Urbana School District 116 Board of Education 06 17 25

001I am the power. In the power You already got an email. This is your logo. One meeting. [Music] Oh, I want a pair of those so bad. All right. Uh, good evening everybody. It's 6 o'clock, so let's kick off this business meeting of Urbana School District 116. Uh, roll call, please. Member Amaribu. here. Member Hixon, member Jones here, member Langorf here, Vice President Baxley here, President Palowski here. Uh we have a quorum. Uh there are a few uh modifications to tonight's agenda. We'll be moving action item 8.1 up prior to board reports and we will be moving administrative personnel item uh action item 10.4 to immediately follow um to immediately proceed sorry administrative reports. It is now time for the citizen statements. If anybody uh in in the audience would wish to make a formal

002statement before the board, please fill out a golden rod sheet, hand it to our recording secretary Lori Johnson. None of them received so far, so I'm going to make uh going once, going twice. Okay. Uh no citizen statements this evening. There is a call for an executive session after tonight's meeting for the person purpose of personnel uh discussion and there will be no action following the executive session. Uh at this point, the chair would entertain a motion to approve uh tonight's agenda as modified. Second. Oh, so moved. Is there a second? Second. Move and second. All in favor say I. I. Now we have an agenda. So first up, Luke. Sorry, Luke. Cheryl. Luke. Cheryl. Sorry. So, this is Luke Cheryl and he is um was just recently a King parent and he has so

003graciously agreed to join the board as our subdist representative. Hey, thank you. So now you and I are gonna formally swore you in. Yeah, that's the hardest thing about Okay. All right. I say your name. I Luke Cheryl uh do solemnly swear that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of member of the board. Can you hear me? The board of education. of Urbana School District number 116 in accordance with the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of the State of Illinois, and the laws of the state of Illinois to the best of my ability. I further swear that I shall respect taxpayer interest by serving as a faithful protector of the school district's assets. I shall encourage the respect and respect the free expression of opinion by my fellow board members

004and others who seek a hearing before the board while respecting the privacy of students and employees. I shall recognize that a board member has no legal authority as an individual and that decisions can be made only by a majority vote at a public board meeting. I shall abide by majority decisions of the board while retaining the right to seek changes in such decisions through ethical and constructive channels. As part of the board of education, I shall accept the responsibility for my role in the equitable and quality education of every student in the school district. I shall foster with the board extensive participation of the community, formulate goals, define outcomes, and set the course for Abana School District number 116. I shall assist in establishing a structure and an environment designed to ensure all students have

005the opportunity to attain their maximum potential through a sound organizational framework. I shall strive to ensure a continuous assessment of student achievement and all conditions affecting the education of our children in compliance with state law. I shall serve as education's key advocate on behalf of students in our community's school or schools to advance the vision of Fort Urbana School District number 116. And I shall strive to work together with the district superintendent to lead the school district toward fulfilling the vision the board has created fostering excellence for every student in the areas of academic skills, knowledge, citizenship, and personal development. Congratulations. Thank you. All right. And moving on to board reports. Uh what we have here tonight in 7.1 is what we have been doing at the last meeting of every academic year. You're right.

006Sorry. You're right. We need to make make a motion to actually Is there a motion from the floor? Some moved. Second. All in favor say I. I. I. None opposed. All right. Now on to a discussion on on on goals. Uh this is we've been doing this about last five years or so where at the end of the academic year and and the first meeting back after our July break, we discuss like study topics we want to go to and high level uh tasks we want the board to accomplish during the academic year. I think um so open the floor up for discussion at this point for uh things the board would want to have covered and study topics and things we want to get done next year. I also gave you our 2425 calendar

007so you can see some of the topics from the this year and some of these are routine things that we will do every year and some of them were very specific requests from the board. Um, so that is kind of what we'll do again is we will do this again in August. We do it at our first meeting again. So if you think of things over the summer um we can add those in and um we'll create a very similar calendar for next year knowing that there are times when we have to move things and change things and so yep. um the cell phone policy at the high school. That's something that we haven't yet discussed because we were so busy last year working on the middle school and um maybe go forward and see

008if there going to be changes for next year. So I don't I the principal is in the audience and they have as a staff talked about this and done some surveying about it and it is my understanding that they have some parameters that they're setting for next year but they are continuing with cell phones at the high school. Is that correct Mr. Guzman? Yes. Yes. And they did some surveying of staff at the end of the year to get feedback on what that looks like. Okay. Okay. Um, communication has always been um, concern for the community members and I'd like to see us going forth on thinking of other ways to convey to um, parents about what's going on in the schools and also have getting input um, way before changes are are decided in

009the high school or other schools. Um, I'd like to see um more of a study of the incoming kindergarteners and see what their levels are and what they might need in order to um continue growth at a uh that the rate that we'd like to see. Um if we don't start in kindergarten, we're never going to see the results in second and third and fourth grade that we'd like to see. Um, so I'd like to start um looking at a kindergarten curriculum and seeing what else we can do to help those students who might not be prepared for kindergarten. Um, I was contacted by the director of uh, immigrant services, Champagne Orbana, and she would love an opportunity to as part of a study session to give a 10-minute uh, address to the board to

010basically talk about what they do. a lot of I mean they are here to welcome immigrants as they come to town, make sure they're registered in school and and so there she wants to come in and and you discuss with what they do and and find and discuss ways they could partner with the school district. Sure. Um I had written a statement as part of the board statements which I thought we had moved to right after citizen statements. Well, this and and is it okay if I just do it now because it fits now? Sure. I mean, this is Go ahead. Okay, great. Thanks. Okay, this is the end of my first full year, so it's time for reflection. I have been thinking about the strategic planning process and about the number and severity of

011parent concerns that we have received about academics and safety in our schools. I was struck by the fact that the superintendent reported that the community members invited to the planning group were supportive when learning about the issues that we face. That should give us confident to interact more openly and honestly with the community in the future. The superintendent reported that the community members said that they want to stay more involved and hold the district's feet to the fire in the future. That's great. But holding the district's feet to the fire on behalf of the community is a big part of our job. At a board training a few weeks ago, we were reminded of our board responsibilities. The Illinois Associates Association of State Boards of of School Boards, the trainer said that there were six

012major responsibilities that we had. Numbers five and six were monitors performance of schools and superintendent and takes responsibility and that was in the what you just read takes responsibility. The trainer went on to talk about monitoring. The words used to define monitoring were observing, assessing, documenting, complying, and making sure the district complies with policies and regulations. So, how can we do better as a board? How can we get better? I have some suggestions. The first one was brought up by the president of the board more than a year ago. Designate a board committee that gathers and analyzes the data that we need and want to know to help us to make decisions going forward. There was a parent at the time who would offered to help us do that. Let's take him up on it.

013Number two, designate a roundroin of board members to do exit interviews of randomly selected staff when they leave the district. The retention rate of certified staff in Urbana is 83.4%. Almost 17% of our certified staff are leaving the district each year. This doesn't include long-term subs. So that rate is even higher for staff who are serving in certified positions. According to the news gazette, there are 10 area districts whose retention rate is worse than ours. The largest of those 10 is Ranul. 37 districts do better than we do. The board needs to better understand the needs of staff. Number three, do an exit interview with randomly selected parents whose children are leaving for private schools. Number four, interview randomly selected parents of students from different schools and from a in a variety of high school

014classes with both groups of parents. We need to find out the following. What do they want in a public education that we are not offering? Do we can we offer anything that the private schools don't offer? We need Urbana families to send their kids to our schools and we need all of our kids in our classes and we need a belief by the community that the district can serve all students. I do not mean to apply imply that the district is not doing its job in these areas but as a board we might have a different question to ask a different point to raise a different response to what is said. The GA the data gathered should not be used to refute what the ad administration is telling us. It should just add to the

015knowledge base on which we set goals and priorities and make decisions. Did we capture all that? I sure did. All right. Thank you. Anybody else want to like uh discuss what topics or um to add for study sessions next year or specific? I excuse me. I uh met the police chief during the uh our former mayor's retirement party and I introduced myself and said that was a board uh member of the board and I was had a brief discussion with him about fostering a a broader relationship with the banana police and then I ran into a uh police lieutenant Michel who is a former Leal parent now going to be in the sixth grade center and he expressed the same sort of request and I thought that that was uh was good. I mean, that

016was a positive conversation we had about fostering a broader relationship. So, maybe we can look into that. Anybody else? And again, this is just an initial list. Uh we're going to revisit this when we uh reconvene in August. All right. Uh any other board reports while we're here? not respond to to everything that Jennifer said, but there was one thing that we did decide last year was as we were going to reduce the time that citizens could come and speak, we were also going to make more of an effort um to go out in the community and to have uh smaller interactions or interactions with parents, whether or not it's at the library or at some place in the community. And I think that we can do that on a regular basis. We have to

017decide on a day and an evening time um once a month and if two of us go to each um meeting and um eventually we will have a pattern and people know that they can come and talk to us over coffee or or uh just have a a time to chat. So it's really us to make that commitment and I hope that when we discuss this coming in August that we can make those times available to the public. Um, even the one time we did it, we was that the the um our vision was to have community members come in who would want to run for the board and if they had any questions, but Jennifer and I actually had an opportunity to sit and discuss things with with each other. So, I mean, which

018is fine because otherwise we wouldn't see each other and there are things that from her experience that she can share with me and vice versa and things that we could decide to do together as a unified um unified members of the board. So, I hope that we can do that um come next year. Okay. Anyone else? All right. Uh next up is the forwarded action item 10.4, administrative personnel items. I guess since Angie's not here. Oh, so we're here tonight. Sorry, I have a document, but I'm not going to be as eloquent as Angie, so please bear with me. Is Mr. High Tower here? Mr. Mr. High Tower, do you want to come up to the hot seat up at the front, please? I have the privilege tonight, um, Angie was sick. Sorry. So, you

019get to get me. Um, I have the privilege tonight to welcome Darius, did I say it correctly? Is it Darius High Totower to the Urban Urbana team? Uh, Mr. High Totower is very excited to be joining Dr. for Preston Williams Elementary as an assistant principal this year or for FY26. He has two bachelor's degrees and a master's degree from Eastern Illinois University and brings over 10 years of experience in education. Throughout his career, he has served both as a classroom teacher and as an administrator and those experiences have shaped him and his commitment to creating a positive and inclusive learning environment for students. He believes that schools thrive when students, staff, families, and the community work together toward a shared goal or vision. He believes that creating opportunities for strong family engagement plays a major

020role in student achievement and is looking forward to building meaningful relationships with parents, caregivers, and the entire school community. And while away from work, he loves spending time with his wife and their four kids, especially at sporting events or school activities. He likes to be there to cheer them on and make memories together and it means everything to him. He's excited to begin his uh journey at Dr. Preston Williams Junior Elementary and is deeply grateful for the opportunity to work with the Avant community. Thank you. Is there a motion for the floor? So moved. Second. Moved and second. Any any further comments, questions, discussion? Roll call vote is in order. Member Jones, yes. Member Langodor, yes. Vice President Baxley, yes. President Palowski, yes. Member Hixon, yes. Member Maribou, yes. And Mr. Member Cheryl. Oh, member

021Cheryl. Yes. You're not on my list here. I put you down here. Welcome. Congratulations. Congratulations. You can say a few words if you like. Um uh just uh thanks for the opportunity. Look forward to joining the Bennett team and working together with everyone. And so again, just thank you and I'm happy to be here. Well, thank you. We'll now begin our administrative reports. First up are our school improvement updates. Uh starting with Gerber School. Good evening. I'm Jennifer Ran. I'm the principal of Gerber School. And tonight I brought with me Jess Wilson who is one of our teachers um who is also a member of our school improvement committee. And so Jess is here to help support me and to answer any questions uh you guys have. Um so without further ado, um thank you

022John. Um so we are going to review first our school improvement goals that we are finishing up this year. Um there are some good some bad things. Um but a lot of information um for us was was built this year with our goals. Um, so like all the other schools in the district, we had an attendance goal, a math goal, and a literacy goal. Um, but our attendance goal looks a little different. As most of you remember, uh, Gerber School is the district school that works with students who are residentially placed at Cunningham Children's Home. Um, so their residential staff, make sure they come to school. Um, so we don't have uh the traditional attendance issues that some of our other district schools have. Um, but we recognize that we have a similar issue when

023our students are out of class for their behavioral or social emotional needs. So that's what uh one of our goals was. That's what our attendance goal was this current year. And you'll see that that theme repeated um in our new goals as well. Um this goal uh what we were hoping to gain was that we would decrease schoolwide uh student time out of class by 15% from the 23 24 school year to the 2425 school year. And unfortunately we did not meet this goal. um we actually had an increase in time out of class despite our best efforts. And in a few minutes we'll get to kind of the reflection and I'll share some of our reasons why we feel like we had that happen. The good news though is our academic data. Um despite

024our kids being out of class more this year, we rocked our academic data. Um we had um our our math and our literacy goal are similar. They both use uh the MAP testing that a lot of our our other schools use as well. Um but because of some of our our very individualized uh levels that our students have, all our students are special education students um and our mobility rate is great. So, we really wanted to look at their individual projected growth and see if we could make that movement with our kids. So, our goal was that 55% of our students would make their projected growth on their uh MAP math assessment across at least two benchmark periods. Um, and by the end of the the school year, we had 66% of our students meeting

025their individual growth score. Um, so we felt very good about that. Um, we felt like we fought hard for that. Um, and um, our our math teachers are very proud of the work they did as they should be. Um similarly um for our literacy uh that was also looking at the MAP assessment and we wanted 55% of students um to meet their projected growth score on the MAP literacy assessment and we also rocked this one. Um we had 70% of our students making their projected growth um across at least two benchmark periods. So, we're very proud of the academic work we did. Our kids are far behind and they really need to make progress and so we are proud that that our staff came together and and really pushed our kids. Um, we did a

026lot of reflections. Um, you know, like you just saw, there were some good pieces to our data and there are some struggles in our data. And so our our school improvement team and then our larger staff body, we talked about it a lot, like what what was going on this year, what was different. Um, and there are a couple things that are kind of outside of Gerber that really impacted us this year. Um, as you know, we're connected to Cunningham Children's Home and most of the students are placed there by DCFS. Um, DCFS has had some new initiatives. They don't want kids growing up in residential treatment and we don't either. Um so they are really pushing kids to move through that program faster and thus through Gerber faster. Um and then um Cunningham also

027opened up um a DCFS shelter care program in one of the units. And so that is designed to be a short-term placement for kids. As a more long-term, a more stable placement is being found for them. So those two pieces drastically increased our student mobility rate. Um, and as anyone who works with kids in general, but definitely with kids with behavioral needs know, um, when you get new kids in, it kind of upsets the apple cart. Um, and so we had this constant churning in our classrooms this year. Um, that was accelerated more than we've been used to. um really since co um things had kind of our our mobility rate had slowed during COVID, but it really picked back up this year and and we felt that greatly. Um and so with that um

028we saw some of the kids that had been with us for a while struggle to adjust to that. We also saw um that we brought in some kids with more intense needs, needs like we hadn't seen in a while. Um, and so those two pieces we really felt like played into that time out of class data. Um, and and the numbers um that we were comparing didn't match. So the number of kids we served this year was drastically different than the number of kids we had served the year before because of our mobility rate. Um, so you'll see that in our new goal. how we're we're working to address some of that mobility and and looking at things a little bit differently. Um like I said with our math, it was hard fought. Um at

