Buffalo Board of Education 3/9/2022 Work Session

001my board of education work session we have three different areas that we are going to conduct business with respect to uh so first f5 we have finance and operation this is rescheduled for march 2nd which will be followed by educational support at six and student achievement at seven so at this point i would like to turn it over to our chairperson for the finance and operations committee uh board member miss paulette woods miss woods the floor is yours well i'd like to welcome everyone to the finance and operations committee meeting and uh we do have presentations on our budget processing from our cfo uh the budget is very important and our community members like to know how they can participate what's going to happen they want to know how their budget dollars are going to

002be spent and we want to give you a lot of that information today we have our new superintendent here today and i would like to give her an opportunity to welcome and say whatever she'd like to say and then mr pritchard it will be your time to present madam superintendent thank you thank you so so much i'm really excited this is my first official um board work session where i am um serving as the interim superintendent and you know i'm hoping that you will allow me for three minutes to start just a new tradition of us really focusing on the hard work that happens in our schools with our students i'm very student centered and i know that you all are also and this past saturday bergaard high school had a wonderful program and they

003sent the video to me it's only three minutes long but i would really like um to share with you all that video so that you can see the good work that's happening at bergaard and so for most of our meetings i like to open up by sharing something that's really student-centered or teacher-centered something that's happening really good in our schools so if it's okay with you um i'd like to ask admir to cue up the video and we will start it this is what we spend our money for educating our children thank you good morning burger faculty staff students and families this is assistant principal johnson coming to you just giving you a review of our activities that occurred on our saturday academy saturday march 5th here at fernand high school we're very excited to

004host many vendors on saturday march 5th and march is women's history month so we were celebrating women on march 5th we had parents and students who participated in our welding shop we had many students who came out this particular saturday and they participated in the welding shop creating making sculptures and exhibiting their talents in the welding shop we also had the buffalo rolling club is one of our vendors who came out and i was the first one who jumped on the growing machine is a wonderful physical activity to keep yourself in chains we were fortunate enough to have a chef that came out on when on saturday march 5th and she did two demonstrations for our parents and students and the dish was tuscan spinach pasta so she gave the demonstration she prepared the meal

005and she served it to all of our staff students and faculty here at burger high school on the field of virus she also shared a wonderful recipe to take home to your families to share this wonderful healthy meal we have jewelry baking so we have jewelry broken we have a wonderful game room that we were able to share some wonderful games that you can take home to your family and have family game night in your homes we couldn't be excited at community school without our our burger gym activities when we had basketball taking place in the gymnasium we have yoga taking place in the weight room and zumba also taking place in the gymnasium we're always excited about our breakfast and lunch on this particular saturday they had wonderful pizza and salads we had many

006of our young people who participated in the creative mini book activity here this past saturday we're just so very excited about the 21 22 version of saturday academy school here at berger high school and we're looking forward to our next school year our next athletic community school will take place on saturday march 19 and we want to see you in the place it's open to all families your friends the entire community once again that's our saturday community school in review for saturday march 5th this is assistant principal johnson we're very excited about our saturday community exclusivities and we're looking forward to seeing you on saturday march 19th we are burgers [Music] that was just amazing you know i've always been one that feels that all learning does not necessarily happen traditionally in a classroom with

007paper and pencil there are all kinds of diverse ways that our children learn and i just want to say to the wonderful leadership over at burger charlene watson and her assistant principal uh eric johnson that they did a spectacular job to our associate of school leadership toya wilson um good work and so thank you thank you i see that um board member belton cotman had her hand raised well i just wanted to agree with you 100 i was able to uh visit bergaard and had some of that fantastic uh tuscan shrimp and i'm telling you guys i told him i'll be back on the 19th uh for part two and i want to take the jewelry class so i want to thank uh the district for opening up that school uh we've had some great

008participation over there uh uh principal watkins and vice principal uh johnson are doing a phenomenal job i can't think of the other vice principles please forgive me but he also but i want to thank you for doing that that community needed that one thing i'd like to share with our parents is that the parents were able to participate in the welding and so we had parents on looking to see about how welding what goes on with the welding experience so it's an opportunity for parents to enjoy themselves and we had quite a few parents in there so i'm very proud of what's going on at that school thank you so much for doing that for that community thank you thank you so now as we move into our finance and operations committee meeting i want

009to share that diversity inclusion and equity are all things that have to lead how we are building and approving our budget it's very important and i had a great meeting with our chief financial officer jeff pritchard and he agreed he's on board with that and so i'm pledging for myself and for our team that will be working very closely with the community to address um issues of you know violence and trauma that we are seeing and see how our budget can support addressing these issues so we i believe we move this presentation from last week to this week and so now at this time i will turn things over to our committee chairwoman miss paulette woods thank you and uh i would like to have a presentation from our illustrious very capable cfo jeffrey pritchard

010to walk us through monthly schedule the events for the budget process and also a report on our american rescue act funds that uh everyone is community is very interested in how they can participate get programs funded so jeff you have the floor okay uh thank you uh board member woods and thank you dr dr williams um admiral it looks like you are yep thank you for putting the slide presentation up um there's there's really two main topics to talk about today um so the 2020 to 23 budget process and timeline update and then our rpsr strategic spending update and these these two things are they're linked together and and really in the months ahead um you know as we get beyond this general fund budget process they're going to become even more linked um so

011that's why it's important to talk about them together so if we could uh please go to the next slide um this slide is actually um i because we had a one week delay in this presentation i did actually add this slide in as a new slide from what we had last week just to recap where we were because it already it's been a month since we've talked about the budget um and at the last finance and operations committee we talked about governor hopkins executive budget proposal um and and that includes a statewide 1.6 billion dollar increase in foundation aid that's the year two of the foundation aid phase in it also includes a 0.5 billion dollar increase in other expense based aids um and those two together that's 2.1 billion is primarily the the bulk

012of the increases in the executive budget proposal for education and those are uh in line with um really what we would have asked for um these are these are great um uh the the district itself so bps is set to receive 31.4 million in additional aid as of that's from the governor's proposal with the calculations then 31.4 million or a 3.6 increase and that's in line with our four-year financial plan so when the state adopted last year's budget they put in legislation that spoke to a three-year phase in a foundation aid and what that will do is that it will actually allow some level of predictability in foundation aid that the district receives it may uh cause some volatility meaning it could go up or down depending on our student counts but but ultimately it's

013based on data that we can predict and project from and because they're phasing it in over three years this this next fiscal year will be a half basically half of what is remaining to be paid in terms of the historical shortfall and then the year after will be the remainder and then we will be fully on foundation aid um and we've been asking for this for several years um so this is again this is this is uh this executive proposal follows along with very closely with what what the the legislature did last year the superintendent budget kickoff memo that's sort of our official start to our budget process that was issued on february 2nd in along with that school-based budgets and then departmental budgets are released so school-based budgets go to the sbmts at the

014schools departmental budgets go to the central office department um we we use the month of february uh and then a little bit into march for them to actually do their budgeting now one major change this year in the school-based budget is that as part of the esser arbester funding we included in the school-based budgets a a what an 18.7 million dollar allocation of of funds um for for the schools and it was allocated to each school based on the um the the student weights that are in the new york state school budget transparency law and and what that does is that actually looks at your students and says certain students have higher needs than other students um for example special education students um students that uh multilingual students english language learners uh students with free

015and right uh reduced price lunch so those those were metrics that have been established by the state and they use that in the school budget transparency law that we have to report against to essentially monitor how our school budgets align to their independent calculations so we made the decision that this 18.7 million will be allocated to the schools using those those weights so each school has an allocation in their school-based budgets based on this and that's part of what that's part of what they will budget with um additionally there are uh centrally allocated things from departments that will also be in school-based budgets and those departments will be including those in the school budgets as well um and then finally uh just for everyone's knowledge um you know within the district's website there is the

016finance page and on the finance page i try to keep current with all the documents that we have outstanding so um any presentations that we have um links to materials related to the budget everything like that we try to keep up there and current so for example this presentation will be there um probably tomorrow morning so we'll have all that we'll have all that stuff all those materials so anytime you may want to look at budget stuff you can go to the budget site um uh one more you know one more little uh thing to add as well so that 18.7 million dollar allocation that's really meant to be instructional um in meaning that the intent of this is not that schools would for example um be utilizing that for security or or facility related

017things though those really are central allocated things so we're this these funds are really meant for right for you know student those student um student classroom student support and things like that so that's really meant for that other other required budgetary spending in schools that may not go through the school-based budget that needs to come centrally but that's not it's not the intent to use this for things that need to be allocated centrally can we go to the next page please our process starts in december and it really goes through may um the remainder of the timeline um is uh is as follows that you can see on this slide um in february and through march there'll be extensive uh lobbying um by our board members um by staff um you know big five other

018organizations um trying to get certain legislation passed um and and also additional aid for the district so even though we've gotten a substantial increases in aid um you know there are still some areas that we're in need of there are there are certain areas where costs are growing faster than the revenues and so forth so though that that continues to happen um now taking a step into a little bit into our our uh anesthesia programs during march we're actually going to be uh entering into our munich budget a budget projection for the esther ii and sr-3 budgets for the 20 uh the 2022-2022 years so right now in our departments are able to spend everything that was included in the budget for this current fiscal year 21 22. um we're actually going to be loading

019all of the uh and these are all from the state approved plans next year into into that as well and that's going to tie in a little bit later um you know as we go through continue through our budget process um departments in the schools and the sbmts will be submitting their budgets many already have there's some that are still working on them and now there's a process here so you know there'll be school-based budget meetings um there'll be cabinet um in interim superintendent meetings i will be working very closely with dr williams um in terms of reviewing all of this data i've not looked at any of this data yet first we let departments we let schools we let we let all these folks you know utilizing the procedures and policies we have in

020place do their budgeting um if there are gaps that they see additional needs that they that they have that comes as part of the budget as well and and again i will be working very closely with with dr williams to review our budget to review sort of the historical tie-in to review the data and to make sure that it aligns with where we think we need things to go um this this really is done you know and this is done kind of at our level um to make sure that hopefully by the time the board actually sees some of these reports that we that you can feel assured that we have done our due diligence and hopefully addressed concerns um and um and things like that and obviously diversity equity we know the needs that

021our student has so we we will be focusing very heavy heavily on that in the coming weeks um and obviously we have time it's early march and there are a couple months left to play in in in the budget process um when we get into april um i ain't go first budget should be adopted um typically in prior years there was a slight bump to our state aid there's probably a handful of things that that will work to our benefit in final legislation and or additional aid in certain areas that we've been specifically asking for um adjustments to departments in school budgets and esther 2 and esther 3 may be necessary so that really is pointing out that once we know where our revenues are sort of at a finalized level you know then we

022kind of have all the information we need to know how we're going to close this out um and you know we're very hopeful uh based on preliminary numbers that we have based on you know the state and federal government have been very good to us over the last year um that we feel will will be in in decent shape we'll we'll know in early april um we'll be able to use use that information to help kind of really wrap up our you know wrap up our budget um the next finance and operations committee scheduled is april 6th that's with all the committees so at that point we hope to have certainly a good update on our aid numbers if presuming that the state paid and the state budget has been adopted um and and hopefully

023an overall on where our budget is and within the month of april you know i have this highlighted in green another one further on these are board actions that are needed so we have to provide a draft budget to the board we have to have a balanced four-year financial plan to the board for approval and submission to the control boards the bfsa by the end of april that's in that's in statutes we have to submit that to the city and it goes with the city to the control board um so by by april 20th we will have shared with the board a a balanced four-year financial plan in the first year of that fight financial plan it may not be completely finalized but the first year is the 22-23 budget um then in may um

024may 4th i believe is the scheduled finance and operations committee um typically in may there are other additional committee meetings scheduled to go over the budget so it's probably too early to schedule those right now but those those generally do um need to be scheduled to go over all the data that we have um and may 18 is the date that we would want to have our budget approved by the board that allows us to load the budget in allows us to actually have the department start entering requisitions and getting uh you know getting contracts set moving forward starting the next year as soon as we can so we're ready um we're ready when the next year starts so so that's really the timeline um i guess i'll go to the next page if i

025can um just to recap um can you please uh advance the slide there it is so um then i i generally like to include just a little uh forthcoming uh committee meeting schedule and board meeting schedule so um april 6 may 4th that's really talking about the budget um the in the next couple board meetings just there's a quick fyi for the board there are two debt amounts that are that we can now refinance the municipal bond bank agency that's the mdba we expect to save 672 thousand dollars by refinancing that's as of early early march data and that's uh that's a death that was originally issued back in 2000 um and there's 8.2 million in april um the joint schools and we've done last year we we we actually had a jsdb debt refinancing

026as well this year we have another one that is eligible for refinancing we expect to save 4.8 million on a 76 million debt um and on so march 16th and then april 20th and both of those days there would be a board resolution um authorizing you know from the board authorizing us to refinance to you know that's required in order for us to refinance and save those dollars um the jscv debt that 4.8 million goes into the capital fund that the the way the state law is structured that on the jscp debt when we refinance those savings dollar for dollar roll into the capital fund and that's how we've funded the capital fund for really the last 10 years um also april 20th four-year financial plan and then back out in may you know the

027adopted general fund budget um and then we'll also have quarterly financial report and quarterly grants report um doing projections for the rest of the 21-22 fiscal year um so that that's uh the budget update now i don't know if there's any questions that we want to go over now or if you'd like me to do the r ester update and then do questions some of this obviously does they do tie in with each other but i'm happy if we wanted to take a break here for uh budget related questions sharon belton cotton you have a question can you hear me hello um miss cotman you have a question and then larry scott okay i'm sorry about that uh yes i have a question so you talked at the beginning of your presentation about uh making

028sure that this budget includes diversity equity and inclusion how do you expect to achieve that if the if the question is for me that's largely working with dr williams you know as we as we had our first meeting on the budget you know we we spoke a bit about priorities um this is a new you know that the superintendent is really the the budget director for the the school district so we will be working very closely in terms of of trying to get those types of priorities in i'll explain i suppose that's where where we where we have been where we have come from and what things look like now but that's really going to be a collaborative process and then obviously that then also will be discussed with the board okay so a couple

029of things okay go ahead thank you a couple of things that i would like to see happen um every school has a site-based management team that's inclusive of the staff parents students and some even have community members and so i would like for them to have you know a say in some of what is happening in their schools and in addition to that i think it's important for our community to know that we have these dollars available and to see you know inform them of what they need to do if they bring an expertise or can bring an expertise to the district to support the work that we're doing you know they have to know that we have this available and how they can qualify to apply to support us so i'll be doing some

030of those things okay so i appreciate that thank you for sharing that so my concern is is that and you're going to get into the next slide i see where you start talking about the s or money but my concern is the distribution of resources how some schools get large resources for example to move children to the next level uh we're aware that five instructional cultures have been provided but when we have the schools that are receiving the children who are not at power we don't see the same sort of type of support my other um concern over the years has been some schools have more teacher aids versus assistance and the schools where the children need the most resources we don't often see the teacher assistants we see teacher aides when we look at

031the special ed formula we see that some schools or some districts have more uh special children of a certain type versus that so for me when we start talking about equity i feel that we should make sure that our principals get an opportunity to at least start at an even playing ground you know and even playing ground does not exist or a foundation does not exist because you give them the same amount of money and you're using that weighted formula which there's nothing new about using that weighted formula but in the past what has happened is is that schools where children have come in read uh the data has not been used so i would appreciate if we could start using our own data to determine what type of supports to our schools need i

032think that's when we start really looking into what equity looks like if i have a school where the children are not excelling they have low reading scores and things like that that each school's data be also used in determining the equity piece and that's what my request is uh madam uh superintendent excellent uh jeff in regards in regards to uh board member cotman's uh question each year in the budget we have a contingency fund that has been set and set aside so that dur during the year we can address equity issues is do we expect that this budget uh will have a contingency fund as other ones have had so we typically have what we refer to as a superintendent hold back every year and and that amount varies from year to year depending on

033the overall budget situation i don't have that number yet but we we make every effort to make sure that that exists in the budget i think that's very important because there are always things that come up um after the budget where there are additional supports that are needed so i i without being able to provide the calculation or know for certain what that looks like you know we've we've felt comfortable going into the budget year with something like that and in our in our uh preferences to continue to do that so um you know that's that's again another part of the equation as we as we go through the this process so that makes funding available that if the board decides that they have equity issues after they talk to their principals their school-based management

034teams they visit they talk to parents if they have issues like that we can have a special meeting as we've had in the past to put an equity overlay uh on the budget that the uh these uh staff has recommended because the board has the right and the privilege to to say these are problems we see these problems and this is what we'd like to recommend and usually the superintendent has been cooperative of putting that on because the board has significant votes in favor because it's usually for most of our schools so that i believe is something that will continue and uh if need be we can have that special meeting and any any uh problem or any difference with that that's the way we've done it in the past i don't see that changing

035this year either no we we go into the process very open-minded you may find that perhaps some of the things that that board members would like to be addressed that as we go through this process that they are addressed through that process as well but certainly you know that's why we have to have a lot of people looking at these budget numbers to make sure we're not missing anything and you know our our process you know it gets tweaked everywhere but that process has been very similar for the last several years but we don't anticipate um you know we don't end with rapid changes right now okay i saw larry scott's hand and there is a hand raised in city hall there are three people there i'm not sure whose hand is next after larry

036[Music] thank you chairman woods um my question is pretty simple but might not have an easy answer so i'm already hearing from some of the schools that they are recognizing that they have the ability to add staff and supports given the additional funding that's being provided but there's concern as we've seen all along here in buffalo public schools in other school districts and nationally and in other industries as well that it's it's going to be a challenge to actually find the staffing for all those positions that we can fund [Music] um so is is that being discussed are are we concerned that we may not be able to fully staff um some of the positions that are being recommended based on the the shortages we have in staffing no no go ahead you know i

037mean historically over the last couple of years you are right that you know when we when we look at the data we look at positions field positions there have been some gaps opening i you know in in my communications with other districts in new york um council great city schools that's that's you know that appears to be something that's going to continue um i know there's lots of things that we've tried to do here to uh you know to recruit things like that but uh i mean that that is certainly a concern and something that we need to be cognizant of um that's gonna require um you know probably a lot of effort to uh to address okay yeah and i i will just recognize too i've seen in at least two papers a big

038ad with multiple positions advertised for vps so just being creative with any other ways we can get the word out that we are hiring and we need good people to be attracted and and stay here in buffalo to work with our students so thank you uh city hall there's a hand up can you um who who has their hand up that's that's um the um chairwoman woods okay please continue please continue board member heard thank you for um thank you for bringing this um information up to the board and to our community also uh i'd like to thank governor governor um coco for recognizing that there's more foundation aid needed across the state of new york but bringing in 1.6 billion dollars um in over a two-year period and with the buffalo public schools receiving

039the 3.6 increase i would like for the force to take a deeper dive into looking into our expenditures and addressing um the concerns of diversity and equality and with that i would like to see what programs that the buffalo public school has invested in that works and what doesn't work i would like to make i'd like to uh take a real heavy lift into looking to see how our programs are working in our schools what schools that they're at and how effective they are uh by looking at our grades our schools um and and uh looking at the information um we can use actually using dashboard or we use information uh from the district itself with the uh principals from school to school from our superintendent about about what programs are operating each and every

040individual school what's our uh participation in the program um also look at the attendance in those programs in those schools also look at the grade point average of our children and um and see uh how we invest in our money and in the future how can we invest it wisely uh with this money because we got more money coming i hate to keep poor money on top of programs that's ineffective and um and and by that april first deadline for the state aid when the budget should be adopted i really think that we can really you know start really looking into um the past three years and seeing you know what's our graduation rates and levels are in those schools in those buildings and um and like i said earlier who's participating in the programs

041how effective the programs are and how it affected our children are they getting better um our reading levels math math levels um are do we need to put more program to assist those programs by putting better metrics in here with um more personnel just so that we can um clearly you know have a clear vision about our future and how we're going to um recognize our expenditures and and for success so one of the things that we are looking to do is do some asset mapping for each of our schools and see exactly what you're saying what programs are in the school and are the programs that are in the school align to the mission and vision that we have and then finally are they giving us any good outcomes for students so it's been

042a couple of years since we've done the asset map you know model for each of our schools to really take a look at what supports you know are in schools are there elt programs like we just saw you know for burger the community schools model um do they have you know counseling programs in the schools what is it that they have and then we take a look at you know for every single school what's existing there and we look at you know is it doing what it is that the agency or the partner said should happen decreasing suspensions increasing attendance increasing academic achievement and outcomes and so we are going to begin working on just what you just shared okay thank you thank you uh uh superintendent williams uh one of the reasons why i

