February 7, 2022 Governing Board Study Session

001no this is for the vote oh [Music] yes okay so again we needed to just need so that we could talk about our district goals and so going down memory lane if you recall and i did give you a copy of the email that morning just sent which was the email that had all the attachments on it so i just kind of want to reiterate um hopefully you had a chance to read it and review it so we talked about having when we were looking at my superintendent evaluation realizing that we need to make sure we have our district goals so that my evaluation is indicative of the district goals and as board goals are developed later on then they're also aligned with district goals okay so when as we were looking at it so

002remember that that developing the strategic plan and identifying her priorities and goals is an ongoing process so we have all these documents the state requires us to do our needs assessment in march and april from our needs assessment then we have to conduct our priorities and goals which turn into the laia and messiah which is which are these two that are in the ade website the life and messiah the saya there's a school plan goliath is the district plan that supports the school goals so in larger districts every single school has a psy app and then the district office compiles all the information into one big district plan to support each site now we're one school with districts so we have one type from our school and then we have the light that's about everything

003that's in the lineup has to be documented in terms of how we spend our funds okay so how we send federal title one title ii title three title four and esther has to be written in the layout and the silence eventually i'm gone okay you have them okay so does that make sense so far for a single school single district why would ours be different between so i have and life because that goes back to again what the principle and the teachers are going to do is different than what the district administrators are going to do as the superintendent as business office as special ed director which are directors so how do we support at a district level the school level goals does that make sense it's confusing which is wrong but if we're drawing

004it all from the needs assessment right we're drawing both documents from the needs assessment correct well technically the layer is developed off of the site because the did we do the fishbone with the needs assessment teachers determine along with the principal and the curriculum committee and all the teachers are in we all do the fishbone we all identify our priorities and needs then that determines what we need to spend money on what do we need funds for or not then we have to go in and develop the action steps as a school to determine our priorities and goals then i have to go in as a superintendent and look at what the psyop says and say okay at the district level what do we have to do to make that happen and there may or

005may not be funds attached to like the lie up would be our central office administrators staff development that supports what the school level is doing okay and as far as the state goes so this sayat and laya is new because you might remember hearing the word elite in adv so we used to have to put this into elite and in a leap you could go in and you could retire your goals and add new goals or at the end of the year you have to put it in progress or not and then we would do it that way this is our second year with the lie up in the cycle so last year we had to input everything into a different system through ade no longer using a leak and and if this program does

006not allow you to carry over goals so this year we had to re-type all of the action steps for the light of the messiah again i believe that this year we're still they still haven't figured out how to let us roll over so we're going to have to be input again okay so all of this is work between may and june and june 30th because then we start to draw down july 1st with new grant funds so the teachers and mrs cuevas are constantly referring to messiah okay and if you remember when we did these priorities and goals and this existing are the strategic priorities and goals that are in the say act and the layer as well so you can see that in the last five years goals don't change dramatically it's the immediate

007work and how we get there and the action steps that have to change so if you recall last year we um it was a huge in our needs assessment that teachers needed professional development time right and that's when we came to you as a board to say we need wednesday collaboration because we can't possibly hold teachers accountable to everything that's in the without time to talk to analyze data to go through specific training and get everybody on the same page okay so once we get all of the work this past year and we developed one thing we had been talking about as a board and is our strategic plan so from our needs assessment from our diet up our saya we worked together as a team to develop our strategic plan which i reviewed in

008july and we were going to be going over my evaluation what we didn't do was ever bring this document for board approval that's why you all were unclear on what our true district goals were on what we were operating okay so what i did so whatever we developed today whenever we decided our district goals we can change this document but i'd like to get it approved in february okay and our that next week so that we can continue our work so in your packet that you've received there's this document that says draft okay so what i did was i took our goal from our strategic plan yes did we not give him the package yes i think they're in this package i don't confuse you i guess that all okay so what i did is

009i took the five goals out of our strategic plan in our strategic plan there's the annual measures at the end of each goal i try to take the measure that's most important ongoing that's going to identify whether we're being successful or not as a district okay even though there's a lot of measures there's like four to five different measures in each goal i tried to pick one so that whatever we put on our website or whatever we have is more detailed right than this big document so that's kind of what i would like us to have our conversation on on are these true indicators are and this was all developed by everybody down from the teachers us the administration's admin advisory everybody that worked on the needs assessment as we developed the worked on this

010stock so everyone accept the lord did we actually work on this you didn't you didn't work not at all no no why is it necessary to have two more documents that outline goals and strategies i'm looking at four different documents all related to goals and strategies and and i don't understand why we have four so the reason why we have four i mean i would love to be able to have one ade and federal require this okay okay as a district boards and superintendents operate on strategic plans that are either due to find your plans that get revisited and update but isn't it's district but it's a one this is a one year this is a one year duck that has to be done every year this is kind of like the master this is

011the master plan okay this with priorities and goals helps the principal and the teachers break it down to even a more specific level than the saya right because this is what we spend our money on what we're using it for this is boots on the ground we teach and encourage stuff development daily things that we do so this is 2025 [Music] this is a living document but it is a five-year plan most superintendents do three to five years because that's when superintendents change boards change so but you have a guiding document so if you remember when i was first hired we did our plan looked like this and it wasn't it was a three-year plan with a two-year plan then coven we didn't do one so then we developed this one for five years classroom

012yes yes kind of back what rich said it's gonna be a lot of maintenance just to make sure they all jive you know and that's why that's why that's our that's why the board is really focused on your overarching goals your five strategic plans with the main measures of what we can report out we will have in july and you will see it because we have a document that has all the measures on the plan the annual measures so in our july meeting here's the strategies the annual measures are going to be a dock with all the information that we've been analyzing along the way and putting in here so that we can sit as a leadership team and with at the board and review what we've collected where we are and how we did

013in terms of our annual measures is there something else that we need to measure did something change are we looking at the right thing as programs come and go we will be analyzing different things along the way but the goals are typically very similar across the nation and the state strategic plan goals entailed from five areas high performing students high quality staff inclusive culture responsive organization and collective governance those are the main overarching goals then i took it a step further and in my evaluation as we talked about i went and highlighted on my current evaluation highlighted what bowl they would be addressing okay and one comment was well why not take out all the other stuff that doesn't relate to the specific goals but all the other yes but all the this my evaluation

014is truly what developed the superintendents have to do and know that's not necessarily gonna all be in your strategic plan but it's daily operations and organization and what you need to do so boards usually adopt a strategic plan some boards have board goals and some don't it's up to our board the board goals if you decide to develop them would be what are you as a board going to be committed to do to allow us to to work our strategic plan and our district goals what is the board committed to do to allow [Music] but remember two years ago when we went to bolt it was the first time that they were really emphasizing for districts and boards to develop board goals prior to that it wasn't you know i hadn't heard about it at

015the district level where i worked and goals um the district before our goals were primarily everybody has a different interpretation of what boards need to have in order to support issues remember they highlighted nogales when we were there they're one of the only ones when we when i looked up articles um queen creek cave creek and queen creek in phoenix have them nogales does um that are posted and visible other boards say they have them but they're not like on their website or we would be that um down here we were bolder but we're talking about five years ago i think today we're here to discuss district district goals yes so that'll be determined later so right now what i'd like to do is determine the district goals are you good with them do you

016need clarification do you feel like you need to add something else in the measure what are your thoughts let's take it from the top do you want to work from the blue one or just the highlighted version well i think we could work from this one but i mean they have to work hand in hand because if you see an annual measure on the on the blue one then there's you can add to it or treat it change it so i'm going to stop talking and you can talk actually um other than this one which i just got a couple days ago on um i don't have any problem with the goals as they're stated on a broadband basis yeah what i have a problem with is how they are specific measured how often are

