Buffalo BoE Work Session 6/14/2023

001okay good all right folks on the screen we good to go Dr Williams are you there yes all right welcome everybody um our first work session is student achievement tonight and we have two significant items on the agenda the first is literacy assessment data um and we this year I think for the first time at least since I've been involved we did a review of September literacy data middle of the Year literacy data and now we're doing end of the year on literacy data to see the progress for our students in the early grades in regards to literacy and then the second item on our agenda is a wazed updates by Mrs Pratt Walker with that said I will turn it over to Dr Williams to introduce Mrs Ann Botticelli our chief academic officer thank

002you so much vice president chairman Scott um you know there's a tribe in Africa that's called the Messiah tribe and their traditional greeting to one another is kasserian and Gary and that means how are the children so they don't ask you know like we ask all the time how are you and you hear fine they want to know about how the children are because that really is asking about the Next Generation and I know that this board is very very interesting we've been talking a lot about student outcomes and academic achievement of our students and so we're going to hear from our chief academic officer and Botticelli some very um detailed information about how our children Our Little Learners are doing in Reading what the demonstration has been for the beginning of the year where

003they started she's even going to go back a little bit and talk a little bit about you know a couple of years ago when our children were um at home learning due to the covid crisis and then we went to the hybrid model and you know where they are now because our uh strategic plan is very explicit in talking about where we want to see our children by 2025 and I think that the data that you see will show that we're on the path to getting to where we want to be in 2025. after she is com after she's done we'll hear from Mrs Perrette Walker who is our program officer and she oversees our wiseed our stream uh prop program which is science technology engineering reading mathematics and you're going to hear where we

004are there because it's a big initiative but you know it's another way that's engaging our children's learning so I'm going to turn things over to miss Botticelli to get started with her presentation on our BPS Student Success plan specifically addressing literacy Miss Botticelli thank you Dr Williams good evening everyone it's a pleasure to be here um I just want to make sure I'm gonna hit the PowerPoint condition here okay so while admir is pulling it up I just want to briefly let you know I am going to be talking about um the progress in our Student Success plan so a specifically focused today on literacy so add me your next slide please as always we are moving on to the next level it's really important to us that we are inclusive Equitable meeting students rights

005their civil rights especially in this case to learn to read so I'm going to focus today on our earliest Learners our rigorous Early Elementary education next slide please as always we are striving to meet the superintendent's goals and today we'll talk about two of them in detail eliminating achievement and opportunity gaps number one and providing access to educational excellence and accelerated learning number two next slide please the purpose of our Student Success plan is to really help ensure a welcoming and affirming environment hold high expectations for our students provide rigorous instruction and inclusive curriculum assessments and to provide ongoing professional learning opportunities to get our staff ready to support those students so I'm going to focus in today on early literacy because we know that if we want our students to be successful in the

006long term not only do we need to make them feel welcome feel that they belong we have to hold those high expectations and we have to provide that rigor and so today I want to talk a little bit about what we've done this year and some of the results we've seen next slide please so just some context for today's discussion um so across the chart you can see the past few years in 2019-20 we sent the students home in March um it was an exceptional time covet first had struck in America and we had to sort of reinvent education and the way it was delivered and our current fourth graders were in grade one our current third graders were in kindergarten in our current second graders were in pre-kindergarten which means that our current first

007and kindergartners were not even in the school setting yet they had a very unique circumstance they may or may not have been identified early on for specific needs that we might have normally addressed with younger students they may have had some some impact on their speech so for example speech delays there's a lot of things that could have been happening with our youngest Learners because they weren't in our traditional pipeline at that time I also definitely want to draw our attention to the older Learners grade four and three because they had an interruption in their foundational skills experience because kn1 is where we deliver um and ensure that students have a grasp of those foundational skills that they're going to continue to develop over the course of time but those particular students had an interruption

008in those formative years um you can see that we were in sort of a remote hybrid in-person mix so again our current fourth graders at that time were in second our third graders were in first our second graders were in K and our current first graders were in pre-k at that time so again it was a unique year it was not the typical experience that other students would have had when they were in those great levels in 2122 we went back to in person but if you remember that was also a time when there was still a lot of restrictions on how we operated in the classroom we were social distancing we were wearing masks for a large part of that time um there were specific strains of the virus that were still um being

009seen in the area so there were a number of student absences and potential teacher absences based on that so at that time our current fourth graders were in third our current third graders were the second our current second graders were in first our current first graders were in kindergarten and our current kindergartners were in pre-k so again a unique experience compared to what other students um have gone through it those ways and then finally this year so we'll take a look at the data right now for our current fourth third second first in kindergarteners next slide please add me so I'm going to focus first on K to two so we'll take a look at their Dibble scores um the whole group and then some disaggregated data and then we will move on to some

010of the things that we're doing so you can see for this first report this is the all students group so all of our kindergartners first graders and second graders you're looking at the composite double score so if you remember there are a number of brief assessments that come that are compiled together to create the composite score in Dibbles so again Dibbles is our Universal screening measure um it is given to all students at these grade levels and then we progress monitor in between so we just make sure that our students are moving forward at the expected rate so you can see we did make some progress in our early grades K one and two the first line you see Boi is the beginning of the year so for example in kindergarten we started the year

011at 58 of our students entering the system below grade level you can see by the end of the year we had cut that down to 40 of our students performing below grade level um so that's a significant impact of some of the work that's been happening in our classrooms we're not satisfied that's not the end but we know that the things that we've started to do over the past couple years are definitely seeing results you can see a similar trajectory in grade one and grade two in the all student group so it just as a quick reminder the blue is above grade level the green represents on grade level the yellow is moderately below grade level and the red is more significantly or well below to the right you see the number of students that

012were tested at each point in time and obviously there's slight fluctuations depending on students being present at the time of test so if you broke it out by our economically disadvantaged students it is a smaller number of students but you can see a similar trajectory for the way students progressed across time at the K1 and 2. I have your next slide please now this slide and the next slide are two I want to draw our attention to so our English is a new language or our L population they struggled a bit more um in this on this particular assessment this again is measuring basically phonics skills and fluency um so we know that many of these students come in obviously not necessarily speaking English as a first language so they need supports to um to

013become proficient in English on top of that we're asking these same students to also learn to decode in our own in English right so not only are they learning English as a language itself but they're also learning to read in English some of them may or may not be literate in their own home language so there's a lot of variables impacting the students scores here but this is an area I do want to draw your attention because it's a place we know we need to put Focus I'm sorry is the entire uh um uh okay there it is okay I'm sorry because it was like half of it was cut off okay thank you no problem um so students with disabilities is also a group that we want to ensure we are targeting so one

014of the things we've done and I'll talk more about this but we are training all of our special education teachers k through eight um to use Orton Gillingham that is specifically targeted at the needs of a number of our special education students it's a program that was designed with the dyslexic student in mind so it is very structured it is explicit systematic and sequential and we know that when we have our teachers trained and they're able to deliver this instruction with Fidelity we're going to see games especially in this particular population so just as a reminder we started this training but not everyone has yet been trained and many who were trained were trained in the middle of the year because it's it's a five-day process and it's very time consuming and it's not easy

015to get everyone in at the same time so some people may have been trained in April and potentially started it after that but you won't see a full year of implementation at this point that's what we're hoping for next year which is why we're continuing to train over the summer so we're offering Orton Gillingham for excuse me four cohorts so 48 per cohort over this summer to try to catch up any teachers that are still untrained but that we want to work with the students in September next slide Suzanne um this is our Asian population and again you're going to see a similar trajectory so the students started um well below in the beginning of the year and that number was cut down by the end of the year because we are very specifically targeting

016chronic skills with our students again this goes back to the science of reading we know how important it is to be explicit and systematic and sequential with our instruction so we continue to improve the way that we deliver phonics to our students next slide please this is our black and African-American population and again you're going to see a similar trajectory in K and one slightly less in second so if you remember those second graders let's see they were in second graders would have been in um Pre-K the year we first went out in 1920 so we have some makeup work to do with our second grade cohort so I'm going to continue to draw your attention to second third and fourth graders because we know those were the students that were strongly impacted in terms

017of their foundational development and skills during the pandemic next slide please these are our Hispanic students so um there are a mix of students who might just be in a traditional English as a new language program or they may be students who are receiving both enl and bilingual education um so just remembering that there is an impact in bilingual education because they're either beginning 90 in Spanish or splitting 50 50 Spanish and English their Dibble scores often reflect that so as time progresses the students skills will solidify in English but for the at the early grades sometimes they're spending more time working on their Spanish instructions so it will vary depending on a particular student and you see that here in our privilege data this is our white subgroup and this trajectory again is very

018similar to the all students group you can see that we continue to cut down the number of students who are in that tier three level so I just took a snapshot for you this is from a kindergarten classroom this particular teacher was trained in the fall in Orton Gillingham and began to slowly and Implement Orton Gillingham methodology throughout the course of the year she faced in different pieces of the program and by the end of the year was using it um pretty much as designed but I just want to draw your attention she started with 10 students well below Benchmark at the beginning of the year and as she began to implement Orton Gillingham you can see the difference over time by the end of the year the eoi she had zero students well below

019Venture that's amazing yeah we don't in the past we have not necessarily seen growth like this um not every classroom is at this place obviously because teachers were trained at different points in time she was trained earlier than many other kindergarten teachers but I just wanted to highlight this because this is what we are hoping to see across the board in kindergarten we should have the majority of our teachers trained for the start of school in September there will always be fluctuations because sometimes teachers you know switch grade levels or we have new hires coming on board we recognize that but for the bulk of our kindergarten teachers they will have been through the organ Healing Hand sequence and we anticipate that they will start the school year using that as their kidney phonics piece

020next slide please oh and I also just want to point out it benefited all the students not just students who were well below Edward can you go back for a sec admir can you go back a slack you're going to notice that multiple students moved into benchmarks and then even into above um so I know there's always concern that Orton Gillingham is extremely explicit and perhaps not every student will thrive in this program but I I really do believe that that explicit sequential instruction is going to benefit every student including a student who might have started out at Benchmark or close to it they will continue to progress as well next slide please do a little bit about what K2 core instruction for reading will look like next year at this point in time based

021on the progress we've made and the fact that many programs are not going to meet our needs um we plan to continue with the existing resources that we have with some upgrades and tweaks so I just want to talk to you a little bit about K2 instruction for reading next year so we're going to maintain the use of hegarty as our phonemic awareness program [Music] we're going to keep Orton Gillingham as the Baseline phonics program in kindergarten I said keep but really many classes are starting that um by first and second we will be introducing ufli foundations it's from the University of Florida's literacy initiative it may sound familiar because back in the days of reading first this organization was at the Forefront um so we're going to be adopting this piece for phonics at

022first and second until teachers are exchange they can continue to use the existing phonics lessons that we have in place but we recognize that the foundations program is going to be a mirror effect for Orton Gillingham so it's really going to use this very similar strategies it's equally explicit and sequential and systematic so as our core foundation for first and second we are very comfortable that this will meet our needs um we will continue to provide or in Gillingham as an intervention at first and second and we've actually opened up training to our first grade teachers so at some point in time we may be able to also use it as a base at first but for now it will continue to be our intervention for tier three then to make sure that we have

