RPS School Board Meeting - 1/04/22

001this regular meeting of independent school district 535 is called order at 5 30 pm tuesday january 4th 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 slash isd 535 where the live stream video may be found this board acknowledges this site and all our ps sites are situated on the ancestral land of the dakota people and we honor the dakota nations and the sacred land of all indigenous peoples present at this meeting our school board members superintendent ken paquel a non-voting ex officio member and assistant board clerk ms michelle severson ms severson will you please call the role thank you clerk edmondson here director barlow here director garcia here director mclaughlin here jeremy marvin here vice chair nathan here and

002treasurer workmen here thank you 2.0 approval of the agenda are there any changes to the agenda move approval second it's been moved and second seconded to approve the agenda all in favor say aye aye opposed agenda is approved 3.0 comments to the board i want to make a comment first we have three high school students here from byron who are observing welcome byron students always happy to have students in the audience and we have a couple of other young people as well one of whom is in kindergarten and we love kindergarten don't we good answer good answer yes and before we have comments to the board we will say the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united god states with liberty and justice we have one person who will be

003providing comments to the board as a reminder we ask you please to speak to the board to limit your comments to three minutes uh when your name is called you can come up here and speak into the microphone at this table have a seat be comfortable uh as we've explained before if you are presenting from a distance you may remove your mask for the three minutes while you are speaking and our speaker this evening is miss gail madison madison gail point 14 specifies that school board officers must be elected for a one-year term as soon after january 1st as practicable and school board policy 202 provides specifics for that process the term begins at the close of this board meeting any board member may nominate any other board member as an officer no second is

004required a quorum of votes is required in this case it will be four votes to determine who is elected to each office an abstention counts as a vote for the nominee who has a majority i'll ask for nominations three times for each of the four offices we have and then announce that nominations are closed at this time i'll accept nominations for board chair miss amundsen i nominate marvin for chair june marvin has been nominated are there other nominations for board chair okay nominations are closed and so by acclimation or default depending on your perspective gene marvin will be the next board chair i'll now accept nominations for vice chair i nominate kathy nathan kathy nathan has been nominated are there other nominations for vice chair other nominations for vice chair nominations are closed and by

005acclamation kathy nathan is vice chair are there nominations i'll accept nominations for secretary cleric not secretary for a clerk ms nathan hi my name is amanson melissa amundson has been nominated as clerk other nominations i nominate karen mclaughlin for clerk karen mclaughlin has been nominated other nominations ms workman i'll nominate um dr garcia for clerk okay so we have because and we will have a show of hands for each candidate those who wish to vote for karen mclaughlin raise your hand those who wish to vote for melissa amonson raise your hand and those who vote to wish wish to vote for jessica garcia raise your hand [Laughter] so the um we need to vote again and we will vote to take two yes if i could speak to this i would like to withdraw my

006nomination only because of my own personal time commitments that i just don't feel like i can do the board the service that it needs in that role may i then nominate julie rickman as a replacement no yes um no because nominations were closed crud nominations are closed and i would also like to withdraw mine first of all what if i just throw mine then okay dr garcia has just withdrawn her nomination i would like to look at miss amundsen i think that honestly okay let's start over again i will reopen nominations for board clerk dr garcia i nominate director bartlett other nominations for board clerk yes the nominee julie whitman julie other nominations who hasn't been nominated yet everyone's been nominated for something we may get asked for volunteers from the audience we have two

007nominees don barlow and julie workman all those who wish to vote for don barlow please raise your hand all those who is vote to wish to vote for julie workman raise your hand i guess i have to vote for myself don would you would you accept the nomination i mean will you accept because did i get them you got them okay now for treasurer um any nominations for the uh office of treasurer ms workman i nominate karen mclaughlin [Laughter] miss mclaughlin i nominate julie workman this is such a big job that i have a treasurer i i nominate just garcia nobody's saying no and nominations are closed our nominees are karen mclaughlin julie workman and jess garcia all those who wish to vote for karen mclaughlin please raise your hand for julie workman please raise

008your hand and for just garcia please raise your hand our new treasurer is karen mclaughlin i will read the resolution be it resolve the school board of independent school district 535 elects gene marvin as its chair for a term of one year effective at the end of the meeting on january 4th 2022 and be it resolved the school board of independent school district 535 elect kathy nathan as its vice chair for a term of one year effective at the end of the meeting on january 4th 2022 and be it resolve the school board of independent school district 535 elect as its clerk karen dawn sorry yeah that was a tight one don barlow for a term of one year effective at the end of the meeting on january 5th 2022 and be it resolved the

009school board of independent school district 535 elect uh karen mclaughlin as its treasurer for a term of one year effective at the end of the meeting on january fourth twenty twenty two move approval two seconds solution and moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye opposed these officers are elected [Applause] that was [Laughter] emotionally complicated 4.02 special session december 14th 2021 special session to review the mid-year performance of interim superintendent when the interim superintendent ken pikel joined the rochester school district last july 1st he and the ward agreed to check in halfway through his tenure to review progress towards goals on december 14th the board met in closed session to evaluate that progress dr paquel was invited to join that conversation after board members had time to discuss clerk amundsen would you recall the

010names of the board members who were present at that time please yes it was uh board members amundsen barlow garcia mclaughlin marvin nathan and workman thank you and this is the summary of that review the interim superintendent is making effective progress towards all three goals on goal one to develop the rochester public school strategic action plan to guide the work of rps during the 2023 and 24 to 2024-25 school years school board voted to authorize the interim superintendent we found his work to be effective school board voted to authorize the interim superintendent to lead the strategic action plan development he engaged the wilder research foundation to facilitate this process currently six committees which include rps staff community members and students are working on different aspects of the plan and are sharing their ideas through the

011coherence committee focus groups and a survey will elicit broader feedback goal two to implement the rps safe and open schools plan to minimize the spread of covit 19 virus among students and staff while working to keep all rps schools and programs open for instruction in person throughout the school year we found his work and his progress to be very effective through through a challenging time with rapidly changing guidance from federal state and local institutions no rps schools have been closed to date due to covid the interim superintendent has been consistent and transparent in his messaging about criteria to be used when quarantining students or classroom he has championed innovative programs like test to stay and goal three which is also found to be very effective to build the capacity of the new office of diversity

012equity and inclusion to coordinate implementation of the school district's equity policy throughout the district working with dei director will ruffin ii the interim superintendent has grown the depth and scope of the dei department adding new equity specialists emphasizing the importance of grow your own teachers and piloting new projects including perspectives [Applause] to provide additional perspectives before the mid-year conversation 36 district cabinet members and lead principals and 54 representatives of community groups completed a survey on which they were asked to evaluate dr paquel's performance to date the survey involved the 10 traits community members had agreed were most important in the superintendent of rochester public schools on the traits of strategic planning and growth collaborative leadership community and parent caregiver engagement and student leadership aggregate scores were effective or highly effective for all on the trade

013of budget and finance confidence was expressed in the interim superintendent's background and expertise but with a tenure of only five months there was not yet an extensive basis for an evaluation of his work with the district at that time on the traits of being an effective communicator approachable and personable honest and ethical problem solver and transparent the aggregate scores were effective and highly effective for each category noted strengths of dr pacquel include impressive research background ability to prioritize multiple challenges and crises tireless work ethic commitment to continuous learning and improvement active presence both in social media and community engagement excellent written and verbal communication skills and expertise in strategic planning suggested areas for continuing focus balancing the speed and efficacy of progress with the importance of ensuring a positive culture and strong relationships and ensuring

014judicious oversight of the rps budget and finances questions comments thank you 4.03 employees of color resource group this is an information item dr dekal thank you madam chair and board members i'm as our executive director of diversity equity and inclusion will rough in the second comes up to introduce some colleagues to describe this this effort i want to just briefly touch on um what research is increasingly show us about the showing us about the power of belonging we know for all of us that sense of being affirmed accepted validated in any area in which we are living and working is important but science is showing us that is particularly important for people who are seeking to contribute and thrive in environments in which they are underrepresented or in which they've historically experienced discrimination or bias

015as in a lot of the things many of these early studies are happening on college students college campuses because many of us know that college students are often guinea pigs for early research studies but these studies are fascinatingly showing that when you proactively take steps to help people who face these additional challenges create that sense of belonging it has powerful benefits to their success in that environment one of my favorite study looked at students of color on a large college campus where they were underrepresented and where grades and graduation rates were historically lower and when the students of color came in what the researchers did was they showed half of the students randomly selected some short videos about welcome to campus where's the dining hall where's the cafeteria you're going to love it here the

016second half again randomly selected of these uh undergraduates of color were shown the same stuff about campus but they were also included in the videos older students of color talking about when they got to campus and how they overcame some of the struggles that they faced how they thought maybe i didn't belong here or when they got a grade that they were discouraged about how they reached out for help or how they finally found their niche on the campus these short additional vignettes in the video cut in half the gpa difference between those students of color and white students on their peers and dramatically raised the graduation rates and when they went back years later and asked the students about those videos the vast majority of students didn't even remember the videos the message was

017internalized that you belong and you can succeed here and we want you to succeed and the power was it was coming from people from within those communities in nurturing the employer employees of color resource group which will rough in the second was an instigator of and one of the pathfinders for rps is taking that same step initially it has a focus on employees of color which is a critical priority for us and the board member but i want to say and as as will may amplify we are eager to see other employee resource groups be uh created and nurtured and supported going forward so that's the big picture around belonging and i want to thank will for his leadership in helping create this new and promising structure and i'm eager for the board in the

018community to get a glimpse of this work in progress absolutely thank you members of the school board i just want to say that you will get a update from me as far as the di work very shortly but tonight's focus is going to be the work of the employees of color resource group and that update will come from the people who are on the ground two who are here with us tonight so i would like to invite rhonda arafat one of our teachers and also minnesota teacher of the year natalia benjamin up to the table with me these are the two of your co-leads of the group so i thought it's very important for you to hear from them themselves thank you to the board thank you for uh marvin for shouting out my kindergarten

019she's pretty excited to be here um as will had said my name is brenda arafat i am a co-lead of the employees of resource color uh resource employee of color resource group uh with natalia we have 10 members on our executive board uh holding various positions within the district and as a part of our board we are looking to network and to bring together the employees of color for the district some of the ways that we are doing that is by networking each of us have a small group of people within the various sites that we keep in contact with support reach out to make sure that they have the support that they need within that uh last year we were able to develop a mission statement and you have that in front of you

020but basically we want to provide an affinity space where we can share the lived experiences that we have as people of color and provide a supportive environment for people to thrive i'll let you read that in more detail we have various ways that we connect with our members including a quarterly newsletter which has been provided on the website and is updated as we uh create it it's also distributed through an email list that we have also we have various social media groups that we post information on as well as uh various articles or research that may come out that we send out to our group on a new basis and ronda is takes credit for all the newsletter stuff she builds all that and i think it's something that the members really appreciate um other

021things that we do is on the website that's in the rps website there is a form that members cancel out so that they can request support or share news or events or anything and that's another way to help us support members that are in need of anything let's see another thing that we do is we connect quarterly with uh superintendent pickel and with will reference so that we can make sure that we're all and just on the same page and just making sure that we have what we need for the group we also hold regular networking meetings which have been held both virtually um and we have yet to meet in person this year we had one scheduled which was delayed due to the snow um it was on the snow day um however we

022did have a oh the back to school luncheon which was successful we had many members that attended that as well as other events that we are holding online which we'll talk about in a second so this uh last year and the summer and then continuing this year we provided some uh targeted professional development and this is something that i'm personally very excited about because not only it gives our members the opportunity to name their lived experiences but also a way to develop skills that they can share with their colleagues when it comes to diverse topics whether it is regarding and i'm going to touch on some of these but some of the pd that we were able to provide and that people attended had to do with critical bilingual literacies and so people that were

023interested in how language works and and how that is beneficial for our students not only are multilingual students but all different types of languages diverse versions of english etc the other one had to do with gender and racial equity in scl and so some of our members attended those during the summer and we had about 10 members that were able to attend the equity literacy institute for racial equity to become facilitators and so that they can bring that expertise to our district and be able to share with not only the people in our group but also their peers in their buildings um and what we are really really excited about this year is um we have a visiting um is getting presented i don't know what her name is dr rita foley and she um

