November 26, 2018 - Work-Study School Board Meeting

001- Recording. - Okay, we're ready. (gavel bangs) - I'd like to call to order this work study session of White Bear Lake Area School Board for Monday, October 26th, would the clerk please call the roll? - Beloyed? - Here. - Chapman? - Here. - Ellison? - Here. - Fahey, here, Mullin? - Here. - Newmaster? - Here. - Wilson? Absent, he's not here yet. - Okay, first discussion item is B-1, Elementary Specialists Discussion of Scope and Timeline. Dr. Kazmierczak? - All right, I'll just turn it over to Miss Paul. Jump right in, Miss Paul? - Chair Mullin, Dr. Kazmierczak, members of the board, we have several people joining us tonight to have a conversation about our offerings that we have in our elementary schools for our specialist programming. We had identified this is a strategic priority

002this fall, and the priority was to review elementary visual arts programming in the context of our elementary art offerings and overall specialist offerings. And so, what we want to do is we want to go through every aspect of the programming that we have, talk about things that are working, going well, give some context and then talk about the continuous improvement efforts that are underway this year. Because we really can't talk about one piece art without talking about the full context of all of our offerings. And so, we're gonna have two of the principals and the principal group joining us and they're gonna represent each of the specialist areas and we're gonna be discussing physical education, art, orchestra and general music, media and world language. So with that will have Miss Pierre and Mr. Krusemark join

003us for Phy-Ed is what we'll start with. Sit down. (throat clears) - Good evening, everyone. - Welcome. - Hello. - Thanks for having us. - Well, when you're walking and your fingers do the talking to the computer and moves your screen, it kinda messes you up here, just give me a moment. So we're here to talk just a little bit about physical education and kinda refreshing everyone's memory on the purpose of White Bear Lake Area schools' physical ed programming is really to remember that we want students to learns skills necessary to perform activities, no implications and benefits from being physically active. - Sir, can we have you go a little bit closer? - A little closer, sure. Knowing that it's important to participate in physical activity, being physically fit, really I guess I'm kinda saying

004being Bear Power aware, right? Which is always something a lot of our students connect with, with that terminology. But moving forward. - Got it. So another thing that we're doing is we have the active classroom grant and this past fall, two ambassadors from each of our sites met and were trained in September and they are bringing the training back to our building. So at Vadnais and I know at Lakeaires and most of the buildings, they took opportunity in building professional development to share the information back because it's tools that they can use in the classroom with the students, to increase movement for kids, both before school, afterschool and within the classroom time. So their proactive wellness strategies connected to the social emotional learning that focuses on this active classroom grant. - And Lakeaires is one

005of the sites that hosted the initial training and we had a revolving door with different folks and Tim was there and we had different teachers and administrators rolling through and it was really fun to see these administrators and adults getting into the actual activities that kids will be or in some cases have been doing already. And the cool thing, I thought from a lot of this was really finding neat ways to embed it in the everyday curriculum. They're tying math or literacy or spelling to these activity events during the school day and the kids, from what I've seen so far being embedded into our building, they're really getting into it and we all know that kinesthetic learning and lots of different modalities is great for kids and adults, too. So it's been really fun and

006our share back was well received from staff and they're already thinking how they would differentiate some of the things that they heard to their own unique level of student and their individual needs. It was pretty exciting, all right? That's all I have. - There's also the district wellness committee. And that's a committee, again, a representatives across all of our sites where they bring up opportunities for our staff to be physically active and there's a variety of things and it changes each year to encourage people to be active and set a good example for our students. Dr. Kazmierczak out running marathons and promoting that is a fabulous way to get us all motivated. So thank you very much for that. As you all likely know, at present our specialist schedule's on a six day rotation and

007students receive Phy-Ed 45 minutes at the elementary level twice in that six day cycle and we recognize that that is not enough. We have 20 or 25 minutes at all of our elementary sites where the students have recess each and everyday and the only exception is based on the windchill which determines whether or not kids are able to go outside and hopefully we get them out. Or if there's rain that doesn't allow us to get outside. Otherwise, they take advantage of that 25 minutes each and every day. As we move forward, we know there's implementation of new state academic physical education standards and that's happening as we speak, and so there's a lot of training and learning that we continue to go through. As liaison of the Phy-Ed department, I can assure you that when

008they meet they're looking at this information and talking about it and what that means for us right here in White Bear Lake. We work very closely with Ann Mulitz to make sure that everything is in written and in plan so everybody knows what we are working on and what our goals are in the area of physical education. - I will, are you okay if we each section, we just open it up to questions regarding that section? So any questions regarding physical education? Miss Ellison? - Do you happen to know when the new Phy-Ed standards are coming out? - It's this year is my understanding. - It's to be in effect next fall? - Full implementation during the 2021-22 school year. - 21-22, okay. - Yes. - Miss Beloyed? - What are the changes to the

009standards, do you know? - I can't speak to those specifically, I'm sorry. - We are going to, in January, the Phy-Ed... In January, the Phy-Ed teachers are scheduled to attend a training to find out specifically from the Minnesota Department of Education what the new changes will be with the standards. So we have a group working K-12 as well as at each elementary, middle school and high school level to find that out. - Okay. - Are there questions regarding Physical Education? Okay, thank you very much. - Okay, our next discussion is going to be around our art offerings at the K-5 level and Mr. Luknic and Mr. Schmidt will be leading this conversation. - Welcome. - Thanks. Good evening and I'm Jonathan Luknic. I'm the principal at Birch Lake. Thanks for your time. And having the

010opportunity to give a little context and what steps we're taking in terms of continuous improvement around arts programming and instruction. So to kinda set the stage for that and get a real understanding of it, it helps to go back to 2008, which is the last time they did a major revision of arts standards and requirements for districts within the arts. And so at that time they put into place some new standards that encompass the areas of arts that were kinda organized into different grade bands. So there were standards for Kindergarten through third, fourth and through fifth and then sixth through eight and nine through twelve. Where some of the grade bands that each have their distinct standards. They identified at that time four different areas of the arts, dance, music, theater, and visual arts and

011they asked or required, they meaning the Minnesota Department of Education, required districts to offer at least three out of those four areas with two of those three offerings to be required things that were built into the curriculum across all the elementary and middle schools. So at that time our district took the direction of focusing on dance and music as the two areas that would be required or offered across the board and done in a manner consistent with those standards that were put into place. So as you might know and to this time, we have music as a standalone specialist class and I know that they at that time and to this day they have a very systematic way of making sure they cover all those standards and assess them and work on them in their

012collaborative times as well. And the dance aspect of that which was the other required offering of the two was embedded within the Physical Education curriculum or at the activities they did within Physical Education spoke to some of the movement standards and things within dance. And finally, there was a third area which although not required like the two that the state asked was offered was done in conjunction with the White Bear Center for the Arts. With a partnership with them to bring in some visual arts to each elementary school and this was intended more as an enrichment type opportunity and not as the two required areas that were to encompass the standards that were put into place. And in addition to that, there were several other enrichment opportunities in the arts like at Birch Lake we

013have the McPhail program and there are theatrical opportunities in the various elementary schools and as you know many other things like that going on within our district, but at that time that was kinda the core framework that was put into place. And so now, I'll turn it over to Principal Schmidt to talk a little bit more about that partnership with the White Bear Center and the next steps we're pursuing this year. - Thank you, so some of this you already know but we'll just repeat it as a foundation piece. So since 2008, we have this wonderful partnership with the White Bear Center for the Arts, we have an annual agreement with them and it's to provide through local community artists an art experience for all of our K-5 elementary students and in every classroom. It's

014gone very well. The artists have been pretty consistent over those years. The kids are getting know those artist well and they're building a relationship with them. So the success of that partnership has really been seen through the eyes of the kids. Now as you know, there's a total of six lessons that are in place for this current school year. Three of them focus on watercolor, two on drawing, one on multi-cultural paper arts and 3-D art lessons. Now five of those lessons are 45 minutes in length, and then the 3-D art lesson is 75 minutes in length. Obviously because it takes a little bit longer. As students, they don't receive a grade, they don't receive credit for this, but they also don't lose anything out of this. It's all about experience and giving kids an opportunity

015just to see some form of media that they don't normally get exposed to. Now, as you realize, the cost of this is around $85,000. And what's nice is that the kids are getting this type of experience and can kinda dabble in a medium that they have never really focused on before and it's pretty exciting to see that investment take hold within their own excitement. Some schools, though, well, six of them, tried to enhance this through art enrichment activities that have cost them about $15,000 combined. With everyone and I think you're all aware of the financial piece for that. The one thing that we do require as a district is that once the local artist is within the classroom, the classroom licensed teacher has to be with that class during that session. Now, where do we

016go from here? The Minnesota Department of Education is now in a rule making phase of creating new K-12 academic standards in the area of the arts, so we have dance, music, theater, and visual arts, which were the previous arts standards, those are still in place and the additional one is called media arts. Media arts is now the fifth one now that's in place. They're trying to make this connect more with the national core art standards. So that's taking place right now. One of the major changes that you're gonna notice within these standards is that the previous standards were in grade bands, K-3, 4-5, 6-8, so forth, now these are gonna be individual grades, K, 1, 2, obviously that way. Now, what we'll do as a district is we're gonna have a team of administrators and

017teachers. We're gonna take these new standards, over time, just unpack them, try to figure out where the gaps are between what's currently in place and that we can support and what are some of the other areas that we still need to enhance further. And then, one other aspect of it, because of our strategic plan, we're also gonna look at these different five areas and see in some way are we gonna be able to support the social and the emotional learning aspect of the child through these standards and some place. So that's our report on the arts, do we have any questions? - Miss Ellison. - I have two questions. One, same question as before, do you know when these standards will be implemented? - Well, they're in the rule making phase right now, and Anne

