RPS School Board Meeting - 2/22/22

001so this is my childhood she is this regular meeting of independence school district 535 school board is called order at 5 31 pm tuesday february 22nd 2022 in room 137 of the edison building interested members of the public are welcome and encouraged to view this meeting remotely at youtube.com isd 535 where the live stream video may be found this 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 sacred land of all indigenous peoples present at this meeting our school board members superintendent kent pacquel a non-voting ex official member and assistant school board clerk miss michelle severson ms severson will you please call the roll thank you director amundsen here clerk barlow here director garcia here chairman

002marvin here vice chair nathan here director workman here and treasurer mclaughlin here thank you good timing at this time we provide an opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible 2.0 approval of the agenda are there any changes to the agenda move approval second it's been moved and seconded to approve the agenda all in favor say aye aye opposed agenda is approved 3.0 comments to the board as you know although providing time for community members to directly address the board at meetings is not required this board believes it's important we also encourage communication by email or phone we absolutely want to hear from you about issues the school district can control

003we support your first amendment rights to agree disagree or offer an alternative to actual district initiatives and if you have a question you want answered please let us know that and we'll respond by phone or email each speaker will have three minutes to speak and we ask you to respect this limit when your name is called please have a seat in front of the microphone at this table state your name and whether you are a resident of the school district our first speaker this evening is anna fault ms bolt awards back to pacquiao chair marvin at uh directors of the board yeah yeah i know all right um it's my honor to introduce someone who i've exchanged emails with but never had the chance to meet john bartus who teaches in our information technology pathway

004and computer science at ctec has been involved in a really exciting competition with some of our students who we have the opportunity to recognize now so john thank you for your work um and we are excited to hear about these future computer scientists and information technology wizards thank you very much you know it's almost wednesday you know if you could just extend it to friday i'm not telling you how to do your jobs but you know we're like 50 of the way there so um no we had uh we've had this competition for many years uh it's called the advent of code uh and basically what happens is uh in an advent calendar you get chocolate but even better than chocolate is programming challenges and so every day at midnight a new challenge comes out

005and uh the person the way i arranged it this year was whoever does the most total problems by new year's so you didn't have to start at midnight but the top people were going to be ranked by how quickly they solved the problems so the goal was participation the goal was to get as many students involved as possible we had over 150 students uh from across the district uh and even some from stuartville although they couldn't win prizes uh participate and they solved over a thousand programming problems altogether so um it was an incredible uh you know amount of work done by a lot of students totally voluntary no credit for it just just for fun and because it's you know something they like to do so we partnered with several sponsors and they uh

006gave us lots of different prizes and uh the rochester area youth tech foundation who as you know partners with the district to provide computers and internet to families that can't afford them um also donated uh some money to for the first time have a giant trophy [Music] for the school with the most completed problems so not the best computer scientist or the or the individual the most people even if they got you know 100 people to do the first easiest problem they could win the they could win the trophy so again really trying to get participation up and unfortunately mr dirks is not here because he was the champion of this he went he's a teacher at mail teaches math and computer science and just got dozens and dozens of kids involved but without further

007ado i want to give out the uh prizes so [Music] in third place for the individual prize this year we actually had a middle schooler win so gautam are you here so he's not here but he he goes to kellogg and actually beat me in the end we were like neck and neck until the very end and he just solved a couple of the last ones faster than me and so yeah when you say future computer scientists i think they're already there uh so second place this year goes to finley bartomai are you there hey come on up [Applause] congratulations so finn goes to century and uh you are a freshman so looking forward to more great programming as well um yeah thanks um and then the champion this year the person who completed the

008most problems the fastest also from century is michael wong are you here he is not here but he usually shows up to class so i mean and then uh we also have a team competition so the way that that works is you have one entry as a team and all your points are split up among the members of the team so that way people that maybe aren't as confident can do it with their friends and this year the team called coding beasts uh yeah i know with jerry and rohil are you guys here guys here come on up [Applause] and like i said uh because mr dirks is not here he even though century had like five of the top 10 uh individuals mr dirk recruited i think 60 kids from mayo to participate um

009so like more than twice as many of the other schools so this year uh because he can't be here jerry is going to accept on his behalf the giant trophy for mayo high school [Applause] so uh if you have students uh who are interested in computers and computer science please send them my way uh we have a huge variety of of computer classes in the district now and just lots of great kids who are doing amazing amazing things so hopefully at the end of the year we'll come back and show you some of the cool stuff they're doing so thank you very much thank you thank you so much and students before you leave i bet your parents would like to get a picture of you up here with the trophy so i come on

010back yeah you don't have to be a movie star to be a celebrity so congratulations okay 4.02 introduction of research assessment and evaluation director dr peter wreck dr pikel dr marvin and directors of the board it's my pleasure to introduce a new member of our team uh peter is our new director of research assessment and evaluation not to be confused with the name of our teachers union the rochester education association and so we have a battle of the acronyms and we moved it around a little bit this would just be the beginning of a conversation between dr ruck and board members and the community he is housed in our department of curriculum and instruction which is uh ably led by our executive director brenda whichman and peter is in uh what week three or something

011like that for uh and he sent me his initial impressions of data and research in rochester public schools today and i think it was 15 pages that sounds about right so that sounds like peter writing that's right well this is an opportunity just for you to begin a dialogue i would like to add just because we know that people are appropriately thinking about uh finances in our district right now the first two years of peter's work is being supported by federal funding which is very appropriate because the number one challenge that he is helping us begin to think through and analyze is helping students recover from the academic social and emotional impact of the pandemic over time that position will certainly be built into a sustainable base of funding i would recommend that eventually peter

012needs a small but mighty team but right now he's a one person shop and we're grateful to him for joining us and this is a chance for him to introduce himself to the board and the community and i'm sure he'll be back many times so peter thank you very much um first of all thank you so much for the opportunity to work for rps i am thrilled to be here um my trajectory into this position is a little bit different than i think most uh folks might be i was actually entirely in the community college system for the last 15 years almost uh started as a as a college faculty member earned tenure and then moved on to administrative work i was a dean for a little bit and then i moved into the research

013world but when i told folks that i was taking this position the two things i heard were either oh welcome back to k12 we knew you'd come back or yeah yeah yeah we'll see how long it takes you'll come back to higher ed right so it's like one or the other but the reason that they said that is it's getting back to my roots my graduate i went to college to be a high school social studies teacher and my graduate work and all of my research uh on that end has been entirely focused on k-12 education the projects on the effects of operating levees on student achievement the sort of increasing blurry lines between secondary and post-secondary education and the implications that it has for students and families and neighborhood effects on school readiness for

014kindergarten which is a really near and dear project to mine that i worked on a while ago so honestly just really grateful to be here and thank you so much if i had to characterize one thing so far in my conversations that i've had with a lot of folks in this room um it's that there's a really good appetite and hunger for research and evaluation within the district and that's actually a very positive foundation to build on i've worked elsewhere where that's not necessarily the case and so you kind of have to build an importance case first and we don't have to do that we're we're pretty well primed to take some next steps so i'm excited to see what that brings thank you thank you i'll just add that we had a major nerd

015moment during peter's interview when i realized that i cited him in my dissertation and that it was like you're that peter you're that peter rook and so it was a yeah it was a whole world it was a good it was a good moment that when you meet the person who you've cited in a dissertation that's a moment congratulations to both of you thank you for sharing that detail by the way all right 4.03 board member committee updates any board members have committee work you would like to report out to the board ms workman yes i just have one announcement um i'm sure we'll be getting uh more information as we get closer to the time msba day at the capitol will be held virtually again this year on march 17th thank you anybody else

016hey we'll move on to the consent agenda are there any items to be removed for separate consideration seeing none move approval second it's been moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda all those in favor say aye aye opposed consent agenda is approved and we have a couple of long time employees who are retiring in june madam chair and directors of the board it's uh my honor to thank and commend first helen e duff who's been a great four teacher at bamber valley elementary helen's retirement will be effective at the end of the day june 6 2022 and she has been with rochester public schools for 36 years and then a member of our incredibly valuable and dedicated paraprofessional ranks joan bosart who has been a special education paraprofessional at bamber valley elementary uh jones

017retirement will be effective june 3rd um and ms bossard has been with the district for 22 years so two veterans and one can only imagine the number of young people's lives that those two people have touched so we thank them and we wish them the best absolutely we will move on [Applause] thank you absolutely we will now move on to our focus topic which this meeting is science dr pikel dr marvin and directors of the board it's my pleasure to recognize brenda whichman who uh as you know as our executive director of curriculum and instruction this is the next step in the series that the board is taking through our major academic content areas um and this is one that i think is particularly on board members minds as i know that um we've gotten

018a lot of emails recently about uh some science issues in our school district um and this is a chance uh to take the lens back and look at the big picture so brenda good evening tonight is science we are not going to blind you with science we are not going to blow anything up but we do have a pretty stellar cast so if you want to come forward and i'll get our slide show up i'm not seeing that on here you know when you invite us we're going to bring in the a team which tonight has many members um just wait till the fine arts update we've got some things planned for that too go bigger go home is um but but the reason is is we don't do this work alone right it takes

019a big team and if we are going to give you a comprehensive view of the work that's going on in k-12 science we need to bring um not just cni leadership but our teachers so thank you all for being here i might add if i may madam chair i say this every time please don't be bashful about grabbing those mics because they're portable and sometimes people are leaning over as though they can't move those so when you're talking please grab them so that the audience and everyone can hear you go ahead i'm working on that okay well um good evening board thank you again for having us uh this evening yeah we're here to talk about science and the exciting part about science is this is kind of right in the middle of of the

020work that's happening in the science standards in the state it's our uh standards that are being implemented closest to today so in about two years or so uh um so we're kind of been working on it uh and we have a number of things to share this evening so thank you for your uh continued uh uh opportunity to come here and to share so just a little bit about the background on the state standards they're to be implemented by the 24-25 school year and at the elementary level we've been doing a lot of work over the last year with the science leadership team that you'll hear a little bit more about later in the presentation and then heather at the secondary level at the secondary level we've been at work for about three years kathy

021knows we've been spending quite a bit of time on really looking at our prioritized learnings and our prioritized learnings for secondary are really focused on the practices so the way that we learn the content is through the practices and you guys have a handout i think that has the practices but things like observation making an argument from evidence so students really master the content through those pieces and they have lots of opportunity to continue to practice that we also wanted to tell you why science is important as you know we're a science community so we're really excited about our focus on science and some of the things that are really important i think are science is kind of that area that gets our students excited and interested their questions kind of propel them into that

022and i think that's one of the pieces that we really want to focus on is how do we keep that engagement and interest going sometimes our kids start when they're young with all those questions and then we don't do as good of a job as they continue on so the teachers that we have with us tonight are going to talk a little bit about how we keep that fire burning as they get older and older i think one other um thing to keep in mind in terms of why it matters is i want to keep directing us back to one of our first presentations in january when we were talking about reading and uh uh in that scarborough's rope that lori mack was sharing with us and she said the bottom part of that rope

023is that word recognition and that top half of that rope is language comprehension and again one of the key ways to get to reading comprehension is focusing on language comprehension in the lower grades that includes background knowledge that includes vocabulary and particularly in the sciences and in social studies as i mentioned last time we were up here that is critical so these are important subject areas that we need to weave into everything that we do it's a key component to gaining those reading skills our students need as well thank you heather for sharing your slides with me here all right um i'm sierra lynn forest i was with you all a couple weeks ago talking about social studies and science has really been my passion project since i started um in in cni and so

024i'm just here to tell you about the work that we've started in elementary peter alluded to we created an elementary science leadership team and i'm really proud of that team because we have brought together teachers administrators instructional coaches from all of our schools including our district-wide choice schools so washington longfellow and lincoln and then one of our teachers as a part of that actually helped write some of the science standards and so there's a lot of expertise and varied experiences to represent our schools and our students so it's been wonderful so we have a representation from k5 on that we meet monthly or bi-monthly to ho to map and plan a path forward to implementation we've done some professional development with some local experts for our elementary science leadership team really digging in deep to

025the science and engineering practices there's three dimensions that you'll hear that that are related to the next generation science standards and we chose to really dig deep into those science and engineering engineering practices that can translate to all areas from those we started developing prioritized learnings so we looked with our team where do we really want to dig deep and provide targeted feedback to our students that's going to be high leverage getting into middle school and high school and so some of those areas that we are really feeling are very valuable would be the asking scientific questions making careful observations developing models and communicating our findings and so we're asking our learners you know from kindergarten all the way up and hopefully we'll have a special guest here that'll tell you a little bit about

026that in a little bit as well but we're practicing this and that's really been the job of our elementary science leadership team is to kick-start the professional development and then to dig deep into those engineering practices identify the prioritized learnings and then try them in action before they go into full district implementation and so they're really spearheading that work they're doing this by collecting evidence of student learning and instructional methods to showcase student work instructional practices all around those prioritized learnings so we have what's called a padlet and i have a little snapshot of it on our slides but um it's just different categories and multiple people can contribute and so we're getting videos and pictures and instructional tools that are being taken in real time i've gone out and coached with teachers as well

027and just posting them there so that it can be shared more broadly with all of our teachers as we start to roll this out district-wide moving forward next year and i'm jen conan i work with the secondary teachers with science and as heather mentioned we have had our secondary leadership team meeting for about three years and as sierra said we have teachers we have coaches we have administrators and we also have some people from the community our corey hill teachers are part of it as is our mayo planetarium teacher and we've been working on that meeting quarterly for the last three years in the last two years we've really dug into the different grade levels at sixth grade we are meeting monthly and they are currently implementing the new science standards ahead of when we

028needed to they jumped on board last year and we're like nope we're just gonna do it we're not gonna just wait a year so they're here to tell you about what they're doing and seventh grade team we are also meeting quarterly and they are implementing the new standards in life science and are using some open psy ed materials this year trying it so all the sites have implemented metabolic reactions and then at ja they are doing the chicken and the egg at eighth grade we're also meeting quarterly and they began we have begun to unpack the standards and seeing what those shifts are moving from the earth science to the physical science and they will be implementing in 2324 and then our high school science team is meeting quarterly developing a new course called environmental

029science which will house the earth and space science standards and we did actually hatch some chicks with that chicken and the egg which was very fun and we're kind of thinking about what that would look like district-wide for 8th grade so a few promising practices that were that you'll hear about with our spotlights one is just to focus on those science and engineering practices so as you hear the teachers talk about that listen for that that focus on the practices a second focus is an implementation of what's called a story line so shane's going to talk a little bit about what that looks like in biology but it's really a series of lessons that kind of get at um a story and get students interested that way then we'll also talk a little bit about

