June 2, 2025, Governing Board Meeting

001We're going to go ahead and get started. Korean school district understands that our community of schools is located on the ancestral land of the Alam Jud and Akima Ootham people who descended from the hookum and have inhabited these lands since time and memorial. The OM whose name translates literally to people are a vibrant culture in communities founding countless generations into the past continuing to thrive in the present and carrying a powerful legacy for generations into the future. With this acknowledgement, the Kraton School District formally recognizes that the traditional care in keeping of these lands by indigenous people is an aspirational model of community stewardship that we are committed to honor with practices, policy, and human relations. And Mr. Man, can you lead us into the pledge of allegiance, please? I pledge algiance to the flag

002of the United States of Americ call. We have Miss Ays and Miss Gibson McClean, myself, Mr. Jones, and Marquez present. We want to welcome everyone to tonight's meeting and remind the audience of the request to address board cards that must be completed and submitted to the board secretary if they wish to speak to an agenda item. Board policy provides for two cards, white cards to be submitted in order to speak to an agenda item and blue cards to be submitted in order to speak during public comments. Due to open meeting law, board members are not allowed to address items that are not on the agenda. This is per policy BEDH. That brings us to 2A, approval of agenda. I move the governing board approve the agenda as presented. May I have a second? Second. All

003those in favor? I. Any nays? Hearing none. Motion passes. And that brings us to 3A, governing board reports. Miss Ays, I'll go ahead and start with you. Um, good evening everyone. Um, I'm not sure I have much of a report tonight. I'm exhausted because I'm still working. Um, and I hope had to get closer to the mic. Sorry. Oh, sorry. Um, I hope that people are enjoying their break. Um, and that's pretty much all. Thanks. Thank you, Miss Gibson McLean. I do not. Happy summer. Uh, I don't really have anything else to say. Awesome. Thank you so much, Mr. Jones. Since I missed the last meeting, I just wanted to mention uh how happy I was to be able to participate in the uh eighth grade graduation ceremonies at Ma Vista and Builtmore Prep. Uh

004thanks for fitting me in at the last minute. Uh but it was very exciting to see all our eighth graders, you know, graduating and then moving on to other academic endeavors. and I hope we've set them up for success. I think uh what the board and the district administration and all our teachers are doing um I think I think that's likely. So anyway, that's all I had to say. Thank you, Mr. Jones. Miss Marquez, hello. Good evening, everybody. Um let's see. So again, echoing what Mr. Jones said, "I got to attend some um eighth grade promotion ceremonies last week. Um, Gateway, TCA, and Excellencia." So, it was really nice to see all the families there. I admit I did shed a tear or two because it really warmed my heart some of the speeches from

005the students. And then, um, what I loved what they did at Excellencia is, um, one of the teachers got up and expressed like something good about each one of those students. And it was just so cool to just see like their faces light up or them you know giggle amongst amongst themselves at like you know whatever been an inside joke. But so it was it was really cool to see it was great to to see and meet the the principles assistant principles and kind of see them in their element and interact with their their students their families and their staff. Um so that that was cool. I hope to uh get out to the schools more often in in the next school year. Um, aside from that, yesterday I attended the Copper State Education Alliance.

006They had a great briefing on special education and I was, you know, featuring our very own Mr. J. Man, as well as Representative um, oh, Sim Stephanie Simichek and some another board member who's very active in the the uh, uh, DD community. Um, so was her name is Steel, but also we had some of our own team here. Our exceptional student services team was there. I got to sit with Dorothy and with Gretchian, so that was cool. And um just, you know, eye opening to see kind of where where education for our special needs students has has been and come from and where we're at. And you know, and the sad reality is we don't have we can't count right now on on our federal or our state to come and help these students. So,

007we have to do the best that we can um with the resources we have in our communities and I know that our team is working hard on that. So, I look forward to meeting with Gretchen and with Dorothy to um to learn more about what we're doing. So, um, there was that and I am going to a schoolboard conference coming up this weekend and looking forward to learning some more more stuff about being a good school board member there and especially about uh school district education financing. So, that's that's kind of my big thing, especially we've got budgets coming up. So, um, that is it. Thank you so much. Thank you, Miss Marquez. Um, I just would like to attest to the promotions. I got to attend um several ones, but it's beautiful to see

008in action what it looks like to for kids to feel empowered. Some of those speeches, I mean, we had bilingual speeches. We had literally students, specific students, sharing his story on how he's been to seven different schools as an eighth grader and he did not find a home until he found our school district. So, to me, that is what this work is about. This is what happens when we prioritize our students over anybody and anything else is no matter what their experiences are, no matter what's happening to them on the outer world, they at least feel safe. Until this day, until they graduated, they shared that they drive all the way from the West Valley specifically to this school because of the culture that they I mean district because of the culture they found and

009the adults that they found in the system to not only support their student but even the parents. So to me, that's one of the things that I I believe personally and I hope it inspires everybody that that's what we stay at the front on how we can touch the lives of these children. And you always hear people as adults, it was that one teacher or it was that one cafeteria worker, whoever it was, it only takes one adult to change the whole trajectory of a child. And being in those promotions is exactly the renewal that I needed is like this is what this work is. no matter what outside worldwinds we're having, as long as we stay focused on our goals and making sure that we're putting our student first, that's where the change making

010happens. And I'm just so thankful that we do have staff that are starting to get onto that and realize that that's what adult convenience leaving adult convenience is. It's not this big old make it out scary thing. It's basically just centering children, making sure that they know that they're empowered, that they don't have to feel like they're perfect showing up into our classrooms. They will make mistakes. They are students whose frontal loes have not fully developed and they deserve the opportunity and the tools to change whatever it is that's going on to better serve themselves. So, that was beautiful and I loved it and thank you so much for all the teachers, the staffs, everybody in the system. I mean, we had one specific student name cafeteria workers, name the janitor staff that they had.

011Like, it was just so beautiful to see that. So, I'm I'm just so thankful for every adult that touches the lives of these students in Korean. So, I'm very appreciative of that. And with that, I will turn it over to Mr. Man for the superintendent report. Thank you, President Korea. Um, yeah, I had the same joy of being able to attend um I think I made it to four commencements this year. Um, and it's I don't know it was it was special this year in a lot of ways. And I think I think a lot of it is sort of the shift in focus, but a lot of it is also how much um, you know, we've in the trenches with the kids a little bit more. And so, one of the things that I

012think was really powerful for me um, was seeing some of our Kraton Kids Congress kids go through the commencement process. Um, and I don't mean to embarrass Principal Burgess, who's here with us tonight, that she actually had a she had a principal award that she gave out, and I was really really pleased to see that the recipient was Valyria, who was one of our um students in our kids congress. And one of the reasons she shared of why she chose her as the recipient is she's someone who puts the rest of the students, you know, ahead of herself. And so she had an opportunity to go with us to tour Camelback High School, but she chose to stay back to be part of the principal selection process um when when Mr. Breezy was chosen as

013the new principal for Lomolinda school. So that's the caliber of kids we have. And so when we focus on them, of course, they're going to do exceptional things because they're great kids. Um, I know, um, when I was out at Excellencia, we got to see, um, Jose graduate, who was one of our Kraton Kids Congress kids who, um, was, you know, just an amazing participant. And I don't mean to leave the others out, but those two I just kind of happened to to spot on the walk through the line. Um, I know we had kids at Gateway as well when I was there, um, and kids at Monav Vista, and it was just an amazing experience. Um, one of the things that was really nice to see is one of our places kids, if I

014help me out if I mess this up, Dr. Lauren, um, actually walked with the Monav Vista students. Or did I get it mixed up with Pace? No, that student had a ceremony at LCK. LCK. Okay. So, there there was a student who was in places who had their ceremony at at LCK. Um, and so that was shared with us as well. So, we um you know, we're we're proud of our kids. We're excited to see them move on to high school and do great things. And we're exceptionally appreciative of all our teachers who have put the hard work in um to help with that. All of our support staff, our our bus drivers, our custodians, our food service workers, our SSAs, and and our aids. Uh we just we have an amazing team and um

015we're starting to see the work we're doing and particularly the focus we have with student outcomes focused governance um bear some results for us. And so I really truly believe you know we're only in year two. We didn't set goals until May of year 1. We didn't finish our guard rails until September of year two. And yet we're already seeing some of the results come out. So, um, I really I have a strong belief that in year three, we're going to have what I call a flywheel year, and we're really going to start to see some motion and see some of the trajectory start to shift for us. Um, in addition to that, in order for that to happen, there are a lot of people, some of them are here in the room with us

016tonight, who um are not out partying because it's summertime. They are continuing to plug away and work hard. And so I know we've had um our a group of people who are um doing the curriculum design studio work. Um they were working last week and I think this week as well, right? Um and so one of the things that they're working on is helping to develop some common formative assessments for next year. And that is an input that we determined we really needed in the system to be able to be more effective at diagnosing the needs of our students earlier and not waiting just you know when we get to the the point of benchmarks. So, um, so many thanks to those teams. And this Wednesday and Thursday, um, we've moved our leadership seminar up

017from it traditionally has been in July. We've moved it to the first week of June because we felt like if the work gets done earlier, then we can spend the whole summer getting ready for next year instead of the last two weeks of summer. Um, and so we will have a couple of things happening. We have a new tool set called Edge Climber which will help us with our um MTSS process, our multi-tered system of supports and being able to look at students holistically, not just their grades, but also everything from test scores to attendance. Um eventually we'll have a a social emotional survey that will be online that will automatically feed into it. Um so all of our leadership team is being trained uh tomorrow on that. So after they leave tonight, they have

018to go home, get some rest because there's going to be a big full day of training. Um and then on Thursday, we are going to be working on um preparing some of the proposed draft interim measures for next year. So um throughout the district, there's people working hard. We've got summer school coming up still. Um so there's a lot of activity that'll be happening during the summer. And I just want to extend my thanks to everybody for putting that hard work in as well. Thank you so much. And one of the things I'll just add on to that is that this is a continuous improvement framework. And that's what I love. And that also sends a message to our students, right? That it's a continuous evolving. It's okay. We make mistakes. We we pivot. Now

019we know what the need is and we give you the tools and we move on to the next. So that's one of the things that I always love to point out that this is not asking for perfection. This is not asking for you guys to get it done now. This is continuous brief conversations on how we make the system better for our students that we're actually meant to serve in this K through8 institution. And with that being said, I'll move it over to 4A, which is our student outcomes focused governance. In the fall of 2023, Kraton School District adopted a student outcomes focused governance framework to ensure a focus on improving student outcomes. This framework is grounded in six research informed competencies. investig monitoring and accountability monitor communication and collabor collaboration collabor and the last

020one continuous improvement evolution constante guided by these six competencies the board created a set of goals and guardrails. The goals reflect the community's vision for student success and the guardrails reflect community values and set boundaries for leadership. Progress monitoring the progresso within this framework. One of the most critical components is progress monitoring. Progress monitoring is a structured conversation between the board and the superintendent where we ask. Does student performance match our goals? Is there evidence of growth towards the goals? Is the strategy strong enough to produce that growth? When all this is done well, monitoring supports the district by modeling reflective leadership, clarifying strategies and next steps, setting clear priorities across the system and providing continu continuous feedback for improvement. This is how we hold ourselves accountable to the outcomes of our students and the

021outcomes they deserve. This is how governance truly serves its community. And with that being said, we will get started on goal three progress monitoring report 4. And I will turn it over to Dr. Pombo and Mr. Man. Feel free to go ahead. President Gio, um members of the board, Superintendent Man, we're excited to present this evening. This is the goal where we saw the most um improvement in go growth. So, we're excited to share what we did and and the data. And I also want to introduce um Miss Sarah Beth George. She's our coordinator for language and literacy. So, she's here to present with me. So, this goal is to increase English proficiency for emerging multilingual. The percent of emerging multilingual students that increase one or more levels on the AELA will increase from 25%

022August 2023 to 40% by August 2028. Um what I want to share when we're looking at this uh data is that we have 1,500 um emerging multilingual students. And this data um from the AELA results that we've gotten so far represents 1,200 students. So 300 of those students came from outside our district and started our school this year. So we do not have their Azela data from last year. We only have this year's data. So, we couldn't see if they grew from last year to this year. So, these are preliminary results until we get the static file to show um how all 1500 students did. So, we only have 1,200, but it's most likely that it'll be trending this way with our students. Um because some of them may have taken the Zella for the

023first time when they came to our school this year. So, we um they might not be able to be um in this data. But if you look at the data, um, our annual target was, uh, the percent of emerging multilingual students that increase one or more levels on the Azella will increase from 28% in August 2024 to 31% in August 2025. Um, and the percent of emerging multilingual students that increase one or more levels on the DNA English language arts assessment will increase from 10% in May of 2024 to 20 20% by May 2025. And our interim measure, the percent of emerging multilingual students in grades three through five that increase one or more levels of LEA will increase from 33% in May 2024 to 35% in May 2025. Um, and you can see here

024with our annual target with our preliminary results that we met the annual target based on the data that we have right now. So we got 37% and our goal was 31. Um for our one of our current measures was the percent of emerging multilingual students they increase one or more levels on the DNA English language arts benchmark assessment will increase from 10% to 20%. Now this is the assessment we're using DNA that's measuring um the ELA standards not measuring language acquisition. So it was just the only assessment we had at the time to determine if that we can predict how they'll do on the Azela assessment. So this is our DNA assessment and the growth on that assessment. So our goal was um moving from 10% to 20%. Um and so when I go to

025when we go to the next slide, you can see that we got exactly. um which shows that even though this is not measuring language acquisition that even though our zela show that they were improving with their language acquisition they also you can see it's trending upward that we're moving um also on our ELA standards so we met this measure the next one is we were really looking at our third through fifth grade um students to move one or more level on the AELA so increase from 33% to 35%. And so this is the same data where we have um 1,200 students data and then we took from there the third through fifth grade students that were of those 1,200 students. So um if you look at the next one, Dr. Pombo, I'm just going to

026interrupt you real quick and if we can go to that previous slide. I just want to point out that both of our dual language schools had the highest outcomes and I just want to say that in a public meeting in case anybody's watching and wants to say anything about our dual language programs. Thank you. Yes, we agree with that too that they showed the most growth. So if we go to the next slide, you can also see that we're trending upward from um 22 to 23 to 24. And for 25, our goal was 35% but we had 44%. And you can see that um 6% of our students increased two or more levels. That's that's amazing. Yeah. So, yay. Yes. Can I can I point something out there too that I think is important? If

027you look at 2122 and 2223, those are the two years immediately preceding the implementation of the student outcomes focused governance goals. Um, and what you'll see is while the numbers are different, they they total 27% both years. So with no change to what we were doing within the district, the numbers just remained flat, right? Um, and so but then you can see the boost we got in 2324 with the efforts that were put forward and then the additional boost in 2425. Mr. Man, so you mean to tell me that when you do different things you get different outcomes? That is that I'm just it appears to be correct and I and you know I know there's a lot of people who are involved in that work but as we talked about last year we have

028to give a lot of kudos to Sarah Beth George who who really led those efforts not only in that first year but in the second year as well. And I do want to add in the first year last year was a lot of compliance. So we were looking at compliance um with our emerging multilingual program. This year based on that compliance and classroom observations, we knew we needed to focus on instruction and training our teachers and coaching. So this year we were really focused on that cohort of teachers getting um specific training and coaching in the classroom. So whisper coaching like right neck while they're teaching there's a coach whispering to them um to improve their their teaching strategies. And so that's where I think you see the we can't correlate it exactly but that's

029the difference is one was um compliance and this year was more focusing on the instruction and thank you for sharing that Dr. for Pombo because that's one of the big things that I've seen in a different too is that we're not teaching to be compliant but it sounds like the district is moving to teaching to actually get results and that's one of the things that I think it's hard for institutions to get out of because it's so compliance compliance compliance and if you're doing X Y and Z bam so I really appreciate that the team has taken that added on step with this framework to start not being so compliant and really thinking about how Can we be compliant? And also it needs to show in our outcomes and our results and this is a

030an amazing storytelling of that. Exactly. So I really appreciate that and the compliance is is the first step like we had to have that first as a foundation before moving forward. So we're just excited to see see the results. Okay. So I'm going to turn it over to Miss George about our inputs and what we did this last quarter or update on our inputs. Yes. Okay. So, as the year closes, we have a lot of inputs that just say we've completed everything. So, you'll see that in the first two sections for professional learning and instructional coaching. We did complete all of those plans that we had in place when we look at instructional materials. Um, we have talked at previous board meetings about a program that we have specifically for groups of students who are

