001good evening everyone and welcome to today's educational support community meeting and the student chief achievement meeting um here here along with us uh today uh for education support um we'll be talking about the joint presentation with the say yes buffalo on social emotional support that our district has to offer and uh since we started a little late i'm going to get right to it so um right now i'm going to let um this time be afforded to dr criner cash to open up the presentation that's going to be set by the district dr cash yes good evening everyone and welcome we're always pleased when we have an opportunity to share the work and partnership that has been going on now for probably ten years uh in total uh certainly six years under this administration and
002we're into our seventh year and we're very delighted that the bandwidth of say yet has expanded uh substantially over the years and whereas they started pretty much at first focusing on the graduation rates and providing scholarships for students who graduated they have now joined us in a full onslaught of robust programming from prenatal prenatal all the way through to post-secondary education and into the world of work so we're very pleased that ms tanja staples is here and i believe she has a colleague miss baron betsy barron is here as well after their initial presentation uh staff from the buffalo public schools will begin to share data on suspension rates so far this year and the kinds of social and emotional supports that have been needed in order to help our children adjust back into schooling
003after some substantial time away and what you're going to hear is yes there's some intensity uh around some of our issues at the beginning of this year but it's good news is that we're only dealing with about one percent less than one percent of our students who have had to have a long-term suspension at this point about 272 students and so that's where we're focusing a lot of our strategic efforts and energy uh to disrupt some of those issues that are facing those young people and to come up with better and better ways to support them uh as they as they work through their struggles so very exciting night uh the most exciting thing is the fact that we are unveiling for you board our new data dashboard you've never seen this before and when
004you see this tonight you're going to see something that in a long road we've been trying to develop this is finally here staff has done a tremendous tremendous job and when you see what we can now show you in real time and how we can aggregate disaggregate drill down to the level of the individual student it will help you understand what the work is clear up a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation that gets flown around out there and you can look it up numbers don't lie and that's what we're going to have this evening so pay attention be ready to go have a robust discussion and let us get through i think first conju staples presentation and then we'll move on to dr williams miss wilson and dr wright's presentation and then mr hurd will
005turn it back over to you for uh discussion thank you good evening everyone it is such a pleasure for myself and my colleagues from say yes to be with you this evening um betsy barron is going to kick off our say yes presentation betsy good evening everyone um and just a logistical question um are you all is i.t pulling up the presentation deck or should we be sharing it with you i believe uh it has your presentation and if you say admir show the first slide i think he's ready to go with that okay here i'll help people he's working on it right now okay all right here we come well he's pulling it up i'll just say uh good evening um it's so great to see all of you i have seen some of
006you but it's nice to see you um and we're really excited to just share a quick update with you tonight and then take your questions i'm betsy behrend i'm a senior director at cs buffalo and i have oversight for our scholarship and financial aid work i'm joined tonight by mrs tanya staples who works in partnership with the school district on community schools and parent centers as well as amanda paul who works and oversees our school-based preventive staff that are working in your buildings to support students and families as well as mental health clinics that are operating in the in the school buildings as well so if you want to go to the next slide we're just sharing this first slide to just to remind everyone of all the different ways that we partner together we're
007focusing on a couple areas tonight but we work in partnership with the school district on summer camp we like i said do preventive services we have a scholar mentoring program for high school seniors that are matriculating to a post-secondary program in addition to the mental health clinics we also support mobile health clinics that go to schools that don't have a school-based health clinic we have a health homes program that's also under amanda's purview we do scholarships we do financial aid we have an mbk initiative called breaking barriers for young men of color ages 12 to 24. we have an internship program for students who have completed at least one year of post-secondary a near peer mentoring program for high school just seniors i believe early childhood work that we work in the 3y and 4y
008programs in the school district and we're just about to dip our toes into working in apprenticeships which i'm sure we'll be back to tell you guys more about that as we get into it but for now we're just going to focus on a couple areas tonight and i'm going to turn it over to tanya to talk about community schools and parent centers great thanks betsy if you can go to the next slide please so we are so excited to be back in buffalo public schools the families are excited the buildings are excited and the kids are having a wonderful wonderful time as dr cash mentioned earlier we are going into our sixth community school year with buffalo public schools and we are looking to have some really exciting and fun and educational activities happening but
009what i wanted to start with and i'm not sure if dr cash remembers this quote but when he and dr david mauricio when we first started sitting down talking about community schools and david had a graphic and on the graphic was a small seedling that was being watered and the quote from a small seed a mighty trunk will grow and so that has been the focus and the direction of the work that we have been doing with community schools the parent centers and adult education so we have continued to nurture the students and their families throughout these past five going into six years by providing them with amazing opportunities to engage to participate in different programming arranging from academic to social emotional health and wellness uh workforce development etc and so as we've entered back
010into this particular school year um we anticipated that it would be a slow start because we know families are getting re-acclimated to coming into the buildings on saturdays but the school buildings their teams and the community school navigators our community based partners our parents center liaisons have been very cognizant and nurturing and understanding what families may have gone through over the past 18 months and how we should be embracing them and instilling certain protocols and practices within the programs within the buildings of the schools so to date since september 25th and september 23rd the parent center programs and community school programs launched so as you may remember when we started this journey we started with 13 schools and now we have 24 schools in tow with community schools we added bergaard and mikowski this year
011and they are going going exceptionally well in the community schools saturday account academy realm we still have four parent centers located within the high schools south park lafayette east and and i'm going to forget one bennett bennett high school so we still have the four parent centers located and continue to work with adult education to date we've had 60 saturday academies that has yielded approximately 5 visits to the schools and we have had about 540 different activities for the students and their parents and community members to engage in and some of those activities have been academic related we've had algebra review we've had science club uh history activities that have been going on the buffalo philharmonic has been in place exploring more we've utilized the rosette curriculum and several of the schools and what seems
012to be very popular is the drone program we've had chess clubs the business competitions that are happening we've recently had on-site admission enrollment from three colleges and universities that have been on site at the high schools oral health screening and and education has been taking place engineering for kids we've had music production zumba housing workshops disability awareness training cooking sports tutoring etc and with the parent centers the parent centers are continuing to operate in the evenings two nights a week either monday and wednesday or tuesday and thursday as well as our saturday academies and we have seen so far about 560 visitors coming into the parent centers offering program activities that have yielded 438 in attendance and then also 53 different type of engagement opportunities looking at the various strands for the parent center academics