030phenomena-based instruction so that's really where students see something in nature wonder about it and then those questions actually guide their thinking and then finally we're really trying to think about community partnerships so as we build particularly that environmental science course how do we make that local and relevant to our students and how can we partner with some of our community partners with that so i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to i think steph is our first spotlight one of rochester public i may have one of um rochester public schools young promising scientists come and join us she's a kindergartner hoping she comes because um she has some good stories to tell about how what science looks like in kindergarten um so i don't know do we have oh thanks um so we

031have a list there of the science and engineering practices and the ones that are that have the arrow are the ones that um this year as i'm piloting this sort of for the first time and fumbling through it sometimes reflecting and fixing things as we go those highlighted ones are the ones that seem to come up for us in kindergarten and be most appropriate what it really comes down to on the next slide you can see we have basically kids will make an observation as heather was saying and then what the kindergartners are learning to do at this point um observation takes a while so each of these components for five-year-olds require some um direct instruction and sort of what it looks like none of these practices are things that aren't natural to them so

032asking questions making observations these are all things that they do naturally and like someone alluded to before the key is to teach them to be aware of it and and be engaged in it so that um some of the old systems that we have in place don't teach that out of them and then we have to reteach them later so um some of the important pieces for us are technology especially with kindergarteners who need some special tools to be able to communicate what it is that they want to share and also for them to be able to access information seesaw is one of those it's been an important tool for distance learning it's a little bit like a google slide um in that uh i can create um a series of slides and this is

033where the students would would record either by video um or they can take a picture of some some pictures that they drew and record their voice to explain it or draw and dictate as they go so it's a really important tool um that allows them to be independent and i don't have to go around and have 21 kids dictate um and try to scramble and write it down because as you'll see in a minute sometimes kindergarten drawings and writing are not always clear when we look back at them later um yeah so um the the process we go through is make an observation this can look like walking around the school taking a walk outside even just looking in our classroom they all have their ipads thanks to the pandemic and so now they um

034they go outside the top case there they noticed a rainbow rainbows are important in kindergarten so they noticed a rainbow in the parking lot and then wanted to follow the steps that we go through to investigate that the bottom one um they make an observation and then we they they're pretty good now at saying oh it's something interesting it's a phenomenon or it's a problem and so the bottom one was uh the problem um that's right and the picture on the side is the animals that could get kind of tangled up in these masks that are strewn everywhere in the playground these days so um so that what followed from that even though we weren't quite to solutions yet is at recess and um our playtime kids would be picking these things up off of

035the ground and trying to to take care of our our school in that way so these are just two examples of how the kids have followed that process using that seesaw tool they'll take a phenomenon um ask a question about it one day we were in the middle of something and i looked out the window and saw rainbows around the sun i had to sort of hold back this is me as a teacher having to train myself how to do science differently and think differently about it to not just say oh that's called a sun dog and to let them go through that 45-minute process of using another app looking in our classroom library for to kind of investigate and see what that was all about the problem that you see on the right this

036was um one of actually our little friend who hopefully was gonna join us um she noticed a problem she couldn't reach the sink and so we spent some days designing solutions um everybody had kind of a different one and then the bottom picture there is her at our sink and we tested everybody's solutions they recorded it put it on seesaw so then they kind of have a almost a portfolio of the steps that they've gone through um next um another important piece of technology that we use is called pebble go it's a bit like a an online encyclopedia and what's nice is that the science and social studies are are pretty well aligned to our standards so it allows students to take this inquiry process i can i can give them a topic and they

037can kind of go to town asking questions about it using pebble go as a tool to do some investigating i'll keep it i'm trying to trying to fly through because i know um some critical tools that have allowed me to try to shift my thinking around science are collaboration time i'm on the science leadership committee if i was doing this alone i don't think it would look quite like it does so i think time to do that is important i appreciate the autonomy that i have this year to try some new things but that has to be combined with expertise and that's why the committee is nice um people have more technology or standards background than i might and so that all becomes important in the collaboration um the technology is important and then i

038feel like this process teaching kids at such a young age to go through and ask questions and then be problem solvers there's an equity component to this for me there's engagement it teaches them critical thinking they're learning to look around the world around look at the world around them and find something that doesn't seem quite right to them and it's really early stages but it's teaching them to be advocates and try to figure out how to help be part of the solution for teachers whole group instruction is not ideal but with five-year-olds it's um the challenge is always when i have five with me what i'm what are the other 16 five-year-olds doing to keep engaged in meaningful ways and this to me is that so if i can teach them to be able to

039go through this process they're excited about the work they're doing it's a great opportunity for students who are learning english actually in kindergarten we say all students are language learners but the conversations they're having with peers they're practicing their social language and their academic language so i'm really excited about the the um chance to try some of these things and hopefully not perfect but just get get some um ideas to share with others as we roll this out so i'm sorry ayla couldn't be here tonight you would have enjoyed her more than listening to me but um thanks for the opportunity to share my my last thing is i am passionate about doing this with these youngest kids because i think if we can do this with a lot of a lot of things stem

040from it if i can do this with the youngest kids first of all nobody else has an excuse why they can't do it with their kids but also we don't have to take the time down the road to teach them this so imagine what can happen in second grade first for students who already know this process and you can start plugging in different kinds of topics um to the to the process so thank you all right then we have three of our phenomenal sixth grade uh teachers who took the leap and have implemented amplify and they're gonna tell you a little bit about that curriculum yes we took the big leap from physical science for gosh a good 15 or 20 years to earth science this year and the amplify curriculum has been immensely helpful

041with those of us physical science teachers for years and relying on some of our colleagues so we appreciate the district purchasing that curriculum for us one thing that was excellent about the curriculum is it was perfect for when we had to make that switch to dl for two weeks the way the curriculum is designed it can be taught pretty easily virtually as well as in person they have all the tools there ready to go for teachers so that makes our job a lot easier when there's so many other things to shuffle around as well and to add to that um the phenomena based instruction it's really a change in the way we used to do things as far as teaching science and uh you start with a question and and it gets in and that

042leads them through the whole unit and it's a really a flip from how you used to just give them the information and then give them the definition and now you search for it and it leads them through the whole instruction so it's been really a nice change of pace for them yeah to give an example um one of the phenomena was there were dinosaurs found in south america and in africa and the dinosaurs are the same dinosaurs and they weren't very good swimmers how is it that they ended up where they were and that was an interesting question to propose to them and then as we dug deeper we found what the answer was was all about plate motion and that was really really intriguing and i had an opportunity as well once we finished

043up that plate motion unit to dig a little deeper and to do some work with uh a simulator that allowed kids to figure out how to uh do a uh it's it's a tsunami warning system and we know there's been some events that have happened in the world and it was really cool it brought home to the fact that there are tsunami warning systems and they are used and the kids had to come and put things together in a simulator and it was cost how much does it cost and uh how long warning system is there so it was really really pretty interesting to see the other pieces is this fits within our standards it was just boom just dropped right into all the standards that we have and and that was a real selling

044point for us so um we also really like how the software is set up so so many segments of it have the articles that they have to investigate already recorded so they have narration right there for them and students of all levels like that it's good for el students it's good for struggling readers it's good for kids on ieps kids who have focus issues so that's one thing that's nice about the articles that they're looking for evidence in and the students can annotate right on the digital articles that they're researching they can highlight them in all different colors they can add notes to them they can go back and sort their annotations and then that leads to group discussions and paired discussions and all sorts of activities we can do with those articles and another

045really neat feature is that besides the articles they're reading about it um the simulators that they're doing they're incredible they're um last week we were looking for lunar eclipses that are going to happen in 2025 and they had to go off and search for solar eclipses and lunar eclipses and uh and then share the data with their people at their table so um very high end simulators i've used other ones in the past but this one's custom-made for the standards we're trying to teach and there's that question again they're going off and searching for that question that they're looking for within the simulators within the article so it's uh it ties in beautifully yeah and the assessment piece works really well there are a number of times throughout the unit where we're we're checking for

046understanding and um there's a there's a pre-assessment these guys just finished up moon i'm just starting moon earth sun system so we're doing a pre-assessment and kids get a chance kind of get a feel for what they're going to learn about with that but i do like the practice of checking every so often and seeing where they're at with regard to their understanding of the concepts so that's good uh the curriculum is also identical from school to school so that's one thing that's been kind of nice too is we all have the same material the same equipment the same lab setups now so we can really share and compare ideas from one um colleague to the next guys and it's also we've had students move from one school to another and they they already know

047the amplified curriculum they skyward automatically puts them into my classroom they know how the material set up one unit has the same sort of structure as the next unit and even though those units are very well put together there's also some flexibility to throw in some of our own materials and activities as well along the way just one more thing to add like joe said that the collaboration has been wonderful you used to not know what willow creek was doing and john you know we weren't even on the same page and now not only are the materials the same but we're collaborating more than we ever have so it's been very valuable and and miss conan and miss wilman have been uh great for leading us so thank you i just wanted to make sure

048that we told you that we had christy quaid uh dave terhar quade weed rick sorry and joe youngster and we didn't get joe's name on the slide so i wanted to make sure that you knew all of the the sixth grade teachers um and then i'm going to pass it over to mr hewitt who teaches biology and anatomy but i think he's going to talk mostly about biology thanks everyone um mike thank you my colleague pete christophson could not be here tonight due to some child care issues um i just want to make it clear that i think it kind of sounds like we're all kind of hitting on some of the same things and let's say idea those prioritized learning standards and you guys are doing phenomena you guys are kind of on the

049same path to phenomena really i mean getting the kids to ask questions and that's kind of what we're doing um mr christopherson and i decided a couple years actually right when the pandemic hit that we wanted to do something a little different trying to get kids engaged like you had said you guys have been doing what you were for like 20 years right 15 years and so that's kind of where i felt like i felt like i needed something different and so we ended up finding a curriculum it's free curriculum it's online it's illinois story lines dr jason crean and kathy rademacher i think kind of developed it and other teachers throughout the united states have worked on it so this is something that we've tried and it's very similar you know you you start

050with a phenomenon i'll give you an example the very beginning of the year we showed them uh it's called the battle of kruger it's a youtube video some people that were out on a safari ended up uh observing some lions attack a baby cape buffalo and we use that to get the kids to ask questions like you know why is it that those lions were working together and we kind of come to find out that well they need to if they want to be able to attack a larger animal they need that energy in order to do that but it's the story line it gives them the context for the learning so going further with that we started to figure out what was really cool about this is that we could give them the evidence

051first like give them the data let them see the graphs let them try to look and make observations and get ideas about what's going on with the data and kind of deliver that slowly so that they could make the learning themselves i'll give you an example we did a little study we're actually out in the pacific northwest right now not literally but that's where we are and we're learning about uh otters and the fact that because the otters are decreasing in population that's affecting the urchin population they're being unregulated and eating all the kelp so by showing them the data and how that was affecting each individual member in the in the food chain they started to get some ideas what was actually going on that makes sense and so then from that point then

052we kind of develop a story ourselves we develop something that they can actually digest almost like a flow chart and we get them to talk through the flow chart so we really take time during class and it's it's better with my eo classes because it's a smaller class and i actually have mr christopherson next to me but when i also do this with my larger classes too and we had to use something called voicethread.com to get them to talk through stuff but beyond the story lines just getting the kids to verbally talk through the flow chart first before i ask them to write anything that's been the key talking it through first and then you should see the kids when they get it the smiles on their faces if they can talk through that that

053storyboard then they can go right and once they do that then on our assessments they're being asked to do the very same thing um but then going further and we haven't done it with every unit but sometimes we throw a curveball at them so going back to the pacific northwest we threw out them on the test so i gave them a short three-minute video on yellowstone and what happened with the wolves that was their test they had to basically apply what they learned in the pacific northwest to yellowstone and why the elk were unregulated and eating all the and it ate so much vegetation that it actually changed the flow of the rivers so that and then being able to use those skills they talk about those prioritized learning you're actually able to make a

054claim show evidence and then explain their reasoning for their claims so it was really powerful and again that's happening through el clases as well so i'll kind of leave it at that but it's really cool to hear that you guys are doing that very it sounds like the very same thing and you guys are doing the very same thing with the younger kids so it's just i think that's going to be a really powerful thing going forward thanks you guys so uh if you don't mind i'm gonna take us back just a little bit because we do have a special guest here um last time we were here with social studies uh we were graced with students that were able to explain the importance of the work in ways that we can't so i'm going

055to turn this back over to stephanie whitmer well maybe we'll come back up a little later we'll see i know how she feels so as you have heard from the teachers one of the broader implications of these new standards teachers serve as the guide now and facilitator and the students are the ones investigating the important questions not just being spoon fed the information they're learning from multiple sources including magazines journal articles and community experts and there's high quality rigorous instruction that all learners it's our kindergartners it's our middle schoolers it's our el students everybody's doing that rigorous work it's not just for certain groups certainly there are challenges as always we do want to be able to share what we think some of those current challenges are around this work again time for professional development

056and time for just teachers to be able to collaborate and work together is critical for example this school year we've had two district professional development days and that's and that's it that's the access that we have so and when you think about calendar and you think about time for teachers to continue to plan together and do important work i think that is an important consideration um preparing for the additional earth science standards at the high school level i know that's been a topic of conversation and then also just looking at our materials again i'll speak at the elementary level um our teachers do amazing work with what they have but i think we need to do a better job giving them the right tools to do that work particularly as um stephanie's up here sharing

057some of the work that she's starting to do we know we need to get better tools in our teachers hands and then they can do some of this great work and feel fully supported um also recruiting and retaining science teachers particularly at the secondary level just getting great science teachers like the ones up here that takes work and then just ongoing funding for and continually improving curriculum and instruction that's certainly a challenge we can't just wait every 10 years um there's a lot that goes into the work of serving each student in rochester public schools and this is a critical one and then the last one is embracing the messini messiness of student inquiry i think some of the teachers could speak to this a little bit but it is different and it is uncomfortable

058uh uh um and we need time to uh embrace that but also time to talk about it with our colleagues and look at resources that support that student inquiry so a few future plans of course we have all kinds of ideas of what we what we'd like to do next so um continued work in curriculum writing and then reviewing materials and professional development we know that we can't just work on this for a year and then say okay we're done so as we think about the sixth grade we're already making plans for summer for what do we want to adjust and then how do we want to make sure that we can still have some of those hands-on pieces that have worked in the past and where do they fit and now that we've gone

