001that's it but then a training I don't expense thank you I'm just saying I hope it's gone it ain't happening all right so this appears that those of you are says I was with somebody the other day and remember they told me that they're good friends with her and now I'm blanking on who the heck I was talking to me all right thank you so much for to everybody for being here we're gonna go ahead and get started Creighton School District understands that our community of schools is located on the ancestral land of the Odom Jude and akumel hodam people who descended from the Hohokam and have inhibited these lands since time immemorial the Odom whose name translates literally to people our vibrant culture and Community spanning countless Generations into the past continuing to thrive
002in the present and carrying a powerful Legacy for Generations into the future with this acknowledgment the current School District formally recognizes that the traditional care and 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 um Yvonne would you like to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance please all right it looks like we have everybody here we have Miss Gibson McLean Miss mcshuffree myself Miss McCaleb and Miss Ayers and 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
003order to speak to an agenda item and blue cards to be submitted in order to speak during public comments due to the open meeting law board members are not allowed to address items that are not on the agenda this is for reference policy bedh I move the governing board approved the agenda as presented second all those in favor do we have any public comments today okay some and that brings us to our superintendent report well good evening everyone um I hope you had a marvelous Valentine's Day or galentine's day or Friendship Day or a day filled with love um I would like to say that a group of us uh celebrated uh Valentine's Day in San Antonio where we were learning at the National Education conference through the American Association of school administrators and while
004we were there I want to acknowledge that Michelle Berg is in an aspiring superintendent's cohort uh specially designed for future female superintendents and Andy Gutierrez is also in a state superintendent aspiring program designed specifically for Latino Latina and our very own Yvonne Carvajal graduated from the national aspiring superintendents program Academy for Latino Latina superintendent so congratulations Yvonne um we also received a copy of the uh aspa survey and the aspa group is the Arizona School Personnel administrators Association and they once again came out with the severe teachers shortage in Arizona but it was also all staff I do think it mirrors many Industries but specifically in education there was a story on it this morning on channel three uh fundamentally we are short across the state of 25 percent teachers and I will tell you
005Creighton is doing substantially better than the state average but there are 2 900 vacancies across the State of Arizona and have been all year uh we have a across the state a thousand bus driver unfilled vacancies and I have a breakdown of those which I'll include in a future board update or anybody else who's interested in the study I can get to you what the proportions and actual raw numbers are it's it's just disturbing across all work Industries but certainly among classroom teachers we we really need our physical presence to make the difference in the lives of children and the joy that we have in doing this job is just enriching and and filled with the difference that we get to make in the development of our future citizenry um I have great news Our
006Family Resource Center was renewed for four more years it's about an eight hundred thousand dollar Grant so yay to the renewal of Our Family Resource Center uh this is our partnership with first things first and this is a big we're just doing such an amazing job kudos to Leslie Owen who's not in the audience today but some she might be listening thank you Leslie for all your hard work and Yvonne for your leadership and Community uh relations uh I have on the agenda under superintendent's agenda to honor our and recognize our partnership with the chorus America and the Phoenix Boys Choir which was brought to me by Amy mccheffrey so Amy thank you for bringing us that partnership and it is beautiful tonight we intended to celebrate um the with the students actually singing for
007you but sadly the music director took ill this evening and we will reschedule that and we will do it at the next the next time she feels ready to bring the kids over to sing for us uh and then lastly and this is another big win for the district is we are so tickled to have had many wonderful Partnerships uh with foundations and other organizations that seek to help school districts uh in the last few years we've celebrated the Creighton Community Foundation which focuses on community and housing and social needs and especially food distribution with our families right now but in the last is it year and a half uh Barbara damiani upon her retirement has taken the lead of executive director and has worked with a variety of other business partners and marvelous governing
008board or board members that are on your 501c3 the journey you've been on to get this kicked off is mind-boggling and I want to thank you and introduce you to the governing board and our community officially tonight so come on up Barbara and share your story please welcome Barbara damiani executive director and Mac McDonald and welcome slower good evening I'm Barbara damiani I'm a retired Creighton School District employee um I have a I decided that before I left that the kids still were part of my life so I had to do something to support our kids so I talked to a few people and Donna and Jay and all of us we discussed about starting the Creighton Education Foundation our foundation so I ran with what I had and filled out all the paperwork for
009the 501c3 became a 501c3 person and got a board and took off running my board is Mac McDonald Patterson Donna Young Sergeant butcher they couldn't make it tonight uh Elizabeth placement Abraham James this be something I don't know how to say his last name and Suzanne schweiser neutral so that is my board and we meet once a month now and we're planning it we had we are here to talk about um the foundation itself it's to support students teachers and staff members of the Creighton Elementary School District live from by providing funds grants for supplies field trips sporting activities other school activities programs for um adventure learning that's what most of it's all about how the kids are going to Adventure in all their learning so we are we open it up yesterday on our
010part It's opened up for teachers to fill out applications and Emily will be sending it out as soon as I get her the last piece she needs for teachers to be able to have all the information they're missing one piece a code they need so the grants are open for teachers right now and students will follow in the next few weeks we're working on theirs all the children that are traveling abroad or wherever they will not field trip they can fill out applications we have it to where students that have left the district in the last few years that are still doing adventure learning we are willing to support them too so that is our plan but applications is opened up as on my end on creightoneducationfoundation.org how about the you've done some amazing fundraising
011oh yes we had a bowling tournament thing in November the beginning of November which was amazing we made a lot of money more money than I would ever think could ever think that you could make in a fundraiser for two hours we have a lot of support for a lot of vendors we have a lot of support from the community um a lot of people out of the Biltmore are supporting us that live in the Biltmore so we have community members everywhere that are just bringing in donations and we got a good start and we're ready to start giving out money to kids and teachers thank you it's okay thank you very much for this information um I sit on the Creighton Community Foundation board and um we've got a three million dollar operating budget
012this year and Jeff I don't Jeff Bowles I don't know if you know him um he would love um to offer support to you guys if if you want it I think you're doing similar things he's got um classroom grants and also supports Junior ambassadors but he's a great resource out there he's been in the community for over a decade doing similar types of things and um is very plugged in so you know that's just another resource for you guys thank you does anybody have any questions or comments thank you Partnerships like this are really important and it's always great to see people that were teachers and Educators in the district and then said you know what I I need to keep going so thank you for all of your hard work thank you that
013brings us to governing board reports and Miss Ayers would you like to start us off not have fun tonight thank you Miss McCaleb just a real brief I hope everyone tried to relax on the three-day weekend I know they're you know double-edged sword because today was the monday-est Tuesday ever um but I hope everyone was able to relax a little bit um I know everyone's super excited that the looming AEL threat is subsided but I also need to remind everyone that it is for a year so making sure that you know anyone out there who's been doing work at the Capitol talking to legislators um really just pushing that we get a final solution to this so that we're not back at this fear stage this time next year again so it's like celebration but
014also don't stop fighting that's thank you so much thank you Ms Gibson McLean I don't have a report today awesome thank you the only thing that I do have to say is a few weeks ago I had mentioned that I was at a school board partner's cohort and we recently had our they do a lot of anti-racist policy work for school board members and we recently went through our anti-racized racist superintendent search so I thought that was uh ironic that they went through a whole segment and they have like this policy framework already put out for school districts that are looking for superintendents and what a great timing so that was great and I also recently got accepted um three weeks ago to the Georgetown edu Comics um con or not conference classes it's basically