018can help me with this, which is 2018, I'm assuming it's probably the same timeline or close to it, but-- - They announced a public comment at the end of May. They went out for public comment at the end of May and we have not received any information as far as, and the next point we'll get will be the timeline and kinda the larger planning scheme. I anticipate that this year. - Oh, okay, thank you. And the other question I have is could you expand a little on what the media arts means? - Oh I sure can. (laughing) Let me see here. All right. It is an understanding of the artistic work influenced influenced by personal, societal, cultural and historical context so they're taking it further into the different aspects of our demographic makeup and trying

019to see how the media arts how arts is impacted or connected to the different demographic groups or just the different makeup that we have within our local community. - So it's a window and a mirror? - Absolutely. Well said, thank you, yep. - Other questions? Okay. - All right, thank you for your time. - Thank you very much. - All right. The next area we're gonna talk about is orchestra and general music with Principal Leininger and Principal Mueller. - Hello, I'm Cindy Mueller, principal at Otter Lake. Thank you for having us here. John and I are gonna provide some context related to actually another arts portion, which is our music arts program. Talking more specifically about orchestra. It was about four years ago that we started to explore the orchestra option. It was a committee

020that was kinda charged with looking at that and how do we develop options for string orchestra program for our students. We are now at what we believe the third or fourth year, are we in the fourth year, wow time flies. We're in the fourth year of implementation of this and just to provide some really important context to the success of this program, it's offered for our fifth grade students only, and it's in addition to general music class, so they receive the general music and then they have the option for signing up for orchestra. This year we have 350, out of our 680 fifth grade students. So percentage-wise, that's 51% of our fifth grade students are involved in our orchestra program. Another context for that is last year we had 265 students, we almost increased by

021100 students over this year. And so, it's really great things to celebrate that we're able to provide these opportunities for our students but there's also some, now we have some kinda growing pieces with that. - So I get to take a few minutes. Again, thank you for having me. I'm John Leininger, principal at Matoska International. So in that context that Cynthia was just talking about, we're thinking about where we take a program like this into the future and we're spending a lot of time thinking about how this program in a very short amount of time has really expanded quickly and our delivery model early on isn't the same kind of delivery model that we foresee in the future particularly with that kind of growth. So some of the things we're thinking about is how do

022we schedule this? How does it fit within the broader context of the arts as principals before us were talking about, how does this fit within the context of general music? And then how do we take these really great things and continue to provide those opportunities and provide that time during the school day and more importantly as we talk about how that impacts our instructional programs and how do we deliver good programs within that context? Really, the summary is, it started out small, it was this great idea and it's really grown into a significant program and our delivery model early on needs to adjust with the success of that program. So without easy answers in there many of things that we're talking about and we're meeting with our music teachers, we're meeting with our principals and

023colleagues and saying, "What is the best way that we can do that, "that will fit within the context of that growing model?" We also are in included, as Mr. Schmidt talked about earlier the current standards, the answers to the questions are the same because the arts standards also include those music standards as well. So with that, are there any questions or thoughts that we can answer for you? - I'm thinking of the historical perspective because I'm old and I remember teaching or being community specialist at Lakeaires Elementary and the room across the hall from the media center was where they did the string lessons, so I remember it very well. And I do remember basically the massive cuts in '82 when the orchestral program, I believe that's when it went. So we had it in

024the 70s and it at least survived till '82. And then I was teaching German at Mariner and I didn't notice anything had happened that year except (coughing) but I'm just wondering if you look back to the past, if you can and how big it was, because I remember a lot of kids did it and I also know the model because I have a son who is a professional musician and I know at colleges the string and the band program merge to combine with concerts and some music so I don't know if you looked at that model and I wonder how many high schools have that model of maybe an orchestral as well as the brass and percussion teachers working together with a band or a concert band? Have you looked at how many high schools

025actually field that, they used to but that was back in the good old days. - I think those are great questions. I can't speak a lot towards the high school component, a couple of thoughts that I have, those were the exact questions that we're asking. How does a well-rounded music experience look here in White Bear Lake for all of our students for in elementary school and how do we pass those on to middle school and high schools? And I've conversations with our middle school colleagues about how does this look and how would it fit together? Because I think I would maintain a strong, well-rounded music and arts component is really, really valuable. I would say even in a context of looking at STEM and science that the arts really bring in that creativity part to

026all of our academic areas and that our scientists need to be creative, our mathematicians need to be creative. We see that in our families as being an important component. How they all fit together, I think as you're referring to, is a really important question to ask. Because our orchestra program currently today is relatively new, those are the questions we have to see how it will evolve into that. I do know that and I think that you were referring as well, I can't speak to when there was a full orchestra program, but I do know that there's been strong orchestra elements in some schools throughout time and then a few years ago those were brought together to a more cohesive district wide program. - I guess, I'm just gonna expand on that a little bit. It's

027kind of like looking at people marching up some place and being at the border, going, "Where are we?" Going, "What are we gonna do?" You've got them coming and you must have had a concept of where we were going because it was popular before. And it has been. The thought of expanding our school band and each time you add a huge and it's a wonderful program but I just can't remember what happened to it the last time other than all the sudden, poof it was gone and how big was it? It's gotta be in the yearbooks or something. - Good question. - What happened to it? And I think it's wonderful we're offering it and I know we've added room to store musical instruments at the middle school and at the high school, so we've

028already kinda started making a little corner, but it looks like it's growing over. So I think you need to know what the goal is. - Our program was designed to go through grade 12 and the delivery model works in middle and high school. I think the challenge is that there are so many kids taking orchestra in fifth grade that we gotta think about how all the parts fit together if we're gonna have it in fifth grade because our delivery model and approach works six through 12 and we do have the capacity to have a robust orchestra and band program. So our design and how we've rolled it out for it grow up through the high school we're well positioned for. It's just this opportunity of the first year being in fifth grade and how it's

029really grown beyond the way that we thought we could deliver it and now we just have to engage people in conversation and figure out how we're gonna keep all the parts fitting together. And that's the focus for this year. - I do see the advantage of it starting in fifth grade. There's a wonderful advantage because when band moved to middle school there weren't any kids below seeing the joys of it, so orchestra has had that added punch with all the younger students, that band used to have when it was K-6 and you were a big kid when you started taking summer band after fifth grade. So I think it's gonna continue to be popular. It's just probably cultivate and develop it and make sure that they have a marvelous marching band and lots good things

030and some them have to fit. It's kinda like you teach a lot of languages and as they progress, "Oh is there room for everything." A lot of red tape. (laughing) - More than everything, my concern is your problem because you know we're in middle of facility planning are also by the way to one of the first fifth grade orchestra concerts and to really benefit the students we've gotta think about giving them a performance space also that can accommodate the number of students because we were cramming people into that gym. There was room for the orchestra but there really wasn't room-- - Yes. For the people also. It's a reality as our programs grow and we're talking about planning for things we don't really know about and really have to think about performance space as well.

031- Miss Beloyed? - Do we know what the percentage of the fifth graders in orchestra transferred to middle schools to do have orchestra? - I don't have that number off the top of my head. I had that conversation with the middle school principal in fact but I don't have that. It's a significant amount of them. - I'm sorry, I'll say it again. I don't have that number on the top of my head. I have conversations with the middle school principals and it's a significant number to which we continue to expand that upward into the high school. - We can get those numbers for you. - We can, yeah. - I'd be interested in knowing how many sixth graders are at the program. Now I heard it was 265 sixth graders. - Well, do you know

032the number of families and how many transition into sixth. My other question because I actually have a sixth grader who started in orchestra in fifth grade and continued on to do it and I can see where the challenges with because there's pull outs constantly in full orchestra and it seems like we're doing a lot of this pulling out of classes so like in sixth grade, you have orchestra as a class that's every other day but then you have lessons that our students are getting pulled out of the various classes and it's interesting because it takes away from something else and I would love to see us to be able to put more focus on just doing one thing instead of having children do too many things and try to catch up with everybody else after

033that, if that makes some sense. It's the same thing in fifth grade because they have to pull out to do orchestra in fifth grade. It seemed they do it pretty well but I'd like to see it as just you do music. You go to, they do singing and interact. - That's exactly that we're wrestling with which was at the start of the program was much smaller and the impact was smaller now with so many students being involved, it impacts a school day a lot more and that's what we have to try to figure out because it does mean that something gives somewhere along the way. - Have any had any ideas maybe in the lounges possibly? - Lots and lots and lots of ideas. There are many ideas out there. It's really trying to put

034it into a context of our strategic plan, our school day, and that's really why we're talking about meeting with our fifth grade teachers and our music department to seeing how it fits together. - Click at your mic there. - Add something to that? - I think what you added about the strategic planning in that context, also context of equity, right? That we want to be able to provide this to anybody that, if we're having this opportunity, that anybody could participate in it. And I think it's the importance of who we're bringing to the table is really that diverse perspective, so having the music teacher, the orchestra teachers, fifth grade teachers who are seeing the impact on the students and the instructional scheduled day, so really trying to bring all that together, yeah. It's bringing the

035group together. - How is the equity piece for that family who can't afford to rent a viola or rent a cello or all that. How is that being taken up with color guard? - We have a scholarship system set up so if families are unable to rent one on the outright they can work with the orchestra teacher and the building principals and we'll make sure that they will be able to have an instrument. - Is that coming out of your building budget? Is that in grants? Where's that money in the scholarship money coming from? - Out of a district budget. - District. Thank you. - Miss Newmaster? - One more and I think because I have two adult kids who went through one of those marvelous music program and they both became professionals, so I

036remember as a mom and I remember dropping kids off for jazz band. We have a great jazz band program. If they practice in a, I guess you call it the zero hour, in middle school they did, I don't know if they still do, but that was an extra and it'd be nice they could add a phase probably from another district program but I'm just wondering, you've got that model of jazz as an extra because you've got band, you've got language, you've got whatever else you're doing. How many zero hours can our kids do and how many can a classroom teacher handle because they already have a huge student load? When you look at the number of kids a band teacher or an orchestra teacher has and all the lessons that they teach, to add a