059through the year i think we're kind of excited about being able to take a look and and make some adjustments building a training and implementation plan to support teachers and their continued learning of the approaches i think it definitely is a different way of thinking about science and so we need to continue to work together on that and i think the best learning honestly has been just coming together and sharing what's working what's not being able to see one another in in classrooms and so we're hoping to be able to do more of that we want to fully develop that environmental science course at the high school level so we're able to take a little bit more time on that um the state has given us until 2425 to fully implement and so we really

060want to think about how do we make sure that we develop that in a way that works really well for our students and is a good launch into science at the high school level and then we want to continue to to partner with our community organizations we've got lots of community partners that really want to work with us and so we want to make sure that we leverage that so those are the things that we're thinking about for the near future so we'll open it up for any questions that you guys have for us yes nathan well i'm excited to see the implementation of the amplify because i remember when on ccic and we were looking at the the curriculum how exciting it was and groundbreaking but i guess my question is with all the

061science standards are there is there an amplify that is that high quality for all of the areas of the science standards we have to implement are we going to have to be writing a lot of our own i mean we talked about the online one but i has the has the market developed as the science standards are coming that we have more of those because i remember at the time of amplify we didn't really have a lot to choose from so how are we doing with that i can speak to at middle school there is amplify for both biology and also physical science the biology teachers have looked a little bit more at the open syad units because there's been quite a bit more development for biology in those units so a little bit similar

062to what shane was talking about but when we look at physical science which is eighth grade i think we're going to definitely take a look to see you know what that might look like we also want to get our sixth grade teachers in front of our other teachers to share what they've liked about it and then some of the things that they've had to adjust so there is definitely amplify materials at seventh and eighth grade there's not at the high school level has not been developed there and then elementary i think they're taking a look as well yeah um over the next month we'll be meeting with a science leadership team to develop a rubric to look at materials that we would might need to support certainly some type of curriculum writing will be folded

063into that process as well just because of minnesota specific and local right we want to rely on our local phenomena as well so i was i was thinking about your example about the sun dogs and how that was 45 minutes that you hadn't budgeted for but what what quality time that is because it shows them how next time they have a question about something how to go about answering it for themselves but how do you balance and maybe you all have uh examples of that how do you balance the extra time that it takes for a student to go through those processes when you could have for five minutes said this is what a sun dog and here's the facts around it um i think i think you know i wouldn't do that every day

064and um you have to kind of sort of take advantage of the opportunities when they present themselves um and it's just you know as teachers we make those kind of snap judgments all day long um about how much time should we spend on this how can i cut something out so it's sort of a constant reevaluation of what what's important and how to reprioritize that it is um the challenges so one of the challenges is it seems like the list of standards and objectives keeps growing and none of them come off and for me i can't do them in silos so so actually when we're doing science they're doing writing and actually they're more motivated to sound things out and try to get the the words written down because there's a purpose and a meaning

065a real world purpose and a meaning behind it so um it doesn't look maybe like and actually isla was going to share a little bit about what we were in the middle of um it wasn't an academic it was kind of our morning meeting and we do that every day so um but i i do this is my challenge is to try to figure out how can i make this the structure of our day and then like i was saying my they'll be busy working in my small groups is where it will really hit the um the foundational skills that they need to build um it's it's hard but um the as i'm doing this more and really learning to love it um the harder thing is to not want to do this all day

066long every day um so uh yeah it's a balancing act but um i think that we quickly as educators get skilled at making those adjustments i think the structure of amplify also from lesson to lesson just naturally lends itself to that um we hear kids constantly saying after they've read an article they've done assimilation they'll go back two or three lessons and say oh that was what we saw in that simulation that's why we read that in the article they start making connections as the unit progresses so all the lessons kind of build on each other i would agree with this with what they have to say uh i don't focus as much on vocabulary i would do some quizlets at the beginning of the hour but we try to get them to use the

067vocabulary in like an active reading we do a lot of dropping or drag and drop stuff um on like a google slide and gets them to use the actual vocab in a real life setting like you would in a like a spanish class or french class what have you so i guess the big idea is is getting them to use the language so that they get feel comfortable so when they get to that flow chart then they can actually feel like they can explain something you they can go somewhere with it and they can tie those ideas together so that's that's been the big key for me i think one of the things when we're thinking particularly about elementary our materials are dated and this is really a significant pedagogical shift a whole different way

068of thinking so as we start to dive in and take these risks it's going to naturally take longer but i think as we start adopting materials that support the the new standards teachers will have some of those supports in place to kind of build it in what's also great is that phenomena ideally are rooted in our back door what can we see in our real world and apply to our lives today sun dogs that can tie into so many different things when we talk about weather and seasons in kindergarten right so taking that and and um having that storyline that overarching thing so that our students can better understand their world around them and like like you were saying that they can attach meaning to it and writing and reading become more authentic and applicable

069and so i think once we get those materials in their hands high quality materials i think that will make some difference as well do you have just a minute yeah okay i was going to tell you um i already showed them the slides that we were going to look at do you remember the day that we went around our classroom and we looked for a problem i couldn't reach the sink what did we do we had a solution yeah and so step one um the exciting day is when um you got to stand by the sink and try out all of those solutions how many do you think there were 21. yeah there were a lot and can you tell about some of the solutions that worked what was one of them the stairs and

070what were the stairs made out of blocks the stool did you like that one nope can you tell them why you didn't like it i am scared of heights it was a tall stool can you tell them about a solution that didn't work the pencil i had to like push it against the sink and it didn't work can you tell about um the your favorite one that you might use the next time you need to wash your hands and can't open or turn the sink on yes it was the stairs is there anything else you think they should know about what science looks like in our classroom what what we do for science we do not use our ipads for our games this is true we use them for learning right yes and what do

071what tools do we use on our ipads have a go do you think we should invite them to to come and join our science you want you want to tell them they're welcome to come to work you can come any day thank you aila they were really excited to hear from a kindergartner because sometimes people we talk about this sometimes people don't think kindergartners can do science like this right but they'd be surprised if they came to your classroom right [Applause] that's going to be a tough act to follow mr barlow well for me that uh sums up really what this is all about uh that kindergarten was uh wasn't repeating what she was told she was actually uh sharing what she's learned and and for me that was very important for you to make

072that point earlier especially as we move perhaps from testing to an emphasis on learning i don't want to get into that it's already even mentioned earlier this evening but joe i think you left us hanging so how did the dinosaurs get from you introduced the idea i haven't had the information i haven't had the observation so his ipad is for games and and then [Music] back to the elementary um the third dimension of next generation science uh uh it's exciting you know less of curriculum driven if you will more allowing the students to discover that they're the scientists really there's not a limit in terms of what they can learn and what there is out there to learn and and so i see signs completely different one additional comment i'll make is the importance of

073allowing you as educational professionals the privilege to grow develop explore and create and whatever i think we can do as a board to encourage that you had mentioned uh pd days well that's important and maybe we view pd or maybe i've viewed professional development a little different than how i'm hearing it and seeing it now but thank you for bringing that to our attention and and uh i'm also glad to hear that you're not waiting for the articulation cycle to be completed and for the state to tell rochester public schools the minimum you know standard of expectation but that you're going beyond the minimum and to ensure that our children have the opportunity to become their very best to truly be inspired challenged and empowered so thank you and i don't see any other questions

074do you have any last words or that sounds kind of dire do you have any conclusion you don't need one this is exciting thank you so much thank you so much [Applause] all right we will move to 7.01 enrollment projections district-wide options schools lottery report and option to stay update dr pical dr marvin directors of the board i'm going to ask jackie peterson and john carlson to join us as you know jackie is our executive director of elementary and secondary education and john is our executive director of finance two of the three items that we're going to talk about now are in board policy um as subjects that the board should receive regular updates on and so this is an opportunity for us to fulfill that policy by giving you an update on the district-wide

075um option schools lottery report and our enrollment projections we are also adding a related uh issue that is very specifically tied to the opening of new schools and changes in boundaries in rochester which is what we're calling the option to stay it's all about how we help our students find the great schools that we're excited to have in this district and so i am not sure if john or jackie is going to go first looks like jackie's going to go first but thank you both thank you uh board members and superintendent pikel this is the stuff that my dreams are made of right now so exciting um district the district-wide lottery report i'll start with that i included in board docs the data around the lottery for this year and you can see in that

076chart that we had 950 total applications for district-wide options that's down from last year but we also don't have fridell as an option which used to be draw some applications as well you should note that many of these students are represented more than once on this table so families might select all of the district-wide options for their student or they might accept or check one or two and so the process uh works at mid mid january we have a randomized computer drawing and um diane pep rocky the office manager in my area makes a phone call to every family that's drawn let them know they were selected for a district-wide option sometimes families are able to say yes i'll take it right there on the spot but oftentimes they want to think about it and

077call us back so it's a time intensive process mainly in waiting for families to make the decision we usually give them a timeline so that we can go to the next person and run another randomized drawing so that we can get those seats filled with kindergarten the next hurdle is families may accept the spot but then we sometimes wait a while for them to get here and enroll because we can't place them in the seat in skyward until they've actually enrolled but that's a good incentive to come down and enroll so i did note at the bottom of this report you may be wondering why some sites can handle more students than others so for example example in spanish immersion we can accept 40 kindergartners while at longfellow we can accept 60. obviously we have

078a larger capacity with the new building that's opening up but it all depends on the the space generally we'll have three sections of kindergarten that will funnel into eventually two sections so um we can't go we try not to go over the target the board set target um so that's just an overview on the district-wide options and i can keep going unless you have questions about that um a question about the longfellow number so how how do you figure out how many from the neighborhood and how many yes um so we had i think it was 11 students that are currently at pinewood that are now in the longfellow attendance area about 140 at jeff at uh franklin i think in the 40 range at bamber and so as we've always done when when there

079was a boundary associated with longfellow we don't make a family except the 4515 flexible calendar we allow them to opt out a great deal of the families that are in that attendance area have opted out and we are working now to place them at franklin because we do have to provide transportation and we want to centralize that um i'm hearing now that we probably have two buses of students that would be bus to franklin rather than long fellow we did do a lot of outreach to the families um amy adams the principal at longfellow did an exceptional job of developing some marketing tools and reaching out to individual families to ask them to consider a longfellow but unfortunately we do have a number of families who've opted back into the regular calendar and do we

080know the reasons behind i mean what they perceive as the benefit or disadvantage i i don't know that we formally ask the question but a lot of it has to do with what the older siblings are doing that they prefer to have their whole family on the calendar and some of it honestly might have to do with even though we've provided information just lack of um maybe they're unsure of that calendar so they prefer and quite honestly and and we should celebrate this most of our families love the school they're going to and they don't want to change so when presented with an option to stay at franklin or go to this different calendar i believe some families opted to stay because they love their current school and again it's we can't force people to

081go to a different calendar so absolutely yeah jackie this isn't a question as much as it is an observation but i mean for years we've had when we have the lottery we have families apply to every school and when as a district we're trying to determine what kind of alternative programs our families want what what we need to provide that makes it kind of complicated doesn't it because if if the thing is i just want something something that's district wide i can tell you as a principal of a school that wasn't a district-wide option when we would do kindergarten kickoff to kindergarten you have been there too as board members i think to see that there's huge lines at the district-wide option school tables and then some of some schools get very few parents stopping

082by and as a as a district administrator i've i've helped support at the table where parents are signing up for district-wide options and i've talked to a lot of families who have checked every box and then they'll say tell me why i should want to go here it's more an idea of i should go to a district-wide option than really understanding what the programming is or why it would benefit their child in fact we when freddell was on the list a lot of times kindergartners would be signed up for fredel too just because it's a district-wide option and just go down the list so we i think it's really important that parents are educated on what they're signing up for and that they really carefully consider what their neighborhood school has to offer i we

083when i was at riverside we had the most amazing kindergarten teachers and it it broke my heart to hear parents say i'll go here if i can't get in anywhere else but we always won them over i mean we did and um people realized that they had a great opportunity right in their neighborhood but it's just this kind of a mindset that i need to try this for myself thank you karen um you mentioned that targets for kindergarten are those in the main chart or is that in the smaller information well the smaller information below um so spanish immersion can can take has two sections of kindergarten lincoln has three sections of kindergarten and a lot of this has to do with space longfellow as i said because we have a a bigger building now

084can do three sections montessori i quite honestly don't always understand how how they divide their kids out they're not in traditional kindergarten for a second they're in e1 and e2 so we we just fill what we fill them up every time we have quite a waiting list for montessori actually and so we fill every seat that they have and then washington again can do three sections so it's the reason that the smaller chart at the bottom doesn't fit with the larger chart is that because of what you said earlier that they haven't enrolled yet yeah okay so yeah or would you limit them to the smaller numbers no the kids that have accepted today that just tells you so right now spanish immersion we have a possible 40 seats and we've placed 34 kids so

085we're waiting to hear from some families but i will tell you that well if you look spanish immersion we have just about 60 kids that that put in for 40 seeds so we should fill it um you should fill it so by the end of august the student place chart will likely look at the like should be full yeah okay and actually we want to do that while we're doing staffing right now we want to fill it now so we start to put a little more pressure on families to come and enroll so that we know that they're taking the seat it's important for staffing that we know that we have our sections filled julie um i remember a few years ago and i'm sure you do too when we had a huge number of

086kids who qualified for the gifted and highly gifted programs in the middle school and how we adjusted to be able to serve them um what i would really hope that the superintendent and the board would consider at some point is having a discussion of how do we extend the programs that are now currently limited perhaps by space you know so if you have a huge waiting list for a particular program at some point maybe that program should be expanded to accommodate those those those families who want that particular option of course that gets complicated because then you're talking about shifting buildings and we have already gone through that discussion once and yes john i saw that yeah were you getting rid of how much fun it was to talk about you know do we want

087to have two sections of you know 45 15 one north and one south and so on but i think those are are important and i also think it's really important we need to do a much better job of informing parents as you said what those programs are exactly as i was listening to um the science uh presentation tonight which was just really really wonderful and totally music to my ears i was thinking this is very much the way the montessori program works in in terms of leading the kids leading how they learn um so i can see a lot of tie in there but um a few things we are looking at uh principal sam pearson said right away if with the boundary shift i have more space here i'd be happy to expand our

