May 19, 2022 Board of Education Meeting

001this good evening everybody welcome thank you so much for joining us we are delighted to be joined by members of our staff our administration students who are with us here tonight to be part of our presentation it's my pleasure to make a motion for the board to return to public session if i could please have a second thank you julia all in favor please say aye aye aye terrific 7-0 would everybody please join us in the pledge of allegiance thank you we are very much looking forward to tonight's presentations we are going to be hearing from many members of our staff and students and even some parents i believe regarding diversity equity and inclusion and efforts that have been underway throughout the school year we are going to have an opportunity to revisit our code

002of conduct and participate in the required public hearing and also to hear a presentation related to our student wellness policy and an annual triennial review i should say before we turn our attention to all of that with the board's permission i just want to take a moment to generously thank our community for its support of our budget we are thrilled with the turnout we are grateful to our community for its support not only of the budget but also of the second proposition which will enable us to continue with our bus replacement cycle and also to experiment with the school district's first ever electric uh vehicle full-size bus and a couple of other vehicles as well and it was a wonderful turnout a significant increase in voter turnout not only in kotona lewisville i think it

003was about 45 increase or thereabouts but also across the region um so very grateful to all voters who took the time to come out and also i would like to just take the opportunity to say congratulations to our re-elected trustees elizabeth garrity julia hadlock rory burke congratulations and thank you to all candidates who showed an interest in board service and who were willing to serve um so thank you i i just thought that that would be appropriate um since that is sort of our main event in between our last board of education meeting and tonight with respect to board of education business that is and then of course we've had many other lovely events taking place this is such a busy time of year and so much to celebrate um i think we have an

004opportunity for board announcements if we could just briefly have some board announcements i'm happy to pause for anybody who wanted to share anything that had happened in between the last board meeting and this board meeting while you're gathering your thoughts i will just quickly thank our middle school administration and pto for a wonderfully attended and a wonderful coffee related to adolescence and the impact of social media i would say um and sadness in particular that is pervasive as a result of some impacts of social media we watched a documentary childhood 2.0 read an article from the atlantic it was well attended by folks on zoom a little less well attended by folks in person but we're getting there it really was just a wonderful forum and we appreciate those opportunities to come together as a

005community so thank you very much for that a lot to think about there anything else please julia um so i just wanted to recognize our students and thank them for putting together they directed and acted in one act plays at the high school and it was really just a pleasure to see them all working together thank you for all the staff who and administration who supported that and it was nice to even see it's this time of year some of our alumni are back and there was alumni in the audience which i just thought was also really lovely that they took the time to come back and see their younger classmates from previous years performing so they just they did a terrific job it was really like it's a delightful way to spend a friday

006evening thank you thank you for saying that and if i can just add that a few of us walked out together and had i think an observation that many of the one acts seemed to be a commentary on parenthood which was really interesting to experience as a member of the audience our adolescents have a lot to say and they are watching us very closely thank you for for that julia anything else uh i had the opportunity to attend the um katona elementary pto um dancing under the stars fundraiser um and it was fantastic live band food trucks it was a lot of fun kind of more indication of a return to normal and you know got to meet a lot of young families it was really a good time thank you that's great to hear

007liz thank you and if there are no further announcements andrew we would love to hear from you if you have some announcements tonight please sure i don't actually have too many tonight but that's part because we want to get to uh the presentations that we have i do want to echo uh your thanks to our community we are enormously grateful uh i had a chance earlier today we were with all of our administrators and it was a nice opportunity to say thank you to all of them many of them are here with us tonight everybody put an enormous amount of work into the development of the budget and we are really appreciative of the show of support from our community and likewise congratulations to the trustees and thank you to as you said thank you

008to anybody who's interested in doing this work it's an enormous time commitment an investment in public schools and we really appreciate uh the willingness of all members of the community to do that uh and and the turnout uh you know and that's a great lesson for our students some of whom are here with us tonight about the importance of participating in one's democracy and we appreciate all of that so much so thank you klsd um my only other announcements are we're starting to get towards that end of the year season so next week begins to be full of those events starting on monday night with a band concert at john jay middle school on tuesday night it's the senior recognition night here at john jay high school and then on wednesday back at the middle

009school with an art show and a chorus concert and i'm sure that's just the beginning of lots of other really lovely events that will begin to wrap up this school year but that's all i have for today okay thank you very much wonderful then without further ado we are very excited to begin our presentation related to diversity equity and inclusion i'm happy to turn it over to you mary thank you i'm sorry that's all right there's going to be a lot of us who are going to be talking tonight and we're going to do some juggling of seats yes we'll have a few transitions so they let me talk first while some of those transitions can happen and i'm going to do my best to try to give some context to the presentation tonight and

010then try to get off stage as quickly as possible so that my colleagues and our students in particular can have a chance to talk about this work um obviously it's very very important work this work of diversity equity and inclusion and the work itself is about developing the most inclusive and welcoming and infirming environment uh an equitable environment in our schools every day for every single student and adult and it's also the work of of coming to always better understand bias and then undo the impacts of bias and i i start there in order to say uh that it's very very hard work and that there's lots and lots of work to be done and this is a journey that we'll be on and you see that slide up there on the screen now with

011the word humility uh we we start there because we approach this work with humility and i think it's really important that we say that up front uh there's always there's always a concern i think in a presentation that it gives the audience the impression that we think we're doing a great job and we're done and look at all the good work we've done and we know that we're just at the beginning here of a very long journey and that the work will be hard and that we'll make mistakes along the way and in fact if we don't make mistakes the only way not to make mistakes in this work is to not be doing it and that's important you know for me to say that not just because it's true of myself but we want

012to give permission to our colleagues and to our students our students always we want them to know that learning is about making mistakes and learning that's this significant is is even more so necessarily the case that we're not always going to get it right what's important is that we're on the journey committed to learning committed to understanding things in ways that perhaps a few years ago we didn't understand we talked again i'll reference earlier today we were with all of our administrators and we've been um from periodically talking about a book that we were reading through the year and you'll see a reference to that later uh and in the chapter that we looked at today the chapter begins uh with this tension between urgency and patience and it's very understandable in equity work when

013people are being harmed every day that the sense of urgency is enormous and at the same time when i mentioned the work of undoing bias a moment ago that work the work of changing mindsets of people requires patience you don't change people's mindsets overnight you don't change them in a year you don't change them with a particular speech or a particular activity it takes it takes lots and lots of work and reflection individual reflection and thinking and so it is this balance of a sense of urgency as well as the patience to do to keep doing the work probably for most of us for all of us for the rest of our careers i also want to pause here for a moment and acknowledge the racist violence that occurred on the weekend in buffalo and

014i think it's important that we say that here tonight and and pause for a moment to think about it and to say that while we mourn of course for the families most directly impacted in buffalo we also think about the impact of an event like that here in our own community and it's ripple effects all across the country and i specifically use that word impact because i think some of the learning i'll speak for myself that i've uh begun to do in the in in recent times is specifically around that word impact and how a particular event or even a particular word we come to understand can have very different impact on different people and that the imp thinking about the impact is what's important to us and whereas perhaps in schools years ago when

015the focus was more about equality and doing the same for everybody in the wake of a significant event we would be thinking what do we need to do how do we take care of everybody what's the same thing that we need to do for everybody when we think about equity work we now are more inclined to think about the acknowledge that the impact may be different for different individuals and we as a result we may need to do differently for different individuals and that's something that we're thinking about uh i would say more and more all the time what what is it that different students might need as a result of something that's happened either in the world around us or as we've seen more recently even within our own schools how do we make

016sure we're taking care of those students those colleagues who might need the most care all of that brings me back to say we have to approach this work with humility because it's incredibly complicated and incredibly necessary work uh if we could move on to the next slide i'm going to give a little bit more context now about what's come to us from new york state this slide uh represents uh or speaks to the uh framework that new york state education department published back in 2018 the culturally responsive and sustaining education framework this is intended to be a resource to teachers throughout new york state who are encouraged to do this work around equity diversity and inclusion the framework sets out these four key pillars of a welcoming of creating working ways to create a welcoming

017and affirming environment setting high expectations and providing rigorous instruction creating an inclusive curriculum and with inclusive assessment and always to be involved in ongoing professional learning you hear again there echoed the idea that this work will be ongoing so new york state put this framework out in not with a lot of fanfare initially but put it out to lots of districts i'm proud to say that we were already engaged in work here in the district uh we had a learning cafe back in 2019 on the topic of diversity uh in the spring in the fall of 2019 we began the work of changing our school district mascot and we had also been engaged for a number of years in in updating classroom libraries and school libraries you'll hear more about that tonight so the work

018again not to say that we're by any means uh done or that we check the box and so now we can move forward but to say that we're committed and have been committed to some time to to doing work in this area and then you see here on the next slide that in april 2021 the new york state board of regents under chancellor lester young put out a call to action which in a way reintroduced that same framework from 2018 but did so with a greater sense of urgency and now there was a really direct call to school districts around the state with suggestions for uh types of governance suggestions for policy that you're going to see reflected later on tonight in the work that our board of education has been doing as well as

019recommendations for example for district-wide committees committees very much like our equity and racial justice committee that you'll hear more about tonight so a greater sense of urgency coming from our education leadership up in albany moving on this is a slide that our board is very familiar with and i know that many in the audience will be familiar with this is a graphic that we use here in the district uh it was at the beginning of all of our budget presentations this spring and our staff are used to seeing it but the center is our learning commitment that we've been talking about for a number of years but we've put immediately around that this work of diversity equity inclusion social emotional learning and sustainability we see all of those things as intertwined we see them as

020not only the things necessary to create a healthy and meaningful learning culture and environment for our students but also we frankly see them as the opportunities and challenges that our students will face for many years in the world that they are entering and so if we talk about relevant and meaningful learning we think we have to be talking about all the things that you see represented on that graphic and we anticipate that it it will stay the same for the foreseeable future because again this is work that we will continue doing moving to the next slide this is now we finally get to tonight's agenda um you will be hearing about work that's happening in our schools from school leaders uh both administrative leaders and teacher leaders you'll hear some about the work of our

021erjc the equity and racial justice committee and then towards the end you'll hear about the work of our board of education and we say down at the bottom of that slide that although we we list them separately there for the sake of organizing this presentation the work is all very much intertwined and overlaps with one another so since the work that our leaders are doing in the schools um reflects on work that's happening at erjc and vice versa and it's all uh very much uh intertwined with each other and there you see the presenters uh who will be speaking with us tonight we're really thrilled that so many folks could be here uh i can't possibly read what's up there on the slide so i'm not here on the computer we're thrilled to have sophia