024she published a book this last year and this is talking um with teachers of color so that they can resist racism and reclaim education within their spaces so that they can have the tools that they need to be able to navigate the experiences they may encounter in their day-to-day work we've also been provided an opportunity to engage in several of the equity initiatives that have been provided through the district and making sure that we have uh diverse representation from employees including various committees as well as being consulted on various issues that may come up through both the union and district leadership so thank you for that um so just in closing some of the things that we've had really positive feedback is from our members to be able to to connect to be able to

025share some time their lived experiences and be in a space where people can understand each other something that has also been very a positive feedback is to to have the opportunity for the professional development and people have started to reach out and just to be able to to ask for help and support whether it is with something that happened at work or with whether they have questions about how to approach different situations or even just when it comes to um whether it is day-to-day things how can they connect with other people that are doing similar work across the building and so those are some of the things that people have been really positive about some of the challenges we've had is connecting and reaching out to people um even this this is my third year

026with this group and even this last year um we've had people join and said i i didn't know this group existed so we continue to work on reaching out to to everybody to make sure that those that need the help can have it if they wish to um another challenge that we have is that of time as you know that's very limited and this work happens outside of our working hours um usually on fridays because there's lots of other meetings already during the week and so there's always a challenge to try to find an optimum time to meet and do this work um as well as competing with other other activities committees and other professional development that is happening so those are a couple of challenges that we have encounter as we we're trying to

027put things together for our group um that's all i have i would like to add another challenge if that's okay um one of the things that we've been seeing is trying to get people to tell the true stories of what's happening in our buildings that's been a huge challenge many people don't feel comfortable joining the group because of the fear of retaliation that can come from their buildings so i think it's important to note that so if i am the person who is causing um concern or causing uh shining a brighter light on a concern then i may receive some type of retaliation and that's why people don't want to join one of the reasons people don't want to join so a big focus a big goal of this group is to be a support

028network for each other for people who are working in isolation to understand that you are not the only person feeling this way and actually there's many of us who do so how can we band around each other and keep our numbers uh positive in this district and not declining because retention is something that's it's an issue countrywide we already know that we have very few edge of educators of color and we want to keep them all we want those we want that number to grow we don't want to lose anyone so the only way that we're going to get there is if we address the true problems that are going on in our in our buildings so this this group is an attempt to do that what i also think is important is this is

029a marriage between the school district and the union so we have two parties who are equally invested in this that's huge to note as well so when carl bachman was looking at these numbers three years ago and approached martine to to uh form the group i think that was huge i never seen anything like that in the district before and to see where it's grown in the three years time i can only imagine where it's going to go three years from now so i just want to say thank you for your support thank you for call for bringing that to our attention years ago but we still have a lot of work to do i think we can get there together it's going to take teachers it's going to take our families to tell the

030true stories of what's happening it's going to take our students to tell us what's happening so that we can all improve but i think the word together is what we need to focus on if we can all do this work together and truly be authentic and truly be invested in doing what needs to happen for this for this district i think we can make some changes that need to happen one of the changes that will happen or we also are creating a space for our white educators as well so knowing that equally having a space for employees of color we should equally have a space for white educators to share some of the concerns that they're dealing with knowing that their concerns would be different than an employee of color so we have people who

031are from various schools who have decided to lead this group they're forming this group as we speak they're working on the structure of what that can look like and how do we recruit people to the group but i envision this just being one group of many we can have many groups that mirror the population of our students and our families in rochester so because of this vision that we had three years ago it could morph into something very great so it's not only about employees of color which is a huge piece of the puzzle it's about our white educators it's about our families and it's about our our students and staff who represent the lgbtq community it's about our people who represent our asian communities how can we do better for all of our communities

032in our school district and that's what these groups are for we want to do better for everyone in rochester public schools so thank you for your time today and if you have any questions we could take any questions thanks ladies mr burlo where to begin i do recall some three years ago carl bakken martine i was able to attend those initial meetings and and what a blessing to see the fruition uh from out of the shadows if you will or not really knowing that much about this resource group to now have for the first time this presentation before the board that's hugely important and i think it's a first step also i think it's important to acknowledge employee resource groups are while they may be unique to rochester public schools i know the model that

033male male merg male employee resource groups so important to allow employees to feel a part of and to realize there's a contribution they can make to improve the overall organizational health and for rochester public schools it's the overall organizational health not only of staff but of students so i you know fully support this effort look forward to what will come of it and while i did attend those early meetings i did realize that it was more so potentially an opportunity for staff those in the trenches to to share and support but i want you to be aware that i'm definitely willing to be of service to and whatever i can do to help fulfill the mission of so thank you patrick garcia hi thank you for being here so i just wanted to say something

034and then maybe pose i suppose a question i also i want to echo director barlow's comments i'm so glad that you're here and i'm glad that we have this for our educators of color i'm wondering if there are explicit asks that you have about how you can be supported by the school board and administration and if there are don't be afraid to ask them and then secondly i was once told that i wear my passions on my sleeve and i feel like that that's very accurate of me and this is one of those things that i certainly would be passionate about particularly if i were an educator in the district um and i am certainly as a school board member of the district i'm wondering if there might also be like a junior version of

035this for because we're doing a grow your own right and i'm wondering if we might tap educators future educators particularly those of color and show them that this resource exists um i don't begin to know what that would look like but i just i feel like also if i think of myself as a student as well and i imagine that this would be true of the students that you serve might they want to see i guess sort of what you're explaining in the in the study that there is already living and existing individuals who this is how they got through that process and that experience and might we just infuse that into their potential for becoming an educator here at rochester miss nathan so i think i talked about this when we approve the equity

036policy but i i think everybody should know that the contribution of the employees of color resource group isn't just to the individuals that are in the group but there were voices who were part of the early formation of the employees of color resource group who told us their stories and were really integral in the development and the evolution of the equity policy so for those who don't know this group has already made a significant contribution to the existence of the of the position of uh diversity equity inclusion and to the structure of the equity policy and equity belief statement that we have to to help provide the foundation for the work so for those who are thinking about whether joining this group matters and whether it has an impact you would be joining a group

037that already has and we're looking forward to seeing how that impact will grow in the future it's a it's a great history that you have and a great future so thank you for being here miss amundsen um regarding the point you made about uh making it a safe space and avoiding retaliation or fear of retaliation um specifically do you any of the three of you have recommendations for actions that we could take or is it just a general building of trust gradually that needs to take place i think keeping the anonymity of the people who have shared some of these stories a blanket statement will be to work on the culture of all of our buildings that they're inclusive for all people so that each staff member no matter what their position is shown equal

038value within that building i think that's a good place to start for all of us all of the buildings without any names or anything no i would agree i think a lot of the people that have reached out but are not willing to to put their stories on paper so to speak that's what they're sharing as you know they may not have felt valued they may have felt treated differently and so forth i think so working on that culture of our buildings to make sure that everybody feels valued for who they are and what they bring is important um and that takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of individual work it takes a lot of group work and teamwork um and so i think as we as we see what um

039what type of conversations are happening in the buildings and professional development that is provided it's it's critical that that this is an integral part of what we do every day it's not just what i do if i'm interested in topics in topics of justice and inclusion and diversity it should be what we do every day and adopting it into i agree and adopting into practice and in hiring uh new staff retention of new staff you know several ideas and making uh mandatory uh professional development as opposed to optional thank you so much for the important work that you continue to do thank you thank you can i just answer oh dr garcia's question really quick um she asked what uh what do we need and i would say um continued support i think we we've

040been provided um time to meet quarterly and so to to keep providing that support for us so that we can continue to do that work and just i know we're working with disseminating information and just making sure that everyone that needs to know this can have it if they want to to have access to it and so as we continue to work those networks and and have the word be out for everybody so that everybody knows what uh what they can access if they're part of the group so thank you thank you thank you again thank you thank you we will move on to school board committee assignments board members uh agreed to continue their committee assignments throughout this school year typically we change january 1st but will be on the same committees this year

041unless there is a member who is struggling to meet the schedule of that committee and then you can let us know we'll find someone else to take that spot are there any board members who have reports on committee work that they've done in the last month ms workman yes um the legislative committee has been meeting and we have i'll let you talk because you've done a lot of the work on that um the update i can provide is that we've contacted our area legislators about a meeting with our committee that's set for january 27th i've heard back from all of the senate district 25 who can all attend senate district 26 we're waiting for one person to respond hopefully they will be able to attend as well but two of them have responded that they

042can be there um and we plan we are have sent out the priorities to them i'm getting their feedback answering some questions and then are preparing some questions to have as a dialogue with that group on the 27th uh we do plan to record that session for board members um interim superintendent pacal cabinet members if they're interested in listening to that we can pass that along um director workman director garcia did they miss anything no yes i would like to um really say i was very um happy that the questions that a couple of our or the one of our senators had for us i forwarded to um some cabinet members and the superintendent and the depth of detail was very much appreciated in that so i think we have a really great opportunity for

043education education goes both ways and i'm really looking forward to to the conversation that's coming up um i also invited them to the ms msba is it no it's amsd this friday right and at least one of them are planning to attend that as well so i'm glad that we're passed on that invite and ams see you're talking about the association of metropolitan school districts right they're doing a legislative update friday morning right so these are bigger school districts in the um especially in the twin cities area and rochester other reports i have one for the um the rochester public school foundation is looking for board members and if people are interested in joining they can either contact myself or director edmondson who is sitting on that board or check their website which i believe

044is linked off of the ohio district website i believe it's rpsf.org thank you anyone else i have two district family engagement continues to be such a vibrant important committee some of the highlights from the last meeting included a wonderful video that they had of a number of adults and children who were talking about the way that native american heritage month had been celebrated we have such a strong important native community in this district in particular and these children and their parents and their grandparents continue to educate us every time we talk with them about the rich culture that we have and that are the first peoples here who are here for thousands of years have in this country i am so pleased personally that our new middle school dakota could receive get the name that

045was voted for is a is a dakota word so we saw that video out also our rps safe routes to school organization is really working hard to get our kids exercising more riding their bikes to school walking to school and they're looking at ways to make the roads safer the routes safer they're looking at ways to get bikes to kids who don't have bikes bikes and helmets they're also looking at ways to educate our drivers to be looking out for kids who may be walking or riding bikes to school finally working with cradle to career district family engagement is helping to distribute kindergarten readiness cards these are almost like flash cards that parents and caregivers can use with their kids teaching them skills that they're going to need when they get to kindergarten they're fun

046they're interactive they're currently available in four different languages and we think this is just a really great hands-on way that parents and others can be involved with our preschoolers so that when they do enter kindergarten that first day they'll be ready to roll and then a quick report from our executive team this board knows that when our former superintendent michael munoz resigned last february we had a significant discussion about the best way forward to hire a new superintendent at that time and after extensive discussion we decided we needed to do two searches one immediate one to find an interim superintendent and then second a second search this year to find a longer term superintendent we passed the resolution that we would do two searches at our february 16 2021 meeting it is now time to

047begin that search for a long-term superintendent and by the way we made it very clear to those who applied to be interim that if they were interested they could certainly apply for the long-term superintendent position we are or john carlson in his office have sent out requests for proposals from superintendent search firms they received a number of proposals back the plan is to do interviews with representatives of those firms this friday so this is just sort of an informal request that if any of you know you will be available on friday and might consider being part of that interview process the times have not been set yet but let me know and we can certainly use another uh person or two in that in that quest any questions about that i assume they'll be on

048uh zoom or they'll be yep they'll be virtual zoom or teams or whatever we use did you have an update from the community engagement committee as well oh thank you ms nathan why don't you go ahead and do that i don't know if i know all the details but uh the community engagement committee has been working on um opportunities to engage our community um hence the name of the committee um and we are going to be hosting on january 20th from seven o'clock till eight o'clock seven o'clock until eight o'clock a virtual uh community uh forum and we're going to organize it um in a world cafe style so if you're familiar with breakout rooms in our in in those virtual spaces we'll gather everyone together we'll have breakout rooms we'll have note takers and