088montessori program so we can look at that if there's actual physical space and we can find licensed staff for montessori we could do that we know we have a waiting list and we want to support as many families as possible the other thing i want to point out is kindergarten is our main entry point into district-wide options but we do maintain a wading pool and as soon as we have an opening if there's an opening at third grade at one of our schools um our office is notified automatically from registration and we we call and fill even in the middle of the year so we want to make sure that we're using those seats and making sure that kids get into those programs if they're still wanting to i i have a follow-up question too

089if i may um what's the story with siblings so if an older sibling wins the lottery for school a um is the younger sibling then automatically able to come in the following year that when they when they when families register for district-wide option they have a place to check that there's a sibling there okay and as we call it sibling preference so we always work to get siblings in because we want to have families together so there's a priority for for younger siblings coming in great thank you and then uh with boundary the boundary adjustment um this has just been kind of a heroic lift for a number of people i feel like we've had a whole host of people that have made this really a smooth smooth process and i would just say i'm

090really pleased that in that we started this in july because i think compared to past boundary changes i've been involved in i feel like we're much more on top of this and it's not going to come as a surprise to anybody in the end and that's our ultimate goal that families feel that this process has been informative and they feel welcome in their new school i noted that so we did do this option to stay so for current kids in fourth grade and seventh grade and their younger siblings they can stay for one more year and finish so the fifth grader could finish at their current school and then the younger siblings just again to keep families together and then the younger siblings would move on to their um their attendance area school we were

091unable to provide transportation for a lot of reasons and we've talked about some of those here um but i can still report to you that around 50 percent of the kids in middle and elementary opted to stay even at a school like gage when you think about maybe ability to provide transportation with 54 of the kids stay and exercise that option i would say high school a huge majority of the kids stayed opted to stay i loved that our high school administrators visited with kids that they hadn't heard from yet to say did you know that you have this option and no one really fell through the cracks because when they registered when kids would register they'd say no i'm registering for for this school oh okay well you didn't let us know you wanted

092to stay so we're able to clean all of those situations up so um the other thing i wanted to point out is that we did um have a a really great meeting with the fridell families superintendent piquel and monica bowler scott sheridan was part of that meeting and we talked about what we could do to support them because they are the only school that we're closing and um while we could not we originally talked about being able to move the entire i think i said this in the last report and the entire seventh grade to dakota we would not be able to transport so then we went to the next best option and that was to allow current seventh graders and their younger siblings the same option that our boundary change students have although they

093don't have an option to stay we gave them an option to choose so about 50 of the current seventh grade fredell families opted to go to their attendance area school with the within their boundary and about 50 percent then 50 chose to um basically do an exception to attendance to finish their their middle school and they did that for a variety of reasons some of them wanted to go where they had familiar faces with their friends of those 50 percent that chose to go somewhere other than their attendance area about 60 percent are going to dakota about 18 at to ja and 18 to willow creek and 4 to kellogg and they're providing their own transportation and again the younger siblings had the option to go as well so we did as much as we

094could to be flexible and allow that choice just as we were for seventh graders whose enrollment was changed for next year julie what happens when those students hit high school if they have chosen a a school that is not their attendance school do you anticipate them then requesting open enrollment to the high school that that's um middle school feeds too sure that we'll have a few that will do that we will request that but we were very clear that this is to finish the middle school year and then we want those boundaries to be clean and so we had them check a box i understand that my high school years will be in the attendance area the school serving their attendance area great thank you yeah i think those are my notes on um on

095those two and then i'll turn it over to john for the enrollment update great and this is very short and sweet we've provided an attachment of where we stand right now of actual registrants for next school year 16 429 that is a number now that's about three weeks old the numbers change every single day because kids come in or their parents come in and register so um we're up 319 from that 16 429 when we submitted this to board docs and we expect that to rise probably another five to six 700 maybe um over the summer what we're really missing is a lot of the kindergarten families right now this report said about 280 i think we're in the 500s now a normal class here as you can tell by the other grades around 1200

096so that just if it's a normal year we're expecting another six to 700 students to register this the reason this got put on here is the second tuesday of february is usually when we bring you the enrollment projections report and we were not ready to do that because we've actually engaged somebody to help me with that this year and so that is coming to you on april 19th so we put this in here just to kind of tell you where we're at but we're going to do a more official enrollment projection in about two months questions uh i might just add the strategic plan that is being developed is very much still a work in progress but one thing that i think is relevant to note with the information that both jackie and john provided

097is that the idea of getting the portfolio of schools right in the district is emerging as a very strong theme and that would be an opportunity to do that kind of thinking about high demand programs and the catchment areas that they would need to provide great education to kids but also to meet family demands and so we'll have to see of course by june when that plan makes its way for you to consider but it's a strong theme that has come across multiple committees both the family and community engagement discussion has emphasized that and so has the economic engine group emphasize that really making sure that the portfolio of offerings that the district makes available is well aligned with what families want and where they live and where their kids can get to school and

098so i think it's just important to note that these issues that jackie and john have just given us a snapshot of are very much on the minds of our working groups that are working on the strategic plan and that i think that might be a very major emphasis of the district's work over the three years of that plan thank you can i just quickly confess to an error there's a reference to an attachment that's not there for you i had hoped to have a report to you so you could see of the kids that were eligible to to request to stay what percent percentage exercised that option i thought it would be an easy pull from skyward and it turned out it was not and i did not want to overburden the registration and records

099department and i also didn't want to overburden principles with calculating that unless you really wanted i gave you a couple examples of schools that had that on hand but i neglected to remove that note in in board docs but i can get that information it just will take some time and i don't know if that's the best use of of our resources right now but i can tell you that a great percentage of families exercise the option and i didn't mean to create confusion over here i just thought i was missing something no i didn't even know if that's what you were talking about but i did i did want to point that out because i just i realized that today and wanted to just call attention to that old mission thank you thank you

100you can clap now if you'd like [Laughter] audience hold your applause you're not a kindergartner john she was cute yeah okay um our next report is this secondary school student safety initiative update say that fast four times dr marvin and directors of the board i call it the 4s uh update for short because it's tough to say jackie peterson um is the providing critical leadership for us on this effort and will ruffin the second is doing the same as board members know will is our executive director of diversity equity and inclusion this initiative was uh launched and it's multifaceted early in the fall when we recognized that for a subset of our students in our middle schools and high schools to varying degrees we were facing some challenges with student engagement sense of belonging and

101in some cases behavior and so we've launched a multi-pronged effort to strengthen that engagement belonging and improve the behavior and so we are trying to give you not a comprehensive update tonight on all seven aspects of the strategy but i think a look at two of them but jackie may give you a brief broader sense of how things are going this is as board members know also a work in progress and so we'll be back to report to you on this again and of course one important measure of our ultimate success will be as we look at our discipline data uh in the summer to see where we uh where we are on the quantitative measurements of student engagement so jackie thank you thank you so much and we we will provide an overview on

102two of the areas and i can answer questions on others but i do we're informing you tonight of our progress but we director nathan brought up the question of how we informed families of our progress and that was a great prompt for us to think about how can we send out a communication to all families we do have a number of our sites have done a great job of explaining what they're what they're working on at their site and how they can how parents can help in those efforts and specifically when things come up like tick tock challenges bringing that to the attention of families and asking for their support i mean those that really does have a positive impact we want to engage parents as much as we can but we do along with

103the website where where the student handbook is located on the web there is a reference to the strategies that appearance i'm told it cascades when you click on a button which i think is super fancy um but i don't know how often parents go to look at that so i think you raise a great point that we could do a communication to all families but tonight we have patty whalen here assistant principal at john adams and i want to thank her for being here after suffering a significant loss in her family last week that she's still here with us to share something she's really excited and passionate about and that's a new software that we are that john adams it won't be new to them they've been using it for quite some time and patty's

104the resident expert but our our middle and high school students will be getting uh the pbs pbis software that includes the rewards piece but patty will also just kind of mention what what other pieces are in place there too sure absolutely so um superintendent piquel and chair marvin directors thank you so much for having me tonight um i decided if little isla could talk to you bravely that i could be a lot less nervous so i'm gonna give it a shot here when i started at john adams eight years ago our pbis team was giving out paper tickets um now if you know anything about middle schoolers they're not always the most responsible um hallways were littered with tickets they would shove them in their pocket pull something out they'd fall out and that's where

105they would stay we also had kind of an issue with um let's get this going here there we go um it's not exactly eco-friendly when you have your you're killing trees on a yearly basis printing these tickets we're also doing our referrals and paper form there wasn't a lot of buy-in from the students you received your ticket for doing something well going above and beyond uh your teacher either filled it out or you filled it out and then you put it up in a box in the media center that box then was taken to our jag news studio where we did um morning reports every day and on fridays we chose one student from each grade level to receive an a la carte item or a pass to go to the front of the line

106at lunch the students didn't really care you know if we were having the smoothies like the berry blends then they were super excited the other things not much and by only rewarding one student each grade level the students really didn't feel like it was enough for them um the opportunity or the chance to have their name drawn was very low and then also it just really wasn't efficient for staff for them to take the time to fill out this ticket well it wasn't a big deal teachers have a lot to do and so those kind of things went by the wayside we'd often hear from teachers oh i have to do a better job of giving those out to the students and then finally like i said before the the middle schoolers would lose them

107and middle schoolers are also very creative sometimes we'd have large chunks of tickets in for drawings that maybe were all for the same person or all for the you know a small number of students so we knew there was something a little fishy going on there so we started looking at what could we do to change this to get more student buy-in to be more eco-friendly to do something that students had more of an idea of where they were at so as we were looking we came across something called pbis rewards it was a very small company out of indiana they were great to work with and as they have grown as a company they have added additional pieces to their product as well so we started with a student reward piece and then added

108the referral piece and then just a few years ago they added the teacher rewards as well so with the student rewards we do both school-wide rewards and then also within the individual classes we do both tangible and non-tangible rewards there's a ton of teacher flexibility we do not tell the teachers how they need to award points they get to decide within their classroom and we'll we'll talk a little bit about how that works a little bit later the referrals are super easy to do we're no longer using paper we're not using a google form it's a series of drop down boxes check marks that the students are all loaded so they can very easily find a student even if they don't know the exact spelling of their name which can be could be an issue

109previously it also is very customizable because we can match the district's behavior policy and responses so in a lot of other programs like swiss you have to just do what their program is built around for us we can say that trespassing is a level two we can call it a level two even in pbis typically they're called majors and minors but with this customizable feature we can call them level ones and level twos to match what we're doing here in the district and then finally it really fosters that two-way communication between teachers and administrators so often when we get a paper copy it will lay on our desk it may get covered up with the next thing that comes up and teachers would say well i don't know what happened when it comes in electronically

110we get an email saying that a referral has been written as soon as we respond to that referral with whatever consequences or whatever response that we've used whether it's individual instruction or a detention or we are referring them to counseling that and we save that that immediately goes back to the teacher and they know what the administrator has done only the teacher who has written the referrals sees that information so if dr paquel writes a referral for chair marvin only dr pacquel will see it and administrators no one else will be able to see that referral and know that there's one in the system and that's good isn't it it's very good yes um and then the teacher report part is just fun the teachers enjoy it so we truly believe that rewarding students is

111everybody's job so we make sure that everyone in the building has access to the app now it links with uh classlink so all of the teachers automatically are put in all of the students are automatically put in but we manually add our paraprofessionals whether they're special ed or general ed our administrators are in there our clerical staff our building subs have accounts so they're able to reward students our instructional coaches and success coaches you could even go as far as custodial and sns staff in a smaller building that might be super important in a building of almost 1100 our custodial staff really doesn't know our students and so it would be a little bit more of a challenge for them but it is an option so you can use the online desktop version you can

112use an app you can do it manually where you just add in the student's name or you can scan a student's id now for data privacy purposes i've created my own family it's the marvel family you'll see down in the bottom corner i am groot reese has 17 paw points currently and we're the jaguars so we call them paw points he currently has 17 points and he was awarded five that's why you see the star there that's what happens on the screen when you award students a point so group points versus individual points you can award your entire class points for doing things for example we have one teacher that offers three points per expectation responsible respectful and safe for the entire class and they work toward earning those three points if they earn three

113points for each one the entire class gets nine points for the class period if they have a day where there's been some maybe some disrespectful language they're having a little trouble following through and getting things cleaned up they might only get one or two points in one of those areas and so then the entire class would get six or seven or eight points teachers will also give individual points to students for just doing things that um they see that they want to reward them for so maybe somebody goes around and just picks up some paper randomly you know we'd like to think that kids especially middle schoolers would just naturally do those things but they don't always they're not always taught that that is what we should do and so by saying to them hey

114we really appreciate what you're doing we're going to just give you some points for it it promotes that idea and gives them a great sense of self-worth as well our sixth grade teachers will do a quarter long goal and say for example we have passes in a planner if you use only the passes in the planner and we don't have to go above and beyond that for the entire quarter that means you're staying in class you're doing what we're asking you to do and so they'll give them a larger number say 25 or 50 paw points for the entire quarter students who are one of our special ed instructional coaches stands at the entryway in the morning and if she sees sees students doing things like holding the door for a large number of students

115or helping somebody get a mask things like that she will automatically reward them just standing there and then our students of the month also receive plot points as well or if you know for going above or in any other reason so there are three ways to award and we can do it just this is the front page of the the program where you just put in the student name you find them you give them one through ten points or you give them a custom amount this is the the homeroom group so this is would be what a class would look like and like i said class link automatically populates this so all of the teachers have their classes automatically set up and so you can select a number of students you can select all the

116students you can select one and then give them a number or give them a number of points and they record it that way and then finally the last one is through the app now most of our teachers do not use the app but some of them do and it has the capability to scan the barcode on the back of the student's ids so we do have that printed by our our photo company and some of our students do carry them and we use it that way most people just go in and manually put in their name and then award them points so we'll we're going to see if this works one of the things that we do is we do school-wide raffles and this was great during the pandemic when kids were not in the

117building um our teachers are awesome they put together baskets of things so we had like um self-care baskets and it was like a little spa basket and we had drawing baskets and all kinds of things and so we would run um a drawing or a raffle at the end of the week and the kids would put in their points and they purchased them one point for drawing or entry and then i would do a screencastify of the raffle and put it on our social media networks and then then the kids would watch and see who would win so this is just a little it's going to double check to make sure it's okay it's going to run through the students that entered and then we get the lovely confetti background so i you know i

118stopped doing it because i you know i wasn't hearing from anything from the kids and they i did have somebody say why don't you do that anymore it's so fun so i started putting them back on so that is one thing you can do you can also do classroom raffles it doesn't have to be school-wide we have two options for stores we call them the paw store our student council runs the school store but teachers have their individual stores as well so i did just a few screenshots of what's in our stores just as examples i don't know if you can how well you can see that so this would be an example of a teacher store a lot of teachers just put in a general a blank number of points because things come up

