodology because you know we know there's you know limitations on any piece of data that we're going to gather the frequency if i wish we're going to measure it this way we're applying these

010measurements consist consistently over time and we understand the limitations of each one i don't think there's going to be a particular metric we're going to look at and say you know we're going to judge the entire agency's performance on this one metric it's really you know how all these metrics performing as a set uh you know on a holistic basis we're going to monitor these continuously so we're going to match our agendas in the future for our meetings uh up with these uh with with these pillars and priorities we're going to be able to to very specifically track our actions in the future that will support different areas of the strategic plan and we're going to be able to monitor this data continuously some of the data is only going to get updated every every

011year some of it twice a year some of it every month or or every couple of months they're gonna be at different frequencies but we're gonna be able to see this and monitor it on a regular basis uh likely every board meeting maybe maybe more frequently than that but at least every board meeting will have an idea of where we're going and if we're not making progress that we want we can we can all talk about it uh and talk about what we can do differently uh you know to start moving the ball forward there so again that's that's why this uh you know today is pretty important um and uh you know again it's it's we want to hear all the board's uh input on these particular objectives uh now before we move on

012to the next point in four again just to remind the new board members uh you know this is a more informal meeting than we typically have uh you know a regular board meeting um we you know our agenda isn't as structured we still have an agenda we still have we still have to stick to it uh we can only discuss things that are reasonably related to the agenda items and what's already been put up on board docs so we can't stray too far from that uh but you know in terms of the discussion uh it's a it's a pretty open discussion feel free to jump in when you can or you know when it's appropriate uh you know that said please be respectful of other people's time we have no time limit for this meeting

013um and so there's plenty of time for everyone to be heard i'm not going to be the moderator in terms of you know calling on people necessarily i will kind of sit back and try to make sure that everyone has time and that and someone's trying to get a point in that they can be recognized but uh you know for the most part i think um if you just observe typical rules of civility i think we'll be okay um you know but again there's there's no reason to you know raise your hand or something like that to be called on you you can talk when you when you when it's appropriate and when someone else is finished uh and again we do want to hear from david this is linda if you don't mind can

014we start with introductions as far as who's replacing mike manley oh yes linda and maybe um i'm not sure if your the connection didn't didn't work but in the uh uh in the roll call um uh aaron wonders has replaced mike manley uh as the representative from superintendent hoffman and that was just a recent change we'll have a more formal introduction and we'll recognize mike mandeling more formally at our next regular board meeting but aaron wonders for the purposes of you know this of the board really but for this meeting in particular uh is is now on our board as of uh i'm not exactly sure the date it might have been yesterday uh and uh he'll be you know he'll be in mike manley's seat uh we'll we'll also have to replace mike manley

015on the on the finance committee but again we'll take all of that regular business up at the next board meeting in may is that does that make sense linda um could we maybe talk a little bit about him i i feel more comfortable since he's here in our meeting i'm not sure familiar with aaron wonders what's your background and how are you coming to the board with us because that's typically a cultural thing we do in deaf cultures we want to know who are we working with so i'd definitely sure know aaron a little bit more as a board member sure i guess as we're here um to be honest i i don't know mr wonders either so uh uh mr wonders if you uh uh would like to just maybe come on and uh

016say a few a few words about yourself absolutely uh thank you mr president and uh members of the board uh aaron wonders here on behalf of the department of education i'm the deputy associate superintendent for legislative affairs at the department of education my background is really in the legislative affairs so prior to working at the department i was a staffer over in the house of representatives in the state house i staffed the house education committee uh for seven sessions succession somewhere around there uh and then have joined the department of education since the beginning of 2019 um so in my capacity as a board member here serving on behalf of superintendent hoffman and very much looking forward to getting to know everyone um and working with the board excellent thank you thank you thank you

017mr wonders and again i think we'll have a more formal introduction and now that we uh understand that you've replaced mr manley we'll we'll uh be able to do that i guess as we typically do at the next board meeting uh so now that we've we've gone through that we've kind of set the the scene and just i'm sorry to interrupt but i from a deaf perspective i think that's important culturally speaking since it's a representative of our board uh just to give you an idea of who it is that's here now on our board and i think others can hear his voice and in deaf speak we see your voice now so thank you thank you linda um so uh with with that said the the next item uh which is gonna be the

018core of our meeting the pillar presentation and discussion um there are four pillars uh we're gonna take them up in order um pillar one is superintendent reichman uh fortunately uh she is able to join us we weren't sure if she would uh but she is here uh so we're and we're happy about that certainly um so uh superintendent reichman if you could take us in on just maybe a couple of minutes to talk about your section of objectives and then we'll open it up to discussion uh to the board members to discuss those objectives i know we've you know we've had these for uh over a week now so i'm hoping that we all have some good input for you thank you president nigro i'm happy to be here so members of the asdb board

019my part is the first pillar i'm focusing on communication and relationship building that pillar has three priorities if you read our report for our performance measures you would see that there are seven metrics under pillar one the first priority is first-rate customer service that has two performance measures one is a survey to parents asking their satisfaction with the school and the programming and asdb the second is a satisfaction survey to asdb employees there are satisfactions with their jobs and with the superintendent and my work so those two performance measures when we're thinking about communication and relationship building how do you measure performance as you know asdb is successful at communicating with the stakeholders and how do we know we are being successful at building those relationships so we will be doing these performance measures to

020try and elicit data for you to be able to review and to see if asdb is successful at building this capacity for communication and relationships the second priority is building capacity with school districts that has two performance measures the force the first is special education's director's satisfaction survey asking about their satisfaction with asdb school programs the second measure is enrollment of students if special education students are satisfied with our school and our programming they will refer students to us so that would be the second measure for that priority in that pillar the third priority for pillar one is engaging the community that'll be a new survey conducted annually asking the community about their satisfaction with asdb to other performance measures we'll be looking at our web page how many people actually look at our web

021page and the second measure will be targeting our social media platforms such as facebook twitter and how many people are actually engaging in those posts monthly so we will be uploading those numbers that would give us some guidance on how much we are engaging the community so that is the first pillar back to you president nigro uh thank you superintendent reichman i appreciate that that introduction um you know i think from here um we can start i don't know that i necessarily need to go through objective uh 1.1 1.2 1.3 individually but i like to open the floor to board members who have any any input on on any of these objectives and this is pv i think so far it looks wonderful i do have two questions first being how do you plan to

022measure engagement of students and family members such as parents and the community themselves that do not have access to the internet so they will not be able to participate like in social media engagement and that's typically a challenge for those that do not have that excess access especially in those remote rural areas second just based on the involvement the current numbers appear to predict a specific go so do we have a current target number compared to predictions have you compared that will that be part of your measurements to answer your question we have been performing parent surveys for the last several years we have collected that data but we didn't have the board involved with our parent satisfaction and reviewing that so we already have a system in place for that networking with parents to

