School Board Study Session - April 15, 2025

001charge. [Music] This study session of the Independent School District 535 School Board is called to order at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 15th, 2025 in room 137 of the Edison Building. The board acknowledges this site and all RPS sites are situated on the ancestral land of the Dakota people and we honor the Dakota nations and the sacred land of all indigenous peoples. Present at this meeting are school board members, Superintendent Kent Pel, a non- voting explicio member, and assistant school board clerk, Miss Anne Kramer. Miss Kramer, would you please call the role? Director here. Here. Director here. Marvin here. Here. Director White here. Vice Chair here. At this time, we offer the opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the stands

002one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Item 2.1 is approval of the agenda. Are there any changes to the agenda? Approval. Second. It has been moved and seconded to approve the agenda. All those in favor say I. I. Any opposed? The agenda has been approved. The agenda and documents for this meeting are available online at rochesterchools.org/sembly. Our focus topic for tonight is the skip 2.0 success measures and process recommendation. This is an information item for our discussion tonight and there will be a prep for action item on April 22nd and an action item on May 6th. Thank you, Chair Nathan. And as board members are well aware um for this discussion tonight um as always joined by our cabinet members, but also um Dr. Peter Ruck, our director of research and improvement and

003Gretch Nicassio, who's our uh coordinator of project management, who've been working with me on the proposal that you have uh before you uh tonight and in your next two meetings. Um maybe to your dismay, you're going to hear more of my voice uh in the initial setup and Peter and Gretchen and others will join in as we move to your uh questions and discussion. Um before I uh turn over to the PowerPoint um and then an additional handout that we added intentionally to Simly today that summarizes feedback that we received on this system. I think the very relevant uh point that I want to make before um we get into this is that there's always this long-standing discussion for school boards um and school district administrations about the difference between policy and uh management or

004governance and management. And that's an important distinction. We've talked about it uh in this board I think for the most part. Um in fact I can't think of an instance in which we haven't gotten that balance right that you all are setting the direction for the school district than we are charged with implementation but I think an underappreciated sort of third leg of that stool is creating the systems with which the district is going to run on an ongoing basis. So there are decisions that you make about the academic program, about the budget, about things like that. And then there's the implementation of those decisions, but at certain key moments, there's the design of the processes that we are going to use across our work. And I think school boards also need to own the

005highlevel components of those processes. And so what is before you tonight and in the next two meetings, I think a lot of boards would not be uh digging into or voting on because they would see that maybe that's just the work of management is determining, you know, these kinds of processes that we will use for school improvement. But I think in keeping with the way we've been uh moving the agenda forward uh at least since I got to Rochester, this decision is a very conse con consequential one that the decision that you'll be making will guide not only our school improvement process but then by extension next fall the development of our next strategic plan. you won't be making decisions in particular on initiatives or um measurable goals, but you'll be essentially putting down the

006goalposts and creating the process. And obviously, we have put a ton of work into bringing this recommendation based not only on the design work we've done over the last uh six months, but on the work of our school improvement process to date. So, with that kind of as background um hopefully relevant um for your thinking, let's jump in. You have a typically long memo from me that you all received that I'm sure you uh devoured vaciously when you couldn't sleep um at night. Um and I'm just going to hit some of the highlights so we can get to your questions, thoughts, and discussion and we can shape uh the next um version of this proposal that you'll get in a week at the um regular board meeting. So part of the point as you saw

007in the memo is I think it's important in every aspect of our work to remind ourselves why are we doing this? Why do we need a school improvement process? And there are many answers to that question, but I think most fundamentally, the needs that our students are going to have are beyond complex and rapidly changing. They've been complex um for decades, and now just the advent of artificial intelligence and an economy that is going to have both opportunities and challenges the likes of which many of us have never seen, uh is very much on everybody's minds. And so the bar we're trying to achieve is incredibly high. And if our schools are not focused coherently on working together toward a limited number of objectives that are wellcoordinated, well planned, and well supported from the central

008office level, I'd submit there's little chance of success. Um there's a quote that I have used a lot since I got to Rochester. If everything's important, nothing's important. I want to thank Vince Wagner, our REA president, who actually helped me track um uh who really said that. And it's an author Patrick um Lencion who I have not read yet, but Vince helped me trace that down. And so uh occasionally people have quoted me saying that and I always felt very embarrassed because I didn't say it. But I think it's a great quote. And um if we don't have school improvement plans, as complex as the agenda that we have for kids uh is and the needs of our schools are, we have little chance of success because if everything is important, nothing uh is important.

009One of the things that I talked about uh with Chair Nathan and Vice Chair Workman in our executive committee meeting on Monday is the fact that at present the resolution in this memo would be um quite a monologue for Chair Nathan to read. And um the logic of that is that the board is then formally taking action on all of the details in this proposal. Um we are talking a little bit about is there a mechanism whereby the board could have a briefer resolution that endorses the components of the proposal. Um but you can see them briefly summarized uh there in bullet points and I won't read them now because we're going to go through them uh now in the course of this presentation. But um it actually is a a point on which I

010think uh the chair and vice chair and I would invite any thoughts that board members have about the pros and cons of literally putting the details of the proposal in the resolution. The logic of that is that in five or 10 or even 15 years if someone wants to know what the components of the skip process in Rochester public schools were in 2005 2006 they can find it in the resolution itself and don't need to go uh chase down the supporting documents. Um there's a converse to that and so it's something we've actually faced this on a number of other occasions in which at times we have said as described in the supporting memo and in other instances we've listed the details of the proposal. So not a huge issue but one in which we

011need to uh reach a decision by next week. So turning to the substance, as you see, there are three broad categories that I'm recommending form the components of our school improvement process for at least uh the next three years. I would hope uh significantly longer that in Rochester public schools. The first would be measures of achievement, not just standardized test measures, but measures of student learning broadly defined. The second is a research-based measure of the environment for learning in our schools that would utilize an instrument called the five essentials survey. And then finally, an evaluation of the quality of several key structures for school operations and improvement. And that those taken together would be the three broad categories of the skip in our 2.0 process. So you can see there under the uh student achievement

012or the outcomes performance measures we would have all schools focused on a measure of consistent attendance meaning that students are not uh that are coming to school 90% of the time or more and the flip side of consistent attendance is chronic absenteeism and that students are not to use the term Minnesota uses now chronically absent. The logic of including that measure is that it is a measure of student engagement and student interest in learning. Admittedly, it also can be a bar measure of the barriers kids face to getting to school from transportation to other uh uh uh barriers, but that um it's a measurable and we know highly consequential highly consequential measure of how our schools are doing. we would focus on the uh aggregate achievement rate uh on the Minnesota comprehensive assessments in both

013reading and mathematics. And it doesn't say it on this slide, but it does in the memo that we would use the Northstar calculation. Uh and and Peter or I can talk about that, but that is the calculation that the state of Minnesota uses for accountability purposes. Um and it is somewhat different than when that calculation is not included in the achievement metrics. The logic of focusing on reading and math um is that they are gateway subjects for um uh student learning in all quantitative and scientific fields in the case of math well really and literacy and certainly in the humanities. One of the points I make in the memo and I think it's important to say it here at the outset is that not everything that matters in our schools can or I think should

014be included in a school improvement process because of course uh art and physical education and social studies and um music and all other subject areas matter tremendously to our students development. partly for reasons of measurement and partly for reasons of math and science being those gateways to learning and other subject areas. Um I don't think they lend themselves to school improvement. That does not mean they would not be subjects of focus in uh our work going forward. And in fact, I'm excited that at uh your next board meeting, you will receive an overview of the long-term curriculum enhancement plan that Mona Perkins and her team have been developing in all of our subject areas. But in our school improvement process, we would focus on reading and mathematics which is aligned with both federal and state

015laws. Um, importantly at the high school level, I am not proposing we emphasize the Minnesota comprehensive assessments. We would of course need to still give them unless a bill that is before the Minnesota legislature this session passes, in which case our state would move to the ACT test as our high school assessment. Um, which I strongly support. We'll have to see how that plays out. But for high schools, we would use the scale score, which is the familiar 32 or 30 or 34. Um, the score that is used to equate the raw score that a kid that gets on the ACT test so that a score is comparable from one year to the next, even though tests are always slightly different. So, we would utilize that um scale score that is the one that gets

016reported when the ACT scores come out for our schools. We would emphasize the four-year what's called the on-time cohort graduation rate. Understanding that a significant number of our kids need a fifth or even sixth year to graduate, which is not to say that if they need that fifth or sixth year, it's a failure. It's a success. If they walk across that stage whenever they do, but we know that the more kids that we get across that uh that uh threshold as uh seniors on the traditional calendar, the faster they can go on to post-secary education or the workforce. Um, and it it if we're getting kids over the four-year graduation rate bar, uh, with the increasing, uh, uh, numbers, uh, it's likely we're doing that with the fifth and sixth rate as well. And the

017vast majority of our students, uh, 80 plus percent do get over that four-year graduation rate, but we know we have progress to make both for students as a whole and for our student subgroups. And then finally, the percentage of our students who enroll in some form of post-secondary institution within 16 months after high school. Very importantly, this would include technical schools, community colleges. As I'll share with you in a moment, one of the sources of feedback we got from people, staff who provided input on this process was, is it too college focused? And we would absolutely be emphasizing forms of post-secary education that are verifiable and measurable, but are not just four-year colleges. We talked a lot about including entrance into the workforce into this. Um, we can get data from the Department of Employment

018and Economic Development, but it's very lagging. It's not until the kids are been out or the young adults have been out in the workforce. And it's very hard to see exactly how our high schools have a direct influence on which jobs kids get into right after high school given that uh there's a ton of things that happen to 18-year-olds after they graduate from high school. Whereas the enrollment in a post-secondary institution has an official handoff. we send a transcript to those providers. Um, importantly, all of these measures would be disagregated by race, income, gender, and so we would be able to look at disparities that might exist and hopefully uh the progress that different groups of students are making. So, this is our first category and to one to some extent you could look at

019this and say, well, what's the big deal? Um, these are the usual suspects. Um and as um was noted in the feedback we received on this proposal, this is taking us from 33 separate indicators to a much shorter list of measures. You'll note for instance that fastbridge is not here. FastBridge will remain a critical tool in our work in literacy and mathematics. It is not however designed to be a measure of the effectiveness of the system. It's designed to be a screener for individual kids who need additional support and intervention. So even though we have shared that data with you and we'll continue to share it, it's really not an effective measure of how well a third grade in an elementary school is doing in preparing kids in uh reading and math. So that's our

020first category, the student outcomes performance measures. The second is an effort to look at the environment for learning. And as I describe in the memo, there is um a long body of research on schools starting with elementary schools, but it has since been applied to middle and high schools that do an effective job of raising the achievement of all learners, particularly learners who face the historically the biggest barriers to success in school. And that research led to a framework that came out of the Chicago Consortium on school research called the five essentials framework. and they turned that into a validated survey instrument called the five essentials survey. Um, it's been around for a long time. It is now managed by a company that manages it, but the analysis and the uh research remains housed at

021the University of Chicago. I have uh followed the 5e for many years. I have uh talked to superintendents and other leaders in school districts big and small that have used 5e and I think it will be a very effective tool for our school improvement work for a number of reasons. First of all uh the categories that are there I think they're very well aligned with what we care about in Rochester. Um and the specifics in each of these categories are listed in uh the memo that you have. But the first ambitious instruction that kids are challenged um that uh the the learning is not beyond them but it is not easy um and it's not wrote um effective leaders we know from uh a just common sense and a huge body of research that the

022quality of the school leadership team has got gigantic effects uh on the performance of the school. Uh by coincidence in this room today, our cohort of 30 leaders uh uh from the school and central office levels who went through the Minnesota Principal Academy finished their year and a half of work together and now they'll be working on their action learning projects and we're going to invite board members to the conference when they present on those learning projects um coming up in June. then collaborative teachers. Um there's a interesting body of research that suggests that when you rank what we call the effect size, the impact on student learning of all the factors that are in a school's control, the ability of teachers to uh work together and solve problems and reach goals is the single

023most influential for student learning. What sometimes gets called teacher collective efficacy. the idea that we can work together here and achieve the objectives we have for kids. And so that's where the collaborative teachers piece comes in. The supportive environment frame is a lot aligned with what we've talked about in the last three years around belonging, kids feeling that they can be their full selves in schools. And then involved families is a measure of the degree to which parents and other caregivers uh are perceived by the uh students, the staff and the parents and caregivers themselves to be uh have to to have to be staff and the school environment is meeting the needs of their kids and that they as parents and caregivers have the opportunity to both um influence and especially receive the information

024they need to support their students learning. So you can see the bumper sticker quote that's down there at the bottom that schools that are strong in at least three of those areas are 10 times more likely to experience significant improvements in reading and mathematics. Now if we move to the five essentials survey, we would discontinue the panorama survey that has been used in Rochester actually for a number of years predating the time that I've been here. Um there are some uh pros and cons to that. I ultimately believe it's a good decision because the purpose of this survey is really school improvement. Um and I think it's well aligned. Um it also provides us with good measures of all five of these areas um that can be uh examined over time. It's sensitive to growth.

