001flowers wouldn't happen i didn't get a chance like i really would have a hard time mailing you a thank you card i don't worry they were beautiful they were beautiful thank you good evening everyone all right we're ready when you are guys yeah i i i'm just going to open up the meeting and turn it over to our chairman of the finance and operations committee uh good evening everyone welcome to the january or january sorry everyone i'm getting ahead of myself december 8th work session uh we have four committee meetings tonight our first meeting is finance and operations i will turn it over to our chairperson miss paulette woods paulette the floor is yours you're on mute bullet can you hear me now yes we can hear you now good evening board members staff members
002and community a welcome to the finance and operations work session we have some great updates and progress reports on two very important areas uh one is our wbe mbe where we have opportunities to improve the lives of our students to improve our lives of our students our parents and our community uh we made a lot of progress on making sure that all taxpayers in every county have the opportunity to do business with buffalo public schools and to attempt to create diversity in our vendors this is important because our students when they graduate want and need jobs and by extending opportunities to all members of our community we create economic development and businesses and provide fund opportunities for our students so i want to thank ramona williams and dr cass for the additional outreach you've been
003doing for these months in this area the second report is going to be on the arp american rescue act funds which is a great opportunity in a long time to remake our educational system 280 billion dollars to model expand and provide additional educational resources to our children and to address learning loss during the last two years of hobits uh dr cash will present and let you know how we're going to uh expand remote learning our technology more social economic supports to our students and also to build bridges and partner with our community so with that said it's an exciting time and i give it over to you dr katz i turned the mic to you and your excellent staff all right thank you chairman woods i appreciate the introduction colleagues this is a presentation that
004i think you will find illuminating uh jeffrey pritchard our cfo and i will share some of the slides cfo pritchard will have the lead on most of these i will start with three slides regarding the mwbe uh efforts that we are making the policy that you have as a board certainly there's a law at the state level that supports this work but i thought it would be important for this presentation to start off with some data about mv w e's and really get a good handle on what that data is both for the city of buffalo the county of erie county and the state of new york and jeff and his team have done some deep digging on how many of those entities exist and are available to do business with us but with some
005caveats so we think this will be a good educative work session i encourage you all to to tune in and after just a few slides we will be able to have a discussion i recommend tonight colleague that we have the first three slides and then discuss mwd and then we go to uh the five slides related to arp funds monitoring and budget timelines somebody has their mic on and we're hearing a lot of feedback so colleagues if you could uh make sure your mics are muted while we have the uh presentation and the discussion unless you are speaking all right thank you very much so mr pritchett let's lead off with our um mwbe population what is the data what does it look like what's the population of this of this work mr pritchett okay
006uh thank you dr cash uh good evening uh board members um as dr cash mentioned there are uh there's quite a few slides in my presentation tonight actually the first three being mwbe so we'll try to get through those as quick as we can for questions admire can you please go to the next slide page number two um so back in march we had given a presentation on some of the initial data gathering uh relative to mwbe and uh that presentation is still posted on the finance webpage so it's march 3rd um but one of the things we wanted to do here because it's i think it was helpful for us as we started to look at the data to actually compare um you know the the number of of minority and women-owned businesses that
007we have on in our vendor system versus the the uh the lists that are in new york state in the county which are who we uh measure our mwbe performance against um and uh you know we had looked at it sort of in in numeric terms before but i thought it was helpful to to turn these into some charts so there's actually two charts on this page um and i'll go over the one on the left first so the one on the left um has uh it's got three groupings of of vendor counts um so the the leftmost is mbe some minority owned business the one in the middle is is wbe women owned business and then the one on the right is actually a sum of the two now i have a little note
008at the very top of this chart that i think i may have probably double counted some because there are some businesses that would fall under uh and uh minority and women owned and in this case i'm actually i believe adding them up here but i i didn't have the data to fully disaggregate and and again this this chart is really just to kind of show just sort of a population um the populations that exist in in in the county and in new york state um and there's actually if you go all the way to the right you'll see the mwbe so that's sort of the combination of both the the green bar is bps that's that's us so we have a little over a hundred um mwbe vendors in our system we're in process right
009now of actually being able to separate those into minority and then women own but at this point i don't have that and i didn't want to guess at how they are so i'm only showing it in this total section here of mwbe um so there's approximately a hundred um and the the other data on this the county in the state is actually from the march uh presentation so i haven't had a chance to update that yet um but the orange uh the orange bar that is the county uh next to that you'll see the gray and that is the county mwbe listing to the extent that they that the businesses are are housed in buffalo um the largest of the bars in here is actually the state mwbe and you'll see that whether it be
010minority owned women owned or the combination both that that kind of yellowy orange is is the highest so there's approximately 700 vendors at that time there were 700 mwbe vendors in new york state and then next to that is the blue our new york state certified vendors that are um in the city of buffalo um it's it's it's quite possible in fact i'm certain of it that there are you know some of these vendors they're they're they're in multiple groups so a vendor might be on the state listing in buffalo they also might be in the county listing in buffalo so one vendor could actually show up in each each of those charts and they also might be one of our vendors um so if you and if you look at it we've got about
011a hundred um that are certified in our system at this point um approximately 200 are certified by the county 700 by the state so our our the the number that we do business with is a it's a measurable meaningful number of the mwbes that that exist um that are certified in the state um obviously not everyone can do business with us um in in the data that we have itself you know we may be missing some we we believe we probably are so that's that's just a kind of a quick recap of those um the chart on the right is what i wanted to look at next and that really just to try and get an understanding of the scale and scope of our overall vendor system so the left most um bar there is
012the the buffalo public schools uh vendor population we have approximately 9 000 active vendors um in our system um i don't know the numbers that exist i don't know the number of vendors that the state has or the county but when you look at ours it's approximately nine thousand i suspect the county in the state um both are significantly larger than ours um that's how many folks we do business with net goes from the largest to the smallest not every vendor we do business with every day some intermittently some very small amounts there are some large ones in there but the total number of vendors is around nine thousand at the very very bottom of that of that chart um in green you will see that's that hundred or so that are um the mwbe
013vendors so right now if you look at our vendor population that the bps uses um a very very small portion of our vendors um are our minority and women-owned businesses that are certified by the state or the county um and then next or above that you'll see kind of with a dotted line if we were to um have as every one of the state vendor state certified minority and women known vendors if every one of those were in our vendor system it would still be less than a thousand it would be around 700 but then again compare that to the overall population so the point here really is that there is a lot of work to be done um and and we play a part of this and and and i think we've done some
014good work over the last couple weeks with some of that outreach of trying to you know start small but start start finding identifying different folks we need to start getting them certified as well but it's it's important to just understand that right now in even if you took every single potential mwbe business in new york state that's on the certified state list they would still be just a very very small portion of our overall of our overall vendor um population um in in what we have found is that and women owned businesses tend to be a bit on the smaller side uh relative to some of the larger vendors that we have you know we have some big vendors that we that we make purchases from um that uh you know publicly traded companies and
015things like that um and health insurers and and so forth that you know there's a lot of dollars there but uh there's there's certainly a lot of uh work to be done but i think it's again it's important just to show the the the scale that we're that we're working with and this again is all data that we've looked at before but we didn't look at it sort of in a graph and i think sometimes it's helpful when we see these things in in a graph um now i wanted to go if we can add mayor if we can please go to the next page um included in the board docs agenda is a a document and uh that document i'll kind of show it you probably can't see it in in my hands here
016but it's a two it's a two-sided document that actually lists um so far what we've been able to compile so we had the director purchase over the last really almost two years come up with a system uh of of taking the you know going through our policy going through the eligible spend that we have which essentially correlates to what we bring to the board um so our mwbe policy for uh most spending uh starts at twenty five thousand dollars we bring items to the board uh bids or otherwise at twenty thousand dollars so they correlate very closely so we're actually using uh data in um in in board docs to create uh um what will ultimately be a quarterly report that we would share with the board that shows the actual tracking on a on
017an annual basis a historical basis in terms of minority in in women-owned businesses this is just a start and there's going to be a lot more uh as we begin to disaggregate things even more it was a little surprising to me how how much how much effort we put into being able to track this data um i'm i'm big on data in in numbers and things like that obviously given given my role here and i've i've generally found that it's when we start looking at the data that's when we start to ask the good questions that's when we start to figure out how to improve processes and that's when we when we will start to see things take off um this data here um is is just a snippet of that handout that is in
018in in the two-page handout that's in board docs um so you have the presentation and then you have the award data so this document here um or what you see here is an accumulation for the 2021 fiscal year of all the awards that went through the board and there were 321 of them so i'm kind of on the left-hand side of that of that table there there were 321 awards next to that will see that there were 13 of the items that went to the board there were 13 that were fully compliant with our mwbe policy and the mwbe policy essentially is that 25 percent of the award would go to a minority or women-owned business you'll see 13 so of all the awards a very small number are are compliant with the policy at
019this time that that that's based on the data from last year now this data again 220 2020 21 and 22 so far it's a little bit different you know we've got we've been in covid we've we've had less activity less less bidding things are different than they were a couple years ago but it's still it's it's you know a little less than two years worth of data that we that we have um and uh you know that's that's where it is now um so again you can see on the date on the left the number of awards the number of compliant awards then the number of minority business dollar awards the um women business entity dollar awards and then of the total dollar award so that's that is of all there's a a large accumulation
020of all the all the bid items that we've brought to the board we keep them in in a master document that actually then populates this um you know this summary sheet i'm going to take you over to the right hand side of of this little chart where you will see um fiscal year 2022 through the first quarter highlighted in yellow you'll see fiscal year 2021 and then fiscal year 2020 and then a total and um that's where you're going to see i guess at this point the the summary of based on this data um where we are in terms of tracking to our uh minority and women owned business goals so i'm going to just kind of run down these numbers quickly with you and and again this is uh this is a document that
021when we put it together i i spent hours and hours and hours talking with the director of purchase going back and forth what does this mean what does that mean it's the type of thing you have to look at a while so i i fully expect that uh in the days ahead i'm going to receive some phone calls with people saying can you please explain this better i want to understand that so i i you know i don't i don't want to get ahead of myself thinking that this will be fully uh followable to everybody because it's something that i have to look at all the time as well but in each one of these years i've got a compliant ratio at the top and you'll see that over the three years that are in
022this about five point one nine percent so about five percent of our uh awards have been um compliant with our policy meaning at least 25 percent of the award went to a minority or women-owned business uh immediately below that you will see the award dollar for minority uh minority business um as a percent of the total award um and that is actually 0.37 in total over those over those three years uh below that is the women owned business and that adds up to over those three years and again i'm just going over the total column 4.22 and then together the mwbe award as a ratio of total awards about 4.59 our policy is asking for 25 in total um we're at over this period of time 4.59 so it's much less than the whole uh
023or much less than the than the policy uh limit it's actually when i look at it and i compare it to the number of vendors we have i'm actually a little bit heartened thinking that there's one there's room to grow and two because of the sheer number of vendors that are not uh certified um the fact that there are many that are um shows that we have that we have achieved some here um some level of success in in this most of it though you will see is in the women-owned businesses um not in the minority um so that is you know that's that's that little snippet of data because that's really um you know this is at this point based on you know based on the data that we pull out of our board
024docs this is something that on a quarterly basis we intend to continue to update and and we'll have all this data tracked over over multiple years um it's it there are absolutely limitations here um you know a couple things one things that are obvious um there is minority and women-owned businesses that are are are that we spend with at low levels small dollars that wouldn't cross over the policy threshold those aren't reflected on here we know that there are minority and women owned businesses that are not certified they're not reflected on here we don't at this time have the subcontractors included there there are times when a vendor has known subcontractors that are minority owned minority and women-owned businesses and we do not have that in here yet out of state you know a lot
025of our vendors are out of state our policy does not recognize out-of-state certifications for minority and women-owned businesses so those would not be represented in here as well um you know and and there's also many businesses that are not uh eligible so not-for-profit organizations even like church groups things like that i don't believe they can be certified as mwbes because of their not-for-profit status so that you know that that's really the the data um in in that handout or the the other you know that where where i pulled this from on that page there's actually three different sections so this includes all awards that went through the board including awards that were subject to a bid or rfp or quote plus awards that might have been that did not so those could be renewals sole
026source preferred sources things like that so to the extent that there is not competition in our solicitations we're not opening them up to minority-owned businesses um and and that's you know that's that's just a function of you know there are many different procurement methods that are out there um we we try to stress the the rfp and bid as being the most uh wide wide ranging in terms of uh you know opening it up to as many folks as possible because that will allow us to help help um you know basically help out and identify and get get bids and quotes and so forth from minority and women-owned businesses um so that that data there um kind of summarizes where um you know where we are with uh with the both in terms of dollar
027awards and in terms of just the the compliant ratio meaning just the number of awards that we make that were compliant with the policy itself so we are a long way away from uh 25 um but certainly um i think that things that we've done over the last little while one in terms of being able to start seeing where we are and in terms of this outreach um i think has gone will has and will go along you know a long way we've also talked to vendors again and asked them to be certified i've actually um on a couple occasions i've i've filled out a letter and sent it to the state um because there's things like that that we can do too to help help vendors that we work with get through that certification
028process quicker because not everybody wants to do it it can be time consuming but obviously it helps a wider goal i'm going to uh go to the next page if we can now and uh dr cash this may be i don't know if you wanted to kind of jump in here for a minute to to lead us off here yeah jeff just i agreed is mine i don't know why you limit me to a minute maybe you're trying to give me a hint there but uh you did a good job jeff and i do colleagues want you to really focus in on that data because while you have uh i think a good aspirational policy in your five four one four five page uh policy there related to this matter and whereas new york state
029law executive law article 15 a summarizes much of the same kind of language that you have in your 5414 policy 15a also offers outreach support to minority and women-owned businesses through the division of minority and women-owned businesses in the state so that's good all that foundation is good but but what you do have to notice is that the number of certified minority and women-owned businesses is very very small relative to the total number of vendors that there are doing business in new york state and then of course by deduction doing business here in the buffalo public schools 9 000 to just over 100 107 to be exact that that jeff is mentioning so we have 107 certified minority-owned businesses doing businesses with the buffalo public school who has over 9 000 uh vendors that we
030are doing business that's the picture and so uh jeff is right i think the goal right now is aspirational um it's not um real realistic right now uh for it to work but where we can make some headway i believe is to start to unpack what our top uh commodity buys and spends are and what our top services uh that we need for the buffalo to run the buffalo public schools are and that's the space that then we do outreach and we do training and we do data tracking to try to get uh more minority vendors in the game so to speak if you will particularly minority as in people of color women of color males of color males of different cultural backgrounds and so forth the white minority owned businesses can be a sticky
031wicket sometimes colleagues and that's a conversation that should be had in and of itself sometimes for example a caucasian female will be the face or the head of the uh organization uh but when you dig down and peel back uh there's my uh primarily caucasian males that actually uh are and make up uh the composite of the business uh but that that's just part of this and so when jeff said i couldn't quite peel and disaggregate the two that's work that that we'll need to continue to do now good news is i have some personnel that i've been talking to and that i think would be very good people to assign to this work and uh and and we could begin then to to do some of the support services the outreach the education pieces
032that must go with this the uh motivation and say hey you know what you can grow your business you ought to grow your businesses and add more services to to your present uh repertoire those are things that can be very motivating encouraging sometimes businesses don't know uh where they can expand and how they can expand uh so that that connection to those uh educative services is something that we can improve upon and be helpful with uh the other issue though and sometimes it's a stumbling block is that sometimes businesses don't want to go through all that it takes to become certified and that and then of itself can be challenging uh for some for some the businesses so the alignment and the work to get more into the gap of this is is where i
033see us heading uh colleagues and uh i think the first thing needs to be people and i'm thinking of two at least two individuals here in terms of the roles one role over in uh jeff's wheelhouse and perhaps another role uh over in legal uh the services legal department and the two working very closely together i think will make a powerful combination to help expand and grow minority business participation in the buffalo public schools so that's where we are that's our three slide presentation and i think at this point we can open up for discussion comment questions and so forth miss woods chairman woods back to you okay um i i do see a hand let's see who this is um [Music] it says there's a hand up can uh i don't see who it
034is who is that shirt heard oh okay mr hur what's your question uh dude how you doing hey um um first mr pritchard thank you for doing all the detail um work to get these percentages and and all the information back to the board about a minority participation and our outreach to the community and thank you dr cass for also supplying more efforts to our reach out to these individuals who do own businesses and possibly work and get them certified in the future it's very important for our community and very important goals to establish and i believe that you know it takes a full effort of people uh not just the board but uh this uh community and other organizations working together to meet these demands you know to kind of fill up some of
035our nwbe and on wbe and be statuses um um a question to mr pritchard uh i know you mentioned about uh our church groups or groups that's a non-profit that may not be able to uh utilize these um these these um uh recommendations um about what moving forward but how does this affect uh not-for-profit for-profits organizations could you smile a bit more about that yeah i mean you know i'd have to get the exact details on who's eligible to be a certified minority or women-owned business but there are entities that are just they're not eligible to be to be that so um you know we have vendors so we we have a large you know our vendor system includes other schools other school districts um those those are not you know there are um you
036know i believe not for profit organizations or other governments those cannot be um certified at mwbe so that that's not you know that certification is not necessarily the be all and end-all of every of every um every vendor it it's you know that's that's basically what the you know how the law is structured is around i believe for-profit entities um being um being eligible for certification provided they're women-owned or minority-owned or both okay but have we looked at not-for-profit for-profits we have 501c3s and 501c4s yep my understanding is that the not-for-profit are not eligible to be an mwbe if they're not-for-profit for-profit so that that may be a group like uh united way or goodwill associates we're actually making a profit but they still give services and can can give and deliver services i'm not
037sure i can answer that i i'm i'm thinking that all those organizations are not for profit you know every even not-for-profit companies still maintain fund balances you know they may run surpluses but the idea of that they generate profit to provide to an owner um or a shareholder is sort of i think the distinction between not-for-profit and um and and a for-profit company you know for-profit companies are trying to make money not-for-profit are trying to serve a a greater purpose um and any quote-unquote profit that they might have is really meant to be reinvested into that entity not not forced to take out as as uh you know as an owner yeah it generally is used for um overhead and um this meeting um the demands of the company so we're looking at possibly uh
038advertisement or community outreach programs things in that manner so we do have some that may be qualified but let's talk later mr heard is give us a list of any uh entities or organizations that that may come to mind or you're interested in inquiring about specifically and we'll look into it we'll we'll call the division of uh minority and women-owned businesses at the state level and uh we'll get a nice report uh to you for those non-profit and for-profit entities that you may be thinking of we'll be happy to look up and look into that thank you sir all right thank you okay um um board member heard just because a church group or a non-profit group isn't a might isn't going to give us credit for our mbe wbe program doesn't preclude them from
039working with the board so you know we can't get a two for maybe but you know we still can work with them so don't be disheartened i see a hand up from um down the city hall um board president um you have a question i i do actually have a few questions uh thank you for recognizing paulette uh jeff have you have you disaggregated the data to see by contract size for mwbe vendors because oftentimes the the size of the contract um just because many of our our vendors either can't get bonding or they don't have the capacity you know there's a variety of reasons why they're unable to bid on a larger contract yeah yes uh specific to that question so you know we have the the data summary that that's in that handout
040is made up of many many individual awards all in detail so this is just an accumulation of all that what i tend to look at um if if you look at on that the the slide that we had the the number of awards that we had that were compliant with our policy in 2022 was about 5.45 um the actual dollar awards to minority and women-owned businesses was only about 2.9 so that tells you that of the awards even if if the number of awards just in total count was about five percent it's only it's a little over half of that is actually in terms of the dollars which means that that the minority and women-owned businesses tended to be uh smaller on average than than the non and that's something you know we've we've seen
041that across all the years that we've seen that same thing that that minority and women-owned businesses on average are going to tend to be on the smaller side relative to some of the larger vendors that we work with um just and there are obviously some very big vendors um that that we work you know that we work with yeah that was going to be the next question jeff is that often times the other thing that you find when you start looking at the debt is that we have a lot of sole source contracts uh we have a lot of contracts that we are obliged either by uh we we have obligations or we make purchases let's say like health insurance uh something along those lines that we are um that we are obliged uh but
042but the number of vendors we have are very limited and that takes a large part of our budget a huge part of our budget and there's a lot of services like that transportation and on uh along those lines some of our biggest expenditures uh do not have an mwbe uh person um or an entity that we can deal with so or that we can uh um that we could uh or that could provide the services i should say um so i don't know if you've looked at that yet detroit start disaggregating the debt along those lines in terms of the overall percentage of contracts and what's obligated for us to spend that we don't really have a lot to or we have limited options you know because that's part of the things we've looked at
043this in the past but that's one of the the uh one of the problems i shouldn't say one of the one of the hurdles that we've had when we started looking at many of their subcontractors that they dealt with so the secondary was even though they themselves didn't but many of their subcontractors are mwbe just gives them more complete picture yeah and and lou that is that is one of the next big steps um and there's a there's a large component of monitoring with that that we're not we're not quite ready for but especially on larger awards um they you know they can identify for us uh very specific minority and women-owned businesses that work for them um and you know that would be something we could certainly monitor we're not the the data that
044you see here is actually just on the primary award um so we so we do we do miss those and that's something that you know we have to stress uh as a district to our vendors um in terms of that if if you're a large vendor and you are um you know you you're you're you're looking to win a large award um you're going to have to identify for us um you know subcontractors that are minority and women-owned businesses and that needs to be a large component of of what they do um in terms of you know winning our business because that's that is true that when you look at the really really big ones um you know those those often are not going to be the minority and women-owned businesses they're you know they're
