001all right i would like to call to order our academic achievement committee meeting thank you for everyone for being here this evening i'm shayla adam stafford chair of this committee and district 4 representative of the board prince george's county board of education if everyone would please introduce themselves starting with committee members pgcps administration staff and then board office staff so we can start with uh dr miller oh good evening everyone this is dr juanita miller chairperson of the board uh hello curtis valentine board member hello judy white chief academic officer hello doug strader chief accountability officer evening anthony whittington director monitoring and accountability good evening jamie bowers director of testing research and evaluation and good afternoon evening my name is david reese jr from the office of equity and excellence hello everyone my name is
002valerie irvin i'm the board liaison to the ceo and i'm aisha berkeley with the board office thank you so may i have a motion to approve the may 25th 2021 agenda meeting okay a second do i have a second how can i second it myself no i apologize i hate i was on mute second okay all in favor aye okay the agenda is approved uh may i have a motion to approve the april 19 2021 meeting minutes so move ma'am trainer second okay all in favor all right the minutes are approved so we have no registered public comment speakers this evening so we'll move right into our discussion items and we'll begin with attendance and graduation thank you so i will turn it over to um jamie bowers and anthony whittington who will share um
003our information on graduation good evening so i'm going to share my screen so we both anthony myself have updated the presentations from march because there were some new information in the last two months and so we want to let you know that we updated the presentations we're going to share with you this evening so we're happy to share the updated presentations with you with the updated information on the slides everybody see my screen yes yes okay okay just making sure all right so we wanted to start by um building a bit of context for our current um graduation rate presentation we're going to talk about which would be last year's senior class so some implications that we wanted to discuss that affected potentially affected some of our graduation rate cohort from school year 20. so
004there were obviously potential challenges to on-time graduation for some of our students due to some unforeseen implications so one of those being disrupted instruction and so we wanted to timeline some of the events that occurred last year so the instructional days began with march 16th the 27th where students were out of school for two weeks due to the governor and the superintendent of schools closing all maryland school systems and so there was a two-week gap of instruction over the period of time official distance learning began in prince george's county on march 29th of that year and continued to the end of the school year in june however in between uh there was potentially additional instructional time lost and one of those factors could have been due to technology accessibility students having access to coursework through
005a technology device or picking up packets at some point during the pandemic at the beginning at their school one of the other things we wanted to point out is the quarter one through three grade average um what could increase by three points in quarter four and that was based on criteria if a student received a passing grade but there were no points awarded for incomplete and so those are the two options last year for our students in quarter four they were either to receive a pass grade or an incomplete grade uh one of the other implications could have potentially been our virtual summer school based on transitional challenges of virtual learning this would have been our students who were taking summer courses for credit recovery last summer so we had some transition changes of going
006online virtual for those opportunities for our students last year for our graduating class of 2020 there were two important graduation waivers that were waived due to coven one of those is our testing requirement uh that meant participation passing and our avp projects or our bridge projects were all waived for our seniors for last year the service learning hours were also waived last year so put to put into perspective we wanted to show you over the last three years including this current year that we're in right now the three different requirements that students need to meet over time but i want to point out that the one implication here that has not changed is our credit earned so our students still need to and have in the past needs to earn 21 credits um to graduate
007however the testing requirements and the service learning hours for the past two years have been waived this past year the board decided um i believe two months ago to waive those requirements so the 24 hours was a standing requirement until the board met i believe in april um to waive that requirement and so the graduation requirement only consisted of our current 2021 seniors of the 21 course credits all right thank you jamie so i just want to talk briefly about uh some of the graduation rate summary data i'll talk about the overall aggregate of the cohort in addition to some of the student and service group data so as you know i was looking at over this uh four year window four or five year window from 16 to 20 and the next slide is
008going to show a few things but our rate has slightly decreased over the past several years one reason is because our school system put in place increased accountability measures for certifying graduates so that could be one of the reasons why our rate has slightly decreased however despite the decline in graduation rate we've seen the increase in the numbers that are inside of our cohort as well as the number of students receiving diplomas over the past several years which is a good sign so this means that our enrollment is increasing within high schools and we're actually giving more diplomas to students next slide jamie so this slide simply represents the four year adjusted cohort graduation rate over the past five years and what it's taken into consideration is a student over the four years of school
009then determining if they've graduated within that four years span and so it starts with their first time in ninth grade and that trajectory walks over four years and then graduation rate is taken if the child has transferred that student leaves the denominator for the school but if the child was withdrawn that student stays within the denominator so as you see our graduation rate increased up to 82.69 and then we saw a slight decrease from 78 to 78 down to 76 percent and 76 represents uh some of the things that jamie just referenced around things that occurred during the covet window and we started instituting more stringent certification of graduates right around in 2018 into 2019. we wanted you to take a look at the graduation rate as it relates to gender as you see it
010appears that the young ladies are graduating at a higher rate comparison to their male counterparts from 2016 to 2020 every single year our young ladies are graduating at a higher rate then are males and this phenomenon is not um just in prince george's county this is a national phenomenon and if i take the data back even to 2010 we'll still see the same thing young ladies are outpacing our male counterparts at this particular time thanks a lot james okay just a few highlights around student and service groups student groups represent ethnicities and service groups represent groups such as free and reduced meal students students with special needs that have an iep english language learners so in looking at the data the african american graduation rate for sy 20 the school year that we just ended
011was at 84.3 percent which outpaced the district average which is a good thing however the hispanic graduation rate hispanics being our second largest student group or ethnicity based on enrollment fell slightly with the two percent decrease moving from 64 to 62 graduation rate as it relates to service groups our sped arms and el group graduation rate fell below our district rate of 76.2 percent and the next slide we'll just give that in a graphic 76.17 percent or 76.2 that orange line represents our district overall average and then on the left side you see our ethnicities or what we call student groups and on the right side you'll see service groups and at the bottom represents the number of students that fail within that particular student or service group for example where it says black or
012african american n equals five thousand seven hundred and sixty eight that is the number of students in the sy20 cohort that fell within the black or african american student group okay and then uh lastly we just wanted to take a quick look at the dropout as it relates to the dropout rate our district overall dropout rate was 17.8 percent representing a 2.1 percent increase and 31 of our hispanic students dropped out of school during this year span and that represents an increase of two percent for that particular student group our english language thirty two point six percent and free and reduced male students twenty point four percent dropout rate was also above the county average the next two slides simply represent as a district our dropout rate over the past five years with 2020 being
01317.8 percent and the next slide represents the same information but broken down by gender and as you notice the males are dropping out of school at a higher rate than the females and lastly the dropout rate for our student and service groups next slide yep our student and service groups shows so if you can see there is an inverse relationship between graduation rate and dropout rate the lower the dropout rate is the higher the graduation rate and higher the graduation rate is the lower the dropout rate they are connected um together thank you for your time dr miller has her hand up dr miller just one second i wanted to ask are we finished with the presentation now are we open for questions okay okay all right guys i didn't know if we were cutting
014you off sorry go ahead dr miller i just needed clarification you indicated that when students leave and then when students withdraw that the system does something for each now when students leave they're still counted or they're not count just explain that piece to me yes ma'am i can definitely do that um the graduation rate is called a four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate so what happens is when a student enters in the ninth grade this is deemed their first time ninth grade and they their cohort starts there okay so let's say anthony enrolled as a ninth grader this year for central high school my alma mater now the state is going to track anthony's progress over four years if anthony continues to remain in the school being educated in four years the state needs to determine
015will i receive a diploma or i did not receive a diploma if i receive a diploma that increases that school's graduation rate in four years if i didn't receive a diploma but i'm continuing to be schooled or moved forward i still don't help the school's graduation rate however let's say anthony was coming to school and then i stopped coming to school once i stopped coming to school the school withdrew me with some type of a w code there are various w codes or withdrawal quotes but any w code that's attached to a student means the child continues in their denominator but it doesn't help the school it's going to bring the graduation rate down because they're a drop out for your school but if anthony transferred to another school then anthony is removed from that