022and ava here with us in the front row thank you both for joining us uh parent from erjc samantha hearst will be joining us our equity leaders jocelyn catherine and candy thank you all for being here three of our principals representing the three levels elementary middle and high school ashland jeff and stephen thank you for being here and neil and mary my colleagues are already up here at the table with us thank you also the next slide speaks to again how how the presentation is structured for tonight and these categories that you see on the screen come from the recommendations uh that were made in the spring of last year at a presentation that the board heard and they help us frame out uh tonight again the work is all very much overlapping and intertwined

023with each other and i think maybe that allows me now to let somebody else talk so i'm going to turn it over to our elementary colleagues thank you ashlynn and jocelyn for being here yeah so thank you so much for having us tonight i'm grateful to represent meadow pond elementary along with my colleagues carrie ford at increase miller and christy harris at katona so tonight we're going to give you a brief overview of our elementary dei work and jocelyn lavidity a fourth grade teacher at increase miller and also the elementary instructional leader for social emotional learning and diversity and inclusion will be able to provide you with examples from her perspective as a teacher so we strongly believe in providing learning opportunities surrounding diversity equity and inclusion and for us the purpose of this work

024is for students to develop positive social identities to build empathy and to engage respectfully with all people including those who are similar and those who are different from them so at the elementary schools this year we've been using new york state's culturally responsive sustaining education framework as a guide for our dei work that was mentioned before the framework helps us to create student-centered learning environments and it outlines four pillars so the first that you heard before too is having a welcoming and affirming environment having inclusive curriculum and assessment having high expectations and rigorous instruction and having ongoing professional learning and support so specifically having a welcoming and affirming environment is very important to us because we want everyone to feel like they're a member of our school community this inclusive environment promotes the opportunity for

025students to see themselves and also to learn about others and at the elementary level we refer to this as mirrors and windows so as ashton stated i teach fourth grade so i'll be able to give some concrete examples from the classroom and you may laugh but i we brought a little basket of books so if i shuffle them i'm sorry so um one example that we wanted to share was this year in my class we read just ask by sonia sotomayor and in case you don't know she's the u.s supreme court justice and her background some of you may know but as a child she was diagnosed with diabetes and part of her reasoning behind writing the book is she wanted students to feel again the windows and the mirrors they she wanted students to

026feel heard and be able to see themselves in the book but she also wanted to give people an opportunity to learn so in the book it covers a wide variety of differences or disabilities and it definitely encourages different conversations so for my students it was an opportunity for students to learn about everything but at the same time some students were also able to relate and connect to the characters which was very important and it actually really set a solid tone for a lot of the identity work that we were doing in the classroom would it be too distracting if you pass the book around while you're talking about yeah thank you so much we would love that of course um and so just to kind of add on a little bit it opened a dialogue

027about learning from each other's backgrounds and experiences and going off of the title it encourages kids to and just humans in general to ask rather than assuming and you can talk about you know what are appropriate ways of asking but just by looking at someone you don't know their background so it definitely opened a very healthy dialogue and it that it definitely did connect to a lot of the identity work that we have that's happening in elementary rooms so we made identity webs and people were able the students were able to add to their identity webs or they were able to learn about other parts of people's identity webs they did ask questions from about their peers and learn about their peers and also just it's a learning experience for fourth graders and it helped

028them develop empathy and understanding in general thank you additionally we continue to focus on diversifying our classroom libraries to include books that represent the world in which we live so we're evaluating our current collections to help us determine if our libraries are vibrant inviting relevant inclusive approachable and user-friendly so another example this one is very funny to share um obviously educators value student input when they're looking at their classroom libraries so in fourth grade i organized my students into groups and then they inventoried our classroom library it's still a process that we're doing together and you know they made several discoveries while doing so and they wanted to make sure i found out about each discovery um and so they were passionate about finding representation across a variety of areas and they looked at what

029we had versus maybe perhaps what they wanted and what they needed and so one group of students in my class they're very passionate about finding more books with female athletes and so this became a huge discussion they started the discussion with the rest of the class because they found that many of the books in the classroom only had male athletes and it's something that could be overlooked very easily so they did a little bit of research and they found this book that was actually recommended to them by a third grade teacher and it's the series the kicks that we can pass around and it's written by a female a professional female athlete so they are very inspired and very proud that they can hopefully give this to the future fourth graders at increase miller so

030additionally over the past few months our district-wide grade level teams have been working with our teachers college and klsd staff developers integrating dei into our ela units of study while we're keeping the integrity of the ela standards we are utilizing more inclusive resources that share a wider variety of linguistically racially and culturally diverse perspectives so for example our second reading unit that we do in fourth grade is in non-fiction reading in it and it focuses on it's called reading the weather and it focuses on weather and when we were evaluating our curriculum as a fourth grade team we were realizing that weather is not part of our science curriculum although it is part of others so we found that this was an amazing opportunity to use this non-fiction unit to embed our social studies native

031american unit instead and so we worked on finding authentic texts and native american authors to teach the social studies content and the social justice standards in ela and so here are just some of the texts we were looking at for next year um this is we are the water protectors and then we are still here and so we're looking forward to that work being implemented so also at our monthly faculty meetings administration and teachers have been engaged in learning about dei one focus has been nationally recognized holidays and monthly celebrations as well as the stories behind them another adult learning experience has been how we talk to students about race so across our three elementary schools we engage in a community read about skin color and each child and adult created a hand representing themselves

032so these are two books the colors we share by angelica doss and all the colors we are by katie kissinger so in my classroom when we read all the colors we are by katie kissinger the book basically explains the science behind skin color and how it's determined by our ancestors and the impact of the sun and melanin using very child friendly language it also shares a like a beautiful variety of skin tones and helps them build positive identities as they accept and understand and learn about the diverse world around us and then okay elementary has props so i know it's on the screen that we figured you know so following the read aloud students completed a welcoming hands activity where they traced their hands and then they used crayons um to find their closest skin

033color and or their skin tone tone and then color the hands in but very interestingly not surprisingly my students remarked that one color did not fully represent them so they did need to combine the different crayons and the different um colors so that they would be able to um best identify with themselves and i have to say just on a personal note this was a very opening activity for my classroom and i felt like the students really were excited to share with each other they wanted to ask each other and they wanted to show each other about it and it kind of opened up a very curious dialogue that felt very natural and healthy for the students so we recognize that this is ongoing work um and we have shared tonight just some of our

034learning and teaching around dei we feel proud of what we have accomplished so far and will continue to advance the important work so if you're curious to know how fourth graders see this work i just want to share a few powerful reflections from my students i just have a few quotes they said first everyone deserves the same respect and should be allowed to be themselves always another student shared it was fun to share about our differences because i was able to be a leader in my class and teach others about my life and then another student said it showed me that i'm not different from other people even though i sometimes feel like it and even if i am different i am proud to be who i am and others should be proud of themselves

035too so thank you so much for listening to that perspective thank you so much so now it will transition um do they have books and stuff well i don't know it's a tough act to follow secondary schools fewer practices actual students so that's a big advantage so i'd like to welcome our middle school principal jeff swiadowitz catherine grabosh staff developer and sophia chang 18th grade student and also erj student member welcome thank you for joining me thank you for having us we do not have props we didn't realize that was something that was coming oh we should have so there's been a lot of different dei and scl work going on in the middle school much of it does mirror what the elementary school talked about you know we do talk about windows and mirrors

036and sliding glass doors and how do we bring that into the classroom so that students can see themselves but also learn more about others so some examples in ela classrooms we did a lot around community norms especially in seventh and eighth grade so the students used different activities to come up with things that they wanted their classroom to represent certain periods of different classes and then they were hung up around the room so that throughout the year the teachers and the students could refer to them so that they would know what was expected and how they wanted their classroom to kind of run so everybody had a voice in there they did also identity maps in all three grades and they were done in ela but they also did them in art and some of

037them did them in different subjects and it was interesting to see the students remark on some things they added in one subject that they may not have added another and then a lot of the teachers used that throughout the year especially in ela when they were talking about stories or doing units and they would have them refer back to their identity maps sometimes add to them and just kind of use them fluidly throughout the school year there's two particular units in eighth grade that we implemented this year the first one is the critical literacy unit which really um is embraces contemporary award-winning authors and brings some cultural relevance to students through a variety of different topics um that they read about and those topics a lot of them are very meaningful to their lives right

038now and they're very current and they relate to them and so students really get a different perspective or learn more about something that they already might be familiar with and then for position papers in eighth grade especially they create this argument writing piece where students again will choose topics of interest oftentimes it will be topics that they are passionate about very familiar with some students might choose things that they just want to learn more about and they are asked to craft a piece of writing using critical literacy skills and argument writing techniques but what it really does is it pushes the students to learn how they can learn from that those argument pieces and not learn to argue so it's really interesting to see them kind of craft these pieces and get both perspectives and

039make sure that they are engaging in that civil discourse when they do talk about their pieces and bringing in facts and you know critical sources that they use um in social studies we um in seventh and eighth grade especially are using facing history which i know the high school is going to talk about as well we've been working with facing history now for several years it did start in the high school and you know they their unique approach is around different pedagogy and classroom resources professional development that they offer we work with one of their staff developers and there's a lot of different tools that help teachers to implement their pedagogy and their resources into their classroom which helps the students then to become more thoughtful and responsible citizens as they go through these different

040units so there's different perspectives and points of views that the social studies teachers have been bringing in especially around the reconstruction unit a holocaust unit that they do in their classrooms in eighth grade um they're um in seventh grade actually rewriting a unit around systemic oppression to bring in more own voices to bring in a different perspective and to kind of uplift those voices that are often just talked about either negatively or not talked about enough and so that's something that's going to be used next year for the seventh grade teachers and we are trying to move students more towards action-oriented learning when it comes to diversity equity and inclusion with all of the knowledge that they're gaining through ela social studies a bunch of different subjects so that they can become citizens that have

041that knowledge and are thoughtful around how they approach their community catherine do you want to talk a little bit about ela and some of the books oh yes that whole piece that i just wrote so also like the elementary level we have been looking at the classroom libraries we've purchased quite a few books and mary has been very generous in getting us a variety of different books um that the teachers and students are really enjoying especially for book clubs um they are a lot more diverse authors more about female protagonists people with disabilities all sorts of inclusion that we need to see more in our libraries also there have been quite a few changes with the texts that are used in the units of study and also some also in social studies and things that

042they have been reading they've been looking at differently and seeing if they needed to add pieces or look at it in a different way or perhaps change the piece altogether so that has been ongoing through all all three grades throughout the year and before thank you so just want to say thank you obviously to catherine and sophia for being here and there's a lot of work from a lot of people at the middle school um you know assistant principals monica and harry they've they've addressed these systemically and with individual students throughout the day our faculty has done a really amazing job capturing some of these pieces and working it into their own curriculum um our community we hear from parents a lot of times around incidents that i'll be talking about in a minute and