029the beginning of the year because we had so many changes. Um we were really struggling. Um this was just year two with the illustrative math curriculum and um with a very different population. Our teachers needed support. Um, and the district had used uh Janet Moore, a math consultant, in the past, and we were able to access um some of our Gerber Title One grant funds to bring her back in. Um, and I really think that made a huge difference in our teacher confidence with illustrative math to to meet kids needs, to meet them where they were at. Um, and really helped us push our kids um closer to where they need to be. Um and then Jess along with some of our other teachers began that that journey with the new language arts curriculum. Um

030so there were um peaks and valleys with that as we learned that as other people did. Um and one thing we we've learned is um you know we still need to adapt. Um our kids have so many gaps. we're adapting and we also need to be supplementing reading and literacy in the other content areas as well. And so I think we're going to be working a lot this year to pull in the other content area teachers um to help us build some of those literary literacy skills even more. So, all of those things um along with uh the school improvement components that I'm sure Chassity has talked to you guys about with the other school improvement plans uh led us to these new goals. Um our first goal um is very similar to that attendance

031goal we had last year. Um but because of our mobility rate um we decided that we're going to look at that data a little differently. Instead of looking at it schoolwide, we need to look at more at the individual student level. And so, how can we create change in our individual students? Um, since we're turnurning quite a bit. So, our goal is across the 2526 school year, 80% of students will reduce their minutes out of class across at least two quarters. Um, and so teachers are going to be reviewing that time out of class data monthly and including their TAs in those conversations. Um, we're going to work really hard with our SEAL instruction because we think that is a huge component of why kids are out of class. Um, and we're also going to

032include our kids in those positive conversations about, hey, you know, you were upset, but you managed it in class. Like, how can we do that again the next time? Those kind of conversations and and helping them understand their own data. Um, and and be agents of change in their life. Um and then our culture and climate goal um at Gerber uh because we are a school focused on behavior and social emotional needs. Uh we have a level system a point system. Um and so on that system we are going to um it we are going to work towards um having an average of 75% of students earning 80% or more of gold days. Gold is the highest you can be. Everybody wants to be gold. There are lots of uh short-term and long-term incentives um

033tied to gold. um it's communicated back to their residential units um for pride and for um incentives in the home environment as well. And once again, we're really going to work through our SEAL instruction, including that seven mindsets curriculum that the rest of the district's going to do. Um our teachers and staff are going to be constantly reviewing our behavioral data. Um and then if as we see that there are specific weaknesses, we're going to do some of those targeted social emotional instructional groups um with smaller groups of kids who need something over and above what our standard social skills curriculum is providing. Um our literacy and math score uh goals will again be on that MAP uh assessment and looking at students projected growth. Um we we tried to set the bar high but

034attainable. We we made great growth so we're going to try to keep striving for that. Um so we set our literacy goal at 70%. Um, and we're going to try to work on some cooperative learning strategies with our kids. Our kids historically don't work well together. It's that social emotional skills piece. And so, if we can weave that together with the academics, we're excited to see what we can do with that. Um, and we're going to continue to do some target targeted specialized instruction with literacy. And, um, myself our assistant principal and our uh interventionist will be doing some data coaching with all of the teachers and the staff. Um very similar in math. In math, we've set the bar at 65% of students um that we want to meet their projected growth score on

035math across two benchmark periods. And we're going to use a lot of those same strategies, the cooperative learning, the data coaching. Um we also feel like there are some um benchmark assessments that we need to develop um to kind of help us progress monitor along the way. Um those of you who are familiar with curriculum know that reading um intervention wise and assessment wise is so far ahead of the game um than than math is. And so we really want to make some strides uh with math to kind of push those scores and and those kids even farther. Any questions? Board members, any questions or comments? I I just have a statement. I know you said that the mobility is quite high, but with the wonderful things that they're experiencing at Gerber, even if it's

036just a short time, hopefully will help them to the next place that they will go. So appreciate all that you do. Thank you. That is absolutely our goal with every kid, Sherry, is that they they can come in and feel like it's a safe space for them to learn and to just take a breath and get back on their feet and then hopefully move on to a a more traditional setting. I'm really appreciative in this report that you highlighted um like root cause like why things went well. I mean oftentimes we focus when things don't go well you've tried to root cause you focused uh on the bringing in additional training for the math. So I guess is that a lesson that we could take to our elementary schools? I mean was it can you

037kind of describe I guess what what um was reemphasized in that additional training? Yeah, I I think having that opportunity to bring in Janet to, like I said, build confidence um as our teachers experienced a different population. Um some of our teachers had to learn how to teach entirely different grade levels of math this year than what they were teaching last year. Um, and so it was it was very stressful for them in the beginning and and having somebody who was that knowledgeable in math to come in and support them was was a huge win. Any other comments, questions? Right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Uh in order next up is Urbana Early Childhood. Just going to use this one since it's already on. Hi, I'm Katie Madigan. I am the principal at Urbana

038Early Childhood School. Thanks, Chassity, for joining me. today. Um, so I did do have a wonderful school improvement team. Um, they just weren't able to be here today. Um, so we changed one of our pictures to show you some of our cute kiddos that we have at Early Childhood. Um, I am going to review first some of our year-end data from the um, 242 school year. So we had three goals just like every other school in the district. Um our first was on attendance. Um we were aiming aiming high that we would reduce our chronic absenteeism rate from 56% to below 40%. Um which we did not quite meet that objective, but we did reduce it. So we ended the school year at 50% of our students were chronically absent. And I'll go into some

039of that root cause um a little bit later. Um some of the things that we did were um reviewing our tiered supports that we have for attendance with all of our staff and providing appropriate support for families when we could identify it. Um communicating with families the importance of attendance through like uh reminders in my principal's newsletter but also monthly reminders in their backpacks and any other communication systems we had. Um we have had a an attendance committee for several years and we continued the use of that through um things like sending letters home when we've at the end of a month if we've noticed that family a student hasn't um been in attendance as much as we'd like or postcards saying thank you for coming to school more when we see an improvement. Um,

040and then we were also given the opportunity to use Panorama um to track some of our interventions that um and and conversations that we had with families throughout the school year when we noticed that uh they were not um at school very often. Um the second goal that we had was for our math. So, we um use a tool um if you know preschoolers, three to five year olds cannot sit down and take a test on paper and pencil or even on a computer. So, um we use real life things and and some pictures. So, we use a tool called connecting numbers to quantity. And so, essentially, we're just wanting them to show us three items, six items, nine items. And the teachers um engage the students in play to get them to show that

041they understand quantity. And our goal was that um 85% of our students going to kindergarten this coming school year would um grow in their ability to connect numbers to quantity. And um we did almost make it. We were really close. So 79% of our students did um achieve that goal which was really exciting for us to see. Um we had lots of times throughout the school year where we were um taking time as a staff to uh review our data together and um taking some specific planning time to review what we see and what we think we could change to improve the instruction and math. Um we had a full day um professional development day. early childhood gets to have a whole day to ourselves of things that are appropriate for us. And we had

042Jessica Hardy from the University of Illinois come and present um engaging all young children in math learning using tiered instructional um practices. And it was really really beneficial to our staff to have that for an entire day. Um the year before we'd also had um some instruction on numbers number talks and I think those combined efforts really showed how um our math knowledge and our students really increased this year. Um and then finally we had a literacy goal and um it was very similar and thank you um we have another tool. It's based on the BAME test of basic concepts. So basic con basic concept vocabulary is something that's essential for learning to read. So it includes words like before and after um first and last some many. And so we created an assessment based

043on one of those um tests shorter because that one has 50 items. This only has 10. And um they're ones that we felt like were really important for students to know. And we were looking to see if they could grow in their ability to point to the I to the pictures that match and then if they were able to do all 10 pointing if they could label the um vocabulary concepts. Um we had 65% of our kindergartenbound students who were able to um increase their score by at least two. Um we realized that we have made some progress but just not enough in this area. and some of our other data analysis showed that we really need to focus on our students with IEPs um because those students were the ones who were um not

044making as much progress and as much growth. And so that is something that we've written into our goal for next year. Um we reviewed our assessment protocols and accommodations. Our tier one intensive teacher created physical representations of our vocabulary. So, we found some of the students weren't able to um point to on a picture which one might be around. So, she made um like a little diarama almost of a box with like crayons all around it and a box with crayons in it so that they could point to the one that was around. Um we also conducted data review and reflection during our staff meetings and teacher meetings multiple times during the year. We used um some of our staff development day and a few of our staff meetings to do some examination of using

045print and prek getting instruction on the science of reading at the preschool level. And then um we also had Lisa um from the curriculum department come and do a presentation for our staff on how we could embed some of the things from CLA, the new language arts curriculum that's being used in kindergarten up into prek. and and our staff found that really valuable. Um and we also had a family night in the fall that was literacy focused. Um we had the Urbana Free Library come and then we played um bingo using our concept words that we were um focused on in French, Spanish and English. So, um, one of the things that we really wanted to focus on is the fact that if our kids aren't at school and if they're, um, having some behaviors

046that are not um, allowing them to learn, then they won't be able to complete the academic work. So, our school staff really wanted to focus on those two things, and that's where a lot of our root cause and reflection came. Um, I think I spoke to you last year about this. Our attendance rate is not great, but 3 to 5 year olds are are young. They're still um building their immunities and getting sick a lot more often than older kids are. Um, we do recognize that our program is only 2 and a half hours and so there are some families that are just unable to access that if they don't have child care the rest of the day that's in Urbana um and they may have to work. Um we do need to do some

047explicit teaching of the impact of regular attendance on our families and do some um education on um excused versus unexcused absences for families and really talking to them about um our program is non-compulsory attendance, but it is important that they're there to set the foundation for future um attendance uh expectations for the rest of their school career. Um, we've also noticed that we have had a lot of incident reports. Um, those are what we at the pre-K level might call office referrals, older students, but we don't actually send them to the office. We just, um, intervene in the classroom. Um, and we noticed that most of our incident reports, um, over 40% of them were for physical aggression. And um when we broke that down even more, we found that most of our students with

048um the most incidents of physical aggression were black males. And so we as a school need to address what we as adults are doing to reinforce the behaviors or curb these behaviors. And so that is um something that we are really going to um dive into deeply for the entire first quarter of this next school year. Um so this year we were tasked with four smart goals. Um so our first one is about attendance. So we got from 56 to um 50% this year. So we'd still like to aim for that under 40% of our students being chronically absent. Um we did some analysis and found that our students who are eligible for free free free and reduced lunch um have a higher percentage of chronic absenteeism. So we would really like to focus on

049those populations. Um we had previously looked at average daily attendance in our um attendance committee which we never fell before below 80% this year which was really good for us. Um, so we want to start looking more at that chronic absenteeism rate monthly when we meet and um doing some more uh individual check-ins with classroom um staff and families. And then working on some um more creative intervention plans with families to help, you know, get past those barriers that are um not allowing them to bring their kids to school every day. Um our second goal is around our culture and climate goal. As I mentioned, we had a lot of students with physical aggression and we would like to look at um reducing the number of students that require the most intensive amount of supports.

050Um and as I said, we noticed that uh we had 10 students um who had the most incident reports required the most attention from staff outside the classroom. and most of those students were black males. And so that is going to be um high level of focus for us this coming school year. Um we are going to have some targeted equity conversations and we're going to have a high focus on positive relationships and helping to um fix those challenging behaviors. Um we are going to spend almost the entire first quarter as I said focused on something called pyramid model. Um it's sort of a prek level PBIS which um works in like nurturing positive relationships um and those targeted intervention supports at the top level if we need it but we're hoping that we won't

051need it as much. Um and then we are also um keeping second step as our social emotional curriculum at the prek level. Our staff who piloted this year found that seven mindsets was just not developmentally appropriate for um preschoolers and so they advocated um strongly to be able to keep second step um for the pre-K level. But we are going to still um work in the mindsets that will be taught at the older grade levels as sort of like our character replacing the character character traits of the month. And then we have a literacy goal. We're really um continuing to keep some of the same types of goals. We really want to focus on our kindergartenbound students, but um looking specifically at students who have um special education eligibilities, and we're going to continue to

052work on these basic concepts because they're integral to reading success in the future. Um but we have identified some key strategies including um having some professional de development and teaching our teachers how to um use similarities and differences to teach some of these concepts. They really lend themselves well to that because there's often that high contrast word um that they can can do some of that um similarity and difference. And then we also want to provide home practice and resources for families because we recognize that especially at our level um parents and family members are their first teachers and so we want to provide them with the resources to reinforce things that their students are learning at school. And finally, we have a math goal that is um also very similar and um we made

053a lot of growth in math, but we want to make that 85% and so um we are going to keep working on that and continue to work on our students with special education eligibilities as well. Um 20% of our population of our school has a special education eligibility. So, it's a big part of UECs and um we're going to continue to use a lot of those what we call non-llinguistic representations. So, pictures, real items to reinforce those math concepts and again use the homework and practice um with our families as well. And then our, like I said, our first quarter PD plan is really all focused on um teaching those social emotional skills so that we can get to the learning of the academic skills. Any questions? Board members, any questions? You talked about the

054numbers of children who were qualified for free and reduced lunch. What is I know what it is for the district, but what is it your particular school? Um it's approximately 90%. And so 53% of our students that qualify for free and reduced lunch are were chronically absent this year. I have a question um regarding the physical aggression and you stated mostly black males. the interaction that they're having is is it always with the teacher or is it with other staff members or could you just elaborate a little bit on that? And you say it's the same kids. Um they're the highest number of students that you know there's a concentrated group of 10 students that received the most incidents. So we had 230 incident reports this year. 44 of those were the same student over

055and over again. Um and then when we bear it down to um those top 10, you know, nine out of 10 of those are black male students. Um yeah, and those to answer your question, the interactions are with teachers, um support staff in every classroom at UCS, there's a teacher and two teaching assistants. There's also speech language pathologists that come in and out of the room, um family coordinators. So any of those adults that come in and out of spaces, they may have some of those interactions with them. Okay. Thank you. Can I say mine next? Because it kind of goes with what Lola's saying. So I normally don't ask questions or comment, but I wanted to applaud you, Katie, for um taking on the leadership um of this really hard, courageous conversation that your

056staff has been having around physical aggression. Um, as the board knows and the community knows, if you've been wa listening to our data as a district, our black males are struggling in lots of areas. Um, especially in exclusionary practices and being out of class. And so, um, it is interesting that that is starting even at 3, four, and five. Um, and as Sherry said, you know, as we prepare for them to come to kindergarten, that's a really big transition, too. So, I know those have been hard conversations that your your staff have had around that data, but I applaud you for taking it on as something that is not only going to improve your culture and climate, but is going to improve the culture and climate for our district because your kids go to all