015a five-week deep dive into budgeting and how the budget should reflect the policies and the goals that the districts have so I'm really excited to take a deep dive into learning a little bit more of our budget and seeing how our policies or what we're saying we're doing actually reflects our budget so that's great too and then after I finish that you know month and a half I've gruesome wonderful numbers and budgeting I'll report back to see what you know changes that we're going to be making here at the district level that ends my report and then we move on to approval of consent I move the governing board approve consent agenda items a through F in accordance with policy bedb-e second all those in favor I thank you guys all right and that brings
016us to 6A which is Monte Vista School update all right at this time I'd be happy to invite the Monte Vista team forward it's been a very interesting year at Monte Vista school and so the team is here tonight lots of kids parents teachers and staff here to share the story of progress and the challenges that they've been working to overcome consistently throughout the year so with that I will welcome Dr Lauren and the Monte Vista team there are a lot of us but don't get nervous [Laughter] we have a they have a succinct time update on uh Madam president members of the governing board executive team thank you so much for this opportunity to update you on Monte Vista and how our community has been doing this year um we've had a lot of
017great things that have happened this year there are also a lot of challenges that have been holdovers from previous years and also things that we're recognizing are things that are coming up that are new for us and so we'd like to illuminate some of those for you this evening um I would like to note that in our presentation we have aligned our goals to the Strategic plan goals so if you're familiar with those strategic plan goals you'll probably see that they mirror in some way I tried to use creative titles so it's a little bit different uh goal number one we will focus mostly on academics one of the things that you'll see throughout the presentation as well is that we have marked each slide that it's appropriate to do so with an alignment to
018our integrated action plan so those of you who are familiar with the title program our integrated action plan is based on our comprehensive needs assessment that has completed the priority year and in that completion of that we identify several principles that we're going to focus on this year our focus is on principles 2.1 2.3 5.2 basically principle two is about instruction 2.1 I don't have to read it for you there it's right there for you to see basically academic behavioral social emotional expectations 2.3 is really about differentiating instruction and meeting the needs of all Learners with Universal Design for Learning we'll talk a little bit more about that in other slides and 5.2 is about environment so where are we how are we building a environment where our school leaders teachers students families feel respect
019and mutually understand each other so our first slide is really related to academics and what we're looking at is where are we right now comprehensively with our data those of you who've been with us for some time probably remember exact path you've also heard from other schools about the benchmarks so I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about that specifically just to note that for Monta Vista we really are looking at especially for exact path where students gaps are in their learning based on the Diagnostics that are given in quarter one and Quarter Two If you recall from previous presentations the program does a learning path sets each individual student on a path based on the gaps that might be present from prior learning so for instance a fourth grade student may
020have gaps in math that are identified as standards from second grade so the learning path would start with those gaps and move students forward you can see from the chart on the slide that we're focused really in this look on skills mastered there are over the course of this time period this represents about 538 students in grades third through eighth that have mastered skills which means that they've completed tasks and completed assessments within the program to earn that skill this is positive because we hope it's going to translate into better performance on the metrics that aasb our state test is going to measure as well as helping us to kind of understand about where they are the program is best when it's adhered to with Fidelity from the students so there are sometimes students that
021will log 20 hours of work on the system and actually have been logged in for 60 hours so there's maybe some opening of the program and not really attending to the program so of course we have teachers work with students and trying to help them understand the importance of that tool um so just to kind of highlight a couple of areas uh if we look at math our eighth grade over quarter one they increase the number of skills Mastered by 81 percent uh we saw a slight decrease in language arts in third grade and we saw an increase in uh a significant number in fifth grade with reading another look that we are examining is our interim benchmarks these benchmarks were completed in January I think Gateway had just completed them before their their presentation
022last time so we're able to kind of dig into the data down to the student level by standard by question even looking at specific misconceptions and learning center problems that are part of each specific area of that test Ela and math are the two content areas that are assessed we have challenges we know that in this particular Benchmark both language arts and math are lagging behind our performance in last year's aasa we're going to address that a little bit later when we talked to you about how our action planning and how we're working toward meeting our students needs that is concerning we want our students to improve and do better year over year obviously so we think that the way that we've approached our action planning for this round helps to focus the question right
023so what is it that students need to do to be masters of that particular skill or that particular particular standard uh areas to note we have in let me back up our school has additional targeted support and intervention as a designation many of the schools in the district have certain subpopulations based on the ASA test our focus is on our students with special needs our English language Learners positive in this particular round of benchmarking is that two of the grade levels of students that would have special needs actually increase their scores over last year which is really wonderful to see um we also have cons a couple of concerns third grade reading seems to be down from last year's scores it's a different cohort so we're talking about a group of students that were in
024second grade last year now they're in third grade but it's really important for us to recognize that you know the teachers are the same the instruction is the same what is it that's changed what's different so we're looking at all those areas you know one of the things that we've talked about in our conversations around data is stamina so our students adhering to the test and really reading the questions completely you know we've talked about how some of these multiple choice questions they require you to answer too not just two some of them have three or some have an eliminate one out of four so it really takes some critical thinking and some processing to be able to kind of get there so um what I'd like to do is ask Maria Guyer to come
025up and talk about our early literacy program yeah Maria Guyer I'm the effective schools coach at Monte Vista and um we have some data for you about early literacy our screener for K3 is ice deep and there are some things that we'd like to note for you we have seen some really good progress with our kindergarten group in fact if we look at one of the tests rapid letter naming is part of a composite of four tests actually and on that Kinder composite we're seeing that sixty percent of our kindergartners were at or above Benchmark and 23 were approaching Benchmark so really big difference than what we were seeing in the fall so we're really excited about that progress with our with our little guys um first grade we've seen some progress in a couple
026of areas we've also noticed that there's a decrease from fall to winter on the ORF some of that can be attributed to the fact that the winter passage is more difficult and students just aren't there yet so again our teachers are looking at that and figuring out where they need to meet students what skills they need in order to get them to become more fluent readers second and third grade seems to be steady um there's been some increase with um The Maze testing which is just comprehension uh oral reading fluency though stays pretty flat in second and third grade so we know we have some places that we need to um work on and again meet those students with the skills that they still need they just really aren't there yet um that's it for
027me what is the um m-o-w-r oh so let's move on with reading okay so we know that all of these uh screeners that we give students K3 are all leading up to that really big third grade move on with reading um legislation and so we work really hard to make sure that kids are fluent readers by third grade um so that's that's what that is related to thank you are all these tests taken um on an iPad or any of these like hand paper no sorry I just thought of the question sorry um the only one that is taken uh on the iPad is The Maze and it's a one minute um like a completion where students have to find the right word okay everything else is administered by an adult okay um some of
028it but none of it is paper pencil it's called oral I think yeah good evening I'm Cheryl Green and I'm one of the instructional coaches at Monte Vista we are using two different programs and are attending a couple of trainings to help us grow in the area of language arts with our district focus on early literacy we have many k3s teachers participating in District training one of the trainings is called letters and it's to deepen the knowledge for teachers to be literacy and language expert in the science of reading it teaches the skills needed to master the foundational okay can't do it Foundation I can't breathe um Master the foundational and fundamentals of reading and writing instruction it is a two-year cohort and they are really enjoying it and they've been telling us how much
029it has helped their their literacy program in their classroom Ames is the second training and this course prepares today's Educators to use specific evidence-based approaches to improve struggling students language skills and academic outcomes in elementary through High School plus it gives a deep dive into what and how and the what and how of structured literacy instruction they also find practical strategies and guidelines on all aspects of language and literacy instruction we also are working with two programs one is Hagerty and one is sips Hagerty is a a program that it is a use of a book and Hagerty happens to be the name of the author um many of our K3 teachers are using this program to help with teaching phonemic awareness and phonics um it does state that phonemic awareness is one of the