043just you know around some other issues as well um and you know having sophie here is awesome because um when we hear from our students they really kind of lead us we think we know from an adult perspective about the way that we should be addressing some of these things but getting feedback from our students is really important um so i'm glad that sophie is here tonight um so we've unfortunately i guess had some teachable moments the last couple of months at the middle school uh the reaction from our students has been i think very good in terms of like the adults really condemning the behavior by the negative behavior that we're seeing so um we did a history of the swastika lesson when a swastika came to the school um we did an adl

044lesson the adl lesson was specific to current culture and things that are happening so um it was we talked about anti-semitism in the shooting at the synagogue in pittsburgh other stories like that and then we talked about an uplifting story of people in new york city subways when they saw anti-semitic uh graffiti how they how they addressed that so um we don't want to just always say it's a reaction always educate but say like you know you're an adolescent you're moving toward action-based kind of um behavior so here are some of the things that that people can do uh we recently had a holocaust speaker in the uh who met with our eighth grade uh for those of you who are parents or in our community we sent the um we sent the speech to

045our entire community so that uh you could see what was being said to students there's a really great story but the impact of uh having a actually two survivors in front of our eighth grade students i think was very meaningful and students had a variety of different reactions some you know proud some connected with families with students coming up at the end in tears saying just thank you so much for sharing your story etc so i think each impacted students individually um i think probably some of the most meaningful conversations and i will not share the student names but i'm talking to students about the impact that some of the recent events have had on the individual students whether it is students of color students of a different race students that are fearful that their

046race or their color is next i think are appropriate concerns for our adolescents to have so i really appreciate those students coming forward whether it is in email whether it is in person i'm really proud of our students for for wanting to do that and being a voice of change um recently and actually in the last couple of days um the unfortunate part of having these events is they also hit the newspapers etc there's good parts and bad parts about that um i think the bad part is that we people might think that this is a widespread thing that is happening in our schools i look at it as the action of a few um and at the same time if you're not in schools you could see wow these things keep happening um and

047what is the concern there anyway the good part is um that our westchester county colleagues in different professions have reached out to us so recently i had somebody reach out from the westchester county human rights commission and i had somebody reach out from the bias and hate crimes arm of the westchester county district attorney's office so i'm thankful that those people are reaching out to us and helping to pay attention knowing that you know andrew you spoke about buffalo earlier um that i'll call him a child was 18 and you know our students are 12 13 14 15 years old and these are not things that happen overnight um so we continue to try to reinforce and build in some of that knowledge for our students i think a majority of our students are empathic

048and really can look across the table and say this is the impact of of bad behavior and i think that there's other education that needs to happen as well so i'm thankful to our colleagues who are reaching out um i also do want to say marjorie thank you for acknowledging the recent talk that we had um if you are reading any professional journals and anybody out there there is and i guess was before the pandemic but that has been an exacerbating um piece here there is a mental health crisis for our adolescents right now and so this is one piece that i think definitely does impact but making sure that we pay attention and stay in tune with our kids is a really really important uh piece so that's the constant you know learning that

049we're trying to do as a faculty as a staff and with our parent community um another another piece that we're doing from uh from a teacher perspective is our middle school equity team uh this started in the fall again thanks to catherine who's leading that work uh we had 10 faculty members initially who signed up or were tapped on the shoulder because they've showed some interest in the past whether it's with ela work social studies work um connections with things going on in their own lives um and we really started by examining what the needs of the school were you know regarding equity we've started to develop a plan uh for addressing the needs of our school around equity you can hear some of the great curriculum work we've done and now i'm hopeful that

050sophia is going to tell us you know that it is making an impact so i'd love to hear and i hopefully all of you would love to hear some of the great work that we're doing from sophia uh yeah i would like to thank miss uh ford and mr speato it's miss graybosch for this opportunity to be here tonight it's really meaningful when students get to be a part of the community more than just going to school and taking tests and stuff so i appreciate this chance um going back to what uh was said about the holocaust survivors it was really eye-opening for me personally and i'm sure for plenty of my fellow peers because it gave us a new perspective not only on um just the entire holocaust but the impacts that it had

051not only in the uh camps and the death camps and the i forget the word now the other camps yeah the concentration camps because um it was not it was um a new way to see not only that the people in the concentration and the death camps it was also people who weren't close to those but they were still impacted and i think it was meaningful that we got to see different stories and different sides of the story and um i'll use the term ripple effect of how even if you're not like in a concentration camp how it can still affect you and the experiences that those people went through was really meaningful to hear also for the ela critical literacy unit for my book club we read a book called holding up the universe

052and it had two main characters one with prosopagnosia which is a face blindness um yeah face blindness and another one with a girl who was a little overweight so i think it's important to talk about um the weight thing because it's important to make sure people feel like seen and it was really eye opening to learn because i didn't know what prosopagnosia was but now i'm more informed about what it is and how it can happen to plenty of people like there are a lot of celebrities who have it and i also just wanted to say that being on the erjc has been very helpful for me as a student of color because a lot of the times when you have when you attempt to have those conversations about race with my fellow peers besides

053like my friends were very on top of that um it doesn't go over well necessarily because you know eighth graders kind of deny a lot of things so it feels good to feel heard and seen by not only people of color but administrators teachers and faculty who want to hear what students have to say about race and things like that because i feel like my and i'm very happy to hear about what the elementary schools are doing specifically about race because in my elementary school years it was very new to talk about race and it still is it's a process but i'm very happy that the students of color and just students in general are getting that chance to talk about it and to like feel like it's an okay thing to talk about so

054that in the future when they do have to have these more difficult conversations about race they're not going to be scared or confused about why it's happening so i want to thank um miss lividini and miss field for doing that and the things that have been happening in the middle school and everywhere they are it is upsetting that they're happening but i think the teachable moment is really what we should be taking away from it to move forward and use that as a reminder that this is a process and we need to keep working towards the goal of more inclusion and creating a safe environment for our students um i have friends who are jewish and the anti-semitic act really impacted them and it hurt me to see like them feel that pain when the

055swastika was put up somewhere and i just i'm not jewish but it gave another will say window for me and i'm sure plenty of other students and then the situation with the other racial slur the n-word in the bathroom i'm not black however i am a person of color and one of the thoughts that went through my head is when will i be next because there have been things written in the bathroom in general like towards queer people towards women and just towards like people in general so it's hard not to focus on the when will i be the next one that's targeted but seeing how like the community has kind of come together to talk about this has been uplifting in this time of like uncertainty and kind of confusion and like upsettingness because

056it reminds me that i am not alone and i want to i want to enforce the feeling that other people who feel the same way are not alone and that's another great thing about the erjc is that i don't feel alone and i hope that i speak for all the students and faculty and staff and parents who are on there when they say that they don't feel alone when they get to talk about those experiences so i just want to thank the erjc and the faculty and staff for that opportunity thanks sophia i just you know just one last thing and and hopefully to echo some of the words that she just shared we have some student leaders that are working with our school psychologist which what didn't mention before i just wanted to mention

057them as well madison olsen sarah freed and ray de stefan our social worker are working with our student leaders to say what else can we do um that a lot of this work does need to come from the students um to be able to help kind of like govern the actions of others uh you know we don't need a police force of students but you know not tolerating when they hear certain words not tolerating a friend who's going to write something on the wall et cetera so um i'm glad to hear that sophia is calling you know her her friends and and colleagues or peers i think you're you've been referring to them as um and so we hope that that will continue and i'm sure that the high school is hoping the same thing

058we really appreciate all that has been shared to this point i know we're still midway through the presentation but i i must channel the sentiment that i know is felt by all of us at this moment to say sophia that feedback was invaluable and we thank you for your commitment to this work for your willingness to come and provide that feedback to us that insight and that student perspective you're so lucid and so thoughtful and articulate and your words were powerful and we really felt them deeply and and feel very grateful and humbled that you shared that with us tonight thank you and to all of you obviously you were all brilliant so far to this point but that was really really powerful thank you terrific and we're looking forward to the rest but thank

059you all and so now um we'll be joined by our high school principal dr steven siciliano staff developer candy wilma and high school student member of erjc ava blanco welcome thank you for joining us hope it says the same thank you i also extend my thanks to the middle school contingent and sofia again thank you so much very much i feel very hopeful for the classes that are coming up into the high school i think before we get into our slides a little bit i think it might be helpful to backtrack just a little bit again to also echo what andrew is saying is that there there's really there's tremendous amount of humility that goes into this work and yet at the same time i think we should uh give credit to those who have

060done this work probably long before it became a state focus a a national focus and that's where i'm so proud of my humanities teachers especially in the english department for a number of years they have tried to set the frame for our students coming into the high school and it's also very challenging to have 9 through 12 have a common experience and so they try to do that through the summer read and if we recall we we walk backwards and we see some of the topics uh that have been covered in recent years and i think they really set the frame very well a long time ago uh with the danger of a single story uh giamata adichie really set the frame for using different lenses to see people circumstances and also most importantly challenging

061ones assumptions and if we have students to do that i think we really are doing their education a great service i once had a sociology professor say that the reason for an education is to have more of a cosmopolitan mindset and not a parochial one and if we're going to live in a pluralistic democracy it's imperative so i think this work is just another turning of the wheel to make sure that now inclusivity is a part of that other topics that we have gone through uh go set a watchman just mercy looking at race looking at the criminal justice system uh all the light we cannot see going back into world war ii resistance in france through the eyes of young people through different cultures educated the great gatsby looking at the effects of class

062on development of people most recently dear america notes from an undocumented citizen jose antonio vargas allowed our students to examine immigration policy and not just policy but also of the human beings behind this those who have come to our country at young ages and what is their future are they forever to be uh termed illegal or is there a pathway and that's something that is before the voters constantly and happy to say that we're going to be exploring new ground this summer with a book called loving you big by my former colleague down county leah moore that is on tap this summer as we learn of the joys and the challenges of raising a child with disabilities so i think we have tried to use that as a stepping stone for this work and so

063we're happy to continue doing that as we move our more into our our slides again the english department uh taking the lead with doing a curriculum audit and doing their texts and very much with candy's assistants i'll turn over to her shortly that a lot of it centered or most of it centered on including bypoc texts into the traditional authors to update the examples and to diversify the characters and during a time this year as on an unannounced observation i'm watching a juxtaposition between macbeth and the joy luck club so again very simulating very engaging very deep and and very relevant so that work is definitely underway in addition to our professional development the high school level in addition to you know working at this through department levels we're also trying to do this at