049facilitators in each of the breakout rooms and people have an opportunity to spend three minutes sharing whatever information they would like the board to hear about and uh those notes will be the note that also be taken and shared with all the rest of the board members um and we will be taking reservations for participation simply because of the the need to send out the information for the links etc which i think director marvin knows a little bit more about than i do well and that information will be available on the website and miss ike and ms nessler have been working with that because nobody wants to trust me with technology which is wise so there will be breakout rooms they're organizing that it'll be groups of eight to ten people and as ms nathan

050said there will be an opportunity to speak to the board member or cabinet member there and then also some time for discussion and i know a lot of people have said we just want to talk with you about some things so the groups will be small enough that we think we can do that you do need to reserve a spot in advance because we have a limited number of people that we can accommodate in breakout groups and if this is wildly successful which we assume it's going to be we'll plan on doing more but for now we think the safest way most efficacious way of doing this is virtually but hopefully in the not too distant future we'll be able to meet face-to-face ms amundsen am i remembering correctly that that your group was seeking

051facilitators for that or am i thinking of a different event you are correct okay and who do we contact if we're available to help yes you can contact ms nathan or i and and again it's january 20th but we certainly hope that board members will all want to be involved in facilitating so thank you for volunteering i just volunteered i just heard you do that perfect thank you other questions comments announcements yes um regarding uh not reassigning committee assignments um this month one one of my hopes was that in my first four years as a school board member i'd be able to try out all the different committee so i'm hoping that my colleagues when they find that they won't be able to attend a particular meeting perhaps reach out to me or your other

052board members to get a sub for that because i really miss student school board oh and and i've never um never been able to participate in several of the other the um so miss amundsen is your go-to person if you need a sub and uh we'll we'll talk too because you can certainly be involved in that ms workman yeah uh i really appreciate the director amundsen brought this up because um i think as john and jean both know this has been kind of our practice in the past last year of course with so many zoom meetings it didn't seem to be as much of an issue but it's really nice to have those committee meetings covered and like director amundsen said you get to learn more about what other groups are doing excellent okay thank

053you um 5.0 consent agenda are there any items to be removed for separate consideration hearing none of approval second it's been moved and seconded all in favor of approving the consent agenda say aye agenda is approved then on to 6.01 this is a focus topic topic english language arts overview dr pikel dr marvin and board members this is i'm i'm really excited about this because as all of you know we have been besieged by covid and many other things and far too often those efforts have not let us get at the main endeavor that we are about in rochester public schools and that is the education of our students and so all of the things we've been talking about feed into that but we are beginning tonight a series of deep dives into the main

054curricular areas that we are seeking to help students uh master and embrace and thrive in and contribute to the world in and so we are i think appropriately starting with english language arts because we know that students need to go from learning to read to reading to learn i have encouraged the teams that our department of curriculum and instruction have brought together of practitioners from multiple uh levels of our district to be honest that the purpose here is not a show-and-tell or a dog and pony show that doesn't present the board in the community with an understanding of some of the challenges that we're facing but the goal here really is to be fairly panoramic and to give the board a real sense initially in english language arts then we'll be moving on to mathematics

055science social studies the arts to do a deep dive but i think it's critical to say at the outset of our first uh such discussion that these can't be a one and done that i'm hoping that this is the beginning for the board of an ongoing discussion of where we are in terms of curriculum uh instruction and student outcomes in these various areas i'm excited to share and we will in february be joined by a new director of research assessment and evaluation in the school district and so we'll be adding capacity to look at evidence and analysis that i think is going to further complement the work that we're going to hear about tonight so with no further ado i want to ask our executive director of curriculum and instruction brenda richmond to come up

056and she'll bring the rest of the group up on a point of order madam chair because this is a not a cast of thousands but a robust group of folks that's going to be coming up i might suggest that board members may want to ask questions as we go as opposed to waiting for the end because we are going to cover the gamut from early childhood to high school and across the scope we're going to do this quickly and efficiently but i'm a little concerned that if we hold all questions to the end it's going to be remember when we were talking 25 minutes ago about early literacy and so i know that as chair you'll need to kind of manage that but i told the team they shouldn't be surprised if board members do

057jump in with some questions as we go and obviously there'll be time at the end for sort of summative discussion but i'm concerned that if we save all board members questions for the end um we won't be able to have the kind of interactive conversation that i hope we've set up so i want to thank brenda and her team we've had some this also in putting these sessions together i'll just say final point this has been a further opportunity for me to get smarter about the state of curriculum and instruction in these critical areas in our district so it's been a great learning opportunity for me and i hope it is for board members and the community as well so brenda jeremiah and board members um this isn't a deep dive i'm just gonna see

058if we did a really deep dive we'd be here till like midnight so but it's not a just a shallow dive either and we are excited to share this story with you and while kovid has been a big part of our lives for two years and rightfully so it should be there's a lot of academic work going on as well so we have uh you've seen heather willman and peter dodds before from the office of curriculum and instruction i'm steph whitney is here tonight too she's our humanities implementation associate we have stacy ellison from willow creek phil olsen from century high school and laurie mack is here one of our district reading specialists and they'll be joined eventually too will whenever you're ready to come up we'll rough in the second so um while we

059love to talk to you about our important work we know that you really like to hear from practitioners so that's who we have gathered here tonight and thank you for the opportunity hey thank you everybody it's good to uh be here this evening and being able to have a good discussion with all of you so um tonight um we want to talk about ela and i think when talking about english language our arts it's important to have uh some context about the two ends of the spectrum when we're talking about reading right and on the one end of the spectrum we have this kind of phonics only approach right where we are really looking closely at words and trying to decode words and we're just drilling drilling and drilling and then on the other side

060of the spectrum of a reading approach is that what you would hear or call the whole language approach where if we just expose our students to great books and and let them discover and see they'll become readers and really what the science of reading would say and what you're going to be hearing about is that it's about taking the strongest pieces of each of those but then making instruction explicit making it systematic and making it multi-sensory so through a structured approach to teaching of reading um particularly at our foundational levels um if we do this then really 95 of our students can be readers um there's just a small percentage of our of students that might have some processing piece but all almost all of our students we should be able to get there with

061the right tools and diagnostics so we're going to be talking a little bit about that tonight and heather so we wanted to tell you um also about some work that we did prior to this um around prioritized learning so we've done some work with our teachers bringing them together to say what are the five to seven most important high leverage skills um that are in your your course or your grade and so we wanted to just share a little bit about what those look like just so that you know that that that work has been done so this is an example this is fourth grade prioritized learning around writing um and really the purpose of these is to help students understand where am i going what is the target where am i now in relation

062to that target and what steps do i need to take to close that gap so that's really what the purpose of these prioritized learnings are and here's a 10th grade example other right yeah and it's important to note that although these are the prioritized learnings or the the most critical learnings we do cover all of the state standards these are the ones that we really focus on highly monitoring and so plcs look at these they make sure that they have quality formative assessments on these prioritized learnings and that's what they really focus on giving students feedback around so why does this matter i know i'm speaking to a former english teacher as one of the the members of the audience here but um we know that that english language arts reading and writing and speaking

063are really critical skills for all kinds of life opportunities so this is a really important piece of our rochester public schools education as you can see as you'll hear threads throughout the night the graduate profile should come clearly through because we know that if students can read well if they can write well if they can communicate effectively they're going to be able to problem solve and they can also learn at a deeper level so you'll hear a lot about close purposeful reading writing re-reading talking and that's really what we're thinking about when we think about essential skills in our language arts classes you can't jump in at any point with questions uh so process to date i think it's important to have context to the timeline of events that kind of happen uh uh as

064well um so the state every 10 years comes up with a new set of standards or revised standards and we align our processes to that cycle that the state follows so you can see for ela expected implementation is actually pushed back a year because of the pandemic but expected implementation of the new standards will be in 25 26 the current standards have basically been hanging in a final draft form and waiting for approval from the state but we have a pretty good idea of what those are going to look like so it's incumbent upon the district to as these new standards come out to develop a team look at our current level of performance look at the new standards research the new standards or evidence-based practices and then figure out what steps do we need

065to take what adjustments do we need to make in our practices if any so um or what material needs we might need to consider as well so we're hoping um to uh build this ela leadership team to start that process uh in the coming uh months and really start to dig into that work next year so that's a little bit about the articu curriculum articulation cycle we review our curriculum as it relates to the new standards that come out one thing that we're going to try and do more intentionally with the english language arts cycle is just really amplify student voice we've always had teachers as a part of that that group studying how are we doing what are our outcomes but we really want to make sure that we have students as a part

066of that process a little bit more intentionally so we're conducting some interviews now trying some different kinds of methods of getting information from students and then once we form our leadership team we'll do some thinking about how we get student voice and then we also want to have some student members of that articulation team so we think that will be a good enhancement so we wanted to share a little bit of some of the promising practices that we're already experimenting with that we have teachers that are working on and we'll be fairly brief because we have folks who are actually going to speak to some of these pieces so the first being this idea of targeted small group instruction for really differentiating support for the specific skill the student needs in reading particularly at the

067foundation levels and lori our district literacy coach will be sharing a little bit about that but then also we've started the work this year on one gap i would say we've had is a tool that can help us critically analyze any new curriculum that we're looking at specifically around equity and how it outlines to our equity belief statements and the the policy work that's been done so we have a team currently working on that and we want to have this tool to be able to use it for any new curriculum that we're looking at another practice that um is very widespread and um and successful is literature circles and then just opportunities for students to choose text that match their interests so you might think back maybe 20 30 years ago all of the students

068may have read gatsby at the same time and we do have some shared texts but we do have a lot of small group and choice opportunities for students to be able to choose texts that really match their interests and their passion these folks will talk a little bit more about the writing diagnostics so one of the things that we've we wanted to think about is how do we find out where our students are at with writing and then how do we target that writing instruction based on student strength and growth areas so some of our folks are going to talk about what that process looked like and then the final practice that we're really trying to think about is how do we build in more one-on-one conferring to provide students with targeted feedback we know

069that that really helps improve student growth and our students appreciate that type of feedback but it's really challenging to do that when you have 150 students and so how do we leverage technology and different structures to be able to provide more of that before we move on then if i may chair marvin it's exciting to hear about the curriculum review tool [Music] under development so i won't really ask you much about that but i do have a question regarding the learning circles i think that's an excellent idea and so how will the well be it from a cultural or ethnic or linguistic consideration how will those factors be uh taken under consideration you're speaking specifically to the literature circles sure yeah i mean i think one of the one of the pieces that we think

070about is trying to really um think about sources like there's a great resource called we love diverse books where they recommend great selections for students that that might really fit what they're interested in and then i think we also need to curate that from the students as well a lot of times students want to be able to tell one another here's what i'm reading here's what's what's been interesting about it and here's where i see myself in the in the text so i mean i think it's a combination of making sure that we have good sources of rich text and then also letting the students kind of talk to one another about what they're reading and are interested in miss workman had a question oh sorry you maybe had more to say about that julie

071yeah um director barlow had touched on the curriculum review tool and i was wondering is that something that you're developing in-house or we started by looking at a number of examples from either other districts or um state has a couple of resources to look at of course and then um some others around the state so we're starting by looking at that and then taking out the pieces that we thought were critical and starting to build our own based on that this is kind of scary i think you were reading my mind because that was my next question that you just answered answered if there were other districts who are taking a similar kind of approach and how you would utilize those so that's really that's really exciting i just i'm so thrilled when we have

072this kind of collaboration going on that's really useful and helpful and um kudos to all of you for that i would say i mean i know the superintendent mentioned this at the beginning to be we want to be candid i mean it was certainly a gap that we've had and it's certainly a huge need um so it is exciting um it's also oh man this we should have got started on this earlier so and we can kind of see where as we're working through this tool there may be a base tool that's kind of a foundation and then as we look at various content areas there might be specific things that we would look for in social studies or in english or in science more to come on that another question you talked about providing