037zero hour on top of that. I wonder if that might be... Your FTE is stretched. - Miss Ellison? - I have just a quick question. As a mean mom who did not sign her kid up for orchestra, she is worried about being behind next year in sixth grade when she does sign up for orchestra. So is that, can I put her fears to rest. (laughing) - You are always welcome to put her fears to rest. No, I think obviously I would believe there are going to be students that have not also taken this. They maybe didn't the first go round and now they've seen it and, "Oh, I wanna try that." So I think there will always be, and I know because they do the balance of large group and small group lessons, I think

038that's how it will, yeah. - Putting them together, the ones that haven't done it before and the small group that's to support kids at a time and tends to bring them together by level. - Because that's an equity question, too. - Right? Right. - The students who came already or just don't have the ability to get to an instrument. - Extra lesson or extra class. I wouldn't want them to be, "Bummer." - Mm-hmm. - Mr. Wilson? - I have certainly heard the term orchestra elementary orchestra many times, what it actually does it encompass in terms of instrumentation, first question. And then second, if there's multiple instruments, who chooses, the student or the teacher? The coming together of the two? How is that decided? - He's the person for liaison. - Yeah. And I never was

039in the orchestra, full disclosure. But I've been privileged to be a part of that. So good question. So, viola, violin, viola bass, cello-- - Is bass an element? - Yeah, and it's really, yeah. It's pretty amazing and it's really fun to see these kids coming off the school bus. Or parents coming in and it's like, okay. And the choosing of the instrument is actually kind of-- - I heard violin, viola, cello? - Cello and bass, yep. We have the full gamut. The choosing is actually a collaborative process where the orchestra teacher will work with the students and the families and say, "Okay, how does this fit? "How does the instrument fit and what are your desires?" Probably a lot like band was for those of us who went through band, it's okay, "Your interests are

040in this area and these are the instrumentations that might fit." It's not a cut and dry in elementary school at least, it's not a cut and dry here you go, but we're trying to find that balance. Because we want to provide those good skills, but we also want to build the excitement for it and part of that is making sure students and families their voices are part of that. - There's also orientation day still, isn't there? Where everyone is one day, any kid that was interested in it go try out different instruments and choose from there. - So in the elementary program, it's strictly stringed instruments and then the continuity is when you hit middle school and that's where you get the rhythms and percussion and everything else put together. In my recollection is what

041you refer to as symphonic band. In the 70s. - That mixed all the instruments together. - Yeah, there was a lot of instruments. - That's what I thought, it's not a separate program. You just started with strings earlier? And I guess I'm just wondering was there any, you talked about equity and how we enjoy something later. I remember something about you had to have piano lessons or they didn't let you take a certain instrument. Probably to thin them out. It really wasn't equitable because it was just a kid that would be forced to go to piano lessons from grade one who thought, "Great, I can't." So is that still a requirement for some instruments, you say, "We'd prefer that you had some piano." So the virch kids are way ahead? - Not in elementary school.

042- Well, in sixth grade they have-- - Can't speak to the middle school band program, I'm sorry. - You have to have piano before you can do percussion. - Yeah, they do require it still then? I thought so. We're not that old, we're baby boomers. So that is an equity thing. - Mr. Chapman? - If it is relatively new program it's still kind of a novelty feel I think out there. Have you done any research, contacted any experts and so forth that have implemented an orchestra program to see if after so many years, what their experience was? Did it plateau out, did it start sliding backwards, in terms of the amount of interest? Anything done along those lines? - That's a great suggestion. This is really trying to show you the direction of our focus

043this year and so we're gonna be doing a lot of reaching out, a lot of exploring of ideas, a lot of figuring out how orchestra fits in the broader full experience that we're providing to our students, so these comments and questions are very, very helpful. - Are there any questions, comments? Okay, thank you very much. - Thank you. - Okay. Principal Healy and Principal Dalhem actually have a PTO meeting tonight and so we have teacher Julie Storehouse here with us and then Ann Mulitz is also gonna be talking to us about our media programming. - Just a reminder of how we got here. During the 2017-2018 school year, the Oneka Future Ready Taskforce consisting of teacher innovation coaches, media specialists, Washington County library staff and district administrators met to really reimagine library spaces and talk

044about how to make something future ready. And so had a full year discussion. And then an opportunity presented itself, so that we were able to then look at two different programming, media and then the gifted and talented program. And think about an innovative way to enhance and strengthen both programs by doing some combining of the two. So this year we're doing a pilot program that aligns and actually supports thinking within our strategic plan. One strategic item being student agency and then the other strategic plan as far as all students being able to have enrichment and so they designed in three of our buildings media and gifted combined together, integrated, in an effort to maximize student and teacher interactions as well as to create a more collaborative environment between staff. So this is the first year

045and we are very fortunate to have Julie Stonehouse, who is one of our media and gifted and she would be willing to share a little bit about her experience. - Thank you for including me tonight. I am Julie Stonehouse, as Ann said. I am this year at Oneka Elementary in both roles as the media specialist and gifted enrichment support teacher. And I have to say, I feel a little bit like a kid sitting at the grown-up table for Thanksgiving. Terry Dalhem had asked me to sit in tonight just because I am living this pilot program this year. I'm just to field any questions that you might have a really brief description of how these programs are working together at Oneka anyway. Is I alternate because my job is 50% media specialist and 50% gifted enrichment

046teacher. And so I alternate days. On odd days, I do gifted enrichment support and on the even days I'm in the media center. The advantage of me being in one school with both of these roles is that I am easily accessible to teachers for support in both capacities and just the opportunity to really create some nice connections with students on an on-going basis. So for the gifted kids that I work with, I see them every other day for reading and math and then on the even days, I'm in the media center doing media support and lessons with all classes. Miss Beloyed. - Is that still the REACH program? - It is the REACH program although we're working on... It looks a little different this year at Oneka. We're trying some new things to make it

047a little more collaborative with what's happening in the classrooms. We're trying to do more pushing in, rather than pulling out. - Seems like there's a maybe sort of like, we started REACH what seven years ago, I wanna say. I know it's gone through a change almost every single year and such. - I believe the REACH program has been around, I have a daughter who's 25 and she was in it when she was in Kindergarten, so it's been around a while but there have been different teachers, of course, that have been in the program delivering instruction. - Are there any questions? Miss Newmaster? - As a media specialist who was elementary first, 12 years I was in this district and also the gifted activity person, again, the ideas come around again, and you offered extra things

048enrichment for students some of it was co-op, some of it was afterschool, and I do think that one thing that media people do, everyone here knows every component that elementary schools need a full-time media person because that's the one position they have to, the research is there, it kind of the closer of the opportunity gap and literacy gap and the reading gap, there is a lot of support for this. I'm really glad to see one person in the job and you just have span all the things that media people do. So I'm hoping that will continue to be more support this way so they level the playing fields and all of our schools get equity the same way because everybody deserves a media specialist who covers literacy in all formats and offers things. You need

049us to do things for preschool and with the growing elementary classes, so you have a humongous job to do and I'm impressed and proud and hopefully you'll have more support and more (coughs) so that all kids have access to a full syllabus elementary media program. Because it's a critical variable for all of our kids. - I would absolutely agree. I'm very passionate about both parts of my job. I love working with the gifted and high performing learners. And I love my time in the media center, too. I do think particularly with our focus on finding ways to increase student agency, I think the media centers are a perfect place to be well positioned to do that. To be the real hub of learning in our buildings. - Sounds too good. - Can you just give

050an example of ways that the students have shown agency within this program? - Are you thinking from the media side of things or more of the gifted enrichment support side? Well, the first thing that I will tell you is that this is year one, so we are navigating the transition and navigating what that looks like. How we change and bring these two programs together. The other piece that I'm learning, personally in the role and especially up at Oneka with a rather large staff, people have varying degrees of comfort with change. One example of how I think my two roles are coming together to support a classroom I'm working with fourth grade high performing readers and the fourth grade teacher so I'm collaborating in her classroom. The fourth graders in general in reading have been working

051on identifying themes in the books that they read and so as I've come in and I'm working with that high performing population, we took that idea and the lessons that they got in the classroom with identifying themes, we decided to identify themes in a novel that they're reading and then they're choosing a real world example of that theme and doing some inquiry in that area and then learning about that real world example and then how that ties into the theme they're reading. So for example, we were having a conversation this afternoon about the battle of the sexes because someone was reading a book called Save Me a Seat and the theme they identified was you shouldn't prejudge other people and so this student started learning about Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in the 1970s

052and how people prejudged women and thought they weren't as good at sports, which we all know, Billie Jean King proved wrong. And that's just an example of how I think that media side is coming together with that enrichment for the high performing learners. - Any other questions? Okay, thank you very much. - Thank you. - Okay so, now we're going to conclude this session with World Language and John is gonna come up and lead us in that discussion. - All right, I get to take a few minutes and talk about our World Language program. And it's interesting. It's come quite a long ways since 2012-13 when it was part of the strategic plan at that point to bring forward in review it says at that point that all students will expand their global perspectives through

053the study of world language and culture at the elementary schools. So we have built a wonderful program at all over our elementary schools, two of our schools have Mandarin Chinese, the rest of our schools have Spanish language and true to that calling, I guess, is that we really focus in elementary school again on cultures and communication, so we spend a lot of time using our World Language program to talk about the world global perspectives and different peoples and as well as how they communicate in that concrete part of learning the language, learning Mandarin Chinese or learning Spanish. Some of our current focus is we're really taking some time to think about our Kindergarten curriculum, really this year we're thinking about how we're setting our expectations to better prepare our Kindergarten students to move into those