030best early predictors for reading success and so it's really important that we have that program in in our hands and working with it so um the sips program the the Hagerty program um is one [Music] the sips program sorry a program that the district has put in place for reading interventionists so now I'd like to introduce one of our reading interventions to share about the sips program probably like sleep good evening I'm Kelly Blakeslee one of the reading interventionists over at Monte Vista um and we have implemented a new program this year which stands for systematic instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness I think I nailed it um my favorite thing about it is that we have received direct training from the sips people themselves so it works best when we can get the information
031directly from the vendor and so it's really nice that we have ongoing meetings that support us in implementing the program because it is systematic and it checks all the boxes that are required by the state a number of them are but we were really thoughtful in how we implemented it so that we could teach it with Fidelity and see if it's actually working and it is we found a lot of success so far um so I'm really excited about that a challenge that we still face is that we're still overcoming the challenges from the pandemic that already were existing and that are just exacerbated and so my colleague Tara monashkin and I are kind of having to intervention our way through a lot of of you know fall behind as a result of that and
032so we just can't do that we need we would need you know 10 interventionist so we really need to in my opinion strengthen our our tier one instruction using some similar things that we've done and found success with in the intervention model to be able to help the teachers to feel just as successful in implementing that tier one instruction so um there's a lot of challenges but I have found a lot of Success With Sips this year and I'm really grateful that we have implemented it in this first core cohort feels really strong moving forward and I'm excited to see the results at the end of the year for our students and one of my kiddos is here tonight thank you Kelly what do you mean by tier one instruction what's that oh I mean
033um like the the first first round of instructions so in a classroom so I do pull out groups I didn't know if it was like a sip specific term oh no just uh just an education term yeah so my my role is technically tier two which is students that need a little support and then tier three would be even more support beyond that television all right thank you I guess I do have a quick question sorry um given your relationship with sips are they able to help Provide support for classroom teachers or ways to kind of differentiate their what they have available to you as far as curriculum goes for it to be yeah that's a good question I think some districts do on a more tier one instruction which is like more in the
034Gen Ed classroom we're using it specifically with intervention groups and I think it works best for that I that's actually me in the photo celeb setting um so and I only see you can see I only see five to seven kids at a time and so it's a lot more effective when I can do that more one-on-one small group instruction um as far as what our you know packages or whatever we've purchased through them I don't know what that looks like um I would have to ask Sarah best she's the one who kind of coordinates all the reading interventionists but it's something we can definitely look into and you know me I'm not going to shut my mouth about anything so I um like I said really grateful for how we've implemented this and and
035looking forward to using that as a model for how we can make find success elsewhere as well thank you yeah thanks I'm going to go a little out of order so we can talk about math before going into action planning so we're going to skip one side and now I'd like to introduce Sarah Larkin to review slide eight hey my name is Sarah Larkin I'm the other instructional coach at Monte Vista um tonight I'd like to share with you a little bit about our mouth journey of the school year um our Math teachers have been consistently implementing uh into math throughout the whole year it has been a steep learning curve but there has been lots of positive feedback some of that includes um like the variety of math manipulatives and online resources like waggle
036our students are enjoying them um our teachers really appreciate the various resources that are available to support differentiating in the classroom um there's a K8 uh word problem strategy called three reads which I think is really cool that it starts as young as Kinder um it's a way to help students access the word problem uh they have academic conversation built into the program with like turn-in talks um and the growth mindset practices are also there so those are some of the the positive feedback um some challenges have been um adjusting to like the pacing guides and the pacing of the overall lessons it's very different from our past resource Engage New York which we used for a lot of years so teachers are struggling with like uh for example some units are in a different
037order than they might have been taught in the past and so they're like oh that's not how I would do it but we know it's going to um you know we're going to stay the course and eventually like see the results so let me think um what else um has been a struggle has been that our upper grades are seeing some gaps in what our students understandings about math are and like what the program's expecting them to already know and so um that's been really challenging and frustrating for them and it may be one of the reasons why our diagnosed our benchmark scores might not be as high as we would like uh to support this teachers are using there's are you ready diagnostic assessment that they give before each module and then along with
038task analysis like thinking about how to best meet their students and um needs and now I'd like to introduce one of our Kindred teachers Devon to talk to you about her math instructions hi my name is Devin del Castillo and I'm a kindergarten teacher over at Monte Vista for the past two years it's been my goal to make math more engaging and comprehensible for my students to support the new hmh curriculum I have taken ideas from the math Cadre and arts integration techniques at the beginning of the year my students really struggled with the amount of materials that came with hmh trying to sort through like flipping to pages in the books and sorting through all the manipulatives but as we started using it every day and they were able to you know get through
039it we were able to have more time and so I was able to incorporate more supportive things like um my number talks so we kind of do it as a warm-up um and through number talks I have seen a really big Improvement in mental math fluency math vocabulary and academic collaboration and this is in kindergarten so they're they're really trying their best um and then I Incorporated some Arts integration techniques like meet the shapes and through that it provides a fun and explorative way for students to learn the names and the attributes of the shapes and overall math is becoming one of their favorite subjects and they're excited to be able to talk about their strategies with their peers foreign slides and we're briefly going to talk about our action planning process that we use
040this last round um as Dr Lauren mentioned we are seeing many challenges with our data we decided to use a data analysis format shared by Cina that was supported features as they prepare their students for the upcoming state test we looked carefully at our data to determine which students we should focus on for our small group targeted instruction we were able to identify which students to include based on growth on prior tests looking at our bottom quartile and different sub subgroups such as our El students and special ed populations on this slide you will see the flow map we use to do our supported Target instruction we use the aasa blueprint to determine the most essential domain to focus on we identified the priority standards by looking at Benchmark II data through illuminate they were
041able to look at the standards and then drill all the way down to the questions then we created the learner-centered problems that helped us determine what intervention was needed I'd like to now introduce Jessica Guevara to talk to us about her small group targeted instruction hi everyone my name is Jessica Guevara I am a 7th grade math teacher at Monte Vista um and last week we looked at our ASA scores and kids you're not looking at them I was kind of bummed out um because I feel like the scores are not reflecting what my students are learning in the classroom um I think at the beginning of the year there was a huge gap between the last year before the pandemic versus where they're at right now um in terms of social emotional and academics
042as well you know they're still learning how to be students but they are also trying to catch up to seventh grade math so with this new curriculum it was a little too rigorous for our students it took a while to get used to um and the number talks and the Turning talks were very helpful when it came to having discussions about math um but looking at the pacing and the scope and sequence this is definitely something that I was worrying about and with the action planning I was able to identify what standards my students needed to focus on and I've Incorporated math centers that are reviewing all of the 7th grade standards that we have gone over and then also standards for the new units that are coming up um they've been very helpful because
043I've been able to spend time with every single student in my class it's China 20 minutes each day with each group and I get to track the progress of every student I've talked to my students about what they appreciate about these centers they've said that they've had more one-on-one work with their teacher than they ever have so um that's kind of what I'm doing in my classroom from this course thank you all right so uh in the interest of time we're not going to take too much time on professional development just to the remark if you look at the chart what we did with our professional development for teachers is we differentiated based on what the needs were from the comprehensive needs assessment it's aligned to the principles that we have that we're focusing on