073students with targeted feedback are you using and i guess how early does it start uh student peer-to-peer feedback on writing i would say i think we have a number of teachers that are really good at that i would say from a systems level [Music] probably a growth area in terms of maybe using those prioritized learnings uh around writing how can we use this tool to support one another and give feedback on one another's work i would say is it probably a growth area at least i'm speaking elementary we have some work to do in writing at the elementary for sure i want to make sure i give the teachers an opportunity to say anything about that if you want to specifically about um getting a set of peers eyes and some additional feedback that's definitely

074i would say a foundational or a very common practice at the high school level um that said it's um a technique that needs constant refinement and oversight um before students are able to offer one another meaningful feedback that typically requires some training and just as one example if there is a mentor text to look at sort of as an exemplar to compare the student whose work is under examination with that's usually a lot more useful than just saying would you give me some feedback on my paper for instance so that requires some architecture but it definitely can be an effective tool and it is happening and i think we're continuing to get better at it i'm going to circle back a little bit to an earlier question about the literature circles as well because i

075feel like there's a similarity with peer feedback as there is with literature circles and the ability to help our students understand how to have challenging conversations um especially in those literature circles are they having conversations about current issues and about things that really matter to their lives and that takes a lot of work to help them through that process and to feel comfortable in that process in a similar way as as that peer feedback process with them and so i think those are two areas that i know a lot of teachers are working on but that we can continue to work on all right so i think we'll move into the spotlight section um and so i think lori's our first spotlight yeah and lori by the way she's so passionate about this that she

076came even after she broke her ankle like i'm coming i want to share so thank you lori yes no problem thank you thank you so much for having me tonight um so this graphic is complex and so i want to unpack it just a little bit for you um and then we'll go from there so um you know dr louisa moats once said that teaching reading is rocket science and then dr jeff's wires took it a step further and said you know teaching reading is rocket science only harder and that's the truth it really is um and so when we look at teaching reading you know the whole language approach was a little bit more like let's just hope if we expose kids enough to good reading and they practice looking at books enough that

077they'll become good readers and for some kids it works they just naturally take to it and and they become readers but other kids struggle a lot more and so we started looking at how can we better meet the needs of so many of our kids and really get to that 95 percent of kids who are readers and so we looked into the science of reading and the signs of reading is not new it's been around for a long time but as a nation we've been a little resistant to it it takes some really hard work to to teach reading this way and so as a district as we're starting with our k2 students we are really we're asking them to make some complex change to instruction and and it's daunting it really is but i

078think we are going to see and and the evidence is there that we are really going to see some progress for our kids and so dr hollis put together dr hollis scarborough took to get put together this rope and when she first built it she built it out of um pipe cleaners and started putting the pieces together of what does it really take to become a reader and then over time it became this graphic and so there's really two parts one part is language comprehension which sometimes we don't think about enough our kids come to school with certain gaps sometimes in language sometimes we don't spend enough time really building up verbal reasoning or thinking about sentence structure syntax how we speak the language vocabulary can be very limited at times it just depends on

079what those conversations are around the table at home and what they're exposed to as preschoolers and so that is a piece that we really need to look at at the top part of this rope there's several several strands there and then we look at the bottom part which is often called word recognition or decoding and decoding has it's kind of had a storied history of sometimes being popular and sometimes not being very popular but what we know now is that if we really look at phonological awareness meaning we can detect and understand the sounds the actual phonemes in every word that we can start to learn to construct words we can decode words we can encode meaning we can spell words if we can actually hear all those sounds and so we know that we

080need to spend some more time there and as a district a couple of years ago we started using a resource called hegerty and really working on uh phonological awareness of phonemic awareness then what we noticed is that we really needed to bring in decoding that was a piece that phonics piece that we just really didn't have any direct and explicit instruction around and so a lot of teachers were trying to do it but they were kind of doing it with their own materials so it wasn't always consistent and so that's a piece that we brought in with our really great reading program and so we're really looking at phonics and how we can build words to decode them and encode them and then we really looked at that sight word piece and so for a

081long time we would think of sight words as sight words were memorized words those words that oh the dolce words the 100 most popular words in print and we would ask our kids to memorize those words unfortunately there's only so much working memory uh to remember words and once you get past a certain point you can't remember what those words are especially the words that are irregularly spelled so how can we teach them to orthographically map how can we get the brain to map that word so that it's automatic and recognized immediately and that's a piece called orthographic mapping and so we're doing that now with something called heart words so we listen to the parts the phonemes in the words that make sense and then we might have to memorize just one part by

082heart to construct that word and it's really a successful way of looking at words so those are the two strands and you'll notice that this is um it's a mathematical mathematical equations so if we have a zero in there we're not going to get very far so decoding multiplied by language comprehension practicing fluency gets us to that point of reading comprehension which is our ultimate goal for our readers to understand what they're reading make sense of it and interpret everything that they're reading you'll also notice on this particular graphic that we have the five pillars of reading instruction so you'll see phonemic awareness and phonics down in the word recognition part of the rope vocabulary and language comprehension we have the fluency piece so we're practicing being fluent and expressive readers and ultimately getting us

083to that reading comprehension piece so if we look at what we have been doing specifically for k2 right now as we're trying to bring our k2 foundational skills um on board and then we will expand that over the next couple of years you'll see that we've put in quite a few different resources that are brand new for our teachers to teach them the signs of reading and so one of the things that we've been doing this year my partner and i has been working on the literacy partnership which has been some ongoing professional development coaching on site working with teachers just to really help them hone some skills around this new style of teaching we've been implementing sound walls which is something different than a word wall a word ball is where we put those

084words on the wall and then hope that the kids use those words to memorize uh spellings and what those words might mean where if we really go by sound while we're really thinking about how those words sound where they fit for example the word the we wouldn't put that under t because t sounds like we would put it under the voiced sound of and so kids can really access words more clearly we've in started a second scoop binder which is really a phonemic awareness small group activity and so it helps kids use manipulatives to find the sounds in words find the syllables onset rhyme and so on and so so some of those kids that really need a little extra help can get that within the small group we have geodes which is a new

085decodable for kindergarten and first grade they're beautiful they're very diverse they offer lots of different skills so instead of just wrote the cat set on the mat these are actual stories but they are decodable we have sound books we have duet books so that the teacher will read parts and the kids will read parts and then finally some decodable books that align with our really great reading and then we also have hegerty and so as we look across the skills that we have for skilled reading the five pillars you'll see that many of those tools are in place right now and teachers are just really unpacking them this year and starting to implement uh these these pieces of resources that we have and then finally looking at our plan for the literacy partnership for k2

086at this point we have chosen a few lead schools that are ready to dive in we've had you know so many interruptions this past year and it's just been really tough for a lot of our teachers um so we we went with four schools that said hey we're ready to take the plunge we really want some on-site coaching we really want to move forward and hone our skills and see what we can learn and model for the district after that and so we are we form some literacy leadership teams and so we want to grow capacity at the school site so that they don't just rely on somebody else to come in and support them from there we're getting their feedback and we're determining next steps and then we will they spent some time before

087christmas really deciding which practice they wanted to implement let's just focus on one and do it really well and then when we're ready we'll move on to the next practice so through some practice plans that were put together they decided which one they would like to start we're going to do on-site coaching so we'll be in the school in the classroom and working with the teachers we'll also be meeting with plc's once a month so that we can do some more in-depth professional development to support whatever it is that they've decided to implement and then peter will be meeting with building principles monthly to follow up a bit of a shift but we want to make sure we're doing the work side by side in the classroom with our teachers any questions um lori is

088our resident expert so if you have questions around reading and foundational skills of reading lori is the person sure and i'm thankful we're not doing a deep dive but i would be curious to learn not necessarily tonight more about uh orthographic mapping and uh how will we know or at what point in the uh not too distant future what we'd be able to say you know this is working uh you know this is accomplishing exactly what we envisioned uh and let's build it even beyond so do you have any thoughts regarding that or because this is my fifth year on the board and and uh this isn't the first time we have had bid curriculum be it concept you know i'm excited about what i'm hearing i believe this will work and and i see

089great value in it uh so uh what are your hopes these liars when do you think we'd be able to well when will you come back and say board you know here it is okay well i think that's part of the inception of the lead sites is um we want to take a focused uh group that's kind of ready start to implement some of these practices um try them out with teachers hey what what's working with you and what's not working and then um collecting data on how did our students grow over the course of our time together and really the goal of that is over the next three or four months so then we can see on a on a site based level this is what works this is what doesn't work or this

090is what we thought was going to work and it didn't and then be able to replicate that on a larger scale so hopefully this spring i really appreciate director barlow the question i just want to put in a plug here for what in my world is usually called common common formative assessments these can be teacher design these also can be technology based they can be diagnostic but it's assessments that actually get at the kind of granular um literacy skills and the same we will see in mathematics and other areas i'm actually i'm a big believer in individual teacher innovation in site-based innovation i'm not a big believer in innovation and measurement if we don't have actual common measurements we can't actually identify effective practice now that's easier said than done and it doesn't necessarily mean

091it's a purchase of a major new frequent assessment piece the additional challenge that districts often don't bite off when they do the hard work of aligning curriculum and instruction with again either teacher designed or purchased assessment is we have to do the hard work of aligning those assessments with the summative assessments that we're going to be judged by like it or not like proficiency on the mcas which was top of their list at the beginning or the acts and college going you can do those equations we can actually look at what we're seeing in a third grader and what that's going to mean over time we've chosen not to focus this discussion on that issue of assessment but it's really really critical it's gotten a pretty dirty word deservedly so over the last 15 20

092years because a lot of assessment actually diminishes effective instruction when it's not well aligned but i think that's part of the answer and i really appreciate dr barlow you follow your historical perspective that you've sort of been here before and you've heard about these promising pieces and the how will we know it's working how will you know at the board level matters but i'll tell you for those teachers that you're working with it really matters they want to know that it actually is working and so that's i think a second wave it's one reason why at the beginning of this discussion i mentioned that we will have a new director of research assessment evaluation joining the curriculum and instruction team it's one person but over time it needs to be a small but mighty department

093that's working very tightly with the people who are doing this capacity building and that's adding value directly to individual classroom teachers so not our focus tonight but in february i'm excited to introduce you to that new key leader on the team and we have to make sure five years from now you or another board member is not sort of saying the same thing this sounds great i think it's going to work how will we know we have to roll up our sleeves and do that work and not many districts have done it well thank you dr garcia yes thank you for all the work you do and i can tell how passionate you are about this work because you're smiling through your eyes i can tell even through the mask on um so i was

094smiling as well um the la i feel like the last time we talked about the five pillars i did have a question and i'm wondering if maybe we can speak a little bit more to it about if i know i realize that this is english language arts and how are we supporting those who speak a language other than english coming into our school so whether they're coming in right into kindergarten or if they're transferring to us from you know another school um another district because i'm thinking of of students who may have a lot of phonological awareness site recognition of a word in their you know first language or even second language but maybe not so much in english and how do we in this space support them to get to where they need to

095go and i'm sort of wondering if this is maybe a double question i really like the idea of the literature circles and i'm wondering are we would we be balancing um fluency or other capabilities like neurodivergency different things within that literacy group or art would we be grouping kids like with like until they're able to scaffold into like a a higher level of fluency or how does that work i guess i can start okay um it's interesting when uh at the beginning of the year for the literacy partnership we were pulling in our second grade group and then also our el teachers into this learning as well um critical critical perspective and one of the conversations i had with uh one of our el teachers and it clicked for me then is actually my the

096students that i work with they are strong at that bottom part of the rope what the struggle is is that background knowledge that vocabulary knowledge on the language comprehension part of the rope that's where we need to focus our our energies and that's why um we don't want to just focus on phonics only we want our classroom teachers to be doing strong read-alouds and asking a language which environment where kids are talking about what they're reading and what what they like about what they read that's a critical piece that we don't want to lose and forget about um so that's kind of that's my answer to that a little bit and i'm not sure if that completely satisfies what you're looking for but um it's it's a piece that we know is critical particularly for

097our el students we know also with the sound walls how critical that can be for our second language students because there are 44 phonemes in the english language but there are only 26 i believe in the spanish language and in other languages hawaiian there's 11. so there's lots of different uh phonemes that are out there some that are common between the different languages and some that are totally different and so really helping kids just to focus on sound where can they find those that make connections with their culture and with their home language and which ones are divergent from their home language so in those beginning grades we really want to focus in on on some of that sound language work i also wanted to just mention about the assessment you know um we uh

