Carson City School Board Meeting 2/8/2022

001[Music] [Applause] [Music] bye [Music] me [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] so [Music] i'd like to call the meeting to order first item on the agenda is the adoption adoption of the agenda is submitted i move that we accept the agenda submitted second we have a motion we have a second and uh all in favor say aye any opposed say no public comment yeah i forgot to take public comment so if there any public comment in person i say none online no mr varner thank you okay then we've had the vote in uh all in favor again say aye aye any opposed say no okay now we will now adjourn to closed session for nrs 288.2204 to discuss labor relations with the district management representatives and this is for discussion only and we have mr aj fueling

002and mr joel locke [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so my [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] mm-hmm [Music] so [Music] so [Music] easy [Music] me [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] uh [Music] oh foreign [Music] hello [Music] oh [Music] um [Music] bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] hey [Music] wow ah [Music] i'd like to call this school board meeting to order today's date is february 8 2022. like the public to know that the reason we had a closed session was allowed by the open meeting law is for labor negotiations and that's what the closed meeting was about just let you know we'll go ahead

003and start with the flag salute and stacey wilkie mcculloch to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you i'd like to welcome all the members of the public that's here tonight thank you for attending uh mr cassiopa had a request but i don't see him here right now so we'll go ahead and move on oh joe i apologize it was a longer line to the restroom than i thought understandable um sorry was it time can i make a request yes that you can um real quick i'm sorry to interrupt but i just learned this morning that one of our longtime um school district employees uh karen putt who used to work at borderwick elementary school she was a paraprofessional she passed away this morning

004i don't know many people knew that she was with the district i think for about 33 years and she worked with my wife she actually worked with judy rand next door and she was real helpful with my wife and she was always one of those people that was super helpful and we're all you know obviously sorry to hear about her passing but i thought if you don't mind i'd like to just take a moment to silence thank you joe next is the superintendent report and this is for information only mr stokes thank you mr president members of the board members of the community i wanted to provide a little information that has to do with the wearing of face masks in our schools as you know since early in september we have asked our students

005and in our schools to be under the process of wearing face masks on a mandatory basis as of today we had our first day where we gave that decision to our face masks back to the parents and uh i'm anxious to find out from more of our schools how the first day went but even though this option for students has been changed the staff and all adult visitors guests since the schools are still required to wear face masks and that's per the emergency directive zero four eight that the governor has put into place staff and students who are ill at school will still be sent home if they have symptoms or have tested positive for covet 19. so we are anxious to still mitigate the coven 19 and other illnesses in the schools and we're

006doing that by a variety of different steps of course we are concerned about the ventilation in each of our buildings we have high level filtration systems and we go through an air exchange several times during each day of course we rely on the skill of our staff and our custodians to help with the cleaning and sanitizing of buildings we are social distancing within the facilities of our schools wherever that's possible and if a student is ill and if the parents desire a covet 19 test we are able to accomplish that at our sites and of course we're still asking our staff our families and our students to do a personal daily health screen we're also offering any member of our staff who would desire a k-7 or sorry a kn 95 face mask we will

007provide them through the school district if they are interested as far as the contact tracing we're zeroing in on students who have illnesses or symptoms of illnesses and those close contacts instead of being everyone in a classroom we're focusing on the nuclear family so if that student has siblings in that school or other schools we're focusing on letting those families know when illnesses are being identified so this represents basically a new day for us and we're looking forward to having as much feedback as schools will provide us as we move forward and so mr president unless there are questions about this change in our process that will be the end of my report thank you we'll move on to our regular board reports we'll start with uh mr cassiopo or excuse me let me ask

008if anybody's here from carson high school they're joking okay hi there so i'm sarah wiggins and i'm the representative from carson high school and this has been a very busy week so far so this is our winterfest week with the theme being senators in wonderland so today was our first dressed up day it was a disney character dress-up day we had our musical theater do a what is it a theater performance during our lunch and then that evening or tonight i should say we have a movie night of alice in wonderland in center square going on right now tomorrow february 19th is going to be wacky wednesday where you're going to dress up as like mix match basically tomorrow during lunch we are going to have trivia in center square of alice in wonderland and

009tomorrow night from 6 to 8 p.m in the upstairs cafeteria we are going to be doing a bingo night instead of the usual talent show fbla is going to be hosting this and it is going to be two dollars per card or three dollars for five february 10th is going to be twin date as tweedledee and tweedledum day and for this lunchtime activity it's going to be simon says and name that song and then tomorrow night in the mcfadden plaza from 6 30 to 8 we are going to do the underclassmen crowning and then friday february 11th is gonna be mad hatter day so we're gonna wear our crazy hats and winterfest shirts with a pep rally at lunch and then we're gonna have the babe james then we're gonna have a basketball game that

010night against douglas at home with jv boys at 3 30 varsity girls at 5 15 and then varsity boys at 7 p.m with it being our senior night for all the seniors on the basketball team along with the crowning at halftime for our seniors then saturday february 12th is going to be our physical dance and it is going to be in the gym so for that you're going to have to come in through the north foyer and the dance is going to be from 10 to 7. for dance ticket sales today and tomorrow it is going to be five dollars with the student body sticker and seven dollars without and then thursday and friday it's gonna be seven dollars with the sticker 10 without and then at the door of the dance it's going to

011be 15 now that's all that for the winterfest week moving on some of our sports going on for wrestling we are moving into our state i believe our regionals is going to be later this week and that's where we'll decide who is going to move on to the state tournament this last week for our girls actually junior ella olsen i believe got second place in the state for wrestling for the girls so congratulations to hearn [Applause] and then a few more noticeable thing noticeable things is that senior night is going to be this friday for the basketball boy for the basketball players and other than that we just have a ski race going on this thursday at kirkwood other than that if you are looking into any spring sports being baseball softball swim track or

012boys golf you can look to see if you have phil.register my athlete all of that is going to be on our website so thank you guys so much no thank you it looks like you have a very enjoyable and busy week coming up enjoy it do we have anybody here from pioneer seeing no one from pioneer we'll move on to the nasbi update nevada association school boards yes we had a lengthy meeting on saturday um some of the things that we decided on as the board of directors legislatively we're going to focus this year on adequacy of funding and not just the buzzword but what does that actually mean in working with legislators to understand what that would mean for our schools and what our need is and the other goal is to really open

013lines of communication with between state board of education school boards state local school boards and also the legislature so those are we had a long talk about that and when i say long i mean a long talk about that the other thing that is coming up and the details are sketchy and i apologize i'll get them out or make sure renee gets them out as soon as possible is there will be the next training will be on march 12th location time topic tbd one of the things i had suggested before we left is that angie taylor maybe work with washoe county school district to locate a venue for the training and if that doesn't work mr stokes i volunteered us to get something together for the directors and the school board leaders throughout the state

014so laurel stacy is there anything i'm missing because my notes that i took i left on my desk at work i apologize the only other thing i can think of is that the um board of directors ratified the decision of the region three directors to um recommend wait uh or to appoint wade polson from uh lincoln county as a representative on the nia board of control and that we'll have an opening on the advisory commission to family engagement because my term is up but um and that they just started meeting again but the nominating committee will get those out thank you for that update we'll move on to association reports do we have any association reports tonight we're gonna do the board member announcements yeah okay we'll do the board members now uh mr cassiopo

015i don't have a report tonight mr walker i do have a report tonight so one of the things that we've been hearing more and more about all the failings or things that are going wrong in our schools and so i really want to focus on the great things that are happening every day in our school district and so i'm trying to change the tone and so i contacted ruthley at mark twain and asked her for the great things that are happening in their school and they did have great things so they just completed their winter map assessments and so they started the year with 43 per proficiency in reading and this current testing they had 49 proficiency and over last year they're looking at about 21 increase so comparing winter to winter so that's excellent

016and then with math they started with and this last test they had 55 proficiency which is an increase of 16 this year but if you look at against last year again that's about 22 increase they had a great fun celebration of the hundredth day of school last week and families and their students made a whole host of celebratory items that showed what 100 look like in the eyes of a child and they are planning a very fun celebration on february 22nd where everybody will do everything in two so i'm sure that that's going to get creative and they're also focusing on creating and maintaining a positive environment and so their leadership students hosted a hot chocolate treat for national hot chocolate day and they are embarking on a letter writing project for their have a

017heart project and the choir students are coming in on their own two to three days a week and practicing so great things are happening at mark twain i'm proud of that great school and one final thing i did receive a complaint from a student at fritsch elementary school he is requesting a later start time because he likes to play video games in the morning and he's grouchy with this teacher so when we look at scheduling i'll bring that back up at that point sounds like a valid complaint stacy thank you mike um well i'm lieu of national school counselor month i want to thank all of our counseling staff for the work that they do every day i was lucky enough to go visit miss allen's class at pioneer if you'll remember we had that

018discussion about their poetry class from asu that that caused some problems they finished that out did was totally full and had a waiting list now they're into the dual credit for wnc for film studies so if you took those classes with miss allen you already have six six credits towards your university career i wanted to thank or congratulate seniors allison guerrero and ellis pamblo they've been named candidates as part of the 2022 u.s scholarship presidential scholarship program that's exciting and then carson city publix works recognized tyranny foster a junior at carson high for designing a winning logo for branding the east williams street complete streets project which was over here at five o'clock if you wanted to see what that was and then from empire they're collecting pots pans buckets trash can lids etc to

019create three music walls for their playgrounds any donations are appreciated and they have also partnered up with wild horse children's theater to create a stem musical performance date will be april 4th and that concludes my report thank you don no report tonight luffy from silicon elementary school mrs zona met with the committee who is overseeing the standard student attire they had a really good response on the survey that they send out um the parents were very active on that and um they are looking into some into giving the kids some options and so they're going to share those options with the parents and they're asking for feedback from them by the 15th of february and then by may 15th they will make a final decision and i really liked the structure of the committee because

020it included parents teachers administrators and students and the one student who who is part of the committee he was very cute because he he was very um engaged and then he was also keeping track of the time and he had to excuse himself because he wanted to make sure that he was in school on time so very very um very cool um i also want to give a big shout out to our counselors because i know that they are instrumental in helping the students stay on track to graduate and also to see their next steps to going into college so thanks to all our counselors you uh laurel okay uh for fritz elementary school the pta is going to be hosting a hot cocoa social on friday february 11th from 7 30 to 8 30

021a.m so um that will be open to the families and also they would like to congratulate the french archery team who took second place in the state this year and they're proud of all the students and the great job by coach mrs henry herman so they have quite the archery team at fritsch elementary school last year they were first place in the state and this year their their second so keeping the streak going fremont elementary school dr ward reports that they're gearing up and getting ready for reading week which will start february 28th and also fremont celebrated the hundred days of school last week and she sent me a cute photo of a list one of the kindergarten classes put together of 100 reasons why i like kindergarten and fremont and the things on there

022are mate are just all the best things you would think that kindergarteners would say um one of the favorites was fire drills um and and indoor recess and which bless all the teachers in elementary school for indoor recess um but lots of things to to brighten your day about that um and then also i'd like to report on some information that i asked mr chambers for from carson high school um because over christmas break i met with um some of my my last my 2021 graduates friends from um that also went to carson hein graduated with him last year and one of the boys said it was his first semester of college was the easiest that he'd had in quite a few years because the ap classes at carson high school were so difficult he

023said those ap classes are cracked so i got some information from mr chambers last year 256 students took 507 advanced placement exams in carson high school 59.7 percent of those students received a score of 3 or higher receiving a score of three or higher means those students earned college credit for those classes that they took for references sake in the state of nevada the percentage of students who receive a score of three or higher is 46.9 percent so carson high outscores the entire state by about 13 um percentage points globally the percentage that passes three or more is 55.1 percent so carson high's ap teachers are leading not only the state but they're leading um globally and internationally on the ap exam and also i'd like to note that last year at carson high that

024was the hybrid schedule and so high school students only attended school two days a week and because of the block schedule they only attended in person in their ap class one day a week so the amount of work that those teachers and those students did last year was outstanding and i think it is commendable so i wanted to point that out and that concludes my report [Applause] thank you for the good news i have a little bit more good news from carson middle school principal principal sadler would like to congratulate the following students who are selected to represent carson middle school for the 2022 northern zone middle school honor band we have olivia croft spencer dale kevin scara quartz c-o-r-t-e if i misspell if i mispronounce the name i'm sorry lizzy barker lily barker kate

025blankenship kathleen brendan corey garcia galvez olivia monson charlie raqueta and ayan rooney so uh good job and congratulations to those students at boardwalk bray principal rich yeah they deserve it thank you principal ricketta would like to remind everyone that tomorrow february 9th they will be having an informational night for parents to learn about map testing and understanding the map parent report they will also explain how parents can support their children at home based off of map testing results the meeting will be held via zoom the link to the zoom meeting was sent out via parent square as a reminder that is tomorrow they will also have a pto meeting tomorrow in the library via zoom at 3 30 p.m and that ends my report but congratulations everybody i appreciate the good news and joe go

026ahead rich sorry i didn't have a report but i did forget i wanted to make one comment we have a student who graduated in 2014 um ian burson and i just wanted to let everybody know we talk about great things that are happening ian is over in beijing china coaching and i'll get it wrong here freestyle skiing half pipe um he trained with a a kid i want to say he's a kid but who's um competing for ireland and so ian is one of his coaches and he's over there coaching him um and i think that competition might have started today but you know congratulations to him and really all those athletes over there i just wanted to make sure i didn't forget to mention that so yeah i appreciate it i think we've had

027a lot of students from carson high who's gone on to do good and great things so i think anytime we can recognize them it's a good thing to bring before the public and thank you guys now we'll move on to public comment comments will be accepted in person i'm sorry you've got association reports i keep forgetting i'm sorry any association reports see none now we'll move on to public comment comments will be accepted in person or through virtual participation via email comments may be made by members of the public on any matter within the authority of this board please note that public comment will be taken on items marked for possible action before action is taken on such items and members of the public are encouraged to comment on such items at the time they

028are being considered although members of the board may re respond to questions and discuss issues raised during public comment no action may be taken on such matters until the matter is placed on an agenda for action at a meeting of the board in making public comment speakers are asked to come to the table or podium sign in speak into the microphone and identify themselves for the record speakers are instructed to limit their comments to no more than three minutes regardless of whether the comments are made in person or through virtual participation and to not simply repeat comments made by others and this is for discussion only so i have a couple here that have already signed in corey rogers or casey rogers okay charlotte oh i'm sorry and uh just say your name for the

029record and make sure the mic is on it's a green button casey rogers for the record myocarditis tops the list of cova vaccine injuries among 12 to 17 year olds vares data show vares data released in january by the center for disease control and prevention included a total of 1 million 33 994 reports of adverse events from all age groups following covet vaccines including 21 745 deaths and 170 446 serious injuries between december 14 2020 and january 27 2022 there was a letter from the u.s senate um that was also discussed by attorney thomas renz who stated that there were several whistleblowers within the department of defense and other places with medical diagnoses that said that hypertension is up 21 to 2 181 percent of an increase disease of the nervous system is up 1048

030percent increase malignant neoplasma of esophagus 840 94 increase multiple sclerosis 680 increased malignant neoplasm of digestive organs 624 increase gilliam beret syndrome 551 percent increase breast cancer 487 increase all of these things for me female infertility 472 increase all of these things that i'm saying to you right now have occurred after the vaccine vaccine came in and you guys continue to have vaccine clinics on your properties that is probably something you need to start stop doing and start considering the masks need to come off our kids it's all a scam we've already gone over this 100 000 times everybody in that keeps coming in here tells you the same thing we keep giving you data the question is are you looking into the data do you consider the data do you are you looking into

031it in yourselves because if you are how is this continuing that's all i have to say thank you but uh maybe you didn't hear the news earlier but today the masks were removed from the kids it's um officer original i mean yes next is charlotte stewart state name for record please i turn it off lupe i think you need to restart the clock we're restarting the clock then you can start so you get your full three minutes my name is charlotte stewart and i'm a parent tax paying person in carson city i'm here because from 2020 until now we have gone from two weeks to stop the spread to endless violations of fundamental and god-given rights after listening to endless board meetings and pleased by parents to remove the useless mass on children i'm glad

032they're gone however they need to be optional to all and that includes parents staff and buses then finding out in elementary school it's now a trend to be a gay non-binary vegan not like kids even know what that means i find this and i find this a reason for intent to claim upon your bonds necessary it is public knowledge in the state of nevada that all public officials have a surety bond and a constitutional oath and you have broken your constitutional ills by enforcing unconstitutional mandates and our violation of said oaths i'm not seeking money however if these needs of the public are not adhered to i will move forward with my intent in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars i also know of at least nine other parents who will commit to claim

033your bonds if you do not vote on the record for the following stop cohorting all forms of coven 19 propaganda considering how danger dangerous this is for our community and all vaccine clinics on school grounds cease coercion and pushing crt and or sel transgender gay rights week demanding children to declare they are transgender to participate in school activities halt all enforcement of policies that require universal masking without parental consent this includes forcing vaccines on teachers and masking the teachers of the district including transportation remove all obscene books and material from the public school system immediately remove all boys from the girls bathrooms and locker rooms if you find it necessary to stand behind these violations of rights i ask you to step down immediately an emergency an emergency directive isn't a law other school boards

034across the nation have challenged these unconstitutional mandates it is time to end this now and i am delivering you with an intent to file against your funds thank you any other in-person public comment please come forward state name for the record i'm pebble wiggins uh for the record a freshman and gsa leader at carson high who goes by they it pronouns and today i would like to talk about more gender inclusivity within our schools lgbtq students are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their straight and cisgender peers overall 46 percent of lgbtq youth in lgbtq affirming schools report being bullied in the past year compared to 57 percent who did not report their school to be lgbtq affirming these statistics show how openly affirming lgbtq students identities can greatly reduce