054higher levels of languages. So it's just one of those natural reworkings after a number of time we say, "Okay, we really need to get down into it "and think about our youngest learners." Kind of in broader, longer-term focus, we're also thinking about and having conversations about how does our elementary World Language program and in the future how does that going to line up with and feed into middle school programs? And there's a lot of good work that everyone's doing and I think one of our goals is to bring that good work from those upper grades in our elementary World Language teachers together to become better aligned as well. We continue working with the more training on comprehensible input and another interesting and important discussion is as we're moving forward in the future, how could we

055better meet the unique needs of our heritage speakers. How many of our students will come to us with multiple language or mother tongues as we refer to it. And how do we best support them in our schools. So our World Language program has really come a long way. We're really excited about it and we see a bright future and an increasing need for not only language skills but those cultures and contributions as well. I'll open up for questions. - Question regarding World Language? - I don't think it's a question, more kind of a comment. This is one of those areas to me where there seems that they're doing half measures. Both of my boys went through and did the Spanish through elementary and a lot of it seemed more like a cultural which is great,

056they got to know the culture and different things to understand but it seemed more that than a language based learning proposition and it's another one of those things where it's here's this, I'm not sure what the schedule is. - Once every third day. - Once every three days, so we're adding these things but we're adding in half measures is what it kinda seems like sometimes because we've got so many terms set into the day and there are four semesters in the school. Seems like we may need to... And the same thing happens with the middle schools because you're now only doing that for two quarters, the language and the second half you don't have language anymore. And now for people that teach different languages, the impression that I've been given is that if you really

057want someone to learn the language it's only a three day class situation so I think we just have to get our priorities on this schedule. That's my personal comment on it. I love adding language, I think it's a great add-on, it's a great piece especially with the culture and all. We're adding so much it just feels like there's a lot of half measures. - Well, I just would like to thank you for raising that because we spent a lot of time last year talking about our middle school programming and the schedule and the complexity of the schedule and how that was really at the core of the challenges we were having through all of those discussions. And it's hard to talk about the things that we're not gonna be able to do if we're going

058to do some things really well. And we also have to balance that with a lot of happy people in our schools right now that really enjoy the programming that we're offering, and so when we look at each of these and why we wanted to talk about these comprehensively is because we spent a lot of time with the instructional leaders at the elementary level and specifically all of these principals who are providing that instructional leadership to say we need to have some really important conversations that have to connect together all of these parts because one piece of this and making a decision around one element. It's gotta be a horizontal and a vertical conversation and the thinking that went into these highlighted points to talk about how we're really gonna focus on continuous improvement, we would

059just really wanted to make sure that all of you were aware of all of the parts before we launch and dig into this work and then not have a shared understanding about how each of the parts has to fit together in the end in order to really provide the best programming possible. - Miss Ellison. - I guess building on both of these things, I think it would be really interesting comprehensively to talk with the Phy-Ed, music and language instructors on what their sense is of how they are getting their work done, getting the standards met on this every third day rotation, because I think you could ask any of these specialists and say, "We need more time." We need more physical activity, we need more music, we need more language and so, I would be

060interested to hear from those instructors. What their perspective is. Are they... Do they feel that they are doing the job that they need to do in the time that's allotted? Because it is wonderful. I love having all those things and I think getting some of all of them at this younger level really trains kids' brains and bodies to be able to learn as move on. Just something that I would like to see as we go. - Other, Miss Newmaster. - For me now, I'm looking at it partly from historical and partly from my own (coughs) experience. I taught, my undergraduate was in German, and I taught German two different times in this district, and I still keep good contact with all of the language teachers and everyone looks at how much time they have and

061what the scope and sequence is and how on Earth they bump along between elementary and then middle school, and then who's continuing down and really hit it and get that college in the schools level where you have fluency and literacy in another language and the reality of it is we're offering a pallet to our youngest students, a buffet. We're offering a wonderful buffet for our students. And I don't know if we can have everything in the buffet. I don't know if that's logical. It's not my decision, it's someone else's. But I look at it and I think how many dishes can you provide and then what happens in middle school when it all the sudden is different expectations and I think the step that was taken this year, dividing into language A and B and

062C was more realistic because some people go through five years skipping in between, and between the schools you have different language or you come in and don't, so everybody doesn't have the same level because they've had five elementary years when they get to middle school. So I think that takes some of the pressure off and some of them are equitable to sample something different also but it still leaves the language teacher trying to balance all these different levels coming into one class and then what happens to the scope and sequence? If someone has taken something since Kindergarten, do they continue with it? That's something we don't know yet as it's just happening. - Isn't that with music, though, too? - And there is a drop out level, so it's one of those things you look

063at. So it's very commonplace but we offer a wonderful bunch of samples and for my own kids, I wanted them to try everything I could make them try. Just because it's much easier when you're younger to try something but then they've got to pull it together. It's a big jump. - Are there any questions or comments? Okay, thank you very much. - Great. - I believe that completes the new items and discussion item which is discussion on the 2019-2020 calendar? - Oh, yes. Well, hi. So we've had a chance to have some good discussion around the calendar and again I just want to celebrate together that we are on track to approve the 2019-20 calendar much earlier than we have in the past, so that's something to be celebrated. The one piece that I had

064mentioned at the last board meeting was that we were gonna look into how we could make some small adjustments so that we could have a non-student contact day on election day and Mr. Maurer had shared that some other districts had taken that approach and we just wanted to do some looking into that. And so you'll see on this new draft calendar that is the one additional change that we did make was that we shifted, we had a professional develop day scheduled for Friday that week, so we moved the professional develop day to Tuesday which is election day and then students will then be in class and then end of the quarter will be on Friday. Mr. Maurer did some very good collaboration across districts for those that are again, most districts are in the process

065of drafting their calendar, we're ahead a pace, but those districts that have implemented that they said that they were really satisfied with the decision and then other districts that were looking at just working with the county to move the election location away from the schools. But if you'd like to hear anything further, I'm sure Mr. Maurer will be happy to share some additional context. - I'd like to add, I got a cold, so don't pass the microphone, I'll use my own sick voice here real quick, the Ventura district that I emailed out, 22 responded back to the email, which is a pretty good turnout. 16 of those are either changing or have changed or are in the process of reviewing a change to making a non-student day, out of 22. The six that are moving

066to currently they have buildings that don't have students in them and of those other four, two of them are just based off instructional review past have set-ups where the public can go right into the gyms and right out and don't need to access any other part of the school. So it's we're on the same pace as every other the majority of the districts, everybody's having the same or similar conversations. And I also have a meeting set up in mid-December with myself and John Hamstead and Kevin Kleitner to meet with Ramsey County just to set that for the future. - Comments, questions, Miss Ellison? - I think this presents a really great opportunity for more discussion with the district about civic life and civic engagement and what this means what our responsibilities are and also the

067student's responsibilities are. My hope is always when we have holidays, like Martin Luther King Day or Presidents' Day that we are able to take those opportunities to talk about the reasons for those holidays and so I believe that this is another opportunity for us and our students and seniors by act of election, the election of judges and just amplify that we find that important as well. It's not just kinda important you also said yourself. - Speaking to a couple of the people who had emailed me back and did say that they did see a lot more students with their parents around people too, so they did see that so you did touch on the same point he was going to. - Miss Sutton-Spade? - I know when I go I kinda comment on this each

068time, but the districts that have changed it so you just go into the gym and leave still have students there they're still taking someone's teaching space and I think I'm glad that we're doing a non-student day and being considerate of our Physical Education staff who are not losing their teaching space and I think we forget that schools that don't have access to the another don't. This is the last time I'll say that. - And it's appreciated and noted, thank you. - Miss Beloyed. - Piggy backing on her civics, I love what they did at North Campus this year, I don't know if this is the first time they've done it, but they had their own election so the kids could see what the process for it was. That's the first time I've heard of it,

069but there's been a couple other schools. I thought that was brilliant. So the kids got to actually see the processes. It was something that actually turned it into responsible rather than scary thing, really. I mean, it's their responsibility. - Other questions, comments? - Just a comment, sorry. Kudos to Sara for being able to put us in position to wrap up the calendar so quickly and efficiently. A school calendar, now how hard can that be? (laughing) Yeah, it's not rocket science, or is it? There are innumerable number of items that need to be orchestrated, you know budgets and everything like that and we need to achieve a balance. I think we ended up balancing the contract for everything. Well done. - Thanks goes to more people than me and one of those people will be coming

070up here in just a minute. I just wanna thank the many, many people and there's a calendar committee but Brian Morris put in a lot of extra work on this because the days were not adding up. And he put in a lot of extra time to make sure that we were meeting all the requirements and that we weren't overlooking something that would be obvious once you catch it and it's approved. So I just want to make sure to credit him for the extra work that he put in. - Mr. Chapman? - Yeah, Sara I just wanna confirm in looking at the calendar for after it looks like there are no parent teacher conferences scheduled through the days. Is that correct for next year? - Correct. - Okay, I was just wondering how that went this

071year as far as having, at least the high school, having Tuesday during the day sessions. What kind of feedback have you had from that? - The biggest part of this was there were trade-off that we had to make, if we were gonna put in days, like the teacher workdays, we had to be really thoughtful about coming up with a way that we could use those to support teachers that wanted to take advantage of using those before school started, we had to do the same with conferences because otherwise, we'd be going into that whole second week in June and those are not the most productive learning days and so that was our guide was to really look at how do we maximize the days that are gonna benefit the students the most and then have to

072make trade-offs on the teacher workdays and conference times and we had really good participation on our calendar committee to put those where they made sense for elementary and where they made sense for secondary. So you'll see that those are at different times which we think is gonna help us with the many parents that have children in the districts that are teaching as well so that they can have more opportunities to attend conferences at the level that their children are attending school. - If there are impending schedules next year will they adjust? - Not during the day, they're all evening times. - Now you Miss Newmaster. - I know people have the chance to check everything online if they have a computer at home but again I always think about that equity thing. So your second