119that they the kids want and and they sell them to them for that number of points you could rent a pencil you could buy a new pencil you could choose music for work time you could also sit in the teacher's chair during work time so those are some examples of things that teachers do in our school store which again is run by our student council members the students are currently using a google form as an order form and they place orders for the items that they would like to purchase um previously we would have a store open and the kids would come and shop and then we'd check them out um so some things that you might find we do certificates like an elevator pass for the day believe it or not kids love to

120ride the elevator when they can't so a daily elevator pass is a hot commodity assistant to the assistant we do have some kids that want to come help us in the office so that they are willing to spend their pla points uh to come down and work with um either myself or one of the other um administrators and do things for us whether it's run errands or make signs things like that there's some kids who really enjoy that we also have some items like lollipops and bottles of water gum school supplies you know random things that kids like the stickers that go in all the hydro flasks those are again you know a really rigged really big seller for our students and then finally this is just how you check it to check out in

121the store so iron man wants to purchase a bookmark and a fidget um you would simply click on them um and then it goes to like a cart and you can see that iron man has a hundred points he's going to spend 60 and then you would just simply purchase the item so it's it's pretty easy one component that we do not use is the events component where you can set a limit that students have to have earned a certain number of points within a time period in order to attend that event so maybe you're having an after-school carnival or dance or something and students have to have earned 500 points within a quarter in order to be able to attend um we choose not to use that but it is an option as well

122so finally i just put in a few quotes from some teachers that about pbis rewards so you can see that it's not just me that loves it but our staff does as well you know i love using pbs rewards it's one of my favorite incentives to use in the classroom it doesn't require any prep work and can be used in less than a minute in our building we use the reward system for students to purchase items in our paw store and to earn prizes in our raffle drawing our 6th graders love it just one other one to highlight from a brand new teacher the last part of his comment was when it comes to the mountain of new programs and devices that a teacher needs to get used to pbis was definitely one of the

123quickest graciously agreed to help our other schools come on board our secondary schools um and really that piece of starting out with this recognition piece is the entryway into the pbis software because we didn't want to ask schools to transition to a different way of recordkeeping their referrals their discipline referrals mid-year so we'll get into it with the rewards piece and then we'll get everybody on board with record keeping and that two-way communication which we so often hear is an issue where teachers are left kind of wondering what happened and so that's the really the key is what is the teacher doing to help address a behavior concern and then how is the administration working with that as a partner with the family so yeah definitely yeah any questions for me yeah miss william i

124mean amazing description of how it works how do you know if it's working how do we know if it's working i mean that it's you know the idea of catch kids being good right so if you're familiar with pbis yeah um it's a three-tier system yeah um so when we go into our reports we can look at that triangle um that that we want that top tier to have five percent of less of our students needing tier tree tier three supports our percentage is currently less than one percent of needing tier three supports to me that's saying that this is working okay thank you miss nathan um you talked about this being the entry way into implementing the other pieces of pbis is there a time frame that you're targeting to have it replace it's

125going to replace swis well i would say replace or be some some of our sites have um adopted more of like their homegrown spreadsheet versus swiss and i was just visiting with peter ruck this morning in a meeting that we we had about actually about discipline data and recognizing and peter recognizes that swiss has incredible capabilities to analyze the data and produce all kinds of information like when are behavior referrals happening the most in the building that kind of thing so we're really wanting buildings to transition to this piece of the pbis software so that they can be more informed and more proactive about uh what the data is telling them so while we want to be um respectful of what they're doing right now to track their data we will transition them and we

126will trans since we're already into second semester we'll plan to transition them going into next year okay thanks yes my question was going to be sort of data related too are there people looking at i would say like number of transactions like one of those one of the slides that you put up like iron man was crushing it he had like 123 points and the other people had like 20 or whatever and so to me that could mean a number of things and the two that sort of immediately pop up as either iron man is like a really good kid and he's doing all the things and maybe the other kids are struggling or it just means like iron man loves to save up his points because he really wants like assistance to the assistant

127right exactly my concern would be like the kid that's got 15 points is that they're spending all of their points or is there just sort of either a lack of recognition for this kid and is somebody looking at the data and are we figuring out like how to support those kids either in increasing that behavior that we do want to see and or providing them supports around like figuring out maybe why that's not happening we have a tier one pbis committee made up of teachers and they are tasked with looking at that data so we can track how many points a teacher is giving we can track how many points a student is receiving we can track some of the things like you were talking about when are referrals being written we can look at

128grade levels we know that our sixth grade team uses plot points a lot more than our eighth grade team um so that's something that our p that our committee continues to work on but all of that is data that we can look at as well so that um and we have a a teacher on there that's amazing and he will um send out emails kind of on a on a bi weekly basis saying hey today is a great day to give paw points just that constant reminder that this system is here we need to use it with fidelity in order to make sure that pbis is working for us yeah i think that would be excellent because there are some kids like there's just their interpersonal effectiveness skills are not here so we're doing the

129whole like 10 points to ravenclaw but like then i don't get points because like the thing i'm doing that's safe or you know rewardable is not happening in front of other people like i wouldn't want that kid to miss out on those options absolutely and you're right there are kids who never spend a single point because they don't want to you know and they end the year with hundreds even over a thousand points um because that to them is the reinforcer right they don't really care about the other things they just want to have this big total right right yeah that would be i would be that kid and my brother would be the kid who spends like every point bracelets or whatever yeah yeah and if we're going to talk about siblings my sister

130won this every time [Laughter] my older sister i think this is one piece in the puzzle patty said it's working and reference their data it's one piece of the puzzle but john adams really has a lot of great things going on in terms of their school culture and i really feel like their early adoption of the software to track and communicate back with the teacher has had a huge impact i think their overall culture that they own as a staff behavior and they don't look at behavior as the administration's problem but they there's there they manage manage classroom level concerns at the classroom level um we had such wonderful visits to john adams pre-pandemic when we were able to be out and spending a lot of time in classrooms i was always so excited to

131go sit in classrooms there because their instruction was fantastic it was fantastic engaging and student voices really listened to at john adams so this is one piece of the puzzle but i would just encourage you to dig in deeper because it really is a great place for kids and they're doing a lot of wonderful things you're always welcome to come and the baby chicks were awesome i do have kind of a follow-up just because i didn't quite understand the time frame that this is just at ja now just this cement just this year we've been using it for seven years okay and so but you'd be the only one that's been using it and now it's going to roll out to the rest of the district um k through 12. uh well the elementary division

132has good things going with their swiss and they were pretty reluctant to move to something different and as long as they've got things cooking pretty well at their level we we're not going to mess with them okay so six to twelve six to twelve and honestly every time i would go visit before brandt gates it was ken mcdonald and you know every every other visit would be look at this cool app and it's like okay this is really working for them they really believe in it it it survived can't a lot of times when the new principal comes in they might not buy in brent really um has a belief in the in the system and um so we just decided when we look at their um the discipline data there and how uh things

133are going at their site we wanted to start looking at what are some systems that we could replicate and i'm sorry just because i wasn't tracking with everything the swiss is that the one that has the better data or is the pbis for um like the times a day and that kind of thing is that in both but different ways uh each year pbs rewards gets better when it comes to the data swiss they present their data in nice charts you get spreadsheets in pbis rewards but if you're familiar with excel you can put it in a spread in a chart pretty easily the biggest thing with swiss is that it's not customizable so if we have something like a substantial interruption to classroom that is not in swiss and it goes under other and

134then you have to really drill down to figure out what other is um pbs could be different in different schools correct correct and pbs rewards has another category we just teach our teachers not to use it we can't take it out we just tell them not to use it that's really informative thank you thank you i think director mclaughlin's point is one that is the question yields a point that i don't want us to move on too quickly without making it there's tremendous opportunity in this district to identify what's working here and share it over there and that they had this for seven years and that's nobody's fault but you need the intentionality to have the capacity and we're talking about software here which is very visibly replicable but the way you ask a question

135of a kid is also a practice that can be identified and replicated and so i think a vision of rochester public schools that has a lot of the lines of transference going across schools not just from the edison building to the schools i mean that matters too but i think it's a it's a it's a really hopeful uh kind of a sign and people who are busy working with kids as teachers professionals or administrators don't have the time to think about spreading what's working in their school to other schools that's a really critical function of central administration to be there uh because they're busy working with kids um so i just want to sort of can i appreciate your expertise in the sense that you've seen it change over time that someone could say you

136know five or ten years you know it worked at ja and it or you know works more often it didn't work and just saying you know that doesn't work but you know that it does and i appreciate that and even just those little things like don't use the other if that's not passed along amongst everybody that could create data that isn't that helpful right so that's helpful thank you and now i'll turn it over to my colleague will ruff in the second to talk about the uh the perspectives project and just i think there's going to be a lot more information coming but he's going to give you kind of where we're at right now yeah absolutely so this is a brief update and we will give you the full update towards the end of

137the school year i think superintendent gave a really good example of we can use something over here and share it over here that's basically the premise of the perspectives project i think many times we make decisions about students but don't always include the students and with this prospective project it's more of a long-term or long-range project and that's what we're trying to do we're trying to take the information that we're learning from our students through an interview or a student focus group type uh project and then share the learning across the district so how can we get better how can we positively respond to some of the behaviors that we're seeing in our schools or how can we proactively get in front of some of these behaviors to create a more welcoming environment or create

138a heightened sense of belonging so that some of those behaviors decrease in the first place so just kind of give you a quick overview so uh we're currently in the middle school stages where we're going to go to every middle school and we ask all of the principals to give us a list of students and keep in mind this was around behavior so the principals looked at their high flyers in regards to discipline referrals or skipping class or any whatever you want to think about as far as discipline referrals and those were the students that we talked to we talked to them in small group sessions um mainly about five to seven each i think there was one it was about ten but and we just asked them questions some of the questions were how's

139school going for you just to get them talking and then we started to dive in a little deeper into some of the other questions like is there an adult here at the school that you feel comfortable sharing with or talking to or an adult that you admire that you would listen to their direction and then that's when they really started to open up without getting into too much details of the findings this is an area of improvement that we can uh get better at within our schools it did hurt my heart to hear some of the students say that they didn't have a single adult that they felt comfortable talking to so to me that lends to a sense of belonging what are we doing or not doing for that student that makes this space

140uncomfortable to make them not want to share something so with that that prompted us to think about this is from the student perspective but how would a staff member answer the same question so we morph from the student perspectives project to just the perspective project because we have to include the voice of the staff and that would be the second round of the perspectives project so we've been to j.a kellogg we're coming up on ferdel we've been to willow creek we've been out to phoenix academy and now we're going to come back around and start talking to the staff as well to get their point of view or their perspective hence the name of the project and from middle school then we're going to do the same thing in high school same same scenario same

141setup principles you tell us so we need to talk to we're going to talk to them in the focus group type session from there i forgot to mention all of the sessions are being audio recorded so that we can come back and listen and learn but more importantly we're going to share the audio recordings with our partners at wilder research and they're going to compile everything from those audio tapes and then compile them into themes so these are what we've seen from all of your middle schools here are the themes that we think you should focus on from all of your high schools here are the themes that came forward and we like to go in that way because we felt it takes the bias out of an individual person if i don't like j.a

142i can downplay them in the way how the data rolls out so we're working with the outside partner so they can come up with those themes it removes that individual bias district employee which that i do like and those themes are what we're going to report on later for you towards the end of this so yeah that's basically the prospectus project so at this point i think i'll open it up for questions from you all well i think sometimes that you know the simplest approach can be the best and this to me makes perfect sense you just talk with the kids what do you do for those kids though you mention students who are absent all the time and we have some who are often in school but rarely in class and i know you're

143not sharing the you know the answers yet but how do you find them because we need to find out what it is that's happening so that they show up but don't go to class and so they don't know their teachers and they don't know most of the staff there except maybe the hall monitors that tell them to go to class you know i would pull back a little bit because i do feel like they know their teachers based on their answers but i would say it's something that drove them away we started off in the fashion we didn't start off in the hallways school starts we're in the classroom at some point we're transitioning into the hallways so what is it that's driving them away from the classroom and into the hallways is a better

144question is a better way to look at that scenario okay now i i hear what you're saying i'm just hearing that they're kids that just haven't been in the classrooms i would say lately okay that could be anyway i think it sounds like absolutely the right approach and you know one thing that i would add is the themes were pretty clear from school to school it wasn't really about one particular staff or one particular staff's sense of belonging it was pretty clear of what the students needed throughout our different middle schools i think that speaks volumes as well you know it is a systemic thing that we can improve upon as far as welcoming our students into our classes and how can we be better for them it's not anything that one teacher is doing

145wrong one building is doing wrong but if we really listen to the students i think we can learn some practices or maybe develop some strategies to get in front of this thing so you talked about the subset of students that you're working with but are you trying to cover all the staff the whole staff of a building or are there a subset and how are they chosen it's been voluntary for staff the principals have given us the time that works best for their staff so sometimes it's 7 30 in the morning or other times it will be after school but that's chosen by the buildings and it's drop-in only so if you want to drop in and lend your voice to us you can do that if you want to just get in your car

146and go home and get to your kids because it's been a long day you can do that as well thanks i was just going to share so i went to willow creek recently and it seems like even though we don't have all the data yet but there was a pretty clear like oh this is how we can move forward and i think a lot of it had to do with observation like they're sending you the list of high flyers and there are a lot of commonalities and so what does that mean um there are certain things that are being said or shared there are themes already so i know we're doing the the qualitative research there and i i'd be interested to see what comes of it i think some of those things i get

147the impression that a lot of it is not going to surprise us and there are also things that even if we are not surprised we need to act swiftly and i think some of that is already changing like i said even preliminarily like they don't realize all the things that are going to come out but i think it was sort of a both both groups of people needed someone to sit and listen and so i appreciate the fact that your team has been able and willing to do this because i can already get a sense of healing on both sides just just now like even without a final product so you did prompt me to mention something because this is a joint effort with our department and carlos department so we have some people from

148scl and the student services side as a part so they can hear the conversations of what the students are saying and then we can build some of those student mental health supports in on the front end so thank you for saying that because that's something that we're thinking about as well i think the mental health stuff is useful because i know you were using it as an example but one of the things that i struggle with like in schools is when one of the consequences um positive or otherwise are the outcome essentially of a student does something we don't want them to do like you're going to go to therapy that is that is perceived as a negative consequence and that just perpetuates the stigma and there are kids who are doing really well that