016central high schools cohort and now i'm attached to the next school that i enrolled upon when i enrolled in i become a part of their cohort so that's why they call it adjusted rate i understand does that make sense yes it does thank you i just didn't unders i didn't i wasn't clear on it no it's not a problem at all any any other questions yes um so in that in the board member if you have questions as well please feel free to jump in here so um just in looking at this data i'm wondering a couple of things could you all share a little bit more about some of the interventions that have been put in place for students prior to the dropout and then also if you have uh any um specific scaffolds
017that have been put in place due to the increased rigor of the graduation certification requirement so are there special um sort of specific programs uh that speak to that uh change that happened in 2018 so just interventions and uh i guess it's sort of the same thing what interventions have been put in place to stop students and then if there were when the graduation certification requirements change where their purposeful scaffolds kind of put in place to help students along them the way okay well i can speak to um our system went through a rigorous audit from the state maryland state department of education in i want to say 2018 17 2017 leading into 2018 and one of the parameters that we put in place was around grade changes so all grade changes or grade changes
018used to be held at the schoolhouse level with paper and paper documentation um now everything is attached to an electronic we call electronic signature or any grade change that must occur has to come through a process of approval starting with the teacher moving into the administrator and if it's outside of the window you have to have an instructional director and even an associate superintendent approve them before grade changes move forward and our office quarterly reviews grade changes and shares that with um the chiefs as well as dr golson um i'm not at liberty to speak to all of the interventions that you're mentioning that are in place at the schoolhouse level i don't know if um dr strata wants to take that or dr white yeah i would just add that you know professional school
019counselors work very um diligently looking at the cohort of students they have benchmarks by which each month they are going through and trying to see who's being certified are students in the right courses did students transfer in at the last minute and have what they need for our graduation purposes um even as well as looking at student service hours i would also say that our school side and they actually have a lot of um interventions in place where they're looking at students looking at performance um having inquiry cycles seeing where students are and they also have programs um where students are able to work what you'll hear say credit recovery but ever since we had um all of our audit fines we've been making sure that we've had real tight credit recovery so a lot
020of our graduates we wait until we get into the summer and we provide opportunities for students to regain credits of classes that they uh fail but could potentially pass and so they have to go back through those courses uh but they have a lot of interventions at each individual school in the area office and how they monitor that i'm sorry go ahead doctor yeah so some of the issues that we experienced that decline that caused the decline in the graduation rates a lot of what the audit exposed were data quality issues not so much you know the perceived notion from our public of cooking the books and so on a lot of it was just around data quality and as well as following the administrative procedures that we had in place one of the administrative
021procedures in particular that we had issues and that wasn't followed tightly then once we did follow it tightly had a great impact on students was the administrative procedure on the attendance uh and the ability for students to pass courses you know cut off on days absent right so the audit had a finding of hey you've got a population of kids here that were absent i forget the total number of days if someone else still passed yeah and still so one kicked in and we put some controls in place actually in school max to cause deference and letter grades that really triggered you know quite a few kids to come into jeopardy um and then we've since lessons learned from that audit we revised some of those some of those somewhat outdated right administrative procedures and
022modernized them but you know all of that you can see in that decline there which you know caught us in that transition time as a result of that audit so a lot of the interventions have been put in place we have some trackers we have data dashboards that have been produced to be able to monitor some of the performance a measure that we're putting in place for this upcoming year it's part of this upcoming year's budget as a ninth grade cohort tracker which does follow that cohort of kids through looking at the different metrics that are required of those students for graduation and once upon a time it included the state assessment results grades credit counts attendance um student service learning credits you know all of that is kind of built into that so we'll
023be releasing that as part of this year's budget you know so that activities i'm going now so there are some things in place but i just want to give you a little bit more information as far as why you see that decline yeah thank you uh dr miller did you have a question as well oh yeah i wanted to know um well this is a i guess a demographic that um was left well how do you include the um or categorize those students that are homeless that tend to be transient well i can grab that and so if they're part of that cohort so the schools have to monitor those students and their transactions as they enter and exit schools right so uh as a student as anthony uh shared with you all schools are
024required for following and tracking those particular students whether they're homeless or whatever the case may be so if a student is absent for 10 consecutive school days actually less than that we have an administrative procedures in place so if a student is absent for greater than three days they get a call from the teacher you know and that escalates in a number of days student is out the 10-day is the automatic trigger which schools need to move forward with that withdrawal or dropout process for the students that requires a pupil personnel worker to go out to the parent up to the home or wherever the past address was for the homeless student requires us to do some additional research to try to locate that kid across districts mr weddington can share too we have processes
025in place to share student information across our borders to not only the school districts that surround us in maryland but also in dc so if the student leaves our schools and crosses the border into dc we have a data sharing agreement with them so we can try to find the student over there and transfer the records and the instruction information accordingly [Music] vice versa if we get kids that show up in our districts we you know are obligated to contact the school from which the student is transferring from right to make sure we complete the paperwork so the homeless kids uh we have some title monies that that are allocated for assisting us in tracking these kids and doing the best we can do to locate them and ensure that their records are following them
026for wherever they end up i remember tracking down and using those papers when i was working in dc so i do know what you're talking about there board member valentine if you want to chime in at any time just let me know yeah i'm curious about uh greeting everyone um the students who do drop out what are the what are the percentage of students who re-enroll after dropping out after a period of time do we have that information um that's a good question we can take that back and so what that would look like is uh students we have we can provide that information so we have uh withdrawal as well as re-entry codes what i'm just thinking of now is we can provide that information over a cover you know so tracking it over
027the four years so for instance at roosevelt high school you have 300 incoming ninth graders um and then as their four-year graduation rate you can see how the 300 200 of them have graduated 100 i'm transferred out 100 of them transferred in but what you're specifically interested in is of those that have withdrawn with some type of a dropout code how many of those have returned um to school over that four year time is that correct yeah i mean i just know people use dropout rates as an indication for a number of things and extrapolate that across other areas of our system and try to you know highlight uh areas of improvement which which is makes sense but they're also students drop out you know for one reason other than they re-enroll after maybe a
028semester or a year or a few years um now i would imagine that number is probably negligible i mean even system are as large as hours even a couple hundred i don't know if they'll make a huge different percentage i'm just curious whether that's a trend or something that you all are seeing so i'm not sure if you would say it's negligible because of the way that we track our data i mentioned before if a student's gone for 10 days or more right our schools are required by the state to go through a withdrawal process of that student so let's say for instance we have international students that are only here for half the year than go back what you're going to see is a regular pattern of those students to be entered into our
029school system with thrawn with a what we call w50 or whereabouts unknown and then the student returns the following season or whatever the case is so then you see a re-entry so we see a lot of those students actually so that's why i'm saying i don't think the number is going to be negligible but we will follow up and provide you with those numbers but it's going to be important for us to use the cohort model to generate those numbers because the bulk of our students withdrawal or drop out in grade nine between that grade nine and ten school year that's why to really address your question adequately we should look at the what happens over the entire cohort of the four years so we'll get back to you on that actual number but i
030just wanted to give you some additional feedback of some things that you know are outside of that normal expectation the kid drops out he's just dropping off federally so you'll see that flip-flop within their records with those students who would be categorized as whereabouts unknown would they be they contribute to our dropout rate absolutely do yes so we are responsible for the kids that walk through our door we are responsible for their educational program until we can ensure that someone else has picked up the ball for those kids and that's my point i mean like again to the to the layman lay woman that dropout rate is sort of a fixed thing right they're gone and we just you know we visualize them never entering our system again but you know for those in system
031dr white who's been a school leader i'm not sure if you were high school or not but we do have a number of students international students who in many cases that the month of december and january will go off and then and re-enroll uh these are stories i hear in my own household particularly at largo high school where you do have a large international population and that was something that was common i don't unenroll them early december it's a very large period of travel back to the continent of africa during christmas time and then re-enroll i just didn't know that it could encounter a drop out but i say when people think that they're judging the board the superintendent of the system that they're not kind of the backstory so i appreciate that the other
032question i had and this is a figure that under dr maxwell was touted and this is the number of the percentage of students need remediation at the community college at prince george's and that number had gone down um are you all tracking that um because i think that's also an important number if you think about graduation rates and again for those who extrapolate a lot about graduation rates being an indication of college and career readiness and you know many ways it's not is there a com do you all have that number of students who had to be remediated at the community college i was just going to say one of our offices under student services that works directly with our community college our students have to pass certain criteria to even take classes at the
