001good evening everybody so nice to see all of you welcome back happy new year katona lewisborough it is my pleasure to make a motion to return to public session seconded by rory thank you so much all in favor please say aye aye aye wonderful would everybody please join us for the pledge of allegiance pledge allegiance terrific thank you so much we really appreciate seeing so many members of our community and tonight we are joined by faculty members who are going to talk with us and share some literacy updates and highlights across the district we'll have an opportunity to hear an update and to speak about the impact of covid and the ongoing pandemic in our schools and also to talk about some exciting work coming out of a facilities subcommittee so we have a great
002meeting lined up and we're very much looking forward to it before we turn our attention to those discussions and presentations we will first look forward to hearing from our student board of education member welcome back abigail it's great to see you and if you're ready we would love to hear your report so throughout the months of january and december students have participated in many school events from winter sports games to winter wonderland and we're getting to have a lot of fun in school outside of academics learning is in full swing as we approach the halfway mark of the 2021-2022 school year so in campus congress over the last two months we have been working to make several changes in our school at one meeting we discussed learning through kovid suggesting things that we wanted to
003let go continue and begin workshop wednesdays will be held throughout the month of february for seniors to attend workshops on mental health sustainability relationships money management and technology and our most recent meeting was unfortunately cancelled due to snow but we will continue committee meetings in the next month so at john jay high school the art show opened on december 17th for students to display the art projects they've been working on in all art classes from painting to ceramics the fall drama two gentlemen of verona was presented december 17th 18th by the john jay theater workshop jazz band concert band symphonic band and wind ensemble performed january 11th for their families to watch the choir and orchestra concerts were held january 20th and students had fun making gingerbread houses and watching the ice sculpture on december
00421st for winter wonderland all the gingerbread houses were donated to the community center amnesty international club and the sophomore class sold candy grams the week prior to winter break to celebrate the holidays and raise money for their clubs and the class and winter sports started at the beginning of december and you can check the athletics calendar to see what games are coming up i know there's a bunch of basketball and wrestling at john jay middle school they also held their fall drama clue december 2nd 3rd and 4th and their first trimester came to an end on december 7th modified sports began at the beginning of december and they also have many games going on the orchestra concert was january 10th and the choir concert was january 19th at increase miller on december 17th 5th graders
005enjoyed a pizza party and scavenger hunt that revealed a secret message from around their school and students participated in a drum circle during music class taking turns leading the class in rhythm this helped communication collaboration and connection as they made music with their friends at katona elementary school they held their annual holiday boutique on saturday december 4th they had holiday share rap night um december 16th and the annual fifth grade first staff volleyball game was held december 23rd right before we left for break at meadow pond the gift of giving was held december 1st max's secret gift shop was opened december 7th and 9th and lastly all the colors we are is a book by katie kissinger and it was read to kindergarteners as they created self-portraits and learned about their similar similarities and differences
006terrific thank you so much thank you were you finished i want to make sure you are finished we so appreciate hearing about all of these wonderful activities that are going on across the district we feel so grateful that so many in-person activities have remained underway even throughout this most difficult month or period of time since we last met to today and thank you for capturing all of that activity with respect to our in-person musical productions um all of our musicians our student actors and performers our artists our athletes um you know students are really meaningfully engaged in so many activities and it's a pleasure to hear about them so thank you for being so comprehensive we really appreciate that and we're excited to hear about these workshop wednesdays that are brand new so please keep
007us posted um we hope that you'll be able to avail yourself of them uh too and i'll just pause in case there are any questions or comments for abigail before we move on no just thank you i mean i obviously we we all love hearing and i i i it's the best part of the meeting when we get the report from our student board member um remarkably abigail you didn't mention the impact really that covet is having and the fact that people are wearing masks and schools and all that and that's really reassuring you kind of give us a glimpse inside the school buildings each of them and it's reassuring to me that that's not the first thing that you mentioned and it's not even mentioned in your report so i really do appreciate it
008so thank you very much i was at the um john jay middle school band concert i think was on january 19th and miss frasic is that is that the band teacher had over 120 people on the stage and i spent most of the time trying to figure out from where they were getting their instruments into their mouths i had no idea where the holes were coming from different places and i also want to point out they had 20 percussionists which i've never seen before it was just a wall of drums it was amazing thank you catherine yeah it's um it's really amazing to see the level of participation in some of these programs and to see how hard our staff members are working despite really ongoing challenging conditions the level of management to pull off
009that concert i have to think was really extraordinary and as poignant and celebratory as it felt as a parent to be back in the buildings it's also sobering that we are still in an environment where perhaps only one designated family member can attend in person while the other family member is zooming from home um you know limiting the density in our auditoriums impacting the very nature of play um you know these are ongoing challenging times and i think our students are eager for the engagement and you know we are grateful that our faculty members and administrators are able to create these opportunities i think this period of time since the last time the board of education met on december 9th and today i think these really have been some of the most challenging weeks as
010omicron spiked and the contact tracing grew and we're very fortunate here tonight that you know and i know not to steal the thunder of the covet update but that our cases are on the decline but this has been a really hard period and really abigail hearing the amazing amount of activity in every building and at every level of the district and as parents a little bit getting to have a window into that as i know many of us have as board members and as parents gone to support many of these concerts performances plays etc um you know we're grateful and please keep it up and thank you you know it's been really a challenge but we feel very very fortunate very grateful can i just i just wanted to recognize the ptos who have had
011i think a lot to do with many of those activities i want to give a specific shout out to the high school pto that got the ice carver and the ice wolf was so cool and really fun for the kids to watch it happening and it came out it was just a really cool thing to have this ice wolf outside of the school so i think you know their partnership has been really crucial during this time and then if i can just highlight one of the athletic events i did want to congratulate we hosted all county tournament for wrestling this weekend which is no you know it's a big undertaking for our um custodial staff and support staff to have 23 schools here and um you know many many wrestlers and we had six um
012of our wrestlers were all county which means they placed in the top six in the county so it was a really great show amazing thank you for sharing that so i feel as if we've somewhat seamlessly transitioned from our student board member report to board announcements which is item 8.01 and with the board's permission i am going to suggest that we postpone board committee reports which we have actually attempted to skip over um but on board announcements before we invite andrew to share announcements were there any other announcements please liz uh this weekend i spent a very cold couple of hours on saturday and sunday handing out test kits with mr seleznick and rory and other you know assorted members of the team here and i have to say um despite the fact that it
013sounded really miserable the way i described it it was genuinely one of the you know nicest weekends i can remember um seeing all kinds of people i haven't seen in a long time and saying hi and you know it was just i miss the community and i i feel like i don't know there's just kind of a little optimism returning right now and i just really want to kind of tap into that and say it was a lovely experience and i wanted to give a shout out to the two different people on each day somebody came and made a second pass and that second pass they handed us free coffee beverages and it was just such a reminder this is a fantastic community in which we live and full of such wonderful people and i've
014missed so many of you and it was just it was really a very fulfilling experience thank you thank you liz and thank you to everybody who volunteered and distributed test kits on a saturday and sunday so many of you sitting here at this table tonight and also so many of our administrators not present with us here this evening you know tremendous thank you for volunteering your weekend hours to provide test kits which is amazing to members of our community we really are very grateful other announcements i will just briefly mention also in between the last meeting and this meeting we had a visit from dr vogmar who visited with parents members of the community who wish to speak with him and it was an overview that he provided and then opportunity for questions and answers
015and i think all of us who had the opportunity to attend and i know many of us here tonight did learned a lot and really appreciate that opportunity for that interaction and also just a quick thank you ship to the town of lewisborough for their ongoing partnership wreck sports are back you know we've had kids in the gymnasiums every weekend since december playing recreational basketball um traveling to catamount goodwinski and whatnot so thank you to the recreation department and to danelle and to staff members our custodians you know members of the team who work to support that ongoing partnership we really um again we need a village to keep kids engaged in this environment and we're very fortunate to live in a great village so thank you and with that i think andrew we are
016ready to hear from you thank you so much thanks marjorie i'm going to keep my comments pretty brief tonight because we have a lot to get to but i certainly want to echo and thank you all for the very positive comments um all of the in-person events you know that we're experiencing as we move into the spring are really positive we've heard a lot about them um i'm very grateful to all the staff members as well as our ptos it was mentioned earlier for making those events possible it was really important to us to get our students back into as many of their extracurricular activities as possible we know about the link to mental health there and how important that is and we want those opportunities to be available so you've heard a lot about
017concerts and shows and other things this coming weekend is the freshman play here at john jay high school the election is the show that they're putting on so another nice opportunity to come out and see people there's a really lovely video on the website actually you can look at of the students talking about their experience so that's all going to continue as i knock on wood and say that we're so thrilled that we seem to be moving in this very positive direction uh i it was talk at earlier board meetings this year so i do want to call out and mention that on tonight's agenda we are asking the board to make an appointment for an sro for the remainder school resource officer uh we'll be back thanks to chief alfano and the lewisburg pd
018for helping to find a person who'll be with us effective beginning of february and through to the end of the school year in a full-time capacity in the school so we're happy about that and um which marjorie has mentioned a couple times we're going to talk about covid a little bit later there's been a lot of updates from the state and some changes so we want to share all of that with folks who are here and in the audience at home but we are going to start with the literacy update tonight because we have a number of colleagues who are with us in the audience tonight we're thrilled about that and we we want them to be fresh with our students tomorrow morning so that's why we always have them go first uh when we
019have colleagues with us so i'm if it's okay happy to turn over at this point to mary ford for the colleagues who are going to join us thank you all we look forward to hearing it thank you so i'm fortunate to be joined by four of my colleagues this evening so allison porcelli who is our district-wide staff developer for literacy jackie kovach kindergarten teacher at meadow pond matthew o'neill who is our middle school curriculum leader and ela and social studies teacher at john jay middle school and emily cantor who is our 3-5 curriculum leader and fourth grade teacher at daytona elementary so thank you all my esteemed colleagues they're the people who do this work every day thank you mary ann just allow us to say welcome it's so great to see you here in
020person we have missed all of you dearly and we are so looking forward to hearing from you so thank you for joining us and welcome thank you thank you so i just i should start out by saying oh this is a little tricky i'll start out by saying that um this we had a presentation to the board if you remember i believe it was february 6 2020 so just before the shutdown and everything so we thought there'd been a lot of discussion about literacy and a lot of questions so we thought it might be a good time to look back um to refresh update there have been some updates to the program talk about them and think about what's different since kovids so some of this is very similar to what was presented then but
021again there are some updates and changes as well thank you i don't know this is a very tricky there there's a slide about goals can and help me back there dancing to get to it there it is okay so the goals of our literacy program so these again this is something that really has not changed um developing those very strong foundational skills when we think about phonological awareness phonics different concepts fluency all those conventions also thinking always about deep comprehension so that goal of reading is to understand what we read connection between reading and writing instruction you can see everything that's bolded there on the slide most importantly a lifelong love of reading and writing is really what we seek to instill but it's also important to mention that we align with the ideals of
022the learning commitment we align with our state standards nice next generation ela standards but we also think about social emotional learning competencies um both from new york state has some new york state social emotional learning benchmarks and we base our work around castle's five competencies so that's very important to us and culturally responsive teaching practice these are things we're always thinking about and trying to embed as we plan our literacy instruction and also reflecting research-based approaches acknowledging that there's new research in the field as well as different perspectives on different things and long-held principles and meta studies that we always consider so again some of the things that we align with the five pillars of reading we'll just take a look at that in a moment the standards learning commitment and you've seen before and
023we'll go into a little more detail later in the presentation we have focus areas um our big focus areas right now are the diversity equity and inclusion work social emotional learning work and sustainability also with everything we do trying to embed those things into our practice so this was the national institute of child health and human development this was a report that came out in 2000 um even back then there was some controversy right there was a minority report that gave some different views things that were left out but i think these five areas have been long-standing and the way that many researchers and scholars look at literacy these different very important areas of literacy instruction especially of reading instruction and then we have new york state education department's next generation these are the ela
024anchor standards so it's important to note they were revised so everyone is very aware of common core standards and new york state revised those standards to the next generation standards that work started in 2017 but full implementation is expected this coming fall in 2022 and those areas you see there when you think about those foundational skills we mentioned reading different kinds of text literary and informational text writing speaking and listening and language so those are all areas that we consider when we think about literacy and alongside those these lifelong practices so those are very important to us as well and those are things that please keep in mind as we look at the next few slides when we start to think about the components so things like reading often and widely from a range of
025global and diverse texts we think about our classroom libraries we think about that practice as a practice that's very important in encouraging a lifelong love of reading self-selecting text based on interest you know monitoring comprehension and applying reading strategies flexibly all of those things are very important when you think about lifelong reading proficiency i may have skipped one sorry the learning commitment of course that's always at the forefront for us so when we think about intellectually engaging experiences we think about relevance for students lives interest purpose beyond test results recognizable connections to students lives and of course that active learning environment and again these are the focus areas that i mentioned before so keeping that learning commitment at the center we think about how we can embed conversations about diversity equity and inclusion those social
026emotional competencies and the conversations about sustainability as well always professional learning has to be surrounding that and also we think about the use of technology you know how we use that to enhance instruction and always thinking about our pedagogy as well not just a little context for the conversation but i will turn it over to my colleague allison to talk about some of the components of literacy okay so the components i'm going to talk about here on this slide that looks like a puzzle all of these components here work together to support those five pillars that mary was just referencing and many of these different components here are most of them are in elementary but there's also implications for a secondary model as well but starting with interactive read aloud that's a really big component
027that we use in the classroom where we're reading texts that are higher level than the students and we're modeling high-level comprehension strategies and giving students a chance to talk and practice those strategies and it's really a big place where we're working on developing language comprehension which in turn supports reading comprehension high level reading comprehension as they move into the older grades so it's sort of this like pay it forward model so the high level work that we do in kindergarten when kids can then read texts more fluently in first grade they then use that information to help them comprehend at higher levels et cetera et cetera so that's the interactive read-aloud shared reading and shared and interactive writing which are on those sides there's similar processes one is a shared reading is a whole class
028model where you have an enlarged text that's just slightly above the kids level and here is where you're going to be modeling and having the kids practice reading strategies things like decoding words fluency and comprehension but it's closer to what they'd be doing in independent texts and same with interactive writing that's a place where they'd be creating a text together as a class the kids even come up and share the pen and practice spelling words practice you know using the phonics concepts that you've taught in context of actual you know writing pieces and then you have reading workshop and writing workshop which is the independent portion so where the teacher does a very short lesson targeted and at something the whole class could practice but the bulk of the time is spent with kids independently