098we we have some great assessments we have really good assessments uh so that we can get to that granular level and figure out what kids need the the mindset that we're trying to nurture and we're hoping to coach is that we can do those assessments daily and not just to stop everything and let's assess let's keep doing those assessments as ongoing so that it informs my instruction for the next time we get together for a small group and so the graphic that was on one of these it says uh plan do study and usually it's act we like to use plan do study adjust because there's always going to be an adjustment that needs to be made to get us to the next level of our instruction with our kiddos and keep them moving forward

099so if we can do that continuously we're going to know our kids so much better and really be able to on the spot make those adjustments that the kids need for that next step thank you all right so i think we get to pass the oh i was gonna say we're passing the mic down for the secondary group okay we'll share the one okay so my mind is abuzz with that conversation and i'm excited about the talk about so anybody who's been stuck in a conversation with me lately has heard the title street data a book by um dugan and saphir that talks about the importance of both they reference umbrella data that big data we look at and also what would they consider street data which would be that which is happening in the

100classroom working with students and so my mind is just reeling as we're thinking about it because they talk about how both are really important but the change happens at the street data level and so as we were talking i was thinking about do our students know if the skill development is happening you know as teachers do we know that but then also do our students understand what their skills are what their need more practice on and how do they develop those things and so that was an exciting little flurry there for me thank you for thank you for letting me talk it out for a moment okay i have what i hope is the speedy version of this because those who we really want to hear from are phil and stacy who have been working

101on this um writing diagnostic with their students and so i'm going to provide a little bit of foundational information that will also look like the majority of the slides but i promise to be fast where's that clicker thanks okay so essentially um we have been talking about the need to align our writing work for the entirety of my career in english certainly i've been here about 21 years and i think especially as we've gotten these prioritized learnings the last few years recognizing that we don't have necessarily a comprehensive understanding of what each of our students skill development is at each level and then what i can expect as i was an 11th grade teacher my students to be predominantly successful in as they come into my class as 11th graders right and so this conversation

102has been swirling about for a very long time and we thought this year with what our students have experienced the last few years might be an interesting opportunity to try to take stock and we know that many teachers do writing diagnostics but we haven't necessarily normed ourselves to one at least in my in my time here and so this seemed like while a wild and crazy time to try to do this um also a really important time to get a sense of what each of our students are bringing to the classroom we knew they were coming in with skills but we had less information about what they might be coming in collectively with when it came to skills and so here we are essentially we set out to create a diagnostic six through eight and

103nine through 12 a proficiency scale for teachers to use to measure where students are in their skills and also something for students to latch on to and understand where their skill set is and what they need to grow on and so what you're going to see in these first few slides really are kind of some background information and then our mindset as we went into it i won't go through each of these dates with you but last spring we did i did seek out those who might be interested as some brave souls who might be interested in joining this work in a steering committee forum um two of them are sitting here with me today very fortunate for that so we met then during curriculum writing and spent a couple intense days i would say

104trying to build a diagnostic try to think through what it is that we're trying to diagnose what do we want our students to come out of this experience learning about themselves and then we got together again in august to try to put together lesson plans to support teachers so that there was consistency in the rollout within classrooms and and to provide as many resources to teachers as we could the teachers knew along the way that we were going to ask for about three days of their time sometime in first quarter and that we would help provide the rest of the details for them and so that was the work we did we rolled it out at back to school week and so the teacher i very much appreciate the teachers willingness to kind of wait

105and hold and and then take that on as we started this fall so first few weeks of school we asked teachers to conduct this writing diagnostic in their classes um and then also within quarter one we asked them to work within their plcs to determine what they found to kind of figure out analyze the data results um look at each of their individual student results and talk through um and then in quarter two we're currently asking teachers to meet as a department and take a look at that skill development and i'll get to the skills in just a second so we're about right here in the messy middle and we're recognizing that teachers are still trying to do this work with all the other things on their plate and so i am certain i will

106hear that this was a tall order um and i know that people have talked through like how do i make this happen in my class in a in a way that is valuable to both me and the students and so we're excited about this being the foundational year the first year we're doing this and continuing to grow so our next quarter then we will be meeting again as a steering committee to look at feedback from teachers and students about how this has gone so we can get better so we can build and get better all right so some beliefs and then the next slide is just wonderings that we had that guided our work as as we were often caught up in weeds and trying to determine common language which is also a major need

107i think within all of our classes how are students hearing words and do they have the same understanding of meaning as we do um so there was a lot of great rich conversations um but these were some of the beliefs that paved our way and then some of our guiding questions so you know just a couple of real light topics that we were trying to discuss and tackle we're pretty sure we've got it solved so that's exciting for all of us um so to get to the prompts um and this is where things can also get a little bit interesting um we had sixth through eighth grade we landed on a sixth or eighth grade writing prompt that was more informative and creative and that aligns with both the prioritized learnings and the state standards

108both the current state standards and looking ahead to those that will be in place in in 2526 and then we also had for the high school 9 through 12 their standards tend to lean more towards that persuasive argumentative writing and so theirs was about the grading for learning and getting some feedback and some strong data on how our students are feeling we got a lot of good feedback we're still working our way through um and so essentially these were the two problems we asked students to answer and and these were the skills that we chose to focus on and so we tried to keep the skills limited to just a couple so teachers could work their way through it but also these skills were linked to prioritized learnings and the standards as well so i'm

109buzzing fast so if you have questions i can absolutely go through this is why we chose these particular skills these are this is why we chose these particular skills um yeah and so the standard link and the prioritized learning i mentioned already we also wanted to make sure that our students understood why they were doing this so these were slides that were provided to teachers to share with their students and teachers certainly could talk through this with their students more but we wanted to make sure that students understood that this was something that wasn't necessarily graded but it was incredibly important for us to help meet them where they are and to work with them on an individual basis and i'll also link of course to the graduate profile with the skilled communicator and critical

110thinker so that is the foundational work um and now i'll hand it over to i don't know who wants to go first all right you've jumped right on there all right i'll just keep my comments really brief i'm stacey ellison i'm an eighth grade english teacher at willow creek and um as noted on the slide kind of one of the things that i really took away from this experience from doing the work throughout the summer and into the fall and actually implementing it into my classroom is this notion of process versus product i think a lot of times we always talk about the assessment as being the be-all end-all and i kind of think of that old adage that it's not so much the destination but the journey and when i put into practice what

111i want my students to learn with regards to writing i kind of had to take a step back and go okay yes they're writing an essay they're writing a paragraph and i want them to do all these things but what i learned in teaching the process of writing was to really step back and have that one-on-one dialogue with students it did take a longer time because usually like when i was in school when you learned how to write your teacher would say this is what you have to do you have two days to do it you get class time here you go thank you very much and you look at the grade and you go huh i did well or i did bad i didn't want to really focus so much on the end of

112the product i wanted to focus on the process especially because i have students that are at various different points i have students that really know how to analyze things but they don't know how to convey it into words i have students that really need bare bones instructions on how to formulate a topic sentence so in the process of teaching a paragraph an analytical paragraph for academic writing and i did this right before winter break um i took i think it was like five or six days to work on one paragraph now you may be thinking okay that's a little obsessive but we really did it step by step sentence by sentence and what i the reason why i did that is because i wanted to help students individually some kids really get it automatically others

113do not um but i found in kind of breaking things down going at a bit of a slower pace i found i was able to connect with students more i felt um i was more able to understand where they're at and they got that one-on-one support and i feel like that feedback that i did as they're working was so much more valuable to them than if i gave them a score at the end because sometimes those kids they look at the score and they just go okay and you can write all the comments you want on that sheet of paper about what you did well and what you need to work on and it's just it's not that they don't care it's just it's the process that really matters for students instead of the product

114um so i really enjoyed kind of tailoring my teaching of writing that way the thing is it does take a lot of time and you know i also got to teach literature at the same time as well and vocabulary but when talking to steph i kind of had this dialogue with her that you know kind of what i see next steps for us as a group is maybe to talk about not only what we're doing in six through eight but also in high school how we can do those foundational skills to help them branch to high school writing but also just what can i do to make writing more meaningful to students we focus so much on academic papers but we also want to know that kids can write for a variety of situations practical

115situations and so i kind of talked with stuff about how i need to be more intentional i need to be more pragmatic in developing writing opportunities for students and kind of you know i don't want to take anything out of my curriculum i just have to work smarter so that's kind of my as i said very brief comment sorry um that's basically what i got through this process and i'm really looking forward to continuing the work with our team stacy wow i was struck by the fact that you had mentioned that your goal was to help students individually and i'm sure that's probably the goal of of all teachers but as i heard you you spoke also about the how you were able to on a personal level connect understand and and support and and

116those things uh allow me to consider well what makes rochester public schools so unique and and really what should be the district of choice for people in this region and and as and and you each of you who presented tonight uh you answer that question this is why uh rps should be the district of choice uh yet having said that i also realized that uh where you may be individually or where we have been as a district as a whole perhaps has not necessarily been where we are currently headed i appreciate the recognition that you and this process well process this product differentiates between uh product and process and how process really is the most important thing grades are important and you know that's an end how well it's structured is important but if learning

117hasn't occurred if the student aside from looking at the grade oh i got a a but i didn't really you know have a significant effect upon me and i guess i'm just thinking out loud how what you guys have shared this evening how it really helps um and this isn't tied to an ask you're not asking us to increase the budget for at least not yet go maybe you are but uh but this is great and and for me as a member of the board i'm excited and uh sometimes when we have our board meetings and there are a lot of people here they don't get to hear this and i think if more people heard this they then maybe their attitude their view their opposition would change because what you guys have shared is

118really where the rubber meets the road and so i just wanted to personally thank you for the passion the commitment you have and how our students are benefiting of a granddaughter who will well a grandson actually who will probably be attending uh next year if he uh if if his parents take him out of the online school but if they were to do that it would be based on part uh what you guys are presenting tonight so thank you thank you ms nathan i should probably let the english teacher on the board asked this question but i saw that one of your guiding questions was how do we provide adequate writing feedback and also live a well-balanced life which i assume is on the part of staff and hearing about your process versus product i'm

119wondering do you see a a long-term trade-off between where you are putting your time as opposed to you know stacks of paper at the end of the process giving a grade then having to give it back to them and maybe converting some of that time and effort into that that process as it goes along so we move away from that grade being what appears but instead that formative assessment if you will along the way in the process well in my utopian vision of education grades wouldn't matter but i realized that we can't do that so um and that's the thing i have a hard time reconciling because i have students that work their buns off with the process of writing and they still need some help getting there so it may not be like in

120stellar a plus paper but that's where i need to have the conversation with them about how this is writing is a process this is a starting point you should never really turn in the first thing that you write you should keep going and make it better and that's something that i think our students have to hear often and hopefully by the time you know by doing it in middle school they basically can carry on that message into high school and they can you know learn from there so i think you've hit your that is sort of the front line right now is getting students to embrace the fact that writing is not an expression of what they know it's instead a way to figure out what they don't already know and so how how do

121we get students to look past the grade i just want to double down on what you said stacy is that i think anytime the the idea of points or grades are introduced especially with writing which is really students at their most earnest and vulnerable um it it distracts away from that opportunity so instead of focusing on a performance which is discrete and finite and ends with you know some ink from the teacher if we can instead embed that idea that you know consistency instead of episodes are going to lead to greater understanding and more proficiency with that particular craft i don't have the magic answer for how to do that but i think repetition is key um saying again and again you know that writing is um you know it's an invaluable skill and the

122only way to get better at it with is with practice and feedback to your question and feedback really is a tough piece because it is so it is so time consuming instead of for instance one example putting a score and a couple of comments at the end of the process my practice has moved more to to commenting on a draft and seeing if with a little nudge with a little guidance um that that product which is closer to vinyl will show some improvement instead of you know saying oh gosh i wish you i wish you had done this in the process but now it's too late which of course is counterproductive so yeah that process piece and um the consistency and i think just to the the volume of writing students have i think so

