001Better hit it again. All right. School's in session, folks. All right. It is now 7 p.m. Thursday, May 29th, 2025, and I call this meeting of the board of education to order. Cindy, would you please lead the role? Matt, present. Gilbert present. Thomas present. Arandu here. Slider present. Here. Right. Next is pledge of allegiance. I aliance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right. Welcome to the meeting of the board of education. If anyone wishes to address the board this evening, please see our recording secretary to submit a form for addressing the board. Please put your full name and address on the form. In general, the board will not answer questions or engage
002in dialogue during public comment. This does not mean we do not take your concerns or comments seriously. The board values active community participation in the district's endeavors and encourages people to engage with the district using the appropriate channels and systems designed with your input in mind. Bird members are not involved in the day-to-day operations of the district and cannot engage in district business individually. If you have specific questions or would like to further engage with the district, you may submit your questions using the link in the website and the appropriate staff member will communicate with you. Our BPS 101 communications director Holly Deman will now explain the procedures for public comment and call up the speakers. Thank you, President Meadows. Speakers will be called up in order form submission. We have one. Your name is
003called. Please come to the podium so you can be heard. All individuals speaking will be limited to three minutes. Three minute timer is projected on the screen and will start once you are settled at the podium. At any time during this meeting, written comments may be submitted to our recording secretary, Cindy Rodriguez, at my right. Speakers should conduct themselves with civility and respect toward others. Our speaker is Martin F. Thank you. At the last board meeting, the BEA president reflected on the agreement made one year ago between the BEA and the district to transform our educational environment, specifically by addressing issues of transparency and trust. Not only has the district committed to this goal, but in the recent election of two new board members, one of whom received more votes than anyone else, the community
004also gave a strong mandate for that true transformation. After years of students coming to these meetings and begging for strong action to be taken and failed referendums revealing that the community does not believe that true transparency and trust are currently present, transformation is indeed what we continuously cry cry out for. Yet one year after that commitment was made, I have not begun to see that true transformation. The proposal made on implementing your year- old strategic plan at the last meeting is yet another disappointment. The DMG plan represents yet another opportunity for true transformation that you are being asked to blow. I have no confidence that DMG's approach will move us anywhere closer to true transformation in trust and transparency. And why should I why should anyone in this room? Because this is our our promise,
005our the process that we have for everything. It is our tried and failed recipe. Make a promise, a year later, pay an outside consultant $100,000 to give us corporate jargon, make some committees, have late night convoluted vague discussions, and ultimately no change is made. There are many things this district does well. However, this is the same tried andfilled recipe that led to two failed referendums on operational excellence, priority three. And needless to say, it has certainly not served us well for belonging and inclusion, priority two. Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And if that's true, then we would be insane to believe that we are on the right track to your very appropriate goal of true transformation. It is obvious that true transformation will
006not come through more of the same. Rather, it demands discomfort and honesty. It demands that we correct ourselves when we stray from our goals. In the recent board election, the community elected two new board members to enact admin and bea's stated goal of transformation to not only express support for equity and theory, but implement it in their own decision-making. Let me be very clear, these leaders were not elected to comfort the privileged or uphold the status quo. They were elected to stand up for all staff and all students. And that is exactly what they are doing. Their board member comments last week made me proud. It actually was and is the one thing that made me optimistic that true transformation is achievable. Though of course not if we stick to our tried and failed recipe
007as you're being recommended to do. Uh lastly, I'll say that your strategic plan's vision is that every BPS graduate will be a quote curious, resilient, empathetic, and proactive contributor to society. I believe that is exactly what I am, the very portrait of a graduate you seek. I'd also like to think that my voice additionally should matter to you. As a recent student who faced many systemic oppressions in my time DPS 101, my voice should be one you seek out and center and I'm always willing to share my experience and insight with you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any further ones, Holly? That's the end of our public comment. Thank you. All right. Reports. Item 3.1, school improvement plan presentations. Tom. Yeah. So, uh, board, I know we have two members that are new, uh,
008but, uh, in December, November, all of our schools, uh, for the first time under my time here presented kind of the goals and steps that the buildings had worked on, um, in alignment to our strategic plan. And part of the the call for the plan from the plan is that our buildings will present bianually, then the district also follows. And that was the timing structure we used given the volume of uh discussion that might occur. So we decided as a board team with the administration to go buildings first then the district and that's what we have here tonight. So we're going to have the buildings be presenting now in November the buildings presented at our business regular board meeting. Um due to the length of that meeting and the conversations that came, the board had
009requested if we could hold this meeting on a separate night and that's why this is the only a well we have a very brief item after this but um that's why it's on a separate evening just so we're clear on that and then uh and then we'll be doing the same thing with the district presentation in June. So, we'll have our June 24th meeting. That will be our normal regularly scheduled business meeting. And then we will have uh our specially regular scheduled meeting to do the district presentation. All right. So, tonight um we are going to begin with AGS. So, we'll be uh going down the list of our elementary schools and the principles are here tonight to present. Uh the presentations shouldn't uh be too much of a surprise if you were able to
010see remember or recall or if you reviewed the presentations from November. It's a continuation of what was discussed there. This is the here's how it went this year. All right. Any questions before we begin? Awesome. Then we'll go ahead and invite Miss Stevens and Mr. Wyatt. All right. Well, good evening. Um, as uh Mr. Kim said, I'm Kristen Stevens. I'm the principal at AGS and I do have Jake Wyth here with me. He is a fourth grade teacher, but also a valued member of our school leadership team. So, um, we are here to share exciting news with you. Um, we met both of our ELA goals, both our proficiency goal and our growth goal. So, as you can see, 78% of our students scored above at or above the 50th percentile. And our growth goal,
011we exceeded by two percentile points. Um, math was not part of our school improvement plan, but I'm too proud to share those exciting numbers as well. um 78 I'm sorry 83% of our students met proficiency in math. So at or above the 50th percentile and 78% of our students showed growth in math as well. So we're really excited about that growth and feel like we worked really hard to to reach those goals. Um I will also say that we had 13 students that were one point away from meeting their RIT growth goal. So, I can't I have to mention them as well. Um, and just because they're not part of the percentile doesn't mean our other students didn't make growth. It just means they didn't meet their their goal. So, we celebrate that as well.
012Um, and then for sense of belonging, we um fell a little bit short on our first goal was which was positive to corrective ratio. Um, it's something we're going to continue working on that is measured by classroom walkthroughs. So, um, we know that's something we need to continue working on and and continue to address. And then we took a little different approach from what you'll hear from some of my um, colleagues in that we measured nursing visits. And we did that because when we looked at our visits, we had 115 students that were making really regular visits to the nurse. And they weren't really for medical um, reasons. they were um Jake's heard me say this to before to get a mint and a hug or to get some words of encouragement. So, we really
013looked for ways to provide that in the classroom so that our students could continue to be learners. Um and again, we're proud to say that 97% of those students being tracked had less nursing visits. So, um we feel like the impact of of what we tried was really great. Um, I also have the EC program at AS and they were working on pre-iteracy skills. They also had great growth. Um, 80% of all of the EC students made growth in pre-iteracy. They worked really hard on higher level questioning. You can see they went from 12% to 26% of their students um, being able to answer those questions. And then sense of belonging. They worked on arrival, dismissal, handwashing, um all those really important skills needed for kindergarten and 93% of them made growth in that as
014well. First of all, thank you guys for having us tonight. This is an exciting night to uh get to share and it's also good to be able to share celebrations. One of the things that I think from my point of view, I've been on that school leadership team for a long time, was very successful this year was our professional development. uh we really took a team approach to that through the uh school leadership team and we connected all of the professional development opportunities both to to the strategic plan and to our school improvement plan. So we had a team of teachers that visited a school uh to learn about collaborative learning structures to support student engagement. We had a team of teachers that went to a training uh with Jennifer Saravalo on uh teaching reading
015across uh multiple content areas and then they provided some additional training to the staff. I worked uh in a partnership with uh Kristen on uh working with a therapist in a in a mental health clinic to come in and provide training on supporting students to help them be more sens uh to help support them with strategies to manage their anxiety and some of those difficulties we saw through nurse visits uh within the classroom. All of those I think were very wellreceived by our staff and I think contributed to um our success with our uh data as well. It was not I didn't feel like it was as random this year. I felt like we had a lot of ownership of that and I felt like it was very targeted to what we were trying to
016accomplish. And then you can see EC as we mentioned had those two successes and I know they did a lot of professional development this year as well. So, um, our reflections are that we loved what we saw at Willard School in Elgen, the the teaming structures. Um, and we are, I think, pretty committed to, um, implementing some of those structures which are really studentled and a lot of inquiry based learning. And then I know EC is going to continue to focus on setting up their classrooms so that the higher level questioning um, is um, is uh, ready to go for those students. So, we are really proud. AS uh did a lot of great things. We think um we have growth to make of course, but we feel we feel really good about what we
017did this year. [Applause] Yeah. Yeah. Uh there might be some questions. Okay. I'm out, Jake. Thank you. So I said a question is because it says positive to corrective feedback. What is that? Sure. So that's part of our Champs model that we use and positive is kind of what it sounds like positive comments to students like great job or I like the way you finished your math. Um corrective is more uh a comment like um let me I'll think of one. I can't think of one off the cuff. Yeah. sit down. Um, uh, need to get back on task. Those are correct, more corrective comments. It's interesting looking at the data because I do think that's still an opportunity in that we had some areas where there were, you know, we were looking for 3
018to one positive to corrective and we did see some areas where we had that or exceeded that. So, I think utilizing some of those areas where we had more positive to corrective is going to be part of our next year planning. And did you say you track that by observation? like it's it's walkthrough data. So you have like a little tick sheet in your Okay. It's a team. It's actually I'm not actually usually part of the team. It's um Katherine Murray who's um our behavior um person here um at RJC and then my social worker and some other members of our leadership team who do that. I'm assuming that's like unplanned. Like they don't know you're they're coming in. Uh they do know we're they do know we're coming but um I think they're not
019they don't fake it. They just act normal because they know what we're looking I mean they know we just want to improve that it's not um evaluative and we just want to get better. What was the um how many times did they do the walkthrough or like was there consistency like once a week whatever? There were three walkthroughs um that were you know led by that team. Um but we always are looking for that when I'm doing evaluations or when we're having conversations as well. And I know our SLT members did a lot of observations of each other and looking for those kinds of things as well. Did you have any staffing issues or concerns this past year? Um not no not that I can think of. I think the only thing I I would
020mention which kind of goes back to the previous question was just that that's something I think we're looking to work on. One of the things we found when we did walkthroughs is sometimes there were people absent or there was something else going on. So building capacity within all of the staff to understand you know positive to corrective and strategies for including students I think is something to continue to work on. Uh, I think you know some of those observations I think we were I don't want to say concerned but we noticed that there was different staff in the classrooms than there's typically there and things like that like substitute teachers who wouldn't have the same level of training as our our typical staff. Any other questions? Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.