035their chances of being bullied and attempting suicide normalizing lgbtq identities is very important for the human rights movement and we deserve gender neutral bathrooms gender neutral gym class and sex ed for queer kids i hope whoever becomes superintendent considers this and takes action for more gender inclusion especially for trans kids who are scared of going into either of the bathrooms available to them in fear of abuse from their peers and authorities thank you for listening thank you any other public comment please come forward and state your name for the record adrian wiggins for the record thank you so i'm here as a proud a member parent and staff member of carson city school district i'm here today due to several comments that were made during the last board meeting and i just want to clear

036a few things up it was brought up several times that nevada ranked 4 45th while new hampshire ranked fifth nationally as far as education goes in fact many people who supported candidate goldhart used that reason of why we needed him to be superintendent the fault in this argument is it wasn't looking at each state it was looking at the whole state versus the individual districts carson city teachers work hard and as a parent that has had two two students that went through this district i know they're doing a great job of providing quality education for our students i'd like to take a closer look at our district and how it's ranked nationally many of you brought some of this up tonight in compared to the manchester new new hampshire district u.s news looks at over

03724 000 public schools across the nation and ranks them according to several criteria college and career readiness math and reading proficiency and performance college curriculum breadth including students earning ap and ib um credits and the number of qualifying scores on college and entrance exams excuse me carson high school actually received a score nationally of 76.69 out of 100 which to put that into perspective that means carson city high school ranks better than almost 77 percent of the high schools in the nation manchester central high school received a 31 manchester memorial high school received a score of 28. both manchester west high school and manchester school of technology received school scores less than 25. this shows us not only that carson high school did well nationally compared to other public schools in the nation but it's

038far from the bottom in the nation it also shows that we outranked every high school in manchester school district while it only shows our high school and not our elementary and middle schools i would argue that it represents our district as a whole because our teachers start in elementary school preparing them from the middle school and up a couple other things i'd like to address that are concerns i just want the board to con consider is candidate goldhart's quick move from the district he's serving when he started he claimed he would spend five years there and he's not fulfilling this agreement which concerns me that we too could find ourselves in this same situation short term leaving us to go through the process all over again um i also have some reservations about the handling

039of a teacher's complaint in his district about copy machines not working at her school while he later did apologize for his response to that matter the damage had already been done so my final comment is whoever our school board decides that is best fit it should be somebody who's invested in our district somebody who cares about our community that we can trust for all stakeholders when making decisions and has a history of fulfilled obligations thank you any other public comment please come forward and state your name for the record good evening christina bourne for the record um first and foremost i just want to say thank you to this board for your dedication and your hard work mr stokes and mr russell thank you so much for everything that you were doing for our school

040district i we know that you worked tirelessly for us and that your decisions are tough and i just wanted to say thank you for that um and thank you for bringing to light tonight all the positivity that is happening throughout our district because we have so many wonderful things happening in this district and i want to make sure that everybody is hearing those things on a regular basis as well i do want to bring up some additional questions that i have about dr goldhart that i would like you to consider as i was doing some research on my own i had discovered that dr goldhart is still under contract and my questions are if he is under contract with new hampshire um are we going to somehow be held fiscally responsible to get him out

041of that contract and in the event that he is not released from his current contract if we were to hire him as superintendent um and you know would the process have to start over and would that cause more uh a bigger financial strain to start the process all over for our superintendent search so um my last comment that i want to say is as you are looking uh to hire our new superintendent please make sure that uh just because somebody has a resume that states they have served as a superintendent before that doesn't necessarily mean that they're the best person for the job every single one of us got our start somewhere and i know that our district has been the launching point for many amazing careers for so many people in this community and

042had we not given them that starting point we wouldn't have so many of the wonderful people that we have working for us today so thank you again for everything that you were doing we greatly appreciate you and thank you any other in-person public comment see none will close in-person public comment and do we have any online public comment yes mr varner thank you mr varner i'd first like to point out that at our meeting on february 2nd there was a issue with the timing and so unfortunately the comment provided by mr harris was he was only given two minutes so at this time i would like to finish reading a portion of his a comment for that last minute that he was not provided on february 2nd so in conclusion for mr harris dr joseph

043was the best has the best chance to become a superintendent but not until she gets some outside experience her mission most likely would be status quo as she has undoubtedly developed a lot of relationships during her tenure in our district the only candidate who is actually a current superintendent doesn't fill the equitable mold so although he has already successfully rebuilt the school district i don't have faith in the board picking the most qualified candidate the board seems okay with approaching standard as doing pretty well this school district is on the verge of a i don't know and goes the town as the students who are raised here numerous children including mine have been exposed to the indoctrination of trans ideology from the family life committee at the expense of learning academic basics first when did

044carson public schools decide they should have a role in influencing the thoughts of children and plant seeds of fringe ideas instead of academic success studies and data show no no decline in self-harm attempts from children who are facing life's difficulties when you view life and others okay thank you mr russell so uh mr varner i'll include the rest of that in the um record thank you the next comment that i have is from uh tierra baboula as a teacher in the carson city school district i feel that i have never been asked about how i'm how i feel regarding my own health and safety when it comes to masks being worn in schools since the pandemic began teachers have been told what to do and never ask when it comes to how we feel about

045our own health and safety most recently the superintendent and school board decided to make masks being worn in school optional for all students at all grades as a teacher in our district and a parent of a student who attends carson high school i have yet to be asked how this decision makes me feel and how i feel about my child sitting right next to other students inc in class who may have chosen not to wear a mask i agree that masks do not prevent someone from contr from contracting coven however i do feel that they help reduce the spread of covet and other illnesses my child already suffers from anxiety which is further worsened by the recent decision to allow mask wearing to be optional she worries about being around others who are not masked

046most likely she is not being given the choice in her class to adjust her seating so that she is only around other students who are masked this morning she was extremely anxious and had a hard time wanting to attend school at the beginning of the school year when masks were optional for students we had lots of student absences because of students being ill not just from covid but from other things like runny noses colds and upset stomachs when masks were made mandatory there were a lot of absences due to illnesses and students being excluded because they were in class excuse me in close contact to someone who was confirmed positive as a teacher i feel safer and healthier my daughter felt safer as a student once again i feel that i am being put into

047a position of being around lots of students throughout the day who can make who can make me ill making me stay home and unable to teach not to mention putting other members of my household at risk even though our students may not end up as sick or even exhibit symptoms of covet it has been scientifically proven that they are super spreaders it doesn't make any sense to me why masks are still mandatory for all students on the buses but not in the classrooms in our classroom students are sitting a lot closer together for longer periods of time than they would be on the bus have the students been asked how they feel about wearing masks or being around other students who are not wearing masks no have teachers been asked no have parents been asked

048no in the future please consider hearing from all members of our school community by serving students parents and teachers about mask being optional before making such an extreme decision ask for input from all your stakeholders not just the noisy few at school board meetings in case you may be interested below are the attendance rates from her classes i taught today and that was today excuse me on february 8th this is a representative of the number of students i have had absent daily in the last five weeks of school fifth grade three students out of eighteen fourth grade six students out of twenty four so three minutes thank you any other uh in online public comment yes mr varner this comment is from jason tingle father of four in carson city he uh sorry that he

049wasn't able to make the meeting tonight otherwise he would be here he'd like to shake the hand of everyone pers excuse me he would like to shake everyone's hands personally he wants to thank the board and mr stokes on making the controversial decision to make masks optional i know in my heart this will benefit our children more than anyone will ever know as i'm sure you're aware other states have started banning mask mandates with all the new information coming out available to the public new studies have been coming out to show how detrimental they actually are and science is now showing this i don't blame you guys as we are all split on what was considered good and bad information mind you these state spanning mask mandates are bipartisan bipartisan decisions which has been unheard

050of for the last two years with that said i'd like to try to help our kids get back on the right track and when i say the right track i mean thinking of themselves something has happened to them mentally and a lot of teachers agree maybe it was a lot of fear or maybe it was a sense of suppression of their voice who knows what it really is but the kids seem a lot less willing to engage with their futures like they did before almost like they were waiting in the woods to be told what they are able or allowed to do this includes their decisions about their future i'm not a doctor and i don't have a phrase or condition that i could speak of but it's an observation and feeling i would like

051to try and focus on groups or even counselors to lift our kids up again let them know it's okay to make those decisions again strip the fear from their eyes and strike it from their hearts i feel we need to reinvigorate our children and empower them to once again take charge of their future instead of always being a part in these meetings in a perceived negative fashion i'd like to offer my help or advice if needed i want to be more i want to move forward towards a positive future if the board decides this is a good idea then i extend my hand out to help i will help in any way i can thank you again for listening to reason and doing what's best for children any further online comment yes mr varner this

052comment is from miles humphreys as the many concerned parents of carson city continue to recognize the overwhelming virtue signal signaling of slavery to a politically driven agenda the board so eagerly displays it would be in the best interest of the school board members to explain their positions on many of the issues the parents and citizens addressed during these meetings the doctors the highly informed parents some of the scientists and others all continue to ask for answers against their never-ending tyrannical mandate that has zero merit on its face but somehow the theater continues especially with the mask when will it end it won't and the goal post continually moves so that it's called leaders caved to their own agenda or some benefit to the political agenda there has never been a better time for the carson

053school board members to allow both sides to have their cake and eat it too allow the parents to unmask their children and allow the parents to mask their children that feel it is necessary for whatever reason it is that simple and i encourage excuse me and the courage to push that agenda is just as simple please do our children and parents the courtesy as they have every deserving right in the matter thank you and do what is right as all of you know this is know what is right in your hearts and minds thank you mr varner let me refresh one more time see if i've had anything else come in late yes thank you at this time mr varner that's all i have okay then we'll go ahead and close the online public comment

054and we'll move on to agenda item number nine it's more good news recognition of nationally board certified teacher linda mill bill knapp and recertification of nicole medeiros and laci carey and this is for discussion only we have jennifer chandler christina bourne and rachel croft hello good evening i'm rachel croft a national board certified teacher and i teach at bordeaux prey elementary so thank you so much for letting us come talk to you tonight we wanted to talk to you about some good things that are happening and that is a national board certification national board is the highest professional certification available to teachers and it is a uh it was created to really recognize and develop accomplished teachers uh there's about a decade's worth of research that shows that students in a national board certified teachers

055class gain one to two months more um learning um having had that accomplished teacher so i'm going to pass it over to jenny who's going to kind of tell you about the basis of national board good evening my name is jennifer chandler and i teach at carson high school and i'm super excited every year because our numbers just continue to grow and grow and it's very encouraging to to me and my colleagues to be part of a team of teachers that really wants to hone their craft if you will and if you refer to your board packets we have provided you with two pieces of information and one of those talking about the validity of national board certification and the other one celebrating all of our board certified teachers here in carson city and we've

056got a couple here tonight to cheer others on and um if you take a look at um the research one of the things that boards is centered around is starting with the premise that you are an accomplished teacher you should need to prove it and so as we go through the process the things that are so rewarding deal with things that we're we're trained to do and after three years in the classroom in your area of desired certification you're allowed to pursue board certification and it focuses on those five core propositions that are listed there how well do you know your content because good teachers know what they teach inside and out how well do you know your students as far as their developmental levels what they're capable of and how to appropriately challenge them

057in the classroom how well do you know your students individually do you know their stories do you know their struggles do you know how you can best support and manage their learning and encourage them and essentially how well do you work within your school community with your colleagues with the child with their parents with with the extended resources in the community and boards has it set up to where you have opportunity to put different components together in a portfolio so i'm going to let christina born my colleague share that with you christina bourne and i teach music at mark twain elementary school and i'm also a national board certified teacher um this process is just it's it's the best type of professional development a teacher can can get and as part of the process you

058have four components that you include in your portfolio um the first component is a computerized uh test that the the candidate goes to a testing center and they are tested on their knowledge of their content area um this is it's quite the test they have a multiple uh choice section but then they have a number of sections where they have to actually um write a number of different things based on prompts and it's it's quite intense um for the other components they are asking them to demonstrate their depth and breadth of knowledge of their students um they are asking them to collect data samples and to use that um those samples to demonstrate their their data and what they're going to do in their next steps to teach these students um and how they're going

059to help these students to grow they also have to demonstrate their dedication to the community their school community their uh their classroom community and um their communication with their parents and other stakeholders in the lives of these students that they serve and they also have to film videos of themselves teaching and then analyze those videos reflect and be able to demonstrate that they are effective in their classroom not just in their writing but but through video evidence as well and i think i'm going to pass it back to rachel we're going to celebrate these teachers that we have here tonight yes rachel craft again so i hope you heard from that that uh this is hard is rigorous um it's rigorous and difficult no matter when you do it and i just think during the

060pandemic and during the challenges that were already going on for teachers completing national board right now is i'm just amazed at the perseverance and the heart of these teachers so i get to introduce linda bellnap our newest national board certified teacher [Applause] sorry linda can i real quick i just wanted to let you know if you'd rather get a better picture you're welcome to come up here i know the back of her head is lovely but [Laughter] lynn develop i teach english language learners at eagle valley middle school um i was asked to tell you why i decided to do this i've always been a very reflective practitioner and this gave me the opportunity to really study what i was doing and improve it and really dig into the information about my students and apply

061that information and as excuse me christina said renee requested you to move the microphone closer it's easier for her to get the record when you have to start over okay and as christina said no it was rachel that said it is it was the best professional development i've ever done and this is my 28th year of teaching and so i've done a lot of professional development and it was harder than two master's degrees so yeah it really is a very good professional development program [Applause] okay so then your certification doesn't last forever sorry this is rachel craft again your certification doesn't last forever you have to renew periodically to show that you are still contributing to the field of education it's a little bit different the renewal process a little bit easier thank goodness um

062and so we have two teachers who uh renewed again during this difficult time and uh we have lacie carey lisa carrier [Applause] hello i'm lacey carey and i'm a national board certified teacher again so that's exciting i really just want to thank the board and carson city school district for all the opportunities i've been given i just love my job i love coaching teachers i love being a teacher on special assignment um and i got the pleasure of meeting peggy brookins who is the um why am i why am i blanking she's the president of national board and she was a very interesting woman and she said something that really resonated with me she said you know every child deserves a national board certified teacher and i truly believe that so the goal is everybody

063that's what we're that's what we're here for so we're going to get them all one day thank you [Applause] rachel craft again i was going to say that we also provide some support for our teachers who are going through this journey and uh jenny and christina there's there's sort of different ways you can do it you can do it in person i do a virtual cohort so that you can do it um on the computer which is not as much fun but in your jammies which is more fun and uh so lacey and nicole were both part of a virtual cohort with me and so then the last one is nicole medeiros yay [Applause] hello i'm nicole medeiros and i teach at boardwalk bray elementary school um tosha on special assignment i'm the interventionist and

064um i just wanted to say thank you to the support because we couldn't do this without the cohort and our principals and our colleagues it would be impossible so the support of everybody is what makes us do what we do every day and being a renewed national board teacher is is the most exciting thing ever because it takes it allows me to continue to grow as an educator and give the best expertise i can to my students every day so thank you to everybody congratulations [Applause] jennifer chandler again just in closing we want to let teachers in the district know that we will be putting cohorts together for next year both virtually and in person and if a teacher is interested in more information national boards has a website and you are free to interact

065with any person that is board certified in our district or around the state nevada continues to grow but we welcome the opportunity to work at work on accomplished teaching together and we thank the board for an opportunity to celebrate these teachers this evening thank you before we move on any questions from the board joe thanks not no questions i just want to congratulate everybody it is an accomplishment and you know we hear especially lately about you know maybe the things that aren't going so well or the things that are perceived not to be going so well and we have a fantastic school district it doesn't mean we don't have room for growth it doesn't mean we're perfect but we're really good um and we're good because we have caring people that are trying to better

066themselves um professionally and in a number of other ways and so i just want to say thank you to you you know whether you're a nationally certified teacher or somebody that just you know takes the time to become an exceptional teacher there's a lot of paths to being exceptional and this is a fantastic path and i appreciate everything everybody's doing i just wanted to thank you and all our teachers and our staff for doing a fantastic job and you know and helping our district be all it can be we hear a lot about where we're ranked most of the information isn't accurate um i've got data along with everybody else to prove that so i just want to again just say thank you for everything you all are doing um to help our students it's

067i for one really appreciate it and i know i'm sure everybody up here does as well thank you stacy and just for the terrific trio i mean you guys are amazing to be able to bring this many people to us to support them to go over the edge to do what you do and you can tell that you love what you do and to help all these all i mean look at this list i mean this is incredible now we have second times around i mean it's incredible the time you guys have put in and you should feel so proud and we are so blessed to have you guys in our district doing what you do because you're not getting thanked for it fiscally for sure but the things that you're producing and the kids

068that are blessed to have those teachers and to get that extra is amazing and for us to be able to promote that within our ranks and have teachers take take the time and after 28 years to go ahead and do it all over again and and get certified i think is amazing of course i think you did it for the t-shirts because they're pretty cool yeah i thought so too but i think you guys don't taken it's gotta work on that we are but i think you guys get the you three especially get lost in that and i just want to thank you for the time and effort that you put in it and and encouraging people that aren't even thinking about doing this and and getting them to do it so we do appreciate

069all that time and effort thank you stacy anybody else mike well i was just going to say for the teachers out there there is a financial incentive for doing this and it's significant so i mean it's not only hard work but you're of course rewarded for that and i think it's well deserved and so congratulations to everyone and i think we're all supportive so great job thank you mike anybody else well i'll just kind of go over what they said i think it was very well stated by joe mike and stacy i think it really expresses the feelings of olives on the board it's a lot of hard work we appreciate it the kids are going to benefit from it and i just wanted to thank you guys for be willing to put so much