023elicit their feedback on their satisfaction with our schools and our programs i'm not sure about those who do not have access to the internet i'm not sure how we handled that in the past i know that due to kovid we've had to work with parents to figure out how to get internet access to those students so that they are able to receive their education online so we have been addressing some of that thank you [Music] hello superintendent this is linda that's a good question that was brought up i really appreciate the the layout you'll have to publish this and get it printed it'll be called the bible i'm curious more about the community how are you going to be able to collaborate and engage the community i feel like there has been a gap there

024again how will you draw them to be engaged how will you have that measurement do you have kind of a vision for that or is that am i jumping ahead too early this is actually a new area we have done special education director surveys parents satisfaction surveys but we have not done a community satisfaction survey so we're not sure exactly the details of how it's going to be implemented and what it looks like but it's like a typical written survey that sent out we might not get a lot of response for those so how are we going to elicit and perform those surveys we haven't determined that as of yet we're just proposing this to you that we can do satisfaction surgeries to the community and if the board is interested in that and thinks

025it's a good idea we would figure out how to make sure that the blind community as well as the deaf community take that survey and get our responses back and we wanted to make sure that the survey itself is accessible and convenient to answer thank you it seems that there's no other questions i'll turn it back over to you president nigro okay i have a few questions and again if any of the board members uh have anything else to say they can jump in after after me um thank you superintendent right then for these uh objectives i think i think they're they're great they're um this whole document i think is a just a really substantial improvement from what we looked at last time uh and i'm really happy with it overall um in terms

026of uh your section uh there's just a couple of things i had here i mean you know one the um in terms of the you talk about in section 1.22 some you know some methodologies or the description of obtaining this data from children that we serve in the early learning preschool the campus-based schools and on the itinerant services through the co-ops um you know in terms of the the early learning program i know that we have uh some you know private um organizations that serve some of the children in the preschool and early intervention um will we be tracking the the performance of those agencies as well i mean in particular fbc and desert voices and i think zimmerman is the other contractor um are we going to be able to break it down by

027you know by that in that level of detail we can do that i'm not sure that we've done that with parent surveys but as we gather surveys in the future we can break that information down by where the student or the child is located and where the parents are receiving services okay i think that would be helpful uh for us to have that information um you know in terms of the the the number of students survey i know we have the number of students on campus and in the co-op um you know there's you you bring up some good points in your limitations that you know the the the co-op serve students that uh you know may uh age out of or move from that district right their you know child isn't necessarily in the

028same school district um you know their whole career academic career uh they may move um some of the districts have their own internal resources and they use the co-ops as kind of a you know a safety net so they'll use uh the co-ops to serve some students but not others uh and so and other students may age out or graduate um and then their numbers will be lower so i was wondering if we could have some more specificity on on trying to obtain some of that data because i think it's it'll be helpful for us to understand uh you know why is there more or less engagement with one particular school district um and is it you know is it because of performance or is it because of you know just other you know other

029reasons um you know in terms of the children that we're serving in those areas i'm not sure how to respond to that we obviously have a student count of enrollment how many students within each school district but how to figure out why some parents respond to the survey versus why other parents do not i'm not sure how we would get that information and i guess i should clarify you know the the the reason i brought this up is not that we'd be hearing from those parents in a survey you know because the one weak point that we have those surveys is you know the participation rate right so we're not going to get 100 uh we'd be ecstatic i think to get 75 um and again there's you know there's some limitations there which we

030reflect in the document uh that sometimes we'll you know look at people who are really satisfied or really not satisfied um you know unfortunately but again that's a that's a limitation so to to hedge that to offset that risk or that limitation in a survey i'd like to see some other objective data that we can obtain uh to get a better idea of what we're seeing so so it's not that's i guess what i'm saying is if we move beyond the survey data and and track the number of students that we're surveying uh in in the in the co-ops per district we can see that change a little bit better um i think we already tracked that i think it's just a question of aggregating it but we can see that that change and you

031know when i say you know serving in the district it's um you know students that were serving uh you know on a year-to-year basis we can see that that trend going in and out um you know more than a a school district dropping out of the co-op i think that happens less often i think what happens more often is as their population that has needs grows and and contracts that's what we you know we see the student accounts go up and down we could track a ratio of parent responses to the survey by school district we could do that annually that's a lot of school districts we're talking about at least a thousand different school districts so to break it down specifically to the number of students in each school district that we serve and

032then we can send out the survey as we collect the responses from the parents we could calculate a ratio a percentage of each school district we could do that that's going to be a significant amount of data yeah in terms of of school districts i mean i um i mean you're right that the drilling down to that number is uh and i guess that number sounds fine to me but uh in drilling it down to that level might be difficult but without separating from the survey um we know all of the students that we serve in the co-ops and we know what district they're from if we can track that over time now you're right if we have a little we have many hundreds let's say in school districts that's probably too much to put

033in our uh you know in our in our metric but maybe there's some you know maybe we could track the the the ratio of change from year year and pull out ones that are greater than a certain target amount i mean can we could we do that so in other words if a school district has to serve 10 children in one year and three in the next that'll at least allow us to take a look a closer look at that situation [Music] we could look at the ratio change annually okay we could break it down to the regions we have that three regions and we can see what kind of information that provides us thank you i think that would be helpful um because you know this way we're getting some data that's not not

034a survey we're getting data from other sources so we don't know the limitations of the survey and we're able to and i don't know what that that kind of threshold will be if it's or something like that but if we see a large swing we might want to note that i mean and i think that's that's we might want to look deeper into why that is and again it could just be natural you know children getting older but it might not be and we want to we want to take a a closer look at that kristin i think you were next oh we have about 207 districts and um students go to different schools we can this is i feel like we're tracking a different kind of data but what we could do is we

035know what districts they are in we know what schools they are in sometimes they jump districts and move within especially in like the metro areas as families move we can kind of keep track of that if that helps you i'm just trying to figure out what data we already collect that i know we can pull from like right now if that would help yeah no i i think that would i think it would help and just a side note on this when we are looking at parents filling out surveys there are probably many parents that don't really realize that these services are coming through asdb they go to an iep meeting there's their hearing impaired teacher or their vi teacher to them they belong to the school they they can't make that separation so you

036know we'll get information but it's it's not going to be you know directly related to asdb it's just you know we're getting services from this teacher who sees my kid you know twice a week anyway just a thought this is linda president niagara i think it would probably would be best if maybe we can moderate the meeting a little bit because i'm not sure if uh we're getting recognized as far as who pops in first and so for housekeeping purposes the sake of everyone if who could raise our hands that way we know who entered first uh the reason i wanted to come in is because i'm i would like to hear more from lynn davidson who does represent school districts and so what type of metrics we can use lynn if you can review