025So you don't just get the data and say um this school is struggling with families or this school is struggling with ambitious instruction and then you give the survey a year two and three later and despite all of your best efforts um the data says it's the same because it's actually not well designed to measure change. It's more measuring something like personality type which doesn't change much. Introverts don't become extroverts very often. And so if you're measuring things that are really more dispositions than factors that can change, um it can be very frustrating because the people folks are doing incredibly hard work and they're not seeing any measure. And so if you click on the links that take you to some of the information on five essentials, every school in Illinois, for instance, gives the

026five essentials survey and you can go to the state dashboard and look at the progress or lack thereof that schools are making in all five of those areas. Final category would be um measures of our school structures. And this is one that um I think would be very innovative to Rochester and will take some real design work. But um importantly, the implementation of this new system would really be implemented in the 2627 school year. So we have a year to build this out. And uh we have talked uh at great length about can we accelerate that? And the short answer we've concluded is no. Um for this category it's because we actually have to build the measures and for the previous category on the five essentials we actually have to give the survey get the

027data and then look at the data for improvement. So this is the quintessential turning the battleship. um it's it's going to take some time to get there and that's true of other aspects of the process as I'll mention in a moment. But the basic idea here is that we would define for RPS the the critical criteria that we want each of these um structures to meet in our schools. What is an effective system of supports in reading? What is an effective system of supports in math? What is an effective system of supports in behavior? What is an effective school improvement team and process? What are effective professional learning communities? What is effective implementation of the mindsets, behaviors, and experience for student success that I hope you'll approve in several weeks? And what is an effective

028process for providing students with mental health screening and supports? Um, all of those have had groundwork laid over the last three years. And in a nutshell, we would be creating RPS models in each of those and then we would design a self assessment that our schools would use every three years to say how well is MTSS and reading working in our school, how well is MTSS and math working, how well are our PLC's, our professional learning communities working, and then they would use those self- assessments to set improvement goals in uh in one of these areas uh for each uh three-year period in their plan. and they would be updated annually. So if they wanted to move faster with different areas of the framework, they could. We have already used self assessments to good effect

029in reading for MTSS and in mental health. And so we have experience with using these whether they were tools that were created by other researchers or organizations or tools that we have built ourselves. Um and so we would build out um the the models that we want to see in each of those areas and self assessments that schools could use to identify strengths and areas for growth. So to sum up, those are those three categories that would be there. There's our outcomes measures, there's our learning environment measures, and there's our uh key structure measures. As you saw in the um memo, schools would be required to choose one in each category in their three-year skip plans. If they wanted to do more, they could, but they'd be required to do one in each category. The

030logic there is that in every one of those categories, schools almost certainly have areas in which to improve. some area of student outcomes that is uh needing focus and attention, some area of the learning environment that is needing attention and some key school structure. Um it will be very interesting to see uh how many of our schools if this system is approved would decide to take a very limited approach and how many would want to go beyond what would be required for their uh improvement process. Um, you can see there something that I've already talked about that um, as ambitious as that set of performance measures is that I just walked through, it lacks a lot of things that we care about deeply. I think it's incumbent upon us to be sure that those things

031don't fall off. A school improvement process doesn't contain everything that matters in a district, even stuff that's quantifiable. I thought a lot about putting enrollment in this school improvement process. The reason I didn't is because at least at present and for the foreseeable future, there are significant uh obstacles that our schools face like transportation service to uh securing uh increasing their enrollment, which doesn't mean there's not a lot that schools can do to be the provider of choice to the families that they serve, but to hold them accountable for something that they don't have the full means to address um seemed uh ineffective and maybe unfair. That said, I'm pretty confident that once we get to the counterpart to our school improvement planning process, which will be district-wide measures, that I will propose to you

032that enrollment and market share for Rochester public schools of the people in our community who could choose to send their kids here will be a measure for district level improvement um but not in our school improvement plans. But that's work that would uh lie ahead of us. So, this is the core structure of the new skip 2.0 no process that we are proposing. It's familiar probably because it has a lot and inlined with our current skip structure. But the huge difference, the gigantic difference is that in our current structure, we have articulated the improvement goals, the improvement initiatives and the improvement initiatives for our schools. We've done that because three years ago, our schools were candidly really struggling to um articulate clear actionable improvement initiatives um and uh the measurable goals for improvement. We're at

033a point now though where I'm confident that especially with a year to prepare for this transition, our schools can set their own goals using these performance measures that I'm uh recommending you approve and design efforts to improve outcomes on those goals with central office support and then continue the work that they're already doing to develop their own action steps. Right now, that's really what is in a skit plan is how are we going to achieve this initiative like mental health, like post-secary pathways, um like uh multi-tered systems of support that the district has articulated for us. In this instance, schools would be setting uh those priorities. The other really important difference here, and you can see it along the side, and someone more talented visually than I can probably make this all look better, but

034the other big change from our current structure is that skips are really disconnected from budgets. We don't explicitly connect a school's skip to their budget. And in this new model, we would tie the improvement initiatives and the action steps that they are implementing to FTEES and dollars in every school's budget. And so we would be able to say, are you adequately dedicating staff time and funding to achieve your goals? Um, and and make sure that we are resourcing, helping our schools resource the objectives that they're setting. We also could aggregate that to figure out how what level of funding our schools are dedicating to their improvement goals as well. But the most actionable way to think about this I think is going to be how much how many FTE and how much funding are you

035allocating to the improvement initiatives and the action steps because that's where the rubber meets the road. That's where the implementation happens. There's a really important connection between this uh model and the balance budget model that you approved in concept and that you're going to revisit when we bring you a budget recommendation in May and June. And then the final point there on the bottom are the progress indicators. Those would be measures like the fastbridge assessment that we're not or I am not recommending be at that top level in the performance measures, but that are very valuable tools for checking progress toward the performance measures. We know that if a school is seeing high growth on fastbridge, they are more likely to see progress on the MCAs in reading or math uh over time. Similarly, if

036a school is moving more kids from grade nine to grade high school, grade 9 to grade 10, grade 11, they are much more likely to see an improving graduation rate. And so grade to grade promotion rates would be a progress indicator toward on time four-year graduation. And that would be the kind of uh data system that uh you know Peter and uh I and others would be working to build out over the year ahead. So um schools can begin to use those progress indicators to track their progress toward achieving the big performance measures at the end of the proverbial rainbow. Um, this is a graphic that I think I um, uh, owe thanks like many thanks to Gretchen for in trying to help us think about how this cycle might work in practice. And we

037can come back to this if it's of interest to you. But you can see the needs assessment piece of this will be of critical importance. It'll be a deep dive that will take significant resource and support that would happen at the outset during year one. And schools are then setting goals in those performance measures that I'm asking you to approve. deciding on what are our initiatives to improve outcomes in those um areas um resourcing them in their budget and beginning implementation and then you can see in years two and three that process continues to play out with refinement and changes as needed to move toward those goals. I was at one of our elementary schools today and it was an open conversation about issues on people's minds and one of the teachers mentioned I'm really

038glad that the new process will be a three-year plan um because it was something that she knew uh in her world uh doesn't happen in a year and we know from a lot of just life experience in schools that we set these ambitious goals and then the second year we're on to a new goal. Um, and so in some ways three years may be too quick, but I think longer than three years starts to be kind of a too long. So we will build out a process um of moving that forward. Um, the board has certainly heard from some folks at public comment who have raised some really thoughtful questions about parental involvement on the teams that will be critical to this process. Um after a lot of thought you can see I am not

039recommending that the parents be required members of the teams but I'll come to that in just a second. You can see that it would be uh inclusive of staff from at least three core groups in every school. General education staff who are uh teachers primarily working in the quoteunquote regular classroom. um teachers or education support professionals or others who are working with kids with disabilities in special ed and then people in student support services like um counselors, equity specialists, um other positions that are there. You'd need to have all three of those and the lead principal has the critical role in guiding the skip process. Um and you can see there that we've articulated some parameters for the size of the skip team. The logic is it needs to be sufficiently large to represent the

040size of your school but not so big that you can't have you know deep uh impactful conversations as you're moving forward to the issues of skip teams and family engagement. Um that first bullet is a little bit uh confusing. It says optional partial involvement. The it really should say optional involvement. I would encourage schools to consider having parents serve on a skip team. The logic of not requiring it is that the parent perspective, the caregiver perspective is of necessity just uh specific to their family experience. And so the um uh putting any parent or caregiver in the position of representing all parents and caregivers when they don't in general with very few exceptions have a mechanism to learn the perspectives of all parents and caregivers in a school. Um potentially really skews the discussion um

041on that uh skip team. Um, I think it also is relevant to note that there's not a lot of organizations, whether it's Mayo Clinic and Healthcare or IBM in business, who have what we might call customers or external stakeholders on their core leadership improvement team, which doesn't mean their perspectives don't matter. They matter deeply and those organizations devote a lot of resources to engaging those customers and um and and we would as well in thinking about our parents and caregivers. And so we would be saying to our um schools under this proposal um if you don't have parents on your skip team, you need to make sure you have an advisory committee, which many of our schools have and more might. That you are having explicit outreach to your parent teacher student associations where you

042are engaging them in the discussion of your skip plan. Um or that you are engaging them at family engagement events where you're getting feedback. I'm also excited that the five essential survey will give us rich data on parent and caregiver perspectives on how things are working in our schools. Um, so family engagement is a component of this process, though I know unlike uh some of the folks that we've heard from at public comment, I'm not recommending it be a required uh uh component on the skip teams. So, um, you can see here a schematic for a really important link from title funding or title one funding, the federal funding to support students who live in low-income families and our budget. Um, you can see there at the outset of the process, as you saw on

043the previous slide, you're conducting the needs assessment. You're um, tying your goals to the success measures that I hope the board will approve. We're ensuring that we meet the requirements for federal title funding as uh in the balanced budget model that you approved in concept. We're um doubling the number of our schools that get that. So it increases the importance uh of that and you're thinking not just about your flexible budget but your staffing plan in general and how it's going to meet your plan. So all that is happening before you do your skip plan in this new model which is uh a really big paradigm shift that you're developing the plan following that kind of uh uh rigorous analysis and then when you do your plan you're figuring out your goals initiatives your action

044steps um you're allocating your budget. Very importantly, uh, the skip team needs to vote and my recommendation is it's a simple majority vote to move the skip forward to the central office and the superintendent. Um, and uh, that is a precondition. If the skip team doesn't vote for the skip, it has not moved forward. Um, very importantly, I'm also recommending that skip teams have the opportunity to provide our lead principles with uh uh advice is probably the best term on the budget with the eye toward how does the budget support the skip. But critically, the skip team would not be responsible for the budget or the staffing plan. I think that's inappropriate for our our teachers, our counselors, our practitioners who are neither licensed administrators, but frankly who are working with their colleagues. And those