021You want to queue it up? Sorry. Hang on. Are we Yeah. Yes. I'm sorry. It's Grace McQueen. I'm going. Nice seeing you. Thank you for coming. Didn't know I didn't know them popping up that it was our turn. They were going to go for it. Very enthusiastic. Yeah. All right. Good evening. I'm Jeff Modf. I'm the principal at Grace McWain. And I'm Ashley Manthi. I'm an SLT member and I teach first grade. Um, and we're going to take you through some of the things that we're proud about uh for the year. Uh, first off, uh, wanted to direct your attention through to our proficiency data. um we had 91% of our students uh proficient in math on NWA MAP and 80% of of our students uh were proficient in reading. So we were very excited
022about the that data. Um our goals that we set for ourselves as far as school improvement were based off of growth. But I did want to mention uh these two pieces of data because we're very proud of them. uh along with the fact that if you look at the proficiency graphs at the bottom, not only is the proficiency uh this year very high uh but it's also been increasing year after year for the past three years which is very important and uh exciting for us. Uh some of our accomplishments around our literacy goals uh include our PLC teams uh meeting to analyze the greatest area of needs in our own literacy instruction for our students um so that we can drive our instruction that way. Uh we introduced and focused on the Illinois comprehensive literacy
023plan as a staff. Uh we were fortunate to have our instructional coach, Laura Footut, provide us with professional development and some instructional shifts um that we as a staff can make um to help foster student ownership and independence in their reading. And then uh finally, we improved our literacy culture through parent and community partnerships uh and by hosting different schoolwide literacy events. Sure. As you can see, we worked very hard in the area of literacy at Grace Quain. Uh unfortunately uh we were trying to move the needle from 56.7 to 60% uh growth on MDN math for reading. Um and that just didn't happen. Um but we when we dig dig did dig a little deeper uh into those numbers uh we found a lot of uh data that we were super proud of. Uh
024first off the percent of kindergarters that were meeting their growth targets this year uh was 20% more as compared to the last three years. So, we saw great reading growth in our uh kindergarten cohort. In addition, our fifth grade uh we we looked and saw that they had the highest growth of proficiency um in the district for uh in the spring as well. Um and the other thing uh that caught our attention was in third and fourth grade um actually in all of the grades when we looked from fall to winter um our growth scores were telling us that we were doing the right thing uh because that we were all on track to meet our growth uh goals uh from fall to winter which is why we continued with some of the efforts we
025were we were doing from uh from fall to winter uh and continuing on to the spring. So when we uh reflected on this some of some responses in preparation for 2025 uh first we want to continue to unpack the best practices cited within the Illinois comprehensive literacy plan. Um we're excited to do that along with our other elementary schools this year as we launch that in August as an entire district. Uh in addition uh we want to more frequently monitor student growth and reading. Uh certainly that's done in a for in an informal sense in every classroom, but we want to do it in a more formal sense within our PLC teams. Uh so we're going to look to develop common formative assessments and more frequently uh look at the data uh so we can
026better predict what our map growth will look like. Uh some of our accomplishments around our goal of sense of belonging. Uh we built community through our schoolwide student centered events we had. Uh you can see in the pictures on the right uh we had a March Madness tournament of books. So alongside the basketball March Madness um all of our students K through five had different books in part of a bracket that they read got to vote on. Um and those were displayed around the hallways. So I know my first graders loved to see what everyone else was reading. Um we also had a super fun clue mystery game. So there was a clue given every day and the kids had to work together try to uncover whatever the mystery was. Um and they loved that
027as well. Um we also introduced something called the keys to resolving conflict which is a process um kind of built to develop resilience uh in our students when they encounter conflicts with their peers. So teaching them a very clear process to resolve that conflict independently when to seek adult support and help. Uh we intentionally found ways to increase our student leadership positions. So we had students leading our morning announcements, uh morning greeters. We had some kids wearing like the little grizzly what it paw. I don't know. My kids love to give them a high five in the mornings. Um and then student focus groups, which you'll hear about in a minute. Um and then we've always done behavior boosts, but we tried to really kind of amp them or ramp them up to promote that
028positive culture. Yeah. So, our sense of belonging goal was to move from 77% to 80% uh on the overall survey. Uh the survey has one question that is about uh sense of belonging, but then there's the greater uh series of questions within the survey which gives us kind of a sense of belonging score. Um with that that larger number, we did not make the goal that we were hoping for. Uh but once again, we we dug into the data and found some celebrations. Uh first off, uh 11% increase in students who were feeling more understood by the adults at school. Uh in addition, there was an 11% increase in the students uh uh with IEPs who felt a sense of belonging at Grace McQueen. Um and just kind of not formal data, but um we
029talked about those student focus groups. Um and it was great just face to face hearing from students saying, "Yeah, I do feel a a greater sense of belonging." And then they would tell us, "Oh, you know, those leadership roles are really cool. We look forward to doing those and we're in fifth grade." And the special events they would talk about uh with me uh showed that on an informal sense that we were going in the right direction for sense of belonging. Um we plan to continue a lot of that work. Uh so we're going to look to target those subgroups who report the lower sense of belonging. Um and uh because those student focus groups seem to be so meaningful to students to give them that student voice. Uh I'm looking to increase those. We
030were do we did them uh once or twice a trimester and we're we're looking to do it monthly at least uh for next year. Uh it's just a great time where I sit down with students during uh their lunch or the recess. Uh we ask some poignant questions and uh they give some great answers. A lot of the improvements we made this year at Grace McQueen were based off of the the results of the student focus groups. All right. So, we also have a lot that we're excited to celebrate uh this year at Grace McWain. So, just a few of those things like Mr. Mov talked about, we have the high levels of proficiency in our MAP, both ELA and math. Um the increased literacy culture in our building from K to 5. Uh those
031new leadership opportunities like they mentioned. Um, and then just really working to establish some new traditions, um, and make some cultural changes just to make our kids feel like they belong. So, that's it. Thank you for the opportunity for letting us share a little bit about, uh, Grace McQueen tonight. [Applause] Any questions? Yep. So, um, just out of curiosity, did you find any contributing factors as to why the third and fourth graders didn't meet the goals? Um, that's some that's something with the data being so fresh that we're still still looking into. Um, but uh we couldn't find one particular uh piece of data to tell us that, you know, an instructional practice that was done or not done within the classroom that would have uh correlated to that data. And then as far as
032sense of belonging. Do you know what caused I think was it a was it a kind of a decline? Was it 80% to 72? What what caused that? Um that so it what was interesting is that we were asking in in the student focus groups we would ask them like hey we noticed that you know this is going down from fall to winter um you know and and talked with them about it and we couldn't pinpoint a specific uh thing that that would would change that for them. Um but what we did is we made sure that some of the ideas they brought forth to us uh we implemented those and then from winter to spring it did go up. So for some reason there was a dip in the winter then and then it
033it went up and we're hoping that that is a trend. I know it's only one beta point but we're hoping that that that shows a trend for us that in the fall to winter next year we're going to see uh that continued increase. We also from that time um the keys to conflict resolution wasn't something that was initially part of our plan. So that's something we introduced in I don't know after winter um after getting some of that data um because as an SLT when we analyzed some of the um comments that we were seeing from students about why they answered questions the way they did we saw that a lot of it well there was a pattern I guess I could say of like small social conflicts happening on the playground or at lunch
034or whatever. Um, so our social worker, Sandra Acasta, helped kind of lead that development to um, give our students another tool, I guess, so when they have one of those developmentally appropriate situations occur, they had something they could go back to to work through it. and not a question, but I really appreciate that even you guys bringing, you know, that you didn't hit a certain goal or whatnot, but you're showing that you're trying to get the real life answers to those and pivoting, which is so important. So, I really appreciate hearing that and just going looking outside that box and figuring it out and just trying to apply different things. That's really great. Thank you. Questions. All right. Thank you. Nice job. Thank you. [Applause] Would you like to click? No. Okay. All right. Well,
035we're HC Storm. My name is Chris Mil. I'm the principal over at HC Storm. And with me is I'm Jennifer Torerson. I am a first grade teacher at Storm and also a member of the school leadership team. And unofficially joining us is Mrs. Jodie Bird over here in the corner who's also on our SLC. So just showing some additional support. So although we focus in on a lot of data sets and a lot of goals, these were the three areas that we actually selected as part of our school improvement plan. Um focusing in on ELA with the growth and proficiency and then a larger sense of belonging, make sure that students feel safe and that they have supporting adults. As you kind of see, we had a downward trend. Um but that's not to go
036say that some of our students, they just did not reach their projected growth target. So, even though we have these as our final scores, u we reflected on the year at SLT and we got a lot of things that we are proud of and some things that are really causing some self-reflection too, which we'll go over right about now. I'll go over those. So, like Chris said, we um reflected on the goals that we set this year and also the work that we did as a building. And even though we are disappointed that we um did not meet our goals, we did find things we're proud of. And one of those things is the work that we did on our high yield teaching and learning strategies. And our students did show um a response, a
037strong response, positive response to those strategies. And we saw that in our math math test. So we had a 12% increase in students that were proficient as well as a 12% increase in students that were meeting their growth targets. So, we feel like those are working and um well, I'll only talk about what I'm proud of right now. So, um can I just ask you what high yield strategy? I'm not sure. So, those are like highly effective strategies that are like studied and pro like studies prove that they have the they yield the most growth in students. It's based off of John Hed's work uh where we found out tons of studies. uh we started this journey about two years ago where we started to look at the high yield instructional strategies that had the
038most bang for their buck at a point four or higher and we looked at them individually. This year what we did is we looked at more of the umbrella and actually roped in about four or five high yield instructional strategies under overall concept so we could actually bring that into our professional development throughout the course of the year and then have teachers be able to implement that inside their classroom settings. Thank you. Sorry to interrupt. That's okay. Um and then in addition the school leadership team we did a book study on the book who's doing the work and we've started implementing that what we've learned from that book and started to share that with the rest of the staff and shift toward a more student centered question design and also just working to develop more
039um self-efficacy in our students so that they are choosing these strategies that are working when their teacher implemented but that they can implement them themselves and they can choose the strategy and when and how to use it and without relying as much on the teacher so that they can be more independent. Um so that's that journey is kind of beginning because we had just started to learn about it this year and implement it and then we're strengthening our collaboration as a building through vertical vertical articulation. So we have had the opportunity to do crossgrade and intergrade um instructional rounds and with those opportunities we can go into each other's classrooms and teachers can learn from other teachers strengths and then offer feedback to each other as well on things that we're looking for feedback on.