064the school level where climate has become a large topic of conversation which is why we feel that unified basketball is so important to what we do and again even retooling student leadership to create a community event in jfest was probably one of the best we've ever had because it truly involved everyone so that's been our lens going forward there's more to share but i'll turn it over to candy and it's my pleasure to also introduce ava david blaco tonight thank you thank you so steven talked a little bit about the english audit uh the idea was to take a look at what we do already and to see when it is if i am a student of color or a transgendered student or a disabled student at what point in the curriculum do i see

065myself and i like to think um although i'm a staff developer now i just want to give a shout out to the english department because that's my department that that brings a lot of opportunity for us to make changes rather quickly because even though we might use an anchor text we can always use additional text to support it and so what we've noticed is that even in our consciousness around race equity and inclusion that it took a very long time for students who are marginalized to see themselves and in doing so what we decided to think about is how we could support uh anchor tax or what we call iconic tax by using bypoc texts to support them and stephen gave a great example of that in addition to that the english department also we

066work with bard college and we've been doing so for the last seven years um one of the things that we are engaging in every summer at the end of august is we do some uh we work with the institute for writing and thinking this year we're going to be doing uh anti-racist pedagogies and really what it does is support teachers in ways and having kids think about the way that we when we do when we engage in attacks how it is that we will address issues of race class et cetera um as far as that goes english and social studies work together we have 15 participants working with facing history and ourselves we've been doing that work for the last six years it's not easy work and it's a struggle um in terms of for

067a lot of reasons however what i'm excited about this year is that we're engaging in the possibility of working with facing in history teaching justice um they have a program that was is tied to boces that hopefully the high school will be able to work with 25 of their teachers to expand that work so we're leaning in in the social studies department to do that work as well where should i go next in terms of the structures for professional learning we started this year collegial coaching and so all of our on 10-year teachers are engaged in peer observations thinking about goals or that they would like to professional goals that will alter their teaching and that's a great opportunity and forum for us to engage in what our standards are around race equity inclusion as

068well um i think that was really evident i know that's not on the slide but here i go it was really evident in the 10-year presentations this year that not one person came to the table if you will and did not talk about an emphasis on race equity inclusion including scl the other thing that we're looking for it's not on the slide as well is this idea of addressing school climate uh steven mary um i believe andrew as well we've all talked about this idea of restorative practices you might know it as circling up uh well it's a great way to address school culture and we have the opportunity to train our staff at least at a tier one level uh so that we think that that would be a great place to begin to

069look at changing school culture and how we address some of the behaviors that we may not be so conscious of that the kids are so conscious of um i'm going to pause stephen you can fill in if you're like no i could just kind of echo what uh jeff was saying earlier is that you know there have been times at the high school we've had some teachable moments and it was time to bring the staff together to say that the things that we're concerned about uh can still be happening in real time and we have to continue to be vigilant about it and bring this message back to the classroom it's not a one and done it's not the incident is over we move on we just have to be to be conscious of it

070and you know the staff uh just like everyone else we're still trying to make sense of this and what is the direction to go and we all wrestle with okay what benchmarks would show us that we really are making progress so right now we are still kind of in inputs you know as as being the work right now but uh that that will continue i know we're going to talk about this a little bit later on but uh one of the things that uh is i'm really really proud of at the high school is spearheaded by david santiago who's our new enl teacher is that we have an iconography project where the enl students who are who for many years it felt like they were invisible are up creating a mural that will be uh

071somewhere in the school we haven't decided yet they're in conjunction with amy stockfield who's our art teacher um and we have a facing history in ourselves class some students from there they've been working they've drafted it and now they've started painting it and they're doing it much on their own time and so um we didn't want to do any previews we want you know that'll be a later thing but the idea is that it's just been amazing they're going into new york city for a youth summit where they're going to participate with other students who are workshopping around creating some kind of change in their school community and while we won't be presenting our mural because it won't be ready next year we will so that's pretty exciting as well and davis has done some

072nice work in our workshop wednesday pilot about this about the african diaspora which it was packed so kids were hungry for it and that's great that's great i think we should stop there thank you would you like to share here first of course so um i joined the erjc in eighth grade but prior to that i had joined the school district in the middle of seventh grade and one thing that was really stood out to me in my seventh grade experience particularly in ela was that i was writing emails to congratula the pencil company so they could lengthen their erasers and watching reading the outsiders i didn't feel represented in our ela classes as someone who's hispanic and someone who's a woman but fast forward to our ninth grade year we entered as dr ceciliano

073said with dear america and that provided me with so much insight on the american experience immigrant experience in america and later on we um delve into the joy luck club which again um discussed the immigrant experience and even in books where we didn't see so much of them again experienced or people of color like romeo and juliet my eli teacher went out of his way to um discuss mental health issues depression anxiety on the topic of romeo and juliet and which is amazing and i was really glad to have the opportunity to research for a period about mental health issues and how we can help other people manage it and get them the help that they need and um the value that i saw on this is not only having our immigrant students and our

074students of color represented in our curriculum but also having this opportunity for other students maybe don't relate to these experiences but to learn about them because education is the way for us to learn more and for us to address the disparities in our community so we can become more accepting overall and overall those are the two things i notice most and as for social studies we actually did a conjoined unit recently about researching inequalities and we were able to research inequalities that were of our choice so um with my group we researched healthcare disparities regarding economic status and i was able to see through my other peers presentations that there are so many things that we see beyond just our own classrooms and i know that other students in our school also researched disparities within

075our own classrooms regarding it yeah and um it's all been very eye-opening for me and i was i was given the opportunity to learn more about everything and other students were able to have that same opportunity as me and i think that that is one of the most important things that the aojc has accomplished educating other students and allowing our students of marginalized groups to relate and feel more comfortable within our environment david thank you again please allow us to just take a moment to say what you've provided is invaluable feedback and the engagement with literature with fiction with non-fiction you've brought to life what we've been hearing about which is this notion of the benefit of providing windows and mirrors and also speaking not only to the impact of events outside of our school

076district or what we've been referring to as teachable moments which we heard about a few moments ago at the middle school and through sophia's lens but but now here speaking about the impact to changes to the curriculum on your own ability to access and feel represented and engaged in your learning and your education and the impact the benefit to other students whether they connect to these experiences or not and really i mean in a nutshell you've just provided the argument for public school education that was lovely so thank you that was beautiful so well done we're really humbled by our students are you i'm i was trying to do the math when you mentioned your experience moving to the district are you a ninth grader now or a tenth grader i'm i'm a ninth grader

077ninth grader okay thank you lovely thank you so much for a few more weeks you're a rising 10th grader thank you terrific thank you to all of you thank you yeah so talk about uh professional learning and my colleagues candy wilmot and catherine grabosh are going to join me in this conversation so you know just naming some of the different things that we've done since we last met last june um of course last summer we had some summer offerings and candy and catherine both led many of those offerings so just to name a few of the things there was a 400 souls book study that occurred last summer with several teachers from the district that they both led also just juxtaposing by poc voices with iconic text which you've also heard about this evening that

078was a course that took place this summer and even our knowing our readers institute which was k-12 and had some external staff developers that also was a place where teachers were thinking about how to integrate some of this work especially identity work more representation in libraries and student voice in writing and choice and how important that is that was another place we did that through our superintendents conference day so this year we only had opportunities in september and november but certainly many options there we had some of the things and neil led one about uh environmental racism the history we didn't learn affirming identity in the early childhood classroom social justice standards and school-based scenarios and then in november catherine and candy together led why we must do the equity work um teaching hard history

079geneve patterson and allison porcelli led that jeff led something including all students in classroom instruction and there was also a self-paced course that was introduced andy and catherine put together for our teachers an introduction to race equity and inclusion so there were many many opportunities throughout the summer in superintendent's conference days through faculty meetings i know all of our principals have embedded some opportunities to talk about this work and give their faculties opportunities to think about what it looks like in their schools and classrooms but even with the external staff developers we work with as you can see their teachers college facing history and bard which were mentioned they're doing that work and internally with our internal group of staff developers as well and then we have so candy catherine and jocelyn are all our

080newly minted curriculum integration leaders um this year which has really been so wonderful to have them in those roles um for elementary middle and high school and they in addition to everything else that you've heard about this evening have created schoology groups and padlets so teachers have places to go if they're looking for resources book recommendations things like that but anything else you'd like to add about the work you've done with professional learning this year you're pretty much covered [Laughter] yeah i think what what's invaluable about having our internal staff developers and i'm so grateful to the board for continuing to support that is that this work is vulnerable work relationships matter in this work so although it's really helpful to have people from the outside come in and share resources with us and get

081us thinking in bigger picture ways the relationships that you all have built with our faculty are so critical to really doing this work that is it can at times be scary um you have to show your vulnerability and that's not comfortable at all but it's so important and urgent that we do this work so i just want to publicly say thank you for all of the work that you've done thank you and then our leaders are also working on their own learning so in addition we had a book study which we just concluded today actually for our admin council we've been reading unconscious bias in schools having discussions about that along the way um having conversations at our admin council meetings throughout the year and this summer and next year we'll be working with a

082consultant actually paul forbes who'll be helping us to do some work on unconscious bias which we're really excited about and i'll turn it over to neil thank you yeah thank you everyone great to be here tonight um and mary had just mentioned um some of the work that we had conducted today at admin council and that was part of the work today uh sitting in small groups discussing uh part of a chapter from unconscious bias in schools mary also mentioned how that work is vulnerable and without that vulnerability its um transformation of the self is is nearly impossible and and today was a really good testament to some of the work that we're doing in the district together and um the other titles here blindspot and the person you need to be have been other

083books that admin council has studied over the last couple of years take a pivot to hiring and retention practices and just before i do so i was able to see obviously all the slides before uh tonight but to hear all of your work and and just be able to really listen to it is really heartening and really as marjorie said i'm just quite beautiful and and thank you to uh ava and sophia for for really having that work come alive so thank you thank you all um when one of my first um concepts i think i started to think about was the um recommendations from erjc from from last june and i have it hanging on my my cork board and i've been i've thought about it a lot and some of the the hiring

084retention practices that we're building on here i do have to also say thank you to alice cronin who created a lot of really amazing systems and and we've just been able to build on her work and in ways that we are hoping that are impactful to what we're doing as an organization um so one of the elements i think i've said before here is the systematic broadening and deepening of hiring pools and traditionally as as my colleagues here know we use um a hiring platform called olas and it's very good for what it does but it also it doesn't send the signal right away that we are open to diverse candidates so we've made sure to begin to partner with uh other uh platforms that really channel uh bipac uh candidates to them one is

085a little bit local one is a little bit more regional at the bottom there you see looking forward i think some of the looking forward work is to extend those partnerships and to con to continue to increase the the diversity of those hiring pools and i will say we're always looking for impact right and this is just one anecdotal and it's not to be self-contradictory or anything like that but in a recent interview with the candidate for a vacancy um she had indicated that the reason she had applied she saw the posting on olas did not apply and then she saw the posting on the westchester alliance of black school educators and decided to apply because she said this says to her that it's a district that is committed to doing the work um and