073shift person will never be able to have a teacher conference. - During the scheduled time, no, but we do have... Our teachers are amazing and they accommodate right now if a parent can't make it on a day that conferences are scheduled they do accommodate that. But yes it's gonna require working with their administrator to make sure that they're able to meet that and accommodate the family's needs. - I know people are second shift workers. Two households, so they would never be able to a normal conference. - And we do, you know, there's ways that we just need to make sure that we're accommodating whether it's for a conference or whether something comes up and a parent just has a question that they need to process with the teacher, that is just something our teachers do

074very well, but I think in light of the fact that are not any day time conference hours is something that we're going to have to make sure is at the top of everyone's radar. - So I notice that there's we don't get the Monday and Tuesday for Thanksgiving break. And I understand because we get two weeks for Christmas, was there concern that both might not be productive days for students being in school because its so close to the break. I know a lot of teacher won't want to do lesson plans for those days because it's because it's a waste because the kids are all over the place. - We sweat that question all the time, all the time. And when we looked at if we came on those two days, then what about the day

075after January first. Do we come back for two days after January first to conclude that week? So there wasn't a perfect answer to not have a short week like that. But I'm very confident that our teachers are gonna plan and have two productive days before break, but those are glaring parts that are hard to make draft into final but it was the best that we could do in light of all of the parts we were trying to balance. - Any other comments, questions, concerns? So what I understand is we'll come back in December for approval? - Yep. - Okay, thank you very much. - Thank you. - Now we'll go on to our next discussion. Item achievement and integrational discussion. - All right. - Roll call? - Why doesn't everybody come on up and I

076will let them know the plan. So Brian Morris is gonna be briefly sharing an overview of the data that you received in your packet. And some of the data we've already talked about when we did our world's best workforce presentation. You guys can all come over here. So what we decided to do was we're gonna do a brief data presentation and then we're gonna give you some context to the story behind the data. And so these are each of our cultural liaisons and dream team, this is an amazing team and they're just gonna share some of the work they've been doing this year that can add some personal stories of families and students and how their work is connected to getting us to these outcomes that we're after through the funding we've received through achievement

077and integration. I know we like to some times ask questions after but I just wanna make sure that you know I'm kinda be a little time keeper role because I want to make sure you hear from everybody. We can do it one of two ways. We can present all the way down and that'll be about, we've planned it to be about 11 and a half minutes, and then that gives us plenty of time for questions after and that way everybody gets a chance to share. Or if you wanna do questions along the way, that's fine but then I would have to step into that time keeper role to make sure that we don't run out of time. - I think it would be better if we let you go through the presentation and then we

078ask questions at the end. - Okay, perfect. All right, sounds good. Brian, and I'm just gonna do some quick introductions even though, but this is of course Brian, Nirvana, Briana, and Michael and Jordan. And Jordan's going to swing over this way so that she's-- - Planned that. - There you go. (laughing) - Mike can sit, okay. - Dream team, yeah, you got it. (coughs) - Excuse me. Chair Mullin, members of the board, Dr. Kazmierczak. The purpose of the Achievement and Integration for Minnesota program is to pursue racial and economic integration, increase student achievement, create equitable educational opportunities, and reduce academic disparities based on students' diverse racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. Tonight we're gonna provide an update of achievement and integration goals and data and more importantly provide faces and context to the work that we

079do in support of our goals. So following my overview, Jordan, Michael, Nirvana and Briana will provide a snapshot of the important work that they're doing in support of our students and our families and then after that we'll take questions. You'll see or will have read that our achievement integration goals are similar to our world's best workforce goals but with a deeper focus on equity. Our first achievement and integration goal is to increase our four year graduation rate to 96% by the year 2020, as I reported before our 2017 was 88.7%. We're working to improve our students' graduation rate by addressing chronic absenteeism, providing behavior support to increase classroom engagement and working to improve student grade performance in the classroom. Our second achievement integration goal is to decrease our achievement gaps in reading and math by

08015 percentage points. Our gaps based on MCA proficiency currently range from three to 28 percentage points in reading and 14 to 31 percentage points in math. The actions that we're taking include professional develop and avid instructional practices, instructional response to student data, targeted student support in a focus in number sense and early literacy. Our third goal is to increase the number of students from underserved groups who are college and career ready. We have had increases in the percentage of all high school students participating and made great strides towards reaching equitable participation in college and career focused classes. Our actions include identifying and supporting students, professional develop in instruction for college and career readiness and improved communication with parents and other stakeholders. Finally our goal for our racially identifiable school at Willow Elementary is to increase

081reading proficiency from 52% to almost 71%. And we had strong increases in grade level reading proficiency in Willow in the past year. And those strong increases were in response to work on with student behavior, engagement through STEM programming, and professional develop in literacy instruction. Like I said, the important work is the faces and the actions that our teachers and our liaisons are doing with our students and our families and I'm gonna pass the mic to Jordan who's gonna start us off and let us know what she's got going on. - Bonjour all and thank you so much for your time this evening. As mentioned I'm Jordan Zickermann. I am the Native American cultural liaison and Indian Ed program lead. And I just wanted to highlight an upcoming event that highlights work being done to not

082only increase student engagement within school but within the larger community. So I facilitate a student group at South Campus right now called JustUs, as I mentioned before to this group. And it is a discussion platform focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. Following a very successful ISI event that was held in the fall at Willow Lane, which some of you attended, thank you very much. The students and the student group at JustUs thought it would be great to host a student led and student facilitated ISI event meaning intentional social interaction. That will be open to all North, South and ALC students, families and community members. And again, this is entirely run and facilitated by our students and I want to highlight that it is not just from the JustUs student group, but instead the students have

083decided to open up and collaborate with all of the liaison student groups. We will have student leaders from each of our student groups, which will be a very diverse representation and increase overall engagement not only from our student side of things but parent side of things and community side of things and again we'll have questions at the end if you need. So I think it's Michael, thank you. - Hello everyone. My name is Michael Jett and I am the African-American cultural liaison for the district. One of my highlights from this fall is having my African-American parent advisory meeting just an introduction of myself and having a face-to-face to ask any questions or any concerns they might have. The support from Dr. K and Sara was awesome. I was able to get quite a few parents

084to be a part of a field trip that I planned for our students that was brought up by the Black Girl Magic. We went on HBCU college fair. Informational little tour over at Woodbury High. I was able to have two parents meet me there and one parent ride the bus with me, which was pretty awesome. I mean, the kids loved it and I don't think we stayed long enough because when I said it was time to go they wanted more information, so. For everyone that doesn't know what HBCU means, it's Historical Black Colleges and Universities. What's awesome about that is a lot of kids struggle to pay application fees to keep applying to college after college after college. HBCU allows you to have one application up to fifty colleges you can apply for out of

085the 101 schools that are considered an HBCU so kids were able to get tons of information. There was 36 colleges that was there. They put on a presentation and then they did a little college fair on the outside, which was really cool and the kids loved it. - All right, my name is Nirvana Yang and I'm the Hmong and Asian-American cultural liaison. So my role is to connect with family that needs additional support as well create programs and clubs such as Culture Club to make the students feel more welcome at their school. And I preach this a lot but my overall goal is to make the students feel like the school is theirs and not just a school that they go to. And so, prior to this position I worked at Hmong College Prep Academy.

086It's a school that's designed and caters to the Hmong community. Sorry, lost my thought. To kinda get back to the Hmong community, before the holiday break was actually the Hmong New Year so I invited all the principals to wish their students a Happy Hmong New Year over the morning announcement. It's sounds like it something so simple, but coming from student especially Hmong students from their principal in the morning announcement, not just to wish them but to announce it to the whole school. It's a small step but I think it's going towards the right direction. And I also spent a day at Hugo Elementary fully dressed in traditional Hmong clothing teaching Kindergarten and first grader why we celebrate the Hmong New Year. Did an activity that we do at the Hmong New Year, which is ball

087toss, getting to know, so the students get to see a visual representation of the Hmong New Year. They get to participate in an activity. I wish I could of brought the treat that we eat at the Hmong New Year but again like I said one small step at a time. - Hola, I'm Briana Santoscoy. I'm the cultural liaison with Latino students and families here in White Bear Lake. What I've come here to share tonight is something that I'm super excited about. And I'm collaborating with a whole bunch of people on which is my favorite thing to do. I've been doing different types of Latino mentorship programs for almost the last decade with specific programs in Minneapolis public school and this is second year here in White Bear Lake and one we focus on things like

088critical thinking, leadership, positive self-expression. Here in White Bear Lake, I have groups that range from elementary up to high school. And one of the activities that we regularly engage in is I'll bring someone amazing, some Latino person that did something incredible in our community. It's always saddened me that most of the students have no knowledge at all of our own history. Most of the girls in the Latinas Bonitas groups that I have at North and South didn't even know who Cesar Chavez was and that's our paragraph. That's what we got. I'm just saying. I'm also I have to say so excited that Jen Babbage is here because she's just got so much energy and she seems like one of those people who loves to collaborate with others as well. I was talking with her about

089talking about ethnic studies and that's something that we did in Minneapolis public schools is that they adopted a Latino Chicano history ethic studies program and an African-American history ethnic studies program and I think that they're working on or maybe adapted since I left a Hmong-American history. Anyway on December 20th, we're going to be doing I'm going to be facilitating a PD for students and staff so Latino students in the morning from ALC, North, and South will be participating in a session and staff from one to four in the afternoon from ALC, North, and South will be participating in a staff focused session. And it's called U.S. History Through a Latino Chicano Lens. And the goal for students really is to inspire them and you're all invited as well. I think it's gonna be just amazing

090and I'm really, really excited about it, if you can't tell. The goal for students that I have is really that they get inspired, that they see that they're not just standing on their family's shoulders but they're standing on the shoulders of so many people before them in their community that have contributed so much to this country. And the goal that I have for educators is that they also get inspired but that they leave with some concrete ideas as to how they can implement and integrate some of what they learn into their curriculum that they have currently. The person who's gonna be leading these sessions with me is Mr. Kleber Ortiz. And I worked with him in MPS for a number of years and I went with him with the first cohort of Latino students and