029reading and writing and the teachers going around and pulling small groups and targeting and differentiating instruction and then word study which is a place where all of this comes together where we teach phonics phonemic awareness and vocabulary and students are practicing that inside of reading and writing workshop and we're helping students transfer those skills in shared reading and interactive writing so you can kind of see how that puzzle all those pieces really work together and this is just a slide that's highlighting how each of those components hits upon those reading pillars that mary spoke about and those next generation standards so you can take a look at how that all works together and as as we were saying before a lot of these processes are reciprocal as mary mentioned so even when anything that i'm
030reading aloud if i'm reading a loud a non-fiction text for example that's going to support kids if they're reading nonfiction it's also going to support them when they're writing non-fiction because it serves as a mentor but also in terms of phonics if what i'm teaching in phonics the kids can practice when they're writing when they're doing their encoding and they're using those you know segmenting skills that they've learned in uh inside of their phonemic awareness also they're then practicing those when they go to read text and they're decoding so all of it is you know reciprocal and it's um as it says on the third bullet there what's wonderful is when this when we have independent reading and independent writing it's an opportunity for teachers to go and see how these skills are transferring and
031to coach that transfer and then especially as we move into the older grades but even starting as young as kindergarten we do have students also write about reading as a way to um enhance their comprehension so they do a lot of that oral practice but then they also will start by just jotting on a post-it they start like in kindergarten they might just draw a little smiley face if the character feels happy but they start working on writing about their reading and it's a way for them to continue to increase their comprehension of a text and then i'll just briefly introduce word study so word study as i mentioned before works on these three pillars phonemic awareness phonics and vocabulary and our main programs in the district we use hegerty for phonemic awareness construction foundations
032for phonics and worldly wise is for our vocabulary wordlywise is fourth and fifth grade integrity is k1 and foundations is k3 so jackie's going to talk about so for hegerty i'm going to talk just it's our phonemic awareness program which is what we do with hearing and listening to sounds and there's speak up sure maybe you can just like a little closer to you jack how's that oh sorry now that works got it thank you so hegerty is our phonemic awareness program and that is done through um hearing of the sounds it's all auditory and i'm going to talk a little bit more about hegerty on the next slide so i'll come back to that but foundations is our explicit phonics instruction program that we use k-3 the program is taught every day in kindergarten
033we teach sounds letters and handwriting it's a multi-sensory program so for anybody with the young children and parents out there you'll remember the kids wouldn't they do the tapping we do the stretching of all the sounds um and you can see that it transfers to our reading and writing because as they're reading words we'll say tap it out as their writing will say tap out those sounds grades one two three move on to blends diagrams cvc words long and short vowels silent e vowel pairs and all those glute sounds are in their program i think i'm going to hold hegrity and we can move to third grade um for fourth and fifth grade we have worldly wise um i'll just talk briefly about the a little about the program um it picks up where foundations
034leaves off uh the program focuses on morphology which is is the study of words and how they're formed so um the program has there's 20 lessons in the program and each lesson begins with a word list of 15 words and they're listed in alphabetical order when learning each word the students are given a definition they're given the phonemic the phonetic spelling parts of speech and um they're given these short partner activities that the kids really enjoy um for example if the word is ease it'll say tell your tell your partner about the place you feel most at ease um and they it just gets them talking about the words and put it in a little bit of a context for them each lesson then goes in and has five different activities that reinforce the meaning
035of each word they also give students the opportunity to learn and practice a variety of of things including applying the meaning of each word in context they learn synonyms and antonyms prefixes suffocate suffixes and roots they learn how to put these words in sentences so they're practicing sentence structure and there's also at the end of each lesson a vocabulary extension which highlights um it highlights one word and gives an additional parts of speech along with discussion and writing prompts so it's very thorough at the end of each lesson there's a multiple choice assessment that teachers can use to assess each student there are also for every four two to four lessons there is a review um so students are able to revisit the words that they now know on their own which is great and
036um the creators of worldly wise have also partnered with a technology tool learning tool called quizlet and so they're able to access these words on through quizlet online and so it was really helpful during the pandemic when we were at home they were able to access this there's a variety of games matching they can study the words um they're also able to there's like a dictation so the the pro the online program will say the word and they can spell it they also will give a sentence and they can write the word that is the sentence is referring to so the online program is really really useful for the kids so at the middle school and the upper levels uh word study obviously looks a little different we really focus on essential academic uh vocabulary
037and high frequency words so the teachers take those words and develop master lists by looking at grade level vocabulary that has high frequency in both fiction and nonfiction and we look at their content areas as well for example the sixth grade has a master list of almost 200 words that we've created that cycle throughout the year and each week the students are exposed to between five and ten words we teach them how to define the word in context so that's a strategy that they could apply when they're reading independently we also identify what part of speech the word is so that they can they know how to use it in speaking and in their writing and then we give them multiple opportunities throughout the week to practice using those words and it's in a variety
038of ways so they'll use them with partners to write creative stories which they absolutely love we will have them develop study strategies because we try to incorporate how do you study vocabulary and create what i call memory tape to make these words stick in your head we do a lot of pairing with visuals we'll put uh visuals up on the board of like a do now and the students have to try to figure out what vocabulary is represented in the image which is another great way to remember especially for visual students um we also use quizlet they love playing quizlet live they love using the games as review they have the matching as emily spoke about but the nice thing is because the words cycle throughout the year they by the end of the year
039they have truly mastered them and not only are they using them and transferring them to their writing they're using them in their speech and they're so funny they'll be like you got vocab you know they get excited when they hear each other start to use the words and um you know you really see how their vocabulary truly builds um so it's it's a really great approach so we thought we'd talk a little more about hegerty which is a program that's relatively new um in our district so hegarty as as jackie mentioned before focuses on phonemic awareness which is all auditory so we will be able to take a little peek into jackie's classroom so we have um access to something called my hegerty all teachers have that they have videos for each lesson they have
040some professional learning modules embedded um and so in this video clip that you'll see and i think rich is about to play it for me um you'll see jackie's class watching the video but jackie would like you to talk about it a little first sure um with the hegerty program as mary was saying it works on the phonemic awareness so it's all auditory it's all through the sounds we're listening for the phonemes and the students you'll see them doing many things isolating sounds beginning middle and end they'll be segmenting you'll see in this they're going to be chopping sounds so for like the word new if they were we would be ooh and then they put it together new it has three letters but it has two phone names we're adding and deleting phonemes um
041and we do the the kids the favorite part they love is the substitution where they'll be giving us you know say app if you put up before it what word do you have you have map and they'll say that and then if you take away the um and you put in a s what's the new word sap so it's a lot of word play and they really enjoy it and you'll see once again the hands and they use those again when they're reading and writing which is wonderful you see it applying to their work we have the book and we also have the videos from the district which is really nice the woman you're going to see is mrs bottari we think we know her and the kids will follow along with her what's really
042nice is teachers tend to go between using the book and the videos what's nice about the videos is it gives me time to see the students what they're doing and i'll stop i'll let you see oh [Music] and you can see them going through what's nice going back and forth as i said it's a nice way for me to assess i can watch the kids as they're doing assess where they are and it also gives me a time to come up alongside the students so if somebody's having a more difficult time i can sit in there with them and really be able to work with them as they're following along with her so it's nice to have both of those pieces together with the program and speaking of assessment um all of our kindergartners this
043year starting in february and march are going to be assessed with the hegerty screener to get a baseline and then after that first graders even this year and last year we had first graders who were you know maybe a concern or might be up for rti also then get the hegerty screener and even some second grade correct yeah yeah and so that's been really helpful to us um especially in instances where students you know sometimes we see students who are making progress they're kind of hitting benchmarks and yet teachers have a lingering concern and so sometimes giving this assessment has given us a window into what that concern might be right they might still be struggling with phonemic awareness for example you know students who are reading well but they're actually using context more and
044it shows up more in their spelling than their decoding because they use context so well so it's been helpful to have that insight and help us to know how to target any instruction or interventions that we might provide and so wanted to talk about independent reading because that's a big cornerstone of our literacy program so obviously it works on everything right fluency comprehension vocabulary and then the standards are about reading literary and informational texts in the lower grades obviously their stamina is a little bit different and we're also finding with covid that's a concern stamina is sometimes impacted um but i think that's it's kind of coming around now the students are used to being in school more for a longer time but students choose their own books based on interest and the genre or
045topic being studied mostly with some teacher guidance so we want students to read books that are appropriate texts for them so that they can access those texts and get lots of practice and you'll see there there is some controversy in the reading world about independent reading and having students work independently and how much you can depend on how much they're reading but you can see by those statements from the international literacy association national council of teachers of english and even niced that it's an essential component of literacy instruction and so we tried to make the most of that and then i'll turn it over to my colleagues to talk about how discussion supports comprehension as well um yes so discussion in the classroom is in all grades but in upper grades um teachers have what
046we call mentor texts and read alouds that they read to the students where they have built-in stopping stopping points where they will ask questions to the whole class this not only allows the teacher to model their thinking aloud um and the process that they're going through as they're reading the text but it also gives students scaffolded higher level thinking and higher level questioning techniques that allow them to think more deeply about the text which is what we want them to do independently but in order to do that um a lot of modeling needs to happen and that's where the whole class discussion comes in this happens throughout all parts of our day it's not just reading in the content areas and teachers are constantly doing this type of work and then with the whole class
047discussions students also have the opportunity after their independent reading to bring this into their partnership work students are partnered up with a reading partner for could be similar reading level could be interest however they are partnered up and they're able to practice these discussion techniques with each other and the teacher is able to walk around and and coach in and listen in to how it's going in the upper grade students learn that the most effective conversations happen when you come prepared with an idea um so that's where the think aloud happens um with the modeling and whole class and they see that if i come with some sort of an idea i can then have a talking point off of and so the students work together to help each other build off an idea we
048call grow an idea and in the classroom into something more complex this can result in talking about the theme character interpretations um lots of reactions that they're having about the things that they're reading um reactions to the plot or events of the text and then usually after if in the upper grades when we're reading a whole class text the teacher is reading us a chapter book at the end once they've been practicing this type of discussion we have something called a grand conversation it's a fancy way to say fancy way of saying whole class discussion but the difference is the teacher kind of takes a back seat and the students are the ones leading the conversation and so they come with an idea prepared and they learn how to build off each other's ideas they
049learn how to take turns they learn how to agree and disagree respectfully and also more importantly use text evidence to to back up what they're trying to say um so this all builds and students need the model from the whole class all the way you know to be able in independent practice with each other to be able to then have that grand conversation where they're able to kind of you know it's a beautiful thing to see when the teacher can just kind of step back and guide them and not be the one you know front loading the ideas the transition is amazing from the elementary school to the middle school because really the middle school takes everything they do and kind of just builds on it you know we have the same variety of discussion
050structures at the middle school level we have the whole class mentor text that we usually start with so students can go back to it as a reference in the mentor text we teach the strategies just like they do in the elementary school we also do a lot of partner work and we do small groups especially book clubs in the middle school is very popular and in book clubs it kind of like what emily is saying the skills really build on each other and in the book clubs the students are planning out their reading they're determining the focus they're determining the amount they're reading every night and they hold each other accountable for that learning so it's it's really nice to see how they build on that i think no matter what structure you're using the
051result is always the same they're examining texts at a much deeper level when they're discussing them they're considering the ideas of other people in respectful ways as emily is saying they're challenging their own thinking by listening to the opinions of others and their perspectives and ultimately they're making sense out of complex texts and they do that all through discussion because you know we know middle schoolers just love to talk um one of my personal favorites is socratic seminar it's kind of what emily was saying it's a really nice way to have where the students guide the conversation they create the questions for discussion based on plot and we really push them to get away from the very simple questions on setting but then start looking you know more deeply at character how character can lead
052them to theme um what kinds of themes are in the stories and using the text to support their thinking one thing i like about socratic seminar especially is because there's a lot of students who are very bright but they struggle to articulate their thinking in writing so when you take that component away and you put them in socratic seminar they really shine and it's always amazing to see how they can take simple ideas from other students and then build on them and take them to such a higher level and i feel like in socratic seminar the students come together almost as a community of readers and they all wait walk away with these aha moments and again it takes a little while to kind of train them but you sit outside the circle and they
053start kind of looking at you and i stop looking at me stop looking at me and then all of a sudden after a couple of practice rounds i'm not even in the room and they just they lead the conversation and it's truly amazing discussion is really an important component to this literacy approach and then complementing the classroom discussion the opportunity for some online discussion um so we've made the most of schoology and tools like that so that students can extend the conversation beyond the classroom conversation obviously in the last years that's become increasingly important to us as well so just to talk a little bit about the text in our classroom in the next few slides um we'll focus on this but this this is a statement from niced and from the preamble to the
054next generation standards but talking about the expectation that students read often and widely from a range of and from diverse texts so that's really important so when we think about our classroom libraries which you'll hear about in a few minutes that's an important consideration and also this balance of classical and contemporary literature full-length shorter text you know variety of cultures and viewpoints so just so many things to consider when you think about the text that students will be reading in our classrooms over time so allison and jackie are going to talk to us about some considerations for text for early readers so many of us participated um over the summer especially the the lower grade teachers um in a book study of a book called shifting the balance by kerry yates and jan berkins which
055is about bringing the science of reading into our reading literacy practices and talked about a few different shifts and a couple of those have big implications for the texts that we use for our early readers so one big shift that they talked about was taking this idea of you know readers reading with msb meaning syntax and visual and basically saying yes they do all those three things but we need to put more emphasis on reading with the visual first so they talk about it as shifting it to visual that you want to prompt kids to use the visual which means the print on the page first and then confirm their attempts at the word with meaning and syntax so of course they're still using all three but we really want to prioritize that visual and
056so our text selection is really important for that because we want kids to have more opportunities to be able to practice using those visual skills based on the things that we've taught them and they talked about these three tensions that we have in the text that we have in our classroom so the top one it's a little hard to see so i'll talk about it um is the level of decodability versus predictability so we want to make sure that there's enough regular words in a text that kids can decode right if there's so many irregular words it's going to be hard for them to practice so we want to make sure there's lots of cvc words and regular words within their grasp but on the other hand we also want to make sure that you
057know it's there's enough patterns and illustrations that it's easy for them to predict if you just put all decodable words then and they have no no anchor then that's hard for them too so there's a tension there then you also have novelty versus redundancy so novelty is there enough new words for them to practice you want them to be able to practice these skills over and over for them to solidify them and not just on the same words but in redundancy means you know we want to make sure that there's also opportunities for them to have repeated practice and get some fluency so there's another tension there and then the orthographic value of the text versus the sense making value we want to make sure that the texts are aligned with the phonics that we've