149can also be in therapy and so i think that it's helpful i'm glad that you're doing that partnership to make sure that there's a good handoff and a good resource for the student rather than being like a punitive outcome or perceived that way aaron i appreciate the work you're doing with that smaller population of the high the frequent flyers but are either you or wilder or anybody else taking a look at how the rest of the student population may answer those questions i know that sometimes it's part of the panorama survey that kind of thing that i find it disturbing when you know i don't know the exact numbers but you know 50 or 60 of the students say they don't have an adult there that that um that they can speak to are you

150going to be using either you or wild are going to be using that information to help that broader population that doesn't have the referrals but still has some of those thoughts in their head and i kind of look at you know you're talking about middle school but they're willing to tell you this the high school you know perhaps might not based on their middle school experience and just you know growing up and being a little bit of an older teenager sure or they may tell too i mean yeah people tell me stuff i appreciate that i think the short answer is no right for the short term we don't have a way or a plan to launch it for all students but i think with any good teaching strategy what's good for one set of

151students is good for all of our students so if we're going to change some of our practices because we're trying to get ahead of the behaviors for this student or increase our sense of belonging for this set of students we're also at the same time increasing our sense of belonging and welcoming for all students so i think it's going to go hand in hand even though that's not a part of the original plan i will also say that during our interviews during every session the students are asking when are you coming back when are you coming back when's the next time so that's prompted us to think of maybe we can just do this for the rest of the school year and then open it up to other students and then they can just share

152whatever they want to share with us that's awesome that's a great student nice to hear from you thank you and uh so briefly i appreciate the will that reminder if i look at dr pikel's letter to us dated november the 16th and at that time there was within our schools a high level of uh student um concerns uh and staff concerns being expressed unidentified so it is appropriate then the strategy the approach which has been utilized i'm not a big fan of the term frequent flyers but students in need and so i look forward to the ongoing effort and then ultimately the report back for milder and then whatever recommendations suggestions that you might staff might present back to us thank you if i can uh dr barlow very briefly one of them one of

153many uh sources uh efforts that the work that will and the equity specialists are leading around the perspectives project will be the co-design effort that we talked about last week that jess roberts is going to facilitate around school safety and belonging which will be a very structured process of really re-envisioning safety and belonging and when i start to talk talk with jess about the fact that we have this groundwork being laid with intensive understanding the lived experience of the people we're trying to reach his head almost exploded because he said that's exactly with the kind of thing and then what you do is you take that insight and you have both perspectives there in your design process and so that's going to be one of several different places to look at it and i will

154also add briefly that we are doing a deep dive into the panorama data through the strategic planning process so that data is and we have a session at an upcoming study session to engage to engage you in that information as well thank you thank you 7.03 american indian parent advisory council and we appreciate you it's it's getting late and we appreciate you waiting so long this is really an important agenda item dr pikel thank you dr marvin directors of the board i am pleased to introduce the the co-chairs of our american indian parent advisory council um value guamaras and laurie sam um they are here to share the committee's findings we also have julie rousek joining us who leads this work for us on the administration side and so i want to echo dr marvin's

155point about not just thanking you for waiting here in a long evening but for your work because we know the long hours you put into this and we take the committee's opinions very very seriously thank you superintendent and board normally our native american liaison would be presenting some background information to you all about this vote of of concurrence however right now we are posting for a full-time native american liaison uh we've lost reagan clover roughly almost a month ago now it's hard to believe and we're working on filling that position so briefly i'm going to just share some information about the american indian parent committee with you from the minnesota department of education website and the vote of concurrence and then turn that over to our two members of the committee to share with you

156tonight so minnesota statute seven section 124 d .78 subdivision one states that a school district in which there are 10 or more american indian students enrolled and each american indian school must establish an american indian education parent advisory committee commonly referred to as american indian parent advisory committees or apex these committees serve in an advisory role and help ensure that american indian students are receiving culturally relevant and equitable educational opportunities these committees are critical to the achievement and success of american indian students statewide and offer a valuable opportunity to strengthen district and parent partnerships and then i'll read just briefly about the resolution of concurrence or non-concurrence to you all prior to march 1st of each year the apac must meet to discuss whether or not they concur with the educational offerings that have been

157extended by the district to american indian students if the aipac finds that the district and or school board have been meeting the needs of american indian students they issue a vote and resolution of concurrence if they find that the district and or school board have not been meeting the needs of american indian students they issue a vote and resolution of non-concurrence the vote is reflected formally on documentation provided by the oaie the office of american indian education the vote and resolution must be presented to the school board by one or more members of the apac if the vote is of non-concurrence the apac must also provide written recommendations for improvement to the school board at the time of the presentation the school board does not approve the resolution they receive the information and it is

158reflected within the board minutes in the case of non-concurrence the school board is given 60 days in which to respond in writing to the apac recommendations the board response must be signed by the entire school board and be provided to aipac and it to the office of american indian education so with that that's the nuts and bolts of the presentation i give you valerie guamaras and lori sam good evening familiar with some of you not all but thanks for this opportunity so i'll proceed with the letter and we will respond and do this in tandem dear school board early la the great great grandson of sitting bull iotaki said that many people don't understand the meaning of his words quote let us put our minds together and see what kind of life we can make

159for our children end quote there are two paths or two sides to this comment there's the school or book way to help a child learn what he is to be but the authors of these books want our kids to be like them in this way this held our children to be like books and to go down this path there's the cultural side to the comment we sit in a circle and everyone has input there is no hierarchy there is honesty and integrity we are creating something for tomorrow and we are living it by example today it is the elders that teach the children who they are drawing upon our future in our past creating an awakening in a child these two paths together this is putting our minds together to see what kind of life

160we can make for our children and this is from early la pointe in 2012. these have been unprecedented times with the pandemic distance learning and with the movement to erase our history because it makes some people uncomfortable there have been great strides within the district since it aligned itself with minnesota statute 124 d point seven eight of what one yet there is more work to be do or there's more work to do we must work together to put our minds together to see what kind of life we can make for our children fourth with our our remedies for our continued journey toward concurrency based in part on dr hardstar director of state state indian ed recommendations for successful native american students one our children need to see themselves in the classroom and in their schools

161two our students need to see themselves accurately portrayed in the curriculum and three our students need the support of adults school board superintendent and others to ensure cultural safety recommendation number one native american students need to see themselves in the classroom and in their schools we recommend a retain and recruit native american staff b participate in job fairs that cater to native americans and disclose attendance to those to the apac c commit to attend yearly the yearly minnesota indian education conference and share key learnings with aipac recommendation number two our students need to see themselves accurately portrayed in the curriculum for a the curriculum needs to be continuously updated at each review cycle and with the help of nato american education specialists and report to aipac standards reviewed and updated that impact native americans b

162use of our native american approved curriculum and books c develop a high school course detailing the relationship between the u.s government and native american nations d what a future would we would be creating for our children if at the new dakota middle school conservation dakota conservational dakota was offered as a language choice three cultural safety for our native american students our native american student liaison must be able to see all of the native american children cultural safety would allow for a policy to be developed and enforced which would allow equal access to all native american students at all buildings b the apac needs continued updates a number of students disciplinary action progress toward graduation and so forth thus enabling the native american student liaison and aipac to work together to intervene to have meaningful family

163engagement activities and to support our children c cultural sensitivity competency training needs to be made mandatory for all district staff to learn about native american history and to help ensure the cultural safety of our students d quarterly meetings between the school board or designee and the aipac lastly e what a future we would be creating for our children if an elder in residence program were initiated our children would hear stories and cultural teachings from dakota elders and others the effort would support your children and our children in ways that we are not able to measure using metrics in closing we wish to reiterate our understanding of these challenging circumstances we have all experienced these past years our unanimous vote of non-concurrence is our evaluation of the current state of rps and meeting the needs of

164our children we stand ready to work together and see what kind of life we can make for our children sincerely the american indian parent advisory committee thank you and do you have any anything else you want to add this is a wonderful letter or board members do you have questions or comments melissa um i just want to say thank you and that i hope i'm still on the board someday when we get a letter of concurrence instead of a letter of non-concurrence that to me would be something i would be proud of after my time in the school board and i would like to know what are the next steps in terms of school board input into this process well and julie and dr pickel we have we will write a letter you know back

165saying these these the steps that we're going to take and what what is what is the process for each individual school board member to give direction on what we think should the answer be i might suggest we we take that up at executive committee on monday and get back to the board but that we could certainly design a process that you could individually provide us with some feedback we could synthesize that and then in the end the board does need to speak with one voice in its response and so having never been through this here myself i'm not sure what past practice has been we don't need to be held by that but i could work with the chair and vice chair and we could then create a opportunity for all of you to share

166your thoughts on the response um we are still in dialogue with the committee about the prospect of a study session that we are going to be talking about separate from writing the response which we will get done before the state deadline but that remains another possible opportunity i'm going to be meeting with the committee i'm really looking forward to that to talk about the purpose and potentially the structure of that study session so that and that's not scheduled right now we need to have some dialogue with the committee about it and in the meantime we need to have a a strong thoughtful response which i know has the board has done in past years and that we would facilitate this year but i appreciate your question because it's not something that we've taken up in

167exec in terms of our process from this point we've been very deeply committed to meet our deadlines but i think we can we can look back to the board next week well to answer your question and my memory could be failing me but i i don't remember an opportunity for individual board members to give feedback i believe the response was prepared mainly by administration and then we had the opportunity to disagree of course but um i i would prefer i would prefer the ability to give some individual input mr parallel uh yes thank you for your um letter and i'm thankful again for the opportunity to re-engage i recall some four years or so ago and uh current chair marvin and i were able to attend and meet with members of aipac and and what

168i was able to learn then i still have retained and so i think minimally it provides an opportunity for board and even then superintendent munoz would attend for us to learn and to become more supportive and uh i don't recall the exact theme of the letter but for two to better learn to walk together and learn so i look forward to the continued effort and opportunities that and challenges that you are presenting to us and the results that that will occur thank you everybody just talking about julie karen just kathy jess was before me i know that for sure okay while you guys are trying to figure it out i'll talk first of all i really want to thank you for for on the specificity that you have in your letter and i think there

169are some things here that could vary that could be incorporated without a great deal of expense which has been a roadblock in the past so i really like how you've laid this out and i really appreciate director amundsen's remarks about what kind of input the board would have and i would really welcome to have that conversation with you in a study session rather than you send a letter we send a letter back and it's done because i don't think that gets us anywhere um so i'm really looking forward to that possibility or at least of having some individual input as dr pickell suggested to kind of synthesize but honestly developing these relationships and having conversations to me are the most effective way that we can move forward on this so thank you once again i

170very much appreciate it karen has just given you the next thing um i want to say again like everyone else thank you for sharing this letter and i too was going to make a comment about how disheartening it was to me in my first board meeting where we got this letter of concurrence that it was non-concurrence and that this second one also is coming forth and i forgive me or correct me if i'm wrong but i also think that we missed the opportunity to respond the last time as well that we were told we needed to respond um and that just we're not being good relatives in that and i think that it's we do need to have i think more of a you know talking circle essentially to like sit and have this conversation

171where there is not hierarchy there are not systems it is us coming together to to do um to a future like creating that future together for our students i just want to say i really love the idea of having conversational dakota i will pay to take that class with students i would love to do that i also like the uh opportunity i'm sorry not opportunity making it mandatory for all district staff to learn about native american history to help ensure the cultural safety of our children absolutely especially what we're hearing going through residential schools like we are obviously not a residential school but we hold that same trauma for people um and to to own that and to to help our students get through those things um i also like i love the idea of

172elder in residence program that would be i think phenomenal and i think that that's helpful to um any any and all student but in particular our indigenous populations i i very much appreciate this list i am i am yes like let's move forward and i appreciate uh melissa suggesting like how do we get to have more stake in the process than what happened last time and i think it fell through the cracks which to me is unacceptable like how do how do we make like a conscious choice and step forward with aipac and hold each other accountable in that space in ways that we haven't before thank you karen um i have kind of a more processed question as well and i want to make sure that my comments aren't reflected that i want the

173committee to do more work that i want the district to do more work but things like you know can we go back the last five years and get these recommendations so that we can make some compare you know has something been recommended for five years and not been implemented that would be something that i would want to take up as you know an easy way or you know something we really need to think about whether it's compared to just a new recommendation this year but i would just want to speak out on the topic of quarterly meetings between the school board or designee and aipac that's an easy week this should be a committee and that we should that doesn't cost anything it's just school board member time and i think that's something very easily

174implemented and perhaps if it's just a new recommendation this year that's great but if it's been something that's been recommended over time i have concerns that we haven't done that already thank you and kathy respond quickly yes to your comment or question about past letters uh they're all on board docs as well as the responses and i'm that's why i said to the district if someone could collect those and send those to all of us all together um so that we don't have to be digging around in there because that's not my skill level great cathy so thanks just as everyone else has said um but i think i make this observation every year that although this is required in statute i have always thought that the aipac process is a model of parent engagement

175and parent voice and a model for how school boards can work with communities but it doesn't work unless the implementation is successful and that is really driven by the commitment of the parents who are willing to serve on aipac the the volume of knowledge that the parents who have been on aipac have developed not only from your personal experiences with your children and with the system but what you're also learning about what we are doing and what we're not doing um it wouldn't work without your investment but i really do think it's a model for any parent out there who is looking to make a change for their child this is really a great model of of dialogue and information sharing and while we may not have made progress over the years i think without

176this foundation we we would have no hope of making progress so i appreciate your effort and your work and look forward to to future collaboration we do look forward to continuing to work with you and thank you so much thank you i we have another visitor who has been waiting for a long time and dr blazing as you come forward let me just give a little bit of background this is 8.01 superintendent search leadership profile dr blazing is from the hazard yangatea search firm and as you may remember last february when former superintendent munoz when the board accepted his resignation we found ourselves on a short timeline to recruit a new superintendent at that time we did some community outreach and promised the community that when we looked that because we were on a short

177timeline we decided to look for an interim superintendent and then do a second search this year for a long term superintendent we promised the community that we would do much more involved community input or getting community input so that the leadership qualities that they said they wanted in a superintendent would be the ones that the board would really pay attention to today dr blazing is here to give us the results of that community input yes thank you and as you noted the first phase of the search is the community engagement phase kudos to you as board members you reached out to the community and the community responded robustly and responding to not only the online survey but dr uh nicastro and i also met with i believe we had 36 meetings over two very long