045difficult decisions about budget and staffing are ones that I think we need to trust and empower and hold our principles uh accountable for handling well. But I do think skip teams need the opportunity to see the full budget and provide their principles with guidance and insight on the investments. And so that would be I think I I think it's happening in many places now, but I don't think it's happening on the timing and with the transparency that this new system would allow us to build out. But as you as I'm sure you all know in the federal government, there are often um structures that are called advice and consent. Um this would not be a consent. uh it would still be the principal's decision to submit it to us at the central office, but it

046would be a situation in which uh the skip team has the opportunity to provide feedback on the degree to which the budget and staffing plan they think is aligned with the skip. And then you can see at the far end of that, we would have a uh very formal process um for approving the skips that will go far beyond where we've been in recent years. We've largely um given a thumbs up. We've largely given some advice to skips but have not had a rigorous approval process. Um and that we will really be requiring that um budgets and staffing plans um explicitly link to the skip in order for the budget and the staffing pan plan to be approved. So you can see that that's a significant uh new process that we'll be building out over

047the year ahead. Um uh the plan is that the application for title one funding that um that larger group of our schools will receive will be fully met through this process. So schools will not need to do a um ownorous separate uh title plan. It will be their skip plan. Um and then that will shape the finance and staffing process that goes on um every year. We're now through that PowerPoint and thank you for the attention. Before I open it up to questions, I want to share a document that you have in hard copy here and that is now posted on assembly. And this is a summary of the feedback that we got which was extensive from a very diverse group of staff. It was open to all staff um on an open-ended survey that

048went out in March and Peter used um chat GPT with um not just a simple query but lots of questioning of the artificial intelligence to get to this summary. Um, and as someone who read all of the feedback multiple times, I think um, this summary does a admirable job of hitting the big themes that we heard in this feedback. And as you know, this survey is not the only feedback we've gotten on this process. We've had um, a lot of discussions over the last six months in doing this design. So, you can see there the uh, potential strengths that came out of that survey that there's some increased school autonomy that would be inherent in this position. um that the reduction in the number of quantifiable objectives that we're working to achieve uh was perceived

049as a positive that there would be an explicit requirement for um diverse staff groups to be um included in the skip team and then by extension families and caregivers to give feedback uh on the skip through the other mechanisms I mentioned was seen as a positive. Interestingly to me, there was uh enough uh enthusiasm for moving away from the panorama survey that it showed up in the chat GPT uh survey, which I didn't necessarily predict. Um and there was a perception of an interest in a career readiness focus with the emphasis on a post-secondary pathways um as one of our performance measures. uh you can see there the weakness that we uh got in the feedback on this first the version um of the skip and I'm going to talk about how we used this

050feedback to shift some of the proposal to what you now have before you there was some concern about overuse of standardized testing and so one thing we did was we took fastbridge out of the um proposed performance measures we would still use that data but we'd use it as an improvement um indicator um that said standardized testing remains a valid and reliable way to measure the effectiveness of our systems in the aggregate. And so I am recommending that we do it and of course we're legally required to even if we didn't want to. There was a question about mental health supports not being the plan. And so we added the mental health uh um testing and service uh provision to the the school structures component that was not in there previously. So that was valuable

051feedback. So schools would do every three years a self assessment of the effectiveness of their efforts to screen for mental health uh challenges and provide services. So we did that. The lack of an early childhood focus is a a tough one because we know early childhood including kindergarten, first and second grade is critical for kids development. It's also a time when it's very hard to get quantifiable measures that are valid and reliable of how kids are doing. Um, it's a reason why standardized testing and surveys usually start at grade three at the lowest. So, I am not at present recommending a uh a performance measure for early childhood, but I have no doubt that our elementary schools will be prioritizing kindergarten, first and second grade as part of their efforts to achieve all of those

052um measures that are included in the system. We talked a lot about using some fastbridge measures for K12 which are valuable for um very valuable for helping to design our reading interventions. They're screeners though and not system measures. They're a measure to catch a first grader who needs help decoding. Um and so it's very problematic to be reporting that as something the school should be trying to improve in and of itself. But I would agree with the feedback that says the absence of the early childhood focus is a is a is is a drawback. Um I don't know how we can do it uh effectively and uh efficiently given our current resources. Uh the memo and this presentation are long and complex. We will work very hard to simplify them for practical uh purposes going

053forward. Um the lack of a vocational education focus I think was a really good point. That's why we um hopefully in the updated version and in my comments tonight, we've made clear that credential programs, career programs, technical programs will absolutely be included in that post-secondary uh objective in the system, not just four-year colleges and universities. If you flip the page over, we're in the home stretch here now. Um there are a number of general questions and concerns that were raised that we also tried to address in the revised version. And so this is a feedback from the proposal, the version of the proposal before the one that you're seeing tonight. I maybe should have been clear about that. Um, how will skip 2.0 ensure that funding aligns with school needs? You could see in that

054schematic, we're saying schools are going to need to tie their initiatives and their action steps to their staffing plans and their budgets. So there'll be an explicit tie that schools will um need to make there. that won't be sufficient but it will be I think enough to drive the discussion and the focus um between essentially are you resourcing with time people and funding your improvement initiatives will there be adjustments based on feedback absolutely it's uh been pretty much a hallmark of everything that we've done and there have been changes in this proposal even since we got that last feedback this is a work in progress that said as I think we said a couple years ago during my evaluation that you conducted we also got to stop changing the goalposts and have a clear stable

055set of objectives that um we can use to um help improve the system. Um, so we do want to make a decision this spring so that we can build out this ambitious system and then I think the goal is to stick to it and refine it but not um not completely change our um objectives which just leaves our school staff not only being confused but kind of demoralized like we we don't we haven't really started to see improvements and you're already suggesting we have to go on to something new. Um how will student outcome measures be determined by subjects beyond reading and math? Um there was not a system fix for school improvement purposes that we could find except in that the 5e survey around ambitious instruction is not unique to reading and math. And

056it gives you a really good set of uh data on both teachers and students perceptions of the degree to which kids are highly engaged and challenged in learning. So I think there's an indirect uh uh connection there that we'll be able to use. But it is true that we lack quantitative measures of improvement in many of those subjects. Science we talked a lot about. Um, science is critical to our kids success. I'm ultimately recommending we not add science to the school improvement process, but we certainly would be reporting the MCA science scores, the ACT science scores, and we would uh we would care a lot about that even if it's not in this improvement system. Uh, how will consistency be maintained across schools? This that's a big issue there. It's an issue for the board

057to think about. This this approach allows variation in improvement initiatives and action steps. And as I've shared with the board, I think that's appropriate because our schools are very different. The kids uh in our schools are very different. But there's an issue there. There's a tension there that we will need to be constantly vigilant about. Um the measures would be common across the system. Um, and I'm sure that there will be many improvement initiatives uh that would be common across the system, but it does empower our schools to innovate and to move in some directions that may be unique um to their schools. Uh the the next two I think are kind of linked. How effective will we be at implementing this new system and will there be a way to hold schools accountable for

058doing it? Well, um the best thing I can say is yes, that's an issue. It's an issue across every aspect of our work. One of the things that we would be doing from the central office is organizing to more effectively support this process so that we have got for instance staff who are responsible for being in-house experts on each one of those performance measures. so that we have a center of gravity on attendance, on graduation rates, on reading, on ambitious instruction, on family engagement. As you can tell, we've been building that out over the last three years. Now, we'd be explicitly tying those offices and people to supporting our schools in these various aspects of the new system. And then finally, something that came up quite a lot about concerns about more uh uh authority

059for our school principles. And this was one that I was a little bit surprised about. It wasn't like a deafening chorus, but it was a consistent theme. And it's interesting because you know in this school district and many others people understandably and I did this when I was a teacher think that the people in the district office don't know what's happening in schools don't know what's you know going on make top- down decisions and you can kind of blame the Edison building or like when I was in St. Paul schools it was 360 coburn and that always goes and there's always some truth to that that those of us who are privileged to be at the central office level need to be open to but um I think some of the tension here is moving

060the decision-m closer to home closer to the building level I think we will need to support our principles in building transparent collaborative skip teams where this happens at for staff and the outreach for parents and caregivers and the outreach for students youth voice um as well. I'm confident that our leaders can get there and if we have leaders where there's a struggle, that's part of what you know Jackie and Eric Johnson do uh every day is supporting those leaders. But I think you can't have your cake and eat it too. If we're going to be supporting our leaders to do this hard work, they do need the authority um to make that happen. So, it's one that I think the structure of the skip team and the process for getting your skip plan approved is

061intend to mitigate the concerns that were there, but I want to be transparent that uh that did come up uh fairly frequently. So, you can see there in the work that Peter did, he broke it down in terms of what they call sentiment analysis where it went over these these hundreds and hundreds of comments and it broke it down to basically positive, negative. In some ways, this is kind of inappropriate to include because these comments were on a zillion different things. We didn't we cannot say 62.5% of the people support this system because that's not what the question was. But it was when you look at basically the thrust of these points uh was a positive or negative. So you can see that we on the whole have got almost twothirds of uh our staff

062saying that this is a movement in the direction but a significant number who are saying uh I have concerns. The the one caveat to that is that when we sent out this survey, the uh shape of the budget for next year was very much on people's minds. And there were other questions on the survey that I have not included here that were on the budget. And so that 37.5% includes questions on the budget for the 2526 school year, not just the skip 2.0 process. And there was no way I could pull those out to detangle it. So that's an important caveat that's there. If we had just asked about the skip process, my hypothesis is it would have been a bit different balance, but since I'm not reporting to you procon, I figured I'd include

063it. Um, anyway, so with that, Madam Chair, I know that was a lot. The presentation of this next week at the board meeting, at least from staff, will be far briefer. Um but you now have that overview and I want to once again encourage um Peter and Gretchen to jump in as we try and uh take your questions and also just hear um your thoughts so that we can shape the proposal uh for your consideration uh starting next week. Um yeah, so one of the things that jumped out at me when I went through um your memo was the fifth bullet point on the potential weaknesses of the skip 2.0. know the lack of vocational education focus and I would really like to see um bullet point three on page 11 under supportive environment rewarded

064right now it says the school expects all students to attend attend college and promotes college readiness and I'm wondering um we want to have high expectations for our students But we want them to have the problem solving skills, the critical thinking skills, all those things that they need to be successful in whatever they choose. But I think this almost implies like we're going back to pushing every every kid to go to college. And the expectation you're going to go to college is like I have no money, you know? So there are other factors that feed into that. So, um, that you can say do something with that if you're No, absolutely. It's it's actually a great insight and we're going to be meeting with the folks from the the University of Chicago 5e. This really

065is an era that the the original research on this was done 20 years ago in Chicago with mostly low-income kids who weren't going to college. and the absence of students going to college was a major driver of the reforms that led Chicago public schools to become the fastest improving school district in the United States by far for almost 20 years. Things have plateaued there. That was an era where they were just doing four years four-year college as the goal. So the summary that is in here is taken from the summary of that framework. I agree completely, director Workman, that we need to be sure that if we adopt this measure, it's also assessing um other post-secondary options besides four-year college, but is really an artifact of its time. It was saying no, our kids in

066Chicago, low-income kids, predominately kids of color, can go to four-year colleges. Um but we'll take a look at that um with either either have they updated that item or is the item diff or is the item fine and this summary just points to college or can we modify it? I guess it it wasn't clear to me that all of this on pages 10 and 11 were simply the summary pretty much verbatim of the 5 survey. It is it's it's from the 5 survey. It's the survey specs. But we should look at that because you're right. we wouldn't want to go. We've learned a lot in the last 20 years about the dangers of overemphasizing four-year colleges as the only good path. I mean, and my experience being on the board is that we really have

067made a switch towards, you know, career readiness, postsecary education, whatever it might be um and not necessarily for your college. Thank you. Um, can I add something to that discussion that that did jump out to me kind of for the same reasons as director Workman, but also the fact that this is um identified in parenthesis for secondary schools that I would hope that that would be a broader elementary on up that's in their survey design. We can talk to them about it. Yep. Okay. and not not only um the career the college readiness but any of the career readiness or whatever um path that we're putting students on should not just start in secondary but early yeah let's talk to them about that and if if 5e can't be changed to measure it I think