044under engagement instruction checking for understanding our PBIS model which is positive interventions behavior intervention support and SEL so at a future date we can update you further on those two slides you're going to move forward into our next goal which is community Equity diversity inclusion I'd like to introduce Melissa Fisher our child Justice Advocate to share some of the work that she is leading on our campus good evening everybody I'm really honored to be here thank you so much for having me and just want to share a little bit with you so as Dr Dr Lauren said I am the child Justice Advocate on Monte vista's campus and I get the absolute privilege of being able to go in as support to the teachers and to the community to kind of add in those pieces
045of you know learning for the students that are non-academic and then getting to support the teachers to incorporate those things into their curriculum okay so first thing that I do I'm just going to go through the list very very briefly here is I do for example there's students that need daily check-ins like for example if they come to school they're unable to adjust to the classroom right away sometimes I go in and just spend a little time with them and they're able to enter right into the classroom and into right into the academics and it works very very well now another thing that I do is I assist the teachers in bringing social emotional learning into the classrooms because as we know it's no longer a time when it's just academics taught there's so much
046more that each of the students need and so I get to go bring that into the classrooms with them first I model it then I team teach with them and then they start to incorporate that into their classrooms and so I have Daniella here with us today and she's going to tell you a little bit about one of the lessons that I got to teach her when I'm doing social emotional learning in the classroom about emotion Daniella will you go ahead and come on all right Daniel go ahead my name is Anila from third grade Vista Elementary School in Miss Fisher's class I learned that you can have different feelings even if your feelings that you can go to a calm down corner I made a card for Isa and Miss Pennington that's because she
047wasn't feeling she wasn't feeling good and I was sad because she wasn't feeling good so I made her a car when she came back I gave it to her she was feeling a little okay but she had to left when we were at lunch because she wasn't feeling good I'm gonna do for her make her happy and so one of the things I did with Daniella is we talked to like she said a little bit about emotions and what I said is sometimes emotions can change depending on if someone makes you feel better so I had them all make cards for somebody that they thought about that wasn't feeling good and she chose a girl named Issa with a special education student and she made a card for her because she was feeling sick and
048when she gave her the car she said she got to witness an experience that it made her happy it changed her emotions so Daniella thank you so much do you want to say that's fine thank you Daniel and so another thing that I get to do in the classroom is community circles and that's where we the the teachers and the students actually get to know one another outside of academics because sometimes it can be you're in the room with the teacher all they're doing is teaching you and a lot of times they don't even know their fellow students so these Community circles give them the opportunity to sit down with one another and really get to know themselves as people and from what one of the edge of the students that I actually was going
049to bring here tonight wasn't able to be here he said it makes the classroom just work so much more smoothly because you're not in the space with a bunch of total strangers and they just get to know when they connect with each other a little bit more and so with Community circles I get to go in and model them and then the teachers get to take them on because they know their students more than I do and so I'm just there to model it for them and to make it something that it's accessible for them and so the next thing that I do is also called the student assistant program now that is a really awesome leadership type program for any student it's one of the electives but the students get to come in and
050I get to train them on how to assist the teachers and so I have Jonathan tequila who is here tonight and he's going to go ahead and he's going to talk a little bit about the student assistant program the student assistant program is an elective for six through eight the student assistant program is when I or other students help the teachers out I can help the teachers out by passing the papers or grading some of the other papers I pass out meanwhile some of the teachers teach the class while on the fellow students in need need I help them I assist them so that is what I do I foresee a teacher Courier in your near future that's awesome thank you so much for sharing that Jonathan and that's one of the things we hope
051to do is to inspire them to something like that so I've expanded the programs to things like making resumes for them getting letters of recommendations for them we've gotten them their first paid position where they actually get to fill out an application in an interview and so it's a really great segue for them to go into high school and so there's a lot of other things that I do but I think what's really important to bring out is I like to do restorative practices because if a student is struggling gets in trouble why just leave them there with a punishment of detention why can't we do a little bit better in helping them to understand it a little bit more like for example I did a restorative practice with one of the group of kids
052that called 9-1-1 as a prank call and I got to do a practice where I got to bring in an officer who was a friendly officer who got to tell them hey this is what happens when you call 9-1-1 and now these kids are a group and they're working together and a lot of them have just started to shift their behavior and so it was something that was very productive and actually was able to bring again restoration to them and to the community and with the teacher as well so that's something that we like to strive for with the scl and that's something that I get to do as child Justice Advocate and so in the essence of timeout is going to leave it at that but thank you so much for listening thank you
053um good evening my name is Adriana padaca I'm the assistant principal at our school today I'll be talking to you a little bit about our Equity initiative what we're trying to do this is an ongoing year-long process so our team is kind of planning on a one to three year plan last year before we had met with you our team spent time working on our Equity commitment so as you see on the screen those are the five commitments that we have centered all of our work around primarily this year we are focusing on the first one creating and sustaining a safe and inclusive environment thinking about the ways that we could do that for the many subgroups that we have on our campus um additionally just to give you some highlights of the equity work
054we've done so far we did have our youth Equity Summit and with our fifth graders it was great the fifth graders were highly enthusiastic so we really appreciated that um a big part of our long-term plan is ensuring that students are able to do restorative practices on their own and are also able to regulate themselves so as a result we've developed something called our rest and restore Corner in every classroom there's a corner and our goal is for students to be able to go and use that for their self-regulation and be able to Advocate and identify that for themselves and as we increase student ability to have their own restorative dialogues they can go and do those together in a private place that provides that inclusive safety and then lastly when we're thinking about our
055staff we've really focused on our personal identity and exploration I think everyone on our staff is really committed to fully understanding what our biases are and also what we're bringing to the table and then being able to determine how we can make change so we're creating an equitable environment so it's been a big focus of our all staff developments and continues to be in our small site so with that we're going to go ahead and move on to our house committee and Miss guy is going to come on up so this is our fifth year of implementing houses at Monta Vista and it's a big point of Pride for us um and if you're in infinitum anyway our staff our staff works really hard at um expanding the house system and including we sent five
056staff members to The Ron Clark Academy this summer so thank you for your support in that and by doing so they came back and are working on brought back ideas which then led us to work on how we could expand our student involvement more and give the students more opportunities that align to the Ron Clark Academy vision and yes is going to come up and talk to you about the house all right hello again um so I'm the house Council sponsor and basically what house counsel is is a mixture of what we learned from the Ron Clark um training versus student council so we match those things up we have leaders from each house who meet up on every other Monday and we plan Spirit weeks free events uh just little things here and there
057on school campus to kind of spread kindness on our campus and love um and our students are just learning the importance of really serving their Community one of the biggest things is service right and that's what leadership really is about is about your community and what you're doing for for them um and then they get to dress up professionally kind of you know Ponder on what it means to present yourself um as an example and model for other people so that's what we're doing with our house Council I really appreciate that and appreciate you even how you said that it's important to teach our kids about community and service so I'm it's really rare when you hear that kind of lingle so I appreciate that and that you guys are actually implementing it in the