017we specifically measuring them um and are we dealing with specifics um as an example and i go through this and i think some of this stuff has already been done when it says on strategies for high performing students develop and implement a comprehensive curriculum management process to provide system-wide direction for design delivery monitoring evaluation that we could as far as i know we've already done that if we haven't then still needs to be developed then i think we need a target date and that's what i have throughout this thing is that i don't see target dates uh even on on this it's got prior status and current status um but it doesn't have specific dates when we want some things to be done on still in this high performing students areas has developed comprehensive program

018for exceptional education gifted education and learning english learners by when when do we expect those things to be in place and when are we going to evaluate whether we have them or not if we put this in place now and we don't look at it and evaluate it until june and determine whether or not we we made any progress with it um so this is why this is a living document because developing developing and implementing a comprehensive curriculum we're in year one of math right so we're it's ongoing that we're monitoring progress staff development looking at data looking at assessments looking at um we teach and enrich looking at our benchmarks in turn for the azmerit this year ela so we're going through next year will be the first adoption we have not adopted a

019curriculum in science and social studies because we always prioritize reading and math so that's next but those are on so i guess it's hard to to say like even start with curriculum so we've already ordered spread curriculum out investor three with ela they have an intervention program for spend students that aligns with our benchmark with the reading curriculum which we are looking at purchasing getting a quote so that part of the house is ongoing with the gifted and talented we're assessing kids now for the assessment and then we're going to have to look at what's our plan who's going to service the kids that qualify as we grow we're going to have to we will need a teacher to teach gifted which has budget implications right so they're all kind of ongoing so i know

020what you're saying it's just know but how's that i dealt with this for so often when it said status ongoing and there's never anything that says when does it have to be done by when so when are we going to have a comprehensive program for gifted or exceptional education okay maybe we've got to do the testing which we're doing now so we set february as a target date for testing then we set april to determine whether we have to have a specific gifted teacher which then the board is responsible for saying do we can we resource this from a funding standpoint and then we we determine these things we have target dates that that are driving actions if we just put ongoing the board is never going to know but okay so then that's where

021we report to you every board meeting we're reporting our progress on all that we do we're reporting on our formative data we're reporting on what we're doing with it we're reporting on where i are don't disagree with that but that still doesn't in my opinion eliminate the need for a target date so you where would you want us to put the target dates you tell me when when is testing gonna be done there's so many and we have our testing dates on our calendar so i'm just saying how thick do you want this document to be well because i mean going back to this document maybe maybe on like this is not a schedule this is my calendar this is what the goals are and it's going to change as needs change as we reach

022certain goals and whatever um how about on this strategic priorities and goals add a column that says the purpose is the plan that we measure so we just threw out something about english learners well this doesn't link back to the arizona audit which shows that we only have three percent of english learners so it needs to be directly linked to data a goal and a target date or else we're just making a plan that has a moving target and it it becomes like housework at my house we'll do it whenever we get to so there has to be a plan that we have to we have any strategic plan and any goals and strategies associated with the strategic plan are going to have dates they're going to either have metrics in the form of some

023quantitative method or a qualitative method of either a date or something like that this this is just putting a bunch of words on paper and there's no way to hold anybody accountable if i may add something and i'm not necessarily disagreeing with content it just seems to me that we have a significant percentage of our kids in this district that have spent the last two years in their living room or in front of a computer or something other than being in this classroom now doesn't it seem somewhat reasonable that we should have at least an intermediate something in the very near term the next six months or something as a goal to try and get not only the kids back into the classroom but to get kind of get caught up i mean we've been

024spending our tires for a couple of years here i mean i think we're kind of putting the car before the horse like i said i'm not disagreeing with these goals at all but we've had something in the last two years go down that has never happened in any of our lifetimes and kids are frankly if i'm wrong but i think kids are probably scattered all over the place in terms of knowledge some people may be far behind and i know there's is there something going are we going to go with the summer program is that on there's money allocated for that or about yeah we're trying to do it we already sent the email out to get teachers to see who wants to teach summer school so that's the plan again our charge will be

025getting the kids here that need to be that's why you're talking about all these goals which are fine there's nothing wrong with them but i think we kind of need to get things caught up first um as a short term and hopefully that's well i i think that's covered a little bit um growth and on track is measured by the math assessment administered three but what's an increase is it 0.5 is it three percentage points is it at grade level how do you measure that in increase is meaningless as a word by itself so that i like the goals but i like the goal don't get me wrong but we're talking about goals we're talking about strategies and we're talking about tasks you're talking about reporting to us on tasks not strap you know a

026strategy when you say implement and align arizona college and career-ready standards for all four and elective courses by when so we can we can add those because it's all year i mean that's our that's our annual but but i i know what you're saying if we put target dates or completion dates right that's expected to be done i i also have i'd like to comment um i would hope none of these ever get completed it's kind of like the name of golf can you play a perfect game of golf i guess if you score like 18 is that perfect you're never gonna like it's something you're always going to improve on as soon as you become perfect you're going to find more ways to make it better right so a lot of these things never

027get completed but i i and i agreed to with what everyone's saying but there are certain things that putting target dates would be extremely beneficial for us to do for things that we haven't had yet started yet such as the gifted program so having the target date is when we're going to have testing a projected target date and then a projected target date is to okay when are we going to start the discussions of how are we going to create the program more who's going to be teaching the program which we have some ideas on that already but i think setting us so that we have a timeline so that by the end of 2025 well especially something like that if you have something that's going to require finding the money for a position yes

028that does not need to happen they do have timelines there because it's an annual so we could easily attach timelines to our strategic plan as well so are we hoping to have um the gifted and talented up and running by next school year are you going to have a teacher and kids that tested and that's where we have to do our cost benefit analysis because if we only have you know five six kids identified as gifted eight across the board and we paid a teacher one teacher salary for five students is or are we gonna that's something we need to talk about are we gonna do an after school or a pull out or something to pull those kids together but how effective will they be in a k-8 model with six kids you know

029that's usually the struggle at sites to get personnel and then you have um mr roman alley who's endorsed i've endorsed so we have to find ways to work with it we don't have the funding for it we want to make sure that we're doing our students but then again you're pulling miss cuevas who's the principal who has to monitor all this stuff finally that's down in the weeds the question is yes these five goals right here do they align with that mission statement the answer is either yes or no if the answer's no then we don't have a goal or we need to change the mission statement yeah we believe but having the dates i agree is going to helpful accountability we've been talking about getting talented for how long and you can go back

030and say well you said back in may of 2020 we were going to have us implemented the spring of 2021. what's up okay well now we know we've got we mentioned three or four steps i think we've now identified that specific one is a great example is okay well let's that's our model for the rest of these things and you know if you get to april and you're like hey may isn't happening okay you know when we look at it and say what do we need to do and the learning from that is we either need to correct how we set our targets or we need to go back and do a hot watch and find out why we missed her because some are going to be dead on other ones we're going to miss

031completely you know no we're nothing greg yeah so i it pains me a little bit to say but i i completely agree with mr hollery and mrs cutts okay i i i do agree that there should be david changes i do agree that yes we should have target things but maybe not on everything because not everything is the same it shouldn't be measured if you go back and look at develop a comprehensive curriculum i don't think that's something you want us stopping doing after we've reached that goal in three years i'm sure that more than five years from now would appreciate us to have this as an ongoing goal versus you know we completed it but some of your other metrics will drive that process so if we're using a certain math curriculum and it