058been teaching that they have opportunities to use those phonics skills but also we want to look at those texts and make sure that there's natural language patterns that the kids can make sense of those texts so there's all these tensions and these they have these two one these three wonderful examples so on the left there's a decodable text which is you know pretty much mostly to the left um in terms of it you know i think can less get up a red pet um yes yes he can so it has a lot of regular decodable words opportunities for them to practice it matches up with phonics however it's you know it might be lacking in natural language patterns um repeated patterns and you know opportunity you know opportunities for them to use um predictability the
059text all the way on the right which you know we have we have all of these examples in our classroom um the text all the way on the right children can climb children can swing children kids can read those texts no problem because they're predictable the illustrations are really strong however they don't really necessarily always have to use the visual component because the picture's right there so that's too far to the right so the text that they show in the middle is in what they call an aligned text and this is the work we've really been trying to do is looking at our libraries to define these more aligned texts but where it says the the pup can run kids can decode that they can use the picture the language pattern is natural um and
060it you know they can practice those skills that they've been learning so jackie is going to talk a little bit about the work that teachers have been doing with their libraries so what it does is it gives them you're trying to find that book you want them to practice that skill that you've taught so if in foundations i'm teaching about digraphs and i have a group of kids and they're ready for that for reading and decoding i want to find books that are is going to support that that's going to give them enough practice so i need to have books that have that skill that's that decodability and that practice but there also has to be other pieces that it sounds more natural and they can read and keeps their interest so i think what
061as teachers we're going through our libraries and we're making sure we have a mix of those books and when we sit down and pull that small group that book we choose is very purposeful because we want to i think i'm sorry i'm far away again i think what we want to try to do is make sure that they have that practice with what we're doing and there's a very explicit connection that we're making as teachers between the lessons that we're doing and then having them have time to practice with those books and so that brings us right to our classroom libraries and our classroom libraries are organized really to support kids with their independent reading and so they can access them independently and they can find themselves in the library that they can be drawn
062to it so we organize them in different ways sometimes we'll have baskets organized by you know popular authors or by series lots of kids get really hooked on to that's what gets them to be readers a lot of times is the series um genres like mystery that might hook a kid in um topics like you can see over on the left there's one that's like i love sports so kids who love sports can find books that they love um and then level and level you'll see reading levels you'll see that a lot in k1 classrooms because kids are still learning how to how to navigate the book so it's very helpful for them to go to a basket of books on their level um and then as they move up in the grades you'll see
063less and less organized by level the teacher may still know the level but um it's more organized in the other ways that i mentioned and it's really also the interest of the children like in kindergarten the beginning of this year a group of kids were very into skateboarding so we pulled a lot of those skateboarding books and then i went through and found books that were decodable on their level but also full of interest and had those pictures that would keep them and they you know were reading those books and sticking with those books and trying to figure it out because skateboarding is really cool i'm sorry go ahead um so in in the upper elementary as alison was saying um you know we want to move we want to move away from students just
064thinking that they are a certain level and because you go into a library or a bookstore and there is isn't a level we want them to start understanding you know what's in a book and how they can connect to them um and and so in our classroom libraries we you know think of that as windows and mirrors which i'll explain in a minute but at the beginning of of each year we not only spend time getting to know each other but we spend time getting to know our libraries it's the first thing that kids see when they come into the classroom and i have to give a shout out to mary allison and our administrators because they worked really hard to give teachers the opportunity to build those libraries and if you have the chance
065to walk into any elementary school in our district there's quite quite an array of books um they're welcoming and you know i can remember when i was in elementary school my books were like yellow and old and we don't want to read them um so you know we we spend time in the beginning of the year as i said getting to know each other um our our school librarian and worked closely with teachers and upper grades to help students create identity maps which is giving them the opportunity to create something that reflects and resembles their authentic self they share these identity maps and they really get to know each other and who they are and we transfer that to books we read books with characters that are dynamic and we create identity maps for those
066characters and and then they can relate to them and see oh i also am like this character and they're able to grab onto that text and feel like they're really in it um it's a beautiful thing to to see when a child was i really like books uh with um you know kids that persevere through their challenges um so we we we look at those as as books that are mirrors they mirror themselves so we create a library where there's characters who persevere characters that overcome friendship obstacles um you know about sports enthusiasts characters that go on adventures anything that a child can really connect with and see themselves in we also fill our libraries with books that give students opportunities to express empathy with characters that they can't necessarily see themselves as and we
067call that as we we look at that like windows so these books can be about characters with different family dynamics characters that go through some social issues that they're not experienced with characters that have disabilities that they you know that they get go through in life and so um when children are able to see themselves in a book and they're able to really connect with who they are then they're able to do the highest level which is have empathy for characters and books which is where we really want them to you know be you know we want them to read the books that they love the series they love but we also want them to connect with these characters because that enables them to go out in life and experience and you know be able
068to handle and and you know uh go through experiences in life that they learn through books um so that's a little bit about uh mirrors and windows very similar at the middle school emily you're stealing on my phone um the middle school actually is currently working in collaboration with our library media specialist to update our our classroom libraries right now so as emily said we're really looking to include new diverse relevant engaging books for adolescents where they can see themselves and they can start to take on the perspectives of others as well as part of that we are also including texts that support our current units so we're looking at some of the authors from their other study units social issue books as well as books students recommend because they want to read what their
069friends are reading because their friends said it's really good so we're trying to have a nice blend with a wide range of levels to meet all students needs but currently the students really love just going down to the library and our librarian also comes into the classrooms on a regular basis she does book talks so the students get to hear books from different genres different authors they write down anything that piques their interests in their reader's notebooks this way they have a nice list of potential reads that they can pull from when they're ready to pull a new book and i think we're going to see an example here a copy of the padlet that some of your students created yeah so um there you go in the middle school um you know mary had
070mentioned before one of the goals is obviously to build reading stamina but it's also to really just foster a love for reading um so in their independent reading that's where we're trying to foster that and the middle school about two years ago created a digital portfolio for their independent reading this is an example of one of my current sixth graders um and we do this in padlet and it really captures their reader identity it shows um by looking at this particular one you can really see the depth and breadth of her reading the genres that she's interested in the authors that she's currently enjoying we use this palette for a variety of things the librarian can come into the classroom she sits with the students she uses the padlet as a conferencing tool to make
071recommendations for new books the students absolutely love to share their padlets with each other and they can learn from each other and get great ideas make recommendations to each other especially when they're what i call a genre rut and they're just reading the same thing over and over so trying to push themselves a little it's an opportunity for goal setting and reflection you can see there's writing on the padlet as well the students get to pick how they want to respond to the book it is not a summary and they don't respond to every book they they respond to the books that speak to them and it could be about theme it could be something they noticed about writer's craft it could be how a character solved a conflict and overcame an adversity another thing
072that we love about the palettes and we're going to be working on and sending a letter home to parents is it's really a great tool for parents to get a window into their children's readerly life and have some conversations about reading as well so that's our paddling yeah that's really nice and that follows them through the middle school so that's six it's created in sixth grade and it goes through eighth grade yeah and just to mention too our digital collections are something that we've worked on um through the library and for the classroom use so we have some newer programs um mayan literacy footprints so that when students aren't in the classroom they're able to access those texts as well so it's a combination of physical and digital text so just you know thinking about
073students who may struggle with reading and how we might identify them just say a few words about that so our universal screeners those things have not changed we still use aims web plus which is a standardized norm referenced assessment that's something we use kindergarten through eighth grade we also use the teachers college independent reading inventory it's standardized not norm reference there are benchmarks for every other month of the school year so that helps us to kind of match students to text in the classroom but when either of those assessments give us any indication that a student needs a closer look you'll also see lots of assessments there that's not an exhaustive list but some of the things that we use that our interventionists may use to get a better understanding of what's going on with
074our students and how we might target an intervention for a student and just to mention some of the interventions we use so some of the published ones foundations is really our classroom program but it could be used as an intervention as well and is in some cases um just words and wilson reading system so wilson reading system you've heard of before and it's an orton gillingham-based intervention barbara wilson is the author of foundations just words and wilson just words is more of a small group version of wilson so the understanding is you would do it with a small group of students whereas wilson it's usually just one or two students at a time it could be larger but it's a little more intensive goes a little more slowly we also have read 180 at our
075middle school in high school that's a scholastic product and level literacy intervention that's dentists and pennell so those are some of the published programs we use but in addition just small group work based on student needs so that some of the things we think about are students strengths as well as their weaknesses and the transfer i think that's one of the things we focus most on you know sometimes students can demonstrate a skill in isolation and so it's easier in a very controlled setting with controlled text to demonstrate mastery of a skill but then if you take a book out of the classroom library or you go to barnes and noble or your school library maybe harder to transfer those skills or to writing so the focus of the intervention is sometimes we know they
076can do it in isolation but helping to coach them to transfer that that knowledge or skill to more authentic reading and writing experiences so just as we finish up a few questions for our curriculum leaders and i just want to mention also um we also have a an ela curriculum leader at the high school jason malki he wasn't able to be with us this evening he did send some notes so i'll be sharing some of his thoughts on that but just going back to those focus areas we thought it would be nice for the board to hear from our leaders how these focus areas are impacting your classroom instruction um i think in the elementary schools a couple of the projects that we have done over the years we did um i think was the
077year before coved ends maybe it was two years before danella will remember we did a program in our writing program the students do opinion writing and persuasion and one of the students wrote a letter to mike jumper actually saying that she wanted solar panels over the playground and so this letter was sent out and as it turned out there's at the time i wasn't even really quite aware of it there's all these solar panels at the high school and so they wound up writing letters everybody came we got to go see the high school we got that's we came up and they got to see the solar panels and the kindergartners were working on all that so it was a wonderful tie-in of that sustainability with our writing which was wonderful this year with our
078diversity our show and tell unit in the past the students would bring in items usually toys that they loved and this year we just put another a little a different lens on it instead we had when we were doing our identity work and a zoom conference with the parents we were talking about our identity maps and families were doing that together we i spoke to them and said instead of the show and tell we're going to bring in items that mean something to you and your families so we instead of the toys it was a me box and they're still in the classroom so the students were talking about things that were important to them it was their relatives it was maybe a picture of certain food or different countries or flags or different pieces
079that mean something to them their identity so it tied in beautifully with our writing unit and it's just looking at it through a slightly different lens so there's a lot of wonderful tie-ins that we've been able to do throughout the years so picture books are just fabulous and there's uh just so many current picture books right now that um just tie into every you know a lot of diversity equity and inclusion and along with social emotional learning um so read-alouds are constantly happening in elementary classrooms you know you can find pretty much any read-aloud on things that are happening current as well as in the past um anything that could tie into um the content areas and then social emotional learning it's it's so important we start our day with a morning meeting and by
080reading a book you can open up a discussion on something that happened out on the playground conflict resolution i mean the opportunities are just endless with picture books and that's you know kids especially in the upper grades when they're in fourth grade um i i try as much as possible to read as many picture books because that does not that is not just for you know the lower elementary grades there's so many messages that that can be shared through those so um the more opportunities that students are given to hear stories and relate to these characters the more they'll be able to apply to their own lives and you know build that uh discussion um open up share which is you know what we all hope to have a classroom where kids feel safe and
081are able to share their opinions and ideas so um i can't say enough about picture books i can't buy enough i can't um you know i have a whole shelf and they there and the kids are constantly going to read those books coming back to them so i think at the middle school level when you look at that chart the thing that stands out most is the social emotional learning you know adolescents it's such an important time in their life they're trying to figure out who they are so i think in ela our our biggest focus has been on the identity work and really trying to help them make sense of who they are and while they start identity work in the elementary school identity is fluid and constantly changing and we're constantly going back
082to our maps and revising them and adding to them and we found that this really started overlapping with our equity work as well and um the students have to understand who they are first before they can start to understand who other people are and we need them to we did a lot of work with empathy as emily had mentioned earlier and really direct instruction of empathy to try to teach them to be able to step into the shoes of other people and be able to take a variety of perspectives even when it's not your perspective um and as a result what we started to notice and this is my goal one of my goals this year as um they came out with the social justice standards and i thought it would be very interesting to
083start to use the social justice standards as guiding questions as we're looking at text and getting to the students to think in those four domains of identity diversity justice and then action because that's ultimately what we want we want them to be stand-up citizens who take action in the world um and so we're starting to develop guiding questions that we can use as we're reading text and because really what we practice in our reading is what gets us ready for life and we really need to get our children ready for being able to navigate the challenging society that they have before them today so i think that's our big focus in middle school thank you and jason shared that you know the summer read this year uh dear america the author jose antonio vargas and
084having that the webinar that was a big focus for the department they're really looking at all of the books um that they read with students with that lens and they actually have a retreat day planned this month to use that lens to look at the 912 curriculum so it is having an impact for sure and just some photos from elementary i think jackie a lot of those are your classrooms correct right so different they're having a discussion the first they're having a discussion about skin color we were looking at the crayons and how are they going to draw themselves and their family and what colors they were looking at all the colors and you can see them pointing and talking about it on the other side is they were drawing family maps so once again
085we pulled those out because they were drawing portraits first of themselves and then of their family and then the middle we talked about families and we started a chart and we were reading just about lots of different types of families so we were constantly adding on to the chart um one of the things you can see is the heart with love because what we cut coming back to is there's lots of different types of families not every all families look the same but the one thing they have in common is the love for one another so and then it's secondary also some photos i think some got cut off there but uh some identity map work that's going on and some small group work kathy from your classroom yeah yeah yeah just an example of
086you know how we pull kids for small groups and target some specific skills and that's them sharing their identity maps they had to do post-its they had a they did a silent stroll where they walked around and looked at everybody's map and then they wrote two connections that or a connection they could make to each map and a question they had and then when we were done with the stroll uh you went back to your map and if you felt comfortable answering the question you could then seek out whoever asked it and answer that question so it was a nice opportunity to learn about each other in a comfortable way and just lastly some questions for all of you thinking about your practices in light of the you know the last few years and any