123few opportunities that when it does come to that performance anxiety ramps up which i think could be alleviated by having them writing across the curriculum and recognizing that that is one of the essential tools for them to express themselves and it might be worth noting that one of our kind of dreams right now is that some of these proficiency scales that we're working on will refine this process and definitely improve upon it for future years but our one of our goals is to create a writing scale at grade level so that it can be shared among other curricular areas um that's something that other curricular areas have asked for um so we feel like it would be well received at the in order to support the work that's happening in english classes i think that's

124really key too because you know yes we are ela teachers but really all disciplines teach reading and writing as well and so i think sometimes we kind of have the heavy burden of okay you guys my kids don't know how to write a paper you hang you'd handle it um i don't know if that's phil's experience but that's been my experience sometimes and so trying to figure out how we can do it amongst ourselves and then branch out to those other disciplines will be really helpful i just i had a couple of thoughts on the prompt too so you saw that in the high school students were writing about grading for learning which when we were thinking about possible prompts that one seemed to have some some weight and some opportunity for students to to

125sink in on something that is immediate and that should matter to them in the moment and thinking about their future future high school careers um and that sort of worked uh i would say that for fresh people uh coming in in ninth grade it was sort of an overwhelming prompt they they were maybe less certain or perhaps had fewer you know experience informed positions that they wanted to defend and that's it just highlights the difficulty of coming up with a prompt that is going to be you know so broad but yet meaningful to each student regardless of whether they're 14 or 17 etc on the flip side on the positive side i think the 10th and 11th grade students at least the ones i worked with really were genuinely interested and because it had that

126immediacy um it led to conversations you know about the efficacy of the various big ideas and it was a really nice entrance into that discussion at the beginning of the school year when we're you know frankly putting our cards on the table and having a dialogue about well this is why that matters and i understand your objection or your experience there which i honor have you thought about it this way so i would say a mixed bag and again just highlights the difficulty of coming up with a single question that is going to you know work for all students um in that diagnostic way i'll just interject and i know we want to hear from uh will ruff in a second about um some uh work that he did as a teacher i just want

127to um as a former high school social studies teacher who gave a writing grade to my social studies students i have experienced the deep sense of adolescent injustice when they are getting evaluated for their writing and social studies what you can't evaluate that here that's in english you think grammar doesn't matter actually in the content area so they got a content grade and the writing grade and you know my colleagues in the english department were all for it what what i didn't have was what you're creating which is the rubric for how to teach writing so it was like my sense of what good writing so the idea that i would have had the kind of rubric and process that you're creating that i could have then pointed toward in encouraging you know because my

128goal was critical thinking analysis blah blah blah i love what you're putting you know in place i i know from previous work that i've done we have a far too many kids in minnesota i don't know about rochester we have far too many kids who proceed all the way through middle school and high school and never write anything i say that choosing my words carefully never write anything in flagrant uh opposition to what our state standards require but we just have people who for many reasons decide writing's not relevant for these kids or and so when i say anything i mean a sustained paragraph i love your story of taking five days on a paragraph so thank you i could i could you know we would end up with a deep dive if i keep

129talking so maybe if uh colleagues can kind of give us the next steps really been fantastic well and i think what dr paquel wants you to know is that if he had to do over again he would have been an english teacher one of many regrets yes um okay so the last thing we just wanted the highlighter spotlight for you um uh our executive director will here uh is gonna share a little bit but um this last highlight i think is really critical and important for all of you to hear because it's really an illustration of the equity belief statements that you work through and the policy work that you did as a board the work that we're going to share here is is the translation of that in the classroom with students and i

130think it's really important that you you you hear that that that piece last year we trialed the process to review a book that we're using in our classrooms and ask is this book culturally authentic or relevant to our students and their experiences and if it's not what other books could we consider could we pilot these books in the classroom try out uh uh and then come up with an implementation plan to uh uh replace these books so we piloted the process last year it wasn't a perfect process but we did really good work in it and we'll refine it beyond this but in my first month on the job will uh reached out to me and i think he just saw that i was an easy target or something and he pitched this idea and

131um i asked will if he'd be willing to just kind of share the what and the why behind this idea and the experience and then um we can kind of share um beyond that or answer any questions yeah yeah so i told peter uh if he jumped on board with this project it'd be his first win so he needed to win it right away so let's let's get started right uh so so the journey for me started as a teacher like like peter suggested i just want to say this before i think you all did a very good job of presenting the y for the reading and i wanted to see that happen in the classroom so the background of the story is a better experience around reading for the students and then trying to

132get our students to love reading and then also just um i think the second part is for all of our students and all of our staff to kind of take an idea and run with it so kind of keep that in the background as i share part of the story i'll try to keep it as brief as i can but when when the district announced that we were to read a book in the fifth grade called chains years ago i remember having feelings inside feelings that i didn't like that the one book that we were to read together as a class had to focus around a little girl who was sold through slavery multiple times who was beaten by her slave masters who was always at um the beck and call of the male character

133throughout the book and i it ate me up inside because i never said anything for years i didn't like it in the moment but i sat on it because this is what i was told to do was to teach this book a few years ago i finally got the courage to say you know what i'm not doing that anymore i knew it wasn't right but now's the time to kind of dig into the sand but i know i just couldn't do that without having an alternative so under the guidance of my principal sanyo at the time i met with our media specialist to try to track down some other books that could possibly replace the book chains and we had a list of books and it was basically like nope nope nope that's not it

134this is not it it has to be the perfect book and the book that we landed on was the parker inheritance when i read the background of the book i said yes this is it so the book was about or is about a young girl who for one loves reading i think that's huge to know for two so she's a young black girl which is similar to the character in chains but now we have a book about a young black girl who loves reading and now i can see the light bulb turned differently into the eyes of my students when we were reading chains it was often like they would always go inward whenever we had to do reading around chains and they understood that this is what we had to do no one was

135excited about reading this material the opposite happened when we were at the park inheritance now we're reading about a young black girl who looks like me who loves reading this is awesome right so it had the opposite effect just by changing the book so that's one part of the story the other part of the story is um there's there's themes throughout the book that the students today can relate to so a student move into a new town a student joining a new school a student going through bullying and how to navigate that student going through a divorce and how to navigate that so the topics were relevant for any of our students for them to relate to in today's time that's the other thing that's important to know the conversations around the book didn't just

136stay during reading time whenever we moved to circle time and the students could talk about anything they were learning things about each other because the book opened the door to the conversations i didn't know you were going through that i'm going through that too i didn't know you felt that way i feel that way too so these are some other things that would come out during circle time which was a different time not related to reading so just because of this book we were getting students to talk to each other and have conversations with each other and actually learn about each other in a way that we didn't do before right so that's the background of why making a simple change in our teaching practice can also be very empowering for our students right now

137for me what made the book super i'll just say awesome that's the word that we all like to use was that the book was a mystery book and i'm not really a mystery person but i love to learn mystery through this book so the little girl uncovers a letter that was written by her grandmother and she finds out that her grandmother was the ridiculed throughout the town for this idea that she had so now her job was to uncover the mystery of this letter that was left by her grandmother to prove that her grandmother didn't deserve what happened to her now all of the events throughout the book were about real historical events throughout our country's history so not only were we learning about reading we're also learning about history through this book some of

138the some of the topics um just keeping it very simple was about althea gibson and how she navigated um wimbledon and how that was for at the time being a woman navigating the sport of tennis that led into some great conversations about you throw like a girl what does that mean you run like a girl well what does that mean so that opened the door to other conversations that we were able to have right another topic was that of juneteenth what is that well don't look at me figure it out right so now the students are researching topics that they're uncovering in this reading novel that they didn't know before right and this is i think is the point of all of all of this is any student any staff member if we have an

139idea that we think can make a change we should feel empowered to do so i don't want us to just fall in line because that's what we're told to do sometimes the process has been wrong maybe it's time to change the process that's what we want people to realize okay if you have that feeling in your gut like i had so many years ago that you know something's not right let's do something about it let's make change happen because what i saw my experience in the classroom with the students was way more positive than it was when we were reading the other book now it's important to note that the other book chains is not a bad book this award-winning book just like the park inheritance but who wants to settle for good when there's

140a thing called better out there and that's kind of my takeaway so i'll stop there i don't want to be here all night thank you we're smarter because you you've been here and i would give your powerpoint an a by the way it was very well written so thank you and just keep doing what you're doing this is one of the best presentations we've heard thank you so we'll um uh try and wrap up and and be brief but um based on just uh all this learning what are kind of the broader implications that we want to take away from the important work that the practitioners are doing here and i don't know heather so one thing and we talked about this a little bit is just our students have reported that they like to

141get their feedback face-to-face one-on-one which is really hard to do um but we know it's really powerful and impactful so we have to think about how we can make that happen excuse me and then the other piece of professional development and this goes to the literacy partnership and working with lead sites it's important to be on the ground doing professional development in the classroom with teachers and their students um because teachers are doing the hard work we want to be there and doing it with them and then also this idea of that targeted small group instruction that's really a critical component that we need to kind of keep working on um and then just the challenges to speak candidly uh uh we wanted to just highlight a couple of current challenges so we talked about

142that idea of quality feedback how do we provide that for our students how do we help them provide it to one another to kathy's question or to her your point and then you know how can we leverage technology to maybe help us be more efficient and effective with that um one challenge is in our third through fifth grade teachers are asking for it and they're excited about it we want the science of reading we have a lot of learning to do and that's probably the most frustrating thing right now is just knowing capacity like we hear you we want to get to you um so that's a current challenge and then i think as we've done this work with with the writing and with the science of reading at elementary we really know we need

143a better more structured system of support for students who need more time to master the standards and maybe more targeted instruction so we have to think through what that can look like and then just uh thinking about reading in the content areas and writing in the content areas as another area and then i'll just go ahead and finish up the relevant formative assessments how do we have the assessment closely tied to the work that's happening in the classroom and then really continuing to look at those prioritized learnings revising them and making sure it really is guiding student learning those are kind of our key pieces that we know are challenges [Applause] so we'll keep working with the diagnostic writing this team is going to continue to look at the writing work and then include exemplars

144for future instruction um we'll form that ela leadership team to think about where we at how are we doing and then how do we meet those standards and then we'll continue the professional development with the science of reading this is where we maybe there's just a slight ask that we may need uh some dollars for materials coming up as we get closer to those and then just developing systems for dyslexia identification and support we've started that work but we need to continue that and then we just want to continue to build opportunities for our students to read and select literature that represents their lives and i think will's example was such a good example of us being more nimble than we typically are sometimes it takes eight to ten years for us to figure it

145out but this is an example of us you know acting and making change in my haste to get away from the microphone i forgot to mention one of the most important pieces was me reaching out to other fifth grade teachers across the district and i think that's something that we can definitely do better at um i wanted to share the positive experience my students had and try to replicate it through other classrooms just to see if it was just my classroom or if this book really is that good and they had similar experiences as well which led to the district-wide implementation of switching out the books so that's the point that i want teachers to understand is we can make district-wide change if we listen to that small voice in our heads of saying this

146is the right thing to do and then have the bravery to step into doing the right thing so collaboration throughout the district can be done across buildings um if we choose to do the right thing so that's it and if i could just make one more short point um a lot of that is the allocation of dollars too because there have been times when colleagues have found that best book but been told i'm sorry we don't have any money and that is so disappointing it's like the worst feeling in the world because you found something that is amazing and something like dollars is totally just disregarding the whole what the experience could be so just a plug for that listen i don't get to sit up here and talk a lot so i'm going to

147take full advantage um i usually sit over there and just listen that that was a huge barrier for us too was the dollars and trying to to buy a classroom set for for my classroom and one of the things that a lot of teachers use because they use some of their own funds is you know this website called donorschoose where we put the request out there and then anyone across the country can fund it so this crowdsourcing by the way is a really good option but then the story also takes another turn because one of the parents of lincoln heard of what i was trying to do and then rallied other parents to say i think this is a good idea what can we do to support it and then the parents chipped in and