031multilingual learners who are at the same level on Azella. And so we can't always move staffing and students around so that students are grouped homogeneously or with at the same level, but when they are, we have a specific program that they're able to use. So for example like all pre-emergent emergent students. May I ask what would be a barrier for that to be accomplished? Staffing. Okay. The number of teachers available. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Yes. Um and so we throughout the year we increase from six to eight teachers who were able to use that program and we are using it exclusively during our summer school program. This year we're offering um a few different sections of um instruction just for our multilingual learners at the pre-emergent emergent level and we are using language power and

032we had a couple weekends ago we had our training for our summer school teachers and one of our teachers who is currently implementing it was able to train the teachers who will be using it this summer and the feedback was really positive around like I think this is great for our students and I love that a teacher who's been using it all year trained me in it so that felt Right. Um, moving forward to the family engagement, we led our final um, SEI family night. We had a significant drop in parent attendance or caregiver attendance. Um, our feedback from all of our parents remains really consistently very very positive. It is the end of the school year. The AEL is already over. Um when we when Ivan Parvahal the director of community ed and I

033who we lead these together when we were looking at like what are there anything is there anything within our control that potentially impacted this and the one thing that we identified was that we did lead it on Thursday evening before we didn't have school on Friday and so it was before a three-day weekend and we knew that when we scheduled it there was legitimately no other place uh last year when we were scheduling it. So, moving forward to scheduling next year, it's definitely something we're going to continue or we're going to look at and consider and hopefully won't be doing that next year. All right. So, then moving to our outputs, we have a slide on outputs from our teacher feedback on the foundational seminar. I know at the last board meeting we shared the

034teacher feedback as of three sessions and also our SEI cohort feedback and so we didn't have any additional SEI cohort trainings but we had one additional um foundational seminar session and so this pie chart here shows the total responses from all four sessions and then the the quotes from our feedback survey. Show spec show feedback specifically from that final session. And then from our final session from our SEI family night, we were able to recognize the parents for the the work that they've done all year. And what was really great is that we while the parents were creating thing a journal that they could use with their their children throughout the summer to continue to work on their literacy skills and we were recognizing the parents. The students were creating thank you letters and appreciation

035letters for their parents. So they came in and that's how we ended the the final session. And one of the things that we did ask on our final feedback survey um was how do you prefer these meetings in person, online or no preference? And overwhelmingly the preference was to come in person. So that is also something that we considered seeing that the the enrollment was or the attendance was dropping. So we will continue to offer them in person next year. Okay. So what is working? We'll continue to use the language power as a primary curricular resource for our language acquisition summer school. Um, next year we have six returning teachers from our teacher cohort will participate in year two and then we're adding 12 teachers to uh their first year of training. So we're just

036replicating what we did this year. We had um the teachers that were in it will continue and then we're adding 12 new teachers um to the training. So hopefully over time we'll keep adding more teachers to get this um very specific training. what needs more attention. Um we will have well this is what's going to happen is we're going to have four teaching and learning language acquisition coaches. This past year we had language and literacy and they were responsible for both. So we're separating that where we have four language coaches and four literacy coaches so we can concentrate on literacy and language. Um those coaches won't be spread as thin. Um then we're also um having a language acquisition coordinator because there's a lot that goes with Sarah Beth trying to do both having someone

037in charge of language acquisition. Um and then our summer school program will have six classes specifically for multilingual learners. So this year we aligned our summer school to the goals. So all the classes that we're offering are offered based on data and and they're aligned to our four goals. And then we did have a lot of questions from our board. So we tried to put one on each slide. Some of these questions are from last time that Sarah Beth and I said we'd come back and give an answer. Um and then we have some future ones. So I'm going to turn over to Sarah Beth and I'll add anything if we have any other questions. Okay. All right. So one of the questions was around how many teachers we have who are teaching that targeted

038time which is ELEL's only or I'm sorry multilingual learners only driven by our English language proficiency standards versus how many teachers are teaching that integrated time which is the content leads the instruction and scaffolds are provided for the multilingual learners. And so, um, in the fall, we have all of the assistant principles complete their list of teachers and who's teaching what. And so, these are three separate numbers. So, teach, we have 43 teachers in the school district who only teach that targeted instruction to multilingual learners only. Um, we have 35 teachers responsible for both sets of instruction and 72 um that teach only integrated instruction. and that piece that says integrated instruction sometime depending on the SEI model that is used and the staffing and student number situation at that particular school. Um, the integrated

039minutes might be ELA minutes or it might be a content area like history or math or science. And this I just I added just as a visual rep visual explanation of what different models are available. So this picture here is the one from the Department of Education. And in our district, we use the pullout model, the 2-hour model, and the 5050 DI model. We don't have a newcomer SEI model program in our district right now. So this shows you visually where students are receiving which type of instruction throughout the day. And then con. So we the question was around how many teachers before and then this one is how many students are receiving instruction from each model. So you can see that the majority of our students in our school district. This year we're receiving

040instruction through the pullout model which is two hours of English language instruction with one hour being targeted and one inte one hour integrated. um and the DLI model with the lowest number of courses at two of our schools. Um how is it determined? Is it on a school by school basis to determine which models they're using or Yes. And so is there any requirement as to a minimum number of models that they're using? Because I noticed there's more than one on a few of these, but then some of them they're only using one, right? So, uh, it there's the short answer is no. There was not a minimum. So, to to clarify, it just depends on staffing and the master course schedule. So, like some schools, we might be able to be able to do

041the two-hour model in like K3, but in 48, we were only able to do one pull out because there not enough teachers. Um so when the students are in regular ELA class and say for instance that class has 40 students and 20 of them are um emerging multilingual so 20 are here and the other 20 have to go over here with another teacher for two hours or one hour depending on how much time we have um or how much time we have with that teacher right and so sometimes it doesn't work like with this teacher's left with 40 kids and this teacher has five you know so it just depends on master course scheduling so we're this year we're recomd recommending that we know with research that the 2-hour model is more effective. So, we're

042trying to make that work whenever we can in the master course scheduling and the the number of staff needed or the staff intensiveness of the model depends on the number of students that would be involved in Yes. and also the so it's the number of students and also the ratio of students who need the English language instruction versus mainstream instruction. And so when I I do want to point out I just noticed those Macken numbers need to be moved over. So it says that there are 121 students at Macken receiving the DI model. That is incorrect. I apologize. Um those need to be moved. Yes, that is not true. Um, I will fix it and I will send you I will well through Dr. Pombo I will send you the updated um numbers. And so

043when we look at like staffing for example, if we have two second grade teachers and we have 60 students and 30 are multilingual learners and 30 are non-English learners, then that's a very easy split, right? And so we can easily do the two-hour model where for two hours of the day, all of the students who are learning English in the SEI model will go to one teacher and all of the other students will go to the other teacher. What gets tricky is when you have where those numbers are significantly different. So if you have five English learners and 55 mainstream students, we that that's where you would need a third person sometimes to be able to pull. So generally speaking, it would be fair to say then that in um schools that have lower ELLL

044student populations, that's where the difficulty lies typically. Yes. Typically. And sometimes it's not just the school, it's by grade level. Correct. You you could have a school like I mean this is going to sound really weird. We may see more of this specifically by grade level as we get better and better at reclassifying kids cuz what happens is when you get up to seventh grade if we reclassified all but four students, right? You've kind of created your own problem, but you've created your own problem in a good way because you know when that same cohort of kids was in first grade, it might have been 32 kids that were you know are emerging uh multilingual students. And it's just that we've reclassified 27. Right. Gotcha. I'll give an example that we were working on this

045week. So Kennedy is a smaller school. So they have one teacher per grade level. So if you have one teacher with like 35 students or let's say 30 students or whatever it is, there's not another teacher for them to pull. So then we have to be creative with how to do that. So it also happens with smaller schools like not having the staff. So what Sarah Beth um works on too is writing a grant to get an SEI teacher, but we usually don't find that out until July July. So like a school like that, we say, "Okay, let's put the SEI teacher there because then they can pull from all the grade levels." Um but it's just every school has a different problem. So that's that's we're just pro trying to figure it out on

046a puzzle of the best way to meet the needs of the students. Gotcha. Yes. And I do also want to highlight that the models can be selected and determined by student, not necessarily just by grade level or school. So for example, when you look at Builtmore, this year was their final year that they had the traditional model with students who are not participating in the dual language immersion program. And so from that class of eighth graders, two of those students were also multilingual learners. And so since they were not part of the DLI model, we had to create a pull out model for those students. And um another thing we've been I've been working closely with the exceptional student services department um because there are some cases where a student who is receiving special education

047services, the way the schedules work might end up on a different SEI model than the rest of the kids in their grade level. Gotcha. Thank you for always understanding all that. No, that's a good question because we it's we've been trying to figure it out with every especially this time of the year because we are knee deep in figuring this out with every campus. Any other questions on this slide? I'm very embarrassed about those numbers. I will fix that. Oh gosh. You didn't tell us we wouldn't know. I heard whispering back there. Yeah, it is. it um it's an automated I I've put in formulas into spreadsheets. Each school has a different tab and then it's all calculated on one tab. So I just need to move just need to shift one of those columns.

048Not only are you great at this, apparently you're good at Excel. So you should give yourself a pat on the back. Yes, I will. Well, thank you. And so there was a question last time about what was the third most common home language. I was like, I know I have the data. I just don't have it memorized. And so when I went back and looked at it, it is Somali with 19 students, which is a significant difference between our second most common language, which is nearly um 2500 students who speak Spanish. And then the the other student the other languages are grouped by the number of students. This is super helpful. I appreciate this. Yeah, me too. I It's nice to see because it I think in the past we've had conversations where it just

049is hard to say. So it's nice to see this. Yes. And it it's it's one of the things I had to I have to ask every time because for some reason it's hard for me to remember. Um but we have the two other sets of language. We have other non-Indian and other Indian languages. So um other non-Indian languages we have 29 students and then um we have where's the other one other Indian then second to last bullet point which is three students each and those are federal labels gotcha that we use those are not labels and so Larara Janicki who is our synergy wiz she repeatedly has to remind me that other Indian what That means it c it can be a Native American language or it can be a language from India. Okay. What

050in the Okay. Correct. When we have our commentary about that, that is what that means. And um we do have so there and and those are going to be languages that are really that are that are not very common, right? Because we do have some Native American languages that are called out separately on their own like you see Navajo. Um, San Carlos Apache is here and then I know like Yaki is another one we've had in the past and so then other non-Indian would be any other language in the world. So very uncommon. So even though that number 29 is larger than the Somali which is multiple different languages that we don't have identified. Okay. I think I had also may I did I I feel like this maybe I had been the one that

051asked this question but I can't remember because I think I was curious if we had and I think my my thinking behind it was um not that it helps with this thing but also translating to our guard rails with uh family supports um in terms of um like a Somali like community liaison or somebody who would be able to like serve in some sort of role in that way. Just like an idea for the future. Yeah. I think the challenge is like you see that there's the 19 students there that speak Somali. It's not just that they're spread out. It's also that we have a much larger number of students from Somalia. It's just that in Somalia, not everyone speaks. They don't all speak Yeah. Somalia. So the challenge is we would actually need representatives

052that speak either multiple languages or a broad or we would need a broad range of multiple um individuals which doesn't mean that there's not a pathway to that. One of the things that I don't know if we've made any headway on, but we've been talking about is there is um some sort of I don't know that it's technically a consulate, but there is some sort of Somali organization here um either within the district or adjacent to the district um that I know we've had intention to do outreach to to see if they could support. Yeah. Yeah. Um I know I don't think well he's no Mktar is no longer on the Baltz board but had been involved in that organization in the past and I think yeah there's definitely resources there and the numbers are

053changing. I actually had to look at a report today and there are now 25 students with Somalia as the home language. Um, and one so this really is home language which is identified through the home language survey which has three questions on it and if a family answers anything other than English on that form it's listed as a home language. that doesn't always mean that that's the preferred language of the family. And so I can't remember if I talked about this the last time or not, but we're currently working our educational secretaries are working on completing an additional field in Synergy, which is the correspondence language. And so we have now on our enrollment forms um for the incoming school year, it will ask home language and also correspondence language. And so that will give

054us a better count of how many families need translation. Cool. So we're almost there. Sorry, I have a question regarding like the targeted versus integrated instruction. Yes. Um because I I know we've gone over it a few times I think with Jay and with even Dr. Dupin, but I was like ah it's so much to wrap your head around. It is. Um so for like the integrated instruction that would be like say in their like home room classroom with their peers, right? And then the teacher what you said scaffolds that lesson. Um, oh sorry now I just lost my question. Um so sorry let me go to so of so so that that essentially means that almost any teacher or or are are they so so when the students are placed in the classroom is

055like any special attention like put on like oh you know like here we have these multilingual learners and so I don't know if this this might go down to like the principles. So are they then put like okay this teacher is a really great integrated instructor. What if there I'm just wondering if there's a teacher who's like maybe a new teacher or maybe is absolutely a fair question. Multilingual learners like how like how do we ensure that our multilingual learners are placed in a classroom with a teacher who is capable or maybe experienced with the the integrated teaching or even with like the targeted teaching if it's in one of those. Um, absolutely. Anyways, yes. So, we do there's a couple of different things to highlight. I throw my papers everywhere. Uh, so compliancewise, there

056is an SEI endorsement in the state of Arizona. And so, any teacher who is teaching multilingual learners or what the state would call an English learner in our state needs to have their SEI endorsement. So they've had 40 I think it's 45 hours of training specifically on how to scaffold instruction and teach language explicitly. So when we can those teachers are prioritized for having English learners in their classroom and the other piece is if you know due to the staffing shortage right that's not always an option and so what is then the next step is that we have to have a plan in place for that teacher to become SEI endorsed and so that's something that the site administration works with HR on um and just so that's the compliance answer and then the like

057qualitative answer is we do our absolute best and one thing that I can say because I've worked with all of our principles and assistant principles on this is that they are always looking out for our multilingual learners and make specific choices about which teacher get is teaching targeted and integrated instruction and when I shared before that sometimes integrated instruction might be in math or in less. Yeah. Um and so let's look at the the pullout model for example. So when we look at the students who are in the pull out model that two hours is specifically is is related to English language arts instruction. So a teacher who teaches English language arts is delivering either the targeted or the integrated instruction. And then when you look at the two and that would actually be the

058same when you look at the 50/50 model, DLI model. When you're looking at the 2hour model, that 120 minutes, that 2 hours of their English language arts block is all targeted instruction. And then there's an additional class that needs to be integrated. And that's the example where you will see students getting their integrated instruction from math or science or history. And I will tell you that that conver that com that that question you just asked is taken into consideration and that's one of the reasons why some campuses might have the math teacher doing the integrated and some might have the science or the history because they are looking to see which is the best teacher to be able to do this for these kids. Thank you. And the one piece on here you'll see the

059different numbers like 60. So when you're looking at the pullout model it'll say 6050 and integrated 6050. That first number is 4K5 and that second number is 468. Okay. I was wondering that. Thank you. So many details, right? It's gonna add that the targeted instruction, those are the teachers that we have in the cohort as many as possible and the integrated instruction we have them going to PD on our quarterly foundational seminar. Okay. I think that's okay. I think you might have may have answered it but as far as determining what model is being used that is then up to it's individual by school based on like their staffing and it yes is that something that just like the principal decides or is that like a team decision or how does so our guidance is

060that um we really need our students as much as possible to be either in the dual language immersion model at those two sites or in the 2-hour model. And so that is the first step and that's what we start with. So make your your master course schedule for the 2-hour model. And then once the assistant principles get into it and this is the process that we're in right now, they find that that's not always possible. And so then we look at well do can we make this work? Can we be creative and figure it out or do we need to move to the pullout model? And um it is so the each so we have um four coordinators in our department and so each coordinator works with specific assigned schools like two or three of