032doesn't seem to be producing the kind of results that we wanted to produce then we needed obviously we're going to re-look at that and have a certain timetable that when is it is the curriculum the problem which would be why that would be an ongoing goal because you would want us to continuously look at after five years from after introducing this math curriculum what has those results been from those kids that started out in third grade to where they're at in april give us a good set of measurables to determine if that math curriculum is and also some of these are going to be driven by data so i i wouldn't say to put a time frame on when we're going to put you know a comprehensive curriculum together for our gifted students because we

033may do our testing and find out we've got three kids or we could do our testing find out we have 30 kids the path to success is two different paths to complete that so so some of it's data driven based solely on you know the results that's why i like this form because it has a definition of what metrics we're going to use it also has prior status and current status and and i mean the only thing that i think is missing in that thing is what's the next step and and if we're not on track what's the target date for for this uh um you know it to me is a much better format as far as as establishing what our goals are what are the actions that we're going to take what measurement

034are we going to use and what's what are the target dates right that's why that's the one we use all the time that's the one that we refer to the teachers and deanna because it's specific but but that's not a strategic plan right that's our priorities and action steps strategic priorities and goals for the 21 to 25 right because this is the overarching strategic plan that's that's the roadmap that that tells you what we're doing what our dates are i don't know that a strategic plan there's some measures here some things that have a timeline but that blue document is the one that has to have the specific timelines that when we do our new needs assessment and we develop what we need and we look at the psyop and the layer and then we

035continue or retire those goals and add more that's that's more of our ongoing document but that's the document we're talking about today correct no we're talking about we're just talking about our district goals the five goals yes and what we want to adopt as a district to say these are our emerging goals how we get is the other documents but for you to feel comfortable with the way this is written and if you feel that we need to go through and look and add specific timelines to certain pieces of this but you're right greg so much of the district plan says continuous and ongoing because they're things that we look at and we're reviewing constantly annually after benchmarks after state assessments during many formatives that teachers give determines are we teach and enrich okay then

036if i wanted if i go back to this guy these are the specific goals these are the actions we're going to take to get them so i think that some of these goals on here need to be more specific okay as stated in here increased student achievement as measured by nwe map assessment um so what level that should be here so it's on our side and here we were talking about closing the achievement gap right by growth that's why we wrote students in each grade level cohort okay the first one entry student achievement ela math at night with youth growth and on track as measured by nwa map assessment administered three times a year so when it says growth and on track that's where we're looking at all of the kids did they grow from

037the first assessment to the end of the year assessment but we look at it in the mid-year right now and then are we increasing the kids that are on track so that's okay what time does that relate to the fact that we wanted to see a three-point improvement at every grade level in math and english based on using america so then students in each grade level cohort third through eighth grade will demonstrate an increase in meeting and exceeding the standards along with demonstrating growth on state assessment so when we analyze the growth we're going to say did we move three percent of our kids into the three percent needs to be in here is my point that's the goal that's the mission that's what we make yeah and we can't be happy that's what we're

038facing that's what we're evaluating against is that specific goal this is a three three point improvement in in actually i think it's specific to eric easy merit not mwa map well so we did have it in there the the thing is that nwa map gives us a different we're operating on grid scores and then state assessment is operating on meeting and exceeding russia i agree with you but no i know it's also intended to align with the superintendent evaluation right the superintendent evaluation does not relate to nwea that's on the performance pay area it specifically talks about ac merit and easy marital no we aligned it to the formative to entrep it's it's not it's not one or the other because we're analyzing both but we should be analyzing both um but just saying that

039we want to see improvement so if we go from x to y and then and that's growth then we can say that we achieved our goal whether it was three percent or ten percent or one percent or a half a percent if we got improvement then we achieved our goal roxanna this is meeting and exceeding the standards what are the standards on the state assessment right reading and math right well i'm just wondering if the information mr already is looking for is in here and i understand we want to keep this one page right well and then going back to the question because when we analyze data assessment data we're looking at when they determine letter grades they look at your percentage of kids that need and succeed standards they look at your percentage of

040kids who have gone from minimally proficient to proficient or proficient to contract right to exceeds they look at our special education students and if they make progress they look at our ell students and they've made progress so there's all these factors that go into this crazy formula they look at attendance rate and from all that they determine our letter grade so you have a special ed bilingual student they count three times in the formula because they're in this bed formula they're in the el formula and they're in the general population data you get a gifted student there again in that realm so it's it's just very technical on how you determine and how we determine progress as a school every year because we can't say that all of our students are going to be at

04180 mastery meeting and exceeding standards in three years why not because we have special ed students who's even though they're growing right even though they're growing they're not going to be meeting and exceeding kids in standards ever on amazing merit they'll close their achievement gap and we're watching them but it's it's not realistic for us to say that 80 of our kids are going to meet and exceed standards at continental so what is realistic so cohort growth as we watch and i think that's it's important that she said growth that we define what we're looking at as growth are we talking growth as a kid going from minimally proficient to proficient or are we talking growth as a kid that was 50 points away from being proficient is now four points away from being proficient

042because that still shows growth so i think it's important to define what we're we're saying growth actually is because growth would be quite a few different things i don't want to go to what she just said if the state doesn't measure it why are we they don't they don't measure it doesn't count if it is so we had a student who was minimally proficient and they went up 28 points but they're still minimally minimally efficient so it doesn't move anywhere and they talk no it's the growth for moving from minimally partially partially to um proficient proficient to highly what we're working on is tracking the cohorts and we've been studying and analyzing where they how how they how they've grown kind of how if there's been backslides if they're students that especially it was interesting

043to see when we had our school closure that there were quite a few students who went from highly proficient and you could see just by looking because we have printed them out each cohort where you just see the slide of a bunch of big percentage goes from highly into proficient proficient into partially and then some of them they the minimally proficient stayed the same and we started to analyze to see wires minimally proficient some of them staying the same and it goes back to some of our special education students who have been throughout that cohort they're showing growth but it's they're still within that minimally proficient um but with few exceptions yeah every test for math and ela we have less than 50 of our kids that are proficient or highly proficient less than 50

044so it's not just spend this that's that's driving this so i mean we can say that you know we've got sped students that just aren't ever going to make it in three years well what about the non-sped students that aren't making it so that's why we decided we were starting to look what is the pattern what's going on here with what we're trying to figure out and then what we're trying to do is we're trying to measure things we can't control yeah and so that's the big challenge we're trying to measure things like the the kid that shows up here that maybe didn't have dinner last night or breakfast this morning and has on two days ago clothes and things so we're you know we i think we really need to focus on what it

045is we can measure and be successful i mean nobody can i don't think anyone can argue with any of these goals although i'm sitting here kind of laughing to myself because the one the one thing i came up with uh was that i wanted to move to a paperless board that was my one goal i wanted worth of printing all of this is in color and this even though it doesn't look like in color it's in color and and this is going for about 25 cents and you know so none of us can argue with any of the goals i mean we want high performing students we want high quality staff and an inclusive culture and responsible organization which is where the paperless would come in and collective governance but i think what we're talking

046about is how do we organize that you know we've got this document and then we've got this document been stained you've got this document for the pads but we really want it on one document and i already had this in an email and i had this in an email and i'm not even sure what this is but it was in the email too i think what we need to do today is decide are those five goals what we want i don't think anybody could argue with that and we're kind of getting down into to the weeds we can't control from minimally proficient to proficient that's the way it's measured that's the way it is get on board i realize that you want to be able to say johnny went from from he took these three