045um you know they're publicly traded companies and and things like that so you know we've got a we've got to work them on to the next level the next you know the next level of that um what i do like about the data that i shared and that's in that two-page handout is that um in what what we are by by looking at the data in this way and looking at the awards that go to the board both both competitive and non-competitive we are excluding some spending that would other that could otherwise be compared so like the charter schools are excluded from this uh other um agencies are excluded from this um other uh public schools and things that we pass money through those are all excluded out of this so what when you look
046at the data that's in here in terms of our total awards that's uh that's uh you know uh it gives a better picture of the total dollars that could potentially be included in this for comparative purposes because we're able to you know we're able to kind of pull out some of the things like the charters and and so forth that that you know we're just a pass-through for that we really have no control over so i have two questions that i'll be uh quiet i swear um with respect to monitoring how are we i know you mentioned monitoring are you uh that seems to be you know that as we proceed forward and this becomes more and more of a priority uh how are we going to address monitoring jeff have you had any discussions
047about that um so there's there's many phases or components of monitoring i think at this point i think we have a pretty good way of capturing the awards and the data that is brought to you for initial authorization um as as as dr cash was mentioning a little while ago in terms of service and departmental resources that's where we're you know where we got to take that next step in terms of how are we monitoring uh once we capture subcontractors how are we actually capturing the data to ensure that that actually happens um and things like that so that that's kind of that next phase that we have in terms of the staffing resources that that are really gonna that'll get us to that so we are you know with this data um you know
048we are we're we're not a hundred percent there in terms of being able to show um show the full picture and to monitor it over the course of multiple years yeah so so low and colleagues um that's the next important step that we haven't taken this far and i'm we're right on the cusp of it i just want these two people that i'm trying to uh what's the word i'm pretty good at i'm trying to influence them to take the job because i think this is a full-time uh enterprise this is something that you can't do as part of you know i got all these other things to do and i'll try to get to this the way i understand this role now especially looking at this data this this takes a person who is
049well organized compassionate about this work really wants to see the mission realized and you know will be full time and weekends i mean i just say that because sometimes that's what we do but you know you do whatever you have to do to to get us making a bigger dent into this but you you can't just set a goal goal is not enough you gotta first grow uh these organizations and i want a particular emphasis on the minority uh aspect of this so you know doesn't have to be a minority but i'm talking to uh several minority people within the organization who i think would be perfect uh for this kind of role given their work performance given what they uh you know have shown to date uh about all this so so that's the
050answer uh luke to the monitoring piece i don't look at this as jeff so much i mean he can he can get the numbers together out of his department but we need somebody that's that's all over this uh on a full-time basis outreach training coordinating teaching educating assisting connecting um organizing all of that will be part of the skill set and i'm sure one if not two people share in this work i i agree dr cash um the last thing i just said what have we done before you on board this person or these people what have we done with respect outreach to our mwbe community have you guys established a listserv are you doing uh do you have them register on the website what have we been doing with respect to outreach so so
051there are several things um you know one of the and i think we've had three of them so far um ramona reynolds office actually is coordinating outreach um sessions and i think we've done at least three of them um we we have a representatives from the purchase department that are out there to really show uh you know to kind of go over the types of things that we do how how folks can um you know can can um see what you know what bids and things like that are out there um we implemented the that bonfire system which is an electronic means of tracking well of of uh issuing bids and rfps we actually issued a request for information uh several months ago asking for minority and women-owned businesses to identify themselves to us said
052we're looking to identify minority and women-owned businesses please tell us who you are what you do we are asking uh vendors or and folks to sign up in on on that and you can get through it through our web that bonfire platform so they can they can receive notification when we actually have a bid or an rfp that goes out there and some folks want to know about everything um and some may choose to just pick a a handful of things that they're that they're interested in so you know we're trying to do as much outreach as we can um trying to think if there's anything else that i'd written down um jeff while you were looking for that another outreach um session will be conducted at the south park parent center south park parent
053center at south park high school on tuesday this coming tuesday at 5 p.m that's informational jeff you found what you're looking for well the other um you know anyone and and i try to refer people to sort of our normal processes so um if you go to the district website you go to the purchase department you know there is there is information for for anyone um and in particular minority and women owned businesses you know doing business with bps click on some links you can see some of the things we do you can see how to sign up for for notices um you know so to the extent that we can get people to you know get sort of uh eyes on our um on our web page that can help identify um more and
054more and obviously you know if if board members uh can bring some of that information to us uh their contacts and and and share with them where um you know where we have our procurement information that that just any whatever whatever we can do to uh you know widen that that pool and and again competition is great we want as many folks as possible because the more people you have competing for things that we need um the more you're likely to get a better product out of it okay um dr cash and jeff i want to commend you as far as the efforts ramona williams has been making i attended her first session she's giving up her saturdays and we've advertised in the challenge of the criterion uh on various uh african-american radio shows and
055on on the radio and put it out there so everyone would know that buffalo public schools is looking to talk to have conversations with and extend the opportunities to minority businesses who enroll in our system to know what we offer and they're asking the questions the key questions of what are the problems that you have in doing business and i talked spoke to um dr reynolds dr williams ramona and she said that at this last one this saturday she's giving up her settings i'm so proud of her they the vendors who were there asked if they could be paired with the our normal you know the old boys network we we do business with these businesses every time we look these are the pieces of people who get our million dollar biggest contracts but if
056these minority businesses could meet have a meet and greet so that these businesses would know hey i'm here i can be your partner so you can meet some of that 25 by just subcontracting and working with me because a lot of businesses are saying they don't know about minority businesses so they can't outreach work with or uh increase our mbe effort the other things that we need to look into and work on structural blocks when when public entities like the county the city and buffalo public schools hey people the little guy can't carry us we have to pay them timely at every county what we did was we we wrote in our procurement policy that we would give 25 right up front when they won the bid so that they're not carrying us and carrying
057a burden and debt and borrowing for a larger entity the other thing you mentioned which is true is bonding the cost of bonding is is prohibitive to smaller businesses and the county also came up with a c type bond that smaller vendors wouldn't wouldn't be so expensive so we need to make structural changes to make this not a dream a wish or validity but reality so i am proud of the efforts we are making getting the data and as you said we got a long way to go but at least we're starting so thank you for that uh mr heard you had your hand up yes yes uh i just have a question um i'm sorry um i came in a couple of minutes late i just got off a plane but uh uh have
058we spoken with the sba on behalf of this matter of doing training individuals just one question i might have missed it small business or administration yes yes you have a thought on that i i'm not i'm not aware if we have okay i am a good idea i know that they offered classes on periodically for training for uh minority businesses a small business i actually took the class uh a couple of years ago uh how to how to um start up businesses and i did receive a question from a person by text messages asking how long will the classes be i i believe they imagine if they started from zero if they want to start and this person is um i'll speak dual languages and want to help with the district but one of those
059rfp is going to come out as far as for translators um terence i think we do our translation service rfps i think they're typically in the spring i can confirm exactly but from what i recall we we do it in early spring and it goes for board approval before the end of june okay spring okay when they come out as an rfp for translator or that's just a hire from the district um well we we have uh several translation services um like i know there's like a a phone service i think there's a i i guess i can't speak top but i believe there's three different services that we typically procure um through vendors um every year okay okay thank you mr pritchett okay uh the only last thing i want to say on the
060nbewbe uh uh section of this is that we do have a minority vendor that came before the board who does provide uh covet materials and mass and there was a question about a bid that was put out he was not given or sent any information about it and i'm hoping that we can address that because uh that the bid was uh you know several hundred thousand dollars and it would make us look good if we at least extend the information he offered to people who are complying with getting on our vendor list so that's last thing that i wanted to say about that paula um actually thank you for that question so i think that that bid we did issue reissue that bid if it has not gone out yet it is going out this
061week um your your feedback um a few weeks ago in terms of that you know was very helpful for us so that should be out there um i'm hopeful that this vendor has already seen it but i guess i'm not 100 sure if it has been issued yet but it is supposed to be this week well he's monitoring the immune system he put he signed in for every bid so you will get some success there are people who want to work with us ready willing and qualified to be the best and the lowest bidder so i'm just trying to get this get this ball rolling so but thank you jeff for reissuing that bit i appreciate it dr cash you ready for the next section i don't see any other hands okay well that was
062uh a good conversation uh we appreciate your questions and uh thank you thank you everyone thank you jeff for your work of your staff colleagues i would recommend um maybe every three months to have an update uh on this this work i think monthly certainly you can have a list but the data won't change so much monthly but every three months i recommend and we could do it either in a work session just as a short update in your part in your sex session paulette or we could we could do a both band where we um send something by email to you looking at jeff's data the way he has his frame there that's a good track to run on but we'll be more aggressive about this as soon as i can get the personnel
063that i'd like to see working on this well you're always welcome to give the community and the board an update in this vehicle so they can see the good work and the progress they need to know all right thank you all set okay so we're moving on to the uh american rescue program and the wonderful things you're doing to expand education yeah jeff i'm gonna let you um run through this and um you know we're running out of time here so be expeditious uh colleagues this is pretty straightforward and you'll really like the graph that we put together and some of the alignment data that we put together that matches up with what some of much of what the community has asked for so i'm particularly pleased with that alignment jeff go ahead okay thank
064you um so there's four slides here i will try to move through them very quickly um we've given presentations to the board to the community to other groups several times on our esser um so this will be a very brief update of where we're at um on and there's four slides in total um the the the main point that i want to show on is just for for board members and for the public the the fourth bullet down um we have each of the applications for the sr2 89 million and sr 3 200 million those are those apple the full applications are posted on the web there's the link uh which you can see there um it can it can be obtained right from the main page of the web there's a an arp plan
065and those budgets are in there one of them is 50 pages long the other is 100. the sr2 has been approved by the state sr 3 we believe we're within probably a week or so of that being fully approved by the state community involvement has been stressed as a very important component of our besser and if we could go to the next slide i'll i'll show you some data that we had put together a little while ago relative to our our spending alignment with the overall uh community recommendation um groups that we had so this this is a table um takes a little bit of studying but uh essentially if you you probably all remember the document that um jamie cohen along with will caress put together that identified um taking our arp plan and
066breaking it out into 19 different categories so one through 19 and what we had done is i asked every cabinet member through all the all the individual request items that they had um that made up our roughly 289 million dollar budget i asked if they could please identify for me um which of these categories the the the budget items aligned with and you'll see that for each of those 19 categories um you can see the name of the category and there were a total 296 budget items um and some of those could be one small line or it could be a larger thing that had uh you know that were in alignment with these 19 categories um the total dollar amount for each of those and this was compiled by me based on the original
067request some of the final requests were a little bit different than original but it was it was relatively close about 246.6 million so what that means is that there were some requests that when we went through they didn't align perfectly enough with um you know with some of the community feedback and we said you know we'll leave them off it's it's better to make sure that they're that we're identifying the things that we saw in the community feedback and what we implemented and put requests in for for budget programs uh the last column on this are the number of recommendations in the feedback and you can see that of those 19 different uh categories some of them had many more um recommendations than others some some had one or two uh others had um like
068instructional reform technology higher standard 57 student supports there were 35 individual compiled community requests operations and infrastructure there were actually 28 of those public engagement communications so you can see um family and community engagement um was another one so you can see in these the the various number of uh of recommendations that were gathered through all these these various public meetings um so i put that in the table to kind of see how things lined up and then admire if we can go to the next slide um this this heartened me quite a bit when i saw this i actually um we didn't ask the community to um to cost out anything but when we look at the individual those individual categories that were that made up the um the art besser plan i actually
069plotted the number of individual um the number of of uh community recommendations in each of those areas and then i plotted the number of recommendations that you know that that we as a as a district accumulated um based on that feedback and based on our our analysis of what we felt made sense to um to put into the plan and when you look at this um they're actually correlated really well together um in general the the areas where you have the highest interest the highest number of community feedback in terms of the number of items were also areas where we had um the highest uh the highest number of individual budget items it's not a perfect correlation but it it it felt when i looked at this after taking that data compiling it speaking with
070all my colleagues i'm like it seems like we're on the same page largely with what community was looking for um and and that's i think what this what this shows um next slide please [Applause] um this slide you you've seen that pie chart before um and that pie chart breaks down our spending into really really high categories um i don't have for for the board tonight um just be because of time i don't i don't have a more detailed report for you but i i always like to in every presentation on the arp plan i always like to have the overall pie chart you know where you can see that orange section takes up over half of it expanded eb instructional initiatives that's that's the most of what we have in our budget um information
071technology that information technology is primarily those are all things that are going into the classroom you've got student supports in yellow and then covet operations and facilities any of the um any facility related things um uh ppe cleaning all those things uh um and also there are some some central office supports too to make sure we can process all these transactions so when we look at it at a high level um that that aligns i think really well with what we've seen peers do and also really with what our mandate from the beginning was in terms of what you know how how spending should probably align um the the table on the left um so we're done with the pie chart now going over to the left um i'm just showing you here uh and
072this is based on the information that we had in our first quarterly financial report just a quick summary of the two programs sr2 and sr3 89 million and 200 million and then you can see where the funding aligns on a year by year basis 124.7 in year one that's the year we're in right now next year is 91.7 million the year after 73.2 now obviously this will change um but that that's what the initial submitted budgets um some things are in there they're in year one but they're really things that are going to take multiple years but they're things that we may be able to encumber in the first year so it looks like it's a lot of dollars but some of the some of those dollars are naturally going to progress into subsequent years
073but we really only have three years in total so everything we're doing is going to be encapsulated in the next uh next handful of years um fiscal year to date spending i ran this i ran this on the fifth of this month um we've spent so far in um if you if you go in and run all of each of these programs we spent about 16.8 million dollars so far um and we have encumbrances which are basically commitments to spend in requisitions which are requests of about 11.3 million so that's about 27 28 million um so far in spending um we have available funds this year of 96.6 million it sounds like a lot um and it is but we're really starting to ramp up you know we will you'll you'll see that in the
074coming months um with board recommendations and things like that um you know this spending it's when i look at that 16.8 million and 11.3 million as well that's as big of a grant spend as we've ever had in a single grant in a single year and and so far really only about a third of the you know half a little less than half of the full fiscal year but school doesn't start till september you know full school yield doesn't start till september we've actually spent a fair amount there's a lot of resources have gone into the schools already in terms of summer programs technology additional staffing things like that so there's uh you know we'll have a more detailed uh uh reporting for you that will show you um you know that will show you
075uh by you know almost down to the departmental level of the spending and and where where it is trending on a you know month probably on a monthly basis i'll have that for you shortly um but i don't i you know it's just given the time there really isn't time to go over that tonight so i just wanted to give this really quick summary um that is my update on the arp esser monitoring at this point um if there's any questions i can answer them okay jeff on on the slide where you were showing um the categories of spending you were saying from the 19 initiatives can you go back to that because i want you to elaborate on what the 77 million dollar financial consideration item that's a big number under that i don't
076know if that was category number 19 yes category number 19 um what is that broad category with 77 million dollars in it yep um okay and actually i have a note i've i figured somebody would ask so there is a note on the bottom of this um that includes uh funding related to schools when we um you know one of the one of the ask was about you know resources for schools so funding that we are allocating that will be allocated to the schools is in that category um and i i wrote down it's about 54 million there's also um indirect cost that's 24 million that's the um that's essentially that overhead component that the general fund charges the grant and that the general fund will utilize in years four and years five to continue
077some of these programs that we're establishing now in year one two and three um so that that's that's that what that section is uh again you can you be more definitive you're saying funding for schools are you what is that you you're gonna give us some more staff for um emotional social learning or is it more the counselors the attendance teachers the fine are large lost kids i mean it can't be it can't be like the computer updates because that's a different category so i'm still kind of not clear what what that 54 million you're saying is directly to the school what yeah it's not uh it's it's all of the above in those areas so it's not it's not completely defined at this point okay and again the in the reporting that will show
078you in the coming months in terms of sort of the departmental by departmental um spending you'll you'll be able to see that a little outlined a little bit better where it's not here okay well i i think most of the board members were hoping that before the actual grant requests got sent to the state and they go and approve and know that that uh the that huge superintendent and the staff would have made a detailed presentation to the board on okay here's what we're talking about and i i still think that is necessary given the magnitude of these funds and even though you're saying it's posted uh on the uh on the on the school website i do think we need to plan and put some time to go through that and make sure the
079board is comfortable with well aware of and can explain to people who are asking us what are you doing with this 289 million dollars how is it going to extend learning how is it going to affect our kids what role do we have in it uh this is a i mean people see this as the a really unique one-time opportunity and they want to understand it have a part in it have a voice in it and the board needs more details on it you agree dr cash oh yeah absolutely and and that may take a good uh devoted session like two hours two and a half hours or so to share that with you certainly but but all of the things that you talked about are in this rfs are spending each one of the
080major if you will could talk about how strategic priority spends that are in these budgets are supporting schools and students and families i mean all of it is in there from from guidance counselors to music teachers to more social workers to you know individual schools having some autonomy about what they need based on data uh each year several positions allocated each year to these schools all the schools um you know it's it's a lot it's really exciting and we'd be happy to take take some time and go through through all of that well that's that that's that's extremely important that's why i said for finance and ops this has to be an ongoing item for uh our agenda for my agenda but i think we may even need a just a special session to go
081over this kind of money in detail because i think given some of the trauma is going on with our schools children coming back and uh having to reacclimate shall we say and the bullying that's going on some of the violence you know incidences that are going on of you know each of our schools is going through some transitions and i think board members may have questions on hey um is that in there you're saying it's in there well where is it in there from my school you know and well you already know my some of my schools emerson et cetera some of the downtown schools are having some significant issues so uh yeah i really would like to have a detailed presentation to the board so we can know on a school by school basis
082and with your overall vision how this is changing the school system for the better yeah absolutely good questions i think that's fair i do want to be clear that that three or four hundred kids are are our you know need a lot of support and help and there's a lot of uh partners that we can partner with to help us with this we don't see the schools only working and supporting these children that are in trauma and having difficulty many children you might not even hear from they're silent and they're struggling internally uh with issues and that's a that's a difficult number to to grab hold of but we certainly are engaged regularly with our principals and with our teachers to tell us what they're seeing what they need and we're also looking at some
083partners from the community right now to assist with some of these high incident schools and high incident issues like the aggravated assaults the assault uh issue with with kids fighting the social media issues that's going to take a robust uh a robust plan to address and so it's unfolding uh as we speak so we have some flexibility in here it hasn't all been you know accounted for in terms it's gonna be this it's gonna be that we want some flexibility in this so that it it can address emerging needs uh as well so yeah i will we'll be happy to have that kind of uh presentation and it'll be more than just jeff and me it'll be multiple cabinet or at least a good half of the cabinet leaders would be would be sharing in
084that presentation so scheduling for the year second of the you know uh whatever in the month ahead and we'll we'll be right at it with you okay because those are two things that i i do think community engagement could be very helpful one you know it's an open secret that there's a significant portion of our children who have not re-engaged with school and we need to do we we need to reclaim our reclaim our our children and get them reinvested involved in school and then this this this uh violence problem where kids are doing stupid things they haven't been in school so long they i mean they forget you can't bring a toy gun to school i mean that's dumb but uh yeah we we need to addre we need the community to help us
085to address that and we we want to uh see how the american rescue funds monies are being directed at that so yeah that's important any any uh other board members have any questions on the uh american rescue act funds and and priorities and problems that you're seeing at your schools i don't see any hands up but i just want to put that out there what i don't see any hand so is uh jeff did you want to do go over anything else uh you said something about something on the budget and so we can close out this session and move somebody else's i i do thank you and actually a good follow-up to your question or or really response to your question is that on um and you know if we want to have the
086edmure maybe if you can put the slides up really briefly um i i did include um a rough outline for our budget process and we include in in our budget process grants are part of that so as we're talking about we want to know where these dollars are going um when we're when we're looking at school-based budgets our overall budget that's that's part of the budget process um admire could you go one uh one more slide please one more uh page um so i i outline in here um you know i might you know just very briefly skim through it but uh you know december is really where we kind of kick off the budget we meet with the governor the superintendent and i usually prepare we try to get it by the end of
087december sometimes it goes into january an overall document that lays out the process that we're going to follow i think it will largely address a lot of your questions in terms of how are we going to know where these things are are really kind of getting into and incorporated into the overall school-based budget which includes those grants um so december january february is is really a lot of the preliminary work on the budget next slide is march april and then may so you you all have this we generally follow it relatively closely um some things do have to get jiggled around a little bit but there are committee meetings in every month typically as we get closer to may we'll actually have supplemental committees the you know the overall state budget april 1st is when