061them to work this out and then um if we need to switch from the two-hour to the pull out or if like in the case of Larry C. Kennedy when we're like we we just can't figure it out with the number of teachers and students that we have then we go to Dr. Pombo and work from there. But it does have to be approved by me or the incoming director if they're going to do a different model besides a two-hour model. Okay. After we try to figure out every way that we can make the schedule work, any other questions, Not at the moment. Let me Thank you. Stop looking at my mistake. All right. Okay. So, these are the questions that were sent via email. And so, one question was, "What predictive indicators are we

062using prior to the release of the Azela data to identify students, classrooms, or campuses in midyear intervention?" And so we this is a very big question that we could talk about for a really long time. Um is in terms of data. So like qualitative we qualitatively we look at coaching and classroom observations right and then quantitatively when we're looking at data for predictive indicators with numbers. Um we that is something we're looking forward to being able to identify with a focused group that is focused only on language acquisition. So since we are splitting the language literacy team into a team of language and literacy um our coaches and new coordinator will be able to come up with a plan for that. some of the things that we have been talking about. We we've had discussions

063here about we our interim measures we look at DNA and that's not necessarily the best indicator and we've talked about you know there are different things that we were exploring and we have actually I think this was in a different question but um we have landed on we still need to explore the potential things that we have talked about before here as options are not going to give us what we were hoping they would. So, we are still looking to see what can we do. Um I do want to add um Sarah Beth George that this this um Thursday like super superintendent man just shared we're going to be exploring intram measures that are predictive and so this is the process we're going to be going through on Thursday. So that's why it says potential

064options because we're going to have the team of u people that are working on the language acquisition goal um to explore intram measures for this and what we could look at as a predictive measure. Yes. And one of the really exciting things that will be new for next year and is already ready to go is that we have um with our consultant and our language literacy instructional coaches. They have designed a specific scope and sequence for writing and grammar for our language for our multilingual learners in the SEI targeted time. So in when you look at the pull out model and you've got half and half like half integrated half targeted that targeted time will always be writing and grammar and we have now a specific scope and sequence that's merged into our unit guides

065for that. And so where you see the common formative assessments that's the next step is to create those common formative assessments aligned to the unit guides they just created last month. Amazing. Sorry, I just uh thought of something that popped into my head. Um, of course, thinking back to yesterday's um briefing that I attended, is there a way to um on this show us where our our sped students, multilingual learners are with their like what's the word? Disagregate the the data to kind of include a line for them specifically. Does that mean we can definitely do that in the future in educ um different subgroups and and look at their data that way. It's one of the reasons we added that tool set. So before you'd have to like have Tyson do a research project

066to pull it out. Now we'll actually be able to go into the new system and set filters and be able to filter down, you know, to look at either specific groups or answer specific questions. And it and it could be multilingual learners who also are, you know, tagged as a special education student. They could be tagged as a gifted student. You could even put combinations of tags in and be able to get to very specific groups of students. So, yes, and I can share with you because I just finished this count last night. This was a hand count because we're still working on getting everything in Head to Climber. Um, but 20% of our multilingual learners are also receiving special education services and I just shared that today and Gretchian responded. So, I know that

067it's not new information. So, she knows that. Thank you. Sorry not not to call attention again to to the page with the mistake. But let's go for it. Uh, we need to change the PA to the to IMA. Yes, that. Yes, I will. Yes. Yes, I will. This is from the spreadsheet we're using all year. So, I absolutely will do that when I send you the correct version. It looks beautiful. All right. So this question is I mean that's the reality. We have over 30 home languages, right? So with over 30 home languages, how are SEI instructional supports differentiated by language group or acquisition patterns to address unique linguistic challenges? So one thing is like one piece of information is that our adopted ELA resources do provide specific guidance to teachers. It's an additional resource

068that's in their platform. We also have it linked on our internal language acquisition site and it's it's really fascinating if you're interested and it shows what those different acquisition patterns are based on home language. So that's a resource that is available. Um one of the the realities is that we do prioritize strategies that scaffold language instruction across the proficiency levels using the researchbased strategies regardless of home language. And so we explicitly, especially with our new um scope and sequence of writing and grammar instruction, we're explicitly teaching how the English language works as opposed to teaching in a way that relies on the home language. So, for example, if you're like, for example, when I was a a language learner of Spanish and English was my home language, I learned that the adjectives and the nouns

069are switched in the two languages, right? And that's how the instruction was given to me. And so that would be relying on that pattern versus explicitly teaching this is the rule in the new language and providing scaffolds to help the students and the learners really put that together in a new context without relying on attaching it to their prior context. And so um we the reality is that these students are spread across nine campuses and nine grade levels. So that 19 that we saw for Somali that speak Somali is a home language. The first consideration is that's home language of all of our students in the district. It's not the home language necessarily if they're language learners. So the number might be smaller even though again today I looked it up and it was 25

070but that is I mean it is it's spread across so far that it's it it is really hard to be able to group students by language acquisition pattern. All right. Considering 49% of our multilingual learners are still at the pre-emergent emergent level. what supports are in place to accelerate growth beyond current trends? So, that is an excellent question and something we've been really working on this year. Um, one, so one of the considerations is to consider a newcomer program. We did not have the capacity to do that this year and we also needed to take time to really figure out who these multilingual learners are who are at the pre-emergent emergent level. So some of them really legitimately are newcomers within their first couple of years of being in our school system in the United

071States and some are not. And so that's that was one piece of information that we've had to work through. And so in the interim of that, we did land on providing summer school for for multilingual learners specifically to pre-emer students at the pre-emergent emergent level with two or fewer years of English language instruction. So what we did as soon as we received the newella data is we identified at each grade level who which students are at the pre-emergent emergent level. Then from there, which students had the lowest subtest score for reading? And from there, which students have been in have been receiving English language services for two or fewer years. So those are the students that were invited to our summer school. So that is currently happening right now. Correct. Would it start on Monday?

072Monday. Sorry. Yes. We are currently still recruiting. We still have a few spots open. Um and so our lead facilitator and um Azela clerk we are working frantically. They've made hundreds of phone calls in the past couple of days. And roughly what's the capacity of those students? How many students are we planning to have in that summer school? Um so six classes, okay, of about 15 kids each. Okay. And so our summer school this year is one summer school program for the whole district. So, it is much smaller than we've been able to provide in the past, which is a summer school program for each school. And how will the district know if that intervention for the summer actually produces outcomes for the next year? Excellent question. So, at this point, we are planning on

073using the language power unit assessments. So since that is the primary curriculum resource there will be we aren't doing a pre-post test of the program because there are like 11 units of the program but they're doing a pre and post test for each unit. Okay. So we'll and depending on the grade level they'll complete two or three units. Thank you. So, another support that we have in place is that we do have that program specifically for students at the pre-emergent emergent levels. Um, and we've talked about our master course schedules being designed with the intent to really allow for that to our model as much as we can. Um, we also would like to be able to explore SEI stand staffing allocations by site as a practice. I know that involves finances and a lot

074of other things but that is something that we expressed. Um and then we also so with the increased capacity of a team of five specifically for language acquisition um at the curriculum department level we'll be able to better explore that feasibility. um one of the the the pieces that I was looking at um last night. So when I got that 20% number of I'm so sorry I need to correct what I said when I said 20% of students that was not of all of our language learners. It was 20% of our language learners at the pre-emergent emergent level are receiving special education services. when you look so not of all of our language learners I I have that written here but I'm glad I'm coming back to this so of our students at the pre-emergent

075emergent level 20% are receiving special education services I will tell you that the majority of our students who are receiving special education services fall within that two or more years I mean it's still like half the number of students that it would have been if it's 20% of the Yes. And so when we look at so then just our pre-emergent just our students who are at the pre-emergent emergent level based on this last spring assessment 43% of those students just completed their first year of SEI services. Oh wow. And so um then when we look at so that just like speaks to they're not all newcomers, right? So we are lot of exploration talks and we'll the next the new team will be ready to to move forward with that work. Perfect. All right. On

076a positive note, what can we learn from schools where students have already exceeded growth expectations such as those moving multiple AELA levels and how are we capturing and replicating those promising practices districtwide? So now that we have the results, we really can dive in and analyze that data. Again, we just received them. We haven't had the ability to dive in deeply yet, but we are really excited to be able to do that and also use that data combined with our learning walk data and other coaching observation pieces of data and being able to move forward with those teachers as leaders on their campuses supported with the instructional coaches. And that's part of the work for coming up. So we're going to learn educing walk data and look at how did the kids grow in those

077classrooms that the the teachers that got the training. And I'm I'm interested to seeing that kind of data because there could be some probably under other other trends in there that we haven't seen. So I am I'm excited for that. I think that's the last question. That is the last question unless you have more for us. I just wanted to say thanks for that last helpful acronym slide. I think that's super helpful for people if they're reviewing this online. Yes, that is courtesy of Tyson Myers. Put that in for us. Yay, Tyson. Thank you. And then um we will be updating this presentation now that the meeting has happened with the with the updated one. Yes. Okay. After I give you the corrected, right, we can't do it. We can't attach it to the meeting,

078but in our postings to our repository, it'll be the updated version. All right. Cool. Thank you, board members. Do we have any other questions? Any comments? All right. It doesn't look like it. I really really appreciate all the information and I'm glad that some of these questions, even though we just got it, there's I still see a synergy. Questions are being asked, but it's already like you guys are working on it. So, I I love how aligned the board and the admin team has been on this journey. So, I appreciate that. Thank you. I echo that. It's great to be like, "Yes, we were thinking that too. Let's share." And with that hearing no more questions or comments, I want to proudly um move that the governing board approves goal three progress monitoring report 4.

079Second. All those in favor? I I Any hearing? None. A motion passes. And thank you so much. I I I literally want to applaud that and we should all applaud because that's a great great turnout that we had and meeting one of our goals. That's that's great. Thank you guys. All right. And that brings us to our next report which is goal four progress monitoring report number four. And Sarah Beth George and I are here for this goal for literacy. But next yes a new one for language. All right. So this is goal number four, report for and this goal is increase reading proficiency for all third graders. Um the percent of third grade student that score proficient on the state assessment English language arts will increase from 18% in August 2023 to 41% by

080August 2028. Um now this one you can already see with the data we have a lot of reflection and obviously a lot of work ahead of us. Um but it gave us an opportunity to reflect on um what we need to do moving forward. Um so the percent of third grade students that scored proficient on this the AASA English language arts will increase from 17% to 22% in August of 2025. And this is the same thing. This is our preliminary results that we have. Um and our goal was 22 and we have 12%. Um, and then we the interim measures were the percent of third grade students that score proficient on DNA English language arts benchmark assessment will increase from 3% to 10%. And the current measure 4.2 the percent of third grade students that

081pass the fastbridge a reading screener will increase from 8% May 2024 to 20% by May 2025. And then the third interim measure is the percent of kindergarten students that score at or above the benchmark on the FastBridge literacy screener will increase from 11% of August 2024 to 18%. And then um just to be clear, I know it's a preliminary number, but it's highly unlikely that even after the final ones come in, we're not going to be going up 10%. No. Just making sure that everybody's Yeah. Yeah. Um, we did want to add this slide just to show because we are going to be coming up with interim measures for this goal on Thursday and we want to make sure that it's predictive. And so we wanted to look at what did DNA predict before and

082then what did we actually get on the state assessment. So as you can see like in 23 predicted that we would get 13% and we got 18% because we always know that the DNA we score lower than we do on the state assessment. Then 2024 was 12% and was 17%. So when we predicted that we would be at 22, we were basing it off these um these previous test scores. The one thing that's different this year with the 2025 is that this is the first year that the oral reading fluency part of the test was counted. We don't know how much of that affected the score, but that's the major thing that is different from the previous years that DNA predicted it um predicted that we would get 12 I mean sorry 16% and we

083got 12. Um but the DNA assessment has been the same every year. So it does show on the DA DNA assessment that we're getting better. So um it looks like we have something that we need to use as a predictive measure for the oral reading fluency and also for writing right to increase to be able to predict how we'll do on this assessment. So that's kind of our preliminary reflection before we meet with our team this week of looking at DNA and the state assessment. Do you think just I mean I know it's early on but do you foresee having to adopt like two different things or do you think there's a tool out there that we already have that we use that can look at the fluency as well as Yeah, I think we

084can use something that we already have. Okay. I think part of it is when we get these um the final assessment like the um static file and everything, we can see where our scores went down and compare it to last year. like we don't have that right now to be able to see what area did we need to focus on for next year that why this wasn't as predictive as before. Gotcha. If you look at the data pattern here, you know, it's likely what's changed because you can literally see that a 1% shift represented a 1% shift in the two prior years. So, it was exceptionally highly correlated. and to have a flip like that really it's it's difficult to explain that if we didn't know that there was an additional area that counted as

085part of the result. So um hopefully the team will be able to disagregate like like Dr. Pombo said based on being able to get deeper into the data. Um but one thing I would say is we're going to do our best to select something that is highly predictive. One of the challenges that we'll have is depending on what it is, we may there's no way for us to have longitudinal data because we will only have the one year's data where the scoring system was changed. So, um it may I'm not saying we won't do a great job next year, but it is also possible that it may take us two or three years to really be able to dial in um the specificity. Um, even if the tool's highly accurate, whatever tool you're using is

086correlated, right? So, you need to figure out what the appropriate cut scores are because it's rarely a onetoone relationship between what you're using as a predictor and what the scores are on the state. And forgive me if this was already said, but um, how are we anticipating these types of changes on the AASA? Are they telling us ahead of time or are we finding out after the fact? No, we we we knew that that that was going to be counted this year. But did we already know that DNA didn't have a fluency factor then in its assessment? Yes, and we do so we do assess fluency on our fast bridge screeners and so this it is it is something that that we've been working on. Um we in our language and literacy group of coaches,

087we were working with our um technology integration coach and we had almost all of our third grade classes practicing fluency assessments um digitally and and doing different things with that. So it is something that we knew. Um, and our students also, well, our students who are currently in fourth grade, they did take the oral reading fluency component of AASA last year as a pilot. The data wasn't included in any of the results, but we did also have that practice as educators last year going through it, even though it was new. It is it is new for this the third graders. And then I don't mean to get so far into the weeds here, but um what exactly does this look like in in uh in practice in terms of how do you assess oral reading

088fluency? So oral reading fluency involves a lot and the measure really is words per minute. Okay. It's it's accurate words per minute and the logistics of that is speaking into a device or correct on the state test. Yes. On FastBridge it's reading to um a person and then the the scorer is marking the words that are correct and incorrect. Okay. On the state test, sorry I know um no these are good question. In which way are they able to assess who what is it? a human on the other end assessing it eventually or is it some computer? I believe it's AI. I was going to say are we taking into account people's uh accents or people's misprononunciation of words but they've really got it or I mean I have a lot of questions about this.