148then bought a class out of the book i know that this can't happen everywhere but what i'm saying is again if we figure out how to work together then things can happen right one dollar amount may seem huge to a single teacher but collectively how can we work to to decrease that amount and the parents in lincoln stepped up for that and then the people who donated through donors choose they stepped up for sure but definitely if we can get some district funding then we can reduce all of that stress for teachers who are trying to do the right thing for their students so thank you the most diverse literature it's continuously developing by these young great writers and we want to give them credit it is a little bit more expensive but it's all

149about that experience of connecting with the story and when you can connect and read a story you can write about it so much easier than reading just any other charles dickens story nothing against charles dickens but just saying it does make the writing process easier so that connects as you can see we really like talking about english language arts but we promise we'll give time for the other agenda items but thanks for the time one final question so dyslexia identification um is there a partnership with the reading center or how [Music] are you i'm sure you're familiar with the reading center and so can you speak briefly to that or towards that um absolutely over the last two months we've made a lot of progress around dyslexia work we had a work group three work

150groups one was a communication group what materials what products do we need for communication one work group was on a process of identification and how do we communicate that clearly to all stakeholders and the third work group was on what do we do when a student has been identified what are the resources we put in place so we just created those three products with those work groups now we're working on trying to make them coherent and the goal is to roll those out to the stakeholders at the end of january and we have been in conversation with uh uh the reading center and they were curious to get their eyes on it as well and i'm just popping up here to say yep we are kind of working on the products first and then we

151will meet with the reading center to say is there anything in here that you think we're missing um they have been very helpful and they they want to partner with us in this important work so we're certainly taking them in with us thank you thank you thank you thank you very much this is time for a break we is this a good time for a break yes can we take a break they say good time for a break or not yes yeah this has been requested we take a five minute break so we will be in recess at 7 44 and we will reconvene at 7 50. you need a wake-up break i've been texting okay that's great okay [Music] at 7 51 so good for almost being on time we'll move on to 7.01

152an update of district-wide school attendance boundary changes this is an information item dr pakal um thank you madam chair board members i'll just mention uh i for any of you noticed me checking my phone or computer during that very good presentation on ela it was exchanging messages with jeff kapper is our transportation person and joey page superintendent austin about keeping school open tomorrow or not no decision yet we're in the throes of it and so that was what that was i want to ask jackie peterson our executive director of elementary and secondary education to come up as board members are aware we have created essentially sub-teams from the cabinet looking at what we um have been informally calling hot topics of interest this year in the school district and one of those certainly are the

153changes that we're making in attendance boundaries and so this is one of a number of ongoing updates for the board on our process in that area next time you'll receive an update on our safe and open schools plan and then following that are secondary student safety and belonging so all of these will be not one and dones and so jackie will be back but today here is uh our opportunity to plug into the work that we're doing with the boundary changes awesome cheer marvin members of the board and superintendent um any of you are peloton riders this is your cooldown ride after your hits and hills 45 minute ride with samuel so now you can just like this is not going to be heavy stuff that was great stuff so the boundary change implementation i'm

154here to just give you a timeline and update on where we are um we have not done a significant boundary shift since 2008 where it was kind of a full-scale shift like we're doing now because of the four new schools that we are opening and i happened to be in the office i was in chris langen's chair when we did the boundary changes and i can tell you that they're not super fun to deal with and you probably hear about them often as well but what i'm proud of is this group that we pull together really getting ahead of the issues and carefully planning so that we can have the smoothest possible transition for our families going into next year well the background on the boundary implementation committee is that it was formed in july

155and we've started meeting in mid-august we meet once a month it's a wide-ranging group including scott sheridan and jeff kappers from transportation melissa gatch from registration heather nessler for communications carla bolas and melissa stanky nicole miller and from student services chris lingan and kim mcdonald from my office and then most importantly i think building leaders eric johnson angie mcandrews levi londack kristen engrecht mark randall tom olson gerald grillier chris davidson and matt ruzek so we come together once a month it's a brief meeting and we do work offline on tasks if needed we really set out to do three different tasks and i can share those tasks with you and where we are in the timeline so the first pro the first task we had was to determine the process for what used to be

156called grandfathering we are updating our language and calling that a continued consideration for continuation that means is if i'm a current fourth grader seventh grader or eleventh grader this year i would have the opportunity to finish in the school i'm currently attending finish my career as an elementary student or middle or high school student we traditionally allowed that we we were charged with determining if we could do that again in this round of boundary changes i am happy to share that there was a consensus among our high school principals that not just 11th graders but all students who are currently attending the their high school would be able to finish at at their current high school that's a change from when the boundary change i referenced in 2008 and those were really difficult phone calls

157to talk to a parent who had an 11th grader they wanted their child to finish at john marshall for example but they had an incoming ninth grader or an eleventh gr a tenth grader and we were telling them they needed to split their family up if they wanted that uh senior to graduate from their current high school that's a tough sell i don't think we're really in the business of separating families into different schools if we can help it we did a careful look at the numbers and what that would entail if siblings were allowed to stay siblings of 11th graders and we felt we were able to accommodate that and our principals embraced that wholeheartedly they were very very happy to hear that that could be an option so currently we have our this

158year's fourth graders and their younger siblings the fourth grader would be able to stay for their fifth grade year younger siblings for that one year to keep the family together then the younger sibling siblings would move on to their new boundary area their boundary school the following year and then same for seventh current seventh graders they would be allowed to stay for their eighth grade year and their younger siblings would stay for one more year so that we don't have families going to two separate middle schools those were the decisions that we made based on the data we had we were not sure uh if we like it well like at high school we were sure we would be able to accommodate siblings it was it was a small enough group of students we weren't

159sure with fourth and seventh graders but having done a survey which was uh implemented just before the break we we have determined that we believe we'll be able to accommodate that we still need to do a deep dive on that survey the survey data but what we did is before the break there was a communication to families impacted by the boundary change each school sent that communication out so that it would be probably more likely to be read by parents when it comes from their school rather than a district person they might not know so each school sent out a communication reminding them of the boundary change and then introducing this opportunity for their current fourth seventh or high school student to stay um one change from previous years is that we cannot accommodate uh

160transportation at this time you know that the strain that we have on our current transportation system so we did ask the question would you if you were given the opportunity would you want your current fourth grader seventh grader to finish their schooling at our current at our school without transportation we did ask the question i would like them to but i can't provide transportation so we have that data we know how many students that's a roadblock for so that we can problem solve through that but we just physically cannot we don't have enough buses and drivers to accommodate transporting kids from one neighborhood to two different schools the survey went out before winter break as i said and our sites did a great job of following up with families to make sure they had all

161responses accounted for and that data was submitted to my office prior to winter break over winter break melissa gatch worked with that data to upload it to skyward so that we could see what we call a role a rollover or a roll-up of next year's enrollment we just got that data yesterday at the end of the day so we looked at it just a preliminary look today at cabinet um to see what that might do when we consider who wants to stay so that's it's a little bit of a complicated process to roll kids up and then pull kids out that should be going to the this new school and put them back in their current school um but we have the data we plan next week to do a deeper dive together as a

162cabinet to make sure that we aren't overburdening a school with allowing those continuations or that we aren't setting up a situation where staffing can get out of balance and that we would have to provide a bunch more staffing in order to accommodate the requests so we'll look at we'll do a deep dive next tuesday our plan and timeline is that by the end of january or sooner if possible we can let families know that their a request is either approved or or or not as i said just looking at the preliminary data it seems very promising so we want families to know by the end of january the status of that their request and then subsequently we can start planning our welcoming activities for students because we want to make sure that students who are

163not planning to stay at their current school but attend their new boundary school will be feeling welcomed and will feel they are part of that school community going into the end of the school year so those welcoming activities we want to make sure that we structure them so that we're not doing something really lavish at one site and something you know welcoming at another site but not rolling out the red carpet we want to make sure that we are consistent and that our timing is consistent because we don't want families hearing from their new school in february and then another set of families not hearing until april that just doesn't sit well for a lot of families understandably so we will carefully plan welcoming activities will involve transportation in the past we've done things like

164inviting elementary students put them on a bus take them to their new school have them participate in some activities at the new school maybe have lunch at the new school and get tours by students for example but we will we will engage the principals on this committee to plan those activities the principals on the committees take this information back to their principal group for feedback as well so everybody will have their ideas in the mix and we plan then by the first week of february to distribute information to parents about what they can expect for welcoming events and activities at their new school one thing i do want to mention is that with fridell closing that that's a little different than allowing these continuations that i just previously talked about with fridell closing we we

165have entertained and we did do a survey similar to what was done at the other middle schools where parents and guardians of seventh graders were asked if you had the opportunity to send your student to overland no no not overland to um dakota or other new school in that in that quadrant if you had the opportunity to send your student to dakota to finish their middle school experience would you do so unfortunately because of the location of dakota at first it seemed like well maybe we could just take all the kids instead of drop them at freddell drop them at dakota well because of the geographic location it is not possible to do that with our tiered bus system so we are not able to provide transportation under that scenario we did ask the question

166though would you be open and interested to doing in doing that and can you provide transportation we had a fairly low response rate to that survey so the school leaders there are calling families this week to just kind of dig into what they're thinking and if they have questions and how we can help them make that transition for next year so that's still in in progress we're still searching and trying to determine how we can support under our current system a smooth transition for the students i do want to note that our current sixth graders when they accepted their seats at fradell it was made very very clear that it was a one-year placement that we had already made that decision that fidel would that that school school would be closing so we wanted to

167make sure that they knew that it was not something that would continue on for three years still we want to be gracious in what we're able to do for our families and make this a smooth process as possible so we're working with that school community so again we want to make sure that we're engaging our families that it's not something that just happens in oh by the way in may remember you're moving to a different school and that's why we started the process early in july and have been very intentional in our timelines and planning to be sure that we are meeting the needs of our families and making sure that they're comfortable in the transition that's where we are i'll answer questions if you have them nathan so it sounds like the activities of

168taking the kids to the school that they would go to would happen during the school day are you planning to do uh targeted welcoming events for families and i assume that might happen more at the beginning of the school year service part of the either step into learning or back to school events for sure we want to make sure that the fall we make sure that we include our new families and maybe do some extra support for them but i know that our principals are anxious to welcome families yet this year to alleviate that stress over the summer of my oh my new school what is it going to be like especially students but families feel that way too so i know that our our schools are very anxious to our leaders are very anxious

169to reach out to their families that are incoming to them i think they'll probably do some tours for families i definitely need to do some things after school to make it possible for families to attend but those are the details we want to iron out and be very planful about so that um we don't have people feeling like they're getting less than um someone across town for example but yes we want a variety to welcome not just the student but the families great thanks karen um you mentioned the response rate to the freidel community was low how about to the other group the other others that need to be transported do you feel like you've touched all those families or are there potentially still gaps of families you haven't reached out to yet that you

170don't know the answer we we definitely have i won't say the word hounded but we wanted to make sure that going into break we had all that data gathered from the other schools so that melissa gatch could do the roll up and it would be accurate so if the survey wasn't if this if this family did not answer the survey the administrators made calls and we're confident that we have 100 percent of our um families that responded either by phone or or by clicking on the very simple survey the fredel um the fredell survey went out later it was not in lockstep with the other surveys so that may explain some of it and we have parents that have questions and said you know i don't know that i feel comfortable yet answering this survey

171until i know of some more information so that's understandable and that is why uh mr londack and and the other leaders office staff will be making those calls it's very it'll be very helpful to get information to know you know are people just very settled in the fact that they're going to go to their neighborhood school or do they have questions they might have questions about highly gifted for example and how we're planning to transition there so we want to handle that with as much support as families might need from the school staff at this time thank you jackie 7.02 minnesota legal compliance contract with interested officer this is an information item dr pikel dr marvin board members i'd like to ask john carlson who you all know as our executive director of business and

172finance and everything financial come and walk us through this all right thank you very much this is a routine standing item we've been doing for multiple years in a row it's just a simple reminder that if you have a financial interest in any sort of business that does business or wants to do business with the school district uh you need to let me know that and we need to follow a separate procedure for approving any contracts or purchases from your company with the school district because you're an interested officer with significant authority we just need to make sure we follow a different set of rules we we got hit on that in an audit once in the 13-14 school year so it's been a nearly a decade at this point but it's uh something we