087adjustments made in terms of covid what opportunities do you see and and what do you worry about and then thinking also about how our students respond to our reading and writing instruction i think at least in for the elementary grades and it's the one of the we know how important small group work is for our students and i think that was the hardest piece with covid was not being able to have those small groups and if you could pull a small group it was six feet away from you and i think that last year it made um made so many of us realize we knew it we always knew it was important but it made us realize just the importance of that and and how we're so grateful that we're back to being able to
088have those small groups again i think one of the opportunities that happened was being able to still keep pieces of the zoom this year i wanted to do identity maps with my students and with kindergarteners it's kind of hard they really don't draw well they do their best if they're watching and they're wonderful and writing is a little bit tricky so to have an identity map for five-year-olds is a little difficult so what i did was i did a zoom at seven o'clock at night i sent the paper home and the parents all got on and i talked about it i shared my identity map so they knew what to do and then together they did their identity map so they were able to write oh these are the countries our parents come from these
089are the foods we like and the kids were drawing and i just sat back and watched and it was wonderful to see all of the kids and parents working on this together so there's pieces of that i never would have i mean a zoom at night two years ago a zoom call with parents would have been unheard of so as much as we've learned from zoom i think there's pieces of it there's still opportunities that i think we can keep it's a nice that's the one piece is the family connections was really nice um we had parents we did our uh for parents as reading partners grandparents zoomed in from other states you know it was really nice those connections to parents um you know there's a bunch of grandparents that i feel who were
090there for wednesdays that i got to know really well and i don't think that would have happened you know so there are pieces of it as as difficult it has been i think you take those positive pieces and maybe we can carry some of those through so and i think responding our kindergartners if you come into the room they'll tell you they're super readers and they're super writers and they can do everything so it's wonderful i think they really see themselves as readers and writers sorry um i think covet really made us slow down and i think um we made important decisions about curriculum um in the sense of like focusing on what was important and really going into depth rather than you know trying to cover cover cover um and i think one of
091the biggest challenges was when you know we had trying to do writing process on zoom was very difficult very challenging to conference and give kids feedback immediately was definitely a challenge but with that said i think some of the like schoology and gave us so many opportunities for kids to express themselves and show their understanding of things in different ways like video presentations discussion threads um expressive read-alouds creative writing opportunities that they could share a document and be writing together so there are a lot of different little opportunities that kind of came up which we didn't expect how one thing i worry about is um in this fast-paced world uh that these kids live in and with all this access to digital media and they're constantly any second they have they're on their iphone you
092know how do we keep them rooted in real books and you know with that deeper meaningful comprehension and just trying to strike that balance between the two um so that's something that i'm always you know helping them try to navigate um just something to think about yeah um i think one of the the challenges uh that i faced was just that um the contact the the personal um ability to give kids feedback um on zoom you know it it was hard you know even just pointing to their work and saying that's awesome you know that makes a huge difference and um i think that's what i miss the most and i think that's what i make sure i do the most now um is you know whether they're you know if whether i'm physically handing
093them a book saying i know that you're gonna love this because you also you know have a sister that annoys you or whatever um and and just making those um opportunities as much as i can because i i missed it tremendously and i think that they did too um and i have the same you know concerns as kathy with with reading you know we talked so much about our libraries and they sat there not being able to be used through the pandemic we had to you know sit them in the quarantined bin or whatever you wanted to call it and wait five days until they could be touched again and it was it was a difficult challenging process and so the fact that they're able to be in school and grab as many books as
094they want and read as much as they want is something that i hope i hope continues and doesn't completely go yeah at the high school uh jason shared you know some changes like teachers being more flexible in terms of due dates like thinking about students social emotional well-being as well as their academic growth i think that you know that really they put that at the forefront also thinking about class time and using that time for an intense focus on productivity in class versus lots of homework nice that's another thing um that was mentioned there and they also mentioned the group work saying that that was a challenge but they tried to find ways to foster connections through brief or lightning round group work so in two to three minutes in a pair share whether it
095was in person or on zoom trying to do that so different ways to foster that connection but in terms of the response jason said these students are amazing despite all the uncertainty they really are a dedicated respectful and intelligent lot and is that early this year there was some concern about some loss and or weakness in writing organization and development but as of our last department meeting most feel the students are largely back on track and of late most of us know little difference in the skill focus or diligence from previous years that's very reassuring to hear so i think that is the end of our presentation thank you thank you to all of my colleagues thank you that was terrific and so good to hear your voices and you covered so much ground i'm
096actually not really sure where to begin i guess i'll begin at the end which is to say even the reflections you've just shared on the opportunities and the challenges from last year which you know might feel like really the rear view mirror to you but um it's so important for us to hear and the hopefulness that you're offering with respect to some of the unexpected opportunities i mean really so poignant and then to just sort of work you know from 30 000 feet to comment on some of the messages that you are imparting to your students every day in in what you're doing and how you're speaking with them about the opportunities reading provides the importance of reading the primacy of reading you know i'm hearing you know reading is preparing for life reading is
097how you get ready for life it's how we end up with stand-up citizens who take action um you know we we really could not feel more inspired by your connection to reading your [Music] dedication to continuing to learn about the practice of teaching reading and literacy fostering literacy uh and the work that you're doing at every level um this was the first time in a while that we've been able to hear how the program has evolved and some of the highlights and you know you've really given us just so much to feel proud of and to feel very grateful that our students are engaged in becoming lifelong readers at every step of the way so thank you so very much i imagine there are comments and questions but i'm really we appreciate the time and
098care that you clearly are taking every day to work with our children and thank you for the time and care in preparing and organizing for this presentation we really appreciate it so i will pause and open up the floor for comments questions please liz i i wanted to say i don't really have any questions but it's um it was such a great presentation to hear about the problem solving and identifying opportunities even very during a very difficult time and just to to kind of hear and feel your enthusiasm for your subject for your students for for books i've always been a person too it's just it's just really nice and i i feel like we've been in a place for the last two years where everything has felt off the rails and just out out
099of kilter and everything like that and i just have to say it's so gratifying like despite all of these challenges and um all of the difficulties to to then be sitting here and and feel like even if everything feels kind of chaotic the work is going on and you're working with our students and you're valuing them and you're finding new ways to do things and your resilience and you know problem solving ability and just you know general enthusiasm and you know care for your students just really really comes through so thank you thank you i mean maybe i'll just make a quick comment i mean it's it's always great to see any of the staff it's so great to see you guys and sort of live in the classroom through you and to see those
100videos and even the little pictures it's just so wonderful we used to do it more i think but recently we haven't really had these opportunities and it's really so nice to see real live teachers responsible for educating our students so thank you thank you so much the presentation was fantastic it covered so so much and educated me a great deal for which i'm very grateful um i get it seems like there's some change in the air a little bit like we've introduced hegerty and there's some sort of new methodologies coming along and i'm just curious our is that is that a challenge at all or is that welcomed by both you as leaders and as the teachers in the various classrooms how do you sort of move forward i guess is what we're doing but
101move forward with our literacy program is it easy for you as teachers or is that a challenge and you know how do you sort of deal with that um it's probably a little bit of both um i think as teachers you're always we're we are readers and writers so we're always learning something new when something comes out we want to make sure that when the new research comes out and something is new or different and that we're teaching the best we can for our students so i feel like with the hegerty i think what we like about the hegerty is the phonemic awareness was always a part of the kindergarten program but i think we felt it needed um more explicit teaching and so when the hegerty came out and we were talking about and
102seeing it it was like oh this is perfect it kind of pulls together pieces that we were doing and so um you know when you get something new it always takes a little bit of time you have to learn it and that there's always a learning curve but i think when you see it and you see the children benefiting from it you realize it's worth it you know and i think that's across not just reading and writing it's how teachers are with everything as we begin to learn something new so we want to do what's best for the students thank you jackie thanks i'd like to thank you it's also great to hear uh actual academic discussion and what students are actually learning it's very impressive you spoke about the books yellowing with age and
103giving out tablets and stuff i had a flashback to my elementary school days when they wrote on stone tablets and the books tend to be very short i have sort of an on-board question is i noticed in an early slide there's lots of references to new standards including a new york state set of standards and i know in in some professions these standards are not always well received you know we are by if new york city can come down with new medical standards about something not everybody is jumping for joy and agrees with everything they say who makes these standards and how are they received because it seems like it's a state-by-state thing which means it varies and there's different ethos about the role of government and all of this i was just curious about
104who are the people are they known experts and then how is this type of standardization received yeah i think nice said you know i mean the common core obviously was something that all states had right and then new york state in particular with different sets of standards they've done it with they've made their own version so kind of based on that the the ela the math and even the science they have the new york state uh science learning standards which are the next-gen standards but just a little bit different um and i think in a general way what we've found with this new set of standards and they are organized in a way that makes sense to us so in terms of the teaching it feels like a much better match than the original common
105core did so i think in a general way although there's always you know variety of opinions with new standards and um i don't know exactly who's in the room all the time these are adopted but i do know that you know based on lots of research which we know you know varies in the field but i think there's wide agreement on if you think about those big categories of foundational skills literary text informational text of course these other things but it feels like a better mesh for our classrooms i'd say in terms of informing instruction okay thank you please elena um i first wanted to say thank you for sharing the magic of the classroom with us and bringing that here and and your passion for it was felt and i assume it's also felt
106with all the students there at the schools and also for sharing about how you focus on the craft and the content of your teaching and that it's a continual learning process just as you're doing continual leading learning in the classroom about how to become a reader and a writer um and i also really appreciated hearing how technology use has changed and you're using it as a tool and not the only way that you're teaching but as an additive tool in the classroom and that's really amazing to hear and how expanding who you're including in the classroom and i was wondering if there's anything more you need from the board as we kind of like or from administration or from parents to kind of continue doing this great thoughtful approach to thinking about your craft i
107can see the wheels turning you don't have to answer now how much can we ask for [Laughter] it's interesting i mean i think all teachers probably but i know the people sitting at this table like we so appreciate the board's support of enhancing libraries every year that's what i just i think that's a huge piece books books books yeah um and and yes now we have some you know expanded digital collections right because students this is going to be a part of the way they read um so they have to learn to navigate those texts as well as the physical text they have in their hands so i just want to say how much we have always appreciated that definitely and continue and all of the wonderful staff development that comes our way yeah you
108know all the new learning and you know it's so helpful to bring in the best practices to the classroom and having the opportunity to talk with colleagues and talk to one another and learn that i think is huge like just spending time um reading the literature and talking with one another and then being able to reflect and say you know all right so how is how does this this new information how am i going to use it in my teaching and in my classroom and being given time to be able to do that is wonderful any other comments or questions thank you yeah thank you so much thank you thank you thank you as we're preparing for our next presentation i'll just mention for anybody who's here and who perhaps would like to speak during
109public comment that we have a device at the back of the room by the circulation desk if you wouldn't mind please signing up we're going to have this conversation related to covid and then one more presentation related to our facilities committee and its work and then we will turn our attention to public comment so thank you for your patience all right so i think now we're going to transition to 9.02 which is our opportunity to have a conversation about the impact of covid on our schools and we'll turn it over to you andrew thank you thank you marjorie so we're moving from the academic into the world of health and safety um the big transition and uh since we haven't met for quite some time we've we've come through a lot since we were lost
110together as a board back in december and living through [Music] what now we hope is beginning to look like the peak of omicron perhaps we're now coming down on the other side of that but for a period there was extremely difficult in the schools the numbers of cases rising dramatically and and i know i've shared this with the board before i continue to meet every monday morning with wichita county officials and they give us updates every week on the case numbers in the county so for that period of december into early january those numbers were rising very very very rapidly uh across the county and we saw it reflected here in the numbers we were reporting out in the district um we m much more recently thankfully you know we see those numbers start to
111go down uh and tonight the number that we reported out was three positive cases across the whole district which is the lowest number that we've reported in quite some time and of course we hope that trend continues for the health and well-being of all so we're really uh hopeful that that's the trend and the direction in which we're moving and while all that's been happening uh the the state department of health county department of health have been issuing revised guidance to us which we have pushed out to the community i'm just going to summarize it tonight very briefly to get us to where we are at the moment but back on january 10th was the first time we received the most significantly revised guidance when the state reduced both the quarantine and the isolation periods
112from 10 days down to five days and that had the impact uh once that went into effect of reducing the amount of time obviously students were out of school and our focus as we've said many times this year has been on keeping the in-person experience as as rich and vibrant and you heard about it tonight as we possibly could it's been our goal throughout the year so we are always happy when we're able to bring more students back into school we saw that adjustment made and then we saw further adjustments made more recently about the rules related to vaccinations and quarantines and status there and we started to see more students be able to come into school even through the quarantine period so most recently as was mentioned earlier tonight we did the distribution of
113tests on the weekend and those tests now allow our district to have a test to stay program which is allowing students who would otherwise be quarantined if they choose the unvaccinated asymptomatic students if they choose to do the test to stay program can also come into school so what this is all meant is that at this point essentially the only students who are out of school are those who are either covet positive or experiencing symptoms of covet themselves at the moment uh those who have been exposed can now for the most part be in school uh and and this is this has made a very dramatic change uh for the lives of our administrators in particular who at the peak of omicron were truly doing nothing all day long but contact tracing and looking out
114for those close contacts and contacting families this was another change actually i should mention this one that the the state made in the last several weeks they ended their department of health contact tracing procedures so that as a district we are no longer reporting those cases those contacts to the department of health which was also something that took up an enormous amount of time but was obviously very important to the ongoing challenge of overcoming the covet experience but that's no longer happening so now we as a district are still because we feel it's best practice still contacting in those cases when there's been a covered positive case in school we are still contacting those close contacts which in case of schools means a student or a staff a student who was within three feet of
115the positive case whether that's in a classroom on a bus if it's an adult it's still six feet but that also has brought the numbers down significantly in terms of those who are required to quarantine so we're seeing more of a return some i want to say normal but somewhat to normal far more students back in school and as and as i mentioned before fortunately with the numbers also still going down i think i think i've mentioned um most of the changes and all of those details can be found on our website in the emails that we've pushed out and if you want to get even more detailed certainly you can go to the new york state department of health website where there are charts and other things available for families and other citizens to
116be able to reference for themselves what the current rules and regulations are the weekend was mentioned the distribution of rapid test kits we distributed about 650 test kits on the on the weekend which was terrific and at this point if there were any families that did not collect test kits that would like to have them for their families if you didn't pick them up on the weekend just simply contact your school administrator and they'll be able to get them to you for your family and i think that gets us pretty much up to this week and i'll just say a few words about what happened at the beginning of this week and i think for sake of clarification around the the mask mandate which was obviously the big discussion on monday and tuesday of this