088we typically will know that although back in january in in january which is in the future from now but prior to april we will have early indications of what the the overall general fund budget's going to look like and at the end of april our four year plan submission to the control board um and then you know we would be targeting a may uh 2022 um board approval so within the confines of that this timeline um there will be significant uh discussions and and share out really of how the overall our plan um this year where we are this year and how it will be incorporated into next year that that that's largely going to be the big the big change for us is to really have that incorporated into this process so um that
089that was all i wanted to go over with the timeline well you know the state our state representatives were really good to us they gave us significant increases in our state budget they uh put a plan in for a full phase-in of state aid full funding of state aid and since they gave us that additional funding this year i think they're going to be looking to see what we did with it how it impacted educational opportunities for our children how it's making a difference you know before they uh go ahead with the next year and the other couple years of full of phasing in full funding so i'm hoping we're going to be ready to say wow this is what we did and and and yeah your efforts and your fighting to give us more
090dollars is paying off and and uh you know it's having an impact on our students so that's that's all i have to say about your timeline going to the state for more money yeah i would i hear that uh call that and certainly on the surface of that that sounds right but i got you know big change and little change happens uh not always fast so some of these things that we're are in our plan and that we're working as we see and observe our children it's gonna take a minute to bake it's gonna take a minute to bake and uh you gotta you're gonna have to understand the patience required with this there's some major major issues uh with with young people all over the country all over the country that we're seeing and
091we're going to put money into it but it's also uh some in-kind kinds of things really going to be about time and and the way we work with our children the mentors they need they almost need one-on-one mentoring many of our kids they need people that listen and and give them uh tough love you know uh it's a lot of a lot of needs that that are emerging here so i have to be a little patient they want to be a little patient well dr cash dr cash i just wanted to say that you got a lot of issues with housing our students as far as uh you know the da vinci situation we need to find places to house our students you've got the issues with uh adults being on the third floor of
092a lot of our buildings so we can't expand programs that are in demand that our kids want we you know we've got money now so i'm hoping that while we have the opportunity and you've got the resources that some of these things that are hard you know and our headaches for you and we we need to move on that we can do it because i think that will that will impress our state legislators it will help our kids it will help retain our students yeah it's in our plan there's no question don't don't understand me we we share your enthusiasm we're working on it just as as fast as we possibly can one of the things that sometimes slows processes for big change is this whole rfp process you know it's what you got to
093do but sometimes it takes it takes several months to to ramp up and get get all that solved and get it get it done so that's why you'll start to see an uptick in all of this as those processes come to uh to come to a close and we can start to present the winning the winning bids and so forth so uh bottom line we agree we agree we know ourselves that's what i was going to say we're we're supporting you addressing all these issues because it is critical to the success of our students and our parents absolutely okay that's all i have for finance synopsis i don't know what committee is next but uh thank you so much uh mr pritchett board members and dr cash thank you so i believe my committee is
094next and on the agenda we will be discussing the superintendent's goals so i would like to i don't know dr cash was there a slide presented for it or are we working through the board docs that particular document yeah i think it's better to work through the document yeah so we're gonna we're gonna we're in the process of posting it to the uh to the screen it is actually in board docs so i'd like to correct my colleagues to go to war docs and go to executive affairs and you will find the pdf there for your reference okay it's a little low a little small i'd like to pick up the conversation where we left it off uh and i'd like to create a few opening remarks based on our earlier conversation ah thank you
095if you could scroll down to student achievement goals i would appreciate it perfect so the first thing is i'd like to refer you back to president petrucci's uh email indicating that this is just one piece in a larger conversation and a larger strategy that we have in order to work with our processes and to really get at the concerns that board members have brought to the table there are a variety of things superintendent goals the goals that the district has embraced through the education bargain the board goals and a playbook by which we proceed forward to achieve them as well as the process for the council of great city schools this measurement it's really critical according to all of the best practices out there so that includes the council of great city schools for high
096functioning boards that includes nisba that includes nsba and it is the practice set by former um cotman former president cotman's work in terms of the kinds of superintendent goals we're going for those are ones narrowly focused on student achievement this affords us to do a couple things first of all and foremost our students and our families demand and deserve increased student achievement and this allows the district to continue to focus on those goals it also is really critical in this particular time because what it does is it allows the district an opening to really look at the data of where our students are at and what we need to do next to move them forward and to continue the good progress that we've been making making they're smart which means they're specific they're measurable they're
097actionable they're relevant they're timely they all work with where we are they're student achievement focused as we've been we've heard a couple different times in my committee about the importance of that so i'd like to discuss just these about the student achievement goals and see if we can move this forward because the sooner there's a certain amount of urgency here the sooner that we can establish this data and look at where our students are at and what they need next the sooner we can get the kind of comprehensive work that we all really want and indeed even in just in this last committee meeting in finance and ops when we're talking about sr funding we're talking about the kind of funding that's available to us this helps us focus on where it really matters which
098is the achievement of our students so with that what i'd like to suggest is that we follow our process in terms of getting comments from board members as we move forward any leftover questions and i will take them we'll address them i'd like to keep this within an hour so we're very respectful of your time when we get close to the hour if there's outstanding pieces we'll go ahead and forward them to another meeting but we really do need to move these boards i really can't emphasize enough the amount of urgency that we need here to move forward on these so with that i will start with miss cotman i believe you're muted i don't have any comments i don't have anything to say i i had spoken at the last court member that meeting
099that i feel that guardrails were necessary in order to be put in place before we could uh finalize this process so that we could include um all of our constituents and let them know that we have also looked at them but um that's the only thing that um i am concerned about is that i don't see the guy rails and that's that's my only concern so um if the process is that there will be no guard well then so be it but that that's the um that's the step that of the board um i thought the board would over would do to make sure that we covered the needs of the students i'd like to i'd like to emphasize that guardrails aren't completely out of the picture since we want to still follow the council
100of great city schools process and as you point out community input's really critical there and so in that way that's still on the table but we're going to as mr as mr patricia pointed out in his email to the fellow board members that's definitely on the table for moving forward these are the superintendent's goals for right now for this year which need to be smart goals so that we know where our students are going moving forward thank you for your comments dr evans brown hello um yeah i had an opportunity to go through the goals and they certainly seem uh appropriate doable and clear uh yeah so guardrails probably would help um but i i think it's it's thoughtful thank you very much i appreciate that mr heard yes thank you dr rivera um yes
101uh i think my concerns still remain the same from from last i did read over material also the opportunity to go in a little detail about it and um some of the questions that i have was um bringing in parent concerns um about their students and um and and capabilities of the schools and giving you know correct um education you know as needed per student also you mentioned earlier where the students at you know um just to clarify you know each building has different concerns and different needs and just putting that in the broad specter of under caches um um goals um that we applied for i mean it's a real cross and unfair you know thing to get to the superintendent to say you know to reach every student knowing that we have different
102concerns in these buildings and we're still working to try to achieve you know some of those goals to help those students so those are fair um and i think they're important concerns so i'd like to propose two things first uh the goals are done in conjunction with the cabinet and with the superintendent so i think your concern about fairness is a really good one and an important one to address and i want to point out that they feel that this is that that broad upper level piece for goals the second piece what you're speaking of is also equally important which is how individual buildings are doing i know that our dashboard is one piece of it but i think that uh an important thing to follow perhaps revisit is some of our own operations in
103our own policies which is that it does say that we can form committees to visit buildings all the buildings in the district once a year and get some of this information i certainly would be willing to explore how we might be able to do that especially to address the concern that you raise thank you thank you dr uh um revere and and um and just looking into this you know i'm looking at the fairness of it to the superintendent and how we can um you know establish you know a set of goals but you know be directive towards our students with needs also so um you know they very they vary from education to mental health and mental awareness and also um copy concerns we know that a lot of um during this time period
104you know a lot of students had covered again it affects students in different ways and and the effects may be still long-lasting after the virus is over so and how education you know those studies have really been done about education after cold weekend and the effects they have with the student body the mentality especially if they lose a loved one or or you know have a long sustained sickness so some things that things are not equipped thank you i'm so sorry please go ahead i just said i just feel that some things are you know are not well established um pertaining to those goals and pertaining to those elements that our teachers our students administrative staff members deal with you know on everyday basis thank you i understand what you're saying i'd like to re-emphasize
105that goals are the what and then there's a lot of conversation that has to happen about how how are we going to get there and i think all of this is really critical especially when you talk about um responsive education trauma-informed education this would be a worthy topic for the future too and hopefully that we my goal would be at our next meeting to talk a lot about that process i'd like to move to miss j for her comments common is that i fully support this and i i'm grateful to you for for uh getting this accomplished and i know it's been a lot of work i mean dr rivera thank you very much first names are fine too thank you very much for that ms mccosy yes i feel like this is um it's
106worth three years if you really think about it we've been doing these goals with very similar goals we've been trying to push these along and during the course of pandemics and and all of the things that become roadblocks and all the things we have to address i appreciate that you bring us back to these are the what and the how has to be something that we discuss along the way so um if i believe that the what has been in place and it's been emphasized and we you know these are great and i just i'd like to really move forward with these so we can really get to the how and address all the other concerns that are coming to the table so i'm in full support of pushing these through thank you very much
107and i would agree i really really want to move us forward to the next stage because as several of you have pointed out actually all of you all of my strong colleagues have pointed out we really do need to talk about these things we need to talk about the how we need to talk about the needs that our students have we need to talk about the funding we need to talk about our process moving forward all of these things are really important we need to be able to move this forward in order to get to those things so i appreciate that president petrucci uh thank you dr rivera uh you know i i like the goals i think uh particularly during covet i think that some of these are very aggressive uh which i know
108that many people would like to see because we want to make sure our students are performing at the highest level possible the um the one thing though that that i i agree with uh former president common also about the guard rails and is under that overview of guard rails as well though is that that there are certain different goals that are more long-term goals that should be part of the conversation as well uh you know mwb that we had a presentation on it earlier maybe it's improving our athletic facilities maybe it's uh maybe it's uh hiring teachers that look more like our student population but those tend to be long-term goals that districts work on that take three or five years if not longer uh just there's something i think that they should be part
109of the conversation as we go forward knowing that there's these higher goals that we all strive uh to achieve but just they're going to take a longer period than than eight months or a year or 15 months so i think this is an excellent point i'm glad you bring it up because i agree with you that three to five year goals for some of these other items are really important and i agree with miss belton cottman that community input on those items is critical and if we follow the council of great city schools process with fidelity we can put those things into place and it is my full intention that we start that convert restart that conversation because we did start it before that we restart that conversation right away in january these goals are
110for one year only this is for this year and so all of these things for those three to five years you're correct you're both correct we need the guardrails we need the long-term vision i really look forward to participating with the community about that and if you recall that big fan that i had all of the all of the pieces are there from students to staff to families to community members to board members all of that's going to happen and i really am excited about moving forward that work as soon as we can mr scott mr rivera my opinion hasn't changed from the last board meeting where i was or work session i should say where i was more than ready to move forward on these um i think they're well done evidence-based researched based
111on best practice from council city great city schools and nisba um they're baked almost overdone so let's move forward and focus on the work thank you dr revere thank you very much miss woods um i believe when we had that board retreat like like they said three years ago we had the same set of it was had to be three but no more than five goals and we said student achievement was the goal and three percent increases in here and there and then uh we've been saying this as you said for a while so i have no problems with this student achievement goals of getting a three to five percent increase mike what my question was just simply what is the base because we we you're pointing out we don't we have the new york
112state assassins from 218 to uh they just gave something out for i guess which uh i haven't seen um i i i understand this out but i i like to review it but i i'm hearing that's not that's not meredith murdered us that's not a good basis so i just don't know you're gonna say a three percent increase from what that that's all my my question uh i know they said we put up a dashboard now uh based on uh various assessments which may or may not be objective i mean the elas and the state uh exams are hands off though they are factual they are they are broad they compare all schools to other states so if we don't have that my real concern question is do we have anything we can say we
113move three percent above that is factual objective and and in my conversation i'm going to point out that every district in new york state and every district in the nation that does this any kind of testing is going to have a similar problem right now that's not an answer for you though and so what i would like to do is to refer this one to dr cash who is more steeped in how we would work with this data to establish what what an increase would be dr cash would you mind commenting on this well my comment is that right there in the gold one over archer it says establish a new baseline and that's what that's what needs to be established um i can tell you that the last time we did this i think
114we were when when when all the kids took it at 95 or higher we were at about 21 let's see math i believe and 24 percent uh ela that was the last time officially from the state that i can remember we were as as a district on three through eight assessments clearly some schools were higher than that some schools were lower than that in this last assessment effort during covert last spring which was optional the state gave us that chance uh that opportunity uh they didn't report the statewide data which i i don't know what it was i was asking for it because that would be a basis sometimes when you have the state even on a off year like last spring that gives us that gives us something to shoot for it gives us
115something to have some contextualized uh understanding about so i was hopeful to get that because i could then say let's shoot for that because it's a statewide uh norm it's a statewide data now and i'd be okay with that to try to try to do that but right now we have 12 english language arts and 9 for the math in the shortened i'm sorry in the last spring assessment um that a small percentage of students took so i don't think that should be the baseline because that's obviously low and obviously it's low all across the state so i want i don't want to play games shooting off of something that is artificially low and and not and not really well understood because we don't have it from the state so as i said the real
116purpose was to try to establish a new baseline because this is the last year of the present standards test it's the last year of it if they do it because there is some movement generating right now to try to get uh some waiver of the accountability portion of this but it won't be long before some districts will start to talk about these assessments again because they're very they're very flawed to be frank with you particularly for against brown and black and brown children that's an area of expertise for me and i could i could give you a work session on that but that said i would say at minimum we try to go and 21 plus three to five is 26 27 and then 24 plus three or five is 27 uh to 29 to
11730. try to move toward that thirty percent and and that's that's the best i can tell you relative to what i know uh about these about these assessments but it's gonna take several years to try to look at and and what i really want the state to do around assessments is to hold the line get a mark get something that you believe all children should learn we're heading toward next generation learning standards that means they're going to shift the tests again there'll be a new baseline emerge from the state on that there'll be a whole set of trainings that we'll have to train our staff off and our teachers in particular and then things will move again uh so you know it's a it's a complex answer to not what looks like a simple question
118paulette woods but it's really not uh that simple when it comes to these state assessments for three through eight for three through eight so i think i think it's clear that it's the will of the board at this point to ensure that we have rigorous high standards for our students but that they are fair there are also fair standards that's what we need for our students we want our student and we need to know we need to have some sort of accurate reading about where our students are at and how they're achieving and can you talk a little bit about how these goals might help us get there knowing the complexity of the data because what i find as a board member personally that i struggle with sometimes it's that ever moving target right so
119you'll look at the inside district data so you look at say our students and how they perform on an ela assessment in we'll say seventh grade and you can see how they look building to building to speak to mr herd's concern and so then you know where to intervene in district you know how they look this year to previous year also with covet that can be really difficult and it looks pretty good because you can see that they've been moving along right but then when you put that data in context with the state it looks completely different and so i think the question for the board is will these goals ensure those high standards well and that's not the that's not the right question i thought what your question was was how can we ensure
120that we are having rigor and higher c higher achievement for our students yes and what i'm saying is this this will not ensure any of that necessarily what what you're going to hear in the next presentation is how schools have a multiple approach to gauging uh student achievement and measuring student achievement and those those are avenues that we haven't really explored very much in the state and every time i ask and have a conversation with the commissioner and the folks who who set out these statewide standards uh they they don't have a good answer for this because they're under that pressure they're under pressure from various groups to kind of make accountability sort of a punishment gotcha kind of thing versus a real measure of any critical achievement of any achievement of any students um
121i'd much rather for example in the in the wonderful ways that our clri department uh has public speaking contests uh voice project they have project-based portfolio projects that last a unit of a whole half a semester can be a whole semester students are so much more engaged in that kind of level there's so much more uh exchange and interchange and growth among different cultural groups even within our classroom i mean it's just it just gives me goosebumps to see the kind of learning that happens that none of these tests are measuring these tests are all messed up the sixth grade math test hardly any adults can pass it's a really really difficult test and then you start getting uh on beyond that and it's just crazy and i don't see any schools cut catholic uh
122independent charter schools doing anything special with these tests i don't now i'll play the game and we'll keep playing the game but what i'm more interested in is a well-rounded um all the children from from students with special needs to english language learners feeling great about themselves coming to school happy in school engaged in their classrooms by good teachers good first instruction that hit our four instructional priorities really well um and got engaged in in relevant and rigorous content i mean you're gonna hear about this in the next work session and i'm gonna show you uh two minute two two minute video segments spoken by children uh and students in schools like ours uh who say very thing i'm talking about it and they'll say it much better than i'm saying so i just don't
123want you to get caught up in the okie doke that the only way you're going to be able to tell the parents and tell the community that you're having much greater achievement is because your test scores on this thing went up by 20 points or 30 points we can do that we've shown that we can do that but there's so much more that we're trying to provide that you want to provide for our students through the whole child approach uh to education and that's what this whole arbestor work is gonna be about for us and that's what the uh goals and and the work for the buffalo public schools gotta be about while we're climbing out of a of a pernicious public health crisis where as some of you have mentioned some students in school
124some students aren't some students are in school but they're having really really tough time and they need a lot of support before we turn to page 57 and start working on the quadratic equation and so i want to hear more from teachers too i want to see what teachers are going through in the front lines i want to see what our guidance counselors are going through and social workers on the front lines about this as we proceed and let that conversation come into play as well and they'll help us create a more contextualized understanding about how to ensure that we've got rigor and achievement among our students you heard ann botticelli not i think it was the last work session talk about eye station uh eye learning uh dibbles and and other ways that we
125are trying to assess student learning beyond just a test so i think what we're going to show you is a portfolio of work and that's the beauty of this dashboard now they can show you a number of different um tools by which to to measure and and be able to see how students are doing at the student level at the classroom level and at the school level to mr herd's uh concerns so i i think all of it is possible colleagues but i'm responsible for the aggregate and this is sort of the aggregate look at this and i'm willing to take whatever accountability goes along with it if it's within this frame and i've tried to answer that the best i could i appreciate your answer dr cash one just two things and then miss
126woods i know you need to speak as well so would you say then it's there in my opening statement that this is just one instrument by which we measure our students achievement then it should be absolutely larger picture which speaks to me as an educator because as somebody who's educated and who is raising neurodiverse students i can tell you that these kinds of instruments do not accurately measure their ability and that's from school psychologists that's from teachers that's not from me as a loving parent that's something that's consistently true and you know we have touched on it on this board a couple different times there is very embedded racial and class bias in a lot of these instruments and they're think it we really do need to be very careful about it in thinking about
127what that means so i like the idea of a larger portfolio and i'm looking forward to having more of that conversation procedurally at this point since we're coming up on the seven o'clock our and i know that we have a lot of business that both we need our staff to be fresh for and we need our public to be able to hear if you could raise your hand if you have another follow-up comment i have my participant list open we'll have a lightning round and then i will close this out and we will move this forward miss woods i said you were next so i'm going to go ahead and start with you okay my question to you and i understand dr cash gave us a lot of information i thank you dr cass but
128again i deal with management and actual uh measurable achievable goals so if we're saying that the last time they did any kind of test that says whether our kids can read and do math at grade level is we only had 21 and 24 we know we've gone through two years of covid and we need something that says where are they i don't care if it if if the facts are that we only get 9 and 12 now if that's what it is i would like to hear who what or where or what is going to give us that objective uh credible baseline because you know if the things the teachers are doing if you want to say this is this is what we're saying is the baseline and uh we're at i don't know uh
12910 and but i'm concerned about the baseline you can't say 10 in mind i was pretty pretty expensive about it i said that was just a that was a few kids i i don't want to go back to that and say if you get to 16 you know you you made progress this year no we we're gonna we're gonna pick it up from the last time we got the data in i told you that was 21 and 24 and that was two years ago even though that's not where kids are right now kids aren't two years beyond that because of the coded uh disruption so we're so we're working on our theory of action that we're talking about we're working with a an accelerated approach to our instructional work so the kids can catch up
130and go ahead faster as long as all the teachers are rowing on this together and the in all the supports that so we're gonna we're doing everything to try to put that structure in motion to try to climb but i can't tell you um you know from where we are now no i can't tell you with it based on three through eight state assessments i can only tell you we've ordered we ordered a benchmark assessment that would be taken before the high stakes test and the reason we went and purchased those you remember that two two benchmark assessment to try to give us and they're supposed to be aligned to the high stakes uh assessments in april and may they try to give us a sense of where our kids are so as soon as
131we get those results that's helpful grades grades quarterly grades are also another measure uh those are things we look at very deeply now uh because we have that data for every teacher in every classroom in every subject so there's a number of things you can look at in in the progress based in what we call formative assessment but the only high-stakes summative assessments that we have are the one from the spring which which the state said are not very useful at all in fact they said they're not useful and they didn't even give us what the state average was right i just then said the last one from 2019 24 percent ela 21 and that still doesn't necessarily tell you all of what it can do or how they're developing it simply tells you the