173agreed to on an annual basis just remind the current board members of what had happened and that we would not do that again so that's the end of this item thank you seven 7.03 yeah i'm just i have it here kathy are we doing policy committee are we doing the policy briefings do i have this in the wrong place uh no it's just it's the second briefing that's 7.04 7.03 is the x okay uh so i haven't switched uh policy 209 code of ethics this is an annual review the first meeting of every year we as a board do another careful reading of our ethics policy and i at this time if any of you have a particular part of the policy that you think would be important to call out to the rest of

174the board or to inform the community about this would be a good time to just read that line and give a brief statement so many hands karen thank you i guess my general comment is i read this first a year ago and it makes it so much more meaningful now after being on the board for a year i circled many that i relate to the work that we do every day um the one that primarily struck up struck with me as i read it it's on the first page under 2a number seven be primarily motivated by a desire to provide the best possible education for the students of my school district i think that that was a motivation of why i wanted to be on the board but it definitely rings true in the work

175that we do every day and i think it's important to tie that into the topic of ethics because we wouldn't be able to do that if we weren't doing it in an ethical manner thank you karen dr garcia yes i i had a very similar reaction to a7 um and i'm wondering why it's not number one um obviously we want people to attend school board meetings but the reason that you're attending school board meetings is because you're primarily motivated by the desire to provide the best possible education for our students um one of the other things that i think is more of a general reaction that i have to this is it does it is more meaningful to me now that i've been doing this for a year and i'm wondering how we could turn

176this into a learning opportunity for people outside of this room because i think a lot of people come to us us being the elected board members to try to move us to do something that we would charge the superintendent with or that the superintendent is doing something you know there there's there are clear boundaries there i guess is what i'm saying and we talked about this a little bit early on because people weren't quite understanding our process of like what a public comments actually mean and what is that what do you do as a board member and what are the differences between a board member and the superintendent and who who might i go to if i have an issue and so i'm wondering if we can revisit how we turn this into you know

177like school board 101 for the community so that they kind of understand a little bit better how to engage us and then we in turn can engage them more effectively when we're all kind of working with similar language and knowledge yeah thanks jess i think that's a really good camera i could answer that too it's not it's not just what we do but i think it's also the values that we bring to this table i think there's a lot of question in the community recently about you know what we do as board members and whether we value public education and the way we do it in this district and i think this really brings that home as to why we do it and how we do it yeah ms workman um i guess i don't

178really need to say this one um be one i would read word for me and say continue to focus on education policy as much as possible but also i think in line with what we need to really educate the the public about is c4 keep an open mind about how i will vote on any proposition until the board has met and fully discussed the issue i'm sure everybody's had the experience where you get a phone call from somebody say well how are we going to vote on this well we've got this in front of it we have not yet had a discussion at the board table okay yeah but how are you going to vote you know and i think it's really i think this board does a particularly good job of keeping an open

179mind until we hear each other out rather than coming necessarily with a totally preconceived idea of um what it has to be because i have certainly learned a lot from all of my colleagues here things that i might not have considered otherwise and if i had made a hard and fast decision ahead of time then um that would have been a big loss for me personally so thank you julie miss nathan oh there's so many pick one or two i i'm looking at e4 um participate in school board action after considering the recommendation of the superintendent and only after the superintendent has furnished adequate information supporting the recommendation i think one of the things i'm happiest about is the work that we've done this year with the annual calendar and this new process that we're

180evolving of the information being provided to the board ahead of time for us to consider so that we can have those fully informed discussions at the table and i i just appreciate the transparency i mean we spent i mean look at the clock how much time talking about something where there was no vote there was no ask but there will be at some point when it comes to a budget decision either a enhancement or a cut for us to have that depth of knowledge just makes our decision making and our conversations better because we're not making decisions on a superficial level so i appreciate having a board having board colleagues who aren't saying oh can't we get out of here by 8 o'clock and recognize the value of the information and i also appreciate the

181superintendent and cabinet also being so open to our increased requests for the content of data and information that we're getting at the meetings and being willing to do all the work ahead of time and the work at the meetings because it makes us a better a better board for our community melissa um i would like to change gears slightly and talk about item d2 which states attempt to obtain adequate financial support for the school district's program in light of our massive upcoming budget cuts which i think hasn't really sunk in with the the community at large yet exactly what it is that we're facing and how how incredibly painful it's likely to be um there are a number of things that we as a board can do besides just cutting the budget which is you

182know attempting um operating referendum both the upcoming renewal or a additional increase in our future and reaching out to community partners i've been saying for years that i'm surprised that the mayo clinic doesn't invest more than it does it's a valuable partner in many ways but bottom line um huge amounts of money are going to be needed and so i want to put that out there and um to talk about uh what our our legislative committee will be doing and contacting our legislators to ask for it so but but i think that the the community the public should know that this is actually one of our jobs to advocate for [Music] full funding of public education and that is something that is going to be very very close to my heart over the the next

183several months to several years of painful painful position with the budget thank you melissa and i found uh what resonated with me was a b3 consider myself a trustee of public education and do my best to protect conserve and advance its progress and the advancement the progress i i think sometimes there are those who are our pup well the community may at times think that we're supposed to maintain a what has been you know versus uh have a the capacity to consider what could be and and part of that includes uh this component of it advancing its uh progress and and i'm proud to be part of the system and have this requirement that we're supposed to be forward looking and not so much entrenched on the way we've always done it thank you and

184i think um for me one of the lines that i keep coming back to is a nine recognize the need to represent all children and all parents or guardians and all community members and it's one of the the gifts of being on a board it's also one of the biggest challenges because parents one of parents biggest jobs and guardian's biggest jobs is to add advocate for their child our job is to advocate for everyone's child and when people come to the board and say you're not listening we listen all the time and we understand the frustration when when some people are not able we're not able to give them what they need for a particular situation um so you know it's a mixed blessing but we do the best we can to really really listen

185and at the end of the day i have to make hard decisions so thank you for that okay then we'll move on to a second reading of policy are there questions for the policy committee no good discussion okay then we will move on to my screen's frozen uh 7.05 is that where we are okay a review of the school district mission statement again at the beginning of each year we are to review the admission statement it is hard to miss because it's writ large at the back of the room there we see it every day and we look at it a lot when we're in this room our mission is to inspire challenge and empower all students in gold with the knowledge and skills required to reach their full potential to contribute to future generations

186to become involved members of a global community we had a group of parents community members students and staff who spent a long time working on that every single word several years ago and they determined that that was what our school district is about so this did not come from any school board it came from the rochester community certainly at some point there may be another group that wants to change it but i think right now it's an accurate reflection of what we believe julie um i have not seen this last sentence before i don't disagree with it we seek to inspire our students to become lifelong learners or is this a glitch and whatever that seems the mission statement is what's on the wall thank you so much for calling me out on that because

187i uh it's a very good sentiment and i know it's written somewhere how it ended up here and not there i'm not sure um but thank you we'll get back to that our next meeting thanks for calling that out i guess okay thank you i'm just accuracy i will all close i just know you've been trying to prep dr pacquiao is trying to help me understand how to use a laptop that i've had for three years so thanks for that okay 7.06 review of school board compensation this is just a discussion again under minnesota law school boards set their own compensation and typically we have this discussion at the beginning of each school year we last set our compensation july 1st just six months ago so i don't know that there's any appetite to after

188six months to rethink that there may be some appetite to put into some sort of policy or some sort of protocol that we would revisit it annually miss amundsen it looks like you wanted to say something well i i just wanted to say that i think this is an important exercise because if it's never thought about then it will go decades again without adjustment and that if there were an appropriate time to make an adjustment as quickly after our last adjustment it might be now at historical inflation high inflation rates um because by not adjusting our inflation we are accepting in essence a paid decrease um in light of the budget forecast i'm completely comfortable with that that would be you know the first place that i would target for you know not creating a

189bigger deficit but i just want to establish the routine of needing to have the discussion and examine it on an annual basis just to make sure it doesn't slip away so would you be comfortable with us making that a protocol at least and i'm not sure if it could become a procedure that at the first meeting of every year we have that conversation or would it be better at another time during the year so director nathan mentioned to me that there are other districts that have various policies and i was wondering if the board would be interested in directing the policy committee to examine what other districts do and come up with a recommendation i'm a little tentative about directing the policy committee to do anything i would certainly ask that nicely well self-direction if

190that's something you'd consider you have other thoughts yes i i think we we would be capable of looking at some best practices and policies and procedures from other districts and one of the other pieces is uh who would be responsible for maybe the last time we did this we had a subgroup of the board do some research about the underlying data between or behind the decision so maybe in whatever we talk about we also designate who's going to be bringing the information to the board for the conversation as opposed to just oh we'll talk about it so yes accept it thank you okay i guess it's the two three vote on that paul it's from the policy committee right anyway so i'm fine with that any other discussion i have one other suggestion perhaps to

191think about doing this in every other year basis similar to what the staff contracts are oh so that's something for the policy committee to decide too yeah i think we should also look at the timing of it if we're going to do it mid-year like we did this time versus a different time of the year okay go ahead i was just going to say the policy committee doesn't decide what to do we can't make a decision we can make a recommendation which the board can choose to accept reject or monitor and of course you would bring it to the board and then we'd have that discussion and then determine if we want to move forward i just want to make it i think it sounded snarky when i was saying the superintendent is just explaining

192to me how to do this thank you because he just had pushed that thing and it worked so thank you i don't believe it sounded snarky okay i take it back all right we are at 10.01 school board annual calendar update dr piquel or miss anything i mean i can but yeah go ahead uh we we uh madam chair board members we don't have many big uh shifts uh coming we will be uh doing our previously the report out from the msba conference for some reason was on january 11th at the study session and we will move that until actually after the actual conference which is a really genius scheduling on our part um will ruff in the second as will mentioned we'll be giving board members an uh update on the diversity equity inclusion

193strategy evolution on january 18th which is an addition we have removed from the calendar what was a placeholder when we were designing the calendar which said at every meeting update on a current issue of interest because we have got more than enough current issues of interest noted on the calendar and that as i mentioned earlier at a number of places interspersed uh on the board agenda and i don't think we need to highlight them specifically we'll be providing the board with updates on our secondary student school safety plan where we're looking at behavior in the middle schools and high schools our safe and open schools plan i.e the covid strategy the school boundary changes as jackie briefed us tonight and then the final is school openings and closings there are many other issues that are

194on the agenda but those are the the chair and vice chair asked that we periodically put updates on those four issues on the calendar as we are implementing them and so those will be those have been added but we'll be adding them at a fairly regular rotation um i anticipate a very important update on the 18th of our covet strategy where we're looking at cdc guidance changes in quarantine taking our test to stay strategy to scale across the district so that's a very important and as i think you all know we will very likely i would say certainly be asking you to vote on policy that reflects the new mandate for vaccination on the 18th so that's going to be a big deal okay thank you anything else we will then move on to 10.02

195our meeting dates they are listed in the agenda at the beginning of each year we we have a calendar and as dr kell said it's on our annual board calendar of all of our meeting dates so we want to make sure that the public has access to that the meeting dates for this month are january 11th study session the 18th the regular school board meeting and the 25th another study session we are also going to add to the 11th just before or just after the study session a very brief regular board meeting so we can vote on the search firm that we want to hire at this point then we are on to 11.01 closed session for a labor negotiation strategy and i make a motion that this board go into a closed session to

196discuss labor negotiation strategy as permitted by policy 205 and minnesota statute 179.14 subdivision three is there a second all in favor of moving to closed session say i post we are in closed session at 8 30 pm we are returning to open session at 8 47 p.m i will read the resolution be it resolved school board of independent school district 535 does hereby ratify the 2021-2023 collective bargaining agreement between the rochester public schools and the rochester principals association rpa employees move approval second been moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye opposed motion passes it is now 8 47 p.m and we are adjourned i would just like to thank carl and john for the work they did to get us to that settlement because it seemed smooth and it was but it was

197lots of us were involved but um thank you both uh