068we can add items that actually might go on the elementary survey that we would develop that we would actually say are specific to am I be being am I for instance being able helped as a elementary student to know my interests and understand jobs that would let me uh live in, you know, get up every day and do what I love. So, we could build out some of those kinds of things. Would that be included in family surveys as well? It could potentially. Yeah. Yeah. One of the questions their kids are talking about. Yeah. One of the questions we have about moving to 5e is that the process of of adding items. The other thing is, as you know, we've uh since Peter's been here, we've we've gotten pretty good at uh doing our own

069homegrown measures, but we the thing that's exciting about 5e is these scales are in fact, this is a huge thing that I didn't say. These scales are not only based on very rigorous research, we will get comparative national data every year for every one of these. So we will be able to in a very real way look at schools that are similarly situated to our schools on these measures. And so that's why changing the survey is something we need to be very reluctant about because if we change it then we can't look at it comparatively with other places. And as I mentioned for instance every school in Illinois gives 5e. So it's a huge number that we can it's given somewhere in all 50 states. Yeah. But we can we can we can uh take

070that up with them. And then if you're giving some separate items that are unique to RPS, it doesn't mess up the 5e calculation. First of all, I I really appreciate the summary of staff feedback. I'm gratified, not surprised that u the district reached out to staff and were very open about what uh strengths they saw as well as the concerns. I have a a question about the five essential survey and I'm really excited to see this because those things ambitious instruction, effective leaders and so on to me would seem to be really difficult to quantify but apparently it has been done and u and it correlates to student success. So I think this is awesome because those things uh are are what help kids get higher My question is who takes the survey? Uh, thank

071you Dr. Marvin. There is a um student version, a staff version, and a parent version. So, it's a three-f. Now, there's there's an additional purchase we need to make to have the parent caregiver version, but we would do that as part of this. the the original survey was uh there was a there's there's a family engagement component, but it was based just on student and staff perceptions of family engagement. And so what we want is direct reporting from parents and caregivers in addition to staff and student perceptions of family engagement. I'm gonna interject and build on that question because I had a question about the the parent um survey as I um think about how to engage parents and I I understand your rationale for not including them on the skip teams. Um, what do

072we have planned to make sure that we have as many parents from as many demographics that are represented by our district taking that survey? I know in Illinois, um, as I read it, they have to have a 20% response rate from each school in order for the survey to be accepted. So, um I know we've been doing a lot of work with our family engagement um team, but how how do we make it better known to parents just how important this is? This is the place for them to give their feedback. That's part of the development process, but can you share? I mean, right now, I would say our response rates on our existing family surveys, which are currently run out of ruff shop with Jennifer It's housed in our Qualric platform. We get about

0735,000 responses and I'm not aware of any of our schools having less than 20% response rate for families. I would have to double check that, but last time I looked it wasn't that. Um, but beyond that, we normally do our standard uh, you know, trying to put it out as possible, sending it to parents, multiple methods, talking to parents at conferences. You'd be surprised how many people will take a survey if you just put a slip of paper with a QR code in your hand on their way out the door. That kind of thing. Where are we going to put that responsibility on each school or are we going to have a district? I think it would be uh chair Nathan of both end. We would send it out from the central office level so

074our schools don't need to manage the logistics but we would have a very strong um engagement and outreach effort to help parents and caregivers understand that. One of the things that um uh is really different about I think what we've currently been doing is that we will be releasing the results of these data on our school district website and sharing them publicly. And the 5e survey ranks you in each of these five charact categories. I mean, it will create deep discussion and you get a a a color based on what your staff, your students, and your kids are saying about these five areas. Now, we're not going to shame anybody. We're not going to say necessarily the survey results are always right, but um I think when parents and caregivers see that their schools, their

075kids schools are shaping their school improvement plans in part using these data and that the data are being shared publicly, it will be a very powerful reason for people to be interested in this survey and the results um every year. And the fact that you'll be able to look across our schools and see differences in ambitious instruction or um family engagement or effective leadership uh will be a pretty big driver of attention. Um and I think also as long as we do it from a strength-based positive perspective from of improvement efforts and I guess the question I have for you Mr. Rock is is 20% enough? Yes. Okay. Okay, y'all be patient with me. I wrote a book. I got a lot of things here I'm thinking of. So, um to the conversation that we're

076currently having um about the parent involvement. I'm I'm I got to give a little bit of push back. Um and I I wrote my thoughts down so I can stay organized. So, just just just just bear with me y'all for a minute. So, our kids are only in school 20% of the time. Um I struggle with us not requiring the parent involvement because I personally I'll keep it personally I don't feel that Rochester is in a place where we have built the kind of community that we can just make kind of some of the assumptions that you're saying right I think that um especially postco and and the way things are kind of changing rapidly um I think that we've overlooked um the the key opponent of empowerment that that could bring by requiring um

077a parent to sit on the board. And I I say this because when we're thinking of our students and some of the words that we have used is not just creating a student that tests well, but when we talk about creating an adult that can thrive, I I think that we are belittling a little bit the power of the parent or the caregiver involved. To me, I see a bigger danger in not having it be a requirement than do. I I do understand the the aspect of the explaining, but I see it more as an opportunity to empower the community. I know even us sitting here on the board, we cannot represent every single person, every single demographic. You you will never find a board that does that. But to your statement when you said

078we don't require customers on boards, but they do require trials and testing, you know, we there's a lot of things done. So maybe the the customer is not sitting on the board, but if a new drug comes out, we've done extensive amount of testing with people, actual people that will be on it. if a new clothing line comes out, they've done an extensive amount of, you know, branding testing with the actual customers that they're going to be using. So, they have already done that community feedback portion by the time they've come back. I think that because we're dealing with children, we could possibly reconsider that model of not requiring the parent. I I feel that we will get more growth and better outcomes, especially when we're talking about attendance barriers and we're talking about some

079things that um that we we we're not really sure why it's happening. We're making some assumptions as to why it's happening. Um but even requiring a minimum of two parents on on these boards could, I think, make a world of difference. um because that would one empower those parents. Okay. And secondly, there would be that lay men's um communication, right? So this everybody may not have to understand it, but just as we are here as a board, part of our job should also be that we when we are talking with the community, we are able to go back and break down some of those barriers or things they don't understand. So I I I I see your point in why it it could be a complicating factor, but I see more power in including it

080than not including it. I think that we have looked at it from the perspective of the complications that it causes our professional team and not at the benefits that it would do for our community growth and and making RPS more visible and transparent with the community. Um, and I just and I'm gonna get all my stuff out the way real quick, y'all. My my other uh concern was that in in the part of you saying that as we do uh the three steps that we will require each school to to pick one thing. I think that's great as the system grows. My concern then is how do we make sure that we're not having as you said I understand we're going to triage the schools out and they will have their assessment but I would

081think in the implementation of rolling out something new we would have more benefit of still maintaining some control of what needs to be assessed in the school as they grow into this new system. I I think that um my concern would be as you said we that they were required to choose one thing from each tier. Uh but we will have some schools that are going to say we're we want to address something from each tier, right? Um and I would not want to start to create a public school system where we have seven standout schools that everybody's trying to get their kids into and other schools where they're just doing the bare minimum. And you know, we're and especially when we're talking about um keeping up enrollment rates and and bolstering, you know, um

082confidence in our community that, you know, we want them to, you know, attend, you know, the RPS program. I I don't I I would like to see something that um would not allow uh for that kind of variation. um where we have the you know and and I know you said we're not doing it to demonize or to make one school worse than the other, but let's be honest that that's what will happen if we have I don't know if it'll be a green light, yellow light, red light, whatever, but if we have schools that are consistently in the green and and achieving in all these spaces, as a parent, I would be looking at these schools saying, "Well, I would want my child to attend this elementary school over the other." So then what

083will happen in those schools that are struggling due to the um measurement that they chose to you know be judged on or they chose to focus on. Um, and I don't know if this really is is question based, but I would also say that um, when I looked at the weaknesses that I just uh, was looking at today um, and where my passion is, my concern of the weaknesses that are listed on that second page and I'm trying to pull up you all. Um, I don't the potential weaknesses of the skip. I don't know if everyone is aware, but that list of weaknesses are exactly the issues that feel as a disparities with black and Hispanic kids. Um, the over over testing, the mental health supports not being in place, the lack of early childhood.

084Um, I did pull up a I did find a 2022 study um that is focused on young boys of color and these are the exact issues that they say are creating um the disparities um that we are trying to fight against. And I don't know how we make our system so that it it doesn't have so many of the markers but it pretty much has all of them as most systems do. So my concern or my question or my plea to you all is how do we create a system that does not have to constantly be amended if we know that some of the weaknesses in our system that we are creating already um continue to uh feed upon the disparities that we already have. So if we already know that these things are what

085are creating the disparities, the the lack of early childhood focus, the lack of mental health supports and the over testing are big big key words when you look at the disparities. Um I'm concerned about creating a a new system that just continues to feed into the disparities of the of the old system that we are I hopefully all are here um trying to prevent. um seeing more of our youth being incarcerated, especially that's um thank you. Um we did add the mental health for that reason after we got that feedback. So the mental health would be there now in the critical school structures. Um I I I don't I think we have an appropriate level of emphasis on standardized testing. There's a lot of other measures there that are not standardized tests. So, I think

086some of the feedback, there are some folks that would like to see no standardized tests. Um, we have a lot of other measures here that would allow schools to show progress besides the MCA and and the ACT scores. And we took the fast bridge out of this part of the system for that reason. Um, the early childhood piece really is just I don't believe we're going to underemphasize early childhood. our early childhood programming that is truly early childhood is not within the control or responsibility of our elementary schools. So to say you're measuring like what Erica Schumacher does with the early childhood, it's really not an elementary school measure. It needs to be in our system measures that are not in before us right now. And the other thing that's just really hard is because

087the kids are so little, what are our measures of effectiveness for early childhood? I completely agree with you. if we had good measures for this system, I would want to include it as well. And so we can go back and keep thinking about that one right now. Um I agree early childhood is critical. And uh are there measures for instance like percentage of kids who would benefit that we're serving in the community in early childhood? That could be one. Parental satisfaction with early childhood could potentially be another. those would be happening in our early childhood programs as opposed to the elementary schools. Um so we'll take that feedback and we'll give that some thought um going forward for the for the the the next piece. Um in terms of the parent and caregivers on the

088team, thank you. That's I I see both sides of that one as well for sure. So that's one I've tried to give um some thought. And I I think finally you're concerned Director Whitehorn about the variation in initiatives that this system would allow. Meaning again there's still common goals, there's still common performance measures, but that schools would be saying based on the data, this is our school's challenge and here's our initiative. This is our school's. You're absolutely right that this board needs to be um and my recommendation is to allow for that variation based on differences in student needs by school. But you're absolutely right. This would potentially have schools reporting to on the future skip visits sharing with board members very different priorities for improvement across the system based on their data. And that's

089a very important thing for you as a board to you know uh think about uh and and balance against the benefits of having the same strategies in place across the system. So thank you. I don't want to try and rebut. I want to say we heard those those are those are three really big issues that we'll think about as we get ready for next week. And I will just I'm sorry just real quick just to add so you know I know that I'm I'm aware of the early childhood is different but um with our kids of color they're entering into even the RPS system earlier because of them being on these IEPs and different things. So, you know, they have a little bit sooner involvement. So they are already being tracked and tested, you know,

090in, you know, even though they're in a preschool or early childhood setting, you know, RPS is, you know, already involved with a lot of these kids. So I don't know, you know, I know that they are two different systems, but when you have a child who has been identified as need-based or needing additional supports, um, a lot of them do do programming that is, you know, out of RPS or RPS staff. So, I don't know how um how we locate all of that data and how we include that, but I guess that that that is one of the key indicators with the disparities that kids of color are on IEPs much sooner. Um so, RPS does have the ability to I know we can track that in some ways. Um and they are being tested