070effort into advancing your teaching skills for the kids thank you anybody else thank you again please do get over the table is and uh thank you once again and not to forget the other teachers we know all our teachers work very very hard and if we're ready we'll go ahead and move on to agenda item number 10. wait till we get set up here a little technology issue it looks like we may be ready now so we'll move on to item number 10 report on the english language access scores for the carson city school district for 2021 school year and this is for discussion only and we have dr tanya scott thank you good evening members of the board and president berner thank you so much for having me here tonight to talk about this

071data i'm sure that you're going to have questions for me and i so appreciate you inviting me but i'm going to start off with a question for you so when you look at this image what is it that you see piece of granite is it too soon too soon too soon i'd say a slab of marble so when i look at that that's what i see i see a slab of marble but this man michelangelo and i'm sure i'm not saying that dramatically enough it should be like michelangelo but when michelangelo looked at this slab of marble this is what he looked at this slab of marble and this is what he saw and this is what he said about it i saw the angel in the marble and i carved until i set him

072free and when i think about my tenure as a teacher and as an educator this quote rings so true to me but specifically for our learners who maybe don't have access to letting their great thoughts and their great ideas be amplified so in my work with english language learners this quote has always been very poignant to me that i saw the angel in the slab of marble and i had to do what i took to set him free so if you think about michelangelo he was an artist but he was also a scientist everyone in his like was right the renaissance they were engineers they were scientists they were artists he was an anatomist i didn't know that was a thing but it's a thing apparently and they saw that beauty in that slab of

073marble and they used their artistry and they used that science to set it free and that's what teaching is so when michelangelo saw that slab of marble and he saw that he needed something to set it free so i have yet another question what was it that he needed to set that angel free he needed tools i'm not a sculptor i'm not an engineer but he needed tools and as an educator assessment is an essential tool for teaching and learning and that's a distinction there's a distinction between teaching and learning sometimes we use assessment as that science we know that we taught what we taught and they learned it but sometimes we use that as a tool for learning that tells us where we need to go from there that's the art i think assessment

074is the science and that it tells us where what we what we've done but it's also the art it tells us how we use those tools where do we carve where do we shave where do we brush how do we set those angels free so i'm here tonight to talk to you about one of the tools we have in our english language department in our school district to know what we do to set those angels free so per the every child succeeds act and the nevada and administrative co code and english learner professions proficiency assessment is administered k-12 for students have been identified and as an english language learner english learners are defined as students for whom another language other than english is spoken in the home as indicated by a parent or a guardian

075and also that student has demonstrated that they're not proficient in english yet so that's a very specific thing approximately 950 students in our school district meet that criteria and another 1500 students have exited the program this means that together approximately 30 percent of the students that attend school in carson city school district have participated in the english learner program the english language proficiency assessment administered in nevada presently is the access test and that is the data that i've been asked to share with you today so just a little background on the access test it's administered once a year per essa presently again it's the wida that's the publisher the access test and it measures four language domains that means when students take those that test they're assessed in speaking they're assessed in listening they're assessed

076in reading and assessed in writing i'd like to say something about that though it's not a four-legged chair so that they receive a composite score which is what kind of is like the be-all end-all but it's not a 25-25-25-25 it's not weighted that way students have to demonstrate proficiency in academic language which lies heavily in reading and writing it's not it's not a 25-25-25 so when we show students are proficient that they are strong in that academic language which lies heavily in reading and writing so the purpose of this assessment in general is that it generates data that indicates of the the goals of our program are being met and those goals are twofold that students reach proficiency and i will say there's an asterisk there that language learning is a journey and it's not

077a destination so that all those are although our students exit and we consider them reclassified it's still a journey that their scores count as part of that population for the rest of their academic life in nevada that's an nrs they they so we it's not as though we we're we're done with those students we consider them exited and then we monitor them for four years per essa again so that we're super concerned about their academic achievement although they've been reclassified i like to say exited but not forgotten and then another goal of the program is growth we want to show that they're moving developmentally through those stages of language acquisition so really those are the primary goals so during the 2020 2021 year 229 students participated in the administration of the access test i would

078like to note that some of those students include students who participate in the alternate access which means there are students who don't participate in the mainstream academic assessments so we're also talking about students who take the alternate access which are students who participate in the north and nevada alternative assessment so that there are students who are have ips who are not who are not considered capable of taking mainstream assessments this includes the entire school population who are english learners so to exit to talk about our first point of our goal as a school district students must have an overall composite score so again that's the four domains speaking listening reading writing again not a four-legged chair it's it's not developed that way they need to make a 4.5 to meet the criteria to be crest

079classified as exited last year approximately nine percent of the ela population in our school district met the criteria to exit the program we also is that better than the years before or is that par for the course or what is that nine percent the typical anticipated exit rate for our district and the state of nevada is fourteen percent the give or take a couple decimal points do you um is the hybrid schedule we're on the last year or so in the lack of schooling for a while did that have an impact i don't have any quantitative data to support that assertion but i would say as far as participation our school district was i would say had more students participate than most because we were on a hybrid whereas some school districts in nevada were

080not even on a hybrid so as far as participation so at this juncture it's it it's difficult to answer that question but i will say it's lower than what we would typically expect but i would venture to say it's higher than participation wise that we would even have that data to make that assertion thank you so there's also an alternative path to exit which is put forth by the state of nevada which we exercised this year and 12 students were reclassified based on that alternative pathway and that alternative pathway indicates that students have a point 4.00 to 4.4 and it's in conjunction with they've showed proficiency in a standardized exam and that is both in english language arts and math so we also had again trying to always capture the largest net we can we've

081also had students that showed proficiency in that so we added that into our total of students that had exited so looking at the other point is our growth so approximately 50 percent of students achieve their requisite compositive growth criteria as defined by our school district to show that they've made adequate growth which means that they did not require what we call an individual language education plan that indicated that they had some sort of gap or they weren't making requisite growth so again going back to my initial statement assessment is an essential tool for teaching and learning and i would again say that assessment is that tool that shows us the science who didn't go where they needed to go but it's also the super important tool that shows us about the art so where do

082we carve where do we where do we shape what are we what do we need to do where do we need to go from now and so obviously without saying this has been an unusual year president varner like it's you know i'm not going to be disingenuous and say the data doesn't look the way it usually looks but it's that data that ultimately the role of assessment is to drive instruction to tell us that art it's the art where do we carve where do what tools do we need so other than assessment we have other essential tools that are responsive to the data that we have so i want to take just a minute to tell you about those other tools that we have so one of our tools is we are blessed in this

083district to have in-house english language development and acquisition coursework formally that was called tesol teaching english as a second language the state has reframed that as english language acquisition and development we presently have 212 teachers who hold that endorsement on their license in my tenure in this position when i started we had about 15. so if you think about that exponentially it's extraordinary and we still offer that in-house and we have several teachers that are presently participating in that we have a tulane highway i like to call it we have teachers who teach focused english language development some of you might think of that as esl coursework that teach students who have that as a pullout or in the secondary coursework as a as a as their english credit so we have a two-laned highway

084in conjunction with that we have almost every teacher in our school district has had training 45 hours of high quality sheltered instruction it's a school board reg 2 19. that new teachers within their first 18 months of hire participate in that instruction and we continue with that endeavor we have ongoing professional ring um the nevada department s has rolled out some standards we've had ongoing professional development in that and again the hqsi continues and again we continue to offer the e-led endorsement to teachers and offer them an incentive for earning that endorsement we also have an el advisory team we've partnered with the community with trustee ramirez i think thank you for being on our eel advisory where we solicit feedback from all stakeholders regarding the advancement and the education of english learners and that

085is ongoing and alive and we meet quarterly and then we're working towards advancement so um one of the things what we're doing we're planning for next year is the advancement via individual termination so avid we've we've embraced avid as a school district and there is a part of that which is called excel which is intended for long-term english learners um long-term english learners are considered students who have been in school for more than six years and i have not exited the program so if we really look at the data we do see at the middle school and high school a lower percentage of students who are exiting which makes sense because there is a greater percentage at the elementary school and that is the natural like development and progression you would want them to take

086but we're looking to address that to meet those needs of those students who aren't maybe meeting those criteria for exit that they we would hope that they would and then this is the one thing i feel really well i mean i feel passionate about it all but we're offer offering enrichment opportunities so um as a member of the el department i should have introduced myself i'm the assistant director of equity and el programming um and also my counterpart was macie okay who's the director of equity we see on every committee in math ela with that lens of what can we do for english learners to make sure that they have every access to every opportunity so for example we've worked with the gate committee and i'm looking for joanna she's left too to see that

087we're casting a wide net so that everybody has that opportunity to participate so that there aren't systematic barriers if you're a gifted student to being qualified as gifted that's linguistic so we do that also this year we've partnered with schools and used our um some of our funding to offer um wild horse children's theater at empire elementary they're going to do a workshop with a play at the end and also a mark twain elementary with art classes typical to what they had at the children's museum in the past precoved so that they have art classes during summer school that culminates in a an art show that will be displayed in the community so really working towards not only like what do we do to remediate students who maybe are developing their english language skills but

088what can we do to inspire them so that is one of the things i'm really excited about in this position so going back to my original quote i saw the angel in the marble and i carved until i set him free so again i want to say that michelangelo he saw that slab of merle marble and he only he didn't only see that he saw a lot of other things he saw this angel he saw that angel he saw this angel and many others and this was the precursor to that quote he said every block of angel has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it and i feel so hopeful in this role that that is our role as educators and i look around and i see

089so many of my colleagues who have supported over the years that this is what we're doing it's english learners are diverse group within themselves to say like someone's an english learner i gave that doj definition it doesn't capture it within themselves it's still a diverse and dynamic group of students and that is our goal and that is our role as an educator and as a sculptor to figure out how do we use those tools not just assessment how do we use the tools we have to carve and set them free so i so appreciate your support in that endeavor thank you thank you any questions on the board mike well you know one of the things i'll just as a new teacher in the district and this will probably stress mr stokes out to remember

090this you know i was one of the classrooms that the department of justice came through to see how our ell students were receiving services and there were findings against us and so it's through the the hard work of tanya who i spent many hours in classes with sometimes hearing carrie pryor's not so wonderful singing and eating of rotten fruit and vegetables but the real truth is you know you are not only teaching us as professionals how to interpret that data but you're giving us those tools to meet the needs of our students and so this education for our ell students has vastly been improved and so that's due to your hard work is due to the commitment of the district and the leadership of mr stokes and so um i would just say good job

091and this is a tough time everywhere assessment data is not ideal for anyone right now but we have the tools as we bounce back to get back to where we were and so thank you laurel thank you dr scott um i serve on the english mastery council and for the state of nevada and it we took a bit of a hiatus last year because we knew that schools were hanging on by their fingernails and so we didn't request a review of the english learner policies last year because they had so many other things but we have done that work previously when i first started on the board is it four years ago maybe five i don't know if they went a little faster than you'd think um but one of the things that we were

092working on reviewing on the english mastery council was the council made recommendations for new requirements for districts to have in their english learner district policies um that are adopted by boards and then and then that guides the training um carson city's english learner district policy was used as an example to all the districts in the state um because it was it was thorough and and it met all the requisites um since the time that i've been on the board and we've given that feedback to this district all districts in the state now have district policies that meet the english learner requirements and they're working on some other new things and they're going to be reviewing the english learner plans and getting more feedback back on that but um i just i i think there's good

093things happening with english learners in our district and um i'm i'm one of the other things i'm proud of is the um efforts that have been made by our leaders to look for those gate students who may be english learners um our staff valerie dockery um with tanya tanya's dr scott's assistants and and everything she's looking at um when identifying and the gate advisory council when identifying english learners who may potentially be gate she is not taking the composite um kogat score what composite that measures math um and language and um writing because students can be gifted in an area but maybe score lower on the language um and which is where english language language learners typically score and so that opens up the opportunity to recognize those kids because they do have additional needs

094and sometimes in the classroom so i like that and i like to that it's the angel and the marble it's not about their thinking they have great thoughts and have a lot to say and it's our job as the practitioner to figure out how to amplify that how to get it out and if we only measure it in ways that measure that then it's they're more remiss and and i think that's something and i don't know it's uh probably anecdotal that i've heard but reports i heard from some of the principals um last year was that there was concerns that more of the english language learners had chosen the full remote option rather than the hybrid which maybe could be i would probably have to dig deeper in it but that could be contributing to

095a little bit to the lower exit rates this year that was really long sorry uh joe hi dr scott thank you i appreciate that um for those that might be wondering you know when you ran over some of the percentages and whatnot for those that don't understand what goes into that you know we said where right now we've got a pass rate of about nine percent we expect about 14 where does 14 come from and how does that maybe can we draw a comparison with surrounding states on how they're doing how we're doing versus them and um is there room for improvement kind of what's our next step if you will well mr cassio there is a metric that measures that through the state which we call atp which is added adequate growth percentile and

096the way that works if you're a second grader and you're a level three english learner you're compared to level three english learners who are a second grader in other states so this was a unique year our test window in nevada was extended to september 17th so we just now received data in december so where normally we would have that validated data at this point we don't have that but i would say like going back like i know this is controversial but like you know how people now they get like a participation award for soccer and everybody's upset because you just participate and you get but if nevada if carson city got a participation award i'm i'm quite certain we would get it as far as participation because as ms crossman was saying like a lot

097of school districts we had more than 95 percent that's what they didn't care about percentage but a participation but we had about 95 participation so i don't have that validated data but so it's hard to say but i will say i feel confident that that data looks good because it's like no other measure you could measure so language development and academic achievement are two different paradigms so when we measure academic achievement you're in school i taught a standard i taught it i know you learned it language development is different it's everything that's happening for you in your whole life so i don't have that validated data but i would say that i feel super comfortable with nine percent when we usually have 14 in a time when data is doesn't look like what it usually

098looks like so i i can't and i appreciate that i and it's probably it's not certainly not fair to ask you to come up with that right now i will say this though yes i'll go ahead so statistically like our elementary schools we usually exit more students because there's more students in elementary school and also that's what you would expect right if the if the goal is that they enter school and they exit within five or six years so at the elementary school our percentage of exits was about over 12 percent so if you look at just if you kind of disaggregate that data it doesn't look dire to in my view no thank you and i don't really have a measure to know whether or not it's dire or not i just try and

099understand the numbers and and um the process if you will and so you know the next time we get updates and whatnot especially as we start rolling again on all four wheels you know being able to track that or even looking before covet started kind of you know how were we tracking and then where are we going and you know is you know i'm just trying to learn is 14 percent or nine percent or a little you know twelve percent realistic or should we be at like 16. no usually um nde wise and federal wise it's a little over 14 that has been expected to exit okay but i will say this and i meant to say this like the pers the participation is kudos to our test coordinators to our administrators who during the

100hybrid had students come on mondays and found ways to get them there to participate so that high participation i say it like with not snarky but that i'd like to give a participation award is kudos to the leadership in this school district who made that happen and the teachers too that that participated in that test administration process who maybe typically in the past had not sure thank you lupe go ahead okay if my button works so dr scott i just want to thank you for inviting me to be part of the advisory team um i was very impressed with the input that i heard from the teachers from the administrators present at that meeting that i attended and i am a firm believer that all students can succeed with the right support in this case

101with the right tools that you showed us on your presentation so and it does take a village it does take a village to get the students to get through the educational system so thanks to everyone who is you know supporting these efforts um i definitely um would love to see more students going into the gay pathway and also the jumpstart in ap classes i definitely would love to i'm curious to see what percentage of students you know that are exiting from the program are are going into any of those um advanced programs the inroads through the advisory are also supporting inroads to supporting students who have native language abilities so at the middle school at carson middle school we've had this year spanish for spanish speakers sometimes called heritage language and then we're adding that

102at eagle valley and then also we're furthering that i'm going to say dr jenny chandler at the high school so that we're really looking at so how do we capitalize on the the funds that students already bring to our school linguistically and then also with the spanish classes we're having two paths where you could take one path where maybe you take ap spanish but also a path for spanish speakers which is more occupational so that we're really looking at how do we take what students already are bringing to the table and then capitalize on that and also having students get that bi-literacy seal in their diploma so i meant to say that with the el advisory that's one of i i would say like there's a fine line between having an agenda for your meeting

103and having an agenda but one of my goals is that we really look at students what are they already bringing as a link as a fund as a linguistic fund and how do we capitalize on that as a community as far as enriching their school experience don go ahead thank you thank you for the education and and thank you for for doing this difficult work uh just a question ideally the esl students you want to get them in preschool even before kindergarten for the for the kids that come later i know you you touched up upon it on in high school and in middle school we do have extra resources we can maybe give them some extra help to push them along a little quicker we are looking at that as far as the avid

104excel but i will say that an english learner is an english learner although they might have diverse needs or practitioners so the skills and what you bring to the table as a practitioner is the same regardless of the students whether they have low incident languages i will say we we are getting a handful of students that are refugees which bring with them a different host of needs that maybe we haven't experienced in the past so we're looking to our community partners to really meet those needs as far as their social emotional needs so on this past professional learning day we did have our partnership with northern nevada international center and also um washoe county school district as far as how do we meet the needs of students because we do have i didn't include it

105in my presentation i was very like i thought about it a lot but we do have a handful of students who speak what we call a low incident language so most of our students are spanish speakers but a spanish speaker is not a spanish speaker we have students that come from central america el salvador like it's not the same it's not an equal playing field so we're really looking at again as one of our tools is professional learning bringing partners into the community to address the needs of those students but at the end of the day we're practitioners we're teaching english so it's it's knowing the best practices and how to meet our students where they're at regardless of their language needs to move them forward any other comments or questions i'm glad you addressed