037what you just stated i'm sorry i can we can you repeat your concerns in how school districts work in tandem with asdb as far as metrics how do we measure whether they're an asdb student a school district that we offer services to and how will parents view that and again it's service provider providers how do we clarify that for parents as far as metrics go it's pretty clear on at the brick and mortar campuses um that the students are attending an asdb school and the district should be represented at those iep meetings because those are their students um where it becomes more muddy is uh in the co-ops and the co-ops serving the schools the parents i've sat in on on many of those meetings and the parents are happy to have the services but

038they don't understand that that these services are coming from outside of their school district that asdb is providing this these services because to them it really doesn't matter they just want to make sure that their child is being taken care of getting the services they need so they don't make that connection to asdb some do and you know if we make it clear but you know in the long run you know the most important thing is that the the student is getting the services they need their goals are being met uh things are being provided what else can i make money for you linda no thank you lynn thank you i appreciate that pv yeah just to put a thought out there a word of caution i want to make sure that we're careful with

039not skewing the data or dividing the data too much otherwise it would be incremental the increments would statistically not prove where we're going and so if you see patterns i think yes at the same time like you said president nigro we don't want to make the numbers too big but too small so that you can't recognize the patterns where do we find that fine balance i think most importantly uh for finding what mistakes or what errors we encounter so in comparison what would probably help if we were to compare let's say a student enrollment decreasing or increasing in a specific school district and the ratio in a school district for example if we're looking at a public school district where the enrollment has gone up or has gone down because maybe there have been some

040relocation and families have moved either in or out we might see a pattern that parallels with our deaf and hard of hearing and visually impaired students within that area as well so maybe two things to correlate there the school district in general and the deaf and blind population so just more of a geographical location a geographical measurement in comparison to data that we get from surveys for example the department of education those numbers are based off of relocation we can compare that and we can draw from that and listening to what lynn mentioned you make a good point i think that probably is something that we do need to address with first-rate customer service and then building capacity in those two pillars i think that's how we can effectively approach that how do we better

041identify and brand ourselves to parents that they are receiving services from asdb how are we clearly stating that asdb is included that parents are receiving those services from our providers and that way they can better answer those surveys all right uh thank you pv um for those comments um i think uh superintendent eichmann can take all of those comments into consideration uh for future revisions um if there are no other comments on pillar one we can move to pillar two uh and that's gonna be dr rex uh dr rex if you can give us just a very brief kind of two minute overview of these and then we can get into the discussion pillar two has and continues to go under edits and revisions as we look to provide outstanding student development this pillar focuses

042on our effort for student growth and development from our early learning program which is birth to five our campus programs as well as our statewide itinerant services and the objectives in this document include us participating in national programs and gathering data using state assessments to gather data monitoring our own benchmark assessments which we have done and continue to do together data are post schools outcomes data our student enrollment and completion of their career and technological coursework data as well as our students that do work experience in our high schools we have that type of data and in preparing these tables for this plan we discovered we have a lot of data and we gather a lot of data but the information that is included in this pillar to report back to this board annually or

043maybe quarterly depending on on how it fits is really to help the board as well as our stakeholders know what we are doing and how we are serving our students statewide thank you dr rex i can open the floor in and out any comments for for dr rex on these objectives i will open the can of worms i know that um the bill the lea bill is out there and the where we're at with that we'll see but i did notice in um 2.2 i guess talking about the pso the post-school outcomes and that that information currently goes to the school districts if and when and however this all works out and i don't know that anyone is clear at the moment and we do become an lea will that information go directly to asdb

044rather than to the districts fantastic question to which i answer i do not know but um and i know it's so but just so you know we are preparing um jay johnson is doing advisory council meetings throughout the state i think we have four or five we completed our first one this week and we shared our we shared that our board is currently going through a strategic plan and we are eliciting information from our special education directors because they are truly our partners and they're very important and um post school outcomes is one thing so is our statewide assessment the ela data the math data this is truly a partnership if if we have to give and take it's gonna have to be conversations it's gonna have to come sitting around the table because we

045can't improve if we don't have this data to share with you and to help us grow and learn so to your answer i do not know but also to your answer um we are preparing to punch in lean in or or try to gather the information with our partner districts because it is important to us yeah lynn this is david uh you raise a great point we it's gonna be hard to monitor these if we don't have the data but i think that uh if you know for some reason uh you know we end up without access to this data for some reason for a period of time we can try to go get it um i would think that some of our igas that we have with districts um would allow for some of

046this data sharing to occur you know without their being you know in compliance with you know with the education privacy laws um so that we can obtain it and and better manage our agency with it um i suppose there's a risk that we won't get at all or we won't get it as easily but that's uh you know that's that's certainly a risk um so i i understand that but we'll you know i i think from from my perspective in terms of you know from a planning perspective we should proceed as if we're going to have access to it one way or the other i agree these are wildly at audacious goals but this is what's going to help move us in a better direction so if we don't if we don't aim for the

047fence and using a baseball term then we're not going to we're not going to grow and improve so we need to have some wildly audacious guess goals and let's go for it pv did you have some some comments i'm curious what areas will be significantly impacted with lea or not lea um it's it's about the partnership if there are students pv then we fill out the post school outcome information and we get that information directly from the department of ed if it's if we're not the lea then sometimes there can be student record information that some districts may not be comfortable sharing even though we share kids we push into them in the itinerant world right now our kids are in our schools but they're also registered in their home districts so we will have

048the opportunity to work through all of these issues maybe i could add an idea to this or add to that can of worms sorry if i do so with the data some of the things that might be clearly impacted lea versus non-lea maybe we need to consider discussion establishing a strategic plan maybe developing for both cases if we are determined to be an alia or if we are determined not to be an lea and what recourse we have it would be similar that development but it would only be impacted by the lea non-lea label so i don't want us to become kind of stagnant with our process and our data collecting if we are unable to proceed with whatever labeling that we acquire so i want like us to continue on that trajectory and i

049don't want to have to go back and reimagine and redevelop if once it is determined and i think a lot of this data we can access we are currently looking at other ways public records is a way to access the information it doesn't drill down specifically always to our kids but it could get us close so we are looking at as you call them i think different pathways we're looking at alternative pathways to try to get the information so thank you great idea uh dr x this is uh david um you know i think from you know on that point i think that the data that we're gonna be looking at is gonna be to me it's gonna be the same you know no matter what the lea issue how that resolves itself um you

050know we have to keep in mind that the lea issue really affects the students in the brick and mortar schools which are hundreds of our students it's it's a large population and we serve all their educational needs uh but you know we serve a couple thousand in in the co-ops um so you know we do serve more children in the coops than we do in the brick and mortar schools we are we do not act as an lea in those relationships we act as educational service providers uh and we're able to access the data there uh right i mean we have access to data certain data from uh the students that we serve in in the co-op so you know to me i don't think it's gonna be as as i mean it'll it'll be