057of our schools. And so, if we can teach some of those skills when they are three, four, and five, it will only help us when they get to our kindergarten. So, thank you. And thank you for to UCS staff. Thank you. I also know you you have a difficult job because of the levels of disability as well and some of those aggressions could be based on disability and some of it could be behavioral and um some of those things might take a long time to change. So, you know, it's very difficult. Yes, we're just, you know, ongoing but hoping to um really have those open conversations with all of our staff so we can improve our practices as adults. with regards to your chronic absentes and goals. Um I you mentioned you you know want

058to work with the families. Um, is there like a like a like like formal data collection with regards to why an individual each individual student I mean it would be nice like a high level to know oh yeah okay 50% of the time it's they really are sick or or or or you know maybe maybe bad weather days are part of it or it' be nice to kind of have a like a high level breakdown on why parents are telling you. Do you collect that data now? So, we don't necessarily have that for all of our absences because we do just have so many families that don't ever let us know why their student is absent. Um, despite our efforts to reach them, we don't always find out why they were gone. Um, so I

059think that's if we could get that information more upfront, then yeah, we would be able to um identify. But when we have specific families that we're looking at because we've identified that they've been gone for a significant period of time, then we're usually able to figure out, oh, they had, you know, a death in the family and so they were out of town for a week to deal with that. Or, um, I had another student this year whose little sister was in the NICU in Chicago and so she couldn't be away from her parents who were with the younger sister for several months. So, it's, you know, part of that educating our families is is asking them to let us know why their student is absent that day. And um we've done things like educating

060about appointments. So, hoping you can schedule an appointment when your student isn't in session because they're only there for the morning or the afternoon session. And then even if you did have an appointment, it's okay to bring them in late. We'd rather them come in an hour late and get an hour and a half of instruction than miss the whole two and a half hours. And we're trying to reinforce all of those kinds of ideas over and over again. Yeah. The reason I bring it up, this this isn't a challenge obviously unique to early childhood. All of our buildings are are struggling with this and maybe you we as a board can discuss strategies with regards to beta better data collection across the board. It's it's kind of hard to to develop strategies to combat

061it if you don't know the why. Yeah, we hear anecdotally things, but um yeah, exactly. We don't have necessarily all the data. We do ask our teachers to contact um families where students have missed three days in a row. On the third day, we ask the teacher first to reach out and say, "Hey, what's going on? Why aren't you here?" if we don't know. And so that's where we start the conversation because they're the first people that have have the relationship with the families. But um still there are some that we just can't quite reach. Thank you. Anyone else? Did you have I'm sorry. Sorry. A quick question. Did you have a waiting list this year? Yes, we did. Oh, it was about 20. Okay. Um I some of the things I noticed is I

062I did like how you pointed out that um staff reactive to behavior instead of proactive. um inconsistent staff responses to behavior and bias and discipline discrepancies in reporting. Um the fact that you guys are noticing that and coming up with something to help benefit that, I like that. Thank you. Anyone else? Thank you very much. Thank you. Yankee Ridge Multilingual School. You got to push it. I did push it. There we go. I'm Patricia Valente. I'm the principal at Yankee Ridge. This is Hi, I'm Elizabeth Smith Andre, one of the assistant principles at Yankee Ridge. And I'm Erikica Rudolph and I'm one of the other assistant principles at Yankee Ridge. And we are the administrative team. First of all, I want to start by saying thank you so much for your trust for being able

063for opening up the school, giving us an opportunity to work together as teachers and as staff and thank you for always yay having our back, excuse me, and giving us the opportunity to work together with this amazing community. And so to start our night out, we Elizabeth is gonna talk about some of our goals that we made last year going into this year. All right. So, as some of our previous colleagues have said, um we did not make all of our goals. Um, we worked really hard this year and so we're going to go through worked hard as a building building our building community, building culture with our staff, with our students. And so we're going to go through our goals that we had set previously. Um, and then uh we'll talk about um Patricia

064will go into more about the reflection and root causes for some of those and then um Eric will go into our next goals. So, as everyone else has had the literacy goal, math goal, and attendance goal. So, first we started out with our literacy goal. We have um literacy goals for all three languages, Spanish language arts, English language arts, and French language arts. So, our Spanish language arts goal was that 47% of students would meet their Spanish MAP projected growth goal. And this year, at the end of the school year, 43% of students met their growth goal in Spanish. In English language arts, our goal was that 48% of students would meet their English MAP projected growth goal. At the end of this year, we found 38% of students met their English growth goal. And

065then in those two um goals are measured with MAP and then in our French uh language arts data, we use the GB+ which Erica will um talk about if you need to later. Um but that is our um standardized assessment for French and our goal was that 59% of students would meet their French GB+ projected growth goal and at the end of this year we found 34% of students met. Now for our math growth goal we um said by uh 44% of students would meet their math math projected growth goal and at the end of this year 48.5% of students met. So woohoo, we made that. Um, and we really did as a SIP team focus a lot on math this school year. We're all using IM. There are a lot of key strategies that

066we wanted to make sure that everyone was using consistently across the board. So, we did spend a lot of professional development PD SIP time um on our Monday meetings focusing on that. So, you can see that reflected in some of the pictures here. We have first we have a teacher um using the IM curriculum and we also have a picture of a student using math manipulatives which was an emphasis we wanted teachers to be using hand on hands-on things during math time. In addition to that there are also two other pictures. The kind of bottom middle picture is a teacher presenting a um a warm-up lesson. And this is a kindergarten teacher. And we asked other teachers from other grade levels to also present their warm-ups in a similar way so that they can see

067how those lessons connect and the importance of making sure that we get to each piece of IM. And then we also had um someone from the UFI come in. he was working with a grade level team, but he also came in and did some PD with us on how we can incorporate IM and also use um like group work and moving around, getting up, interactions and things like that to support and I think all those things really helped us reach that math growth goal this year. And then finally, we had our attendance growth goal. And our goal was that we would decrease the number of chronically absent students to 20%. And at the end of this school year, our chronic absenteeism rate was 22%. Um I think we all, even though we didn't meet the

068goal, we all are really proud of our attendance um this school year. I think throughout um the whole year we we really pushed hard to have our families come to school, have our students send their families send their students to school and we really emphasize the importance of that. We have some really great family liaison seas who have worked so hard um in collaboration with teachers with admin with all of us to help support um our students come coming to school. Um, and then we did have a few different things that we included to try to build that community, build that culture. So, for example, having a friends and family board in each classroom, making students want to be here. This is my family. This is my team. This is why I'm here. I need

069to come to school to be with them. Um, and then we also had a daily attendance board that was updated every day um with grade level attendance. And so students would box, it was a very visible board, so when students walk by, they could see how their grade level was doing. um and they would get excited about that and want to be uh make sure that they were they were showing up and being there. And so some of our root causes are we're a new building. It's our first time together. Three buildings put together, different systems, different ways of kind of running a school. So really trying to be make our systems united, come together in similar ideas and similar visions was kind of working towards that. And so some of the the scores and

070some of our projected growth was affected a little bit by that change. I'm excited for the years to come as we as we come together with our vision, as we grow in that space, how our literacy, math, and our other goals will continue to grow. And so because of that, we recognize that we need to continue to grow our systems, right? So MTSS being one of our bigger systems to be able to notice students and when they need literacy support or math support or behavioral support. So be able to create clear systems that teachers are aware of, parents are aware of that we can communicate and meet the needs in tier 2 as well as in tier one. Another root cause would be the unfamiliarity with the new curriculum and the learning curve of navigating

071a new platform. So CLA and Caminos was new. We did K5 commaminos in Spanish and then CLA, our French dual language program used CLA K through five. And we had our coach that was there two time every two weeks for two days. The the K2 teachers really worked intensely with her in the classroom planning. And so getting to know that program was just kind of part of the learning curve and building those foundations. And so our consistent monitoring, our consistent work in that area will be our goal for next year as well as continuing to grow those spaces, the phmic development and literacy through three through five. And in three through five, we continued our work with the biiteracy unit frameworks which we've been doing since the beginning of the program. And we had wonderful

072professional development, but just now unifying all the teachers doing the same thing together, right? because in three different buildings just different ways of doing things was really important. And then our knowledge and consistency use of multilingual instructional best practices throughout the building. So coming together and be on the same page of what strategies we're using for our multilingual learners, being very explicit, very monitoring, being clear about that, and then being able to get professional development and support for the teachers to be able to implement those high high yielding best practices for multilingual learners. as part of growing and be that consistency in program is really kind of being able to be consistent in implementing of our language allocation plan. And so I just wanted to bring out our language allocation plan for Spanish and for

073English. So I'm super excited that and French a lot of languages going languages. So I'm super excited about next year just being more consistently using our access scores and being able to measure and consistently implement our English instruction from kindergarten through fifth grade. We teach English in kindergarten. Just want everyone to know that. And so what's powerful about I mean 55 minutes of English instruction and as we're going as a team consistently implementing programs like UFly connected to our mystery science so that they're doing the content and strategic literacy work at the same time and then being able to talk about sheltered English instruction and being able to do some of that sheltered instruction in Spanish and in French as well so that we're unifying the three languages to have that middle linguistic reflection. So

074it's happening. So teachers are aware of it, students are aware of it, but being able to be true making our schedule, which is so exciting. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to make our schedule. Yay. We were able to um really use the allocation plan that the teaching for bi literacy has recommended for us to keep an 8020 model, 5050 model in French, and making sure our literacy blocks can give that comprehensive literacy instruction in all of the languages. I think that's exciting space being together. Now we can have those conversations and tackle some of those difficult spaces. How do we do it? What does it look like? And we can put our minds together. So this is a really important part in our continued vision and growing the language allocation. And then another

075so exciting part we had Dana from the biiteracy unit um teaching for biliteracy space come and really support us in building map for the three through three through third grade through fifth grade. So what are maps? What is that? It's taking the standards in science and social studies and then looking mapping it out for the year and then being able to connect the the writing standards and the reading standards strategically using both languages for French and for Spanish in a way that you get the best bang for your metal linguistic connection and then being able to now that they had time this year making those making a map teachers have a vision of where they're going. Then you take a unit and in that unit that most of them have we're just now perfecting it

076or amplifying it or making it stronger. You take the unit is six, it could be six weeks, it could be four weeks and then you're you're adding the details of what's the vocabulary, what's the metal linguistic that I'm doing, what is the the supports that I need. So it's been really powerful to see collaborative groups, grade levels. We've had time once a week to come together as a grade level third through fifth to be able to plan these units to plan the mapping of these units. And so I'm really excited for the f next years to come how this is going to make an impact in our reading and our growth and literacy. And so I just this this is the work we did this year for me as a bilingual teacher and a principal

077and a coach. This is this is the bread and butter of what life is for multilingual. And so this is just kind of the literacy that the book that we're using. This is an example of the teachers collaborating during our sit professional development because we've also had opportunities three hours sometimes six hours to be able to do this work together collaboratively collaboratively with teachers. That's where you get the most creativity and the most like just the juiciest curriculum that really connects to students and brings high yielding standards, multilingual standards to the page. And so the example at the top is the mapping the way that that we did as with with the teachers and how they they thought through the standards and they thought through the strategies. And so I'm excited to see this implemented

078more in our continual work in this space. This will be powerful in our growth for literacy. Another really great opportunity. I love I love community. I love families. I love parties. I love just connecting. We all love parties, right? but our parent engagement. And so these are just pictures of some of the amazing opportunities. We have an amazing PTA. We have an amazing parent leaison. We have amazing admin team, amazing teachers, we have amazing community members that all joined in to be part of these activities. And so I just want to I just want to celebrate the the way the community and the way the teachers have just really stepped up and just the excitement and the passion to be part of something new. And so I hope to continue the intensity of this. You

079know, our welcome our welcome should be I love seeing parents in in the school. And so I just love being with the community and I think that help has helped some of our culture and climate for this year. So I'm going to hand off the next. So um we've seen this before so I'm gonna go ahead and skip this. Almost didn't skip it. So I get the pleasure to talk about what our work is going to be moving forward. Um as everyone else has done, we have written some goals and what we did was we took some of the things that we had from last year and we kept the good and we added so that we can keep getting even better. So our attendance goal is to improve our attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism

080to 20% or below by the end of this upcoming school year. We're going to implement some targeted strategies that are going to focus on our adult practices. So, what are the adults in our building doing as well as student engagement? Um, we talked a little bit about some of the things that we've done in the past. We're keeping those things that are good and moving on. We are recognizing that 89% of chronically absent students are Latina and we aim to reduce absenteeism within this group by 15%. So, how are we going to do that? Uh our key strategies include establishing clear schoolwide expectations for documenting parent contacts. We've been documenting parent contacts, but we want to make it so that it's the same across the board. That's going to make it easier for all of

081us to communicate um with our families and then with each other about how that's going. Engaging in positive one-on-one conversations with students using conscious discipline practices. and then rolling out a comprehensive attendance handbook which we've been working on um and we're really proud of that outlines procedures and is accessible through the Yankee Ridge dashboard. We want it to be available. We want it to be available to staff um and so everyone knows what the expectations are moving forward. Um and these efforts will be led by by everyone. We're going to focus on those starting right off day one and you'll see that in our PD plan and then revisit them in quarter three to ensure consistency and impact. Our next goal is on culture and climate. So, we will strengthen our school's culture and climate

082by consistently implementing MTSS procedures and enhancing our schoolwide PBIS systems. So, we're going to start with the use of CHAMPS, which um we're excited about and we're excited to learn more about. You'll also see that reflected in our PD plan and targeted PBIS supports. We aim to create a positive and predictable learning environment for all of our students. So our goal is to reach 80% implementation fidelity on tier one by the TFI by spring 2026 and with tier 2 and tier three implementation guided by the fall TFI data. Our key activities are going to be using Panorama which we have available and we have um spent some time on. Um again you'll see Panorama reflected in our PD plan to talk more about how to use interventions provided by Panorama, our SAGE groups or SIG

083groups, social academic instructional groups and the development of some clear procedures. I know Patricia touched on those a little bit but um you know it's good because we all know the plan and we're working towards it so that the procedures are really streamlined. They're really aligned. it's really consistent so that everybody knows what's going on and feels that they're part of those decisions. All right, next is our literacy goal and our key activities. So, this is this is the big one. Um, and this is I can explain a little bit about the GB+ within this. Yankee Ridge will um improve our student achievement in Spanish language arts, which we usually shorten to SLA, French language arts, FLA, and English language arts, ELA, by increasing the percentage of students meeting their individual growth goals with the

084aim of reaching 50% or more in each area by the end of this upcoming school year. So to achieve this, and this is where we have to break it down by our languages, increase SLA growth by at least 5% across each grade level band, ELA growth by at least 10%. And then raise the percentage of students meeting their French GB plus projected growth goal from 34% which is our data from last year to 50%. So just to clarify, the GB+ is the evaluation lecture premier and it assesses literacy in French. So how are we going to do that? Uh targeted instructional strategies with high effect size such as identifying similarities and differences in cooperative learning modeling strategies which again that's something that we talked about using in some of our um our PD and some

085of our days from last year. We love those. We love coming together. We love having our teachers who are experts in areas being able to highlight those and supporting these strategies through peer-to-peer observations informed by walkthrough data and needs assessments. And then all staff will integrate interactive graphic and sensory supports into instruction entering consistent implementation from day one. So day one, we're starting off right away through ongoing professional development led by various staff members including the SIP team, the tier one team, CIT, and administration. All right, our math goals. So as Elizabeth mentioned, we spent a lot of time focused on math um with having the IM curriculum and and knowing that that was something that we wanted to highlight and spend time on. And so we've kept on going with some really high math