106it i was going to ask you about the refugees that are coming into the schools and your plan to address their needs but you kind of touched upon a bit can you expand upon that a little bit what other plans do you have are you going to have other language speakers come in do they have access to some kind of online or remote training or learning so through our school district we partner we have two partnerships that help in that regard we've dedicated funds to transperfect which allows us to communicate with parents in a low incident language on demand so we it's basically a three-way phone call i don't know really how it works but at any moment we could have somebody in any language on the phone and then this year we've also partnered

107with the unr language bank which translates which means written document so we've always had interpreting we've all in my tenure we've had that luxury of having that but it's translating so we have um where you could have written documents in a variety of languages and so it's a very budding friendship or relationship with the unr language bank and unr international center just because in the past we really haven't had an influx of refugees and i think it would be um exaggerated to say we've had an influx but we really have had some families that have resettled here and so again we've partnered with our community and like it's it's a learning process but at the end of the day i would say it's it's still about our practice so the practice of teaching english learners

108is not about teaching spanish speakers it's about teaching anybody who does not speak english as their first language and we're practitioners and so it's still a matter of implementing those best practices but i would say that i will have reached out and we are having a budding connection with our community just because not only our school district we've all been experiencing maybe students or the needs of students who are english learners that we have not experienced in the in my tenure in this in my work in this district thank you i kind of wanted the public to know that information um also uh i know that access testing is very stressful for the teachers i know that personally everybody yes and so i just want to thank the teachers who are the eol teachers i

109know it's it's not easy work for them either so not only are you doing a good job but i want to recognize the teachers who are involved in the program that's doing a terrific job too and again i would say that test coordinators and the administrators it's it's a multi-layered process and a high stake literally a high-stakes process it is yeah um but uh again just thank you and all open one more time if any more comments if not we'll let dr scott go i think because i'm gonna go tomorrow and access death so thank you yeah i know it's stressful probably not gonna sleep today but thank you thank you all right moving on to item number 11 presentation of the learning acceleration plans for the elementary schools in the carson city school district

110for the 2021-2022 school year this is for discussion only and we have a whole host of people going to be presenting we'll start with doctor dr tasha busan thank you did you want to introduce the other speakers or you want me to we can introduce ourselves as we go through our presentation all right thank you [Music] okay thank you president varner tasha fusan for the record um first off i want you to know that we have returned loss of learning so you may have heard the term loss of learning several times over the past two years with covid and um the newest research is saying we really need to not focus on the loss of learning for students and instead focus on accelerating learning for students otherwise giving up two years of time if you

111will will simply put our students behind and we know that if proper intervention and supports are provided then we can accelerate that learning and get students back on track so this is our presentation on acceleration of learning previously known as loss of learning i believe you know in our sr3 application we were required to um reserve at least 20 percent of the funds to implement evidence-based strategies and interventions in accordance with essa so the are when we do provide interventions we actually have to go to research them to make sure that they have research behind them supporting what you know the programs that we bring into the schools they're just not oh let's do an after-school program and do you know you know work with clay um that kind of thing so we actually have

112to research the interventions that we provide and they have to be in accordance with essa those interventions have to respond to students academic needs they have to respond to students social and emotional learning needs and they have to address the impact of covid19 on underrepresented student groups so our english language learners our special ed students and our frame reduced lunch students so the the start of our acceleration of learning programming really started this past summer with our summer academies our elementary summer program ran from june 9th through june 25th from 7 45 to 11 45 every day for 13 days our secondary programs ran from june 9th through june 30th a little bit longer day and secondary because students typically had two am session and a pm session some students went all day some students

113just went one or the other sessions but that lasted for 16 days and then pioneer academy also ran from june 9th through june 30th for four hours a day for 16 days overall we had 792 of our students that were served district-wide 399 students at the elementary level 76 students at the middle school level and 317 students at the high school level district enrollment on june 2nd was just under 7 800. so approximately a little over 10 of our students participated i think that was an important point to to share with you all that we had a large participation of that 209 of our students signed up for transportation 792 of our students if you'll notice that's basically 100 of the kids who attended had access to breakfast and lunch so nutrition services actually served

1144 262 breakfasts and 4 489 lunches for funding we spent a little over thirty thousand dollars from general fund our 21st century grant so that is like our after-school programming grant like that runs the solutions program or provides funding for solutions at the high school uh came in at just a little over 117 000 and then our sr2 funds we used about a little over 68 000 so we we invested about 215 000 into summer programming last year then we moved into this year so we had some initial planning thoughts as we moved into this year we had originally allocated interventionists for each school that interventionist could be a certified or a classified person depending on the school's programming that they put together we um had planned to serve or excuse me to do beforehand

115or after school programming as well as intervention blocks during the school day we intended to provide transportation and have after-school snacks so when i say intended to is because although these were our thoughts and our ideas as we started heading into the year as our schools started putting their programs together we did run into staffing issues for instance we did not as you know have enough bus drivers to actually provide transportation to some of our programs some of our programs started three or four weeks late waiting for for us to be able to provide transportation some of our schools were not able to hire interventionists so instead they did things like prep buyouts for teachers or extra pay for teachers after school those types of of massaging of our initial plans i say that because

116i'm going to now invite our principals up to actually talk about what their programs look like in each of their schools there is not a one size fit all for all schools they they literally had to build unique programs based on what resources they had so we are going to go through our schools in alphabetical order so i'm going to ask a miss principal cheryl ketta to come on up and talk about borderwick prey all right good evening i'm shel raquetta the principal of bordeaux and we were very very fortunate at puerto ric and where we were able to um hire a full-time interventionist um to work with our students in grades um first through fifth in fact um nicole medeiros who was here earlier as um the board certified teacher she is our interventionist

117and what we put into place are intervention groups throughout the day so every grade level has a 45 minute intervention group and during that 45 minutes um students are pulled into smaller groups with not only nicole or interventionists but um also with uh nancy varner our el designee and our special education teachers and um so that then the students that are left then are um smaller groups within the classroom so that those uh so that every student at that for those 45 minutes are receiving very targeted um interventions um in addition to that we are able to put into place um an after school program for our first through fifth graders we run that three days a week we focus on reading and math we have six teachers currently and four paraprofessionals that are helping

118with that program um when we decided who we were going to target for our program so for our intervention pull out um for with miss maderos when we focused with students that were between the 20th and 40th percentile um because we wanted to get them up over the 40th percentile because as you know with like for read by grade 3 those below the 40th percentile are on a learning um plan and so reading plans so we wanted to help help those students become more proficient with reading and then the same also with math we invited for the after school program we invited 120 students um that were in that demographic for the after-school program and we were able to have 74 that are attending consistently so school-wide um we had from our uh fall data

119to our winter data we had some really um good results that we were very have with to show that we're going in the right direction um we had 55 percent of our students um in reading met their growth and that was up from 39 in the fall and then we also had 60 of our students made their projected growth in math up from 50 in the fall so we are very pleased to see that trend um we also decreased the number of students who were below the 40 41st percentile reading from 46 percent to down to 39 and then increased those that were above the 60 percent 60 percent being important because that shows proficiency likely likely proficiency on the s back test so we went from uh would have lost the place here we

120went from um 34 up to 37 from fall the winner in reading and then um for we also decreased in math um the number that were below the 41st percentile we went from 44 to 38 and then also increased for the 60th percentile from 33 to 37. so um we were we were very happy to see that we were headed in the right direction um closing in on our school-wide goals that we have for the year so we're excited to um continue with this and look to see where we're at in the spring moving forward we're just going to continue to monitor we are doing a lot of professional development on targeted interventions also along with avid program to make sure our instructions rigorous our after school program will be continuing through april um and

121then we are excited to be able to continue with our interventionist next school year thank you any questions for uh principal i i just have a question on your previous slide when you talked about targeting the students between the 20th and 40th percentile based on map data what about those students that were lower than the 20th percentile is that just such a small number that it there there are there are different targets for any that fall below the 20th percentile of profi on map data so with our interventions um because every student is getting interventions at the same amount of time for 45 so even though we the 20th to the 40th percentile were those that we targeted that we're going to get pulled out to work specifically with our interventionists but every student is

122getting interventions differentiated to meet their needs and so all no matter even our lower students were and a lot of those a lot of those students that were in the lower um percentiles are also students that are getting pulled out that may be on an iep program program so they're getting pulled out getting individual supports based off of their iep i will have to say for all of the schools that's one of the challenges is that although we want to make sure we have appropriate supports for our students we also don't want to over remediate students so if they're being served on an iep or if they're an lep student that's being served in a pull out model you don't want to then pull them out again more time for a different intervention so you're

123going to kind of see that consistently across our schools when they talk about target groups joe thank you just quick question in your slide you said the program has six teachers and four paraprofessionals and we we know we have staffing shortages and things like that and not being a teacher i mean i'm how hard is it to pair up a professional teacher say in a primary grade with those students or you know do we have the appropriate grade level teachers working with these kids or is that not so important you know what i mean do we have fifth grade teachers working with first grade students we we did the best that we could with pairing that up um but we do so i had i struggled with getting primary teachers that would work with those

124so we do have like a fourth grade teacher that's working with um our first grade group um that was probably the biggest discrepancy that we had but uh but when you talk to that teacher you know to her it was kind of like a even though that's not the group of students that she works with which would be ideal um she still enjoys having that little bit of a change and so so it's it's difficult it's really hard to get teachers and so sometimes teachers like to have that difference so it's a little bit different than what they're normally doing outside of their comfort zone okay thank you i think another just an important thing to note about that too that i think that was a good question trustee castillo normally when we do interventions

125outside of the school day they're more skills based based on where the students learning gaps are where in most cases when we do interventions within the classrooms they're based on the grade level curriculum and shoring that up for students so i think it's easier to be able to have teachers work across grade levels when you're doing the skills based if that makes sense any other comments or questions the after school program you're talking about is that the dolphin club what's referred to as dolphin club yes it's the dolphin club thank you thank you for your presentation thank you um if principal squires can come up and join me we will talk about empire elementary next good evening susan squires principal of empire elementary school before i present to you my slide i want to say

126that although we're going to talk about two specific things that happen at my school i want to give credit to every single staff member that is on my staff from my office manager and secretary to my custodian my head cook my teachers all of my specialists there is nobody in my building right now that isn't working towards acceleration for our students learning and i want to give praise to them right now in front of everybody they deserve every single bit of it for their hard work so we with our funding for accelerated learning we did two specific things first of all we did hire a full-time interventionist that is working with students daily in ela and math foundational skills and these students are all students that are below the 10th percentile and map so they

127are the ones in our school from kindergarten to fifth grade that are struggling the most with foundational skills the other thing that we put into place was our and listen to this title fact fluency fun club because if you call it something fun maybe they'll come that we do every morning for students who were struggling with math effect fluency and our school-wide goal on our school improvement plan was to really focus in the areas of numbers and operation because that is where we have found that our students are having the biggest trouble and when you narrow that down it comes right down to fact fluency when our students don't have their math facts known it makes it much harder to then go on and do operations without knowing your math facts so we um we're

128focusing on that for our kids so you can see that the number of students that we are seeing for intervention in el ela and math are very small groups we are not at this time able to service third and fifth grade students because of our block scheduling there wasn't a way in our day that we could create for our interventionists to be able to target those kids otherwise she would not be able to use the restroom have lunch or breathe so we created our schedule as is and she is continuing to see the same students all year long oftentimes we will switch students out but we want to make sure that these students really have a good grasp of foundational skills and then the number of students that are attending our facts fluency fun club

129it's it was small to begin with both of these programs we struggled with getting off the ground for health reasons um other things that got in the way we struggled getting them started so our fact fluency fun club didn't actually get started until later in the school year but is ramping up now because after our first semester our teachers were able to see where which students really needed to have that extra support so there have been more students that have been added to this program than the numbers that you see on there um so our data again because we struggled a little bit with um getting these programs up and running and then one of our interventionists being out for quite some time we don't have as much data as we would like to have

130but we did find that our kindergarten students being seen for foundational skills improved their writ scores on the map test by 10 points or more students being seen by enter the interventionists in ela and she's using the hegarty phonics program um hadn't been assessed when i made this slide but at this time their map growth went um anywhere up from six percent to 28 on their math group in ela our growth in math numbers and base 10 every student that is being seen moved at least one writ band or more and in our facts fluency club it hadn't been assessed at that time and we're having a little hard time assessing exactly um what we want based on the program that we're using but we have seen great growth we had our first math be

131for this school year where we had students in all all of our grade levels competed like a spelling bee a math bee um for the top winners in their grade level um which was really fun to see we had one student who attended our fact fun fluency from the day it started he attended every single day for three months and went from 53 proficient in multiplication to a hundred percent proficient in multiplication and so he's a fifth grade student but i'm going to tell you that's going to take him a long way in in knowing uh being able to move forward in operations um so moving forward we're going to continue with our interventionist and we will get to have her again next year i'm continuing with small groups very targeted skills for the remainder

132of the year and our intention is to increase the number of students that are in our facfluency fund club by changing it up a little bit giving it incentives really praising them for consistent attendance it's in the morning so attendance can be sometimes difficult but we have our parent advocate involved in making phone calls to parents of kids who have signed up to come to just get the attendance up so we're hoping to continue that as well and to be able to encourage more kids to come to that thank you any questions or comments from the board joe thanks susan you mentioned if i heard you right that you're having a little bit of trouble with some of the assessments because of the program that empire is using it's just just because we're using a

133program called well i can't even say we're using it our fact fun fluency club um again because it took us a while to get started for our teacher to actually get started in using it she wasn't sure um what exactly she wanted to use and so we played a little bit with using different kinds of programs games flash cards etc and one of the programs they're using is called extra math and so we're still learning how to use it how to um use the assessment piece of it so that we get some accurate data so it's not that we don't have data i just don't know how valid or accurate it actually is right now so it's just a learning curve then for for staff it really is and unfortunately our teacher that runs it

134um um health-wise has had some struggles this year too um so okay no thank you for the clarification thank you joe any other questions or comments i have one i was wondering uh for myself and for the public who may be listening when you say that in math everyone scores at least a one writ band what what is that so um when the students take the map assessment they are given writ scores in the different sections of the map tests that they take and so when you lay that out on a continuum there are bands writ bands with those numbers and you can put a student into each one of those bands for every part of the map test that they take so numbers and operations is one of the things that we're working on

135so students will fall into those writ band areas okay and you can look at their names and you can find out this is exactly what you need um where the students are learning for let's say base 10 okay um so to move from the one rip band that they're in to the next writ band um shows that they are making progress in whatever that is and so we have had those kids be able to move one rip band two rip bands um making progress in those areas does that make sense i'm sure somebody can explain it a little more no i i think it did fine rit is probably an acronym for something you know it's a yeah in education we like to make things as difficult as humanly possible and therefore a ritz score

136is a very difficult score to use um because it's not like on a scale that you would be used to but what what susan's saying is exactly that is that you can tell a student's movement by moving from the bands but it's difficult they can't say oh well the kid got a 90 on it on a test that's 100 points you know what i mean it's so unfortunately we'd like to give you a better explanation but um it's difficult sometimes for us to even really follow exactly how they they do those but those scores are renormed constantly based on how students do if that makes sense so they're constantly moving as well and it's based on the group of students that took that assessment at the time that that assessment was taken and it's so

137that you can constantly see um that that it's a dynamic score and not stale that stays put i don't know if that makes sense but the better all the students in third grade do at the time the test is taken then the like the higher the score goes up so you can't use like a comparison from this year to that year i don't know if that makes sense i don't know if i muddied the water no i think it makes sense one of the great ways i'll just say that our teachers are able to use it that's exciting for our teachers to watch is when we differentiate learning for them and we know that a student is in a lower writ band than where they should be at grade level and we teach them right

138in that area for what they need to know and then when we see them move we can watch them getting closer and closer to being at grade level and then know exactly our teachers are able to see exactly this is what i need to teach my student next and now she's moved here and this is what i teach her next and so that's how we use those rip bands thank you i'd like to thank you for the work you're doing and all your staff it looks like it's moving in the right direction so uh thank you thank you thank you everyone okay next step is dr ward with an update on fremont elementary jennifer ward for the record uh just a little bit about the ritz score the nice part about a ritz score is

139it doesn't matter who at what grade level scores at a 200 it's kind of like weight if you have a first grader who weighs 200 pounds and a fifth grader who weighs 200 pounds the doctor may say something to you okay so the weight is the academic weight so a 200 rit in first grade is the same weight is the same academic skills as a fifth grader who scores a 200. so it is a nice unit of measurement and that's the whole design of our map test is that you can see a kindergarten student all the way through an 8th grade student scoring a writ score it is a numeric way of saying what academic skills does that student have in the various goal strands areas so you can do almost a competency type of

140assessment being able to group students outside of grades outside of skill levels all you're doing is looking at the the rip band area and that is at what their instructional level so just a little note well thank you yep uh so at fremont we got a slow start uh we do not have an interventionist for this year we will have an interventionist for academics and behavior for next year it is our hope that we will be hiring a certified employee to fill that role with our attendance support we decided because of our chronic absenteeism we needed additional phone calls conversations so we have bilingual uh support that calls our families who are struggling with attendance and really making that personal connection you know what's going on with the family how's the things going rather than

141just sending them the attendance letters that they would normally get at the five day 10 day 15 day increments and so we also added an after-school program with our interventionist position we missed out on what we wanted to do with our dyslexia program so we incorporated that into our after-school program and then we looked at staffing and we looked at availability and we were able to pull second and third grade students for our after school program we have four teachers who work on dyslexia two are special ed teachers one is a speech path and we also have a paraprofessional who does our dyslexia program as well as our esl teacher so those are trained in the 100 teaching your student to read in 100 lessons it is a dyslexia program that also focuses on letter

142formation so the students work one-on-one with an adult it is a time intensive so it is only three students per adult in order to make that program happen the other program that we have is our second through third grade and it is two second grade teachers and two third grade teachers who are teaching that program so we started in november and we anticipate wrapping up in april and so our map scores we did not feel were relevant in this comparison because the students had only attended six days so that would be disingenuous to include our map scores but we looked at how many students we were able to capture in our after school programs we have 50 students 25 in second and 25 in third between those two teachers so nice groups of 12 to