091and um by different measures. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think we can bring some thinking on that uh to future discussions. Thank you, Dr. I also had a lot of thoughts on this and I um just start out briefly by by saying I I really appreciate the level of uh detail that you brought to the board and your instinct that this is an appropriate um structure for the board to weigh in on and and hopefully endorse in some way. Um your uh your quote from Patrick Wion at the table group a management consultant. I've actually read a bunch of his books really and uh he has his he's got a bunch of them but one is about the five dysfunctions of a team and it it it mar it marries up so well with a

092lot of the work that we've been trying to push at RPS about the the foundation of it is trust. You have to have people able to be vulnerable so that they can take risks and they can really engage um to collaborate effectively. And then ultimately you have to align on what the measurables are because that's sort of like a an old management chestnut that only what is measured gets managed or improved. Um and that's totally true. If you decide what the thing is that you're going to measure, then you have some way of tracking and improving over time, right? Um the other side of the one of the statements both in the memo and the presentation that um not everything that matters can be measured. Um Einstein has attributed with a more expanded version of

093that quote that um and not everything that can be measured matters. Right? So, um, when I was looking at this, I was I I have some thoughts also on the parental involvement, but I'm going to come back to that after I talk about a couple of other things because I do think that the board should really carefully consider what it is that we're going to have our systems align on for their measures of success that they're going to be pointing toward. Um, and as I was looking at that list, a couple things jumped out at me. One was why are we putting chronic absenteeism in the measures for student outcomes rather than um the learning environment measures and I I just wasn't sure if there was a a thought behind that. Um I also was

094looking carefully to see recognizing that not everything that matters can be measured. Are these all things that make sense that we would expect to be meaningful in creating the kind of school environments that we um that we prioritize? And um in general um when I looked at most of the the measures in the third category, the school structures um I I wasn't it wasn't clear to me that those were things that were important to be separately measured. Many of them seemed important for sure, the MTSS um structures and so forth. um but they they look like they could also be interpreted as um action items or interventions for the purpose of trying to drive some of the other measurable components. And I I just wasn't sure whether it made sense to have those that self-

095assessment mechanism for determining whether the structures were in place as a skip goal itself. Um and then the uh and then on the on the parental involvement I I don't share your concern Dr. Keel that that parents would not um just because they are so tied to their own family experience would uh not be able to contribute meaningfully to schoolwide um improvements. My concern with requiring parental involvement as opposed to inviting it and welcoming it um is that I don't have a high degree of confidence that there are parents who are able to contribute that amount of investment of time at every single one of our schools and mandating it might artificially create some burdens that we don't really intend to. Um if you could share some information about what kind of investment of time

096you anticipate for involvement on the skip um review committee itself. I think that would be helpful for the board to just have an understanding. And then the last And getting back to the measures, um, one of the things I was imagining as I was looking at this is like what types of improvement initiatives skip teams might dream up. And it's pretty easy to imagine that if the priority is literacy by third grade, those measures align pretty well with how to go about doing that, especially because of the three-year time horizon. Or uh, graduation rates. Another one. Um, I wasn't it wasn't obvious to me how a skip team would use the measures that are there now to assess whether every single kid or a meaningful proportion of students in their school were engaged in deeper

097learning at some point in the school year. Um, and so I thought maybe that's something that we want to be able to measure if there's a good way to do that. We've spent a lot of time aligning on a definition of that so that it can be recognized. Um, and then the other measure that I thought about was um, reflecting back on the MTSS report that the University of Minnesota prepared for us, um, the proportion of students identified for special education service and whether there was a directional change in that or just overall um, and whether that percentage of students identified for special education services is meaningful of in and of itself. itself given that you know we heard that when that is above 20% or so that's an indication that your MTSS is not

098uh sufficient to the task perhaps. Um so those are those are some of my thoughts and and thank you again. I I really am excited about this work and glad that we're engaged in it. Um yeah, thank you. Um the where we grouped chronic absenteeism is a really interesting point. And you're right, suspensions are in the learning environment. Uh chronic absenteeism could be in the learning environment, too. That's kind of an category piece, but it would it potentially would make a lot more sense there. So, thank you for that. The logic of including those school structures in the skip process is that we know from a lot of research and also kind of common sense that if you don't have effective versions of those structures, your capacity to execute on the other objectives is going

099to be diminished or maybe non-existent. So you're right, you could just have them not in the skip process and make them tools to support it. I think our experience is that um elevating it to the skip process greatly increases the chances that those things will be attended to and done well. It's and that's one reason why the board's approval is a big deal because we're saying that the caliber of your functioning of your skip team, of your PLC's, of your MTSS system, um is of such importance that the school board, the superintendent, the community want every three years for you to assess the effectiveness of these structures in your school. And where you self-identify gaps in the effectiveness, you need to put in place strategies to address them. Um, so it's really elevating that piece

100of the effectiveness of those structures to the level of the improvement process. Um, because I worry that if it's not there, those will be things that would be episodically utilized. But it's that the logic of it. Um, the positive of not doing that would be simplicity. And so I think that's a really interesting point that we'll take into consideration because you could make those tools available as supporting resources and not necessarily have every school need to do them in the process. So we back to the idea of you know reducing the focus. Yeah. Yeah. Potentially. Um, I thought a ton about the issue of special ed identification and concluded, including after conversation with both our special education folks and school psychologists, that would be an inappropriate measure to have as a school individual improvement goal

101in so far as we want um our evaluation teams objectively measuring kids for disabilities absent any pressure to either um push them over the line to get them services or don't identify them. As you know, we have huge work ahead of us to be sure we are not identifying kids, I think director Whitehorn's comment references this as well as having disabilities who simply have not had good instruction or who have needed, you know, that's huge. I think that lives at the system level like enrollment, like early childhood. These are the things an individual elementary, middle or high school can use for improvement. I think both that and the early childhood are uh and enrollment are prime candidates for system uh level measures essentially how you'd be looking at the work I'm doing in the you

102know leadership team is doing going forward. So that was the logic. I I I think I also say one thing about the issue of parental involvement and I didn't say it because I I frankly I know this for some people it it it may be a somewhat contentious issue and I didn't want to you know create a us versus them dynamic. The feedback I got from our administrators was overwhelmingly supportive of uh recommended but not required for parental involvement on the skip teams overwhelmingly. So this is not just my conclusion and that was significant. I still think it's a super important discussion to have. Um and my my recommendation of making it recommended but not required is not just uh verbiage. I would authentically be encouraging it and then if we find as I think

103might be the case that it is effective one two or three years from now we could be talking about shifting from recommended to required which is of course how we did our cell phone policy. It's how we did you know we've piloted things before we've gone to the required piece. Um to your question of when most skip teams are meeting what it was logistics that also was part of the issue. They meet during the workday because otherwise you're doing stipens and asking teachers to come in the evening and they meet when they can fit it into the school schedule. And so there for a lot of parents and caregivers there would be a real select out issue just with the logistics. It's at least monthly. Some meet much more than that. Some have subcommittees but

104this process is going to be a quantum leap in the importance of our skip teams. So, I think we can't read too much into how busy they've been in the past to how busy they're going to be in the future because they're going to have a lot more uh decisions to make if this process is improved. So I think um it's a great question of what would the logistics be and if a parent or caregiver was involved which ones would be able to come like at you know 2:30 p.m. during a during a workday was one of the things I know when we when we queried our principles that they were concerned just about the logistics of it. That was definitely true in all of the uh conversations we had with principal students. Exactly those

105two things, the logistics when the team meets and then a stronger and I just want to give you a chance to clarify because you've said it a few times and it appears a few different places that um there is an additional set of systemwide district level uh performance indicators goals um that may cover some of the similar areas but also different areas that aren't covered in the skip goals. Can you elaborate on that a little bit how that might come to the board and where it fits into all of this work? Um yes I can. I think I mean that's why this study session is is so helpful. I think what we bring you next week without bringing you a set of what those um will be because we need to do more homework on

106that. I think we can bring you some exemplars. Um I've mentioned three of them. enrollment uh identification and support rates for kids with disabilities, early childhood participation and quality. You mentioned deeper learning. The ambitious instruction domain on the 5e survey gets at a lot of that. But I would agree that's something that is very hard to include in your school improvement process, but is what we're all about um in a lot of ways. So that's another one where we think about how actually might we be um measuring kids experience of deeper learning but not necessarily say it's something that you're actually putting in your skip plan to improve by 3%. You know how do you improve deeper learning by 3%. But can we actually you know we did through our project that's concluding this year

107and you'll get an update at an upcoming board meeting. We did develop measures of deeper learning that are about the experience kids and teachers have had that I think are very valuable for improvement purposes. I wouldn't want to have a school necessarily saying we have to increase by 6% the percentage of kids that are reporting on this one survey deeper learning because it's very subjective. Like one kid's experience of deeper learning is not another kid's like this is how my class, you know, it doesn't particularly float my boat kind of a thing. But I think there are some of those other uh things that could be outside this process but part of our um strategy going forward for sure. The other thing that's not here because we said it's not uh something individual schools the

108diversity of our staff critical goal for us but it's not something that right now schools don't go out and recruit staff beyond RPS. That's something that we need to be bringing in so then they can interview those diverse staff and hire them. But it's that's another example of more of a I'm trying not to say district level because we're all the district. I say system level, but district level measure potentially. And so yes, I think we could bring uh we could bring because this is just a week away. I think we can bring a commitment to develop parallel measures of the system that you could you we can talk about a timeline for the development of those process. The reason that we haven't done that is because um we've assumed that those will come a

109lot out of the development of the next strategic plan. And so that as the next strategic plan is developed, a lot of those system measures will be influenced by what you ultimately approve to put in the strategic plan. But there are some like the ones we've been talking about that are really good prospects that we could, I think, hold up in advance of that process. Thank you. First of all, um I enjoyed reading the uh the 12-page memo and the 14 page uh presentation. That being said, put that on the record. Um, as I think of um parent and caregiver um involvement, um I view that the ultimate power of parents and caregivers is where they choose to enroll their children. And based on that alone is why I think it's important to um extend

110the opportunity beyond uh not to mandate, not to require, but to certainly welcome and actively uh uh seek that input for those who are able. uh and perhaps allow it to be more than just a u point in time, given day, given location. But uh perhaps as many of our surveys are administered, uh we could potentially create an opportunity for parental input to occur that may be part of the process of consideration. Um hasn't been mentioned. I will um raise it as a area of concern and that is um are we anticipating any potential uh disruption in funding um due to uh uh federal and and no one can answer this. I know. Who knows? But uh are we considering though? Uh what would we do if you know all of a sudden um uh

111be it the federal dollars uh I1 18 million or whatever were to no longer be there? How would that and this is my question. How would that affect, if you will, uh our improvement goals and improvement initiatives? how greatly would they be affected should something like that occur. And um then finally as related to the uh development of I think the term was used RPS model uh well I think Dr. Pel you used it in reference to some of the work that Dr. Ruck might so align with and compared to I guess that's my question in terms of the RPS model what be aligned to what what it be compared to. Are we simply comparing oursel to oursel or where we were this time last year or a year ago? I'm just kind of curious

112in that either. Yeah. Thank you. And obviously, Madam Chair, I'm not I'm not waiting for you to kind of give me the give me the ball. Right. Okay. Yeah. Um in terms of the federal funding piece, you're right. We don't know. And yes, it would impact the most immediate impact would be the loss of title one funding for the expanded number of schools that would receive it through this uh through the balanced budget model and then this proposal. Um if that happened, we would obviously have to um rethink the balanced budget model uh in a pretty fundamental way um for next year because a lot of that additional resource to serve kids who live in poverty is coming through the first is the state of Minnesota's compensatory funding which is also under discussion at the

113state level and then the the um title it would it would be a real tragedy because those are the dollars to ser the students who need the support the most. Um, I think it would not mean the end of our improvement initiatives. I mean, we it still is a relatively small share of our total budget, but about 4% of the general fund, but it's targeted money for schools that are doing a lot of the heaviest heaviest lifting. Um, so we would need to um I think be realistic about how ambitious we could be absent those dollars for some of our schools that need to put in place the most sports for kids. Um, and so we're watching that, you know, all the time. In terms of that that RPS model piece, it it really, and