040We although we didn't meet our growth goals as a building, we did note some um reading growth that's notable among students um certain specific student groups. For example, our black or African-American students showed a 9.5% increase in students who are meeting their projected growth targets. And as our third grade cohort also showed that 12% um increase in meeting their growth target for the spring. Um throughout the building in all grade levels, we have seen consistent growth in EXL skill mastery in both math and ELA. And then we've worked to refine our win time focus by working with our PLC's to develop database groups. And then many of the grade levels have been then exchanging students to um create shared ability classrooms for more responsive support to what we're seeing on the CFAs. Of course, we
041have reflections especially not meeting our goals. So we are we have questions and we have plans. So, we are wondering and working to answer the question of how we can transfer these learning strategies that we've seen be effective in math to our ELA instruction. Um, we also are going to continue that journey with who's doing the work to um refine our instructional practices and continue the journey of um creating more quality and rigor of our question design. We're on the journey with the rest of the district to learn more about the shifts in literacy instruction and we need to um deepen our implementation of the seven components of literacy and that is going to involve learning about these shifts as well. We um although we have shown se seen growth in certain subgroups, we also
042um see see that we still have gaps in our student populations and we see these gaps both in academic um areas as well as in sense of belonging which was one of our goals. So we know that that requires intentional support and we need to pay attention to th to what we're doing for those subgroups in our building. Um, we talked a little bit about those high yield instructional strategies. We want to continue that momentum that we have putting those across all content areas and we want to foster a growth mindset in our students. So that kind of goes along with that self-efficacy and having them believe that they can do these things that it's not all what the teacher can do with me and for me. Um, so we're working on what strategies we
043can use to help them develop a growth mindset and encourage them to be more independent in applying their strategies. So in the end, looking at our academic goals, we acknowledge that we have areas of our growth and as a building, we are committed to remain focused on making decisions that um I can't read what the slide says. making decisions that are student that lead to student centered improvement. I also think that's one of the things that we're proud of over at Storm is that we're willing to have those difficult conversations and really try to look at solutions to try to move forward and move our students forward. We wish we didn't have to have them though. But we're willing to but we we would. So then going to our final goal, what we're proud of
044is just building our community. Uh, I think that our classroom buddies were really good is that's where we actually took our younger grade levels to partner them up with our older grade levels for fun events either to read to each other or do some type of activity and event. Um, we have a strong PTO partnership. So, our school activities and our community events, whole school assemblies, our family literacy night, our family game nights, our monster bash, all of that really brought our family togethers which is absolutely fantastic. We had high numbers of students participating in extracurricular activities throughout the course of the school year, which is great to get that involvement. Um, the final one that I have up there, which I'm we as a building are probably most proud of, is our bilingual community
045building event in partnership with the BHS Ed Pathways program. I had a parent from our bilingual program come up and approach me and say, "Hey, I feel connected to the school. I want to get other people connected, but I don't know other people inside the bilingual community." So with her advice, we set up an event. We had about 85% of our families and students come to that and the high school students were the entertainment. They probably had more fun than the kiddos playing games in the gym. Um but was absolutely fantastic. That's something that we definitely want to enhance. And after that community building event, we had more parent volunteers in our bilingual program. um volunteering for art in the classroom and just coming on to field trips or just being more present in the
046building with two additional adults personally finding me to talk about student academic growth. So really proud about that. Other notable student successes and their self-rating overall four out of five social competencies increased from fall to the spring. Spring was our main focus on perseverance and we had a positive 8% growth on that. And students see that their self-management and supportive relationships are up at 85 and 88%. Um, I know that Grace McWain also said this too, but our students with IEPs, there's they had the same percent of sense of belonging as their peers, which is huge for me. Um, and then our third grade cohort, all their social competencies increased. And some reflections over there again, the students saw one aspect in their emotional regulation and teachers saw slightly different and their emotional regulation as
047well as self-management. So, we want to investigate that a little bit more. Um, the other thing that we want to really hone in on is how much respect do students give you? That seemed to be their lowest one in the fall, lowest one in the winter, and that continued over into the spring. So, we definitely want to reflect upon that. As well as with our current fourth grade, they had the lowest scores for social competency and sense of belonging. And some of our subgroup populations had a decrease from the fall to the spring. But with that, and although I do talk to students, don't think they're giving me the honest answers because of my position. So, we got to find out a way to do that. However, in Panorama, they have the opportunity to do
048open-ended comments. So, I took 187 of them and put them into chat GBT and I found those six common themes. So, I'm actually getting honest student voice and their perspective. That's their reality. So, I think we as a school need to take that perspective and help guide our decision- making moving forward. So, but thank you. Open for questions. Yeah. Uh, I might have missed it, but I'm just curious. I know that you piloted the Boys and Girls Club program. That is correct. And I'm just wondering if you have any comments on how that went. I know we're going to take it over to JB Nelson next year, I believe. So, I'm just kind of curious how that went. It was a journey. Um, the reason why it was a journey, I find a lot of
049value and success in that partnership. Uh, we reached out to multiple families. um some of the families were just hesitant. So we had a core group of students that started the year but then we had internal boys and girl club rotation. So we didn't have consistent staff for almost about half the year. Then when we actually had the consistent staff we saw the students wanting to come. We saw them having more of that social emotional that partnership the actual mentoring portion which is really great. And then they actually started to partner up with our VHS mentoring program and we got to support a lot more kids. So okay I do find value in it. I think that there was hesitancy. Anything that's new takes a while. Absolutely. I had a I guess a question about
050the increase in extracurricular activities. Um so I'm a big believer in that more extracurricular activities is going to help with uh not only academics but also sense of belonging. Um did you find that you removed any obstacles to help kids participate more? Um any anything you can share there that helped to improve the the participation? I think it was just our overt communication actually. Um we switched up a lot from just after school to morning. I think three or four of our events moved to the morning instead of the afternoon. People that worked with their work schedules. Um I also see we just have go-getter kids. I mean when we just had our fifth grade promotion I think uh we had 67 kids. We had about 58 that were participating in some after school activity
051and it's just a lot of their own ownership of everything. Uh but the overcommunication I think was probably the largest one having teachers make that personal connection to them and being like hey we need you to kind of do this. We find interest in this and it really did help out. I love seeing the um efforts made to include the bilingual families. And this wasn't mentioned, but my fifth graders at the fifth grade breakfast when we first walked in and Cindy was there um handing out translation devices for the families of the EL students, which I thought was awesome. My older son, I don't remember them doing that three, four years ago. Now that came from our Bpack and just looking at how to increase accessibility of communication. Uh we purchased that I think at
052the end of last year. We've been using it a lot over in our BPAC one. And then for any of our inschool activities and events, any building has the ability to go rent that. Uh but it just helps them. They get to come on in. They don't have to sit clustered together. They don't have to have that pause and waiting for the translation to happen. They're just again building our community. So what is it exactly that you're using? So it's this little device. Okay. So, have you ever gone to like any of like the art shows and you just sit there and you walk around, you could hear everything? Yeah. So, Cindy was there one over there at the fifth grade promotion. So, she would have a little microphone and the other parents would just
053have headphones with a little transponder. So, then if I talk slow enough, Cindy's able to translate and then they could just sit there mixed amongst the whole entire group of everyone so they could hear everything that I am saying or anything that the students were saying in their native language. That's awesome. That's awesome. I just have a couple qu questions. Um, right there it says the difference between student and teacher rating. So what was what was the difference? Like what did the teach what did the students say versus the teachers? So self-management for the students they rated themselves at about 85% or teachers rated them at about 65%. And that was about the same exact thing for the emotional regulation just that disparity of students seeing that they're either lower in emotional regulation but high
054in that self uh self-management but teachers seeing the exact flip-flop from their perspectives. Okay. And then um there's a thing up there that says that the uh black African-American students did a positive was it nine 9.5. Um was there was your goal was there a goal for those students like in your plan or you just saw the jump? We just saw the jump. I think that with the some of the shifts in our interventions and doing a little bit more of the pushin helped them be still exposed to the academic language inside that home room classroom setting that that helped kind of carry over when they had to perform it onto the test as well. But it was just one of the data points that we actually saw, but we didn't like specifically pinpoint that
055one target for that uh one population. We did it for everyone and they just seem to have the biggest grasp on to that. Any other questions? Thank you very much. [Applause] Hello. I always feel like to turn down the AC. It's got to be hot. It is warm in here, actually. Thought I have short sleeves. Thanks a lot. All right. Hello. I'm Gina Greenwald. I'm the principal at Hoover Wood. I'm going solo tonight. I felt guilty asking staff to come after school was out, and so it's just me. So we'll go get started. So our literacy goal, our goal was 61% of students will meet or exceed the projected growth and we were at about 59%. Which if you look at the bottom that's kind of where we have been 52 59 59. We keep