14313 students per teacher we have 13 students that we are able to serve in our dyslexia program with two openings we also shifted what our reading coach so our reading coach pam copperthwaite does during the day she picks up quite a bit of our students that are not able to attend our after school program or who we program a little bit differently in the dyslexia and does one-on-one dyslexia programming for our students during the day so it's kind of a dual support for our acceleration of learning for those students and so we look at our data success point as having successful attendance data we do have students who are attending regularly every single day of our after school program in both of those two programs the overall student attendance has been difficult we have been

144running at a little over 30 percent to 33 percent of our students are chronically absent meaning that they've missed more than 10 percent of the school year already some of which have already missed the mark of 18 days which is the 10 at the end of the school year and we're only in day 101. so we have been able to reduce some of those students who are chronically absent some of those students it is by the nature of covin it is in their family and it's kind of they're in quarantine they get sick sister gets sick brother gets sick and they're out for three weeks so when we look at our success in our attendance it really is just the relationship we're building with our families and having those conversations rather than just writing them

145off and we call and we check on the kids we make sure that we're having that progress note as part of our funding so as we are moving forward we'd love to see that chronically absent percentage decrease our goal was to get down to 15 percent prior to covid we had four percent so for our staff that is a huge impact for our success it is a impact of our teachers who are trying to continue their instruction on a day-to-day basis and yet 30 percent of our students have missed more than 10 percent of the school year if not more so as we move forward we're just going to continue with our attendance monitoring monitoring and then we will also be adding program students to the program if they if we have openings we haven't

146had any of our students really drop out of the program so we haven't had ability to add students to our program just because of staffing we will be wrapping up our program at spring break and then seeing how we can shift that work into our next steps we do hope to have that interventionist on board for next year to continue our dyslexia work and then any after-school program that we can put into our programming for next year either through the 21st century or looking at our title and as our funds differently thank you very much any questions or comments from the board mike so you have 13 dyslexic students at your school is that what so the way that um actually indicates we have 24 i believe 24 at our last count students that are

147showing components or elements of the ktea showing dyslexia we do not diagnose dyslexia we simply say that they're showing indicators of dyslexia and so miss copperthwaite we do this screener yep that that is with our screener it is students who are struggling and we can't quite pinpoint like why they might not making the pro progress that we would anticipate them making second third fourth grade and they go through the kta screener and then through our interventions either in our after school program or ms copperthwaite i believe has 12 students on her caseload something like that we are able to capture those students we also do true dyslexia intervention is that one-on-one adult it is a time-intensive 20 minutes one-on-one consistent not just one day at a time it is really consistent over and over again

148and that is staffing-wise a very difficult intervention to do we also put into our primary intervention time in our power hour we do whole group components of phonics instruction which is not typical in third fourth and fifth but we've incorporated some of our phonics instruction to support more of our students that have those indicators of dyslexia any other comments or questions joe dr ward just a general question after school programs um the chronic absenteeism i know you're talking about in school as well but after school are we able to provide transportation or are these kids expected to stay after school then their families picked them up or how does that work so our students we decided this year with our transportation complications all of our students were able that we invited were able to have

149transportation from their families during our after school program we have very high attendance and so the chronic absenteeism is our second component of what we were using some of our funding for which is making those parent contacts the actual attendance in our after school program is over 85 percent okay thank you any other board member see and then i i do have something the absentee rate does that include the excused and unexcused absences so is there different i mean you know can you break those out sure so in our view we the state has made some changes and they allow if a student has a doctor's note to their data gets pulled a little differently the issue that we felt at fremont is when we were four percent chronically absent we counted every student who

150was not there so for us that's apples to apples if you start saying oh well they're not here because they went to a dentist appointment and the dentist excused them they're still not in front of us so when we pull our chronically absent numbers we look at students who are not in front of us who are not interacting with us and who for whatever reason that is so at our school for that statistic that we look at we look at all absences the state will pull our data and it will look different it could look much better i wouldn't say much better but it will look better because if you extract any student who brings in a doctor's note from that and they don't count on being absent which is kind of a unique component

151because if you're not in my building you're absent but for the state for statistics they're saying based on a doctor's note and that does help for that particular reason for issues of covid and such thank you this is for you mrs fuson that 20 at her particular school do you see that trend throughout the district yes we do we have very high absentee rates throughout the district um significantly higher than they've been in the past more than double typically so it is um attributed of course to students being sick but then when we were doing contact tracing and having to set students out um quarantining etc so it is it has been exponentially higher across all sites yeah uh i'll open up one more time any questions comments i'd just like to say uh thank

152you for your presentation and the good work you're doing i know you run a very good school thank you and just a shout out to my nine professionals that stay those three days a week it makes for a very long day they are usually there well past five o'clock and most of them are in the building around seven so i truly appreciate all of the funding and everything else is fantastic but if you don't have individuals who can step up and do all the work it is difficult to present even to this board to say you know i have nine i would love to have 18 but i'm also into staff preservation of not pressuring my people because if i did i think i'd i'd have more but with pressure so i just have to

153say a huge shout out to all of those nine individuals who day in and day out keep going and are doing the best things for kids on top of all of the people who do awesome work i kind of echo what susan and i'm sure cheryl is thinking of her staff we have been rock stars this year and every one of my staff deserve a high five and then some and so a little extra love to my after-school people thank you and i do know from personal experience that it is hard to find teachers who are willing to work that i know my wife does and i know it was hard at work to to find as many people as they would like to have had in that program thank you okay principal brown is

154going to come up and talk to us about rich elementary thank you mr fuson excuse me good evening dan brown the principal of rich elementary school first of all i want to thank you all i know you guys have had some very long evenings and been here and listened to things and i really appreciate what you guys are doing so thank you very much i also wanted to just do what uh ms dr ward and susan squires said about our staff members they are going above and beyond and we really appreciate everything they do i also want to congratulate lazy kerry tonight with her being the nationally board certified teacher she is an ace in my hole at school and one of the great things about it is that she is our instructional coach and

155having the background of being a national board certified teacher she's able to go in and help coach teachers but also she has kind of put our program together i want to talk to you guys about today and she's the one that kind of oversees that and she's one of those trained our interventionist and she meets with them weekly and goes over their data with them weekly and i really appreciate everything she does so start with the evening probably one of the most positive things to come out kovit is we've been able to use our school theme for the last three years which is trading for the gold and you know as the olympics are right here presently with the winter olympics that has been our theme that we've been able to use this year as

156well and we started out before and 20 when we had the summer olympics coming and those were postponed we were able to continue our theme for the following year and then this year we're able to use it again so we got to thank covet on that part i guess but anyway what we've done with our training for the gold is we have designated our students as either bronze silver or gold medalist and what we do is use the map data to determine that and i'll go into that in just a second about what we've done with it but what we're able to do with the funding for mesa this year is to bring on board two interventionists and what we were able to do with that is we found classified employees paraprofessionals that come in

157and do that so we have great two individuals they really help out both of them been trained in our dyslexia program which is the barton program and so with the help of lacy she has trained both of our interventionists and his system with that and they're able to pull students and use the ideas and strategies with the barton dyslexia program to support the interventions excuse me to support the flagged areas that they have been identified and helped them currently um one of our interventionists has seen about 73 students per during the day in small pullout groups and so she will go the classroom pull those students out and support him daily and our other interventionist is working on she's supporting seven students daily within the barton system working independently one-on-one with them and then she

158also has reading groups to support those students as well so within that she has seen about 40 students plus the seven that she has seen with the barton program so our before school program we didn't go with after school because all of our students have other activities going on and we were help kind of surveyed the parents and realized that some of our parents did not have a we have child care or support before school so we kind of focus it with that to get more involvement in our before school program so we have three teachers and we have one paraprofessional or supporting students this what we're using is more of a homework club atmosphere is that uh these three teachers in the paraprofessional check in with the teachers of the students that are coming

159and finding out what they can do to help with the um activities that are going on in the classroom to support them by pre-rolling some things but also help them with uh maybe some missing assignments and also if the teacher lets them know that there are some things the student needs to work on more independently than they are there to help them one of our so the breakdown for our teachers is we have a second grade teacher a fourth grade teacher and i have a specialist that come in and help as well and then our paraprofessional is a special ed paraprofessional so she has some of the other skills that can be utilized to help support those students so we looked at identifying students for our program we are servicing caves first through fifth and

160i was telling you earlier about our excuse me our gold medalists and our silver and bronze medalist is the majority of our focus on our demographic is supporting our bronze medalist and teachers will uh conference with the students talk to them about why they are bronze medalists at the time but what they can do to increase that metal count and moving on to being a silver and from a gold into a goal so that is our ultimate goal is we want to have all of our students be gold medalists like anybody so we work on that and support those students and then looking at supporting our before school program okay so with that do you look at um our successes that we've seen so far this year is that we have kind of increased it

161to look at some more of our bubble students that are past the 40th to the 50th percentile and find ways that we can remediate them and help them to just keep continuing to growing we are extremely excited to see what our growth was from fall to winter and really are excited to see what will come about during the spring testing time and same with our access scores we're excited to see what our students real learners can do as well but some of the other pieces that we're using currently is that we look at our hmh reading special in our spelling inventory we use that as a data piece for our our intervention groups during the day and we are also using what came about this year is our knowledge of using a fluency check that

162is provided by nwea and the benefits of doing that and so our interventionists are using that data as well to support their learning and their goals for our students so moving forward what we want to do is we're always monitoring our students and looking at the growth and that's why again i was thinking lacey is that she works with our interventionists on a weekly basis and looks at the data they're collecting with the students um kind of refining what they can do each week to support the students and then look at our growth and then which brings us to our next point is we get to celebrate the students um that are graduated from our intervention program and so we have in the past when we would have our sfa we always had a little

163graduation ceremony when the kids went from roots to wings and we've kind of done the same thing that they are graduating our intervention program and we want to celebrate that now moving to the end of the school year we're going to start looking at really pushing some of these students that are in this intervention program to our summer school program and see if we can continue on with the growth that they have had and that we can as we said the acceleration within their learning and keep them going forward and and so we can all celebrate his gold medalist here in the future so thank you principal brown any uh comments or questions from the board really all right great job thank you thank you guys i appreciate it have a good evening you too

164thank you so um principal clary was not able to be here she had a family emergency that she had to tend to this evening so i am going to talk to you a bit about mark twain elementary they um currently have a parapro interventionist that is working with students utilizing the sipps which stands for systemic instruction and phenol in phonological awareness phonics and sight words it's a program that identifies specific gaps and strategies uh students work in small groups or the interventionist works in small groups with students of like needs they do their in-school programming so many of our schools have talked about like intervention blocks that they have um a lot of them have different names some of them call it what i need or win time but in this particular case during their

165intervention time at mark twain they focus on literacy needs grades first through fifth they do have an after-school program as well and in their after-school program they focus on math so they chose to focus on literacy during the day and math in the afternoon they invited students in grade level groups small groups based on targeted learning gaps which were identified by maps and they are focusing grades second through fifth at this time their demographic data um all students are were considered to fall below the 30th percentile an ela map in school were placed into in-school programming 95 students were identified as needing support who are not currently being supported in other programming like on ieps or el students 56 students are being of those 95 are being served in their after-school program they identified 125

166students needing support of whom 65 students are currently attending the the important thing to know about the intervention programming is that it's really intended to be fluid right we don't want to put a student in an intervention program and have them stay there all year so as we progress monitor them and they show that they are making um improvement and getting up to grade level or where we want them to to be then we exit them out moves other students in as you've heard many of the principals talk about so again it's meant to be dynamic in that in that way moving forward at mark twain um at the end of each quarter they review their data from their teachers classroom interventions map data is available and programming data and they make adjustments to their

167in-school programming their after-school groups continually invite new students as staffing allows so she's been trying to add staff as staff is willing to even in and out of the program based on their own personal lifes and what they have going on in their their own um with their own kids etc so they are trying to start a before school program for first grade students they just found that they didn't have enough first grade students um and families that took them up on the opportunity to do that in the afternoon so in case you were curious about why only focusing on this slide in second through fifth that's why so they're trying to add that first grade program in principal clario said they intend on continuing their programming next year very similar to what they've done

168this year they found that looking at their current data they've been very um they see positive outcomes for students so they think they're being very successful in their efforts thus far thank you any questions from the board or comments seeing none i'd just like to say that i was pleased to hear from the elementary schools how they're addressing the i get the wording right learning acceleration plan and i think everybody's doing a good job and we're trying to move forward and i just want to thank everybody for their hard work in this area very good we have one last school though we do have principal zona that's okay from seleger elementary she's gonna bring bring her elementary presentation to a close all right thank you everyone for your time good evening um at seliger we

169were not able to hire an interventionist so we chose to use our learning acceleration funding to bring back our after-school program which is known as the pirate club and we ran it over the course of nine weeks for three days a week we had eight teachers who were interested in helping us with that and two paraprofessionals um so with that for the fall session we were able to have 25 extra days of an extra hour of instruction on tuesdays wednesdays and thursdays and so based on the data that we had we we chose to have two of those days focus on reading and one on math and so i'll get to a few changes that we'll make after we looked at the data from the fall but our goal was to move as many students

170as possible above the 60th percentile on our maps because we know if we can get them to that level that they have a greater chance of being successful in our state testing called the sbac and so we chose to invite students in the 41st percentile to the 59th percentile in grades one through five we were purposeful inviting this particular population of students because we knew that we were already supporting our students who had who are in the 40th percentile or below with individualized literacy plans and so we knew we were already reaching out to assist them with extra and we we really were missing that middle section of students that we wanted to get up and over to the 60th percentile so we had 94 students who were invited and identified in that group and

171we had 74 who consistently attended and participated over the nine weeks and so based on their fall map scores and the teachers recommendations we stuck with the 74 students we were very pleased with our attendance rate we had 90.6 percent and we'd like to thank our parents for their support with that because we know it changes the after-school plan for the families and we'd also like to thank our transportation department because they helped us make a bus happen at 4 30 when it was time to go home as for our academic data we did a pre-assessment on their very first day of pirate club they did a cold read for one minute on a grade level passage from our hmh reading series and on the last day the students read the same passage without practicing

172it during the nine weeks of the time period and 84 percent of our students increase their reading fluency with an average of about 14 words gained per minute we also did the same in math because we wanted to increa we didn't call it a fun fact math program but i'm going to remember that that's fun but neat and so we knew that we wanted to see how many facts that our students knew automatically in one minute and by the end of pirate club we had 88 percent of our students who had increased their fact fluency by an average of about 15 facts in one minute so we focused mostly on addition and subtraction and then with our older students we added in multiplication when it was appropriate for them as well to focus on overall

173our map results we had 68 of our pirate club students who grew in reading from the fall to the winter maps and we had 43 percent who grew in math so in our goal results of having students get up and over 60 percentile we had 29 percent meet that goal of being at or above and in math we had 18 percent who met the goal of being at or above the 60th percentile or higher with 19 now being above in both subjects so with only 25 hours of additional practice we were pleased with this effort from our staff and our students and families for committing to attend our program so moving forward we're a little bit smarter after our fall session we've learned a few things so we made a few changes last tuesday we

174began our spring pirate club we kicked that off and we found that the extra hour made for a really long day for our first graders and our second graders and so um we are focusing our spring um group on an sbac preparation academy for our third fourth and fifth graders so students are either in a class that also focuses all three days on math or all three days on reading it was difficult to have two and one and so we kind of toyed with do we want to do every other and one week be two of one subject and one but we just decided based on their data that they were either going to be on the math track or the reading track so we are using performance tasks we're practicing that because they're asked

175to complete those on their sbacks we're using the iready practice books and assessments and we're integrating writing into everything that they're doing as far as even in math writing about how they got their answer so our extra time with our students we definitely will continue to monitor their progress and their growth and in closing i'd just like to thank you for the opportunity to share out our results and efforts at seliger and hope to have the same opportunity to share how the spring worked thank you very much any comments or questions from the board joe go ahead just a general question i think it applies to all the schools and i just don't i don't want to pretend i understand more than i do but when when we talk about this percentage of students your

176goal is to get this many above a certain percentage and that indirectly i guess correlates to in general the reading and math proficiency is that all of us read about and try to strive to get them higher can you draw a correlation on what you're doing and what you're seeing with how that might show like what's your what do you think this will get us in terms of overall student proficiencies i know it's a guess and it's probably not a fair question but i'm just trying to wrap my head around you know how are we doing that's that's that is a very difficult question to answer and i asked it horribly and i'm sorry well i think so in normal years prior to covid um we as school leaders right would look at our data

177basically based on the nevada school performance framework as you all know our star rating system and at each level whether it's elementary middle or high school we have a different set of um criteria that we have to meet to to make that star rating so at the elementary level it's based on sbac aspect scores the hard thing about basing something on s back scores is it's a one time a year test and for the past couple years as you know two years ago we didn't give us back last year we did but us back um we um so shout out to these guys got a 95 or higher participation rate but other districts in the state did not even remotely come close so we don't have that data to move from so so it's just

178kind of one of these things that at this point in time what we can say is we have map scores map scores are i know this is really a ricky question so i'm going to try to answer it and not make myself sound like i don't know what i'm talking about map scores are correlated to us back in that they can be predictive but they're not women is that am i saying that right i gotta look at jen cause she's our other statistician over there but but you can't say that they're one and the same so it's difficult to say based on your map scores what do you think your aspect scores are going to be and then is your star rating going to come out higher so those are hard answers so instead what