114maybe that's a little bit of a grandiose term. And it was the point that I think director Cook was raising a very interesting question. Does that really belong in the school improvement structure or are those tools that we build out for schools? So that's something I think we'll give a lot of thought to. The idea of a model was really saying when we think about literacy, when we think about math, when we think about uh behavior, when we think about student motivation, these are the essentials. These are the things we want all of our schools to have in place and then building a self assessment that a school can use to say, how are we doing on these essentials? Uh I was at Bishop this afternoon meeting with uh Bishop Elementary the team and administrators

115and they were talking a lot about their what we call tier three interventions and literacy their most struggling kids and how they've worked very hard to have common time for those kids to be working with reading specialists and teachers in an intensive way. And this was something they've spent a lot of time on thinking that would certainly be part of our literacy model if we built it out. we'd be saying you need those interventions that are intensive for that 5% hopefully no more of kids that are really struggling. So they were pretty proud of this which was wonderful to hear. Another school might have a lot of heavy lifting to do to build out their title three support but the model would essentially say here's what it looks like for the kids who are way

116behind in reading. Do you have the common time? Do you have the specialist support? Do you have um the uh collaboration time for teachers? And it would be a way of having them assess the quality of their what we call tier three interventions for the most struggling kids. And that would be as something that a school for instance if we built that out could come away from that saying whoa we're doing okay with tier one in the classroom and maybe our tier 2 group interventions are good but we are lacking that intensive support for a student who is basically sitting in the class not able to access the curriculum at all because of reading. And then that might become one of their skip goals is or their skip initiatives is building out that tier three

117instruction. That was the logic of having that piece in there that that there there may be a way we can include that and actually simplify the structure by not necessarily including that in the the structure of the skip. So we'll give that some thought. Okay. Um so I've been kind of mulling this over. It's it's kind of into the weeds, but I'm going to go there anyway. having been a former teacher. Um, teachers observe each other's practice and work together to review assessment data and develop instructional strategies. So, just a couple of of practical questions or comments on that is if you are the teacher of a class where you are the only teacher of that subject in that building, I would have to go to another school to observe someone else. And we've done

118that in the It would require a lot of logistics and the same thing even in building if you're a social studies teacher and you want to go social studies teachers then that class would have to have a substitute for that time. Do we have first of all do we have the capacity to do that and then the second piece of that work together to review assessment data and develop instructional strategies. Um as you I mentioned earlier a lot of this is very very subjective especially in the area of the arts and how do you have assessment data I mean I can't tell you the number of meetings I had to sit in and try to participate when they are discussing breaking down data from science or math or something else and they've got all these

119new charts and everything is and it's like I can't really do so that would be my one of my concerns about this collaboration piece and what that looks like. Yeah, thank you. The the the logic of including the 5e framework would be that it would inform and prompt discussions of precisely that point. So if you were in a school and your teacher said, "No, I never have the chance to look at data and collaborate." You could take a step back and look at that data and say, "hm, well, is that our special area teachers? Is that art, music, and this?" You're probably right. They are not getting the chance to essentially refine their practice with colleagues in their subject area. We don't have them in their building. Can we work with other schools or the

120district to create that? We are not doing much of that right now in an ongoing way. So, the data might push for that change. if you were looking at it. And then in terms of the, you know, the challenge you had as a music teacher, you know, sitting in those meetings, this proposal does put reading and math at the center of school improvement. And it does so not suggesting that music, art, science, social, I was a socialist teacher, are not critical, but it's saying that those are foundational uh gateways to learning in other areas. Um, we would have to be very very very diligent in not overemphasizing that. I mean, it seems to me that there's going to be a really heavy burden on English and math teachers in in this model. And you know,

121it's like, well, when that's happening, what is everybody else doing? I think as as long as we don't suggest the only thing a school should be doing is improving reading and math scores, I I think we can lean into that tension. I mean, you also have to remember I've been out of the classroom for 15 years. I hate to say that. 15 years. So things are a lot different than they were when I was there. But um just some of the practical applications of how this I think too our secondary schools are increasingly seeing responsibility. Just to give you a quick example, I remember um when I was teaching fourth grade beginning orchestra and I would with the classroom teacher when she was teaching fractions because that really had a lot to do with teaching

122and making that kind of a tie in. So, you're right. There are a lot of things that tie into it in a maybe not so thank you. Think about those. Um I had one followup. Um Dr. something you had said earlier and then a couple a question about the IE um when you talked about how to measure the postsecary enrollment you talked about the transcript request is that the only way we measure that or are there other ways to do that thinking about that people request transcripts they might not go or my experience I think when my son transferred he had to request transcripts another year so he would be double counted I wouldn't want that to happen no it's a thank you for clarifying it when I mentioned transcripts I simply trying to suggest

123that there is a more formal pathway from secondary to post-secary than from secondary to the workforce. Um the measurement is actual enrollment and so we get very good data um from most any post-secary institution um that is an accredited institution including technical schools. And so it's an actual enrollment data through the statewide longitudinal education data system. our sleds. So that's the that's the measure we'd be using. And then we haven't really touched on this. Um military engagement, is that part of that as well? It it you know if they well certainly if they go to a service academy it is um I don't think Peter that military service is in sleds but we actually get um data through deed on military. Correct. Yeah, it's not list but we could that we could take a look

124at because that's that's that what happens is you get workforce categories through the department of economic employment but military is a very seg very very defined category so like you really can measure that with a lot of precision there's not like a non US government branch of the military so that's interesting we could at least not yet I mean listeners are actually right Yeah. So we could um we could take a look at military service too as adding that that's an interesting point. And where would um enrollment in apprenticeship programs in the trades? It would have to be at an accredited postsecondary institution. So you'd be affiliated but not like the or not in a way that I'd feel comfortable tying it to an individual school. But if a school is sending more kids off

125to RCTC in welding or things, we're seeing improvement in preparing kids for the trades, even if our measure doesn't encompass every kid going into the trades. That's why I think you have to see these measures as relevant but limited. So if we're seeing, oh my gosh, more and more kids from Century High School are going to accredited technical postsecary institutions. There's reason to believe we're doing a better and better job of preparing kids who don't want to go to a four-year college and are finding their path even though we wouldn't necessarily have I'm doing an apprenticeship with a union that is going to lead me to a trade absent a credential. Frequently two union programs are tied some dimension of a formal institution and so you get it that way. Second part of my question

126is I noticed in the I like the I think it's it's really um helpful to understand how this is considered and I also like the fact that it's ultimately in your presentation tied to budgets. But one of the things I noticed is that in the 5e two-pager that you handed out um or sent to us, it includes freshman on track as one of the measures. And in my prior work experience, that was a huge um anecdotal piece of what I was always looking with the young people I was seeing in court. Um, and that's not included in your measures, but then the suspensions is and that's not in the 5. Can you help us understand that? Um, oh gosh, what a great question. Freshman on track would be one of our performance indicators at the

127bottom of the system as a because freshman on track leads up to grad rates. So, it would absolutely be one like a subset monitoring indicator. Yeah, it is. And we're actually sending a team off tied to our participation in the state attendance pilot to Chicago this summer to really begin the reinvisioning of the nth grade year tied to the onra. So we're measuring it, but it then leads to the four-year graduation rate. That's the that's and and we would also be able to share that data with the board, with the community. It just wouldn't be the the dashboard goal that you're aiming for. It would be a pro progress monitoring indicator on the way to graduation. And Peter did some statistical analysis this year that looked at essentially attendance, behavior, and grades for nth grade

128that was very predictive of completion of high school. And that's what we'd be building into that progress monitoring part in the bottom of this. And I should add to that, my prayer work, it was all those things. It was the attendance, the grades, and um what was the third one said? Behavior, discipline rates. Yes. That's why they were in court. They weren't there for the cookies. Well, I did see some of the overlap of attendance, but that's that I mean, it was, you know, anecdotally, it was evident which the kids were really going to struggle to graduate and as my would see them through various years, they were the ones that were not. So, I appreciate that. And then how about the part about um suspensions not being part of the 5B, but that's something

129you're including in the environment. We thought deeply about measures of discipline and discipline disparities. And as you know, we have tried in our current version to use what are called level two infractions as an improvement indicator. And it has been a very problematic indicator because that's basically something the kid gets sent to the office for. and schools, individual educators, teachers, counselors make decisions about essentially sending a kid to the office for reasons that are um complex and multifaceted, which is not to say that having clear criteria for what a level two infraction is doesn't matter. It does. We've made, I think, a lot of progress in giving criteria and making sure that those are getting recorded, but it's not a good measure for improvement because you're you're sending that kid to the office or you're

130asking a counselor to come and get the kid and work with the kid because of dysregulation or because of the there's a multitude of reasons. So to include that as a essentially a measure of our school environment is is really problematic. However, when a kid is getting suspended, they are not learning. They're not in class and it's a highly consequential decision that we want to be uh rare but used when absolutely necessary. And so tying suspensions to our school improvement goal allows schools and requires schools to be very deliberate and transparent about how many kids are getting suspended. Uh of course disparities in suspensions amongst groups. Um and it will promote discussions um within schools and with us about what do we do to get those suspension rates down. So that's the logic of tying

131it to suspensions. Um and of course there also are state laws that are saying we can't suspend um very little kids um now which so that that suspension measure really would be upper elementary, middle and high school if you approve that. That was the logic of that one. Um so and the direct to director Cook's point if we move attendance to that category we would have 5e as learning environment measures attendance as a student engagement measure and essentially suspensions as a school discipline sash safety uh measure that we could be looking at and just a follow can you explain from your research background why suspensions isn't really considered in the 5e or is it a subset of something else that I'm not understanding 5e grew initially, even though school is now, even though it's now

132used in in thousands and thousands of middle and high schools, it grew out of research at the elementary level. And so there are little kids that have always been sadly suspended, but it's not nearly the phenomenon it is at the middle and high school levels. And so when they looked at the factors that were predicting improvement in elementary schools, it didn't rise to the top as one of the big factors that uh was uh associated with fastimproving elementary schools. 5e is really about what are the things that help a school improve academically in reading and math rapidly um or be high performing. So it's either you're improving fast or you're you're high performing. And in that original research suspensions wasn't uh didn't prove to be a very influential factor. I think in part because it

133was elementary schools like any measure 5 is not not perfect. Um but I think it's it's potentially a good fit for us right now. That's good background to think about though as we think So, I want to ask a question about the needs assessment and how that differs from the other data and where do you get it from? That's a great question because if if I wasn't pretty clear, that's a key thing. The needs assessment is using the data on the performance measures that you would approve. It's a deep dive into the measures we're talking about now. A deep dive that's done every three years in a very Now you're going to look at them in the intervening years. Doesn't mean you only look at them once every three years, but you're going deep with

134that needs assessment and then you're designing your improvement measures. So it would be with your suspension data, with your 5e data, with your MCA scores, with your ACT scores, um with your self assessment if we keep it in the system of those key school structures. And part of what we're preparing for schools are essentially incorporates all also the goal of people should spend time reflecting on it trying to find it. So that's the part of our work this summer is developing. So we have a data set performance measures deep um in and That'll be one of the fun fun things um of building out. But in a nutshell, in my experience in doing that, you're looking at the data set and the first level is understanding it. What's it actually telling you? What is the

135ambitious instruction scale on the 5e or the suspension data or the test? What's it actually measuring it? The first is just understand the measure. And then the second is looking at your uh outcomes and your trends and and asking the question, why might that be happening? Why might parents be responding to the 5e survey that way? Why might kids in this group be getting suspended at rates that are higher? And it's really forming that hypothesis. And then you are and you're not doing that simplistically. There's a a a protocol that gets used fairly often in schools called the five W's where you establish your well we think it's this why. Okay, we think it's this why. We think it's this. You're probing. That's still a hypothesis that then you test with more dialogue with uh

136the team and eventually leading to and so therefore this is our implementation strategy. Um, one question that we've talked about is can schools manage that process effectively themselves or do we need the build the capacity in the central office to go in and help a school conduct their needs assessment meaning literally running that process for them. The positive of that is that you can build people who are really good at it and they can go in and they can really do it um uh with a lot of experience. The negative is they're not in the building when you're actually serving kids and working with families. You know, um, one thing I know we need to do and we've already begun to do, but we will be in much more explicit way is have explicit centers