132percent of students who are identified as proficient on that test proficient the percentage of children that are proficient level three and level four that's what it tells you and that what that means proficiency that's a whole nother uh conversation um but i i guess the state intended for us to say yes they can do math at that grade level and yes they can uh perform the functions and the uh standards associated with that grade level if they are in a level three and a level four so that's always been the goal relative to these tests is to move our students from level one to high level to coming to level two and level two on up and into the level three and level four and we have a persistent long-standing um record of having mostly
133level one students uh um in terms of proficiency on these tests in this district that's that's what we have so so you can look at it a number of ways again it's trying to move level one students to a higher level of proficiency and that certainly has been in our in our work as well and that's that's about all i can say about it thank you and i look forward to dr evans brown's uh future student achievement work sessions because she i know she plans to work on this and give us a sense of where students are at and have these reports continue so we can go ahead and continue to invest and make sure that we move our students forward that we get their skills recognized and that we get them to where they
134need to be in a way that's both supportive but also has those high standards that that we all have including our families of our students to have for them mr heard i have maybe about two more minutes left in this committee meeting you're the only other hand raised i want to give you the opportunity to speak um thank you thank you dr rivera um dr cash you mentioned earlier about playing the game and um you know that that refers to the test scores and how the state assessments are are used here in the city of buffalo and across new york state but in buffalo we kind of like playing two games uh one is the three to eight state uh assessing the scores you know for our elementary programs and then in high school where
135we have a different amount of uh subjects that's offered to kids um virus vocational or uh future training you know for um whatever of course they want to be if it's anywhere going from carpentry to to engineering so how do we look at the measurables and achievables um and how do we relate those to our high school programs with we have graduates taking remedial courses in college you know for for one or two years you know and um before they can you know take take their college-level courses how do we change that what what do we do to um to embrace you know education and and bring it up to a higher standard to help this evaluation to be more prominent yeah i i thank you for the question i think it's a it's a
136good question um i mean we've heard it before but we've also uh produced so many specific accomplishments if you go back to that district accomplishments uh document where there's over 500 initiatives from pre-k to grade three from grade three and four to grade eight and then the high school secondary years almost and then one goal one is academic achievement and so almost all of those initiatives just some really really uh fantastic initiatives over the years that we have um launched initiated provided for more ap courses more duel and dual language do enrollment courses uh speaking contests like the august wilson speaking series you know all of our best in class clri work the community schools there's so many things that we've done to to try to make sure that our students if they're with us
137from pre-k to grade 12 that they don't have to start that pernicious cycle of taking 30 to 60 courses it and they usually drop out before they do it before they can even start on a gen ed based uh course we've launched innovative new high schools those new high schools are doing much of what you're talking about if you look at the individual high schools uh higher graduation rates and kids who come out of those schools and that's what we need to look at i go on to college and and i'm matriculating persisting and graduating at the end of the day you've got to get more people graduating from college and even into graduate school here in buffalo and that that includes adults that includes all of us so so there's a lot of measures
138that we can show initiatives that we can show that we have worked on to try to give kids a chance to graduate and when they graduate from us they can start fresh to begin work on their on their undergraduate degree the dual language work that would i mean dual enrollment work is a big single initiative on that so the kids can begin coursework uh while they're still in high school for college i think hilbert college and some other colleges uh that you all are familiar with and have talked about we're involved in some of that work for our students but it's really a lot uh mr herd is nothing it's not a nothing it's it's actually uh something and it's a very big something that we have done in the last six years uh to
139to try to er eradicate that that that thing where you go on to college and you're not ready to to get right into their gen ed courses so good question but i want us to be well informed so we can answer those questions to the public uh when they when they saw when some uh continue to say that because we have done an awful lot uh in that regard more needs to be done but i want you to also lift up what has been done and that doc documents the major district accomplishments from 2015 to 2021 all of you have copies of it uh when you go through and look carefully at each one of those that will tell you the story of what we're doing to change that to change that narrative and change
140that picture for our graduates so i'd like to make one comment on this also because it really does touch on my life's work as an academic dean who this is what i do is to talk about and think about and find ways to bring p through 12 and higher education closer together i really endorse a lot of the dual enrollment work i'd like to point out that uh there is a movement in higher education to move away from remedial education because it's a two sides problem and not just in buffalo it's a national issue so it's a two-sided problem both with p through 12 and with higher ed in terms of how we work with our students when they reach our door in the higher ed side and i think it might be a really
141interesting thing for us to start working on as we come around to the spring and we go through our pattern of work sessions about ways in which we really can ensure that we make that transition doable for our students that they're supported in in wherever they choose to go to school that they're supported that they're prepared and when we talk about preparation it isn't just academic preparation it's social emotional preparation because a lot of times that's the thing that really trips students up and ensure that they can go through higher education successfully they graduate with a degree on time and that they are eligible for further studies if they so desire or their career ready and so thank you for your indulgence on this one as many of you know this is a passion of
142mine with that i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to close my work session i thank all of you for your thoughtful comments and your patience with this project and i look forward to moving these goals forward thank you all right either chairman petrucci or dr cathy evan brown the only thing i would ask colleagues is get if we could maybe take a two or three minute break just to go to the go to the water fountain and and then come back we're kind of at the middle of this and these have been a lot of good could we could we take a little break not too much maybe a quarter after okay that sounds good you have to 7 15. all right thank you appreciate it we'll be right back 7 15. there
143you go kathy i'm just getting ready to say put that old teacher hat on it's 7 15. get everybody back yeah they're coming in we're going to get started with our student achievement work session and we have a couple more people that are missing yeah another 30 seconds i used to hate when my teacher i know i was going to say even if it was good miss hope jay aaron belton cotman i used to hate them to call my name but we'll get started we'll get started well this is really this is a really exciting uh session all of them have been good so far but this is kind of where the rubber meets the road and and it's the juice of it all if you will so i really want i really want everybody
144to to come on um you know especially the board members so and here i'd like you to admire is that near there remember i have a video that i want to tee up before we go into these now don't do it yet don't do it yet admir admir hold on hold on allow dr brown to open this up please thank you yeah that's right let that let kathy open it cat dr evans brown you give it over to me and then we'll get going correct all yes what i like about these sessions is that they all target student achievement what's best for children um are we perfect no we got ways to go we are doing some great things uh and we also know that one size does not fit every child i remember working
145briefly at school 69 and i told miss dr cash just a few days ago um as a substitute teacher i worked with um you know she had a a system where there were all girls educating together and all boys and what an experience that was um there are some advantages to single gender schools um young people have more confidence than their co-ed peers they perform better academically and uh it's more of a relaxed environment um they're willing to take more risks when they're not afraid of failing in front of the opposite sex so there's some advantages there i enjoyed that concept and i still enjoyed that concept and i support it and like i said one size does not fit everyone and the complexity of our district is so huge and different that we have
146to have a a variety of opportunities for young people to keep them engaged just nationally the dropout rates are still high and so under dr cash's uh supervision he's bringing in other uh opportunities for young people so i'm going to hand it to you dr cash all right colleagues good evening as we continue our work sessions tonight um this one is really important as a thread if you will to much of what we've been talking about tonight one of the reasons um i took a moment about well how will we know whether the kids can read and write if we don't have a baseline around these student test these state tests it's a good question it's the right question but these issues of the test being the only indicator of how poor children children who
147come from less abundant homes not necessarily poor because their culture is rich but people who come from less abundant homes these tests are never been designed for you to really hit the top mark on it as soon as you get close and we got close in districts that i've led before they change the test because it doesn't fit the narrative for everybody to be doing well especially for minority children if they're doing better than we're doing then what do we have these things for we got to be different we got to be separate from them trust me when i tell you i can give a work session on this so you have to have that only as one measure of how children are assessed and what happens and this is what i've seen the most
148in my career is that when you follow this testing game all the way out to its conclusion you end up having what's called good schools and failing schools see good schools and failing schools and what i've seen over the years is when you hang the moniker of a failing school onto a school you affect the children who go to that school in a very negative way you affect the staff who work hard and teach and and nurture and and help to develop our young people in those schools in a very negative way you affect the community in which those schools reside in a negative way and then it all fits into the larger pattern of it's expected over there and what we have out here is better now i've been in this work long enough
149to tell you that that ain't true either okay what happens out there is they don't get the microscope that we get every day of every month of every life that we live we're always under that microscope and not everybody's built for that i'm built for it i can handle it but it would devastate certain schools if they were all of a sudden told that they were a failing school and what i can tell you is one of the reasons the state did not release those results recently about last spring is because it would speak to all of those other 700 school districts and it would affect their self-esteem of themselves you see because you would be told you didn't do very well matter of fact you failed and so it's a game that goes on
150with these test scores now what i want to show you is how a child who did graduate from a so-called failing school what she said about that and she turned the narrative on his ear in two minutes and said so did i go to a failing school look at me it never failed me and then the next one two minutes also talks about there's so much more that we are and that what we do than this thing we did that day in that two-hour period and she says this is who i am this is what we do so colleagues i can't say it any better even the dynamite top of the top of the top line top tier fantastic ladies you're going to hear from next first let's tee this up because they're going to
151be super but let's tee this up with two brief video clips one follows the other and now admir play that for the board and then fatima first with four or five slides and then uh toya wilson will share and take about 30 minutes to go through this really special presentation and mayor put it on the big big screen all the way out hit that little button down there on the right oh make it wider make it even wider see that button down here at the right where you see that little wheel looks like a wheel there you go now make it big there you go all right play it and then let it run to the next one too turn it up can't hear it no sound the port treatment of jamaica high school and
152it represented our fight against the elected officials who wanted to close it i spoke on behalf of the students and i talked about the unequal treatment of jamaica high school compared to other schools in the building and elsewhere we received the bare minimum of supplies very limited resources and ultimately minimal space in a building that had once belonged entirely to us all we needed was a level playing field and a fair chance jamaica high school may have been labeled a failure but that didn't make it one when a school is labeled as failing it labels the students as failing too it left us with a sense of shame and doubt and also with a sense of unworthiness and grievance and based on what that our test scores aren't high enough the test scores may reflected
153that lack of investment in us but it couldn't measure the benefits derived from extracurriculars and clubs it couldn't measure the depth of the connection between each other and our teachers our teachers went above and beyond and it inspired many of us to fight for the right to be educated there from my experience teachers really do care and i mean they really really do care so did jamaica high school fail me [Music] my goal is to make sure everyone in bronze for everyone from third all the way to eighth grade to stop staying exams it's not helpful this is one assessment that cannot be a reflection of what our students have done throughout the entire school year there are project based assessments that students can give where they stand up in front of a panel and
154they research and they come up with a conclusion of what they've done we also have portfolio based assessments i think portfolio work is the best thing it gets to see the mistakes we made and everything so like in one part early you have a drive the student wrote and then you give it to the teacher the teacher make sure it's correctly done and then you write everything over and you put it in the back of the paper and that's when you put in your portfolio and stick and see okay she made a couple mistakes now let's see what she's struggling on or will she need help in the future no sounded mere so yeah luke and you asking me what's going on on okay can you hear anything dr cash or not no could you
155yes we could oh good all right as long as you all heard off i can't i can't hear it i don't hear it i heard nothing could you just start with that last one and see if you can fix that last one and then we can move on okay all right amir's working on it okay there you go [Music] let's keep now no nothing nothing microphone the microphone is that's the base yeah that's how we did the last time it worked yeah the first the first video worked the second video cut out in about about 20 seconds okay all right edmure says he knows what to do all right let's see if it works now we we need to hear this truth loud and clear larry that's right oh and it's coming from a babe
156come on babies no we can't we'll try one more time and if not we'll move on okay here we're gonna do this step there that might be it come you see what our teachers go through yeah that's yeah that's the thing that he's important to me this is one assessment that cannot be a reflection of what our students have done throughout the entire school year we also have portfolio based assessments i think portfolio work is the best thing it gets to see the mistakes we made and everything so like in one part early you have a draft the student wrote and then you give it to the teacher teacher make sure it's correctly done and then you write everything over and you put it in the back of the paper and that's when you put
157in your portfolio and it's they can see okay she made a couple mistakes now let's see what she's struggling on or will she need help in the future a lot of students like to go over with their teacher make sure they have every step right on a state exam we cannot do that one of our english language learners decided that um she wanted to share um that she's opting out of the exam and another student asked the question why are you opting out that's when all the questions started and the students started researching and decided if we have an option we need to know about it that led to them actually protesting they went around the neighborhood to other schools and they started protesting there in brownsville there was a lack of information there is
158an inequity in the dissemination of information when our parents are informed they are able to make decisions that are best for their children so it starts now it starts today and i'm glad that our students have the voice so what i'm doing to get everyone in my community brownsville to opt out is to keep protesting we have to do better we must do better we must and we must decide how we're going to really truly assess our students so that we get a holistic picture of how well they're doing my favorite line is show them who you are all right we go home after that now listen admir turn that turn that off and let's go back now to dr fatima morrell who will lead us off and toyah wilson miss toya wilson two presenters
159extraordinaire who really really know this work and have done deep research on it toya having run a school for young women leadership academy in rochester college i turn it over to you thank you can um can i be heard i hear you okay you might you might be a little louder if possible and mere is that something you can control or is that something that we control from our port okay um that's that's dr morell needs to control the volume on her and not on our end okay just a second okay am i heard now a little louder is that better could be louder okay well you're really loud so i can't i can't turn it's as high as it goes so i alright we can hear you use your great dr morel voice and
160we'll be fine thank you dr cash and thank you for those awesome videos as a segway uh greetings um esteem board of education madam chair dr kathy evans brown um president petrucci esteem board members thank you for allowing us to have this opportunity my colleague miss wilson and i to present to you an introduction to single gender schools we are excited about this work um i just want to point out that we will be the first buffalo public schools will be the first to open public single gender schools in western new york yes this will help us continue to compete and go out there and give our students the best options for their secondary education thank you and mayor next slide and so what exactly is the purpose of single gender schools well it's been
161a long time coming as we have been in conversations with dr cash for the last um i would say at least three years and it really is now coming to a point where we can actually implement our schools based on a perfect storm of a number of things coming together the will by many in our community in our superintendent and also with um the strategic funding from the esser funds we're able to realize the goal of presenting to our district single gender uh schools and so um a key purpose is really to challenge historic racial and gender-based inequalities and so here we are centering gender-based identities of male with females and particularly those who have come from historically marginalized communities of color who may not have had their histories in their culture as well as
162their gender identity celebrated and validated in our schools and so as we think about creating and intellectually and physically safe learning environment we are thinking about those pedagogical practices which includes those historical narratives where our students see themselves in the curriculum but also allowing them to have uh the self-esteem and confidence to have access and opportunity to advance coursework to actually have a can-do uh philosophy around being able to achieve at ever higher levels and so we position student voice and we position that voice as being validated in our classrooms and in our content areas and we know that also single gender schools as dr kathy evans brown mentioned it has a host of it has a host of elements and attributes that allow our students to be successful for example it deters negative this
163uh negative behaviors and decreases disciplinary infractions it limits learning distractions and it also allows our young women and our young men to engage in academic risk taking and that includes once again um taking advantage of opportunities that they normally would not in the presence of the opposite sex but also they don't have to have showing off and impress you know behaviors too because that gender is not good i i'm something is really distracting like a noise i can barely hear myself i feel like i have to scream is that that if anyone can mute if you're not speaking thank you thank you and so in so doing um we are raising the competence and self-esteem levels of our scholars and we're creating an opportunity for them to develop positive self identity and self uh and
164self concepts so um when we see our students accessing ever higher levels of advanced coursework and experiences that they normally would not advance we also normally would not take advantage of we also see them being leaders of their own learning so in a lot of the implementation phase of this as we're planning we're thinking about the work of christopher emdin where students take leadership of the learning processes and strategies that suit them best in the classroom and with appropriate guidance they're able to narrate their own experiences and content areas and we see a high level of social emotional support going into that as well miss wilson continuing on you'll see young women and young men in the fabric of these schools you'll see this embedded throughout everything that's happening with these with these schools and
165you'll see it evident in multiple ways as we share examples with you tonight improving academic outcomes for scholars and educating the whole being you need a next right do we need a next slide we're on the same score we're on the same side okay thank you i'm on the last bullet so we want to improve academic outcomes for scholars and educate the whole being of boys and girls so this work focuses on high expectations rigor and social emotional supports that are intricate elements of both single gender models next slide please so of course we want to share that there's a significant amount of research that supports both single gender models and here are just a few boys and girls and single gender models are more likely to behave better and find learning more enjoyable and
166curriculum more relevant this comes from 2000 the year 2000 and there is evidence that this model supports a reduction of negative behaviors that impacts academics girls in single gender settings take more advanced coursework and they perform specifically significantly higher on secondary school specific to girls girls and singer gender setting take um girls in single agenda settings are more likely to overcome stereotype threats we know that this improves academic performance specifically and particularly in math and science so you'll see an intense focus on stem and in 2008 it was found that single gender schools has a beneficial effect for boys or excuse me for girls when it comes to building self-esteem and you'll see that embedded throughout self-esteem and self-concept of their ability of their abilities leading the girls to take more advanced coursework and develop
167a significant identity of themselves dr morell thank you again there is a wealth of research that specifically speaks to the beneficial effects of building self-esteem and positive self-identity concepts leading to girls and boys taking more advanced coursework and engaging in extracurricular activities that they otherwise would not do in a mixed learning environment as we see from the cambridge study while literacy development is deemed in many school cultures as a feminine trait or attribute in which young men shy away from in all middle schools young men were found to have an elevated interest uh in literacy and an increased success as skilled readers writers speakers and analytical thinkers as related to literature additionally we can see the outcomes of academic excellence in the entire eagle male academy network as well as the chicago urban prep network
168however the eagle academy at staten island is particularly noteworthy as it has a 54 special education rate while graduating 100 of its males and so it's not about doing well with kids who will do well with or without us it's actually about doing really well in a space where those who may have struggled academically in the past uh academically or social emotionally are also able to excel and do well in our school environments post high school next slide introducing the shirley chisholm school of leadership for young women how exciting is that why name the school after shirley chisholm well u.s congresswoman shirley chisholm was the first african-american woman to serve in the house of representatives and she has ties right here in buffalo in 1972 she became the first african-american and the first woman to
169run for the president of the united states she settled here in buffalo with her husband and she is buried in forest lawn cemetery congressman chisholm exemplifies women in leadership and it is believed that her journey will springboard the young women of buffalo who we plan to attend this school to follow in her foots footsteps this will be the first school named in her honor the school will start with grades five and nine with 50 students at each grade level and the plan is to grow out over four years to approximately 400 young women next slide please supporting the whole girl centers around three main areas and i'm going to break down each and share some personal notes with my own experience of working with a young women's school so nurture self-efficacy by supporting young women
170and developing their voice voice is a big element you've heard it already loud and clear it was evident in those videos student voice is critical here central students lived experience to both validate and provide real life experiences into the focus of the school and intentionally structured learning experience that help address stereotype threats which support support strengthening all subject areas particularly in math and science for girls going further there are four pillars of this program that support girls education so here i've supplied you with evidence of this work from young women young women's school one that is very near and dear to my heart as dr cash has mentioned the young women's college prep of rochester um the school here shows there are different elements here that we will point out that links to each of
171the four pillars in leadership here you see the young women taking the lead on presenting um at to the school and the community there were several opportunities for our young girls to step into opportunities like this there was leadership opportunities embedded in everything we did health and well wellness here you see girls from an advisory group which is a critical component of the school these are small groups who meet every day that incorporate academic counseling social emotional supports leadership development and strong strong relationships among the entire group this particular group of girls had identified a need in the community they took on the leadership of planning how to support that need and they were out in the community on the day of this accommodating event our day of caring this particular girls were taken on
172the role of big sisters at one of our local elementary schools college access here you see the girls participating in an event during their junior year that they worked they worked up to from their seventh grade year this school was a seven through twelve they intensely researched colleges and careers through their advisory work multiple visits to colleges each year and recruiter connections over the years they created a portfolio of work which included transcripts college application components and their resume they came in that day and they interviewed with recruiters and many of them with the recruiter of their top choice imagine that the recruiter of their top choice school their meeting with we had nearly 50 recruiters who had attended and connections were made um with actual recruiters and as you can imagine this supported college
173acceptance opportunities and financial aid for example one young lady interviewed with alfred university um she was in an ap class that year she was she was having a bit of a struggle she applied the recruiter remembered her held her application until things got better for her with that ap class and not only did she get in but she got scholarship so it was those kinds of connections that were made through the college day which is the culminating event but many efforts that led up to that steam here you see the girls participating in one of many activities that included bringing in women from the community who work in the areas of science technology the arts and math in this case the female guests were engineers and they worked for a year on a series of