091the social justice tour out to California on the bus that broke down like five times in the desert. That was very exciting but it was amazing. It was a great learning experience for both of us and the students and he has a ton of experience working with educators. He's working at MTTC now in the teacher training program. He's running that and he worked extensively with the U of M on the ethnic studies curriculums that have been adapted in several districts. I'm really excited about it and I hope to see some of you there and I think I'm the last one. - Well before we open it up for questions, I just want to make sure formally introduce Nirvana Yang. Nirvana is just joined us obviously, just started here. I think one of the statements that

092he said is he's passionate about students feeling like the school is their school. It's exciting just for him to love his culture and it was very, very hard to get him to actually come here because he was being pulled from where he currently was. They did not want to lose him. They fought hard for him. He was willing to take that leap of faith because he just really believes that living in a community or being part of a community that really values and sees diversity as an asset and how students can really embrace their culture and actually be positioned for success. He is just an amazing person and we're so lucky to have him. And I just want to say that about all of these folks. I'm just gonna share this right now because they

093are such an example of the direction we're moving in if we're really going to deliver on our now strategic context. So, this is a quote from Brene Brown, "The level of collective courage in an organization "is the absolute best predictor of "the organization's ability to be successful in terms "of its culture, to develop leaders, and to meet its mission." and they are courageous leaders and every idea that they shared was an idea that they brought forward through collaboration with their colleagues. It was not something that they were asked to do. They had courage and they took the initiative and they're making a big impact. So, with that, do you have any questions? - Questions, Miss Ellison? - That was really good. (laughing) Thank you very much. I have a question for each of you actually.

094Michael, you were talking about HBCUs, are there any that are local? - No, no local HBCUs, the closest one would be in Ohio. - Okay, are they mostly coastal or southern? - It's more southern. Ohio's gonna be the closest you get to the Mid-West, other than that everything is down south, east coast. - Okay, but I love that idea of kids being able to submit one application. That is genius. Jordan? - Yes. - For you, the ISI event, when is that? - I have flyers for each of you but it'll be on next Saturday, December 8th at 11AM to 1PM at North Campus in the lunchroom. And again, I do have flyers and Marissa and Arie in communications have been so awesome and help pushing those out in the e-newsletter and the digital backpacks and

095all of us doing robo-calls and whatnot. It should be a good turn out, we're really excited. - And is this something that, if it's successful, you might do it again? - Yes, I think this is being done in result to a very successful one that took place in the fall. That was my very first ever ISI that I've ever attended and or facilitated. And it was absolutely amazing. The entire community even stayed to help pick up the tables and the chairs. That's how I knew it was a great event. We have been exploring some options as student led ISI and I've also been talking to Robert Anderson about doing some mini ISIs between students and teachers. In the mornings, maybe just coffee and donuts to have mini Intentional Social Interactions. We're talking about different methods

096to continue these interactions. - Any questions? - Briana, I know Kleper and-- - Oh you do? (laughs) yeah, he's awesome. - The first that you've done a program with him for history through the? - The Latino Chicano Lens? I mean, I do that in a microscopic fashion with my mentorship group students. But we've not, I don't think probably that it's happened in White Bear Lake where there's been a-- - For the last four years that I, I mean there may have been but I just wasn't a teacher. - Not here, no. I did some of that in Minneapolis. - And where will that take place? - So, that's gonna be at South, yep. And students will be in, I think both will be in the auditorium at South. Yep, morning and afternoon. - And we're

097welcome to attend? - Yeah, for sure. Alison Gillespie from North was like, "I'm going all day for the student part "and the afternoon part." So you're welcome to attend for as long as you can. That day is gonna be good I think. - And Nirvana, I just wanted to say that you mentioned the principal mentioning Hmong New Year over the loud speaker. That really opened my eyes a little bit what steps we could all be taking to make student feel welcome, so I guess my question for you is how did the students respond to that? - At the time, I was driving towards Hugo to present, but I haven't got the chance to ask a student yet, in my culture club group, but I'm sure they would be very surprised and even a few of

098them, the principal took an extra step and actually said it in Hmong. I know that made a really big impact because just to go into the elementary, you don't see a lot of the culture arts or anything on display so even when I go to a classroom and say, "Oh, I'm the culture liaison," especially a male culture liaison, they're so surprised that there's somebody there that can speak the language as well and to have the principal say it in the morning announcements, I'm sure it makes a big impact. - And then I have one more question, I guess for all of you. Do you meet on a regular basis as a group? - We try to, our schedule is super busy, but yeah. - Sometimes it miraculously happens that we're all in the office at

099the same time. - That's awesome, it doesn't happen very frequently but maybe once a week. - Can people come to those meetings as well? - Well, they're just so accidental sort of. They're not really set-up times, but we could set up times to meet with all of you and any of you. - Well, this is really exciting work and so I'm just really anxious to learn more about-- - We should do that. - What your cultivating, you know a couple of minutes get a highlight reel but I think it would be really valuable to learn more about how you're working through all the different levels and community nature itself. - Two things, we could just create a spreadsheet that gives an update that can be sent out. We do that at our check-in meetings so

100we could do that and share that out if people are just wanting to see all that's going on. Might be the inefficient way to just feel the energy. - Thank you for that. I know all you're doing with so many crews, but I love the fact that there's several things we can attend if we get the information to show up at the right place at the right time. I know that the Painting Faces was great the other night, and the conversations at Willow earlier in the fall. All of those things are great and any of them that we can go to just get a good sense of the community. It's a whole lot wider than closer. One other thing, I hate to make it another meeting. That is if the information is provided, because you've

101got exciting things going on. - One other thing, Principal Streiff is still here and I know that going back to the data piece and a leader that leads by example by seeing the students behind the data. I didn't know if you also wanted to make sure if there's any questions for her, she is here as well. - Are there questions, comments? Yes? - I just wanted to say that it's really nice to see you guys working to open the eyes of everybody in the schools. I don't think there's enough of it going around. Really where the cultures have mysteries around them. It's such a big part in our society right now because we're equals. - Anything else, Miss Beloyed. - Mine was kind of in general if it could might be talking about behavior support.

102What specifically with behavior supports, what does that mean? What does that look like, like an example behavior support put into place for the students? - Well, for this year we've changed a lot this year. In the first six weeks of school, our referrals were down 60%, I'm just trying to pull data over here. I don't know yet. I'm gonna need some help pulling some data, but I know all of our discipline, suspensions, in-school, out of school, everything is way down. And we contribute that to restorative dialogue. That they're also using at Sunrise and when kids, and I've even done restorative dialogue between a student and a teacher, and even between teachers when need be but it's really about talking thing through and working things out with kids and not discipline and then we move on

103when the problem still exists, it's really time consuming but it's the right thing to do. We see really strong changes in the whole atmosphere of the building because of it. So that one support with Mr. Johnson. He is a behavior specialist, well, we used to call him that but now we call him our student success coach, because everything he does is on the positive side. It's proactive and we do everything we can to be proactive and he does student groups and social groups and sports. He and Mr. Tim Daniels had a basketball team and a football team for the last several years. This year they have two basketball teams, a girls and a boys. They run them I think through Community Ed. That changes the culture when they feel like there are people that wanna

104be with them, they're building relationships with them. We use positive behavior intervention so they hand PAWS tickets, our goal is always 10,000 a year that we tell the kids when they're doing the right thing. So I would say it's a whole lot of things coming together and each year building on what we have from the prior year. And the kids now in fifth grade where there when we started PBIS in well, they were in first grade, so I think for them it's just the norm. So that's just some examples of the supports and then the ALIVE program. - The what program? - ALIVE, it's trauma sensitive programming. We have grant for that for three years. We're in our second year. We have ALIVE counselors that teach lessons in every classroom and there's research behind it.

105I just think that helps relieve stress in kids. It gives them the opportunity to talk about things that they are worried about and then they don't act out in other ways. - My other question was for all of you. You found newer and different ways, I know overall just getting some parents to engage sometimes can be a bit difficult. Have you found new and interesting ways to get more parents to engage through the school and did you with any particular groups and anything that works? - What I've found and half the emails didn't work, I had on my list but a lot of parents responded back through email and I didn't get a chance to robo-call. And then we put it out in all the newsletters. And parents, they want to hear from us. Once

106you make connections with them, it's kinda like you're exchanging numbers. They just call you for just any support that you possibly can give them. And I just think it's the open door policy is just call me when you need me. That helps a lot of parents out all the way across the board, I think. - I can't seem to add anything. - The impact of these folks at Willow Lane being a very diverse school has been amazing this year. Even running the ISI was amazing. Building relationships with our families, hosting student groups, being in our buildings, getting to know our kids and talking with the parents, just being a part of our team, our staff and our kids and our families. It's been really great working with the way they work together has been amazing.