013and instructional technology social emotional learning and wellness diversity equity and inclusion parent leadership and advocacy personal and professional growth and development and soon to be a new parent support and family bonding programs so we've had continued our sickle cell support groups cosmetology multicultural conversation pregnant and parenting teams fast food programs team drop in career coaching workforce development and our ever popular the virtual legal clinics so we are continuing to look at ways to reach the students and their family members and bringing them in and having their voices at the table in program development planning implementation as well as the evaluation component so i will end there and i will ask my colleague amanda paul to come and provide you with an overview thank you tanya uh good evening if you would be able or if
014you'd be willing to put the next light on thank you um so just to recap uh betsy mentioned some of the programs in our school-based services department and so under that realm we have our family support specialist programs um betsy mentioned our preventive services program which is a wraparound support program for families the health home program working with children and youth who have chronic medical and or behavioral health needs and then also under department is the facilitation and coordination of both the mobile health clinics and the school-based satellite mental health clinics so today i'm only going to highlight services under the mental health satellite clinics uh so we continue to partner with ten agencies for the school-based mental health services eight of these agencies uh provide omh office of mental health regulated satellite mental health
015clinics and two offer school-based health clinics under department of health there are various additional supports available within the school buildings dependent on the agency in that school things like peer supports and that's really up to the programs and the building administration on what additional services they offer through the school-based clinics students receive private individual counseling right within the school building these sessions are built around the comfort of the students and families and since the pandemic the agencies have the ability to provide telehealth sessions if that's preferred or if needed if and when a student is not in the school building it's also helped to increase parent engagement as well because a lot of the parents well right now the parents are unable to go into the school buildings but in addition it's just an easier
016method to loop parents into services through these partnerships there are 61 embedded mental health clinics and this past year despite the pandemic and remote learning they served over 700 students many students though not without difficulty they did engage with telehealth services through their school-based mental health clinics during the remote learning time frame and then when students went back to school they transitioned the students back some students were able to actually attend the outpatient clinics and other agencies actually layered their supports by going out to the homes to support students of course following safety procedures as of last june there were close to 600 students still enrolled in the clinics many of the students remain engaged throughout the summer time and even going into this school year unfortunately we have faced and if maybe some of
017you have already heard there's a bit of a shortage of clinicians for our school-based clinics since the pandemic set in and similar to many other fields hiring has been really tough and difficult so in reference to the bottom bullet we continue to hold our regular and very robust mental health task force meetings and we come together and we talk about these issues and we figure out ways to address any gap in care um and we've been very successful through this team more recently focusing on the shortage and coming up against it through efforts through the task force emulating what has been done within buffalo public schools we've helped to transfer this model over to higher education settings which remains an ongoing and familiar mode of support for students as they matriculate currently and through the
018support of the community foundation and the gates foundation we helped to facilitate six satellite clinics and six of our local colleges and this will be our third and final year moving to the bullet right below that our third and final year working with university at buffalo department of psychiatry also supported by the community foundation and it's had a tremendous impact on our students in the buffalo public schools they've offered free psychiatric case consults to members of the bps crisis prevention and response team members of student support teams occasionally bringing in teachers as needed all without disclosing any identifying information on students we work with two psychiatrists dr sarabsen gupta and dr jennifer hake who additionally offer two info sessions a month on specific content areas and also opening up for general q a and lastly
019they provide large-scale psychiatric coaching sessions crucial topics you know thinking over the course of the pandemic uh in january we had a presentation called sss a road map through the pandemic navigating the facets of stress and anxiety and considering students families and staff and all of our stress responses and how we were working at that point in time so we work really closely with the bps crisis prevention and response team um ub and say us buffalo and it's our hope that that can continue as in years to come and so lastly as i mentioned cs buffalo continues to facilitate the mental health task force which now consists of two task forces um the needs and processes for higher education and partners compared to buffalo public schools differs and it made a lot more sense to
020break those up but occasionally we come together this past week we just did that into one large group um to continue to put our heads together and expand mental health supports for students okay and from there we're gonna hand it over to betsy she's gonna take some time to talk about say us buffalo scholarship and financial aid available to students thank you amanda if you could go to the next slide please the say yes buffalo scholarship i'm sure you are all familiar with but it was really the first the first program that came out of what is the sas buffalo partnership we have been raising money since our inception to pay for tuition scholarships for graduates of buffalo's public schools we are last dollar scholarship so that means that we come in and cover tuition
021after state and federal aid is applied um to help students get that state and federal aid we have a program and partnership with the university at buffalo where we train undergraduate students and then they become interns who intern within each of the buffalo public high schools and provide direct one-to-one support to students and parents on completing what can be a very difficult financial aid process with all the different forms for fafsa and then also for the new york state tap application the great news is this year we are back in the school buildings we had to move virtual for the past year or so and we are now having our staff right back in working with the school counselors in each building in addition to our financial aid counselors we have our scholarship team who
022is out and about doing presentations to high school seniors and getting them ready to start completing the seas application which will be open in the next week or so and i'll just note a couple of things about what's been happening in terms of the pandemic you may have seen but nationwide there's been a huge disruption in the number of students who matriculate and persist in higher education as a result of everything from you know not wanting to be out and about in a classroom having additional family responsibilities including having to work instead of attend school and so there's been overall about a 20 decrease in students who have matriculated or persisted and we have certainly seen that here in buffalo as well we've seen fewer students matriculate we've also seen students who had started school
023prior to the pandemic have to leave school to take care of those other responsibilities and that will be evident in some of the statistics i'll share with you to give you a snapshot of the last school year we had just over in total since we've started just over 2 buffalo public school graduates who have completed a post-secondary degree and that is defined as a certificate an associate's degree or a bachelor's degree what's really exciting is that we've had over 100 of those students now go on to earn a high graduate degree as well we've got three lawyers so far we've got a whole bunch of mbas and msws and so it's really exciting to see where these students are going something i want to note is last year we did have a lot of trouble
024with getting students to complete the sas application getting students to complete financial aid applications and this was mirrored in our partner cities so we have a sas chapter in cleveland and one is syracuse they had similar difficulties on a standard year we usually get about 90 95 of all eligible students to complete the say yes buffalo scholarship application last year we only had about 50 percent so that's a pretty significant drop in addition we saw a decrease in the number of students who completed the fafsa so we only had about 34 of students complete fafsa last year we're usually right around 50 or 60 percent um and tap completion was also down oh sorry i have a little person here you're gonna have to wait a second honey okay yeah go ahead um sorry about