086goals for ourselves. Yankee Ridge Multilingual will increase the percentage of students meeting their growth goals in each grade level band by at least 6% with a goal of reaching 50% for all students meeting their growth targets by the end of the year. Key activities include high impact instructional strategies including identifying similarities and differences, cooperative learning, and these strategies will be introduced and modeled. We're going to keep what we've had and we're going to keep on um working with our teachers during staff meetings um during professional development time to um continue to support these uh use data from our walkthroughs and any needs assessments so that we can find out what what do we need? What does our school need? What do our teachers need? What do our kids need? um having that come from us

087and having that come from peer-to-peer observations as well so that we can reinforce the most effective instructional practices and do what's best for our kids. All staff is going to incorporate interactive graphic and sensory supports into their daily instruction to include equitable access and engagement for all of our learners. These strategies will be embedded from day one and reinforced through ongoing professional develop and collaborative support structures. It's a great sentence, so we put it in twice. Okay. So we have also um started planning and developing our first quarter PD plan. So um kind of have three three pieces here for quarter 1. And our first piece is starting off with those um three professional development days, opening day, institute day, the time that we get in those um in those spaces. So during that time

088we want to focus on champs because that will be new um for everyone. want to make sure everyone gets that information. We also also want to make sure that we reiterate um our Urbana School District's messaging here with our mission and vision. So, making sure everyone um is aware of that and aware of the changes and um understands that that's where we're going now. We also want to emphasize these u multilingual best practices. So that includes kind of almost getting back to the basics of the three pillars of dual language education. So making sure everyone remind everyone of those things and um keep thinking of those as we move forward. And then um doing a refresher on our PBIS systems. We're not making any big changes from what we did last year, but making sure

089that we're all uniform on the same page with our PBIS systems and um ready to start day one uh with those things in our classrooms and in our schools. So on on number two, you kind of see the examples of the different PD sessions we will have on the first days, institutional days, and throughout the time that we will be this first quarter. So, we're really interested in continuing to clarify the chain of command for behaviors. What's a classroom behavior? What's a school? What's a what's admin behavior? What does that look like? What's the process? How do you call for help? How do we support the teachers? What are the what are the pieces in the classroom that teachers need to have? The calming corner, the incentives, those different pieces. Also, building a school community

090through school family strategies, parent contact log. We're really continuing to do home visits, connect with families, do our uh have our events where we have come together and talk about talk with parents and families about the different areas that we can improve and strategize how we can make the school stronger. Um we want to continue to use panorama to look at the profiles of the students and and what they need. and using WEDA data is really important to implement as we're we're working through growing our ESL component stronger being able to use the the domains the reading listening speaking and writing and being able to help te teachers work through what does that look like going back to the roots right because I think sometimes over the years being the only strand in a building

091it's easy to kind of mold yourself to everyone else and now we can really come alive right and focus on what we're passionate about um also So just being able to teach, continue to enforce the PBIS core values, why we're doing it, who we are, what does it mean, celebrating incentives and families and the students through that and then launching walkthroughs. So not just having admin walkthroughs, but also having tier one peer walkthroughs, being able to open the door to look at interact with each other and model classrooms that it's we're doing this together. It's not just us acting upon you, but building that collaborative. We have amazing staff. Like the the the the knowledge that's in that building is tremendous. And so it's just being able to unify it and unlock it and work

092together. I'm excited to do next year. Yeah. And since we're always thinking just a little bit even further ahead, looking into second quarter, continuing implementing some of our IM strategies. Again, we um we like where we're going with math and we we want to keep working on it and hopefully can reach our goal. Thank you. Any questions? Any questions? Board members, any questions, comments? Go ahead, Jennifer. I was wondering if you looked at the math the math data um by um language. So, did you know the French students, the Spanish students? Uh, and the reason I'm asking is we had some parents come in earlier in the year and ask about um not having and I'm trying to remember was it a three, four uh combination class for next year and that we did have

093enough staff to do that for next year. Um I it was suggested that per perhaps if we couldn't afford two separate classes for that grade level but that maybe we could have 1.5 so that the 0.5 could take one of the math you know the math groups the either the higher level or the lower level math groups and I was wondering um if you looked at those combin combination classes. Did that affect the math the math scores because the math un I I could see how you could teach literacy in the combination classes a lot more easily. Um and so I'm just wondering about the math and were we able to accommodate anything that the parents asked about that? Jennifer, is there can I hand that off to you? Sure. [Music] I don't Well, I

094guess I don't I can't speak to how they're breaking it up in the classroom. Um, but I do know one of our goals next year was to provide more differentiation instruction for uh those teachers that are teaching the combos. So, I don't know if Erica wants to speak to that, but I mean, I can speak to it a little bit. I I don't I don't have any actually of the data right in front of me. I'd be happy to look at it um and get back to you about that. But um it is something that as we were coming in, as we've spoke about, you know, coming in and seeing um what we wanted to do moving forward, we have provided a lot of professional development opportunities. Um I know that I've spoken with um

095a a coach from the um IM program and asked, you know, what are some best practices that we can do in some of the combined classes? Um, we provided professional development this summer for some extra planning for things um and that can include math um and and working with the best ways to support our teachers and really trying to listen to the things that they need and what they see in their classrooms so that we can best support combined classes. To connect to scores, we did look at our 23 was one of our highest math scores. Yeah, I was going to say I don't have any of that data in front of me, but I I do know that um like our two three and same thing for the GB+ as well um our two3

096combined classes had some of our highest scores and we do have some math data disagregated by dual language programs. We'll share a little bit later on in regard to the staff member or the 1.5 um we weren't adding an additional teacher. Um we have talked about adding an additional teaching assistant to be there to help with the groups. Um but that again will depend on what those numbers look like after we do centralized registration. So yeah, when when when you looked at the numbers of this year's classes, if all of those kids just moved up, that would be I think when I looked at it, it was a class of 26. And so it would be a class of 26 kids speaking trying to learn two languages and they're then to have them at different

097grade levels also that would be challenging. So that's why I was wondering and the parents did come and ask us about it. So I was wondering what happened. I'm gonna speak up with curriculum because with math what's great I'm gonna speak up with curriculum what's great about our illustrative math program and with their standards that oh sorry with our standards um that we teach um they build on each other so like if I'm teaching a two three split a lot of the skills that they're teaching is really the same and the strategies so I can see two three teaching the same skill but like second grade they're adding adding up to a 100 and third grade's adding up to a thousand. And so you can still teach that skill, but it's just second grade's working

098with up to 100, third grade's working up to a thousand. They do a lot with time, whereas um second grade is like five minutes, 15 minutes, and third grade is within one minute. So you can still teach like the same concepts, but that that's where that little differentiation piece comes in. And I am is all about your mathematical thinking and how you think about problems and persevere with problems versus like um teaching like memorization. And so I think with I am it's a it's if you had that split um it would be um not easier but it it's you can teach the same concepts but just expand it based off of what grade you're teaching. Does that make sense? Yeah. uh and then using manipulatives. Additionally, there's opportunities within IM for students to um work

099independently with support. So, while some students are getting direct instruction, other students are able to have independent time to work um and to have those different groups kind of flowing um working back get um back and forth depending on the time. And centers are great. Our program for illustrative math has centers built in and so the teacher could also have that split. You know, while students are working at centers, they could also be pulling a group and teaching that group specific concepts that they need. So that's the the beauty about our IM math curriculum is that it has many opportunities for differentiation. So yeah, I appreciate you I appreciate you bringing that up because that is something we're working through as a building. So, it's good to be able to explain some of the different

100things that are happening. Thank you for asking. Um, I'd like to congratulate you for achieving something that we all had as a vision, blending our two programs together and well, three buildings. Yeah. But as far as the um the two Spanish speak uh Spanish um schools together, that was something that we didn't we always wanted to to see. And it's good to see that you've been able to accomplish that and thank you very much. It was a difficult job you have. Also, you also have the same um difficulties as King School is that the students are coming all the time and I didn't know I didn't so that's a big adjustment, but I didn't know exactly what was going to happen this second semester. Um but you were able to maintain um student uh enrollment

101and you also have the biggest school in the district as far as the elementary schools. So with over 500 students there. So um you've been able to maintain that which I'm sure is very difficult to do. But when it's when it's something you love and it's something I come every day to work glad I'm coming to work. Like for me it's my dream. Like this is a dream. I'm living a dream. It's not easy but it the hope and the excitement of it like really like I I'm so blessed. I am blessed to be here and every day I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm here." So that but there are some things that you just cannot control and you don't have any um say about and those are the things that are

102the most difficult things to to deal with and they have been very difficult this year. So you've managed to maintain the the attendance and the um enrollment which I know was very difficult. You're Yankee Ridg's hype girl. You should see her on Fridays. Maybe you have. Maybe you have. Any other other questions or comments from the board? Thank you very much. Thank you. [Applause] Oh, I think they're just our team's gonna come sit right here. You guys want to come up? Join us. Do you want to come up? Good evening everyone. Good evening. Thank you for allowing us this opportunity to be here. I wanted to say thank you to the board. again for granting me the honor of being the first administrator of the sixth grade center. I'm excited about this opportunity. Uh oh.

103We have a hype crew ourselves. Um and I'm appreciative of the opportunity to be doing this work with the wonderful Miss Janette Delgado. [Applause] Hi everybody. And as you can see with us, we brought some members of our school improvement leadership team or our silts. So, we are very energetic group and we are excited about this work, but it's really a testament of our collective commitment to excellence and moving forward to bring out some student growth and achievement for our rising um sixth graders, our incoming sixth graders. So, we're excited about this opportunity and happy to be here. Um you'll see the the me the members names on the screen of all of our school improvement leadership team. With us tonight is Cindy Adam, Rusty Cleger, Leticia Douglas, and Alyssa Ginsburg. Thank you for being

104here. They've been very instrumental in this process, so we appreciate them. All right. So, as a new building, of course, we didn't have any um goals from last year. However, we did think that it was important to look at where our students landed at the end of their 2425 school year. So we did some data digging and looked at our our incoming fifth grade our incoming sixth graders data and for our literacy goal they 31% of our fifth graders um met or exceeded their growth their projected growth goals in literacy for the 2425 school year which was a total of 91 students for math. 36% of the fifth graders that are now coming in to be um sixth graders which is 108 students met or exceeded their projected growth goals in math. Um, you'll notice

105that when we get to our school improvement goals for this coming year, we will not focus on projected growth. Instead, we'll look at proficiency. And we'll explain why when we get to that point. When it comes to chronically absent student data based on Panorama data for the 24-25 school year, 22% of our fifth graders demonstrated chronic absenteeism, which was one of the lowest tied it seems to be with another group. Um, so 22% of them. And so we are looking to decrease that as well. Um, as we have talked about with our root causes and reflections, this information was taken from um, and then also feedback that came from the current fifth graders that are going to be rising sixth graders coming up. And a lot of the root causes just like other buildings as

106well was app absenteeism, engaging instruction, consistent systems, and accountability. And with us moving into the sixth grade center, we're really looking at starting off with very strong um consistent systems and accountability. Um as far as reflection that goes along with it too, we have um consistent monitoring of data and implementation adjustments based on the data. Um we really want to get student voice. We the students are going to be the key factors to how successful sixth grade center is going to be and without their voices it the change is not going to happen. So, we are really looking forward to um getting student voice and their feedback. Um we're going to keep moving on with ongoing professional development, implementation of learning walks to ensure intentional and fidelity of systems and practices and then ensuring accountability

107measures um are intentional and consistent across the buildings. Um I'm going to move forward with that one, but all right. Okay. And to begin our attendance goal for um the 2526 school year, um we are going to improve overall student attendance by decreasing our chronic absentee rate from the 22% that you saw on the previous slide to 15, which is a reduction of 7%. Um our smarty goal of again, we're going to target those um specific groups that are listed there um and and get an additional 3% reduction in the chronic absenteeism rate. So a total of 10% for those targeted groups. And some of our key strategies are going to include um um implementing uh a tenants verification process and system which um we found that as um part of the 68 building that

108a lot of our attendance data um uh we were missing some things because they we weren't capturing all of the updates that needed to happen in our attendance. Meaning that students who came in significantly late may um their attendance may not have been updated accurately. And so we wanted to implement this system to make sure that our attendance is accurate and make sure that it's being updated on a regular basis. And so this attendance verification system will require staff to look at a report um and verify yes, this attendance is accurate. And if it's not to indicate any changes and make the changes so that it's done in in a timely and consistent way so that when we're looking at our data, we know that it's accurate. Another strategy that we intend to do is

109um use Panorama for our contact parent contact log. Um, but we also want to increase our communication with families about the importance of attendance. So, we'll do that by by sending out some postcards in a regular basis to talk about why attendance is so important, why it's important that students come to school and are energetic and ready to learn. Um, we'll also host some family uh engagement events through our phase team, which um if you know phase is family academic supports and engagement. So, hosting some events so we talk about why it's important not that just that students show up, but that they're in class ready to learn. they're on time and they're um en engaged in the learning process. Um putting forth their all because it's not just what our staff does, it is

110also that partnership that we build with our students and our families as well. Um, another strategy is we're going to make sure that our tiered support systems um for intervention are in place so that when we start to notice patterns about um student attendance, meaning either they're not coming to school or maybe they're coming and maybe not getting to class on time like they should, that we're identifying those patterns and and digging into the why, having the conversations with our students. And that starts with our teachers, you know, noticing because they are the first point of contact when it comes to having students in the classroom, seeing, okay, if this student has missed, you know, um certain number of my classes, I'm reaching out to that student and having that conversation to say, you know,

111what's going on, but also contacting the family and making that a three-part conversation. So, it's not just with the teachers and and students, but teachers, students, and families because we want to instill that partnership. um understanding that this is all a collective work between us and them. And so we'll make sure that um we partner with our SCA and our family liaison to have the harder conversations when we notice that there's a significant pattern of chronic absenteeism so that we can identify needs and find ways to support those needs to make sure that students are getting what into the building like they need to. Moving on to our culture and climate goal. Um, by the end of the 2025 2026 school year, implementation of ABVID framework strategies will be observed in at least 85% of

112each teachers classroom walkthrough data. And from the fall 2025 to spring 2026, there will be a 5% average increase in students sense of belonging as measured by the Panorama student climate survey. Um, one of our smarty goals that goes along with that is that um, by the end of the spring 2026, students in each of the following subgroups will report an average of an 8% increase in their sense of belonging as measured by the Panorama survey, including our students of color, our multilingual learners, and our students with IEPs. Um to try and reach those goals, we our key strategy is going to be providing ongoing professional development on the implementation of seven mindsets um the curriculum and and through AVID um the framework to support implementation with fidelity and intentionality. With that with the AVID