047little steps and we're really glad and we're showing that but the bottom line is nobody cares about you and mom and dad when we're reaching out to the community their concern when they're looking at moving here and fleeing to usd they're looking at why are 44 of fifth graders minimally proficient that's what they want to know i had a conversation i'm talking several months ago maybe over a year ago with an individual that has their their kindergartner brendan kenner they put him in the enzyme because they had a higher grade at least at that time than continental did and so that's what parents are looking at when they're choosing school districts where they want to live where they want their kid to go to school now you know our open enrollment um law t in

048arizona it certainly facilitates that um but we should be the school of choice and we are so the thing is when you work in a school and you know how that works we don't buy our houses based on where our kids what the letter grade is of the school because we know what that means if we you can have you know you can we know what that means and that doesn't mean the success of the school it doesn't it it and i tell parents the best thing you could do it doesn't even matter where you're moving is that you are watching your child's progress that you're doing your job with your child you make sure that the teacher fit know what teachers you're putting your kids in because kids have different personalities and play with

049different teachers and then you won't have to worry if you do your part as a parent and you're setting those expectations for your kids and you're communicating with the teacher regardless of where you go your child is going to do well okay we have no control over that absolutely no control but what we do have control over is the teacher we put in the classroom the equipment that we issue um you know when you go through here and you read some of these things um you know recruitment and retention teacher retention fuel rate certified position employee satisfaction climate surveys well what does that mean i mean i've seen climate surveys where somebody you know the organization has 25 percent so what does that mean yeah and again we how do we push our parents to

050take those climate surveys and do them we've increased the amount of parents who have done them every year but if by far is not 80 of our parents don't answer the survey because if they're mad they're going to answer the survey if they're happy they're like well everything's fine i don't need to fill this out but that's so standard right across that's across all industries i guess we have so much ongoing work every single day that we're doing because we're constantly looking at our teachers and what they're doing like our learning walk tomorrow for example you know we're trying to align effective strategies school-wide and unless you pull teachers to watch each other and listen to us give feedback and give feedback to teachers and to kids we're not going to be able to close

051that achievement gap and we're and but that's been a three year process by the end of this year every teacher will have been observed and will have been part of the feedback group doing the observation and teaching has changed because they realize okay they're serious about what they're expecting because we're in a room like this saying when you did this your kids did this when you said this your kids did this and this is the end-all goal so it's just for us i think as school leaders it's very hard to quantify and put like i get metrics and measures and timelines but there's so much that's ongoing that it's just really hard to pinpoint what is gonna truly make the difference and get us over because it's the parent the student the teacher the leadership

052the curriculum the training and that's the same thing in every industry every industry that i work in i see the exact same thing and everything is ongoing uh that your your first goal of high performing students is ongoing that's forever your second goal of attract recruiting and attracting high quality staff forever that's that's going to go forever in an inclusive culture i'm not even sure what that means uh responsive organization i would tighten that up collective governance all of those are things that that we certainly want to do it's it's the strategies how we're going to get there how we measure that how we know when we're there that's or when we're getting close to it right and even if it gets to if we got all of our kids at 80 what would we

053all be sitting here talking about how do we get to 85. so but it's just setting those targets so that we know how to get to the 85. and you know i i'm almost i almost feel like our best bet would have been to play one of those saturday morning movies you know the one where the teacher goes into the inner city school and everybody throws stuff at him and then he teaches them how to sing or something like that and they become an a school and get national bank you know let's look at what they did how do they do that what are the strategies that they use well okay that's a great thing there's nothing in here that talks about music and athletics and you know what some of your kids are gonna

054do and well a great way to keep bad kids off the street our students going to weldon are at this advantage what we don't have um we can't use our hurdles for traffic because they are older than i am and to give them all tightness that's science teachers but we had the walden girls soccer team that went to nationals had like six or seven that went to state had six or seven of our continental kids on the team so that goes back to responsive organizations we are we have a whole list of all these athletics and clubs we bought new vans we did all this other stuff but we can't run hurdles because our kids will get hurt and get splinters well that's the first i've heard of that so i that was years ago

055i don't know if we still have that but yeah when elia was on traffic we're like oh and that's something where we're you know with our sports and our clubs promoting we look at the percentage of kids that are participating do we have more girls than boys what's that we never talk about that well we do we do but when mr nathan presents sports data you know he does and when you look at achieve excellence in academics character and skills i mean it's it's the whole comprehensive goal but we never talk about that's the mission but it's not in here it's not in our goals or our strategies there's so many goals and strategies that we have no way responsibility for that because you know here we are blindsiding we would have oh we're concerned

056like oh i've never heard that before but that that's kind of on us and i think a lot of these complaints instead of just saying this way roxanna i see that you want um a gifted and talented class what can we do to make that happen by next year keep this informed this is the due date we won on that and we as a board we need to take that leadership and so these are great goals let's see how long they're implementing and i think that goes over to what board goals are and it's not my job to tell you if you don't have hurdles that's your gym teacher's job and your athletic director and if they didn't do that that's the conversation you need to have with them if they tell you it was

057because they didn't have any money that's who you have the conversation with next that's the management piece of that we don't do that right right well for sure we have tons of tax credit many for extracurricular activities so there's no reason why we don't have what we need so there could be more to that as well like are the other schools in our uh whatever group of schools we compete against that's called um maybe they don't have hurdles either and that's why we never replaced them well our basketball girls are undefeated and the game is tomorrow two games left and they're undefeated so so much fun to watch yes so we will be there tomorrow so going back to this high performing students district goals we are measuring and looking at the growth through interviewing

058map which helps us then determine where our students are projected to end the school year by doing that we have plans in place that we want to enact which is this school here what we're planning to do is at the end of next school year we want to be giving during these are our plans during pre-service days we will give teachers this is pre-service like in the summer time when we're coming in to start a new school year we're going to be giving the teachers the 20 21 22 post test results and they'll be getting the state results of the students in their classes that they're getting that way they have a snapshot of the rosters of the students that they're meeting and where they are ability wise and where they are academically so then

059that way we will be able to prepare they can plan and prepare as they plan for that first month first month is when they take their first benchmark which is considered our baseline benchmark so then we know where we need to plan from there but to start the school year when they're here a week before the students start they will already have a snapshot of where their students are on their roster so that they can start planning interventions with them from the get-go at the end of each benchmark we're going to be having them go over what their students are they'll be producing a online calendar to us breaking up their students in benchmarks um daily by weekly by month as to what they're going to be doing intervention-wise into intervention groups and what standards

060they need to be taught so when we talk about what is our plans for our high performing there's so many things to do but it's just keeping it as simple as we need to use the blueprints that the state has provided to us which we now have the blueprints that have been refreshed for the new arizona academic standards assessment which is it's not getting married anymore i don't want to say it we're comparing different places to change you know it's like so um those blueprints are going to be huge for us because when we before we head into next school year they're going to be able to help have us strategically map out what we need to teach our students what's our thing for our buck as far as power standards that need to be

061taught up front and inspired throughout the school year i'm feeling more confident especially with this school year because it's been a lot more normal than the past two school years that we're able to start strategizing and getting this stuff ready for next year and we've already started implementing it with our teachers we already began to go over the blueprints and when you look at the blueprints for the state test it will tell you exactly what percentage is in mathematics if it's measurement it's only going to be 35 yes 10 is gonna be on measurement so you know what right now we're not going to be teaching measurement as much as we need to be teaching fractions in fifth grade so that they need to make sure that they're really hitting on fractions but since we've

062got these blueprints well into the start of the school year we're having to kind of plan with what we got recently whereas next school year we're going to already have all of this stuff ready and lined up for our teachers so along that same line you said they'll get that data the teachers will get the data roughly a week or two before they start is there any way that seems like that yeah they could get it sooner but it's just with registering and the rosters we won't know sure right when they come through free service we have more idea of their roster so we'll be able to get that info to them yeah because then we have to balance classrooms boy girl we try to balance by ability so that not all the so the