023strong fluency practice we have a number of pro programs with decodable materials so kids will be practicing their chronic skills after they're taught by their teacher so that will help develop their fluency and reinforce phonics we know how important oral vocabulary is and I say oral because at this age many of the students can't read multi-syllabic words yet but they can understand them so they may not be able to read the word Chrysalis but I can teach a student what that word means and they can speak that word and recognize it when other people are using it and then when they do learn to decode Chrysalis in third or fourth they're going to automatically be able to attach meaning to that word so we're trying to be very structured with our approach to vocabulary we're

024going to make sure we're targeting academic Advanced words with the youngest Learners so that they can use those words in their speech and recognize it in our speech and that when they become more proficient decoders they'll be able to read that word themselves and apply to meaning so to do that we're going to focus um on a lot of vocabulary tasks through our read-alouds the clri department provided us with a fantastic set of resources last year called Rising voices and we'll continue to use those in our classrooms for read-alouds we'll also access actually access things like ckla which is a knowledge building readalab program so we have a number of opportunities there to not only build comprehension but also build vocabulary with our younger students and then across the content areas we'll continue to focus

025on vocabulary so in our social studies curriculum in our science curriculum we'll be continuing to add to the students on lexicon in terms of comprehension we will also use read alouds and we'll use text dependent questions tied to those read-alouds so a number of those were already rolled out last year so it's really just continuing a practice that was begun by the reading Department last year but the text dependent questions help students who later will be taking State assessments and need to find evidence in the text we're training them early on the questions will tie back to the text and they have to share their answers using evidence from the particular read-alouds that they've been listening to by second there'll be more proficient with text and we also believe we can pull some of the

026Journey's Anthology back in and then in terms of writing and grammar Orton Gillingham actually does have a writing in grammar excuse me a writing component especially for forming letters but we'll continue to step up to writing at these grade levels because we know how successful it's been in the past so nothing other than adding ufli nothing is dramatically different than what we have done in the past but we're having a more intense focus on using the decodables we will not be using leveled readers of these grades so we're working with the teachers to make sure that in small groups they're addressing the skills appropriately next slide please so I just want to talk briefly about ufli so the simple view of reading is decoding times linguistic comprehension equals reading comprehension so you have to have

027a solid understanding of decoding as well as Linguistics in order to be a fluent comprehending reader ufli is going to focus for us on the decoding piece so it's going to replace our letter space phonics lessons teachers will continue to use those until they've received the training in ufli but we believe that this particular program is going to meet our needs for those first and second graders next slide please oh and I should say it is also explicit systematically sequential research-based and admin space they've been piloting it and their results are very promising in terms of phonics phonemic awareness and fluency our Intervention Program will remain the same so in tier one students will continue to have enrichment opportunities they'll use step up to writing teachers can accelerate them with particular texts that they select

028and we'll also be phasing in some wazette opportunities across the board during RTA in tier two they'll continue to use hegerty we still have Lexia and will be Max and there are lessons very explicit lessons that come with Lexia as well as civils and then for tier three we'll continue to use Orton Gillingham we are phasing out our direct instruction programs next slide please so now I'll briefly talk a little bit about our three to five program for reading so we'll start with some of our results um so you can see we did not have the same trajectory here that we had K12 remember these were the students that had the most interrupted educational experience in kindergarten and first when they would have been learning many of those very foundational phonics skills so we know

029that we need to Target these grade levels again we are training all of our special education teachers all of our enl teachers at these grade levels we are training we train have trained after a reading Specialists our literacy coaches our kindergarten teachers and as many first grade teachers as we can get in um so that resources can be concentrated at kn1 with classroom teachers and the Specialists can move up and Target our students third fourth and above next slide please you're going to see a trend here most of our data follows a similar trajectory to our all student group so this is our economically disadvantaged population at these grade levels next slide please our English is a new language population or else um again we are training the enl teachers so they will also be

030fluent in um Orton Gillingham as well as morphology so by the time a student's hitting third grade they're accessing multi-syllabic words in text sentences are longer words are more complex the structural analysis of words becomes very important so we're training all of our third fourth fifth and sixth grade teachers in the imsc morphology program which is a companion to Orton Gillingham so it uses a similar methodology but it's going to attack more sophisticated words so students will be practicing base words root words and prefixes and suffixes in Greek and Latin so those multi-syllabic words they begin to encounter in third grade we have a strategy to help them and that will especially support our English as a new language program because many of our L's um they're going to need that additional support because they

031wouldn't be as familiar with some of that vocabulary so our enl teachers will be in excellent support here next slide please and again we are training all of our special education teachers the expectation will be that they use Orton Gillingham with their students in tier three to support um the phonics skills that some of our students are struggling next slide please this is our Asian population again you know we're not seeing the exact pattern of um uh decrease in our um well below uh student reading situation but that is obviously something that you keep trying to Target and I have some other suggestions for how we can do that work next slide please [Music] so similarly our black and African-American student population saw a slight regression in grade four stayed relatively the same in grade

032three we'll be continuing to Target their needs Hispanic often again other next slide please our white population again we continue to see that the well below population grew a little bit by the end of the year um in fourth and so we know that we need to stay alert next slide please so I'll start out here with our response Intervention Program which is very streamlined in tier one students who are on or above grade level are going to be part of the junior great books program so do you know great books um Fosters dialogue vocabulary and comprehension and there's a writing component so help to accelerate the students who are currently on grade level or above our tier two students will participate in the morphology program I was discussing so again starting in grade three

033you begin to see that need for structural analysis um because those words become multi-syllabic and more complex usually in grades four and five you see you start to see kids needing to access Greek and Latin in order to read the prefixes suffixes and Roots so morphology will provide them with a structured systematic approach to learning um how to break apart words and put them back together so we hope that will help all of our students obviously but especially our enl students and then tier three Orton Gillingham remains for any student that is still struggling with phonics because that's the key component of the Orton Gillingham program so kids may be able to transition from Orton into morphology that would be our goal and then eventually from morphology into junior grade books um but for now

034we have a pretty structured approach and we feel like this is going to meet the needs of a lot of our kids who experience that pandemic loss next slide please so now I want to talk a little bit about the core program I think you realize that Journeys has sunsetted so they're no longer printing that program the online components are no longer available so we'll be moving to um propose this adoption for grades three to five so status of my view has an interactive student Edition so you have a hard copy that is consumable so kids can highlight it right in it take notes for themselves annotate but they also have those same options for the digital Edition we know we're moving to computer-based testing across the state so it's important to us that our

035kids have this type of access right um Journeys was adopted quite a while ago and it didn't have some of these features so we're excited to be able to provide our students with these opportunities so in the interactive student Edition again they can annotate they can highlight they can work in the digital text they can either use the consumable hard copy they'll have a new one for the class every year or they can use the digital Edition next slide please yeah we're all so excited about the project-based inquiry that's built into this particular program because we always know how important it is for our kids not only to to feel connected to the work that they're doing in that project-based opportunity is one of those ways to help connect the kids but it's also it's

036also going to provide them opportunities to compare across tests do the research practice their listening and speaking and presentations they have a self-assessment so they own the project and then there's obviously writing opportunities embedded here next slide please this particular program also again talking about the computer-based testing opportunities provides customizable assessments that our teachers can use as well as a essay score and essay score um so when students type their essays into that format it provides them with feedback so it'll analyze how they're performing on particular essays and let them know areas of strength and weakness next slide please and something that the committee especially liked was the social emotional component so embedded in Daily instruction are opportunities for students to work toward the five pillars of SEL incorporates things like collaboration problem solving perseverance

037in your work um there's daily opportunities to practice those five key strategies I think you can see a picture here of goal setting opportunities that are provided by the program so the teacher can have students set goals for their inquiry projects for assignments that they have and have those conversations because it's structured into the actual lessons next slide together and you can also see um that it is inclusive and Equitable in the sense that the team ensured there were positive images of gender roles and special populations in the particular program so we hope this will help not only address some of the struggles kids have had during the pandemic allowing them to have conversations and self-reflect but also begin to develop some of that collaborative environment in the classroom we know that kids who were

038home perhaps isolated during the pandemic may have struggled when they came back into the classroom to adapt to that type of social situation again so we we anticipate that this will be sort of a bridge for many of our students next slide please so I just wanted to conclude with a quick um summary from Ed reports which is um it's an organization that rates different programs and you can see they gave their highest rating to the um staff as my view for third fourth and fifth grade in terms of text complexity and quality which also includes vocabulary knowledge building and then the usability of the program itself next slide please from the grade three section of the Ed reports this is talking about anchor texts so this particular program meets the criteria for anchor text

039being of publishable quality and worthy of a specially careful reading and consider a range of student interests so you can see some specific examples they pulled out from the program at grade three so for example unit one week one the students read grammar and the great gourd retold um by chitra Banerjee uh different Community it's a Bengali folk tale in unit two week four they read welcome back wolves and wolves don't belong in Yellowstone um and unit three week five they read various poems including firefighter face Miss Stone the race in Daddy's arms and the Wright brothers um so again the Ed reports has deemed these texts to be well worth students time and attention next slide please here's a sample from grade four because I talked about the importance of academic vocabulary instruction this

040program also targets more apology so there's a spoken sequence for the morphology as well um but here we know that the focus on academic vocabulary so rich rich words um will really support our elves because we saw their data earlier and we know that we need to continue to build their vocabulary but really it will support all students because academic vocabulary that tier two vocabulary is the type of words you encounter across all texts across all subjects the older you get the more complex that text gets and so you need to have a grasp of the academic vocabulary so Ed reports rated that strongly for grade four and then in there's just an excess I try to put one from each grade level so if you go to the next slide please admir I pulled

041out the grammar um from grade five you can see that this is one particular standard that was being addressed explaining the function as conjunctions prepositions and interjections in general and their function in particular sentences so they pulled out some examples of where this program was meeting or exceeding the standards um in terms of grammar instruction because we know that grammar is also one of the things that can hold our students back when they're trying to access a more complex text so it's really important that we solidify our grammar instruction and I will say that has not been our strong suit in the past so it's something that I'm excited to to work on especially at these grade levels that concludes my presentation I'm happy to take some questions thank you and currently focused on student

042outcomes um we will go in reverse alphabetical order to take questions board member Woods any questions or comments um my question would be the materials that you're using um how diverse culturally relevant are they because the comments I'm always getting is that if I don't see myself in the book If I don't see African-Americans portrayed as something other than slaves or whatever if it isn't inspiring encouraging me I don't want to read it so for me that's what makes children learn be interested and focused is that the books reflect them and infect them positively so that's that's what I ask about all materials continue to use the rising voices series that was adopted last year which is 100 culturally diverse so any point where we might see a gap we're going to make sure we

043address them very good board member shooter where was it piloted was it piloted in urban um so I can get that information for you I'm sorry okay be itself well thank you board member McCutchen presentation I do not have any comments or questions thank you board member mckozey so I think it was a great presentation uh obviously you need a drink of water that was a whole lot and you did it pretty quick but um I have very similar uh I wouldn't say concerns I know we're on top of it by bringing clri into the mix but we have a lot of I guess catching up to do so just maintaining that balance is so crucial and key with a community that just you know the diversity has been saying I don't have to tell