117week for sake of clarification our authority and our obligation to implement the masked mandate throughout the pandemic has come either from the governor's office or from the new york state department of health and i think that's true of all school districts in westchester county again the governor's office the new york state department of health throughout the pandemic those orders have been in place and then there was a brief window of time from monday afternoon into tuesday afternoon where that authority went away until an appeal was made on tuesday afternoon and a stay was put in place so that now that mandate is back in place and that's honestly the long and the short of where that authority comes from um and that brings us to where we are today so i don't know if there
118are questions from board members or any anything i can try to answer or address for you thank you for the overview and for bringing us up to date we really appreciate that comments questions the administrators experienced a belief in that burden are they able to turn their attention now to yeah thanks bill they they certainly to some degree but not entirely um again at the peak of omicron when contact racing was still required when we were still reporting all of those cases and the close contacts to the doh it was it was all day long nights and weekends all the time that's not the case anymore but still as positive cases come in every case does require us to try to figure out if the person was in school where were those close contacts it's
119it's not as extensive as it was before but it's certainly still an important piece of the work each day yeah any other comments or questions before we turn our attention to our next topic thank you all right and this brings us to 9.03 which is our opportunity for some discussion and an update from our administration regarding the work of the facilities committee i will just briefly note that we had skipped over our board subcommittee announcements and i just want to check in and make sure that we're okay to continue proceeding in this order and then do subcommittees later is that okay yeah okay um then i'm going to turn it over to danelle please sure thank you thank you that's exactly what i was going to say i think liz will say a little bit
120more about our facilities committee when it comes to board committee reports thank you um but i'd first like to just acknowledge our operations and maintenance department i think they've done a fantastic job throughout the years with small projects throughout our buildings you may recall last spring we performed our five-year building condition survey and that just gave us a great opportunity to really look at our facilities and create a committee that can really look at our schools through the lens of that five-year building condition survey and then how can we bring our school buildings up to a more suitable level to the learning that we're seeing today the learn the types of learning that we're seeing today our last major construction project was actually in 2003 we've had other smaller projects ap farms we've done roof
121work um track and field work so our operations maintenance department have been doing a lot of work to our buildings but we really haven't seen any major projects since 2000 2003 when we had to take out some bonds to perform those updates so we're really looking forward to the facilities committee i think it's a great opportunity you'll see later on on the agenda some facility committee members community interested so that's what i have thank you any questions or comments from board members about where we are i mean i think it's worth repeating that it's been almost 20 years since we had any major uh facilities upgrades at any of the schools in the district and they take a lot of wear and tear and we recently had an opportunity to tour this building and the
122middle school and there are clearly some areas that are in serious need of upgrading facelifts i'm thinking of the science labs and some of the step labs and some of the other areas around schools that just need it i mean they just need it so i think hopefully the facilities committee concurs that there's some substantial work to be done and we can start to move forward with some good progress that our architects and the ups the operations teams have really given us a great lens into uh what can be done so i'm really uh very uh ambitious about what might be what we may be able to achieve does it feel appropriate can i just jump in now please do please for continuity um just to give you an update on the facilities community report
123tonight we will be appointing a bunch of community members we had such great interest we've got a wealth of talent expertise and enthusiasm around this particular committee which is just really exciting um as rory was saying and we're talking about buildings i've learned some things about um pointing repointing brick that i didn't know about in the past um and so there's you know with um projects like this there's you know some very exciting potential things that we could do and and i think that we are fortunate to have such um interest and expertise in the community um as danelle mentioned there was the five-year building condition survey there are four different categories of the types of upgrades that are recommended none were category one which are life and safety upgrades um so you know that
124is also kudos to the operations and maintenance um department that really keeps our buildings in such great shape um but then we did see some more exciting and you know bigger projects that could potentially be done and really enhance the education and learning atmosphere in our district and i think that it's going to be a very exciting project i know that i might be overwhelming with the optimism right now but this feels like a very normal thing for a school board to be talking about like that has nothing to do with the pandemics so um i just want to say thank you to all of the community members who are going to be joining us at our next meeting next week and we really look forward to this work wonderful thank you so much for
125the update liz thank you danelle it is a really exciting opportunity and we're fortunate to be meeting this opportunity after several years of dedicated work toward a learning commitment so that we have a sense of what we're striving toward who we're trying to become through the lens of our infrastructure and we have an amazing group of administrators and teachers and staff members who will also be involved in this work and community members who will participate we hope in focus groups and we really do need participation from our entire community to make sure that we are striving toward the values and goals and aspirations of our community members with respect to what we want education to look like several years from now you know we won't be putting the shovel in the ground in the immediate
126future but you know first we've got to prepare ourselves financially to be ready to meet these challenges and um you know it's it's very exciting and thank you so much for leading the work we look forward to appointing community members in just a short while any other comments or questions nope okay thank you terrific um so perhaps we will continue to postpone the remaining subcommittee reports until after public comment because we have community members who've been with us for a while and we want to be respectful of their time so this is now our opportunity 10.01 for public comment we thank you again for your patience and thank you for joining us we ask that you please introduce yourselves and let us know if you have children in the district and perhaps where you live
127we do take seriously our responsibility to listen attentively and respectfully during this portion of the meeting so please don't feel disappointed or surprised if we don't respond or we don't engage in any back and forth this really is the public's opportunity to comment on matters that you might have heard about tonight at our meeting or other matters pertaining to the school district a little bit later in the meeting we do have opportunity for or dialogue but again even there please don't feel disappointed if we don't engage immediately in a comment or concern that we hear tonight we really do appreciate an opportunity to reflect on all that you've shared to do any research that might be necessary and certainly at a future board meeting we can also always revisit a topic that might be brought
128to our attention this evening if if tonight isn't the opportunity for us to immediately respond so with that let me turn my attention to the sign up sheet we do ask that you keep your remarks to three minutes please we have a timer that we will rely on um and just a reminder that we're all abiding by the code of conduct here this evening and we appreciate uh your respectfulness in advance uh the first speaker to my knowledge is corey stotesbury um if you don't mind joining us at the microphone thank you very much hi thank you very much everyone my name is corey stowsbury and i'm a parent in the district as well as a child psychiatrist serving students in the district and throughout new york i'm also the co-author co-author of a recently
129released toolkit called the urgency of normal why asked today of the board would be to vote to ignore the state's mandate requiring any non-pharmacologic interventions in our school tonight i hope to thread a needle and communicate that i'm not asking you to prohibit npis if a family wants that for their child they should have it however currently that right of choice is only recognized in one direction an increasing number of families feel that the lack of normalcy is greater is a greater harm to their children than the risk of covet i won't cite the data regarding the lack of efficacy of masks and other mpis nor the plummeting risk of hospitalization and death for our children as i know the board is beholden to their fiduciary responsibility to the district rather than data and that
130fiduciary responsibility is largely defined by the rules of the state in the county you likely have a risk management advisor that has told you that violating state rules will expose the district to litigation those rules are harming our kids and the resulting litigation will probably fall on the state instead of because you have followed those rules which i understand however the harms including the loss of education and increasing mental illness are something that we need to be thinking about more urgently instead my appeal is to the part of us that led us all to work in careers involving children that at some point we have to put our personal standards up in front and decide to let those kick in and refuse to allow orders to harm our children orders that are increasingly being ruled
131in places as unconstitutional across the country our district has been very fortunate these past years our children have enjoyed a better school experience than most in westchester county and certainly than new york city i haven't seen this officially but watching our numbers i assume that we've not had any super spreader events in our classrooms looking at the emerging data it would seem that this has not been due to our mandating rules of npis rather the static characteristics of our community low population density higher than average income higher than average personal health and a higher than average employment in positions of non-customer-facing jobs that allow people to work remotely omicron has shown us how pervasive airborne infections can be regardless of npis i do believe we're nearing the end of state mandates but still over the
132next few weeks over a million people will just descend upon los angeles to celebrate the super bowl and will not be engaging in any npis as long as they show a vaccine passport yet not a mile away from the stadium children there will wear a mask indoors and outdoors all day long in school now being required to wear a surgical mask with a tight fitting wire across the front every night tens of thousands of people in new york city do the same thing where they can enjoy any measure of enjoyment they want without any restrictions as long as they can show such a passport 14 states in the country are the only ones still maintaining school mandates 66 percent of the counties in new york have decided not to enforce the governor's mass mandate in
133schools and yet when her mandate expires on february 1st for indoor facilities for adults and people outside of school our children will wait three more weeks for that order to expire in schools i feel that that's unethical and inappropriate at this point mr stonesbury i apologize for interrupting you i just want to point out that the three minutes has elapsed if you could please conclusion thank you it would make me very proud if our district sent a message to the state that the county and the county that parents rights over their children's well-being is not something we need permission to protect currently our rules as parents have been stripped from us because of these rules thank you thank you [Applause] thank you daniela rapisardi petroro good evening my name is daniela reposardi my son is
134a first grader at increase miller as you know tomorrow the second department will hear the motion to stay the nasa county court order declaring mass regulations unlawful if the second department lifts the temporary state tomorrow the decision to require face masks in schools will fall to individual school districts during the pendency of the appeal i urge you to consider allowing families to have a choice as to whether their children should wear a mask in school the mental emotional and social harm that we are doing to our children by forcing them to wear a mask in school is far worse than the verses of covin the pandemic started nearly two years ago in those two years there have been huge changes one a vaccine is available and our community has high vaccination rates two there is
135medicine and treatment for coven 19 widely available at our hospitals and three the virus has weakened it is time to reassess whether extraordinary measures like masking our children are justified at the present time covid poses very little threat a serious disease for students in highly vaccinated communities like this one teachers and other staff members can get vaccinated in a booster dose if they want to obviously we're not forgetting about the vulnerable there have always been illnesses such as rsv the flu pneumonia that have affected certain people in a much more severe way than the general population i have been in the shoes of parents with vulnerable children my daughter had several life-saving brain surgeries postponed because she kept getting colds and ear infections you can't undergo anesthesia while you're sick i get that fear but
136i never expected other people to change their behavior for her instead i changed our family's behavior around the times of each of her surgeries similarly here there is a solution to protect the vulnerable the most vulnerable can choose if they want to to wear a well-fitted n95 respirator a properly fitted n95 is highly effective at protecting the wearer and does not rely on the behavior of others for protection high quality one-way masking is more effective of protecting the vulnerable than universal use of extremely low-quality masks this is what my son wears to school he wears his minecraft mask and so do all the boys it's a little more than a fashion accessory forcing every child to wear this unregulated fabric over their face does not benefit anyone real world studies and academic studies have not
137demonstrated any clear benefit of masking students while the benefits of mask wearing to society are highly questionable the damage that mask squaring is doing to our children is very real our children's mental health is suffering our children's development is being impaired our children can't see each other's faces they can't learn social cues their teachers can't see their smiles their classmates can't see their frowns their speech is being affected how can they learn to develop sounds when they're wearing masks their learning is being affected my son wears glasses and his mask always fogs up his glasses how can he learn to read with foggy glasses the literary presentation was awesome but it's not going to help if he can't see anything i asked my son today how he felt about wearing a massive school and he
138said he can't breathe in it when he had coveted he didn't even have a single symptom and i get it while sitting there i feel like i'm suffocating in this mask how can he learn i wouldn't be here today if i didn't see a real change in my son that i know is from mask wearing there are many parents here who see the horrible effect that mask wearing is having on their own children our children are our future they deserve the highest priority in our society especially because there's another better way to protect the vulnerable i truly hope the second department makes the right decision tomorrow and ultimately on the appeal and of course i hope that the katona louisville school district makes the right decision for our children thank you thank you daniela goldman
139good evening my name is dr daniella goldman i have three children in the school district two at meadow pond and one at the middle school i am here tonight to ask you that if and when the state state the state mass mandate is removed for you as a board member to accept the decision and remove the masks from our children our children have the lowest risk of cobit yet they have been subjected to the most draconian measures our children are suffering for a disease that they are at low risk for adults needs have been placed over our children i would like to start off with some facts this is comparing mortality rates in the u.s for people under the age of 25 compared to covet for the age group of under five children are 11
140times more likely to die in a car accident they are ten times more likely to die of homicide and two times more likely to die of a drug overdose in the age group of five to 14 children are 10 times more likely to die of a car accident than cobit they are six and a half times more likely to die of suicide and five times more likely to die of homicide in ages 5 to 24 they are 9 to 10 times across the board more likely to die in a car accident suicide homicide or drug overdose out of approximately 72 million children in the u.s as of yesterday 883 children have died of covet rate of covet death under age 18 is 0.00001 i will leave that up to you to determine if you think
141that is a big or small number joseph allen a professor at harvard a cove vent and ventilation expert who has been a pro mask advocate recently went on cnn and spoke about the harm masks are causing in our kids he states that the risk of covets to kids have been consistently low throughout the pandemic new data out of new york state reports that even during the peak of omicron surge the risk to an unvaccinated kid being hospitalized is one and a hundred thousand the risk of a vaccinated child being hospitalized is two to three per million these rates are incredibly low vaccines have been readily available to the general public for over 10 months teachers and adults who want to be vaccinated and boosted have had ample time to do so in a recent study
142reported by the cdc two weeks ago it shows that even with a two dose vaccine regimen your risk of a severe covet outcome is 0.00003 percent you heard me correct that is four zeros in front of a three vaccines work we are underplaying the effect that vaccines have on this virus teachers and adults are protected children have been in master almost two years to claim that they are resilient and no harm has been done is wrong children have suffered socially and academically a recent study at brown university shows significant cognitive and motor delay in children since the start of the pandemic it is time to remove the mass mandate and if our governor won't remove it it is up to you and to fight for the local control of our schools what happens when we
143are faced with another respiratory virus every year we have a wave of influenza or even a rhinovirus are we going to continue to mask our kids until they graduate in response to people who say what's the big deal just wear a mask i politely say please wear your mask and don't force it on everybody i'm almost done people who want to continue to wear a mask should take comfort in the fact that one way masking works one way masking is where one person wear a mask and another person doesn't joseph allen the professor at harvard talked about it and was recently written in the atlantic about the efficacy of one-way masking children are getting all the downside of wearing masks hiding their faces not being able to read facial expressions and none of the upside
144unmask our kids i am asking for you to fight for our children and take back control of our schools from policies that are driven from fear and not facts thank you [Applause] thank you violet on yellow good evening everyone good evening my name is violet aniello i have two children in the district one uh one at meadow pond and one at john jay middle school when kobet invaded our lives about two years ago measures were taken to protect our communities we are in year three of what some now are calling an endemic we have more knowledge and data that shows that the how the virus impacts the various age groups specifically we know that the risk of dying from covid is almost zero for children and that cloth masks are ineffective in stopping the spread