033community college and they work in tandem with them especially around our mathematics and our um well math is the biggest one to determine where kids are falling uh what they're achieving on that data so i'm sure that she can grab that data and i imagine there'll be two cohorts right so there are those who are taking dual enrollment so you're talking you're 10 through 12 which depending on what you're taking if you're still in our system technically that remediation to me wouldn't be as big an issue as opposed to those who have graduated would have crossed the stage we've said that they're you know alums of our system and then walked into the community college and then study radiation so yeah and we would have to ask the college if if once you once they've
034left us if they're tracking where students are coming from entering in i know for our dual enrollment and even some of our concurrent enrollment students that are still with us more than likely we can grab that data but i'm not sure we track once a student has graduated because that would be based on what the universities collect for students coming in i mean that number was something i know that the maxwell administration touted so i'm assuming they they were getting i think from dr dukes um but i mean just another number that i think um we could hold on to but again i appreciate this conversation thank you chairwoman adam stafford for having this conversation this is graduation season i add two pieces to that one of the pieces that uh dr maxwell put in
035place actually was what was going on at the state department at the time that was during the college and career uh readiness movement of which uh state law came out requiring us to actually track college and care readiness for all of our students so we have measures in place to be able to identify college and career readiness within our students state assessment programs there was a college and career benchmark there and ela and math we also have the sat we had benchmarks there we are required to assess all of our high school students all of them at least once on college and career readiness if they're they get through college and career readiness by 11th grade fine if they're not requires us to kick in some other additional supports for the student so on our
036side when we had the state assessment programs you know prior to covet and so forth we were able to track that for all of our students now that the state assessment program uh we haven't used you know assessed our kids in the last two years that's a bit more problematic but i think you will see some of those numbers you know once we get up and active again with those assessments that data we hum the what you're talking about here is trying to get data from our community colleges back to us on you know what's going on with our kids that is usually a bit more problematic you know to get that type of information but what you're asking is definitely a worthy metric to track yeah we can work together as you know partners
037i mean we you know just you know community college in the system are not like um totally out of touch like albert state school or a private school would be private college so i hope we can work together on this that's the one thing i think i'll say before i turn it back over we looked at this years ago we understood that sort of the ninth grade reading and math lag indicator for graduation and that was something we really wanted to concentrate on as we put a conversation towards solution just wanted to like do i get a feel for is that number is that ninth grade math reading still a lag indicator students who do not pass reading math and ninth grade are there like are their chances graduating in four years uh diminished as
038it was in the past yeah i would say that you know as we put measures in place then we hit the pandemic so i think once we come out of the pandemic you know we've tried to put in a lot of supports for students to be able to regain so for example you could have had a student who might not have done well based on circumstances of what they're going through right now but we're trying to get them caught up and then by the time they get to 10th grade we wrap our arms around them which that ninth grade tracker that um dr schroeder um referred to will allow us to see who those kids are and to put those extra measures in place to try to bring them back on track so that they're
039getting the support they're getting the social emotional i'm just some different components that i think will help address them you know in the past i think we spent a lot of time really focused in on just content and i think what the pandemic has allowed us to see is we've got to make sure we have a lot of wrap around skills also um and supports for students to help them get back on track if they've gotten off to try to push them towards graduation so we always say ninth grade tracking data for a purpose and that's exactly what you're talking about because we know um that that's the year that either we're going to make or break a student right and so that's the year where we've got to try to say what happened how
040can we support you how can we support the family and how can we you know not worry that that happened but get them right back on track and try to get them caught up with their cohort and we're trying to work to put other measures in place to make sure students have those opportunities to catch up and to be supported thank you i i had just a quick question about what dr white just mentioned do we have any programs for ninth grade students that double up on math and ela i know that that's been a stress okay we do so a lot of times you'll see our students and they start tracking that data from a student in eighth grade so you can identify from their eighth grade data in in the articulation that would
041go from a middle school across to a high school that a student might not only need algebra one but they need algebra one lab so you try to back them up back to back in same way you identify students um that are struggling with english so you want to give them english now but you're going to give them a back-to-back lab and then you know for a lot of our esau students depending on where they come in they have opportunities to take um a different math in a different english until we feel ready that their academic language is enough for them to be successful in our regular courses thank you i so my my question actually uh board member valentine and i think i saw a board member jackson come in and she may have
042left back out but um i was going to ask about the predictors uh for student tendency to drop out and i wanted to know just the the numbers for me are struggling around latino male students specifically and i wanted to see if you know there had been plans or or if this has already happened or if this is something you're interested in in doing but pulling together um maybe some focus groups of students to sort of get at you know what are some of the outside factors or cultural factors that are you know impacting this rate where are there some bright spots where we have uh latino male achievement where latino male students are are graduating at very high rates and what can we do to replicate that and i think that as we think
043about models of culturally responsive teaching and learning where boys of color are thriving you know have we or are you are we interested in looking at possibly hbcus and hsis um you know as models for how to really usher in and support uh those male students oh you're on mute a dollar a dollar i know that we have um many programs in our district board member valentine is a huge um sponsor of making sure that that our males have male figures and opportunities um we're doing a lot of partnerships with you know different universities at howard but i i can definitely um we can that's one of the things that we can look at and see specifically especially around our latino males like what are what are where are the pockets of excellence in terms
044of you know we know that our international high schools um do well and they follow a different model but where else are those pockets of excellence and what does it look like so it's definitely something we can go back as we're trending and looking through data just to kind of comb through it a little bit more absolutely i think your idea of a student focus group is also valid because i know last year bladensburg high school did a focus group with some of their students who took the access test and found that their lowest performing subgroups on that test were speaking and listening and so they want to hear from students what other opportunities can we offer to you to help strengthen your speaking and listening and a lot of the students said offering more
045opportunities of language that they would go use to further a career or a job we get a lot of valid data from doing those student focus groups so i think that that's probably something that we should look into with some of our more specialized populations to get that kind of feedback and board member um adam stafford for the past several years we did have something called an early warning indicator report i don't know if um yeah that for several years um and what it would do is really predict or look at a promotional probability and give every student seventh eighth and ninth grade a percentage of being promoted uh when they enter ninth grade because all of our data from prince judges county suggests if a 9th grader moves from 9th to 10th successfully 86
046percent go on to graduate but if they are retained in 9th grade only 24 went on to graduate in four years and many didn't go on to graduate at all so moving from 9th grade successfully into 10th grade is a huge factor for the success of our graduation rate and we looked at the factors we in a bunch of formulas their grades their attendance however they're able to read and how many times they've been suspended and then we will update that promotion probability every quarter so kovy kind of yeah spin on that because then we couldn't use correct factors because we didn't have enough data but we're trying to move into that space for sy 22 again to give promotion probability for those um incoming students into the 9th 8th and 7th and you know
047tell me if if this is already happening but i know that in districts a ninth grade academy uh is that something that we we have happening here but there there's funding specifically for a ninth grade academy at a school in in which those students would move as a cohort they would do college tours together after school programs together they had like competitions this sort of sense of belonging that that sense of belonging that you you know engender when you're part of that team and you know perhaps you know some of the you know funding that we're getting from arp which i know is focused on helping students particularly low-income students could be used to support those ninth and ninth grade academy um in some of our hot spot schools where you know those programs i've
048seen them have great success yes ma'am and dr miller to your point um the service groups that we showed we only showed the service group groups with the largest number of students but there are other service groups like you've mentioned um i think you you mentioned homeless there were 132 homeless students in the cohort for sy with a graduation rate of 29.5 but the state also tracks foster care military connections title 1 students ada 504 students as well they are service group designations too but the numbers are really low so that's why we only showed the largest three for our district i turned it back over to tim i i'm going to say anthony thank you for that early warning and that's that's sort of the point i was making with dr white about 8th