058school so over the years that we've been uh coming into the board and presenting we've talked about inclusion and we haven't really focused on our self-contained special education classes as much so tonight we thought we would take a moment to illuminate what's happening wonderful things that are happening in our PACE program and our places program which are both cross Oracle programs the distinction really is the places program has students that are much more medically fragile and maybe even more significantly cognitively below their peers I will invite Ms Pennington our PACE program it's a tongue twister the PACE program teacher for intermediate students to share a little bit of her experience with how we include our students in the self-contained classrooms in our community as well as some feedback from one of our parents who unfortunately
059couldn't make it tonight so Miss Pennington and Miss Lee from third grade so thank you so much for having me here today um as Dr Lauren said I am the paces teacher over at Monte Vista for intermediate ages um so with inclusion I'm not gonna lie we originally were very simplistic we're with our thinking of what is inclusion and what does it look like we took our kids to lunch recess special area classes and that was it but us as a team we decided we wanted more exposure and our students needed more exposure so we came together and we decided that we wanted to have our students come into our general education classrooms so we are getting the exposure of the academics with our gender teachers and also more communication skills with our peers ever
060since we have been going into our general education classrooms we have seen an increase in all of our students with communication skills academic skills and overall they just been thriving altogether the reason why I have Miss Lee up here with me today is because for the first half of the school year for second quarter we have the honor of going to special area classes with her classroom and our kids in my class just grew a strong bond with her classroom Daniella is one of the classmates that has grown so fond of our kiddos and unfortunately this quarter we are not able to go to special area classes with Miss Lee's class but we decided we wanted to continue on that relationship with her classroom so now we are doing reading buddies with her class um
061ever since we have done reading buddies with our classes together I have seen a growth in one of my students particularly he was very shy and did not want to read at all when it was just one-on-one with me and now he is thriving and is wanting to read he goes home every day with a book and he reads to his grandpa every day um I would like to have Miss Lee share how it's impacted her classroom and impacted her having our kids come together even so blessed with this opportunity I've been dying for this for years to have the page program in part of my classroom and the children just took to it like water oh my goodness and so they are excited to go find them at lunchtime can I go sit with
062them you know it's extended to strong friendship and in the classroom with the reading buddies they just love being with them and they are learning how to ask her children questions about what they are reading with the books and making sure that the child holds the book not just them and just being tunnel together and talking things over and so it's just the bond oh my goodness it's so strong and these children just absolutely love it and they were devastated when they didn't have specials together but this is a great way for it to continue with the Friendship so and in addition to that not only have we been reading together but her class in particular has been really wanting to learn more of how they could communicate better with the students in our pace
063and places program and so they're like can we learn sign language so we did one half of the class doing reading buddies and in the second half we all together learned the 25 basic signs so that was pretty cool to watch as Dr Lauren said we did have a parent in my classroom her name is Cindy Garcia mancha unfortunately she was not able to make it tonight however she did send me something on behalf that she would like for me to read um when RJ was two months of age he was diagnosed with epilepsy his neurologist had given us the news that RJ would not be able to speak show emotions or even have an imagination as any parent would be we were in denial but would do anything to help RJ achieve these milestones
064we have seen improvements as the school years came and gone and we were afraid he may have lost what he learned when covet hit but he didn't when he got to miss Pennington's he progressed from what he learned in Ms A's class and more RJ has been more vocal he picked up sign language from Mom because I am hard of hearing but he is using both words and sign to communicate more RJ had begun to be more independent and always saying don't worry I got it RJ has been excited to show us the books that Ms Pennington sends us and has been improving enunciating with each book we Are Beyond grateful for what Monta Vista has done for RJ but truly blessed that he has had the opportunity to be one of Miss Pennington's students
065and show the neurologist don't worry I can do it so thank you so much for letting me share inclusion with you today I have a couple questions yeah um so how long have you been combining the classrooms um we've been combining the classroom since the very beginning of third quarter of this year of this year okay yes okay I guess I was under the impression oh sorry I should reiterate with the competition with me and Ms Lee's class has been since third quarter but inclusion as a whole we have been working as a pieces and places team to continue to increase since the beginning of the school year okay so okay I guess I was under the impression we've been doing this for longer like for many years so I'm it's great that you're doing
066it um and what's preventing um The Specialist classes from happening um so the the inclusion we've been doing has been always focused on the um gen like the special areas in their lunch because of the cognitive needs of our students so that has been happening for years um coincidentally for this team um there are Behavior challenges in every class and when we realize the balance between creating doubles classes in PE and then the class the classes that we had their Dynamics um there was a bit of a struggle so it made more sense to split up that group which caused just a change in the schedule so nothing to do with the programming of it all but just the logistics of the many personalities we have in third grade thank you yes yes still with
067the third grade peers just a different third grade classroom so in turn more relationships are being built thank you so much for sharing I really appreciate it um my brother was in self-contained classroom at Monte Vista in the 90s and it's miles different I mean eons different from what it was I can't even imagine him being around other peers so it's really great to see this happening thank you I just want to build on that but being more intentional like you said we've done the specials and the lunch and the recess but at the end of the day they're still and then they go back to their classroom so I just really love hearing that we're increasing that interaction that's huge just to editorialize for myself the houses are a big part of that too
068so all of our students all of our students and all of our staff are separated into houses and they get to celebrate when unfortunately infinita wins something um that they get to participate everyone gets to participate in those celebrations so um thank you for that so we're going to jump and what I'm going to do in the interest of time thank you so much for being gracious um we're going to just have the people that we invited to speak come up and share because we want to honor their commitment to our presentation um so I'm going to ask Miss Dana deniger Smith she is a second grade teacher and she has been a part of our Arts integration program since we started six years ago when I arrived in Monte Vista so she's going to
069share a little bit of her experience good evening I'm Dana deniger Smith and I am very happy to be with Monte Vista blessed um it's been an amazing to see the importance of how we are integrating the Arts and creating using a creative literacy in the curriculum this has been huge for our school the changes within the last six years that we've been starting and incorporating um not only is it fun it has opened up the minds to have greater understanding that reinforces all the concepts the students are trying to learn for example one that um I have had a lot of fun with once I've learned how to do this particular art integration um it's called a character interview and character interview you pretend you're on a talk show and a lot of the
070kids didn't know it's it's second grade what a talk show really was so first we had to kind of go over that and give them examples and they just you know ate that up and so we do a talk show and of course um I have to be the host and I invite up the characters that we have just read about in a book of literature and they um are that character so they come up in character not just dressed in character but they are completely in character with how they've what they've learned about that character so they're showing the character traits um some of the students that are doing this uh have great difficulty with writing and expressing themselves and once they are given this opportunity it's quite amazing to see these students what
071they can do and um not only am I asking the questions up as a host the audience the students are asking questions about showing their comprehension they're asking the characters that are up questions as well and um we could take it in so many different levels so it just it's just been quite amazing um with learning this concept of character interview in arts integration I was able to model to a few to a few teachers and help them use it in their classrooms and um so that has been quite it's been remarkable that we're spreading what we're learning now to other teachers there's um another one that I've tried just this year that I learned so we're still learning and it's called movement with music and this has been fantastic for science the students are
072able to you to show us what they've learned for example this year we did the life cycle of a butterfly the bee and with music and movement they're able to show us the different parts of the life cycle so Arts integration has been fantastic yeah that's awesome that you did that um I recently two weeks ago read an article on the facts that psychologically has on it was mostly like high school students but it was a like a thesis part or a statement report whatever you call those on arts and how it really enhances the brain development so the fact that you guys are already doing it it's it's awesome especially what it does in in children so that's great to hear well weren't you going to do something with the board with science and