107- For the Indian Education program, the program is still young so I think a big part that increased in overall engagement not only from our parents but also from our students is increased awareness. And that came through many different methods. We came out with our first brochure, we got a landing site on the webpage, we sent out Native Times newsletters quarterly to inform about upcoming events that we have. Now we have an Indian Education program calendar on our website that highlights every event that we have going on for the entire year. So that is the media push and the communications push that really increased overall awareness and engagement. But then like Michael said, once the parents have your number, they'll use it on speed dial frequently. I mean, it really comes down to the relationship

108building aspect of that but for the Indian Education program in general, I'd say a lot of it had to do with our media support. I'd also say in regards to the JustUs student group, what I found is when our students feel really uplifted to use their own voices, their parents do the same. Really a lot of these students have stepped up and beyond and attended the Urban Leadership Academy and their parents therefore feel so much more uplifted to use their voices as well. So that's kind of a collaborative dynamic there. - Oh okay, sure. I think I have to agree. I think the most fundamental piece, for me anyway is that trust piece that parents know that I have the best interest of their child at heart and that if they have a question, I'm

109gonna find an answer even if I have to talk to 900 people. Which sometimes is the case. But I think for district wide events, I think for Latino families the more pertinent an event is to their child, if they can see their child in this event, if they can see a direct impact or benefit for their child, they're gonna be a lot more likely to take their time and attend, you know? - And I was gonna add that we all serve very different communities. So for the Hmong community, not a lot of the Hmong parents know how to use the resource that they have, they can't read and write in Hmong, they can't read English. They have this sense of pride feeling attending an event that they don't much of because they don't want to

110feel stupid or uneducated. So in my community it's a lot of personal phone calls, home visits and actually gaining that trust from families because Malia the previous Hmong cultural liaison she had this strong relationship with multiple families and now that I'm taking over and just with the conference that I've been to translating for these parents, they don't feel like they trust and you can get that sense and just to break that wall down saying, I am the new cultural liaison and I know my age play a lot in it, too. I'm very young and lot of the parents feel like I can't provide what they need but just to constantly knocking at the door, "Hey, I'm here. "Here's the resource for you. "I'm here for you." And yeah, all of us serve very different communities

111and reaching out to them is very different as well. - Just one more thing to off everything that we've just said and going back to the ISI event at Willow. That was a really eye opening event for me and I hope for others as well because it was by far the most diverse event I've attended in White Bear Lake. And I think that is because what Nirvana just said is we each strategically outreach to our parents, families, and students in ways that we know that they would get it. And they would understand and they would feel included and welcomed as soon as they came in and that was at every single level, we had paras and teachers and admin and each of us reaching out in different methods in order to ensure that the message

112got out to all. And I think that really highlights parent engagement at it's core is many methods to ensure all can receive. - And that's, I was gonna mention ISI and I'd like to thank Chris for the jumping. The very first one was held at Willow? - Yeah. - It was like, "Okay, let's just do this." And I like the fact that I'm there, I don't have to wear my school board tag. At the last one a parent sat down, was a Woodbury parent but he was asking me, "What are the opportunities are there for my children?" and that was fantastic that I introduced myself to Michael at Convocation because I went, "Let me introduce you to our African-American cultural liaison." and then they had a great conversation and the discussion start about a African-American

113parent in the classroom. And those the kind of things like with the diverse groups that are there and everyone's there enjoying a meal you end up having intentional conversations. Those are the really, really valuable experiences. In my opinion and if we're looking at the different liaisons available making connections with the families which is so important. - Miss Ellison. - I just have one more brief question. Do you four have literature lists that you share with the teachers at certain levels about ways they can integrate different types of literature into their curriculum? - Well, I don't know, I know that I don't necessarily have literature lists that would help teachers in the integration of that those piece, which is one like the PD on the 20th is really in my mind at least one step in

114the right direction for that, but I know that the libraries of North and South campus are sort of rebooting their... Because now that Lindsay Lamwers is there, it's all gonna be, she has to redo the whole thing. I have a whole list of Latino and Chicano literature that can be used by a lot of different teachers as part of their curriculum. That they're gonna look at getting for their school libraries. - And I know you have some Jordan. - Yeah, at the end of last year the Indian Education Program we purchased about 50 different books all written by indigenous authors for all different grade levels and I am currently doing student book clubs, Native book clubs for sixth through twelfth grade and I'm working with some of the media specialists because a lot of the

115students too just wanna have access to these books and don't necessarily wanna spend every Bears time in a Native book club. Bears time is all about student choice and student agency so we have to honor that. But this list, what I have done is I have curated a list of every single book that we have a description of it and a picture of it and I've shared it with our Native students and with our media specialists. And the media specialists, this is new to me, I've never done a book club, but we had to do it with just Native students because only Native students can access the books that were purchased with Indian Ed funds. So it's been kinda of wonky trying to figure out how the best and most effective way to share these

116resources with our student but through sharing this list with our media specialists Nancy just the other day was like, "Hey, we just got this book in Dreaming in Indian. "Do you guys happen to have it on your lists "because we're thinking about adding it "into curriculum at North." I'm like, "Yes, we do have that on our list." So it's sharing resources out to let them know that this is valuable and authentic literature that you can include even though I can't necessarily hand over our 12 copies, but they are available to all of our Native students K-12 and we're still trying to figure out an effective way for our Kindergarten through fifth grade students because it's just hard for me to run them any book clubs. But it's a start. - Other questions, comments? - Mr.

117Chapman. - Yeah, mine has to do with a question going back to the actual goals here that have been stated. These are lots of goals, I mean, that you listed. And I hope that that means we can not only meet them but surpass them. That being said, I'm not sure how the goals were arrived at and I just wanna make sure that... I wanna get a feel as far as comfortable level in terms of the realistic aspect of this. For example, Willow increasing reading proficiency from just under 52% to almost 71%. I wanna make sure that we're not, we're stretching, but not stretching too far because you folks and educators involved are gonna have to work towards these goals and wanna make sure people aren't getting stretched too much all at once rather than in

118more increments. - Yep, just (coughs) excuse me. The goals were set last spring with the new achievement and integration plan and you're right, I mean, I think setting stretch goals are more important than narrowing down to what is a manageable goal. A manageable goal is not something to necessarily strive for but when you think about, well, first off, when you think about Willow's goal, they had from 17 to 18 five percentage point increase at the elementary level, they had huge fifth (coughs) excuse me, grade five cohort. And I didn't go into necessarily all this level of detail but their grade five cohort from fourth to fifth grade a 15 percentage point increase and that's huge. And I think part of seeing big change is to set big goals and the journey that takes place on

119the way to those goals. I mean our graduation rate goal is also a very high goal as well and it's one that I think is definitely worth striving for and setting in the first place. - What you're saying is really important and we talk about this a lot at Willow. We know we have to accelerate our kids, we have to and they can do it. So we really try, I try not to have them focus on that because it can be overwhelming but focus on their good teachers. What can we do systemically to change what we're doing so that we can better accelerate our kids. So this year we started something called Win Time. So we have a half an hour every single day where instead of if there's three teachers per grade level, we

120use the three teachers to split kids but we also use intervention teachers, paraprofessionals, EL, special Ed, and now we stretch from three groups of leveled kids to ten groups. With the smallest groups being the kids that need the most support and the larger groups being more enrichment to accelerate the kids. It's messy work. We visited Carver Elementary School and they were seeing great gains, very similar demographics and this is what we learned from them. We continue to partner with them. They have come to visit us at Willow to learn about PBIS and we go to visit them or call them with questions. I think we can do it and I try to have the teachers not focus on that. Do our good, hard work every day, there is no magic bullet. It's hard, hard work

121and I think systemic changes will bring that kind of growth. - Is one of the things that I always like to see there's movement, progress and as much progress as you can make without events that have before stretching people to the point of breaking in the process because in the end what have we really accomplished. So many organizations in the private sector do that. It is unreasonable by expectations that people are push and push and push. And in the end if you don't meet those goals then it will be demoralizing but frankly (coughing) and it can backfire in the end. Wanting to hear what you have to say and sounds good to me. - The one piece I'll add, we did have a year where we had some frustrating, we didn't meet the goals we

122were after at Willow and what Chris did was she broke it down to growth to proficiency and also showed the students that were really far behind how they had made growth to get to proficiency because you cannot expect a student that's two grades behind to make up two years of growth in one year but a year and a half or you know, that's pretty significant. She does a good job in making sure that, "Yes, we didn't meet our goal and our kids are capable "and we need to keep making the adjustments we need "to make to have a system that best meets their needs "but look at the growth we made "to get to the outcomes and they're accelerating." And making sure that they hear that as well. - Other questions or comments? - Miss

123Newmaster. - I was glad to hear about all the exciting new lists of books and when you have a list the best person to share it with is your media specialist who has the budget and can add those. I did that for 30 years at North. I know there was a good cultural collection there that can always use a boost. I know we had a long resource center there that's been moved, I'm not sure where it went. There's big story cloth and I think we all tried to build the places that make kids feel like it's welcoming and you can easily find a classroom set in the circuit or whatever you're looking for usually. I think media people are always eager to support that and excited to do it and have kids that are pre-school

124or before school do a book club. Hell, like an informal type of yearbook. So that's cool. - Other comments or questions. For me, I want to thank you all for your work. It's amazing stuff and thank you all for the work you're doing, thank you very much. We'll move into the last discussion I have D four, the big sleuth. (groups whispering) - Good evening. Thanks a lot. The Big Sleuth's a really fun thing to talk about and I wanna just show you a little bit of background about it and then tell you where we're at with it right now and what are our next steps. We introduced the Big Sleuth at Convocation and when we talked about it to our entire staff there what we said is if you look into this strategic plan you

125can find exactly where in this strategic plan the facility's work is in that. It's written right in there. The Big Sleuth really came out of the concept of the strategic plan of like, "Wow, we involve 200 voices in decision making here. "What if we involve 200 more? "What if we involved 500 more? "What might that look like?" And helping staff understand that they can help us to continue to shape our strategic direction as a district is really, really empowering and a really I think exciting cultural shift for us as a district. The software and kinda the program that powers the Big Sleuth was actually invented by and is maintained and managed by United Healthcare. They basically give it away to districts for a really, really nominal cost and there's a collaborative of about a dozen

126districts in the greater twin cities area and then about 50 districts nationwide that are using this platform. And one of the most exciting things for me about this work has been being able to collaborate with all these other schools because there's very much this shared excitement around, "Wow, if your school comes up with a great idea, I wanna hear about so we can make it happen here." And so people have been really willing to share ideas and I think that the fact that all these other schools that have done this before have been so willing to share what were their successes and failures helped us have a really successful event right in our first year. And that gave us a real leg up on other districts that have started and just haven't had as many