049grade 8th and 9th grade i mean reading in math in 9th grade i mean that early warning was was again was a lag indicator of the what the graduation rate would be three years later i will say it's ironic we're talking about you know uh you know latino male cohort you know we made history the next student member of the board is going to be latino male and so that's something it's all it's about timing but i you know if that's his interest i think that could be an area um i think i see him watching right now he's attended i was gonna already say that he's attended congratulations if congratulations you know i'm you know i'm the only black person where i work so i i know what it's like people say hey man
050you do this because you're in a group i don't want to put that on you bro but if that's something you're interested in doing i know i would and i and she like i call you dr adam stafford maybe that's coming too would be interested in i received that you receive it i receive it uh let me talk to your husband about it because my wife has a doctor it ain't easy on the spouse though um but to that point this is what i wanted to bring up and it's sort of a good transition and this is again how we bring everything that we have to bear let me ask you a question dr white is going to sound kind of weird what was your dissertation topic dr white uh i'm focused on educational leaders
051in their beliefs and did their beliefs actually impact the work that they did in their buildings i asked that because right now everybody's talking all these graduates everybody got doctor with everybody but a lot of doctors going around and i'm talking my wife i said daria how many times people ask you what your dissertation was about she says not very often everybody want to like the pictures and comment but all that research you put into it often got and goes on the shelf yeah there are people right now who are getting doctors right now and in our school system they're researching they're in the schools they're talking to students uh i see the soon to be dr bowers and everybody and i'm saying there's somebody right now studying graduation rates about melson and prince jordan
052county and are we leveraging this expertise from bowie state howard university morgan state university maryland college i i spoke to a cohort of doctoral students and and and soon to be dr bowers was on that call saturday morning and it's just to me we have these conversations but there are questions that i have and one in particular around certain subgroups so our west african students particularly when it comes to val sao outperform i believe their demographic in a lot of ways and i wrote an art about this years ago and i said how can we get certain parent groups who do well in the same school that other students aren't doing well there's something that they're doing when they go into the building something they're saying to their kids somehow they advocate that puts them
053in a position that a lot of students are not in and so there's ways to converse amongst groups to bring together a working group attac whatever you want to call it to say our system works well for a lot of students and our system does not work well for a lot of students and it's and it's sort of like the never the two shell me like how come this group you know we got students going to harvard yale morehouse bell and howard you want to call it and we got students dropping out in 9th grade in the same school and you know it's often times when we have these research opportunities and i know we have dr eubanks is over at university of maryland now working on working within the doctoral program how can we
054bring some of these doctoral students to the table to our meetings um soon to be dr adam stafford and say hey you're studying you've been doing it for three years you know you don't you didn't work then i got a friend of mine who's doing a doctorate right now he's working in four of our schools right now and i'm like so what happens when you finish a dissertation what do you want he's working on middle school math scores for boys in picture this county is everyone gonna read that that's important to me i wanna be able to bring all this you know together together and we could do that as a committee but also the systems board member valentine i'm like i didn't i don't have any emojis on here to like clap or snap
055but i was i'm hearing everything you're saying it's so funny you know as i look at the national landscape i really truly think that here in prince george's county we really are leaders in working with young males of color in helping them feel that sense of identity and affirmation that's what everybody in america is trying to figure out right now how do we engage young males of color and so i really do think that dr white and her amazing team if if this team came up with a framework for social emotional learning that was culturally affirming that's gold right there that's a pgcps branded framework of cultural affirmation and and how do we how do we like like remember valentine is saying we have students male students students of color here in this district that
056are achieving at high heights and so many people around the country are trying to figure out how to do that and so us developing our own framework and testing it in our own schools leveraging the brain power that we have right here in our own system and network i really do think that we could create something that could be like game changing for real so definitely i think next year we need to have some featured guest speakers and maybe possibly uh go deeper with this concept of you know graduation rate specifically for males and males of color to kind of pull together some of these great minds to think about where where is this working well and what are they doing i just think about flowers high school of course some biases in my district
057um but like you said they're cranking out these young men who are going they're going all over duke we got harvard i mean they're everywhere and and what they're doing they're establishing that sense of identity establishing that we go together far uh we go far together that that kind of concept i think is is gold so i i hope that we can can bring those thoughts together now we have to move on i i am so sorry everybody i just get so uh interested and passionate about what we're talking about and we have two other things to discuss as well um so i want to move from here if that's all right with everyone to our next item which is testing accountability um for school report cards and then we'll move to our last item
058which is equity so i'm going to go ahead and share my screen with the presentation so just some things we want to highlight before we talk about the actual accountability framework within the state and our district so for the last two years you can see when you go to the maryland school public report card site that due to the pandemic report card results were actually put on hold for last school year and this school year and we're going to talk about why um that was done and some of the implications for that to occur as well as um some things that we are still looking at as a district even though the state is not collecting those and using those to come up with a point value or stars for our schools so a few
059things of note for this current year so msde in april submitted a waiver request to the u.s department of ed uh based on a few things uh so one of the things that they wanted to have in their waiver request was for accountability measures and so some of the things that they targeted in their waiver request for this school year that we're currently in is continuing with the no star rating so because we did not have a state assessment administered this year and because we could not track growth of our students in that state assessment for reading and math that eliminated about 50 of our points that would have been used to calculate a star rating or point values for schools another indicator that they want to put on pause and that waiver is identification
060of any newly identified csi and tsi schools for fall of 2021 so currently we have two csi high schools and we have over 80 of our elementary middle and or high schools are identified as tsi schools and so the waiver request would actually put a pause on that and not allow us to or the state to identify any new schools that would fall into those two categories for next year the third most important waiver i believe is not to administer our science assessment to our students in grades 5 8 and high school next fall so as we sit right now our students and we'll get to this in the second bullet point our students in prince george's county will be taking a fall administration of our mcapp reading and math and currently they're also slated
061to take a science mcapp assessment in grades 5 8 and high school and that would occur within the first few months of school the logistics have not been worked out nor has the timeline been worked out for when that's going to be however that would put three different assessment administrations on our students in the fall and so that waiver is asking usd to waive the third assessment which would be that science assessment msde with that waiver would also still be able to do the following they'd be able to shift those long-term goals that have been identified for our annual targets our amos for schools by one year and so in essa we had a window of time in which msde set long-term annual goals um formerly known as our amo targets um so that would
062allow districts to shift those and msc to shift those by one year and we will also be administering a fall and spring 2021 english language arts and mathematics assessments to our students in grades three through eight and grade 10 for high school and that would be language arts and for mathematics it would be students in grades 3 through 8 and then our students who took algebra 1 geometry and algebra 2. so those assessment administrations would occur in the fall as well as in the spring and so msd has not received a request for more information nor have they received to my knowledge as of today during the board meeting a response on that waiver so for this current school year we did not administer any of our state assessments that included our access our mcat
063for reading and math our or science our alternative assessments in science our high school government assessments and for high school students this was supposed to be the first year we administered as a field test our social studies assessment in grade 8 that was also not administered our alternative assessments for english language arts and math nor our maryland school survey so you can see some districts did opt to administer one or two of those assessments however print georgia county did not administer any of those state assessments this current school year so when we're looking at in our regular school year we have an elementary a middle school and a high school report card so we wanted to show you the breakdown and what i was speaking about earlier if you look at the blue box at
064the top and the green box right underneath of that so if you look at our state assessments in reading and math uh in elementary school that is comprised of 45 points out of so you can see off the top that schools would be at a detriment and not administering those reading and math assessments nor showing being able to show growth so if you look further down uh we have credit for a well-rounded curriculum which anthony's going to talk about in a few slides in more depth which is 10 points we have our progress in achieving english language proficiency which is our access assessment that is 10 points we have our chronic absenteeism rate for our district and schools that's 15 points we have our maryland school survey which is worth 10 points and we have