025that um just to note we were requested to provide an update on a couple of different specific points so the questions were here in the bullets the current number of school graduates who have enrolled in a post-secondary degree program the estimated number for this school year right now is about 1650 students we're still counting them so that's why that's an estimate um but that's yup honey i'll take care of that in just a minute okay you're just gonna have to wait thank you we also have um for you here the current number of buffalo public school graduates who have received scholarships to a college or university for this school year again this is an estimate because they're still coming in but it's about 750 of those students the reason why it's not the full number
026of students that are in school is because the rest of those students are likely covered by state and federal aid so they don't require additional tuition scholarships outside of that lastly it was asked how many seniors used say us buffalo college enrollment services this number is from last year it was about 1100 that we worked with directly typically we are almost twice that so again that's where you see that 50 percent decrease in number of students who completed our sas buffalo application so i'm going to turn it back over to amanda who's just going to share a quick story with you that illustrates all of our services and then we can take your questions thank you betsy if you don't mind going to the next slide all right so we are always really excited to
027share impact stories of the work we do when this young man really deserves the spotlight colin is a current fifth grader at dr lydia t wright he came our way by referral through the building principal in the 2019-2020 school year um previously colin had some in-school behavioral concerns and unfortunately prior to the pandemic he did spend some time out of school due to suspensions as a result he was referred to our health home program where we have a family support specialist located right in his school building for support that family support specialist helped to establish what we call an interdisciplinary team which is a group of support in any area colin or his family desires to have so that could be education medical community mental health um any any type of support you can think
028of and certainly the hard work on behalf of colin and his family colin was awarded with a certificate of achievement just this past month he is having a great school year he's testing all of his courses he's loved by his football team and recognized for his teamwork um and he shared with us recently that he aspires to win to be a day be a football player himself or maybe a police officer and we're confident that he's going to go really far because he's very dedicated he's very hard-working and um we really just uh are looking forward to all that is to come for this young man um and so there i'm gonna if you want to go to the next slide i'm going to open up the floor if anybody has any questions for any
029of us i know we covered a lot of information that's why we only highlighted three program areas but happy to answer any questions if anybody has them yes i'm going to open the floor to questions at this time but respectfully let's ask questions about the dashboard the community schools and parent centers mental health services and the impact that this our programs have had on our students and also respectfully next month we're going to revisit the scholarship and financial aid and our students that graduation rate that are attending college um the say yes director david rust wants to go more in detail next month about it and um so i would like to try to hold some of those questions right now pertaining to that issue because uh he also wants to report to the district
030about those those numbers that we have and um things that we can do to help improve um the situation that we have here in buffalo so um we have a number of board members that's available right now so i'll start off with the board president that's in the room if you have any questions concerning the dashboard the community schools and parent centers mental health services and the impact that our programs have having our children uh thank you mr heard uh my question would be about what does the usual participation look like like how many visitors how many family members how many community members come to a typical you know saturday community school so that really really varies by community but what we've been seeing on average we're ranging somewhere between 85 90 to a little
031over um close to 200 in some of the schools and so each month each week saturday academy um has fluctuated but uh we're starting to see retention and and that's those families that are coming three or more times is it reflective of the offering that's because i know often each saturday there's some different focus or theme in addition to the standards uh do you find that you have higher turnout for some of these yes sometimes it's it's based upon the theme it's seasonal you know we just celebrated harvest and so we've seen a lot of families coming out for the different specialty kinds of activities that are happening and again i think it's about comfortability once families start to really get more comfortable um with coming into the buildings we are adhering to all the
032social distancing protocols and people are wearing masks and we're doing the screener and the body scanning and so each week we see more and more students and parents uh coming into the buildings thank you very much thank you thank you uh president patrowski and i will go across the according to our screen i will go across the top to the bottom uh how our board members are placed so uh the next sport member that will if you have a question will be um dr kathy evansborough my son interfered what was your question my question was do you have any questions uh pertaining to the presentation today by uh by tanya staples um bessie um bran and um amanda paul no i don't i just always admired the say yes program i remember my young man
033my last son who was now 24 um participated in some of the activities over at performing arts he did well um we weren't eligible for any of the scholarships however um it did allow him to at least participate in some of the activities so no i think you guys are doing a wonderful job and i've always admired the say yes program is a asset you know to our district thank you thank you doctor i'm kept the evans brown next on our screen we have um former board president sharon belton copman thank you mr heard um thank you say yes uh you have certainly far exceeded any expectations we had uh many years ago when you first started and i uh really appreciate that you guys are a very strong family member i feel you're beyond
034the community piece you are a family member of our district i just have uh two questions um possibly three i am um focusing in on um girls at this point and i'm curious to know has there been any conversations about possibly expanding services for young ladies uh similar to the breaking barrier and my brother's keeper had we talked about or has anyone even you know approached that at this point particularly since it appears that you know it's a missed opportunity for our young ladies and looking at the data that's associated with them uh is that what do you think is that something maybe that's worth talking about or uh etc how do you guys think about that definitely um one of our colleagues has such a great passion in that area so we are in
035exploration phase right now with what a girls breaking barriers could potentially look like um but in the meantime there are different um navigators that are hosting mentoring groups and and young lady groups and girl groups in their buildings because that's also been expressed by the principals um you know what can we do we've seen a tremendous number of incidences you know girls are just not getting along the way that they used to social media activities are coming into the school buildings and so what are some of the interventions that we can do to try to calm the waters in the schools so the navigators working with their school teams again with the cbo partners our say yes colleagues that are in the buildings are looking at opportunities to create and develop programming for the young
036ladies but we're definitely in the exploration phase for what a breaking barrier girl initiative could look like thank you appreciate that so much in regards to your parents centers do our um uh pals our parent um our parent uh representatives from our school do they work at all or are we doing anything in conjunction with some you have your parents center set up many of the schools have a person in the building that's you know earmarked that to go that go-to person for things that are going on i was at a meeting last night and i it said that we were upwards of we had about 43 uh parent facilitators currently up and running right now have we talked about you know uh maybe doing anything with those individuals to try to help um solidify
037our parent involvement piece or anything like that because if you're if the parents are coming in i'm wondering if we're we're missing an opportunity to engage the parents you know what i mean not you know as far as helping us move this school district to the next level so i don't know you know if any of our of our facilitators are working with you guys at all you know are they doing anything like that but we have been in conversations with dr ramona reynolds about um collaboration and partnership and how do we reach the parents and expose them to the different offerings and services through the parent centers so there is conversations that are happening in schools that may have um parent parent liaisons okay thanks i'm gonna follow up with her on that one