044anybody you know that but I'm I'm very um also in tune with that what that looks like as people are there are people who are frustrated or on you know we have parents and caregivers who I don't like this book for my child so it's almost like an educational piece where folks might almost stand in the way because of what they believe so we have to be on top of our game at all levels are you know a part of of The Learning Journey for our children especially those who are coming from different countries or do not see themselves reflected in our materials so thank you for being conscious and aware and I do I also should have added we um we're about to deliver classroom libraries K through six to um for our Native

045American indigenous authors so we've got we've curated a collection there that will also be gone to the schools so one of the things I think is important is that as we solidify foundational skills and academic the oral vocabulary with the younger ones they can access those tests right so we'll continue to bolster our classroom libraries and provide those resources to our kids because we know that as as we develop their foundational skills they can access texts that might have been out of their reading range in the past so we're going to continue to make sure we support the program that way as well can I ask a follow-up question it is about curriculum can you just verify something that I have heard from Administration but also from the community that the Native American cultural resource

046uh uh persons will be spending is it a week in different schools throughout the summer school um the summer school months in order to bring about the programming Native American programming I just want to make sure that was something that I got directly from you um that's correct hubs um so we have a smaller number of people working over the summer one of them will be stationed at Central registration to make sure they can address any questions that families might have when they come to register their students the other two will rotate through the pre-k6 summer hubs so they'll spend about a week at each site and they'll they'll be delivering um cultural lessons to all the students in the group thank you so much board member heard can't hear you still can't hear you

047can't hear you while you're figuring that out or if you can't figure it out you can text into the comments your question um we'll go to vice president Dr Evans Brown hello thank you uh vice president um my brain froze Mary Scott um uh Chief battle channel that was an excellent presentation very comprehensive um it looks like we've made small inroads in the area of reading since the pandemic um I guess my question is I want to say are we mandating kids to go to summer school but I'm gonna put it another way are we encouraging for these children who are not meeting The Benchmark in Reading Segway this gave me the perfect segue um we are definitely encouraging students to go to our programming and we are also targeting our first graders so if

048there's parents of first grade students listening please come to our summer program we hired Specialists to deliver Orton Gillingham across the board to our first graders so the placement tests the students they'll deliver the instruction in small group to every first grader throughout the course of the summer um so yes definitely want to get that message out and we're also obviously encouraging all of our pre-k6 students to attend um because we think it'll bolster their skills fantastic seem like we should have maybe think about providing some kind of incentive to get them there I don't know sometimes you have to use certain carrots you know with you know uh children and families and I don't know what that is but we need to think about something but thank you thank you president Belton Cotman thank

049you for your presentation thank you for breaking it down by the subgroups I appreciate that um I have a couple of questions about the training uh the uh professional development um and I don't know how to say this tactfully but what is the incentive to a teacher to make sure that they're uh trained well it's mandatory they don't have a choice okay okay we gave them two options one they could come and get paid if they chose to do it outside of school hours or we'll pull them out of the classroom we're trying to avoid that option um because the other is less disruptive to instruction but we will make sure that everyone's changed all right could you put take your camera off please could you pick your camera off thank you thank you all

050right so why not teach the teachers Aid and assistance as well they can't deliver instruction directly but we can definitely give them support to help implement the program so what they said to me is is that oftentimes the teachers are not even there and they're ending up with the classes and so they would like to have the the training done across the board uh as well and I think it's a mistake not to do it uh to at least expose talking about if they're substituting they're substituting in it by the way that's another discussion we'll talk another time but I assist think that the teacher aides and assistants have shared that they're in the classrooms that it does not hurt to provide some PD for them as well so my question really goes to um

051as I started looking at these numbers first of all I want to go on record to say anything coming out of Florida right now I'm questioning uh when the NAACP issues a national warning for Hispanics and black people to stay out of Florida and not support Florida I'm Court questioning anything that comes out of their educational system knowing that they have removed over 10 000 authors of of brown and black descent from and their books off of their shelves okay so uh for me I'd like to see more about it because I'm not just okay with uh Florida anymore and um I'm sure you may be comfortable and you're the professional in this but I'm going on record to say that anything coming out of Florida needs to be looked at uh double triple time

052and make sure that it meets the needs of all children's needs I'm glad to hear that it's uh something that has been used before but I am not just simply going to allow things to come into Buffalo from Florida and not have it looked at not when the NAACP has gone on record to say black and brown people stay out of Florida okay there's a tack on you in Florida so that particular program um would be more about the foundational skills than any other type of thing so it wouldn't necessarily be text heavy or anything it does have some decodables so I can make sure there is a thorough view to ensure that there is nothing questionable but it would be the phonics component they're looking well that's great I'm still wanting to be double

053checked Madam superintendent it is coming out of Florida and um I have no I'm not going to Florida I was planning to go to Florida in September I am not going to visit my best friend this year because of what's going on in Florida I'm not spending money in Florida Puritan at this point so I just wanted to put that little commercial out there just to let you know okay but anyway different review on top of what they've already done okay so I guess uh Madam uh superintendent and um uh Chief academic officer when I look at the subgroups the questions that come to my mind are how many teachers are not taught or have not been trained in the professional development when the children are receiving the lowest grade the lowest uh numbers okay

054in other words in the schools and I'm hoping that this report is differentiated by schools as well that you are able to look building is doing and that if you're able to tell if there's growth in these buildings or non-growth and that that conversation I'm assuming is being had because we talked about that before but I'm curious to know what teachers have not been taught and what's going on in their classrooms because when you say that it is our goal to have them all taught by September I don't feel that if a teacher in September is not ready to go into the classroom I don't feel that the children should be penalized as a result of it so I'm trying to figure out what's the solution for that no one no one will become less

055so we have existing materials for phonics so until someone completes the training they still have the materials we use this year in the classroom yeah but they don't have the results the previous material does not have the results according to what you said that the Orton Gilligan has and so that's the reason for questioning that so yes give give the schools that have the teachers who are not coming to training or whatever who have not been trained let them continue to go down the same roads that they've been down when in essence there is a tool that can help them move to the next level and without looking at without looking at that data you'll never know why the growth is not happening in a building is because you're going to assume that it assume

056something that's not accurate and I really would like to make sure that we're looking at those numbers um this is in regards to professional development under the new contract did we get any more new professional development days no no because the superintendent conferences are that's formed from the state I believe um however we continue to offer the 1-200 then we've had a terrific response from our staff they really are coming to training the ones that that aren't able to and there are obviously legitimate reasons why someone might not be able to come for example on Saturdays so we're going to be working to pull them into an embedded cohort in the early fall so that they do receive the training because we don't want we obviously don't want students not to have that experience thank

057you so I'm I'm I'm on my uh math I'm on my math uh broom I'm writing my math room and I would like to be on record to say that I personally feel that when Ela numbers are reviewed that math should also be reviewed that for me they are hand in hand there's not one without the other and I would like to see what's going on with our children in math as well I would personally like to make sure that I'm superintendent that every child uh who is not at uh uh where they should be a letter is sent to their parents uh informing them and inviting them to participate in summer school um I think that that would be a nice gesture uh it would and and I think that uh at the end

058of the summer hopefully we will see more proof my uh final issue or question or concern addresses the uh the math in this District I want to I'm very proud of what is going on with our math department the math league for the past three weeks uh their their uh banquet has been phenomenal uh Madam superintendent I would like to see if we can bring the top performers for each of the math leagues down and honor them um if the other children want to come maybe it's something we can do as a kickoff in September to get our kids up and running or something we don't have to do everything this year but I really would like to highlight the Excellence because that competition uh the high performance schools and things about kudos to uh

059uh uh uh to John um John uh What uh the Lord uh Mrs Wagstaff kudos to uh don Wagstaff uh uh Jared heard port and Kelly Baldo as well as uh uh your Chief academic officer better Telly as well but kudos to number I think in September our first meeting really needs to be a kickoff of the Excellence that our children have done not just in math maybe we can highlight Sports maybe we can highlight so that we can get them pumped up to get uh the reading or whatever get them pumped up to move forward so thank you for the presentation the only other question I really have and I'm going to put it in the finance departments here or the finance operation I want to see a uh something that shows how much

060Esser and art money made it to the classrooms in other words of the money that was spent I want to know what actually impact that this money have and how much was sent or being spent in the classrooms directly impacting students uh I really think that we need to take a look at that because we still have some money left and I want to make sure but I really am from my district I am going to personally ask for a breakdown of what this report looks like for the ferry district I want to know uh my weakest links and my strongest links in my in my district I just want to go on record for that thank you um um I know Jadon I really appreciated when she saw you and Dr Evans Brown at

061the math with banquet so thank you and I'm not sure if anyone else was able to make some of the other ones but it's nice I do it every year I do it every year and I I enjoy it and I have fun with the children and I'm seeing them in the community now and at the supermarkets and they're recognizing me uh because I think they call me the uh uh fanatical uh board president uh because we have a ball too bad it wasn't recorded uh this is the type of stuff Madam superintendent that can go go miles if we start recording the success of our students and putting it on our website uh the work that those kids do and and kudos to the teachers they were volunteers you know I have no understanding

062why uh uh uh they were required to be volunteers but I thank them that they were but I do feel that they are entitled to receive something for the work that they do as well but I appreciate the work that they're doing but I think next year we'll have more so thank you so much for uh listening okay are you able to are we able to hear you yes are you able to hear me now yes yes thank you um I'm just gonna be sure because it's kind of loud here but um my only question that I had was uh I didn't see any data about the date of American population um I I looked through the chart but do we have anything to reflect on the the debit scores or the or the uh

063that wasn't an option when I um I don't believe that was an option in the um platform but I can go back and double check at some grade levels we might not have enough students to generate a very accurate report but I can ask Osa to take a look for us I just know from um from previous uh information you gave Australia this year that they wasn't fair and well I just wanted to make sure that we can also have a track of them also so that we can um probably you know getting the best Services also as we continue to move forward through our district thank you so much for a great presentation and I'm looking forward to see that information can I have asked one more can I talk to uh the superintendent

064one more time about something so it came up in the um athletic committee meeting about our seventh and 8th graders and how there's normally a situation where they don't that group of students don't really show up well for summer school and so in in that conversation uh because we do have the resolution and the guidelines in place that says that students have to uh that we want athletic Scholars and that they have to maintain a certain uh average or success in the classroom um I would like to and I know this is going to be controversial so just get ready for it but I would like to have the discussion if our children our seventh and 8th graders who are who are not on par who are failing subjects do not attend summer school to

065take those subjects as to whether we should consider uh not allowing them to participate in sports in this in this in this in the fall the only reason I'm trying to be strong about it is is that we have we have a situation with our seventh and eighth graders Madam superintendent that they are not where they are supposed to be and if uh and uh the chief Balotelli brought up the data you would see that but we cannot have children failing two and three subjects and not coming to summer school and I don't understand academics is first okay and so if that can be a carrot all I'm trying to do is use it as a carrot to get the students in the building so that they can start improving that seventh and eighth you