127other districts to draw from. Our goals are really two fold here. First of all to authentically engage more voices in decision making, I already talked about that. And then to provide this structure that United Healthcare built to really elevate those ideas to a strategic level. We're not just going around doing listening sessions and talking to people, we're actually saying, "Okay, we're gonna elevate this idea up to a strategic level." We had a lot of communication around the Big Sleuth with this goal of making sure that all staff, not just the teaching staff, but all of our contracted staff felt really involved. So we had a little teaser campaign this summer with the website and a really simple postcard. We talked about a convocation as I mentioned. We went around and met at nearly every building

128and with nearly every department to talk about what the Big Sleuth was and how staff could get involved. And then we emailed people throughout the process and targeted emails at key moments throughout the Big Sleuth. Here's the website that we built. And from October 1st to October 17th, we allowed people to just submit ideas. We was very open ended, "How might you make White Bear Lake a better school district? "How might you improve White Bear for students?" And so we opened this up for a couple weeks for people to submit ideas. The form that they used was really simple form that really focused on what is the problem you're trying to solve. And then we asked also what's your solution? How do you propose we solve this. And then how does it relate to our

129current strategic plan? And three kinda big themes emerged from the ideas that got submitted. There was a fair number on learning spaces which was a real affirmation of the work that Tim's leading around facilities work. That was really nice to see. Some things around social emotional health, which I know you all have been very aware of and are really tuned into. That was really important. And then opportunities for students, too which we've heard a lot about tonight and that staff feel really passionately about. So it's fun to see those happen. And then we also asked people just to estimate from a financial perspective is this a big, medium or small idea and that's how we split them up. 143 ideas were submitted by staff. We were initially just out of the gate just to give

130you a little perspective here, hoping for 25 or more ideas. That was kinda our target. So we were absolutely overwhelmed. When we got to like 42 ideas I was like, "Oh my gosh, we might have 50 ideas as a district. "That'd be incredible." Then when we hit 80 some, I was like oh we might 100. And it's really I think a remarkable affirmation of staff's creativity in this district but also their trust in the fact that okay my ideas are going to be heard here. That's really, really fun to see. And a huge variety of ideas as I mentioned from really across the board but one of the fun things about once these ideas got posted other staff could go in weigh in on them and say, "Hey have you thought about this? "Let me

131work with you on this. "Here's another solution I have." Or just, "I love this idea "and I'd love to see it move forward." Then from October 5th to the 17th we had our voting process happen. And the way the voting works was you'd be presented with two ideas and it would say, "Which of these do you think will have a bigger impact on White Bear Lake Area schools?" And you pick one and it'll give you another pair. And you could do that as many times as you want. With 143 ideas, there were 10,000 possible idea pairings to pair every single one of those ideas against every other ideas. And I will tell you we had a couple staff that made a run for it but nobody made it close to 10,000 ideas. But we did

132have I think 10 staff that voted on over 1,000 idea pairs. Which is remarkable in terms of an investment and really wanting to have their voice heard. Overall we had 505 staff that participated in this process which is over a third of our total contracted staff. We know we skewed pretty teacher heavy, I think we had well over 50% of our teachers in this process but we're really trying to break this down to look at our total staff we have in this district because we want to make sure custodians feel like they have a voice here, that our nutrition staff feels like they have a voice, that our nurses, our bus drivers, that everyone that works for our district feels like this is a platform that they can move forward. And it's really fun I

133think for all of us to walk around and hear people like something would come up and people would be like, "Oh, you should Big Sleuth that idea." And it was fun to see that become part of the language so quickly for people. I was outside of the district at a different event and met somebody who was like, "Oh, I've got a friend who works in White Bear. "She loves working there, she really feels "like her voice is heard in the district." And I know there are a million things happening in the district that work towards that thing and I think the work we're doing with the Big Sleuth is just one small way that we're helping voices be heard and it's impactful. So we're excited about that. Overall our staff voted on 66,000 pairs of

134ideas. A big investment in time, the average person who voted voted on a little over 100 pairs. They had a couple of weeks to do it, so people were just kinda look and go in and click through them. That was great. People were very, very engaged in that process. From those votes, every time you voted on an idea, so if you're presented with two ideas and you picked idea B, that got an up vote. And then what we measured was that up percentage, which ideas had the biggest up percentage, which ones got voted up the most number of times. The system tries to evenly distribute all the ideas so that every idea gets voted on a similar number of times but it's mathematically we'd have to have the exact number of voters to make that

135happen, so instead we work on that up vote and it came out actually pretty clear through the vote count as well. What we said is that after staff voted on the ideas we'd advance one big idea, two medium ideas and three small ideas, the other 137 ideas that are not going through the design process that I'll describe here, those ideas will be handed to principals and to department chairs in a ranked list from your building here's a ranked list of ideas that got submitted, unpack the ones that you can and I think it'll give principals and department heads a really interesting way to have a conversation with staff. In the big idea category our one big idea that's moving forward was presented by a fourth grade teacher actually up at Oneka and it deals with

136student mental health and how we provide services for mental health with staff. She's really, really excited to work on it. Two medium ideas, the first one from Beth Samuelson at the ALC. She's our Chemical Health Specialist. Around a really an idea that really deals with student dignity at it's core but her initial idea is to get a washing machine and a dryer at ALC for students to use which will have a real impact there. And then from Lindsay Lamwers to take a look at school times across the district which I know you all talked about and matter of fact it was the project of our previous student representatives to take a look at this. So this will be a good way to resurface that idea and really try to get some traction around it. And

137then three small ideas. Our two ideas in this thing that got the biggest number of votes were around recess and Mary Maloy entered one of them and John Barnes entered the other one and because they were so similar in the way that they were written and because they were the two that were the highest, before I contacted anyone else who won I contacted the two of them and just said, "Hey, would you want to work together on this? "You certainly don't have to. "I defer to you, you can advance "both your ideas if you want." But they know each other and were really excited to work on their idea together. So fun to see that moving forward and really trying to look at how we use recess in this district and who has access to

138that and for how much time. Kelly Sokolowski from Willow presented one around flexible professional develop opportunities which I think is a really interesting way. She had some really good ideas around how do we make sure that staff have all kinda of opportunities to strengthen their needs and really honestly if you just think only about the presentations you've seen here tonight, there's a lot to know in this district and if you're a staff member finding creative ways to get that information out to staff would be really helpful. This would be a great chance to look at that. And then Kristina Kuehn from Central presented an idea that just an unbelievable amount of traction from people and a ton of conversation around... Those of you who have been teachers in this group know that you get those

139packets after all your pictures and you just put them in a drawer like we teachers don't need those packets. And her thought was doesn't Life Touch donate that number of packets to students on free and reduced lunch instead of giving them to staff. We have some work to do with Live Touch to see if that even something contractually they're interested in doing and what we need to do but I think the broader question that she brought up around accessibility and what do students have access to and what are the opportunities and what are some the barriers. Those are all questions that we'll be tackling as we pursue her project moving forward. Just to tell you briefly about next steps here. Each of these idea champions is now part of a design team. So these seven

140idea champions running these six different ideas. You'll have an idea champion they'll be two design thinking coaches that'll help them through this whole process. Those are district staff members. They get to pick one staff colleague to work with and then three to five students that will help to influence their idea as well. So keep those people in mind as we go to this next slide. The design thinking process starts in December. So the first process here is to empathize. To go back what is the root of the problem I was trying to solve and how could I better understand that. So the idea champion, their fellow staff member, the two coaches and the students will have a list of about a half a dozen questions and they'll conduct interviews of staff and students across the

141district to gather more information around that. Then they'll define who's really having this problem? What does that look like? They'll ideate, "Okay, you came up with a great idea about how to fix this, are there other possible solutions here?" And our goal is to have working prototypes in place at the end of this school year for as many of those ideas as we can pull off. Really exciting next phase here and in terms of the-- - The real world. - The work of the Big Sleuth, it's honestly just getting started now that we've got these ideas and we're really moving in to make those work. I'm sure I will keep you updated about this throughout the year because a real passion project for mine but for now except for the empathy work, there's not a

142whole lot happening until January when we pull those teams back together. - Questions, comments, Mr. Wilson. - To my eye, this whole process you got on the scanner is one step off from the scientific method-- - Yeah, uh-huh. - The one key step that the scientific method incorporates that I don't see there is gathering more information. Is that part of what you're doing with the prototype? - Yeah sure. Yeah, this really a more of a... Circles probably a better way to draw this because you're always... That's kinda part of the prototyping phase. It's like what's working here and then you go back and you re-loop in. So you're always kinda re-looping back through those first four steps and then doing a little test and then re-looping again. - And communicating your results. - Exactly, yeah.

143- Other questions, comments? Okay, we're looking for votes. Looking forward to continuing the year. - Thank you so much. - Telling this group, thank you very much. Is there anything else that we need to discuss? - I just got one comment, but a lot of those things that we discussed today have really shown that we value empowerment and agency in this district and I think that's such a positive thing. So I'm just hoping we'll keep it up. - I just want to add I'm just looking for this certain diversity for decades as my child went through back in the olden days in school and all the things you're looking for as a parent and I think we have evolved a wonderful resources here. It's very optimistic. - Focusing? - I just think this the Big

144Sleuth looking at the needs or somethings like the two late school start times everywhere and conversation with them and coming from staff that they voted on that makes wise, oh gee that's wise, that's amazing. And honestly my job that makes my role much easier and the recess makes kids smarter. I mean just that whole idea of taking recess away from kids. And when Chris was here talking about restorative practices instead of punitive things. I think it's absolutely fantastic. - The intentionality of all those different things that they're doing is just marvelous. There's purely a real intention in what they're doing to tie all those things together into making people feel good. (whispering) - Thank you very much, with that I will entertain a motion to adjourn. - Mr. Chair I move to adjourn. (gavel bangs)

145(laughing)