065access to well-rounded curriculum which is 10 points so that rounds out the total of 100 points for our elementary report card so in lieu of the state not calculating a report card score or stars this school year we still do collect several of these indicators in light of the fact that the state is not and so some of those indicators are credit for completion of well-rounded curriculum which anthony will talk about in a few slides of what makes up that well-rounded curriculum our access test while we did not give it this past school year we did have results from last school year that we actually used to make some instructional decisions for this career we're in we still continue to collect chronic absenteeism rates for our students who are chronically absent in their buildings and
066then the access for completion of well-rounded curriculum so much like our elementary school report card the middle school report card looks very much the same uh some of the point differentials are within the well-rounded curriculum you can see there's an addition of our science and our social studies assessments for middle school students however all of the other point structures that access the chronic absenteeism the school survey and the access to well-rounded curriculum stay the same for high school the report card looks a little bit different so our academic achievement on our mcap reading and math is now 30 points because we're unable to track growth in the same way as we are in elementary and middle school because of the different course taking structures that are in high school so they give more point value
067to the actual overarching academic achievement results in high school for reading and math they also have a 15 point differential for high school graduation rate on their report card they still have 10 points for our act the access assessment in high school they have five points for the on track and ninth grade as well as five points for completion of well-rounded curriculum and then the chronic absenteeism the school survey and the access are still the same point differentials as were in the elementary and middle school report card so we see in that bulleted list while the state is still not collecting some of these measures those things that we've highlighted in that bulleted list are things that prince george's county is still continuing to collect and track for our own accountability measures all right so
068i'll be brief to make sure dr reese has uh time uh jamie referenced many of the points there and i'll touch on it go back four seconds there um so what i want to take into consideration is this is a sample of what every school receives and you can on md reportcard.org you can pull up any school within the state of maryland's accountability report card for sy 1819 school year because they haven't done it in the past two years if you look at the top right you see stars here kind of like going to a fine restaurant one star versus a five star so this school in this example has a four star rating and right below it it says the percentile ranking because this is an elementary school it says 74 percentile what that
069number is referencing is the comparison of this school's total possible points earned at the bottom 68 to all of the other elementary schools in the state of maryland so it gives a good indication of how this school and the students are performing on all of the indicators as it relates to every elementary school in the state of maryland not just prince george's county schools so that 74 is a very high rating for this particular sample elementary school in addition you see on the left hand side we have indicators academic achievement academic progress progress for achievement in el proficiency and school quality which are then broken into possible points which is there are 20 possible points in the academic achievement indicator and this school received 14 of the possible 20 points moving along the line you
070see a check there for annual progress which used to be called an annual measurable objective or the percent which the state would like you to be and that percentage continues to escalate or move forward and then you get a check if you're showing some type of improvement within this particular indicator next slide all right now elementary and middle school primarily have an identical report card as it relates to indicators left-hand side indicator academic achievement academic progress english language proficiency and school quality these indicators are broken into accountability measures so the first one academic achievement the performance composite on english language assessment and the performance compiles it on the math assessment worth 10 percent of the total pi of the total possible points so 10 10 and you just add up all of the points to
071get to your total possible points in the n and those are divided against the numerator and on the right hand side it just shows the instrument to which the state is using to actually calculate those points i'm going to talk a little bit about um high school next so the next one jamie will show will be middle which is similar but high school whereas elementary and middle they're looking at the students that are currently inside of the building starting with third grade and how they did on these various assessments and these other indicators high school is looked upon a little differently when you calculate their report card for many of these indicators high school is looking at the exiting students of that year or the students that are graduating within that year and then backtracking
072four years to determine many of the indicators here so the english language arts the academic achievement is attached to exiting students the graduation rate lags a year but it's attached to exiting students for a year prior english language proficiency is attached to current students that are in the building because you need two assessments back to back on track for ninth grade is attached to current ninth graders but credit for well-rounded and opportunity for well-rounded are attached to the exiting students looking back over their four years of cohort work next slide before i talk about credit i'm gonna talk about um you had an indicator that was there for all elementary middle and high school called chronic absenteeism chronic absenteeism is attached to the entire building of students and it represents any student that has missed
07310 percent or more of their membership days all into a chronic absenteeism status but that number continues to move based on the number of membership days for example if anthony could be at 13 chronically absent in november because i've missed 13 of my membership days but if i start coming to school more my 13 moves down to 12 to 11 or 10 and in march i couldn't i would be out of the 10 or more window and then i'm not deemed chronically absent so that number is a constant moving focus last two things i want to talk about is credit and access credit simply represents passing think when you see credit means they pass so for elementary fifth grade students passing one of each of these courses their social studies fine arts physical education and
074health if i have a passing grade a b c or d in all four of these areas the school gets a win or a point on the state report card middle schools same but they're looking at their court content areas mathematics english science and social studies remember passing means a b c or d for their final grade and last for high school credit they're looking at um you passing one of the assessments that are listed here which is deemed or making you college and career ready which uh board member valentine i think he alluded to earlier so during my four years of school was i able to get a three or higher on an ap exam a four or higher on an ib exam um was i able to be dually enrolled meaning i'm taking
075college classes while i was in high school was i able to get a 31 or higher on the asvab or the armed services exam do i have a seal of bi-literacy these are things if students can show mastery in one of these areas a s.a.t score of a 480 and an english score of a 520 30. if i can show one of these the school gets credit on the state report card for credit for well-rounded whereas access next slide is think of the word access and enrollment are the students enrolled as fifth graders in all of these courses if they're a fifth grader in our school district they should be enrolled in science social studies fine arts physical education and health for eighth grade they must be enrolled in fine arts physical education health and
076computational learning which was added in sy 19. they must be enrolled in all of those courses for the school to get credit for that student and lastly for high school this looking over the four year span was the student ever enrolled in an ap or ib course did the student participate meaning enrollment in a dual program or did they complete a cte concentration program and i think that's the last slide this it is okay great um questions on that i know we moved kind of kind of swiftly through that but we just wanted to give you a quick overview of the maryland accountability framework in the state report card that schools receive um regularly but we haven't received a report card for the past two years thank you so much i i was wondering about
077the seal of my literacy can you talk a little bit more about how that's attained right in order to receive a sale of bi-literacy a student must prove to be able to read write speak and listen in a second language fluently i don't know if i'm staying at 100 right dr white but um and they have to pass our english they have to be proficient in english as well right so that's second language you have a high we have i think we're trending in the state higher um than a lot of districts in the state we can grab those numbers for you um our immersion programs help us as well as our world language we have a lot of students in our and just our regular comprehensive world language courses that are passing as well
078and my next question was about the science course if i remember correctly from your presentation you said students well offering a science course added an extra point to the school's report card or students being enrolled in a science course it depends enrolled in all of those courses that i listed earlier you would have to be enrolled in all of those courses i don't know why i thought on that individual school one there was an extra point added for science and the school one okay maybe that i read that wrong because i was wondering i know that there's a school in our district that requires all students middle school thomas johnson middle school requires all students to take a stem class and i thought that was unique and i didn't know if other schools had that
079requirement and if that could be something that could help support getting more points generally and overall for our middle schools thomas johnson and oxen hill middle school are two stem middle schools and they're able all of our middle school students have to have be exposed to a computational learning learning school so while we have a computational learning course those two schools are able to use their stem curriculum because they're stem focused schools it also counts as that computational learning so you'll see most they'll have a hundred percent because they're our stem school but um somewhere in their middle school trajectory all of our students have to have somewhere in that middle school experience of computational learning do we have any plans to expand that designation of being a stem school you know just thinking about
080sort of you know the demands of industry right now and that great opportunity to get that exposure in middle school um do we have any thoughts on it you know having more schools have that stem designation yeah it's something that that we've been talking about or and if not that how do we expose our students to different stem opportunities at those younger ages our stem supervisor um does well with um a lot of con competitions for all of our students down to elementary um and if we were to expand i know one school right now that has been begging to be a stem middle school so but it is something that we're looking at you know with budgets we always have to look at what is it what does it cost to build out and