066got to understand those are the students who we deliver to our high schools okay so this is very important that we get a handle on those seventh and 8th graders as soon as much as possible particularly after coming off of of covet so I I you know that's your baliwag but I really want you to consider what we can do because traditionally that is the group that does not show up to summer school that is the group absolutely we do know that um I think it's something that is worthy of a discussion it is absolutely worthy of a discussion why should you be allowed to play basketball and your fell in three subjects four subjects all right board members are over our time and we have another item on our agenda um so I'm going

067to turn over to Dr Williams to close up this agenda item and transition us to our next agenda item on the wazette update thank you chief I'm sorry Chief uh um chair her uh her uh chair her uh was saying something yes I'm going in and out uh yes uh to answer that that's something that our modified sports program is designed to help candle with the mentoring counseling tutor and also training aspects of it so um some of those things um the issues with the children does not come to summer school or not advancing very well during seventh or eighth grade that um that that that tutoring and the counseling of all part of that program to help those individuals you know um be interested in school and sports and um and try to do

068the best in performance a beautiful um I apologize I want to just ask uh board member heard the these programs and all the things that are in place for modified sports or what we're going to call Middle School sports moving forward can we can the board receive documentation of everything that's in place because I feel like I didn't know anything about a mentoring program for our seventh and 8th graders and I'd love to be able to know what's in place so I can advocate for that and tell parents about this I'm not sure like where that is and if you did a presentation I apologize that I might have missed it but any documentation that's going to uplift our student athletes in the Middle School level I would love to see that because there's a

069lot going on where parents don't know what's happening so I'm just asking who brought it up okay thank you we're just waiting for approval with this lieutenant and the president uh to move forward with that um the documentation is um has been worked on for quite a while now and um and we're just waiting for some more programs to formulate with the athletic department working with Mr House Ramona Reynolds and um and also um Mrs Watson and um it just uh just to formulate the plan to get that out so it should be out soon and we also have I believe Nine Sports that's operating right now with the modified program and with those elements that you're talking about with the counseling training and tutoring thank you so thank you for that but I still

070would like the superintendent to look at the fact that we have to put some sort of something in place to make sure that these children are coming to summer school and these are this is the group that is not showing up and mentoring year-round is a great thing but we have to put academics first thank you alrighty Dr Williams go ahead all right okay uh thank you so much Chief Botticelli for I think a presentation that gave us all a lot of information I do just want to share that you know in addition to the work that's being done during the year we have a very robust summer program that we're hosting uh we are partnering with the mayor on the summer reading program we're keeping our finger to the pulse and doing exactly what

071president Cottman talked about looking school by school and which schools are growing and at what rate and which schools are not so that we can Target and provide support for those schools I know that her department is working with Dr Morrell's Department we want to make sure that that inclusivity part is there that's very important as uh board members mccosey and woods both share that's very very important and so even when they were looking at adopting a new program they were very involved in making sure that there was diversity that you know was a part of the programs I think our next step for me for next year um I'm going to be very assertively trying to engage parents on how they can also help their children with understanding and learning to read so that's

072something that you know we'll be working on next year and I can see that you know Chief Botticelli is looking like really I haven't had a chance yet to talk with her about it but that's where we're going and I think this leads right into our next presentation which is um talking about wise Ed which is really really exciting to see it's really exciting to see and it's a brainchild of uh the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and you know I got to meet him he shared his story on how he was not necessarily a great student in school but things like being able to use his hands think creatively think critically at what really helped him and led him to become the co-founder of Apple you know um the for us to be able to

073engage our students and I'm very proud to say that we are the first large Urban Pathway District not in New York state but in the world in the entire world and we know that across the world everybody uses Apple products so we're going to hear from peret Walker who is our specialty program officer and she's going to share she's been on the job for just a few months but she's already making an impact so she will share some information on wazette and where we are with things thank you so much Madam superintendent it is a pleasure to be with all of you this evening we want to begin with the first slide um as we talked about was Ed about our um the five by 25 BPS goals from wazette and from our superintendent and

074of course that is number two [Music] yeah that's the wrong presentation though too um can everybody that's on except for Mrs Walker um please mute we're getting a lot of feedback here thank you so much Scott next slide please thank you we're going to be just giving you an update on on wazette and as I mentioned before this is under number two for our superintendents Initiative for 5 by 25 goals and it is providing access to educational excellence and accelerating learning I want to give you just a brief overview of what's going on with um wazed which of course um is emphasis is being placed on problem solving collaboration and Technology but for the distribution of materials we have a ton of materials at school number 187 but after speaking with Mr Booker from the

075service center he has assured me that he is going to be transferring those items to the service center and then processing them sorting them and delivering them to schools and we are going to be doing so he's going to be doing so you surely by September the teacher training most of our instructional coaches you can please stay on that slide for a bit the previous slide thank you so much the teacher training um for instructional coaches has taken place it has taken place months as well however Megan Miller who was the chief academic officer of YZ would like to do a refresher uh training for instructional coaches and train our high school teachers who haven't been trained yet so that's going to be taking place um in late September so that we can get the

076program rolling out then of course our instructional coaches will return Community training to our teachers and we're going to be doing that during our grade level meetings or was a summer plant we're going to continue partnering with say yes as we did last summer and last summer we had um 13 sites and this year we're going to have 14 new sites we're very excited about that that the program will be expanded in the summer programs the camps will be provided with the animation kit and students will be of course using that kit and providing be provided with Hands-On activities I am going to be visiting every single site throughout the summer just to make sure the program is being implemented answering questions and making sure they have everything that they need to run the program

077successfully our school plan for 23 24 is a simple one I we really want this program rolled out early in the school year from K through 12. I'm working with Mrs Crystal Benton in staff development and uh we're going to be providing embedded in the workday training because we found that I found that in the in the past when we had training unfortunately not many people attended that many people showed up the attendance was very poor we were very serious about about this program it's very important as a district initiative therefore we're going to make sure that training takes place during the school day uh again Megan Miller will be taking care of that for us also we're going to be planning our and second annual was at Showcase which was a huge success um

078that's going to be taking place as well was very exciting and of course it did include six schools and we're hoping to expand it to many more going to have a was that conference in 23 2023 and that pathway conference will take place in November the 2nd through the fourth and that's in Arizona and some of our principals and teachers will be joining us along with our honorable board member President Sharon Belton Cottman now next slide please thank you so they had a chance to really Showcase wazette in in two different ways this year the first one was with the summit with the parent engagement Summit where the students um built or robots with our robotics program and then of course we had our big first annual was that showcase that I mentioned earlier that

079featured six schools and um that it was very very successful and well attended and we are going to continue using that um platform to to Really showcase wazad and to um let people know or show people and share with the public just what wise Ed is all about and it was a great program that was student-led great activity that was student-led and supported by principals at our six schools so we're going to continue that next year and again hopefully have even more participation and I just want to thank the principals of all six schools on Nathaniel Barnes School 61 Ms Marquita Bryant 64. we also had Mr Johnson's School 54 and Max Grundy he is the supervisor of career and Technology education representing 74 along with the principal Mr cook and Ray Farrell who represented

080um as the was that designee as our science teacher at mstp with principal Womack and at this time I want to share with you uh what was it looks like at the elementary level the Middle School level and the high school level so we have two principles that we'll be sharing with you what the program looks like in their buildings Mr Nathaniel Barnes and Mrs Ms Marquita Bryant followed by Mr Grundy who's going to be sharing with you what was that looks like at the middle school level and Mr Ray Farrell who will share with you how was that is being implemented at the high school level set this time it's my pleasure to present Mr Barnes next slide please good evening superintendent Williams and esteemed board members at r30e for the 2022-2023 school year

081we had the honor of piloting the YZ program at our building at arthro Eve we have two specialized programming our integration program and a gifted and talented program and that which Bridges both specialized programming is creativity so we were able to adopt the YZ program as a platform for teaching creativity and this program was taught by our gifted and talented teacher to all students who attend our school you may be thinking how exactly did the gifted teacher teach this to all students well here at afro Eve if you look to the right of the slide you will see an enrichment Triad model we follow a school-wide enrichment model so regardless of the fact if a student is identified as gifted or not all students receive type 1 instruction which is exploratory activities so we were

082able to use the YZ program which the goal of YZ is to build an engineering mindset within students and as I stated considering the fact that creativity is is the nucleus of our programming we were able to use YZ as a platform to incorporate our approach of teaching students critical thinking skills and really helping them to massage or cultivate that trait of creativity within them next slide please this year's slide gives you some insight as to what why does it look like in real time at R through Eve if you look to the bottom left of the slide you will see type 1 instruction 3D printing so this here is an example of third grade students applying their understanding of a critical thinking strategy we teach called phui it is a acronym for fluency flexibility

083originality and elaboration to create a bumblebee so the photo represents the 3D figure before and after revisions so the last letter of that acronym stands for elaboration so you see the Bumblebee when it was just a round 3d figure and then after the student was required to elaborate and make some revisions you see what it came to be if you will if you follow the arrow to where it says animation level two this is students I'm making animated clips of handmade clay models connected to the retelling of stories that were explored so the students explore certain stories and gifted and talented type 1 instruction they made clay models and then they use their devices to animate those models if you will using the YZ approach if you follow the arrow you will see more 3D

084printing this is a entire class I'm in type 1 instruction using what we call the design thinking process steps to work collaboratively to create a 3D model and if you look in the bottom right hand corner you see what that turned out to be so you see the process of that there the beginning of the animation process if you will on the student's device and then you see the product where the student actually is holding this 3d figure so we were very very uh excited to adopt this program and now that we've executed it for a full year we're excited that we did thank you so much for your time and I will turn it over to my colleague principal Brian good evening superintendent Williams and esteemed board members thank you so very much for

085having me on today and if we can turn to the next slide please thank you so very much at Olmsted 64 we have a school-wide implementation model that we started during the 21-22 school year so the idea here was to ensure that students in grades cater for are exposed to the wazette career Pathways we developed a career pathway progression or progression map if you will to ensure that students have opportunities to engage in specific or specific kits at each grade level that was done as a comprehensive approach to enhance our goals and our primary goals were to provide Learners with increased opportunities to engage in 21st century learning skills that align with both District goals and our schools vision and Mission and that was centered around innovation creativity as well as technology the strategy that

086we use in order to implement such was that we worked as a school leadership team in conjunction with grade level science and math teachers and we utilize backwards planning to review the BPS curriculum and pacing guides to determine how specific wazette kits could front load and or supplement problem-based learning using creative problem solving strategies for example our grade 4 Teachers utilize the wase drones level 2 Kit which was prepare for flight as a supplement to enhance a science unit 1 the energy emotion from the BPS curriculum so students had enhanced opportunities to engage in project-based activities around energy speed and moving objects next slide please so here we just see some examples of some of the things that our students are and have been doing so to the far left we see kindergarten students working

087collaboratively uh utilizing and controlling boxy robots uh as a simple coding command so even in kindergarten our students are able to utilize robots and develop and learn simple coding skills and commands so there you see students are utilizing the iPad and to the left in that corner you see the boxy robot they are actually using the iPad to give coding commands to that robot so for example they can code the robot to move forward Left Right Etc uh the next two images you see there are images of second grade students applying their knowledge of air pressure and Technology to enhance their understanding of how objects travel through the air so they're learning about flight essentially here and that is a drones level one kit so you can't see it but to the far left that