089Yeah, that's fair. So do we. Sorry, I'm getting into like a cross-examination here and we've really down the issue, but you are not the witness that I needed to ask you these questions to. I'm happy to step down. I love that reflection. You don't even have to plead the fifth because we literally don't know. I feel like we This was a question that was asked and I I believe that it is AI, but I'm not confident. It's hard to imagine that they would have enough staff to there's every they're not even answering the hotline calls. I don't think they're going to be listening to the little test. And I know the tool that we were using with teachers to have students practice did score with AI. So the students read into their iPad and they

090do get an immediate score that is scored with AI. And so they do have that is something that they do have practice of. They can they and their teacher know how they're typically scored versus how they typically speak. Gotcha. Okay. But if if you've um interacted with AI at all, you might have more questions. Well, from the speechto text text that I received from my dad, I can only assume that it's not very good. I can just share as a person that uses captions all the time, it doesn't it's not accurate. I have to kind of guess sometimes what what it's saying. And when my mother-in-law uses it, my wife receives text messages addressed to Wayne and and her name is when I will clarify that is not an Aegis comment. My dad has a

091southern accent and there's no way I understand anything that is coming through on the text message. Sometimes I think there's an emergency happening and that is not the case. So I can only imagine what is happening on these exams. Yeah. So the next slide is um our intram measure the percent of third grade students that score proficient on the DNA English language arts benchmark assessment will increase from 3% to 10%. Um and so if you look at the if you look at the end result at the bottom we got 16%. Um and so we did meet this interim measure, but obviously um it wasn't predictive of how we did on the assessment, but you can see on the graph that um that the students are improving throughout the year compared to even the previous year

092on the U DNA assessment. I just have a quick question like how many more um rounds of the DNA test you think we would have to do when it's not showing enough predictiveness for us to be and I know this is kind of like a weird question but at some point if it's not showing the predictivity when do we just pull the trigger and say hey like this has gone for far too long it's not being predictive what are we doing next because we can have endless conversations for another year two years three years and just be stuck in the same cycle. So, at what point are we saying, you know, this is amount of test or amount of time if it's not working, we we really just have to move on. We can't continue

093having these conversations. Does that make sense? Thursday would be my answer. I love that. Okay, perfect. But tell me if I'm right. Yeah. Okay. Sometimes I get a little out there. Okay, perfect. Thank you. I think we can look into like were we the only district that experienced that? Yeah, that's I was that was in my mind as well because they did you say I would like to be able to look into are we the only district that experienced this like change in predict it seemed like in the past it did predict like um we always scored better than what our DNA assessment said and then we also uh based on the cohort training that u Mr. Shapiro and I have gone through is looking at the predictive factors and so we asked for their

094um linking studies and their research um and then also how it because obviously other districts use this to see um the to see if it's predictive or not. So we just got those linking studies. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Um the next interim measure is third grade students that pass the fastbridge A reading screener from 8 8% to 20%. And this one um we met this interim measure for the fastbridge a screener. So, going back to the original question about um monitoring oral reading fluency, the A-reading screener for third grade is one component. It's like one screener. There is also an oral reading fluency screener that all of our students do take. So, that as we're looking at in measures be one that we add. And then you can see from last year they ended with

09513% and this year is 20%. And as we showed before, each time they take the assessment, the the cut cut score gets higher because they're throughout the year they get they have to be able to get more correct than they did the beginning of the year. And so there is an improvement from last year from 13% to 20% this year. Okay. And um just one thing I I I want to and I made this comment earlier, but I want to clarify it again. There's really two things that we need to take into account as we're looking to these. one is is the tool correct? The other one is are we setting the cut scores that we're using as indicators of success correct? So there's actually there's there's kind of multiple elements that we need to

096assess. Um but then the other piece of it is like we've got this other screener that's that's related to oral reading fluency. Now that we actually have scores to assess, one of the things we may be able to do is look at how those results relate to the test results we've received this year, which will give us at least some indication if there's a possibility that might need to be one of our interim measures for next year, accurate um predictive reflection of what the results might be. Um Dr. said she can add to this. Do you want to come up and add what your what you did at your school? So, we use just to answer the question and and as a person who has a lisp, it doesn't always pick up what I'm saying

097accurately. Um, it's kind of a running joke in my family that we speak Amy. Um, so because I don't edit my text. Um so for our students it was really eyeopening for them as they were um they were they we were using the AI tool in Seesaw for it to grade their oral reading fluency and then they would practice the passages throughout the week. And so the first time the kids saw their scores they're like that's what I got and it's like well let's talk about it and let's look at it. You said the word um they instead of them. Does it really change the meaning of the context? and they said, "No, it doesn't really change the meaning when you're you're reading the context of the text, but it does count it wrong." Or

098sometimes there were accents or people with um speech impediment speech impediments like someone like myself that it doesn't always accurately pick those things up. So our student, it was very eye opening for the students. And so we said, you know, instead of trying to go as fast as you absolutely can, you want to read, you know, part of reading fluently is reading with accuracy, taking your time, making sure you're reading all of the words correctly. So we did see that that shift with our kids, but it gave them that they were the ones that are like, I said that word right. I know I said it right. um or sometimes it might um when the whole class was doing it, it might actually pick up if a student was too close to them. Um just

099one of the weirdest things that's coming up for me and thank you so much for saying that which now is bringing this up is one of the things that I've learned and have my coach or my leadership has helped me is my coaching and how I record myself and I have watched myself right and I know sometimes with student it's hard to record students and stuff but what does that look like having students hear themselves as they're practicing this test because if they're hearing themselves it's different from you saying well when you did that two seconds ago it was wrong but if they're catching themselves and I just think, you know, sometimes that's helped me in my coaching when I'm they make me watch my own videos and and hear me and that's how I

100can improve because now I know, oh yeah, now I'm seeing it. It's kind of like we always bring it back to sports, right? If you're if you're in a sports team or you're a dancer, I've been a dancer for many years. They always make me watch my own videos so then I can perfect myself. I'm wondering if that's a tactic that we can use for students on when they're doing this and if this is something new, having them record themselves and then they hear themselves so they know what to correct moving forward. Absolutely. And that is something that um we're working on bringing to more teachers through the Seessaw app that Amy was talking about, Dr. Bras. And also that translate to our coaching model. We have part of it is our teachers recording themselves.

101So they can when their coach and the coach watches the the recording and they watch it and they talk about what to improve because you can improve faster when you watch a video. Yeah. Cuz I know Seesaw helps with the lower kids, the lower grades, right? It's not something they do. And that has actually helped even in my case as a parent because sometimes I can hear my daughter when they're doing certain things in classroom and then I'll go back and pull it but that's just me being extra. Um but yeah, that's I think that's a a great mechanism on how we reflect and hear ourselves and then take corrective action based off of that. Um the next the next one is looking at our kindergarteners, kindergarten students, because they will be the ones that

102are um uh in 2028, the cohort, the students that score at or above the benchmark on the FastBridge literacy screener will increase from 11% to 18%. Um and if you look at that if you go to the next slide we um got 20% when our goal was 18% and it went and last year we ended at 17 and this year we ended at 20%. So there is some improvement with our um from compared to the previous year and then the next slide um Sarah Beth George will give update on our input. All right. Okay. So in terms of professional learning, we were talking about the foundational training on how to use our new intervention materials. And so our goal was that 80% of our K8 ELA teachers will have engaged in training. And we had

103not met that goal um by September 30th, which was the end of the vendor training. And so in the spring semester, what we did to catch more of those teachers and provide support to the teachers who were not able to attend the vendor training was our language and literacy coaches provided that onetoone and small group training to 51 teachers across their when you add up all of their schools. That's how many additional teachers we were able to serve and train. Um, and then in terms of instructional materials, we the updates are from February and May. So, I know last time I shared I'd only I sorry, I didn't have the February data yet um included in here. I'd only had the December data. So, I added the February data and the May data that shows

104the usage of our newly purchased intervention materials. And then again we have our family engagement this year. Oh this last so in the professional learning we had another input was our training seminar for how to implement small groupoup rotations. And so last time they came they shared the data up until their third session. And so at this point we've completed all four sessions and we have a hundred responses from all four sessions. And so we've updated that pie chart. And then again the feedback from the teachers is specifically from that fourth and final session. Okay. All right. One of the pieces that we wanted to share was our third grade students at risk of retention. And so this so our move on when reading legislation says that students in third grade are at risk of

105being retained if they do not meet a specific cut score on the third grade reading portion of the third grade test. And each year we receive a list of students in the middle of May who are eligible for retention. And so in going back to 2022 we had 23 students eligible for retention, then 29 and 21. And so this year we have 16 students who are eligible for retention. And as a result of summer school we can have students retake the post test. um and if they make significant growth to show that they have advanced in their reading skills, they're able to move into fourth grade. And so you can see how that has worked out each year. And then obviously we don't have those numbers yet for this year, but that is something that

106we're proud of that that number is decreasing. And that's just and when you the 23 29 216 that's districtwide, correct? Okay. Thank you. But we wanted to show this because even though um the state assessment shows we went down, there's other areas that showing that are that we're improving and so going from 23 or 29 to down to 16 students um you know some we are showing some improvement that that our students we have less students that we have to retain. Yeah, thank you retain potentially. Yes, we'll see. I don't think I've ever and I really appreciate all this output information specifically with this move on when reading because I don't think I've ever seen any of this data in the last five years I've been on the board. So I appreciate this. Uh could

107I ask a question? What what are the conditions for them not or or not being promoted or being retained versus not reading proficiently which is right the concerning number of the of our you know uh the overall goal right we wanted to increase from 18% to 41% over five years so most People hear only 18% of our third graders are reading proficiently but then I look at this number and it's so this is so the cut score I don't know what the exact cut score is for the state but it is not all of the students who are not reading proficiently. So they let's say we have this many students who are minimally proficient. This group down here would be the group that is eligible for retention. But how bad is that? It's so it's

108I I don't know the specific numbers. I just know they are the lowest performing students in the state and when they that they take all of the state numbers to create the the cut score that they use. Oh, so it's just it's compared against other students. That's my understanding. My my understanding too is that it all the students that are mentally proficient do not fall in this like what Sarah Beth is sharing is that it's the bottom of the minimally proficient that are um sent the the names are um for are eligible for retention. Okay. It's part of why the category is not not proficient because there is some level of proficiency but that but within the that group of students who are minimally proficient there's a broad variance and so this you know I

109I can't I can't verify this at the moment my understanding is the same as as the teams is that that number shifts from year to year. It's not like a hard you know this is the the cut score. It has to do with sort of the students in the lowest percentage grouping. I get it now. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. I wasn't that's what I figured but I just wanted to clarify what yes condition of course and I would like to add so when when we put here number of students eligible for retention that is that differentiates the number of students on that list that we receive from the state. So the list that we receive from the state based on cut scores is larger than 16. Um but there are different exemptions that students have.

110And so one exemption is if they have received fewer than if they are an English learner or multilingual learner who's received less than three years of SEI instruction, they are exempt from this number. And then another one is if they are receiving special education services for reading and the IEP team has determined that retention is not in the students best interest then those students are exempt. So from that list that we received the original list our number becomes smaller once we take into account students who are not or who are versus are not exempt. And then the additional exemption would be students who participate in a summer school program and show growth. So that's where we're hoping to be able if they don't show significant growth then they then we are required to retain them.

111Yes. All right. Um okay. So what's working? Individual follow-up on training with coaches is increasing the use of 95% group for tier 2 resources and 57% of responding teachers were using the materials January and 72% in the spring. So as uh like the word spread and people started getting more training on 95% group, more teachers were using. Um next school year 10 teachers will participate in the K3 literacy professional development cohort. Um which is where we're replicating what we did with the SEI cohort is we're doing the same thing for literacy. Um and we had teachers apply to be in these cohorts because part of the cohorts we're having a um consultant do specific training with them. We get substitutes for them for the day. Then the consultant goes in the classroom with them and

112coaches them and models that for our coaches and our principles so that they can replicate that when the um when the uh trainer is not here. And so we're adding we're doing 10 we're adding 10 teachers to that for this year. Um and then hopefully next year we can add another 10. So we keep adding more teachers as we um as each year goes. We can't put that many because of subs and trying to get um have time to do the training. Um do you want to do the third bullet? Sure. So this is when we look at our interim measures. So compared to the prior school year, our students had a greater increase from pre to post tests. So the first measure is that third grade proficiency on the DNA English language arts benchmark.

113Um so that nine that you see in 22 23 that shows that there was a difference in nine percentage points from pre to post. And in this year we had a difference of 13 percentage points. So if I go back to 4.1. So that's this one. So it's showing last year we started at 3% proficient and we went to 12% whereas this year we started at 3% proficient and moved to 16% proficient. So, it's showing that like we we know the reality is we did not meet this goal. Um, and we're looking for for things that are working and we are showing that while we're we haven't made enough growth and it's not reflected on the state test, we are moving in the right direction. And the next piece is a uh intrameasure 4.2 two

114is third grade passing scores on the FastBridge A-reading screener. And last school year, there was a difference of negative six points. So students started out, we had more students being proficient at the beginning of the year than the end of the year. And we've decreased that gap. We It's still a reality this year. We have fewer students who have a passing score on the spring screener, but we have started to close that gap. And one thing that's important to remember here is that this specific test, the fast bridge screener increases the the cut score increases at each test. So our students are growing not fast enough and fastbridge is just for the lower grades, right? Um or are you guys using it across all grades? We we have it available all grades. It depends on

115the site. We are it is required K3 And that is but all K3s are using Glassbridge throughout the district. Yes. Yes. And that also that's also part of that move on one reading legislation. Okay. And then the final one that kindergarten passing on the FastBridge literacy screener last school year um there was an eight point difference and this year a ninepoint difference. So it shows that there is some increase. Granted, it's not what we'd like to see. we need to accelerate the growth that we're seeing. The only other question that I have that just kind of popped in my head is on Thursday, will you guys also be talking about how this is going to align to our theory of action? Because I think in our theory of action, we kind of talked about how

116everything needs to start being moved to more centralized since there was a lot of autonomy in the districts and obviously that hasn't given us the outcomes that we've expected. So maybe um how is that going to be tied into our action of theory of moving that from the top down and then once we start getting a little bit more results then people maybe can start going back to doing their own thing and I know that that plays a part in adult convenience. So I'm just wondering how we're going to wrap the action of theory too and make sure that we're starting to implement that as well. That's on the agenda. Oh. So uh superintendent man's going to do the mindset work and then I'm going to talk about theory of action. Okay, perfect. Thank you

117for that. And then you can see uh we have the number of student percentage of students that um improved from pre to post on the right hand side. And then what what needs more attention or what we're doing is for teaching learning coaches, we are going to have the four literacy coaches. Um and then obviously Sarah Beth will be working on literacy only next year and not literacy and language. Um, and we're going to have that cohort model where we have principles, coaches, the coordinator, everyone together learning um, from the consultant what what what a classroom supposed to look like, which goes with that theory of action like what is a reading classroom supposed to be look like? Um, and then continue coaching throughout the year with that cohort and learning from each other. And

118then Sarah Beth talked about this already, but summer school, we have two classes specifically for the risk of retention students. Um and each teacher will serve eight students. We have 14 of the 16 enrolled. We will be calling the other two students again tomorrow. And just one thing I want to clarify is in that theory of action, there's a differentiation between the things we're tied on and the things we're losing on. So um even even in this time period where we maybe haven't achieved all of our goals, there will still be elements, you know, of individual site um uniqueness and individual classroom uniqueness. I think what's important is that we determine which things are sort of the non-negotiables because there are things that we're hanging our hat on are going to create the shift and

119the change that we need. Uh and then outside of that space, it's easy to allow, you know, for some variance and that's sometimes helpful. But you know what what we don't want to have happen is we develop a critical strategy that's necessary in order to move kids and that's something that's then you know a school decides to do something completely different instead that you know maybe it's also researchbased etc etc but it makes it much more difficult for us to support it as a district because we do have limited resources. So if we can choose the best options available to us and align all of the ships to be using the same type of fuel, then it we were able to be more efficient in making sure we have enough fuel for all of the

120ships. So correct. Okay. And then we did have some uh board questions for this for this um report. So I'm going to turn it over to Sarah Beth. All right. All right. The question is, as we review extended day and summer programming, how are we reimagining these opportunities to ensure they are truly high impact for students showing minimal growth midyear? For example, how are we ensuring that summer placements are guided by real-time data like DNA and fast bridge results? So just to address the example question, this summer due to our funding and the way summer school is designed, the only ELA sections that we are providing or that we're able to provide are those third graders at risk of retention. Again, aligned with the SOFG goal, the remaining sections are supporting our other goals, our

121other SOFG goals. So, we have um we have the six English learner or multilingual learner sections, the two third grade ELA sections, and then I believe about six math sections as well. I do want to add because we have a smaller summer school, we were able to be highly selective with the teachers and make sure we had the most effective teachers teaching these classes um and based on our classroom walkthroughs and data throughout the year. Correct. And we had over 30 applicants for I think 14 positions. So it was definitely a competitive process. Yes. Thank you. Um and then so one of the things is so this the question is how are we reimagining opportunities to ensure that they are high impact for students who are showing minimal growth. And so one of the historical

122practices when we talk about that datadriven placement question is that we typically have been providing or been prioritizing students whose scores show that they are at risk and they are showing growth for those additional programming options. So something like summer school or extended day is limited in scope. Summer school is is 11 early release days. After school programming is typically once or twice a week. And so those are not extremely high impact intense opportunities. And so the students that are invited to those typically are students who do need support and have evidence that they are showing growth and they need a little bit more of a push to get them to the next level. And so when we look at the students who are showing minimal growth midyear, those are the students that are typically

123in in are identified for that daily intervention in the classroom. And so with move on reading legislation, we are and because we also know it's good practice, we we do provide reading interventionist services at all of our schools. And during that block that our K3 reading interventionists are pulling students, our K3 teachers are providing intervention in the classroom. And that's when they're using those um tier 2 resources, the newly adopted resources that we talked about. And so those students that are showing that minimal growth are are identified for that daily that 3 to 5 days a week during the classroom 20 to 40 minutes as opposed to an outside option. Okay. All right. The latest teacher survey showed that nearly 30% of teachers have not yet begun using the newly purchased intervention material. So, what