081what staff would you need in all of those things but it is something that we're evaluating awesome i had one question particularly around you know the assessments that we won't be doing how will this impact our ability to assess and diagnose particularly areas for student achievement i mean student improvement are there other sort of apps or technology we're using particularly for teachers and some parents to be able to to use to assess where that's where their students are how we can help them yeah so we have a lot of our digital platforms that allow us to see where students are i think you heard um soon to be dr bauer say that when students come back in the fall there will be many assessments some that msde is asking us to provide to students that
082will quickly give us where they are we we've also have some other uh district uh data that will allow us to see where where our kids are where to interrupt the disruption happening and how we are able to fill some of those gaps as we move forward thank you all right if there are no further questions here um we want to move on to our next discussion item which is equity right before he starts i have a quick question um soon to be dr bowers and mr whitting if you guys can send over those um presentations email those to me so we can post those thank you sure floor is yours mystery thank you very much if you just give me one moment to make sure i am in fact sharing the correct screen because
083i am now using multiple screens uh just by way of introduction my name is david reese and i am honored to be here in the office of equity and excellence in the prince george's kind public school system can you all see the opening slide at this actually that's not the slide i want at this point in time yes yes you can awesome sauce all right so i am going to kind of jump right in um but for those people who know me i i really don't like presentations because they make me feel restricted and constrained uh so the slides will be my guide as i kind of walk you through um some things i wanted to discuss with you all this afternoon and i'm a cat dad so indigo pops up um whenever she feels
084like it a year ago today george floyd was murdered and the ceo of our school district dr monica goldson and her executive leadership team knew that something had to happen pretty quickly for the system to begin addressing the conditions um that were at play in the nation and some of the things that were troubling the hearts and minds of our community members in prince george's county soon thereafter on the 11th of june 2020 during the middle of the pandemic i was charged with putting pd together to help the system think about bias implicit bias and sometimes explicit bias but because of my work in equity i knew pretty pretty i felt pretty strongly that we had to take a step back before we could talk about equities and inequities and what creates um the racism
085that we see and i pulled back so that the system could do some focus on the topic of identity and i want to quickly share what the activity looked like that the staff saw um on june 11th um where we centered identity and i was able to facilitate a conversation where i asked people to write your name in the middle of the circle and we got to say whatever it was that we chose and i think i refer to myself as junebug because that is a childhood name that i was given and i told my name was david i was able to speak about things that i hadn't said out loud before in front of people and it was cathartic i got to talk about being the 23rd grandchild of my grandmother from alabama and
086she has 40-something grandchildren and i was the first to graduate from high school i got to talk about being a teacher i taught at the early college high school in durham north carolina and there was a picture of me when i was teacher of the year teaching at that high school was one of my proudest moments i could have chosen to speak about my religious upbringing as an evangelical lutheran and if i wanted to i could have talked about my gender identity sexual orientation age or other aspects of my identity that were important to me as we continued in that activity we got to the hard part where people got to share out with their groups and we asked the leadership team to model for the entire system a story about a time when you
087were proud to identify with one of those identities and we asked them to share a story about a time when it was painful to be associated with one of those descriptors and then we had a conversation about stereotypes so because i'm a teacher um and i don't necessarily do things in a conventional way i want to open up the floor for a moment um just for a brief moment to get some feedback from you all i want to ask a question particularly to our school board members what might the impact of an activity like this be on a school district if everybody does it across scale and i'll open the floor to hear a couple comments from you all i'm going to go first because i had to drop off um but i do appreciate
088um this conversation and where it could go i think it's just opportunity to really understand how we are all interconnected and how we can support one another but also just each of our individual contributions as a part of the whole and what we as a district uh can be when we come together i'm just so excited about this board and this system because i just know the potential um once we appreciate everyone's unique contribution but also more importantly their ability to bring their full selves to the work um and so i think dave you mentioned all the different aspects of who we are and a lot of us don't bring it to the table for different reasons but i i kind of equate it to a car it's like you know having a ferrari but
089only driving it in first speed yes sir we have all those things um and i tell some of my students at university maryland college park you know you just brought everything you were to this course and we all did how beautiful it would be now the question is why you don't and that's i think what you're talking about so how do we sort of give people the space nothing i i brought up to mrs bowers and her group this um this weekend at the university of maryland i spoke with them which is how do we create an enabling environment for others to feel comfortable to uh to be their full selves and some of it's on them to to move into that space but i think also as we look in the mirror we say
090how can kurt is a valentine how can we how can i make the space open for everyone else to feel comfortable being their full selves i think that's that's an important conversation i do have to drop off but i definitely look forward to hearing more about this in the future absolutely thank you for your participation and is there anyone else who wanted to say a few words about the impact that you could foresee yeah i think the intersectionality of our identities really influences how we show up every day and for school leaders that determines policy that determines how you interact with students and families and this is such important work uh it's so important for people to hold the mirror up to themselves uh to know yourself and know your students so i'm so grateful
091uh for you uh mr reese for doing this work uh with our teachers this is a core part of culturally responsive teaching and learning this is awesome absolutely and if at any moment in time other colleagues want to jump in and say something feel free to do so but i know we'll have some q a at the end so we heard two big i words one was interconnectedness and the other was intersectionality of our identities i was pleased to hear our colleagues earlier from the division of accountability talk a lot about testing about data about graduation and all of the factors that are important to a school district well underneath each of those data points is a whole student who in order to show up in the data and and be their best they have
092to be comfortable bringing their entire self to the school where they are affirmed where they know that the adults care about them and the adults have to know that the adults care about the other adults in the building too and not having to hide aspects of who we are um is essential to that so that said i have two essential outcomes for today i want to briefly talk about the work that the office of equity is leading and leading i'm doing my air quotes with because we are truly working alongside our colleagues so that this work is not siloed so the work is being led by all the chiefs in our school district and then i want to highlight a few areas where we're highlighting um specific aspects of the educational equity policy zero one
093zero one that um our school district has received lots of rewards and accolades for some key takeaways and i want i won't want to read what's on the slide to you but for those of you who are watching from home we have this beautiful educational experience it is seven o'clock because i have my time go off every hour on the hour and it has effective aspects and then it has some expected impact and what i love about this policy is that it explicitly names things that we have to confront and address in order to become a more equitable and inclusive prince george's county public schools it talks about deficit thinking and what that means when just because a person is black or maybe overweight or maybe overweight and dark-skinned and an english language learner that
094sometimes we climb the ladder of inference and we have low expectations for what we think that person can achieve and as board member adam stafford said we have to turn the mirror on ourselves think about our own biases and the things that we bring to the table but we first have to normalize the conversation so that we all understand that we are impacted by these implicit biases and i'm part of our school district for a lot of reasons one that i'm extremely proud of is the fact that people have not been afraid to lean into those conversations and when they did experience discomfort across the system you can talk to lots of employees people engaged and had lots of ahas there are certain key texts that are undergirding the work that we're doing to help
095prepare the system to begin doing deep meaningful and transformational work and the areas of diversity equity and inclusion i'll talk just about two of the books that you see here actually i might talk about three of them the first one is a book called this book is anti-racist and our ceo is just announcing as of yesterday our book study that is going to be on this book is anti-racist and it's 20 lessons for how to wake up take action and start the work and we're going to thread lessons from this text throughout next school year throughout our professional learning so that more people know the vocabulary so we can talk about inclusion exclusion calling in calling out creating welcoming environments and some of the vocabulary that's attached to equity our principles this school year are
096going to read the book unconscious bias in schools which is specifically looking at teaching and learning and what leaders can do to help strengthen the instructional core the relationship between students teachers and content as we look at the biases that we bring to education and the hope and promise that we as teachers bring to education and i'll talk a little bit more about the book in the center culture responsive teaching in the brain which is the guidebook it is the guidebook for how the work gets done and dr judith white and the division of academics has been leading her entire division in what's now a five session book study where we are incorporating elements of culturally responsiveness into our curriculum we are looking at who we are what we're asking teachers to be aware of