137of expertise on our staff in central office in every one of those performance measures. So, we have very clear these are our go-to people in literacy. this is in math, this is in uh suspensions, this is in and they are charged with knowing the research, knowing the data, knowing the initiatives that are proving effective. Um, and that they are the resource people that our schools are asking for when I say I have a chronic attendance problem with my ninth graders kind of to director Mcloffin's point. So, what do I do about it? They know the research around effective strategies and they know what's working in Rochester. you know, you ought to go over and visit Kellogg about that or you ought to go to uh Franklin and take a look at that. So, that's another

138piece of that that comes after the needs assessment, but it's they've got to be part of it, too. Um just just to add to that, a really um really linear way to look at that is that the sites are looking at their measures and the step down is that they need to figure out what their story is. So that needs assessment process is getting them to drill in, ask the questions, formulate what their story is and what's unique about their site as it relates to that measure. Um through that process, they identify what levers are within their control to be able to make impacts and and to tie back up to that measure and make make that measure move the way they want it to. And then based on those le levers that they're identifying

139through that needs assessment process, the storytelling process, they're identifying the action. So they're getting the they're getting the process from the top level success measure um all the way through to the action that's going to come up in their script. Can I just add I used this process at Riverside 10 years ago um with the help from centers of excellence and I can picture myself in the conference room with the leadership team and the moment we did we did the five W's through the needs assessment and I I can picture myself right where I was when we got to the like aha moment where we said this is our issue and it felt really good I mean it felt bad and good felt good to name and have everyone agree in that room, the teacher

140is to say it's our core instruction in reading. And um once we sort of you accept it, this is this is where we're at right now and we have to we have to come up with some solutions now instead of throwing darts, you know, prior to that saying, well, it's because we're doing all these moveins, you know, or kids that are moving in. We were guessing at why we weren't moving the needle. when we actually engaged in this process and really, you know, took a deep dive and asked ourselves the five W's and um went through this kind of difficult process but kind of a cleansing process and then worked with the experts to say well what can we do about it? We started to move the needle. I think too if I I know

141I know this uh this seems overwhelming that's why it's a year out from implementation like I have a lot of impatience for this but like to do this well so so one example that I'm thinking of you know graduation rates which we are about a month we we think although the state department of education is giving us some conflicting signals we're probably about a month away from our graduation finding out our graduation rates for the class of 2003 23 and we don't have the capacity to measure that accurately internally because the state can measure where kids went who we don't know exactly what happened. So I'm certainly and we we'll put that's on the board agenda and we'll be briefing. My first year we had a really nice 10% increase in our graduates. The second

142year we had a not quite 10% decline but individual schools were different. One of the things that we need to be doing in that space of graduation rates is to director McGofflin's point giving them data on the gradetograde promotion rates that hit long before that kid is not walking across the stage on time. But then when we get that graduation rate, who were the kids who didn't graduate on time with specificity, the specific kids? And then chair Nathan to your question of what's in the what's in the needs assessment understanding with specificity what kept those kids from graduating not a generalized thought because we can identify the exact kids that were supposed to graduate and didn't and then going out and connecting with the kids connecting with families connecting with counselors and saying what were

143the factors that stopped that kid from walking across the stage and That takes time. That's why you only do this once every three years. We if we can't do this, if I But then we come out of that with saying, you know what, these are the three things that emerged from our analysis of those 47 kids. And we we know that from the kids who didn't. It was uh you know, failure to acrue credits at this point. It was lack of understanding on the students part of where they really were with uh credit acrruel and it was the parents uh weren't informed early enough to get engaged with. Those are just potential things. So now we're going to put in place an early warning system that says this kid needs to know exactly where they

144need to be. We need to have parent notification and we need to have a mentor who the student can go to for that support. So that's where that needs assessment becomes pretty labor intensive. And you said it a few times about using next year to do the work so that it's not implemented till 2026 27. Does that mean that the budget that the board would approve in the 26 27 school year would reflect the skip 2.0 generation one gone right after having gone through all of these preparations we'd be bringing you a skip a set of a budget proposal and a report on our skip goals that will look very different from the past it will be saying these are the goals at Willow Creek that they've identified these are the goals at Bamber Valley

145these are the goals at John Marshall and and here's the data that they had behind it to identify these goals and here's how their budget ties to those goals Um and so that then you're approving it in the aggregate. We're approving based on criteria that you give us each skip plan as and budget as ready to go for the next year. I almost lost my thought. Almost I lost something. Sorry. Okay. Um So, I I I've been listening to all the feedback and and something that um Director Cook said is has been sticking with me about um how not everything um what' you say? Not everything that's measurable matters and not everything that matters. Um yeah, um so wi with that in mind and and um I've read through most of this uh um the

146majority highlight. Uh but even in the 5e um even when you dig deeper into your attached document, they do have kind of a heavy emphasis on that parent involvement or caregiver involvement. Um and I've listened to what everyone has said about uh versus mandating, not mandating. Um, and I I will say this, uh, if we don't mandate it, um, it it's it's a conflicting it conflicts directly with what the 5e is requiring. But I I want you to hear me out. I I'm listening to everyone and I I'm a little concerned with a lot of the in the box thinking that we're using right now. Um because I think we're looking at it from a very nto-five perspective, a very uh timerestrictive perspective. And I guess I wasn't viewing it from that point. I I

147wasn't viewing this community involvement from we need to have a parent at this meeting at 2:35 p.m. in the middle of the school day. Um I think that we have kind of boxed it in which is what is creating the logistic um concerns. Um teaching and education is a community service position. We would like to say it's a nineto-ive but it's really not. If you're really looking to create students that are thriving wholesome individuals just like a police officer or a doctor. You know what? If there wasn't a 24-hour ER, I mean, some job. We're not, this is not a banking position where we're working in 8 to 5. You're working with families. You're working with children. Um, and I'm concerned with all of the feedback that's coming back. Sounds like this impedes upon my

148supplement. And that that's that's what I'm hearing. I'm not hearing a lot of concerns of, you know, there there are some concerns with whether or not the parents would be able to to fully understand the the process. Um, but I think that's that that's ruling folks out that that's putting parents in a box. We are in a public school environment where we have a myriad of parents with a myriad of different educational levels. Um, I think for any of us to make the assumption that there are not one or two parents in the school that would be totally on board is is I I I'm concerned with that. I I that just concerns me. It also concerns me that we are putting it in a box where especially now we live in a day and

149age where there are so many ways to communicate um and that we have just downed it to this we are we going to be able to find a good parent that can fit in this spot. Um there are so many ways that we can enact this parent engagement. We did talk briefly about um the surveys. Well, if this is if we're going to take that parent involvement number seriously, maybe we seriously say, you know, we need a higher number of these surveys returned. I I just think there's that we're not looking at all of the different ways that we don't even necessarily have to create something new, but we can already use some of the things that we have to create that mandate. I think everybody's brain went right to finding a parent to sit

150at this meeting as opposed to um could the mandate be that we need to have a certain p percentage of um parent responses before we you know you know you know in agreement or you know I just think there's other ways that we can we can we can implement um a requirement of parent involvement. It doesn't have to be um I think what everyone is already thinking that it just has to be a parent that has to be there and has to commit these time. I mean, I I I think that there's so many ways that we can we can look at doing this besides just that traditional sit in the meeting way, right? Um so I would I would implore all of us to look outside the box. And then something else that has

151come up since we've been talking a lot about data um and you know this is very data centered and um to chair Nathan asking about the deeper dive and the information that we receive when we get this. Um another thought that I have and this is it it may be you know as I I like what I directed workman said maybe I'm off in the weeds somewhere but it came up to to thought to me is how are we interpreting the data? So, even when she was speaking of the the suspensions and you were saying on the tier 2 suspensions, but there are so many ways this data can be interpreted. It doesn't just have to be from the student perspective. And I'm I might upset someone when I say this, but it can also

152be from the educator's perspective. Do we have educators that are chronically sending kids to the office? You know, why, you know, are we only looking at this data from one perspective? Are we truly using the data in the multiaceted ways that it could be used to improve our school environment? Right? I I mean I I feel that we have I understand the importance of setting up those goalposts and having a a a direct vision on what we're doing and I agree with that. I don't I I don't agree that we can fix everything, but I do think that it's valuable in saying we it's not about collecting new things, but maybe the data that we already have can be looked at in some other ways that can also be benefic beneficial to us. Um creating

153a healthier school environment. Um and again looking outside the box in ways that we can involve parents and we can you know I think by using the word mandated it's a it's a dirty word but you know all the other people are required to do their part and I don't I don't think that that's a negative to require our parents to be involved with with their students. I just think that we may need to be inventive on what that looks like. Um, and it may be some tough conversations, but I don't think we should rule it out because they want to have their meeting at 2:30 or because parents may not understand the highleeness of creating a skip process. I just think that those things are, in my opinion, not good enough excuses to say

154that we can't find a way to involve the community. And being that this is a three-year plan, I I suggest in the reverse. I suggest that it it becomes a requirement. But I feel more so that if it's a requirement and it's successful, we won't have to continue to require it because parents will already be involved. But I think when we're at a space where we are struggling with parent involvement that the requirement may bolster that number that we can get to a space where we don't have to you know pull the teeth to get the community and the parent involved in director I think your emphasis on family engagement is really important and I'm wondering if the issue here is how be involved parents because I think the slide says advisory committees, special sessions,

155events that for me at least what this plan is saying is that parents need to be involved and there are lots of ways to have them involved in listening sessions and in regular meetings with the principal, whatever. I I think maybe what we're struggling with right now is should it be required that there would be one parent who would be a sitting member of that committee who would speak for every parent in that school? For me, that's really a fraud kind of deal that you tell one parent, you're in charge for knowing everything about everybody's kid and being the parent who is going to represent all of us. I just I and maybe I'm reading it wrong, but who would be a regular member of the team, it seems to me that asking more parents

156to be involved and to provide them with information and have them give feedback to me that's a great way of bringing the community together and and I guess that and I if I you don't mind if I respond, but I guess that's what I was getting at that maybe the the parent involvement requirement doesn't have to be a person. Maybe it's just that we have to have so many completed surveys or maybe we just have maybe it doesn't have to be in that box of we need a sitting parent on the board. But I just think that we should broaden what that looks like. And I don't think that there's any shame in requiring each school to to set that. And I think 20% is what someone said would be a very good number. But

157I don't think it has to be written that a person has to be it. But maybe if you know whatever we have to have 20% response from our our teachers and that I mean from our parents and maybe that helps with that connection. And I appreciate both of your comments because I was thinking along those lines as well. Um I I don't know what the uh record has been over these past few years when the schools have had skips about what we've seen in the parent engagement by the principal. have there been um how many of the schools have had a formal meeting or presentation at a PTA meeting or included it in their in their newsletter. I think if we're eventually perhaps going to get to the point where we have parents who are

158capable of sitting on a skip team, we have to do a far better job informing all the parents in a school about what their school's priority is. And I was also thinking of it from the context of how to help parents understand what their children's daytoday experience might look like because their school is chosen this goal or chosen this emphasis or chosen this initiative to implement. Um so I'm wondering if you know the requirement is and I'm wondering if there's something from other places that have used the 5e best practices. what are the best practices for principles to communicate out um either the results of the 5D survey or or improvement goals. So, and maybe that's what we ask the principles to do in this first year is a certain set of communication strategies or

159meetings. So, at least we know that every school is doing something to move toward a better informed parent community. like title one schools are required to share their improvement plans at a parent meeting. It's part of the title one grant requirements. Maybe we do something like that with this. That's a great idea. I think and yes and we'll bring some thoughts on this point. So thank you. Um I think the the paradigm shift here though I think our schools have done some of that. Certainly as Jackie pointed out there's been the title one but we basically told them what they had to put in their improvement initiatives up to this point. So they're really bringing people together to tell us what we made them do. So like they were good things. So I don't think