043say that because it's a heavy change in buffalo the direction and change in um culture in buffalo is is really becoming uh on the trend towards more violence more high school dropouts more grade school dropouts we have in our children that's disconnected from schools and disconnected from education um we have a heavier load of of suicide or suicidal type students um in the district in buffalo so i'm more more keen in investing into programs to help assist these different challenges and also to help with the heavy violent violence trend that's trending right now in buffalo and um see what we can do to try to address those issues also i know the district can't you know address everything that happens in the city of buffalo we need help from our common council and the city

044and the mayor and and community partners so um but um what we do inside our buildings what we have in that feeling we do have some kind of control in and to try to find the means to help those um those students thank you um board member heard uh we do need uh to keep on schedule so um our cfo if you could move to the esser funding and um so we can have some time for questions on that also jeff thank you admir can you please advance the slide deck one all right um and i'll go through this pretty quick um you know this is really an update largely that the board and the public has seen before um again the the district's our passer plan um is 289.6 million it encompasses two grants

045um that are under separate federal legislation so s or two it's 89.2 million which we can spend through september of 2023. um that plan was approved by the education department in november of 2021. the sr3 is 200.4 million through september of 24. that the sr3 also includes that set-aside the the lost instruction time set aside they called it which works out to about 40.1 million and that's largely being addressed through um summer programming and some extended learning budget things and and we've spoken about that at a prior meeting this plan was actually just approved um final in final form by the education department at the tail end of february so it was just it was just last week actually we had the ability to start spending on it but that final approval um did not

046happen until then um both of these applications in in all the grant details are there in the arp plan section of the of the district web page so if you were to if you had uh you know that that's that's the link that would take you there and underneath each one of those is the full application for each of those grants so there's there's more detail in in those grant documents than there would be really in any other budget that you've probably ever seen outside of another grant budget so it's very detailed down to the years to the vendors of proposed vendors not the final vendors necessarily selected the amounts the programs the department that that operates it so all that information is in there community involvement again was the key to developing it and

047will continue to be i should probably know this but i don't i'm not sure when the next round of meetings are but that's probably something that will be coming up um in the near term in terms of re-engaging with um just as we have with our board um this is where we're at and this is where we're going um if we could please go to the next slide admire um and again this is just really at a high level to summarize it um you can see on the there's two tables in there on the right hand side is that pie chart that you're probably very familiar with that we tried our best to break down the budget into um expanded eb instructional initiative that's really your your classroom instruction in related items uh and that's

048in the orange the the largest section information technology is in the gray that obviously all primarily goes into the classroom student support um is yellow and then covet related costs operational costs and that includes facility security um any plant charges transportation anything central um is is in there so that and and those those pie charts have kind of aligned pretty similarly um throughout the entire process when we did it and uh and in many ways when we would compare ourselves to other districts uh and and so forth would see kind of a similar breakdown um in and i and i did collapse in things like benefits and so forth there allocated all those charts to those sections just so i can keep the pie chart as simple as possible on the left hand side you

049can actually see the two grants at the very top um and then and then the years so you can see that again um we're front loaded in the grant and and that's maybe a little bit of a misnomer because some of the spending is going to be encumbered on the front end um and it's shown when it's going to be encumbered even though the actual spending might be in a subsequent year um there's an air handling project that was approved as part of this that that's all encumbered in year one uh it's likely that a lot of the spending will ultimately be in year two um and and so forth um and in this as we go forward we'll start to you know we we will through the process start to make um you know

050start to propose revisions um in conjunction with our overall budget um now a quick recap on the spending um i i ran the reports as of uh last friday um and we've spent in terms of expenditures 24.5 million um i have in in parentheses there uh december where we had 16.8 encumbrances in requisition so these are things that are not yet we haven't cut the check yet but we've got the commitment we've got a contract we've got uh the request in that's 17.8 million so those things they start there and then eventually they move into an actual expenditure when the check is cut um you know when the work is done and so forth but these are commitments to spend 17.8 million so that's 42.3 million um a little over halfway through the school year

051and that would be the biggest grant that we've ever had in an entire year you know the largest grant that i think i've ever seen you know title one is is in upper 20s we've we've deployed a lot of dollars already um there are available funds um remaining obviously in this year and and uh you know that that will ramp up you know in the months ahead now i had included in in and i know the board members had seen the the the handout so there was a summary handout that i had prepared for um and distributed to the board at the last meeting um that try to over um two pages show a little more detail in the different functional categories of where the spending is it's it's hard to take um grants that

052have 6 000 individual line items in the budget and be able to show a report that can um you know that can that can show you everything you need to see without really summarizing it so we summarized it in alignment with the pie chart so there's a color-coded header and you can see the different functional areas within there um the budget the actual funding the encumbrance is an available budget that data was as of um february 28th um i have not updated it since because it takes a little bit of work to get all the allocations and so forth in there um but that shows uh you know a detail essentially of sort of the spending that i just spoke to you about here's the budget here's the amount spent here's the amount that's remaining

053to be spent um we we will and this is this is sort of our next level is that as as we typically do this time of year we get we start getting very heavy into doing projections for the remainder of the year and and that's utilized to help identify oh here's an account that we're not spending on or here's a position that isn't filled or a contract that we haven't completed and and that helps to inform us where you know where we might need to mediate some things where we may find that we haven't spent the dollars and then that will those dollars ultimately you know as part of our overall process which we're still developing will will be possibly redeployed for other purposes um some things may just be delayed um um from this

054year into a subsequent year um and again this is where things like uh uh staffing positions can sort of be identified that if we if we have positions they're posted they're in the budget they're not filled we would identify him here throughout that you know through that overall projection um so that you know again in in in a nutshell is where we are at i would i would like to um provide at least a small update every month um going forward in financing operations um in terms of where we are in in sort of how how this will all tie into our overall our you know our overall budget process and you know over the next over the next couple years um but that's that's the update as of today for for the our best

055funds thank you um our amenable cfo um i have just a couple questions and then we can go around alphabetically to each of the board members and you can uh ask questions as you will um when we went and met with our legislative people uh assembly people they asked questions about the issue of attendance and our attendance having dropped and i believe you gave us some information that appeared that we may have lost something like 2 000 students um they the other thing the community keeps asking and they bring it to our attention at the board meeting is that for graduation purposes they want to understand why our counselors our children aren't receiving counseling as to what great classes they've missed uh are they on track to graduate so my question is to address the

056attendance issue and the counseling issue is that something that the uh 18 million uh 18.7 million that you're putting in the um school-based budgets is that something they can add a counselor attendance teacher those type of things to be to be more uh to find the students um you know in i can i can let dr williams speak to this as well but uh i know that the attendance department i believe initially um requested an allocation of additional positions as part of as part of their our passer request those dollars like i was like i was speaking of that those dollars would have been allocated centrally and i believe counselors might have been similarly done that way but there there are um you know some of these things are are provided possibly centrally but but

057schools have the option should it be something that they believe based on their data that they need you know that they that they could certainly deploy dollars for um for any number of functions the the allowable uses of our programming is is very wide it covers um you know it really can cover from you know start to finish um any of the instructional or support functions that are needed at schools so that that's kind of at a high level what i can what i can tell you but um you know others can we did add some school counselors to our year one budget and we did add some attendance teachers also and i know that mrs younger and mrs sanders are in the process of hiring those positions they're posted and they're in the process

058of hiring those positions okay yeah one more thing um uh board member woods the uh as part of um as part of the overall school based budget air locations we we have adjusted to increase the allocation of guidance counselors at the lower at the elementary schools that was one of the things that we really identified that elementary schools irrespective of their size actually received the same allocation which really wasn't appropriate and that's part of the school-based budgets now what that means is that these schools will have that allocation in depending on what it is that they that they need uh taken care of as part of the sort of the baseline allocation you know they may choose to add more they may shoot and then and then any other dollars they could use for something

059else but that that was one of the one of the big areas that we wanted to look at this year um just to make sure that it was part of not just in in in the federal funding but really part of the overall allocation that will continue after the our funding ends so part of the actual formulas um in the school-based budget process okay the only other question that that i have and then i can we can go to the other board members the detailed information that you gave us uh for of the um covering the first year to 1.1 124 million under the category 4f which is staff development you had funding in three different areas under expanded eb initiatives of 1.2 mil 1.061 mil and another 5.5 mill that was 6.5 million all

060in that one category staff development and then when i looked at after school which is a category 6d you had almost the same amount of money for the after-school program as for the staff development i just looked at that and said my goodness what uh what's all this staff development staff development theft development to to the tune of 6.5 million and i don't know if you can address that now but uh i do think that one of the special meetings will have to be to go over the uh budget and programs in this uh esser and american rescue act funds so um can you address why so much in staff development staff development stuff about development in your in your sheet and this is only in the first year yeah well let me um you

061know for for one one thing that you know you're seeing it in different areas because those different functional breakdowns have to do with where the dollars go so if it's you know if it's for um if it's for development of it or if it's for the actual like the teacher staffing versus administrator so that's why you'll see it in different buckets um but from my recollection and we can certainly um get more data for you on this a lot of what we're looking to do with arp funding is to the extent possible do it as early as possible not necessarily wait till year three but start you know start right away so that that's sort of an overall concept that we tried to incorporate into the planning for for this unfortunately i i can't really

062answer the question on on the items that are in there um but we can but but certainly we can we can probably circle back with more details i just i just don't have that kind of at my fingertips okay madam superintendent did you have any anything to say about staff development anymore to add a little bit yeah so that's something that i will have to sit down with our executive team and then take a closer look at the specific areas where there are staff development um that's been allocated and you know work with them to see specifically you know what the staff development is for what the expected outcomes will be and those kinds of things so as i meet with the executive team i'll be getting more information about that thank you madam superintendent

063okay starting with alphabetically uh board member sharon belton cottman do you have any questions on the budget the uh arp funds um or the budget in general yes madam chair um i have two cus uh questions that were or two statements that were sent to me by listening uh viewing audience since we don't have a mechanism in place that they can reach out and ask their questions one is a statement please make sure parents are involved in the schools that they are actively a part of in in planning the budget uh not just signing off on so uh that might be some area that we might want to make sure is happening and then the next question and i and i have caught this myself is can the student support portion of the pie increase

064so i'm a little confused because 20 percent i'm trying to figure out uh when you said in in this presentation that there was a 20 um set aside under esther 3 for lost instruction time um but they're also my understanding was uh 20 i thought was supposed to be set aside for the most neediest children in the district okay so is that the same money or is that different money yeah the the only um the only statutory um item in there was was really about lost instruction time the the media still i mean that that really encompasses all of the funding but there was no there was no specific set aside um beyond that 20 that had to be in what what the state well federal government defied it defined as lost instruction time and

065that's largely accomplished through through summer learning extended learning other um other supports to to catch students up um that so that that's that's what that is it but it's not necessarily you know it really should encompass all students and all the funding should especially encompass um the neediest students um so i asked this question on the uh national forum and i asked specifically uh how this should be addressed and i was told at that meeting i can't remember but it was i think in august that each district was supposed to take a look and see in addition to what was going on they were supposed to provide additional support so i'm going to uh uh go back and see um what that i'm going to have a revisit that conversation with on what we were

066originally told because my understanding was is that we were responsible to take a look at the data and in addition to that provide additional supports that was my understanding okay to the most neediest students and i specifically asked that question in a in a form that lasted all day and that was my answer but i will uh follow back and make sure nothing has changed or or maybe i didn't understand it because i'm in trying to pull all this together i am concerned that uh only seven percent of this budget so far has been used for student support for social emotional needs i think that um the um there's a need uh of course uh uh i'm sure our superintendent knows this to revisit and take a look at what type of supports i am

067early convinced that this district cannot turn around without community involvement and community programs inside our schools it is um it is not enough to put a uh behavior specialist who at five o'clock leaves out the building and the kids continue to carry themselves on when we have community people so i'm i'm looking forward to having a conversation about opening up the um the opportunities for our community partners and make sure that we get grassroot people involved in this we have to start looking at this problem these are cultural problems we need the asian community to come out to this date no one has said that we have an asian problem everyone is assuming that that incident at mckinley happened and it was african-american children and it was not we need to make sure that we

068start addressing with every group of our citizens their needs and it's not happening and so i'm looking forward to this piece of the pie growing and i expect to see a 20 in there somewhere in the future that 20 of this money because it is a known fact that a lot of money comes into this district but it does not make it to the children and i'm looking forward to hopefully seeing that that's uh that's changed i've reached out to the state the state is interested in having a conversation with you uh dr williams uh in regards to the esser funds and i want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule today to lobby with us for whatever reason okay you saw yourself personally how important that was to

069the senator that you were there it represents respect and it represents expectations and he was very pleased that you took the time and they are always very pleased we take the when when the superintendent takes the time to uh uh spend time with them and you can see you were well received and i want to thank you because one of the problems that we have is there appears to be some sort of a mentality out there that is okay for the board members to come but not the administration and you saw today the impact of you being there uh it goes a long way and he's gonna remember your face and he's going to make sure he gives you everything that you need in order to move forward so i want to thank you i

070look forward to seeing your asset mapping in in this and i also would like to uh start focusing in uh in our next meeting or whatever we start focusing in on academics so that i really would like transparency to happen because what i do not want to happen is that all of our roles come at you down the road i like to just get them all out the way so that you can have a a clean uh slate and we can uh move forward but i'm looking forward to seeing this budget process um i expect um i'm really i'll be honest with you what i would really like to see is somehow or another in-school suspension room set up with some with social emotional supports um in place i feel we have enough money at

071this point to start visiting that and make sure that we get those community people inside the school that can help us i'm not talking about the ones you've already talked about i'm talking about the ones that can provide additional support for our young ladies and our young men our and we need to start looking at we need our asian uh uh community people to come forward at this point uh we need to understand what we're not doing or what we can do better in the asian community we need to have that across the board in all of our cultural groups and i appreciate you for uh jeff i want to thank you for the work that you do on this district i don't know if you often realize that you are appreciated i know that

072you have a lot of weight on your shoulders and what and we need you jeff and we want to keep you and make you happy so please make sure that you know that they appreciate you okay you know that john i appreciate that okay thank you all right thank you um board member cotman uh dr kathy evans brown any questions uh i have a couple of statements and questions so sharon kind of took some of my thunder um jeff i want to thank you also for the stellar work that you do on a continuous basis and i like the fact that you um indicated that you would like to meet with us on month a monthly to give us reports so i like that thank you with the asset mapping uh superintendent tanja williams i

073like that process as well um in line with what sharon said about that 20 most needy students i heard that as well in one of these meetings and i do think that when we talk about academic achievement or student achievement i should say that um the board last year um encouraged and directed uh the superintendent the former superintendent to increase the lines for reading teachers and he's done i mean and that was done um we would like to see how that process is going did it make a difference etc and that you know i think that's just worthy of part of you know when you're looking at resources in place are they are they worth working and also along with that 20 percent media student when we look at you know some of the lower

074grades for example and looking at warning signs you know kids who um speak grades who have attendance issues who are disengaged you know etc um how are we capturing these students um you know in terms of of um the resources etc because we know we got them um and so we need to find out where they are let's look at how and you may be doing this already i don't know but um how many students are we talking about um you know etc so i think some of those dollars should be earmarked specifically for those kids because when you capture these kids younger uh what happens is it it has a reflection on reduced dropout rates we don't want to get kids you know you know miss these kids they're going through and pushing them

075through and get to the ninth grade they're gonna drop out they don't drop out because they don't have the necessary uh grade level um uh mindset you know to move on they get discouraged so they drop out that's just what happens um and and certainly when they get in high school we want them to be um at ninth grade reading on the ninth grade level not on the uh third grade level for example so that's my two cents i think that that 20 most needed students is there i think we need to um earmark dollars just for them and then lastly when we talk about the positions that's posted to be hired um guidance counselors and attendance teachers do we know um do you have candidates for example that are in the pipeline that we're

076getting ready to hire and if so when is the expectation to um hire these people thank you so the expectation would be if they're in the pipeline that it will be as soon as possible we need them um i will meet with miss younger and find out if we have enough viable candidates and we begin holding interviews and make sure that you know we want the highest qualified folks and so we want them as soon as possible because the needs are there the needs are there right now so i will find out okay board members at 6 14 so uh uh let's see if we can bring uh this committee to a close not too too long so of the next person would be you terrence uh heard thank you um thank you chairwoman woods

077uh let's have a couple of things while i'm on the floor just to ask questions about and to get an answer so i'm going straight over to the um budget status report um uh mr pritchard and and one question i just want to ask um i'm looking at the line item for the lottery uh advanced repayment and and i see that we have a number of 92 108 dollars that's total for the year that's the actual and look like it may include to project it um why is that value so low in the district this size in the state of new york which i know that the community and others invest a lot more into a lottery program that's supposed to be uh giving back to our education programs for new york state and the

078last thing is that now that we adapted gaming here in new york state i don't see a line item for gaming and the monies that'd be supposed to reoccur back for the district for that okay um so the state of new york make the decision every year how they're going to fund our foundation aid and all the other types of aid that we get so the when they come up with the number whatever that is for our aid they make a decision where they're either going to use state general funds or lottery funds so that's totally up to the state which funding source they want to use so to the extent if they use more lottery revenue then they would reduce general revenue accordingly so it it it doesn't exactly correlate um between you know

079the the different revenue or where that whether they use lottery or not and um in in the aid that we get so if more folks are gambling that doesn't mean that we're going to get more lottery aid necessarily it really is up to the state and within the lottery aid there is a commercial gaming component so that that's part of that overall um lottery aid so has there been an increase since now that gam gaming gambling is allowed in new york state for um betting on athletic games i mean have you received the increase are we prospected to see a increase on that um next year yeah we wouldn't we wouldn't know yet because it wouldn't those funds wouldn't really be available i think until probably the next year and after the state adopts their

080budget i think subsequent to the budget adoption that's when they make the decision on on how much lottery versus non-lottery revenues they'll use they'll allocate to us so i would expect that we will find out next year and and yes if if if if that component is started and expands great a great deal we probably will we may see a higher component of lottery aid um than than general aid okay thank you so they intertwined with the general aid and the lottery to balance it out okay thanks for explaining that um last couple of questions on it's not for you um jeffrey but it's some things i like to see uh you know we talk about our school climate we're talking about how can we adapt to uh to our students and their needs in

081today's age we know a lot of our students not eating at home and they come to school just to eat a breakfast or a lunch so um i know a lot of our schools have hot breakfasts and lunches that that served at our schools but some still have cold meals that serve so i like to see how can we adapt our budget to try to bring in hot meals to to the needy students in um property areas so that uh we can address those issues so they can't have hot breakfasts or hot lunches uh another thing i'd like to see that we can address in our transportation issue see what we can do now known as suburban model and transportation and as we roll out our modified unified sports program here in the district um

082it's kind of it's transportation gaps and i know some schools actually have their own bus for transportation that we can find some way to help alleviate the stresses with um working with um our partners in transportation and adopt some more buses here for the buffalo public schools to help with our transportation needs that that can you know verbally you know uh go from school to school uh i think that we can um actually solve some of our own problems in our some of our own issues and with the transportation also um to use the budget to uh promote more bus aids over the summer time and including now the substitute teachers and the last thing i just like to say quickly was our pre-k programs we don't have enough pre-k programs here in the city

083of buffalo a lot of our parents in the buffalo public schools really send their children to school early which is not really comparable to education and equality and equity uh when we look at our suburban counterparts who children tend to go to school a year later for their programs so we can um advance and try to have more pre-k programs where children three to four years old can actually be in a pre-k program and not four years old uh going on five that's going into a center kindergarten program uh i think that we can do a lot more with our educational values and um and as far as stress education in our district and the children's ability to learn so um that we can really try to take a dive into that maybe do some

084research some surveys uh i think that we can go a long ways in our in education and also the mental health of our students um a lot of times we see kindergarten where kids are in classroom playing you know they're not paying attention to detail for classroom and course work and course studies so uh so that's because they're still young and um a year means a lot in in nurturing it so i'm gonna close off now and they'll be short on time so uh thank you very much and if the superintendent would like to respond to anyone please you uh uh chairwoman woods okay go ahead superintendent points um all very good and um again you know i will be working with executive level staff to see if you know i can share responses with