124coaching, leadership, accountability, or peer learning strategies are in place to support and shift this behavior across the system? Great question, and we it's something we've been really fig I've really been working on this year. And so, um, we will have more capacity to support our teachers next year with having four coaches and one coordinator specifically for literacy. Um when we are when we begin the year, one of the things that we'll do differently next year is that coaches will provide that small group prep time coaching during prep times during the day in the first quarter instead of us providing that vendor training. So we had the vendor training last year. we the amount of hours meant that it had to be provided outside of contract time and we it we were able to provide compensation

125but we were not able to get as many teachers as we as we needed and so that's one shift that will happen. Um we've also found that that word of mouth success is really really helpful. So it's very effective when teachers find when they do start using it then they're able to tell their their colleagues, hey, this is not that hard. And one of the things that I don't remember if I shared last time that our coaches experienced and they're like, okay, you went to that vendor training and you're still not using it. Come to my prep time. We're going to sit down together and look at it. And they open the book and they're like, oh, I can do this. Yes, you can. And that onetoone connection, like we thrive on it as adults,

126too. We talk about our kids needing it, but we need it, too. And so that mass training wasn't effective. And so we're we'll still have some of those options, but we're going to shift to having more of of those smaller group options with our increased coaching capacity. Um, one of the other indic one of the other realities that we learned from our implementation survey was that some of the teachers who have not begun implementation, it wasn't because of a lack of training. It was because of the difficulty of accessing the resources on their campus. And so we are working with those specific campuses to identify a system that will work better for their teachers next year. Thank you. Um, I also appreciate the answers on these questions because I know that sometimes we get a

127lot of questions like, why are we adding more coordinators or why are we adding more coaches? But this is reflective of we really can't have correct student outcomes if all the a high percentage of our teachers haven't even begun to implement, you know, what they need to be doing and adding another coordinator and coach obviously has been working and we we can see that. So, I appreciate this. So people have a broader on sometimes why we have to make these type of decisions to make sure that we're equipping our teachers in order for them to be able to equip our students. I can't remember um if it's AJ Crarabel or if it was Dr. Ramos who said this but some and I'm sure it came from someplace else um but one of the quotes that

128always sticks in my head is that the system is perfectly designed or sorry the system is perfectly designed for the results that it gets. Thankfully, I wasn't being checked by AA on that one. Oh, it's from Switch. Oh, I know. I read it. I know. I heard it read it someplace. So, um, so you know, one of the challenges that we have is when you design a system, there are all sorts of components to the system, but one of the components to the system is the support infrastructure that's in place. And so, when we add coaches, like a lot of times people perceive that as, oh, look, more administration. And it's a fair criticism because there have been times in the past where coaches have been co-opted to function as additional administrators. Um when we

129redesign the coaching model, we were very intentional to try to preserve coaching for the purpose of coaching. And so now when we add four more coaches and you can see the results from this year, which was a learning year. I mean it took our coaches probably the first quarter or more to kind of understand the shift. it um we created havoc within our sites because we pulled a bunch of supports out of the sites. Then we were trying to figure out like what can we do to make sure that those you know were helping to fill those gaps and not leave those problems there which we haven't done perfectly but you know it's been a a co-learning process between um you know the site leadership and the district leadership. Um but what we saw over

130the remaining three quarters is the level of impact that having those positions um provided and the reason that we're increasing the number is because we need to increase that impact. And so ultimately for me um as as we do that the real tell of whether that's effective or not and beneficial AC beneficial throughout the system is are are we making obviously our ultimate goal is are we improving student outcomes by having that in the system. But the correlary to it and we saw this with some of the feedback data from the um the the training program that we did um with Heidi Ksky and the whisper coaching and all of that is that if we help create additional facility, we will also make teachers quality of life better because we're we're providing them with the

131tools and the resources so that way every day isn't as hard. So that way when you come back tomorrow you're not completely exhausted because you had a stronger tool set. And so uh you know one of the things that is definitely from AJ um he talks um you know in his work on um restorative practices that are studentled. He talks about you know if the only tool in your bag is a hammer like what you know how are you going to solve a problem right? And for us, if the only tool that the teacher has is a hammer, then, you know, they're it's they're going to have to bludgeon their way through solving problems in the classroom. As we as we're able to provide better resources, um they become surgeons in the classroom and that's

132an easier day than having to, you know, deal with the lack of tools to try to bring that forward. So, so we're seeing that in some of the early survey results and with these extra resources, my hope is over time we're both improving student outcomes and retaining and attracting more teachers because our system prefers for making life in the classroom that much better. So, the survey I'm just wondering is that from teachers like that? So, I've heard um from a few people that there are a couple coaches that maybe aren't as effective as some others are. Have we asked our teachers how they feel about their coaches and and that perception of of what's going on or they feel is happening like at their school? Because we know that perception sometimes is one thing while

133reality is another thing. And I think both are important. I'll let the team respond to that specifically, but the survey I was referring to was the survey related to the the training and the whisper coaching that Heidi Kosski provided. It wasn't specific to our individual coaches at the site. Um our our coaches um gave a survey twice a year, so like after the first half of the year and the second half of the year, and we meet with them each quarter. So the coordinator and I meet with them and we go over um their coaching log and their coaching survey that gives them feed. And they only gave the survey to the teachers that they're coaching. Is it anonymous? I don't remember. No, I don't think it is. Leaps. Yeah, it is anonymous. Okay. Yeah,

134I think it it it does depend on the coach because they we didn't we we provided a template and then because we have different content area coaches, they did they were able to add some of their own pieces. So, I'm thinking about it and most of the ones that I've seen have did not have names on them and uh verbally um the feedback that we got we this last quarter we had coffee with cabinet where we had each principal uh select one teacher to come meet with um the cabinet to share with us uh feedback from out the year and then also share with them our three-year plan for meeting the SOFG goals to get their feedback and they're representing their school and so a lot of the comments um that were captured that day

135was about how the coaching model was successful on their campus and also that even if they weren't getting coached that if their colleague was getting coached that they could see the difference in their classroom. So it was very positive about coaching during that session. Have you randomly pulled people? Like I just know from being in education for so long that that we need to also do randoms because I just think like picking and choosing people. You're always probably going to get some good feedback. I would suggest maybe also getting feedback from people that are just you just randomly go and pick I just I don't like the handpicking and maybe that doesn't happen here and I hope it doesn't where they're like picking the best but like I know it happens in other places. Well,

136yes and that that is fair. I've experienced some of the same things. I will say all of our coaches who when they sent out their surveys, it was to every teacher on their case load in addition to teachers that maybe weren't on their case load but they worked with. So the only teachers that were not are teachers who they didn't interact with at all. Why would they not interact with a teacher? Capacity. So keep in mind we had four coaches for two subject areas across nine schools. So even though this question say one might be getting coached in math, another one might be getting coached a different teacher might be getting coached in language and so all of they might not have been in contact with the math coach or the language coach depending on

137who support coach, right? like the and we were careful when designing case loads that a teacher did not was not overwhelmed with more than one coach. Like we were prioritizing needs, right? And that was based on feedback we've had in the past about, you know, if we're if we're providing too much coaching services to a teacher. It's overwhelming to them. Yeah, it is. Okay. The next question is systemwide reflection. How are we ensuring that inputs such as materials, coaching, professional development are linked directly to changes in adult practice and ultimately student learning and what feedback loops are in place to assess this connection in real time. So um the first part is clear learning objectives for our for our um teachers when they are in professional development. Um, and the coaching initiatives are designed with

138clear, measurable learning objectives for adult practice that directly, well, we don't know for sure, but directly impact student outcomes um because they're adult outcomes. Um, and then as we described with the consultant, the see it, do it, get feedback. So, they get PD um and coaching and then they have an opportunity to practice in the classroom and then they get whisper coaching and real-time feedback um during that time. Um and then we also are continuously we're doing learning walks and also looking at student data to see and teacher surveys to see if we need to adjust um our professional development or our coaching. Um and the feedback is obviously classroom walkthrough observations, regular observations by instructional leaders, coaches and our data wise team. um teacher surveys and focus groups. That's more with the specific like

139well we had the SEI teachers um had specific surveys and um or the focus group with students that Sarah Beth did um to see how their and also with kids congress like those focus groups getting their feedback um student learning data of course formative and summitative coaching logs and then um PLC data. Okay. And those are all looking at the adult behaviors. Um, now I'm going to ask Dr. Burgers to come up with some of the questions um around student support. Yeah, you'll have to because you see split up there. So, I'll have to Thank you. I'm going to toggle between two screens. Um so one of the questions uh that we received was asking about how do we track how are we tracking correlations between low academic performance and increased discipline referrals or suspensions

140and what are we learning from that data. Um so I actually just had an opportunity to meet with my my team today for student support services. It was yesterday and today and it was great and I was sharing the questions that were given to us and they're like these are really good questions. I'm like I know so let's dive into them. Um and so we did um and they they we were sharing ideas with each other around it. Um and so when we see both academic challenges and behavioral challenges and elevated suspension rates, it gives us really an opportunity to look more into really in depth at those patterns as well as like are there systems impacting that. Um, and so as a district, we've act actively been building the infrastructure through our multi-tered systems

141of support or MTSS. And all of the sites are already monitoring students who need more support academically or behaviorally or both. Um, and this process really helps us ensure that the interventions are targeted to the specific student. Um, and it allows us to monitor the um, the effectiveness over time. However, in order to strengthen MTSS and really systematize it across the entire district, um we're really in the process of developing a system a district systemwide um process using educ being trained in tomorrow. Um and we're currently in the process of developing that system in order to track students and the progress um that students might be ex or the challenges they might be experiencing whether it's academically, behaviorally or both. um in order to track the interventions and the progress of those interventions. Are they

142working or are they not working and do we need to implement something new in in place? A key part of that is going to be our work tomorrow. We're there from 8 to 5:00 all about educ which I'm really excited for. um really just that district-wide training for all of us um for on leadership team. And this platform is really going to allow us to effectively track suspensions, referrals, interventions, restorative projects, restorative practices um whether it is academic, behavioral or both all in one place rather than having to pull from multiple different systems. Um, and it's really going to give us that ability to analyze trends over time, compare the data year-toear and what support students really are are needed in order to support a student and be consistent and cohesive across the district. Thank

143you. I appreciate this question a lot too because I know and I'm not going to go to get too into it because it's probably going off topic and hopefully we can have a deeper conversation about it. But given our reports, I I am seeing a lot of our lower grades being suspended at higher rates than our older students. And with the third grade proficiency rates that we're having, I mean, I see a correlation also on behaviors. Yet, we're we're overwhelmingly suspending younger kids. And I I I feel like this question directly ties to that we have low performing in third grade yet we're suspending for second and third graders and even kindergarteners. So to me that's something that I hope the team really dives into tomorrow and really is looking into that because just for

144me personally suspending first, second, third, and kindergarteners is a little it's hard for me to take that in and say I this is a good thing which I don't believe it is. So, um, I'm appreciative of this question, whoever asked this, and I really, really hope that we can dive into that because I think that's something that me personally, I'm going to be looking at that, too, is how our discipline is really affecting the outcomes that we have and what changes we need to make to correct those behaviors in order for them to be able to produce the academics or outcomes that we need. And Educ really does this because this we have educ like like we I put in those that's awesome to hear into the system and they do correlate and you can

145pull up tons of different graphs you could see where problems are happening and target like those areas like where are the majorities of problems happening are they having happening in a classroom does that teacher need support there okay so to classroom say okay yes they can they can say oh we're having a lot of behavior issues cafeteria. So what kind of systems are happening in the cafeteria? So it really drills down like with the behavior, but then it also does correlate with their academics as well. So it's very interactive like together. Okay. Awesome. And what's great is tomorrow is we're going to be spending a a a day learning how to run reports, analyze um just run reports and really diving deep into Edgimber um and how to really use that system. And we're in

146the process of developing the structures around it. The student support coaches and myself developing the structures around it. So an office referral is the same like how we refer a student for an additional support whether it is behavioral or academic. It's the same process across each campus. And if I could add, I think um you know it's we don't disagree with what you're saying and the evidence that we don't disagree as we came to you and asked for an additional input and she's standing in front of you. Yeah. So um right you know two things that are two things that are important is that we put the supports in place. Right. And so that's that's one of the pieces. The other one is, and I'm embarrassed to say this, and I can I have all

147sorts of amazingly wonderful excuses for it, but um but the solution is also in front of you. We're like a year behind in our ruler implementation, too. So, we identified that we were going to bring Ruler and Sanford Harmony in. They're not like the perfect solution to everything, but ruler really is a first step. until we can help our students identify their emotional state, um we're not going to be able to help them improve their executive function. And so, you know, when you say, well, you know, why are we suspending instead of helping them? Again, it comes back to we need the tools, right, in order to be able to do that effectively. And so, we're trying to bring those tools online. Um, a year and a half ago, we were able to identify what

148tools we needed. We procured those tools. our expectation was this year would be, you know, the implementation of those tools and and we're we're just behind on getting there. So, um, as you know, as Dr. Burgess actually gets a chance to settle into her new role, as her team gets up to speed, and as we're able to provide resources to to all of our staff and teachers, this isn't just for the teachers in the classroom. This is for our bus drivers, this is for our cafeteria people, right? So, as that begins to permeate the system, we know it will be effective. And and to me, one of the strongest indicators that it will be effective is that uh two of our uh Kraton Kids Congress students from Gateway School when they were given um just

149a very limited exposure to just the concept of the meta moment um by Miss Wiz who taught it to them at Kids Congress, they went back to their school to teach it to the staff there. So you even the kids know these are the tools that we need and we just need to get them in place. Now I appreciate that transparency because when I do look at our data and I am seeing the younger kids, it's like we again I always go back to frontal loes and having patience with children. They're just learning and not having those implementations and stalling them because of whatever cases like I think that's the number one. And it's also a guardrail. The social emotional wellness of our students. And for us to be reprimanding students that young to the

150fact of suspensions to me that's a little there's something going on in the system that we really need to work on. And also I am so happy that we have you because that would that is a missing link. We can't really focus on academics and do all these things and expect for us to do these things. But having you and having these conversations and having board members ask these, I think we are going to get there faster. But I do appreciate that full transparency and we're we're doing what we can and also I I think obviously we need to do a lot better especially with our younger students and I and I would honestly say it's beyond the system. like we're experiencing a change that started around 2019 in the types of of um I

151don't even know what they're calling because I don't like calling them behaviors I'm sorry needs needs and manifestations maybe right that that we're seeing in kids and a lot of people have said oh this is the pandemic right or oh this is this other thing but I remember sitting in a room um with some peers at a conference and everybody was like whispering over each other's shoulders are you guys seeing like a crazy increase in the amount of you know sort of outbursts with kindergarteners right so so whatever it is and I couldn't tell you I think it's probably not a single factor it's probably multiple factors but that has been building since 2019 maybe even 2018 it hasn't been helped by the time we spent in the pandemic and the number of ACEs that

152are out there you know in the community with our young children and so but none of that has any meaning at the end of the day we only have control over what we have control over. So now we need to get those tool sets into place so that way we we can't we we aren't the problem but we need to be the solution which actually leads us directly into our next question is how is the district ensuring that restorative practices are not just documented but implemented with fidelity reflection and relevance to students lived experiences. And so as a district, as we deepen like our commitment to restorative practices, we're also examining how um our routines, our expectations as the adults um and the systems that we may or may or may not unintentionally serve as

153barriers rather than supports for student growth. again, whether it's behaviorally or academically or both. Um, we know that behavior is often a mirror of of relationships or systems or lived experiences that surround students and adults quite frankly, whether it's inside the school or outside of the school. And as a district, we continue to we're continuing to invest in those professional uh learning, specifically Ruler for those proactive approaches and Sanford Harmony uh for the teaching of the social emotional skills and relationship building so that all of the all of the students and all the adults are just not reacting to behavior but really responding to the need of the child. Therefore, shaping the conditions for success emotionally, socially, and academically. Um, we're also in the process of, like I said before, really just creating those systems