063teacher has a non-balanced class so we're constantly looking at data to make it fair for them to and let's say you're talking fourth to fifth do you go back to the fourth grade teachers and say yo here's what your fifth now fifth graders this is how they perform yes here's like we've talked you can get as granular as you want on these that's what we talk about cohort yeah so when we say your fifth grade the fifth grade teachers that's fourth readers this group of kids this is how they did in third and fourth grade so what's but i mean these fourth graders they all know they've lost their kids already but they need to know where they were good and where they were so they know all this group of kids i don't want

064to make the same mistakes over again right i mean hopefully they're doing that throughout the year but if we don't have that compromise until the end right with our like our kinder teachers they're you know our our parents tell us that we give the kids so much and we only have them do three things a week and then um we talked about they're like they're behind they're not gonna be ready for first grade okay so what's our plan guys we need to plan a make it take it because we know all the kids that need to come are not going to come to southern school so do we plan a workshop for the parents and say these are the three activities you need to do for reading and these are three format that you must

065do and how are we gonna hold them accountable even in the summer to make sure that they do that and then we usually do kinder jumpstart okay but do we need to add first graders who are so low at the kindred that want to come in for kindred jumpstart to be little role models a little self-esteem booster but these are the conversations we have you know with our teachers like just trying to figure it out constantly on what are we going to do for these cohorts of kids that are struggling so those are all operational things and and i i appreciate them from the teacher point of view and the administrative reporter dude but in preparation for this meeting what i did is i went and pulled the top 10 k-8 schools in the country

066and i laid it out and i identified their commonalities and what did you come up with the commonality is a teacher-student ratio of 14-1 so that is a board goal how do we get if we want to be the best all the data indicates that smaller classrooms yeah when we analyze data for the state in our state of arizona in our top 20 schools do you remember what we said the commonality you i was it was funding it was less uh they all taught a grade level up first graders were receiving second grade standards second graders were receiving third grade standards that's what basis and those charter schools do so when we talk about when we have our kids where do we start to teach them up like we talked about do we get our

067first graders that are ahead of the game and start migrating them to second grade with the second grade teacher to receive those standards or how did we get there right because you got to start but that's an operational or a tactical issue right and as a board we can there's nothing we can do but there is something we can do to create a classroom environment for teamwork not with our budget and not with work that's our sizes i mean that's our problem we need a new school because that's our problem our problems our facilities our problems are money that's it that's what we deal with curriculum [Music] how we make it happen in the classroom we don't do that look i don't know financially how we would ever be able to have 14 kids in

068the classroom with our budget auditor's report it says that we went from 14 back in 2017 and 18 15 to now 18 or 19. whatever it is so how were we there and how do we get there and you know as a board those are the kinds of strategic issues we need to be talking about what what makes a successful k-8 school and you know that was the one thing i i looked for i pulled the top ten eighth grade schools in the country and that was one of the commonalities and they weren't in the best neighborhoods but if we want to have high performing students and a high quality staff i think we can serve ourselves well by having a span of control that's conducive to exceptional learning it would be great if we

069could find high quality teachers more of them because we were at the job fair you know and we're chasing teachers down and trying to attract them to come here but i think you know we'd have to have financially the only way we are going to be able to afford it is if we have more kids if our enrollment increases so that we have more purple well the more kids we have the less chance it is of having smaller classrooms so i think these are all it's a wonderful discussion absolutely yeah that's right but we're not really here for all that because come six o'clock i got a feeling we're supposed to be the same spot we are now so district goals and i think i heard you say we all agree that the goals are

070good no one's going to argue the goals i think except i think we need to have some specificity in what the goal is in each one of these areas so that we have some conception of what we're shooting at the goal should be something we're shooting at so it's highly performing students how much map growth do we want to see here how much improvement in in azmerit do we want to see if that's if that's the case yeah i think that we modify this and then there's a section that says measures so right now it says student achievement growth on track high quality students whatever number we think that's done high quality staff attract and retain quality teachers okay maybe a retention goal of every teacher that's graded proficient or highly proficient uh that we

071want 95 retention i i you know i don't know what the right number is but but that's something that we we need to work are all of our teachers certified i don't know are they no yeah so we've got a certain percentage of our teachers that are not certified so what steps do we need to take to make sure we've got 100 that should be the goal 100 certified teachers um and our teachers that are not certified are really good teachers because they're going through teachers but i don't want to say 100 certified teachers but it's again the quality of the teacher right and then the ones that aren't certified together and programs to become great so why don't we adjust that when we get there yeah i think we need to tweak the measures

072which are going to give dates and numbers and some of those are already in the saga right right so we can make sure we jive there so they will be and then if we have time we can come back and then well we can talk about the top ten i think that stuff's fascinating so we will go through and add the timelines and the measures to this document and then i can send it to you um and we obviously may or may not be ready for next week maybe we just present it at our board meeting as a draft we're going to review with the additional measures and then we can look at the march meeting approving it will that work do you want to since we've got another 50 minutes or so kind of

073just walk through it as a group now and then you can put it together and grow format or do you want to just handle that and send it out and we'll need to do this again well if you have some specifics in when you looked at some of the goals but some of what we what we add if we can hash it out right now i'm not sure that you will totally completely understand what we're analyzing and what we're doing and we need to figure out how to put it into words that will okay that will make sense to you guys work for you guys um yeah you know i went through i just didn't want to leave with us coming like what the heck were we doing right i went to the arizona department

074of education last week to get what the definitions of an a school of b-school and i mean i don't know how they assign these things necessarily but i saw the things that they look at what are the things that's in there is the percentage of certificated teachers that's one of the measurements as far as whether you get a b grade a d grade or an a grade i mean there's a whole bunch more than just that but that's one of them and i'm saying you know i want continental to be an a school i wanted to be in a school next year and then maybe the year after that or two years after that i wanted to be an a plus school because that's something that we can publicize and broadcast to the community and

075anybody that's working in our uh our school can say wow i want my kid to go there um and so you know i'm looking at those things and and so some of those are the steps that i think we should be taking to quantify the goals that we're trying to reach that's good okay so when we look at um kelly do you have any specific when you're looking at measures or anything that stuck out to you in terms of something that you would want us to be looking at so when you look and just one example on the high performing students the first annual measure was the student achievement right the second one was student behavior discipline referrals suspensions and attendance rate we do track that but i didn't put it in this one-pager draft

076form because we really don't have discipline problems per se that are affecting academic progress our attendance rates contrary to what teachers would say are it's the same students but some of them are still meeting standards do you know so i didn't put that here on this one but we can still have timelines and goals on what we expect because as we've grown our discipline problems have grown also but it still doesn't mean that it's high alert we need to you know develop a new school suspension class because we're not there high school readiness participation in advanced coursework and act so that is something that we're working towards and that we have discussions about but i didn't put it on here so am i hearing that i was just trying to do like a cheat sheet

077this is good this is good too so you down here you say we want 10 of 8th graders participating in act for example and have that started by semester 1 2023 whatever it might be here this is virtually needs to be untouched this is a supporting document for this specific example so in reality there are three to five measures for each other well i think this is designed to be kind of generic and really yeah did anyone look at any of the others from other districts yeah from other schools we've compiled when we did this work we looked at other districts and other schools and other superintendents plans and other work but i think we've got to be careful on you know talk about the proficient and not proficient and on the state level is