085respect to transportation and you know exploring hot meals look taking a look at what our data is showing how many of our schools do not provide a hot meal for students um and seeing how and if you know we're able to do some of the things that you talked about okay thank you uh um superintendent williams you're welcome next board member hope jay do you have any questions on the budget or the esser funds board member jay hi sorry can you hear me yes i yes i don't have any questions thank you cozy do you have any questions on the budget or the s refunds thank you chairwoman woods um i really don't have many questions i just want to just put my stamp on what i think should be reiterated often and that is

086this level playing field mentality this looking into resources before we just start handing out dollars looking into what's necessary for schools um i actually agree with a much of what board member cotman was saying i do feel though um [Music] that when it comes to how we look into the resources right we need to work on making sure that we're educated as well as board members i would like to you know propose if board members are willing and you dr williams that we sit as board members and really get to know um everyone's district and the struggles that everybody is dealing in all of our districts all have struggles that are very similar but at the same time there's a there's a difference that we need to understand because what's happening is you know there

087is a serious gentrification issue in our city right now and the most diverse district right now which is in the west district a lot of the different cultures are moving into different areas of town and the organizations and the people that we you know are promoting to be a part of our work need to understand all of the different aspects that everyone is bringing to the table and i myself you know i'm not familiar with many of what's happening in my own district because there's 80 something languages spoken one school alone you know i mean so if we can work together as a board and maybe have i don't know if they're special meetings or different just kind of education pieces of what we are offering how it affects certain communities and then we can

088really start getting into how we talk to different folks right um there's we're translating in like six seven top languages alone just to get information to our public so uh that's you know that's a concern that i have is that we make sure that we work together um especially with now this fantastic leadership i feel like it's a brand new day and we can really work together to make sure that we're all on the same page at least how we go about communicating what is needed in our schools because in the end we're bringing it to you and we're also expecting you to be able to work with your team and instead of having like these fractured everyone's coming at you with different things for their specific community alone we can relate it to each

089other as well as what we need for our specific district um i see that it's it's very clear we're all dealing with similar issue but at the same time we all have hurdles of our own we know our communities are dealing with if we're going to really bring community to the table you know we would be able to maybe get the communities to come together and we can bridge some gaps we have real opportunity to be able to bridge some gaps in in our just our communities alone how they communicate with each other have people communicate with each other a lot of times people don't know you know they don't cross certain streets and they don't know certain areas and and maybe we can you know bring folks to a bigger better buffalo if we

090bring ourselves together on that level so that's that's a huge thing that i would like to see happen and i mean i'm encouraging the conversation we can do that next we have um board president petrovsky you have your request any questions on the budget presser funds i i do uh chairman woods thank you for the opportunity uh just first of all i just want to start making a comment about the hot lunches it is my understanding that many of our schools are not running complete lines uh simply because there aren't enough food service workers so i know that there's been a shortage of food service workers i know there's been efforts to onboard some additional staff but it's my understanding because this has come up a few times in various schools and people brought my

091attention it's my understanding from looking into it that seems to be the biggest obstacle is the food service workers we need we need more of them and we need to get them employed so hopefully we can work to address that i just have one question for jeff this evening if you piqued my curiosity jeff when you said significant spending ramping up in the months ahead uh is that for programs this year for programs for next year is it both and will any of this be for after-school programs um it it would be both but what we've seen is that over you know over the last several months you know it takes time to get things moving so if things have to go out to bed um you know there's that takes time for that takes

092time you know to go actually to the board for authorization and contract things like that so um you know as as we've looked at it it you know it kind of started the year slowly and started picking up now yes i think also in terms of multiple years there there are things that um may have been contemplated to be spent in this current fiscal year that will start halfway through that may extend into the next fiscal year um so there'll be things like that um i i i can't really answer your question right now on on the you know how far the elt programs have rolled out i know that they've they've expanded more than they were initially but i i don't have a great update that i could give you right now um in

093terms of sort of how the elt is somebody may you know someone else may be able to jump in and speak to that better than i i'm not sure um chief boticelli is on and okay i'll get back with you and share an update on the eltps dr william i i was um on the last task for after school task force uh meeting that was last week and we have another meeting scheduled and there are there were supposed to be um some more specific plans as to what's coming next for after-school programming at that next meeting thank you madam chairman that concludes my comments and questions and finally we have board member scott do you have any questions that you'd like to ask about the esser funds or the budget women did i did that

094women did i did i skip in our s okay well um board member scott then board member uh rivera i'm sorry don't go ahead dr rivera i just i just have one uh question which is um i'm very well it's a statement and a question the statement is i'm very interested in the asset mapping that you mentioned i think that's a that's an excellent initiative what i'm curious about is if to if you foresee any way in which that asset mapping can feed into choices about the rpas or funding absolutely um so we're going to be taking a look at you know again what supports we have at schools which is really data you know social emotional supports academic supports and you know who the supports our support team are they supporting the most needy

095children that are in every single school and we want to take a look at you know not only what is there but what's happening you know how often are they meeting with the children are they meeting with fidelity and what are the outcomes and how long have they been in the buildings um and so you know i think it's going to show us where there are gaps you know and where there are best practices that perhaps can be expanded to other buildings so i'm really excited about that also thank you for that because i think i think as several board members have pointed out we have different cultures in different buildings and different sense of needs among different students and being able to replicate our best practices being able to identify what those needs are

096and tailoring how to support them is really the goal of the arbester funding so i appreciate you using data to move forward with that thank you board member revere my apologies board member scott thank you chairman woods i'll be real quick because we have several presenters here waiting and out of respect i'll be quick um just a a comment and an announcement based on something that was shared earlier um buffalo public schools is unique in this area maybe you know much of the state and that we provide a full day pre-kindergarten in all of our elementary schools with transfer date transportation provided it was something that both my wife and i for both my boys um thought was very advantageous for us for our boys when they went to full day pre-k and it's something

097that the suburban districts don't offer with the exception of chemtown that just began a small whole day pre-k program this school year um and we also will be getting uh we will have a presentation at our next educational support committee um from david rust on the potential of a three-year-old preschool program we have three-year-old a three-year-old program at better park montessori and we are looking at the potential of expanding that to other elementary schools so that will be in our april work session our educational support committee work session and that is all thank you thank you board member scott i believe that was a priority in what uh when we were lobbying with our state delegation funding for the pre-k was one of the one of the issues and they did support it uh that's

098uh uh jeffrey pritchard thank you so much for your work superintendent williams thank you so much for your questions and support that concludes the finance and ops committee the next committee is educational support chaired by terrence board member terence heard thank you board member woods um chairwoman great committee meeting today with our financing operations but right now i'd like to move on to the education support committee meeting we went to education support committee meeting the first thing i'd like to say and not be remiss if i don't say it is uh this is a woman's history month so to celebrate all our women that sits here on the board and works in our schools and for the better of our children so um woman history month you are history you're making history every day you

099come to the board and fight for our children so um and our superintendent um intern superintendent that was announced so uh this is one of the history month so you guys make sure you celebrate and celebrate yourselves that we celebrate you next i'll just like to talk in uh quickly i'd like to just uh take my laptop and camera just to take a look so everybody can take a look and see what's happening here um what we have here is a bunch of community members right now community leaders and ministers that's here at um at the board meeting to talk about a program that they want to come and help with mentoring and counseling our children here in the buffalo public schools and we've been meeting with this group um for a while now in

100all different facets to see um what plan can we put together so we can have uh ministries ministers and and community members actually work with our children in our schools in our classrooms so you know this is unprecedented times that we're going through right now and um in public education we've been dealt with kobe 19 we deal with social emotional uh issues with our children and our staff we also experience our um traumatic experience with our students and our students feel as if they're disconnected you know from education and through all the phone calls text messages the emails that i receive day and night i think that um it's right now it's time to change the narrative you i want to change the narrative saying that uh we have a lack of community participation and

101lack of community members that exist in the city of buffalo that don't care about our children and don't have interest or or don't um open their doors you know to try to find and alleviate the issues that's in their communities so as of right now um they're also another nerd that goes around saying our parents don't you know put enough interest in our children um in the classrooms you know our parents are going through challenging themselves as being the poor third poorest city in the country and of its size and this district is is really trying to find ways to help cultivate you know these families these children and deal with the ongoing issues um that's that uh i truly deal with so right now after a lot of community meetings uh dealing with ministers

102we have we have ministers here that's over national programs uh local local programs and also that's um have children grandchildren and great-grandchildren um here in the um city of buffalo and in our buffalo public school system um and we're looking for ways how to adapt mentoring programs mental health emotional behavior um bringing arts and physical activities to these children through programs also which is big is one thing that i really want to say is that one thing i've been working on since i've been a board member is trying to find a way how to reach out to our fraternities and sororities and right now we have uh one of our members here that's going to talk to you tonight about bringing sororities to help with our young ladies um here that's in the buffalo public

103schools and um and this is really a way to bring the organization in and acknowledging the big cry that we have um in our district so using the whole whole concept and also the whole school concept with now i really like to call the whole community model um we look in ways how do expenditures for our uh our 289 billion dollars million dollars that we have in our escrow funds allocations and how we can um address it using community input uh how it's meant to be addressed so uh right now i'd just like to go to our powerpoint presentation uh emir yeah the first one please breaking barriers the first one not the um clp no the one i gave you that's skipped the power plant yes okay good yeah no that's your her board

104member heard of fun i'm sorry forgive me i'm sorry forgive me okay i just want to welcome uh the gentlemen who will be presenting tonight and to say that i do agree with you that you know in today's times it's going to require that we develop a collective voice to help prevent um some of the violence and trauma that our students have experienced and to create intervention services so i just want to welcome them okay uh dr todd knows i was going to have you come on before we go through the powerpoint just want to get that done but thank you again okay it's not it's not this one's the first one i gave you the powerpoint the series that's what i got it was three the one i gave yesterday okay it was three

105okay i'm sorry if you can um just excuse me one second please um while um we get to the correct power point um dr chandra uh well i was gonna give you a moment to speak anyway but uh uh this group right here that we have right now like i would like to say earlier are people that's invested in this community and they weren't trying to find a way to how can they work with our community members our community partners and also work with our parent parents in our community to how they try to uh bring um our children back to us how to get them involved in education and the stresses that they have from kovic and also the stresses that they have you know doing life struggles um we deal with poverty we're

106dealing with a huge disconnect that our students feel that they're experiencing so uh once we're able to get the powerpoint presentation we can move forward chairman herb did you introduce your your guests where did i miss it that's that's coming up can you spend the turn again do you think right here okay if he just says so how is everyone tonight thank you glad to be here any questions for me while we're waiting you know it could be that if we went on to do the introductions while he's while he's facilitating that in the expeditions yeah why don't we start that terrorist is it okay if yeah oh he has it yes do you want to have these guys do their intro to guys and girls do their introductions he got lost in the email

107chain i'm sorry once again so uh he saved me one second pulling putting it up yes while he's doing that preparation you want to introduce us yes okay well okay let's okay we go a little bit off schedule so what we do is go ahead and start the introduction for this program and next person who i'll bring up uh will be will be gabrielle moser who will do an introduction for the program as he pulls powerpoint up so we just go a little backwards to go forward take your time um hello everyone and thank you for your time thank you um mr harper providing a platform for us to come in here and speak to you guys um as we are sitting here listening to some of your concerns and ways that you plan on

108addressing the budget um not only are we privileged to be here but we're also here to um provide an opportunity to have solutions for some of these um things that are happening in our district um from the inner city and to the outer suburbs so as we know many hands makes light work and and as opposed to recreating the will we are a group of um esteemed leaders and professionals whose goal is to bring a new program initiative to the city of buffalo and our group is called the community leaders program and our initiative focuses on education um through the academics field community development and social emotional development so um as i do know that a few members of our group are working on a time constraint i would just like like to let you

109know what the mission of our program is and provide an opportunity for those couple of individuals that have to step out to um let you know a little bit about what they will bring um to the district with your blessing but also what we are already doing um in the community as individuals we can continue to bring these things into our district for the benefit of not only our students and their families but also for each of the individual schools that also have all of these gaps that need to be filled so um can we please go to the next slide the community leaders program namely clp our mission is um that we are a multi-faceted mentor in educational program we are developed and led by leaders of which some of them you will meet

110today from the greater buffalo and niagara region clp is designed to encourage empower strengthen and nurture young people from diverse backgrounds who are currently enrolled and will be enrolled in the buffalo public schools grades k through 12. and i'd just like to take a moment to um segway and um provide an opportunity um for one of our partners and participants to speak i'd like to um provide an opportunity for pastor brent mccallister to come up and um speak to some of his um core program areas and it is a little bit off schedule that i like i mentioned a couple people have things going so i just wanted to provide that opportunity before we get into some of the grass roots and what we do and what we will continue to do let's hold off

111with this let's go to the original one so that i can introduce introduce you guys yes okay okay mr um yes sir thank you uh board members thank you superintendent thank you all of those of you who have taken out the time to uh to professionally often care and commitment to our community uh we as the pastors and we as other leaders in our community are just honored to be a part of this and hopefully this will be the beginning of something real and relevant and rich for our community for our children for our families so we want to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts my reason for being here right now and leaving momentarily is that as a pastor uh we participate in ongoing bible studies and and comprehensive approach to

112ministering to the whole man we believe that that's what this program can and will do is minister not only to the children to their financial needs but to the families that that embrace them to the community that will be supporting of them and and so one of the things that i particularly will be offering is issues that address anger management cultural and community awareness and mental and emotional development and again we believe that we will touch them at the core of their needs because we're there i mean today i was dealing with a kid who's in trouble with uh with issues with gun control i was an issue with first hand touching families who've lost kids so for us it's not an issue of an option we feel the absolute imperative of concern of touching

113and meeting the needs of our children in a holistic fashion we believe that this group will be able to do that so thank you for giving us this opportunity i want to thank mr heard for his for his passion and care and commitment to us and to all of those of you who offer that kind of support so god bless you thank you for allowing me to share this this moment sorry i have to leave thank you pastor mcallister and um pastor callister can you quickly state the church that you are affiliated i'm the pastor of midtown bible church we call ourselves uh the the church where everybody is somebody and jesus christ is lord and we we feel like we're doing some good in the mood okay uh amir can we go to the

114powerpoint presentation so we can get back on track yes sir um quickly i just want to talk about the community leadership program next slide um we talk about the whole home concept adapting to the needs of our students and families look very different today than it did 50 years ago the one-size-fits-all prescription doesn't meet the needs of our diverse student population that we have here in the city of buffalo next slide we talk about our purpose what's the purpose of the community leaders program next slide reimagining schools rethinking our school mentoring strategies so that they could better serve our student population and their families finding creative ways to adapt to the new challenges that our school district face adapting self-motivation techniques to encourage self-confidence building cultural bridge programs to to bring customer awareness to our

115schools and also connecting students and teachers to the world around them next slide we also talk about reimagining lives we want to meet our students right where they are we also uh look at schools to rethink their roles in the community how can excuse me um apply themselves to the community and um you know what changes can we make as a district so that we can keep you to keep our doors open you know for our children that need more more communities more community type initiatives also um support low-income families and and single-parent mothers so we get we have uh putting instruments and tools together so we can help with these families that are struggling and single-parent mothers that may have um coping issues you know dealing with um problems and stresses of poverty and

116also on raising children we also talk about filling the gaps with a mentorship opportunities um during class time after school weekend and during the summer so uh with this program with uh community leaders program we're looking to try to fill those gaps where it's needed where kids are left out and unattended to especially on the weekends and during the summertime periods we also look to providing additional extracurricular activities that support our futures of scholars growth and development such as on-site and off-site music summer sports summer camps and enrichment opportunities um and last thing uh we have revert from violent and violent and aggressive behaviors by using restorative justice practices now there's also tools that being used within the within the church and families in uh buffalo community about how to uh address violent and aggression

117and now some of those things is having us spiritual leaders you know have interaction with our children and um you know working with them individually one-on-one and as groups so that we can try to find programs and ways to uh to uh bring in self-wealth and self-worth to the children so that um the practice of violent behaviors you know won't be the first thing that they come to the first thing that they think about it's about believing in yourselves and having uh having a a belief that um you know that you can make a difference that can make a change um for a child the next slide please we talk about the process the process is our community leaders at communities on program and education um using ministers from various faith groups we're looking at

118education health and wellness mentoring counseling diversity history parent engagement and crisis intervention and last is our payoff uh accepting accountability we'll be looking to change the narrative it is said that the emphasis in training and mentoring education of our children have been placed on the teachers and our um the building the administrative leaders for a for a long time now so uh we're trying to find a way how to change that narrative so it takes the emphasis off the teachers by bringing it back to collectively working with community groups and community agents so that we can um look to try to change the way we mentor kids the way we educate our kids the way we uh become involved in their lives um ministry in our communities have also collaborated in brotherhood to help address

119various issues that our children face in the communities and community leadership programs clp is expanding um is it a spanning group of faith-based ministers and spiritually led individuals that either lead a congregation or work under the direction of a pastoral leader and closing um connecting schools and teachers in the world around them uh one of the great things about this program these ministers is that uh they also work with teachers they um with adopted program that um gabrielle moser will explain um in her presentation it talks about familiar familiarizing teachers the teacher population with the cultural differences and cultural practices so they can have a better understanding of their students that's in their classrooms and i believe um board member jennifer mccoy just mentioned about the number of different languages that's being spoken in schools

120so we're looking to adopt not only this group of individuals but other groups and muslim faith that they can come along and help bring in mentoring and tutoring programs through the educational support committee to try to reach these children where they're at we have an unders they have understanding of the nuclear joint and single parent family structures and also teaching bill how to build self-esteem and self-worth of our student population our mentors and counselors will connect the buffalo public school parent population and build healthy relationships between the students and the educational leaders so this group also has a structure that will actually reach out and meet the parents also so it's one of the things that we talked about in the past uh that our parents don't interact with our children don't understand the coursework

121education or or they just may be going through issues themselves so this is the way that we can use that whole home concept so that we can um have that outreach to parents and to our community okay thank you um the last thing i'd like to i think that's the last slide amir so the last thing i'd like to add is that um for this we'd be looking to adopt and use my essay funds to help create this program and help um bring a relative um endpoint to uh committing to working with our children and our families in the district right now i'd like to bring uh uh uh canada over to uh president petrovsky who will talk about uh esther funds and how we can adapt this uh yeah uh thank you board member

122heard um so one thing that uh terence and i had discussed earlier that i had a discussion with our previous superintendent about was the possibility of creating a program that would better integrate our schools into the surrounding community that would address some of the uh concerns that we've heard about working with and participating with the district um and but but also how to better engage because some of the concerns have been raised to me uh as i said here is that oftentimes people felt that our schools were insular that they shut down at three o'clock that uh that they don't that they aren't um that they aren't as well in mass years we're not as well invested in their surrounding communities as they could be so one of the things that i know that we

123had some discussions that were put on hold and maybe we could bring them forward is about how we can do this better and one thing that we that have been discussed and we may you know wish to explore further is something along the lines of a pilot project or a grant in which each school would be giving a certain amount of money which they could identify both programs in the surrounding community that would come back into their schools that would help whatever it may be maybe mentoring and maybe athletics it could be dance it could be gardening it could be whatever it may be but but using those resources that are adjacent to the building bring them into the building let let many of these small businesses entrepreneurially get their foot in the door what

124it's like to work with the buffalo public schools i know that other i know both the city and county have had similar kind of micro grant programs that have achieved this some are at the block club level some are a little bit bigger some are through a community organization but they but they tend to be very narrowly focused and they tend to address very specific concerns in a very very granular area so for our purposes would be the area right around the school and what if given the opportunity what could that site-based management team do with that school to better ingrain um and mesh take your pick of adjectives or adverbs to to uh to be more connected to the surrounding community and just something that i know that terence and i have i spoke

125with other board members as well that it may be a way for the district to move forward to both uh where the community could see both that investment um with the programs that were the surrounding community being brought into school but also that are going to uh address the needs of the individual schools because as jennifer and other people have mentioned hey there are certain commonalities with all of our schools across the district but they're also each each school population is a little bit different we need to recognize that and try to develop the programs and policy and funding to address those very specific needs in that student population in our individual schools so thank you terence for the opportunity to explain the uh you know the concept of what we've been working towards thank