038as well so question my last question at one point um the children who were not eligible for the scholarship were receiving means money uh money that um it was like uh i think at one point it was a a uh a visa card or something that they could go and use at the bookstore do you do that anymore or if you don't get a scholarship you don't get anything do you do anything like that anymore you know um sharon i actually don't remember that so i'll have to look back and and see um we don't do anything like that right now what we do do for students in that situation um is we usually push them towards the community foundation for greater buffalo scholarship program which is the largest program behind ours in the city
039and a lot of students are able to qualify for those scholarships in addition we push our scholars there too because they can get additional money beyond ours for like books room and board there um further i will say um you know looking at ways to support students with books is a constant issue so it's definitely something that we are interested in exploring more so if that's something that is of interest to this committee we're happy to have those discussions all right thank you thank you for all the great things that you're doing in our district we really appreciate you all that's it okay thank you um um uh mistress of sharon belton codman next on our screen we have uh lawrence scott scott if you have any questions yes thank you chairman heard um just
040want to first thank tanya betsy and amanda for your presentation um say yes is a tremendous partner probably well definitely our best partner and all the work that you provide and do is so necessary and i think most necessary this school year um i'm thrilled to see the saturday academies back up and running i have visited five already and those are one of the saturday academies i hold in high regard there's something that i think are just so valuable to to our families to our community um and i i just want to also thank the the many volunteers in community-based organizations uh mentors students from canisius that i met this past saturday there's just so many important people that are playing such a significant role to help make those saturday academies so successful the mental
041health clinics and this is my question um those also very unique something you're not going to find really in many school districts none that others that i know of um and that the access to psychiatry through ub just wondering if you have any trend data given this school year and the pandemic um you know i'm as a mental health professional myself in a school district i'm experiencing higher intensity more frequency of social emotional needs mental health needs i'm just wondering if if your mental health clinics have any trend data that's showing something similar thanks larry um what i can sew for hard data our due date for input is the end of this month so we'll have some fast data after this month but what i can say is at our task force meeting on
042this past monday they we did discuss uh trends and what the clinicians are seeing um the psychiatrists are on as well um and really what the reporting i i don't i wouldn't say it's surprising they're definitely seeing uh an increase around symptoms of depression and anxiety um and a significant increase in the the in the ability to focus um some of our older students are even self-diagnosing you know things like 88 saying i have adhd so a lot going on and obviously this past couple of years having a tremendous impact um and then on another level we're also seeing some increased aggressive behavior so that we even though we don't have the hard data we wanted to take the time to really talk this through and talk about any potential gas and care and we
043brought some people in to also talk about what we can do to come up against it as well very good thank you amanda thank you again um mr scott next person that we have um on listed is um paulette woods i also want to commend say yes for giving our children the opportunity to attend college that's that's something that's immeasurably important uh but i wanted to ask you what is your progress since you paid the last dollar for a student going to school a lot of the poorer students get significant financial aid so it ends up middle class family may get a significantly larger payment and a poor family just get a little payment yes so the question the parents are asking me is kind of an equity question they have other significant needs that
044keep them from other expenses for going to school they need the books uh some of them have transportation so they they have a myriad of other needs so can you just update me on what other expenses that you have been able to pay for these students who you know um aren't getting a lot in intuition but they need uh you know anything from board transportation books etc what other needs have you been able to finance for them sure thank you for the question um you make an excellent point and we are well aware and um and actually we we sort of speak to this as there's a lot of students that we work with in the school district who can't afford quote unquote free college it's there's just so many other barriers that they have
045financial and otherwise um that need to be addressed in order for them to be successful um i one thing that two things i'm going to speak to um one is you know we've been doing this now for 10 years we had we started out with this goal of can we get scholarships on the table to start sending students to college and we accomplished that right we got there and now we've been doing it for 10 years we've been able to see how it's working who's able to take advantage of the scholarships how much are we spending each year um getting a better understanding of how much we need to raise so that we can have this forever and what we've done is we just started about three weeks ago convening a committee of our board
046and staff who work in the scholarships and data department to take a harder look at that data specifically to look at issues of equity because we absolutely hear what you're saying and it's something that we are interested in knowing and addressing as well what we're going to do is see if there is opportunities for us to make changes that make sense that would strengthen the offerings in addition to that this is something that we'll be able to talk more about when david rust our ceo comes to address you i believe next month but we are looking at uh we received a grant from new york state in the amount of 10 million dollars this is a few years ago well yes it's still good news so we received that a few years ago when they
047announced the excelsior scholarship um and when they announced the excelsior scholarship they were sort of like you know buffalo you guys got it covered you don't qualify for excelsior and they said well wait a second this is all private dollars we need your help too so they said fine we'll give you 10 million dollars and you cover the scholarships and so ultimately this is a better deal for buffalo um because we're able to invest those dollars along with the rest of our endowment and grow that money over time in addition to handing it out to students they specifically earmarked those dollars to support our opportunity grant and that is a grant that goes to students who are receiving within right now five 500 of the maximum pell award which means those are the students with
048the greatest financial needs it is an award of a thousand dollars per semester that can be used towards any expenses our goal yes so that's wonderful but also if you work with students you know a thousand dollars is not in a lot of cases not enough um so what we are also doing is working with new york state right now to see if we can revise those guidelines as well as doing a cost study to see if we have the ability to increase both the amount of money that we award each semester to individual students as well as the number of students that we're able to give that award to so that's something that we are actively working on as well i just want to thank you also for your diversity in the staff because
049that gives role models to children and it gives opportunity to work so thank you thank you again um i'm mrs paulette woods uh the next person that we have listed here is um hope j joje if you have any questions that you could ask at this time the floor is yours i have no questions i just want to echo the same sentiments as my colleagues how grateful we are to say yes i am personally grateful to say yes for assisting me with my children when they went to college um both say yes scholars and you do tremendous work absolutely tremendous work and and make a difference in so many so many of our students lives so it was very informative um i i'm glad to see that you're innovating and and you know rolling with
050the times here and and that's what we need so i appreciate we appreciate you thank you thank you miss um hope j uh next person we have is our west side um board member uh jennifer mccosey jennifer you have any questions the table was yours unheard um yes obviously i mean and want to sound redundant because it's the accolades are did well deserve so thank you i also personally thank you for helping my my daughters and it's you know just amazing work i i'm curious the question i have is around and i've heard it mentioned and i also know just the schools in my district alone um produce the the retention of families when you talk about families who return two and three times um do you uh like bring those those names and do