179we we are doing specifically based on read by grade three criteria is really focusing on the students that are below the 40th percentile and providing interventions to try to get them up above the 40th percentile and or looking at as paula stated if we know that if students score over the 60th percentile on maps that they are very likely to score proficient on the s-pac so those are the kind of indicators that we use when we look at targeting and event intervention groups for each of our schools you can tell that again their programs are very individualized or unique to their schools because what we ask them to do is through their school performance planning process when they did really in-depth needs assessment at their schools based on all sorts of data sets then to

180identify where their respective areas of weakness were and then to come up with plans to address those areas so some schools through their their needs assessment this saw that they needed to focus on dyslexia for instance versus other schools said no we can focus on our percentage of students on individualized learning plans or based on those map scores and then built those intervention programs so hopefully in a very convoluted way to get to your question the ultimate goal is we want all of our students to be able to be proficient and be prepared again for that s back test but then we get those scores you know in the summer and it doesn't do a whole lot to tell us what to do next year so we just constantly keep keep tracking that and keep

181pushing forward to help our students become successful based on the only indicators that we have that can say where our kids are based on other students of the same like grade across the country versus just our internal assessments so that's kind of what you're hearing and why there doesn't seem to be a consistent practice if you make you know if that makes sense because it's needs based any other comments or questions stacy tasha this is just for you so do we have an idea of how many kids this is affecting and how many we're going to lose or will we know i mean will you guys have a good sense of who needs summer school so that they get up to proficiency and stay in their grade levels so we will constantly uh reassess that

182so right now based on the intervention efforts at all of our sites schools will again be taking a spring map assessment and we'll be able to see on our spring map assessment how effective our intervention efforts have been and those students who are identified well actually now because you can kind of look at the trend if a student has been trending that they're scoring below where we would like them to be the target area then those families will be invited to participate in summer programming and then based on spring maps assessment scores we'll just kind of verify what our our our our educated guesses were if you were based on the data that we currently have so right now we do have plans in place for summer this coming summer um each of our schools

183we're going to do it slightly different than we did last year because we did find it was a challenge to have one elementary administrator if you will of summer programming and then we had programs only at four sites although it represented all six schools so this year all six sites will have a program at their individual or each respective site and they're going to have a site coordinator that will help the principal run that program we are not going to on this bullet point number one we are not going to hire an elementary district coordinator that will actually be me so i'll be working directly with the principals and their site coordinators to get their programs up and running we are planning to have our materials available for spring parent conferences so as our schools

184and our teachers are meeting with their parents in uh in march uh that we will be attempting to entice those families to to join our summer programming um and it will be based again based on the the program data that they currently have the fall and winter maps and again hopefully verified by the spring so those are the plans we do hope to provide transportation and nutrition services i say hope to because it's going to be based on staffing for both we are i had a conversation with elizabeth today about nutrition services we do not have enough nutrition workers who are willing to work in the summer so we are trying to think out of the box and figure out how we can staff that so that we can feed our students at least breakfast

185in the morning but those are the some of the challenges that we're up against right now again our teachers are tired our teachers have been doing this for two years they've been doing after school programming summer school programming we're asking them do summer school program again they've been subbing for each other they've been selling their preps you know i we're going to do the best we can to to staff that and continue to offer services to students but we are so we have started that that planning at this point in time and and we're hopeful that we'll have just as robust of a summer program this year as we did last year so you know the questions or is there any of the comments questions there again i'll just reiterate oh laurel just a thought

186i had um we have culinary students at the high school would that be a position to see if they want summer jobs good question it's good thinking outside of the box i like it i'll i'll track that down and see if there's something we can do with that thank you again thank you for your hard work all you building site principles thank you excited to hear i consider it good news we're moving forward and uh just thank you and your staff thank you very much we're going to move on i believe to the next generation which will be on middle schools yeah that's item number 12 uh presentation of the learning acceleration plans for the middle school in the carson city school district for 2021 and 2022 school year and this is for discussion only

187we have dr lee conley and principal dan sadler good evening thanks for having us um so we've been actually here watching the whole meeting and enjoyed our colleagues sharing uh what they're doing you'll see some things that are very similar and some things that are a little bit different from middle school one thing that you won't see yet is our data we're still working through we just finished up winter maps so our teachers particularly in our after school programs are just working through plc process to kind of track what those results are looking like but we're excited about that so to kind of start off with we looked at what we've been doing with acceleration kind of going back to summer school last summer we had a lot of students at both sites who were

188credit deficient particularly 8th grade students that's our main focus for summer schools making sure that all of our students have their credits in their pockets so that they can advance to high school so we worked with carson high school in summer school and also worked with pioneer academy because we had some students that were credit deficient beyond something that we could recoup in our normal summer school so mr zona did a great job working with some students that advanced to pioneer academy and the remainder of the students we actually had 97 of our students that were in summer school that completed and made progress to move forward to high school uh so that was a celebration for us um so this and you'll see on our slide like we have cms and evms when when

189dr conley and i got together to talk about this so many of the things that we're doing we're similar so we can certainly touch upon differences between our two sites but i'll just speak for carson middle school we did extended school day this year and we started with a group of teachers to see how many we could support really and we wanted to identify small groups of students to be able to support with uh specific interventions in ela and math so we did recruit four we actually started with six teachers um we have four currently and we capped that at 12 students per teacher so that we could really focus on getting those students what they need those teachers looked at last year's aspect scores as kind of a starting point to identify students who

190were making progress and they were close to being at grade level for performance but we're just under we also talked to teachers from the previous school year and worked with families on students who we felt were really motivated so that we they wanted to show up after school to make some gains and that's how we started our school year so we started with 42 students in our program at carson middle school and we're a little bit down from that now when we get to some of our challenges i'll kind of share with you kind of what's happened with some of our students and some of the adjustments that we're going to be planning to make through the remainder of the semester into next school year hey good evening first i want to say um i'm

191impressed that you're up this late every two weeks because it is way seriously way past my bedtime so good job on that um like dan was saying um with our um extended school day we were i have a terrific group of teachers that are willing to you know give give give and i was able to get um finally about five teachers that did the after school program that are doing the after school program right now and uh we are serving uh about 65 kids so a little a little better than you know 12 per uh pretty consistent what uh mr sadler was saying consistent with us we tried to really look at the kids that we thought would have a true chance of being there every day and again getting to some challenges you'll see

192um later you know we we weren't able to get anybody you know any buses or anything so we tried to find those parents and we made specific calls to each parent and each kid to see if they would be willing to come in on a consistent basis and we have been very consistent we've had a few that have had to drop out but we've always had a waiting list as well we've still got quite a large waiting list of kids that are willing to come in and wanting to come in and we just fill those holes in as people as the kids either you know end up not being able to come in um we've even been like if we know the kids are going to be out for an extended period of time because

193of sickness or they've got a family issue or they're just you know they went on vacation and they haven't come back to school you know the attendance has been an issue we will drop those kids at least temporarily and bring in some other kids to take their place to always try to fill in those gaps so we don't have a lot of empty space within those five after-school programs i'll move on to the next one as well we have the uh both of us four years have been offering the credit recovery during school and we will continue to do that we had toyed with you know do is credit recovery an excuse for the kids to say oh i don't want to do math in a regular class so i'll just do it in credit

194recovery we toyed with you know is that a factor or not but we figured there were still enough kids where it was of value that we would still offer it because at one point we thought maybe we won't even offer credit recovery but or we would try to do it after school or even on the weekends but again a lot of that has to do with kids being able to get to school and stay at school and so we are going to continue offering the credit recovery through the using the apex program and again that's just really monitoring pushing those kids to finish a course before they try to get into another course we do have a number of kids that they really lost a lot and they are behind multiple courses more so than

195ever but we are starting to narrow that gap a little bit as well and uh just to kind of touch on something that i know several elementary principals spoke about with map like our our teachers who were supporting the extended school day look at the map rip bands on a continual basis to make adjustments with students and apex learning tutorials has been a tool that we've utilized this school year as well it's been kind of new for us but it's it's been a good support so what it looks like in our extended school day program kind of differs from day to day but they are definitely using apex tutorials for support and then teachers also pull that group of students to do a like lesson so our students are grouped in similar rip bands so

196they have very similar needs so if they're working on a specific concept in math say one step equations this the teacher can utilize apex tutorials as a tool to support those students but then can also do kind of a breakout session and just work through individual problems to support but it's very specifically not focused on current grade level content it's it's really focused on accelerating students um through the the rip bands we also at carson middle school started an esl intervention class this year so we had an english teacher who was willing to give up her prep to work with some some of our ell students to provide an additional support to them specific for their um english class to so that class is something we started i want to say last october and we're

197looking to pair that up with avid excel moving forward so we're excited about that mrs rissmann's been doing a great job again is working with a small group of students and really just giving them an extra boost that one kind of balances their current grade level with their rip bands so it's kind of a mix of the two but we're looking forward to building that into the schedule with some additional supports next school year challenge for that and and again the challenge slide will highlight some of this is when we do that we have to then remove that student from an elective class and that's been kind of a slippery slope for us because a lot of those elective classes are what motivate some of our students who are struggling to come to school but

198we're also certainly getting to the point where we've got to really provide everything we can to these students to move them forward academically so we didn't place students in there without working with the parents and families on that as well so i think that's really important and then the last thing we have in here is uh as we move this through this spring especially when we get done with our our map data analysis we know that we need to expand some of the services for our students we started with a fairly small group and it's it's gotten a little bit smaller at carson middle part of that is because some of the students who were attending the extended school day program started falling behind on their current grade level uh work and that's certainly not

199something that that we want to do so we've worked with those families to to provide support and we did have a few that unfortunately weren't able to continue but that's something we want to try to provide some before school and during lunch support so that they can still get that service without falling further behind on their current academic work and i'll just add a little bit to that dana and i were talking uh before the meeting here and uh again and the elementary teachers did a good job or the elementary principals did a good job of thanking their staff for giving up they do they give up their mornings they give up lunches a lot many of them don't expect to pay you know they just say hey kids come in we have a whole

200lot of kids coming to the front of the lunch line with passes to say i've got to go up you know this class and make up a test or to go in and make up some missing work so our teachers have been really just tireless in that and i know it gets a little frustrating for them knowing that you know these kids are uh they're falling behind but at least they are our kids are being a little bit more motivated to come in on their lunch times and all that rather than hanging with friends and sometimes we have to give them a little friendly push but we're willing to do that and we something of a bright note i've had more kids this year and i think this is largely due to the fact that

201they missed these types of things when they were out with all the coveted stuff i've had more kids say you know dr conley can i start a club i'm like what are you thinking well you know like a game club you know maybe kids that would want to go in and play games like django or board games so not video games thank goodness right um and so i've had teachers step up and say i'll i'll supervise them at lunch if they want to do that so they get their lunch they go up to the room they play games for example have another one it's so cool a kid you know it's a basically a disabilities club here's my disability and it's not just a physical disability it could be you know my disability is you

202know um i i don't have any you know buddy at home to help me with homework so you know i just want to talk about that or you know i'm having trouble making friends it's a very eclectic group it is cool that that was started by a student as well just these interests so we're seeing more kids kind of jump at an opportunity to their craving clubs and so i think we'll get into this about what we're planning to do some opportunities that i think we're going to be able to provide through some 21st century grant funding hopefully and with the help of valerie dockery with that as well to prevent to provide not only remediation but some enrichment for some of these kids as well because they they missed a lot of that during

203the code times as well and and just to touch on that i think it's important when we first started uh the conversations about what is now acceleration it was actually called learning loss and it was very specific to okay with this is what we need to address and that's become more flexible and how we're able to address this and enrichment is something that we're looking forward to expanding to our students as well so with some of the challenges you're all aware of some of the staffing challenges and that's certainly been a continued challenge for us we both had a full-time interventionist position certified positions opened up and we were excited and a lot of our plans had been geared towards if we were able to hire an interventionist and unfortunately um both carson middle school

204and eagle valley middle school were not able to do so another staffing challenge with as far as people volunteering even though teachers are getting paid to support this program a lot of teachers don't have time to volunteer because they're covering on their preps and they're just really really working hard on a daily basis everybody's pitching in our teams are awesome but it's understandable when they're not raising their hand to volunteer for things at the moment so those are just some of the the staffing challenges that we're working through when we say compliance and support it's really we don't have a way to require students to do this this is a partnership in working with families and trying to get our families to understand the importance of the supports that we want to provide to their

205students and so we've had really good support in those conversations with families and the students we're working with but we don't have a way to require some of the students that really need to be there to be there um so again as we look at expansion when we have our students there during the school day there's a little bit more that we'll be able to do that will be we will be building into next school year but again that kind of comes at a cost as far as an elective class for some of those students and it's going to be really important for us to continue to communicate with those families as to the importance of that as we move forward and then as i had mentioned that we have some students at carson middle

206school who are dropping acceleration after school because they were falling behind on current grade level uh transportation we have some limited transportation we're thankful to have any transportation um our transportation department's been really good at supporting us we do have one bus so any of our students who are attending the extended school day that are within the transportation zone get transportation after school those students in the walk zone do not and then at eagle valley middle school that's been a bigger struggle because they do not currently have transportation but i will say that our our kids have been better about walking i think kids can walk more to and from school anyway it's good for them right it's healthy riding their bikes parents getting them there so again we've had pretty good luck with our

207after school program with numbers uh just because the parents have been really willing to bring him in and we did make that personal call to parents and and kids to say we really want you here you need to be here here's an opportunity and they they bought into that a lot uh early on so uh dan and i are looking forward i think to what we're planning on doing um we've got uh we already know and uh tasha has um early on gotten us talking about summer school we've already been talking about it heavily which is great and so uh we are because we are in the midst of a lot of where we're going to be right now and in the this summer with a whole lot of construction in eagle valley carson middle

208is going to host summer school for us again and so we're going to be doing that um for sixth and seventh graders uh that are behind and you know we haven't really focused on sixth grade in the past just because you know there's no credits tied to sixth grade but it's still important that they get into that working habit and they don't just think we're sixth grade credits don't matter we don't want them to get into that mindset so we are actually having sixth and seventh graders uh go over to an acceleration academy at carson middle school and kind of the summer school uh version uh for the sixth and seventh and then the high school is again is going to host our current eighth graders um and as dan mentioned earlier you know last

209year 97 of the kids that went through the summer school you know earn enough credits to actually you know get into either pioneer or high school so that's what we're hoping to do to do again i think i can speak for dan i think we have more kids this year that will be attending summer school um we're looking at probably twice as many as usual uh but again i've already i just got two emails tonight while i was waiting on the lobby of teachers saying hey whenever summer school comes out i'm interested in teaching it so you guys i i don't think we can reiterate enough how much these teachers even though they're worn down they're tired uh they're still willing to give and they're looking three four months in advance saying i can do

210this i can help with that so kudos to our staff um so dan uh did touch base on this a little bit too with our acceleration classes again these are classes for those kids that are um maybe a little bit behind in providing them with some you know added um instruction and support we we have to weigh that though with taking away electives i'm a firm believer and kids have to enjoy coming to school they have to be able to you know really um get in culinary or art or computers or stem or whatever it might be you know musical programs those are invaluable so we have to really weigh those and i know that at eagle valley and dan can speak for cms but we're going to have that as we're going to try

211to make that as fluid as possible so once we see a student improving and performing better get them out of those classes get them back into an elective so that's going to be an ebb and flow of kids it's going to be a fluid type of process at eagle valley academic teaming is something that i'm excited that eagle valley's looking at that for next school year we've we've done different phases of teaming over the years and there's different challenges associated with it especially with the math classes because math classes are already leveled at the middle school so when we do a true academic team that would be that those students share the same math english science and social studies teacher and that presents some some unique opportunities for planning obviously for conversations about how we're

212supporting students interventions that are being provided to those students and you know as we talk to our teachers and we say okay what do you do with your students that are struggling currently like we we don't have a whole lot in place because we're those teachers are still moving students forward so obviously they're going to provide okay students can come in at lunchtime and they can come in before school and after school to get some extension and some support but when it comes to really differentiating for our students like we're having some great conversations about how we can do that as a staff and how we can utilize each other as colleagues to to be able to support our students so that they're making better progress moving forward so i'm putting at carson middle school

213our teachers that are on academic teams next year will share that common prep and be able to sit down on a weekly basis to kind of review where their students are and what's working with those students and what challenges they're having it also helps out with communication to parents it does present some challenges as far as limitations if there's a reason that we would need to switch a teacher then it breaks the teaming and those are things that we've got to work through but again this is definitely a best practice for middle school and we're looking forward to to building up um our academic teaming for next school year uh for i have a question when as you guys are talking about teaming in my mind i'm kind of thinking about your acceleration classes and

214having to take away electives from students and what i'm wondering is if you couldn't team up an elective with that process and it's almost like an a b schedule so you know like when we were in middle school they called the exploratory class you know you kind of rotate around sure and so maybe they're getting that enrichment from their electives and the remediation from the acceleration class you know so many days a week so just a thought it's a good thought and uh something i didn't really touch on there was is uh listed as intentional student placement and scheduling and it's really for that reason we know a lot about our students and we have a lot of data and a lot of information in addition to knowing a lot of our students personally and

215what's going to be best for them so that's definitely going to be part of our conversation as we work through scheduling at carson middle we just met with our department chairs and they just met with all of their departments with our draft schedule to really start breaking it down to see what are some of the things that we that we haven't addressed in past years that we'd be able to for those reasons and uh mr walker i'll add a little bit we've uh we had some visits up to some schools in washoe that have been doing teaming and uh got some really good pros and cons of teaming kind of the what to do is what not to do is what to avoid what you must do and that was very insightful as great of

216those principles to spend a lot of hours with us quite honestly um and then i've even got some teachers that um well like michaela filigamo she was a student at a teaming at a team school and then she was a teacher at a team school and so she gave me the perspective of you know as a student this is what's good and bad as a teacher these are the pros and cons and uh and then some teachers that way back when eagle valley used to do a form of teaming in the past have been able to give us invaluable um information as well but it's gonna be exciting that we're gonna actually be able to collaborate and coordinate like um themes you know if they're if they're working on the civil war for example in