126you president patricia and uh thank you for being so thorough with the with the presentation that next amir i'd like to lead over to uh tommy mclean where we say yes to buffalo and tommy will come to the podium and talk about the need for a program for community based relations with the schools and how we can adopt this and a plan of um making sure that um we can put and still um instill a schedule together so that um this this opportunity you know don't pass us by and that we cannot install this program within our district so um mr mclean of want to say congratulations to dr williams who i've uh had a chance to work with early and uh we're just starting out with some of the work we're doing also to

127the board and to the past you just want to say uh just thank you for the opportunity oh one of the things i want to talk about is the work we do with young men of color is reaching uh young men of color ages 12 to 24. and working with that group looking not only within school we look at in school but also out of school understanding that in school is is one place where they're actually getting their their formal education but also they have some education that takes place out and make sure we're having dealing with the social emotional needs that a young person needs in that process and so what i'm going to do here is kind of just give you a 10 000 foot view because they told me that four minutes

128so in four minutes we're going to give you a ten thousand from you and then it will answer any questions as we go along so uh let's go to the next all click you can click it one more time please all right and one more time all right the breaking barriers is a initiative that's under uh say yes but the the one thing that's a little different about that than other sailors programs is it goes outside into the community we go from ages 12 to 24. so you know the young people will graduate they go on and we look at from cradle to career so we follow multiple career and then also we look at some of the things such as looking at the crime rates in the community because they understand if a young

129person goes through school and they finish uh college in their community they should be able to buy a house in their own community and so what we're actually looking at how does crime impact their community and how can we be an impact on their crimes you're gonna go to the next clip please right off the bat i want to start with uh kind of about some of the from my 10 uh high view what we want to kind of look at is how we can actually work together as a community so part of this is is not just buffalo public schools because i think if we looked at just buffalo public schools by itself and not looked at the surrounding community then we are doing our young people in injustice and so what we have

130here you can go ahead and click again one more time uh yeah today i thought i was getting a little clicker saying how to move my old clicker all right but what you see here is the facebook community how do we connect the faith-based community buffalo public schools and a lot of you uh know me as as as tommy mclamb and senior director at a boys medical initiative but the young people know me as pt and pt is pastor tom and so and actually doing that working within the within say yes within the school system but also tied back to the community through faith and so here you can see how do we do that and so we're thinking about actually setting up a mechanism where we we're doing uh in buffalo public schools currently

131we're actually uh working with two schools mckinley high school and riverside high school we're invited in by the principals and we do breaking barriers in the school so we go in one day a week and we bring in uh the young a lot of the young men are the young men in which the school's been having uh issues or problems with and so what we've seen it just in this short only been doing it for about a month the the principals have asked us to come in even more because they're seeing the transformation now just the other day a principal stopped me walking in mckinley said the young man that he kind of gave him a break and that young man now has been on time for school every day uh since that day and

132it was so it was something where we were able to work together with community at the same time working with the school system in order to make that happen so uh we can do the same thing with faith-based taking the breaking barriers model which is actually really a group mentoring model and actually do it in in faith community do it in buffalo public schools if you notice everything i'm going to give you here the infrastructure is already there we don't have to create anything new we already have an infrastructure that works you know the next clip working with the our community-based organizations and they all vary so some organization they work with young people who are 12 to 18 others may work with young people or are 12 and 13 year olds this model actually

133allows them to work with the area that they have expertise in and in addition to that what we give additional training so they have the training in order to kind of amp up what they do all right one more time can you click for me please all right we've worked with buffalo public schools with city and buffalo and uh say yes we've been in alignment for almost five years actually to fashion this is going to be a breaking barriers model along with working with the mbk work that's going on in the city in addition to the nba work that's going on in the mbk work in the city and nbk work that's going on in the school system and so we've been working together for a long time it's not something that's this is not

134a flash in advance it took five years to get to this place where we could actually begin pulling and putting this model together so you know another click there all right final click see uh almost final click i'll say what we can offer now is we take a young person let's say for instance a young person is in a making program at your church or a mentoring program in buffalo public schools or working breaking barriers there that young person also applied to the big breaking barriers in the city so what happens is from from january to december their involvement program it's not doesn't end at the end of the school year school year ends and what they just do is they connect with their brothers now i want to read one of you some of

135you probably wondering why is he wearing a jacket up there i wore this jacket purposely this jacket is a jacket a young person received after doing an entire year and they have criteria they have to meet they get this jacket and we call this jacket we put it on permanent loan permanent loan means that as long as they're living up to the standards of this jacket they keep it whenever they don't we have a special set of skills going to the house we need to pull it back all right but we don't pull it back just to keep it we pull it back in a way in which the young person has to go in front of his breaking barriers brothers tell them basically where he messed up how he's corrected and what they will

136do is they will put his jacket back on and so the goal is having accountability amongst young young people and they see themselves now as not not as adversaries but allies and so that's part of the thing of the jacket and so can you imagine across this whole city you see young people walking around they burn these jackets and now they don't see they don't see west side east side they don't see uptown downtown what they see is my brother and so that's that's the the thought process behind there so on the bottom what we actually offer and the citywide uh initiative is that right off the bat what we can do is actually quarterly city-wide run facilitator training so i don't care if you're coming out of a church you're coming out of school

137you come to wherever you're coming what we will do is have a quarterly training you come in we will train you facilitate you on a curriculum that has been established and the curriculum was written by uh one of the uh the the board members actually worked with them and they've been working with them over five years to get this curriculum to the place where now this curriculum meets all of the the board standards so we have a curriculum that works in addition to that remember we meet here here year round we meet once a week virtually once a week in person so that young person will have a connection that will go from january to december every year most of our young people have been with they started out for a year but they usually

138stay uh when we run our virtual right now we're running virtual with young people calling in working on their law degree in florida a young person calling in at howard university young person calling in from a m young person and they call in with their also their little brothers here in buffalo so their little brothers get to see them uh they move on and accelerate to a new level so they know that if they can do it guess what i can do it also and so that we actually run the virtual in addition to that you see we have a annual citywide graduation we have a graduation where they're actually a big deal when they get the jacket and we make it make sure we purposely make it a big deal and then finally uh

139we would like to do this is a kind of an aspiration a citywide conference citywide conference where young people call to come together and then we'll use folks from the community to come in and then begin to speak to them so they see us no longer as way out there but they they can touch hands and they give our hands with us and i think uh from from uh putting on my spiritual hat the other side is that's what we're called to do and then at the same time working with public school we also understand that our young people need to get education so how do we begin merging and put together infrastructure that meets the needs of both so within a nutshell that's kind of how it we can click it one last time

140what two times i'm sorry all right those infrastructure already mbk is already there my brother's keeper and the school system is already there and one more time any further to the further connecting community and education it ties them together so this is something that we would kind of put forward and we've already in the process of working through it and so the next step is uh in the faith community we need to sit down and figure out how do we earn it out how do we make it work that's right oh last slide uh last flight is uh first we want to institute training for uh community student mentoring opportunities that's the training we're talking about we actually learn how to make my background is i've been the last 20 years he's actually mentored and

141so what i do is train folks all over the country and i have two other people to work with me we train people all over the country on how to mentor young people of color all right and you know rendering young people of color is a little bit different especially when they come from many different cultural backgrounds in addition to that discuss how we can best work with uh community schools and we have community schools saturday academies how can the churches actually move and how can the community move and begin working in the salary academy in which they bring their cultural understanding of that community to uh to a school that's in the neighborhood lastly begin initial conversations about developing some of the community programs start the conversation how do we be for programs how

142do we tweak programs so that we meet the needs of the young people not necessarily young people all over the city but how about the young people just in their six by six block area how do we make sure we meet we reach them so with all that said that's uh i'll turn it back over to you okay yeah let's keep this slide up thank you our minister mclean for your time and uh let's just make it clear that uh this um the community leadership program um is not under to say yes title but uh time to mclean and we look at these three slides this up is that they want to work with this this community mentoring leadership program so that they can um make sure that every individual that they bring into this

143program is trained and mentoring um our youth also uh would say yes and speaking with uh david russ that uh they really really willing to fully work with um the ministers in their saturday academy programs so along with that we're going to have a discussion on how we they can best fit into our study academy programs and that way they can reach out to our children in other ways uh the last part uh beginning initial conversation is very important about summer community planning because uh what we talked about and what we discussed was the possibilities having the church stores open in their communities so that they can bring in children and mentoring throughout the summer times they can have programs food programs mentoring programs counseling take trips and also uh just get to know them

144you know just have an open ear to listen to the concerns of the kids develop relationships and that's how we take our streets back that's how we take our community back in this in this format um it's detailed way more meetings to come but it will also give us a pathway so that our children could um be in the better mindset when they come to school um have understanding you know of what their goals may be in the future and develop goals and strategies on how to achieve them so right now i'd like to call back uh gabrielle actually introduced other ministers they're gonna have a couple of minutes just to speak introduce themselves and uh she will leave that thank you so yes once again thank you for um to each of you for

145your flexibility and your ability to um assist us as we aim to provide multiple touch points throughout the school day after school and spreading into the saturday initiative can we please go over to on the third slide [Music] next one right here so in case you're wondering everybody does have a copy of each of our board members were provided a copy i'll um try to get right to the point and get through our community leaders program um the purpose is to challenge historical racial and gender-based disparities create academically and physically safe learning environments promote college and career readiness promote the attainment of personal goals through academic rigor and experiences that are uniquely tailored to our young people in grades k through 12. in addition we're going to improve the academic outcomes for our scholars and

146we're going to educate the whole being of not only our young girls as listed but all of these participants and their families the community leaders program will implement the excellence in education core values and which we will utilize the district's pathways that will lead to increased academic achievement success dedication commitment and collaboration of our students and parents as we push forward to have increased outcomes in our communities next slide please the specific objective and purpose of the community leaders program is to create pathways to academic success community involvement and social emotional development this improvement strategy incorporates the whole child and family relationship model and our goal is to advance student outcomes by breaking their economical sociological psychological barriers by implementing the whole home education model we will encompass a group of community-based leaders from um

147buffalo and which you'll hear from a host of our partners today and we're going to encourage these developing healthy relationships between our parents and children um and as you know that is going to lead to the better outcomes next slide please and um our methodology just briefly i won't go through everything our methodology not only are we going to have programming available during the school day but we're going to be available after school as we all know that students have um the most at risk behaviors that occur between three to six pm so we'll have a day school program providing services to um fill in some of those gaps for you we'll get into the after school programs and we're going to spread into those saturday um community schools initiatives how are we going to

148um identify the needs of each individual community we are going to do that by having a community needs assessment it's going to be distributed at each of our partnering locations to ensure that we are in fact meeting the needs of each community as a whole because this is not a one-size-fits-all approach this is uniquely catered to make sure that we are achieving equity in all of our neighborhoods we will staff the programs um and we're going to make sure that we're providing the parents and the students with the skills that they need academically the enrichment activities to keep them actively engaged college and career readiness programming but we're also going to help and assist in addressing some of those behavioral interventions that are needed throughout the school day the parents are also going to be

149provided with the tools that they need as we continue to meet the physical mental emotional economical and social challenges that our families are facing daily and then lastly i just like to say um we plan on partnering with the buffalo public schools say yes to education erie county summer youth program the mayor summer youth program and we're going to continue to build and develop summer programming for our participants so that we too are able to meet the needs of students year round next slide please our collective our collective um collaboration as mentioned on in my opening many hands leads to light work how are we going to make sure that we are successful um through our collective collaboration we have already started to have some of these meetings but we're going to continue to meet

150and be committed to meeting on a monthly um basis um to assess our outcomes making sure that we're progress monitoring our program areas of opportunity and meeting the needs of each of our partners the um administrators the schools the community filling in the gaps where we see need in addressing those concerns of our leaders and the families our community partners will be selected to work with the part um parents across all the program areas and we're gonna also we plan on consulting with you the board to help bridge the gap between the parent child relations as we will also bridge the gap between school day learning and after school learning and community based outcomes participate will have several incentives for participation they're going to be involved in the selecting of the programs and the recruiting

151of participants and they're going to be rewarded with field trips and on-site activities we'll get vendors in the building to make sure that they feel like they can um fit in the school building after school somewhere that they can be and be safe they're going to be active actively engaged in the planning they're going to develop their leadership skills and that's going to lead to healthier out we're going to continue to collaborate with the principals and the counselors to make sure that we are plugging in to each of the advocates adequate support areas that are needed next slide please so i'd like to take an opportunity to introduce some of our community leaders in no particular order and there are a couple of individuals like that we would like to provide the opportunity um they're

152not in there right now but this is an organization that is continuing to grow we have individuals that are qualified from across our community and they are ready to serve they are ready to step into the food and meet the needs in our communities so i'd like to pass it to our um first community leader just a few minutes each pastor tommy bags please thank you gabrielle and pastor vapps all right thank you uh board members for listening and receiving us my name is pastor tamiel valves i'm the pastor of thankful missionary baptist church uh 17 years over and 197 summer place in the city of buffalo on the east side i've um my expertise lies in the area of academic support i spent 30 years working for the university of buffalo as a senior

153academic advisor doing just those things that are getting ready to mention now in the areas of study skills uh career explorations test taking skills um test anxiety and coping skills workshops so that's what i would be doing that's what i would be bringing uh to the district uh in our area in this in this particular program so um with that thank you so much for listening um and i will pass it to kenneth norman he's on his way i just like to say a couple of things about pastor babs uh he already uh last couple years worked with say yes and had summer programs at his church and um they did a wonderful job over there working with the kids and also had food programs and uh and educational values that they taught over at

154the church so this is already a opening process that this group is um putting together so it's just about connecting the dots here in our district okay so uh in the slide it says that i have administrative skills adult education and health care administer administration um 17 years as a middle manager and as an administrator in the service industry and another 17 years in healthcare administration adult education working for the educational opportunity center as an adjunct instructor in math customer service and a workplace readiness so i want to lend my experience and my expertise in these areas and my passion is really to help young people to have an understanding of their values and understanding of their vision because if they know what their values are they don't become victims of their environment because they

155can say well that's not me i don't have to go along with everything that's going on because i have my own values if they have a vision then they know where they want to go and they can look for resources to help them to get to where they want to go no one's going to be successful if they want to be like everybody else and i always i say this a lot i'm also the superintendent of our sunday school and and my wife says i tend to repeat myself and one thing i often say and i say you can challenge me on this nobody ever became great by being like everybody else that's right so um i want to put my support behind this program thank you so much thank you next slide please all

156right so i'm not sure if um we have miss melody baker on the call but as we look at this program and long-term outcomes we are in the foundational set on stages but with the different levels of expertise that we have coming to the table we have the opportunity for long-term sustainability grant experience coming to the table program evaluation and community organizing by way of melody baker and then also um i was thinking about sitting here we have a lot of great men coming to the table to meet the need but as you know behind every great man is a greater woman so let's give it up for some of the ladies that we will be seeing i had to put that in there um myself i am gabrielle moser currently i'm a high school

157educator i work in the um charter school system at health sciences charter school where i teach math um i specialize in academic intervention it is my passion to meet um to have intervention early as opposed to weight we cannot put band-aids on things that need early surgery in long-term um solutions i also specialize in program activation not only creating program but building it and providing the opportunity for this program to be sustained creating a pipeline for it to go to the next person to be here for the um needs in the future i'm great at community organizing but also that community needs assessment i've been successful in activating programs through community needs assessment so that is what i can bring to the table um and a quick breath and i'd now like to prac um

158pass my two um one second i know that you're trying to get away in our and our pastors and our spiritual leaders here are so modest can you please just talk about some of the programs that you did work with an organization that you activate i'm sure so currently um i work with edtrust new york and uh several of you know that's a education equity-based organization we're working on locally but also statewide looking at some of the areas of need areas of opportunity um i served on the board for the buffalo urban league young professionals for five years where i had the opportunity to be a secretary as well as education chair running urban education conferences where we not only taught parents about meeting the needs of their urban students and supporting them academically but

159we um partnered with um st bonaventure university to make sure that we had students teacher candidates come into the city to learn what it is like and what are the real challenges that we face as educators in the inner city so um that was actually the state of urban education public private and charter because we all meet the needs of inner city youth um i also work with the french foreign buffalo i work with the boys and girls club of the north towns for several years where i had a um teen center was actually one of the first teen only after school programs we got some of the youth involved we cleared out an old church building they swept up inches of dust we transformed it painted it got furniture donations from buffalo state to

160flip it so that that center became what the students in the community asked for um there are other things but many hands make light work i'm not the only one coming to the table and i look forward to bringing from learning from everybody bringing my expertise to the table so we're going to plug back in and make sure we are meeting the needs of these students in the school day and after school and on our saturday programs and another one of our um planners and somebody that's been there since the beginning and infantry um stages of our program development is ms brittany adams and i would like her to come up and speak more to um what she's bringing to the table in partnership thank you [Music] hi good evening everyone i'm super super excited

161to be here uh thank you uh terrance for inviting us and i appreciate the pastors for being here as well and the other community um partners that will be currently blessed community leaders partners they will be partnering i'm super excited to be here my name is brittany adams i am currently the president of iowa ada ada nursing sorority here in buffalo new york i kind of brought it here because i was like you know what we have other organizations um involved in nursing but we don't have a sorority so i was like you know what i'm just gonna you know go out there on a limb and try to see if we could do this we brought uh i found the necessary nurses to get involved in this awarding and we're here we're super excited

162we are doing community service projects or in churches we're in the community we're doing a lot um and now we're actually partnering with this group to just infuse ourselves in the schools we want to work with students who are involved who want to become a nurse or who want to become you know a doctor or a physician assistant so we want to work with those students to not only get them prepared but get them excited for the workforce i'm excited to be a nurse i've been a nurse for 14 years i started off in the hospital now i'm in community health and i absolutely love it i look at it as my calling and now i feel like my calling is being stretched to the schools into kids and i'm super excited about it um

163dr morelli actually asked me to come into one of her mentoring programs recently a couple weeks ago i was a little nervous starting out but i'm super happy that i did it because the kids were so excited about what i talked about and i involved them in that process i was actually able to touch in one young lady's life so much that she asked me for a hug we're going through a pandemic and she asked me for a hug and what did i say absolutely tears started falling down her eyes and i was like i can't believe god placed me here i i'm i'm supposed to be taking your patience and this but i'm now working with students and i absolutely love it i saw the impact that i had on that one student two

164weeks ago and again we're communicating we're talking and she texted me yesterday how are you doing and she said guess what you made an impact on my life and i want to do that globally i want to be able to go into schools and encourage young people that you can be somebody you can be awesome you can be whoever you want to be i had to study i mean i used to go to church all the time and i had my bible in one hand and my studying books another hand because i had to work hard told them and they accepted it so i'm here to work to serve and also we do about scholarships to nursing to those who want to get into nursing nursing students high school students and in college so there's

165definitely a benefit of being a part of us yes yes and can you please tell us maybe a sorority and it's really sisters that will become involved with the program yes the name of our sorority is iowa ada ada incorporated akai 85 swording incorporated there will be there's 13 of us who will be involved in the program and will be infused in a saturday program so i'm super excited about being a part of this and likewise my counterparts are excited as well [Music] and their colors are green and yellow if you can't tell thank you again mrs adams she also has a husband that teaches in the buffalo public schools so she already tied to this endeavor all right um i'd just like to take a minute to segue over to one of our virtual

166participants i would like to provide miss annette king with an opportunity um to just say a couple of points and she is at midtown bible church thank you miss annette for joining us thank you and she said i'm a net king but i am a member of pleasant grove baptist church and i'm a retired buffalo police officer i am currently at miss barbara school of dance um she couldn't be here so i'm going to represent her because i think it's a great idea to have the arts involved mainly with musical instruments and dance but i'm going to speak on behalf of miss barbara so miss barbara as most of you may know she has owned and operated on miss barbara school of dance in buffalo new york for 55 years and she started the dance

167school in 1966 in what was in the humble branch ymca on east ferry street um she received her professional training and education and tapping jazz locally with fred jones and beverly fletcher she danced internationally with henry lee tong and of course everyone knows the alvin ailey american dance theater she has taught stage choreographed directed and produced shows of african dance um she has been the teacher and choreographer of alpha capital alpha gamma phi omega sorority incorporated deputized pageant since 1986. has affected the lives of thousands of young people who have used her instructions in the art of dance charm grace and patience as a basis for her own personal achievement which she would like to bring she has numerous awards but i'm gonna keep going on forward what she would like to bring for her