097and we're doing the adult work at the same time i get so excited i can talk ad nauseam about this but i'll have to stop myself because we're limited on time and i just talked a little bit about what was happening with the division of academics and we're actually doing a plc with the zaretta hammond herself where about 12 teachers and 12 central office folks are in a pilot where we've been for several months delving deeply into these concepts teachers are trying out their learning to become more expert and what we mean when we say culturally responsive because there's a science to it and there is an art to it and there's a there's a connection to it and we want to make sure that cultural responsiveness is not a buzzword but it is something
098very technical and artful that we do to help improve teaching and learning in the division of school leadership and support dr helen coley and her team are we just had a beautiful professional learning from the human rights campaign in schools where we have created a new transgender and gender non-conforming students policy and we have begun to think about what it means to create welcoming environments for all families no matter the composition of the family so that everyone feels welcome in schools and we are centering the lgbtq plus community we had lots of principals and assistant principals look at data about mental health suicide being kicked out of the house and feeling the opposite of affirmed being rejected and so when we look at the dropout data and the student achievement data and we ask questions
099about who the students are who aren't meeting their maximum potential it is often students who fall into these these intersected identities who don't get the type of affirmation that they need the work for restorative approaches is expanding um under this division and we've done lots of work to begin thinking about what we look at at our bridge to excellent schools so a walk through used to be when i was in prince george's county we focused on instruction we focused on what the teacher was doing in the content we now hear people saying what about the schools that are tsi and if you are identified for english language learners did we collect data about the english language learners what do we know about whether they're one two three four five on listening speaking reading writing and
100how does that play out so our conversations are becoming even more nuanced which has implications for improvement and last i'll actually skip over talking about the work happening in my own division but there's lots of book studies lots of stuff that dr holden is doing with summer leadership and her team have been doing lots of professional development throughout the year where we are centering um aspects of equity and cultural responsiveness as i begin to rap um there's a slide there that you can read through but we've had some successes that have been and i have high expectations for our school district uh but the successes have been bigger than i can imagine um board member jackson i was invited to meet with two different student groups that she was a part of and our students
101are so bright they're so sharp and they advocate so hard for their peers um and it's been amazing to hear them talk about what they want me to do to help their school district get better and there is an eager appetite for improving pgcps um where people are naming and confronting things like i hadn't heard before but what i learned was that when the space is created by the ceo to engage in the dialogue people walk into that expectation and begin engaging and we're just at the beginning and i can only imagine the richness of the rewards that we're going to get five years from now and on the challenging side um one thing i want to want to point to is that cultural shifts are not always measurable when we talk about like how
102you feel when you feel like you belong sometimes it's difficult to quantify that and when we think about success there are all of these micro stories that are a piece of that success story and the other thing i want to point to is that this work once you start bringing up aspects of your identity of your pain and allowing your students to do the same and your colleagues there's the opportunity to reconcile to be better understood to feel like you're part of something which is motivating and the work takes an emotional toll and so it's going to take it's going to take support for us to figure out what to do when some of the issues come to the fore that we have to confront um the work is adaptive is hard there aren't cookie
103cutter answers um but that is a challenge that we will have to look forward to last how can the board support and this slide i thought about long and hard around how bold i would be um and here's what i came up with i want our board of education to engage directly in the work as a school board that aligns with our equity policy i would love for you all to do the circles um of my multicultural self activity as a start with each other if you haven't um and and i know you all advocate really really hard and as you're advocating be in the work at the same time for yourself and reflect on your own biases and assumptions because it's important that our leadership at the school board level and at the executive
104level and at the school leader level model that we can disagree productively and through that disagreement when it's managed well we can be really creative and resourceful and it allows us to be inclusive of divergent ideas and that makes us stronger and last maintain a learning collaborative orientation as we advocate for students and families who have been most marginalized i particularly appreciate the warmth of this committee the laughter that we had together before the cameras rolled um because it creates a space where i don't feel like i'm presenting to the bosses of my ceo the bosses of my boss's boss right i feel like i'm in a collaborative learning space where we can figure something out together and that's what our purpose is so those are three things that the board of education can do
105to support and if there are questions that you have about anything that you saw uh go for it i'll try to stop my screen share so you can see each other's faces better awesome uh board member jackson yep so good evening everyone sorry for my late appearance and arrival um i guess first i want to start out with just saying uh mr reese uh you know how much i love you and your team and the work that you're doing here in pgcps um and truly genuinely it's the work like this that makes me probably the most proud to be a pgcps student um you remarked and alluded to some of the meetings you had with a few student groups um and i can do nothing except emphasize and echo your sentiments about students particularly you
106know being hungry for change and wanting to be involved in that process of getting us to this place where we should be with that being said i only have one question at the moment and i might have missed it so i apologize if i did um but i was wondering if you can kind of talk to us about our strategic plan and where that is in its current progress and current state i know at the beginning of my term um we had a meeting with yourself and a few of your other colleagues um and we kind of started the conversation around equity and where that fits in um within pgcps mission division so what's so awesome is because there's so much to talk about and the work that that was one of the things that
107i did not mention a whole lot about but we definitely um in the when we had the when dr thornton was still the board chair we engaged the board of education in some conversations around uh the upcoming strategic planning process got lots of comments around mission and vision and what that might look like uh with and it's so interesting that doug schrader is here on this call because we've worked in collaboration as human resources and accountability to lead the charge with the data collection the analysis process that involved lots of community members from prince george's county to create this thing that we call the emerging strategic framework um that we had these open mic sessions where once we produced it from the voices of the system we had lots of people come to one of
10844 sessions where all you had to do was come and share your thoughts and ideas around does this work what should we measure what gets you excited what didn't we get right and that has helped us refine the strength of the framework as we begin to put measurable goals in place and we actually have a conversation tomorrow with our partner hanover research let's talk about what those kpis um key performance indicators which we're calling something else will look like that will help drive the equity focused goals that we're going to have for our district thank you for the question thank you so much now this is a topic i could talk about till 10 o'clock at night this is the work i do every day so i'm gonna request that dr white and mr reese
109and i would connect uh outside of this but you know i'm so you know thrilled and happy to hear about all the awesome work that our district is doing around this work and specifically um giving educators and school leaders the space to really uh analyze their own biases and how they show up in the classroom so you know my questions are just around how do we scale this in terms of uh transfer to practice so you know what i talk to districts about is moving beyond the book study right the book study got it we got the content down right now we need to move beyond the book study to change in hearts and minds within the classroom uh to really exhibit this anti-racist uh attitude and policy uh in a real tangible form so
110that's that's the first question you know how to what's our plan for scaling and moving you know from policy i'm sorry from theory to practice and then also you know just thinking about um you know equity centered design right so as you all are coming up with you know these kpis and thinking really deeply about uh the work from the information gathering you've done you know the the concept of you know equity centered design i don't have to tell everyone here is that you really design for the margin right you design for those that are least able to access what we have to offer and so how have those voices been brought to the center um of what the equity initiatives and policies have been and are there plans to pull together focus groups stakeholder
111surveys around people that really um are really the furthest from opportunity within our district and then of course we have to talk after this because you were in durham at the same time i was down the street i was at hillside new tech so we definitely have to talk outside new tech okay and i started up at jordan high school we have a lot to discuss i was at jordan too there we go carolina awesome so let me see if i i think i tried to capture your questions in my which is not my messy handwriting i'm more like a physician than a teacher with my handwriting uh but i'll give you a quick story around how you scale and actually get the work into practice and i'm actually going to talk about some work
112that happened um with the division of academics where there was a group of us who've been leading this professional learning around culturally responsive teaching in the brain and there's a a team of about seven people who dr white selected to lead the work and she graciously said david do your thing have at it with them i'm gonna check in we're gonna talk about it but i want you to work with them and build their capacity well one of the debrief participants on the leadership team of that group she said during our first session 75 percent of the people who spoke out were white women but white women are not 75 of the people who are working here yeah and we have a conversation about what we did to create that space and so we as
113a leadership team leading the work had to be in the work of how is privilege playing out how is power paying playing out we as teachers who are we inviting and disinviting and it was that simple data point that made us go back to our own drawing board as the culturally responsive people to figure out what we might have missed um and what we permitted so because we had that hard dialogue across difference with each other we know what it feels like when we invite teachers and principals and other people to do the same thing so i think you scale the work by actually truly being in the work which is that's why that's my ask of the board to be in the work so we know what it is that we're asking people to