088picture they are looking at different objects such as balloons they may be looking at flights Etc and they're looking at how air pressure and all these other things contribute to flight and things being able to take off in the far right hand corner or the right side of that slide that was from our was at Showcase here we have third grade students utilizing and demonstrating cyber security utilizing Sphero minis to figure out a password like holding through a maze so it was a pretty uh comprehensive and complex approach to utilizing uh cyber security and coding aspects along with a maze and what's really great about that is that our third grade students actually had a lesson in which they were also demonstrating and teaching kindergarten students from another school how to actually code and utilize

089cyber security and passwords I can also share out that our students are very excited about the programming they are highly engaged they are asking their teachers when do we come back how fun exciting the lessons are the teachers are actually motivated to utilize the kids and eager to use them our parents have been highly receptive and it's also in some cases increase some of our parental engagement where they are also able to contribute to some of those skill sets such as coding and participate and help students with coding strategies in clubs Etc thank you very much for your time and for listening to me today I turn over to our next colleague a good evening superintendent Williams and honorable board members I'm Max Grundy supervisor of career and tech ed um if you could please

090Advance the next slide all right so when we um when was it was first introduced to the district in the 2021-2022 school year we realized that the middle level CTE course technology education was a perfect effect um the strands that we were that we we worked with wazad to bring into the district included uh engineering and design and as well as Robotics and we were able to see the engineering design strand the middle level or their level three would be able to be plugged into our existing design unit which you can see um the bullets of what we we are set up already in our curriculum and then the robotic strand became the focal project that the project-based learning for unit 11 in which students design Implement test and evaluate a multi-system uh product so

091after we work with our technology teachers to integrate the WASP modules directly into our curriculum we had wazad come in Megan who was mentioned before came in and did a full day training for our teachers so that every technology teacher in the district is delivering these units to every seventh and 8th grader that has technology and if you can move on to the next one please I can talk a little bit about what that looks like in each classroom so in each classroom um the design and Engineering models were implemented in the spring of 2022 and on the left hand side you can see that students are busy designing and then 3D printing some actually they are going to be delivered to each of the board members at some point I was hoping it was

092going to be today but I don't think you've received them yet name plates once again these are students are designing this all in a 3D modeling program and then sending it over into the 3D printers that have made it is a an advanced step from what's happening at the elementary level and then on the right hand side the robotics kits were just introduced this spring the students have just gotten their hands on them right there you can see a maze on a floor that one of the teachers designed and challenged the students to figure out how to program the robot the way through it on the right hand side you see two students working together to build the actual robots students absolutely love the 3D printing when they can see their Creations coming to life

093and the early returns you know we we did it for the first time now but the early returns of the students are absolutely rising to the challenge of doing the robot building um so just want to thank uh Brett Walker and and the superintendent and uh president Bolton Common for bringing these in because students are really enjoying it so thank you very much and I will turn this over to the next presenter uh good evening my name is Ray Farrell I'm the computer science teacher at the math science technology preparatory school at Seneca and I've been able to implement a few kits this year the first two I want to talk about are the level 4 Robotics and the level 4 3D printing design kits these kits um are more open-ended than the earlier kits

094and it allows the students to actually start to do some design work um the first step they want to talk about in their design process is to empathize the students are kind of analyzing a problem that exists in the world that affects somebody else not necessarily themselves and they're trying to put themselves into that that mold and try to come up with a solution to that problem so then they move on to the second step which is to actually Define the problem because you see on the slide it says that is one of the most crucial steps because if they can't just Define what they're trying to solve the solution will never come to them so we spend a lot of time in this step trying to Define trying to figure out all the different

095possible solutions there then they move into the design process this can be done analog some of the early projects are really just using things like paper and cardboard to get their ideas out there and then we move into the 3D printing the 3D and the circuit design once they get to design we move to that implementation stage for them it's going to be either designing 3D prints it's going to be building circuits which they'll have to code or git code for which is written in C plus then that last step is to test it everything works great there's probably still improvements to be made so this process becomes a continual Loop and they're kind of always going back and they're saying okay did I meet my needs did I meet the problem did I Define

096the problem properly what can I do to improve this so those are the first five steps in that design thinking process and then if we could Advance the next slide um the next thing I want to talk about is collaboration these problems are complex learning new technologies is complex wiring circuits is going to play different students are going to pick up on different concepts of this and then they're able to work together and kind of build a cohesive model together um all of these projects are touching on cross-curricular skills reading math science um some of the things we did for like the wase Showcase was using the speed of sound to calculate distance these are advanced concepts that the kids are implementing into code and then the last one is anybody that participates this is

097going to get increased technical skills and the one thing I probably didn't mention in the slides is the one promise I made to all my students is No Matter What by the time you leave this program these these classes you're going to think differently you're going to be more analytical you're going to look at problems differently and you're going to want to analyze them um so that's just a little a bit of what we have going on at MST at the high school level and I could turn that book over to Mrs Walker thank you so much thank you you all did a wonderful job thank you very much for sharing the wonderful things that you all are doing with why they're in your buildings thank you very much and as I close I just

098want to really thank our honorable board member president uh Sharon Belton Kaufman as well as the superintendent because without these two ladies this program would not be in the Buffalo Public Schools and our students would not have this wonderful opportunity to participate in such a great program that really emphasizes collaboration and problem solving and technology and just really preparing students for today's workplace so I want to thank you so much and this concludes our presentation thank you Mrs Walker and to all of our presenters um we'll go in alphabetical order this time and keep in mind board members that we are well over our time and into uh Miss shootas Mrs Shooters educational support committee so keep your comments and questions brief uh president Belton Cotman I'm not going to say much I just want

099to say that I want to thank in addition to the uh parties uh the staff um Matt Grundy and I also want to give a shout out to Kelly Baldo because Kelly uh was very uh instrumental in um uh seeing the vision and carrying it with along with her along with uh chief academic officer um and better Telly so that's all I have to say this is just the tip of the iceberg um there's so much more that we can do with this and I this is what learning is about I would like to ask though one question um to the principals and even the teacher uh Ray Farrow I hear so much about how great you are uh has this improved attendance and has this helped improve uh discipline within the schools I'm just

100curious answer [Music] president Cartman I'll respond to that it certainly has supported attendance here at school 61 because type 1 instruction students don't know when it's scheduled only the adults know so students come to school each day saying do we have robots today do we have information today they don't know when it's occurring so it certainly is giving them some extrinsic motivation to come to school to your point thank you thank you that's all thank you vice president Dr Evans Brown hello great presentation Miss Walker and colleagues one of the questions I have is I know you are planning to expand why is that throughout the district I would like to see some of my schools on the east side um be selected to participate you know in this wiseat initiative and so do you

101know how you uh select these schools and uh for the next year for example this was rolled out District wise okay so be clear about it no I left on that are you referred to the Showcase no I'm referring to the participation in the schools because I think I heard you say yes everyone yes it is in every building oh it's in every building yes oh okay well that's good to know thank you you're welcome um missed board member heard are you still with us doesn't look like a board member makozi I I find this to be a great presentation to know that it's in all the schools is fantastic I think it's on us as District now to make sure that uh it's being all all principles and everyone are engaging on the same

102levels some principles may not be taking advantage of this in ways that other schools might be then it becomes an equity issue and it's on us as a district and I'm going to keep pushing for us to be to make the standard to create the power that this is something that if it's this successful so early on we should be jumping in and if we are the first one worldwide then why wouldn't we be uplifting this in every level at every school um I'm I'm with Dr Evans Brown as I wasn't sure uh if it was in my school so maybe it's you know I'm not putting any pointing any fingers but we as a district should make sure we start putting power on what's going to advance BPS but also Advance our children and

103give them options that are outside of the box for them to learn and you guys did agree thank you board member cozy um I think board member mckeken um could not make this this time board member shooter I would just like to uh uh Echo that uh I um really found a presentation informative and my questions were answered throughout the the presentation so I have no further comments thank you board member Woods yes um when they opened the presentation they said that this program was rolled out at six schools they named the schools and the presentation is excellent the YZ program is excellent and I know that my principal at Waterfront school was extremely interested in in the YZ program because he already was doing things of that nature with 3D presentations and 3D learning

104so can you explain in a little bit more detail what school system is rolled out at what level and what were you saying about it was at six schools so I I'm just a little confused from what you presented in the beginning what I presented in the beginning that the Showcase presented six schools the ones that showcase featured six schools but the program is K through 12. so ever the program is in every single School building in our district schools unfortunate and it and can you can you continue you're saying is it every school district at what level what are you what are you saying a little more detail I am saying that is in every building every building has the wazette program however there are some buildings who unfortunately get enrolled out as quickly

105as for instance the six schools that I selected to be involved in this showcase be a little slow and rolling it out and because I just came on in a couple of months I wanted to feature those schools who were already really involved in the program but every school has them has the materials at least the first round of materials everyone will be getting the second round of materials so every single School building has the materials to move forward with the program one of my roles is going to be to go around to every school just to make sure it is being implemented and to make sure that they have everything that they need to be accepted people to participate in the program have you had a chance to visit Waterfront and and can you

106say anything about what's happening at that program I would have thought they would have been part of a showcase because I know the principal was just I mean in love with the program well that's great to hear and we will be expanding the Showcase to include other schools so hopefully Waterfront can participate in the Showcase next year we'll be happy to have them and no I have not visited Waterfront point point of correction uh or just so that uh would you share again the six schools so that Mrs would like to know which six schools were involved well I heard the six I didn't hear any of mine no problem that's why I never want her to share it again so you can hear that school 99 was involved hello is that one of your

107schools well yes School 99.9 is definitely one of mine well it was definitely in the Showcase well thank you anything else board member Woods I'll be visiting all my schools it's a great program thank you for the presentation so thank you for your comments thank you board members I I just want to also expand on how this is being rolled out District wide um to to be blunt I have a fourth grader and a seventh grader and they're in two different schools and I am unaware of of them having any exposure to this this program um I know that we as a board made a significant investment in wazed with the understanding that it was going to be rolled out district-wide I'm certainly not placing any blame on anybody um but I I do have

108a fourth grader who has been disappointed with his science or lack of science this school year and I understand that math and Ela are a priority they they have to be especially coming out of the the pandemic but I would like to know and maybe it's not answered tonight but I would like to know more about how it is being rolled out and if it is K-12 how that's happening K-12 if I may I can add a little bit if that's okay I mean I just get this too though if I can just say that you know we have so you can imagine K through 12 ordering the materials for 60 schools for all grade levels there are lots of materials so you know a part of getting it you know is is and she

109did share that she's in the process of getting the materials delivered from 187 into the schools so all of our schools you know we're a district-wide program and so all of our schools will be having the you know the materials that they need and you know Ann and her team really kind of catapulted at the beginning of this and you know identify which schools which grade levels would have which materials but you know the start of it all is really going to take a minute to get the inventory of all of the materials they've been ordered she ordered them for the whole District we got them all ordered they're here but now they have to get out into the schools so and you go ahead and and share a little bit um about where we