178days and you wore us out quite candidly but it was a delight visiting with staff administrators teachers community members parents students to provide their input into what we're presenting you tonight i know you've had a chance to look at the profile report i know you've had a chance to look at the desired characteristics so over the next few minutes we're just going to go through some things that led to led to our report uh being finalized here now all of a sudden i see our powerpoint is no longer up there yep it's it's simple it's right there and in front of very good okay and ted you can see it right here you can see it right there too thank you okay uh so let's just launch right into this so 28 days ago actually

179my math is bad i think it was actually 28 days ago in another three and a half hours be 29 days that we actually started this so since that time we had the planning the search with the community engagement piece we did district research what was available and then we reached out to staff invitations were sent out to folks to participate as well as posting the survey and inviting individuals to participate in the online survey the survey results were analyzed as i mentioned we had our interviews and meetings and then we had the data compilation and analysis and then finally tonight the report presentation so those were the seven things that that we mentioned we researched publicly available information and and as i said information provided by the staff by the district to put together

180our posting we need to market the district and we need to market the community everyone in the upper midwest is familiar with rochester minnesota folks may be on the coast not so much so and so that's what we led to our developing information not just about the district but about the community as well michelle and heather were wonderful to work with thank you so much for facilitating all of the meetings the technology uh it sometimes was was a bit of a struggle but we uh we persisted and all the meetings were held we even doubled back in some cases with folks that couldn't get into the meeting and made certain that we reached out and incorporated them as well so thank you so much for all of your help with that okay so the online

181survey 785 folks 315 which was the largest group were parents and guardians you notice that there are there are six groups that we could list and you as board members gave up one of those slots to the students and then you participated either as a community member or parent however you wanted to self-identify within that group so that's a little bit about the results here's another way of looking at it just in a table view of the same data let me pause here this is an opt-in survey not a scientific survey we ask people to participate they could choose to do so so it is not a random sample of each of the subgroups that you see there it's important to remember that so you don't over interpret the results from the survey okay what'd

182they say we asked them to choose different strengths of the school district and you can see here these were the top five rated strengths of the school district um it's also kind of good information as you begin to put it together your next iteration of strategic plan to consider some of these responses as well technology we're finding that school districts that we're working with when they respond to the online survey technology all of a sudden is bubbling to the top we just came off of covet we just came off a lot of virtual learning and so folks are cognizant of that and they're thinking about the wonderful technology that their schools are providing to students and staff so maybe you wouldn't have seen that three years ago maybe you would have but probably not because

183kovid really emphasized the importance of technology they talked about the facilities being well maintained they talked about your staff and this was reinforced with our interviews as well all staff many times in school districts as you can well predict people will talk about wonderful teachers well that was true in rochester but they also talked about wonderful administrators wonderful support staff across the board your staff was complimented that's very nice they talked about your efforts to engage with an increasingly diverse student body and community and uh and and saying those praises quite nicely by the way during our meetings and interviews we asked the same questions of each we ask them about strengths of the school district points of pride when they're talking about the school district what is it that they talk about that they

184feel very proud that they think the district is doing quite well then we ask them for challenges and issues facing the district now let me pause there um it's very easy for folks to respond to that prompt by saying budget because that's a current issue and challenge to the school district so we always ask them to think about challenges and issues in a three to five year time frame things on the horizon or maybe even just beyond the horizon issues that the district will need to confront that they'll need to wrestle with whether we want to or not so we asked about that and then we asked about the desired characteristics albeit personal or professional that they would like to see in the next superintendent of schools and then many times we would ask them

185to help us convince a candidate to move to rochester minnesota what's so great about this community and i can tell you without fail everyone we spoke with increased their rate of speech and spoke with great enthusiasm about the community they were very proud of rochester and pointed out the many wonderful benefits of living in rochester and then we also ask them do you know of someone that you believe would be a good candidate for the position and by the way that was also asked on the online survey and folks responded to that with this as well so that's a little bit about what we asked and then who did we meet with we met with each of the seven of you individually a cabinet principals former board members faith community they were really fun to

186visit with by the way community leaders the community at large teachers support staff parents students so representative sampling of each of those groups that we met with so let me back up just one here i didn't keep up with this within this then here are the things that bubble to the top chris and i believe bubble to the top as we listen to individuals and groups about the strengths of the school district teachers and staff that reinforced what we heard on the survey as well robust program offerings academically and extracurricular-wise folks quickly noted that the school district at all grade levels not just at the high school at all grade levels they noted the program offerings that were very rich within the school district financial management john over there that was often often noted as

187a strength of the school district and by the way that bodes well if you need to pass a referendum if you look at research on passing referendums you need to have strong of the perception and feeling of strong financial management within the community in order to be successful with the polls that's kind of on the baselines i say that because i taught the course at the university of minnesota for many years on leading school finance elections that was part of the research the community and city of rochester folks felt that was a definite strength they loved this place and then the increasing diversity of the student body and the community so those were the strengths now the challenges the good news is the list of challenges is shorter than the list of strengths however there

188were some things that came up as i noted people are thinking about the budget they're thinking about financial stress on the school district there was some mention of management functions uh such as reorganization and clarification of administrative duties for greater clarity communication that was kind of a mixed bag they were talking about internal communication and disparity of communication from some schools compared to other schools and then welcome to america divisions within the community the cultural wars that i'm sure you've experienced right here in this very room you're not immune to that we've got a lot of company everywhere but that was noted by our interview participants the increasing politicalization of local issues so how do we put it together we looked at the desired strengths looked at the challenges character and then the characteristics from

189each of the groups again almost 800 people and that's what this is how we simply put it together leading to our desired characteristics draft so the survey data the input from the listening sessions well chris and i are thinking well what did we hear so we're going through our notes and we're thinking well there's there are some resonant themes here there are some definite feelings of what people are looking for in that next superintendent of schools well then we put together a word cloud here and as you can see those larger type bolder statements are things that folks were looking for this is a compilation of words that we were taking notes on from all of the groups we put it into a word cloud and here's what came out communicator collaborative relationship builder listener

190team builder approachable all of those kinds of things that as you read through the desired characteristics you find that they're now in there so from the listening sessions obviously collaborative that's high on the list of everybody communicator extraordinaire to include refined listening skills and also someone who's approachable at the same time now that's later on on the last bullet here visible and approachable in the schools in the community but that's part of the communication as well they want somebody that they can approach that they trust that they can come to and uh and that's just part of that big matrix that's called communication relationship builder and team builder relationship builder internally and externally by that i mean within the school district they want the superintendent to have strong productive working relationships with you as seven

191board members with the administrative team with with them with the principles teachers even support staff very important the superintendent built strong working relationships with those folks and is a team builder and then outside in the community they want someone who can build strong productive working relationships with all of the many facets within the community talked about a diversity leader experienced educator they want someone with some fiscal background because uh often folks said you know we're confronted with making some pretty significant budget adjustments hopefully the new superintendent will feel comfortable working in that area systemic strategic thinker not someone just managing the day-to-day things where's this vision how are we going to accomplish it what do we need to put into place in terms of strategic thinking take a district vision align it with buildings with

192departments and even oversee the implementation of the services delivered to children in the schools and classrooms leadership characteristics this goes without saying here in rochester you need someone of the highest of ethical practices and is of impeccable intriguity integrity an inclusive management style um here are some here you know under the management abilities um you might describe these as tools in the professional toolkit that the superintendent brings into the job staffing every district in america it seems like is struggling with staffing as we know enrollment in colleges of education is down 22 percent over the last 15 years at the same time you have increasing number of staff that are saying you know this isn't what i signed up for or i'm ready for retirement that's just teachers and then you have support staff trying

193to recruit and retain support staff so it's no wonder that we hear that from others as we visit with somebody that's got a magic potion that they can use to help with staffing the budgeting referendum leadership out there on the horizon folks talk about someone who can lead a referendum within the community and then pedagogy um someone who's well read and understands the latest research on teaching and learning this is quite a list so these next few slides um when we put together the desired characteristics we always try to do it on one page and in our mind we accomplish this even though it's back to back but as you can see it's a fairly lengthy list of things that are in the standalone document the desired characteristics i'm not going to go through every

194piece of it um but you can see the major headings are the things that i just spoke about the communicator extraordinary management leadership skills to lead a district as complex and sophisticated as rochester a community builder that's the relationship piece pedagogical expertise and they want they want somebody to be the chief learner for this food district they have a strong focus on academic leadership that's kind of gotten lost over these last two years as we listen to survey respondents in other school districts it doesn't always bubble to the top then personal attributes and nothing on here i think i've spoken to each of these except the last two and i think today i i don't that last one understand and appreciates midwestern values and i'm not certain if today is the best example of that

195but it would challenge someone to make certainly understand that even though rochester might be in the banana build of minnesota it is the upper midwest and uh and we embrace where we live and we hope that they would do the same thing and have a dollop of humor to go along with that so that's in essence our report again you're to be complimented as board members for reaching out to the staff to students to parents community members to allow them to provide their input and ownership in these characteristics that we're developing to select the next superintendent of schools now chris and i can pledge to you that we're going to use these characteristics as a template if you will to recruit candidates against and to screen candidates against we're also going to remind you here

196about a month from now when we present a slate of candidates to you and we go through an interview workshop we're going to go right back to these desired characteristics and help you to develop questions in your interviews that match up with the desired characteristics so it's an important document we want to make certain that we have it as we like to say roughly right you have unique perspectives on the school districts given your positions on the school board and so if it's not correct if there's something that's we've emphasized too much or that we've failed to note we need to know that so that we can modify that desired characteristics if need be so that's uh that's our report um there's our contact as you know how to how to get in touch with

197us and that has happened i just checked my email files i have over 400 already on file for rochester so it's been a busy month thank you thank you dr blazing and and before you go um two things first we appreciate that that uh your firm sent the board this information and quite a bit more over a week ago so we've had quite a bit of time to uh to study it we've also all of us have received a number of phone calls and emails from constituents who had strong opinions about what we need in a district superintendent so i appreciate that the one note you had there about midwestern values i think what that meant is that if someone's going to move to rochester they better know how to work a snow blower that

198late this afternoon as i was driving around yeah i commented the number of snowblowers that were out there running and um i don't think we'll include that in the desired characteristics president marvin if that's okay with you but we'll talk with candidates about that so before you go do you have uh questions or concerns that anything's wrong or melissa i do have a question okay um i just wanted to know i mean i think it's a great um a great summary and it resonates with me as what i would think rochester residents would have communicated to you but i remember from a superintendent search process like 12 to 15 years ago and and they went through a similar thing where they listed their characteristics and and the the search firm said so in general you

199want the person to walk on water because you want them to be good at everything and that's kind of what i see from this list as well what i'd kind of like to know is because you've done this you know multiple times with other districts i'd like to know what stood out to you as different than just wanting a superintendent who walks on water what what did you find unique to the rochester process they want the superintendent to be all things to all people right right yeah walks on water what stood out fifth difference soft scales but different from what other decisions yeah that's soft soft skills soft skills bubble to the top what do i mean by soft skills approachable visible communicator all of those things are important leadership pieces maybe not necessarily what

200you would hear about a superintendent of schools that's unique to a superintendent school such as pedagogical knowledge academic background leadership in curriculum and instruction that's what stood out the the emphasis on soft skills as opposed to the more unique skills knowledges that you would find in an educator okay that's valuable thank you i will i'm sorry this is chris and i'm so sorry that i'm not on camera but i'm in a place where if i go on video i won't be able to tune in so um i'll just say to you to add to what ted just said soft skills absolutely are rose to the top i think people are looking for someone that they can build a relationship with and team building really was a a very important uh characteristic that was that was

201mentioned multiple times by a number of people thank you ms nathan um under the management and leadership skills to lead a large and complex school district one of the characteristics is understands and demonstrates competence in reducing the budget and i i'm looking at melissa because it is the least favorite conversation we have our budget reductions but i'm wondering if if there's a better way to say that because it it almost makes it sound like we want someone who's going to come in and you know cut but what we really want someone is to manage manage our deficits or manage our expenditures right we we don't want to have a budget cutting mindset but we want someone who's you know able to manage expenditures i don't and i don't know if anybody else agrees with me

202is it maybe more about the process than about the the end product of a smaller dollar amount well just reducing the budget sounds like a mindset you're going to manage your financial situation by reducing the budget as opposed to all the tools we have in the toolkit you could almost change the word reducing to say balancing because that infers as we know there are two different there are two sides to a budget you've got your revenue side and your expenditure side you could certainly make that change i like that i thought of you thank you other comments julie yeah i have i had a question um i've been thinking about this but a um a tweet this afternoon that was brought to my attention from jordan shearer mentioned that there are now five districts in

203this area who are seeking a new superintendent and i was wondering if you could comment a little bit of the difference between maybe this the last couple years versus five years ago are you seeing more openings fewer openings are there more people looking to move can we just anticipate that there are going to be hundreds and hundreds of people applying for this job or are we looking at perhaps a much smaller number as opposed to what we might have expected four or five years ago kovid increasing politicalization of school district issues has led to an incredible exodus of superintendents not just in minnesota across the country prove it on our website hazard young matia we list openings not just that our firm is working with but for all of our competitors and in fact if

204an independent school district is just doing their own search for a new superintendent that's posted there we have over 700 postings today that's that's unprecedented so we have an increased number of vacancies and at the same time the candidate pool has gotten smaller and shallower by that i mean we're not seeing the numbers that we would see in the past and within those numbers by shallower i mean we're talking about folks who would like to be the superintendent of the rochester public schools but they don't have the background of experiences the training to lead a school district like this so are we going to have hundreds of candidates absolutely not you know chris and i uh our challenge as we say is we're looking for one we're not looking for numbers we're looking for one

205and if we can present a slate of five candidates we're gonna we're gonna feel successful in that it's becoming an incredible challenge um to find quality top-notch school leaders and um and that was a trend that we were seeing kind of developing over not just the last three or four years kind of prior to that but now it's really been accelerated this past two years you know more so i think this year because a year ago there were a number of superintendents saying well you know what this colbid thing is really tough to manage i'm going to stick around and help our school district through this and now they're saying now this is not what i signed up for i'm going to move on to the next chapter in my life would it be fair

206to say that there are people who are looking for 700 people who walk on water yeah yes it is don i think wants to speak to the walking on water [Laughter] he knows he knows what he's talking about but just a question regarding uh the experience of your firm and or other firms have you ever recommended to a district perhaps even at the stage where you've conducted community surveys you have a good handle in terms of what a community is looking for and you may also have knowledge of what the community may already have have you ever [Music] said to a board or offered a early recommendation in terms of you have what i think you're already looking for or you have what we're going to be looking for have you has that ever been