051more work certainly but i don't think it's going to be as large of an obstacle if you know for some reason uh we move forward as a not an lea for uh the students in the brick and mortar schools from again referring only to the perspective of data collection um i think that we can get to it uh in just as we do for the itinerant students um although it would probably be easier for us to get to uh if you know if we were an lea or or are an lea again you know being agnostic to whether or not how that issue resolves itself and then in terms of the coops are we requiring or mandating information when that collaboration with the current school districts that we are with we do share information and

052and they work very well with us it it is some i don't like david said i don't think it's going to be a problem but we will find ways of gathering that information so we can update you okay um dr rex in um 2.1 2. and i think some of these numbers may have repeated themselves not really sure but i want to make sure before we kind of publish this in finalized form that we have each metric with a different number so we can map it back uh uniquely but uh in in 2.12 uh vi uh you know we reference the national outcomes and developmental data assistance center chart um and and that's great that's a great resource um and and that's uh that's excellent there's not an equivalent one for the blind and vi

053side and i think we're proposing to use the oregon project uh you know which is useful for certain things but um i'm not sure it exactly maps up uh is there a way i mean i mean do you think there's a way that we could develop our own uh you know set uh of of similar data or make what's similar to the uh national outcomes of developmental data for blind vi or i know that's a large task but you know we have a long time to do it so what are your thoughts there dr ben is already on that kendra has been working with the comparison the 2.11 is an h.i based work that is being sponsored at the national level and then uh dr except i think you're a mute now or you were

054can you hear me uh dr kendra benedict is working on that and you saw that first outcome measure 2.1 talks about the hi and then as you go down she did a 2.1.2 which is a vi based work she is looking to develop an equivalent to the hi version it does not exist currently um therefore she wanted to use the modeling on a smaller scale and do it as an in-house project to monitor students so kendra is preparing for and developing that right now and working on it [Music] that's excellent kendrick thank you are there are there other comments for dr rex on 2.1 or 2.2 or anything in that second pillar uh pv i noticed with 2.1 there seems to be some struggle struggle with establishing a similar consistent data collection and that's for

055specifically bvi i know that the oregon project mentioned using that analysis which i think is great as a start but it seems that there are potential concerns about gaps are there is there any research related to maybe lighthouse or the helen kellen center or other blind association or based programs that and what they're using what kind of assessment tools that they take advantage of for language acquisition i'm going to turn that over to kendra because she's she's already kind of begun the work and i think she will do it justice so um yes so in answer to that question like dr rex had already mentioned there isn't an equivalent project to what's happening with deaf hard of hearing now in blind vi with that said i've done some preliminary research for those of you who

056are newer you might not know that we work very closely with fbc foundation for blind children they are one of our contractors they provide services to students birth to three and preschool age in maricopa county so i've been working on that with them as well because we were we will be responsible ultimately for overseeing their data as well um and since they are one of our contractors there they have confirmed that there is nothing of the equivalent and even the oregon project it's not norm reference it's criterion referenced and so there's just not a lot out there so and there's just such a wide variance of levels of ability in blind vi there are in deaf hard of hearing but not as much as blind vi and you're measuring so much more than just language

057too um with those kiddos and so i will continue to work with fbc um in coming up with other what with whatever metrics might come available over the course of the next few years um but to my knowledge with the research i've done thus far that's what we've been able to come up with does that answer your question tv yeah that helps honestly i have to admit that i'm a little bit surprised as an adult and working with this population you would think that there would be a lot of tools and resources for assessments and it's typically not language specific it's more related to accessibility accommodations and the like but language itself we just assume by that age they should already have access to language and be progressing what are some of the data or

058some of the statistics currently with students that are blind in vi where their language acquisition is or the percentage of those who are delayed in language i'm not going to try and fake that i don't have those numbers off the top of my head and again to have to have any numbers that you can then apply to the rest of the population any numbers that are available you've got to look then at the population you're wanting to apply those numbers to and if if what the population was was was normed on and the population you're looking at isn't the same doesn't have the same characteristics the numbers are going to not be of any use to us so again there's to my knowledge there are there is not any norm referenced assessments in blind vi

059that would allow us to track over time there's plenty of criterion referenced so our blind vi children making progress in comparison to their hearing peers what we would expect physically social emotionally fine motor language cognitively are they reaching those skills so we're monitoring it but it's not based on on um you know in in a comparison necessarily to their peers um to where there there would be a percentage that they're doing x percent above the typical peer there aren't those assessments that are available we use the oregon project we use the communication matrix is another one that that we use um and yeah and certainly if you are familiar with anything else that i'm not send it my way i'm not opposed i love information so um i saw brittany had her camera open did

060you have a question related hi yes i just i just it's kind of just one of those really small things but i see that all of these are targeted specifically for either blind or deaf where does deafblindness have their outcomes where are they factored into since it's a dual sensory loss instead of either or i love that you asked that question love that you asked that question and i think you're right we did not make a third category for that and i think we should it would be very similar to the tests that we're using with um with with blind vi it depends as you well know there can be such a range in there too we could have kiddos who are whose needs are predominantly deaf and hard of hearing and could maybe very

061easily fit into that group and then there is a group that who are more similar to blind vi and we they could be in that group so maybe putting those together the blind bi on their own but again within that it's going to be it's going to vary so much but i i appreciate that input and i think we can we can definitely work that into the plan so that we're we're looking at that as well so thank you for that no problem i appreciate you taking my question i just i mean i know that you kind of said like we could incorporate it into both categories depending on their strength of their dual sensory loss but in all due respect it is deafblindness and that is their absolute diagnosis and maybe that's how they

062want to identify and they don't want to be put in categories that are um making one seem more or less like over the others and i know as a family of that um i wouldn't want my child's disability being um once more or less when as a person she was deaf-blind and i know we're a small percent but i mean i guess i would yeah it's important but i still i think personally too i would just be interested in the exit outcomes and everything for just that small population of people that we service here at asdb go ahead linda yes this is linda i definitely want to vouch with what you just mentioned brittany absolutely we have to be able to recognize deafblind as a population within its own right and the develop that collaboration

063and the identity within that community it's pivotal versus selecting one or the other i think for example for myself but if we look at someone who has multiple backgrounds they are black deaf if you were to ask them which they identify with we're forcing them to make a choice so we have to respect the intersection within the population we serve the community the minority community are so diverse and they do they come with uh different identities and different backgrounds and so to to label one versus the other we have to recognize all of that in who we are as individuals so i agree with you brittany i think we need to broaden our our labels and i mean if you look at this tucson campus we have deaf-blind students there and how are we tracking