051you connect with the district on those families that return and keep returning and try and figure out maybe and dr cash i guess this is for our staff as well how do we take that opportunity of those folks that are continuing to come and just kind of digging in deeper with those families to see whether or not you know not just for recruitment purposes for them to bring other people but especially in a district like my own where there's so many communities who are just pretty much engaged in their own communities do we have like uh workshops or themes that are based around you know putting those in leadership or maybe in roles where they're empowered to you know connect in in larger ways the families that keep coming the families that you know are
052participating regularly i know families in particular that have been participating for years and years you're now getting you know the little the the cousins and and those folks because the others have graduated so i'm just wondering what type of opportunity we utilize and maybe we've said it before and i missed it but i see like leadership development opportunities i see so many avenues where we can maybe even talk about some of the issues that we work with you know maybe those families can help with attendance issues or talk to their communities around that so just you know it doesn't have to be in deep now but i'm just wondering what type of strategies we might be using or if there's a thought about putting that together in the future well just on a small scale
053within the community schools you know the navigators know the families that are coming multiple multiple times and so we do have leadership roles or opportunities and community service activities that the navigators engage the families the students in particular with as well as trying to engage their voice and the kinds of programs and opportunities that they would like to see whether it be in a community school saturday academy or parent center or even adult education and then we also look to determine again what are the needs of the families because you're getting to know them more intimately and then how do we source out other opportunities through whether it's in amanda's department how do we connect them with scholarship or boys and men of color so you know we've been talking and say yes about dosages
054because we know that if we can continue to move the families through the continuums within say yes and within things that are happening in the district as well as in the community that the parent the parents and the students are going to be for the better and so if we look at a continuum over the course of a 12-month period of time community schools doesn't stop in the summer we continue to offer programming and opportunities to engage families and then how do we get the families linked in with the summer camp program that's happening this summer how do we connect the families once we return back to after school so you see the families in school base they're participating in after school activities saturday academy summer camp and then what are some other kinds of
055things that again services through say yes another being able to leverage with other partners and providers that are working with us um creating those types of ambassador groups is something else that we've been um working on with our students and families okay yeah i great i understand maybe um my question is more along the lines of when you're talking about how you do this are you um empowering or utilizing those multiple returning families to help bring that table i know the services are definitely there are they being encouraged to make sure that they are communicating with folks here are they given roles i guess yeah to be another another kind of avenue of a communicator i don't know like incentivized men not incentivized but just uplifting not only their participation but knowing that they're definitely
056respected and empowered by both our district and say yes um that's that's kind of where i was going with that i definitely appreciate your answer because i know that you know all of that needs the the how do we how do we do it how is like the question for any and all things we're doing and um yeah i was just trying to make sure that i i put across what i was thinking around like empowering those late that that are continuing to come and we definitely um encourage and utilize our families as ambassadors for the work that's happening that's definite you know trying to instill that each one reach one kind of concept um but definitely about empowerment and engagement and families are also celebrated some schools have had celebrations for families based on
057the number of times that they've come to a community school saturday academy thank you mrs mccosey if that's any of your questions and um i believe last if i didn't forget anyone um be dr anne rivera dr ambergris you have the floor very much um i just want to echo and and support the thank yous and also just to say i really appreciate the work you're doing in an incredibly challenging time it's really difficult it was difficult during the pandemic you stayed as engaged as you possibly could and you're continuing that engagement and amplifying it i really appreciate that work my only question is one that you may or may not be able to answer which is does it look like we're going to get more participation from from students who are eligible for say
058yes in applying to colleges and fafsa completion have you seen any changes even at this early day um i think it's probably too early to understand that i can actually talk to our folks i mean the fafsa did open i think it opens october 1st so i can ask and see um for that specific team what they've seen so far i know we've been doing i participated in a presentation at hutch tech a couple weeks ago we've been really focusing on getting the word out right now and the real one-to-one work really starts in this month in december and then you know really pushes out in january and february next year um but i think that's a great question and i'll see what i can get to report back to you on that if if
059it makes more sense to wait until later as as this develops it's just an area of interest to see you know our students continuing to access that opportunity and has it changed as we're starting to come out of a pandemic we i mean i will tell you that we are very hopeful um and we're looking for other ways to strengthen our work there you know it was interesting because when we first went remote when the pandemic started working with those seniors who had started their school year in building and then were forced to go virtual we actually um in terms of the financial aid advising it was a very smooth transition to virtual because a lot of situations um require the involvement of a parent to complete some sort of financial documents and when you're
060doing the one-to-one work in the school building the parents usually not available or not on hand and so when we were going into students homes essentially the parent was you know maybe in another room and so we actually found it easier in some regard to get some of those financial aid documents completed so we are not abandoning virtual we are still keeping that as an offering to supplement what we are doing in person but we are optimistic that since we will be in building we'll be better able to get into the faces of students and support them in understanding their questions and addressing those obviously in partnership with the school counselors who are you know doing that great work as well thank you for that and it's good to hear that you're opening you're able
061to open up some avenues for for increased work with families thank you again um dr revere for your for your questions and i believe that concludes um our board members so i have a couple of questions i'd like to ask myself but i believe that some of my questions actually goes into the next presentation so i'll be asking probably someone which say yes and some of them with um dr tanja williams um first of all i'd like to congratulate you on six years um i know it's been a very challenging year last year in the years before that um pre uh pandemic you know uh you guys been doing a wonderful job and i couldn't imagine this district felt the work that david rusk and um dr um italian staples and your team has put
062together so i'd like to congratulate you on the work that we have done here and and continuing the work that you're doing uh if anything that you know this district can do to help assist that you know dr cash has done a wonderful job of reaching out to you guys and um helping us with our needs and helping us with our children their futures um a couple things i like to say is that um i'm big on community and um first let's start with the dashboard i love the dashboard i noticed the board been asking about the dashboard for a couple of months now almost a year about the implement of the dashboard and running into this district and i am happy to see that that we got reports of the dashboard even going as