174events with the girls in engineering and you'll find that the steam coursework is embedded throughout everything that happens at the school it's embedded in all the college exposures as well as community guest events next slide please continuing with the whole girl education there are 11 practices and six competencies that we like to always unpack if we talk as we talk about how we support education of the whole girl we will unpack the 11 practices again you see pictures off on the side and we'll talk about them student voice again earlier we talked about how this was a critical component and you see in this diagram it's the largest here because it is evident in many places and there are opportunities to develop their voice speak their truth in a positive and focused way rituals and
175traditions these are important and evident by the development of the school creed and work that supports the components such as leadership positive community members being a positive community member and scholars imprint imprint would be ways to support the young women in understanding their impact on the community both in the school and beyond restorative practices this is embedded in the day-to-day as needed and a critical component of the advisory setting which we mentioned earlier attention to relationships this connects back to advisory this is an important specific time that is embedded into every single day and ongoing professional development is delivered to staff to support the success of this overall opportunity to build relationships connection being connected to each other school staff and the greater community again going back to relationship collaboration this is key and it
176overlaps in many places academic rigor having high expectations providing supports and celebrating success accelerated coursework and ap classes are provided and that is evidence through the academic rigor that the girls receive cultural relevance again a larger practice in this diagram because it's a major component which you will see throughout the presentation and you'll hear about it again later in this presentation courage cultivation this practice is connected to why shirley chisholm is important to this school the girls work to overcome stereotype threats and build high confidence levels gender consciousness meaning that the girls work to gain an understanding of traditional gender roles and they work to establish how they create the new norms and how they work against those stereotype threats so here again you see more pictures of the young women from young women's college
177prep exemplifying the 11 practices next slide please the six competencies leadership self advocacy identity self-regard academic preparedness and the growth mindset they're all attainable uh with the emphasis that is placed on the 11 practices that we just unpacked which leads me to my all-time favorite quote it comes from an all-time an unknown author and it is a strong woman is one who can build a strong foundation with the bricks that i've thrown at her here in these pictures you see young women building that foundation each picture tells a different story but i need you to just know that the girls picture here have many bricks being thrown at them yet here they stand in these pictures showing that strong foundation that they were working on next picture excuse me next slide so the model we
178have explored to support the shirley chisholm school of leadership for young women is the young women's leadership network schools with 412s here you see an overview these schools are traditional public schools in new york city and there's a network which includes both traditional public schools and charter schools across the country from rochester baltimore las vegas los angeles and several in texas these schools averaged 95 graduation rates with a number of schools being right at 100 percent and 100 accepted into college with over 30 years of experience we visited schools in new york city um dr morell and i who took a team to visit schools and we we looked at the girls schools as well as the boys school so we visited eagle academy as well as 12 schools and we asked the students um
179one big question before we wrapped up each session we wanted to know what did they think was most important for us to make sure we focused on as we were looking to bring schools single gender schools to buffalo and they said overwhelmingly student voice student voice student voice you see it's a major component of the overall programming and that was evident in their response they said students should feel connected to each other and to staff again the relationship model key these are all things that are really critical that as dr cash mentioned earlier don't show up on a new york state assessment but really important skills that are needed for our students to transition on to the next level and be be successful they said we should collaborate so the eagles from eagle academy said
180they work with twills and that we should consider doing the same because there's some elements that cross over into both models and as you see we're already starting at what as we co-present tonight on the schools and opportunities for big sister little sister connections so you saw that as evidence in ywcp the and and that's that's part of the model and the reason why there's ninth graders and fifth graders because now we can have that big so big sister little sister model all the way through from the first start of the school next slide thank you it is with great pride honor and jubilation that we have the opportunity to imprint upon the scholars in the buffalo public schools the legacy of oratorical greatness intellectual genius and promise of our former president barack obama by
181naming the mel academy in his likeness in in the likeness of his great attribute playing on his multicultural background creating a culture of inclusion within our school walls we expect nothing less than excellence at this dynamic new male leadership academy in the buffalo public schools and so a strong focus on leadership and oratory skills through robust literacy development opportunities including public speaking debate theater and the arts will be central to the barack obama leadership academy as the first african-american president in the history of our country there are so many key learning elements in which our scholars are able to emulate and model after as they pursue their personal life goals as successful young men uncovering their infinite intellectual potential as they are guided to walk in the steps in the light of our former president
182barack obama the barack obama leadership academy uh will be based upon the current my brother's keeper national milestones established by our former president and are currently implemented in our 7th and 8th grade middle school model there will be a focus on steam opportunities locally and nationally in preparation for college and careers and of course the successful development of social emotional competencies is one of the my brother's keeper national milestones and it will serve as an underpinning of the entire male academy curriculum and extracurricular extracurricular instructional programming as we teach and cultivate our young men who have by the time they reach us in seventh grade unfortunately may have experiences of being devalued as young men of color and given their natural developmental needs it is paramount that we ensure our young men are learning how
183to self-manage how to self-regulate and how to address adversity in a manner that forwards their personal progress towards their own success while also being able to demonstrate emotions yes even crying in a nurturing environment that allows boys to be boys next slide it has been an honor and extreme honor to develop and implement the middle school mail academy for the last four and a half years here in the buffalo public schools we have seen over the years how some boys and young men in our traditional educational settings struggle in the environment resulting in high levels of suspensions and auto and and low and and in low attendance rates and we have seen how these very same young men have through the nurturing of the mbk program and focusing on their needs and their histories have
184allowed them to flourish and we have seen decreases in suspensions and improved attendance and overall joy with our young men and therefore we see more time on task over the years in the classroom which pays off with academic success and many scholars have come back to the program they have come back to tell us what a great impact you all had on me when i was a seventh grader i'm a senior now i'm graduating and the social and intellectual growth that we have realized has really been uh just unparalleled when we talk about um voice efficacy boys understanding of who they are as young men and what it means and and what are pathways and goals to success we have not had parallel programs and that's why it was important that we created the little
185sister the big sister little sister dialogues program because we saw that working so well for our young men once one to replicate that we know president obama initiated mbk to provide mentors and steam opportunities and students involved in this program are specifically able to discuss issues related to black and brown males while learning about leadership development so you see a trifecta of steam learning opportunities black and brown male voice and other male voices and leadership learning and development we have served as a state exemplary model already our program's curriculum resources and structure have have been used statewide to bolster the implementation of other mbk programs in our state and parents and caregivers in this community for a multitude of years have not only supported the program but have pushed wholeheartedly for a male academy high
186school because they so enjoy what they saw at the middle school level with their own sons they would say to us he's graduating he's going to high school what's next and now i would like to be able to turn to parent caregiver and say we have a high school to continue to replicate but expand and like dr cassay and widen the boat of these experiences for our young men and i guarantee you if we widen our boat with these here extraordinary learning experiences and opportunities for our young men in our young women we wouldn't have to worry about a test score it will take care of itself next slide and so the tenants of the school really expanding upon that middle school male academy i think all of you have been to the village at
187one time or another but uh and increasing that village to include more guest speakers to include more opportunities from for student voice for male voice to increase more opportunities for brotherhood bonding one of the things we noted at the eagle academies in new york city was there are many many opportunities for the young men to bond as brothers it was my brother this and my brother that and that was because there were rituals there were rituals about everything that they did and those rituals said to them you are special you are important we value you and you're you're going to work hard so we saw heard and saw everything from thai ceremonies from moving up ceremonies to the next grad level to the next a great level that became an entire ordeal to uh their
188turkey their their football uh um competitions amongst the network schools and their turkey bowl uh competitions but you know more importantly um seeing our young men um value the the you know friendly competition and um their creed and their beliefs and saying those things every day because we know that when you say something every day it becomes how you think and then it becomes a habit and becomes who you are and so those rituals are dynamic we see them in private schools like st joel's and canisius and we want to say we we can create a better experience than those those those private high schools we want to compete with them we want to compete with the best because the this is going to be the best opportunity but we can't do it without parents
189and family right so part of our model is to ensure that parents are engaged that parents are not just coming in when there is a parent night but there will be opportunities to engage our parents so that they are partners and not just a cursory uh person on the side um for the education of our young men because we know that when parents are our partners all of us achieve and so academic rigor must be there but also the supports have to also be there so when we talk about academic rigor and supports we're talking about extended learning time we're talking about opportunities for intervention and acceleration all of those things need to be there it will be a grade 7 to 12 college preparatory program we will start with about 57th graders and 59th
190graders and we'll build our program up until we meet a 407 to 12th grade student body in addition mentoring and internships will be commonplace at the school as well as advisories leadership development is a hallmark and a cornerstone where young people get to intern with high profile men in our communities they are able to create brotherhood bonds and networks with uh mentors at the college level and expanding upon brothers keepers fellows program and above community to the service community and a critical piece is our summer bridge program to ensure that our young a that we know where they are academically so that we can provide the right supports so that parents can move us and feel comfortable school programming with the teachers with the administrators if we could please mute with the teachers and the
191administrators and of course you can't have a male academy without a strong athletics and extracurricular program when we talk about extracurriculars we're not just simply speaking about art and music we're talking about art we're talking about music we're talking about dance we're talking about theater we're talking about lacrosse you know what the multitude of things that our scholars would be wanting to engage in and they love this anime and we have to get on board with that and figure out how we put mathematics in that program because they love it and then raising scholar voice continually letting them you know as emden said be leaders of their own learning have voice in the learning process and have teachers that are trained well enough to understand that process and then uniforms uniforms that say we are
192one you don't have to worry about what you look like you don't have to worry about competing with the best brand of this and the best friend of that because we are all one we're brothers and they and we got really cool uniforms and we're gonna wear them and be recognized in the community and we're gonna learn what what a tie looks like we're going to have thai ceremonies and we're going to learn how to tie them and be comfortable with those next slide please and so the benefits of successful male academies of course is breaking down those gender stereotypes those negative stereotypes about males of color especially and we know that historically there has been a a a degradation of the intellectual capacity of bells of color particularly through the years and so we
193want to break down those stereotypes to say you are great you are excellent and you will go to college and you will succeed and college isn't an option it's not an option this is what this is a college preparatory school and there needs to be structures and practices which tailor instruction specifically to meeting boys learning styles and needs so a question i will ask any teacher who wants to teach in this school is not king not are you just a good teacher but are you passionate about teaching always and what does teaching boys look like for you right because they're going to be some tough days and and how do you have that passion and that curt caring and that nurturing to really cultivate the genius of our boys it's not just about teaching and
194then boys have the ability to discuss topics and issues that specifically impact males and the curriculum centers their voices like we're trying to do at the elementary level having that curriculum that really puts the voice of males of color where they see themselves in literature as a protagonist that's doing well or they see in non-fiction pieces where the protagonist has achieved and triumphed over adversity or in fiction pieces where the protagonist is able to also overcome some kind of triumph and they can say and i too can do that and i can apply myself in that way and that serves as an exemplar next slide and so in creating developmentally appropriate appropriate structures for bro for uh young men you have to start thinking how do i create brotherhood bonding and brotherhood bonding comes in
195a number of ways and we saw in um in our eagle academy school there was healthy competitive structures right so in the houses for each so for example i would have you know one house is the imhotep house and another house is the thurgood marshall house and another house is the malcolm x house and in my house we we completed more homework assignments in the month of january so we're getting harriet tuckman bucks to go spin right in my house we had a 98 attendance rate we beat the immo tap house we beat the uh thurgood marshall house uh we're the malcolm x house and we're going to uh the michigan street corridor right because we're doing so that kind of brotherhood bonding working together because you're going to say to your brother man you
196better do that homework because we i'm going to i'm going on that field trip so it creates uh accountability amongst them but also two making sure that's healthy and then doing that social emotional wellness practices so in our village that's not only where social emotional wellness is raised and elevated but also in the classroom spaces we expect reason we expect resource restorative circles we expect opportunities to discuss the community current events what's going on around me that impacts me and my life right um but also too steady skills development should be a course in the in the course of the day and um we also know that our young men um they need to study uh their core content subjects should come if we can before lunch so that those encore subjects will come after
197lunch because we know that they learn better earlier in the morning and that after lunch they get lethargic and they get tuned off so maybe we want to have some of those other enriching experiences like debate and um their extra athletics or what other ever other encore subject but also outlets for male behaviors right so we know males are a little bit more aggressive so let's call it what it is they have more aggressions they have testosterone that's going wild so how do we cultivate and harness that rather than punishing it and criminalizing it right so a lot of that aggression needs to be you know on the football field like we saw with the bennett uh high school team going to a new york state championship that's how their that's how their their developmentally
198appropriate aggressions are being harnessed in their behavior harnessed in their behaviors uniforms and positive image branding the school will need to be uh just laden with the the branding of barack obama the uniforms the crest the tie the young men need to feel special about wearing a uniform and so all of those things will need to be laid out next slide and we talked a little bit earlier about culturally responsive practices and curriculum but we plan to continue to of course our standard curriculum but we must also make sure that it is a diversified curriculum that speaks and attends to the uh to males of color to males in general than males of color and it must also uh speak to women in the girls schools right it needs to speak to raising and edifying
199voices of girls as well and they need opportunities to see themselves and they need as you saw in that video the central decisive coordinator and those kids were engaged in emancipatory practices around social justice and social activism that is the kind of learning key learning pieces that belong in an emancipatory curriculum that signals liberation for our young people next slide so the college access initiative this is an element that as as dr morell mentioned there are some elements that you will see evident in both models this is one of those that you will see in both models similar to the culturally responsive curriculum this is a comprehensive and well-rounded education structure um with a focus on academics service enrichment monitor mentoring and extracurricular activities along with internships that ensure that young women and young men
200at these schools transition from high school ready to meet the demands of college and career and achieve their personal and professional goals so to accomplish this there would be a dedicated college access counselor that would be there to support the students along with their school counselors this staff would work to prepare scholars to transition from high school ready to meet the demands as we mentioned before that they personally set out to reach along with staff trainings which include things such as letters of recommendation like how to write those and they will provide a high level of parent engagement with the college access process as mentioned earlier sometimes beyond the academics it's the behaviors and understanding the environment of transitioning onto college also this parent connection when it's not fully amplified becomes a problem and and
201also hinders that transition so we want to make sure that that is done at a really high level and parent engagement is all throughout both programs and this will support college tours at each grade level with partnerships that lead to high levels of college enrollment and persistence for young women and young men developing a college going mindset through multiple opportunities for college interactions or campus interactions and building relationships with college recruiters because remember it's those relationships that will matter for our kids as they transition on to the next level um and those recruiters those connections become really important and they matter and they really do come back to help our students with that with that difficult transition next slide please and so finally um next steps thank you toya so finally next steps for our
202single gender schools uh miss wilson and i are knee deep in this right now and um we are working collaboratively to ensure success of both programs and so we are partnering at this time with the young women's leadership network and the eagle academy foundation for guidance and support and we are next going to create advisory boards from the community to also be a a whisper in our air to to to let us know what's going and what their thinking is and to inform our thinking inform our practice around development of these schools so we're looking at uh you know high passionate community members who want to do that and then we have to take this to the community and we will be taking that to the community with dr cash and um with the forum
203with forums and then um we will need to be engaged in administrator and teacher selection and training as soon as possible and we're waiting on our esteemed leader dr cash is selecting a location sites and then student recruitment and the high schools ahead process and fears with dr williams thank you for listening colleagues that was exceptional so proud of you dr kathy evans brown oh yes uh both of you dr morale and victoria wilson did a phenomenal job in doing a presentation for both of those academies distinguished in the schools um you included a lot of energy passion the research was on point provide examples of schools that you visited in new york city i've heard about a couple of those and they're awesome so i'm really excited that uh the district is bringing something
204similar for this district so with that if you have any questions go around and ask each of you for your insights and or comments or questions i'm going to start with um board member sharon hoffman welcome cotman thank you for your presentation i'm excited always about new schools coming into our district uh i am pleased that you guys are doing this work my only concerns i have and i put it in an email out to the entire district uh to the cabinet is uh the work that uh we need i need to see the board deserves to see a plan for our existing schools and the issues that they are also encountering before we step out into new territory and these issues have been out there for a while so i'm looking forward to finding
205out what the solutions are going to be for our uh high schools uh that we currently have and then to move forward to open up new schools after those needs have been met is my priority and i think that's only fair that we fix what we have currently in place and so that you uh the board is aware uh various principals have approached me with their concerns in regards to this um about their their existing needs being met so not to take away from what you're doing here uh certainly we need as many options as possible i can feel your enthusiasm but i also need to make sure that we do the maintenance on the uh existing schools before we move forward that's my only uh caveat with this thank you thank you oh one
206other thing i have one other question so my concern with the when i look at equity when i talk you talk about the gender yes we've got a middle school about a female school but i did not hear the emphasis placed on science technology engineering and math in the mail academy as i heard with the female academy and i want to make sure that if we develop this that we make sure that the same emphasis that are available for both schools are available uh a strong emphasis with reference with sports in regards to our mail academy i want to make sure that the same emphasis are put in place for our girls as well because they are very competitive as well but that's the type of stuff that i will be looking for uh at
207to make sure that we don't uh give girls uh uh cups with uh little dainty uh flowers on it and and not make sure that they're able to uh uh run a track meet or knock down a football player in the process okay but to be clear with that that those are the type of gender things that i'm very uh cognizant of and i want to make sure that all needs are met with our students thank you okay thank you um well i'll say what i need to say later okay parents heard war members care parents yes yes um uh thank you um uh mrs wilson and and and dr morale for such a a great great presentation tonight and something that um our community and my ears want to hear for a long time
208we've been on talking about the male academy in the female academy um since um i've been on the board and i'm and i've been at dr cash's here every now and then asking where we're at with this and i'm so happy to see all the work and you're doing it and also all of the research that you guys are doing to make sure that uh we can bat all our eyes and cross rt's about creating a successful program that's going to be uh utilized for our kids in our district and um i have a couple of questions because i know that um yeah doing this program you know we have um you talked about restorative practices and summon some in your language and also structure and confidence within the girls and the boys you know
209about different different aspects and mental awareness that happens we know that our boys and our girls they mature at different times and they um and they also um you know build their confidence at different times in their lives you know and and be very excited about what they can do um um i don't know if i'm asking this too soon but my questions would be how can our children enter into the program and how would a selection be a child coming from a uh already existing school and wants to go to this program is it how many kids would be allowed into the program what the class sizes are projected to be um i don't know if i'm putting up the cart before the horse but um is these some of the questions we can
210answer now or just give an enlightenment to uh because i'm sure our parents would want our kids and their children to be you know selected for a program like this um and what the criteria is going to be is going to be a testing format or or just going to be a selection or maybe even a a draft or a lottery yeah so let's start with that girls let me just say this for uh colleagues so thank you for that question terence because it's a really important one and what what dr morrell and miss wilson found in their travels was they didn't really want the more successful school that they visited we didn't want it to be about a criteria another criterion school so it's sort of exclusive the schools they visited were actually opposite
211of that they took all the students and that's what's so impressive about it so colleagues if you say more about about that being our approach as well here i think you can begin to answer uh mr heard's question we don't have all the details you saw on one of those slides that's what we're working on but certainly this overall approach i think the community should hear why yeah so um thank you dr cash so um definitely we we really want this to be a choice um for any family who's choosing the single gender model so there is not a criteria these are not criterion schools they won't there won't be a test to get in it's just simply selecting that you left these schools and um you're agreeing to the model um the model does
212include uniforms i think that was noticeable in both um both schools um and we have rules or excuse me ways to support that for our families um but then there's also um you know when you think about the i talked about the grow out at the with the girls at grades five and grade nine right there will be 50 students coming in so that would be two to three sections depending on how that would break up for each grade level so you're talking about between 18 and in class at fifth grade and then the same thing um at ninth grade um so that model will continue to grow out until you reach five through twelve and the reason why five fifth grade was selected for the girls because it's a natural break here in buffalo
213um and so families who who are looking for a new home at the end of fourth grade um it's it's enough it's another option for them um but then also we wanted to engage the girls a little bit earlier and we needed to make sure that we had our middle school grades also engaged because that's a critical component of developing that college going culture you really have to start earlier than ninth grade um and so that's a lot of the work we're doing right now with our schools across across um the um buffalo school district um and we're working to do that starting with our cake with our k-8s but now we're looking at a school that would go five through twelve i hope that makes sense yes it really does but if we have