073movement maybe next time thank you thank you thank you Dr Lauren I think the best example of this sorry about my my uh voice um is seeing it in action in one of your classrooms I don't know that any of the new board members have had the opportunity to see that because it's I saw it pre-covet I think so um when we come and visit um that would be a nice thing too is that yes really when I understood exactly kind of what it was yeah we invite you to come and we'll make sure that we have some experiences for you to to participate in and you don't have to be a butterfly you could be okay water cycle is another uh I'm going to skip ahead and ask Miss um Holly Hancock to come
074forward she is our technology Mentor teacher and has a student with her Carlos so we're gonna have Carlos come up as well unfortunately uh good evening my name is Holly Hancock and I'm a fifth grade teacher and our school is technology Mentor teacher and I'm going to speak to you briefly about technology at our school um so Monte Vista is an apple distinguished School meaning that teachers at our school have demonstrated their proficiency with iPad and Mac applications and shown that they can integrate these tools in their instruction in a way that has proven to be highly effective um as Monte vista's technology Mentor teacher I have the privilege of getting to work and collaborate with teachers to advance their understanding and usage of technology in their classrooms so we often discussed using technology to
075collect and you know collect and analyze student data increase student engagement provide greater opportunities for student choice and especially as an Arts integration School how we can use technology to enhance student creativity through our lessons um so overall um it's incredible to see the ways that technology is um used across our campus and how it's made learning more accessible to all of our students from a student in second grade I'm using it to broaden their understanding of place value to our self-contained and special education students I'm using it to um excuse me support their communication needs and find their voice technology at Monte Vista has used to promote creativity um and increase accessibility and promote Equity each day um so I have Carlos here who wants to tell you a little bit about his experience
076using technology in the classroom good evening my name is Clarence but good evening my name is Carlos and I am a fifth grade student at Monte Vista I would like to tell you a little bit about how I use technology at school using technology in my classes has allowed me to be more creative and better learn my subjects for an example I often use keynote in my classes to make presentations about different topics or use freeform to draw visual models to represent my math problems overall I think that using technology at school is very important for students to be successful in school thank you for your time thank you thank you thank you so much all right I'm going to ask Elizabeth otania she is our Community Education Outreach specialist and uh one of our
077parents Olivia Hermann and she's our PTO treasurer so we want to talk a little bit about our environment good evening my name is Elizabeth and I am the Community Education and Outreach specialist at Monte Vista I collaborate and I support PTO with a lot of their events most of the credit goes to Mr Moses salceda he is the kindergarten teacher that is in charge of the PTO this year of 2022-2023. um believe that when families engage with meaningful communities with connections they feel a sense of belonging in addition of building a community connections for families create strong support and networks promotes respect and bringing children and their families together our PTO at Monte Vista we focus in trying our trying to make our events affordable and the way that our families will be able to
078attend all our community engagements and events for example we had a trunk or treat that was free we also had a movie night that was free the only thing that was charged was the popcorn and some of the drinks we were also so happy to have our family sweetheart dance this year which we only charged a dollar for the families to be able to event and also a low-cost food truck that was there available towards the end of the year is to have a family picnic and we can invite all parents for free to spend the day with their children and spend um reading our PTO members are also volunteers on our campus for the last past year so they're very involved I would like to present to you our Monte Vista Treasure um Olivia
079Herman hola my name is [Music] pitio ontarios and Escuela Los Angeles thank you so much I'm going to try to be quick no she translated first and then she said in Spanish word okay perfect you want to make sure um so I know we've had a creative definition of 12 minutes so I'm going to try to go very quickly um through the behavior landscape but please feel free to ask any questions um feel Rush that's what we're here okay so I mean if if we get to 11 p.m like yeah if we get to 11 pm I'll order us all Pizza um so ultimately we wanted to give you a very like thoughtful and honest um glance glance wow it's Glimpse at the behavior landscape that we have at Monte Vista we have been focusing
080a lot on our tier one interventions for our students um so we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about tier one interventions but then we will spend some time talking about tier three students and the challenges we've had in addressing those needs and what our plan is moving forward um a big part of our tier one instruction uh revamp was through PBIS refresh so we have spent time spending with our committee creating school-wide Behavior expectations if you look on the screen it's the nine locations so now we have a unified message of expectations in those nine areas additionally we worked on making sure that everybody's on the same page through the use of universal hand signals attention getters and also volume levels so anyone can walk into a room and address behaviors
081in a way that the students are aware of and understand we've also spent a lot of time working on our discipline flow map which ultimately is deciding what are the tier one teacher managed behaviors versus the tier two office managed behaviors I'm using Tier 1 and tier two in two different ways in that case that's just the classification of behaviors when we talk about tier one and tier three we're primarily talking about the students and their level of intervention needs so we do have Miss Goga here she's our child Justice Advocate para she's going to share a little bit about what it's like doing this work um with our students hi my name is Alexis Goga and I am honored and I am blessed to be one of the child Justice Advocate parents at Montevista
082my job has a lot of moving Parts um but one of the most important parts are the restorative conversations that I have with students that means I use these conversations to have each student have an opportunity to let each other student use their voice but also as an opportunity to actively listen to one another so with that being said when needed I will jump in and you know give guidance where needed or if students need clarification on what the other student is saying that's when I'll kind of jump in and be like oh this this is what's going on at the end of each conversation it is up to the students on the type of relationship that they want to have with one another that being a co-worker a an acquaintance or a friendship with
083that being said I always do let them know that that is something that can change over time but I do let them know that no matter what they do need to Advocate and set boundaries for themselves thank you I have a question I think I might prefer Eric um do all the schools have parents for their CJs or only Monte Vista question Madam president members of the board yes all of the schools have these paraprofessional positions they actually staffed them first these tied directly back to our pandemic Relief Fund priorities so that we could provide some immediately immediate intervention and relief while we added the instructional components through the certified teaching Advocates thanks um so just some outcomes of that we have found that the students who are tier one who basically are responding well
084to teacher manage interventions has been improved and also the students that we are seeing they're not as many repeat offenders in our tier one and tier two so we did see a decrease from last year what we did want to be like very honest and open about is we are seeing that we have an area of focus and growth for our increase of tier three students um the reality is we've had a high increase of those the number of students and the severity of behaviors we're seeing are atypical to what we've seen pre-covered and then lastly some of these issues are very uncommon and they're also just outside of the normal teacher experience um I don't think that's fair to say not normal but our common experience that we've had so it's just struggling through
085grappling with how to address those behaviors is something that our team is continuing to work on with the teachers one of the things that we have been focusing on is strengthening our cell Partnerships through care Solace that has been a great addition to our programming they are doing a wonderful job getting to our families very quickly the reality is when we are dealing with trauma sometimes it's difficult for the follow-through so we are working with our families to make sure there's follow-through in that and additionally in our South Southwest Behavioral Health Program huge shout out to Miss Janelle Staub she is an amazing counselor and we are very lucky she is working diligently to get through the needs on our campus that being said we do have a we have data that shows that we
086have double the need that we had in the previous year and she was already working on a full caseload And We additionally have up to 10 students right now who are on the wait list so the need is proving greater than the interventions currently in place but we're just continuing to work and try to figure out how to address that another way that the Southwest Behavioral Health has really helped us is when I speak about the uncommon issues or outside of typical tiered behaviors the reality is is that there are severe mental health issues that typically Educators did not have to respond to in the way that we're requiring a response because kids have needs and we got to meet them so our cell partnership with Southwest Behavioral they have helped us begin to develop