113framework, we're um going to be working specifically with the goal of um relational capacity. with relational capacity with AVID. We're going to be hitting the rigor, advocating for our students and then supporting there to remove barriers that students might have academically, socially within the buildings. Um, another key strategy will be consistently monitor monitoring implementation of SEAL and AVID um strategies through the walkthroughs and providing feedback to improve outcomes. The third strategy that we have along with that is established student committee solicitating student voice and using feedback to improve student culture and climate practices. So once again making sure that our students have that voice to make that change within our building. And then before we get to our literacy goal, I wanted to um reemphasize that we'll be at AVID building schoolwide. And so um

114we do have an AVID elective class that some of our students are enrolled in who applied and have entered into AVID. But as a building that is pushing AVID schoolwide, we want to make sure that everyone is engaged in those instructional practices. Our our teachers understand what the AVID framework is. That its foundation is that relational capacity, which it it matters how we engage with our students socially because if if they are not responding to us socially and emotionally, they are likely not to engage in the curriculum and in the instructional practices. And so we really want to build those positive relationship with with students so we can get that rigor out of them and then push forward to achieve our out our outcomes. And so when we're looking at our literacy goal of course

115um this is where I talked about at the beginning the previous data was based on projected growth and we're going to be targeting proficiency and the reason um for that is because we know that prof proficiency is the best indicator of whether our students are college and career ready. And so um that is also tied with the district's strategic plan and we also are aligned with the middle school so that um we're all three grade levels focusing on that proficiency. We want to get students um meeting their expectations at and meeting the standards at their grade level because that is going to um be the best indicator of again like I said if they're college and career ready. And so we're we're really going to be aggressive with that. And so as you see here

116we did look at where our our um rising sixth graders landed when it comes to proficiency. um the numbers were not good but we are energetic and ready to um push forth um for these goals. So for literacy um they landed at 19% of of the students um proficient in literacy which again is is is that just tells us that we have a lot of work to do but we're committed to that work. Um and so we want to raise that by 10%. And I know it may not seem like a large number but we're talking about 31 approximately of our students because that last um check it was about 317 um students that are coming into the sixth grade center. about 31 32 students that we're really going to be moving from where they

117are significantly in that 20th um or or lower percentile into the 60th percentile is where we want to u move them with regard to math. and we're going to do that. Um, and we have some targeted um, focus for our our students of color, students with IEPs and multilingual learners where we are going to push for an additional 5% for those targeted groups because we really want to make sure we're hitting our our our um, students who are um, underrepresented and making sure that they can achieve their best as well. We'll do that by implementing the AVID focus notetaking strategy which is a high yield strategy for notetaking and allow students to synthesize their thinking um engage in collaborative discussions um uh guide their information through summarization and then they'll be able to reflect and

118apply their learning in every content area. We also want to push for comprehension strategies across content areas specifically those that pertain to vocabulary and summarizing. We found that um as we began to focus on um and I'm talking about um our before practice as a 68 building, we found that when we really um focus on vocabulary, especially academic and content specific vocabulary and increase students comprehension and we were able to see some um noted growth when we were analyzing our MAP data. So, we want to um capitalize on that and continue to build that with our incoming six sixth graders by facilitating that same thing. And so, we'll continue to do that. And we're going to use not just our MAP data but our into literature which is our ELA curriculum data, our SLA data

119which is the Santiana curriculum and then um like I said map to really um make some data informed decisions looking at those targeted areas where students are struggling or where there's a huge opportunity or achievement gap so we can um put in the the correct strategies to help build students confidence in that and build their skills um in that area as well. And for our math goal, um just like how Miss Carr said, um it our math goal is also going to be based on proficiency and it kind of it also goes along with our strategic planning um through the district. Um, so by June 2026, the sixth grade center will increase overall student proficiency in math computation by 10% from 16% in 2025 to 20 to 26% in 2026 as measured by spring 2026

120math map growth assessment. So um also with that we have uh the goal that relates to our targeted groups um which is an increase well sorry um it'll show targeted growth of an additional 5% in proficiency in our students of color our students with IEPs and our multilingual learners. Um our first key strategy would be to implement the AVID focus notetaking strategy. Um that will help students with discussion with um engagement with reflection and applying what they are learning into the classroom. Our second key strategy will be embed math fluency in problem solving into science and other um applica applicationable um content areas. And then our third key strategy would be to gather data from illustrative math and map to make data informed decisions providing feedback um and to set and monitor objectives to support

121student growth and achievement. All right. And as you can see, our our first quarter PD is going to focus a lot um heavily on Panorama because we use Panorama not just to track um data in attendance, but in all areas um and and to support our tiered MTSS practices, but also um to um collect um information on parent contact so that we can make sure that our staff are doing this with fidelity and intentionality. Um we'll do um a heavy training on the attendance verification process to make sure that all staff understand what that looks like and what the expectation is so we can ensure that that is done with consistency. Um focus note-taking strategy will be training on that because we do have some new staff coming in and we want to make sure

122that everyone's on the same page and and we don't want to leave leave anyone out. And then again, as an AVID um schoolwide building, we want to make sure that all of our staff are on board with that AVID framework. Um making sure that we understand the foundation is that relationship piece so that we continue to grow and we have um student outcomes that we all want to celebrate. Thank you. Any questions? Go ahead. I looking at your math goal, you were concentrating only on math computation that it was an increase in computation. You were looking at problem solving as part of science and things like that. But I was wondering were you only going to look at growth or proficiency in math? Computation computation fluency. Yeah. you know other parts of math problem solving

123and that is that is going for now we're we're looking at computation but as we are moving on to sixth grade the test also begins to change and alter when it comes to math testing. So when they are leaving elementary school they take the two to five math and when they come into the sixth grade center they'll be taking the six to eight grade map test. So with that also the different um areas of instruction also changes. So we're trying to go ahead and start off with computation and then add on fluency as time and as our students also start to get used to the rigor of math in the classroom as well. And then Amani if you want to add anything else to that. Yeah I was going to say exactly what she was

124saying. Um we know that our students um will they will be seeing this different version of the MAP test for the first time this year. And so we wanted to focus on one particular area, but as we go throughout the year to see how students are progressing in relation to this goal, we'll modify um the goal as needed and um to address um those other areas. Anyone else have questions? Thank you. Great job. [Applause] And uh last up is Urbana High School today. Okay. All right. Good evening everybody. Um you get me tonight. Um, my SIP team worked on June 2nd and third and many of them asked about coming tonight and I transparently I I told them no, stay home. It's summer. I got this. So, you just get me tonight. So, hope it's

125okay. And so, um, this is the same format as all the other schools. And so, um, we're go ahead. Oh, go ahead. So, we're gonna not do that and then we'll go ahead and jump straight into our goals for um this past school year. And so, our first goal was attendance. And at the end of last year, we had a 60% chronic absentee rate. And so, our goal was to bring that down to about 45% or less. We did not quite make that this year. However, we did make a dent in it. Um, our first semester goal was to get it down to about 50%. Um, our second semester goal was about 50 to 45%, we ended the year at 51%. And so we did get a decrease, but not as much as we wanted

126for that. Um, and so some key activities that we did do is we reviewed attendance procedures and protocols. We promoted daily attendance. We really focused on our SEAL and our AVID strategies. and just really with our staff unpacking panorama data looking at what motivates our students and what can we do to get them in the building and to stay and to be in class. And so that is something that we will continue to work on as when we talk about um our goals for this upcoming school year. Um literacy um was another goal that we put forward for this year. And with literacy, last year we focused on attainment offormational text and this year we switched it up to growth goals. And I am excited to hear that the middle school and sixth grade center

127are looking at attainment. So hopefully in a few years we can switch to attainment because right now our students at the high school are just all over the place. we have some significant gaps and so at the high school we made the decision to stick with growth and we are looking at 5% growth um for our students from fall to spring and so that is something that we're working with just because we have our students all over the place. It's their last step before leaving us into the real world and we want to make sure we get them um best in the best possible position to go forward with a clear plan and a clear vision going forward. And so we're looking at growth goals for now and we want 5% growth for that. And

128so when we look at where we ended up this year, we set high lofty goals where we uh for our 9th graders, we wanted 75% uh to meet a 5% growth goal. 77 for our sophomores. For our uh juniors, 79%. And you can see that we did not quite make that for this year. Um, we ended up with 45% for our 9th graders, 46 for our 10th graders, 38 for our 11th graders. And again, that is looking at a 5% growth. And so, if we were just looking at it growth period, we would be over 80%. But we want 5% growth, right? And so, we're setting that high bar, that high expectation for ourselves um for that. And so, that is where we came in for this year. Another thing that we did um was

129we really tightened up our protocols for MAP testing um with our staff and with our students. And so that was another contributing factor to where we fell with um our map data for literacy. Um and then again as a staff we're unpacking the data. We're looking at it. We're making it more embedded in what we do on the daily for that. And then again looking at PD and really utilizing AVID strategies especially with wicker and looking at the reading and writing and along with quir inquiry and collaboration for that um to really support our literacy for math. Um this year again uh we wanted to get a 10% increase in growth and we set some lofty goals for our three grade levels that we tested. Um, sophomores, sorry, freshman were 86%, sophomore 77, juniors were

13079. And you can see that we did come in short for our MAP uh math growth goals for that. But again, we were looking at a 10% increase based off of the data. And that's where we came in with um 49% for our freshman, 52 for our sophomores, juniors, 33%. And again, again, tightening the protocols for MAP testing. um really looking at unpacking it and really looking at key strategies with our staff, not just with our math department, but across the curriculum with all content areas on how we can support mathematical strategies um in all content areas. And so when we look at root causes and reflections, um a significant thing is absences and tardies play a huge role in high school. Um that is something that we're continuing the battle. As you saw, we

131had 51% chronic absenteeism. And so, that is something that we're going to continue to work on because we feel that's a huge get our students in class, they will learn, right? And so, that's something that we're going to continue to work on. Um, inconsistent staff responses to behaviors, engaging all students in rigorous academic coursework, academic interventions. I'm so grateful for the changes that Dr. Dr. Ivy Tatum made for this upcoming school year with our tier one teachers and our intensive teachers so we can actually get some true interventions in place at the high school for our students. In particular, we implemented this year read 180 um for our tier three students who are really behind with reading to try to move them into a place that they're better positioned um for when they leave us.

132And then again really looking to implement a comprehensive program. So, I'm grateful that the district finally landed on a curriculum that we're going to implement next year that all our freshman and sophomores will get um through our academy course, which is like our advisory. Um so, our seven mindsets curriculum will be implemented for um half our student body. Our juniors and seniors will be an as needed basis um for students who are um struggling um uh with that social emotional component. And then just overall student engagement is something that we're continuing to work on at the high school level. All right, so we'll go ahead and jump straight into our goals for next year. Um for our attendance goal, we uh where we ended up this year was at 51% chronically absentee. So we're wanting

133to take that down to 44% for next year. And then um with our smarty goal, with that equity piece, because I'm a huge proponent in looking at our minority groups and looking at our groups and really working to wrap around them. And so when we look at our um Latina Latinex um subgroup, their absentee rate was actually 60%. It was um the highest in our group in our building. And so we want to take that down. We're going to focus on um our Latinex students. And then our black students were 56% chronic absentee. And so we're going to work on bringing that that number down as well. We're going to do some intentional strategies, intentional work with them just because we have to close those achievement gaps. We have to close that attendance gap for

134our students. And then some key strategies is we're going to really um focus on our tier one, which is we're going to really work on that parent outreach, really figuring out with our families why our students are not there, what's going on, and really just trying to to get to the root of that. Um, and then really making sure that we got a solid tier 2 team that meets. We have that, but we're going to continue that work. And the tier three really working with our sea and wrapping around our students who are um our worst offenders for that. This year we're adding a culture and climate goal. And as everybody knows, when I came uh two years ago, that was one of my uh key tasks, key missions was to help restore a positive

135culture and climate, stabilize it. And I think we've done that. And we've had two years of good stability at the high school with regards to culture and climate. So now it's time to try to improve that data. And so looking at where the need is based off of the data, the data is really trying to ex to reduce the exclusionary discipline and looking at out of school suspensions and expulsions. And our goal is to reduce that by 25% as a whole. And so that's going to be our mission. That's going to be the work we're going to focus in on. And again, looking at that equity piece, looking at our students, um, our black students and our students with an IEP, we're going to focus in on our students, um, those students, and really looking

136at reducing that by about 20% because they are obviously disproportionately represented in our exclusionary um, discipline. And so, we're really going to wrap around um, our students to make sure that we can keep them in school inclass learning. And so we're going to really hit with this uh restorative practices. Um educating, encouraging all staff and students to participate in restorative conversations. Um really looking at at the high school, we don't say PBIS, we say MTSS. And so we're really going to look at some targeted behaviors that we see based off of data when we come back in August, but we already know it's going to be uh behaviors that are tend to be avoidance at the high school. Um, so cutting class, going to restrooms, I mean, just and so that's the biggest things that

137we're seeing. And so we're really going to work on that. Uh, we're going to put in check-in connect, um, SECO, um, and so then we'll do stage groups as well. Um, and then our third strategy will be, um, mindsets, um, seven mindsets. And so we'll really work on that implementation for all our freshman and sophomores. Literacy goal. um we are going to stay with growth and we're going to stay with 5% and try to really increase that based off of our numbers. This year we um decided as a team to look at what was reasonable. And then for our equity um goal and our uh students, we are really going to look at our black students and students with an IEP. And um our key strategies that cut across all content areas that we're really

138going to work on the high yield strategies is summarizing and note-taking, setting objectives, and providing feedback. And then questions, cues, and advanced organizers, which are also rooted in AVID strategies. math. Um we are going to again from the data this year, we've set our goals for next year. And then for our um equity piece, our equity uh component to that, we are really going to focus in on our students with an IEP because they had the largest gap. And so, and again, our strategies for math will be summarizing and note-taking, setting objectives, and providing feedback. and the difference from the literacy goals. We're going to look at non-llinguistic representations. And so with that, um, we are going to really focus in on AVID, MTSS, Panorama, Champs, and seven mindsets. And really looking as a school,

139what are our opportunity and expectation gaps that we see? What are the systematic things? What are the mindsets of staff? and really looking at tackling that that that that me piece about why we have the achievement gap that we have and really bringing that to the forefront to work with our staff and that's all going to be done through our uh professional learning community work for this upcoming school year. Uh any members have a question? Is check-in checkout? Yes. Okay. And just one more closing thought with this. Yes, we have the school improvement plan. Yes, we're looking at culture and climate, math and literacy. But at the end of the day, as a high school, we're looking at that graduation rate, right? And so everything that we do is ultimately to increase that graduation rate.