214um 200 applicants how would that selection go um um is there is there a way how how to uh pull 50 children or it will just be by by chance i'm not sure we'll go through that go ahead dr morrow now you've got nothing wrong colleagues colleagues i wouldn't get caught up in that today let's uh think about the question thank uh board member for the question and then take it under consideration and advisement okay that's all we can do tonight but thank you for that okay thank you for your answer thank you thank you uh and did you have anything else on that issue no i think dr cash has spoke for us now okay so i i like the side that indicated that eagle academy of staten island maintains a 54 special at
215rate while excuse me 100 rate that is impressive and so it looks like that is definitely one of the criteria that you're going to see you know for um getting our young people into those younger gender schools um next we have uh they hope to have hope they have anything if you want to comment on or questions yes thank you uh very interesting presentation i just have a couple of questions my first question is are we converting uh buildings that we're already using to accommodate these schools or are we looking to secure new locations or do you not know the answer to that yeah that answer we're working on on the big board is going to be the biggest challenge around this uh ecstatic project is where will these schools be had and well would
216they be held so we've got six major capital improvement projects on the big board and we'll be attacking all of those uh simultaneously and should have at least a proposal in the next month or so maybe maybe two months uh regarding nutrition but we don't have that answer right now we're looking at existing space and we're looking at possible reopening or refurbishing schools that we do have that do exist and things of that nature so that that's that's what's under consideration now is there a projected date dr cash when when you're you know when we're looking to launch these new schools uh realistically in my mind given what i know about everything is that it likely will be the fall of 2023 probably going to be the earliest uh we can do this sometimes we
217launch and i've launched things over the time in january sometimes january is a good launch because it's a soft launch and that could be um also january of 2023 but certainly i don't see it at this point necessarily being in the fall we want to open in the fall but late for colleagues are planning toward that but i just don't see it at this point we've got too many hurdles to cross uh to get there we're gonna try but it's it's not likely until a year after that okay and i just have one other question this might sound um you know again not knowing how single gender schools are established in the context of public education i mean i i have obviously we all are familiar with this model in private schools there are a
218lot of private schools that are single gender schools i'm not familiar with with this model in public schools although you know i understand from this presentation that there are some in in the new york city area how do we address uh our students who are like gender fluid under questioning non-binary um transgender you know all of those issues and i i don't know if that's something to talk about tonight but it just struck me as we were as you know this presentation was being hit and you know how we're really sort of creating schools that are um identifying you know traditional gender norms um you know that we really we're a public school district so we have to take into account you know all of our students and there are students that we have that
219don't identify or are you know gender fluid and all this kind of stuff so i just wanted to bring that up as an issue clearly it doesn't have to be answered tonight but i just sort of wanted to put it out there yeah let me let me answer that colleague at least respond to it because i don't think uh an answer but i think that's a great question and i think the way buffalo public schools uh would be on that where our position would be you know we talk with the parents of course and the student and and we we're in the spirit of whatever the student identifies with you know what the student says she identifies as and we we would welcome that student we would help that student build her voice if she
220uh transgender to to to a female as she transgendered to a male we help him build his voice so you know that that wouldn't be a thing where we go hmm we really would uh welcome and embrace uh the student but certainly it's a good question and we would make that very clear early on uh that that all students were welcome uh but also around that whole identity gender identity thing because the one thing about gender identity the little i know about the research is that there really should be full support for that by the family uh the student and then of course we then as educators uh will do do everything especially in these kinds of academies to amplify that student self theme let's do the voice uh that student's sense of self and
221belonging and and all of those things you heard heard in the presentation but yeah thank you for that there would be no no exclusion or commitment no no i i i know that you know that we as a district have have developed policies that are are you know empathetic to our transgender community but i think when you're establishing a school based on gender dr cash there are there are students who are you know i guess for lack of like they're they're they're gender fluid you know they they're non-binary meaning they don't identify necessarily as one gender or the other so if you are you know establishing a school based on gender um in a public school district i just i just think that it's an issue that needs to be more fully explored and perhaps
222that it's been explored in these schools that are down and you know i i just again not knowing a whole lot about this um you know it just it occurred to me as the presentation was because it's so geared towards this is how we're gonna treat girls this is how we're gonna treat boys and and i think that in today's society gender is not as um black and white as as it's been in the past so i just wanted to raise that issue that's a great idea miss j in 2001 under no child left behind we were able to um we were given provisions through title ix legislation to create these single gender schools and that's where you'll see it's not just in new york they're all across the country there are networks in chicago
223their networks in new york their networks in detroit and so um it's it basically stated that if there are structures that work better for some kids that can increase student achievement for those students then as long as we have a comparable site or um for other kids then we can actually create these sites so we're doing it the right way by creating both female sight and healthy and that kind of alleviates us from the the title nine um tests um but but also when we're thinking like dr cash um when we're thinking about these gender-based schools they they are just that they're gender-based sports so if you what whatever your gender identity is if you believe your gender identity belongs in the female school then then you're well we're going to welcome and nurture that
224like dr cash said if you believe you belong in a middle school we're going to welcome and nurture that but they are and there has been a lot of fluidity around these laws so i do agree with you but um we do you know we not we're not going to get a big lawsuit because we do have that legislation to protect us okay so thank you for that um conversation next we have uh president suspension uh thank you dr evans brown uh my questions were asked by by uh by sharon and by hope they both touched on the issues that i would have thank you for the opportunity okay thank you board member larry scott reverence brown and thank you dr morrell and miss wilson for the wonderful presentation um you know i've attended the
225mbk of some of the mbk events helped organize one with dr youssef salem from the central park five um and you know it's long been an idea to have uh um a mbk high school and so i'm happy to see that we're kind of moving or transitioning from just it being an idea to potentially happening in the future so i am very impressed with the research that's been done with the proposals for both programs and look forward to seeing this transpire into hopefully happening for both our male and female students i also want to recognize too that i i'm happy to hear that it's five to twelve it's going down to fifth grade i think we often overlook our middle school students not just in buffalo but everywhere i feel like that's a group of
226students that we need to do more for and so to hear that we're gonna we're gonna start this at fifth grade um i think is all also very helpful and i think this is really as it was mentioned by somebody this is an opportunity for us to again in buffalo be innovative um compared to the rest of western new york and statewide as well in some ways so thank you and i am complete i am in complete support of what was proposed today thank you for watching uh next dr ann rivera very much uh as with uh board president patricia several of my questions were answered i just would like to add into this um i really enjoyed the pieces about scholar voice about college access which is obviously a passion of mine about also
227about this idea of lead advisory boards for school change really like the proposals i think they're very important i think this is an important expansion for us i would like to find out if you um have any plans to take what you've learned about some of those pieces of it and maybe implement them in other schools that maybe aren't just uh new or focused on single gender that we could use to move our student body forward in other ways maybe an attack development yeah let me take a crack at that colleague i think that's a really good question and what we some of the conversation that we've had with fatima and toya and then of course anne and others is that while these are single gender proposed schools there's nothing and i mean nothing stopping
228traditional schools from applying the principles from looking closely at the research or even having gender based uh parts of the school for example in a high school i'm very familiar with research and practice that takes ninth graders for example and has single single gender based academies in the ninth grade because coming out of that eighth grade into high school that is the biggest transition of all of the transitions in a pre-k to 12 public school settings to the ninth and so we've done and seen the research that a long story short uh i know these these scholars who presented tonight will be giving as they learn and implement the gender-based academies we're going to be sharing these in our monthly meetings with principals you know in in best practices emerging practices so that they can
229rethink and reimagine how they group students in school how they grow students in grade levels and how they move students based on gender as well because this research is powerful and can work in traditional schools now it's most powerful when you keep the genders separate for the reasons stated but i don't want to i don't want us to think that unless we do gender-based food we won't the other schools have no chance to be successful uh as successful or to learn from the research uh that is that is very uh prolific uh in this area so that would be my response uh dr rivera to your question which is a great question now uh a team and toyah if you want to share and join in on that question as well yes absolutely so several
230elements for example the college access model um those are that's a model that we're looking to bring to our students at the middle grades and expand into the high schools so that model of a college counselor we're looking to start that with some schools um in the in the near future so that is the component that we feel like and we know we've seen the research we visited actually um the co-ed schools that actually had this model and have seen the success there that was also a part of our our research from new york so that's one example that's excellent to hear well we have approximately nine programs um we have the mbk mel academy the mbk fellows the big sister little sister dialogues program global scholars um we have um they now the lornasty
231hills speaking contest we have approximately 7 to nine pro instructional programs that focus on race and scholar voice stem steam opportunities project-based learning um mentoring um social emotional wellness support um cross-cultural collaboration thinking so um if you take all of those programs and you know you have a good crop of about five to 600 kids in our district right now that engage in these programs weekly and daily now how do we transfer some of these high leverage uh learning opportunities and skills the schools that is a really good question um that's a really great question and it's something that i'm looking forward to um working on even more as dr cash said as we learn more and as we learn more about the processes and the structures and the programs and how they are effective
232then we can you know work collaboratively with our colleagues and our associates and our superintendent to say hey this could work well at this school this might work well at that school but it's not like none of this exists anywhere right now because we have a myriad of programs that are doing especially the scholar the scholar voice component we have a myriad of programs that are doing that but we do have to improve i agree and it's mostly about scalability i think what you're doing with scholarly boys is wonderful i think it's really important as you point out you're increasing your access what's interesting to me is that you're scaling part of it into gender-based academies and how and i just wanted to gauge what the will was to take that and think okay so
233how do we make this bigger how do we increase this access how do we continue to move the work forward because as all of you have pointed out there are pieces of this that can be working within schools when dr cash was speaking about these models within traditional schools i immediately started thinking being an interesting response intervention right so if you have a student struggling you have a cohort of students who are struggling they might have access to some of this as well i really appreciate your answers i appreciate the work you've done on this thank you very much for your just the thoughtful presentation and the care that you put this together with thank you guys we're going to get better we're going to scale we're going to go to scout thank you and
234colleagues one more element that toyota knows about that we have already begun the contract and toy i think they're going to do it for free what i heard was they were going to do it for free because the the young women's leadership academy national network is going to partner with us right and they're going to provide this colleagues going counselor there's a there's a dedicated counselor that's a really important part of this work that is we're going to use our esser funds it goes to the conversation that we've had tonight but we don't need to do it they're going to pay for it they're so excited about us doing it but that role that role is really important toy could you say a little more about that role and how we're going to scale that
235role because many of our many of our high school counselors they they do have an unrealistic uh load especially yes all that would you stop that and and especially for the high schools uh when you say you have 450 students to one what can you get done uh with 450 as a low i remember in memphis we had 750 to one it was just undoable so this this dedicated role if you could say more about it i think it's a game changer i think it's a game changer for our kids and we're going to have that in all high schools now go ahead so the clown initiative is what dr cash is referring to um and it's not free completely they're going to pay for a large portion of it so it's going to feel
236like it's almost it's pretty close to being free because they they have funding that they're able to support most of it and um this will be it it is a cornerstone of the young women's leadership network schools but it does play out in other schools in new york city um we we visited a couple of co-ed schools and then there was one of the one of the boys schools um eagle academy who had the same initiative um in their school they have a model that's similar but then they actually had the college bound initiative um in their school and that is a dedicated counselor as described in the in the one slide and that supports it does they don't come in and take the place of the school counselor they work in concert with the
237school counselor and all of the staff so they become um a an intricate member of the of the staff that's focused only on creating a college-born culture so there's two levels that we are looking to partake in for buffalo um there's the level of these of these college-bound initiative counselors actually being in the school and doing the work and we're rolling that out over a period of time and then there's another level that it's it's all about building capacity so it's district level and school level supports that support all the way down to grade six so you keep hearing me say we're going to be working on the middle grades so it's that building that college going culture starting at grade six um and working our way through to make sure that we have those
238touch points prior to ninth grade and so there's there's a series of four years that they work with us to help us build the capacity to do that work and support the things that we already have in place like eos um you know our our initiative to increase ap classes at our at our schools like there's a number of initiatives that we already have i work with say yes this would help us continue to bridge the bridge the gap between those different um initiatives into one um one place where this one person in each school is um is supporting that but then also building the capacity district-wide now paulette there you go you can now chime in i didn't know my i didn't know my mic was open after cash i was just enthusiastic okay
239well everybody knows that the my brother's keeper program has been like one of my hearts uh totally supported and just enthusiastic about about your work uh dr morale um but i have a question on that with the my brother's keeper the whole emphasis was the children who were in danger of falling out the kids like my nephew who god knows doesn't have a father figure and i didn't know what i was going to do to save him i mean the criteria for that school was taking the most neediest kids and like that one example you gave four percent of the children on special ed so i'm just a little bit like parents saying well wait a minute wait a minute you're saving our kids who we're gonna lose we're taking the worst neediest the brightest
240maybe but just the kids who are in danger and i don't want to see that you know we don't keep that that emphasis in there because that that that was important to me that you know your my brother's keeper program is taking those kids and then when you said the high school i'm like all right go ahead we're going to take them all the way in you know so remember try to see if we can throw out the baby thing that emphasis is important i know it should be kind of open anybody and everybody but we're saving the boys who we're gonna lose you know our brightest who get you don't because of a challenge because they didn't have mentors because you reached out and got role models for them that's part of the success
241that's why i love your program uh when it's when they talk about taking the things that work that help these urban males the community partnership the role models the men the examples that's something i think if we could take it broader to all schools you know we'd reach more than 50 or 100 we make a difference significantly so that's one of the things i really think that comes from your program that we need to emulate yes i'm really proud of your book pushed out where you stressed about how our young girls are sexualized and made as looked as women because we're you know we're voluptuous what can i say but we're still girls they're girls okay so you know that part is why i was really happy you're gonna get a all girls school and
242and and help those girls because if inaudible school they'll avoid some of that they will get their self-esteem to be able to combat that and stand up for themselves so i like the all-girls school i think that's just important uh i hope that you will still if you have to do 50 50 you know there's got to be a way to get at least the neediest boys and girls who are are in trouble into these two schools you gotta somehow put that into your into your opening and then i do have to agree with sharon uh before we kick off two new guys as as much as i want them we got about four other things we have got to address and i know you dr cash you said you're working on them and you
243know you you see the letters from the parents about our our fourth school situation so um just you know as much as i love you we gotta we gotta keep all these things these things moving so kudos kudos and those are my own only i give you my applause and um my support and i take it under advisement uh i'll make sure absolutely care of the least of us absolutely all right god's work thank you yeah thank you all for your comments um i don't see any other hands we need to wrap up we have one more uh session on your education support so with that i'm going to close out the student achievement workshop kudos to both of you and dr cash for five presentation robust educational um so now i'm going to pass
244the course to board member lawrence scott for the education support committee meeting thank you dr evans brown tonight we are going to have a presentation from dr williams i believe on student placement and central registration i just want to say that this is central registration has been something that i've long wanted to improve i feel like we have made some strides over the past couple years um number one i think just being more open and transparent with the process with parents um the updates that started coming out a couple years ago just to keep parents informed on when to expect to hear news i think was very helpful um to have parents ease some anxiety from parents and right now there's much anticipation from parents to get this process started the 2022-23 application live i
245believe we're going to find out tonight when that will go live what format it will be digital or paper when it needs to be submitted by um any also the expectations with criterion-based assessments and application process um and then lastly we're going to hear about data on in regards to central registration um and so we're gonna have i'm gonna turn over to dr cash to introduce staff and then we'll file follow the same process that dr evans brown did as well as dr rivera we'll have staff present and then we i will go around in alphabetical order board member to make comments and ask questions so dr cash go ahead yes uh larry you did a good did great on the overview that was important to give you what's going to be in the presentation
246and i'd only say that we want to be educative both for you and for the public around this issue because this is your induction office into the schools and to buffalo public schools so it's very important for us to be extraordinary in our service at student placement and registration i think you'll hear that under dr conjure williams who embodies the spirit that certainly we're after uh and being great customer service uh in this division and in this place but there's always opportunities for improvement she will talk about those as well and then we will continue to strive so dr williams thank you dr cash um greetings chairman scott and co-chair heard and board president petrucci board members superintendent cash colleagues parents caregivers and the public it's not easy being the last presenter of the night
247but i'm going to work hard to make sure that this presentation is concise but it's also informative and it's meaningful and so i'm excited to share that the department of student placement and registration reopened to the public on october 4th dr cash ensured that we put in place a very rigorous safety plan because it's an office that engages with the public so we had to make sure that we would stagger the number of visitors that would be there at any one time we make sure that every person that enters wears a face mask if they don't have one we have a stockpile of masks for our visitors we have a temperature scanner which the nurse monitors we utilize the health screener tool all of our staff are socially distanced from the public that they're servicing
248we have a nightly cleaning protocol that is very rigorous and we have an isolation room over at the central registration center so we make sure that safety is premium next slide please so i thought it would be good to start with um a brief overview of what the real purpose of a district of our size having a one stop shop which is really what the purpose is of our central registration department or office so the central registration center was founded little over a decade ago in 2008 at school 12 and the purpose really is to provide all of our parents and caregivers with the opportunity to have their children registered and enrolled into a buffalo school of their choice and i say whenever possible and i'll talk a little bit about that later as efficiently
249and quickly as possible that's really important we didn't want to register students and then have them show up to a school to be enrolled and maybe because there's no one there to build a schedule on that day they'd have to come back we wanted to do as much as we could at this one location so in an average year we have over 8 000 families that come through uh the department of central registration that's a lot of families and so far this year we're not even halfway through the year we have already registered 49 new or returning families that's a lot since july 1st and some of the uh offices that are over at school 12 in addition to our student placement and registration office include a mckinney-vento space which is a space that services
250our homeless education students and ensuring that they are very um much prioritized and that you know we place those students as quickly as possible under the leadership of ann botticelli and nadia nashir we have cultural resource assistance and a language assessment center and that language assessment center is really important they help us with translating documents they engage with our new american families in their native languages and so they're very important we also have a language assessment center so when we get students in who are um new to the district and english is not their first language they um are able to be assessed and see what supports they need um if they need to go into a dual immersion or desire to go into a dual immersion or a bilingual program um that assessment is
251done right there at school 12. we have a special education department we have a nursing department we have security staff and we have an engineering staff so at this one-stop shop what happens is that parents and caregivers are able to receive information on all of the school choices we do assessments we register and we enroll next slide so this is what you know lots of our families have been waiting on the application process um when creating the presentation we had a goal a friday that the application would go live i received a phone call right before our meeting tonight the application is live tonight so i'm excited about that the application is out there um it's live tonight and that's due to uh the hard work of kelly daniels who is the director of that
252department and uh myra burton who uh oversees our i.t department they work really closely it's not easy to create an online application but due to their diligence we have a live application so the deadline that has been set and this was done in collaboration with principals for applications to be submitted will be on friday february 11 that's when all on time applications will need to be submitted um and if we can keep with that timeline then families will begin to receive notifications on where their child's 2022 school placements are in mid april that's a lot sooner than it happened last year but last year we had covet that hit and so some of the notifications went out a little later so i want to talk a little bit about the applications and the elementary application
253which includes those grades from our three-wide program at the bennett park montessori school all the way through eighth grade parents will be able to submit those applications either digitally or on paper and so if they choose to do it digitally there will need to be an uploading of some documents scanning documents and uploading and if they do it by paper they can bring the information in and we have about 42 elementary schools that parents will be able to apply to what's really exciting on this year i mean there's a lot to be excited about but one thing that we're very very proud of and very excited of is that for school 64 and school 61 those are gifted and talented schools they are sister schools there's one test that students take to be placed in
254either this year we're going to have our first graduating class of babies from the arthur rowe eaves school of distinction number 61 and we worked really hard uh with the principles and with dr cash's blessing those students that graduate from school 61 this year as a part of the gifted and talented program will have the same opportunity to go to school 156 as their sister school peers from school 61. that's huge we're excited about it um we think that from an equity standpoint that was really important to have in place so we're very very excited about that for the elementary schools there are a couple of preferences that parents should know about their sibling preference and so when there are seats that are available in elementary schools if there's a brother or sister that resides
255in the same household then they are able to receive preferential treatment as long as there's an opening at that school for them this place um there's also proximity uh preferences so for students that live 0.1 to 0.7 miles from the school those are considered walkers if we have a seat that's available at the school they certainly receive preference in applying and finally we have our community schools which also receive a proximity preference for walkers for community students and then 20 percent of the students are able to go on just throughout the district so those are some of the preferences for our elementary schools again the on-time applications will be due february 11th they are live right now now for our high schools which include grades 9 through 12 the application process is a little more