078what's the state level proficiency yep right that tells me a couple of things this is a test run you know is that something be a very the average in five million kids in the state is forty percent there's some wrong well if the test was good at measuring that they would change it every two years she had that right so something i mean it should almost be like i get some districts you know should be almost like the abc you know the majority are going to get average you know 75 percent every day and then you know just the way you expect scale a b and c to work in a school but that test doesn't work never has how come some districts do so well i believe i would say i think that some

079districts do well this is just my opinion i used to be at a school that was a failing school and they brought a principal in from that ended up creating a data room who made teachers accountable for really looking at their data and not just and understanding it which is what we're trying to do here and um flipped the school around they were at f school and within the course of two years we're all the way up to a b school and then um it's hard because the higher you get it's harder to show the growth but in a lot of the schools that i've looked at are charter schools and you can you can choose who is going to remain and who is not going to be there a big piece of that too

080is the kind of parents that send their kids to that school have to make an effort they're going to drive the kids there themselves and they have to drive them far away i mean we're talking about faces there are kids who are driven an hour each way by their parents to get there they're doing two hours of homework in the car so and also what kind of home life that's gonna facilitate a whole lot and basis doesn't have to take johnny that can't spell cat we do so it's not just the special ed students it's the mediocre kids that can have parents that can hire expensive tutors or can sit down with them because they're not fried from work in things at least one parent stays home or if mom just works a little bit

081or they normally don't so how many parents come and talk to you and say my kid's going into third grade do you know missy oh yeah we know well what teacher do you think would fit her best very few right i did it yeah uh for my kids you know i requested we usually afford them so i don't think anybody possible remember also if you recall they don't allow visitors in the school they don't have awards assemblies they don't have everything is done before school and after school and they just and and it's not a community it's not a community culture because it's by far just you're going to be doing homework and back to basics all day long so when we sit here and say we value music and pe and athletics and clubs

082and we're trying to you know build character life skills well-rounded children those are not your those are the academia only kids and if you have a child that excels in extracurricular in art or music or pe you're not going to put them in basis because that's they're not going to get what they need i agree we're never going to be on basis but i think yoda you still have to shoot for something higher than then i mean when i see this right here that meeting the standards that just that sounds awful to me because we all know what the standards are and in my opinion they're they're poor very very poor and yeah i agree i continental's never going to be a basis we have we have far too much other things i mean it's

083just it's a different school it's a different environment of course but you have to have something to shoot for and there's no harm in saying this is what they do right with their academic portion of it and we can take bits and pieces of it that would suit us as as a goal to shoot for i just i just think it's a mistake to i think it's a mistake to shoot for the standards i think we ought to be shooting for much higher standards and i think and if the kids struggle then at least but there's there's still going to be some growth there i think there's more success in a child struggling to shoot for here than than to just sort of skate along and make it to here i don't know that's could

084we as a board you know fighting the what we are up against as a public school um as a board can we request say you know we want to see more money available for more um uh late best friends and after school tutorials because my two older kids are were the i i was very absent i was a single mom i had to work constantly and when i got home like i could not even spell my name much less help them with their homework and after school tutorial got them through through school and if it wasn't for after school tutorial they probably i don't know it would be doing as well tax credit funds cover after school tutorials to pay teachers they pay athletics and they pay all our clubs so that's how much tax

085credit funding so that gets back to when you're away you come to us and say hey we do for us to do this just like you came to us and said we need a math specialist boom hey we need this that's a great idea but we can't afford it let's see what we can do for next year they can need homework clubs you know whatever homework we do we have them it's just very hard to get our kids our parents to commit to send their kids that's it on a regular basis you know we're we're pulling we're begging pleading sending letters they are behind they need to come to school we're filing the fact that they're not staying and you were well we're selling but they're not buying i think we're selling the wrong product

086we have been inviting kids to saturday school we have at least one or two sessions a month and i actually got a response from what the teachers refer to the kids for the kids who have caesar below in content and could benefit from that either the tutorial or the saturday school i actually got a letter back on the permission slip that the parent declined it my child does not want to come to saturday school we will work on it so if nothing else maybe if they really do that and take that option then maybe we're just making one more communication to let them know that if they thought they were addressing it before they really need to pay more attention to it as well because we're getting so good at online do we have an

087online option that parents could sit with a kid and do a 10 or micro learning is what we're using in industry now you know you want to learn how to create a pivot table you learn it in 10 minutes in a micro learning online session that's what youtube has done if you're lucky enough to find the parent that will take the time our kids are very involved in club sports after school they're in ballet they're in soccer they're in gymnastics off the charts yeah they pick them up early out of school because they have to drive across town to gymnastics and ballet and stuff and we're saying like today we had a little weird mom was here for doctor's appointment i'm like can you ask her to give us five minutes like we i we

088need her daughter for five minutes the second grader who is super below level that we're trying to figure out how we're gonna get her to read and you know we're begging parents to not take their kids out because we need their children so you just said we have that ability for somebody at your guys level to get that granular to one second great kid nobody else is doing that and good for us and you but it's how we implement that to get all this i mean obviously that's pushes it and we encourage that right but we just said that our parents are picking their kids up driving across town to get them in some swim club or tennis club or something like that so we must be selling something they don't want to buy how

089do we repackage what product is it that we need to sell that moves our kids are you sure it's not athletics i guess sorry i can assure you what i've seen from so many schools is continental it's top notch when it comes to the availability of sports i think continental is phenomenal for sports i mean there's issues with some some of the you know we have we have to do some work on facilities and things like that but i don't personally i really don't think we're we can always do better but i don't we're certainly doing but you cannot sit here and write a document that says thou must do that to these parents the parents people tell you hi they've got things to do they've got bills to pay they might have to be

090at work on saturday morning and i would love to have that you know to say hey let's let's get the kids here on a saturday morning to get caught up in whatever they're they're not doing so well but if their parents aren't behind them i don't know what to do what are we supposed to do i mean that's that's right and i feel like our kids are amazing well-rounded respectful kids when we had the mostly um kosher group come they were floored by the amazing behavior of our middle school kids the level of questions that they asked about music and the instruments and i mean they were saying this was amazing they they're they said they're willing to come back when our kids went to just talk at the high school our kids at continental

091stick out as good kids leaders they're not running around like the anza kids they're not and when we talk to high school teachers they can identify kids that came out of continental so i i and academically they can also their study skills their habits so we know we're doing things right um but we do have to have you know more of our kids show what they know on state assessments because our kids do know it when we had our presentation we met with the data analysts from nwa map every single grade level showed growth and she said that's not the norm right now in schools that she met with the national the bar graph was below zero she said you're you guys need to celebrate that every single grade level demonstrated growth that is not

092happening across the nation but are we satisfied with that no because we're still very worried about our kids who are not here yet and that achievement gap and what's happened in the last two years yeah you know i think probably brought up an excellent point she said her own experience as far as awfully busy when she came home from work and really couldn't help with homework and all that and the importance of after school tutoring or saturday tutoring or whatever to me if that would be an example of something that that continental could provide to attempt to address some of the parental issues which i personally think is the single most important to a child's education um then then to me we would charge the administration we would charge mr schubert okay let us know

093what it would cost to do two hours of after school tutoring every day and make that available and then two hours on saturday morning and if we have to have bands going on to pick up people to bring them to school on saturday morning what does that cost and then say you know what would we have to give up in other areas of the budget in order to fund that specific objective and and that to me is how you address some gaps and try to solve some of the problems with some of the kids that need some extra help that they may not be getting that kind of supervision or that kind of encouragement at home so it's just an example that to me is a board charge saying we want to know what it