056hovering around this one area and haven't been able to get out of the 50s. So that is something we're definitely working on. Um growth is a sticky wicket though because when you're scoring in the 90s or you're scoring well already to show continued growth is challenging but that doesn't mean we obviously want all kids to grow. Then for the proficiency 73% of students will score at the 50 percentile or higher in reading. And that one we made by the skin of our teeth. than that. For to be transparent, it was by the skin of our teeth, but we did make the 73%. And I just want to shout out for a second, our little kindergarteners were at 85 proficient in reading, which is I know that across the board, our kinders do really well, but
057it's always just so impressive when they come in not knowing, you know, where to sit and then they leave being readers. I always just love that. So really um proud of them. And then if you look on the bottom, our our trend data is going up from 66 to 70. Now we're at 73 in reading. So some good progress there. And of course hoping that continues to grow for our seal by the Oh, wait. I was going to share one other thing because I noticed my c my friends here saying even though it wasn't up there, they were talking about their math goals. And so I was like, "Oh, shoot. I didn't talk about math." But I'm going to because we were at 83% proficient in math schoolwide, up from 73 in the fall. So
058that's a 10% growth over the year, which is very impressive. So no, it wasn't a little slide and that wasn't our goal, but I'm going to shout that out, too. Why not? It's my last time up here. I'm going to shout it out. On the panorama, we um started off really well. Actually, we were at 79% at the beginning of the school year and so we wanted just to go up to 80. The the part of with PR panorama the questions they asked in the fall they altered slightly in the winter which which altered the data just a little bit and so we had a dip and then we're like okay well maybe that's just because the question altered. So then we they asked those same questions again at the end of the school year
059and it didn't really go back up to the 79. So we work I said well what what went on what changed in the course of a year and then as we were digging in we realized that that sense of belonging is actually four different questions and they take the average of it to develop the sense of belonging kind of final or percentage. So when we looked at that we found I think someone else was mentioning the part that was lower was that part about students respecting each other. The question is, do you feel that other children or other students at your school show you respectful behavior? And that was the one that was lowest. When we asked students, do you feel like you belong here as an individual, that was at 79%. So, we needed
060to tease that out a little bit to see, well, what area are we um showing a deficit in? And it really is how do kids treat other kids? And I think that's an ongoing challenge in schools is how do we help kids treat other kids respectfully all the time and not just the kids that they're friends with, not that the kids that are in their class, but everyone. And then by spring of 2025, the walkthrough data, we wanted to show an increase in the average of positives and a decrease in correctives and we achieved that as well. The spring data showed an increase in posit positives by one point. I can't see that. I think it's 03 and correctives decreased by 2 um 53. So some good growth there. But again as some of uh
061I think someone had asked do the teachers know when you're coming in and they do and you see a group of people come in. So I'm always again weeding out all right if you are a teacher and you see five adults come in with check you know clipboards and they're they're you know they're taking data on your positives to correctives is that true data is that inflated data and so I think it's always more beneficial for me as a principal just to be in and out of the classrooms and kind of listening for that and seeing okay did we miss opportunities and so that was the stuff that I would give feedback on when I was in and out of classrooms just on post-it notes hey there there's opportunities for some more positives here or
062did you notice so- and so doing this well because I think that's that's where um real growth is really at how we act every single day. And then the reflections were celebrating that 73% of students are proficient in reading. That was great. We're continuing to work on growth in ELA. Um, one of the things that we thought was really effective actually was instructional rounds this year because last year some of our data was showing us that our students were compliant. They did what they were asked to do, but they weren't doing deep enough thinking work and they weren't working as well together as we wanted. So, we had a goal of working on collaboration this year, which we did all during the year. We had many staff meetings. How do we help kids work together?
063How do we teach them how to work together? And then once they have that knowledge, how do we go more in depth in the actual learning standards? And really, if you think that through, doing that and helping them with that collaboration should also result in more respectful behavior towards each other because they're you they grow in their ability to work together. And then this is something I put in just really kind of for fun. Um, you know, as we talk about map data, and we do all of the time, we talk about map data, and this year we did, uh, the final MAP test was at the beginning of May. They had about three weeks left of school. And typically in May, our kids are losing their desire to really focus on that test and
064really take it seriously. And we debated as an SLT, well, what do we want to do? How do we help kids? and we bandied about the ideas of the pizza party, the awards, and and that's it's just not my vibe to be honest with you. I don't love that idea of like here you get this this tangible thing because you did well. That that's not something I I love to do. And so we talked about it and we said, let's just have that be more um from their parents. How can we help them pump up their students as they're sitting down to take this test? And there actually is data that supports if you close your eyes before a test and you really think about some positives and you think about yourself achieving, you will
065do better on that assessment. And so we asked all of our parents to write a pumpup letter to their child from kindergarten all the way to fifth grade. The students didn't know it was happening. On the first day of MAP test, they got their letter from their parents. And these are just some examples. And I love them. They were just so amazing and so uplifting and so focusing on the whole child that um they were just really special and some of the students actually were tearing up. Now some of you might be wondering well what if the parent didn't do it right? Um the teacher would write it if a parent didn't do it but I don't have the exact number. I didn't add up all the amounts, but I would was asking individual teachers,
066how many didn't, you know, did you have that you had to write? Most classes, 100% of the parents did it. Um, there was a couple that the teacher had to write and in one uh one fifth grade class, the teacher wrote it the first day and then the next day the parent had emailed because the the little girl went home and said, "Why didn't you write me a letter?" But the parent got on it and the next time she had that letter done. So um yeah, so this is a tradition we'd really um like to continue because it was really meaningful for our students and really for us too. And that's that's my presentation for tonight. [Applause] Any questions? I have a comment, I guess. So uh well, one, congratulations on your retirement. Thank you.
067Uh I just have a question. Maybe it's for Mr. Kim actually but um as Mr. Greenwald is transitioning out and Mr. Degman is transitioning in is there been a coordination collaboration transition plan so that the good work that they're doing is like a seamless transition to continue along what's happened? Yeah. So he's been in communication with Gina with our team here. Um he's been on site he's met with uh staff. He he's been very involved and then um we have some you know communications on documents, questions, processes. He was included into some of our email groups so he's staying looped in on everything. And then this is again maybe this might be more for you Mr. Kim but like we're kind of seeing like every building sort of having some things like this letter thing
068I love. Is there a mechanism so that all the buildings can collaborate? So hey this is working for us. You know I could see everybody sort of trying to adopt something like this. It's kind of fun and I'm just kind of wondering. I mean, I always say every good idea I've ever had is stolen from somebody else. So, um, is there a way for the SLT and the administrations of the buildings to, hey, this is great. This we struggled with, you know, spitball ideas. I know. So, we have administrative meetings where we'll meet as an entire administrative team or we're meeting with different principal groups and different levels. Um I also know regularly the principles are reaching out to each other and collaborating um begging, borrowing and stealing from each other, supporting each other. Um
069part of my own conversations with our principles often will reveal like yeah I kind of bounced this off Gina or I bounced this off Chris or you know name any principal here sitting in the audience they that they'll like talk and say like yeah I saw that and you know giving that a try. So, it's been one of the things we've tried to really figure out how to open up and and continue to grow like that level of collaboration. So, not just within the building, but like kind of across the district. There was mention of that questions in Panorama had changed and maybe the results. Um, do we know is there a way to see if other districts also saw those same? I don't know if it was a universal or if it was just
070because it was new this year. Panorama was new this year and they were trying to kind of figure out which questions. So I'm not sure if it was an issue with Panorama or is it just kind of a glitch in our system as we were learning the new system of panorama. So hopefully next year the questions in the fall are the same questions as the spring because that's it's just consistent. And that's a good point you just made. Like panoramas districtwide is new to us. So like the data is going to be difficult to interpret until you start to see patterns a little bit over time, but I appreciate the good, the bad, the ugly that everybody's kind of pulling out here. So thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Any other questions? All right. Well, thank
071you. Rub it in t-shirt. I couldn't read this. Yeah. No, I'm 100% with you on that. You deserve it. They I was get I was getting ready to go and my um my husband because in addition to retiring and doing all this, I just I got married on Sunday, too. So, I like to pack it in. He's like, "You wearing that to the board meeting?" I'm like, "Yep. Yes, I am." Fire you. Thank you, Gina. Thank you. [Applause] All right. They still had it. Alphabet. Oh, my wall. JB first, right? J, right? Alphabet. Elementary school. Your principal need. Yes. Yes. We're writing this down. We're taking coffee. No, because the thermostat doesn't work, right? It's thermostat. It's only getting warmer. All right. Is this the same? Is this the same pointer or a different one?