140When I first came on, it was 80%, at the end of my first year, it was 83%. So we shifted at 3%. We're still uh computing the data because we have some stu seniors that are doing summer school. And so our goal is to again maintain or increase that graduation rate and have all our students with that four-year plan so when they leave us they know exactly what they're doing and where they're going. I'm not familiar with the English or the reading classes that you have at at the high school. How is that structured? So those students who are really not reading on grade level can get the individual attention that they have. We do have um different levels. We have our on track and then we have the advanced track, the honors track, but

141we also have um courses where if a student does not pass, we have classes for them to fall back into to take. We are implementing next year um some ALS. So students who are not um being successful will fall into that class to support them and then give them that attention that they need. And so we we are implementing those interventions and then we do have different tracks that they can offshoot to to make sure that we correct that course as best we can. That's for all four years for freshman. Yes, there is a plan. It looks different at at each grade level, but there is a plan. Okay. And there are different um options. Great. Thank. So, are those reading courses um basically like basic reading instruction or are they helping with the um

142like the science class, the social studies class? Um yes, there is that there's that cross content. Like for example, um our sophomore class, it's world studies and then our junior is American studies. Okay. And um the now that we have our Spanish program, our dual language K. Yeah. The dual language K through 12. Are there any um goals for the Spanish language arts? Um as a building, it's to maintain it and keep it going where it's going. Um our enrollment is increasing and so we are going to continue to work with Dr. Weimalt to make sure that it's a strong program. And as you can see that we had a high number of students get the civil by literacy and so we want to to maintain that and keep that going. Anyone else? Thank you

143very much. All right. Thank you. Great job everybody. Moving on. Our second administrative report this evening is a district school improvement update from Chastity. Let's Okay, it's on. Good evening everyone. I'm Christina Kuwendowski and we have a team here that's going to present tonight, Chassity and John. So, we are excited. Um, it's the end of the year, beautiful day, and we're going to start with providing you an overview of chronic absenteeism data. Hopefully, everyone can hear me. Okay. chronic absenteeism data, uh, map data with math and, uh, reading and SEAL survey data, and maybe anything else you want to know about. Maybe we have the answer. Yep. All right. And I'm gonna drive from over here because there's some things that are interactive. Usually I help people with interactive things from afar, but today I'm

144going to help from near. Uh so uh starting out with our uh chronic absenteeism data. Uh so this is our data for the uh district and the schools for uh the 232 24 school year. So this was our last year data. uh at the end of our uh school improvement plan for last year, they set the chronic absenteeism goal for this coming year at uh 34% which would have been down from uh 44% the previous year. So we have our data from this year. Uh and uh as you can see over the course of the year we did uh track it throughout the year and it did uh dip below 34 at points in the year uh and then rose uh kind of towards the winter and the end of the year and ended up

145at 39% for the end of the year. Uh and that yellow line there is the uh trend line for the year uh which stayed relatively flat over the course of all the data. It kind of you can see there was a little dip in the middle there. So this was more interesting also for me. Uh this was our individual monthly data uh disagregated by race. Uh so here you can see for each individual month uh how many students were uh chronically absent for that month and as you can see uh that black line in the middle is the district data. So there was uh kind of a trend of over the course of the winter months that December, January, February, March that we had higher absenteeism during those months. There was also uh during the

146month of February, our data for our Hispanic students, which had been kind of in the middle of the uh other races kind of spiked in that February month. Uh and I think at one of our previous uh school improvement plans, people had kind of anecdotally mentioned that they were having some attendance students uh problems with students in the kind of last week of school. uh just getting across the finish line. And you can also see that reflected in the data here where the month of May had a higher chronic absenteeism, although not marketkedly so than the previous months. And did you have anything you wanted to add on that one? No, you did it perfectly. I just think the February data is um fascinating um and how it relates to reality. Yeah. Uh and this

147is one more for the chronic absenteeism. This is the data uh by grade uh by month. So here you can see kind of over the course of the year where the highest and lowest uh attendance issues were for individual grades. So uh let me move this up here. uh kind of interestingly well like in the start and middle of the year the middle grades were doing a lot better. Kind of towards the end of the year the middle school grades fell off while uh some of the upper classes had more uh exams and things that they needed to be present for. So they were actually doing better towards the end of the year. All right. So now we're going to move to unless anyone has questions about Well, maybe we should take questions at the

148very end. Yeah. Yeah, we'll take it at the very end. All right. So now let's move to student achievement data using the assessment that we call MAP that we do three times a year. And these are our results for spring. So we have the data divided up um similar to like a bell curve. And so what we want to see is the opposite uh of the bars that we see. So it starts with the low and then kind of curves this way. And we want to see the curve going the opposite way. That's what we want to see. And so when you combine the lowest quintile levels which is high average and high um basically that starts at the 61st achievement percentile level and what the reason why I'm bringing that up is because it's

149important that helps with projecting how we're going to do on our Illinois assessment for readiness test that we are mandated to uh take once a there. And so it gives us uh kind of a window, kind of an idea of how our students are going to perform on that test. And so let's go to the next one. And this is reflecting a different type of data. So the first one was achievement. Now let's talk about growth. Did our students grow? And the reason why it's broken up into four different parts is because we have 15.9% of our students who guaranteed met their projected growth goal and or even exceeded it. So if the RIT score for a student was 121 and the projected score would be for them to go up two points and it

150was 125 then they are included in that first bar graph. So that's what that means. Um now the yes with the asterk u underneath the bar is 28.4%. Now why does it have an asterisk? because these students barely made their projection. And so we do email these reports home to all of our families. And so it is important that our families are looking at the projected growth and having those discussions with their students at home, with their child at home. Um, and it could be simple as, you know, they barely made it between one to two points. And it could be maybe they were just daydreaming, maybe they were just tired. Who knows the reason why they barely made it. Um, and then this is really fascinating. The next bar says, "No, 33.7% of these

151students almost made their projected growth goal and they missed that goal by again one to two points. just one to two points. Maybe they were speed reading. Maybe they were um thinking they could just rapidly guess and then they decided to concentrate. Who knows? But 33.7%. So when you add the first three bars from left to right, that's over 50% of our students that could have made projected growth. I just want to make that as a point. And so what does that mean? That means we have to build a testing environment. We have to make sure our students are ready. We're giving them study skills, test taking strategy skills, um that we're allowing them to practice, especially, think about it, first graders, think about kindergarteners when they come in, um and even all the way

152to middle and high school. So, I just wanted to um point that out. And one more item of note, uh I know we mentioned this in the past, but especially for the new board members. So for the growth versus the achievement, uh in order to be moving higher on achievement, uh students the yes and the yes star need to be add up to more than 50% for us to be improving. If those add up to less than 50%, then we're not improving on the achievement. That is correct. And so when you add those two bars together, yes and the yes asterric, what do you get? You get less than 50%. All right, let's go to the next one. Student performance by achievement. This is language arts. Again, we want to see the bar going the

153opposite way. And when we combine the last two bars, that will give us an indication of how we may uh perform on IR. And speaking of I almost forgot this, they are changing their targets. Um the state of Illinois decided that our targets were way too high when they compared the state to other states assessment uh targets. And so we're really excited to see um how that's going to to look not just for us but across the state of Illinois. All right, next slide is the projected growth and we have the um if you look at the no bar again 35.5% of our students almost made their projected growth by one to two points. Um so and when you combine the yes and the yes asterric bars um that is under 50 uh%. Okay let's

154go to the next Oh no we're going to show something special. Yeah and I wanted to give Christina some credit for this. Uh I think what uh member Hixon you'd asked about a data dashboard. Uh Christina had generated this just out of the ether. Uh which also lets you really drill down on uh map performance by uh basically anything uh you had asked earlier about uh the dual language program and how they're performing on math. So you can go right in here and say of our Spanishspeaking Spanish dual language students and you can see how they're comparing to the rest of the students. That's across the whole district. But you can also kind Oh, but John, you forgot the spark line. We need start with the spark line. So can we get the DL data

155out of there for a minute? And the SDLS. Oh, right. So, if you could point up to the spark line, this I don't know why, but this tickles my fancy a little bit because it just it's so cool. Um because it moves every time you pick a different type of uh data point. So, right now as a district, and by the way, this raw data, I always download the raw data from map the day after we get done testing. So, it's concrete. It's in there because what happens? Students move. As soon as students move, even the two days after, they're out of our portal. They're out of our MAP portal. So, these this data is reflecting the day after we tested in May, uh, which would be May 17th, a Saturday. Um, but anyway, the

156sparkle line there, 19 and for language arts, 20%. And then when we put in the DL, watch it change. Yep. And I'll go back. Let's do first let's look at Yankee Ridge, the entire building. Uh, so this is everybody in all of the programs. And then if we select individual programs, we can see how things compare. Uh so this is a great amazing tool for administrators to look at as they're looking at their goals throughout the year uh where they can uh kind of drill down on anything they want. Uh they can also define SDLS for that was we might make that a little easier for the administrators later. That's Spanish speaking Spanish dual language students. Uh but also if you wanted to look at incoming sixth grade students, uh you can select current fifth

157grade students and be able to kind of disagregate all of the students from all of the buildings into uh one tool where you can kind of look at that uh in another tab that has lots of student data. Uh people can look at individual students for their buildings as well. And then I don't know if you wanted to kind of go through um just one more chart just go all the way down and you they can see that it also affects the growth as well. If you wanted to see well how did our French dual language students that naturally speak French how did they do? Did they meet their growth? Um how did our African-American students do? Um and so forth. So it changes every time you click interactive map. That's all I have to

158say about that. Did you create that or I created it? She just asked for those at home. Did I create it? All right. Next. Um Oh, seal data. John, are we ready to move on? Yeah. Let me let me get that. So, while he's setting up, um, so Panorama, as was referenced by many of our principles this evening, which by the way, bravo. They all did a really wonderful job. So proud of all of them and their teams. Um, you have it. Yeah, I just have to refresh. I think this was So, we do surveys three times a year and Yep, you're getting it there. And so we are we always do really well when it comes to the topic called supportive relationships and we have done panorama since 2021 and it we usually land

159in like the 89th percentile. Um, so our students really value the relationships they have with their teachers, with a special uh staff member in the building. Um, so when I heard the check-in, checkout was going to be used tonight as a strategy to connect students, um, that's done with a supportive adult, with a supportive staff member, and the data does reflect that. Um, now we have self-management is a very important topic and the slide that you are seeing now reflects students in K2. K2. Um, what happens there since they're five, six, and seven years old, uh, the teachers are the ones that ask the questions. And so, it's the teachers perception. And so, we have self-management that increased that had a nice little bump there. And I'll talk about self-management um, after the next two

160slides a little bit more. Let's go to the next one. And this is grades three, five. Um, you can see here that self-management increased again for this group of students. Um, and I know you see like a uh the arrow going down by one point um for supportive relationships. Please keep in mind that they are measuring from one benchmark to the other. Um so from winter that group went down by one point. Um however again overall since 21 they u that topic still is strong and that says a lot about our district. That's a a positive thing. Let's move on to the next and the six through 12. I mean that's half of our student population, right? And so their voices have been heard and we have um in these three topics all of the

161uh topics went down and we we heard from the uh principal that there's some work to do and and going to continue to do some work there. Um and all the principles stated that they were going to dig into the data. So when you do, you're not going to be able to do this now, but when principles and teams are able to um get into this data and explore more, they can get into the uh priority groups of students even like uh the grade levels, the uh socioeconomic status of students, and even pinpoint the question like what exactly is going on with my students for this data to go down. And so that's what I heard tonight that that's what they're going to do and I'm excited for that. Now, what I wanted to say

162about self-management, why is that so important? So the research says that self-management there is a crystal clear correlation that if you can get that self-management up in your students, not only will it decrease chronic absenteeism, but it will increase student achievement. Why is that? Because it is related to how student write goals. And if you students are writing goals, they are reflecting on their learning. And so we are hopeful this year that all teachers are going to have students write goals. And you're probably thinking, "Oh, kindergarten can't do that." Yes, they can. Kindergarteners can write goals as well. It's actually one of our portrait of graduate skills. So we'll be starting that in kindergarten. And seven mindsets has life plans that they write. They call it a life plan instead of a goal. That is

163awesome how everything is connected all the way to kindergarten. Yes. And it's really amazing to me. I love data that we just have such a wealth of data in the district and like we're generating these tools to use it. We also uh it's still preliminary so we're not going to show it but Christina also made a similar one for I data uh that once it's the actual data we'll be able to share with principles. Okay, I think we're done. Yep. All right. Okay. First of all, thank you to John and Christina for providing that comprehensive overview um of where we're ending at the school year. what I'm going to share is more um aligned to at the beginning of the school year we shared district goals and so some of that was within their um

164slideshow as well but I'm just giving the numbers so you should have like a little two-pager handout where I'm sharing um where we ended the year specifically on those goals. Um before we get to that I want to say again thank you to you both. I think that this year has been a growing year for us all trying to reinvent um some practices and school improvement. So, thank you to the board and Dr. Ivy Tatum for giving us that leeway and freedom to kind of tweak some things. Um as you can see, the school improvement process is is strengthened this year and I was like so grateful for teams. So, shout out to all the principles and teams for coming and bringing their teams and just producing such great work. They worked really hard on

165June um 1st and 2nd and so I'm really excited about where they're going this year and I'm just excited they were here and that they have so much information to give you all and so a plan already in place for quarter 1 PD to really kick off student growth and um like staff collective efficacy as well. So thank you to my colleagues, my boss, you all as well, but the teams as well for doing such hard work. So, please, as you know, continue to give us feedback this year on how things are going that we can tweak so we can continue to improve our continuous improvement process as well. Um, and so I'll share this, but I'm so glad that we also have strategic planning goals as well. And so, next year, the capacity you

166will see us all in is probably giving reports on the strategic planning goals. So, we're also excited about that as well. So, as John stated, we ended our year um our goal was by spring of 2025, chronic absenteeism in the district will decrease from um 44, it was supposed error, excuse me, 44% to 34. We ended at 39%. Then when we go to map growth, we created a very lofty and rigorous goal to increase first through for ELA 1 through 10th graders will have an increase of 15%. We ended the year um last year at 40% of those first through 10th graders um meeting their goal and then at the end of this year we ended at around 43%. And so there was a 3% increase for this year. As you can see, there was

167some dips. We started off very strong in the fall with 49% and then in the winter 48% and we ended the year at around 43%. And that's reflective of what you heard in the school improvement plans that there were dips throughout the year as well. And then in math, we also wanted a 15% increase. um math, we included kindergarten because they do um they are being assessed in kindergarten once it starts in the in in in the winter. And so you'll see we went from 54% to 53% and then we ended the year at 45%. And so at the end of last year we were at 42%. So there was about a 5% increase in our overall district growth. Uh, I shared a couple of months ago, I think it was back in January or

168February, our AR results and um, as Christina and John shared, we do have preliminary results that of course we are not allowed to share just of yet, but we're very hopeful that we did make some progress in increasing the proficiency of our priority groups. And then the last piece on the last page, I know we didn't directly have a um a discipline per se goal, but as you know, um we are cited by the state ISBY. So there is a discipline improvement plan. And so we thought it was important to make sure that you all know how we ended the year and why you will see some of the um kind of targets and goals set by schools as well to to help decrease this. So, as of the end of the year, we had

169um 1,294 minor referrals, 8,143 major referrals, and then when we look at just suspensions, um for the whole district, there were 943, 260 of those came from elementary. Um 482 of those came from 6 through 8, 201. And then total we had nine expulsions. And so what I will say is too that all of the um kind of task targets and key strategies that align with our district school improvement plan. You will see in the um in their school improvement plans but also our strategic planning. Right? We thought about MTSS using panorama to look at data. um we have I meet with uh those who oversee culture and climate or discipline practices at school. And so there's already work being done, especially um Beth Lad and I who's the executive director of student services. We

170have a meeting with the middle school next week to really start digging into some of this data as well because of course we want to go in the year being proactive versus reactive. And so we're already meeting to come up with a plan to ensure that this number is reduced. Overall, this is reduction um from some data from last year. But of course, we know that's not good enough. We want to keep going because we want our kids to feel that sense of belonging and we don't want any of our students to be excluded from um classroom or activities within the building. And so that is to share out about discipline data and hopefully there is more to come. Any questions about any of this? Any questions? Question for you. based on you talking about

171the um testing environment we have um I don't know what the percentage is but there are certainly um would be many students who would need a quiet testing um environment or um breaks or whatever. So, how do you accommodate for that? And do you need a IEP or a 504 plan in order to receive that if a if a teacher knows that the about a student that might need it? Is that something that they can just do or do they have do parents have to go through the process of getting the IEP? Oh, that's such a great question. Um, so we have I'll I'll just put it out there. King School, for example. Um, so King School, what they learned was some some of the um staff didn't know exactly what you had just said.