094would take what would you have to do within the budget to fund this and if you say well we'd have to give up this and this this then the board can make a decision as to whether those are prudent decisions or not so i think it's a valid point that you've made that it's one thing to have a saturday school year but it's a very different thing to have a van that will go pick up susie to bring her here because that's probably i'm guessing that's potentially a big part of the no i can't i can't check that box because i have to work right things i have other things to do and i can't get much out there but i did have that conversation with a couple of parents who's stated that concerning and

095we've offered that we have the school dance and mr layton and i have offered that and did it changed much it didn't change at the time no both both sets said i can't commit to that we only have one vehicle i have to get to work i won't be home lots of i don't know i don't know exactly it didn't really answer it so i it's it's not that i disagree with everybody but it's the reality of getting the parents on board how do you do that that's a huge challenge maybe we have a town hall meeting with all our kids that are not meeting standards and you as the board sit here and say what do you need what because this is our goal and this is our plan but what do you need

096because we offer saturday school after school tutorials homework help we teach it enrich what else can we do i i have a little hairbrained idea i just emailed to myself my mom is like the biggest world of contact and that's their message to do like one two little one minute or two minute lessons on one little thing we should make our own and all the teachers they have to be required to make like one or two videos a week of like one little standard and teach the kids how to look it up on their little cell phones while they're sitting there at the dinner table crying over their homework and their mom's mad and making dinner um and dad hasn't gotten home from work yet they'd be like oh i'm you know like look up

097mrs johnson's khan academy figure out how to work this problem again on the chromebook that we issue them yeah so that's like our own online video resource database yeah or they can even say here's a link to a two-minute video on google or like i saved a hundred bucks because i did a youtube on how to fix my garage for real you know three seconds after i knew about it and our teachers and kids dark kids do use khan academy already but i think it would be something special and something different to see your teacher having like and having all the teachers collaborate on it like if i'm in third grade i can pull up all the third grade teachers teaching you know i have access to all that that grades well you know what

098they do in high school i think i told you so in my son's chemistry and geometry class when they introduce something new generally speaking the kids get to a team they do a tick tock or some type of video and then they like you should library the best ones there's a resource that appears just i know it's getting too cold together but what is a teacher and you tell them here's what your kid needs and here's what we're willing to do to help what do they say i mean i know it's probably all over the map and you probably get just some stuff sorry you know some of them are struggling with how to motivate their kids themselves dealing with behaviors or multiple kids in the house some require more attention than the other um

099they say we're doing homework we're you know we're trying we're working on it i don't think anybody says i don't care and i don't want to help some are struggling to pay the light bills i hate to say this but when you can't feed your kids and you've got a light bill to pay for and you might get kicked out of your rental or whatever right the last thing you care about is summers for some you know saturday school and these figures have a lesson in maslow's hierarchy of humans just go right back to that when you're worried about food clothing and shelter you're not too concerned about what's and the variables when you talk to parents i've never heard a parent say i'm sorry i just don't care but i have but the variables

100identified in those conversations are as unique and individualized as the family scenario or situation some kids um i mean anything from the change of custody happens on saturday and so they go to the other parent to the fact that they're in a sport and even though they're battling with eligibility they they will do certain things but can't commit a saturday because they're in that sport if they have re-obtained eligibility i mean the variables go on and on um one boy did tell us that he has a seven-year-old brother at home he can't be gone on saturday because dad has to work on saturday and you know there's a lot of variables it's really hard to i have never heard a parent and i've shut her to think about what i've never heard a parent say

101i'm sorry i just don't care yeah because i have had teachers say i don't even know how to help them i mean parents say i don't even know how to help them at home because i didn't learn the math that way what you're teaching me my wife was an engineer [Laughter] every school in arizona has some of these problems uh you know i was looking at the list the top 10 elementary schools in tucson only four of them are charter schools or private only four five are elementary district public schools and so i mean they've got underperforming kids they've got sped kids they don't get to choose their kids like a charter or private school can and so they all have some of these issues to address there's no question about it so you know

102what can we do with our kids to get in that group of top 10 because i wanted to continue on and say that we can be the a school and not in any school that's in the 40s just because we showed growth because that's not what i i want to be in a school but not in a school but because we showed big jumps in growth we're in the 40s and 50s i want to be in a school we're in the 80s and 90s and um one of the biggest things that's testament to your work as our board members and what you've done is helped with in years before i believe mushriko came and then as i came on there were where i think we're at the end here where a lot of our students

103are now gone to high school but there was a long time where there was curriculum everybody was kind of doing their own thing so that's one thing that's a big gap here that where i think in my past three years here and welcome to rico this is your sixth year fifth year this is it's gonna take us time to get everything aligned so having the math curriculum which you have approved this is really a big deal here a reading curriculum we're going to have alignment we're meeting on wednesday to have a common alignment across all great levels um for weekly testing for benchmarks uh so that way when i say testing i mean if they're teaching inferences for two weeks in one grade they're going to be giving the same type of online test that

104the kids will take that and it'll it'll look the same test that they'll be taking in kindergarten all the way like the format of it and that's one thing we're going to be working with linkit so that we have a common testing database so when the teachers give their weekly tests on the math standards that they're learning or the ela the reading or writing standards at the end of every week their kids are going to take a three to four question test and immediately once they turn it in they're gonna know this got it this group did it i have to pull this group and i need to teach them instead of what have been happening and what was going on is it's spray and prey kind of thing like you know we're going to

105teach it hope that they get it we're moving on to the next thing that's not working that's what we have to fix you're right we have we don't need to be a basis we don't need to be a charter school i see that that is a trend that helps too you know we've we've got we've had some students that we take in here with loving arms and open arms that have come from an academy from basis because of behavioral issues that they were dealing with so parents have come and brought them here that's okay we're going to love them we're going to teach them we're going to embrace them and they're going to be successful because that's the attitude we have about it we are going to be in a school we're going to be

106in a plus school we're going to move our kids but it starts with aligning curriculum across all grade levels so when our kids get into middle school we didn't have just you know certain grades that were teaching some writing stuff but then it wasn't taught in this grade but then it wasn't this great now over here and now they're not understanding stuff alignment is key outcomes of students and getting on that those outcomes whether they need enrichment and they need to continue to be challenged and moved so that they don't fall or because they need to be helped and there needs to be quick intervention they need to be in and having more communication with parents and saying hey you know what i'm working with your children this week i need the parent after school

107tutorials this is a must so it's changing our system being strategic with our system having things in place so it's not we have all these wonderful resources but how are we going to utilize them so that they're successful with their students so i feel like i'm super excited about where we're going because now we are getting alignment across all great levels what first kinders teaches guess what now they're gonna be able to collaborate because they have a common curriculum they're not just pulling stuff off the internet they're not buying stuff off of teachers and teachers they're not trying to come up with their own things and we're moving into a one door's closing another door is opening and we're getting there so i don't i those letter grades what bothers me about them is i

108remember years ago i sat in an assembly and i heard and it was not here but i heard clapping in this world turned into an a school and i remember sitting there just thinking how can they be celebrating that when they're in the 30 percentiles and parents don't know that when they see my friends they'll call me sometimes and say hey this is an a school but this is a b school and i'm going to tell my kids that do you have advice and i always say well go also and look at you know what are the percentages because people will think i'm this is my kid to disage school but they might still also be you know we don't want to be that peaceful right now but that was given to us before i

109think i've been here because we haven't had a letter grade since before i came so that b letter that we have was from 2018 2019 school year since they haven't been giving letter grades since then but there was a lot there was a lot going on that led to that i think before that was a b it was an aim right am i correct in that yeah was because in the formula the percentage of average kids did not we didn't move any average kids in particular exceeding into meetings so that was and it was we were like a point off from the eighth but that was that number in the formula that every school can grow up to 70 of students meeting and exceeding the state standards in ele and mathematics we will get there