086i just thought that was worth sharing with the board that's one person and we want to be able to be more systematic than that but i think it's just worth sharing we've also updated the human resources portion of the website um and really have centered a commitment to inclusion and equity just as we research candidates and and we check their references as you all know they they also look for artifacts on our website and we are as a district and often we hear in interviews that they have checked certain parts of our website and what we're up to and so we just wanted to make sure that the hr portion really reflected the values that we're trying to manifest throughout our interview stages and and candidates will go through uh multiple stages uh before uh

087they come to you at a board meeting uh we've embedded equity-based questions throughout the process and this might look like a question along the lines of like how have you centered dei work in whatever work that you're doing what was the impact how do you know and we're able to piece together through multiple stages of different questions of a candidate's uh commitment to to this work uh we've also focused and this is part retention as well and um some of the research that i've done on my own uh not only just in the educational world but also in the private world corporations is this uh notion of belonging and some some of the work that's being done with um the the sense of belonging for employees and what that means for retention and as you

088can imagine it's uh they're correlated the more belonging someone has to an organization the more likely they're going to retain and or they'll remain here and and be happy while they're here and one of the um initiatives that we began this year was to um to conduct a mid-year check-in with all first and second-year teachers as option to speak with me one-on-one and my questions were really gauged based on the researcher about jessica nordell who did some work on unintentional bias and what she found was that when you ask questions about belonging not asking do you belong but questions such as to what extent do your ideas matter and to what extent do you have an influence so we asked a series of questions that led to um engaging just qualitatively our first and second

089year teacher's sense of belonging and i'm happy to report there's a very strong sense of belonging um and the belonging leads to inclusion and also leads to feeling they're part of the organization and and thus remaining too so that's very important in the looking forward part all i'm going to come back to this idea because i think there's something to scale here a little bit as well um erjc membership on hiring committees and and that's also not singular we we've been um making sure as much as possible to invite members from septo and pto on our stakeholder interview committees when candidates arrive at that point and we also have a erj subgroup dedicated to this topic and i just want to thank the parents and student and administrator that are all part of that group

090it is a wonderful group that's providing a lot of fantastic feedback and very helpful about five months ago or so we instituted a video that we labeled hiring for excellence unconscious bia unconscious bias and um hiring for excellence in the katona-lewis borough school district and there's a couple themes that run throughout and the main theme is that we're human and therefore we have biases and it's not something to feel bad about but it's to bring the biases forward that you may have about candidates and it could be it could be racial bias it could be gender bias and it could be even things like a halo effect like something as simple as you might see a candidate come in with um a jacket of a team of your favorite sports team so you're more might

091be more likely to really enjoy what that candidate says and kind of um not make the what they say is uh and just assign i think a lot more halo to halo effect to that candidate and and take into what to account as as more positive in in and kind of also like in converse to that is the the horn effect right where someone comes in with a team that you don't like you might not like that candidate and they may be saying great things but you might hold that against them so there's all kinds of biases with all kinds of potential harm and the idea is to set the conditions design the conditions for all candidates to shine uh regardless of their background regardless of where they're from regardless of what the languages they

092speak and to ensure that the conditions are set for that i think looking forward i mentioned um the impact so it's it's thinking about what are the impact of some of these uh concepts that we've put forward and uh how do we improve upon those uh take a look at those impacts and improve upon it i also think just hearing some feedback from various stakeholders is the the video is solid but we also need time and those stakeholder interview committees to unpack the video to make sure there's a shared understanding of what we're actually talking about so that the candidates that we have are actually really able to shine and i think finally just looking forward and going back to that mid-year check-in is to scale that a little bit more to employees across the

093district um and not just teachers just to to everyone here it's not something that can be done for every single employee but just to get a better sense of belonging which is information and feedback back to us um to just be ever more inclusive and making sure that we are designing systems that are affirming and welcoming and a sense of belonging i think it's back to you right yes thank you actually back to ava and sofia to talk about opportunities for student equity leadership so both of you have discussed your experiences on erjc i'd like to say anything else about those but also you know on the slide there you see different opportunities that students might have um for their voices to impact this work um this is definitely a place i think where we

094know we have to grow even more um so student voice is student leadership to some extent um but i'll let evan sophia speak to some of their experiences with some of these clubs and opportunities okay so um i just want to start off with something that my mother told me once and it's that change happens in the rooms where decisions are being made so i want to give a thank you to everybody here that allowed me to speak and to my father who drove me here thanks dad so student government is the first place where i see student leadership opportunities being offered of course we have presidents and it's obvious that leadership is being involved but um the recent presidents that have been elected for sophomore year we're making pledges to um have mental health

095days for students and i think that a lot of that has come from this sort of heightened ability to feel like you can express and implement these new ideas comfortably and have them be accepted wildly by um your school environment um the the equity and racial justice committee is one of the biggest changes i feel in student equity leadership because it allowed students and parents to come together and share their experiences here in schools especially students of color and students who are queer and students who are women or transgender or of various sexual identities to me that's one of the most important things that um we have offered up so far and this committee has offered a unique platform for all these experiences to be implemented and i think that without the implemented attention of

096this committee i wouldn't be here today sharing my experiences along with sophia um saga so i'm a part of the school sexuality and gender alliance and i found that student leadership opportunities exist in the places where you don't always expect them so in a small like group in a classroom i felt so heard by my peers in my community and um of course congress campus congress seeing the paragraphs along the halls and being able to see that there are students who are encouraged by these opportunities to make change in our schools is something that i see is very valuable yeah at the middle school we also have a sexuality and gender alliance club i first went with one of my friends from ninth grade as an ally things have changed since then but um it

097was nice to be in a room full of kids who were queer who were allies and who you felt like understood which is the similar atmosphere that erj gives for um the equity in racial justice people who understand and who are willing to listen to what you have to say um i didn't run for student government this year but i was a home base leader and a lot of the presentations that we did for black history month women's history month i think next one we're doing one for aapi month and um it was it felt good to give my feedback on a lot of those presentations and hear the students in my home basis feedback as well we watched a video about a woman who was treated dish wow treated differently at a cash register

098because she was black and versus her um i want to say half sister or stepsister who was more light-skinned and i asked a lot of students in my home base i was like so why do you think she was treated differently and like what happened there and this one student was like oh her feelings got hurt and i was like can you elaborate on that please and so we've had a lot of good discussions about why things happen the effects that things have on people we also had a discussion about women's history month and everyone was very confused on who amelia earhart was versus helen keller so we had to make a difference we had to different them because they were like wait which one flew a plane i was like well you know amelia

099earhart flew a plane but it was good to hear like what they had to say because a lot of them are white students but i felt like even though a lot of the times they were playing games on their ipads during presentations i do think they were listening and i felt good to be like implementing that experience on them because maybe in their homes they didn't have the conversation like oh i saw a black woman at a cash register today and she got treated differently like that may not happen in their homes so even though home-based presentations aren't like the biggest change that i could do it did feel good that i was doing something and not just doing nothing and it also makes me happy that the iconography projects in the high school not

100there yet but it it gives me hope for when i do go to the high school that there will be chances for me to do things such as that that can continue to add to the feeling of community that i think we all would like to feel at a lot of times in our lives thank you both and just you know final piece in terms of student voice as you know we um have the senior surveys at the end of the alumni surveys and last year we started to add some questions about diversity equity and inclusion to see how students felt as seniors and then a year later reflecting on their experience so hopefully that's more data that we can look at in the fall and now i'd like to introduce samantha hirsch who's our

101parent member on erjc and who is a parent at increased miller elementary school yes hi thank you everyone um first of all eva and sophia i no words because um while i do have a kindergartner in the district if she grows up to be half as poised and caring um as you two i would be very very thankful so i that's all i'm going to say um so uh just to give you a little bit of background about myself i am the mother of a kindergartner and i've lived in this community now for seven years since i've moved here i have heard issues of racial injustices and hateful incidences and for a while didn't feel it was my place to get involved because i didn't have a child in the district and i focused my

102attention um in my workplace trying to increase equity and racial justice in that way but when my child entered the district and everything happening i felt it was time to speak up and be part of what i can to get involved in the community to really help create as much as a parent can a welcome and affirming environment for all students and i have um been so blown away and um affected by being part of the erjc i have i once had a grad school professor say you should you have two eyes two ears and a mouth and you should use them in that order so i have spent a lot of my time listening and observing and not speaking as much because i'm taking it all in and i will say that um as

103a first-time parent on the erjc too there's a lot of passion and a lot of care and it while people may have differences of opinions as to how to get to the goal they're all there for the same goal and it just reaffirms being in a community that i'm i'm happy to be part of um i'll go back to the uh the slideshow so i apologize for uh diverging a little bit um but one thing i will mention is that uh i selected so we were able to self-select subcommittee groups and i selected to be part of the parental or parent and community engagement group um again i just thought that as a parent and community member this was somewhere where i could help support the district and the community um we are in the

104process of developing a book study that i'm looking forward to the subcommittee is very excited we'll be reading um and i'll probably mess it up so i apologize the power of you changing you no the person you mean to be or that i mean completely different my bedtime reminder went off about a half hour ago so running on fumes um okay so we are going to bring that to the community and and mary and i have spoken about uh how to best do that so we can get as much as much involvement as possible and when to do that and i don't know if you wanna yeah we are hoping to start that before the end of the school year and then maybe continue over the summer so thinking about something happening in june and

105then maybe a meeting in july and one in august but we think it's a really good book in terms of being very inviting so if you're somebody who hasn't been reading or thinking about this a lot it's really welcoming and also i think really um instructive because it can help us to have those more difficult conversations with each other but also assuming good intent so as the title implies you know the person you mean to be so you meaning to have that good intent but also knowing that sometimes even though that's our intention our impact may be different so that we're excited about the possibility of doing that with the right book title the other topic that we have uh taught brought up and talked about is this idea of equity and diversity liaisons and

106this came through one of the subcommittee members brought up this notion and i experience it as well in new york city a lot of schools have a parent um i don't want to call them a consultant but sort of a liaison to help parents navigate the school the school system and bring them into the school community and we are talking about what that looks like in kotona lewisboro and acknowledging and you can tell me to stop talking because i don't want to speak for you no no just i think acknowledging how complicated it is you know so you if you have a person so i think a number of community members said they'd like to have a person to go to when something occurs and they want someone to feel really comfortable to be able