172Um, can I remove a group of students who are ESL students? Um, and I think they were they started the year here um, new to the country as well. And so they were like, you know, for the spring benchmark, we want to just put like three students in a group and test them separately. Is that okay? And they called me up and I said that. I'm like, yeah, you can do that. That is awesome. Thank you for doing that. Um, so yes, you don't need an IEP to do that. Um if the teacher recognizes that that is a need um that they need a smaller environment, they need a quieter environment um to test the students, it really comes down to the principal and their team to be strategic with when it comes to assessments.

173it it comes to planning ahead and last it comes to when the window is from April 28th to May 16th. Hopefully everyone's healthy as far as staff and everyone understands what to do. Everyone has the schedule. Everyone knows this is the days that fifth third, fourth, and fifth grade are testing. Um, so I'm going to be quiet in the hallways. It's it's everyone's on board. Everyone's on the same page. Can I add, so what Christine is talking about is a testing environment. What you're talking about are accommodations also. So yes, but in terms of things like having the test read to them or having extended time or things like that, they have to have an IEP or a 504 plan. Yep. That's part two of your question. Accommodations specifically, like Dr. Ivy Tatum said, yes,

174they would need to go through the process. Um but for um English language learners, they're um it's okay to give them extra time. they don't need an IEP. So, it would seem that, you know, testing a few English language learners apart from and I'm wondering how how much uh professional development do people have about what is allowed um in the way of accommodation? That's a good question too. Um, so at the beginning of the year, the principal gives a refreshing uh training class or part of their staff meeting. Um, it could be like 10 to 15 minutes. Um, because maybe you only have one new staff member, right? But it's still nice to review everything about how to take this specific assessment, including what to do about students who have accommodations or students who have

175any kind of special needs, right? Um, so that's one way PD is involved. The second way is I create this uh NWA map manual and it's updated every single year. And I used to not print it and because I'm trying to save paper, right? We all trying to save the environment. Um, however, we do have a lot of staff members that don't really like electronic. So, the test is so important that I'm like, okay, so um, since 21, I've only printed it once. So, this year I did print it and it was the second time printing it. And so it did go out in the beginning of the year, but did it go out to to teachers who started in like November or January? No. Unless that building took care of them. Um, but that's

176another way because in this manual, it talks about how to take care of students with special needs. there's an accommodation page with for ELELLL students and um how to take the test um how to uh access the practice test, how to create a testing environment. Um yeah, so for we have to actually do a sign off that everyone has to sign off that they've read the book and they've reviewed the practices of how they're supposed to give it as a standardized test. So and they go through training as well with that and the principles too. Okay. I have my question again about and um projected growth um what is projected growth is projected growth one year? So if you're working at a first grade level, your projected growth would be by the end of the

177year, you'd be working at second grade level. Okay? Now you're talking levels. Now you're now you're not talking growth anymore. Those are two different things. So let's talk about growth first. Okay? So if I'm a first grader taking the reading test for the very first time specifically MAP then I am not going to have a projected growth goal because there's nothing there's no data to compare how I'm going to perform. There's no data there because when I was in kindergarten, I did not take the test. Now it's winter, right? It's December and I'm still a first grader. Well, now I do have a projected growth goal. And for first grade, um the RIT could be uh let's say it's for reading 165.85. That's what I'm expected. I'm expected to get to a RIT score of

178165.85. And what does that mean? That means I'm at least reaching an average level of 50%. I'm at least reaching the 50th percentile. Remember in my slideshow I gave you five different quintile levels, right? So the first grader creates the goal to be about five points uh to increase their RIT score by five points. So when you're talking about growth, you're comparing one growth event to the other. And now this first grader has a test test results which is in fall. And now they can look to see if they increased uh okay so so and I may be the only one that doesn't understand and I think to answer maybe so there's different growth targets for different periods. So that's so there's a fall to fall fall to winter fall to spring. So that first

179grader who got 165 point something would be expected to get 170 point something. That would be the growth. No. So first it's a norm reference assessment. So 165.85 is just saying to everyone that that is the average, right? Just the average. And so if the first grader for fall reached a work. That's red. Oh, there it is. All right. If the first grader in the fall reached a growth goal of 156, let's say, the expectation is a 155. By the way, it's 155 in first grade in the fall, but they reached 156. Okay, so they went above the 50th percentile barely, but they did. And so they can create a goal and that goal could be for uh growth could be 5.5 points, maybe let's round it to six. I predict this student is going

180to be uh increasing their RIT from fall to six up six points. All right. So, 156 plus six points is 161, right? Unless my math is wrong. Is it 161? All right. So, 161. Let's remember that number. And the expectation for winter or Yeah, this is reading for winter was 165. So it didn't really the growth goal didn't surpass that 50th percentile. However, that's why it's important that it's individualized as well. So every goal is individualized. Um so if it's 161, they missed it by four points. However, if they reached it by 170, then they surpassed that projected growth goal. And like John mentioned earlier, the goal is not only for students to reach that projected growth goal, but it's to exceed it. If we exceed that growth goal, then that's how we're going to

181close the achievement gap. That's how we're going to uh increase student achievement. I feel like I need a chalkboard to to to explain it. But basically, I guess my question is how do we know if everybody if all the students make their projected growth goal and that growth goal and let's say I'm a second grade student and um I'm not reading very well or not doing math very well. So I'm really working at a lower level which is a level I grant you not a growth score but if the growth goals are how if the growth goal does not push the student more than a grade more than a year's worth of learning you know over the year How do we imp how do we know we're going to improve our our achievement? So that

182goes back to the 50th percentile and above. And I actually have a a one pager that might help with that. So let me so while she's pulling that is a norm reference nationally norm test. So we don't set the RIT scores. The RIT scores are determined individually for every student based on their performance on the test and and all of that is determined again through MAP and through their norming the test nationally when they compare our kids to kids who take MAP all over the country. So does that make Okay. So one thing you're saying is how are we closing the achievement gap, right? How are we making sure kids are getting on grade level? So when you look at school improvement plans, anybody who is setting a bar above that 50% of students are

183meeting their growth growth grow, excuse me, are really attacking that. Anybody who you see who is setting achievement goals versus growth goals like sixth grade center said is really looking at how are we making sure our students are getting at grade level or above versus just the growth that they're making. And they also to close the gap even further. They set a goal for all students but then they also pushing their priority groups to exceed that by even five more percent. That's how we are going to be able to create those baby steps to close the achievement gap is to make sure our students with IEPs, our black students, our Latino students are even growing more than their Asian and white uh peers who are in a lot of cases already on grade level. Yeah.

184And the parents also get individualized reports uh emailed home to them that have their students like uh growth and achievement both on a graph that gives them kind of an idea of like what they can do to like help their student. Yeah. So, do the specs of the test tell you does it compare at all to achievement or to like the IIR or because usually tests norm reference tests will do that now I haven't read any specs for years and years. So, there's a thing called the Lincoln report linking report. L I N K I N G. You can Google it right now. NWA linking report and it is like a lot of pages, right? And this I know it's hard to see or but this is one example of how the MAP test aligns

185with the IR test. So on the AR test, you have what's called scale scores. If students reach a scale score of at least 750, they are basically meeting um achievement. They're meeting that andor exceeding when we um John go up the previous slide. When you are looking at map, when you're looking at the high average bar and the high bar, that's the connection to our state assessment. This because that starts at the 61st percentile and a scale score of 750 for I AR starts between 61st and 74th percentile. Does that make sense? Yeah. And I would offer as well, I know this might not be everybody's particular topic of interest, but if there's any time you want to come to the district office and take a super deep dive into all the map data. I

186know Christina and I would be happy to like delve deep into the data. And member Hixon, just the recent email where I gave you like the screenshots of the data. So the top portion was growth and the bottom portion was achievement. So if you wanted to look at like particularly the groups we were looking at and how they're achieving, you would just look at that bottom portion of those pictures too and that would give you a percentage of students who are above that 60 um that 60th 61st percentile to say okay these students are on grade level and should be like proficient when we um take the IR assessment. Yeah. Yeah, John. I'm I think we're all getting tired of these microphones. Um they're they're all dying on us. Maybe like as a goal for

187next year, we can look into what it would take to replace this whole system with something that's like Oh, I like that idea. We've had these We've had these mics for over 20 years. So, I like it. Can I Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, you go ahead. I don't want you to forget your question. Go ahead. I wrote it down, so it's okay. So, on uh the Panorama survey 6 through 12, there was only 1,135 um responses. How can we get more students to respond so it' be more accurate? Try again. It's musical microphones. I'm glad you pointed that out because before Mr. Guzman, we had even less response rates. I'm telling you, him and his team, they have increased the response rates. Like they are not joking around when it comes to taking the

188survey. They they they motivate students. They announce it. Um so they really really try everything they can to get students to take the survey. Um, and I know that, um, they're going to continue to strategize, um, because hearing their students voice very important to them. Um, just like how they're so excited about, uh, creating the equity uh, committee. Um, that's with some really, really fascinating, brilliant young adults. So, they want to hear their student voices. So, they will increase it. But Lindsay, you bring up a good point. it should have been closer to about 2100 students and so we're about a thousand students off. So we do need to um make sure that our so the way it's supposed to hap work is the students take the survey test in class with their so it

189isn't like something we send out and they do it on their own time. They're supposed to do it with a teacher during one of the class periods. And so that is an area that we need to make sure that our staff members the week that they're giving the test are actually giving it per the direction of their administrators. So that's something I think our our principles are going to have to follow up and hold people accountable if they're not doing that. So like at the high school they might say okay period one whatever class you're in today for first hour you are supposed to be giving panorama. And so um that is something that we need to work on in terms of holding the folks accountable who are or are not doing that. And I

190would say so this year I was uh I was overseeing student voice and culture and climate. So that has all the secondary administrators on that team and when we looked at the panorama survey data, we definitely had those discussions and making shifts for next year. of this past year it was given in PE classes and they noticed a lot of kids were opting out and so we're making a shift of what classes it's given in to make it a more smaller testing environment so the teacher can really share why um and also through the student voice equity committee um high schoolers currently but we're building that out to be um to include sixth seventh and eighth as well we're ensuring that the students know the rationale and why we take this as well so their

191student their voices could be heard. So, we're trying to shift some things, some adult practices, but also empowering students to know that it is important that they take it so we know how they feel and gain that feedback. And two of the major skills are part of our new portrait of a graduate, social awareness and self-management. So, we're hoping that the more we teach our students about what those skills mean and and how they learn those K through 12, it'll help make that um data more meaningful for them too. So, basically what Chassity just said too. And one last point, and that's what Lori just gave you guys, um just to reiterate the point of the growth percentile. So when Chassity mentioned 50% just remember it's percentile and um take a look at the students

192on the right side of the uh flyer that was passed out. See the third bullet point where it says 50. So when they reach the 50th percentile that's just average growth. So the whole grade level reaches just 50 at the 50th percentile. So anything above that, that's what we want. And to reiterate again the district goals, um yes, we did better overall from last year to this year, but we only hit at like 48 at the 48th percentile. So we were two percentiles short of even hitting the average. Does that make sense? as a whole group. So, I hope this helps a little bit, too. Okay, that's good discussion. Uh, any other questions? No. All right. Oh, okay. All right. Thank you very much. Our last administrative report this evening is on our social studies

193curriculum. Uh, Jessica Bradford. It's not working. Okay. Uh so I'm here to talk about the social studies curriculum which I'm super excited to present to you um this evening. Um so uh Urbana Middle School uh grades sixth, 7th, and 8th. Um we started having a discussion back in March with the whole social studies department about um possibly looking at new curriculum to pilot. Um, and after picking several different curriculums to pilot, we discovered that the current curriculum that they're using, which is TCI, um, they have updated their curriculum to a 2023 version. And after looking at that presentation, um, they really decided they didn't want to pilot anything because they really like TCI, the curriculum they use for social studies. It's just way outdated. So currently sixth grade has the 2019 version. Um and then

194seventh and eighth grade have 2002. So it is very outdated. Yeah. Um and actually if you that was one of the feedbacks from the strategic plan is working on updating our curriculum and making it more rigorous for our science and social studies. So um so when we looked at the TCI curriculum, teachers have been supplementing uh their current TCI curriculum because all the mandates that we have to teach. Um so they've kind of taken the TCI curriculum that they have and they've had to add to it. They've had to supplement it and create and add to the units. But what the beauty about the new updated TCI program um that we're suggesting um to adopt is that um it's online. So currently teachers or and students do not have online access. And so um teachers

195would have online access to TCI along with students. And so students would have online the online books for TCI and it would be the newest version. Um and um we are ordering extra so that we're one to one right with student Chromebooks so they would have access to the books online. Um and then we would order extra books to keep in the classroom for in case those students who like forgot their Chromebook or their Chromebook is uh not working. Um but this curriculum if you look at the how it's been updated I am so excit I'm so excited and I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not a history person. That's my least favorite subject. But when I we were looking through this demo and looking with all of the updates, I was really

196excited to learn about history. And that takes a lot for me to be excited about history because I'm just not it's not my favorite subject. But they the strategies that they use are marzano strategies. And if you know Marzano, he has excellent strategies that so all of these strategies and activities that they use come from Marzano strategies. So that number one made me super excited. Um it's in several different languages. So as we know we're very diverse and we have a diverse student population. So they can take this curriculum and teach it in any language. Any language like so that was another big point to this. And then the you can differentiate the reading level many different levels of students. So um you can differentiate the reading um and assigning to students based off of

197their levels. And so that's fantastic. Um there's just so many perks to purchasing and adopting this curriculum. uh teachers um can't can um and it's all updated to the Illinois mandates that we're supposed to teach for history. So that's another exciting piece. But teachers can give these assessments online. They can change the assessments. The assessments are can be read to students and then the data is automatically populated. So it's right there for teachers to see um because students can take the test online and then the data is automatic and it groups it into standards and it tells teachers what to do with the data. Um it is it is fant it is fantastic. Um they have games in there that students can play. They have um field trips, virtual field trips that students can take

198for history. Um and if you look on here, there's, like I said, video activities. Um it's just updated. There's just so many great features. And um I am really excited of what this is going to look like for our teachers and for our students. Um like I said, it got me excited and that takes a lot for me with history, but um it's I highly recommend. So our ask this evening is normally Jesse finished with the curriculum um committee that she was working with the department just recently. And normally we don't ask you to vote on something the same night that we bring it to you. Um, but since this was going to be such a huge upgrade for sixth, seventh, and eth budget to purchase the curriculum now instead of waiting until August, um,