154and those structures. Um, really in or in order to support that vision and really just I'm a data person. I'm I'm a data nerd and so in order to just really track everything and just see is what we're doing effective. Um, and I look forward to when I have the amazing data that Sarah Beth shows like this is where we started and this is how much we've grown. Um, we're just not quite there yet because I'm wearing two hats still. Um, so how do we Oops. So the next question was is how do we ensure that adult convenience or routines is not the primary driver in decisions about student discipline especially when it um it may be in conflict with the district's values of inclusion, restoration, and growth. Um, one of the ways that we're

155safeguarding against this is through our intentional use of restorative practices. In many cases, students receive multiple layers of intervention and support before a suspension has even occurred. Parents are a part of this as well. Assistant um or the adult in the child's life, assistant principles and those sightbased teams are consistently working um behind the scenes really just holding those restorative conversations or providing a project for a student, engaging in reflection, skill building, providing mentorship for the child. um as well as involving all of the families or the adult in the child's life long before suspensions are even considered. There are unfortunately circumstances when a suspension may happen before an intervention has taken place, but that's usually more of an extreme place of something like vaping. However, when um that does happen, those restorative practice when

156the child does return um there's often projects, there's often opportunities for teaching. There's those are al often occurring once a child returns to school. So it's not just like you're suspended, you're gone, but it's okay now you're coming back to us. How are we going to teach you? How are we going to support you? How are we going to move forward? Or if harm has been caused in a situation, how are we going to repair that harm to our school family, to our class family? Um each site also uses like the district's behavior matrix as a reference for consistency and equity. the assistant, you know, principles ensure that they're not using it in isolation or the behavior teams, but really collaboratively and they're frequently consulting with one another as well as um the principles and

157other administration um to apply interventions that match the students needs. Um we oftent times used to reach out to Dr. Dupin, now we're going to be reaching out to Dr. Pombo to walk through some of those sometimes when it's a little bit more complex situation. Um but we're really committed to those restorative learning opportunities. And then in addition to those tools, um we track those interventions and teaching opportunities for the students as well as the adults because sometimes the harm is caused by the adult and we have to res have those restorative conversations myself included when um and we have to restore those conversations with the student um and say, you know, I was really frustrated in this moment. I'm sorry as the adult. let's talk about what I can do to better support you

158and how um we can work together in those situations. So, that's a a critical reflection point for us as a district and the student support team. Um are we teaching those behaviors that we expect to see? Um just because like we have to teach kids to read, we have to teach kids to write. We we have to teach those expected behaviors and are we monitoring that progress and all of that's going to be tracked through Edge Climber. Perfect. Thank you, Dr. Burgers. And I think the next questions were for um Miss Miss Kaiser for exceptional student services. Yes. Thank you, Madam President. Governing board members, Mr. Man, executive team, thank you for the opportunity to highlight some of the work we started um last year as well as share with our call to action moving

159forward. Um just since I had the opportunity, I'd like to highlight two of my teammates, our small but mighty ESS team, please. um our instructional our one instructional coach right now, Miss Dorothy Green, and our newest member, Dr. Kathy Essus, as a manager. So, thanks. Let me highlight my proud teammates today. Um as many of you know, um thank you for your support as we did um we did adopt a reading program last year with governing board support through McGra Hill, our corrective reading and reading mastery. We are in year one. These are some follow-up questions that we shared um with the governing board. Um and we too really appreciate your very thoughtful thoughtful questions. Um, one of the questions was, according to the report, only 38% of the regional exceptional student services teachers have

160received the McGra Hill training compared to 56 districtwide. These programs serve our highest need learners. And how are we addressing this disparity in support? If I may provide just some scope to what was offered, um, our full day paid um, training for um, we collaborated with McGra Hill. Um, they came in and provided a full day training. We worked with our CIA team to schedule it on July 26, which was the day that all of our new Kraton employees were on contract and just three days prior to the first day of school with the hopes to bred the opportunity for our teachers off contract to have that paid opportunity for that Friday. We very much recognize some of our colleagues are on vacation and cannot attend and we very much recognize that as a part

161of our way to provide then the ongoing relevant professional development learning for those who did receive it and may not have received it. We did prioritize all of our Kraton professional learning the former affinity days throughout the year um as noted in August, November, February and April um to focus on the implementation and development of our SRRA our McGraill materials. Those trainings did include our coaching team as well as intermittently our trainer from McGraill to provide um support ongoing support. Um we additionally had a McGraill trainer come and um visit and observe classrooms with fidelity checklists and support to also provide that ongoing relevant um training throughout the year. How long do we get those benefits or are they limited time after we adopt it? Pardon? Sorry. Sorry. How long do we get that benefit

162of having them come down or is that just a limited time after the adoption? Typically it's uh your professional development is embedded in your quote. Um McGraw Hill has been very very flexible with us. In fact, we ti we we purposely asked if we had some carryover from last year to bring into this year and they yielded. And so we're trying to be very thoughtful in how that's done. Um but typically it's part of that contract and part of the quote um the professional development hours and then we work with the um vendor to see how can that best be distributed. Gotcha. Thank you. Um one of the follow-up questions is how does how are we addressing this disparity in support? And so one thing we're recognizing is that our teachers are working very very

163hard and sometimes offcontract time can be a challenge for them to attend because of other commitments, other jobs and families. So as we have been working um with our Mcgre Hill trainer and our ESS team, we're really going to work on prioritizing again those training hours as you mentioned as Gibson McClean on our time during the school day during contracted time. So focusing those professional developments on our um creating professional learning um again continuing that on-site support through our coaching. So we have those individualized supports um to our teachers in the um curriculum program. We also attend special education site team meetings our team does to provide some additional support specific to that team or that campus. Um and also we'll continue to participate in the learning walks um with our leadership team. And also

164next year we're looking forward to implementing fidelity walks with the um McGra Hill curriculum so that we were able to provide ongoing individualized fidelity checks and individualized coaching to teachers who might be at different proficiency levels. Do we have a set goal of moving this 38% to a certain percent by next year? Um for the teachers who are McGraill McGraill trained pardon my stuttering. Um yes, that is our goal. Um in working with um our trainer to provide and working with Marie Twist who supports our new educator orientation the first week back. We're just trying to finalize and kind of all vying for that same time, but our hope is to provide that um that day training when all teachers are back on contract as opposed to a before during the summer. So yes. Yes,

165ma'am. Thank you. Um the next question had to do with increasing the fidelity and the pacing. Um so we wanted to really talk about what the McGraill wants um SRRA to look like the implementation of reading mastery as well as corrective reading. Um I have the benefit of having taught this program for over 10 years at Macken School when I was a resource teacher and a reading interventionist. So that gives me u a different lens because I taught it. It also allows me to do a lot of um modeling the lessons which I've done across multiple campuses and any teacher that's asked I've been able to go in and model lessons and then have them teach and then I observe them and then if I need to model more or if they I'm watching them

166to see that again that fidelity to the program. I would say we're probably 70 to 80% in terms of fidelity. It's it's a very precise program. Um there's it's a there it's scripted. It's direct instruction. It's very explicit. There are specific components to it. It's all researchbased and best practice. But if you start adding other extraneous components, it affects your pacing. If you skip things, that's going to obviously impact your student outcomes. So, it's a matter of helping the teachers understand the importance of every single element of the program. It's all very intentional. There's reason for every part of it, and it's really about getting the staff to be able to implement it with that full fidelity. So, that's what we've been working on the most. The goal is to teach two levels. So, reading

167mastery is for K2 students. So, it's really teaching students how to read that do not know how to read. So, it's, you know, phmic awareness, it's, you know, phonics, it's all the different letters and sounds and blending, all the different skills that go with learning to read. That's designed to be for kindergarten through 2 grade students. There are times when we will place a third or fourth grade student in there if they have shown not to be ready for the corrective reading program. The corrective reading program is called that for a reason. at students who are in third through 8th grade and have been taught how to read but have not shown a a high level of accuracy with their reading skill. So they've got a lot of splinter skills. They've kind of sort of

168get some of it but not all of it. And it's really to correct inaccuracies and it's to help them build that fluency and that accuracy with their reading so that they can then start working on the comprehension which is the biggest part of reading right you have to learn to read but then you have to read to learn and you have to be able to show that in order to show that on the state assessments first we have to be able to read. So the corrective reading the goal is for them to pass two levels per year. The levels are it's a little irrelevant right now, but it's A, B1, B2, and C, and they're all aligned to different grade levels of reading ability. So, the students take a diagnostic placement test that groups them

169not by grade level, but by reading ability, and then the teachers put those together in their schedules. This year being the first year of implementing it in a number of years required some amendments to IEPs because perhaps students that needed the program didn't have the right number of service minutes. So IEPs needed to be amended, which means bringing IEP teams together, discussing the program with parents, getting them on board with their student needing this level of intense reading instruction, then providing it. And in order to get the results that McGraill wants us to get and that we want to get obviously, which is two years worth of growth for every school year, teachers have to be keeping to a really tight pace. So that's another area where we realize that we need to keep working

170on because some schools, some teachers did better than others. And we did collect that data. Um, is there anything else on this slide I'm missing? We'll get to it. This is the data I looked at it from. So we created data tracking logs um before we even implemented the program at the beginning of the year so that we would have the teachers on a regular basis tracking the progress that they were making and the pace that they were following. Then at the end of the year I personally analyzed all of that data at the teacher level. Then we merged it onto the school level and this represents the district level of that data. So we have it broken down disagregated all the way down to the individual teacher and individual student group data. You know

171if and when you want to see that in the future. But this illustrates what we found overall was the district average. So we had 293 students that took part of either reading mastery or corrective reading which all comes under the McGraill SRRA program. The average number of lessons taught was 59. Some some students got less, some students got more. It's an average. What McGra Hill recommends is about 130 lessons per year. So you can see that that's an area that we need to work on and improve in in terms of the pacing. Being new to the program, there's probably four teachers that implemented the program this year that had taught it before. Everybody else was new to the program. It takes a while to get good at implementing a new program. So the pacing um

172is difficult to stay up with if you when you're first learning how to implement it. Then in terms of mastery tests are those progress monitoring checks for understanding through they're layered throughout the program. There's a various amount depending on what level the students are in but every the average number of mastery tests given was nine and then the average passing rate was 88%. So that's actually pretty good and the the program is designed for mastery. So, they would want to see 100%. You don't go on to the next level until you master this level. You don't go on to the next level until you master this level. It's not uh well, that's close enough. We'll go on. It's designed to really really get that high high level of accuracy and fluency. Now, the question that

173I have is this specific programming is just for the places programs that we have. You know how we have four different programs? Sorry, I didn't mean to say places. that's specifically for those groups or it's districtwide for any? This is the because we have obviously exceptional students in gened classes that so it's for anybody in Oh, that's a great question. So, it's not for every single student that has an IEP. It's specifically for students who have basic reading as one of their areas of eligibility. One of their areas of need has to be basic reading. We have students with IEPs that have speech only needs. We have students with IEPs that only have goals and services in math. They aren't being given the SR program. Then there's that diagnostic placement test that places them into

174the program. That's a good question about the regional programs. Um, many of our students in the regional programs actually qualify for alternate assessments because of their level of disability and they wouldn't test into this program when they do the diagnostic placement because they're actually not able to fully participate in it. Got it. Yeah. Thank you for that clarification. Yeah. Other questions about for me right now implementation. Okay. Did you questions on that one? Good. Okay. Thank you. Another question that came up is how is the district ensuring that students with disabilities are part of our core goals for reading and math proficiency? And further asking, what disagregated student progress data currently exists? What targets short and long-term have been set for regional program students? This is a great question and while we're proud of the

175action we've taken thus far, we very much recognize this is our work moving forward. So you see some of the highlights of the work we have and also the work we have to come. That call to action in asking the first layer is how are we ensuring that our students and disos are part of our core core goals for reading and math proficiency. Our students in special education are general education students first and in fact the majority of our students as you mentioned President Creo are sitting in the general education classroom the majority of the day. So part of what our collaboration with Dr. Pombo and the CIA team is really merging our two um departments to work very closely together. And I know we have different um ways to go, but being part of

176those learning walks throughout the year to be looking at that success criteria. Think of that Hadtie's work of learning targets and success criteria, whether it be through classroom observations, through our coaching cycles, through classroom visits to be in the room to understand what's happening in the classroom. Coaching cycles, as I mentioned, um each of our campuses um under the support of our um principles do offer and support special education team meetings. Some meet weekly, some meet once a month. Um our goal um is to participate one of our members participate for Regulin there so that we're able to support and learn what is on that campus might be sight specific. Um and we have continued to collaborate not only with um one of our AD specialists looking at our um our federal school improvements our

177comprehensive school improvements through our learning walk data but also with our um early childhood specialists for our preschool and ad. So those are some of the areas in which we've very much been welcomed in and part of the conversation to support our students. And as I mentioned also, we're recognizing that we need to go deeper and that is the work that we have moving forward. So um we would love the opportunity to come back and share some of that work um if that's a further future agenda item. Um but when we're looking at that area of action, it's a beautiful goal. What does that look like for our regional programs being that those students do have such unique needs? Some of the conversations we're starting to have is to develop those smart goals with those

178interim measures. So we have some outcomes to be looking at and our initial conversation in looking and brainstorming is really looking at those inputs of that teacher instruction. And some of those conversations we're really talking about based on not only our um McGra Hill data but through our classroom observations and teacher input. We're looking at how are we really structuring our day to maximize instructional time in our regional program. And that looks at how are we differentiating even in that smaller group for our students of 13. How are we differentiating well? How are we maximizing transition time so that we have enough instructional time throughout the day? How are we using similar to our first and best instruction and general education? Some of the conversations we're having is how are we utilizing that centers based

179instruction. So we're building not only that direct instruction, that independent time. So those are the some of the things that we're talking about now to build for smart goals for this upcoming year. Um, so we're very much looking forward to the opportunity to come back and share our call to action in that area. Yeah, I love that because I think that's one of the biggest feedbacks that I was going to have is I would love to see some smart goals being set in our special education department because if we don't have a starting point, a midpoint or an ending point, then we're just going to continue in the same scenario regardless of what beautiful things we say or put on reports. So yes, I do look forward to looking for that and that's exactly the

180answer I was hoping I would get. Yeah, we were actually talking about that quite a bit last week when we were doing some just brainstorming and kind of looking at our year and where are we and where are we going and that's why I was analyzing all that data was we need some baselines right this is the first year that we've implemented SRRA okay so now we know how many lessons and and what that looks like but also how does that correlate to the skills that we know students need to have in order to show progress on the state and the district level benchmarks right so this is kind of internal program but the kids should be able to generalize those skills and it should show make a difference and show up in the other

181measurements as well. So we have to look at okay so what is that tool? Is it an oral reading fluency assessment that's done more often than three times a year? Is it you know some other measure of basic reading skills that we can show this student moved from a first grade reading level to a third grade reading level? Not just within the program mastery assessments but also outside with a you know a text that they are unfamiliar with. So that's what we're looking for next time or this next year when we're setting our goals is h great and let's do that better and how do we make sure that's having an impact here also. Yeah. And one of the things I always like to double down on too is the coaching that I receive that

182it's okay if we don't have a starting point. I I always like to reiterate as questions get harder or these conversations get harder, it does not mean it's appointing a a blame on any department or anything because look, we have one goal that has a 0%, you know, outcome that we've had since 2015. So, it's okay if we don't have any starting points, but the point is is that we start somewhere and we have something that's letting us know if X, Y, and Z is working and moving the needle. So I always just like to say that because it's okay if we start from zero. This is what this framework is for. This is what this continuous improvement framework is. This we have to start from zero and we have to explicitly say you know

1830% of our students in XYZ will go from that. That's that's perfectly fine. And the governing board will have to go out to the community and explain to that why that's happening not necessarily you guys. So at least that's the two-way collaboration that we can have is that when those hard questions come that falls at least in Maya's on the governing board and the new direction of why we're being so smart goal oriented and doing these conversations and having this. So I just wanted to say that from my perspective we appreciate so much. I mean just this year you helped us move from having three coach positions to having four coach positions. Unfortunately, as you noticed when I was introduced, I was was the only coach. So, we have now doubled our coaching team and

184we have two for next school year, but we really do need the four. There's a reason why um the department came to you to ask for four coaches in order to do this kind of deep work. We need a larger group because the capacity is just I can't do all the schools. I can't help all the teachers become experts at SRRA by myself. So, we do need to find ways and we've been doing our best to interview and try to hire and we we have a second one. So, that's good. We doubled. We do need We're still only half staff, so we need to keep working on that. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. And if I could add, um Dorothy's not Wonder Woman. No, Dorothy. Dorothy is Wonder Woman, but um I I recall

185being over at the um Kraton Academy. I think it was circa 2021 and it was when we were setting up the new um room for the curricular materials to try to get our hands around things so we could make sure things were getting out to schools and I spotted a and if I mess up this story you're going to have to correct me but I spotted a pile of reading intervention materials and I asked you the question so why is this pile here and the answer was um well Jay we haven't had any PD to be able to even utilize these older materials for years and years. So, I just my hats off to you and the team. Um, and my appreciation goes to the board for your support when you allowed us to add

186that input of these materials. Now, you know, yes, 38% was a slow start. That was a 38% increase from the zero that we used to have. And obviously the team has a plan to increase that. But just the fact that we're even with only one Wonder Woman. Um the fact that that we're beginning to move the needle on this, you know, the journey of a thousand steps begins with that first one. So I just I'm very appreciative because, you know, clearly we're not where we want to be, but the only way we're going to get there is by starting. And so this is a a much bigger start than me going, "Why is this pile of books over here?" We need like a game for people watching along at home for all your sayings. Jisms.