256complex because there are various folks that have to complete different parts of the application and we get students from non-bps schools who are applying as well as bps the application requires that parents complete a section teachers and or counselors complete an evaluation section which looks at effort attitude study skills cooperation and maturity the principal has to sign off and the parent has to sign off and so because there are so many different components to the high school application it would require a shared electronic folder for everyone including those non-pp bps students um and the folks at their schools to be able to engage with that electronic application so for this year only um we will be having a paper we're reverting back to a paper application for the high school component because again the technology
257wouldn't support um having non-bps school counselors and principals having access um to that uh to that uh system so i'll talk a little bit later also about what we're doing about that but for this year the paper application is out there and um we're you know we're really excited that you know we're kind of on track usually the application is due um the first week in december so we're just a couple of months you know behind that the counselors have already begun working those eighth grade school counselors have already begun working with those students who will be going to high school informing them about what the high school programs are we had a fantastic showcase a virtual showcase from november 1st through the 6th we reached 4 720 persons with that virtual showcase that's huge
258and so it wasn't all bps students there were students from charter schools private schools it was open to everyone and the principals put so much thought into their presentations uh toyah wilson and david hills did a magnificent job working with those high school principals to put together um programs that were engaging you know it was interesting to see it was recorded and so families are able to access at any time they have questions about what is this school offer what does that school offer they can always go back and engage with uh that video so in the event that we ever do need to um you know revert back to a virtual situation we are prepared a placement we have our um we had a lock box that process that we put in place um
259last year and it actually worked pretty well um and we are able to go back to that although they're very excited and we're all very excited that the public can come in you know it's a little different when someone can come in and sit and talk to you across the table but what i do want to say is this the staff over at placement last year never stopped working they never stopped they never went remote and they never stopped and so because what we know is that it's difficult sometimes to take pictures of documents and upload those on your phone and send them or you know to try to scan them we had staff from placement going to homes to get documents from families um at a time where you know um you know it
260wasn't necessarily um safe to engage we didn't know with kovid you know how things were the staff was so dedicated they would come out and when families were leaving items in the lockbox and needed you know copies of documents they would go and get the copy you know get the documents go inside make the copies come back out you know so this went on all year last year that staff over there is super committed they work late they work on saturdays they work really hard it's a small staff but again you've heard the numbers 5 000 over 5 000 families already this year have been um you know supported through that office so i'm very proud of the work that they do over there next slide please um i wanted to give you kind of
261an overview on the six high schools that we have that are criteria based and share with you uh what the criteria is that they look at starting with performing arts they are in the middle right now of auditions you know and so they came up with the safety plan dr cash approved it um you know toya wilson took a look at it and you know they are in the process right now of auditioning students for next year they look at of course how the auditions come out they look at grades for students attendance there are recommendation letters from community artists and then there are teacher evaluations hutch tech is involved right now in entrance testing you know dr marquezio worked very closely with david hills myself dr cash approved it and so we have hundreds
262of students right now that are going over and testing for hutch tech at each one of these sessions we have a makeup we have a couple of makeup days that are set for january and i shared for you what they look are looking for as far as criteria they look at the tasks grades and then that teacher evaluation piece that is on the application city honors in olmstead we are gearing up now to begin our testing in january uh the test will all be at uh frederick law olmsted we will have families pre-register for the test so that we can ensure social distancing but we're gearing up for that um we've been meeting with the principals from those schools these are dates that they felt most comfortable with and so that will be starting right
263after the winter break middle early college i spoke with the principal there they will begin interviewing students shortly after all of the applications are due they have to know who's applied to their school in order to begin their interviews so they will start their interview shortly after uh february 11 and then leonardo da vinci they don't do interviews and they don't have testing but they certainly have criteria that they look at that include the teacher evaluations the grades and the attendance next slide please so some student data um chairman scott asked me you know just to share a little data and so i want to share with you where we came up with that 5449 families that have been supported already this year between july 1st and december 6. and before i do i want
264to also share that last year the total year serviced so already we're at half point we've already serviced more this year that's how higher that team is working over there already serviced more this year than we did for uh the entire school year last year so there are students who are first-time students and i apologize that should say 3y pre-k kindergarten or first grade those are students who have never ever been in school before and so far this year we've already registered 2492. we have students that are coming from other public schools in new york state it could be amherst could be brooklyn syracuse hamburg and they've already registered 626 of those students and then of course we have our out-of-state students that come to us we received already this year 509 students from charter
265schools already um we've registered 375 students into upk programs those are some of the community-based uh pre-k programs and the team over there is responsible for registering those students also so our boces programs include schools like falk baker victory etc we've registered 227 students there 198 into head start we've received 147 students who are new americans from out of the country our non-public schools in new york state include all catholic and parochial schools we've also registered students into agencies our special ed department handles that piece and then we've had 85 students that the department has registered into our cci program so those are young adults that we've registered into that program they register home homeschooled families and then when we receive students that may be coming from a detention facility we've had a couple of
266those students um that they've registered and we've had one student who had dropped out and was returning um to school so that's how we came up with the number of 549 students and again that was as of december 6. it's a fluid number i'm sure today you know there are more because every day that's a very very busy office so there would be even more students on today next slide and i'm wrapping up now i want to end by sharing some of our opportunities for improvement that's really important to me as the associate over that department so four to five years ago what we were experiencing over there were long lines folks were waiting for hours in line to get their kids registered especially right before school started and so the way that we handled
267that was that we started to have our e l students go to school three over the summer to be registered it was closer there was better access and it really cut down on a lot of what we were seeing prior to that three years ago we were having issues with leadership staff stability we had three directors over there in a very short period of time we now have stability two years ago there were communication issues that i heard about all the time the telephones were ringing nobody was answering i'm not hearing that last year covid hit and so everything kind of you know we had to revamp everything and we did and every single application that we had was processed and students were able to start school on time that's huge so for this year
268because i'm always looking at how can we improve there are four buckets that we're focusing on the first is training that is a staff that works with a very diverse group of parents they don't get to cherry pick who comes then how they come in and so we will always continuously be doing customer service training over there i would like for dr morrell and her team to come over and train the staff in some of the clri practices i think the trauma piece is really important and so we're looking to do continuous training for the staff there capacity as far as technology is concerned is really important right now they're interacting with three different technology systems the first is versatran then we have infinite campus and then we have magnet and it's very time consuming
269when they're registering and enrolling because they have to go out of one system and into another and so last year we had a vendor uh that worked with us and took a look and did a lot of assessment with all three of those systems to see if they could be married and what it would take and so now we are able to look at with um some of our arp funds at you know doing an rfp so that we can move into the next system and we're looking to get one system so that we can create a user-friendly application we can have documents uploaded and be attached to that application running lotteries electronically considering proximity and siblings and then a system that will then be able to generate assignment letters so it's a big task
270but we've already done phase one now we're moving into phase two the next piece is marketing there's always going to be a need for increased and enhanced marketing so you know working more closely with our pr department so that we can have more of a social media presence um maybe getting out and visiting the school so that the registration clerks are familiar firsthand with the programs that are offered at each of our schools to enable to speak fluently about them with parents as they you know come over and visit and then finally equity equity is uh the lynch depend on all of the work in our division and what we really want to have happen is that we are ensuring that equity and assignments is happening for all of our students regardless of zip code
271regardless of socioeconomic status regardless of any of that in a timely fashion um and that the choices that parents want for their children as much as we can will be the choices that we're able to offer we do have to always look at seat availability though and make sure that there's space at the school that parents may want to have their children attend next slide and i'm concluding now one of the lessons that we learned from this past year is that patience flexibility excellence collaboration and attention to detail matter specifically with that department so with that being said i'll conclude thank you dr williams mr scott yes thank you dr williams and i failed to mention that yes kelly daniels director over at central registration and all the staff really adapted and although there were
272delays last year they adapted very well to the pandemic and adjusted and made sure that the process worked for our parents and for our students so i commend them during that tough time last year all right first we will go with uh miss sharon belton cottman any thoughts questions thank you dr williams i know you've had a long day i know what time your day starts and i thank you for being here with us thank you for the details so i do have a question because there has been situations where there has been neighborhood preference afforded to people outside of the uh 0.1 to 0.7 mile guideline has that been corrected so when you say neighborhood preference um any time that a parent comes over because we're a choice district if they choose a school
273that's in their neighborhood um that's the only way that neighborhood preference would be the school that they would get is if they live within a certain mile radius but if they choose a school and there's an opening that's there yeah but we would do so you do still have neighborhood preference right okay other than outside of the proximity perimeters of 0.1 to 0.7 for walkers right right so we have the 0.1 to 0.7 for the walkers and then i believe it's 0.71 to 1.5 and it's called community okay then anything beyond that would be district okay so what i'm what what what my parents are telling me is that they cannot have access to certain schools uh one parent approached me and said please get me another african-american child in this school so my daughter
274in this class are in this school so my daughter is not alone in the court case from 1970 and then again with on with um or phil okay gary or phil when he came back in 217 he was clear to say that we had to take down the neighborhood barriers and we had to uphold the the original ruling of judge curtin because we did not have our community segregated so in a situation where there is a school where uh these uh uh these extra layers are put in it it does not allow other children opportunity from outside of that community to have access to those buildings that's inevitable and it's against the law and so i'm concerned about that as a um someone who's concerned about equity but i'm also concerned about it because we
275are definitely in violation of the ocr agreement and we're in violation of the original ruling so i don't understand how uh it continues to exist is what i'm saying okay because in a given situation if the majority of the seats are taken up by someone who lives within that community how is that allowing other parents to have choice so are you speaking of community schools i don't care what label it is it's called neighborhood private uh preference and whether it exists in south buffalo north buffalo east buffalo from everything that i have and and the documents that i have we are not supposed to be doing it [Music] so what did what does that say to my people or my community the fairy district who cannot get a seat in north buffalo because their parents
276cannot afford to live in north buffalo so we have to look at that that is an achilles hill and we are vulnerable and i brought it up several times and for whatever reason it has never been addressed so i'm concerned about that and i really need to get some clarity on it because as a representative of one of the poorest school districts in this in this city i want my children to be able to have access across the district and if they're being denied accesses in in several schools because of where they live not because yeah i need to review um some of that but it is my understanding that the community schools were created in areas where there were lower performing schools and it was an attempt i believe to try to really build
277up you know the programming in those schools and create some um you know give parents some pride so even for some of the schools in your district there are community schools and parents that live in those areas do get preference to those schools also it doesn't matter the preference issue is the issue that that is i'm questioning here that is outside of the parameters of the law okay because as a parent okay i my child will never be able to get in the north buffalo school because he lives in the fairy district close to his house close to his house because there's a limited number of positions every year no schools that system is broke and it has to be fixed and i'm gonna and i'm gonna go on record at this meeting to say
278that it needs to be addressed during this cycle because it has been allowed to exist for too long i want to know which board member sitting at this table feels that it is okay for a limited space to be made available for children in this district and we have free choice that's my point here okay so i'm not trying to i'm doing i'm only only advocating for my my constituents and children and other constituents that are not at getting access to those buildings and that's consistent so we we've had this conversation before and we've had some mistruths corrected it needs to be clarified that those ratios are pertained to all of our community schools and the difference it would not matter larry hold on hold on hold on i need you to be clear it
279has nothing to do with community hold on school 81 it needs to be corrected for the public school 81 there is not a neighborhood preference to my knowledge for school 81. it is open to all students equally mm-hmm so school 64 is not a community school correct it exists in that school this okay so i'm telling you what i know i'm not i'm not i'm not you should know by now if i come forward at this table that i know what i'm talking about and what i'm asking is is that we look at that in fairness to the children in this district why is it that some schools have very few minority uh children in there take a look at the data it's there okay and so i don't care if if it's conceived that
280i'm i'm i'm i'm i'm throwing care pretty out there at this point this is an issue that needs to be addressed in this district okay and if it's not addressed as a fairy school representative then i feel that i have to make sure that this board is put on notice that at the time of essence to fix this at this point it's not fair it's not fair because a child cannot live in that neighborhood that they cannot have access to that building it's not it's not fair thank you tanja i appreciate what you're doing dr williams i appreciate the work you're doing and we'll help you in any aspect i can but i'm not gonna sit back and allow to see inequitable uh guidelines and and procedures exist and not bring them up that's not
281what i'm sitting here for we have to change this we have to do right by all children in this district thank you miss belton cotman um next dr kathy evans brown uh thank you dr williams for that presentation um i learned a lot um i have two observations one and it just so happened to to be related to school 64 the one sharon cottman just talked about so you talked about sibling preference um and you indicated that if it's an opening so say for example if you know i know of a situation where a person wanted their sibling to go there the the child go to the school so the siblings now ready to go and there wasn't an opening so what would that person do would she have to reapply next year for example
282and for an opening for her sibling yes so every year starts a new application process okay all right i was disheartened because i just automatically thought that that existed i know when my kids were in magnus food it was just automatic that a sibling uh would follow you know in the footsteps so they would is so the only time that that doesn't happen is if there are more siblings than there are seats that are available and so then we have to run a lottery so if they're only five seats but there are 15 siblings um then we have to run a lottery okay all right that's fair and then my my second observation the high school showcase um you indicated that um you know you had and i remember you said 4 000 views or
283participants is that something that you keep on the web or um constituents that they can go on and look at it yes it was reported okay so that that's that's why i was going with that because if not my recommendation would be to have you know a couple of them but you answer my question thank you you're welcome thank you dr evans brown uh mr terence heard thank you uh mr scott um there's um a question i do have about um about students that's from buffalo public schools that's not from the city of buffalo could you please go over the criteria for those students um that's been placed in buffalo public schools that's not in the city of buffalo or live and reside in the city of buffalo you mean a student that may live
284in cheektowaga yes or any other neighboring district so we're buffalo public school districts so the expectation is that um students in the city of buffalo students reside in the city of buffalo to access our schools for free so if we have students that live outside of the district that are interested in attending a school within the district uh the criteria is the same and if they qualify but they still reside outside of the district then they would need to pay tuition in order to attend a school within our district and that tuition amount would be the same amount as as we project the child that that entered to the school city buffalo yes yeah okay and how is that selected is there a selection process for these students to enter um into into our schools
285that's um for a fee for a price how's that selected how many children do we have uh prospectively so i would need to work with our finance department to see how many students we have right now that reside outside of the city of buffalo and who are attending one of our schools okay um and with this question my concern is about the number of students that's taking seats in criterion schools um that's paying from out of the district and not allowing you know inner city kids to have these seats so if you can come with the numbers um that would be very very much uh appreciated and um so we get a number in the base of how many children you know attend schools that's not in our district i know there's other means reasons
286why kids um or our students you know they move out of the district and and leave the district or or a hardship may happen where they can still continue going to school inside of buffalo those i'm not um they have a number on those also they'll be great also okay so let me clarify that if we have students who are on the waiting list that reside in the city of buffalo they receive the preference it's only if there's a true opening and there's a student outside of the city that would like to attend one of our schools but we and we have a true opening and no waiting list that we would allow that to happen okay so we can get we can receive the number of children that that's um doesn't reside in the
287city of buffalo that's attending buffalo schools yes okay okay um i just want to calculate that just to see the see if there's any disparities about children who live in the city of buffalo that may uh want to enter or come into a criterion program that's not being recognized you know for that program or maybe be placed in a waiting list that could be just so uh so thank you thank you thank you for her i think what would be helpful too i'm gonna have dr uh will carestas reach out to you and have a conversation with you um i think it would be very helpful we worked i think a couple of years ago board members to really make adjustments substantial adjustments to what used to be the practice where a lot of people
288if you knew somebody uh you could get into our to our top criterion schools in terms of academic achievement the olmstead 64 the the olmstead 156 the uh city honors school and so forth even as well and we we worked hard on that mr hergen and dr cresty did an excellent job leading that work to make sure that all of things being equal we really wanted buffalo students to be taking those seats in the criterion school so a lot of work has been done in that regard he'll he'll be much more uh comprehensive and informative about that and and i'm gonna have him reach out to you and help you with that particular question this is a good question but it's not like it used to be so we want to we want to take
289now there are some schools like a school 84 uh for example where where students come from all over all over the county and come into our school so we we have some school like that and that's a and that's a great uh example of service to to the larger community but let's i want you to really get clear that we're not it's not willy-nilly like it used to be kanji and you can't just call up somebody and say i want my kid in that school you know because i'm a powerful person in the community um and so i'm really proud of how how much progress we've made on that to make it fair first for our kids here in buffalo and uh i also had heard several parents say that um you know they teach
290here in the city of buffalo but lives outside the district that would rather have the kids you know in the building with them um um if i don't know you know what's our policy what that is if a teacher teaches inside the city of buffalo i'd rather have a child that's in the building with them that they can help educate or nurture throughout their school year i don't know what we have done with that in the past also or that's part of the same policy yeah we don't register if they don't reside in the city of buffalo we wouldn't register them over at student placement they have to provide proof of residency okay okay thank you thank you mr herd and one thing to add to what dr cash said i know that a few
291years ago what the big change that we made was in order for you to apply and take the test for city honors in olmstead you had to reside in the city of buffalo you had to show proof of your residence in the city of buffalo where before i i think i remember dr cash saying there were literally people from canada that were taking the test to get into city honors um next i don't see hope jay here um miss mccosy remember scott um i i think a couple of the questions that i had have already sort of kind of been addressed i do want to um i i do want to uh dig into the the whole preference thing only because i'm hearing that you know you were a school of choice so if people
292apply to go to that school then they're choosing to go to that school but also along the lines of this preference do the people and i just need clarification for myself and actually like three people who just text me do the people who live uh close by do they have the opportunity now i'm hearing from board member scott that 81 no matter where you live it's it's you know whoever chooses to go to that school we do have schools in the city of buffalo where if you live close to the school you have preference over everyone else before the choices are made or before people can choose to go there that exists for elementary schools yes for element okay and and that just needed to be clarified because it you know we we are a
293district of choice and that comes up with much reasoning around transportation and the whole nine and then it becomes this kind of confusing factor so i just wanted to clarify that and um also like uh board member heard did raise a question that i i had and and you know i'm i'm glad that we were able to clarify that i do have a question around um schools like the the criterion schools particularly middle college um we're trying to grow programs uh i had a question from the last um the last session and i don't know if i miss my name but it kind of ties into this when we have schools that um we're trying to grow or we're trying to bring to the table um i totally believe in you know we have many
294credit we have not just criterion schools but schools that are being in that are innovative that are you know pretty new that we're trying to put programs in place and we really don't even have the data to see how the cohorts are doing at this point because they are so new i respect bringing new schools in but we also have schools like middle college who's kind of stuck in a building is growing you know we have to find schools to house other schools and i know we've talked about putting them in another school as well and that's been coming up um as parents are looking to bring their kids to middle college of you know space right so um i guess only because i'm answering questions that are coming to me about this are we
295looking into um moving middle college out of uh bennett and and giving them another building um i know it was something that was on the table and i guess that would also influence how many kids we take in every time we do you know another recruiting measure um and uh they're just you know i feel like they've been moved and pushed into so many buildings in in so many different you know over the years that yeah i'm really kind of advocating for them also because i have parents who have been contacting me so i just want to put that on the table that as we think about how we're growing these schools and you have so much interest in them you know we we i want to see these academies like tomorrow i think they're
296great i think the the gender question that we addressed earlier was addressed in that that covers it like we can really make these happen but we have to get the space for folks and middle has become you know it's a criterion school it's a great school and you know it's just it there's we need we have a space issue so i'm just wondering basically for public sake but also for my own are we are we looking to house them in another in another location i know it's been talked about and put on the table before short answers yes it's one of the six or seven priorities uh to to try to to try to get these schools that we want to grow a little bit uh in our excellent schools into their own space we're
297trying to do that it's all up on the big board that's one of them uh same with the boutique school the school of bioinformatics and life sciences which is also that's a great little school uh we'd like it to grow between three and four hundred uh but it should be in its own space and i ideally would like to see that in the medical corridor and again we're making overtures and outreach to uh to folks who are key decision makers about the ub medical corridor and and i'd like to put it right there uh so these things are all on the big board we're trying um but they just do take a little bit of time they take a little bit of time uh so that we can determine whether we're gonna purchase and lease
298uh more property for example for ecc closer to i'm sorry mec closer to ecc we're looking at right trying to reboot and re-establish a fresh relationship with the ecc which has gotten a little sour there under the prior administrations but they have a new president i think uh either on board or coming on board very soon i'm scheduled to meet with that individual so that will have some implications for for mec and then we want to ultimately uh free bennett to become the world-class uh innovative technology high school that i know there's a lot of interest in growing and so they have a good strong principal over there right now they have a great alumni association uh you know they're winning games in football so a lot of interest to become a stand-alone bennett high