064their development are they in classes with the blind or with the deaf and so i think it's important to recognize our programs and their post outcomes where will they belong in the end so it's not just the deaf community not in the blind community but they actually have their own deafblind community absolutely and so i i hope we take the time to watch even a 20-minute short film it's called action life or to film that has been nominated for an oscar and it talks specifically to the deaf blinds called life it's a live action film it's called feeling this feeling through excuse me feeling through yes feeling through it's on youtube you can watch it it's just 20 minutes short film it talks about the life of a deafblind individual so i highly encourage everyone

065to watch that if you haven't had the chance just to give you an idea of what life will look like in the outside world so that's what i would like to speak to thank you dr bennett thank you i just wanted to add um to brittany and and linda i i just thought of one piece of data that we could include in this is we're currently working with some researchers out of primarily gallaudet but a couple of different universities um they are doing a study on pr on pro tactile sign language they've been working with about six or seven of our families since december collecting data on pro on protactile sign language and we could probably incorporate some of that data into this that might be a way to start to capture some of that

066wonderful absolutely that's amazing it's revolutionary and i think it's a change in the right direction for the deafblind community pro tactile uses the entire body and there's work that's done on the back on their legs and their arms and it's a different way of giving them access to communication and if we start the younger the better right the earlier the better so thank you kendra um kendra this is david um the other question i had uh was about you know in terms of language acquisition you know we've talked you know at length over the years about you know early identification right i mean that's that's a key issue we need to get identified children early so they can acquire language uh early and they don't lose as much time uh you know we don't want

067to see a child at you know three or four um and having lost all that very important time from the childhood uh and if dr sims is here he would often say uh you know from a medical perspective there are many diagnoses where hearing loss uh you know may manifest itself at two or at three so a child may have hearing uh as an infant and and then lose that hearing uh uh later you know in that two or three uh age um i'm wondering if we can add a metric about you know the age or average age of identification just so that we can keep track of it now that's not always a function of how well asdb is doing i mean those referrals come in from a variety of sources um but i'd

068like to know you know how how early or how late are we getting to these children and getting them the services um and at least want to have that idea uh so that we can see you know that that may affect some of our outcomes um but we also may be able to work more with the the partners that refer these children to us um so that we can try to do something to to get to those children identify those children sooner and help them acquire language sooner i love that idea we're also we can easily add that um to our database we're right now tracking bilateral versus unilateral um we can easily add um the age of identification we're seeing that as a huge issue right now with covid a lot of we were

069getting a lot of very late ids and so that could also help us justify um the provision of services beyond three i know dr sims that was something that he was very passionate about providing those those parents supports past three we have done that during covid because we just felt ethically and morally that's what we needed to do and our referral numbers had gone down a bit so we had the time and we've continued to support families past three um who were late identification um the other piece that we're looking at too that we haven't included in the metrics right now but we could um a zip the arizona early intervention program is wanting to make sure as we begin going back into homes starting tomorrow we are allowed on a very limited basis to

070go back into homes and as we do that there's a phased-in approach they're wanting us to track race and ethnicity to make sure that there's equity across the state so we're going to also be monitoring the delivery of services the frequency of services the method of services in looking at race and ethnicity so if that's something you are interested in we could add that to our metrics as well uh thank you dr bennett yeah certainly the age of that you know is is you know probably the the most important thing we really need to get to these children as well as as we can so that uh we we can help them develop uh language um effectively because that's really going to help them uh on a you know on a lifelong basis that's going

071to have a long effect and and you're right i know that's one of the reasons why we have the early you know we were reorganized to be and i think that's uh you know that's the reason we did it and i think we're seeing benefits from that uh pv i see you have your hand up yes thank you president nigro i also wanted to add that what you touched on where i was going with with kendra i wanted to add to that as well could we watch our internal data within asdb as regards to bvi services for example how many students are within the ieps that have targeted goals for language can we compare that to our deaf and hard of hearing students that have language goals on the ieps could we compare that to

072give us a better understanding and sense of what asdb is missing and not just age but what types of goals are language focused for those students so i'm just curious if there's anyone actually looking at those numbers to see what blind and visually impaired students need in terms of language or emotional social behavior development and their growth because i understand there's some outside assessments are limited can we use our internal data to assist in figuring out those gaps so we can first one thing just to for for clarification is that currently we don't have an in-house preschool program for blind there used to be one years ago in tucson but it closed we are looking at starting one up again but as of this time there is not we have a few deaf-blind students that

073attend the preschool here and in phoenix um but the preschool services that we we contract with fbc for those so we would have to look at at their data at their ieps which we certainly can so i could get current data based on that next year we're going to be um preschool students in the public schools so jay johnson's program can focus more on k-12 and we'll be taking on that early learning piece um from the cooperatives so that will be both deaf hard of hearing blind visually impaired and deafblind so we can start to gather that that data that you're talking about when we start to do that next year i think it's a great idea awesome uh great um if there are no other questions on this one we can we can move

074on i give one more opportunity uh thank you dr rex much appreciated uh and dr benedict too for your input um so next we have pillar um three i believe we have uh ms pyatt uh if you could give us just maybe a two minute introduction uh to pillar three good afternoon board president and i grow board president members i am going to discuss pillar 3 today the superb organizational culture there are three objectives the first one is to ensure a superb organizational culture through advancing a continuous climate of continuous improvement and modeling service leadership and staff diversity the second objective is the model to model servitude leadership by creating more leadership opportunities and increased agency communication and then the third objective is diversity and staff serving our students by increasing the percentage of staff

075who match the ethnicity cultural and abilities of the student population within those objectives we have created five outcome measures one for for objective one is the types of professional development that are being provided for objective two we have two objective measures the communications to the agency and the professional development that we are offering to our leadership and then on the third objective we had added two outcome measures one or both of them being for staff and student demographics i will now turn it over to you for any feedback or questions that you may have thank you very much are there board members that would like to comment on pillar three this is pv maybe a little bit of a silly question please forgive me but i'm thinking back to will invention for the survey early

076intervention do parents actually know that asdb are the ones providing that service as well dr uh benedict they can answer that question uh it's my impression that they would be even though uh we work with other state agencies in early to deliver early intervention asdb has that responsibility throughout the state uh and it's not um you know in connection with school districts until the age of three when there's a transition uh to an iep um so it would be my understand certainly when our family went through early intervention it was pretty clear that it was from asdb so i think that's the case protector benedict do you do you disagree or do you think do you have a difference of opinion on that i just want to make sure i understood the question i apologize