072Although some people in the audience look comfortable. They're just used. All right, keep it simple. All right, guys. Hang in there. I know we've had quite a few. I did wear the Jaguar shoes again, so they're back. We are the JB Jaguars. I'm Nicole Apprentice, principal at JB Nelson. I'm Melissa Musgrove. I'm a kindergarten teacher and SLT member. Here we go. Um, so we had a lot of things to celebrate here at JB. this year. Um we have the same slide earlier, but we updated it to represent what um how many students were in our extracurricular activities this year. And something that we're really really proud of is I feel like it's kind of growing every single year. Um and we have um a lot of kids involved, which of course leads to that sense
073of belonging. Um we have a high PTO involvement. We had four steam parties this year. Three. Three. Three. Mhm. Fall, winter, and winter, spring. Yeah, three. Um maybe you had another one that I didn't know about. I wish I did. They were really fun. But the parents were involved. We did lots of steam related activities throughout the building um that day. um themed around um fall, themed around winter, themed around we did like a story book end of the year um which uh the kids had raving reviews about and the parents really loved setting up for us. Um our student advisory board runs uh they do they're involved in lots of different ways, but one of their big things is running the school store. Um, and so they plan the store, they pick out what
074they want to have in the store, they run it, um, they figure out how much profit they have and all of those really good things. Um, the great life skills as well. And so then with their profits, they donate um, to different charities and then they use those profits for other um, for the start the following year and things like that. So yeah, nicely done. Thanks. All right. So this year our school improvement goals were um centered on literacy, math and social emotional learning. So in literacy you can see um our goal was that 60% of students would meet their growth targets in reading. The rationale is below. Um so you can see that trend. We had you know 54% 50% and then 50.38%. Um this year we did increase. We're going in the right
075direction. So 53% of their students met their growth targets, but we did not sadly meet um that goal of 60% in literacy. So going in the right direction um but not quite where we wanted it to be. In math um we wanted 70% of students to meet their growth targets. Um based below, you can see we had 42.9. I'll just round 43, 55, and 68%. Um and we had 76% of students meet their growth targets in math. So we did actually exceed that goal. And again, we're going in the right direction, which is what we want to see. Um, for social emotional learning, um, I went a little bit in a different direction. I did not focus on belonging. It was in the fall. Um, we did have a low percentage in belonging and it
076was a composite score and it seemed like a lot of things to focus on at once because there were so many different skills in belonging. So, we just decided at SLT to focus on um managing their emotions, emotion management, because that was our greatest area of need. That was our lowest score. And we thought, well, if we just hone in on that, hopefully it will ripple into affecting belonging. Um and so we focus in on that and um and the end in the spring we did have 82%. So, we exceeded that goal as well. Um, as a little bit of an aside, we saw the same thing that the other schools reported where in the winter there was a dip um and we were like, yikes. So, we did um we stole an idea. I'm
077going to talk about stealing ideas um from Grace McWain and we also did student focus groups and we were really we love doing it. We want to continue to do that because um their voice really helped us to find some clarity. We did find patterns. We um interviewed third, fourth, and fifth grade students. Um and it was myself, the social worker, and um a a teacher from SLT and our new EL teacher. Um and we showed them the results. We showed them the data. We said, you know, why do you think this is? And over and over again, the themes that were coming out were about neurode divergent students, students who just seemed a little different. And um it it really helped to find that pattern. And so based on that, and this is not
078part of our, you know, our goal or anything, but we did tr um try, we piloted some lessons at the end of the school year in fifth grade that we want to then try again at the beginning in the fall with all grades to talk about what neurode divergence is and um how it can actually be kind of a superpower. But that's something that we're starting to hone in now that we've given it fall, winter, spring. Um, and we've seen that. Um, and we've seen the same exact trend that the other buildings have seen about that studentto student respect. That's something that we want to hone in on as well. So, even though we've met two out of three of our goals, we still have plenty of work to do. So, how did we do
079this? Um, we our goals were aligned to the strategic plan for enhancing teaching and learning and also fostering inclusion and belonging. So, on the academic side, we use learning targets and success criteria. This was our third year as SLT but our second year whole building using it. Um we did instructional rounds that was mentioned before. Um and that happened in the fall and in the spring. Um our SLT members walked through. We were really excited to own the instructional rounds this year. In the past um we had a consultant that came in and pros and cons but you kind of do it the way the consultant does it. And so when we were given ownership of this this year, we were able to take our data from the fall and then we made some tweaks
080and we decided we wanted to change how we collected the data in the spring. Um, and we were really excited because in the fall last spring we saw the same thing. Who said it just now about compliance? Was it you, Gina? So when students were asked, you know, what does it mean to be a good learner? What does that look like? Sound like I'm good. I I I don't interrupt. I'm quiet. I'm kind. They were they were talking about the JB way. safe, respectful, responsible, kind, I'm respectful, but they were they were being compliant. They weren't owning their learning. So, that's something that we came in in the fall and really hit hard. Um, but even in the fall when we did our walkthroughs, we did not see the change we wanted to see. We
081were kind of like when we looked at our data and so we continued to focus on it and we were really excited that in the spring more than half of our students were able to to give an answer that talked about learning and not compliance. we saw the learning targets and success criteria in in more than just half of the classrooms, but we wanted it to be what they were working on. Um, which wasn't always the case. So, we are moving in the right direction with that and we're going to continue that. Um, for fostering inclusion and belonging, we taught the zones of regulation language. We um brought back grade level buddies. It's something that we had um pre-COVID, but it had kind of gone by the wayside. So, we brought that back um buddying
082up lower and upper grade levels once a month to do activities together. And um we also designated a regulation station or sometimes they're called a break corner um and taught the zones, put the visuals up and put that in every single space including specials. Um again, because we were focusing on that emotion regulation. So, we wanted to teach them some strategies and some ways to stay in the classroom. Um along the lines of AGS, our nurse data was also not in a good place. Um, and so we wanted to focus on what can we give them, what strategies can we give them to regulate in the classroom and not have to seek that at the nurs's office. Um, we also saw a decrease in nurse visits from fall to spring, but I didn't bring the
083numbers, so I'll have to be better about that next time. Um, so next steps, this year it was all about really cementing success criteria, learning targets. Um, next year we want to kind of up the up our game a little bit. Um, we want to continue to focus on data guiding our instruction and PLC's. We're going to do some student goal setting. Um, and like all of the other buildings mentioned, we will be learning about that comprehens comprehensive Illinois literacy plan. That's a mouthful. Um, in SEAL, we're going to continue to focus on belonging. Um, we're going to launch the year with a theme and we're going to have some trimesterly celebrations to try to increase that belonging in our building as well. That's all I got for you. questions. I was told I was
084too long in our practice, so I cut like half the slide. Was I Was I good? Did you type me? Okay, good. Much improved. Okay. Have a couple questions. Yeah. Um, did the self-manage if that improved, did it give your whole sense of belonging improve like you said you hoped it would? Our sense of belonging did improve a little bit, but not dramatically. But that one component improved which is the one we focused on. Yeah. And then um for the self-managed emotions and it says you you measured that by nurse visits. That was one of the components. Yeah. The panorama data and looking at nurse visits. We also had the same thing of they were going there for a hug and a mint and we said no more mints and um we created we created
085a pass system so that um and we did have a change in our nurses midyear so that kind of but also yeah that we were like oh we're kind of starting over again you know with a new person. So there was a bit of a hiccup there um for our data as well and data collection too but um we did implement a pass system because students would just show up and say their teacher said it was okay when maybe they didn't. So, with that pass system, it was like, "Where's your pass?" And it it's a little piece of paper that the teacher just checks a box, but then we know that, you know, they had permission to be there because they'd come from recess, they'd come from lunch, they'd, you know, go to the bathroom,
086but then also kind of just go visit the nurse while they're out, you know. So, and I don't know um like the panorama and the self. So, I'm just curious like yeah, the self manage your emotions. So, is that just when they're feeling down or like any kind of emotion? So, then I guess Does the does it ever get to like they're maybe acting out and it goes to the office like is there office visits or is it strict? Do you know what do you want like you measure can you measure that in office? You know we could behaviors where we determine they weren't managing their emotions. Not to put words in your mouth. Yeah. It's like you know so I understand like we're feeling bad so we're going to go to the nurse but
087it's more like I'm angry and I might be acting out towards another student. Does that behavior go to the office? Something like that would definitely yeah be some. So then did we measure the office visits? Like I don't know if that went down or up or Yeah, we absolutely could look at that. That's a good point. Um we didn't focus on that this year, but that's a data point that we could look at. We really were looking on at students who were, you know, escaping the classroom and and visiting the nurse for that little something extra, not so much the big outbursts. Yeah. Yeah, but you're right. That's another way to collect data. Any other questions? Okay, thank you. Okay, [Applause] now it's your turn. [Laughter] Hello. Uh, I'm Mike Wall. I'm the principal at
088Louise White. I'm Kristen Stern. I'm the instructional coach and a SLT member at Louise White. Okay. So, we um met in November and I listed many things that we were going to do do this school year for you guys and now we have done all those things and so now I'm going to tell you about them. Uh, those things that we did were having focus areas throughout the school. So, these are things where each month we have a different focus area. that might be kindness, respect, um, uh, sense of belonging, all of these different areas. So, we'd have those focus areas throughout the school. We'd kick off with an assembly and then we'd have lessons throughout the month that were focused on that same topic in classrooms. And that way, kind of having that shared
089experience of looking at specific uh, areas that we wanted to see improvement uh, and working with our students. And we celebrated that each month with a celebration. And so that took many different forms including staff for student volleyball and basketball and various things that children were quite excited about and many of my staff as well. It was uh it was mostly the staff were very excited about. Okay. Another area that we focused on was CHAMPS and discipline uh alignment and reviewing our discipline procedures. that is CHAMPS is the program that goes with the walkthroughs that other principles have talked about and this is just having shared expectations in different spaces. We found that we had different expectations in different spaces for children both multi-year going to a different teacher and the expectations being different but
090also throughout the day if we're going to specials or other locations. So trying to align those practices make sure that we all know what what a level one is etc. Uh and then just discipline review, reviewing our practices for how we're responding when students need additional support. Um and aligning those efforts between classrooms and throughout the school. And also uh with calming corners, calming corners or um regulations, regulation station, chill zones. They come by many names, but the purpose is having an acceptable corner uh of the room with uh calming fidgets or other things where students that are struggling with emotional regulation are able to calm themselves in a safe uh uh way without needing to leave the classroom to get a mint and a hug from the nurse or whatever other technique they found
091that works for them. So that is just aligning those expectations throughout um all those spaces. So that's the behavior section and the academic. Uh we began with the uh Illinois comprehensive literacy plan introduction. This is going to be driving our instruction um for next year and for the foreseeable future. This was introductions to what does that mean and some of the shifts that come along with that. Staff reflecting on um what our current practices on and where those align and don't align with the comprehensive literacy plan. Uh and so starting some of that work, focusing like many of the other buildings on learning intentions and success criteria that is allowing students to know what they're supposed to be learning, what it's going to look like when they've learned it, so that they can take ownership