299school again and so we want to grow toward that so all of these things are up there jen you know it just we we're trying to make it all uh fit together and and see where where we can make the best decision for for the sc for the school while we also um you know don't overburden long-term the financial uh expenses for the district and the board we're really excited for example about da vinci and the plan we have for that uh but that may take another year and a half uh but believe me it's a great it's gonna be wonderful when it's done so if you're just a little patience with us what i can assure you is that this is all in the consideration mix and our staff is working really hard uh
300to make it happen i really appreciate that dr cash and i know you know the public does as well just that clarification right here right now is it's it's real and that um i need you know i needed folks to hear you say you know exactly what you got on the table and yeah patience is a virtue but it's got it you know we everything good takes time and again you know i don't want to be repetitive but dr williams thank you so much for the presentation i learned a lot and um thank you for answering the questions your problem thank you miss mccosy president petrucci uh thank you chair scott for the opportunity uh good evening dr williams i just wanted to first i'll start by thanking you and director daniels i know that
301i ask you guys a lot of questions i'm always appreciative of your fast response um i do have some of some specific questions for tonight though um with respect to our universal pre-k program i know it's always very popular do we have a waiting list this year or not um i will need to check into that and find out i'll find out for you thank you um one thing i i know that uh uh former president common uh spoke about school choice and you know it's good time for us to revisit our criteria based schools and our schools that have these preferences and see what what's going on with them but i will say knowing from speaking of many uh parents that who have children that attend schools in uh in the park district one
302of the stumbling blocks or one of the things that that definitely influences their decision is that middle school transportation that oftentimes they don't send their kid to or their child to a specific school because they can't fully participate in all the school offers and then have a way for the child to get home and that sometimes influences their choice when they're making those decisions as to what school that that so it's it's part of a larger um a larger discussion that we should have particularly at the middle school level but transportation oftentimes does impact choice uh which is my segway into my next question one of the things i know you and i have gone back and forth about is in my district when when students are placed at riverside uh just because often times
303i have a student that can literally throw a stone across the street and they're in lackawanna or west seneca and they're on the bus for an hour and 15 hour and 20 hour and a half to get to riverside you know if they miss the connection you have to do something afterwards it's even longer because the buses run with less frequency and parents don't want their children on the bus for that long so it's just very frustrating uh because i know i know that oftentimes there are limited seats available but still it just makes it very difficult for the parents in my community when their child's on the bus for that long so what i can assure you is that the placement staff wherever they can if it's a parent's choice to attend a school
304that you know um is in their district and that's what they want in their seat availability they certainly you know do all that they can to have the student place there but what we run into sometimes is that students make decisions to apply to schools just based on friends or things they've heard and parents sometimes understand how far away it is or some things about the school and sometimes they don't and so right on the application this year we've put on the application that there's a one-year commitment because once a student is accepted into a high school especially there's a lot of work that goes into it you know the school generates a letter welcoming them um you know they assign lockers they begin building schedules they have you know a summer orientation and so
305it gets very disruptive when we get lots of you know parents that say uh you know i didn't realize riverside was an hour and a half away um and so they now want to go to you know maybe whatever the school is east high school or south park high school but wherever we can we try to work with families and to make that happen but we do want parents making informed decisions so that they know this is a really serious process and you know they have five choices and so certainly we don't want to take a seat from a student who made a conscious choice to apply to east high school at the last minute because a parent says wait a minute i want my child to go to east i didn't apply to east
306but i want my child to go there so we really look at the application with fidelity and we try to accompany you know as many of those choices as we possibly can for children and parents that choose um different schools i appreciate that and i i appreciate uh you mentioned my uncle tony hapa's alma mater east high school always good to have a shout out for east one of the things i know that we've had discussions over um is that a lot of our families don't realize that the application uh deadline is so early in the process so i was just wondering if you could speak a little bit about outreach because inevitably i will have someone who will reach out to me because they made application in you know in may in june and
307july and they thought or they presumed that they would bet that there's all these openings in our buffalo public schools and as you all know uh they fill up quickly so i was just wondering if you could speak a little bit about the outreach yeah i think you know we can continue to grow in that area we have it on our website you know we inform principals we do robocause you know but can we always continue to increase um you know how we are marketing to schools that the application deadline i think you know doing presentations like this you know is important so that you know as many ways as we can get the word out social media is another way uh we certainly want to get the word out so um you know we
308do do uh you know marketing in multi-tiered ways but you know there will always be some that maybe you know we're not reaching but we rely on you know even with our parent partners you know they all have connections to stakeholders and so if they're able to share with their stakeholders that the application deadline is coming up i think you know last year we began putting things on our web page just updates to let them know you know you've got seven weeks you've got six weeks there's a countdown and we probably will do that again uh this year so as many ways as we can get the word out we will we get the word out with translated documents for our families that our enl families our school counselors mrs daniels and her team presents
309to them so that they know and as they're in schools working with staff they know it principals know it but can we always continue i think to you know get better in that area absolutely thank you uh yeah we can always improve um and i appreciate that about you and your staff uh that ability and that recognition that we can always do things better um with respect to our boutique high schools um i'm just wondering do we have is there um are we able to accommodate the majority of people who make applications or do we have large pools of people that apply but we can only handle 20 or 25 of the applicant pool of a hundred no i don't think we have a waiting list at all at this point for boutique schools okay
310let's speak enough thank you yeah all right that's all my questions thank you very much you're welcome thank you president petrucci dr ann rivera again thank you for your presentation also your willingness to answer such in-depth questions uh yeah sorry to say i have another one i actually have two the first one is about um reducing barriers to access for students wanting to apply to schools particularly or even changing high schools particularly with high schools so one of the experiences i had as a parent and then working with cpac is that students would choose a school that had a particular focus and maybe it wouldn't be the best fit for them some of this has to do with our neurotic learners where like career and technical education might be a better fit for them at
311different points but i think it has to do with our typical learners too is there a way for students to um for us to understand what the barriers might be for students to understand what schools they might want to go to and then maybe to change high schools if they find that when they're in isn't a good fit so do you mean as far as us informing students so that they really understand what some of the cte programs you know what what is the day in the life at emerson what's the day in the life at mckinley or at burkar you know what the expectations are we do a lot of work our counselors um so that when they're meeting with their seventh and eighth graders and families they're talking to them it's almost like
312um like a college going uh process but it's a high school going process and so we look at do you you know do well in larger schools or smaller schools you know is a long bus try something that um matters to you or it doesn't um culinary arts you know that's an art it really is an art it's a lot of work it's not just going and making cupcakes there's a lot of work on with the cte piece of it as well as with the academic piece and so we want folks to understand children want to apply to performing arts because they love to dance that's just one part of the curriculum there's also new york state graduation requirements that they have to meet and so they do a lot of work with students um
313so that they really understand you know the complexities and um you know how challenging it can be at some of these schools i encourage um parents when i speak with them to do shadowing you know if they're able to do shadowing you know if they're able to visit the school sites and look at you know um you know the open house programs virtually it's not easy now because you know we are in a time where we're not just having large groups of children come out and go into schools but wherever they can do some research on the school because these are really serious choices that and you know the reality is the children are 12 and 13 years old and so you know they may not understand the seriousness of the choice that a 17
314or 18 year old applying to college would you know understand so we need for our parents to really understand and um you know to do some investigation um into the food they're applying to thank you i think i just have two comments then one just to think about um doing maybe a little needs assessment as you move forward and continue to improve because what you just said is great and i endorse all of it i think that's a really important thing i do know even just now as a parent of an almost 13 year old who's doing this process literally now we're in the middle of it um there's still a lot of confusion out there parents are still really confused about what it means about what their options are and it might be worth
315thinking as we come out of covet you've had enough to do right there's been a lot going on right now so this is just about thinking forward and maybe scaling forward about the next steps that we could do thinking about ways maybe to embed it in students even in their grade level pieces because sometimes as dr cash mentioned before guidance counselors have caseloads of like hundreds and hundreds of students and it's hard to reach them it's hard to ask folks to have that they just don't have the capacity so it might be something as you think forward and you plan forward that might be something to think around so that thank you thank you i hope it's helpful it was i'm offering it in the spirit of helpfulness for sure and absolutely thank you and
316then the second one is equally true about accessibility for our neurodiverse learners placement is difficult for our 12 and 13 year olds it can be doubly difficult triply difficult for our students with neuro-diverse needs that might be a place to think about as we move forward as well okay you'll be happy to know that um the department does work very closely with our cte department and so all of our seventh graders that take home and careers do do um career inventory that kind of gives them some insight into you know some of their likes and where their strengths are you know do you like working with your hands do you like you know plants and that kind of thing and it gives them a little bit of um guidance into some of the programs that
317we do offer you're right i am glad to hear that and i think it's an interesting intersection with some of the student voice work that's going on in special education now as well i'm looking forward to seeing those points really come together and communicate well absolutely thank you appreciate your consideration thank you thank you dr rivera um miss woods and then i have one question and one comment go ahead miss woods okay um excellent presentation you made tremendous progress reorganizing the uh admissions center uh i noted that the in your advertisement for when people are going to take the test for city honors steady honors my problem high school uh you said you're going to offer the test only at one place onset what a lot of people had been pushing and i thought was
318progress was that the test was offered in more areas so neighborhood schools parents knew about the test and got an opportunity to take it so i'm not sure that going back and putting it at one place is a great decision i i'd ask you to kind of take a look at that because uh opening the access to city honors is something we're all getting a lot of heat and that was one of the steps to open access letting the exam be taken more places so that's just for high school for the elementary school we will continue to do the in-school testing for any fourth grader or sixth grader they can take the test right at their home school so if you go to school 37 school 53 you can have the test administered right at
319that school it's only for high school that we're doing the um the 156 the warren site and i assume the kids that are not bps students correct so so for dr williams because miss woods i'm sorry to interject here because this was my question too because i know this was something that you know i'm getting hit we did a few years ago where we started administering the test within our schools so that every bps student had access every fourth grade student last year we couldn't do that because of the pandemic so dr williams you're saying this year every fourth grade student who wants to take the test can take the test in their schools and can we get a sense of when that might occur we're planning to start that we just um got the
320new test and i'm working with uh associate superintendent bullock um and as soon as the contract and all of that has been finalized we're ready to go her team is ready to go my team is ready to go so we're hoping early january we're ready to go excuse me can i ask a question on that so do the children need to have a signature they do they need their parents signature to take the test so in the past we had students opt in to take the test uh this year we want to offer to all students and parents can opt out because we believe you know there are children who are absolutely brilliant you know and just you know because of whatever the circumstance they weren't opted in and so they don't have the opportunity
321to take it so we're looking this year and offering it to all of our fourth graders and parents have the opportunity to opt out if they don't want their children to take it and we were promised that years ago just want you to know that we were told that four years ago thanks not by me dr williams you as you can tell this city honors things been sensitive i get my head handed to me so much okay so uh my question again city honors what about the uh a training this is the parents you're telling me the the test that we used gave us worse results on getting minorities in the city honors so the new test you're talking about i'm hoping that somehow some way we can have better results and the parents are
322saying to me can we do training so that children who don't have uh uh parents who've been teaching them how to take the test and what's in the test and these different uh aspects of the test so they can have the opportunity to do well on the test is that was something that i even have a group that's interested in working with us to do because they're saying our kids are not scoring high enough because they need just like we do for our civil service in the county we recruited minorities we get training and then they scored high enough so we could reach those kids so what about some kind of training so that our kids can do better so we can get more minority kids in the city honors so i don't think there's
323any training that um that they can do really to prepare them for the test but uh you know we're partnering with uh buffalo prep we're looking to establish a partnership with buffalo prep and so what it can help them with is understanding the endurance that's involved in taking the test you have to be able to sit and focus you know for 60 to 90 minutes um some strategies with that you know so that they're not surprised when they come into the test that you know this is too long i'm tired or you know so we think you know doing some of that will certainly help familiarizing them with you know not going ahead because if you go ahead and you're not following directions you could be disqualified there are all these things that we want
324to make sure that our families know and understand before the test but i don't think we're able to train them or teach them you know the content that would be on the test but the endurance the durability and all of that i think it's important that they have the opportunity to be exposed to some of that when you said the content that's on the test that's not what i'm talking about we at erie county made a conscious effort to reach out and get more a broader base of of minorities and other groups doing well with desks we taught them things like if you see the word never that's a flag it isn't probably true if you see always these are red flags that can make you rule out two of the crazy choices and only
325be picking from two fifty percent chance even if you guess you 50 percent get a chance of doing well in tests there are test taking mechanisms and you know some of us have been privileged we have parents and aunts and everybody that work with us but that ain't the case for a lot of our kids so this is something that's coming to me from the community that's why i'm sharing it with you and um i'd like to see some something on it uh the question what about our uh what about our um jessica uh some award winners are they gonna be taken care of in this uh uh this year in getting the school of their choice that already happened it happened we were here um so we took a look at all of our
326jesse catching winners and their first choices and we assessed whether or not they got in and we were able to offer to students um you know their first choices if they did not some chose to some chose to stay you know where they had already been um accepted into but we did start that this year so every single one okay last question like what you mentioned emerson and you mentioned the importance of somebody a guidance counselor helping these children to understand their aptitudes doing and studying something that they love to do so just get paid to do what you love to do and you'll be you'll be a success what i'm finding and i'm hearing at emerson is it's now becoming uh i don't want to say quite a dumping ground but they're getting a
327large number of students who are not interested in cooking and they quickly find out they're this isn't where they want to really want to be and what i'm hearing from you is not that easy to transfer out so i guess what i'm saying to you is i'm getting a lot of instances in student bodies at my at emerson because these kids aren't focusing there they shouldn't be there and i'd like to know dr cash i would get more counselors guidance counselors and put something in place keep those kids out or fewer kids being put into emerson and schools that they're really not interested in because it's a failure for them and it's difficult on the administrators when the kids aren't focused in that area so the guidelines really give guidance they give information but the
328fine the choice is the parent's choice the only way that a child would be assigned to emerson is if they've chosen it on their applications so that's why we know there's a lot of work to do with our parents so that they understand you know emerson is a school that focuses on culinary arts that's what it focuses on and so you know it's a school that's not a criteria based school so if they put it on their application it's a lottery based school it's open it's available to everyone so if they put it on their application and if their name is selected in the lottery that's the way that they get assigned to emerson but the counselor never um you know tells a student you should go to emerson or you should not because if
329they do and it doesn't work out now they own that so they give the information they give some guidance they give what the criteria is to get in they can give information on the program the size of the program where the program is located where they can go and get research you know fig you know see what what a day in the life that emerson might be but they'll never tell a kid you go to hutch tech or you go to emerson that's really the parents choice okay um again i'm saying the counselor's job is to focus that kid on something they love doing what do you do i'm in my garden so send me to mckinley because i'm always in my car you you know the teach the kid where you're at what do
330you do so you get paid to do what you love doing and you would you will excel do we do that how do we do it how do we intensify that we do encourage that i mean but do we have students that apply every year even against a guidance counselor guiding and saying so you have to have a certain average um last year's acceptance class 80 percent of the children had i don't know an 85 average so a student may have a 64 can they still apply absolutely they can apply if they decide i don't care what you say i'm still applying i want to go the guidance counselor can't scratch that choice off of their application because you know it's a parent's decision and so they can but they try to give as much
331information as they can for families to make those you know informative decisions so they're taking the career inventory to see where their strengths are uh the counselors are working with the children to make sure they know and understand what the expectations is of the program uh we work with our parents to make sure that they understand uh so but at the end of the day it's a school choice district and parents do have the choice um to apply to you know any school that they like to okay i still say at the end of the day you got one counselor for 400 people so i think we need to put a little more uh resources into that that's you know speaking for my school amazon thank you hey all right thank you miss woods and
332you answered my one question dr williams the only the point i wanted to make and there is a question to it but i don't think we have the answer i i know that from mr pritchard he has reported that every year we average about seven to eight hundred students returning from charter schools and it seems like we get a flooded of them in the springtime to hear that we're already at 509 at this point of the year we're potentially looking at about a thousand by the end of the school year if we continue on at this pace so that that's i think something that we need to um just ponder on and and have the public recognize that we're having so many students return from charter schools already before it's even january 509 students coming
333from charters to buffalo public schools um dr cash dr williams any last thoughts before we excuse me i have one more thing i'm sorry larry on friday uh at the new york state um at big five uh shelly mayer will be there um and she and we will have an opportunity to talk to her about charter schools i think this is an issue that needs to be brought up with her they're gonna go over the charter school bills and i just wanted to share that with the board that uh there will be uh the commissioner will be there as well as uh uh shelly mayer who uh is over uh deals with the senate education committee and that's something that uh charter schools are going to be talked about and i think that's something that
334we need to share and just want to say one other thing when the community schools were presented to the board the board was clear that there that the neighborhood preference would not be put in place in any of the schools because of what we had just gone through with the office of uh office of uh civil rights um and so there was a maximum of a fifty or a a 60 neighborhood preference put in every school only the rest were supposed to come from outside and that's not happening and i just want to make sure that i'm on record with that because i am serious about this i'm very serious about this because this is something that that is a barrier that stops children from across the city getting access into different buildings so i
335just wanted to clear that up the neighbor that the community school piece had nothing to do or should never interfere with the neighborhood preference piece they're not the same okay thank you [Music] all right dr cash dr williams any last thoughts uh yes go ahead i was just going to say thank you i know it's been a long night um there's been a lot of good information shared but thank you for hanging in there for this last presentation yes colleagues i have two comments first uh this was a model night in my view of uh board work sessions uh a lot of them on one night we don't often do that uh and i'm certainly not saying we should do that all the time but when we do do them the way we did them
336tonight i thought was just uh exemplary and i want to commend all of the chairs of the four committees uh the way you engaged your colleagues in the work um and the way you handled the the discourse i thought was excellent so commending all of you uh for that uh and so let's keep on that kind of a track and uh and we'll we'll do great great things for this district for for a long time now i want to say second and last uh this evening is that when you do look at all of this work that we are working hard to try to achieve the superintendent goals which i believe we we're going to settle on now and then vote on those next week the idea of some longer range goals that some of
337you brought up that are also important for us to keep in mind and drive towards all of the good work tonight around mwbe around making sure that our esser funds are managed and executed in a really really uh stellar way that meet the needs of the community and your expectations the excellent excellent work of the vision of the gender schools with the caveat that we want to inject all of those elements uh into into all of our schools while we don't make one preference over another in terms of work that has to be done to try to improve all of our schools we look at it as a both hand we look at it as a both hand so we thank you for those observations and then of course dr william's work can't tell you
338enough about what she does on a daily basis to try to keep us safe both students and staff colleagues this is something that keeps us up all night every night while we're in school the numbers are high the numbers are high and uh covet is very serious and um we don't we're not trying to politicize it but what times it does let's say we got to have masking we got to have testing and we got to have vaccines that's that's our strategy and she's doing an excellent job navigating through all of the different organizations and energies to try to help us do that but all of the staff are working hard half of them are here tonight and there's another group that aren't here but that i will be bringing a resolution and a board
339item to you to this board meeting as the first semester comes to an end i look at the last 10 years look back seven years look forward three years in that ten years um we we need to redesign and reconsider the compensation for our exempt employees we've done some very good work with our other 10 bargaining units they've all got new contracts some of them have gotten several new contracts and since in under my administration but we need to now look at the uh exempt employees the cabinet and the executive team and then the other uh 16 or 17 exempt employees those are the ones i work with every day and in order for me to do this work i can't do it alone you know that uh this is the team that i rely
340on to get the work executed and into the deep tissue of our organization so that proposal and that resolution will be on the board documents for this board meeting i want you to examine that uh proposal closely uh give me feedback give me questions uh email me between now and next wednesday plenty of opportunity in advance to to review this and uh and let's um take very thoughtfully and very considerately on this proposal that i'm putting forth it's a resolution two and a half pages with four uh attachments and accompanying documents and that will make make for a really really better compensation for our exempt employees they're just they're just fabulous you see them all the time you see their work but they have not been fairly looked at in in in just the nature
341of it for example the other unions and cbas have a specific agreement and we're working again with them now for example our teachers our administrators but we need to take a good hard lit look at our exempts at this time as we try to bring our system out of the pandemic and on into great outcomes uh using these essa funds so i want to alert all of you why i had all of you and you will see that tomorrow night uploaded and then for your full consideration on friday through through wednesday so thank you for that colleagues that is my last word and i turn it back to larry and to lou again thank you for your full attention tonight great meetings tonight thank you dr cash and thank you dr williams for your great
342informative presentation tonight and all staff that have remained on with us late if there's any public still listening just let us announce again that the application for student place student placement application for 20 22 23 school year is live as we speak tonight and it is due by friday february 11th that is all from educational support president petrucci anything sorry larry i should just set up here it's i think it's that time to adjourn everyone i don't see any objections in anyone's faces unless you want to may stay till midnight we can get pizza no have a good night everyone tonight stay safe