110are with it sure so um to Dr Williams point the orders were placed but in some cases the materials weren't readily available they had a either a backlog or supply chain issues so some of them came in staggered times throughout the year so even though the initial uh rollout schools had um at certain grade levels had some kits that we had ordered for a different purpose originally um so they were able to start implementing those during RTI we started by training schools with the instructional coaches so they could work with their teachers and get that rolling because initially remember we had started by saying we would do it for after school so we had some of those supplies on hand and that's how we were able to start and then other supplies have been coming

111in throughout the course of the year and that's what Miss Walker was referring to those will be distributed now directly to the schools but the initial plan is that every single grade level will have access to I believe two kids um they vary a little bit by grade but because we're a pathway District we will be doing it at every grade so it's a secondary It's actually an elective course that we're creating so we're taking several kits um and combining them into a course so students will have that opportunity to take it at the high school level and then we're phasing it into various RTI Pathways at the elementary occasionally a science depending on where a kit might fit in with the technology standards um but so it wasn't quite as smooth in the very

112beginning as we would have liked just because we didn't have all the materials readily available but rest is shared by this school year starting in September they should have materials for every grade level so that everyone is able it wasn't just you know it was the materials that was one piece another piece was finding time in the school day you know to be able to expose all of the students to it and that was a little more complex than I think you know what we initially thought it would be but because our strategic plan centers on equity which means that you know if we're doing it for one school certainly children at other schools should have the same opportunity we went back to the table and thought about you know how can we make this

113work for everyone we don't just want to offer it in after school we don't just you know want to offer to certain grade levels and and roll it up we really wanted to do because it's a great program and the kids love it I mean it is a even our Little Learners that are kindergarten and you know Pre-K it's infectious when you go around and you see and they're explaining to you you know all of the uh details on drones and animation and you know I I would have to believe that it does help with behavioral infractions because the children are working collectively they're working collaboratively together I've seen it every time I go out and I get to observe um you know what they're doing and you know they're able to explain in great

114detail about drones and and they're excited while they're doing it I think it almost tricks them into learning I don't even think they realize you know all of the Science and Mathematics and literacy and all of those things that are involved when they're doing it they're just having fun but they're also learning absolutely and that's why that's why I raise that because our students need to have access to it because of how influential it can be on their learning absolutely so we're off to a great start and I'm hopeful that we're going to grow going into next school year flicker knives that that program was not being as as it should have been and so this is why the position what the court dating position was created the schools had the uh Kelly Baldo made

115sure that all the uh every school had the kits there were certain people that were enthusiastic about it and they went and went online read how to do it then there were certain people who had to be trained and who were pushing back so this is the reason for creating that position to make sure that this grows every school has the kits as to whether they decided to use them at that point at this point was their choice but one particular person you will remember board members who came down to the board every month was from school 99 Stanley mikowski she was a teacher who said she went online read about it herself rather than allow those tits to sit there and not be used and she took it upon herself to self-teach herself because

116it really is an easy curriculum and she rolled it out at school 99 herself with uh early in the year in addition to that so I think it you know it was there whether uh and I think parts of it were used like in some schools they just wanted to do the CD of the CD Printing and things like that so you know it has been there and so you need to make sure as a parent that you asked the question when it when is the principal going to make sure that your child gets uh get it rolled out okay because the people who were enthusiastic did it and some people uh uh have to be encouraged a little bit more thank you all right thank you Mrs Walker and to all of our presenters

117again Dr Williams any last thoughts before we turn it over to board member shruta no we're already over time so we're just gonna Jump Right In with board member shooter and and however she would like to begin her present you know her half of our committee meeting okay well I think what we're going to do is Dr Williams I'm going to hand it right over to you we are going to talk about a community-based organization evaluation and our mwbe monitoring all right thank you so much chairwoman shooter so you asked for it you know the board has been asking about you know the evaluation process and I know that board member Woods is um particularly interested in the mwbe monitoring the process and what that looks like and so I'm excited that tonight we have

118three ladies three of our cabinet members who are going to be sharing information with you that I think um you will find informative um and will assure you that we are moving forward with the evaluation process for our school-based Community Partners as well as with our mwbe monitoring so I'm going to turn things over I'm not sure who's starting if it's Dr Reynolds that's starting it out but we'll have Dr Reynolds Dr Brown and um our chief of diversity equity and inclusion Miss Amos I mean chief Amos is actually going to start it off thank you Dr Williams all right so good evening and greetings Madam superintendent uh honorable board members and listening and viewing audience this evening's presentation community-based organizations evaluation and mwbe monitoring will be presented by me Antoinette Amos the chief of

119diversity equity and our own chief of student I needed that slide thank you the chief of student Support Services Dr Ramona Reynolds chief of Athletics Community Schools family and Community engagement next slide please so um we're going to talk about this is the agenda so we'll do the introduction talk about our first section is where are we where we will speak about Equitable public spending pre-qualified Community Partners catalog Buffalo Public Schools compendium community-based organizations evaluative tool then we will go into where we are going where we will talk about next steps and timeline for the CBO evaluative tool then we will talk about how we will get there and then entertain questions next slide please where are we next slide please so when we talk about where are we um just as I believe a

120few of the speakers previously talked about we are moving to the next level with one voice One Vision One mission and making efforts to fortify our connections with our Community Partners the presentation aligns with each of the superintendent's five by five five by 25 goals and if you guys don't mind for the sake of time I will not read those I see nods okay all right next slide please so my portion is a discussing Equitable public spending and if you see uh look at the the graphic it's moving from equality to equity currently our BPS mwe policy goal states that we will um to promote equality of economic opportunities for mwbes eliminate barriers to participation and enhance the ability to compete said policy set to mwbe participation goal of 25 there are currently 4961 active

121vendors in bonfire of which 119 or 2.2 percent are mwbes uh I am still combing through data however I can tell you that um of those 119 mwbes current they are currently 31 that has received funds and this is a year-to-date number and that number for those mwbes is 3.8 million dollars now we of course I don't have the percent the number of what percentage that is of the whole but I will get that we do have equitable increase our Outreach and marketing uh we will have our mwbe recruitment materials I plan to carry them everywhere with me um because recruitment is the ongoing thing uh we will increase our events we already have the rfpq meetings um as led by Dr Ramona Reynolds and her team and we would like to um attach ourselves

122to that I speak as though I have a team um I'm talking about the the Dei Department um and we will also have our first well my first nwbe vendor and contractor recruit recruitment event which will happen on August 2nd from two to four and we are hoping that you all will be able to join us and uh the venue will be um is to be determined uh we are also increasing our Recruitment and under for the purposes of Dei we want to leverage Community Partnerships so that's a little different than um what we normally speak of when we talk about leveraging Community Partnerships in this case I am speaking to what um The Honorable president uh Belton Cottman spoke of not recreating the will and therefore I have reached out and partnered with the

123Dei teams from the City of Buffalo as well as Buff State uh Erie County mwbe certification office and the Community Foundation for them to share their list of mwbes with us so that we can recruit and pull from those as well um we will also increase our performance monitoring and that includes the CBO evaluative tool which Dr Brown will speak to in a moment and compliance auditing and monitoring of our vendors and contractors by me uh or my office in addition to eliminate barriers to participation and enhance the ability to compete we will increase the technical assistance professional development we have opened up the Dei implicit bias training to some of our uh vendors mainly those who are client-facing or student-facing parent-facing uh in addition to that we have resource provision for example the compendium

124and the pcpc uh both of those Dr Brown and Dr Reynolds will speak to um soon we have review and Alignment we want to make sure that we align our mission our goals our policies and procedures so that you know um so that if you look at if you look back at the top at what our policy currently States it talks about equality right and so we want to make sure that those all of those policies align so we need to revisit some of our policies and change those to align with uh the superintendent's goals and she talks about equity in addition to that and last on my list is public reporting so we will have Dei will have a presence on the new VPS website and that is where we will do public reporting

125as well as making sure that we touch and talk about all holidays that are relevant to our students um and other activities and for right now that is it for me and I am going to pass it on to Dr Ramona Reynolds thank you so much Chief Amos greetings superintendent Williams honorable board members and our BPS community so as you are all aware BPS engages with numerous community-based organizations for different purposes for today's presentation our references to community-based organizations or cbo's will refer only to those contained within the pre-qualified Community partner catalog or pcpc that you've heard referenced I'll discuss the pcpc and Dr Brown will discuss the BPS compendium and evaluative tool let's first take a quick look back so originating from a concern that local Grassroots organizations have historically not been considered for

126Partnerships and contracts we establish a standardized infrastructure to increase local organization awareness and access of partnership opportunities by way of the BPS students and families supplemental programs and services requests for pre-qualification and we have all done dubbed it rfpq so where are we in this process well based upon the board's feedback and to ensure that this process is as user friendly as possible under the leadership of the office of parent and family engagement and partnership with the office of strategic alignment and Innovation we've instituted a few updates which include the following more consistent promotion and Outreach regarding the rfpq process including website promotion flyers and information distribution more tabling opportunities newspapers advertisements and social media promotion we've transitioned from conducting a few informational meetings during the school year to ongoing virtual and in-person meetings during

127these meetings Staff address questions and provide support to potential vendors to support them with submitting a proposal a transition from receiving program proposals only twice a year to year round during a rotating 10 week cycle so during this cycle the rfpq was posted and active for eight weeks whereby organizations have the opportunity to submit their proposals by way of bonfire the posting then closes for two weeks per cycle to allow the committee to rate the proposal submissions notify the vendors provide them feedback as well as update the catalog with the newly vetted partner proposals the office of parent and family engagement and strategic alignment and Innovation teams then share the updated catalog with school and District leaders for contract considerations and I subsequently share with superintendent Williams cabinet and the board so Dr Williams asked

128that I provide Clarity regarding the process once a vendor has been vetted considered pre-qualified and included in the catalog at that point they are eligible for a contract but it doesn't necessarily mean that a contract will be awarded after reviewing data and considering existing gaps within the schools or departments if a school or District leader is interested in an organization's service or program then they would work with the purchase department and the CEOs to determine specific Services programs that will be provided desired outcomes targeted audience schedule and costs and once all those details are finalized a contract is developed I'll say that opfv and osai and the purchase departments have been extremely instrumental in providing direct vendor support during the contract development phase now this year every school has been touched by at least one

129CBO from the pcpc who have provided either professional development programs or another type of supplemental service so in an effort to provide our school and District leaders an opportunity to learn more about each pre-qualified Community partner we are now working on hosting a fair where the pre-qualified Community Partners will be encouraged to table promote and meet face to face with school and District leaders because we recognize that it's one thing to read about a program proposal in a catalog it's another thing to physically engage with the potential partner and ask questions and so finally at the end of their contract term each pre-qualified Community partner will be evaluated using the newly developed standardized evaluative tool that Dr Brown will now discuss next slide please thank you Chief Reynolds and good evening everyone so as you