107to hear their story and feel comfortable and safe in that way and then we talked about you know what that would look like if you're a parent volunteer versus a school employee and there are complications either way right and there are issues around privacy and and all sorts of things so it's just something that's been such a topic of conversation in our subgroup we didn't want to not mention it but it's not something that's a fully fleshed out idea at this point either um so we just thought you know it's important to mention that that need has been heard and we're trying to figure out ways to meet that need and then recently we had the learning cafe on inclusion and samantha was in attendance as well yes um and i i will also say

108that i found it to be a really remarkable learning experience i um was dragging my feet because i was very tired and didn't really want to go um but left at about 9 15 walk into my car full of energy because of the conversations the dialogue the discussions that took place i was and i have to applaud every faculty member that was there the sheer number of faculty members that were present so far after hours show their dedication to this um and just being able to listen to different perspectives on what the word inclusion means what it means to them and i'm really looking forward to the next learning cafe regardless of the topic but it was fantastic and just um i think it was mentioned before but we had a family night for the

109families of our english language learners i'm at the middle and high school so catherine and candy were certainly instrumental stephen and jeff as well and our enl teachers davis santiago and halpa duarte so it was something we hope to continue and thinking about more ways and again you know approaching all of this with great humility these are some things but i think there's certainly acknowledgement that we need to do much more to engage the community in this conversation and as samantha mentioned there were on erj this year we moved into action groups so just on the slide you'll see several of those action groups we were discussing the parent and community engagement there were several others one related to the school environment and as you can see the extracurricular programming for students students and staff

110learning and as you mentioned the participation on hiring committees so with that i will turn it back to andrew and before you do if i can just pause to say samantha thank you for joining us and for introducing yourself to us and for your courage and commitment as a parent of a kindergartner to become involved in a district-wide committee and really for helping us to again understand the impact to you and i'm sure to others as parents of this opportunity to participate in the committee i mean really that parent perspective is invaluable and i'm sure it is way past everybody's bedtime and thank you so much for sticking it out to be with us tonight and for sharing that parent perspective that's truly invaluable feedback super helpful thank you very much now to you thanks

111marjorie so i'm going to be mindful of the late hour particularly for our students but also for my colleagues who are out there i'm going to talk fast uh we this is the home stretch of the presentation uh and and we're kind of coming full circle here we started with the call to action from new york state and that sense of urgency from new york state and we know that in in making change in an organization uh the message has to come from all levels of the organization and this is really the opportunity for the board of education to send its own message to the community about the importance of this work and that's why we have a policy the slide that's in front of you spells out the fact that new york state school

112boards association sends out a sample policy for boards to look at our board looked carefully at that sample policy was inspired by it in some ways and drafted its own version of a policy that you're going to hear about in just a moment now erjc had an opportunity to provide feedback and tonight is the first of three readings so for those who are not familiar with the process this is like a first draft we we read it tonight we're actually gonna i'm gonna read it out loud in a moment we don't always take that step but our subcommittee felt it was important because of the nature of this particular policy to do that there's an opportunity for questions and discussion it comes back for a second reading and then when it comes back for a

113third reading hopefully it's ready to be adopted and becomes uh the policy of this district so here is the draft policy for tunnel spur on diversity equity and inclusion in education the kotona lowsper school district board of ed believes that the most diverse and inclusive environment is the most effective and equitable learning environment for all students as a result the board of education is committed to providing a positive safe welcoming learning environment in which all students are free from discrimination and benefit from inclusive practices and a shared commitment to recognize understand and systematically address disparate educational experiences and student outcomes where they may exist and that should have read systematically not systematically in furtherance of the board of education's commitment to fostering an inclusive culture equitable allocation of resources and the elimination of barriers to

114education the superintendent of schools or designees shall engage in ongoing examination and continue continual improvement of the learning environment and instructional materials to ensure equitable access inclusive practices and a welcoming environment for all students staff parents and community members develop individual and organizational knowledge skills practices to create a culturally responsive and affirming environment in which all students have opportunity to reach their fullest potential prioritize understanding and addressing biases barriers and disparities that may impede a student's ability to reach their fullest potential review district policies and practices to ensure equity and access for all students with an intentional focus on vulnerable and marginalized populations design hiring practices that work towards diversifying the applicant pool for all district vacancies and implement anti-bias protocols in the hiring process include budgetary support for this policy including professional development staffing

115curriculum resources and programmatic experiences the superintendent or designees will work to ensure the curriculum instructional materials and practices and extracurricular programs reflect the district's commitment to diversity equity and inclusion educational materials and experiences should reflect a range of perspectives and experiences including those of historically underrepresented groups the superintendent will create practices to implement this policy and will report on progress to the board of education at least annually so that is the first draft that brings us towards the close of tonight's presentation there's opportunity for the board to ask questions which could also be questions about uh this policy but the board also has two more meetings of which to provide feedback uh i want to send my thank you to everybody who shared with us tonight we so appreciate you all being here um i

116do want to go back to what i said at the beginning it sounded like a lot and there is a lot going on and yet still we know there's much more to be done we know that in order for every child and every family and every staff member in the district to feel welcome included the work has to continue so i want to express my appreciation but go back to that word humility and with that i will be quiet and we invite questions thoughts from my board thank you thank you and again please allow us to just take a step back and say thank you to each and every one of you who presented who talked with us this evening and who is bringing just tremendous integrity sensitivity thoughtfulness caring and compassion to this work

117and to our students there was a moment i think when you were speaking neil about conditions being set for candidates to shine and really what i'm hearing throughout from each and every voice is that we are dedicated to creating conditions for each and every student to shine as well and we thank you for really bringing this work to life through every dimension of administrative leadership teacher leadership student and parent leadership truly inspirational and so cohesive and beautifully developed as a presentation that really enabled us to see so much of this important work in action that has been ongoing for quite some time and and yet for not all that long systematically and to think that you've been able to bring us to this point already is really um a testament to your dedication and leadership

118and um we thank you i will gladly open up the floor to my colleagues for comments and questions i see we've got a microphone and a panel in action thank you i love that um and the floor is yours please list i'll start um again recognizing that it is getting quite late i want to just thank ava and sophia um for coming tonight i really appreciate it it's always nice to hear students at the board meetings and um i i really appreciate hearing what you said i i have been thinking a lot about the um the incidents at middle school and it does occur to me you know hearing about all of this work and the change in the libraries and everything like that that change always you know drags backlash along with it and

119um and to think that that we're finding a way to turn it into a teachable moment um i think is is really what we should be doing in education and and i think that that kind of really struck me um i i the books and changing the books and all of the interesting new texts that are finding their way to our students my freshman son was reading the joy luck club the other day and i thought wow how amazing an experience for him to see the world from a completely different perspective and i really feel very strongly that it is one way to develop empathy and understanding and curiosity about the world and other people that is hard to establish anywhere else so i just want to say i i'm so very excited about the

120books and especially the ones we saw and that kind of takes me over to the parent and community engagement section of the erjc i'm actually serving with sophia on the school environment part but for parent and community engagement as both a parent and a member of the board of education all of the resources um that are available would be so interesting i think to the entire community and i think it would really kind of deepen the work both in the school and out of the school if if that's also happening at home so sharing those resources would be something that i would really value and then my very last thought i promise is at the community center there is a program that they use that i could maybe um find the person to talk to

121about it but it's a trusted other program and it is to help people who may be navigating or struggling to navigate the schools if there's a language barrier or if they're just new to the community and don't know what resources are available to them and to their children to um give them somebody who is familiar with it to to really guide them through the process and i think that it's a good model but i just want to say again thank you so much and um i am finished now thank you liz thank you yeah please rory so i i won't repeat everything that many of us have said already because it is kind of getting late but very very much appreciation to all the presenters in particular ava and sophie and samantha thank you very

122very much it was really compelling what you had to say um and i really appreciated andrew's sort of summary that we started with a call to action clearly there's been a lot of good work to be done but we recognize that we're not finished and we probably we never will be finished um it sort of struck me that we've made progress and we know there's more progress to be made but there's not an easy way to measure how you've made progress and with the continued incidents at both the middle school and the high school and i kind of wonder are we are we chasing these issues out of the corn field like are there you know people lurking there that don't share this common culture that we're building um and is it because we're providing

123a platform now to expose this as an issue in the community that we're seeing maybe a little uptick in these types of things but that's not my question my question really is around measurement and how do we know we're being successful and a year from now how will we be able to say yeah you know we've achieved something good and perhaps in our hiring practices that may be more evident in certain aspects of this um but i just wonder is there some yardstick by which we can measure how we're how we're trending are we doing a great job a year from now or we still you know not not move the needle very much [Music] i mean i think i don't know if you're asking them but i just think i think a year is

124like a really short window right yeah right right yeah yeah this question is around benchmarking metrics and data to support it does anyone from the buildings want to comment on that from your experience or from our administration i think this is why i take great interest in the senior survey and i really would like to continue the relationship with challenge success i think they've given us a lot of tools to work with uh mary and i were just in boston recently uh learning what do next steps look like uh different programs and it was fascinating and also very reassuring to hear schools from california florida new jersey all saying the same things we're all wrestling with the same things we have the same issues the same concerns and sometimes even the same problem so i

125think those are probably two things off the bat yeah that's really helpful i think also some of our best metrics are our students right so they're the ones that are going to be able to tell us whether or not the work that we're doing is impactful and i think at the same time equity work is very hard to measure because you not everybody's coming in on the same level right so there's not and there really is no leveling to equity work but you come in at different places you start with different information and so i think the more we can talk with our students and reflect with them and get feedback from them i think the easier it will be to see that at least we're moving in the right direction yeah and hopefully that

126is reflected in in the senior surveys right we should see it there but like it does make sense to maybe find a find a way to have the students communicate back as they have been tonight but but in other forms as well that's good thank you if i can just add to that and just thinking again about some of the words that you mentioned regarding the hr dimension but that for whatever reason just really struck me as questions that could be helpful to students when we think about sel and the mental health crisis when you're talking about belonging and hearing you speak about you know that the students are our best barometer of whether the work is taking hold and having impact and you know i don't know how frequently we really ask our students

127in our classrooms are you feeling that you belong you know do you feel that your ideas matter in this classroom um or however else you ask the questions you had several of them and so in any case that just struck me as another opportunity to think not only about how we interview or prepare our environment for candidates but also how we speak with and question and prepare our environment for students on a routine basis you know can i just add something to that i mentioned before we talked about restorative practices and this idea of circling up and i think what it does is it provides students an opportunity you know school is really focused on what kids are learning and teachers are focused on that and kids are focused on that what restorative practices offers