187Well, and I will say some of the most exciting work that I did this year was uh working with teachers who had anecdotal excitement over um progress that students made. students who had never been able to read that had these aha moments and I mean there were there were sweet fourth graders who literally were like I've never gotten 100% on anything in my life and they were getting 100% because the program is structured so that we directly teach and then we're going to test what we taught and they were just in awe that they had gotten 100% on anything and just the confidence boost for these students and students that the teachers have struggled to work with for years went from non-readers to being able to read at a second grade level and surprisingly or

188actually not surprisingly their behaviors also improved right there is a correlation very tight correlation there when I feel good about myself and I feel successful I'm not interested in acting out I'm interested in doing more of that because that feels good and that feeds my intrinsic motivation as a student. And I will tell you as teachers, it feeds their intrinsic motivation. The level of excitement that several of our teachers had, you know, cuz at first you're like, "Oh, it's scripted and it's this and it's robot." I had that same attitude. Dr. Dupin was my principal and he will tell you. I was like, "I'm already a good teacher. I don't need that. No thank you. I'm not going to be robotically reading something." And then I was like, "Okay, Dorothy, you got to try something

189before you put it down." Okay. And I'm an all-in kind of person. So, I allin and I taught it to fidelity. I learned it and I taught it to mastery. And lo and behold, my students did better than they did before I used those materials. So, I became I flipped my entire attitude and I became all about it because it worked for my students. It wasn't about did I love the stories about the con man. It was about I loved that my kids could read and I knew I was sending students on to high school who could be competitive and could pass high school and do well instead of fail and that mattered to me. Not did I like the stories. So it it that there's a lot of power in being successful with it.

190They're they're controlled vocabulary stories. So as you can imagine they're not maybe rich literature. they cannot and should not be the only literature that students are having access to, but they're very valuable and that it is a tried and trueue program. It has been around for many, many years and it works and you know there's no denying that. I love you sharing that story because in that story I found a perfect gem of how you change your own adult behavior to accommodate you know and that's what we mean and what we talk about adult behaviors. It's not this big old out of the box thing like I want you to be more tired and who cares about the individual. No, it's literally the smallest things of when AJ always starts her mindset. Sophia, what have

191you done in the last two weeks to make it harder for your students to learn? And that ties back into your story of I, you know, I did it whatever, but then you went back and look at the outcome that we have. And that's what we mean by adult convenience. It's yes, we all have the experience of the world and also there's also times to learn new things to get different outcomes. So, thank you so much for sharing that story. I appreciate it. And I will add this is the work that we're super excited about. Like this gets us excited. So, we're looking forward to sharing the stories as the years go on. The final question um board member Q&A, what systems are in place to ensure these students access both grade level content and

192quiet quality differentiated instruction beyond compliance-based supports? And with that, how are we making sure these students are part of our instructional innovations and not as an afterthought but as a central responsibility? We love this question. So, thank you um governing board members for for the inquiry. There are several things and this is an area of action as noted at the bottom. So, many of these things we've participated in on some level, but this is a slide that we're also very excited to tell you a little bit about and come back and share as we go. Um next year, communities of practice um led under the leadership of Dr. for Pombo is a way of gathering a group of stakeholders to come together to work through identify areas of need and work through solutions. the area

193um of our ESS for our communities of practice is looking at our inclusionary work and part of what that work is going to be looking at is bringing a good as I mentioned a group of stakeholders together and we'll be doing a professional development study on the way to inclusion which is a book that um that talks about systematic approaches to not only identifying what the inclusionary practices are but it's very much linked to the equity work which is very much part of our data wise um and it is a it is a book um and a structure that provides resources, action plans, reflection tools. So, I'm very excited to be teaming up in our communities of practice to really start that common language and common understanding of what do we think inclusion is, what

194does that look like, and how are we critically looking at our systems. So, we're very excited to start that in the new year. Another thing that we're very excited about, I know you've heard us mention Ed Climber a lot. I wish I worked for Edge Climber because the way we're promoting it, but we're very excited because what Dorothy and I and and Dr. you sis and what we keep thinking is oh we now have a tool where we can pull that data quickly and well and and that's no excuse for not having the data I want to be very clear on that and educ will allow us to pull that data on a quick level basis to where we're able to be more responsive and hopefully free up some of our colleagues from having to

195pull some of that data for us as well. So when we think about that, one area that we recognize is that we need to have a system, a a department system of looking at our students not only in those subgroups and disagregating that lower um but also looking at what does that mean in correlation or causation to DNA to fastbridge as well because we do very much recognize our students can and will achieve and some of our students might not might not be showing that at the rate of their typical peers. So what other ways are we showing whether it be curriculum based measures whether it be mastery test growth how are we telling the story for our students who might not be able to show up in some of those standardized assessments. Um, additionally,

196as we mentioned before, one area we recognize based on the data we that that Dorothy talked about with our McGra Hill, we very much recognize that we need to support and coach and encourage our teachers for that fidelity and implementation and to really tighten up that I management and systems because we need our kids need to read. Our kids need to read um we need to support that. So in also leveling up our own data checks not only through the tracking system as Dorothy had mentioned but also um a fidelity check walkthroughs um as a coaching tool and as a way to understand what when I'm walking in the room what should I be s seeing during that time in collaboration with our principles when you're popping through in the rooms and your teachers teaching

197corrective reading what are some things you for as well um so those are some of the highlights that we very much recognize our call to action is that we need to systematize that better um and we're very much looking forward to building that using Educ Climber as a tool and coming back and hopefully showing some really great process and and and student outcomes achievements with some of these call to action for us as the years go on. Board members, any questions or comments? Thank you so much. I appreciate all the thorough explanations of all the questions and um just for a clarification point before I make the motion of this progress min report. I understand that we did not meet our goal but at times um when we adopt goals and we adopt this reports

198it's not about meeting them. It's about the strategies that are lay in there and if we're convinced enough to know that it's going to push the system to on Thursday or for the next coming year to really make changes. From my personal perspective, after all the conversations back and forth, I do feel that we asked the right questions and the team is going to go into looking at what different inputs or things that they need to change in the system to make sure that we're not in the same scenario next year. So, with that being said, and just as a clarificating point with whoever is still hanging on with us or would like to come back and watch the the board meeting, I move the governing board approve SOFG goal 4 progress monitoring report 4.

199I have a second. Second. All those in favor? I I any nays? Hearing none. Motion passes. Thank you so much for that. And that brings us to our item 4B, approval of the standard evaluation system, teacher observer observation rubric. So, Madame President, members of the board, this is fundamentally one of the inputs that we're looking to make a shift in. And so, um, that's why we're presenting it to you this evening. Um, and before we start in this library tab, I know that we had this on the board update and I loved all the changes, especially um, I don't know if board members noticed, but I want to point it out that there was a added on framework in the Danielson's group. I think it was the fourth or the fifth one, I can't remember,

200that we specifically did not adopt or they told us that they weren't because it didn't really align with our um, student conduct. um practices that we're shifting over. So, the fact that that administration's already looking at those kind of things and making sure that they are aligned where the governing board is is is amazing. So, I just wanted to point that out to our board members in case you missed that in the board update. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Pombo. Thank you. And I have um Martha Hernandez is here. She was on the committee. Um Dr. Joel Lauren was on the committee. So, there's more committee members, but the three of us are here tonight. And we're not going to present the entire slideshow. We're just going to present the part

201that's aligned to SOFG. Um so the committee started meeting in the beginning of the school year and we were looking at the current Danielson um framework that we've been using from the 2013 and we wanted to compare it to the updated version, the 2022 version um because we thought it was more aligned to our SOG goals. And so um that's where we started our work and I think we're going to start on slide 12. But I'll just read what's on that slide while we while we get started. So um the highlights from the 222 um Danielson framework is that the revised version has seemed more detailed and concrete. So this is the people that were on our committee. We had um teachers from different schools, but we also got feedback from our principles and assistant

202principles, our coaches, and we also got feedback from teachers um that came in that were not on the committee to get their feedback on the student outcome focus governance uh alignment to the new Danielson. So, these are some of the things that they said. There was a stronger emphasis on equity and student ownership. Um there was include clarity and focus on inclusion were highlighted by some of the uh people that were looking comparing contrasting. It supports trust building reflection and next steps in practice. Supports coaching and reflection align professional development allows observers to better highlight student voice engagement and ownership and more growth focus and align to individual practice. I feel like just yesterday we were having this conversation about if the new Danielson thing or I I remember googling in a meeting. I feel

203like we just talked about this last year because when we were looking at you had asked a question if we're looking at um the inclusionary practices student agency in the classroom and we said we're using the the 2013 Danielson framework and we want to create a committee to look at the 2022 framework. So that's what we started this year and that was based off our conversation from last year. And then um Martha Hernandez is an expert in Danielson, so she's been wanting to look at this for a while. So she's been a big part of the committee of I'm just happy that was like what people were noticing. Yeah. Yay. So we pulled out like we looked at the rubrics and we just pulled out some key parts that were aligned to um student outcomes.

204So the first section is the uh the goals. So it's focus on student learning and growth. So, Danielson 2022 shifts emphasis from the teacher behavior to student outcomes and experiences directly aligning to our board goals focus on proficiency of ELA, math, and multilingual progress. So, it's had a lot from the student perspective rather than from the teacher perspective. It supports the goal-based instructional practices. So the framework components, especially domains two and three, guide teachers to implement high impact evidence-based strategies that help meet smart goals such as increasing third grade literacy and eighth grade math proficiency. Also accelerates equity for target populations. There's explicit equity language in the 2022 framework supports progress monitoring for black students, multilingual learners, and students with special needs, mirroring the board's focus on these subgroups. And then when we looked at

205it from the guardrail perspective, it equity and inclusion is embedded in this new framework. Um includes indicators that are tied to culturally responsive instruction. Um social emotional learning and linguistic ac access supporting superintendent guard related to equity, wellness, and multilingual inclusion. It also prioritize student needs over adult convenience. The framework emphasizes student agency, choice, rigorous task aligning with the guard rail, preventing adult pri priorities from uh student progress. Inspires broad community engagement, emphasizes a student identity, inclusion, learning condition, support board uh guardrails around community voice and multilingual family involvement. And then ongoing professional development. So the 2022 framework serves as a tool for differentiated coaching and reflective teaching. It also has an indicator in there the teacher seeking professional development. Um so those are the things that we looked to see if it was u

206more aligned to student outcome focused governance. The next slide just quickly you could just wanted you to see the rubric. So what the different groups did is they looked at the 2013 version and 2022 version and they based it off the guardrails and gave scores. And so you can see that the 2022 version got higher scores. So this was um feedback from the evaluation committee. the um and those are just some comments from the evaluation committee that I know you probably had a chance to read already. Um and then the feedback from leadership council. So this included our principles and assistant principles and you could see the scoring 12 to 18. You can start seeing that the scoring was aligned even though we were doing at different times with different groups. And then the last

207one was a focus group of teachers. We asked some teachers to come on their own time after school to look at this and compare and contrast. We wanted to make sure we had uh representation from all different schools and also different um content areas. And so the same thing you kind of see the points are similar to when they were looking at that uh looking at the two different frameworks. So ultimately the very last slide is that all the groups asked that we adopt the 2022 framework um for teaching this for this upcoming school year. And then um do you want to add anything Martha or Dr. I just want to add that the the common theme across was the the actual um terminology how it was very explicit and specific to to strategies or

208instructional practices. So when we talk about cultural um relevancy practices and how to create inclusive um classrooms, our teachers are like, "Well, what does that mean? What does that look like?" I think now looking at the rubric and the re and the revised version of it uh the the theme across was like it's more positive. So h coming from a administrator or a coach perspective when you're having those conversations with our teachers, you can really have a rich conversation and discussion without like belittling the work or like making, you know, making it a a negative conversation, but it's more about professional growth, right? And so that was the common theme and that was music to my heart was amazing. And then the second piece was um I forgot my train of thought. It's been a

209long day. I can't remember what I was gonna say. I apologize. Um the It's okay. Oh, the inclusive practices were like when you talk about it, you don't know what it looks like, but it was a specific strategies of what what is being expected. So teachers was like, I can pick this rubric up or these indicators and make sense of it on my own. That's what I was gonna say. Yeah, Lauren, I don't know. Go ahead. I don't know that I have anything more to add other than it's been a couple of years of a process. um because we did start talking about revisions to the evaluation system last year. Uh looking at how we're looking at data and the Danielson revision was a was an important part of that conversation, but I think we

210started too late in the process last year to make a change that would be enacted for this year. So looking at it this year, really doing the deep dive and having having it kind of pulled apart by different groups, uh, and looking at it through the lens of the student outcomes focused governance, especially the guardrails, I think was a critical piece of the conversation. And, uh, so we're excited to make that recommendation. Yeah, I just love this and I don't have any questions. The only, um, statement I guess I have to say to this is this new rubric came out in 2022. We're barely adopting it now, but our goals were created in 2023 and they're so aligned to the Danielson framework that has nothing to do with SOFG. So, this comes and also tells

211me the synergy of how another realm of professionals said, hey, school districts should be moving in this direction and here we are leading the way and did it before the Danielson framework got adopted. So that's just another shout out to the board and to also the superintendent and the beautiful cabinet team that we have that we've been on this journey and now that we are on this vertical alignment of where we're at, all these new implementations of things that we're doing, they're just kind of sliding in and working perfectly to move the needle. So again, that was just like a a a moment that I had that, okay, stuff still keeps coming back and saying, you guys are in the right direction. we're doing what needs to be done and I know for a fact

212we will see different outcomes next year than this because now everything's starting to kind of play itself out with all the other internal systems that we have. So that was just my aha moment right now and moving forward I will always be referring to them as the be cabinet. So I appreciate that little turn of phrase because we're all just beautiful you know it help it works for me because I refer to my wife as the beautiful Wendy all a I love that. I think that um it just kind of you know we there's a framework here that's obviously the basis for it has been in existence for nearly 30 years and it's like one of you know it's like an industry standard best practice um tool to use and so knowing that they've continued

213to evolve their tool for um for people across the country to use and that that tool um values things like equity and inclusion just helps me um continue to be clear in in our um in our stance as a board to continue to affirm the importance of that in everything that we do and um uh you know continue to say that we have everybody's back in this district and making sure that we are um doing what's best for our kids. And so this continues to come through as as one of those things and and um just want to reiterate that again that we have everybody's back and making sure that if this is a part of what's best for our kids then we're going to be behind it. Thank you. Awesome. Any other questions or

214comments? So um I talked to Mr. man yesterday and our one-on-one and um the one thing that I have been thinking about since last year was how many how many teachers we have that are highly performing and performing um and how many are developing and what's the last one ineffective ineffective and I'm hoping that maybe with this like we're going to see because it aligns with our goals that we're going to see some differentiation um with those because I was kind of alarmed at the numbers last year of how many people were highly effective and effective. Um and our scores aren't showing that. Yeah. Um and that is a that's a big concern for me. Um, and I'm not I I feel um as an educator myself um that I look at where my kids