077pv can you repeat that for me was it tv sure i can ask the question again do parents actually know that the early intervention is being provided by asdb is that clear or is that just the thought from what lynn was talking about as far as iep meetings and parents not realizing that aacp are the ones that are providing the school district that serve us um i know early intervention in itself is its own program but i'm just wondering do our parents aware very good question um yes i would say far more than they are at the school it's much more clear that yes while we are part of a team-based early intervention model in birth to three they know that there are services that they get from contractors that might send in speech otpt

078some get services from ddd and then some get services from asdb so i think they're they're pretty aware that we are asdb teachers going into their home um but like i understand what what lynn was saying it's somewhat of a seamless operation when a k-12 itinerate um teacher from asdb goes into a district it's you know we're truly partnering with them and um while we partner as early interventionists it's much more apparent where the service is coming from and and you probably know too the ifsp the individual family service plan that supports birth to three is very different from the iep plan that supports uh preschool through 12. so when you were talking earlier about looking at those goals and and what the goals are like they're written very differently on birth to three and

079a lot of the goals are geared toward the family it's family centered not child centered so you might not see specific language goals like we'll gain 100 words by xstate it's much more family centered and talks about what the families needs for supports um so does that help does that answer your question tv yes it does help it may require a little bit of backtracking to the previous point of how we brand to the parents and how do we show that acb is providing x y and z in comparison to what is apparent in early intervention program why is that different and can we model that can we model from intervention programs to the school districts and make it clear that we are asdb providing the service throughout the iep meeting how are we representing

080ourselves just just a thought maybe that can help as a benefit both for the eop program early intervention and for the school districts and how we collect data okay um thank you uh brittany yeah i can just i mean i can speak really quick i guess as a parent that my daughter received services through asdb starting at like two months old and it was pretty it was pretty apparent from the very beginning that where her services came from and her interventionists had ids i'm so sorry guys um had ids and um i mean even her iep paperwork by the time she got to preschool it had asdb on it and she did attend foundation for blind so um we i was very well informed that asdb was providing my daughter her vision and her deaf

081services and um as well as all of our friends kind of in the community they're they know where their services come from so i feel like we do a good job with that there might be a lot of gaps which i do understand um but i don't think it's as big of an issue as um it might seem to be so i don't know if that helps but and it's kind of antidotal because it's my experience but i feel like we do a pretty good job yeah my my experience you know as a parent i agree well sorry that's okay um i was just saying my experience as a parent was uh very similar to yours brittany again my experience in early invention was way before i was on the board um but there were

082there was some interaction with fbc who functions as a contractor and still does today with astp and in fact asdb during that period went through some changes um but the case manager the case manager was always with asdb and if we had someone uh a service writer from a contractor it was pretty clear who the contractor was and if it wasn't from them it was pretty clear they were coming from asdb so at least that's my experience but again that we're a number of years separated from that now um so you know i'll leave it to dr benedict to let us know how things are are performed today but uh i think my experience is pretty similar to your spreading and yeah i just wanted to put that out there because i think with the

083early event intervention anecdotal experiences are great it proves that at least with early intervention parents are aware of who's providing those services so my question is how can we emulate that after they transition into iep to make sure that those parents later on for example if they move if we get a transplant if they move or they need these to be services later on like in the co-ops for example how do we emulate that from elp that branding to parents so that they know that they are receiving services from asdb whether it's in the iep or partnership with a co-op what works in early intervention that we can emulate and it i'd also be curious to see what the data comparison is for data i mean for parent involvement the response to surveys from those

084within early invention first versus those that get those k-12 services that's a certainly interesting uh point you know i think one of those reasons is in early intervention uh you know zero to three asdb has you know original jurisdiction so to speak uh you know we're the agency that's in charge of every child in the state um and that's not the case after the child turns three you know they're the responsibility for that trial that goes to their local school district and then we work with that local school district in in many cases um you know in various aspects to in our early learning program to support that child although not all so there are certainly larger school districts that you know run their own programs so i think it's it's in in the early

085intervention it's more visible because the case manager is going to be from asdb but uh you know you you bring a good point that uh when the school district's involved it can blend together and that was you know lin's point from earlier today um you know when the child is older and they're in school you know who's this a district employee uh and who's a uh someone from asdb or who someone from uh another contractor is uh you know it can be a bit more more murky if you're not paying attention to id badges and things like that or other paperwork but for you know for now are there any uh questions for ms pyatt on uh number three pillar three i do have a question oh excuse me no that was the incorrect one

086please go ahead okay uh well there's no questions on three i i think three is very good i think i think um this is a you know really much closer to what we were looking for um you know than than our last round so uh you know thank you for all that work and that goes for dr rex and superintendent reichman as well um you know this is uh uh i think it's gonna be really helpful for us your work in the last two months is going to be really helpful for the agency you know going forward and how we measure you know measure progress uh if there's none other we'll go to pillar four and miss cooper um and ms cooper if you can give us uh maybe a two minute overview of this

087objective okay good afternoon board president nico and members of the board last but not least starting on page 39 begins pillar iv effective resources management pillar 4 has four priorities the first being optimized human resources where we would address the people and the time one of our first measures we would want to chart how many positions we have and how many we have filled the percentage of those that are highly qualified another chart we have in this area is tracking the hiring activities and the success rate we also have another chart where we thought about showing our staffing ratios the second priority where it is aligning capital resources what we have been working on is developing a long-range facilities plan we also want to begin thoroughly tracking the management of our agency fleet and then

088the third priorities are technology improvements and integration where we are addressing the allocation of our technology resources where we're going to start tracking the technology training needs and serving the training satisfaction with those the fourth priority seems to be the biggest if you recall that is the new priority that was added and that's maximizing financial resources for this area we would be identifying several outcome measures which most of them are already being tracked and discussed during the finance committee meetings one of them being identifying the number of students enrolled in the day and residential programs another would be identifying the number of students enrolled by disability type another metric would show their spending percentage by operational area where we would show the classroom and non-classroom spend and then another one would be showing the average

089cost per student by the various programs we have within the agency and then also showing for those same programs the staffing and caseloads and then another measure would be showing our continuous fiscal stability as well as efficiency so this pillar is unique in that it covers and supports all of the key areas for the implementation of our agency strategic plan so that we can make sure that it is successful and we're optimizing the use of our resources so optimizing people time technology space financial and other resources effectively and efficiently actually enhances the learning and supports our improvement goals so we do believe adequately as well as aligning and making sure that our resources are equitable are necessary to improve um our agency continuously so at this time i'll open it up for any feedback or

090questions each of you may have i do have one question i think it might be important for us to consider or maybe discuss part of the strategic plan is not just public wide recruitment but also discussing paths or partnerships something with those that are already are those established programs for deaf education specifically creating opportunities for those students to come and student teach and expose them to deaf education itinerant services the brick and mortar services and if they are inclined or like those experiences they might be more inclined to stay so how do we facilitate long-term plans and goals of incorporating student teachers long term to become permanent staff employees within our community thank you stevie i'll take note of that and we'll discuss with the team thank you that's a good point uh pb that's