217social studies how can english and social and science and social studies or and uh math figure out you know what in their curriculum could they tie into that so a lot of i'm excited for professional learning days next year because we're going to use a lot of that for our team planning time so the teachers can work on those types of lessons together and working on hey you know little mikey walker over here is a problem in my class are you guys having the same problem and so behavioral-wise as well to be consistent with the progress michael tucker oh sorry they called you mikey a lot of things probably but um but uh we're excited that it's gonna become uh i think it's got great potential i think it will have it's not potential it's

218going to happen that our teachers are going to be able to get to know our kids even better too and whatever strategies are working well in one class it's going to be a lot easier for teachers to share that and be consistent with it with that kid across all four of those classes at least but then mike what you were saying as well bringing in those electives as well into the mix because i don't want to leave the electives out that they're not part of that team they're a part of it as well uh carson middle school one thing we're going to be expanding we've done alc alternative learning center that's been different versions over the years and it also serves for in-school suspension but uh part of our school performance planning this year we're

219having some really deep conversations about how we can support restorative practices within our classrooms and really trying to keep as many students in class as we can and so if you look at our school performance plan you'll see the steps we're taking currently to put this in place we're piloting it with our sixth grade class this semester and we'll be tweaking some things as we make this something that we're looking at school-wide next year and really the goal is that you know once students are on our campus we want them to remain in the classroom and for various reasons whether that's visiting with an administrator or a counselor or they've been stepped in the hallway for a couple of minutes or they've been sent down on a referral they're working with a social worker they're

220hiding in the bathroom there could be many different reasons why they're not in class and we need them in class so that they can focus on learning so i'm providing an alternative learning center to be able to refocus those students and keep them engaged in learning even if it's not in the class that they were coming from is going to be something we're really excited about building on our campus and i have to apologize to mr sadler i didn't tell him to put a uvms on that we're actually going to do that next year as well uh stealing some ideas of what dan's already done over carson middle with that and then uh with the continuous improvement plan um that's something that was a new process for us this year i mean we've always done

221school performance planning and you know we look at our s back and we say okay we can't celebrate if we've got only 49 of our students who are achieving a grade level on s back and it's not a celebration even if we grow that to 51 percent but when we look at map we can create the expectation that all students can grow and that's realistic for every student in our school and our teachers are familiar with the tools and the process to be able to support that so moving forward that's going to continue to be a conversation on our campus our vision is that every student at carson middle school is going to grow and meet their their map growth every school year so that they're there for one year they're going to grow one

222year while they're there and we've got students all across the board right now we always have pre-code we have students all across the board with different learning needs and it's a it's a challenge to meet all those learning needs but that's our our role and our responsibility and that's something we look forward to to working um kovit's been a challenge for everybody in our school for different reasons and it continues to be it's not like it's gone away it's just kind of adapting to it and we're learning a lot as we work through it and we're keeping a keen eye on things that we can improve upon we don't talk at carson middle school about going back to pre-covet because it's not going to happen so what can we learn from it what can we

223adapt in ways that can innovate and help our students learn moving forward continues to be of utmost importance and i'll uh i'll just add to that a little bit you know it's i when covet came it was like oh my god what are we going to do i got to tell you it's if there's any i always think there's something good that comes out of something bad you can't get much worse and covered um but what's good about it is i think it forced us to change our thinking about some things and um that's kind of where really we started thinking about the teaming it's like you know we've been getting kind of similar results for the 12 years i've been at eagle valley and it's time to kind of change something up and try

224something new so with the acceleration with the support of um tash has really been supportive with allowing us to really talk about adapting our scope and sequence and our pacing of curriculum as well and being able to adjust that because you know similar themes for example in social citizen science may not be taught at the same time maybe social studies is teaching something in november that science usually doesn't get to that they could relate to that topic until may cash is allowing us to tweak those and come in alignment and that's going to be part of that professional development and learning and planning that the teachers are going to be able to do with common department perhaps and with then the work that we can do as teams during our pl days those professional learning

225days so um i i think it's going to be a good opportunity to do something different and to really take a different approach on some things and then to provide the acceleration and the remediation opportunities for kids i think we're going to see it's just a golden opportunity to really make some big changes and we might have been forced into it we may not have liked it it's been uncomfortable it's been tiring but i think we're going to come out ahead in the future i really do i think just to kind of add to what mr connolly said uh dr connolly um our focus district-wide has really been shifting to focusing on skills and i think that's one of the things so when he says about the pacing when we focus too heavily on the

226content of a class for instance if you're talking about middle school history the content is important but what's even more important is the skills that the students are utilizing to learn that content are they reading are they writing are they speaking are they listening and if we can really get our teachers to focus on increasing students use of those skills and teaching of those skills through the content like the content is the vehicle right but the skills are the journey if you will then we can actually have a better chance at increasing our students academic performance and then the other reason the focus on the map again is the growth so although we do want all of our students to be at that 50th percentile hopefully more like a 60th percentile because it equates to

227that three or four and s back what's really important is to be able to celebrate the growth of the child so if the student is at the 10th percentile or 15th percentile and grows to the 30th percentile they might not hit that mark of the 50th percentile but they've actually grown significantly and what we really want to do is try to close that achievement wrap by growing our students more than one year at a time so that we can actually narrow that so again that's what you're hearing across the board from all of our principals that's what they're really focusing on at their schools and that is our ultimate goal to make sure that we grow our students and that we challenge them to take those rigorous classes and and hopefully prepare them to be

228college and career ready so next time at our board meeting we will be working with our high school principals to tell you what these programs look like on their campuses this is what we appreciate that and then uh all over the board for any questions or comments joe just a wrap-up comment i just wanted to thank both of you and all the principals um it's a late night for everybody and you know we're hearing the same themes from everybody and they're good themes where everybody's on track to help the kids grow help them get to that next level whatever that next level is for each individual student and everybody's working hard to do that so i appreciate the fact that most all of you if not all of you thank your staff for the hard

229work they're doing because people are putting in a lot of work and you know when you have somebody that comes to work at 7 30 or 7 o'clock in the morning and they're agreeing to stay or they need to stay till 5 o'clock at night you know some people might hear that and go well gee that's not that long of a day number one it is and number two that's not all they're doing most of those people are waking up earlier than that i know from home watching you know my wife work her school day doesn't start when she shows up at school it starts way before that and it ends way after she gets home so people are putting a lot of effort all of you are putting a lot of effort and i

230i just appreciate what everybody's doing and what everybody's trying to do so thank you for that seeing no more comments uh just again thank you i like your plan move forward and i think uh hopefully it'll be successful and maybe next time you'll have your data ready to share appreciate it thank you very much thank you have a good night good night guys thank you for saying so long i'd like to propose to the board that should we consider moving item number 14 up before item number 13. so mr fueling can get out of here he we've been here for four hours or is there any appetite to take a quick recess now or wait until after um i would suggest we just get through this quickly let's just be diligent okay what's your pleasure

231the board do you want to move 14 ahead because i don't know how long our discussion is going to take well i think we just need to be concise in our communication and let's get this done okay we'll go to we'll stay with 13 then yeah i don't have a preference just to answer your question we can stick with the order i understand the the need or the desire but i'm okay sticking with the order we have okay then we're going to move to item number 13 which is discussion and possible action to establish the criteria and process in completing the second round of interviews for the superintendent vacancy for the carson city school district which may include without limitation selection of location and process to conduct interviews and this is for possible action i

232i believe i'm just gonna for the sake of opening this discussion i thought maybe we could look at the possible schedule for the 22nd there's a several different options really that that's been discussed and we could start at 8am on the 22nd and that would give us and then go to 8 15 that gives us time for the flag salute and the stuff we need to get out of the way before we start the interviews then we can start the interviews at 8 15 go to 9 45 for the first interview take a half hour break and then have the second interview at 10 15 to 11 30. then recess that or adjourn at one uh 12 o'clock then if we wanted to have the school tours that day we could do this between one

233and four and then if there's an appetite to have a meet and greet on the same day we could do that at 4 30 to 5 4 35 pm to 6 30 and then have the seven o'clock board meeting where we make the selection now there's other possibilities and um we could have if we decide to have a meet and greet for the candidates we could do that the night before which is a president's day on monday and we'd have that in the evening hours between say 5 30 7 00. or maybe we don't have a meet and greet for both candidates and we wait until after the final selection is made then have a meet and greet for the new superintendent that's been selected so that's just to kind of throw out to start

234our conversation about what the board would like to do and i don't know joe you want to start with your thoughts mr president can i interrupt for just a second i apologize uh just so the board is clear on the first scenario that you presented you will need a period of general public comment before you adjourn that meeting sure yeah no it'd be the same agenda items on there um yeah just so i thought about this quite a bit and it's unfortunate that monday is a holiday but it is it's president's day so you can't do much you can't do tours or anything that day um and i was originally i was thinking about you know be nice to let the staff in the community maybe take another survey and do those kinds of things

235but the reality is there's no time for a survey by the time we ask the candidates the second round of questions and then we deliberate you couldn't get responses back from a survey so for me that doesn't work so i like the idea i like the idea if we're going to do a meet and greet not to cram at all as i think about it in one day and i know the 21st monday is a is a holiday but i wonder if you couldn't steal if you want to do a meet and greet do one say from 5 30 to 7 at night so those people that are working can get to it and those people that maybe took advantage of the weekend most of them probably be back in town by then and then

236tuesday conduct the interviews in the morning if you want to do the school tours community tour if you will i think it's a good idea i don't know that the board would or should be involved in that anyway and then we would you know vote later on in the day so that's kind of how i've envisioned a schedule but i'm open i would i would just say if we're going to do a meet and greet i think it would be very awkward to do one meet and greet with two candidates so if you're having a component like when i was on the um tmcc presidential search advisory committee back in the day you know there were different receptions for each of the candidates and so i think that one of the challenges we face with

237these restrictions you know the mass locations it's going to be a challenge and so i don't i guess i'd be comfortable with foregoing a meet and greet but i mean if we're going to do it i don't think we want the two candidates at the same time that's just awkward and you have like competing well did you see how many people were talking to so and so you want that candidate to have an opportunity to work the room and speak with the people in the public and i just want to make clear too while we're engaging in this conversation i will not physically be here during that process um i will be involved i'll be fully involved in the interview process and the board meeting that night i'll just have to take some nodos or

238something because three hours later um but anyway so i'm providing some thoughts but i just want to be transparent let people know i'm not going to be here so i appreciate that there's one other scenario that may be considered by the board is if we forego the meet and greet we could interview in the morning come back at one o'clock or 1 30 make this election for the new superintendent and then come back at seven o'clock for the regular board meeting so that that's another option so a question i have is if we're already gonna have a board meeting that night why wouldn't we just make the selection at the board meeting why three different meetings uh that's this is uh thrown out for a discussion yeah i mean i think just if we're already

239gonna have a meeting let's just do it then i mean that's my thought any thoughts from the board are the thoughts on the board laurel all right i i think it's okay to forego the meet and greet because i think there's a lot of complications with how that would run um and i'm just wondering i was going to ask mr um ryan if we do the interviews as this i guess it is a special board meeting because it's not our regular time and places um could we just recess that till the evening meeting or would it have to be two separate board meetings so my thought on it was it would be very much like when we did the interviews in the first round and had a board meeting that night they were two separate

240agendas one special meeting solely for the purpose of doing the interviews and then the regular board meeting if you do it like that it was the point i was bringing up to president varner you do need to come back before you actually adjourn the special meeting and have at least one a period of general public comment um and then in the regular board meeting you would have your period of general public comment as well as public comment on the action item itself right so just so it's clear to the public then we would not have any public comment during the interviews because we're not taking action at that time all the public comment for general public comment and specific public comment would then occur in the evening i'm confused so i don't want anybody else

241to be connected i apologize if if it's confusing if you're having a special meeting it counts as a meeting of the board which means that you have to have multiple periods of public comment uh one before any action item and one general period of public comment in which people can comment on anything that's not agendized for action if you're just doing the interviews the interviews the decision will not be agendized for action and so people will be able to comment at that point on on the candidates and then you convene a regular board meeting and again the the multiple periods of public comment will apply which will mean you know after the agenda after each action item which would include the approval of the candidate and another general period of public comment instead of being

242so complicated why couldn't we just have a meeting that starts in the morning we take a recess and pick up in the evening and then we're not having multiple meetings and all this extra public comment then we're people still have time to give their input so we have the interviews and i don't care if after the interviews we have public comment or not and then a recess and then just pick up from the normal meeting at seven o'clock or whatever i'm i'm fine with that uh the only difference is you would be calling it i think a regular board meeting at that point you could do it like you did today with a session that precedes the um the regular board meeting uh we would just have to be very specific with how we agenda

243and how we post it i'm just saying let's make it easy for all of us and renee and the community i mean too many things to keep track of and i would hate for somebody to think that we weren't allowing them to be part of the process uh no and and trustee walker that's that's the point of with what i'm saying with the agenda we want the public to be very clear on when they're going to be able to comment on the on the candidates yeah and i'll just i'll i'll i agree with what mike's saying i like the idea of keeping it simple um you know there's been this has been a long process for all of us and i think for the public and it's been a long year so i think if

244we can do this and be you know be succinct and and and keep it simple it's probably better for everybody okay so mike if i'm hearing you correctly you said you're fine with a general period of public comment in the morning if we haven't we have a meeting in the morning we do the interviews at the end we have our general period of public comment then we could close that meeting and then come back and have just or just take a recess so if we're not if it's just one meeting and we're not taking action then the public comment would be like in a normal meeting we would have it on the agenda so the first three items we would have the pledge adoption of the agenda we'd have the interviews recess and when we

245come back public comment would be after the recess period okay and before we take action and it it'd be general public comment when you came back from the recess and then public comment on any action items that are on the agenda for that night it would look frankly a lot like the one we have tonight with just different times in certain and the nice thing about that is in the morning other people you know who may want to comment are at work and so now everybody has the same opportunity at the same time to watch it comment and you know it'd be this time frame for public well hopefully not this time frame but loopy you shake your head to anything i think that's a good plan don't go ahead joe i'm fine with that

246that sounds good on the 22nd i was gonna say and i'm fine for for not doing the meet and greet because i agree that that's hard to do i was running that in my head on how that would work and i don't know how you how we how we really would get it done no exactly then uh what about a school tour for the candidates one of the things i really i think would be great is if we did have a panel of people and even if it was like of the different groups so a diverse group that gave a tour of the district and then maybe even those individuals could provide some kind of feedback for the board that we could review i mean if we're going to do it then that would be

247one way i don't think that we want to be i don't personally want to be giving somebody a tour of the district i think that that's going to be a logistical nightmare and open meeting law and yeah i never perceived that the board would be doing it mr stokes's volunteered i guess for like a better term to do the tours if if we elected to have one and that could be in the afternoon after the interview what's your thoughts on that if we wanted to go that route i think if if mr stokes or a select small panel of people that say mr stokes chooses does the tour i'm fine with that i agree the board wouldn't be involved in that we have one candidate that you know probably doesn't need a tour but may

248elect to go or may elect not to go but we would make it available to both candidates we just wouldn't be involved so we would meet in the morning the board would do what we do and we'd reconvene later in the day and what happens in the middle of the day is more of an operational thing that we're really not involved with but i do like the idea of a tour being offered you know not just of the schools and maybe a little tour of the highlights of the community if you will where the lcb is where you know those kinds of things any other comments or concerns suggestions okay if i can kind of recap um start at 8 am do the business first that we need to then go into the interviews break

249or recess after the interviews are finished come back for the regular board meeting at 7 pm that same evening and the tours of the afternoon conducted by mr stokes or somebody of his choosing is that correct pretty much that's what's been proposed i mean i think that we want to continue getting information before we make a motion yeah right we have another part of it so i just wanted to see where we're in that now the second part is the selection of the topics for the candidates presentations and i think hopefully everybody received these suggested ones from nasby so i think we may want to start the conversation there if it's something we want to go with or i'm entert we need to entertain other suggestions also from the board so i don't know if

250somebody wants to start that conversation you know i would rather i don't think i wanted to go with the nasby suggestions i think we've been there done that i think it's time to get a little bit different perspective one of the things that we are going to be looking at as we go forward is we're going to have to refresh our strategic plan and so you know a presentation about what is what have we learned from our strategic plan what are our next steps because that's a vision piece and i don't want to i think i don't want to give too much more information other than that i think we want to have something open-ended and i want to see what the vision of the leaders are and i i concur with that um and

251i want to make sure i'm clear mr russell when as far as questions if if we does if i if i decide i want to ask the candidates a question or two i want to make sure i understand how rigid or how flexible the questions can be if i have a question for mr fueling do i have to ask that same question to the other candidate or can it be more personalized based on what we're hearing from their presentations if you will trustee cassiopo i my understanding or my feeling is that it's the latter you can't have custom questions to a presentation that you haven't seen and you can't expect the presentations to be the same and so i think if you select a scenario or two for the candidates to present to you you

252will have the opportunity to engage in a question and answer as you would with any other presentation that comes before the board go ahead laurel mike was talking i was writing and and so i'm just going to kind of throw this out i've got the first one carson city school district is currently refreshing its strategic plan do you want to to add something like a what is your vision or or what direct i have some possible origin also if i can throw up okay i'm just throwing i'll just throw this out uh this is something i came up with earlier with uh listening to other people provide your understanding of the existing strategic plan for carson city school district and what steps would you take to strengthen it what steps would you need to take