207your experience or anything to that level yeah you know i've i've been doing uh searches um before before i retired um so over 40 searches and most of them run the full course there have been a few where i've called the board liaison during the search and have said look um here's candidate here's the situation this candidate is um a candidate in the school district down the road here as well we need to move quick or we're going to lose them in our opinion this is an outstanding candidate for the position so there have been a few of those situations um conversely there there was a couple of situations where candidates withdrew at the last minute and that really sent us scrambling um to try to come up with a slate for the board to

208consider beyond the candidates withdrawing and that that's becoming more and more problematic as well as we have fewer candidates and as you know it takes a confluence of one's personal life and professional life to take on a new challenge in a new school district leave alone maybe move not just across the state but across the country and so it's all those things are are a formula that makes it really tough to recruit today and then just as a brief follow-up to that or extension so have you been involved in a search process where the the district may say you know i think we uh actually have what we're asking you to help us find uh after the process has already started uh have you ever experienced that and what was that like not not directly

209uh indirectly yes that we we stumbled on and i've used that word stumbled i think appropriately in that in that situation um there were there were a few searches where um here's the perfect match here's one many times boards become fixated on a number 15 20. how many applied that's always how many applied and and again i always go back to we're looking for one so it's not a matter of numbers it's a matter of quality and the numbers issue is that's off the board that's just gone i mean forget about talking about that you're not going to have a large number of candidates i can assure you of that our concern is the quality and the folks that we do bring forward so no i answer your question directly no there have been a

210few that kind of come close to that but answer your question directly you know karen um director martin i appreciate your comments and it kind of segues into what i'd like to say next first of all i want to thank you for your expertise i think your candidness on those last couple questions have been really helpful to my thought process here um and um director anderson's comment about walking on water i look at some you know we can't expect perfection but we want to do what's best for our district um so i'm prepared to make a motion to suspend the search at this time and uh for dr pequel the contract if that would be entertained by the rest of the board um i have a couple things to say about it i think that

211the what you said about the emphasis thank you okay and i'll say about this thank you you had a resolution and i made a motion yes emotion right and if if you will make sure that michelle gets the wording of that so if that motion which involves suspending the search and then offering dr paquel this is awkward for you um the contract um if if that's seconded then we can have that discussion i'll second it the motion once it's once she's got it i think just a resolution to suspend and offer so you move to suspend the superintendent search and offer kent pacquel contract correct okay it's been moved and seconded discussion can i start yes i had something else to say um i i appreciate the emphasis on the soft skills i think that

212that was helpful to our analysis here um and like i said i i give a lot of credit to your work but i also think that um when we're looking at finding the correct candidate i appreciate your insight on that too the way i look at the situation that we're faced with is that we have an interim superintendent who has essentially been in a constant job interview both with our community and with the board and the district there there would be a conversation i would like to have about some some expectations but i think uh moving forward but the um i think the emphasis of the discussion tonight on the community um being a strategic thinker and an excellent communicator we have the person here in the room that i think we need at this

213time thank you other comments michelle michelle melissa um i'm i'm my brain stopped working and i hope this doesn't come to about quickly because i need a little bit more time i would appreciate after a thorough discussion having a recess before you call the vote because i just need like a few quiet minutes to walk through everything that was said so that's a preemptive request to don't call a quick vote please um but but but i um don't disagree with anything that director mclaughlin said but i'm also wondering what the advantage is in your mind to suspending it at this point because i would expect that a wonderful candidate like dr pickell is would survive a a fair and thorough interview process and perhaps you know we'd come to the same conclusion at the end

214of the process having done our due diligence so i'm just wondering i can answer that um i i come at this primarily from the overwhelmingly positive comments we've received from the community by email that they were blunt in that you know we have someone here why are we wasting our time why are wasting our energy why are we wasting our money and i think we need to be fair to this firm but that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense with the other issues that we're facing and i understand your comment to melissa it seems to me though that we've had about an eight-month interview with dr paquel i mean he's been eight months and i can't imagine we're going to learn anything more about him or the way he works in an interview

215than we have than we know already from his time here julie yeah um looking at it from the other perspective um we would get a list of recommended recommended um candidates we would have the opportunity like we did looking for the interview or the interim superintendent to review those recommendations um we would be able to chase down some of the references that are provided we'd need we would be able to chase down other references perhaps or other people who aren't on that list who would be able to give us some information and then we would eventually have a one hour interview roughly with each of the finalists and so i'm trying to figure out how we could learn as much about each of those finalists as we already have information from this very long interview

216that we've basic basically been going through because you know sometimes people will look really great on paper and they will have a wonderful interview and as much as we've tried to make it fit maybe there's you know something like oh my gosh if we had only known and so i'm i'm looking at this is we know a lot of of where we are right now so those would be i think um my reasons for supporting uh the motion that was brought forth by director mclaughlin and i think we shouldn't presume that while uh dr pikel is committed to fulfill the current one-year contract he's under that is not surely commit him to remain if you will on the table for our further consideration so the point being now for me while i've not observed uh

217dr pikel walking on water you'd tell us down if you had right i would tell you well it's winter it's winter and there is ice but it's not being said and director mclaughlin i appreciate the fact that uh you also indicated uh not without opportunity to grow in this eight month period there have been some things that maybe we see as opportunities to develop a long-term relationship that we would like to include in if indeed a contractor offered and and i am definitely comfortable in supporting this resolution ms nathan karen i appreciate you bringing this to the table i had a very difficult time reading these uh community feedback without thinking that's our interim superintendent it was i was trying to be objective i was trying to look for pros and cons but um i

218i kept asking myself i think the question done the way you posed it if you already have someone in in the house why are you continuing to to search i am concerned with the number of openings that are out there for superintendent and i'm concerned with our time frame because i believe one of the districts that really recently announced that they were looking for a superintendent and they're making a decision before i think we even have a slate of candidates and if if all the information we're receiving which you confirm tonight that the pool is just not wide i agree with what julie just said about even if we have five candidates and we think about all the time we would spend with the information and i remember the last time going through the the

219the documents and the paperwork we already have that on superintendent piquel and we have far more than a one hour or even a day of that last day that we were planning on doing um so i i would also be able to support this resolution keeping in mind that it we will vote on this and if we agree he doesn't have to accept the contract so there's but we have to make an offer before he can what we're doing now is right if we just offer the contract yeah and then i would um like to respect director amundsen's wish to take a brief recess to reflect on this plus we've been sitting here since 5 30 and i think most of us could use a break for a few minutes if you would be willing

220to entertain that yeah i'm not sure if it's kosher to take a break when there's emotion on the table i think i think you can you think so just don't talk to anyone okay with apologies to everyone we will um it is if i may quickly go ahead uh read through with ted i mean this evening he left us with questions or and i think we have already responded to that so you can stick around there's not a need for him to continue to irrespective of the decision we make it's the fact that you came to you've accomplished what you were here to do and i think the board has responded to what you've presented and it wouldn't be fair to just unless you just want to well there's one other service that i think

221i could offer that's very unique to this particular associate with this particular search firm and that is that our family loves our place on leech lake and i would be glad to test any new newly appointed superintendent to see how they could walk across water several miles open water right in front of our place and we'd be glad to see how they performed dr blazing we'll get back to you on that but thank you so much and safe safe travels so it is now 8 59 and we will be in recess until 905. we are reconvened at 906 pm the motion on the table is to suspend the superintendent's search and offer a contract to kent pacquel in talking with dr blazing as he was on his way out he reminded me that in the

222community survey that was open to everyone in the community the online survey that one i think was the last question was do you have the name of someone who would be a good superintendent for rochester he said i think there were 215 he's nodding 215 215 people answered that question some of them were nonsensical i think probably more than one was anyone but gene marvin but he said of those 185 were kent piquel so there's that now done oh and he's coming back coming back you have an opening tell me about that real quickly um that's always a question that we put on the end of the online survey folks know of someone that they think would be a good fit for the position please give us the name and if you have contact information

223provide that as well 700 plus respondents you could predict you might get 20 or 30 entries there you had 215. within those 215 you had 185 dr paquel kent pacquel paquel you had a difference of 30. now within those 30 you had nobody good luck uh mickey mouse and so you begin to narrow down pretty quickly the group of candidates from that i think chris and i when we looked at when we went through that there were two or three that was yeah we should follow up you know with those folks but i just share that with you thank you don and to not appear as if we are rushing through the process or not allowing adequate time for board members to process the resolution is it possible to table action on this for the

224next meeting to allow board members to have a if there is a need i mean i don't want to suggest there is a need if there isn't a need i know director emerson had said she needed more time to process and i don't know if the break was adequate or not i appreciate that ex extremely much um i think it's a trade-off i think now that it's been opened i think it would be kind of difficult to leave it hanging there for a week so while well i've had to do some really quick processing i think i've done that and i appreciate the break to do that at this point then are we ready for the vote we have the resolution we have the second all in favor say aye aye opposed what i hear

225it's unanimous and dr patel we would like to ask you if you would i feel like this is a proposal and you don't have to answer now but we would we would like to offer you um a contract and you can think about it or i i if i if i if i can first of all i think it's important for everybody uh to know uh my my colleagues here people out there this was authentic democracy at work this was not a uh this wasn't i wasn't in on this strategy you know so there was no strategy so there's no strategy i want to it would be every intention to enthusiastically accept i want to be attentive for instance to some of the the thoughts that director mclaughlin referenced i'm i'm a continuous learner i

226believe there's always things that i can get better at that we can work into i'm not sure those things would be in a contract because i don't anticipate any issue in that but i being here in an interim capacity uh first time uh out in this role i've learned a lot and there's things that you do in an interim capacity that you might do differently if you had the new new year in a place for a longer period of time so i'm deeply honored i will say i would not have said this had you not taken the vote i am in two searches both of which would have required me to withdraw before this search went public and i was recruited for both of those and have applied and i was very panicked on what

227i was going to do because i would have had to withdraw from them assuming i advanced long before rochester got to the public part of the search and i you know besides the fact that i'm passionate about doing this work i got four kids in college and so i needed to be sure i found myself in a place that's way in the weeds i would never have said that before you voted because that that would never have been intended to sound like a threat but i would have been faced with a real conundrum because i think the opportunity we have here in rochester is just extraordinary there's no place i'd rather be and so uh i'm pleased pending whatever discussions we now have that that i wouldn't be required to make that that timeline decision

228um i was very concerned as dr blazing who i've known for 20 years was guiding you through that conversation that the timing issue it is a little bit like different searches moving in different lanes and kind of who's going to move first and i was finding myself in that situation this time around so but that's not the primary way i should be reacting except to just say i'm really honored it's been let's just say a roller coaster i think this is a superb board and we really are on the cusp of long-term strategies i want to thank everybody who is over to my left in the cabinet they have been my primary teachers about rochester public schools and i have benefited from that immensely and owe them a real deep debt of gratitude for that

229as well so um i appreciate it very much so is that a yes i think it's a guess okay [Applause] then we will ask our attorney to get in touch with you and to negotiate a contract and um if and when you come to terms in that contract then the board will be very happy to accept that and welcome you and i welcome you to we welcome you to welcome you back to welcome you forward so thank you good discussion and we would have to vote on the contract we would have to vote on the contract exactly and that's what makes it official point of view in terms of our consultant is that something the attorney will also yes okay no offense policy committee but this next thing is going to be a little anti-climatic

230we always save the best for last 8.02 policy recommendations policy committee met on february 2nd and we have the following police recommendations for changes in policy policy 201 legal status of the school board the purpose of this policy is to define the statutory and constitutional authority duties and powers of the school board in carrying out our mission to inspire change and empower all students with the knowledge and skills required to reach their full potential to contribute to future generations and to become involved members of a global community we updated the policy to the most recent election date for school the school board meeting election cycle and a minor punctuation correction um policy 202 which is about school board officers it says that school board officers are charged with the duty of carrying out the responsibilities

231entrusted to them for the care management and control of the public schools of the district the purpose of this policy is to delineate those responsibilities and it was just minor updates for grammar policy 203 operation of the school board governing rules the purpose of this policy is to provide governing rules for the conduct of meetings of the school board there were minor updates to legal references from the msba model policy and then 203.01 the school board procedure that goes along with this for rules of order the purpose of this policy is to provide specific rules of order to conduct meetings of the school board there were updates to language on roll call votes to reflect practice there was deletion of language on contract approval that duplicates other policy and conflicts with msba model policy and

232there were updates to the legal references from the msba model policy policy 401 equal employment opportunity the purpose of this policy is to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants for school district employment and school district employees minor updates to language and legal references based on msba model policy and then 424 on licensed status the purpose of this policy is to ensure that qualified teachers are employed by the school district and to fulfill its duty to ascertain if licensure status of its teachers policy does not negate a teacher's duty and responsibility to maintain a current and valid teaching license and the updates were minor changes to language suggested by our executive director of human resources and finally 427 the workload limits for certain special education teachers the purpose of this policy is to establish general

233parameters for determining the workload limits of special education staff who provide services to children with disabilities receiving direct special education services 60 or less of the instructional day and there were minor updates to language based on the msba model policy this is the first briefing and we'll brief it again and then it'll come back on the consent agenda before we vote yeah right thank you um 10.01 changes to the annual board calendar since february 8th 2022 you have the calendar on board docs do you have any questions for anyone you know no questions about this right then moving to 11.01 march and april 2022 school board meeting dates sometimes um as i'm looking at this we're going to have a number of meetings that we won't be doing because we've had special sessions for the

234superintendent search so we're going to have to revise that one and i know that we'll we'll miss having additional board meetings but our next um regular meeting will be march 1st now we'll have another regular meeting on march 22nd and then two study sessions on march 15th and march 29th we'll still have a study session then but that will be strictly our board self-evaluation with gail gilman any other agenda items to be considered for a future meeting karen can we go back to 1001 i'm sorry i just realized something um the annual board calendar um this might seem really minor but i'm always getting confused when i look at this with the dates in the past as the first column and then the next column is the meeting dates can we put titles on the

235top of those so people like me know what we're looking at on the chart a header on the chart a header on the chat yes i have the same because i'm looking at it thinking well that's already done why am i why are we talking about that but that's when the action was taken right change the meaning and that never triggers in my head so headings would help me thank you anything else all right then it is 9 19 p.m and with thanks to all of you and with congratulations and thanks to dr pacquel we are adjourned