087up some additional trainings for our teachers in terms of the mental health first aid the program that they have done with us previously but then also trying to find a way to identify if there's a particular mental health issue that we're seeing with this particular student can you provide training and just kind of information to help root our team on like what our supports are and what's really within our capacity because the last thing we want to do is assume and expect that all teachers can be counselors but we do want to provide them with the knowledge because the knowledge will be powered in order to meet those needs so we have one more person Dr G is here with us today and he's just going to talk a little bit about how tier three
088is impacting our school um it's nice to be here uh to speak with you um I'm the school psychologist at Monte Vista um and uh as you I'm sure you are well aware um a lot of my time you know is spent working with our excellent Special Education team as we work to identify and meet um many of our students unique and educational characteristics and needs through special education um you know a lot of the things that were you know tier three yes um impacting you know we find that it's still within that five you know that five percent marker you know so you have your tier one at 80 your tier two at 15 of kids that you know the pyramid right um our tier three is still within that five percent uh marker
089but it has increased since last year and how it impacts is um just all these wonderful people that have spoken to you muskoga Miss Apodaca myself when I'm able to um a lot of emergencies a lot of fires um we're sitting in you know I think it's very important to continue to lay down um the systems that we've really in the last couple years have put in place so revisiting PBIS you know uh as it's kind of nestled within the house system you know eventually we're working also to bring you know collaborative and proactive Solutions model um to Behavioral Management which we've already touched on uh last year when um the entire staff we had a training on how to interact with our children in a trauma-informed way because you know we do have a
090high rate of trauma as well and we certainly see how that plays out you know in our hallways and our front office um but um could you maybe give some examples of the tier three behaviors you're seeing that are uncommon sure um well complete School refusal and not just the beginning of the year right so out of the blue suddenly later in the year so refusal to go in the classroom um classroom allotment um you know um a lot many a lot of what was it a lot of disrespect what were the three main things so the tier three um there's kind of two ways that we look at it one is like the number of office referrals that a student gets the more office referrals or recidivism that we see the more interventions that
091are put into place um so there's a group of kids who typical behaviors but there's just a lot of them um with the uncommon issues a lot of anxiety right now a lot of students that are um vocalizing or either presenting evidence of self-harm or suicidal ideation um anxiety is very big right now and then um and there's quite a few but I'll stop there um and then in terms of the like big behaviors that we're seeing from our tier three students it is I'll make sure to check my notes um we do have disorderly conduct gross disrespect and deaf science that's what we're seeing in our tier three students and what do you do in the case of school refusal what are the options for the the kid in the family a lot of
092patience so um working with the child uh working with the parents trying you know the Guardians trying to find um a way to get them more regulated and comfortable continuing to just try to you know we can't pick them up and take them to the classroom right so um I know we um there's a lot of also just creating plans with the teachers and the families so um with our youngers it's inviting parents to come and help them through the difficult times an adjustment of their schedule for some students we have them in the beginning half of the class but then we pull them to work with Miss Goga or to work in the office so that they're getting that quiet space really depends on the student we have some students who have like sensory
093needs and so really all they're needing is a quiet space where we have some students who their refusal can become like an explosion of emotions and so in that case it's more um just like immediate interventions and triage or Guardian caring adults and of course working to um you know get Miss Janelle stop our counselor through Southwest um referrals hopefully you know she doesn't have that big of a waiting list although these days she has um utilizing carousels which has been wonderful um they're very um attentive you know uh to get families help when they need it I'd be remiss to say especially for our sped Department another big part of it is as the office referrals were to increase or as those behaviors were to increase students are naturally put into their mtss process
094in which the teacher and their their team are working to determine whether or not other interventions should be put in place in the classroom and ultimately that would move towards for a small group of students um sped testing and possible resource and or could I find definitions of these I guess offenses are they in your handbook are they the one are they specifically from a discipline policies from the district um so it's kind of a twofold if you go I have to ask Dr Dube and help me with this but Arizona has definitions of those things um and I don't quite remember where you would get them but I'm sure we could get you a link um our PBIS committee though does spend time defining those things for ourselves um so that there's a more
095working definition if you look at the Arizona definitions they can be by off-putting and so we spend some time determining for ourselves with those eye um 15 they have definitions that are separate from the criminal definitions or where do they come from there are definitions for schools and then they tie back to their in our student information and management system and so when behaviors are entered into the system they're they're assigned a category okay so I'd be happy to pull a list to provide that in a coming update okay cool thank you I just I just want to appreciate um the the transparency and like having this conversation in depth because it's not a Monte Vista challenge it's not a Creighton challenge it's something I'm hearing from teachers and administrators at every District throughout the
096state throughout the country um and so it's just something for like I know we have a lot of conversations about it but we also like as a board and as a District staff we need to really be realizing I think there was a lot of Hope of like we go back to normal and we're just continuing to see these things unfold and and see traumas like you guys have said in in ways that we just didn't before um and in a delayed manner that we I don't think any of us expected um so we just need to be mindful that because also a lot of these supports that we have in place come from Esser um so we need to think about the reality that you know we said we're going to throw all this
097money at it and it's going to help you know these these first year two years back but we're going to need these supports for quite a long time if I can add to that comment um just like we as staff members are struggling to meet those needs families are also struggling and so the work that all of the CEOs Community the Family Resource Center is doing is to also provide those trainings and those skills and strategies and techniques to all of the families so they can address them because once they trusted their kiddos during the school time when they go back on the weekends at night during breaks the parents are asking what can I do what else can I go what partnership do you have for me and so during my other job that's
098what we do for parents just also want to add that it's an impact on our teachers and our staff the the constant struggle to know that you have a challenge in your classroom and that that challenge is going to meet you at the door every day at 7 30 they'll be there for breakfast and you don't know what your day is going to be until uh the the chips fall where they are right and so it's not just uh impact on the classroom teachers but also the support services the reading interventionists the resource teachers Administration our staff at the lunch uh playground Duty everyone is dealing with these situations with Grace and love in the best interest of the students at heart and it can be a challenge it can feel overwhelming but I think
099that you know I for one am proud of how Monte Vista has risen to that challenge and we're not perfect we're not there yet 100 we've got a lot of growing to do but I appreciate that that's where we are at this time so um so this time we would take any questions that you might have it's we did break the hour barrier so any questions or comments yeah I'm just going to say all my um carnival at once I didn't do it separately so um first of all I just want to appreciate you showing us the way to use data to drive instruction um because we all know that that's the best way that um we can help our students grow I absolutely love that sense of community with the houses I've been over
100at your school before and I think it's amazing and I hope that when I become a principal one day that I can do that system I just think it's totally amazing how your kids are working together especially in a Kate School how everybody works together to appreciate each other um I love the story on inclusion um I think it's amazing I've always done it at my school with one of my teachers and it brings out the best in all students I think um and I just love that you have so many support staff that address the student social emotional learning because we know that it's an issue and that has become more of an issue and it seems like you have a really good support system to help your teachers and that your teachers are
101supportive as well in that community so I just appreciate all of that thank you for that appreciate it anybody else thank you so much for all the work that you guys do we really appreciate it thank you um that brings us over to 10A um I hope everybody had a opportunity to look at these dates but I moved the governing board approved the attached schedule of governing board meetings for the 2023-2024 school year I I have a couple questions yeah I want to discuss some of them yep um I don't understand why we have only one meeting in November in January that it seemed like that started for a specific reason and then we've just stuck with it we we talked about the number the one meeting in November didn't we yeah that's why election