130are aware our compendium it was revised at the start of the school year and director maiwen and her team from the department of social emotional and wellness supports under the division of student Support Services they really took a lead role in collecting the names of all CBO Partners district-wide along with a brief description of the services offered and that was really it was a massive undertaking as each school as you can see through the compendium when we reviewed it earlier this year we have multiple partners and the information was also shared with central office as we have many central office departments and divisions that have that are contract owners because they partnership to support students at the school level the compendium shifted from a PowerPoint back in 2018 with all the partners listed and so

131now it's a catalog that is organized in a very colorful and user-friendly Manner and as you can see the CBO support ranges from academics to social emotional health and wellness enrichment and family support just to name a few next slide please while the compendium reflects on how the organizations focus on providing various levels of student and family supports we know how important it is to continue to work to strengthen our relationship between these organizations and the district to ensure alignment of service for students and families we realize how large our district is and this is really the first time we've ever done this and as we continue to do research we don't really see any other District that has taken this initiative while they have certain evaluative tools maybe for Community Schools nothing uniform that

132is used across the district's District the organization's outcome and deliverables it definitely will be essential in increasing the impact of these services that they have on the Student Success therefore we knew that it was really important to conduct research Dr Williams charged the team with making sure they conducted research with a goal of gathering data to affirm the development of a CBO evaluative tool that will be part of phase one and this year Dr Rosanna top Chan she is the program evaluator for the office of shared accountability she did an amazing job and conducted basically a landscape review where she analyzed and surveyed responses from some of our CBO Partners particularly the ones that we've been working with with for quite some time one of the major recommendations from the landscape review was to seek

133additional information around the effectiveness of the CDL services that impact our students in response to that landscape review we created a cross-collaborative team which uh the team they were from several divisions and you can see here student Support Services office of parent and family engagement strategic alignment and Innovation office of shared accountability curriculum assessment instruction and Extended Learning so again we are just finishing up with phase one we did a lot this year phase one of the implementation of the CBO and value evaluative tool also included student voice Dr Rachel Dominguez she's the program evaluator for the division of student Support Services she met with our inter High student council and there are District student leaders just to receive some feedback about the compendium and the resources that are offered in the compendium and then

134she asked them to share ideas for added resources that they would find interesting and they really brought up a lot of awesome ideas and we won't stop there we will continue to elevate student voice throughout all phases of this implementation and Dr zamingus and top chain researched how to identify an evaluative tool that will effectively evaluate the cdos so this information was really critical to gather prior to the teams even working together and mayor can you please click the evaluative link I'm sorry can you go back and click the orange link thank you just to give you an idea of what it looks like and I'll be brief okay it's loading okay so when the evaluators click the link I'm sorry we can make it a little larger thank you Amir so when the evaluator

135opens up the 10 minutes it says it right there's a prompt that's right there and it's it takes about 10 minutes keeping in mind that the goal is really for the evaluator to have like ongoing conversations with the CBO we don't want to want it to be a situation where they're being evaluated and they haven't had any discussion throughout the throughout the con uh throughout the contract and the CBO the expectation is that they should be providing ongoing reports relating to the goals which should make this too much easier to complete and so all evaluators if you can start scrolling down and we're um I'll evaluate way to evaluators to complete questions 1 through 21. questions one through six and if we could stop at item six they primarily focus on the demographics so if

136you see item six it asks the evaluator to indicate if the CBO has the mwbe certification or other certifications which is absolutely you know critical because as you heard Chief Amos say earlier today she is really looking at the percentage of mwb e partners that we have in the district questions seven through Section 5 uses the likert scale of found it questionable unacceptable and n a and as I mentioned earlier uh the program evaluators really spent a lot of time researching the best tools to use for to build organizational capacity and so we see here for question 10 if you could scroll down at near it speaks to ongoing monitoring that really keeps it in the Forefront of the evaluator to say how are we monitoring what kind of data what are the data points

137that we should be collecting throughout this partnership and if you could please scroll down to question 20 and there foreign says Dei diversity equity and inclusion because again we always want to focus on Dei to see if they have a mission statement to ensure that we're meeting that and that also references the monitoring piece so after the evaluator responds to question 21 if you want to scroll down to that please Amir so by selecting one of these categories uh which is aligned to the compendium in rfpq the evaluation then branches off to the category chosen so each division prior to so they have the subcommittee then they broke off into subcommittees that were respective to to the to the categories that you just saw and they developed smart goals that are aligned to the 5x25

138as well as the goals within the division so if we can just I'll give you an opportunity to go to let's go to question 28 and we can just walk through a section in I don't know if you can make it a little bigger in there but 28 for example so when it branches off if your partner uh is under social emotional Wellness the first question will be 28 the CDs work aligns with data from the youth risk behavior survey we want to make sure that we always keep the data at the Forefront our yrbs data we know that it's administered every two years the last time it was a minister it was 2021 there is a committee that meets an ongoing basis a diverse stakeholder group where we are preparing and getting all the

139feedback from from the last couple of years to prepare for 2023 and we also want to make sure that they're looking at the school health index tier Fidelity inventory the next question 29 it focuses on the whole school whole community and whole child approach we have a wellness policy so any partner that is coming in we want them we want to make sure that they are familiar with their wellness policy also question number 30 it the work aligns with the data of attendance and office discipline referrals we know that when students are socially emotionally and physically well they do better in school obviously academics and their social emotional well-being increases so we want to make sure that Partners have a laser focus idea of what our goals are and how we're trying to reduce and

140reduce suspensions increase attendance and really focus on being a restorative District uh the next question please 31 edmir goes to goes to 34. 31 the CBO Services supports increasing on track graduation we always want to focus on increasing our graduation rates making sure that students graduate on time question 32 focuses on the CBO is familiar with the district's code of conduct we know the code of conduct was revised for this school year and we want to make sure really every partner is familiar with our code of conduct that's our blueprint that is the tool that we use to engage all of our students and Families and then the next question final question 30 34 the CBO has demonstrated a commitment to creating safe spaces and engaging and culturally and linguistically responsive framework so we always

141want to want to make sure that clri is at the Forefront in that the cdos are working in partnership with the schools to support students in that in that area so that is how that branches off into those questions and then Amir if you would please go to question 50 because everyone answers the first 21 questions and then question 50 allows the evaluator so I'll give you a moment to get there we know that again we have 66 schools we have several Central offices to be able to create one universal evaluative to again like I said earlier that's huge but we know we can't always cover every single area because all of our schools have unique cultures so this is an opportunity for the evaluator to include additional comments that weren't addressed and then question

14251 is the final question and it just simply asks the evaluator do you um would you recommend this partner for the district to continue to work with this partner and I just want us all to keep in mind that again this would be our first year using this tool therefore we're not trying to immediately terminate contracts and Partnerships unless there are glaring concerns that cannot be addressed expeditiously to meet the needs of our students this is a way for us to collect massive data and to be able to use it and look to see if we are moving in the direction we need to for Student Success and admir if you can please go back to the PowerPoint and if you can advance the slide please [Applause] our next is where are we going and

143it is in relation to the evaluative tool and so this is our timeline for the evaluative tool prior to launching this district-wide we want to just test it out we're not saying a pilot but just really asking for some volunteers at the district level and the school level and we like to do this in some this summer to find out and provide them with some guided questions what what was your experience with it was it easy to complete did it did it meet the needs of your of your contract or your mou with the CBO and and just to be able to gather some additional data as we move forward forward then the summer of 2023 we'd like to meet with the principal advisory committee we definitely want their feedback we want to be able

144to share with them the preliminary data points from the school and District personnel and then in the fall of 2023 we want to roll this out District y we want to have an opportunity to be on one of the principal meetings of hopefully September no later than October we also have central office administrators who attend those meetings and this will be an opportunity to really go through this this evaluative tool also we want to make sure that we're training our cbo's we know that Dr Reynolds through her rfpq process she has several informational meetings we would love to be able to to collab to collaborate just to ensure that they are aware of the evaluative tool but not go too deep into it but once they are approved we really want them to have this

145tool so that they understand just like with our students we want to make sure that they understand the rubric they know what the expectations are so that we can help them to meet those expectations in a partnership and then we want to continue to work closely with our office of sharing accountability we know that they hold all of our data points and they have been part of this process um since its Inception and so we would like them to assist with collecting and disaggregating the data and that will be on an ongoing basis and then finally the fall of 2023 this is just a consideration to be able to designate points in the procurement process for those cbo's that have demonstrated a track record of success we know that that may not be next year

146but at least the following year once we get all of the data because if you're if you have a proven track record that can really increase your chances of becoming a future partner and to be able to advertise that next slide please and how do we get there so we know in order to do all of what we described it takes transparency we want to maintain Fidelity and utilizing the new evaluative tool we want equity for all and all that we do with no excuses thank you and we are now open opening it up for questions thank you for your time okay um would we'd like to start with uh Dr Evans Brown do you have any questions no I have no questions great presentation ladies um I like the fact that um we're continuing

147to involve Community Partners um and I like the fact that we are providing an evaluated tool because often I think um our partners come in our schools and we have not been and I may be wrong we have not um been consistent in evaluating uh uh Partners whether they're Community Based or partners that we've had for 20 years so I think it's important that whoever we bring in um it should be some accountability in terms of of student outcomes um so kudos to to you guys thank you okay uh could we have uh Mrs Woods Miss sure um very impressive uh presentation I agree with um Dr Kathy Evans Brown you know you have a compendium of so many agencies who have been working with us for so long and uh it's always prudent to

148have some kind of evaluation to see if the program is still is efficient is necessary that the problem gets out are we making any progress I I really am impressed with the evaluation tool for all all um cbo's on the thing of presentation about the MBE progress you know the goal for 25 minority participation it looks like we're we're trying to make progress and I know Dr Reynolds you're you're doing so much you know you're reaching out you're doing the training but you have to I'd have to say I'm just still still on baby steps if you're saying we have a 119 agencies that responded and only 31 have contracts and then the dollar value is 3 million out of a 1.4 billion dollar budget oh we have so we have so much more that

149we need to do um I had to MBA agencies that asked me a question today one of them um said that they found putting their uh proposal into munis uh very challenging so I I she said she got it done she actually you know it took hours and her children helped her so um my question and suggestion is that we um extend a little bit more to to the agencies the minority in in mbwe so some help with getting into into munis that that that was raised by uh some of the programs uh another may I comment for um president honorable for president or abort number wood I'm sorry the and that is exactly why we offer the informational meetings both virtually as well as in person and we also extend the contact information so

150our lead for those informational meetings is office of parent and family engagement supervisor Danny Gray she's been wonderful um working him hand in hand um with the partners walking them through and our purchase um Department as well I know Sue Felice um as well as Jennifer low temp you all have supported those who have been um having a little bit of difficulty either uploading or navigating bonfire so we can absolutely continue to do that above and beyond the informational sessions well I I always applaud your efforts I know you're always finding a way to to reach out and that's what we we have to do because the commitment was that it's instead of going constantly with the same people the same players that we're gonna extend opportunities to new groups new people because there are

151new technologies new efficiencies and you know again as I always say everybody pays taxes so everybody wants a shot at having contracts jobs and opportunity but the other thing that um was the uh agency person called me today and asked about are Esser funds there if an agency is already has a contract they were approved they're doing a good job they the agency was under the impression that their contract was for two years that they were going to be in for the two years remaining of our Esser and there's a rumor going around saying no that just because you're in and you're doing a good job the second year maybe that you you may not have a second year is I I didn't know what to say to the person yeah have you have is