091a a great point that you're raising the pipeline issue is uh something that you know in this space uh we're always looking at um you know a foundation for blind children uh recently partnered with asu uh to start what we believe is the the only teacher the visually impaired program mississippi that's that's at asu now uh and those teachers are doing their student teaching or getting their education um at fpc working in it with fbc classrooms uh so and that and that's been pretty effective uh you know thus far that's a relatively new program but it's been pretty effective and i'm wondering if there's uh some something similar that could be done here um to support some of these uh you know strategic objectives to to shore up that pipeline within our state uh so

092that we're getting um you know young adults interested in the space uh to be uh to teach um you know in the special ed space but you know in particular uh children that are blind and visually impaired or children that are deaf or hard of hearing um i i think we we need to be doing that to just to develop our pipelines that we have that for the for the future of the agency i think that's great what's happening with asu and their tvi program i know that it's relatively new but it's amazing because we do have a community and we can encourage people to consider that but a lot of students who graduate from the program or graduate from deaf education a program of deaf education in both areas there are high needs and

093high demands we as asdb need to do something to stand out to highlight ourselves to say hey we're here just simply saying we're here or this is our pay this is our benefits package those will be the same those companies and other schools and districts are doing the same thing so we have to do something a little bit more unique from my professional experience when i moved here for my internship experience i liked what i saw i liked my experience which made me stay and become stuck here so for that process to create a path as a strategic goal of having an actual like you said president nigro that pipeline is crucial for the goal of the agency that'll help us to identify those programs and universities out there that do provide programs for tvi

094or hi and di who we can reach out to to have student teaching here have their experiences here and if they like what they see they like their experience they're more inclined to stay so that does give us a competitive edge and linda here i'd like to add to pv's comment i feel like that is crucial when we're talking about education we got to make sure that we have clear pathways we have one for deaf education and one for tva oftentimes that is kind of blended together in special education meaning those with disabilities in general and they include deaf and hard of hearing children within that so that kind of supersedes the importance of deaf education itself we want to be explicit in promoting asdb as deaf education i know that special education certificates are

095important but those students within the classroom it's often focused on those with additional disabilities and so they don't understand that there's two pathways to teaching if we look at asu they had a program called teachers college and they had a special education program i did come in to ask if they have a track specialized for deaf education and if there is and if that's a need they can come here and do internships here so how is that different from you know the pros and cons the gains for both will have to find a university that has a special education track and then partner with them to focus on that deaf education i mean that's just an idea so that we can do more community community partnerships within the residential programs to really booster and it

096provides those gains and benefits for both but i think it's worth it to make that attempt to make those connections that's just my thoughts thank you thank you sure if that's actually appropriate for pillar four but again just a thought i wanted to put out there uh thank you linda i don't want to interrupt but uh we are 90 minutes in so i do want to take a break for the interpreters i know we're getting towards the end of the agenda but i do want to get a break uh for the interpreters because we're just past the 90 minute mark so if we could take a 10 minute break we'd come back at 5 43 uh and then we can we can proceed and continue uh uh where we are thank you foreign okay thank

097you so please you okay i think it's going to be time to come back there we are everyone uh thank you um for the break so we were discussing um you know we're still in uh uh item number four of the agenda we're discussing uh pillar four ms cooper is gonna be answering any questions that board members may have lynn i see your camera is open yeah i i i don't know if this is under the finance but i just want to go back to what pb and linda were talking about as far as teacher training for um for deaf education we currently have a program out of the u of a the problem is not many people are going into the program and deaf education is not like a strand of special ed it's

098always been at least a two-year program that is just concentrated specifically on deaf education it's not like a special education program where you may concentrate on autism or one of the other disabilities such as learning disabilities it is a concentrated program that is being offered at not a lot of schools so that's why it's so difficult to find teachers it's the programs aren't out there and [Music] we try to get it what we can out of u of a but tucson kind of grabs them before we can get them um but i just wanted to make that a little more clear as far as what a deaf education program looks like and really the difficulty of finding people who are are in the programs thank you for that lynn anita were you going to comment

099thank you shayna yes i just wanted to comment that there are activities that we are doing with um schools that do have the programs and so maybe something that we could do is um put a chart together of those activities along with the number of internships and practicums that we have each year this is pv that's exactly what i wanted to mention thank you anita you stole the thunder i was also going to maybe recommend adding how many of those universities and institutions do we contact that have special ed programs if there are any deaf specialties vi specialties and if there are then we definitely need to start developing some sort of mou a memorandum of understanding or collaboration and contracts with them that way we can get them early on in their in their

100careers for student teaching and giving them opportunities so we want to train them in in-house and to recruit them and to maintain them so it's a consideration when we are developing our new hiring process maybe we can have some financial support included for you know asking people from out of state to just come out and move to arizona and how can they afford their rent their food transportation what it is to survive as a college student in your in your practicum or internship i think having a pay incentive and a contract with that university could be a benefit so that kind of resource i think asdb can look into either whether it's at ptsd or acb tucson campus i think we can do a further collaboration for exposing our students and our teachers but the

101itinerant services as well we have the resources let's just utilize those resources to develop future teachers to convince them to want to stay and become actual staff members for the agency and to grow your own culture thank you i agree with you yeah thank you i agree with you we can provide a listing of the schools around the united states that we are in contact with and that have programs i think that would be helpful as well okay are there any questions for ms cooper about pillar four the objectives under pillow for pillar four no i'm hearing none i mean i i think these are excellent they're really outstanding so so thank you so much uh ms cooper this is uh this is really helpful for us thank you excellent um so we can move

102on now uh to step five the next steps for discussion uh you know in terms of where we are in the in this process i i think uh last meeting you know we gave really substantial input to the staff about what we thought the objectives should be they've responded uh in the last two months by putting something together that was uh much more keeping with our our direction um i think that the comments we've heard today uh have been all useful and i think there'll be some adjustments to the to the document um but you know it seems to me that we're you know we're not far off uh you know from being complete so you know from from my perspective i i really want to get this done uh and approved by the end

103of the fiscal year so that's that's june 30th uh we have a meeting in may um i'd like to be able to get that uh on the agenda uh you know for next time and i think that the next uh you know the the next uh step is to have the staff make some of these adjustments and and then have it go to us for approval that we there will be an opportunity for uh you know some some public input you know both in the public comment at the meeting and and through other channels um so we are going to get some of that input as well uh but you know in terms of it being finalized i mean to me it seems like we're we're very close to to a finished product are there