063far as our summer camp enrollment to our mental health clinics and um and number of visits that our children have so we can actually have a valid number or assess data um compiled to um you know our children needs and and the needs of our buildings and our schools so that's a great great um tool that that been developed and that that shortage shortest district want to use along with our administrators of our um and our building administrators also and teachers so thank you again for your work that you have done a couple questions that i do have is um have to do with supports and i'm going to concentrate a little bit more on the females at this time i know sharon bell common um asks a couple of questions about um female programs
064like the breaking barriers which which i truly love and been a part of um but um these children need help and the females also need help also because uh at this time from the record we had last year police department reported that they're being arrested three times more than the young male hour at this time so um and the incidence that's currently happening in this district with violence and um some current ones that actually happen today you know i like to see how we can address you know further address the issues with the female i know we actually like say yes program but um how can we um support um our young women you know that's that's in our classrooms also i'd like to see how we can support mothers um we have um single
065parent mothers and um i know i looked at research around the country and they have clubs for these mothers and it's possible we can try to formulate a club or do we have anything on that level that um they can work together and um you know form a fellowship to help one another because due to the stresses of poverty um underemployed um having children and trying to raise children and through the problems we have education and you know at times here in the district we had um we had virtual learning and you know they had adapt to those situations also so there's anything that we have for the first question is about our single parent mothers or single parents you know that's trying to adapt to the situation and what supports we have lined up
066for them so we have um the parenting and pregnant teen drop-in centers so our parents center liaisons have been working specifically through their schools and with their the admins in the schools and identifying students in that particular population of students as well as students themselves are coming looking for resources and supports and to be able to be a part of the drop-in center so um the parents that are liaisons they are focusing in on those type of activities we're also um doing the toddler our toddler zones are going to be a part of this as well as other kinds of resources and supports that we could lend so that we're not having any barriers for our mothers that whether or not during the school week or even on the weekend there's opportunities for them to
067be able to participate okay um dr cash how can we try to um get these notices out to the homes and to the parents um can any way we can look into try to make sure that that our our parents in the buffalo school system know that this program exists and that they can um call into this program to help them through it through their issues absolutely we have quite a number of programs actually that are working in this population some of my staff have come on now and are prepared to speak to it but yes we have a number of communication vehicles that we use um lou petrucci and i were talking recently and he had a good idea that we have so many good things going on that we should chunk the news
068we shouldn't put it all out just once a week or once a month or through robocalls only you get a good story or you get a good program like the ones for for this population for example then then fill it up make it substantive and then get that out to all of our constituents and stakeholders and this might be one that leads off with that so uh let me hear what tanja and others have to say about working with our young women and our mothers in particular great point great question dr williams all right thank you i'm sorry that's what you're gonna you're gonna present next on i believe something similar to the same topic um on understanding and managing complex emotions uh do you want to wait until there to try to answer that
069question or now no i can answer it now if it's pertaining to our uh pregnant and parenting teens program the district collaborates with say yes on we actually have a community education leader um that specifically works identifying and supporting our young mothers as well as our young fathers um that are in our schools and so you know they do things to provide intervention for those parents but also prevention to make sure and support that you know we decrease the number of teenage parents that we have in our school so they have like a baby think it over program that they work with the home and careers teachers online and um they do presentations and work very closely with our school counselors and social workers and i believe would say say yes in helping to get
070the referrals to them on who the students are who are in schools it's a lot easier to identify pregnant mothers than it is to identify young fathers who are about to be fathers and so um you know we're working very closely with them on that with respect to uh working with the young ladies and mentoring i know that um we have one of our cabinet members that you know does a lot of uh work she's done a lot of research you know in the area of young ladies and educating young ladies and providing supports to them and you know that's toya wilson and so she might be a great resource to work along with um say yes in identifying some programs specifically designed for our young ladies thank you dr williams also dr akiba morrell
071of course works uh with former board members of yours uh dr never go for gonna happen barbara never go with the big sister little sister uh program initiative the uncrowned queens uh initiative very exciting work that is going on uh around that so we'll speak more about it i just want to let you know that we do have programs but there's always more that can be done and should be done and so we look for great partners in this regard and anyone that wants to continue to partner with us if you have good ideas of people who want to uh authentically partner with us around these issues that our young people are facing today then we we're welcome to first listen and then uh see what's possible yes um thank you thank you dr cash
072uh as i said beginning big one um community and we have a number of um youth leader programs um for young ladies here in the city of buffalo and um we have a number that's reached out to the district or reach out to me that would like to be included with the plans of the district and possibly we can um um support them you know with our esser funds rp funds so um i will work on compiling a list of these um programs and hand them into the district so maybe we can uh form some partnerships and you know work within um the elements within our schools um next question that i have is uh uh one thing that you referred to last board meeting dr cash and we spoke about previously a couple of
073times was having men in schools and fathers um that's a great program and it'll be it'll be very much needed to uh to have some parents in our schools that can help give instruction to our kids and and you know mentor our kids and um i'd like to know if say yes have any hands on in that you know possibly uh working with them in our community schools also um it's very important you know to have that type of relationship with our parents and and build you know um better relationship with our children because our children some sometimes are in fear of adults and others or people who may wear a badge or something like that because of things that happen within the community are things they have seen so how can we address that
074yeah well i've alluded to it so we're working on connectors now uh who are the people in the community that want to help with this and get get down to business with us on this uh fathers pastors community members there's we need a bigger boat we need a bigger boat and certainly let's figure out who wants to volunteer and who wants to provide services uh to help our young people we have the young people we have the population and the pool of focused young people who need tier three and tier four supports right now and so dr ramona reynolds is part of her work uh dr cassandra wright and others of you who know people uh connect us to them and we'll get we'll get going pastor kenny simmons called me tonight to ask how
075he can continue to to help and how he can broaden his base of of uh mad dads for example so we'll we'll we're all over this uh but again we need a lot more uh engagement especially one-to-one one-to-one uh with our young people young males young females and they they can do wonders once you build that trust and once you have that consistent check-in and trust and and know that you're going to be there for them thank you thank you dr cash i just have two more quick questions uh one question is um um working with families with separations to where um we have a lot of children that come to our classroom with attitudes you know from our time in teaching you know we see it all the time and teachers deal with this
076issue all the times um things that happen in the home to where when um a parent separate and our children are left in limbo and confused and they really uh you know exhibit you know uh sometimes bad behaviors in the school or they don't participate in class or that they might um you know act out in a certain way pertaining to an age level they had are we capable or are we working with a program right now to help with those families was family separation uh yes i'd like to have some of you respond to that i was just talking today tanja and cassandra um with some of these issues that our kids are facing is is because their parents are not not all of it but some of it has to do with parents