199we were hoping it is on as an action item for 11.1 that um, because we didn't switch to a different um, program or a different company, it basically is just updating what we currently have that the board would be willing to approve that tonight without the twoe waiting period. In this instance, this is our last meeting. We wouldn't be able to get a vote until August. So, um again, I know it is not our practice to do this, but we would really appreciate it if you consider approving that um so she can work with the team to get all the resources that they need now and get people using it and looking at it over the summer. So, is it right for ask questions? Yeah. Um, so what's the additional spend? Oh, Jess. The the

200additional How how much are we paying for this? 69,000 for three years. Okay. For all three grade level for all three grade levels. And it includes Yeah. online for online teacher access, student access, um, free professional development training. Um, and then we're ordering a 100 student like hard books that go along with it. So, yeah. Um um how does that compare to the other um curriculums that you were going to possibly look at? They didn't even compare um honestly. No, as far as cost Oh, um it was we didn't even look at costs for other curriculums because we just didn't pilot it to look at it. But for us to get three years for $69,000 for a curriculum, I can tell you that I just put in a proposal today just for like a math

201intervention program and it cost me it it was $45,000 and it was just for a year. So to get a three-year cur updated curriculum for sixth, seventh, and eighth or teachers and all students for $69,000, I think that's a heck of a heck of a deal. No, there there's roughly a thousand students in the middle school, right? You do the math, it's like $70 a student. You can't You can't buy a textbook for that. Yeah, you can't. Yeah. And it's giving us online, digital, and student textbooks. So, I was pretty pretty happy with um the deal that they gave us. Yeah. So, this curriculum is is it was it cover history, world history? Yeah. So, there's like an there's So, sixth grade, I think, teaches like ancient history. I don't. Seventh grade does like world

202history and then eight does like modern day history. So, um so they have um they're that's what they use and they have that. And then what's great is um for seventh grade we have to teach civics for a semester. That's great. But we don't have to purchase the extra civics package with that because what TCI has already that the seventh grade teachers are teaching, they have civics embedded into it. So that was like another perk. um is that we didn't have to purchase an an extra um curriculum for seventh grade like two curriculums for seventh grade. It's the civics is embedded into what they teach. I was concerned about you know we need more civics. Yep. It's embedded into that seventh grade. Yep. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions? Yes. Um can students still

203take the test on paper? Do they have to do it online? No, they don't have to. And then when would we be implementing this? Starting in August. Okay. It's a so the training so the teachers have already like they said they've been looking at this since March. Um and they have had access a demo account and so they've had access to go in and start exploring with it. Um so um we've done that from like March to May and been looking um at the TCI components online. Um, but we also uh would get a two-hour training um to start out with um for our teachers and then um embedded into TCI are like modules that teachers can take throughout the year and there's videos that teachers can watch if they ever have a question. Like

204all these training modules and videos are um teachers have access to it online in addition to the two-hour PD session that they provide. And then there's frequent check-ins throughout the year with the company just to see how we're doing. The 69,000 included the PD and the training, right? So that is even another reason why it's I'm telling you it's a no-brainer to do it. Yes. Yeah. I'm guessing this it's it's like an introductory price to kind of get us Yeah. keep us but it's it's a good deal. Anyone else? All right. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Up for on the agenda as an action item later on. Uh speaking of action items, let's move on to our consent agenda. Uh 10.1R minutes uh from the April 17th executive session, May

20520th business meeting, May 27th district parent teacher advisory committee, the June 3rd study session, and the June 5th special meeting for module number three. Uh 10.2 two are our bills and checks. ED fund bills uh to the tune of uh $5.3 million, operation and maintenance fund bills for $87,000. Bond and interest fund bills for $753,000. Transportation fund bills for $537,000. IMRF and social security for $156,000. Working cash bonds for $2.4 million. Uh, school facility occupy tax for $87,000, working cash for $30,000, tort for $70,000, life safety levy for $70,000, payroll salary and benefits for $7.8 million and Urban Adult Education for $103,000. Um, there's a long list of personal items in our packets that are typical for this time of year. Uh 10.5 are interfund loans uh from O andM to working cash uh for

206$1 million, IMRF to working cash for $400,000. Tort to working cash $400,000. Transportation to working cash for $100,000 with a permanent transfer approval is also requested to transfer interest as of June 30th. This is a permanent transfer of funds. uh amount of transfers will be in the actual amounts of interest earned through uh June 30, the end of our fiscal year. Uh interest earned in the working cash and bond interest funds we permanently move to the education fund which the board of education deems to be the fund most in need of such interest. This is something we do every single year. Uh 10.6 are our approval uh for June bills for payment. So since we're not meeting in July, we're requesting authorization for the bills that come in during um for the June bills that

207are paid in July. Uh 10.7 is a resolution declaring intent to retain interest earnings and interest and not to accumulate as principal. Um this is was described in the inter fund loans section and 10.8 is resolution authorizing directing sale or disposal of personal property. Um, this is DeepW WY and UHS library books. A bolster swing, a moon swing, uh, 30 broken hurdles, family guide to second step, and preschool kindergarten second step. Uh, that's the entirety of our consent agenda. Does anybody wish to have an individual uh, item removed from the consent agenda? Sorry. Uh, there's a 20 broken hurdle. So that's that's part of that um resolution authorizing the sale or disposal of personal property. Okay. Um if no one wishes to have any of these items removed from the consent agenda, the chair would

208entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda in its entirety. So move. Second. Move to second. Any comments, questions, discussions on the consent agenda? Roll call, please. Vice President Baxley. Yes. President Palowski. Yes. Member Cheryl. Sure. Yes. Member Hixon. Yes. Member Maribou. Yes. Member Jones. Yes. Member Langodorf. Yes. Moving on to our individual items. Uh first up, what is our social security social studies curriculum? Is is there a motion for the floor? I move to approve the uh uh to acquire the new social studies curriculum. Second. It's been moved to second. Any further questions, comments, or discussion? A roll call, please. President Palowski. Yes. Member Cheryl. Yes. Member Hixon. Yes. Member Maribou, yes. Member Jones, yes. Member Langodorf, yes. Vice President Baxley, yes. The motion passes. Uh, Loveet 2 is appointment of the 25 IASB

209delegate assembly. So, this is um at the triple conference, the ISB general body meets and votes on propos on basically how the entire group lobbies the legislature for for different things. Um Sherry was did this for us last year? Um I guess who was kind of committed to going to the conference this year? Okay. Does anybody want want to take this on? Awesome. Yeah, she enjoyed it a lot. That's that's awesome. Um then then uh I will formally uh make a motion to nominate Sherry to uh be our representative at the delegate assembly. Is there a second? Second. Moved and seconded. Any further comments, questions? All in favor say I. Any opposed? Uh 113 is renewal of our insurance. Maryanne, could you provide context for the board, please? And you don't have a mic. Yeah,

210this is uh something that we do every single year. So, we go through, we work with USI and they are our like broker and then they provide us insurance. So, we're going to be um continuing with ICRMT. Sorry, there's a lot of acronyms so bear with me. And then um so the package price for that is going to be like five 497,000. Um and then you can see on your uh memo what that includes. And then we also carry standalone policies for cyber liability and workers compensation. And you will notice in your um packet like part of the increase of 32,000 is because um it's a two-year. And so we pay it up front the first year and so it's this year we're paying it up again. So last year it's a little bit it's

211a little bit higher than last year's because we pay for that um environmental liability. It's less of a jump than we've seen in other years though. Correct. All right. Is there a motion for the floor? So move. Is there a second? Second. All right. Uh any questions or comments or discussion? Roll call, please. Member Cheryl, yes. Member Hixon, yes. Member Maribou, yes. Member Jones, yes. Member Langodorf, yes. Vice President Baxley, yes. President Philowski, yes. Uh 11.4 Four is our board of education 2526 schedule which we hammered out at our last meeting. Is there a motion for the floor? So move. Second. Um is it move and seconded? Any questions, comments, discussion on the dates we agreed to in oral or orally last meeting. Okay. Lori, you have a question? Typically we meet the first and

212third uh Tuesday but there are two months that we had to change that because of a holiday or a vacation day. So otherwise it's pretty common that it's first and third. Right. Can't remember this. Let's do a roll call. I can't remember if it's roll call or not. So, let's let's go do roll call. Member Hixon. Yes. Member Maribou. Yes. Member Jones. Yes. Member Langodorf. Yes. Vice President Baxley. Yes. President Palowski. Yes. Member Cheryl. Yes. Motion passes. 11.5 is our tenative district budget which we discussed in detail at our at our last meeting. Is there a motion for the floor? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Moved and seconded. Um any questions from since our last meeting on the this project which Go ahead. Since the last um presentation, are there any changes or

213anything that that you can foresee? Um, we did get information about our title two funding and as of right now, but even that is still kind of up in the air, but right now there's no title two funding which is usually used for our professional development and kind of the more focus on the teachers. So, um, but right now we're looking at zero for that. So, we are seeing some impact on the federal dollars, but I haven't seen anything from like ISBO or anything like that that has given us any updates here recently. Thank you. Again, this is very very tentative especially this year. Um, if there's no further comments, discussion, a roll call vote would be in order. Member Maribou? Yes. Member Jones? Yes. Member Langondorf, yes. Member Vice President Baxley, yes. President Palowski,

214yes. Member Cheryl, yes. Member Hixon, yes. Vote passes. And again, this is our 11.6 is our attentive adult education budget. Um that was preset detail last time, but um it was in our packets and it's that's and I didn't know how you typically vote on it. So, um, and historically it looks like it's been two different, um, it always line items. So, that's why we separated it, but it was, um, with like their information was with ours last time, but we didn't really present on it because theirs is even more tentative than ours, and it's really just kind of rolled over from FY25 into FY26 until they get more information. Yeah. Um, is there a motion for the floor? So moved, second moved and seconded. Um any any further questions, comments or discussion? The only

215thing I want to state is that I noticed on the personnel list tonight that there were several employees that are off the rift and are included. So that's good to see that that the program is going to go forward. So that's awesome news. All right. Um there's no other questions or comments. Uh roll call vote is in order. Member Jones, yes. Member Langodorf, yes. Vice President Baxley, yes. President Palowski, yes. Member Cheryl, yes. Member Hixon, yes. Member Maru, yes. Motion passes. It concludes our action items for the evening. Um, there is no call for future special executive meetings. So, we're not going to one after well, we'll have an executive session a after the conclusion of tonight's open session, but um we're not going to meet again until August. superintendent report. Okay. So, very quickly,

216um just one slide that has a couple of important dates. I know we have some incoming sixth grade families here at the table, so you'll be interested in these dates as well. So, um Ben and Luke and Lindsay all have up um incoming sixth graders. So exciting. Um we set the openhouse events. Um we are going to do the official ribbon cutting. We I invited Tony Sanders, our state superintendent, and he was going to try to come, but he has to be in Springfield now. Um, but he committed to coming um and walking through our dual language because he's a huge proponent of uh dual language programming. So, he wants to visit Yankee Ridge Multilingual and then the um sixth grade center as well. Um so, August 8th, uh we set that week specifically after

217our discussion last week. most of the board members. You guys all said you were in town that first week of August, so we thought it would be a good time to make sure board members could be there as well. The first event is going to be focused on students and families. Um, and we have some ideas. Um, Miss Carr and I have talked a lot about some raffles and some ways to really incentivize to get the students there and some activities that the students can do um on the night of the um ribbon cutting to kind of memorialize them as the first incoming class of uh sixth graders. Um that will be Friday, August 8th at 5:30. And then I've had so many people from the community ask when are we having our open house

218so they can come view the building? Um, and so we're going to do that at a separate night because we really want it to be about our kids and families first. Um, but on Monday, August 11th, we're going to just open the building for an hour and staff won't need to be there. Um, but we'll have other people available to just give tours. Um, and so people from the community can kind of drop in during that hour. Um, so those are are our two open house events for the sixth grade center. Um, we are moving back to doing something we haven't done in several years. Um, actually we haven't done this since I was deputy superintendent is a district welcome back to school night. Um, we have really been focusing because of all the changes

219the last couple years on sending our families to the schools to acclimate themsel acclimate themselves to the new um their new schools and new communities. But this year, we really want to bring everybody into the fold as a district and really kind of um kind of bring us back together around our new strategic plan and our new um our model of uh being stronger together. So, we're going to have a welcome back to school night and community resource fair um on the grounds of UHS. Uh we did this, we used to do it years ago where we would have food activities. Um we're going to invite a lot of our community resource folks out to have tables set up. Um we'll kick off our mindset of the month which is part of seven mindsets and

220we're going to actually do a mindset of the month for the community as well and involve our bus drivers and um so everyone in Urbana will know when our what our mindset is that we're practicing for that month um in our whole community. Um, and we also are going to use it to really encourage our youth to come out to UHS activities. Um, when we have things, all of our students start off, like you saw at early childhood, most of them, not all of them, but a large number of our kiddos start with us as three-year-olds or 5-year-olds. Um, and they're with us through their whole school career and they all end up at UHS. So, we really want to instill um, one of our values is pride and belonging. and we really want to

221kick off um talking about school pride and community pride and district pride um at this welcome back night. Um so we're going to have our um athletes from the fall sports introduced and after we have our food and um visit all the community resources, we're going to invite everybody to go into the stadium and um meet all of our fall sports athletes and um go in and enjoy our UHS activities there, too. We don't have all of the back to school nights for the elementary schools solidified yet. So instead of just sharing a couple, we're going to just wait until we have all those dates um and share the back to school nights uh that the elementary schools host um later in July. So mark your calendar for August 8th for ribbon cutting. Um tell

222people you know in the community who ask who ask you when can they come and visit the new building, they could do that on August 11th. and welcome back to school night um August 15th. So big three big things happening all right there together. That is it. Thank you. Um I have one thing to say. Are you guys going to include like the marching band for that one? Oh, for the welcome back ride or for the ribbon cutting? No, no, no. For the um August 15th while you're doing Oh, yeah. We will have Yep. Yeah, absolutely. They're a sport. They're part of fall activities. So TNB will be there for sure. Okay. Um I think that concludes our business for the evening. So, um I the chair would entertain a motion to enter close session

223uh for the appointment, deployment, compensation, discipline, performance or dismissal of specific employees, specific individuals who serve as independent contractors or specific volunteers of the district or legal counsel for the district, including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against employee, a specific individual who serves as an independent contractor or a volunteer of the district um or against legal counsel to the district to determines its validity. However, a meeting to consider an increase of compensation to a specific employee of a public body that is subject to the local government wage increase transparency act may not be closed and shall be open to the public as posted and held in accordance with this act. So moved. Is there a second? Second. Roll call, please. And there will be no action taken after this uh close session. Member Langodorf.

224Yes. Vice President Baxley. Yes. President Palowski. Yes. Member Cheryl. Yes. Member Hixon. Yes. Member Maribou. Yes. Member Jones. Yes. All right. We'll have the 10-minute recess first and then um we'll start a close session.