092of their learning and know whether or not they've been successful without needing an adult to always tell them. Uh and then PLC structure review. So this is professional learning communities. This is where our grade level teams meet to look at data. So trying to align those practices to focus on data consistently in each one of those meetings and thereby drive student achievement. Um one highlight I was with the board sometime in the past it feels like multiple years ago uh but with another teacher talking about the fifth grade service club and so just to give you guys an update on that piece. So that was a um a club started by one of our fifth grade teachers Jamie Hartness who had this great idea and did all the work uh for it. Uh so that
093is where we had by the end of the year 80% of our students participating in different service jobs throughout the school. Um which was awesome and teachers liked it, kids liked it. Um and lots of good data supporting that. One particular piece of data that you've heard about here is the sense of belonging. And for that fifth grade group from winter to spring, they saw a 10% increase in their sense of belonging as a as a cohort there. And I would attribute that to the hard work of our fifth grade teachers and building classroom community and supporting them, but then also some of these activities and opportunities to get involved in the wider in the wider school. Um so um did we meet our goals? Kind of. Uh for behavior uh we started the year
094with a goal that 95% of students would not have an office referral. Uh going back to the question about students needing to go to the office for discipline, this would be students that uh have a discipline incident that usually I'm involved in uh in order to resolve. And so I think that's kind of that measure that we're looking at. So by mid year uh when we reflected on this data, we were at 92% of students. So we pivoted to make the goal 90% instead and we hit that goal. So uh we had 91% of our students ended the year without a discipline referral. Just for a reference in a school our size that 9% equals about 35 students and the vast majority of those students are have one uh one incident. So um so that's
095a celebration for a map like many of the other schools we had the goal of growth at 60% by the end of the year we were at 56% we were at in the winter 59% um and so we did not quite meet that goal uh despite having areas of um excellence there. And then sense of belonging as well was start at 76. We were hoping to go to 80, but we have held at a nice 73% uh throughout the throughout the year. At our May school leadership team meeting, we um our staff had the opportunity to reflect on our progress and identify some action steps to help us move closer to our goals. uh two of our grade levels did meet our growth targets in math ELA and similar to the rest of the um
096elementary schools. We had a high proficiency in ELA and math. Um and we met um our building did meet their our math growth targets in math. Um and then several individual teachers from grade levels also met their math targets. And this is really encouraging sign of the progress that we're making. Um, these achievements highlight the strong instructional practices already taking place in our classrooms and give us a really solid foundation to build upon. Looking ahead to next school year, our SLT wanted to focus on deepening our literacy alignment across the grade levels. Uh, we want to continue to build our uh, training rooted in the evidence-based strategies outlined in the Illinois comprehensive literacy plan, which we started to work on as a school this year. We also um our SLT really wanted to dig into
097some vertical alignment um and and really get teachers talking between grades to create more structured opportunities for them to talk about instructional practices that are working in their classrooms. And we really wanted to have a more cohesive learning experience between grade levels for our students. Um some of our students or some of our teams will be um exploring a new ELA resource potentially in the fall. We're hoping to learn from that experience and um see how we can use those insights to refine instructional practices across all of our teams. Um and lastly, as Mike mentioned, we're going to expand the work of our PLC's. We started looking at a structure that we really felt good about this year. Um and within that structure, we found uh a lot of growth in those conversations about instructional
098strategies. And that's that work that we want to use to have data guide our conversations and really talk about those impactful instructional strategies similar to the ones that they're using at um HD Storm School, the high yield and instructional strategies. Um we think that that's going to be a focus for next year for our PLC's. Um, and our goal is to just continue to support each other and continue these conversations not only within our school but between schools to really say, "Hey, what's working between our schools and how can we learn from each other to continue to grow?" Okay. And then within Panorama, the sense of belonging that you keep hearing about. Um, there's two main areas. One is skill areas. So that is uh self-regulation, perseverance, those pieces. And we had growth in all
099of those specific skill areas, which is very encouraging. When you look at the sense of belonging areas, this is where someone else referenced that there's four different scores that combine together to make the sense of belonging overall number. Uh and so in each of those subcores, which are do you have supportive relationships? Um do people at school know you? Uh we had growth in all of those. the one that we um went down in is students respecting each other which went down and and washed out all the growth that we made in those other areas. So SLT looking at that then next steps there are some more diagnostic data. So a panorama in this format is helpful in getting that really big view of what's going on but not so much um diagnostic like which
100are the specific areas where we're having those struggles and then based on that data what are next steps to help our students to feel more respected um with each other and some of that might look like conflict resolution training but it could also take many different forms um and then um yeah that would be a main area that we're looking at at with Panorama as well and that is [Applause] Going last is great because you've exhausted all your questions. Sneak away while you can. Seeing that there are none, thank you. Have a good Um, so hi everybody. I'm Adam Lester. Um, I am filling in tonight for Tara Pitekch, who's currently on maternity leave, and then Kelly Bennett, who's our instructional coach and our SLT member. Um, I'm the associate principal of operations and athletics
101currently. Um, and here to update you on our school improvement goals. Um, so we did kind of an overview. If you know anything about RMS, this was our year of new. We had 17 new staff members in our building this year. um with the amount of retirements we had last year. And one of our successes this year, they're all coming back next year. Um so, not as much turnover as as we had last year. Um some of our other successes is our improvement in buildingwide math proficiency. Um I'm going to talk about it in just a second, but we are at something like 77% of our students are building wide proficient in math. Um which is the highest it's been in the last few years. um as we talk about panorama and that sense of
102belonging, we saw a less than 10% disparity between subgroups versus um the buildingwide data. And then for our champs walkthroughs, we hit all of our targets and had a decrease in classroom disruptions from an office discipline referral perspective. Um even though we didn't quite reach that goal, um some of our opportunities, I I know you've heard a lot about Champs tonight. I heard another elementary principal talk about the fact that when you have one set of expectations in one classroom and a different set of expectations in a different classroom, it can be really challenging except it's seven times during our day. Um so that's been this is our first full year of implementing Champs in our building. Um we started it after winter break last school year. So this was our first full year of
103that. Um and this will also be coming up the first full year that we've had an entire building of students who've had experience with CHAMPS as well. Um reading goal was not achieved this year. That's a definite gap for us and it's something we're going to work on as we move forward. Um we have a new math curriculum roll out that's coming in 2526. So we're hoping to improve the you know already strong math scores even more. Um and then we are going to do a continued review and revision of our bulldog block structure um for consistency. That's our intervention time during the day that every grade level gets. So our two school improvement goals, one was about equitable learning environments, which is our champs and our panorama and our um office discipline referrals and
104then our increase in student learning through impactful tier one strategies. Our academic goals for the year was the 2425 goal was 70% of their of our students meet their growth targets on MAP. So you'll see that for math that was 65.34% which is higher than it's been in the past but about um I'm sorry higher than it's been in the past. And then also from the fall to the spring our proficiency buildingwide went up too. So we started at 73% proficient in the fall um and got up to 70 7% in the spring. Reading is the place that we know we need some work. Um 50% of our students met their growth targets and our proficiency actually went down a little bit from the fall to the spring. that is in line with what it's
105been the last couple years, but also something we know has to be a continued focus for our building. Um, I know you heard a lot about the comprehensive literacy plan. That's going to be a part of our our work as well. Champs walkthrough. So, again, this is the piece of of our building where we're trying to systematize and be consistent in what does it mean to, you know, what's your conversation level? What how do I ask for help in a classroom? And we hit all of our champs targets. Um, the positive corrective ratio goal of 3 to1. We hit the opportunities respond um average disruptions and then ontask behavior. All things for our first year of implementation we're really proud of. Now for example if you look at the opportunities respond the average was 12.76.
106The goal is 10 to 40. So did we hit it? Sure. Is there a lot of opportunity to get better at that also? Sure. Um and it's actually going to lead into more of our work for next year. One of our other goals and metrics for that uh classroom environment piece was we wanted to see a decrease in our office referrals for disruption. So somebody mentioned before about you know it got to the point where it gets to be an office issue. In 23 24 we had 82 office referrals for disrupting the classroom where it got to the point where it had to escalate to the office. We were shooting for a 25% decrease. We got a 21% decrease. Um so down to 65. So again good growth but not quite all the way there
107to the to the goal that we were shooting for. Um, Panorama, our one of our other focuses was sense of belonging. So, you'll see kind of that fall, winter, spring that everybody else has seen. And when we first saw that 70%, 68% are like, "Oh, that's a little concerning, especially when you're seeing elementary schools with 80% or whatever it is." So, what we looked at is we looked at how do we compare to other middle schools um across the country because this is something lots of different people take. So that 68% sense of belonging for our building puts us in the 99th percentile for middle schools that take Panorama. Um, one of the things that we did with this that's going to lead into some of the work that we do next year is in
108the winter we brought this information to our principal advisory group, which is our group of eighth graders who kind of like give us a temperature of what's happening in the building. They're the kids who come on our sixth grade welcome day to give tours um to those incoming sixth graders and ask them like how can we help with the sense of belonging? how can we help make kids feel safe, feel good here at school? Um, so that's some of the work that is going to continue into the fall with our SLT. Um, and then this is kind of an update of some of that future work that we talked about. So quarterly champs walkthroughs have been happening and one of the pieces that we know we're going to look for in the coming school year
109is how can our champs look for is contribute to academic success. So one of the ways I've been explaining that to people is an opportunity to respond is something like, hey, can you pick up a pencil? That's an opportunity to respond during champs. I don't know that picking up a pencil is a super academically rigorous thing to do. We're going to see how can we find more of those opportunities to respond that are academic, you know, leading to academic growth. Um, guided bulldog block. So, bulldog block is our time during the school year or I'm sorry, during the school day when kids get enrichment, intervention, um, and structured environment. This was the first year that it's been building wide structured. It hasn't it hadn't been previously. So that's a piece that our SLT and RTS
110or team leaders will continue to review to make sure that we are following that structure and then adjusting that structure as necessary. Um as we did day-to-days we looked at data for you know map as the as the school year went and one of the takeaways from that was more focus on common vocabulary andformational text. We predict that that might be a place where we can improve some of those MAP scores. And then instructional rounds is another piece that kind of shifted as the year went. Um, somebody else earlier mentioned that it used to be done by consultants and now our instructional coach is kind of owning that and leading that. And one thing she did the second half of the school year was paired content teachers with other content teachers. So, sixth grade math
111saw seventh or eighth grade math. Sixth grade social studies saw seventh or eighth grade social studies and led to really rich conversations about tier one instruction and strategies that have shown to be effective in those classes. Um so that is a piece that we continue as well or we anticipate continuing as well questions. [Applause] So for the classroom disruptions that's tracked in powers school. Yes. So go ahead. So like if I have a student that's maybe disrespectful and they cause a disruption in class, do they check both? So the champs walkthroughs happen during the time when like I forget who said it before, sorry. The the panel of five teachers come through and kind of see what happens. So a classroom disruption for champs might be something that just kind of interrupts the flow of
112discuss or of instruction. So it might be, you know, somebody blurting something out and the teacher turns and said, "Hey, can you, you know, not blurt out right now?" That would be a disruption from a champ's walkthrough perspective. But the office discipline referrals are the classroom disruptions that get to the point that it has to escalate to the dean, to an administrator be, you know, kind of beyond that. Understand that. What I'm saying is if I have to give a referral for a student who maybe is being rude and disrupting the class. Yes. In power school, do I go in there and say I I don't know if being in one? I don't know. But let's put rude and then rude and disrupting class or do you have to pick one or the other? It