168program right now is uh for saturdays um she have dance on saturdays i'm sorry you're gonna hear music because the children are dancing right now and if you hear the music i'm sorry about that but i hope you can hear me well so i miss barbara says dance education must be thought of as another form of learning and it should be understood that learning to dance is part of a person's education dance stimulates all senses of dance integrates the body the art and the intellect she offers traditional african dance hip hop dance and jazz dance but she also would like to incorporate a program which is called young gifted and confident development program now this program is developed to design to educate motivate cultivate and instill and re-instill values that have been lost um the

169training is for she currently had it for girls but she would definitely love to have young men also involved that we can find a man to do the mentoring to partner with her and the ages would be from 10 to 12 and they will grow to um be confident in their health and physical fitness mentally aware and morally straight beautiful inside and outside and so what they will work on they will work on their poles you know their posture their walking their sitting personality plus which includes self-confidence and positive attitude attitude um social success as far as conversations friendships phone etiquette and manners um she will also like to get them involved with baking and finances a lot of things that may not still be taught in schools but she's had this program and i

170think it will be i think i know it's necessary it's necessary for our young children today fans and this young gifted and confident development program okay did you get it yes we did thank you annette first of all for your years of service as a police officer and that also brings a lot of tools to uh to the community leadership program and also uh please thank barbara i know she's having class right now are trying over a little bit so um just tell her thank you for um for wanting to come on and be part of our programs that will distill these type of values into our children in the buffalo public schools i sure will thank you thank you all right thank you um we are going to go to the next slide please

171and um before i pass it back to um our next esteemed um female mentor and professional i would like to provide one of our partners who are who's here with us the opportunity to speak i'd like to bring up reverend blue please hello to everyone and congratulations to uh superintendent williams it's good to be a part of this opportunity i am a reverend mark blue i pastor in the city of rockawan a second baptist church but i'm also the president of the buffalo chapter of the naacp and we would like to bring the naacp along uh with this venture one of the unique programs that we have in the naacp is the axel program that's the afro academic central technological and scientific olympics we have 33 cohorts in that program ranging from humanities uh cultural

172uh business uh performing arts visual and culinary arts so it's a great opportunity to have this as a caveat to be a part of this program also personally we need to get them engaged in civil civic engagement uh knowing how to vote knowing who to vote for knowing how to vet those individuals who want to make rules and try to rule us not rule us but try to make decisions for us in areas that we're not in right now i also served in the military as an equal opportunity employment counselor a total quality management instructor and also i have a lot of other experiences as well but one of the things that we can do together is make sure that we have a base in which our children in a platform in which our children

173can stand on we also want to eliminate race-based uh politics and antics that have been holding our our children down in hostage so this is a great opportunity for us to partner uh with the naacp and the programs that we have along with the other ministers in our partners program so thank you for giving me this opportunity thank you thank you again um pastor blue the leader of the naacp buffalo here and does a lot of great work in the community it also has um everybody's phone number in the city of buffalo so anytime we need partners anything that goes with the district we have a direct connection with it all right next up i'd like to introduce miss gwen triplett and thank you for your patience as we go through some of our community

174partners um we really wanted to highlight the fact that the community is behind the commission the community partners are in the community we're doing the work we don't need to reinvent the world and we're ready to serve at this time um thank you mr hurd i'd like to thank the channel now i'd like to thank the community leadership group invited me to be a member and um i want to just give you on my background i'm 33 years for the university of buffalo educational opportunity center and i also developed a prison reentry program for erie county correctional facility as well as orleans county and uh it is um no longer existing at this particular time but that program is still within the urban league uh i also the president of vice president of mirabi caliber

175as well as the director of the summer enrichment program as well as the after-school program for 11 years at lincoln united methodist church which was funded by uh the church itself or churches the group of churches that we've received that funding from so i'm quite familiar with the after-school program settings and i'm also familiar with leadership uh committees as well as mentorship as well as developing tutorial programs so with that said my new initiative for myself is to be a coordinator for the angel tree ministry which i'm targeting the young people or young children of incarcerated youth or incarcerated parents so we need to gather that information so that we can service the children uh in the buffalo area or in the city of buffalo or lackawanna or the surrounding area so that we could

176be in an asset and we can be of service or support to the parents thank you thanks thank you once again miss triplett and uh she deserves an applause also because for the work that she does um i like to say that uh miss triplett um working with the district there's a large number of um children that's within a district in the city of buffalo that has parents that's incarcerated or that get incarcerated so she has a team of people in other organizations because she's very modest she didn't say everything but she has a team of people and other organizations that she work with that can target these children bring midterm programs to individually or as groups and also parents that may uh get arrested you know those children exhibit different types of behaviors mental

177stresses and um having a program in the buffalo schools to work with those kids so they don't act out in class or act out against others or even the bullying that comes associated with with those type of uh actions that uh we can have a program here in the district that can work with those families so thank you again miss triplett and we begin to uh miss gabrielle motion all right and once again in no particular order um we are going to bring up next pastor richard hague followed by reverend doctor kenneth terrell thank you [Music] good evening everyone um once again i'd like to congratulate dr williams on being selected i read your statement in the um newspaper it's an honor for us to have you as well as a honor for you to

178serve so thank you very much my name is ambassador richard d hayek jr i am the senior pastor of the mount eerie missionary baptist church um i'd like to first of all repeat the name of the church it's the mount early missionary baptist church it is not in the city of buffalo it is across the grand island bridge in the county of niagara in the city of niagara falls new york and the value of me sharing the location is that i have discovered over the years that every urban community across this country has been systematically plagued with the same problems that the pueblo buffalo public school is trying to wrestle with it doesn't matter what city what state all urban communities across our country is struggling with the disengagement of and the dysfunction of our

179ethnic children in public schooling i drive across the grand island bridge to meet with a group of passengers understand fundamentally the most important thing to do is to integrate the spiritual power of change every tuesday evening a group of pastors meet for the sole purpose of bringing about spiritual change let me pause for just a moment come on come on just say that preaching to you members of this board every tuesday we pray for every board member we pray for every student in the school system we pray for the teachers and the staff because we understand but mentally if god doesn't change it it ain't gonna be changed amen most importantly we've been blessed and we understand that we cannot celebrate our blessings in isolation so it is our calling to reach out to both

180the board and community and share the blessings that god has given unto us i am here to serve on any and every level and they they're giving me this wind-up signal let me tell you one thing i drive from niagara falls new york the place where the niagara river follows all of the falls it is one of the seven wonders of the world as long as there's water falling over that farm god has not given up on us and i'm not giving up on our kids pastor hey yesterday i don't want to wrap your sermon but could you please okay can you please tell us a little bit about your path to working with community programs and and think that you initiated this briefly i started working with uh the lighter school program in 1965

181and under the leadership of dr peggy moore we initiated the first live school program in toledo ohio that was funded by title one in the state of ohio i moved on from there and created the first and only charter school in the county of niagara i'm a member of the board of directors for uh independent health i'm on the board of directors for community admissions or lack of frontier i served for 17 years on the board of directors for erie niagara health education council and i currently am on the board of directors for the teacher collaborative thank you thank you pastor and uh we're not going to take up a collection good evening guy i am reverend dr kenneth terrell pastor of jerusalem missionary baptist church here in the city of buffalo new york and

182again we want to congratulate our interim superintendent and to this great body we're just glad to be here on today i um just want to say that i'm proud to be a part of this uh community leaders group and thank mr herb for bringing us all together uh just wish uh to just state that uh one of the things few of the things that i bring to the table started out education with associate associates degree and applied sciences and church ministries and uh church education program and then went on to graduate with my doctor's of ministries degree in strategic leadership i wish to also bring uh some of the attributes that i have from being a 42-year member of international free and accepted modern masons in order of eastern style incorporated where would hopefully be

183my hopes to involve a few of our brothers to try to bring some of the foundational principles that we deal with in our fraternity also to be a part of what we heard here today in the mentoring program and also to be able to uh help involve our young people and coaching and helping themselves to see themselves differently and with the hopes of uh just knowing the world was open to them and that there's no limit as to what they could achieve so again we're glad to be here we thank you for this time thank you next up we're gonna have pastor carl hill thank you sir i'm glad to be here we are grateful for the opportunity to just share with you and be a part of this uh leadership program my name is

184uh pastor caraway hill and i serve as pastor of the greater saint matthew missionary baptist church located on 450 win street here in the city of buffalo new york and i've been serving as pastor at greater st matthew for 25 years and prior to serving as pastor or even during the interim serving his pastors for 25 years i've worked for the board of education for approximately 22 years in the capacity of a teacher aide as well as a security officer i've worked uh in several of the high schools uh bennett burgard hutch tech as a security officer i worked in the school 84 for the physically challenged for approximately 19 years and in doing that uh working in the school system as well as in the city uh school system as well as uh in

185the city of buffalo uh as a pastor one of the things that i know as it relates to young people whether in the church or whether uh in the schools that you need several components uh primarily you need the component of being real you can't reach anybody whether it's church whether in school unless you're real because if you're not real then those that we're trying to help educate uh they'll they'll shut down so we have to be real but also we need to be relevant that's one of the things that i see on the uh emblem for the buffalo public school uh uh uh in them and we got to be relevant we got to be able to to reach those amen and to connect with those that are in the school system and you

186can't connect if they don't know that you're first of all real and if you're going to connect to any of the children within the school system doesn't matter if they pre-k all the way to 12th grade it doesn't matter if they don't know that you care it doesn't matter how much you know that's right they have to know that you care so we have to be real with them we have to be relevant with them but we also have to be reachable and you get you can't reach anybody if you don't respect them yes you have to respect them if you want respect one of the things that i found that was very helpful to me personally uh uh working in the school system as well as in church is that you have to give

187respect if you want respect and and and some of them sometimes i run into uh students that i had years ago because i've been working and worked in this school system for about 22 years and they still address me as mr here mr mr hill because i addressed them when i was working with them as mr or ms because i gave them respect and i believe in working in this program within the school system this leadership program will enhance what's going on here in the city of buffalo uh it can only improve what is going on here in the city of buffalo we come alongside to mentor uh whether it's in the area of mental health whether it's in the area of grief we come alongside to help mentor them it will work if we're

188real if we're relevant and if we're reachable thank you thank you thank you pastor hill and um i just know that your background education here with the city of buffalo working with buffalo students already you know you already have an upside of bringing um working interaction with our students but also with our mentoring group so you know leadership you know it's very well needed and thank you so much for serving that much time here in the buffalo schools bless you thank you all right and if we could please um just please we're gonna go forward a few slides and i'll be able to just summarize all of those things on my main point i'd like to go forward to the parent and um family engagement partner slide because as we know and none of this

189would be possible without the support of our um parents it would not be able to be sustained without um the education for our parents and their families next slide should be it um yes so how will this work not only are we going to be um meeting the needs of the parent and the family the student educating the whole child we're going to reach out to the whole family so my partner is partnering with um some of our parent and family engagement organizations and some of our esteemed educators and community um leaders we will be able to do the following we're going to offer parent engagement classes throughout the academic year partnering with those saturday schools and after school to meet them where they are by doing so it's going to narrow the generational gap

190we're going to connect with the students and the teachers connect them to the world around them we're going to help to um make connections between the different cultures so we don't see each other as different but we see more of what we have in common we're going to change the narrative centered around parenting and family dynamics um offer what it means to be consistent in your parenting um open communication provide that platform um teach each other the parents um not only just the parents but our educators our school staff how can we understand the family structures that currently exist in buffalo public schools so that we can um further the outcomes for these participants for their families and for our community we're going to offer social emotional clarity for our parents and for our family

191partners through early intervention family engagement um through our incarceration on ministries and i look forward to seeing the fruition of miss triplets initiative um god bless you on that teaching cultural history to our participants and their families so they can see what are the historical um outcomes and implications from not only um you know you have to look you have to know where we came from so we can know where we're going that's where we are now and that's where we want to go moving forward next slide please so through your support what is the payoff the benefits of a community leadership program with the partnerships of the parents and the students is going to be insurmountable youth in grades k through 5 6 through 8 and 9 through 12 will work in various groups

192to learn their cultural history social emotional skills self-empowerment resiliency diversity integrity and career exploration all in an effort to break the generational barriers while encouraging positive outcomes and next slides please um at your own leisure please take a look how are we going to get this going on such a large scale there's so many different ways to eat an elephant we just have to open our eyes to our community and the needs we can have pep rallies we can do giveaways we need to give away books we need to promote literacy we need to leverage you our board members and the superintendent we need to get guest speakers from our community we need to leverage our community health organizations and of course the young people if you build it they will come and if there's

193a dj the young people are pulling up next slide please so once again um thank you all for your support thank you for your time on this evening thank you for everybody who came out to let your voice be heard on all of our behalf from everybody in our community we are the community leadership program thank you for your time in collaboration we will increase the academic community and social emotional development outcomes for use in our community thank you [Applause] okay i'd like to thank you for your presentation on ms gabriel moser um very very powerful very um this group is about action this group is not about um uh sitting around anymore in the city of buffalo and watching what happens you know to our our children without without having to input or or

194haven't added value to their lives um i also like to add uh one thing um we passed through was on grief counseling also so we're looking at an extended grief counseling roles that that our ministers can play in the lives of children who uh maybe went through a a traumatic experience and we also uh is all-inclusive for all students no matter what race create of color um we're here to support all students and we have other groups that that will come in also uh in the future that we'll talk to about with the muslim community uh that address our muslim students and also other ministers that that wants to um be involved now what you've seen tonight was just a couple of our ministers that's what should be part of this program uh we heard

195the cry that uh our community don't get involved with our kids in our school system education so this is our community coming tonight stepping up and showing that um they have a promise for our community and they want to open their church doors and also come into our doors here in the buffalo public schools to reach our children where they need to be uh met at you got you got to come to children and meet them um right where they at in their life and they applied and uh this this uh demonstration or illustration tonight uh don't show that we have people in our community that cares about our kids that cares about education and invest in their lives you know to help our community and help our uh children um that um that you

196know if we don't i feel i feel personally that we don't take this opportunity and and take a deep dive into this and activate these type of programs that we're actually missing out we're not doing the jobs that we set forth to do so uh i thank you so much right now i'd like to give it back to our uh superintendent dr tanja williams and once again give our uh team here another round of applause for coming out so much time tonight and and all of the community meetings the tireless long community meetings that we've been having to try to trying to find some formulas and some metrics to put together of how they can work in the day school programs the after-school programs and the saturday academy programs and lastly to try to get

197the doors open to uh you know in the summer time to our kids and get the doors open so that we got an open door policy not only here in the city of buffalo in our in our school district but in our churches also um it it takes it takes a team to raise a village and our villages are here you know these are our team so we really gotta have that input into our community so i thank you guys so much and i really see this group this organization going so far uh um with the buffalo schools and also here in the city of buffalo in the county of erie and the state of new york this is this is the pilot program for it and i believe that uh it's vastly hispanic because

198we receiving calls every day for more ministers that want to be part of this group and this team and there are also others that we didn't bring in tonight that that want to speak but we know because of time restraints and we just made it under our that we can move forward so dr tanja williams thank you so much i mean i really want to on behalf of the board and myself and you know the team that's on parents that may be listening thank every single one of the presenters that came in tonight it's certainly quite a coalition i took a lot of notes um i do have questions and would like to meet to discuss it a little further so i will reach out to miss mosher along with dr reynolds who really leads

199our um community initiatives and um just speak a little more peel some layers and talk about um you know some of the goals that we have and see how we can work together on this initiative very very um thorough just wonderful information again i have pages of notes that i took on all of the presenters that came forward um certainly it was like a who's who listing of folks in the community that want to support our children and i certainly appreciate that we just have to make sure you know everything is aligned um with what we're doing and so i think i'll be able to speak with miss mosher and get some of the questions that i have answered and just peel some layers and i'll include dr reynolds uh probably dr morale and we'll

200sit down and have a conversation about some of the offerings that they discussed thank you dr williams thank you dr rose and also i'd like to leave a q a for the board and you guys i'm not going to pick order because of time but um just go ahead and raise your hand or chime in if you want to make any comments or remarks or any questions i don't have any questions but i do want to thank all of the leaders who came out um and who had the opportunity to speak about what they have to offer um i always believe that collaboration with public education is critical the buffalo public schools can't do everything and be everything to everybody and so i think your program and what you have to offer is worthwhile and

201as dr williams says she will reach out to you to further heal um away some of these questions that you have so thank you thank you dr um kathy evans brown if anybody else want to chime in or have any comments or responses i have a question um more and and i appreciate and thank you all for coming out and giving such a thorough presentation and everything that was brought to the table is exactly you know we need uh more participation um from everyone on all the levels that you brought to the table i have um just a comment is that with everything that was brought to the table i'd love to see when you peel back you know everything that you're gonna bring um how you know how are we communicating with other groups

202as far as diversity goes and um you know who are you teaming up with as far as like different uh different cultures maybe different beliefs um i know faith this is a very faith-based so what other you know beliefs are are we teaming up with since the bps community is made up of so many cultures and beliefs um that's something that you know i'm sure dr williams will be addressing as well but my question is for you dr williams um years ago uh uh eric rosser and myself citizen actions some community members came together around really looking at the cbo's already within the buffalo public schools and trying to you know really look into what they're all doing read out the complacency uplift the folks that are really doing great work uh there was a

203there was an actual structure that we were gonna look into and um then eric uh less of greener pastures so i was wondering if that was looked into and if not i i just want to make sure that you know we had 137 at that time how many years ago the cbo's working within the bps and i believe that we need to really take a deep dive into that as well as we're taking in new folks i'm not saying don't take in anyone else till we look into it what i am saying is let's make sure that we're not um and being real you know folks can feel any kind of weight about this but i i really feel like if you're not pulling your weight and you've been kind of skating by and all

204these groups are coming to the table with some real substance and they have been coming at the table and knocking at the door for years and years and because we were either at capacity or didn't have the money or did you know i mean we we couldn't we couldn't honor even the requests so i would really like to figure out if we can re-engage that conversation bring the community into it as far as just the list of folks that we are working with and um see who's really you know who are we supposed to be uplifting and giving opportunities to how many vacancies should we have and should we let go some of the folks that have just been pretty much doing the okie doke with the bps because they know they can fly under

205the radar i mean i i feel like that's a real that's a real thing and um you know we need to really as a you know as a district look into this so we can welcome you know groups who bring great substance to the table so that's exactly what that asset mapping piece is going to do look school by school to find out what community-based partners we have there um again what school supports where the needs are are the needs being met are they not how long have organizations been there what have been the outcomes that's exactly what the asset mapping piece is going to do will we be covering the ones that are in our um the ones that we're bringing to our community schools as well in our saturday programs or is that

206more say yes's uh recommendations in wheel house so i feel like that's kind of an in for folks too and we do have such great programs and then we have programs that we may not have a lot of engagement in so how do we support those ones who may not have a lot of engagement but do great work and how do we weed out the ones who you know are just kind of there you know i'm saying so as long as we're incorporating all of that then i'm down and i'm ready to help out with that in any way i can okay i think the first step is for us to first just look school by school and see you know what's even there take a look at you know test scores suspension rates attendance

207you know identify what the goals were for the organizations that are there how long have they been there are they meeting with students now this year has been a little different because some of our community partners haven't been able to get into schools to do some of the work so we'll have to take that into consideration thank you so i'd like to say thank you to the community presenters and um i'm not sure but are you going to have additional forms for other people who also want to do the same type or because they can do so much but we need a lot more for this are you planning on using your committee in the future for for more people uh like this because i would recommend that uh you talk first to dr the

208the superintendent and let her review it and then what will happen is she will um be able to move it forward and the board will just get a summary of uh what they're going to do when she permits it because there are a lot of people out there that would also like this opportunity and um uh our board time um i think we can we can use our time i think we in respect to the superintendent if we give her that opportunity she can uh move it forward and um then bring it to the board as as they presented i think that's a better uh a way that it can get done because as she has a bunch of questions and she met with them first then her questions would have been answered and it

209probably would be probably would be an rfp being issued at this point to move it forward so i'd suggest moving forward that we get the superintendent involved in these firsts because this is a great program and i'm looking forward to seeing if we can do something with it thank you thank you uh uh board member um sharon bellam cottman uh this is a great program i do agree um this this team we've been meeting for quite a while now and before the installment of our new intern superintendent and uh we were we was um projected for this date to present and this conversation went on with the previous superintendent and as we talked about this installation of this and bringing our community partners together so it's been going on for a while now that works