114experience and the other thing i want to give kudos to is the fact that the office and this is not um a plug for more positions but the office of equity and excellence is pretty small which forces the fact that the work cannot be siloed which means i have to work with doug schrader in his division i have to work with veronica harrison and i have to walk work with kia mcdaniel in academics because we all have to do the work together and once if it doesn't start silo they can't remain siloed so that's my answer to that equity-centered design um there's so much i could talk about um regarding that so when we've been listening to people at the open mics it's been amazing to see who has shown up sometimes it's people who
115have what we might refer to as i don't believe in this but people talk about low status positions in a school district when they don't have to think about their supervisor or supervisor supervisor when you say anyone can come people showed up and they spoke their truth and they gave their ideas and so i was writing their names down so when it's time to have people lead to do something later on those are the people who we're going to tap um because they showed up and they can help us create opportunities for more of their peers to have voice and agency so it takes intentional searching and intentional centering and literally taking data around the fact that we don't have any last year we had zero asian americans who were on the leadership team for
116the ceo book study this year we have like two of the six are from the asian american community so it's about looking to see what we're missing and actually doing something to fix it and then telling people that that's what we did and i wrote down durham because i was taking notes but that was not your third question there was a third question you had but i missed it got it no i think i only had two because i could literally talk about this all night and i i don't want to be you know do that again here goes uh miss jackson and then we'll wrap up here yeah thank you um you said your office was pretty small mr reese you know just throw it out there graduating senior be going to college soon
117if you if you need some help i got you um but aside from that i had two questions actually i'll reach out yes i have i have something for you to do we'll talk about that offline with the ceo book study involving students in the comments last night you have not that's right cool all right um yeah okay so i have two questions one of them being that you said that um cultural shifts aren't always measurable um sometimes there is no hard numbers or data or statistics we can look to to see or to examine the progress that's being made when we talk about um some of these ideas and and practices um so with that being said my first question is with with that in mind how do we know as a school system
118that change is actually occurring um so whether it's on like for example i guess like the school-based level how do we know that educators and school leaders you know my principal my assistant principal my teachers are employing the practices in internalizing kind of these social theories that you know are being um that they're being uh supplied with um so yeah so how what are some indicators i guess for example me as a student i would look out for what are some things that i would maybe start to notice if things are changing and what does that shift look like would be my first question okay i'll give a quick response to that first question because i said that these cultural shifts are difficult or hard to manage not impossible um so one for instance um
119like what if for example we surveyed students to say on a likert scale or how many times or how many of your teachers and other adults in the building have affirmed some aspect of your identity that's important to you and what if we knew that because we care about identity and students feeling like they can they belong and that the adults who are charged with caring for and teaching them we're doing that work of affirmation like what if we what if principles knew that that is a metric that we actually wanted to see get better what would a principal do to encourage staff members to understand different types of identities to encourage students to be who they are as board member valentine said and to show up with your whole self so we could look
120at that type of data over time to see how students are talking about their experiences and that's the most valid data uh that is just about my own bias is the data that comes from students that's one way how we might begin to capture how much the work is being entrenched and internalized okay um thank you and then my second question is i know that a few individuals or individuals um one of the ways they think is effective and kind of transmitting this understanding of intersectionality and checking your biases and um showing up with your whole self and understanding the more theoretical side of it is professional development right we need a pd course for this we need a pd course for that we need a pd course on cultural responsiveness and i know your
121office in the district is working on that but i guess my one of my first questions would be is what role um do you believe pd has in this case what role do you believe professional developments have when it comes to ensuring that there is this understanding by faculty and staff members of you know what we want them to understand with this idea and then aside from professional development are there either more effective ways on their own or more effective ways in uh combination with pd's to ensure that you know again this idea is being understood and internalized and all that good stuff that's a brilliant question thank you for asking it and it really is brilliant because when people think about professional development or professional learning many of us think about the hour-long session
122the weekend retreat or the powerpoint slides that david reese might show you and that is a piece of the professional learning um and when the professional learning is actually job embedded when supervisors and managers actually create time and space on a regular basis during team meetings that might happen weekly to reflect on the impact of the circle's activity or the impact of what happened when we had all of these principles affirming lgbtq members like what was the next step with that it's it's it's the ongoing consistency and follow-through that helps people reflect on their practice and then there's a lot of research on reflective practice so small things like little check-ins around how did that go for you or i used to think but now i think or a supervisor saying in the moment dr
123white i noticed that you did x connected to our learning great job if that's the way a person likes to be affirmed all of that is a part of the ongoing cycle of professional learning so we have to think more expansively around what that means i know we have a lot of people in prince george's county right now who i am like we're gonna say preaching to the choir that's one of the colloquials that we use like people know and understand that and have a lot of experience with it the other thing i would say even like with academics you know you you have to make sure we didn't i slow walked it like i knew that that wasn't when we were going through zarita hammond's book that that's not something and i i have
124a like the melting pot in my division right so it's a lot of different cultures and before you can you have to be comfortable who you are and what you bring to the table right and how do you manage yourself and so where this has been like every other month we get together and this team gets together constantly um they send things to me we review it but i think the biggest thing about professional development is you set the tone when you set a purpose and you have to say so in a year from now i already knew in a year from now what do i want in a year from now it wasn't adjusting curriculum and a year from now it was having my own staff who impacts teachers they have a better perspective
125of who they are so they're inviting to who they serve right and so you gotta you have to use professional development to have a hook i think when dr golson first did her book study last year you know it was she opened that up to anyone that wasn't about if you were on her executive leadership team or if you were a principal like anybody in the district who wanted to be a part of that movement at work um and she's going to be doing that again this summer so i think we have to not look at professional development sometimes like oh let's get everybody done and we're going to train and like we're going to think magic happens you know and the other thing i would say definitely in the um anniversary of you know
126everything that happened with george floyd it was such an opportunity for us to have student voice it was such an opportunity for us to begin to give teachers toolkits to have very uncomfortable conversations down to our youngest learners in the classroom and to give them a guide to follow so you might not be comfortable but we're going to give everybody a guide to start and we're going to give this toolkit of how to have and that that hasn't been the only uncomfortable thing that's happened then we had the capital happen and boom right again now people are more used to that toolkit they know a better way to come in and we were able to create different resources for staff to use to become comfortable because sometimes you have to push through being uncomfortable to
127allow everyone to have a voice and that in itself is uncomfortable yeah so it's not something that it changes overnight it's like how do we just how do we begin to say that this is an uncomfortable thing and every voice can be heard and every voice has value and that's going to take time to see that in our district as large as we are comfort in the discomfort well i am like so excited and just this is such a great way for us to end our meeting you know on unfortunately this anniversary of this this racial reckoning that happened in our country but to be encouraged by the great work that our school system is doing to move the needle forward and you know i just want to encourage you know this team to really
128think through okay how can we develop our own pgcps surveys models frameworks around cultural affirmation because the thing is we are doing it well here if you look nationally everyone is trying to figure out how to work how to motivate and push students of color specifically to be high achieving across the board and that's happening here and so i really think that cultural responsive teaching is the broth that it's all cooked in it's not like a checklist right it's a change in the mindset and so the fact that we're spending that time with staff to really dig down deep into that just says a lot to the commitment here in the district and so like i said i can talk about this forever but we are going to keep going and i'm just so grateful
129uh for that presentation um so um any most any follow-ups from the committee will be posted on board docs and i just wanted to thank everyone for coming out for such a great meeting and i wanted to see if i could have a motion to adjourn the meeting one quick thing before you get your motion yeah mr reese can i get you to email me your presentation please absolutely i'll share it with you right now thank you all right adjourn go ahead all right great so can i have a motion to adjourn so move madam chair okay all in favor oh wait a second i need a second okay second okay all in favor aye aye okay so we're adjourned thank you so much bye-bye thank you everyone good night mr had to ask you
130a quick question thank you you'll still be using that you'll still be on the recording could we stop the recording possible or pause it do you want to stop the cloud recording