128is an opportunity for kids to talk about the experience of school and so that's where the information is going to be that's where the data is going to lie is in those conversations about their experience in school and so that becomes a survey in every single class where kids get to say this happened and you know having been a classroom teacher in the high school for a long time the kids know a lot more than the adults know and it's an opportunity for us to be a part of that conversation so that you know we can actually be proactive sometimes rather than reactive because they can kind of tell us what's brewing thank you for connecting those dots thank you i'll table my question but i can't help but make comments um sophia and ava

129i mean we've all said it over i'd like to i'd like to point out they did this without notes which besides being remarkable sort of demonstrates their passion and they're you know they're able to just say things because this is what they really really feel i just um i certainly would have been able to do it when i was your age i don't understand probably would have understood half the words you used when i was your age but it's just it's remarkable what i found very interesting very early on we there was talk about um acknowledging differences like in the elementary school and calling attention to them and it made me remember back in my day um the zeitgeist was don't notice differences we're all the same and you know that's the difference that we've

130been learning about between equality and equity um i think it's so that's like a key difference i think that's happened over time and then finally i smile to myself and i feel great when uh somebody's presenting to us and they're talking about benchmarks and how they're going to measure things i think that's fantastic but overall this was um very encouraging and uh just very impressive thank you bill please so um i have a question but i just want to try it um i just want to tie to it that this has been one of my most defining experiences on the erjc um being able to sit here with people and discuss this and of course being able to hear sophia talk about her experiences as well and um that leads to my question how do

131we plan to give students um this platform discuss their experiences in classes beyond just thank you for the question how do we plan to build other opportunities for students to share their experiences beyond this forum and i think that's you know the work we need to do right to build that into every classroom so that every student feels seen and heard and represented but it's it's hard work so we need you to push us to continue to try and to try harder and to share your ideas there may be some ways you know you're thinking about that we're not thinking about so it's so helpful to have student voice in this conversation if i get a correct answer but well ava i'd like to explore with you ways for yourself and your peers to address

132the faculty and there are ways that we can do that hopefully that you're comfortable doing and you know we've been having this laying the groundwork for we need to hear more from students whether it's at the end of the unit tell me what you liked tell me what worked what didn't that's information we need so i think that's something that uh let's talk some more about that thank you you can also join campus congress student life i happen to be the advisor i think sophia had something she wanted to ask yeah i just wanted to add something to what ava and what ms schiff said with the sel lessons and trying to tie that into student experiences i think especially in eighth grade at least i don't know what it's like in the high school

133yet but um during the sel lessons they're often an excuse to not do earth science so i think kids usually see it as a way out instead of a learning experience and a lot of the time from what i've seen and what i've experienced just in my own head is that when you see like experiences of like mental health and like feeling like you don't belong and feeling like there might be something like off you often want to say no i don't feel like that that's someone else this doesn't matter i'm going to play tetris on my macbook instead which we've all been guilty of at one point but i think using student experiences to propel the process forward and continuing to evolve the sel lessons along with just trying to make like a space

134for students to say how they feel because also sharing student experiences not everyone gets the chance that eve and i have had here today and this also comes back to having students join erjc i was talking about this with miss ford how it's hard to get students especially at this age to take time out of their day to go on a zoom with a bunch of adults to talk about uncomfortable topics so i think in sel lessons often i think we just need to i don't know how to explain it but we need to be mindful that a lot of kids might deny it but even though it seems like they don't want to say anything they are thinking about it and they are processing it in their own way whether it's like is this

135towards me am i like this or oh i think i know a person who might be like this and also what ava said about student experiences a lot of times students have trouble talking to guidance counselors and like the uh psychological helpers that we have at the schools because a student quite often is like well they wouldn't understand they're an adult and they're older than me and they grew up at a different time and though a lot of things are different now than they were back when the teachers were students there are a lot of similarities so i think what we need to do is bridge the gap between um faculty and like staff experiences and kind of like meld them with student experiences so that teachers can say hey i went through something similar

136i'm here for you because a lot of times they'll say like you can always go down to the guidance counselor's office or someone like that but students often don't want to because they may perceive it as like being weak and like giving in and being like oh well i'm actually going to talk about how i feel for once in my life and there's a lot of uh we're gonna go back to the word vulnerability there and that's very difficult for adolescents and students to do so i think the more that we can like bridge the gap and say we hear you we see you and we understand you the more like this this is a process but the more comfortable students may feel talking to adults about their experiences i think what you've just said

137is so insightful and really sophisticated this idea that you can't just necessarily expect to ask a simple question and get a straightforward answer from an adolescent who might be feeling something that really does need to be explored and seen and recognized so that sort of triangulation and also this notion of bridging the gap between faculty administration and students i think that's really insightful and one note of hopefulness that i think we can share is that i know the term school culture was used before and that's a chapter in this book this unconscious bias in schools and i really think a key component to what you've just articulated as really pretty visionary if i can use that word um i think that's what they're talking about in part in this book that is being explored and

138embraced by our district leaders so thank you for again you know bringing to life something that i think really there's real urgency around what you just said and it has to be um it's nuanced it's pretty nuanced work and sophisticated and and we can't just um roll things out in front of our eighth graders and expect that it's going to work they're a sophisticated crowd yeah thank you i hope these girls think about these ladies think about running for student representative of the board of ed in the next couple of years we would love to see you guys back here you will continue to push us um every time we meet thank you now other comments or questions were you gonna say something a minute ago no okay anything else ilana yes please um sort

139of building on what ava was saying i what i heard in today's presentation was how much this is trying to filter throughout the entire school community at all different levels and that it's not being just relegated to one committee but really trying to kind of go across and i think your question ava we're just talking about so if you have how to bring that into the classroom and bring it into everyday experiences is something i'm hearing on everybody's mind and i'm glad that that's kind of in the forefront i was also particularly interested in hearing more at some point as after the summer perhaps on the restorative practices and the circling up and how that might get implemented and what that would look like and how that might seed further change and further feedback mechanisms

140for understanding what's working what's not working and how we want to kind of shift culture to be even more welcoming and inclusive speaking of summer if i can just ask a small clarification regarding the the shared read around the person you mean to be i think this is for samantha and mary who discussed this is this envisioned to be a shared read from members of the erjc or a community-wide community for everybody okay so we're trying to figure out the logistics where this might happen and how we might do it right um but maybe you know pilot something over the summer and then you know see how that goes and maybe try it again in the fall so we can reach more people but not to be confused with the community read from the high

141school two different two different things no this is more from a place of self-interest invitations i'm really excited about the effort that we're making towards thinking about inclusion and that the activities and practices of inclusion lead to that feeling of belonging and they're different things inclusivity is a is a action and it's a thoughtfulness and it's a respect for people's words and belonging is the feeling that that will create and i'm really hopeful that we can create that feeling of belonging for our students our staff and our faculty so just thank you very much for what you're doing i i can see you can see the wheels turning and that's really exciting there are no further comments we thank you thank you so much everybody thank you ladies that was really fantastic thank you oh

142yeah i'm sure i've i know you know oh we see you terrence bye terence oh wow great thank you so much for your patience welcome lisa thank you for joining us nice to see you and we're sorry that it got to be so late we're very much looking forward to hearing your presentation regarding code of conduct and then our district safety plan and our wellness presentation and i will gladly turn it over to whomever is going to kick it off is that to know we have a really tough it's tough to follow that so bear with us this is a little bit more nuts and bolts than um the great conversation that we just had so with that um lisa hurley is the school business administrator she's been working um hard with a bunch of

143our different uh groups and um we're going to review the district-wide safety plan lisa so thank you for having me here tonight it's nice to be here in person last year i presented over zoom so it's nice to be here in person with you all and so i'm here tonight to present our annual safety district safety plan it's this is a mandated public hearing that is required by project save legislation creating and maintaining a safe learning environment is everybody's business project save was enacted in the year 2000 after the result of a tragic event that happened to columbine hosp high school in 1999 project save recognizes that learning cannot take place in an unsafe environment parents want to be assured that their children are in a safe place save act requires school districts to define

144how school districts will respond to acts of violence in other disasters through prevention intervention and emergency management the district wise safety plan as required by safe law has been established to provide for a safe healthy and secure in the security of both students and staff and allow for input from the entire community we held an annual review of this plan at the end of april i'd like to take this opportunity to thank the members of this committee who contributed to this annual safety plan review this included a school clinician a school resource officer members of the district crisis team building level administrators building level crisis team members district level administrators as well as representatives from the vista fire department katona fire department the town of bedford as well as representation from the bedford police department

145emergencies in schools are defined as undesirable events that occur and have the potential to cause injury or illness to members of our school community or disrupt the orderly educational process they can be acts of bullying or harassment or natural or manmade events emergency management is the discipline of dealing with and avoiding risk knowing what to do can be the difference between stability and upheaval the benefits of being proactive are mitigating student and staff risk minimizing and avoiding interruption of instructional time as well as decreasing liability and costs for repairs our district-wide safety plan not only meets this mandate but is but it provides useful information to help minimize the effects of emergencies and is designed to protect against harm and mitigate damages the district-by plan is filed with sed and our local police departments once

146the board has adopted it at the annual reorganization meeting in july some other mandates that project safe implemented our employee training at the beginning of every school year with mandated mental health components district and building level safety teams which meet on a regular basis as well as required drills and different types of drills that are practiced each year last year we had an amendment to education law that required districts to amend and adopt the continuation of operations plan this year we updated our incident command system hierarchy to include mary as an alternate alternate incident commander as well as neil as a public information officer we changed the title of this role from chief of operations to public information officer to be in line with the national incident management system also called nims further we added

147representation from each building by adding the assistant principles to our district emergency response and safety team so in summary schools must remain a safe place and katona lewisborough is committed to providing a safe and supportive environment by having such tools as a safety plan like to take this opportunity to clarify any questions or open it up to discussion thank you very much we really appreciate the process and the opportunity to revisit any new information or changes thank you for the presentation are there clarifying questions or overarching conceptual questions we had a bigger change last year as was referenced with the requirement to add the incident continuation of um operations piece um and it sounds like this year maybe some smaller adjustments please evan a little question um in in the compilation of this i noticed

148that lewisborough wasn't represented in the groups that were consulted is that i assume they're still part of the emergency management plan even though they weren't in this exactly they're a part of it it's just that they they could not attend the meeting they all are invited so and the sro this year are we partially funding the sro with lewisboro now or that's just district money but the sro works for the town of lewisboro now am i right about that so if the sro was what was there the talents were in that regard was represented i would think right yeah well and vista is a hamlet of lewis bro so you know the in terms of the fire department representation at least you have three volunteer fire departments within lewisboro goldensburg the stone house salem and

149once the plan is adopted at the reorg meeting we will send the plan to the to louisville pd to bedford pd we're required to and then the district are the building level plans once those are approved and that's uh late summer early fall those also get sent to the different police departments i just have one observation really more than anything um i took a look at the plan for july 1st and there's still some gaps there i see we don't have a board representative for example or some teacher representatives that are not there i will those be assigned i guess before july 1st uh we will look into filling those um at times sometimes it's hard to get a different representation but we will certainly open that up too there is no board of ed