145of the virus two years ago we did not have any other treatments so masks were the only thing that could really help us to stop the spread even dr fauci told us in 2020 that masks are not needed and not as effective as people think his statement may have changed over time but science remains crystal clear on the effectiveness of cloth masks or lack of we see that in our own community with our children being masked all day the virus continues to spread in and outside of the school environment a very recent publication stated that face masks become non-consequential and do not function after 20 minutes due to saturations said this was from a professor yvonne where cassart from the department of infectious disease at the university of sydney when my kids get home their
146masks are soaked and i give them more than one masks are absurd illogical nonsensical and potentially dangerous in trying to stop every case of covid or stopping cobit at all costs they may be partially effective in shielding adults from kovid since when is it ethical to burden children for the benefit of adults why are we harming one generation to protect the other you have been put on the board to protect our kids to help them become young adults and not stifle their learning and growth potential i implore you to do what is right for our kids especially make mask wearing optional respect all viewpoints those who want to wear a mask should have the same right as those who do not want to earlier this week when i told my kids that they could go
147to school without a mask they cheered they were so happy they said mom we're going to be able to breathe again we're going to be able to see our friends my husband had to be the one to tell them that was a short-lived situation we now have treatments to help us against covets let kovat let's use those tools that are all better off and but offer a better level of protection than masks although my kids missed the day the one day that they could go to school without a mask i heard horrific accounts of teachers shaming kids who chose not to wear a mask in a classroom that behavior is inexcusable and i hope those teachers are going to be held accountable masks are going to go away neighboring districts around new york and around
148the country are making masks optional let's do the same here you guys have the power you guys are here to protect our kids lastly why are we continuing to limit interaction between kids whether in the classroom or during lunch or recess it's a sad picture to see young vibrant kids eating lunches on their lap and being spread out every six feet through the hallway we can't stop the virus we need to learn to live with it just like we have done for the flu or any other communicable disease we have faced in the past we should not continue using protocols that were implemented when we had no knowledge of the virus and we didn't have any other tools thank you very much thank you jake kempen sorry one sec uh good evening everyone uh if
149you don't know my name's jake kempen uh i am a representative of the saga club the straight and gay alliance before i start uh there's been a lot of talk about masking i personally would really like to commend the board for maintaining masking guidelines and keeping us safe that's just what i'm feeling want to get that out uh all right um i come here to give some good news some issues and some not so good uh news first some good news with the help from mr seleznik and vice principal mr bell we have gained progress towards a more inclusive environment by ensuring that the gender neutral bathrooms stay open so i very much commend you for that while this is great there's still a few things that can be done first of all i've been
150addressed by over 54 students which i had a petition you guys there's copies of it and stuff um the issue that was addressed to me was that the lack of feminine products in restrooms and in gender-neutral bathrooms and on behalf of the student body and the saga club we would like to request that all gender neutral bathrooms and women's bathrooms be fully stocked with feminine products such as tampons and sanitary pads this isn't really a want this is a need currently the only place where you can obtain feminine products is from the nurse and while that's great that that's it's really not enough um so i would on behalf of them greatly request that all gender neutral bathrooms and women's bathrooms and maybe even men's bathrooms be stocked with feminine products uh all right that's
151the first thing uh the second thing is um prior to this meeting but a few meetings ago i had addressed to the board a need for a policy on the usage of all bathrooms regarding gender and that sort of thing currently uh i met with mr bell earlier today um any trans kid can use any bathroom they identify which is great i love the inclusiveness the issue is that there's still a lot of gray area in that i'd like to propose that a bill that we have been drafting at the saga club which basically just goes over everything the school is doing already but putting a policy set in stone would be a very good idea because it no i'm sorry one sec um that would just be smart to have a policy in place
152um uh yeah um and lastly uh i formally invite any of the board members and to mr seleznik to attend one of our saga meetings so we can all uh try to get on the same page with stuff we're not asking for a lot we just want the school to be as inclusive as possible so yeah to any board member we totally welcome you to attend one of our meetings if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me or any of the saga members please we don't bite so thank you thank you thank you michelle de rivage it's so hard to speak through this can you hear me yes okay so good evening and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak there are two extreme views on mask wearing
153both very passionate i think it will be obvious what my view is um so my name is michelle duravage and my children attended the katuna lewis lewisboro district schools as a mother and educator i am and have been saddened by the covet policies the district has chosen to put into place for all the district schools and compliance at both the district and parents have displayed this practice is in violation of our medical freedom and it is a parent's choice not the school districts there's so much damage being done to our children who are muzzled and prevented from seeing the faces and smiles of others the facial expressions of emotions of their parents their classmates and school staff this extremely serious issue should be understood through basic common sense and this is wrong there's not the
154slightest medical justification for any of this the masking of children is hugely damaging to their physical health their mental health and well-being it deprives them of oxygen they're breathing in their own co2 which creates an acidic environment and attracts disease the children handle their mass constantly creating unsanitary conditions their masks are full of spit and dirt the deprivation of oxygen disrupts their ability to learn in early childhood development children need to see facial expressions in order to develop their minds and their character they need physical interaction with each other and their teachers well how can a child determine words that a teacher is enunciating when he or she can't see their faces they need to see facial clues for learning nobody seems to have not acknowledged or denied the fact that mass do not stem
155the spread of cloven 19 so that forcing children to wear them is an act of cruelty for which there is simply no excuse there have been over a dozen random randomized clinical trials regarding the wearing a face mask and respiratory viral infections including one specifically aimed at cloven 19 cases not one lends any support to the current masking hysteria there's no demonstrated statistically significant difference between wearing or not wearing face masks in public spaces during an outbreak of a respiratory virus in a single randomized clinical trial of course if anyone who chooses to believe a mask will help to free help it's free to wear one but the insistence on stifling entire schools full of children for no proven medical reasons seems simply to instill panic to undermine the ability to bond with one another
156and emphasize their social unimportance by covering their faces thank you for your earnestness and critical thinking and making the crucial decision regarding giving the option to parents to choose whether or not to participate in this practice thank you [Applause] thank you thank you ashley lamonic thank you good evening let's do hi good evening my name is ashley lamonic i live in uh katona and i have a daughter who's not yet old enough for the schools i spoke at the last few board meetings as well i was pleasantly surprised to read that that katona lewisborough was one of the districts that adhered to the court ruling earlier this week i greatly appreciate that masks were optional for the day and understand that unfortunately mask mandates are once again again enforced at katona lewisborough many parents and
157prospective parents in the districts sincerely hope that the district opts for lifting current mandates and avoiding any new ones this should be done as soon as possible i know this is not an easy issue there are people passionate about this on both sides i also understand that school the students were taken aback by the sudden change on tuesday this is all the more reason for the school district to be proactive in lifting mandates as soon as possible on their own terms so that families teachers and administration can help students transition back to the normal ways of being in school i'm sure i'm not the only one who has heard about the negative effects the negative impact of covid protocols in schools in general but i will focus on the impacts in this district well my
158daughter is not old enough for elementary school i've heard from multiple neighbors with young kids that their children have experienced both stagnant academic growth as in like no growth same reading levels year to year and sharp declines in self-confidence for one family their polite shy five-year-old didn't ask for help when he didn't understand something because teachers had trouble understanding him through his mask and he hated to repeat himself it got bad enough that he was waking up in the middle of the night with panic attacks a five-year-old his parents even with three other children have since homeschooled since chosen to homeschool their kids rather than subject their child to the emotional distress caused by these mandates once upon a time not too long ago it was beyond normal for kids to go to school see
159their friends and teachers faces interact with their peers sit next to and socialize with their friends as adults the last two years have been completely unprecedented in our lives and now we have a generation growing up thinking this is normal it is not this is especially concerning for younger kids for young kids we're going on two years this and for young kids this is all they know the longer it goes on the more damage is done to this generation these were meant to be temporary measures it is time let parents be the ones to decide what is best for their children thank you meredith black good evening good evening first i wanted to take a moment to thank miss mary ford for preparing the literacy presentation and providing a copy for publication on the boe
160website in advance of this evening's presentation so as to give the board and the public an opportunity to review and consider the developments that are being made with respect to literacy in our schools so much of tonight's presentation highlighted important elements and steps in fostering the development of strong readers and i hope this presentation is indicative of a move away from antiquated and damaging reading strategies that have long enforced formed and infused classroom instruction with that said i remain curious about it what i remain curious about is the implementation of these concepts have our teachers receive training on these reading pillars by whom and with what frequency do they truly understand what these pillars are how they tie together how to reach these pillars and how to identify and assist children that do not readily
161grasp these concepts however teachers received any training on transitioning away from antiquated and damaging reading strategies to scientifically proven and supported methods of reading instruction i was happy to hear and learn about the conversation that has started with the reading of the shift shifting the balance but i still remain particularly concerned with this as the district's december 20 21st response to my foil request indicated that the district continues to use teachers college study in both reading and writing and it's long been shown that these programs continue to include and guide students to use msv to inform that their coding such tools have been proven to be inconsistent and detrimental to readers so if the district is going to refuse to step away from these programs what is being done to educate our teachers on the
162portions of those programs and teacher manuals that direct them to use these tools in their lessons my understanding from other other literacy experts is that such instances in such instances teacher training and education is needed to inform teachers why such strategies are antiquated and harmful and educate them on proper alternatives and instruction to provide one highly regarded program for such transitioning is letters has the district concerning considered investing in letters training for its teachers what type of ongoing training is made available to our teachers to keep them abreast of the scientific research of reading have our teachers and administrators received any training in learning disabilities that affect a child's ability to read not only so that they can understand why a child is struggling and how they can help them but to also enable them
163to have empathy for the challenges those child those children face in a classroom as a parent of two dyslexic children i can attest to the fact that even knowing what my kids struggle with participating in a dyslexia four-day seminar entirely changed my perspective and understanding of not only what their disability might feel like but how it has the ability to impact the way they engage in classroom activities participate with their teachers and problem solve i can honestly say i would not have had the same understanding or empathy i do today without that seminar which by the way took two hours it was free and it was done by the putnam county boces um group besides trainings are teachers being observed in the classroom by program trainers to ensure that the implementation of these scripted programs
164is being done properly what type of literacy program and support is being provided to middle school and high school students that are struggling to learn to read because just as a child finishes third grade or graduates from fifth grade it doesn't mean that they're a fluent or capable reader and in fact children that with dyslexia and other learning disabilities continue to need additional instruction in reading and the elements of reading into uh into their teenage and adult years it's a lifelong process so simply saying you're making text available or providing support is not enough they actually need that reading instruction and lastly what type of credentials do teachers provide providing rti and reading or specialized reading instruction have would the board consider making such qualifications a requirement for individuals fulfilling these roles thank you i
165look forward to hearing more about literacy in the school district thanks [Applause] thank you adelaide black hi my name is addie black i'm in fifth grade and i'm dyslexic i've been attending windward for three years i am not here to make a fancy speech but i want to ask you a few questions why am i here at windward and not a kes why is it taking so long to respond to parents con concerns about reading when are you going it to make a change needing so that students like me can return it to schools with my friends why am i being treated differently why when dyslexia is it so common thank you [Applause] thank you erica glick good evening i'm erica glick thank you for providing the slides in advance of this evening's presentation i
166know when i've requested them in advance in past years that request has been denied so thank you this was very helpful i tonight went immediately to the references as a parent a professional and someone incredibly interested in reading and literacy i think it was worthwhile to be familiar with what you were basing your information on first i noticed your first reference was that of shifting the balance your summer book club reading while i can appreciate that you were interested in the six ways to bring the science of reading into a balanced literacy classroom this reminded me an awful lot of spin one could be hopeful that you're attempting to build bridges but aren't you just spinning the science lingo into these conversations perhaps to placate those with questions i'd like to know what research there
167is that this idea of blending poor methods with real science is better than real science why would one do that these products balance literacy leveled literacy and poor professional developments are unfit for the intended use of teaching foundational reading in a scientific explicit and systematic way period i'd like to see a study on how this works effectively that is adapting poor products to use the science but unfortunately no such study exists the next reference was something from the international literacy association one could observe that ila board members are derived from a variety of camps whether you see that to be problematic or perhaps not i read everything from them with a bit of skepticism they were quoted regarding the benefits of independent reading while independent reading does in fact have benefits it's most appropriate for
168readers who are already fluent otherwise a complete waste of time and time that can actually be better spent teaching your next quote from dr allington the retired professor famous dyslexia denier whole language supporter former president of the ila who threatened to shoot whoever wrote the say dyslexia bill which was simply a bill asking for universal screening a few years ago and again denies the existence of dyslexia needless to say rightfully skeptical of anything he says and the ila as they chose to never stand against his hateful narrative i hesitate towards throwing them my support either moving along to your information from the ncte national council of teachers of english again largely whole language supporters again on independent reading more time for the struggling reader to learn how to fake it in fact this was also
169discussed by the nic hd the report of the national reading panel that you cited from their extensive report independent silent reading with minimal guidance and feedback not surprising they were unable to find a positive relationship for reading achievement one could feel some of these references were cherry-picked but when one truly looks past the buzzwords and spin i'm finishing up it's sadly empty and simply wrong similar to the overall presentation full of buzzwords to the unfamiliar listener probably sounds impressive but to those in the know we can see through it i also find it curious that there was no mention of teachers college readers or writers workshop tonight other than the intervention method that's a rather large pink elephant in the classroom that we're not speaking about or are we still using it it would be
170wonderful if all stakeholders in catona lewisborough could come together and share at the table share their truths listen together non-judgmentally and collaboratively problem solve if this table existed i'd eagerly pull up a chair but sadly while we could be working together through a literacy committee sharing all of our hard-earned knowledge we continue to limit ourselves our district and ultimately our children i again ask for a literacy committee let's do better for all of the children thank you jacqueline klein novak good evening um i am a parent a resident a speech language pathologist special educator and reading specialist oh forgot my name jacqueline klein novick um i would like to know when there will be a response about the concerns regarding the special ed program uh it's been many months and about a hundred speeches by
171residents concerned about the abuse and mistreatment of autistic children in this district uh i wrote an email to you mrs schiff after our december meeting i didn't get a response and i frankly just want to know when we will get an update about the changes to improve behavior management when will we get an update about changes to safeguard our most vulnerable students please address this when uh dr ocmar's visit was disappointing not a thorough assessment of the program i don't know really it wasn't so clearly communicated to us what it was supposed to be what the goal of his visit was but it certainly wasn't a thorough assessment of the special ed programs um you know i did he review the children's ieps or specific goals before he observed and if not how could he
172have known that the lessons were appropriate i just don't understand that um did teachers relate challenging behaviors that they were dealing with did he help interpret negative behaviors or how to interpret negative behaviors did he help with behavior management techniques did he speak about setting appropriate goals academic social and behavioral i didn't hear any of this on dr volkmar zoom as a special educator and former teacher this is what i'd want to know from an expert i didn't hear any of this we need a real review of our programs in depth and thorough and dr volkmar's visit wasn't it and i'm really just wanting a response at some point of when will we know about any sort of updates about this um about the literacy program um i i find it uh it was it