215are coming in and where my kids are going out and if I have brought them a year or more along the route that I consider myself effective. So I'm not saying that we have to have you know um like everybody has to achieve like this high level. I mean of course we want to get there. I mean, that would be like our ultimate like goal, our wish. Um, but I really think that we need to start thinking about like how we're going to align the goals that we have with what the teachers are doing because I I I'm not seeing it yet. Um, and I don't want to say, oh, you can only like give this many highly effectives. We have that in our district and I don't agree with that either. Um, but I

216think we need to see um the backup from our data to go with this. So, I just want that to be on your radar because I still would like to discuss like how many we had this year. Um, because it does just disturb me that there was like so many. Um, especially when we have new teachers, we know that they're going to be developing and it's not that's not anything horrible. It's just No. and it's not fair to them to to do that, right? Um, so that that was just something that I had talked to Mr. Man about yesterday and asked if that would be the appropriate place to bring this up during this time because like I still am thinking about that from last year um and things don't bother me that much um

217most of the time, but like that still is just like kind of like eating at me. So I had to I have to say something about that. Um so that's my two cents. Thank you, Miss Ays. Any other comments or questions? All right, it looks like we're ready to make the motion. I move the governing board approve replacing Danielson's 2013 framework for teaching with the revised 2022 framework for teaching to be used for certified teacher evaluations as part of the standard evaluation system. May I have a second? Second. All those in favor? I I any nays hearing? None. Motion passes. Thank you so much for that. That brings us to 5A, public comments. Miss Huades, do we have any public comments? Thank you. Number six, approval of consent. I move the governing board approve consent

218agenda items A through P in accordance with policy BB-E. Second. All those in favor? I. I. Any nays hearing? None. Motion passes. That brings us to 10A, business and planned approval of the 202526 proposed budget. And I'll turn it over to Miss Shapiro. Did you want to play a song for us before? No. Like trying to wake everybody up. Thank you. Um, look at that. I didn't even have to look desperate for too long. Only one quick for getting better. It's only been two years and uh I got this down. Um, madame president, governing board members, and superintendent man, I'm happy to present the proposed budget. I did want to um make a statement about uh the process that we're using here tonight. Uh this item is usually on consent agenda. So this is our

219proposed that then leads us into our budget hearing that then we would you know have some more discussion about the budget. Last year we pulled proposed budget out of consent so that we could make the uh connections um as we were starting um just to more fully put the process into an SOFG lens and we've done more and more and more. So, I think it was just appropriate for us to bring it out again um since we do have our two new board members that wouldn't have heard it last year and this kind just the beginning of that process. So, next year we'll go back to consent. Um but I did want to um any opportunity I have to talk about account codes and this uh particular uh presentation has a little bit of that.

220I am going to go very fast. Uh a lot of these items we did uh cover over the in the budget 101. Um what's been happening with the budget is in the back end is where a lot of the SOFG framework is happening for us especially on the operational side we're uh putting that into the the process of bu building the budget the budget conversations the budget request as we go through that budget calendar that was shared in the last meeting. Um so that budget development is where alignment sits but I also um you know want to point out this is a managerial document. We have no control over these budget forms. They come to us from the state. Um at at this point in time, we have budget forms, but we do not have

221our final numbers um as to uh what those percentage increases will be. And so we will have to revise to those. Um and we will go ahead and and uh put out our best budget possible without all of the information just as we do every single year. um this is a legal obligation and um and we have to hit these deadlines and so that's the purpose of this process. So we have to hit these deadlines but the people providing the budget to us don't sorry I just Yes. Right. Exactly. We hit the deadline but there's no deadline for them to provide information to us. So we do the best we can. Um, and one of the things that I just want to uh add before you continue is that Miss Shapiro is also part of

222the SOFG implementation cohort that we were doing. So, it is so so imperative that our CFO is also involved in what that looks like. So, when she's running her budget and she's having those conversations with our team, she's already exposed to what the expectation is on resources. There's a whole other section in SOFG framework that talks about cascading alignment of resources to tie into goals. So I am just so appreciative of you Mr. Shapiro as a CFO. It's kind of unheard of for CFOs or um cabinet other cabinet members to be Dr. Pombo is also part of that cohort. So I just share my gratitude because it brings a whole another insight when you're bringing budget to us and we can at least have somewhat of a reassurance that because you are in the cohort,

223you already are thinking in that in that mindset. So I appreciate it. Thank you. And uh it's definitely uh been insightful and it makes sense. It makes sense with what we're trying to accomplish and aligning the budget. it it's just logical and makes sense to com to um have student outcomes be directly connected to the dollars that we spend and we talk about that in our in our progress reports and all of those choices that we're making have happened through a budget process. So um uh let me before I jump into that real quick I'm just going to um I want to show you the budget. I'm not sure how much um we've had an opportunity to take a look at it. Um it's a very tiny screen. I apologize. This is the maintenance and

224operation budget. So this is it gets its own page because it is uh uh the budget that we talk about the most. This is what goes to meet and confer. Um this is the main operating budget of the district and it is set up uh through an account code fashion so that you can have some knowledge even though it does look like numbers on a screen. Those numbers tell me an immense amount of data. So, uh, when you look at that column to the far left that talks about where the expenditures are being budgeted to, you can see that the program 100 is regular education. Below that, in that second box, you can see program 200, which is special education and gifted. Uh, below that 400, pupil transportation, and then some other um areas that

225we have to account to. Um but the the main uh portion of our budget exists up in that top area. It is then broken down additionally through what's called a function. Those are the fourdigit codes of 1,00 and then the the 2000s. And I talked about this in the budget 101 very quickly. Um 1,00 is in the classroom. That's that's that number. That's the one that we want to put as much of our dollars there as possible. But as we've noticed, you can put all the money in the world into the classroom, but if you don't support the teachers and you don't support the students, they're not going to succeed and we're not going to reach our goals. Um, and that's part of the conversation about uh the coaches and the instructional coaches. Um, that

226cost falls into a 2200 which is when we support our instructional staff. We we teach teachers how to teach and that's where instructional coaches fall. So you will see increased dollars in that bucket as we move forward through the um instructional coach plan. Um 2100s are direct support to students. So you'll see uh numbers in there and that is um services that are facing with students. So PT services, nursing services, uh psychologists, all of those directfacing uh supports for students that aren't happening in the instructional classroom are in that 2100. So um you will typically see our budgets are heavily weighted in the 1,2100 and 2200 functions. The rest of it is the operational values of um like 2300's are the executive team and their support. 2400s is school administration which is the principles and

227their support. 2500 central services. So, um that's fiscal services, payroll, um uh human resources, a warehouse, all the things that kind of make the guts of the district run. Um 2600 is the operations of maintenance and plant. Uh when you drop down, 2700 isn't um in that breakout, but it is located under the program 400 pupil transportation. That function and that uh program go together. they just report that out separately on this budget. So you can see that that does carry down into uh sped services also where things happen directly in the classroom and then support to students. So I I think with account coding those are some of the key areas and the takeaways that allow you as board members to very quickly identify what types of services and where those budgeted dollars are

228sitting in this budget as it stands. This is the proposed uh this is before we know final numbers, but we know where we're budgeting our dollars and that doesn't change very much from year to year. Uh except for when we're making choices to um add additional programming and it gives it that opportunity for us to see it happening real time on the on the spreadsheets, which is exciting to me. Um the rest of the budget covers Oh, I guess I could stay in it. um covers those additional funds that we've talked about um before which are very highly regulated, not as much flexibility. We have to spend them exactly as stated in statute. They typically have restrictions or supplanting restrictions, meaning we can't um uh replace the existing dollars that we're spending in those areas,

229but we could add to that's what supplanting guidelines mean. So classroom site fund is a supplanting fund. Uh this this uh fund is uh specific to adding to teacher salary and performance-based pay. Um and that's just kind of how the whole budget goes. It breaks down those various capital funding sources. Our bond, you're going to see a big change here in the bond dollars because we just had a bond sale. So we're um finishing up the past bond and then adding in our new budget. That's why you'll see an increase there. Our unrestricted capital outlay stays pretty steady. we have an override that doesn't change. It's 2.9 million each year um until uh we need to go back out again for that. Um another big thing happening this year is adjacent ways. We will not

230be going out for any adjacent ways dollars. That's a a direct levy to our taxpayers happening through the budget process. Um reason being is is we've planned our projects and our bond sale year to keep our tax rate as flat as possible. One of the things that we don't want to do is um have our tax rates go up and go down and go up and go down and go up and go down. So, we work really hard to try to maintain um just consistency through that tax rate. Um and part of that is managing our adjacent ways projects along with our construction projects. Since we have a bond sale year, this would not necessarily be the best year to put out an adjacent ways, but we will next year. Um, this kind of breaks

231down in the presentation what those functions since I went through very quickly. Uh, and this kind of gives you an idea of what costs sit in those areas. You'll see this also when we do our annual financial report in October. Um, it's the same codes. So, what we budget to and what we spend are the same codes. So you can see well we budgeted you know 10 million in uh salaries and we spent you know 9.5 million in salaries or however that correlates. Um it's the same coding. Uh also on that budget sheet we went over what was on the left. What happens across the top are the object codes and those are 6,000. I break that down here. um happy to do any kind of uh account coding on the spot uh training with

232any of the board members uh by request. Love to do it. I'm sure I could fill at least an hour uh talking about account codes. Um but as I said, you know, having um specific account codes allows for structure, planning, and transparency. and then we can all see those numbers and see where the dollars are sitting and absolutely know what that was spent on. Um, so this is kind of just alignment. I've I've given this out a couple of times. This kind of puts some of those pieces together and connects them so that when you see them in the budget or you see them in our annual financial report, you can know, oh, those codes together create teachers. Those are teachers salaries and benefits. Um, or teacher support or contracted staffing. uh we're still struggling

233uh to fill positions. We rely on contracted staffing. We have strategies that we constantly uh discuss to try to reduce that reliance. But at the end of the day, we have to provide for our students the necessary supports in order um to continue uh increasing those student outcomes. Um, and again, just some more alignment with the words versus the numbers to kind of give you some insight and you can review at your leisure. And we did want to kind of go through some examples of our alignment, strategic clarity. These are this is like the all of those progress reports uh in on one slide. Um, these are talking about some of the strategies you've been hearing uh in some of those reports. Uh, what we're continuing, what we're increasing. Obviously, we're increasing uh content coaches.

234That's a very large focus for us. We've seen success. We want to duplicate success. Uh we do have some uh new strategies coming out. Um adding that director of student support and inclusive practices. Uh we think that's going to have some just priceless results. Um adding that to the learning walk platform so that we can increase the amount of data that we are collecting. uh we know that uh datadriven decision- making is um key and then abandonment at this point we don't have specific things uh identified other than what we've talked through the progress reports last year we had um eliminated the other coaching model we eliminated the CJAS there were just a couple of strategies that we really clearly knew at that time which I don't really have right now but we will continue

235to showcase that in our U progress reporting And then just some uh significant changes, the new budget forms. Um oh, I did want to show that to you. Sorry. Let me show you one more thing that's kind of causing me a not heartburn, but um it's just new. It's just something new and I'll have to adapt to it. So uh when we talk about our fund balance reserve we maintain that fund balance reserve uh through the 10 15 20% whichever the committee and our recommendation comes to the governing board. This year we had recommended a 5.8 million uh reserve in our carry forward to ensure that we um carry forward the dollars we needed um to protect us and help mitigate the the uncertainties with the federal funding. uh the declining enrollment, all of the

236risks that have been identified in previous presentations. In the past, that was accounted for on a different budget sheet. They have now changed the budget sheets to include that as a line item on this budget. You'll see that grade area. And then how much are we maintaining? I plugged in a number. This is not the number that it will be. um that number will occur after we've completed our spending for this year. So we can do the calculation. Uh that calculation comes from a percentage of our expenditures in the prior year. So we're in our prior year right now. We're still continuing until uh June 30th. Then we close up the books. We will then get a final cost by the time we do our annual financial report. At that point, we can do the

237calculation and take that into committee and um and kind of understand a little bit more of our risks and then we will do a budget revision to change that number to what the committee um recommendations come forward and we'll know if we're at do we feel like we're in a 10% world which I I just don't see anytime soon uh with what we're experiencing the next few years. Um but we will make a recommendation at that time. So at this point in time that's just a holding number until we revise after we have some conversations identify risk and go into committee. Um uh but I wanted to point out that they are and and I said two years ago that this was coming uh that the the fund balance has become just even more important

238as uh we see what's happening with other districts that don't have a fund balance policy or a process and we see kind of the troubles that some districts have been having. Um, so I think that our pre-planning and kind of knowing ahead of time what was what was coming um just kind of shows how we're ahead of the game. We have good best practices and I believe that our budget is um a healthy budget that allows us to forward think and plan um and have uh enough contingency built into it so that we can pivot as necessary. I was not I, as you guys know, every conversation we've had, especially about the federal funding, I just kept reassuring you that I felt like we had the space to deal with what gets thrown at us.

239And this is why u because we have been planning forwardinking budgets um for quite a while and prior to me being here, Mr. Man did an excellent job of that. So I was able to pick up the reins and just put some verbiage to it. But he's had that process the whole time. And that is why Kraton continues to excel in this area. And I think it's um because of this I I think that we have impact when we sit on the cohort for SOFG. Uh because we're not coming at it from a broken budget process. We have a pretty strong budget process. It makes it easy for me to walk into the cohort and have good conversations about how this can support and be very clear in the SOFG process. So, uh, and again,

240this is not something I created. This is something I'm continuing with Fidelity. So, um, that is pretty much it. Again, no adjacent ways. Those federal budgets, I'm putting them at 8 to 20%. Um, could be worse. We we just, you know, we saw some current news today. You know, again, every day there's new news about what monies we're not going to get. Um I kind of like I'll believe it when I see it both ways. When I get the money, I'll believe it when I see it. When I don't get the money, I'll believe it when I see it. So, I just keep planning forward. I know that we have cushions and protection. And it's not that I'm not concerned about the things that are happening. It's just that I think that we will have

241some space to have good conversations to deal with it as a team whatever comes down on us. Um I think that's pretty much it. Uh next steps are going to be our adopted budget in June 24th. Um October will be our uh report out on our capital and bond spending. I really love that report for you guys. It really gives us a chance to showcase what those capital dollars are doing since typically we're talking about operating cost and salaries and uh the maintenance dollars. So the the capital presentation is really fun. Um and then in October is when we'll see our annual financials from the fiscal year that we're closing out in June. And then we'll be heading right into we may do a September revision most likely. Yes. because I don't have the final

242dollars on these um budget forms. Even if they come out now before June 24th, I can't change our proposed budget um and fix it in the adopted. I will have to do a budget revision, which we would do very quickly in September. We we're just getting used to doing it because of how late the information comes to us. And then um December may or may not do a revision, just depends. the May we'll definitely do a final. So that's our budget process and and our um uh budget calendar uh states that also which you got at the budget 101 uh last board meeting and I'm happy to take any questions. Board members questions or comments. The only thing I'm going to say is thank you so much for including the examples of alignment and strategic

243clarity. That's something that that's the first time I've seen it. It makes sense when we are actually being upfront on how it's connecting to our guard rails and our goals. Um, and I know that strategic abandonment is one of the hugest things that um, the cascading of funds and as we get into it, I'm I'm sure that we'll start adding more stuff. So, I just appreciate that slide and it helps also for me verbalize when I'm out in the community on when I get all these budget questions. What are you doing with all these millions of dollars to make sure you're moving the needle? Thank you. Absolutely. I'd like to give a quick shout out to Mr. Russell Denult. Um I know he's typically in the back of the room just running the show here,

244but um he's also been one of the leads on our strategic abandonment work as well. So thank you for the presentation and the reassurances and then the explanation of the carry forward because I was like that looks different but yeah uh All looks really good. Thank you. All right. Hearing no other questions or comments, I move the governing board approve the proposed budget, call for a public hearing on the 202526 fiscal year budget on June 24th, 2025 6 p.m. and authorize public notice of such meeting. Second. All those in favor? I I Any hearing? None. Motion passes. That brings us to 12A. Do we have any future agenda items hearing? None. That brings us to 13A. I move the governing board adjurnn. Second. All those in favor? I any n hearing? None. We w have

245a great night. Thank you guys. I know, right?