113it would put it would be tagged as a as a classroom disruption and there might be like some narrative notes in there to the dean to the administrator to like hey here's what happened and it would be a part of our follow-up conversation. But the really the only way it would like hit the champ's data and the office discipline data is if it happened during a champ's walkthrough. So if I said so if I don't have a walkth through in there and say sorry Rob disruptive in class and I just give a referral for Rob for being disruptive that doesn't show on here. It does. That would be the office discipline referral. Yes. So that was that. So that's why I'm asking like can you have can I check well Rob's being rude and disruptive
114in power school or is it one or the other? Yeah, it's it's it's that's one of the like subsets students being sent down for is how it's ultimately I guess. Okay. I guess my question is just like how if there being both I mean what's we just take them I guess the the worst one. Yeah. The teacher makes a call. Yeah. Then I guess it's like we're really capturing it because if they he's also being disruptive, you know, but I I understand it, but I don't know. I don't know if the way is power scoping. You do multiple and then filter out or it's it's just the one and and it's I teacher discretion, I guess, like how they choose to code it as this, you know, this kid was being so rude that they
115disrupted instruction to the point where I couldn't teach, then that would, you know, be an office referral. And then you said the bulldog bulldog block was not structured. So it was kind of like team structured. So one seventh grade team might run bulldog block one way and another seventh grade team might run a different way. This is the first year that our SLT decided Tuesdays is going to be diagnostic. Wednesdays is going to be independent reading. Thursday is going to be skills for reading or math. And then you know Monday might be something like independent reading. We drop everything and read for 20 minutes. Fridays could be fun Fridays depending on if you have all your work in that has is not building wide now as opposed to like teams doing it how they've done
116it. So does so seven so sixth, seventh and eighth grade follow that same structure or just sixth grade follow No, sixth grade, seventh grade and eighth grade. You mentioned that you're you've talked to students to get student feedback and you said they're the students that lead tours or what? So the principal advisory group that's a group of eighth grade students. So part of what they do, that's kind of like their first part of the principal advisory group is to be the ones on that sixth grade welcome day that we have in August to lead tours of our incoming sixth graders who who come over those days. Um but then during the school year we'll ask, you know, bring them down to talk about, hey, what's going well, what's not going well? What ideas do you
117have for making the school better? That probably happens once a month. Um but that was one of our once a month meetings with them was looking at that panoram panorama data. Any other questions? Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank [Applause] you. Hi everyone. Um I'm Joanne Smith. I'm the principal of Aavia High School. So, um, I just wanted to do a quick shout out of all the people who are on our school leadership team. Um, we have a big team and they're representative of different curricular areas or administration. Um, one interesting little fact is about half of these people were new to SLT this year. So, we had a lot of learning as a team together this year. Um, we talked a lot about some of the things you already heard tonight. Um, obviously
118school improvement goals, but also we looked at instructional rounds. Um we did instructional rounds with our school leadership team and then eventually expanded that beyond the school leadership team with our coaches. Um we talked a lot about how to look at data in a way that isn't um that's as least biased as possible and we're including that student voice which I'll talk about in just a minute. Um we use something called equity traps. If you remember from November I gave you guys a laminated card that we use when we look at data to try to avoid those equity traps. um some of those biases that we bring in that may be intentional or unintentional but we really tried hard to have our team members call each other out which worked out really well. So those
119cards were always at our table and you would hear teams when we were doing small group discussions around data they would say things like oh I think you're falling into this trap and they would point to the card and it kind of gave that third point reference. So it was a great tool for us. Um, and we also use a book called Street Data to help us with our protocols at looking at data. And this was very very helpful in um, looking at some pretty um, heady data and some pretty some data that we needed to really dig down into. So in the fall, I showed you these two goals. One was around ACT and one was around extracurricular activities specifically for our lowincome students. So, as many of you may know or may not
120know, the state of Illinois changed from SAT to ACT this year. And so, this was really a stab in the dark. 60% we just kind of said, "Okay, this is where we were with SAT." Um, in the past in this kind of general area, so let's just kind of throw this out there. Um, and so that was kind of where where those numbers came from. It was really just kind of a stab in the dark because we didn't know we hadn't given the ACT to all of our students since 2017. And then the second goal is around um again extracurriculars and our students particularly focusing on removing barriers for our low-income students because there is a gap. There's a big gap in participation between our non-l low-income students and our low-income students. And that gap
121is pretty consistent when you look at attendance office referrals. It's a pretty consistent gap. And so one of the things we thought as a SLT was our our hypothesis was if students are attached to the school in ways beyond academics, this might have a ripple effect on attendance. So if I have this really awesome club that I'm a part of, that'll make me really want to go to school more often or um it'll make me want to, you know, not not get an office referral because I really want to do a great job in this club that I'm in that I'm really invested in. So that's kind of what our hypothesis was. And we knew that these goals, especially goal two, was not a one-year goal. We knew that for a fact. We knew this
122was going to be a multi-year process. Um, so I want to talk a little bit about our results. So for the first goal, um, we did not hit it. We didn't come close. The stab in the dark was a bad stab in the dark. Um, so one of the things that this transition proved to us is that the ACT and SAT was a big transition for us. Um, many of our teachers are very young. they didn't even take the ACT uh when they were in high school because they're so young. They were still, you know, they're part of the SAT. So, we spent a lot of time this year just getting a hold of what is the ACT going to look like because also since the last time we gave it, it went from paper
123to online and it's a much different test. It's an adaptive, it was supposed to be an adaptive test, which it ended up being, but there it was, it was definitely a bumpy road in that transition. Um, so one of the things we will get from ACT that we don't have yet is that deep dive into what strands of math, you know, what are the specific skills that maybe we need to focus in on because math on the ACT is literally everything. Um, so what are the specific strands that we need to focus on? Is it geometry? Is it special area of geometry? Is it algebra? And then same thing with reading, you know, is there is it comprehension? Is it some is it something different? And something new that the ACT does this year that
124we have access to that they did not in the past is this combined ELA score. And so that's one thing too that we're kind of newly learning about is this combination of reading, English, and writing because those are separate tests on the ACT. For our second goal, this is where our SLT had probably the most impact and the most work. We really, really dove into this goal. Um, as I mentioned before, our hypothesis about students participating and feeling that that sense of belonging would would improve other gaps that we see with our low-inccome and non-low-income students. Um, so we worked through all levels of data with this. So, we started with this really high level look at just participation rates. What does it look like? Is it dependent on grade level? Is it dependent on
125other things? And again, we saw that big gap about a 20% gap between low-inccome and non low-income students and their participation. um we engaged in this like like I mentioned a street level data book which is talking about how you look at different levels of data. So we come in with our own biases and you know I think some of our SLT members well-intentioned thought this is why our X Y and Z is why our non our low-income students are not participating and so we really wanted to break that down and make sure that those pre presuppositions were correct and they were actually 100% wrong. So, we had some some team members had some ideas about why our low-income students were not participating. And we conducted about a hundred one-on-one student interviews with our low-income
126students, students who were involved, students who weren't involved to figure out, you know, was there a difference maker? And these were the themes that emerged from those hundred interviews. Um, peers matter. If I have a friend that's in that club, I am so much more likely to be feel comfortable walking into that club meeting. If I have a friend that agrees to go with me to the first club meeting, again, so much more likely. So, kids said over and over again, I felt weird or I felt uncomfortable walking into that club meeting on the first day. Communication matters. So, we blanket, you know, all kinds of different ways of talking about activities, athletics, clubs. We have video boards. We have morning announcements. We have parent newsletters. But we still had kids that did not know
127the information. They didn't know how to join a club. They didn't know that we had the late bus option, which we do, which is amazing. But how, you know, so we have to we realized that even though we thought we were doing the communication well and blanketing it well, we weren't. Kids told us one-on-one, I didn't even know there was a late bus. So that's something that definitely came out of those interviews. And then finally, staff matters. So, someone else mentioned this too, but if a staff member told a student, "You should really be in psychology club," that student was much more likely because they felt that personal touch of, "Oh, my my teacher said I should be in this club. I'm going to go check it out." Or, "My teacher introduced me to the
128sponsor. They took that extra step, so I'm going to go check that club out." So, those were definitely the themes that emerged. And some of the other things we thought we would find in those interviews, we did not. Um, so a lot of maybe some biases or some presuppositions that were just not accurate. So things that we're going to do moving forward is obviously continued preparation for the ACT, working with our our teams and our teachers and our students in class and out of class preparation using as many resources as we can to help make sure students are ready for that test. Um, it's not the only piece of data, but for a lot of students it is really important. You know, ACT is really important for a lot of students. So, we want to
129make sure that we're giving them all the tools they need to be ready for that test. Um, our SLT members next year will be assigned a case load of students um who are low-income students who are not included or involved in activities. And the the intention there is to meet with them one-on-one, determine, hey, if you're not involved, why aren't you involved? Is it a barrier or is it I just don't want to? And that's okay, too. Or a lot of kids we talk to who aren't involved in activities. Hey, I do dance outside of school and that takes up all of my time and that's totally understandable, but making sure that we can help facilitate that participation and and break down some of those communication barriers or other barriers that might exist. Um, so
130again, removing those barriers, sponsors and coaches and seeing if we have even more systematic system, sorry, systemic barriers to participation, that intentional outreach, coaches, sponsors, reaching out to those students, making sure they know how to get to their activity and making sure they know there's a bus, just really again that communication and blanketing that information in a different way. And then SLT will continue to monitor um our data around those gaps, but also continue our student interviews, continue all the data reviews we do just to make sure we're on the right track. Um the good news is we did see an increase in participation this year for our low-income students, even though we really didn't change a lot this year. So, we're on the right track and that that number has ticked up each year,
131but we want to make sure we're closing that gap. And that's what the goal is is to close the gap between low-income and non-l low-income students. That's it. [Applause] Question. Yeah. So for the you said the ELA there was something that you didn't know was on the ACT. Was it the reading? No, that's just a new way that they now report the data that they didn't do 10 years ago when we were giving the ACT on a regular basis. We never got that ELA combined score like they're doing now. So it's just another piece of data for us to look at. is not just the reading score, but the reading, writing, and English together. That one where like they they have to read the story and then write on it. That's the Yeah, that's the
132reading. The English is more that gram grammar and conventions and then writing is obviously just like writing a passage. I again I took the ACT so Me too. So the SAT did they not have a written portion? Like I really don't know. They did. They did. They didn't break down the score like that. Yeah, exactly. I think on the SAT, if I remember, it was optional when you were actually taking it. You had to like sign up extra to do it. Yeah. So, it wasn't always consistent. Well, that's how the ACT used to be, too. Yeah. It used to be like that as well. So, there's been a pretty significant overhaul of what the ACT is. So, like for any of us in this room who took it, it's not the same. It's totally different.