077going through divorces right now and multi challenges affecting the household so certainly i'll start with say yes since they're our guests tonight if you have any responses around that are you seeing that issue in your family support specialists for example the mental health services things like separation affects our young people's mental health there's no question about it trauma is the traumatizing experience for them how would you respond to mr hurd's question absolutely um you know for the length of time that i've been ces and working in school-based services separation and loss you know it's grief comes not just when you lose a parent to death but grief comes when you're separated and so that's part of what we strive toward through our school-based services when it comes to identifying students who need the supports between
078preventive services or the health home care coordination it's a it's a layered level of support for students and it's really based on where the students needs are at and we work really closely with the buffalo public schools the student support teams and their tiered supports responding to wherever we can to help wrap those students and services so yep definitely something we see often continue to see and continue to try to meet amanda do you want to speak to the nurturing fathers program as well i think that's also something that would be helpful to talk about here yeah absolutely we have um eric maldonado he's one of our preventive supervisors but he also um is very heavily involved in the engaging father's task force and he does a lot of work in the nurturing fathers initiative
079and so um this is part of the programs that we try to wrap around our families and um we have programs that are run we work really closely with buffalo prenatal perinatal and have these courses for dads who they might be required to take parenting classes through the county or they can sign up independently for these programs but it focuses on father engagement and it's very much um uh a support group they're they're a big support group to each other and i i actually recently um sent i'm sure that uh others have seen the video of the dad's going to schools and i sent that to eric and i said i'd love to see something like this and um so i love that you guys are talking about it and i think that if um
080you need to know who to work with that's who to work with from say yes buffalo great thank you thank you thank you and the last question is is really really positive because we have very very talented children here in our district and um i'd like to know is there anything like in response from say yes for a gifted and talented program to recognize these children as gifted and talented and try you know embrace whatever their gifts are you know um the talent what the talents may be and how can we you know help support them you know as a district also and they might be in music it might be an art but they might be you know enlisted in a different program you know that doesn't you know have lift um singing or
081or dance or anything like that so how say yes no lifting these um children up um i'm going to take that question in a little bit of a different direction i think where we're really best positioned to support students with special interests beyond the work in the community schools that mrs staples is working on is um looking at helping them to leverage their talents and interests when they're in the post-secondary space and beyond so helping them understand um is there a career potential in their interest area and then connecting them to professionals in those sectors so that they can develop that interest towards a profession and then hopefully connecting them to jobs as well so i would say that's one way to sort of answer that question and i don't know um tanya if you
082have anything additional to add there i was going to defer that to dave when he came on next week that's the way to do it my staff do that for me all the time thank you again uh dr uh uh for your reporting coming in um um dr tanya staples betsy and um and for your presentation tonight and i'll turn it back over to dr cash for the second part okay colleen before we go to the second part i just wanted to thank tanja and amanda and betsy for coming on this evening and for doing what what we've said all along we want to take our children who are so often placed at risk for so many of the issues that they face and we our job is to place them at promise place them
083in promise and you're seeing a lot of the work that's being done to do that uh while there's always so much more work to do and we don't have every single kid pointed in that direction that is what our aim is that is what our mission is now i have a question that arose from the say yes presentation that i'd like to ask and then we'll we can move on when i look at is two questions really when i look at the scholarships and financial aid issue i see that you work with almost 2 000 kids in just the last year or two it's 1650 so if i were to interpolate a little bit over the last five years what six years ten years ten thousand kids easily right and then when i i hear
084this narrative and this there's two narratives that that that bother me trouble me uh that i hear too often and they they they slide off loosely and easily and yet they're not countered they're not counted and then when you don't counter a distortion uh the more you hear it the more people start to think that maybe it's the truth and so one of the distortions and the narratives that is out there is that our kids graduate because i remember when you first came it was all about graduation rate you weren't graduating that's why part of the reason you're here graduation rate was 48 and it was in the 20s for black males and for some populations it was uh similar or worse well now we're we're at 76.2 graduation rate and folks are still pouring
085uh hot water on that so yeah well you either manipulated the numbers or uh they can't learn they don't know how to do anything they can't learn in college they employers won't hire them uh so they're not qualified so see those big overarching uh distortions so i want to to ask say yes because you're in a unique position to answer this so so when you work with these young people who are either going to college or are in college and you point it to your colon case colin case who's only in the fifth grade now how do you see these kids has are they at promise are they talented are they smart are they capable or are they you know like the narrative says not very good not worth investing in certainly not worth hiring
086not worth admitting to college tell me what your experience has been uh with our young people uh and how we how you can help us uh counter that uh that negative derogatory narrative about our young people because i've heard it i've heard it from some in the business community and other aspects of the community but i want to know what you think about it and tanja i'm going to start with you i'm not gonna let you defer that to david what what do you see what do you experience and how would you assess our young people's capability for post-secondary work and for working in the world of work if companies hire them if companies give them what they give everybody else which is support and they give them a chance and they have internships and
087they have opportunities at college to support our young people they can accomplish anything and they have so i want to hear from you though because sometimes they become daddy listening to me all the time well what how would you say it and i want to hear from betsy and amanda as well and then we'll move on go ahead well dr cash i would say definitely uh the kids within the city of buffalo are definitely at promise we have some amazing amazing young people throughout the buffalo public school system from the little babies all the way through to our high school students and one of the things that i think we have to do a better job is at is telling our story and telling the story about these kids and you know putting the pictures
088out and and putting the narrative and showing how the children are moving through the system and the things that they are doing and the things that they are accomplishing so kids are doing so much in school you know they have musical arts cultural talents they're doing things in their communities that we're also not pulling in and showing that complete profile of the student you know who is this child what is this child doing they're involved in their churches they're involved in their communities they're in boys and girls clubs their working job and going to school they're involved with sports so our kids are doing a lot of different things but we gotta highlight them and we got to change the narrative in such a way but then also we we have to begin to work
089with our employers and really help our employers get ready for the children that are coming to them and begin to have those types of conversations and it's not always just about the skill set but it's about the competencies that they're looking for as well in their workforce and then also again the the changing of the narrative changing of the mindset within some of these companies and communities so that it's not tolerant you know really looking at the work and the things that are happening um and and changing their policies and their protocols through a a dei or an rei lens um reading themselves for our children coming into the world of work or into an educational post-secondary environment yes so well-stated tanya thank you uh betsy and amanda in brief in brief your observations about