173was a beautiful presentation and i appreciate what went into it and and the um enthusiasm for it uh the problem is it doesn't work for all and that's the problem uh it is estimated that 20 of the population is dyslexic twenty percent of the kids at the school are dyslexic so varying degrees so hegerty that sounds like a nice addition foundations k to three um it could be problematic because it needs to be delivered with a certain intensity a certain consistency a certain fidelity to the program that i don't think is really happening i'm going to go real quickly now do we stop teaching decoding after third grade worldly wise i'm very familiar with i use it it's not a phonics program it's a vocabulary program it doesn't teach structure in any kind of direct
174systematic way it's about vocabulary it does a nice job of that um i had the opportunity i was at the christmas crafts fair um in katona uh in december in the commuter lot in katona and it was a wonderful school community event then i i was reminded that 23 katona louis borough kids are not part of the school community because they are waiting in that communal lot every morning to take a bus to windward which is unbelievable this is first through eighth grade we have 23 kids going to windward i don't know how many are going to eagle hill i'm not sure this i don't know how many are going to winston prep but i do know there's about 23 kids that are getting on a bus in the morning from that commuter lot so
175that they can learn how to read if our reading program was effective these katona lewisborough kids would be in district and part of their school community like addie so bravely just talked about uh i'm not even including the struggling readers that my colleagues and i in the private sector work with at 7 45 a.m in the morning or late in the evening we must do a better job we can it starts with a willingness to look at it a willingness to be open to the research and the science a willingness to be motivated and driven to have all kids receive what they need to learn to read in district let's come together let's discuss how this can occur can we form a literacy committee it's never too late to do that so that all the
176kids including those 20 with varying degrees of reading disability can have their needs met thank you [Applause] thank you is anybody else waiting to speak not aware yes please uh thanks miss schiff i wasn't planning to speak but i feel compelled to my name's matthew golia happy new year i know there hasn't been a meeting a public meeting all year the last one was cancelled abruptly i'm wondering if you can comment about what happened there trustee garrity you seem so giddy about the facilities committee and and you talked about the wealth of knowledge that the public had and how excited you were to work with folks which i admire your positivity but i feel like it's a bit of a slap in the face for some of the ladies behind me who have been asking
177for a literacy committee for two three years we have an we have a facilities committee and i am imes space committee an equity and justice committee why can't we have a literacy committee why can't we have a special education committee um uh mr burke nice to see you haven't seen you in two months i emailed you regarding your comments on november 4th i have the same questions for you you said you didn't believe we understood how much the board of education cared about the students the vulnerable students and how active you were and how many steps you have taken to address our concerns so my question to you can you can you tell us specifically what those steps and actions have been thank you that's it thank you is anybody else waiting before we close
178the public forum for tonight okay thank you so much for uh members of the community for joining us and thank you for your comments concerns um and for taking the time to speak with us we appreciate it i'm going to suggest a brief recess it's 10 10 i'd like to make a motion for a brief recess board members have been sitting at the table administrators for over two hours and i think just a brief bio break might be called for thank you for seconding the motion ilana all in favor please say aye and we will reconvene at 10 15. thank you okay great thank you so much everybody i think we're ready to come back into public session if i could ask for a motion please thank you julia seconded by liz all in favor
179please say aye terrific so i think let's go back up in our order of business to 7.01 which is our opportunity for board subcommittee reports thank you liz for reporting out on the facilities committee was there anything for audit tonight not tonight okey-doke great and how about from finance uh sure the finance committee met earlier this week and we had a very productive meeting in the district office most members were able to participate we had one person dial in via zoom because she was in florida it's coming together so we're feeling good about our charge which essentially is to re-evaluate the forecasting model and get an understanding of what the revenue and expenditure streams of the district will look like over the course of the next four years so a little bit of predictive modeling
180going on we're also planning to review our expenditures comparatively to our peer districts and then hopefully with that information as insights identify areas where there may be opportunities to uh realize savings or to do things a little more efficiently than we are it's still a work in progress the dunnell and the district office have been super helpful in uh pulling data for us um and we have some really wonderful committee members um this year who are adding uh enormous value to the way in which we're thinking about it as well as some old committee members um so i think it's it's going along well we're preparing to report out in june and uh i think we're i think we're on track a couple of people have some homework to do but i think we're on
181track and things are going well wonderful that's great to hear thank you very much parent council we met at the beginning of this year and we had the the gift of andrew sort of framing our discussion um apropos tonight with some articles about covet and the difficulty of the past month in particular where um there was sort of you know we were heading toward the peak of this current surge and how it was difficult to make decisions in that moment and that there kind of may not be a right and a wrong around um particularly around the question of school opening and how schools opened again and this was sort of you know in january and look how different it's sort of a different discussion yet some of those same questions are still there so
182that kind of framed we had a very good discussion at the parent council and then parent there were a number of questions that got answered but a lot was around covet during parent counsel at our the first meeting of the month thank you sounds like a great discussion thank you sustainability committee did meet in early january and mary was able to update our committee on the great work that is newly underway thanks to the curriculum integration leaders for sustainability and also the work of the sustainability in our schools committee several of us had attended a climate change institute last year you might remember and mary was actually able to arrange for a consultant that we met there to meet with our committee the school committee that is not the subcommittee to share a framework for
183sustainability education and to help the district think about how we can use our own buildings as teaching tools there's going to be a follow-up to that later this month in preparation for that committee's next meeting in february and in addition small groups of teachers in partnership with a consultant are developing units of study that are aligned with the united nations sustainable development goals the sdgs as well as discipline specific standards and dispositions related to the learning commitment we also returned our attention to electric vehicle infrastructure through the lens of governor hocal's state of the state which had just occurred right before our subcommittee meeting and in her address she proposed legislation to require that by 2027 all new school bus purchases will be zero emissions and that by 2035 all school buses on the road
184will be zero emissions today several of us had the opportunity to attend a webinar um hosted by a group not affiliated with katona lewisboro proper but it was a panel discussion on many various perspectives and elements related both to funding and implementation of electric vehicle infrastructure in the region importantly the passage of legislation that was referenced by the governor would ensure that the state provides some aid toward this infrastructure which can be quite costly um and danelle and paul christensen have continued to work on the project that i mentioned at the last meeting is already underway with regard to moving forward for some eevee infrastructure at the middle school and high school john jay campus um we discussed opportunities to apply for state or national level national level recognition of the great work to reduce
185our greenhouse gas footprint that's been underway for years it's just about time that we apply for some of the official recognition that we think we're eligible for and we're going to be exploring this in greater detail in the spring and then with regard to westchester putnam school board association there was a regional symposium last week and ted dintersmith was the featured guest speaker he's a venture capitalist turned entrepreneur slash leading advocate for education policies that foster creativity innovation motivation and purpose you might know him as the funder and executive producer of the film most likely to succeed which was very popular several years ago and had a little bit of a following very interesting talk very well received and next week westpot is hosting its annual superintendent westchester county putnam school board legislative forum on
186february 3rd 7th to 9pm i think that's it for subcommittee reports unless there are any comments or questions from the infrastructure you mean like all the where you plug where you get electricity from the controller it's really exciting and of course danelle can say more than i can but we are underway in you know not yet shovel in the ground because we got to wait for the ground to thaw and spring is a better time but the plans are really being buttoned up so that we can move ahead with ev charging infrastructure on the john jay campus right now there could be plans in the future for the elementary schools as well and this would be for commuter vehicles and small transportation fleet type vehicles a minibus for example and this is you know a
187pilot and sort of taking a step forward with an eye toward future opportunities and really also waiting for the market to adjust with respect to you know making this all a reasonable cost benefit proposition for a school district and eagerly awaiting some connecting of the dots between the governor's vision for where we're headed with ev fleets and you know where the rubber meets the road so to speak in terms of a community's ability to afford it interesting yeah when we were giving out test kits what i took away from it was electric cars are here to stay there was a significant percentage interesting there were electric cars so it's sort of the catch-22 of you need the facilities to make the cars practical but if there's not a lot of cars the facilities are hard
188to justify so it seems like we're over that hump to some degree because the people are out there driving it i would imagine in a given community the the school buses in total add up to a lot of emissions you know in terms of you know big vehicles on the road every day going lots of distances that would be a significant thing to achieve would be to change the fleet it is it is it is really interesting to think about um and and what you've said certainly is true thinking back to our presentation the sustainability subcommittee's presentation last spring however what we know is that it's actually our building infrastructure that really is the greater culprit percentage-wise so although we need to be going out after this on all fronts all the time through a
189financially responsible lens um you know there's there's even greater gains there are even greater gains to be had with respect to the buildings than there are actually with emissions from the fleet but that being said you know we're looking at all fronts and also looking at how to raise awareness among our students and our population of responsible decision making on behalf of the planet and the people we serve they get their generation like out soon making decisions and being in positions of power as soon as possible yep absolutely thank you um okay so then that brings us to our consent agenda 11.01 and i don't think we have items that we need to pull out to vote on separately i know we have a couple of things that we want to pause for some brief
190comment or discussion but if we're not voting separately on any items would anybody like to move the agenda thank you julia seconded by joe thank you and then let's just pause andrew i think you had a couple of comments that you wanted to make first please there's a there's a few personnel matters that we want to pull out and comment on on tonight's agenda uh the first being uh congratulatory mata which is our director of technology mr chris nelson uh is being recommended for tenure tonight it feels like chris has been with us forever probably pandemic related but he's it also feels that way because he's made enormous strides in the district really truly uh when we think about how well all this technology infrastructure works that's really thanks to chris and and when we
191think about getting through the pandemic also he helped us enormously in the distribution of all these devices i mean we we really leapt ahead in ways we weren't anticipating in terms of the scale and the scope of the technology infrastructure in our district so we're really thrilled to be recommending chris to the board tonight he's in addition to what i just said an enormously dedicated employee who can often be found here late at night even when you need a last-minute fix of some technological issue he seems to always be around so we really appreciate that another appointment that's on the agenda tonight which is a more unexpected one but but also one that we're very grateful for is the appointment of mr kwon stanbow as the acting principal at katona elementary school as we know
192christy harris is out on a leave at the moment and kwon has really stepped up in challenging times to lead that building and we really both appreciate that but also uh want to acknowledge appropriately the work that he's doing and that's why we're moving him into this position with the board's permission of acting principle and then as soon as that's happening know that we're also looking to backfill his position and we hope very soon to be recommending an acting assistant principal so that the building has the necessary administrative support for the rest of this year or for as long as christie's leave should continue we don't know exactly how long that will be after that a couple more items uh on the other end of the section we have some retirements on the agenda we
193do a much bigger celebration of all our retirees in the spring so i'm not going to go into great details tonight but it would be wrong not to say something so because all these folks have had lengthy careers here we want to congratulate two assistant principals mr vinnie bell here at the high school you heard his name mentioned earlier and ms dawn pomeroy over at meadow pond both have announced their retirements effective at the end of this school year so we congratulate both of them and wish them well and we also have four teachers tonight who similarly have announced their retirements at the end of the year that's deirdre parkhurst at katona elementary school jim egler a math teacher at the middle school in the high school stuart shippy high school science teacher and jeff
194tepper a middle school counselor and all of these folks have had really lengthy and outstanding careers here in the district so we want to just acknowledge and say how much we appreciate all of their years of service and congratulate them and they'll be a more complete recognition of their careers in the spring thank you thank you andrew we really appreciate those kind words and we want to underscore your um gratitude and celebration of chris nelson on the occasion of his uh being appointed tenure this evening and also thank you to juan and we're very grateful for his willingness and ability to step in to this role and we are of course wishing our retirees all of the very best in their retirements but we would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that they leave behind
195quite a legacy that's you know quite a lot of history and expertise subject matter expertise institutional knowledge and so we thank you for calling that out and um we will miss them and we look forward to celebrating them properly at the end of the year i'll also just briefly underscore liz's comments earlier we are about to appoint i think it's 11 community members to the facilities committee were really excited about their expertise their willingness to lend their talents and their time and also that they represent an amazing cross-section of the district and so we're very grateful for their willingness to join us in that work and i'll pause in case there is any further comment or question about the consent agenda not we can vote all in favor please say aye thank you 7-0 okay
196this brings us to an opportunity to recognize a few gifts and donations we're at 16.01 and it's my pleasure to make a motion to approve these gifts if i can have a second please thank you rory so tonight we have three gifts we have from the kl foundation a gift in the amount of hundred and fifty dollars um which is going towards o m for maintenance of the forever molly and gregory sundial we're really grateful for that donation so that we can maintain the sundial and um thank you very much to the kale foundation um for honoring that memory uh also a gift from the lewis and ann abrams foundation this is five thousand dollars for the john jay high school thank you very much for that generous donation and finally from the town of
197lewisborough for a donation of 600k and 95 masks valued at a thousand dollars 1092. excuse me and we very much appreciate that generous donation i think we can vote on the resolution all in favor please say aye thank you so much and this brings us to 17.01 which is an opportunity for board dialogue and discussion um it has been a while since the board last met um but we did think that it might be worth reflecting back on a couple of comments and questions that were raised back in december when we last met in public comment maybe i'll start by mentioning or reminding the board we had one community member who inquired as to whether we were aware of the framework provided by new york state for social emotional learning and i think this bears
198repeating for our governance team and for our entire community because we are so focused at this moment on the social emotional health of all of our students and our staff and we thought it would be helpful to remind the board in the community that in fact we had had a presentation here at the board table i think it was january of 2020 back when we were able to do conversations in two parts it was a wonderful presentation so yes absolutely we're aware of that framework um i'd love to invite you mary to say a few words if there's something you'd like to add i know already in tonight's presentation you did embed reference to the social emotional um framework and and perhaps new benchmarks and if you wanted to just even repeat what you shared
199earlier i i think it bears repeating because that work is so pressing at the moment if you don't mind and as you know that's one of our focus areas for this year but it's been a focus for quite some time and we do base our work around new york state's framework which is actually based on the castle framework the collaborative or academic and social emotional learning you've probably seen that castle wheel it has five competencies two of them are related to self-awareness two related to interpersonal skills and one related to responsible decision making and so the new york state framework is also based around those five competencies and they've actually created some benchmarks which are really helpful for teachers to see so one of the things we've done we have a curriculum unit blueprint uh
200to help teachers design units of study and alongside that looking at your uh core disciplinary standards you might look let's say you're designing a an ela unit right you look at the next generation ela standards but alongside that think about those social emotional competencies and which ones you can build in so it's just kind of thinking about how we embed it into everything we do so things like partnership work where students have to think about their interpersonal skills and how you maybe agree to disagree or you know just connect with others and giving taking turns speaking at the lowest levels those kinds of things um are really important but the self-management piece that's another big one that we work on throughout the grades but the benchmarks are really helpful in thinking about what that looks
201like in a first grader versus a second grader and it kind of takes it up through the grade so they're all really helpful resources from new york state and particularly from castle but they are actually interconnected right now because seems to be the preeminent source for many of those materials thank you marjorie do you have the actual dates of that just in case if anyone in the community is watching they can go back and watch those yeah i'd be happy to share the dates yes it was january 9th and january 23rd of 2020 yeah it was one of our final two-part presentations before the pandemic so january 9th january 23rd about two years ago the two-part conversation dedicated to seo thank you mary sorry just real quick on that but when we reach out to