152that something that's going out to to the agencies are you referring to any uh CBO or vendor contracted um through that pcpc that we've described yes the our the rfpq yeah so the rfpq okay so those contracts are um yearly contracts um we will be doing the evaluation at the end of the contract term um the good news is that all schools be it Community Schools as well as partnership schools the partnership schools are the non-community based or excuse me non-community schools have funding so if those schools um would like to continue with the contract and the partnership with the CBO they may do so okay the the vendor uh indicated that the schools were very happy with them but they were being told it they may not be you know they may not be

153able to continue because the school itself would have to pick them up because they're what they are Esser monies wouldn't wouldn't be available so that's perhaps offline you can provide me with the name of the of the organization okay um I really applaud your um Outreach as far as uh having the mbe's network with each other but um can you speak on uh the idea that we also had uh suggested and that would be uh a good thing to do uh since we do have major contractors who continually get funded and provide services uh we had said something about and you you said um we would try to link the minority vendors and women vendors with our major um suppliers so that they could partner because you know agencies get comfortable with whoever they had

154as a partner and it they don't you know they need to meet these vendors that we have and see if they can use them and partner with them the um I can start and then I it looks like Chief Amos wants to to chime in as well so please know that our um many of our cbo's particularly our cbo's that work up with our community schools they subcontract to many um smaller Grassroots organizations um mwve certified organizations so you heard me mention um you heard two things you heard Chief Amos mentioned the mwve recruitment fair you heard me mention the pcpc fair so at that pcpc fair these every we have 63 vendors currently in the pcpc it's one thing for a school leader to just kind of read the proposals but we want to

155use this as an opportunity for them to really sell themselves market and allow our district and school leaders to go table to table to touch their artifacts to ask questions to see you know perhaps video clips so this is you know you talk about really extending to organizations that have historically not been provided access here's your opportunity to really sell themselves to the schools to provide the the school leaders and District Leaders with a lot more information about what they provide and then Chief Amos that you want to touch on on the mwve recruitment fear that you mentioned yes and so very am I it's very similar to what Dr Reynolds is talking about except we're talking about them wbe contractors although we will invite uh service vendors as well um but uh part of

156the plan was for me to ask the bigger more established companies to Mentor those who are just starting out so that we can again eliminate barriers do everything that we say in our policy we really want to stick to all of that stuff that we say that we do and so part of that is to through this Fair make sure that we um put people together that can help one another well ladies you're doing an excellent job making an excellent start and I just say Kudos and please continue your efforts because uh again if we all have to pay taxes we all want to share the benefits thank you okay um I'll I'll go I guess to president uh Feldman Chapman thank you it's so encouraging to see this this aspect of the district growing

157I am concerned however that we may be missing a piece of this puzzle by not making sure that uh our smaller vendors can be paid in a timely manner it was suggested that um by one of our Community Partners and I won't say it online but I will share it individually with you that if we figure out a way to make sure that they can be paid in a timely manner they can grow and they can exist and do more and so uh this conversation was had previously and we talked about something similar uh board member Woods shared that the county does uh as far as providing funds we have to look at that because we cannot expect a small vendor to wait three and four months to get paid so I really need you

158guys to uh visit that with uh Jim uh our CFO and the superintendent to get get us where we can make sure we are a small business friendly I think that's really important and uh in trying to grow this might I add a comment there or president Cartman we developed um we developed a template particularly for those new organizations the Grassroots organizations that it's working very very well this year so we kind of learned last year that some of the new startups didn't have the infrastructure in place so um one of our principal clerks collect Clements developed a very simple easy to follow invoice template and again going back to our district leads um Danny Gray from the office of parent and family engagement has worked hand in hand with the um with the organizations

159just to make sure that their invoicing is accurate and we have found that once we submit the invoice to BPS contracts if it's accurate the turnaround is really really quick so I think what's really quick well you know what I always hesitate and saying but I will tell you that four weeks six weeks at the most yeah but see that's still a long time that's still a long time and so does this mean that we need a policy that says that our our small business uh Partners uh will be paid within two weeks once they submit their invoices they don't have the uh in most cases they don't have the bankroll to support a four-week paying their employees for in six weeks so I appreciate you creating that that was definitely needed but I think

160it because we have people that are still waiting to get paid for different things uh Terry will uh attest uh uh all year so I think in order to make sure that this is going to be a success that there needs to be specific people earmarked to work this and within two weeks that it slipped and they get their money because they have a payroll to do they have to do it and we have to raise the standard uh in in our accounting department to make sure we do it so uh I think that's a big piece that has to be addressed and if it's the policy the Board needs to uh do a policy in order to ensure that it happens in fairness to them I had an idea that flipped to my mind

161and it was about um color color coding services in other words if I'm a principal and you have this big how does it how if I'm a principal and I have a need and first of all I hope that we have a system where someone is monitoring the data in a school and saying you need to go to work with someone with our social emotional compendium or whatever but what what when I say color coding I'm a principal and you give me a book with all these pages in it what makes you think that I'm going to re you know look through that book to find who I need do you understand what I mean help me understand the process with that how is it how can we make it or how efficient is the

162process when I open up and I can pull mine out if I have to How will I know you know my you know what I'm saying uh I see you shaking Dr Brown I'm trying to figure out how to make it easier for to be to use that compendium I got a red problem my problem is um my attendance is out of control who would be who would I use for attendance I don't know you know I I've never worked so I'm just trying to figure it out that's all no and I love your feedback and that can be included in some of our subcommittee work because right now it's a catalog and it just it shows what all of the schools have to offer so it really helps even at the ongoing process of

163when students and families come in and register if they want to know like well you know what's I'm interested in school x what kind of services and programs do they offer because that may help a family decide this school better fits my child's needs but I love your idea about color coding and having a multi-faceted use for that compendium so that would work thank you I'm just it's just an idea that came up because I know when when you when we look at the report today we saw the red the green the um yellow and and I'm just wondering you know so if your attendance is poor you need someone who is good in attendance would you look you know what I'm just throwing that out that's you guys work that but here I want

164Dr Reynolds to tell us where are we in the new cycle where are we are we taking rfpqs can I can I have a a link that I can send to people before tell me where you are absolutely uh goodness I we are active right now let me pull give me just a second and you can submit proposals I should have that schedule but let me just say this let's go to admir do you have an opportunity to just share the screen really quickly go to buffaloschools.org because I want to show everyone in our listening audience take us to buffaloschools.org and then we're going to go to the uh parent and family engagement page because I want you all to see the calendar all right you still with us in there Amir let me see

165if I can do that well let's see I may be able to do it give me just a second here it's uh Glenn is trying to get to it right now if we want to give it just a minute okay okay thank you Dr Kane you're gonna take us to the parent and family engagement page perfect got a depart departments go to parent and family engagement scroll down a little bit set the bottom parent and family engagement click scroll down please so you see on the left hand side PCP pcpc let's click there and yeah okay okay and let's scroll down so that's the catalog and the the slot oh there it is the informational flyer so click on rfpq no I'm sorry Don rfpq information page on the bottom not the tip sheet on

166the bottom of this page it says current rfpq informational meeting flyer click there okay scroll down please there we go so here here's here's where we are in the cycle so what's today the June 14th so we're in the active cycle right now so it closes on June excuse me July 4th so right now cbo's have an opportunity to submit their proposal by way of bonfire our next virtual informational meeting will be conducted if you take a look on the right hand side where it says rfpq informational meetings we have a virtual meeting being conducted on July 12th and we also have an in-person rfpq informational meeting at the Lafayette parent Center that evening so this cycle is open until July 4th I mentioned that it then closes for a two-week period so that uh

167the committee can rate the proposals and form the the participants provide feedback and update that pcpc so it closes down for two weeks and then it reopens again on July 19th and remains open until September 3rd so notice that this schedule is provided through the end of next school year great so help us to spread the word we got all of the informational meetings outlined as well um so that folks are well informed so can you bring this up and have this when you first come on our page one of our highlight things to let people know that this is going on now and is it possible just to have that uh under count is it also under calendar events as well maybe we can throw it over there under calendars under our calendar the

168reason that I'm asking people are asking me about this and um I I would like a link just to send them I can't talk to them about it I know that but I can can I send them a link during this period of time if they're asking me a question just send them a link and uh um and do it but this is really aggressive and I want to thank you very much I appreciate it uh thank you I think uh some good things can come out of this thank you so much I appreciate the work you all are doing thank you uh Miss mccosy yeah so a lot of what I was uh I don't even know if the word is concerned but the you know the pay structure for our smaller businesses myself

169being a smaller business and now going on three months waiting on a payment uh it really is a that really is an issue but um I just want to say that this is something when it comes to cbo's and it comes to how we vet folks this has been near and dear to me and I've made you know I've I've made comments over the past and I can tell you that this is great you know to be able to bring uh folks to the table to make it to apply to have the transparent process to have you know very spelled out and detailed ways that folks in our community can actually engage with our students and our families this is this is really great you know traction it's been six years that I've been on

170the board and look where we are now so I just give kudos to the fact that you know people are you guys are listening you'll understand how important this is this isn't just a chore I can see you're putting your heart and everything into this for the benefit of everybody involved so I really just want to give you props because this is a process we have had people grandfathered in who've just been kind of laying alone doing the least and sometimes we aren't on the right side of how you know our cbo's we're functioning in our district and this is a way to make sure both of us and our cbo's are held you know accountable for what they're bringing to our communities our students and our families so I am just I'm just over

171the moon with the progress is and I just appreciate you all thank you we appreciate you it's one thing for us as you know cabinet members to have the vision and and in conjunction with superintendent Williams it's another thing to have Dynamic Department team members who are able to carry out that work so we really do uh applaud our department um staff we'd really do thank you absolutely Reynolds and Dr Brown for a great presentation and in light of the time over I'm going to just turn it right over to Dr Williams thank you chairwoman Shuda and certainly thank you to all three of our Chiefs um I hope what you have seen through their presentation is that we do have a lot of work to do but we've also done a lot in a

172very short period of time to make sure that we're moving this lever forward so I just want to thank them I think it's a good suggestion for us to have it you know in a place on the website and I think you know that should be an easy lift for us to be able to do that so that you know it's easily accessible to folks who may be interested in supporting our students and we know that we've got lots of them and we've got lots of needs but certainly you know this is a heavy lift the work that they're doing this was a heavy heavy lift I don't believe the district and I thought I heard Dr Brown Say she couldn't really find any other District that you know is doing this kind of work

173so this is this is Cutting Edge work it's a lot of work but you know they have put a lot into it Miss Amos just joined us um just a short time ago but she has hit the ground running and I believe we're just going to continue to get better and better and move to the next level so thank you ladies and thank the board members would you please make sure in the future that you don't bring your dog to our board meetings thank you okay are we we're done good night thank you remember Juneteenth we're walking this year if you're able to join us join us we had a wonderful Flag Day today ceremony um at Forest Lawn and School 54 was great it was a great great day so