160they were embarrassed about it. You could still have done some This is very different. We have done our needs analysis. This is the priority for John Adams. This is the prior. It's going to be a very different um kind of energy if this is successful because they're going to be saying, "We need your feedback on this because we need to make sure this resonates with our parents and here's where we're headed." And they're going to have a lot more ownership of this under this new system than they have our first few years where we were basically saying you have to do MTSS and literacy, you have to do deeper learning. Um, so I think there's going to be a different energy around engaging families um, in this and and staff. I mean, we've had some

161staff uh, many who have not really been involved in the skip process in their buildings at all. It's been a subset of people. Again, this process, I believe, over time will greatly increase the reason for people to pay attention to their skip because they're going to have much more uh autonomy in deciding how they're reaching the goals that you are setting if this system is approved for the district with lots of guidance and support. So, I'm sorry. So, my followup question real quick on that is so I guess so something I said earlier. So what what is the I hate to say consequence but consequence is what I'm thinking. So what is the consequence of saying okay we got four schools that they don't have no no parent engagement you know they they only got

1625% coming I mean I I know we I know what it's saying encouraging it you know what I mean like like what what I I I struggle with that because if there's no consequence attached to not doing it if a school or a principal for whatever reason is struggling in that area and there's there's no reason that I that I have to do this, you know, we're just making a beautiful suggestion. I I I just I just wonder how how do we I I think these are wonderful. I've read through a lot of it and like I said, I think that it's a great system, but um to what director Cook was also saying like h how do we h some of this like like even when you look at the at the um at

163the family involves families like how do you measure some of these things you know parents and partners are improving their like I don't I don't some of this stuff is is is good stuff but it's so subjective that I don't see how we would be able to attach anything solid to it, right? Because principal A could be like, well, I think I do a wonderful job, right? They're only getting back 6% of their parent surveys, but but I but I I feel like, you know, I just I don't see and as to what the little quote, which I really think I like. I'm probably going to write that somewhere. um that yes it may not be easy to measure just like prevention is not easy to measure but if we're going to set this up

164as our standard I think we need to have a way if if we're saying this is our standard and this is what we expect of our schools to me standard says that this is what we want you to do and this is the consequence if this is not what you're doing otherwise we're just spending a lot of time making a lot of really lovely suggestions of things people ought to do. Um, which doesn't doesn't give us that push to a goal, right? Because you wouldn't drive the speed limit if there was no risk of you getting a speeding ticket, right? So, there there's got to be, I think, something attached to this that emphasizes the importance or or the I don't even know what I'm looking for. Does anybody understand where I'm going? Yeah, this

165year the the accountability mechanism okay that the I was looking for it in the memo and we will pull it out in what we bring you next week. But what the design says is that if a school in any of those performance measures has had um sustained low performance or downward trending, we will absolutely have the authority to direct their initiatives such that they no longer have that autonomy. And so it will be if they are showing up red on family engagement on the 5e for X years, which is a validated measure of it's a good measure. It's been statistically tested and it it also just it has what we call face validity. When people look at the 5e scores um and I've mostly talked to people in Chicago public schools where my sister-in-law is

166a principal, they don't look at the 5e and say that can't be true. They say oh yeah, they have a problem there. I mean it's a good measure and it doesn't doesn't mean we fire anybody or or give anybody a reward but it starts the discussion. If the school has sustained uh problems in effective leaders or in engaged families, we absolutely at the central office level would have the not just right but the responsibility to say okay your skip is going to have to have a very different structure next year because you are not you're not meeting goals. So that's a critical point, director Whitehorn, that isn't adequately here. There is autonomy, but there would absolutely be much more direction if we're seeing our schools that are not uh making progress on these goals. Do

167you mind if I add a comment to that? Yeah. Um I think it also points to the importance of having um the school structures or the the frameworks as part of our success measures specifically uh the skip team and the processes. If we're having an assessment and we're evaluating um how we are um performing those processes, how we are following through and the accountability at the site level for maintaining those processes, making sure the the parent engagement piece is part of that. Um, if we're assessing that, then it's going to keep that uh top of mind and it's it's going to help us uh keep everybody accountable and also see where there may be additional supports that the district provides if there are gaps there. So, I I think that's one reason why having having

168the assessment piece pulled out to a to a school structure success measure is um is particularly important here. And the evaluation piece is more the implementation of it, right? Because I I feel that we spoke on evaluations at another meeting about them not being robust enough um for individual staff you mean or for Yeah. But but the but the creation of the evaluation would be more on the information side. Correct. Yeah. Now, if you mean evaluation of the schoolwide performance in a skip, that's the kind of thing that there would be a lot of self-evaluation in the system. There's trusting them to look at the data and say, "Whoa, we're not getting the outcomes." But if we have low performance or sustained problems, we would be stepping in. We do have some real both opportunity

169and heavy lifting to do in individual staff evaluation across all of our employee groups, including mine. So, I think how that individual employee evaluation is linked to school improvement goals is a very interesting question that um we haven't really gotten to that thinking yet, but that does need to happen. It's in our people strategy, but it's in it for next year. And I had one thought on the K2 um the early childhood focus. Is it possible that the rubrics and um the self assessment for like the reading and the math and the behavior mindsets could require that part of that is specific reporting on what they're doing because that's such an important developmental stage, it needs to extend across the grade spectrum at every level. So actually to director Mclofflin's point about nth grade on

170track. If you only evaluate high school graduation by the percentage of your kids who got over the bar in 12th grade, we are not focused on the early intervention. So the high school piece must include nth grade. Similarly, the elementary piece must include K12. Um because those kids are in the building. We just can't measure their learning effectively with you know separate you we you know fast bridge is really good for intervening with those kids it's just not good for a measure of how well is second grade working um at least in the current thinking we're doing uh here the other thing too is there's something to be said for having an indicator be only for improvement purposes. Nobody's publishing it, nobody's doing like this is just for us to get better. So there's no

171like, woo, our fastbridge scores are really struggling first grade. That's not a I have to report to the school board. That's a we are going to roll up our sleeves and get in there. Our MCA scores starting in third grade are struggling. That's public. Like that's that's a that's a system measure. So you can kind of create a a certain stigma to something. I I mean I hope we're going to avoid that, but it's human. It kind of happens. That was one other logic of not including fast. board members. Director Cook, um I I I I really am authentically very excited about this whole um project here. And I I I didn't quite finish the thought I meant to earlier. So, I'm going to try uh to clarify what I was trying to get at.

172And that that is I think I think this process unlike the previous one where most of the initiatives were set districtwide but to be implemented in a school specific way, this is really giving an opportunity to our school level leaders and communities to go through the process that uh uh was just described at Riverside, right? Where where you get this collaborative opportunity for people to have a rallying cry about what it is that that everyone is going to try to measure their efforts toward advancing. And it's that that process of authentically collaboratively going through that so that everybody has something that um kind of crystallizes what is the important thing that we're going to focus on. And I don't think um another point that that you made earlier, I don't think that we could do

173that successfully for next school year. So I I totally agree that the bright time frame is the 26 27 school year because it's going to take a long running start to do that. Well, it's going to take months, not weeks. Um, but I'm excited about that opportunity. I think it can be extremely powerful. And the the connection I didn't make about um the author you quoted um is that in addition to um encourage encouraging trust and collaboration and vulnerability. Ultimately, you have to get everybody rallied around something and it should be tied to a measure that relates to your your end product. you know, your your deliverables or your sales or whatever or student outcomes. And so that's why it's so important that the things that we're measuring are things that we really do think

174matter. And um because you know doing the exercise that you talked about with the why why ultimately it should be a student outcome, you know, a test result. Yes, it's not everything, but surely it is an indicator of a school that's doing some things well. And whether we like it or not, everybody's already paying attention to it. So we better. Um, so I I I think this is this is really powerful, but I I I think I already made the point somewhat, but just to um do it a little more clearly, the structures themselves, and I I totally hear what you're saying, Gre Gretchen, about the the importance of emphasizing doing the skip process well, but just the idea of a skip process geared toward improving a skip process is like I It's like a

175it's eating its own tail or something. I mean, it just um it's important and it's part of what supports the outcomes that everyone should ultimately, but the implementation or the the strategy of how you improve those outcomes can have multiple steps. Well, we got to have this MTSS process and we got to build all these things that get to that and we got to make sure we're using fastbridge really well and we got to all these other but ultimately it's the literacy, right, that is measured in this way. I think that's fine because everybody can get rallied around that. But the structures themselves, I just let's be really thoughtful to make sure because that's that's the real danger when you're going about setting out what it is you're going to measure. People are going to

176put significant effort into optimizing against these things. So, you have to be really careful that the things we decide to measure are really the things we want to care about. Um, so anyway, that's it. But I I love it. Um, I'm excited about this and thanks again for bringing it to the board in this level of detail so that we can engage with it. And and I think something you said just made me think of something that we'll have to think about down the road after this is implemented. But every time we've gone on a skip visit, and I think I said this the other day, I wanted a drone camera over my shoulder to just follow me. for the concrete examples of what the schools were doing to implement their gifts. And I think

177our community is uh accustomed to looking at how our district is doing based on those numbers. We have the dashboard. We're improving our trans our transparency on that. these outcome measures itself will be out there as you know raw whatever numbers but with all the time and all the effort that's going in these skip plans we've got to figure out a way to share with the community that bird's eyee view of what's happening in the schools to actually make the changes that are going to improve the outcomes for students because that work is I can't emphasize how impressive it is I think every board member who's been I mean everyone who's worked in district to see how hard people work on things that we're telling them to do, right? Not even the things that they're

178choosing uh to be their priorities. Um, you know, we're not just doing this to go through an exercise. There's a reason. Um, and the reason is that we're going to be able to have better outcomes for our kids. So, I'd like to for us to figure out how to show that work in more than a a plan on a website because it deserves that attention. Can I offer one example to to answer a question from Gage Elementary School? It's from Chris Davidson's new position of that parent quarterback position that he created. Um, and one of her responsibilities, I'm sorry I don't remember her name, one of her responsibilities is to create a schedule where parents come in and they observe in their children's classroom and they observe the school. Then the principal then goes in,

179subscript the teacher, and then allows the parent and the teacher to have a conversation about what just happened in the classroom or what the parent observed while they were walking around the school. So the the the school and the teacher is getting real real time feedback from a parent about whatever it was, right? So it could be their their skip goal or it can be about how you're doing X for my kid or you can it can be about we're improving whatever, but it's real time, right? So, that's one example of how we're engaging the community and bringing them in and coming and saying, "Look at what we're doing." Um, and it's working. And if it's not working, the parent then gets to say, "This is not working for my kid in real time." But

180that structure had to be built in. That came from a grant, right? So we also have to figure out how can we use these creative out of the box ideas and have them be sustainable so that they don't run out when the grant runs out. Right? I think we have a lot of educators and teachers and principles who have ideas that are worth exploring. We don't have the funds to back those ideas. That's just the reality of the times that we're in right now. I wanted to point out that example because that's a principle thinking outside the box. on how to bring his families in to see what we're doing in our building and be a part of the process for improvement. Anything else board members? I I think the only thing I would add

181is that this conversation really underscores why board uh input on and ultimately ownership of this is super valuable and important. I really do think so. This is like Kent's skip process. It's so much less influential than if it's something you all are approving. I I'm not just saying it. It's like it it I I really do believe your approval of this process and then your ongoing engagement with the result of the processes will elevate it significantly. So I'm grateful for the effort you've put into this. We we are going to stick with our tight timeline because As we've said multiple times tonight, we have a ton of work to build this out. And so for us going into the um end of the school year with your ultimate decision on this process will set us

182up to really be doing some very important work this summer and hit the ground running uh starting in August. All right, moving on to 5.1 uh 4.1 annual board calendar draft ABCD update. Are there any items a board member would like to add uh for consideration on a future meeting agenda? Hearing none, our upcoming board meeting dates. All meetings begin at 5:30 p.m. We have a regular meeting on April 22nd, a regular meeting on May 6th, a study session on May 13th, and a regular meeting on May 20th. And hearing no other business, this meeting is adjourned at 8:00 p.m. You know what we need is a a forum.