210for it and uh it just so happens that uh it's it happens today into the suit our uh to dr chad williams second week you know as our superintendent here with the district so uh uh let's work together as dr taja williams said to uh set a date and work with gabrielle about putting programs instituting and see what works where uh we have a great great number of individuals here who's willing to dedicate their times and they also bring in members from their membership then so we're looking at possibly having up to 50 to 100 people you know come into this district including sorority sisters and and other entities that work together like in the prison ministry um that will come together and work with our children in our district so um the possibilities are

211endless and like i said there's more ministers that didn't come on tonight and there's others that's calling you know to be part of this group so yes we are looking to push this project on more to avoid more community groups more ministers and bring ministry back into the schools um uh that's the aspect of mentoring and counseling we got people that certified this group for constantly they didn't tell you everything and certified to teach so uh there's a sleuth of people in different areas that we can reach our children at and this community leadership program i believe is a start for a great combination here in our district and i really really respect you know uh these men because there's a million other things they can be doing but they're they're ministering and preaching to

212our community and they feel that the way to change our communities is get to our children and get to our schools and make the change here you gotta mentally change they take patterns of thinking patterns and um and try to um work with the whole whole concept you know to reach the parents so this is something that we've been talking about for a long time as a board and as a district and this is our opportunity to get into those homes to to talk and speak with those parents and also working with our partners would say yes who's willing to to help push this along and get our presenters certified and mentoring um i i don't see you know any other way you know or any other groups that that that came along that can

213do what this group is capable of doing well i'm gonna beg to differ i feel that they bring an asset and we can use them but i feel there are quite a few other groups out there that have made it known that they want to help with buffalo public schools but has not been given the audience at this point and so i'm sure our superintendent is going to work on that i'm just concerned that um um if opportunities are provided that we we are equitable and in our opportunities that can be provided and so when we use a work session like this and go to that level then what other people are texting and saying is that when can my group come on so i think we need to be mindful that um the superintendent

214should and her staff should be you know moving that forward and bringing it to the board so that the board can focus in on an attendance report and a suspension report and and start doing more things that drive student uh my opinion anyway that involves more student um engagement but i love what they've done and i appreciate everything they've done and i i am so glad to see the community is coming forward but i really feel that we have to be equitable in what we do and we need to be mindful of that okay and so uh that's what staff is there for and um uh the board uh gets uh the recommendations of the superintendent and we move forward with that so we got a lot of staff members that are capable of meeting

215and and assessing things and i'm sure they're going to do something with this program um because we need what just said we need more student support but we have to be equitable as a board and we now that you open up this then we have to open it up for other people to be fair so we have to be careful what we do [Music] thank you i do agree that we do have uh other uh programs out you know people have been overlooked in the past and my door's always open my phone number uh answer my phone all times a day all the time tonight and uh and just think about the work that was placed to um work with these groups here we have a national naacp group that's willing to bring you know

216other other uh support send for our community also so when we look at all the groups that's here uh this is endless to the possibilities and and other groups in the city of buffalo who wants to come in and work that like i said i'm receiving phone calls already from other groups like text messages about how can we get involved and i do want to support those groups also that wish for the district to work together to support them also okay thank you so much and again thank you to the partners um that showed up tonight that want to work with our district so we have one more uh presentation for the evening and that will be um under the chairwomanship of dr kathy evans from and i believe um it's under our student achievement

217committee and we're going to hear this evening from miss ebony bullock who oversees our office of shared accountability she's our chief and some of her staff as she shares some information with us regarding high stakes data and attendance and graduation rates dr evans room okay thank you dr williams um worship pleasure board would you like to take a five minute or you want to continue five minutes [Music] ten minutes okay five will be ten so those in favor raise your hand five needs five though dr brown dr evans brown i am i have to go pick up my son i'm gonna get on audio so i won't be on video and then i'll come back when i get him i have to bring him back home all right cool mommy mommy have to be mommy's

218see you in five times okay it looks like it's been about seven eight minutes hi app hello how are you god how are y'all i'm good it's going to be dr bola soon soon come soon come all right we will wait a couple more minutes hello everybody i would just like to steal the stage for a little bit it said mirror um next week when we're gonna be at the waterfront if everybody can bring their laptops we might be doing some swapping we got some new devices for the people that didn't get the new laptop from the district so just an fyi you can all bring your laptops to the next board meeting okay does that include the cabinet admirer i'm joking everybody just everybody and the videos back on um thank you in here

219yep yep no the first email i sent you that first day yeah i did not get that one that we talked i don't think you don't want zero though yeah i don't think you're more sorry it might not have came through at the time i double checked are we live yes okay we're gonna get started um only because it's getting late and um a little long that was the only reason i sent you that text that was i didn't even see it oh i said it's a blood reminder all right just show you what's there all right so if you're not talking please mute we're going to get started this is the march 9th student achievement session and we're so excited to have transparency in our district in terms of attendance suspension rates as well

220as graduation rates um 10 years ago when i was working on my dissertation i remember um the buffalo public school graduation rates was at a mere 48 and it's sort of uh soared to about 56 um other urban districts in this country to see what that looked like and what i found was that they had similar near graduation rates as well so for example in chicago their graduation rate at that time was philadelphia was 45 and so on today our graduation rates in buffalo is now 78.5 up a little from last year 2.2 percent so contrary to the narrative that's out there in the atmosphere our kids do graduate and they graduate unfairly and on time so on time means that kids graduate in four years from the time from the ninth grade to the

221twelfth grade that's considered four years on time so we want to change that narrative in this district that our kids work hard to get out of high school they aspire to change the world they also become teachers business people lawyers doctors i know a lot of them matter of fact four of my nieces last year graduated from this district one got a full scholarship to syracuse in her second semester right now one graduated uh and she graduated from sarah um i'm sorry uh hutch tech full scholarship to madai that's the second one the third critically thinking about where she want to go the last one in fourth she's at ecc doing a two-year college education so i'm convinced that we can do better but i'm also convinced that we have done been successful in a

222lot of ways yes there's room for improvement in many areas but i'm here to tell you that our kids do graduate and they work hard to do that so with that said and i and i also want to just say this our colleges and universities can do better as well okay some of our kids do go go to college i was one of those people back in the 70s i'm not going to tell you how old i was but i remember i had to take a developmental math course before i took a college-level uh math course and i was a pre-pharmacy major so it does happen so our colleges and universities need to work with us this district um to help us uh to reduce that developmental stuff i don't know how but we need

223to take a look at that as well to mitigate you know the process of developmental courses so with that i am going to um turn it back over to our uh superintendent dr tonya williams to introduce her staff thank you so much dr evans brown um i see our next presentation is really bringing everything full circle we started talking about the budget we know that you know the budget is what drives a lot you know it's very important that things like diversity equity and inclusion are part of that we next heard uh you know from a wonderful collaborative that has a whole litany of resources that they want to provide to our students in order to help them be successful and so now we're going to hear from our chief of accountability um and so

224i'm really interested to hear from mrs bullock um you know what our cohort information looks like you know she's going to share some definitions with us on what that really means as far as attendance what our attendance looks like her office enlightening speed was able to post so that all of our parents families community members and whomever i asked the question and 24 hours later it was done so we have posted now on our web page suspension reports and attendance reports and that came under uh miss bullock's leadership so i appreciate that it's another example of the district being more transparent and i'm looking forward to the presentation this evening thank you thank you and good evening um chair lady dr kevin kathy evans brown um uh superintendent dr tanja williams and all of our

225other esteemed board members it is my great pleasure to be co-presenting with my colleague and soon to be dr laura somalski peters she is your assistant superintendent in the office of shared accountability and your data data protection officer we serve at uh the pleasure of you all and it is our pleasure to do the job that we do um admir if you can put up your uh put up our presentation as admirer is doing that i just want to say that i concur with um everything that was just said there is much much good news to celebrate and first we're going to start off with our first slide i do know that dr williams has um if you can go to the next slide so our next slide is the ed bargain we have done

226some updates to this slide so i'm not going to go into it um i don't have the updated language on this slide um and i'm sure that dr williams will roll that out soon enough but what i want to say is that in essence our ed bargain is is a promise it's a it's a two-way promise it's a promise um that what what we as a district will provide to our families our students and our families and what our families and students will will provide to us in that deal to make um education uh impactful for all students now as we always should in this bargain and in the successes that laura and i are going to talk to you about we give first um congratulations we give first credit to parents because we know

227that they are all of our students first teachers and we know that students have done everything that they could they show up with all that they have they show up with their hopes and their dreams the best that they can um every single day no parent sends um a broken child necessarily they send the best that they have and they want us to partner to pull everything great out of them and to make sure that kids have um a great world-class education and what you're going to see in tonight's work session laura and i are going to show you we have done that we are turning the ship around um in a recent interview i told a reporter listen we're not handing out diplomas with lunch if you think that our students and our teachers

228and our families are not doing everything that they can in the classroom to earn a diploma we're going to start showing you a different narrative we're going to start showing you exactly what we're doing and so that's what this presentation is about we're going to show you how we have increased access we've increased equity we've increased opportunity and we increased quality across our academic and our behavioral programming so we're again we're increasing access equity opportunity and quality in academics and social emotional learning and we're going to show you what that means in terms of graduation and what that means in terms of attendance um edmure go to the next slide laura's going to talk to you a little bit about what a cohort means for graduation um and this is a very interesting conversation it's

229an important conversation because sometimes we have some of our babies that are in our high schools for four years um that doesn't always mean they're included in a graduating cohort so laura's going to uh explain to us exactly what the cohort means and then we're going to get into some other discussions so go ahead laura thank you ebony and thank you board members and dr williams for allowing me this opportunity to share this with you so tonight we're going to talk about the the students that graduated from the buffalo public schools during the 2021 school year so june of and august of 2021 those students started high school during the 2017-28 school year which made them members of the 2017 cohort so that's how we calculate who belongs to our cohort they started their ninth

230grade year anywhere during the 17-18 school year our final number of students in the 27 cohort was 2597 students out of those 2597 students 2039 of them were considered graduates as of august of 2021 259 of those students were still enrolled in the buffalo public schools as of october 30th 2021 and 255 of those students had dropped out as of october 30th of 2021 so when a student drops out sometimes um they drop they let us know that they're leaving sometimes we have students who just stop coming to school and we're not always sure where they went but they're still considered a dropout what we're doing right now is we are working with the student supports department and we have a group of attendance teachers who come and work on saturdays over at school four

231and they're making phone calls they're reaching out to families they're doing home visits and on their list are these 255 students that left school and what they're trying to do is number one make contact with them and number two if the child has not completed high school anywhere they're giving them some options they're either trying to get them into a ged program or in some cases trying to convince them to come back to school and finish up so we are doing this this important reach out with our own staff members trying to get some of these students back in and there we could go to the next slide laura i just wanted to add up i just wanted to add a point i'm sorry admit just go back just another flesh out so i just

232want us to be clear the 259 students that are still enrolled they will either be fifth year or six year graduates and that's going to connect to a conversation later on when i talk to you about some of our alternative programs that we are using to support students who don't graduate in the four years i also want to um just give a quick little shout out to the special education department because in that cohort that we talked about just now we do have kids who've graduated with a cdos or or special education credential and that's important to know too because again we're reframing the narrative our kids we are going to open multiple pathways for our students to graduate and the graduation pathway is not just a straight four-year pathway and however they get out

233four five or six we're going to celebrate that but we have great news to celebrate with our four year i just had to add that in thank you laura thank you ebony so this slide that you have in front of you is showing you a historical view of the new york state and bps graduation rate over the last 19 years generally speaking as we begin to make increases in our graduation rate in the bps the state implements some type of change that kind of takes our students some time to get used to as an example if you can see the first line the the first black line that cuts through these line graphs with the 22 excuse me 2006 cohort um the the goal was change the rtt the race to the top application aspirational

234goal of 95 percent was put in place and some of our metrics changed and you can see that right after that shortly after that our graduation rate took a little bit of a dip down to 49 percent our students began to make increases again after that once they uh kind of got used to the new requirements and then a couple of years later the graduation rate standard became 80 but with changed requirements so again we had to shift our focus and in order to get our students prepared to um to get used to that change and be back on track to meet our graduation rate goals so then what you can see that change in 2009 but since then we've been on a slow but steady increase as you can see the chart after um

235that second black line really has been increasing and this year um our 2017 cohort is at the highest it's been so the orange line represents our august graduation rate which ended up being 78.5 percent and our june graduation rate is the blue line just underneath it at 76.4 percent what's not represented on this graphic but i can share with you is that the new york state graduation rate for august ended up being 86.1 percent that would be the yellow line and then the gray line the june graduation rate for the state came in at 84 percent so when you look at the gap between the buffalo public schools graduation rate and the graduation rate for new york state it we have um really in the last few years closed that gap so last year for

236the 2016 cohort our gap our graduation rate gap in june with the state was eight and in august it was 8.5 this year for the cohort 2017 our gap in both june and august decreased to 7.6 so we are slowly but surely closing that gap between our bps students and the state overall also we have spent quite a bit of time cleaning this data and ensuring that there are no mistakes in any of these numbers so in the past we did have some uh fluctuation in our graduation rate due to um data being reported that wasn't necessarily combed through and cleaned the way it probably should have been but over the last couple of years our office has really made a huge effort to make sure that these numbers are as clean as we can

237get them and we can stand behind these numbers and say these are the exact numbers of students who graduated from the bps we've been over them and over them and studied them and these are accurate numbers okay we can go on to the next slide so this slide is showing some of our subgroups and their performance over the last few years so as you can see from this slide our four-year graduation rate for students with different abilities has increased by 12.5 percentage points over the last three years additionally our our four-year graduation rate for english language learners has increased by 36.5 percentage points over the last three years so our graduation our our subgroups are graduating at a much higher rate than they were three years ago and i'm going to turn it over to

238ebony to talk a little bit about why that is so what we know um is that our students even those who may need the support of an iep or a 504 or students who may need the support of an english as a new language learn learner teacher we know that they are just bursting already with knowledge and it's our job as the professionals through strategic pedagogy it's our job to draw that out and so that's what we're doing we're leveraging our clri programs we're leveraging our open excel monies to provide again that increased access opportunity and equity more you'll see uh programs such as our mbk program helps our young men of color connect whether they are gen ed special ed english language learner it's helping them connect with um instruction at a very deep

239level it's helping them see themselves in their uh the things that they're reading the lessons that they're engaging in um all of our work is being met uh mediated through culture and language and we're tapping into kids natural abilities students are having more opportunities in the arts in the sciences and math um all of our high schools offer our high school students the ability to not just take uh regions courses but to take advanced placement courses and college other college uh credentialed courses where they can um get quickly up to speed to where they need to be and get into courses that will help them post high school they get opportunities like jrrtc where they get other kinds of life skills and are able to apply what they're learning in areas of which they're going

240to be able to pursue after college we have all of our wonderful vocab programs all of this helps kids want to be in school help them in their core content area classes help them strive and persist through so that they're able to graduate on time they see themselves and every class also what's helping with this is our unique and um really innovative summer programs and extended learning programs where we are quite honestly using and lending uh leaning on community-based organizations to come in to help our students make up opportunities we have grab point and things of that nature where kids can come in one on one or in small groups and make up uh credits where they might need to make up so these are all excellent opportunities for kids to um tap back into

241school make up credit or get advanced credit so that they are able to graduate on time and see themselves in you know activities that they might want to do after high school next slide laura's going to talk to you um about some more specific data as it relates to our graduation rate thanks ebony so this slide is exciting because there's so much green on the slide um we this is a list of all of our high schools and their graduation rates and any school that is highlighted in green has a graduation rate of higher than 70 percent so you can see um from from this graphic that 11 of our high schools ended up with a graduation rate above 70 percent so um i just want to go through the highlights here so we had

242six high schools with a graduation rate that was higher than 90 percent those were city honors olmstead leonardo da vinci bavpa hutch tech and research lab and then we had another group of student of high schools rather that were higher than 80 percent middle early college uh buffalo culinary arts and hospitality emerson school of hospitality mckinley lafayette south park excuse me south park's in the next group ending with lafayette that was above 80 percent and then the others that were above 70 percent were south park high school international prep math science and and tech msc riverside and east bergart is right on the cusp bergaard is right there we're working with ferguard and and um they're knocking on that door and you know just three years ago bergaard had a 50 graduation rate so they're

243knocking on the door at 70 they're knocking on the 70 door right now but they've made great gains at bergaard over the last three years i also want to talk a little bit about the newcomer academy which is our first school highlighted in red that school is actually closed right now the students that were at newcomer academy for the most part not all of them but primarily are now at lafayette and riverside however when you close a school and you have students who potentially graduated um from other schools but were part of their cohort or who dropped out before the school closed they still end up on technically on the graduation rate for that school so that's why they were assigned they were calculated at graduation rate even though they're closed because there were still

244some some students who didn't have a valid additional location um for us to include them in and then the last two schools on the list pathways academy and the academy school those are um schools that are really um transition schools they're there to help students who have fallen off the right path to get to graduation get back on the path and if those schools are doing what they're designed to do they're getting kids back on track and back into a high school a traditional high school so those two schools do have very low graduation rates but that's because they're really um doing their job they're getting kids back on track and then funneling them to the other schools because they're those transitional types of schools so ebony's going to talk for a minute about the

245different programs that we have in place with some of our high schools that have contributed to these graduation rates absolutely so i want to first of all i want to just go back to the celebration of burgard right so we have a school within three years and again that's because that of that strong partnership with alfred that's that strong welding component that's that struck bergaard is so phenomenal they have community programs where parents and community members can go there on evenings and on on the weekends to learn how to weld so burghard is not just um supporting children they are personifying they're a true model of teaching people how to fish so they're helping the children they're helping the parents they have so a wonderful uh seo programs going on i'm headed up by arlene

246adams who is really in the grassroots um helping with getting some serious counseling and serious seo wrap around interventions around the students and families and that's all contributing and that is making bergaard do what it's doing again three years climbing from 50 percent to knocking on 70 and that is worthy of celebration and that is the whole community wrapping themselves around the students and family that go to burger lord talk to you about newcomers i want to go a little bit deeper with a deeper discussion around pathways and 131 on the academy school what we need to know about these schools is that they have been officially designated as transfer schools and what does that mean number one board you need to know that transfer schools they um they're giving their they are given special

247allowances with respect to graduation rate they're not held to the same accountability um and their primary focus is to take kids who are over age and under credited some of which you might just be coming out of adjudication and exactly what laura said we hope to put them on the right path we create strategic programming for the students that would include high intervention for academics and high quality intervention for social emotional uh needs for those students so they have indoor individualized programming with pathways kids can go to a site and they are in a classroom and they have a teacher that's working with them but they may be at on any given day engaging in several subjects on the computer via like a grab point type program and they're there to make up the credits

248that they do not have these are not the students who would have graduated in their four-year cohort they are always going to be on track for five and six years so four year may be read right but five years probably orangey and then six years definitely much gonna look much better for those schools uh schools and what we probably have to do quite frankly um as a department is to do better with giving you guys the five and six year grad rates for these buildings so the red looks a little scary for these two these two buildings what i want to say to you and what i commit to you is we need not worry toyah wilson and david hills they are working together with dr williams and the entire student supports department and our

249you know our wonderful chief academic officer and botticelli to again create strategic programming for these students i want to tell you that also what these students do or what these programs also are doing is they actually are helping our other buildings let me tell you how they're helping our other buildings our other buildings who have students who have high needs high academic needs high sel needs um and it uh it's not just a gut reaction it's a process but if we have a kid in that in that situation who needs to that a traditional school setting is not working for them we now have the ability with pathways and with academy being that they are in this they're designated as transfer schools we can take that student with high needs put them in pathways if

250the pathways program works for them if not we can consider the um 131 the academy school and if they have programs there that will work for that student that student can go there we are working to build those programs up and that's just a moment of transparency it is not where we want them to be but the plan is is to continue to wrap ourselves around pathways and academy schools to get them best in class in this area of being a transfer school to help students who their needs um are a little bit different cannot be met in a traditional school so but even in that if you look at where pathways and where academy was in terms of graduation rate two or three years ago again they're making slow gains slow games and they're

251having the stat and they have the staff and they're getting the training both staff and students to deal with those high needs in a way that's conducive so we still have much work to do there but that's the that's the plan they're transfer schools they're there to deal with kids who have high needs and that's what we're going to do we will address them at their needs we've done some already some really miraculous things at uh pathways and academy with some flexible kind of schedules for the kids um we have some kids that are there every day um we we already know that pathways of kids engage in their lessons via computer or one-on-one small group we attack their needs however we need to and they also get on-site again very specialized and sophisticated uh