104board members that don't agree or that have other other questions i think one thing i'd like to put out there for president nigro is there any plan or any timeline per se on how this will be distributed to the public that way we get feedback from both the deaf hard of hearing blind and visually impaired community members is this document complete to the point where we are allowed to receive feedback and obviously with remote learning i'm assuming internet options we want to make sure that the community has plenty of time and opportunity and options in how they can review and give input i think that will give us more time that will require more time so i think putting it on the agenda just for public comments and not receiving any may be too hasty

105so we would want to set up a plan where we can elicit more involvement from our community and our stakeholders at the same time uh thank you pb um we do have a plan to do that um to put it on the website uh and i think uh nancy alexander's on the call as well she may be able to provide more input but uh in our planning uh we were planning on putting it on the website to have public input uh in a more formalized way where you can go to the website and and say what you'll need to say and that will get distributed to the board um you know for our comments or for our thoughts uh in terms of the uh document itself i mean the draft document is on board doc

106so everyone has this uh already but in terms of the kind of the next iteration or the adjusted iteration of it will be up on the you know the main website or or one of the sub pages of the asdb website uh and again uh maybe um nancy if you're on i think there were a couple of other ways that we discussed uh getting this out there um in our last meeting there were a couple of other groups i think that would be circulated yes we talked about sending out on parent square as well as with all staff members the availability of the document on the website and have designed one quick questionnaire what do you see as the strengths of the strategic plan what areas would you like us to look as opportunities what

107do you aspire a street strategic plan and what really are going to be other measurements for results so it's called an soar it would then also be distributed during advisory committee meetings we have a group with elp a group with itinerant services and a group current group that works with superintendent right so those were the plans right now to get public input any ideas that they might have specifically to the strategic plan that sounds perfect sounds wonderful thank you for sharing that and i feel like it will be you know some kind of i'm sure there will be a social media announcement or an email blast reminding everyone to please review this that there we are in final draft times for reviews so please give us your final input and feedback that way people feel

108that the urgency is here and they need to say what they need to say yeah yes baby that was really our thinking as we we wanted up on the website for the general public but we want to have that specific uh feedback uh you know from parents and and from from educators from from staff and the other uh educators that we work with uh linda you had some comments yes thank you president nigel i hear what you're saying and when we're looking at the deaf community as you mentioned uh we are planning on hitting the public in different ways if we're looking at putting this in our board meeting in may for final approval is that your anticipated uh final acceptance date let me backtrack annette when would you start using the strategic plan what

109what is what are you visualizing timeline why is when you will start utilizing this and that here i think we will start july 1st 2021 it will be a full year that will be adopting this for the next school year and in the spring we will be able to report out to the board the following fall so this will be an annual board reporting process also we will be following each board meeting agenda item so we will be reporting to you what is consistently happening here we won't have any data specific because most of the measurements are measured annually but you will be aware of what is happening so when you look at the data it will be interpreted at the board meetings with what it means so that starts july 1st linda's asking so

110if we approve this in our may board meeting do we have a subsequent meeting i don't have my our calendar in front of me so may our board meeting there we approve that when is our next board meeting after that would that be july 1st uh we have a our next regular board meeting is may 6th and then after that it's july 22nd okay so we have about a month from now per se to collect that information okay so as a board we want to make sure that we finalize this document for that and we're expecting full-on approval to start july 1st in may correct yes i i would like to do that time to gather information and feedback from our constituents and again including the deaf community is one month enough time i i

111i think that it is and i think we can work to get there uh if we don't for some reason you know we can consider you know a special meeting in june uh i i you know just just to handle this great um i'd prefer not to do that because we you know we already have some other work study sessions planned in the second part of the year uh we have our other you know our additional regular board meetings um so you know we can see uh you know where we get on that but i think one month will be enough to get us there but if you feel differently or if we get to the may 6 meeting and there's a feeling that we need more work i mean we could potentially schedule uh

112you know a brief uh special meeting uh in uh in june but but i'd really like to have it done uh you know by the june 30th thank you linda this is pv i completely understand what what you're you're saying president niko i agree and i also caution us and for us to be aware that those stakeholders do have an opportunity to review and consider and chew on it chew on the process to process the information and really understand we're looking for meaningful impact so to put people in a hurry we might not get valuable input so i don't feel like they might get might felt heard may 6 is a is a good is a timeline that we can ask for responses from the community but to be open-minded to the possibility that we

113might need to do an extended special meeting if needed i appreciate that and i think the goal is of course the strategic plan and that we have you have our full support and our you want the community to have give you full support so we we we don't want any doubt or apprehension or any feeling of uneasiness we want to move forward with complete trust in this document and our plan because this is our guiding principle for the next five years is to really put forth all our efforts into this process okay um and that's that's good feedback annette i'm wondering if we can try to kind of fast-track some of the adjustments that are going to make made in response to today and you know i think they're they're going to be some but

114it's not going to be nearly as extensive as it was from february till now but if we can get that document adjusted soon in the next week or so you know i think we'll be able to get it out there and and get some some feedback is that does that work for you annette yes yes okay great yes we have already taken down and documented those that feedback and we'll make those adjustments okay and i think we should be able to get back to you within two weeks okay great um yeah again i'm open to a special meeting if the board is uh and we agreed to it we'd have to enact it or or for you know vote on it in may um if we can get there on the on may 6th though

115that's you know what i prefer and and you're right this is going to be a living document um you know our our meetings going forward are going to be mapped to you know which of these areas are we looking at and we're going to be looking at this data on a regular basis um i'd like to work with um you know i.t to get some kind of dashboarding so to speak so that we can have an access access to this data and uh again not it's reported on many of it much of it is annual but for some of it isn't um but i'd like us to be able to constantly be looking at these so that we're really being able to to use the data that we're gathering um you know from our community

116and from our our students and from our staff to drive agency decisions so that we're always aware of it at every board being um and we're always aware of it to base all of our decisions on at a regular board meeting and as you know it's you know they could be quite likely okay so that that sounds like a good plan for going forward um are there any other questions about that for five for the next steps uh if not we can go to number six adjournment um and i see lynn opening her head it's my second i moved it you can uh turn on your camera and uh you can say yes or you can indicate a visually either way or perfectly both um yes uh l opposed no uh great great um so

117we will adjourn thank you everyone i know this process has been uh a months long kind of journey i think we're pretty close to the the end point here um and i'm you know happy that we're able to uh you know implement some of these uh you know it's really a different way of looking at how we measure the agency's performance uh and how we're gonna in the years to come and uh you know get some better outcomes and prove our outcomes for our staff and for our students uh and also be good stewards of the public fund so so all of that i think is part of this document and thank you so much to the staff for uh for working on it and developing it uh and thank you to the media for

118producing the meeting and the interpreters of course as always again thank you very much we will see everyone on may 6th thank you thank you thanks everyone bye-bye