133Yeah, it's totally different. I mean, I taught math for years and we had it under control and it's a totally different test. Math changes. Yeah, math changed. No kidding. Other questions? I just have like a general comment. I just want to say thank you all to the principles and SLT members for these presentations. You did a great job. Um uh and what I really like about it is we have these goals and uh everybody was digging into the data. So we're getting results and then we're analyzing it. As you said, Dr. we have assumptions and then we were uncovering that some of these assumptions were wrong. So I love that we're using this tool to help us be more strategic. And then the other part I love was everybody mentioned involving student voice um because
134that revealed again we had assumptions and the students revealed maybe something that we didn't know. So I I'm really encouraged by that. Uh there's a saying that I heard recently that kind of triggered something, but it said if you do not know where the port is, no wind is favorable. And so now we have goals and now we know where to where we're finding where our energy should go to reach those goals. And so I think that's the point of what we're trying to do here. Uh and then the last thing I'll say is I like this format of breaking this out into a separate meeting. I'm not sure what like everyone out in the audience feels like, but I think for me it was nice to have the bandwidth to have this focus and
135give it no one felt rushed I hope tonight as opposed to the last time. So, thank you. I appreciate everybody. Are we doing our final comments? If you want to do comments on this that way they don't have to listen to us do our other stuff and they can go. You can go ahead and start with that. Um, so first on the on the goals, you know, as as everyone said, you know, there's some challenges and we're going to be looking into that. But just as a reminder and I think it was Mr. Milka that used the term the journey, it this should be a journey. Um, we talk quite frequently uh Mr. Kim and Mr. Kber and myself in the strategic committee where we wanted these goals not to be easy. Okay, we wanted
136them to be stretched and something to strive for. So, um the fact that you know you didn't meet a particular goal to me that's uh not as concerning as looking at you know the trend and then also what you're what you're going to do to try and address it. And as uh Danielle mentioned, you know, being able to pivot once you do see that that data and changing up what you're doing as needed. Um, and then I'll just reiterate and I I'm glad uh Joanne was last that she spent a lot of time on the extracurricular um participation. I do believe in that. So I think if there are those barriers that are preventing our students from participating in those activities, let's you know, let's take a look at that and see how we can
137improve that. Um, I think once you do get that up, you you will see changes in their academic performance, sense of belonging, etc. And then, um, I asked the initial question about staffing. So, I didn't hear any anyone else mention anything about staffing issues. So, I'm going to assume that everybody felt comfortable with that and uh, and we're heading in the right direction there. We could go randomly. So, anybody that wants to jump in, I'll just say thank you. I appreciate the honest self-reflection and I know it takes time to present all these facts and data and and I appreciate it. Especially coming in new, it's nice to have a very clear idea of where we are and where we're going. I can piggy back on that as the other new person. This was very
138helpful. Um, and I just liked the collective reporting structure, too, so that we could all hear what everybody's implementing and go, "Oh, I'm hearing that over here." And I can maybe take from that and use it. So, thank you all very much. Anything yet? No, I mean, you guys did great. Thank you guys. Thank you very much. And I love hearing, again, like Rob said, all the student voices being brought to the table. I'm a huge advocate for that. So, I just love hearing that from all you all and just all the pivoting and all the and again what Rob said is we're not sitting here, you know, why aren't you hitting this that I don't think any of us feel that way. Um, it sounds like everyone's doing awesome and I look forward to
139the next one. Yeah. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Um, you know, the only thing I would say is, you know, I know like we all say like in my in my job outside of here, you know, I do auditing and I audit a lot and I like to do surprise audits. So, I just again I don't know walkthroughs, but you know, when you go in, you make the announcement, hey, next week we're going to go do this. I wouldn't mind saying, hey, let's just go in and see what's going on. Um, you know, because I know when I do my audits, like the areas, they do really well and then when I do my surprise audits, they don't do so well. When they see you coming, does everyone go the other way or I've heard
140that. Um, but I don't know. Well, you're good at your job. Exactly. Right. I'm tough, but I'm fair. So, well, and to your point, Raquel, for me, if I could just uh Sorry, I know this is the board responding to the presentation. Okay. You can finish the sentence. So, I think to your point, I mean, that's a part of the reason why I enjoy kind of my own spot check presence. I don't the principles know I don't announce when I'm coming to their buildings. Part of it is because I know they're so busy as it is and I don't want anyone to feel obligated like I got to go meet Tom at the front door and hold his hand around the building. You know, I I don't want that. want people to do their job
141because one of the things I knew and remembered as a teacher was it, you know, I didn't want the dog and pony show. I don't want that. And I wanted to see the real teaching. And what I loved seeing is I go to certain buildings. You know, I can remember specifically I walked in the GBN JBN and I saw two different grade level teacher teams totally different grades teaching portrait of a graduate lessons and talking about what does bullying look like and what spaces does it occur, including cyber bullying. you know, and it's like so I I just think, you know, kudos because I think sometimes people are not as nervous anymore. I hope, right, teachers that when I just show up, right? I some have shared that. But, uh, you know, maybe in year
142two, it's not been as bad. But, you know, I like that. I And to your point, Raquel, it's it's nice because then you're just seeing what kind of really happens. But, I do like the invitations to like all the fun stuff, too. Please. He likes the t-shirts. Yeah. because I wear board meetings. Hear the board meetings. Noted. The only Thank you. I appreciate it. The only two things I'll add is one, I very much appreciate the time and effort everybody put in for this. I very much appreciate the staff that came and the SLT group that came to kind of show that this is a partnership and that you guys are really working together because the the little bit of research and information done is when you start kind of pivoting to this datadriven perspective
143and I'm not saying here other districts have sometimes had challenges getting the staff to adopt the same mentality right and I really get the sense that you guys are working together on this to try to understand it in the best interest of students so I expect that. Uh, point number two is there's a lot of things we're trying to do or you guys are trying to do that kind of fix and affect things now. And I appreciate all the hard work you're doing on that. From my perspective as a board member, this is a long game. The the things that you're teaching about sense of belonging and inclusion and attendance in kindergarten and elementary school will pay off as they continue to go. So like the the um the one of the class one of
144the sessions of resiliency things that one of you guys was talking about not quite a blur but close um is like that kind of that kind of kind of tools that these kids will have will help pay off as they get to middle school and as they get to high school. So this is about the long game in a lot of ways. While we're trying to affect change and try to make things better for kids right now, it's also about the continu continuum through school. So I can see that and I think you guys are doing a great job. So thank you. All right. Anything else Tom on this? Should we do we get to tell them they are now dismissed? You want the meeting is going to come close to an end? Stick around.
145We're close but it's up to you guys. Yeah. My only comment would be thank you. Thank you to everybody. Um you know you heard me say this in November. It's just awesome that everyone's here supporting each other, sticking around. No one's bailing on the presentations when they're done, right? So I and just thanks and appreciation from all of us here today. All right. Thank you. That's it. Okay. Next is very exciting item 4.1 public hearing school calendar waiver. Oh yeah. Sure. or this should look very familiar because we did this um a couple meetings ago and in full transparency um there's a lot of paperwork that goes with submitting a waiver to the state and I uh one of the requirements is that I notify our union partners about the the public hearing for this
146waiver and I said at our next meeting and the state requires me to say the date in the time of our meeting. So, they got a new notice and the statement is requiring me to redo this public hearing. Is there anyone from the public who wishes to speak about Brad? I'm gonna pause you a second because I have a highlight. This is a thing I have to read and I don't want to do this a third time. So, it says Brad will explain this item then conduct the hearing. Once he's conducting the hearing, we will ask if there are any comments from the public where you where you are able to see where you will be able to see Cindy Rodriguez, our board recorder, for a form to fill out. Then Brad says all the
147stuff he just says and he keep keeps you can keep doing that part and then I'll say my next part. So Joanne Martin any comments. All right. So um that is what we have to do. So after this meeting there were no comments from the public. I will let the state know that. I will resubmit all of our paperwork and hopefully we can get our calendar approved by the state of Illinois. So thank you. Are there any questions or comments from the board on this? So, is this gonna come back to us again or this is like I mean if it does I'm not doing it the right way, right? No. So, we don't I already feel bad about this. So, we like So, we voted to say yes, you can do this and now
148you're just doing the Well, no. I I you guys did everything that you guys needed to do. I left out one part and the state kicked it back and says you have to redo everything. So, I'm redoing and this was despite the fact that both union leadership teams were here that evening. I said I can show you on video that the union was here at the meeting and they're like, "Well, it's not good enough." You didn't say the date here. Didn't say the date. I tried. Okay. So, I do I think I kicking it back to you, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, and it was any questions for the comments from the board on this on top of that. Okay. I will entertain a motion to approve the application seeking school calendar waiver. So, move by
149Raquel. Second. Second by Katie. Cindy, please lead us in roll call vote. Yes. Gerals. Yes. Arandu. Yes. Gonzalez Thomas. Yes. Kilberg. Yes. Meadows. Yes. Sligger. Yes. All right. And motion passes. Thank you very much. And I will also then entertain a motion to adjurnn as we don't typically do board comments at special board. So moved. So moved. Second. Second. All in favor? I. Does that work, Cindy? Or do you want to do a roll call vote? That works. No. All in favor? I. Let's has it as a roll call. Danielle has as a voice. That's fine. Danielle, it is now 8:52 p.m. and the meeting is adjourned. Thank you.