252counseling and support that they need to to master both their academic and their behavioral needs so what i want you to remember is that when we think about pathways and academy we're thinking five and six year graduation rate and we're going to be we're going to do better with clarifying the data around those two schools um laura my assistant superintendent she has she's really good at that that is her primary function is teasing out the data and i commit to you that we will be presenting to you as often as you'd like um clearer data for pathways and academy because there is a success story there they are helping children we're getting through some bumps but there are some success stories there and so now we're going to go on to oh i do want

253to um make a note that um buffalo it is um unique that buffalo a school-like pathways in a school like academy schools in-house i don't we should have another meeting around but other districts do it slightly different um where they place them in a boces we don't do that that's what we're doing um so that was the last point i wanted to make about that and then what laura and i would like to do is open the graduation rate conversation up for discussion is that okay chair lady dr evans brown yes ma'am um so thank you for that thorough presentation um and i'm sure that some of my colleagues here have questions um i don't see any hands okay sharon felton cotman you're on so i have a question thank you for your presentation this

254evening sorry that it's so late you guys worked such long hours i i feel bad keeping you this late but i have a question because in my conversations with principals they feel that the um transfer schools to particularly the pathway academy could better be utilized if it was under under them in other words they could move students in and out of those programs versus how it's currently being done where and it's a very costly program okay and so in talking to principals and i don't know um if this conversation has been had with them where they basically say that if they if pathways was under them they would be able to move students in and out of the program as they needed it where currently there's an enrollment situation where there's a maximum enrollment or

255whatever under that program and what they're basically saying is is that they feel that this program could be better utilized has anyone had a conversation with them about this because i've had two principals tell me that they could uh improve their graduation rates if they were able to have uh that be under their umbrella thank you for that question um board member comment that's a great question and from what i understand i do know that my colleagues toyah and david are on the line i do believe that on various models and ways of moving students in or out are on the table for discussion um and from what i understand if a principal needs to have a child moved into either pathways or academy 131 they should speak to either toy or david they're assigned

256asl and they have a system for working it out that's the best um answer i can give you right now i can make sure i give a more accurate and more exciting that's a good answer but what i'm looking at is the cost factor okay so if we have you know that's a very costly program and for not to attach it to a technical skill or something not to have it attached these are children who have already illustrated that they um uh need additional supports and not to have a technical piece where they learn a skill attached to it i'm wondering if we're under serving or not doing as best as much as we can for these children okay uh and so i'm i'm curious to know if we're having that conversation i know um

257dr williams you're aware of a recently proposed program that was provided or was that was proposed and has not moved i don't know where it's at but i'm just wondering when we look at the cost associated with that you have a principal you have assistant principal you have staff why wouldn't that be under the school's umbrella and at least allow the principals the option to uh uh handle that program and make it more efficient and if you're if you're gonna if you're not going to provide a uh some sort of a technical support for these kids that's my concern of mine when i say technical i should say uh career vocational i should say more rather than technical vocational support for these children and make sure that they get um they come out of this

258with at least a skill or something because they've illustrated that they're not the round pegs okay so i i don't expect an answer this is all new dr williams and i do expect for you just to consider that option because when i look at the cost of that program mm-hmm it's it it made you it may be great in what it's doing but i think there's a more uh more smart more uh less costly method of getting it done i really do that's my opinion thank you okay thank you so i know that we have dr wright on the line and um she kind of coordinates our principal advisory committee and there are secondary principal leaders that sit on that committee and i think it's something that is worthy of perhaps i'm discussing and seeing

259what the principal advisory committee is thinking about you know creating some opportunities even if we pilot a couple you know and some starting with our cte programs so i will uh request that dr wright put that on the agenda for one of the upcoming meetings i would because when we look at the attendance on many of those schools there there was no attendance and so my question is how do we continue to move a program forward when we're not getting enough results um and so not that i did speak to someone who does work with that and they were saying here they've had great success they've had over i think 100 and uh credit hours completed or something like that i'm not knocking the program what i'm saying is for the cost it just appears

260that we can uh probably do it in a better way so thank you for that okay thank you thank you board member cotman uh anyone else have any questions on graduation before we move to the next subject area dr evans if i could just just reiterate um when folks ask me um of course i'm biased because i love this district but i assure them that a number one in terms of exemptions dps is not the only district that benefited from exemptions every high school in new york state benefited for them for the exemptions but what we've done especially in a pandemic um to refocus around supporting the whole child the the mind the heart the spirit of a child to really get them ready and feeling comfortable um and feeling accepted in classrooms connected personally

261to the things that they're learning that is um as dr wright would say that's the magic sauce we've done so much work to make sure that kids who speak all different kinds of languages and our black brown purple green and in between feel comfortable we're doing so much work the cli work the restorative justice work all of that is the reason why our kids even in a pandemic persisted and graduated um we can give you the the the breakdown and the specif this the specific statistic excuse me but one thing that you guys should know is exemptions aside cohort 27 was a unicorn they were a unique group of young folk and many of them actually were on track to graduate on time even without an exemption so we have kids that are doing phenomenal

262work um and would be graduating the exemptions are nice but we have kids that are still showing up and still doing the work thank you for that did that work yeah because you're absolutely right i know a lot of these i gave you an example for my nieces and that's not being biased but other you know young people who graduated in that cohort um despite the pandemic as you you mentioned um because they want to change the world despite all of this other nonsense you see on the news our young people are the next generation you know they are making strides you know in in their careers um i see larry scott has have your hand up larry court member thank you dr evans brown i just want to piggyback on what you just shared

263and what dr bullock just shared i said it last year and and dr bullock just said it very well the the exemptions for graduation applied to everybody suburban parochial charter every single student that graduated buffalo didn't isn't the only district that had the exemptions and used the exemption and similar to what dr bullock said i said this last year just before the pandemic i visited i believe it was six of our new innovative high schools and i saw firsthand from the principles the data that showed that many of those students were already receiving the credit for passing region exams and were slated to graduate with the region's exam whether there was going to be an exemption or not and so i think that just needs to be reiterated over and over and over that our

264students can succeed and i think it's also it also needs to be recognized that we have a diverse population of students and we have different learners and i think the state needs to realize that a region's exam may not be best for all of our students whether they're in buffalo public schools or somewhere else and i i guess my question for the staff is we're probably going to be having regions exams this year and do we expect that this is going to um prop likely just like it's going to impact elsewhere is it going to have a negative impact on many of our students especially those from that are ell and students with disabilities so it's a great question board member scott so yes we will likely have regents this year um i ca i

265can't really conclusively say right now that it would have a negative impact or not what i do know is the work of my colleagues is just inspiring um when i when i see even you speak about your own children a lot when i when i hear my daughter brooklyn coming home describing to me this past thursday in miss jenkins class she did a a heart dissection on a real animal heart when i when i see you know nieces and nephews coming home and they're reading born on the water because they experienced it in the african-american region um my heart says our kids are going to be fine they're going to do fine um i know the work that cai is doing they're they're in buildings with the walkthrough tool helping teachers helping leaders understand how

266to look at student data how to to drive their decisions through what kids are showing today not back then but today what they can and cannot do my heart says our kids will do the very best that they can um are in our nadia nashir hurt the multilingual department blood sweat and tears they're doing everything to support our students um but that the readiness exams are tough and all i can say is my colleagues and i we are committed to this work and we're going to keep pushing hard for our kids and we're going to support them and you support us and we will make sure that our students show up and do the very best they can we all know that those exams are just a number and um that that's probably not an

267eloquent answer board member scott but that's the answer i have this evening dr bullock that's a wonderful answer thank you thank you for that uh anyone else going okay jim mccoll court member jen i um thank you uh board member brown i just want to say that i am inspired in a way that you know it it doesn't seem like there's such a long haul it doesn't seem like we're up against it so hard with all the things that we've been through and you know all of the narratives i really appreciate miss bullock how you just you just give it real like this is the truth you know here are the numbers when people say they want to see data you show them data and now they're going to come back but that's wrong that's

268not you know that's that whatever any way you look at it things are moving in the right direction and we you know i feel like there's new energy and we're going to be able to um really overcome we have students who are seeing that this is they're being supported right and i'm just i just had to comment on how you know you don't have to give eloquent answers because nobody's bringing eloquency to us we're getting the negative and the nasty and the threats and the whole nine so you know you're doing this work to make sure people have something that they can look at touch and feel that's real and i just want to encourage um our staff and us as board members that you know it's all with a grain of salt because the

269numbers speak for themselves people can twist it any way they want and you are doing your thing in the accountability department that word scares the mess out of so many people and you're doing your thing and the staff is doing their thing i appreciate you green means go look at all that green y'all really are inspiring me and i'm looking at this as you know bring on the narratives however you bring it i'm going to throw the data at you every time and i'm going to keep saying we're not handing out diplomas with lunch our kids are doing the work our teachers are doing the work we're doing walk throughs our caa our cai department and our building principals our building leaders our instructional coaches we spend a lot of money on instructional coaches they're

270in the classrooms they're turning the ship we don't want double-digit jumps that wish that would indicate to people that were doing something that we're not doing slow and steady wins the race and that's really what we're doing board collectively that's what we're doing it takes time to turn the she does okay so thank you so much let's move on to your next presentation suspension and uh attendance so chair lady i um i have to apologize we do not have suspension today but we can provide you with some suspension data we do have attendance though and so i'm gonna have laura go ahead and start attendance but dr williams laura and i will make sure that you get a a comprehensive suspension report to provide to the board uh but you should know that september october

271september through january is posted where it normally is posted it's back to where it was and we do have the real-time data dashboard that you could pull forward i'm sorry i just wanted to add that it's not where it was but it is on our website if you are on the main page down in the in the bottom left corner there's a little yellow circle that says district data if you click that there's a tab in there that says attendance and suspension data and all the monthly reports are listed in there thank you laura you're welcome and february should be up by monday at the latest okay great thank you and chair lady as i said if it is okay with you i'll make sure that we um send those reports to dr williams and

272she can get them to you it is on the web but since you were expecting to have them this evening we will make sure you have them in the morning okay perfect it's perfect the floor is gonna go ahead um if you can talk to the the tenth slide i think it's like two slides or if you hit hit keep going next slide we passed it we have to go back one yes now yep that one there we go so this is just a quick explanation of average daily attendance so average daily attendance we take the total number of students that attended school each day the school was open for this school year and divided by the number of students that were supposed to attend school each day that the school was open multiply it

273by a hundred and that gives us a percentage this slide says ada as of two seven um my apologies it should say three seven we checked and checked and this one got by us but as of monday which was the seventh our ada for this school year was 78.83 and this percentage is available every single day on our public data dashboard as well as our internal dashboard so you are able to check it every day it refreshes every night and recalculates so it is available um average daily attendance is different from daily attendance so we do have a screen on the dashboard that talks about daily attendance but daily attendance would just tell me for that day of all the students in the district that should have been there how many were there average daily

274attendance is averaging up every single day of the school year and giving us that long picture of what the school year looked like so we can go to the next slide so this um disaggregation is also as of this past monday on the 7th so you can see that by grade level um we are hovering for the primary grades around 80 percent and our secondary grades are a little bit lower they're in the the lower 70 percent of students um ada also we have the breakdown of ada for you by race and ethnicity by special education status and by english language learners and again the district overall is 78 78.83 so you can see where all of these different groups are in comparison to the district overall so we're gonna can we go to the

275next slide please so what we've done here is we've given you a a daily overview of not ada but daily attendance rate so every single day of the school year what did our attendance rate look like so you can see in september we started off right around 80 percent we started the school year we as we moved into october we started to drop a little bit into the 70s and we can move on to the next slide november started off still right around the 70s and there's little anomalies here and there for example if you look at the first day of november that was a monday that we had school and then we were off tuesday so we took a little bit of a drop in our attendance rate but for the most part until

276we got to almost thanksgiving we were we were right around 70 with our daily attendance and um as we moved past thanksgiving and certainly into the holiday season um and the whole omicron variant we started seeing in december that our attendance rates started to dip down into the 60s and even 50 percents um there is one outlier on the december that's friday december 17th ebony and i have had many discussions about friday december 17th we're trying to figure out why that day was so low um and we're still working that out in our office we can go on to the next slide so in january we did have a difficult time when we returned from break as you can see our attendance was hovering in the low 60s high 50s and that was when we

277had so many uh covid cases in our schools and in our community and it was reflected in our daily attendance rate as we started to come out of that towards the end of january you can see our attendance rate rising and then into february february was a little bit of a roller coaster and to be honest with you many of the lower days you see in february are days that we're remote so we do have some attendance um collection issues with remote school days um but you know we're still um we're still working on those issues and calculating um as students turn in work after the fact from the remote day that increases our attendance rate so right now you're looking at like a a period a day and time when we pulled these rates

278and since then some of these days have increased because students have had the opportunity to turn in work because they were working remotely next slide please and then lastly this slide shows you how we're doing so far in march you can see we've we're we're still on the rise we've had a few days in the 80 percent and we're hovering pretty high up around 80 and um we're still uh you know calculating these days and hoping that will continue to rise as colby cases go down and as the weather gets better we're hoping more kids will be attending school on a daily basis so we showed you the the sort of uh day by day look and how we're looking every day at attendance because this is exactly what we're doing and in september um

279actually excuse me back in october dr cash requested that laura and i began to send him daily uh s sheets to look at what is going on with attendance and we really are looking every single day so admire if you go to the next slide so this is something that we sent every day to dr cash we now send it daily to dr williams and it is by school and we did it high to low so this the schools that had the highest um attendance all the way down and he would get day to day and we can look and see how each school is doing day to day with their attendance what this helped us understand was we needed to really attack homeroom attendance taking so one of the interventions we immediately put in

280because of these daily sheets we have a staff member in our department who every day pulls homeroom attendance out of infinite campus and when she sees that there is a school that has even one home room not have taken attendance she calls and she says hey school number 76 and a half mrs bullock hasn't taken attendance that principal then calls ms bullock to say hey you didn't take attendance and so um and i'm going to talk about some of the other things we did to really attack absenteeism because we needed to yes make sure families are getting their kids to school but we also had a data collection a data issue right we know bad data in bad data out um and we knew that we were calling some families and they're saying hey ebony's

281in school she should have been mark absent so we've done some things to make sure that um [Music] we can we can stand by our data so what you need to know is if a school is in green that means they're above the district average red they're below on the district average and we're just working on a way to now that let me circle back we've attacked all homerooms must have attendance taken taken we do know that some schools particularly in the high schools they have later homerooms to just make sure that they can accurately get how many kids are in because you know sometimes kids might have a late bus or two and so we want to make sure that we always have to the best of our ability the knowledge of who's in

282the building so we attacked homeroom attendance taken we our next big project that um osa and student supports are working on is really um working on when we go remote reminding our wonderful teachers how to take attendance when kids are remote right so if we're the whole district is on remote the teacher must mark the child present which is different if they're in person if they're in person and a child is present they don't have to do anything am i right laura yes is that right yes yes so if when students are in person the teacher doesn't have to go on an infinite campus and mark them present they have to mark them absent if they're not in right but it's the sort of the reverse and it's a function of the platform that we

283have um and so that's that's what we have to do we just remind us so what we what we know now is certain schools will send out blasts right so um you know hey school number 76 and a half remember we're all remote today make sure everyone is signing in you have to go in go through schoology sign into your classes hey teachers remember you mark the kids present so again it's just getting used to a different way of taking attendance when they're in remote now if it doesn't happen again we can go back and we can look and see that they sign into a class later on in the day and then mark the child present did they turn in homework or a class assignment and then mark the child present and the same

284thing for our kids who are on virtual because of you know they might be out on a medical or something like that we just have to make sure that as they turn in work or as they make contact with the school they have to be marked um present that has taken some work to remind teachers and quite honestly we've also had to engage our school clerical staff because they are one of our front lines in cleaning up attendance so if a child comes in later on in the day it is the school clerical staff who would then go in and change that child from absent to tardy which would then indicate that they were present in school so if you go to the next slide admire that initiative i'm sorry can i just add one

285one thing that's going on to help clean up this data um and i have to really give student supports a shout out they have been wonder a wonderful partner with trying to clean up attendance data and so what we have is we have it staff in our office and we also have um some research aids in student supports who are constantly looking for irregularities so for example if a child's marked absent in homeroom but they were present later in the day for classes they're constantly sending um myself and the director of attendance and the assistant superintendent student supports lists of these irregularities that we then give to the attendance teachers and the attendance teachers have been doing an amazing job of hunting down those cases and making sure that the student is correctly recorded for

286every day so that we are not um penalizing kids attendance rates because of clerical or you know uh data entry errors so we have a lot of people in both departments really working on making sure this data is clean thank you i don't know if everybody sees that there's a small white box in front of the slide i'm not sure but this slide lists some of the um enduring and you know as i went over these slides um today with dr williams because um we are very fortunate to have a superintendent now who her life's work has been about student supports and she has intimate and intricate knowledge of attendance attendance policies um attendance interventions and so she has been you know wonderful from from the beginning of this year and last year really helping

287us sort of turn the ship with this data as we went over this line she said you know what ebony we don't really need to have cobit 19 on there anymore because our rates are going down and what we do know is those of us those of our children who are out because of cobit 19 or other sickness they can still access learning and so we're no longer gonna put that on there as a barrier or a challenge because it isn't we solve that if kids are well enough to work whether it's coveted or maybe they're having some other um sickness related um absence issue they're actually not even marked absent if they sign on to school so say ebony bullock is out because she has the flu i may have the flu and mom

288is not sending me because we don't want to spread the flu in the school but i feel strong enough to work today i sign on and i'm not marked absent i get positive attention or positive attendance excuse me and i get great learning for that day transportation we're resolving that we all know what sheryl kennedy is doing we all know the various plans that you're that you've discussed that we've that we're trying to do transportation is on the list still but we're working on it whether we all know that the cold weather months you know some parents are just a little iffy about sitting their kids out when it's so cold that we always take a dip in the cold weather months behavioral infractions that sort of balancing out as well because again really with

289all of these except for the immunization i'll talk to you about that in a second what we do know is this if a child is out because of sick or because of any kind of behavior infraction if they have a device they can log on they can still get their academic and behavioral services that they need and they will be getting marked present for school they will get positive attendance we have you know a small set of kids who every year in october novemberish you know they're out because of new york state public law 2164 they have to get certain immunizations um and and to be clear if they miss two or three days and they're already you know in that at-risk category for attendance so these are some of the barriers we've already talked

290to you about the human error specifically as it relates to when kids are learning virtually let me tell you about some of the things that we're doing to overcome those challenges and barriers if you want to go to the next slide oh okay so i'll get to that in a second this is a survey let me talk about this really quick i apologize that my slice got a little out of order um last month ramona um dr reynolds excuse me did a survey dr cash asked us to poll our community so dr reynolds um worked with her some staff and some of my staff and we did a two question survey if you're sending your kids to school why and if you're not why not and so some of the reasons that um parents are

291saying that they do send their their kids to school they are sending them because of you know many of our schools have wonderful opportunities advanced coursework sports cte programming um music vocal art and so they want their kids to be a part of those um initiatives in schools to take part in that and then some of the reasons why they're not were some of the things that we just listed and we're working to address all of those so dr reynolds staff has those and we're working with student supports to address the reasons why parents are not sending them and my eyes are failing me just a little bit i we had a couple parents saying that sometimes um you know it's weather they're having challenges with remote access but again every time we get the

292voice of the people the voice of our parents we work to try to answer their concerns and so admire if you go to the next slide here are some of the things that we're doing to decrease absenteeism um all schools are offering incentives and i mean right from the beginning all of our schools all of our secondary schools do a wonderful job over the summer hosting freshman academies all of our pk 4 and pk8 buildings they have ready freddy out at the beginning of the year they have welcome back to school cookouts and family gatherings where they're giving families all of the information they need about the wonderful academic and behavioral programs at the school and they're talking to them about getting to school i know that bennett park montessori and some of the schools

293again that have pre-k they have the buses out there they teach kids what it means to get on the bus so they do all of this front loading of this is why coming to school is important and then throughout the year they do different kinds of ascent incentives i know that um at bennett ljb they have the bengal that comes out and they give kids their mascots a cute little bango he goes out and he goes into homerooms or other classes and he'll give kids candies or treats just to keep them encouraged because they're in school they're learning and schools have all kinds of champion breakfasts i know 156 olmstead they have a quarterly champion breakfast where they incentivize students not just for great grades but for showing up to school city honors is something