202the state or when the state provides a framework like they do for seo which is obviously a very valuable tool and resource are we left to our own devices to interpret that framework or do they provide sort of training resources for us to is there somebody you can call to say hey help me walk me through this or i'm just wondering how that sort of process works not at new york state although i have to say that in the case of social emotional learning lots of really valuable resources that they have provided but we really look to castle we have our own it's a helpful it's more of a lens for example at the elementary level we have a program called second step that teaches many of the social emotional skills directly but looking at
203that in the context of those benchmarks like which ones are they helping us to reach which lessons are connected to those so this the state isn't giving us the how there is some degree of interpretation but they do give us many examples like they have a crosswalk document that was really helpful different school districts that have shared what they've done like in you know a science unit for example and how you might work on social emotional learning competencies within a science lesson like that but there's a reasonable amount of work on the district's part to interpret and implement those types of guidelines yeah that's helpful yeah we actually had yesterday the we have a social emotional wellness committee um that meets and so groups of teachers met yesterday around that thinking about you know the
204curriculum interventions and then just the school climate piece because that's a really important part of it it's the context for our social emotional wellness we want students come to school feeling welcomed and affirmed which is also connected to the culturally responsive piece they all are very much interconnected but those are the three areas that our group is focusing on here thank you um and just one other topic that we thought might be worth revisiting we heard some concern from a few community members if i remember correctly around the notion that maybe the board wasn't aware that esy is part of a requirement um as a result of idea legislation and i i did think it was worth clarifying and maybe also discussing in the context of upcoming budget deliberations that absolutely were well aware of
205the requirement to provide the program but with respect to advocating to the state back when the executive budget was um recommended to be modified and the district was in a position to be um filling a 385 000 shortfall we certainly understand that of course we would always maintain our program and maintain it with the integrity and care that is the hallmark of our of our every program but from our perspective as fiduciaries we really only have two sources of revenue state aid and property taxes so in our role as trustees we are also always looking to ensure that the state is upholding its end of the bargain uh and also advocating for public school children everywhere and although we stood to lose 385 thousand dollars in that moment other neighboring districts excuse me stood to
206lose much greater sums of money and we may be in a position to make up that shortfall by adding to the tax levy or modifying other programs but that's not always the case in neighboring districts and so actually this was an act of solidarity on the part of approximately 13 school districts in the greater westchester putnam county region and it worked and the executive budget was modified and all of our school districts maintained that state aid for that program so that was really the upshot of the advocacy i think we also separately heard some concerns about the duration of our esy school day which were new concerns and i thought it might also just be worth you know checking in with the administration regarding your perspective on that if we remember there were questions about
207a three-hour program versus a six-hour program and it was noted that there are some neighboring districts that have six hour programs there there are in fact two different lengths of program that can be applied for in the summer a three or six hour and up until a couple of years ago our three hour morning program was always followed by an afternoon program that was run in conjunction with septo it was more of a camp-like experience that families actually seem to enjoy and appreciate the academic component in the morning more of the camp-like or field trip type experience in the afternoon um the the challenges about running a six if the school runs a six-hour program it's six hours of academics which uh in our experience is not something that all families necessarily want in that
208program and also there are challenges around staffing a program like that in the summer we rely on our own staff we know that we have enough staff for a three-hour morning program who are willing to do it we don't know that we would necessarily or it'd be more challenging for a six hour but i'm happy to say that most recently uh catherine mcnulty is back in conversation with septo who've expressed interest uh newly about perhaps coming back to that afternoon portion so i don't want to get ahead of ourselves because i think they're just beginning that conversation but it may be that we'll be seeing a return to what was a few years ago thank you thanks for the update if there are any questions or comments on either of those two topics we can
209certainly pause here or if board members had other topics or comments for board dialogue turn the floor over to you thank you please i know you we don't always comment on what's been said at the current meeting but it feels hard not to give a little attention to kind of what came into the room and also in the context of of this week of what happened um and here tonight we heard a lot of concern or questions around asking particularly around the authority of the board and i just a quick clarifying question which i think was already said earlier that the way that the mass mandate is currently in place is because of the state mandate and that our board is not making first of all when there's a state mandate there's nothing the board
210can do we have to follow the regulations of the state right correct and if that were to go away then we would discuss what options were in place right if then maybe maybe the board would have authority or not or maybe it'd be a superintendent decision there's this question as to whether or not we have local authority to impose a mandate i think that's the most i could say at this point yeah yeah i i would agree that um i think this is one of those if then propositions unfortunately tonight we're not in the position to have to cross the if bridge i think it it is an open question as to what happens if there is not a mandate and if the authority upon which we have relied up to this point is no
211longer constitutional simply stated then you know we have another set of questions on our hands is how i is how i understand it at the moment although it is i think important to say you know we do have community members who seem under the impression that we have a certain authority you know and i understand people have their information and their perspectives but um we are well educated and well advised and for the time being you know i think it would be prudent to not wade into um exceeding our authority potentially um but but i think you ask a great question or you you hint at a great question and that that's helpful right that we don't we don't need to get ahead of where we are however this week was sort of a disruptive
212experience in when this unexpected change to kind of how we were operating came up i wonder what if i don't know if we can anticipate if something happens again but if we had more of a sense of how we might make decisions or if for example if the question came up before the board and there was not a board meeting when the question came up would we convene as a board potentially in the absence to help make a decision or would you know if things changed again i guess how it might we operate as a board and then also i think the question that parents had was like how how do we know what to do in that situation like the emails that we received the majority of emails this week we're saying we are
213we really want masks in schools you know we didn't hear that tonight but that's what we kind of heard in correspondence over the week um so how like i think they said the question what might be the process if something changed again so that parents i think i heard a lot tonight i think we heard it in the emails too the parent choice parent informed choice feels very important at this moment when there's a lot of things that are unknown and as the rules under which you're operating shift and i know the school district has been operating in that way for two years and it's so challenging and this week was sort of just another reminder of that so fast um i i heard a comment from one of the teachers tonight that's one lesson
214that she felt like she was getting from the pandemic was a pause and like looking at education so i wonder in this moment where we've come out of this again can we pause and think about what the process might be and well i might not agree with everything said that i think there's real value in open discussion and being having the opportunity to hear what parents are feeling and what the community is feeling and also what they need to feel safe and trust the school and then knowing how a decision might be made after that happens so i'm not sure i mean i have like i have an idea what that could look like and i but i hope this is hypothetical and that it's sort of clear but i just just given what happened
215last week and given the constantly changing guidance i think this might be a situation we come up against in the near future and i wonder if there could be some parameters or sort of understanding how decisions get made on this a little more you know like we were you've been relying on state guidance for a very long time if that were to go away what might be our process here and we don't have to answer it now but maybe it's just a question what might be the board's process your process uh you know and and how to and then how would a decision be made so people can know kind of at the very least what to expect and that their voices would be heard their concerns would be taken in and then a decision
216would be made and i i think we all agree like we're all engaged in this democratic process and i really heard it in the literacy presentation that what we're teaching our children is the value of bringing more voices into the room and into conversation and through that conversation as we build on each other's ideas and really hearing each other we get to something even bigger than what we started with and so i i think there's like real possibility here and not vitriol and i appreciate the comments that were respectful tonight you know even though there might be some things and there were things in there that were not based in fact and true information and so we have to like but we were not involved in a dialogue so we can't do that full thing
217but i think there might be a need for that at this time i i just i would i would i mean i think it's always important that we be as clear as possible with our community so we we don't know yet what the clarity is going to be and and i certainly appreciate all that you're opposing and thinking about it's all i just want to suggest that another path and the clarity that we might need to provide could be there's no more state mandate and there's no authority that we're able to gain to impose our own in which case there might be nothing to discuss there might just be information to put out there and i do think you know we heard appreciation this week for the transparency with the information that we received when
218we got it so certainly we can pledge to make that effort and then if there are more complicated conversations to be had i think you make the point that we need to figure out how to have them yeah i guess i just wanted to know that many of them are not here but i really appreciated the fact that although many of the people were speaking on behalf of getting rid of a mass mandate all the adults were masked and did not create any kind of situation where they were not following the mandate and i know that has not been the case in many districts and many board meetings so i just really want to acknowledge everyone who spoke for being respectful of the current mandate and speaking about something that was important to you but
219still following the guidance and that was really super helpful and a great relief to us to not have to sort of argue about what the mandate that was currently in place meant so thank you thank you for observing that yeah that's so well observed thank you and i know from colleagues that there have been some very very challenging meetings of late and i think it's really worth echoing how much we appreciate our community having you know uh very civil some may be disagreements but civil disagreements and that's really important yeah and to the extent possible if we can find ways to ensure that this doesn't become a divisive issue in our community clearly people have very strongly held views on this matter and for good reason there's a lot at stake any way you look
220at it there is so much at stake and you know to the extent that we can keep our community as unified as possible despite critically important decisions on behalf of all children you know that that would really be a sign of success i think on our part um you know and to the extent that the authorities who really have the responsibility to make professionally informed decisions about these matters can make them and carry on you know that will be helpful to us and to all school districts um and let's hope that we can count on that you know really we've we've had to count on them significantly for the duration of the pandemic and you know hopefully we can continue to do so i understand their frustration uh there have been times during the pandemic
221where the state's advice was a little bit out of sync with other people's advice or the reality on the ground you know it's just slower to respond to things you know things don't change that quickly you know tomorrow policy doesn't necessarily change because the cdc said something yesterday so i can understand their frustration i think a lot of this is going to come down to sort of the way it's falling out with vaccines is there'll be people who are interested in learning more and let's look at what the data show us some of the speakers tonight uh quoted some data i'm not sure i agree with all of it but certainly something to look into if we ever are in a position where it is clear that it's on our plate to make a decision
222about this i think we should do so with as much information as we can in terms of the facts and unfortunately like vaccines it could also come down to there will be people on both sides who aren't particularly interested in the facts either or they want their choice of the fact so you know there'll be a group where it's we can have a reasonable discussion let's talk about the pros and cons and stuff like that then there'll be groups where it's it's an emotional thing and and talking about numbers is not going to be particularly helpful so i agree i hope that this is a is done at a state public health type of level not stick down to each individual school district but i i think it's something if we have some advanced warning
223we might have to begin to you know do some research and find out a little bit more about these issues so that we can make an informed decision i do you make a a really good point there at the end regardless of what happens i hope there's some advanced warning because that was a lesson from this week for all for for me and i think for many of us was that the suddenness of the announcement was very disturbing to people understandably and disruptive and um i really i i will be advocating if it is to come from the state that they give us some sort of lead time and it's interesting almost done the um a lot of the legal argument is about the constitutionality of the chief exec an executive issuing the order as
224opposed to the department of health as opposed to a law passed by the legislature it's not really about the content of whether mass too useful or not it's more is the way it was implemented allowed and i think people could honestly disagree about that too you can be pro-masked and still think well gee maybe this is something that should come from the legislature or something so i i think the courts aren't necessarily debating the scientific merits of it they're debating the the constitutionality of the process yeah it's just unfortunate that they couldn't see their way clear to holding off on announcing it until a friday so you know yeah all the school districts in the state of new york might have had some time to address it well they make decisions and then they say
225look you know for i know this is going to be appealed you know so they don't they don't i don't know what the legal term is but they don't make it actionable right away they say this is my decision but it's now going to go to a higher court and i'm not going to disrupt the whole state for 12 hours because i said something yeah well i was unfair the best way i can look at this and if there wasn't so much at stake i would spend more time looking at it this way is that all of our students from a very early age learn about the branches of government and if there was ever an exercise that could really illuminate at every age level really um because you could go more in depth or
226less in depth checks and balances the function of the branches of government you know you could draw some really interesting pictures and develop some really interesting content around all that has occurred in just this one week and if you peel back the layers of the onion even just ever more so slightly around deputy governor becoming a governor governor the son of a former governor i mean it could just go on and on and on and on a lot of good social studies content right here it's funny that you say that marjorie because um i asked my son a question the other day and he said i'm not gonna tell you you're a fed and i was like okay i kind of guess i am [Music] all right uh any other comments discussion can i just
227commend uh jake kempen for um his uh discussion around gender gender and neutral bathrooms feminine products and he did ask for a policy change which i'm not sure where the board sits on that um but i i really applaud him for going and speaking before us again he did so before and i believe we were able to implement what he had asked for then um and the whole saga club i think that they do wonderful work and i really think it was a courageous thing for him to do and we should certainly consider um his request for policy change i do know in the past that saga has had some events or meetings this is pre-pandemic where the board would be invited and so would you keep us updated if there is anything that we
228can support i wasn't able to attend but there was something you know back in our old life in our old lives yes we have we have attended but it has been a couple of years now since we had an opportunity yeah but not everything is appropriate for the board to attend so i would trust andrew to let us know you know or the administration to let us know when there is something and also to please help jake know where he can get his concerns addressed he doesn't have to come to a board meeting to ask for feminine products in the bathroom if there's an issue that really can be addressed much faster um you know by by reaching out to individuals who are just so much better positioned to really remedy something that sounds like
229it needs to be remedied yeah absolutely so so that would be great i found very courageous that he came after five people were arguing one way and he very calmly said i don't agree i i vote this way i mean i i think this way and then moved on like it was like talk about being willing to agree to disagree yeah a lot of people wouldn't have brought up that whole issue just to announce in front of a room that by the way i don't agree with you absolutely yeah very mature can i just ask that is the policy he's proposing is that a board level decision or is that more an administrative level policy um i i think we'll have to look into that i think he's actually also asking us to make policy
230out of something that's already law okay and sometimes we say if there's law we don't necessarily need policy because it's clearly the law of the land so um but it might it might have a different solution that's not actually policy it's more communication i don't know and somebody will reach out and talk with him oh yeah terrific thank you anything else all right then i think we're ready to look to future meetings the board is healthy committee meets in a few minutes maybe we shouldn't go to sleep all right we'll do it that way we'll go in order the policy committee is meeting tomorrow morning at 9 00 a.m the facilities committee is meeting on wednesday of next week at 7 pm the sustainability committee will meet friday morning february 4th at 8 15 am
231the board will next meet thursday february 10th 7 30 pm here in the library finance meets tuesday february 15th 7 pm the board meets again february 24th that's thursday at 7 30 p.m policy friday february 25th 9 a.m and then saturday february 26th 8 30 a.m budget deliberations this is a busy month um if i didn't miss anything then i will ask for a motion to adjourn moved by liz seconded by catherine all in favor please say aye thank you so much everyone have a great night i assume it is