102day that's what happened last board meeting in November a lot of uh that's thank you for reminding me that I think that's very important and we haven't taken an election day as a school holiday or anything so that's why we did one date in November I revised some of these in January I don't know I think January has always been just kind of odd because for three months we go with only one meeting a month it hasn't been like that the whole time I mean I mean I guess that would make sense for January if that if the only meeting was at the end of January but it's on January 9th so then I think you have to have it by a certain date because you have to yeah so then I guess I'm saying
103like what's stopping us from also meeting on January 23rd nothing we've just never done it that way so we can add another meeting but it's just never been I mean I don't want to have another 11 o'clock P.M for a long time and I think that would help prevent you know those very long meetings um the money Vista presentation was great but they these school presentations are getting really long um that's that seems to be a common thing and that's going to make our meetings really long going forward that this is the only thing really we had on the agenda for tonight so um so that's just my thought um that's fine so what we can do is um so instead of can I take my motion back and just take a motion to table
104this that way we can discuss this further and discussion just kind of discuss it right now so you guys okay you guys want to add a January date that it's up to you guys I will let Lindsay share her piece maybe I also I mean kind of in that I was also looking at the dates because I have to go to my school district's meetings and they do it on the second Tuesday of the month and so it usually works that we do ours on the first and third and there's four months next school year that we do it on the second Tuesday um and some of them it makes sense because of holidays so I know that's unavoidable um which ones are they specifically so September 12th and November 14th December 12th and January
1059th are all second Tuesdays of the month um and I know in one person so I don't want to be like we have to move them all I just want to try and avoid as much conflict as I can because this year I've had to do a huge Balancing Act and I want to make sure I'm here for as many meetings as I but if I have to present to my district I have to um that being said like the and I think too like if we had two January meetings that would help alleviate because then I wouldn't feel like I'm missing a huge thing if I have to um September 12th is there a reason why we only have one or why we have why the September one is on the second Tuesday like
106the November one I understood because of election and Thanksgiving Labor Day so it's really hard for the teachers right after Labor Day to come to prepare after a three three day weekend for a board meeting coming up that Tuesday because Monday is off so we moved it to that second I'm sorry I'm just asking yeah okay yeah I think I think as close as we can stay to our plan schedule as possible is probably best and yeah we can do September 1st and if or sorry help the studies sends wild just proposed we also were mindful that after a full day Saturday typically you wouldn't necessarily want to come back on four days later or a meeting so I know that was a factor but I don't want to step on anybody's toes well we
107threw that in that's still yeah that's still a full there's a three-day weekend in between yeah because there's the proposed study session is 22 August 26th so that's two weeks so it's three in August and when one in September just to kind of show the balance yeah overall distribution is there a reason why we have the study session in August and not the general it was in July originally yeah to get the year started and to review strategic planning annual goals uh so just to kind of have a year thrust of where are we in getting our year off the ground uh so okay well whoever wants to make the motion I won't be at the February 20th meeting I can tell you that right now so then sorry I'm going to the dates here
108and then for okay all right so remember we have elections I would I would move to um amend this schedule to um change the September 12th meeting to September 5th and I would also move to amend the schedule to add in a meeting on January 23rd hi second all those in favor can I just forget it really so I'm just looking at my calendar it is also okay to vote later to pull a meeting if the board chooses right you can call an emergency vote uh and you can also move a proposed study session if it feels too crowded for you all right because it says proposed okay are you okay yeah sorry it's okay all those in favor it's okay all those in favor aye aye aye so now we need to go and
109approve the actual whole new schedule because I was just a motion that we that is no schedule oh I just made a motion to amend I didn't say that we were approving the whole schedule but it's fine in my motion I didn't say we were approved in the whole schedule just in case you go back and check yeah I see what you're saying because that would have been a discussion just on my motion to amend and then we would go forth and then approve the new schedule with the amended just putting it out there but yeah yeah I can do it I move sorry I moved the governing board approved the amended um schedule of governing board meetings for the 20 2023 oops I said too many 20s 2023 2024 school year all those in
110favor aye perfect and then um all right that brings us to 10B legislative political report does anybody have anything I have some stuff but okay so a lot of uh yeah a couple things after you're done because I know you have educational committee ones I have some weird stuff um so the first thing that we want to talk about is basically um our new superintendent of Public Instruction he came out and said that we have a grant that we're able to choose either counselors or sros he has gone and set out that if for every school who wants to reapply that doesn't already have an SRO set that he will not disperse any counselor grants so that plays a big part in how the Dynamics of our school district are so that money is kind
111of up in the air we may not get the grant again so that's one of the issues that we have going on um some two good new things that came out yes go ahead so there's a statute that actually governs the school safety program specifically with the procedures that they're supposed to follow the way it works is that the schools apply and the Department of Education education like that's all of the applications and then the Department of Education decides who they're going to submit to the state board for approval for these grants now so they're saying that they're going to use their discretion and not approving people to submit to the state board however I think we should be interesting to talk to our attorney and have them look at our stat at the statute
112the way I'm reading it and again I'm not a title 15 expert but the way I'm reading the statute it seems like the way the legislature the legislative intent behind it it seems to me that that wasn't their intent was to for them to be able to have such a broad discretion in deciding how they submit these applications to the state board or to create barriers or gatekeeping in this way so I would love for us to talk to our attorney about it I will add that from the Ade art Harding showed up at a guppy Mac meeting and seemed to speak verbally um that everyone agreed that counselors and uh social workers were going to be supported in some Manner and that the there is recognition that there is a lack of sros that
113they can't force that as the expenditure but while they had that in as a priority he felt that many things would be approved we are investigating this um these bills and these interpretations and Pam burkhart's a master at working with the Ade so everything you just said is aligned with what we talked about in cabinet today so we will I know we're going a little too far Hilda on our legislative report but it is it is an important um it's due soon right the grants due soon and with child Justice Advocates we may be able to Parlay that okay okay um there's a lot of stuff coming out in education that I'm really not going to touch on because of the governor that we have something passes she has the power to veto it and
11499.9 that most of the stuff that's going to come to her desk just like the budget that she vetoed recently will happen again so I'm not too worried about some of these um education bills that are coming out um two good things though SB 1675 which is a period product um uh it would require every school district to have period products in the bathrooms I know that we have a partnership right now but it's not like uh you have to have this so with this bill every school district 6 through 12th grade would have to have it there so that's good and Amy a nice one for you sb1546 has to do with Gardens and it would become out of the appropriation fund so I can't forget how much money it is but it would
115give a certain amount of money for that would get dispersed evenly through districts to focus on the gardening initiatives that they have at their schools that passed the house so it's gonna probably go to the Senate and hopefully it gets sent out those are the only ones that I have I just wanted to put everyone on alert same thing as far as what goes on in the Judiciary I go to a lot of Judiciary Committee meetings just because I also go there for another organization I'm in but I noticed an uptick in educational related bills in the Judiciary committees which is a little concerning because a lot of push to criminalize teachers for certain things luckily a lot of those things will get vetoed even though they got out of committee but it's just something
116to pay attention to that if we didn't have this Governor there'd be quite a few new laws that would likely be passed that would be criminalizing teachers for all kinds of interesting conduct that is unnecessary so luckily it will get vetoed yeah and and yep okay um perfect anybody else no okay um all right now do we have any future agenda items session um of special education on it and also Personnel issues I feel like when you know the last meeting um attorney was Aaron was just kind of shut down the conversation so I think that conversation perhaps needs to happen in executive session what was the first thing you said I'm sorry I didn't hear audit okay special education and personnel and Personnel issues anybody else have another future agenda item all right I
117move the governing board adjourn second all those in favor I thank you guys have a great night