294um where they honor their kids who have perfect attendance by quarter every school does something um where they on the loud you know on the speaker give shout outs to students to make sure they understand that grades are are are important and you the only way you can really get great grades is if you're in school every day so we incentivize we created a step-by-step manual again we saw that there was an issue with attendance taking human error so we have a manual that tells teachers how to take attendance it gives clerks their responsibilities and their role with keeping attendance data clean um and so that is up on the osa website it's on the student support website we do weekly attendance audits with on student supports laura specifically works with andrea sanders every friday

295and the attendance teachers and they do weekly trainings they do weekly audits of attendance they talk about schools and drill right down to students and families that need support with attendance we know that um there was a targeted initiative to make sure that pls are hired and in buildings and we've um infused that with even more targeted use of pals to call parents and say hey parent-to-parent why isn't ebony here what do you need what can we do to help you get ebony here um we had that initiative where we hired additional attendance teachers through with arp and esser funds and um so more schools have attendance teachers available to them to really support families in getting their kids there to school um i can't say enough about our programming instrumental um choirs musicals uh

296sports academics again uh access to ap and ib courses we have still it you know we're still trying to keep our families safe from covet so we still have a high level safety protocols we don't require mass because we can't but we're still enforcing the make safe choices wash your hands stay home if you feel sick but log on to school right um we're doing regular district and school level analysis of attendance data academic data and behavior because we know it all ties in together we had that really innovative parent survey and one of the things that i'm most proud of and i'll end with this we have some innovative saturday outreach going on dr cash um one of the last things he approved for my office was for us to bring in attendance teachers

297on saturdays attendance teachers do great work during the week but what we know is sometimes we have to go as people as someone even said it here this evening we have to go to where the people are so we are bringing attendance teachers in on saturdays they are calling they're doing home visits this first saturday um under the leadership and direction of laura and andrew andrea sanders they received training on how to do this safely they will continue to get training throughout the process on how to work together to do it safely to use culturally and linguistically uh supportive and sustaining practices we don't want our tennis teachers just barging into people's houses they're doing it in a way that makes families feel safe and they're going to be getting kids back to school all

298of our attendance teachers were able to opt in to this initiative they were hired in based on seniority and based on their availability and laura correct me if i'm wrong they are working almost every saturday through is it april uh no we have three weeks we have eight saturdays that go from they started last week and we will do the last one at the end of june um but we will be there this coming saturday we'll be at school for uh doing making our phone calls right so they start at school for the first we're we're i'm engaging families at at the call level first and then once we're calling if we if we still don't get um what we need we will then move into uh home visits um but we're doing that trying

299to get them you know back to school any way possible i'm laura is there anything you want to add about this the attendance saturday outreach i just want to add i just feel like i need to give one last shout out to student supports and and um director sanders and those attendance teachers they were there on saturday they were they were finding kids they were giving me names to you know provide appropriate locations for because they've moved other districts and they were so excited to be there they were like thank you you know thank you for for giving us this opportunity to find kids and um i was just really impressed with how professional they were and how excited they were to do this outreach to our families so so my board colleagues we listened

300to you we listened to parents and we listened to the attendance teachers they said we have to do something different last year the amount of money that we're paying these attendance teachers i want to tell you we paid a private investigator who just really gave us a list of kids and information that our attendance teachers already knew and they quite frankly they said laura we had this information we thought this guy was going to bring us the kids so we said dr cash that doesn't make any sense let's give that money to these attendance teachers and have them do that face-to-face work and they're doing it and they showed up and they were happy in the midst of the shamrock run this past weekend and i think that that kind of forward thinking innovative listening

301to parents listening to attendance teachers listening to you listening to my colleagues on that quick pivot i think is going to make the difference um in finding students and we're not just looking for board we're not just looking for this current cohort laura said ebony yes it would be great to clean up the graduating the cohort that's going to graduate this year but we should be even looking for little ebony who's a fourth grader nate we don't know where she is let's look for all of our students because we hear the cry that they're students that we have not heard from and so that's what these wonderful attendance teachers are doing just be clear they're not just looking for our graduate are missing in air quotes um potential graduates they're looking for all of our

302kids any of those kids that we say we haven't heard from those are the kids that we're going after we're going to find them admiral you can we can close out the powerpoint and chair lady um it's our pleasure to open up a question well thank you yeah i i believe that you know aggressive outreach is important um to reach out to our children because they're out there and they can be found and it looks like you've done some real innovative and creative uh work you know in terms of that outreach um engaging at the call level and the home visits just to get the kids back so that's that's really huge um i see board member larry scott's hand is up larry so great presentation dr bullock and doctor or soon to be dr

303smelinski smolisky did i say that right peters um just a quick comment i think i have your answer for december 17th are you ready that was the day of the outrageous tick-tock message about about violence yes thank you we were judging you reporting everything there's your answer thank you that makes sense thank you both that makes sense all right larry larry's in the no uh anybody else questions comments sharon belton cotman raise your hand um years ago when we were struggling with attendance we um there also was a report about um staffing when there were uh when the staff did not come to school we saw a pattern of children so i was wondering if we monitor or have we taken a look at or did a parallel graph in regards to that i was

304just curious because that might have something to do with children wanting to come to school if their teachers are not in the building and things and i also was going to share with them that that was the day for the tic tac event as well because i remember the conversations people were having but i was just curious about that because i ran across that report uh years old but i did run across the report i want to thank you for the work that you're doing um i think that we are missing a piece uh i don't know how to incorporate it however but i think um we may need to get a parent maybe at the beginning of the year uh maybe set our expectations and have our parents commit and agree to it um

305maybe in some sort of a contract or something or something that they agree i don't know if they often um are incorporated into the engagement piece and and if they're told how important it is and what happens to children who who don't receive a certain percentage and how many days how it what it equates to learning loss i think um that in addition to that as well as putting the in some way form and fashion in every building i think i've been in schools that have that have it but i don't think all schools have it as you walk in but i really think we might think next year about a contract between the teacher and the parents and the students and and and see if we can uh and then reward those students i

306mean it wouldn't how hard would it be with permission of our parents to list the names of our students who are uh who come to school on a regular basis how proud that would be to have it on our website that you're on a certain honor roll for attendance or something parents could go and look at that and be proud of that just little things like that that incorporate them but i really feel you guys have the a handle on it and i appreciate what the work you're doing thank you board member comment i can get it i can get you a pdf copy of it but you are able as a board to go in um to your sign in to the dashboard um so internally we have um a metric that that displays

307uh staff attendance but we can certainly send that through dr uh williams to you so that you haven't told me how to do it i'm a little bit familiar with that uh data dashboard i've been uh spending a lot of time out there on it so um probably not as much as i was but uh because i'm more comfortable now but uh uh i thank you so yeah you can send it to me but i will look for it because what i'm looking for is to show a parallel with our if they're on a graph if our children are in school if the teachers are not what what happens with that i'm just looking to see it just you know put into paraphrasing but thank you but yeah that's a that's a good analogy because

308i know and i'm not going to tell you what church i go to but when folks know my past is not there they're not going to show up just saying so um i think i saw board member paulette woods hand up pilot oh okay guys i'm just i'm just a little confused so i'm gonna ask to to kind of help me to understand i love your presentation uh i love that you're reaching out for the children i know we needed the attendance teachers to go out and find these kids but i might but my head is sitting here and i'm listening to the one presentation and then i remember the last presentation which had a chart on it and it had all the different schools and it had the attendance as only satisfactory coded green

309and i stared at that that chart and i was trying to understand it and then it had another section and it said the children were critically absent one day a week or something of that nature then the chart had another percent at least 33 percent it said severely absent now i know that was presented to us and maybe it was because it was the winner and the buses weren't picking up children and they weren't getting there but i don't i don't i guess what i i i'm trying to get my head to correlate three pieces of information that i've been given and i i don't know how to do it right now so first is that report which a lot of people have been saying and our all our albany uh assembly people said our

310attendance is a mess okay so they read the that initial report which indicated like half of our children were not coming to school and that's i was kind of worried you know it's like oh my god we got to do something we got to do something then i got my financial data which said we used to have 32 000 children and that's what we were calculating our foundation aid and everything on and that we're now 30 000 children we lost 2 000 children so i got this finance piece that tells me i've lost 2 000 children i got previous reports saying we've got a chronic absenteeism problem with over 50 percent of our kids and now i've got this wonderful report that indicates maybe it was the remote and they weren't marking the kids i

311can can you pull it together that's that's was the old data wrong did something change or it was bad it improved and how do we still wind up with 2000 less kids so i i just i just can't correlate the three pieces of information i've been given help so but i want to say a couple things the reduction in the amount of students that's about um enrollment so we have lost some students right that's people are leaving new york state um i i don't like the narrative that we're necessarily losing them to other entities the population in buffalo has dropped some so we have lots of students so you're right there um and then what what all i want to say is your data protection officer laura paula woods she's a she's a woman of

312of your own heart let me tell you she is a data cleaner that is her calling and what she has done is she has cracked some codes about the error the input errors so there are some input errors laura before i keep going and put my foot in my mouth maybe you can help better explain it okay so i know exactly what what graphic you're talking about and that was a graphic that told us how many of our kids just as you described are severely absent chronically absent at risk and so it's important to understand what those terms are saying so basically if you in order to fall in the severe category which would have been the red bar that we saw in those graphics you had to be absent more than 20 of the

313time we were in school so let's just like put that in perspective out of 30 days if you miss six days of school you will be in that red bar of kids but you have 30 opportunities to miss a day of school so not every child who's in that red bar is missing school on the same day so what we presented today is daily attendance rates which are hovering in the high 70s low 80s but we do still have that chronic severe at-risk and satisfactory that are changing every single day because the target number of what you need to miss changes based on a how many days you should have been in school and b how many days we've had school so just another way to put it into perspective in the green the green

314piece of the bar that we would consider satisfactory attendance that means you've not you've been in school 95 of the time if you missed two days of school out of 30 days you can't be in that green bar so it's just a different way of measuring the metric and i know that red green orange that looks really scary because we have so many children in the red um but like ebony said there are some data systems going on that we are working to clean up that will improve those numbers um some of it has to do with covet if somebody had covet and was placed in quarantine they're in the red they just missed enough days of school in their mandatory quarantine to get placed in that red bar so um the daily attendance looks

315a little different because like i'm saying not everybody's all absent on the same day but we we do recognize that that other one looked a little scary did that help clarify it at all yes but can you match it to now what you're presenting if if if a child makes six days that made them into red yeah but that means that they actually attended 24 days so that would actually give you this attendance of what six eighty percent so even if even if they're in the red severe we we have 80 attendance is that kind of what you're saying it's kind of what i'm saying because i have to think of it like this all of those kids who are falling in the red are not absent on the same day so if they were

316our attendants would not be 80 but there could be some kids who are absent today and tomorrow we have a different set of kids that are absent friday we might have a different set of kids so we're still hovering it 80 percent of our kids come to school on every given day it could be that we have kids who take one day a week off and then they're gonna be in that red bar but that isn't you know what i'm saying like on the other four days of the week they're there and they're counted towards the present kids if i can it's also very similar to what we're looking at with our kids who are struggling behaviorally we have a small group of kids now their behaviors are like level five they're like big behaviors

317but it's a small group of kids it's the same thing with attendance we have a small group of kids who are on paper really really absent that we know are really absent um and they're absent a lot and that's scary because you know they could get into trouble if they're not in school but the great majority of our kids are getting to school every day we will we want it higher than 80ish percent um we would like our secondaries to be around 85 and our elementaries to be around 90 to um and we'll get there um i think this is also a discussion that we're having internally about what it means to be present for school is it present in person is it present virtual how much work what is the contact so we're having

318a very nuanced discussion so board member woods you are right where you're supposed to be we're all supposed to be scratching our heads saying i can't figure this out because we're in a new space and we have to be thinking about attendance differently the state is going to be the state and the state is always going to hold us accountable to certain metrics and even they're starting to loosen up a little because this mess that they say our attendance is is because they changed the game halfway through a year and said nope i want you to take attendance this way and with a district our size we can't we can't flip like that and they did that in the middle of a pandemic and i'm not there's no excuses we did the best that we

319can but we have a small number of kids who have some attendance issues and we're going after them but right now we got we have about 80 ish of our kids coming to school and we're going to incentivize them we're going to incentivize their parents we're going to incentivize and give teachers a pat on the back for taking attendance the right way and we're going to wrap them around and wrap them around keep them and go after the ones that we need we know we need to get back in school well then just last last question does that's does that mean that we don't have what appeared to be like we lost a third of our kids because of this two-year pandemic we didn't we didn't lose how many kids did we lose who decided

320i'm not going to school they went to work or they just off they're just they're lost of god i mean i was given the impression that was that was a big problem too so please give me some good news that that number was not a third of the kids it was approximately uh back in the fall it was hovering around a thousand students and we've now whittled it down to about 500-ish that we're still looking for on those saturdays now do that include so which you know i know every year since i've been on this floor we've been uh receiving somewhere around 700 kids returned from charter schools has that happened yet absolutely we get students every day over at central registration not just from charter schools but students that move to the city you

321know we get students from out of the country that have moved to the city but every day that office is very very busy registering new students yeah i believe it was um mr starkey over at lafayette who just recently shared with us the in the number the the number of afghan and students from um the russia i'm losing language to the the the country that russia just just took over ukraine ukraine and i was surprised how quickly this has happened but he has a uh really his number of afghan and ukraine students from ukraine have just shot up from these two different countries um we're getting students foster uh you know students who are in foster care we have um migrant worker families who are migrant workers and that this is around a time when

322we start getting um those kids coming into our district so it it's fluctuating um again the narrative that we have lost kids we should really really contextualize it again regionally our population is down when parents leave they take their kids right so that's their they've either moved out of state or they've jumped over one of our first ring that borders into our first ring suburbs um but again the fact that we had about a thousand ish students on our rows that we needed to find we've knocked that down since about september to about 500 and so that is to celebrate some are back on our rolls and back in our schools some we have found have moved away um or have you know you know they're in other school districts or school um you know

323school entities and we will find those other 500. so i want to just say i mean i i think ebony and laura are doing a yeoman's job they are doing some things that are innovative that i have not seen and i think what you know one of the things i'm hearing tonight is that attendance is really everybody's issue you know so everybody has a little peace and you know helping to make sure that our children are coming to school and i think whenever you really start you know scrubbing data and really trying to be as accurate as you can if there is the possibility that you reveal some gaps but that's what helps us then go in and support and know what we have to do so those saturdays that you have those attendance teachers

324going up never seen anything like that and so i i will be you know um anxious to see what the outcomes you know are from those saturdays that they're out and training them you know to go out it's a little different when you go to someone's home during a work day than going on a saturday when the whole family's there things are a little bit more relaxed so i mean you have to train folks on how to engage with that and um you know we did have a different kind of year with covet and you know some kids were in isolation multiple times um you know and so that was very unfortunate so i think you know attendance is complex as it is but this year it really became complex but i i think we've

325got two ladies on the scene or on the job that are attuned to it and are leaving no stone unturned thank you dr williams you know in in in i just want to say this i know that attendance is an issue across this country in many school districts california namely um and so we're not uh it's not unique to us there's a hand in city hall um i don't know who it is but you have a floor it is nine it's actually ten o'clock and we need to wrap this up so we can go into uh i think we're going for executive sessions so go ahead in the city hall thank you i will be very brief uh first of all the city of buffalo has increased in population first time in a generation so

326we've had a little uptick in population so that's a good thing just i'll put my buffalo booster hat on um thank you very much for the surveys i think these were outstanding because it lets us know why people aren't sending the kids or why they are sending their kids that's really great with that though i was kind of curious because the two questions that i would have liked to see added would have been um you know either vaccine refusal or vaccine or whether or not a person was vaccinated as a condition as to whether or not they were sending their children there because i know a lot of people didn't want to have didn't want to be vaccinated um and the other reason i heard often was the lack of a remote learning option that

327there i know there were many families that wanted a remote learning option uh just because they were they had these health concerns and because it wasn't a an option for them because they didn't have a medical condition um that they kept their kids home as well but i thought this was honestly i i'm going to refer to this survey over and over as i'm making decisions going forward because it really gives us a basis you know particularly the uh why you're not sending your kids there i mean that that's a nice response rate i mean that's it was good i mean i like this the more type stuff that we can do like this the better the board is because then we can make informed decisions as opposed to trying to make it um uh

328make a choice based on anecdote this takes us out of anecdote and gives us some like hard numbers some survey results some good things to help us uh guide our decisions as we go forward so thank you very much uh that's that's all that i have thank you president i just wanted to say i'm sorry charlie i just wanted to say report that that was a free response survey so we didn't front load responses that they could choose from if vaccination is not there and it's tiny but i don't see it there on to your point president petrucci um that means that no the other parents who responded that wasn't a response that they offered so this truly was we didn't give them a drop down or choices okay they were able to put their

329own choice in that that's even better to know that's great thank you that that's really that's that's even more impressive that that's really good i like that thank you very much for clarifying and the response rate was very impressive um that was a good response rate considering um there's another hand i believe is court member terence hurd yes um thank you um hey um uh miss bullock and um and uh this is a great presentation and also i'll just like to um ask one question uh pertaining to it uh just questions but um as i look at the graph um the um the rates for um attendance and that's about 25 as we spoke about for african-american for um for um hispanic and also a native american uh 25 uh that doesn't attend so my

330question is um how does this compare to free do you have any data on that uh what were we at before pre-coding so we go back to 2018 and how and what's interjected now we we actually do have that data i don't have it in front of me right now but we can make sure we get it to you okay thank you okay thank you very much and education in school okay thank you um thank you thank you again now kathy all right thank you all right so no other questions um uh i'll give the floor to dr tanya williams do you have any last-minute comments if not this will conclude the student achievement session thank you dr evans brown i have no comments i think it was very thorough um it was an excellent

331presentation thank you ladies okay yes um i see nate is here nate i'm going to pass the torch to you yeah i provided a a script to board member or board president petrucci to go into executive session but at this point there are a number of cameras that are off i'm not sure if that's intentional or not i can't see the folks in 807 city hall and you know i'm concerned about having a quorum to go into executive session so if there are any board members that are on that have their cameras off that would like to participate in executive session please show yourselves thank you nate i have a different perspective uh i see that we do have quorum here uh i said yep larry and jen just came on so we do and

332terence is here terence is here is where i see him looks like he's a little dark i can't see me blue is there a reason why the camera is not on uh i do not know i i just i i changed terence's terrence is actually in his car right now but terence is there i can see terence's smiling face or at least the bottom half of his smiling face um because he's in his vehicle driving home okay well i think i think we're okay at this point we have five that i see that i'm i'm comfortable okay well that being said um may i have a moment right now okay may have a motion go into executive session for the following purposes to discuss the lease of real property to discuss the potential discipline and

333dismissal of a specific district employee to discuss a contract with a particular vendor and to discuss collective negotiations with the buffalo teachers federation so moved by jimmy cosey do i hear a second second by larry scott so at this point we're going to go into executive session uh admire i need you to uh restrict everybody except for our board members and nate and um to the extent i will be coming up uh to the board room um but i think we'll need david hill's can remain okay and uh dr carestas i think he was in the building i'm not sure anymore if he's gonna do it virtually or come up to the board room but he will need to what about uh superintendent yes and of course yeah dr williams thank you yes okay um

334dr caress is on the eighth floor gotcha i'm in my i'm actually in my office nate okay are you gonna do it virtual so in my office okay all right so we need darlene and tamika i don't think we need either all right i will be up momentarily can anybody else see the board room or is it just my computer that i can't see in there we cannot get the camera's off yeah admire can we get that fixed if i come up there so we can see in the boardroom yes you can okay cool be right up okay blue red they got coffee up there lou in the boardroom we do paulette but uh i've i've had quite a few cups so i'm trying to not drink anymore oh send me one through the phone

335if i could i would paulette uh do you want to grab the door for you yeah just a second guys [Music] let me see if you guys see her i don't see her in my end yeah well in there let me see if she's on yeah participants maybe just my yeah no she's not she's not in there right okay so yeah we will let you know okay i think we have everyone i do i do want to see everybody though edmure i'm hearing that the live stream is on yup i got it okay thank you just let me know when we're ready you said the live stream was uh