253to implement a new strategic plan i mean just to build off of or we can not use that language i think i'd like to if we're going to go the strategic print plan route i'd like to focus it on the strategic plan we have and then if you know the can't one of the candidates you know take it in a different direction i mean that's part of what we want to what we want to hear from them and i i'd like to hear in it some not just what your vision is but i'd like to hear some measurable goals and i guess just to play devil's advocate so we're looking at the person who's going to lead the district forward and take what we've done and start to grow and so instead of i'd like

254to see kind of what have we learned and how do we take this to phase two and so that's going to be part of it but it's it's kind of forward thinking because we're moving forward because that's what we're going to have to do and that's going to allow us to kind of see and visualize this district moving forward without mr stokes leading that charge does that make sense so do we just say that do you give us a pre uh give us a presentation on the strategic plan or do you want more specifics so would you read again what you started i had just started carson city school district is currently refreshing its strategic plan um to add some language that mr varner included it would be um you could do something like provide

255your understanding of it and how to strengthen it or something like that i don't necessarily want to limit it too much but i don't know how to so you i mean and if you said something along the lines of carson city is in the process of refreshing our strategic plan what components are necessary for a successful plan and what steps might you use to implement it you know something along those lines that ryan are you working your brain about that i hope somebody is i could see the wheel's spinning ryan i'm just trying to take notes as you guys go i i can tell you what i think i what i think your scenario so far if you want to hear it uh carson city school district is currently refreshing its strategic plan please provide

256your understanding of the of the strategic plans and what steps you would take to strengthen it how would you measure your goals and discuss what the district has not only learned to date but how it will move forward uh with your implementation see i knew your wheels were spinning that's exactly what i was thinking right word smith for sure mr stokes so when we've asked our principals to do an interview we've usually involved some aspect of their presentation skills i think we need to be as clear as we can what we're expecting i see this as more than just them answering a question i mean i'm seeing them show us what they can do with their computer skills how they talk how they answer questions all of those things that are important so i think

257we have to be fairly precise on what we expect of them we want a 15-minute presentation to the board of trustees and to the community that results in what ryan read and then be prepared to answer some questions about your presentation and maybe you want to do that in addition to some other aspect that maybe you're thinking of just some ideas i like that i think i'd like it to be a little bit of a longer presentation and i think that we even could say what technology you know what i mean we could even give a list of technology that's available and they could tell us what they need right so what do you suggest for a length of uh that presentation then i would say 30 minutes at least i mean this is going

258to be our chief executive and that include the answer uh question and answer no no no that's the presentation and then you know if we had 30 minutes and then planned for you know 15 30 well 30 minutes 45 minutes questions type deal i think by the time this we're all a little bit verbose at times and then if we want a second scenario i think that's up to the board i'm comfortable with one scenario and a question answer period but i'm willing for to do more also yeah i i like the idea of one scenario um and i agree with mike you know seems like 30 minutes isn't too much to ask um but i we got to keep in mind each candidate is going to have total of 90 minutes and so if

259half that time is reason excuse me is presentation that that was up here if half if what's that yeah so if we say 30 to 45 minutes and then we have time for question and answers and then we do the same thing we have a few minutes at the end of the presentation if they have anything again they want to ask us even adding on there i mean i think that one of the things i didn't like about the first step is we didn't get a sense of who the people were and so i would really love to have a ten minute five to ten minute tell me who you are in your educational philosophy and then go into a presentation type thing so that we get that sense of who the people are i

260mean even a five to ten minute just come in and tell us who you are what what your beliefs are i thought we got that with the introductions um with some i did not feel like all of them some some some choose to use their time differently than others um i just i i i don't know i i'm still i know we're looking for a presentation and i know we're what i'd like i i mean i'd like to see a presentation i'd like to see how that is but i'd also i feel like a lot of what we already heard was kind of presentation so i'm not quite sure how to um i don't i don't know i mean and i guess ryan the other option could be for trustees to come up with a

261question or scenario to present to each of the candidates that will bring that day i mean and i think if we needed to run it by ryan to make sure that there's everything's on the up and up the way it's phrased or whatever we could do it that way but i mean i think i would prefer a presentation but i'm not opposed to us all coming up with questions and it's a more straight interview and we could even laurel if you wanted we could even we could have a presentation and then we could all have a question or two you know what i mean and maybe we each limit it to one question and we ask that those questions of the candidates and so then it's kind of like a phase one phase two we

262might have to extend the time period a bit i don't know i i too like the idea of a presentation and i'd you know and i but i also want to make sure we all get a chance to ask the questions we want to ask i don't plan on asking the candidates 10 questions each but if i want to ask them you know two or three questions hopefully it'll be time to ask them that because this is it we've got to get a good feel for these two candidates and we all probably have different questions that are important to us and if we have the flexibility to be able to ask these questions this is the time to do it the last one it was very scripted um i thought there was going to be

263a pool of 35 questions and then it was the 10 we were going to ask for going to be a bit more of a surprise but there was no surprise so nobody really had to think on their feet they had generally they had time to prepare i'm just curious ryan if we did it that way if we asked individual questions would they have to be made public in advance if you're going to predetermine them yes but what i've heard the board talk about today was an idea of giving a set interview time with direction to nasby to provide a certain scenario and direct the candidates to prepare a presentation to the board of up to 30 minutes which will be followed by open question and answer the motion could include direction to nasby to address

264what mr stokes was talking about to determine what if any technology they'll need as a part of their presentation if you do that they're going to know the scenario they're presenting on they'll both have the same scenario but obviously their their presentations will be different which will allow you to craft your questions to the individual candidate because you won't know what they are until you see their presentation and i like that approach i do too i mean i like having the same presentation yeah do we have to decide on our scenario tonight or are we saying we're giving because i i would rather the scenario be one of our choosing than just giving it over to nasby i i totally find if nasby relates it to them but i also i'm feeling a little hammered

265at almost 11 o'clock about thinking about the scenario so that's a little frustrating i think that we're this late in the evening trustee crossman the way the agenda item is written you can absolutely determine the scenario tonight and just direct nasby to provide it to the candidates and i i would concur with you laurel i think that that's what i would prefer as well is there does anybody have a different idea is there somebody that has an idea other than strategic i guess my my concern with a strategic plan is it's so community-based and so does that tell us more about what the community wants or does it tell us more about what this superintendent has a vision for so i'm not suggest what what other topic uh i have several but joe i know

266you you uh had submitted some maybe you want to discuss your number one no i don't want to discuss my questions honestly i want to kind of keep those with the aces i keep in my sleeve not that they're all that groundbreaking but the scenario is kind of you know what i'm thinking i guess to answer this question laurel the the i'm okay with the strategic plan but what i'd like to know is we've been talking about the possibility of maybe as we revise it looking at call them smart goals called immeasurable goals whatever you want to call them but i'd be looking at like mike said where are we at you know recognize what we've done but how are you going to take this forward and how are we going to track it and

267you know what are some measurable outcomes you as a superintendent are looking to achieve you know how do we how do we hold you accountable i know things could change but and i guess my question where you're trying to take us i guess my question to that though is when we've done strategic plans in the past which which i i understand and i understand what that could tell us but the goals have been goals that have been set in committee by multiple people it hasn't been the superintendent mr stokes didn't say hey i want to i want a health-based you know um or a school-based health center that was something that the community said they wanted and they valued so i guess that's where i've just seen a bit of a disconnect and i'm trying

268to make it make sense and i'm feeling like i i can't quite get what i want out of that you know what i i think so well and as i think about other topics that are going to be important i think that you know one of the things that all education is dealing all educational systems are dealing with right now is the struggles to attract and retain qualified individuals to work within the school district and so it could be something along the lines of you know make a plan for you know staff recruitment um that is kind of covered if you look at uh scenario number one that was submitted by nasby it's kind of covered in that we may be build upon her thoughts there everybody read it because it asks you know for

269to address plans for addressing the professional development retention of high quality staff to ensure our students continue to receive exceptional instruction and targeted support so maybe we can build upon that i'm throwing that out i just want to help you i mean all the questions are are you know can be good but they also can be vague and you know we already heard a 90-day plan and i don't want to sit through another hour of look listen and learn we need to go beyond that now i mean that's all important but we need to go beyond that i have it you can read mine if you want to get it right here then um just while we're killing time here and throughout scenario number two that was submitted by nasby provide multiple pathways to pre-k

270through 12th grade students who will be empowered to be ready for college and career as lifelong learners and active citizens please present to the board your plan and strategies for increasing student achievement in the area of reading i kind of liked that one but i wanted maybe to expand it just beyond you know the things we keep talking about are reading math you know and then if you look farther excuse me to keep doing that farther down the road you know the high school students act preparation and but i think that even i mean i agree with what you're saying but i think as a superintendent mr stokes isn't planning reading instruction i mean he's kind of charging as principals to lead the schools and do that so i mean i think that's a scenario

271that would be appropriate for a principal maybe i think for a superintendent it's just a little bit more it has to be broader this is a we're hiring a community leader and so that's why i mean i'm still inclined to go with the strategic plan and i know i don't think it's optimal either laurel but it's a way to get a sense i mean unless we have i'd rather have that than what are you going to do as a planned reading no planning reading you know what i mean they're gonna help purchase program which they ask their you know deputy superintendent to vet and yeah i don't want our superintendent to write to give us his reading program yeah but what i think the the um strategic plan question it allows us to to dabble

272in those areas and ask maybe more general questions but if we want to touch on academics if we want to touch on vision you know it it'll it allows us room to ask those questions as a follow-up could you live with it if we yeah sorry i'm just it's like i i just i i don't yeah i can live with the strategic plan it's just like thinking about it like that going it's it's not really the superintendent's plan right so that's where i kind of i'm like oh we're asking him to give a plan but well but it really is the superintendent's plan once it's created i mean he or she will be the one that is executed in i guess i have a question about your suggestion joe my understanding is that if they

273make a presentation the questions we can ask is specific to their presentation not to go off on a tangent and ask different questions unless we would ask those same questions to each candidate is that correct or well i think the the lawyer answer to that is that's a really good reason to make the question broad because you can see where they're going to go and it'll give you leeway to craft your questions based on what you've seen but again you don't want to tie your hands by ignoring the scenario so much that you have to ask the same questions of both you want to be able to receive a presentation and react to it and i think the best way to do that is to make the scenario broad which which i think i think

274you've done but yeah and i agree and and that's why you know i i appreciate what laurel's saying and where she's trying to go with this and i wish i had a better answer but i think along the lines of that strategic you know strategic plan gives us that flexibility gives us that you know keeps us wide enough to where a lot of questions could stem from their presentation okay i guess the next question be is does the board feel that one scenario would be enough to fill up the hour and a half period of time i'm seeing a lot of nodding ahead so i'm going to take it as a yes we could tell them we want a presentation that isn't you know at least this range or between 30 and 45 minutes or

275something because i you know not about this but i could give you a presentation and keep you here for two days no you couldn't no you couldn't i'll talk i won't know if you're here i'll just keep talking i think 30 minutes is a good goal post just because when we had it the last time when we have the hard time end we have to cut it off and i'd hate for a presentation to go so much longer that then we can't have the interactive questions that might stem from that yeah and we already had each of the candidates for 90 minutes so i mean if the if the whole thing takes 60 minutes that's fine okay so what we'd ask them to do is a 30-minute presentation on the wording for the strategic plan

276that uh ryan outlined is that everybody's uh understanding and agreement okay one can you read it one more time please sure do you want to hear what i think the motion is or just the scenario let's hear the motion it will be a motion to approve uh february 22nd at 8 a.m uh for the next meeting of the board to convene uh with interviews of the superintendent candidates to start first one 8 15 to 9 45 and the second from 10 to 11 30. with direction to nasby to provide the following scenario to the candidates with a request for a presentation of up to 30 minutes after each is able to give an introduction they're on followed by open discussion and question and answer with the board this motion includes direction to nasby to request

277from the candidates any technology that will be necessary for their presentation the scenario to be presented is as follows carson city school district is currently refreshing its strategic plan please provide your understanding of the strategic plan and what steps you would take to strengthen it how would you measure your goals and discuss what the district has learned to date and how it will move forward with your implementation please include your plan to attract and retain qualified staff do we need the re i'm i don't think we need to retain staff on there no at all because because that's already a goal so so ryan could ask another question when we're looking at the timeline and i guess this is for richard also i think what i'd prefer to do is start at like 8 15

278and then have interviews start at 8 30. last time i felt like it was a little bit rushed and i would really appreciate to have at least a half hour before the interviews to have a little bit of time to clear my mind get some fresh air use the restroom because otherwise it's like you're just kind of non-stop and you don't have as much time to really take it in and think so i think we need to look at that time to give us a little break in there to kind of change our mindset and come in fresh and ready for the next interview yeah i think we had a half hour built in there but we could i think it's at 9 45 and then 10. i thought oh yeah no way we need

279more time between yeah no my original plan was and we can change this but it was 8 15 to 9 45 for the first one then a break until 10 which is half hour to 11 30. but uh that's flexible whatever you guys want to do okay just hearing what mike said and looking at because you know 90 minutes is easy for easier for me to figure out on the 30 minutes so if we start at 8 15 we start we our meeting starts at 8 15. start the first interview 8 30 to 10 30 minute break till 10 30 and then 10 30 to 12. and then rich when you're running the meeting it's much easier for you to keep track of as well you're not figuring out yeah so okay so you'd like

280to start the board meeting at 8 15 the first interview at 8 30 to 10 and then from 10 30 to 11 12. yeah yeah it's getting tired it's getting late yeah that's not a problem i can't wait for aj's presentation we're all going to be sleeping sorry aj i would honestly i would prefer that i would prefer that i like that idea i think it's an easier time frame to keep track of yeah no i'm total agreement mr president if anybody is is interested in making that motion it would simply be uh altered to reflect the time frame starting at 8 15 interviews to start at 8 30 and 10 30 and the last line of the scenario would be removed so mr president i'll move that we accept the motion as presented with

281the changes by ryan russell uh we have a motion by mr walker i'll second that the second by mr cassiopo any in-person or any further board discussion before we move into uh public comment mr president on advisement from council i will be abstaining from voting on this agenda item all right thank you any other comments seeing none any public comment in person public comment seeing none do we have any online public comment yes mr horner this comment is from mr tarr of the parent of two students who attend schools in manchester new hampshire he's writing to you about the finalists dr goldhart their current superintendent please take serious consideration in reading this dr goldhart is not the person for whom you seek for your superintendent in his interviews with you he stated many convincing things

282to your interview team when he was a candidate in our schools he said the same bold statements he is still under contract with our schools yet chooses to i i hate to interrupt but this is public comment related solely to this agenda item and the candidates uh which candidate to choose is not on the agenda tonight um that we could consider that as part of general public comment if you'd like or it can be read in at the public comment before the choices actually made would your suggestion be it's up to you it's definitely not within the scope of the agenda item that it's being discussed so the the comment can be included in the record as part of the public comment that was received for the meeting uh or it can be read in

283the next general period of public comment before the board or before the action is taken on the superintendent i think it'd be important to read at the next general agenda i agree with that yeah that's fine any other online comment that would uh pertain to this motion no mr varner thank you seeing no more public comment uh i'll call for a vote on the motion all in favor say aye aye any opposed say nay saying none motion carries unanimously thank you mr president i'm wondering and just for the sake of time if the if item number 14 might be something that we can't table until our next meeting i mean looking at it's not like we're up against a deadline i i think we're getting the thumbs up so uh if that's a wish of

284the board we could definitely do that yeah i think that's a fabulous idea so if you want to table it as the president mr varner you can absolutely do that in your discretion that'll be continued or you can take a motion uh if you'd like but it it is within your your discretion to discontinue it at this time we'll table it and reschedule it for our new agenda with that we'll move on for the approval of the consent agenda i'll move that we accept the consent agenda as submitted and this is for possible action second do we have a second any public comment seeing none in public in private i mean in person do we have any online no mr varner seeing none and we'll call for a vote all in favor say aye aye

285in the opposed say nay saying none the motion carries and let me see what else we have here the informational items is for discussion only and no action will be taken i don't know if we want to read these or everybody had a chance to read them are we having a plc in february since we're all packed in here did we reschedule it because we usually have one in february i had actually considered canceling this one because we have had a number of um meetings in addition it seems that if this is going to be something that your new superintendent is going to do there's already been some significant work that's been done my plan was to hand that work off to the new superintendent for him to do whatever he feels um appropriate so

286it was going to be my suggestion to cancel the february community plc okay we'll move on then to uh any requests for future agenda topics um just one and it i mean it'll be far down the line but there was a discussion at the parks and rec meeting on um the first um they are looking to do an access road where capital christian is so they're interested in seeing if we're going forward or not in case if we're going to do that then that would be part of probably our obligation if we go to look at that property and then they can put it off for a couple more years but they're really wanting to push and find out what our plans are so that they have an idea of how to plan for that

287any other future gender topics the board would like to see laurel no um i would like to see more celebration of the successes of our kids in school and i know we do that quite often but uh we have a lot of kids that are doing a lot of great things and maybe just if we can celebrate more of their achievements so mr president one of the things that i would caution us about i think a few years ago we had a lot of these types of things and we ended up in many meetings till midnight and i think really when you really look at it most people don't want to come to the school board to be recognized it's uncomfortable for a lot of people i think that if we're going to celebrate success

288go to them do it in the school do it in the school day go to their workplace but i don't think it's that's why a lot of our retirees don't come to that end of the year thing there's not a lot of people who want to come and stand in front of the school board just because it's uncomfortable and so i mean i think we need to think about that that i don't want to i don't i think there's a limit on what we want to do just honestly okay i think that's something we can discuss i think there's a balance and um but that's you know we can have that discussion yeah that's the idea is it's a future agenda item that we can develop at some point later on sounds good to me

289uh no other comments or anything we're going to be adjourned thank you guys uh appreciate you guys staying so late thank you [Music] hmm [Music] bye