110we will get this i don't unless you guys fire me i don't plan on going anywhere for a very long time this is i have big dreams and goals for this place this is where my part is this is what i'm passionate about and it is it's tricky it's like shelley you talk a lot about through numbers looking at things and the way you think is is what we have to see how we have to think about things we have to tweet things we have to see okay you know albert and i and mr layton were looking at the cohort trends the other day and thinking okay how are we gonna how how are these trends changing it's pretty crazy because uh over the course of five six years we already have aims and we

111had easy merit now we have easy sty now we have aasa yes so there's just different things but in the end all that matters is we have to have keep it simple we have to have a simple system in place to monitor where our kids are we say that with our five different levels yeah because if it was that simple but it can be that yeah it can be that simple when you get out of the weeds and just start looking at what's really important kids have to be in school so attendance is important kids have to be able to interact with their teacher so small class sizes are important kids need books that aren't older than their teacher so curriculum is important discipline is important in the uniformity from kindergarten all the way through

112we've never had it but we're going to yep and right there the curriculum is going to include the tier three that's in alignment with whatever you're going to now be in line with you all with our el students they'll be in alignment with our special education and we asked about gifted education the components that go with these curriculums it's exciting because one of the biggest things that we talk about with our teachers is what do we need here and one of the things i heard was alignment we need to all we need to when they jump from one grade it needs to be that we're not all over the place in the next grade there needs to so that's what we've been working on throughout these past two and a half years but i'm excited

113i'm excited that you have been supportive of what we needed to do especially with this curriculum this is huge well everybody knows that mrs smith used to cry when she got mrs johnson's kids from second to third grade because she knew they weren't going to be able to read and all the challenges that she was going to face and if you're fixing that that's a huge chance so i i think you know just the i think the five goals that you've identified are pretty standard for everything i've seen they're worded a little bit differently but they're all there um and the fact that there's only five is a good idea we usually say in a stream teach a plan to have three to five goals uh make sure they align the commission statement and i

114think that's there so we will go in and we will put in specifics on the measures and the timelines and then we'll send you a draft that we could review at the next board meeting just email anyone okay i won't make copies but can there is something that i would like to ask that we do need help with and i know you know kobe with copenhagen there is a lot of there has been a lot of absences but in looking at the trends over the course of the past three to four years there's a high level of absenteeism and i know when i came i had there was a group of some teachers that had been working on it in the past had concerns about absenteeism and you know we don't want to dictate what

115people do throughout the year we can't really police it either but if we could re-look at the policies that we have in place for attendance so that you know we don't have truancy officers anymore we could have an sro that we could go and do home visits and stuff but there's really nothing that that we can use to really get parents to understand that we need their kids here so you're talking about and beyond outside of code yeah moving forward we really i really would like us to you know get input from our teachers but also to come together and come up with look back at what what are our policies like certain districts create their own types of policies um perhaps so many times one of the things mr layton and i we when

116we came back from january asked jen in a pool who are those that are consistently tardy and absent so that my first year here and last year we started having meetings where we would give contracts to the parents and talk to them and they with the student and then that worked but we want to be able to go back and look and see what are our district policies if people are booking two week cruises in the middle of the school year are those um excused or unexcused kind of you know what i mean could you put together some data for us to say you know yes all the absences that we've had over the last year uh 35 were covet related either quarantines or isolation um this was because the parents took them on vacation

117uh yes and so on and so forth yes that may help but i think you need to have some substance behind it you can say all you want we want you at school but if you don't have any way to enforce it that's what well like like boards policies that they've instituted in districts and it's very you know this is what's going to happen you'll have you know these are the consequences these are the excuse these are unexcused you'll have to go kind of what the steps would be um kind of like requiring summer school or saturday school in order to be promoted yes does that work that's i think i think if you enforce it yeah moving forward with this because this is huge that's right because the parents are going to come to

118the board and if the board wavers and says you know what grandma was only available that month for us to go on the cruise it was really good it was at disney yeah they can make it up they gotta make it up somewhere we'll see but and but that's what they do do all of our parents who take their kids out for long extended vacations or whatever it's usually military if they're deployed and the husbands are in this state and the mom is going to take the kids and go there they're very responsible and say we'll get the work and we'll make it up and they do but end the school like in saturday school or summer school right so they do make it up and you know where we have to look at did

119that attendance really affect the grade well not if they made it up and not if they did it but it's still irritating to the teachers that kids are randomly not here like when i send you the reports on how many kids were out for covent there's usually 25 to 30 kids that are out for miscellaneous non-sickness related no excuses looking at the year before there was three thousand absences three thousand right now with colgate at january we're at four thousand and with the state now because remember funding with attendance so as long as the parent tells us where they are whether we agree that it's a good place to be or not it's an excused absence so parents they we our hands are tied because there aren't truancy officers there's nothing at the state level

120that says if you miss 10 absences you're going to be dropped i mean that's 10 absences you're dropped if you're a no-show completely but there's something excuse there would be the unexcused unexcused any absence that's defined as unexcused right 10 consecutive unexcused absences that is the mandatory so our kids don't do that you know they'll be gone maybe three additional days or tack on three or four days before a holiday or after a holiday but our hands are really tied in terms of make up the work or to fix your grade and that's pretty much all we can do um because before you had truancy officers we could report it to juvenile courts and then juvenile courts would find the parents for kids not being in school and juvenile courts that's they're doing bigger things

121they're not worried about truancy right now so it goes back to what can we do as a school to fix our own little problem per se well i think also relating it to the kids that are not making it up or not performing and you can really tie it to absenteeism there's going to be kids that were out for 15 days and they're still in the proficient or highly proficient areas so well good great conversation i appreciate your time and your feedback and that helps us and i really think we'll entertain maybe a town hall um to get these parents together but i think they need to see us you know as a unified front saying we're all in this and we're all owning the problem so let's come up with some solutions do we

122have anything planned before next week this is mr early can you send me those lists that you guys uh when you tick for the schools and the national rankings so we can have those to contract please what do we want to do as a study set study session this coming monday or at a different time to study the revised provision that you did or just do it by even i don't think that they're they're looking to see i think we're going to put it as a draft yeah that's what i mean for the board meeting but if you want to do it i will as the study says [Music] what was your intention on the draft to improve it now no we could do the draft like we mentioned and discuss it at the board

123meeting and then we could go for approval in march and whatever we discuss next week then we can still tweak and send another draft and then once you send an email we can come back and say what we were talking about right or whether that's wonderful or in between yeah or that's at this or let's take this on and if you want attendance to become important you have to make it yeah and i expect people at the basketball game tomorrow no excuses they're great four thirds they're so good they are so much fun you're missing out if you're not there well they start at 3 45 with c team but by the b team then plays and then a team usually starts at 4 30. 5 o'clock for the learning walks tomorrow ms joshua you're

124going to be here in the afternoon you're going to learn you walk i don't know why morning you said it's what eight to noon i have a meeting in town at 12 15 or so can i yeah maybe by 11 or 11 sure yeah because you can you'll see that we go through three teachers that go through the process three times so that means you get the first and the second you don't have to go to the third so if you're at eight then okay and what is it [Music] so we're going to recess for a minute to science and vouchers for greg they're brand new starting at number one and they're not xerox whatever you call this kind of paper just do one at a time [Music] going to county and we just started

125a pre-number into 0-001 keep going forward there's 10 of them all right