150representation at the moment right and currently no um and the parents know but we can discuss that and open that up and if anybody would like to represent feel free to call lisa or myself get you on board thank you any other comments or observations if not then we can move on to our student wellness presentation thank you lisa thank you danelle lisa is also going to take the lead on this as well great and feel free to ask any questions but i will try to go through quickly [Laughter] so we are here tonight to talk about the student wellness policy and why are we reviewing this tonight it's just that it is part of our own policy thank you um it's required by the state education department as well as the usda that every

151three years that we review our child nutrition program although just having come through a year hybrid learning another of shutdown we thought it would make the most sense to focus on the required components of this policy but our plan is in three years to present a more comprehensive review policies such as this one were adopted at a time when there was an intentional focus on physical wellness including nutrition and physical activity social emotional wellness and student mental health are among our highest priorities they are not however the subjects of this particular policy our current wellness policy was adopted in may of 2018 and has been implemented district-wide components of this policy include information on how our usd regulated child nutrition program offers complete nutritious meals to all students guidance on food and nutrition standards as

152they relate to fundraising activities and class celebrations education around and promotion of healthy behaviors related to nutrition physical activity including physical education recession and in the classroom as well as monitoring and review our program conforms to all usda and nysed requirements our lunch menus are evaluated for variety quality and conformity to the required components of fruits vegetables meat to meet alternative and whole grains offered at each meal at both elementary and secondary levels students are required to select a fruit and or vegetable at each meal only usda approved a la carte items are offered at each serving line all healthy snack items must be pre-approved by the district and via the usda's smart snack calculator to ensure its ability to be offered training of all child nutrition staff members is conducted prior to and during

153the year to ensure the latest regulations are implemented in an effort to maintain the wellness policy and the integrity of our child nutrition program this includes airmark staff as well as klsd staff who are involved in the school lunch program state education department monitors via the administrative review to ensure compliance once every three years the last one was done in 2018 2018-19 and we are currently under review this year additional monitoring is performed internally every year this is through a self-review process that is done in consultation with our food service consultant that ensures that usda and contractual compliance monthly food and wellness meetings are conducted to enlist suggestions and share comments with the committee members the monthly meeting schedule is posted on our food service webpage this is a direct line of communication to our

154food service director and provides helpful input from all regarding our child nutrition program and surveys are being conducted and compiled this mission kl's klsd works with consultant to be sure that our policy and food service programs are in compliance with both sed and usda regulations earlier this spring the new york state wellness policy assessment tool was shared with each of our building principals they were asked to review the assessment and provide comments and feedback topics covered under this assessment were nutrition education physical activity nutrition program and school meals competitive food as well as wellness promotion and marketing [Music] during shutdown free-to-go meals were available for all students thousands of free meals were collected at john jay high school and some meals were delivered nutritious school lunch has been available free of charge to all students

155since the pandemic began and will continue to be free through june 30th of since september of 2020 excuse me september of 2020 we have served over 336 000 free meals while we're unsure if free meals will continue for next year for the 22-23 school year eligible families can apply for free and reduced lunch our student wellness policy is functioning as designed and is benefiting the health and well-being of our students we look forward to continuing our mission and enhancing our student our child nutrition program again i open up two questions sir thank you welcome and thank you for providing some visibility into the number of meals the free meals that have been provided since the onset of the pandemic that's really terrific thank you questions or comments about where we are in this triannial review

156thank you for the update and for taking the time to put the presentation together welcome if i can do that i think that um i remember in 2018 when the wellness policy was implemented and there was always i think we had some policy in the district anyway but i do think that at least i noticed that within like the pto uh planning um that it is something that we do talk about like and it and it's definitely like the community is conscious of um the priority to be thinking about like what is an alternative that we can have and not just having like only things that are high in fat and sugar and um you know i think catherine and i have been involved in a couple different things over the years in the schools

157and i i mean i think nice to see that sort of this mandated policy is actually having an impact beyond just sort of like meeting the requirement i do think it's really um changing how people think about celebratory events and you know what what is fun for kids and healthy for kids and i think it's opportunities for our children to you know just enjoy food even if it's not sugar-laden and fat-laden and i think that's terrific i take the opportunity to say we've we've talked quite a lot um in the last couple years about the incredible shifts that the school district had to make to continue providing instruction through the pandemic this is an opportunity really actually to say that also behind the scenes lisa endanelle and our food service director at aramark were doing

158an enormous amount of work to make sure that food was being continued to deliver both as lisa mentioned during the shutdown was the enormous amount of work of figuring out how to get those meals prepared every day and out in front of the schools and i think it was two days a week and getting picked up and then and then once we reopened everything was different about how lunch was provided and continues to this day in some ways and that was a tremendous amount of behind the scenes work to make that happen uh thank you to both of you thank you to andy at aramark and it was just as big a transition as anything else that happened in the district thank you very much for taking the opportunity and thank you thank you for

159the reminder and helping us to envision that transformation of you know serving lunch to go for all of our students um that's an enormous shift and as you point out a shift that continues to have repercussions for how meals are served so thank you very much for leaving that yeah please elana building on that i was curious if um do you have a sense of since the meals have become free if there's been more usage of the school lunch yes yes just um there it has been it's you know this year last year since we were hybrid it's a little more difficult to tell but this year yes there has been a higher um usage and you know it was it's a little bit again difficult to measure um because we had just until even

160recently this the elementary students as i'm sure you know were pre-ordering their meals so it was just a little different but um it is a there is a higher number of students who are participating in the program yeah i think i mean i can tell you at least for my own like older children they just have two lunches every day you know i mean it used to be they would bring a lunch and now they're like oh you know i'll have a second lunch so he's coming home with chicken rice and vegetables he's like it's terrific okay yeah no and i mean maybe some kids that didn't eat like tried the school lunch because they have sort of that favorite misnomer of like oh school food is bad or whatever or saying like oh school

161food's pretty good you know yeah i mean be curious it'd be interesting to see the numbers kind of over time at some point when we're thinking about this not what they're required but just if there was an increase how much where how does that correlate also to just um what we know of need in the district versus like is it is it you know is it just people using it what does it mean and and also you know the question of i think well-fed kids have better educational outcomes probably too right so regardless of the need but just to think about why that might is it just like why why there's more usage now do you need anything from us to sort of complete the box for the triennial review thank you anything for me

162we appreciate being apprised and thank you for helping us fulfill our responsibility to remain apprised of these policies and how they evolve as plans thank you thank you very much lisa have a great night thank you all right moving along we don't appear to have any public comment so i'm going to move us forward to our consent agenda where i'm not aware of anything that we would want to vote on separately i do think we might just want to pause for a moment for a couple of comments perhaps um but is anybody waiting to vote separately on an item that needs to be pulled okay if not would somebody like to move the consent agenda moved by rory seconded by catherine and i did just want to briefly pause as we are about to vote

163on a resolution to accept the results the official results of the election to express our gratitude to kim monson who has worked day night weekend saturday [Applause] most attention to detail it is a team effort thank you well thank you they are they're there all day thank you kim doesn't have a microphone so i'm going to repeat it was a team effort thank you to the inspectors and everybody was there all day and that you're very grateful to your team and and we really appreciate your leadership of that team and your commitment to the kotona lewisboro community and helping us over the finish line so well done and thank you very much we really appreciate it thank you um again thank you to our community for supporting our budget and our second proposition and i'm

164not aware of any other comments or questions at this time so i think we can vote on the consent agenda all in favor please say aye aye wonderful thank you so much i just say marjorie i know um i'm sorry that i didn't pause for no no no that's fine i'm slow um just just to point out that we had that first reading of the policy it's a little bit unusual it came at the end of a presentation and it was a lengthy presentation i could imagine that perhaps people don't want to add on questions and comments about a policy but it'll come back for a second reading and if people think about comments or questions in between we would welcome them at the next meeting thanks for the reminder can i just on that

165topic are we replacing an existing policy or is that a fresh policy brand new policy interesting okay we didn't have any any such wording or do we need to update any other policies that's a good question there is one footnote at the bottom of this draft policy that references another nasa policy we have non-discrimination dignity for all students act policy which is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary this summer and we have other we have a non-discrimination policy which is a required policy this policy that we're looking at tonight is not a required policy yet uh it's a suggested policy by state wonderful thank you wonderful okay great thank you then we're ready to move on to recognition of some generous gifts and donations this is item 14.01 would somebody like to move this resolution

166moved by julia seconded by liz thank you we have box tops for education in the amount of 59 earmarked for john jay middle school from our metal pond pto 3976.36 this is for the purchase of steel blackboards flex backboards pardon me athletic backboards flex goals and pull pads for basketball hoops o m is going to generously install um also from the metal pond pto for classroom books 5799.66 oh actually for classroom teachers from from classes to the classrooms i'm a little confused on this one okay it's a very generous donation for our classroom teachers from the meadow pond pto so thank you very much did that sound right and then from henry muschio this is a tasco 7te-5 telescope valued at 200 being donated to the john jay high school science department so thank you

167so very much for these generous gifts and donations there's no further comment or question we can vote to accept them all in favor please say aye aye 7-0 terrific this brings us to some more dialogue and discussion if there is any remaining board dialogue and discussion here as we approach 10 o'clock at night and if not then we can look ahead to future meetings there aren't too many left for the board of education we're looking ahead to june the board of ed will next meet on thursday june 2nd at 7 30 here in the library and then again on thursday june 16th here in the library and then we've got our reorg meeting where the board will kind of reconstitute itself on thursday july 7th 2022 in between now and all of those meetings we

168have a finance committee meeting monday may 23rd at 7 00 p.m audit committee wednesday may 25th at 7 o'clock p.m facilities wednesday june 1st at 7 o'clock p.m sustainability friday june 3rd at 8 15 a.m uh policy friday june 10th at 9 00 am and facilities again on wednesday june 22nd at 7 pm did we miss anything while we're looking ahead to all of these meetings we did just also want to thank the administration for all of those budget road shows that occurred between the last board meeting and this meeting some of them had occurred prior to the last board meeting but then you continue to do others and they were really terrific we captured some good questions from community members we so appreciated your representation we had great representation from the board it became

169really nice opportunity for conversation with those community members and pto leaders who were in attendance so thank you for those meetings also we've had a lot of meetings and a lot of time and thought so thank you and um i think this brings us to 17.01 so i'd like to make a motion to adjourn back into executive session for some board development if i could have a second please seconded by bill thank you all in favor please say aye aye 7-0 thank you so much wonderful presentations thank you good night