090our young people so they're absolutely to a student at promise um and i don't think you'll find a person in this work who would state otherwise um and i will just briefly share a couple of specific examples we have a young woman who graduated has gone on to complete her msw and her jd and she is now working at a law firm here in buffalo so she is one great example we also had a visit to our office just last week from a young man nicholas ariane who some of you might remember he was our original poster child for say yes he was on all of our original materials he completed his degree at buffalo state went on to earn a master's in education at michigan state and now has an additional master's in divinity
091from duke university where he works and where he just brought a new mentoring initiative for black men in academics to duke university so we're seeing um you know not only the potential of these individual young people but the potential of what they can do for the communities that they are engaged in for the next generation to follow wow thank you so much for that thank you amanda not leaving and to briefly end on that note um yes i all of our students have so much to offer and i think that colin is just one one example of the many many kids that we work with and if i could have the whole floor tonight it could take up weeks um but i think that a lot of what we do in our programs this whole
092family and it's you know i met with a grandma just this past week to enroll uh childhood counseling and she's telling me she doesn't think she can do anything she's in eighth grade and she doesn't want you to know what high school to go to and it's changing the narrative um in the whole home you know making her uh help her to see the possibilities and help help that whole um outlook to change and and know what they can achieve and bringing in stories like this you know having these mentor like programs and bringing these things to real life i think is key um and one of the things i would love to do at some point is um work with students who have been through our programs and parents who have been through our
093programs this came up earlier and i didn't really answer because we're not quite there but i'd love to have them be ambassadors um you know and peer support parent support and working with the parent support models that are already out there so yeah so thank you so much amanda so there it is colleagues uh you got it you hear it and and hell let's spread the word the right way about our young people there's 31 000 kids in our district 31 000 and there's no way you can paint that brush uh in a negative way those are your children our children people's cousins nephews and so forth and our job is to make sure they stay at promise and then go into being at aspiration at aspiration they now are aspiring and exceeding so yes
094there's always going to be extra work and hard work but those stories don't don't paint the district so please please help us with that so mr hurd i'm ready to transition when you are oh yes sir once again thank you dr tanya staples uh betsy barron and um amanda paul for your presentation we appreciate all the work that you're doing in our district and our kids probably appreciate it more in the family so thank you and please keep it up and um be a beacon for us and for our community thank you okay thank you and dr cash i won't delay um any longer um you have one dr tanja williams up next yeah well we're not delaying this is important work this is your work so the transition is this the second narrative that
095is out there right now and again equally false uh doesn't mean that we're not addressing it but it's a false narrative i've heard it as recently as today uh by people in key positions uh in our city and that is that our kids are out of control uh our kids are misbehaving at the level of federal uh descriptors all right and and that uh that's what you can expect from the buffalo public schools so now what what you're going to see tonight is you're going to have a dashboard where you will be able to continuously look at data continuously look at the data that we have and then what we're working with and it's easy to sensationalize about our young people but it's much harder to get down and dig into the work and do
096the work necessary to make sure all of our children succeed so first we're gonna have uh dr williams dr wright and dr uh well toria wilson uh she's working on that doctor uh do you guys go first or are we gonna present suspension data first and then talk about what we're doing about it how do you want to how do you want to do this no dr cash we would like to go first to share some narrative to kind of contextualize for uh our board members what the date we're sharing okay that's what i thought we worked out and so colleagues you're gonna hear from our very best uh and then you're going to hear from some more of our very very best and that's all you're going to hear from tonight is our very
097best so so let's start with the inimitable dr tanja williams who leads our student support services division she then will be uh joined by her colleagues dr cassandra wright and miss toya wilson they have a very powerful set of slides to share with you to put in the context some of these behavioral challenges that you've been hearing about uh and that we've been working with in this first half of semester in particular keep in mind again talking about a 31 000 plus student school district we're talking about 250 to 300 kids that we are working with on a regular basis to to address some of their challenges all right dr williams thank you dr cash admiral you begin the presentation i don't know which one just continues the next slide after the end of the
098say yes presentation okay and for a while he's doing that um i bring greetings to our board chairperson for tonight uh board member heard the co-chair board member scott our board president mr petrucci board members superintendent cash colleagues family members caregivers students any concerned citizens who may be watching my name is tanja williams and i am proudly the associate superintendent for student support services now tonight um i just need to take a couple of minutes to talk through uh what you're going to see and i need to share some factoids about what you will see so what you're going to see is myself along with several of my cabinet colleagues who will be joining me and we will be sharing a very thorough and a very comprehensive presentation which is going to discuss how our
099district collectively works with our partners our families and with one another as we're working to understand and manage a range of very complex emotions that we're seeing during this unprecedented time we're navigating our way out of a global pandemic that i don't think any of us has lived through and we're doing that at the same time that we're navigating through social unrest and exposure to community violence that again many of us have not seen at these levels and so as you all know it's not just happening in the city of buffalo these are things that are happening nationally we can look at a concert that happened uh this past weekend you know there are things that are in the news every single day which discuss complex emotions that our nation and especially our young people
100are grappling with and the thing about it is that there really is no playbook for how to manage these emotions and so you know what we are doing is uh we're going to the research we're speaking with colleagues and other urban districts you know we're looking for best practices and we're implementing them swiftly and methodically and so you know it did my heart well to hear dr cash and the staff from say yes talk about what they see as far as kids at promise i do believe that um you know our community has to get better at celebrating the brilliance that our children bring to the table because they do but at the same time there are many that life has continued throughout this pandemic and so things like exposure to um or mental health
101incidences are happening children continue to experience homelessness even during this difficult time pregnancy foster care placements child protective services being called high rates of kovic continuing to happen in our community some families continuing to experience fear um to covet and and encountering it and so it's brought about continued isolation some of our children have experienced loss to this virus of family members neighbors friends and then just lost in general so they're dealing with grief and fear and anger and you know we're at a time where our young people are exposed to so much social media it's like 24 7 have it your way you can get almost anything and that is not necessarily always a good thing and finally our children are exposed to community violence and that's a lot that's a lot and some
102of these things all of these things can't help but to overflow into some of our school days and again it is not just buffalo but i believe that school districts nationally especially in urban and poor rural districts but even in our affluent suburban districts and in private schools we're grappling with managing complex emotions so while we know what we know as educators is that we do shoulder a significant responsibility in helping our young people to understand process and heal from the momentous events over these last 21 months or so we know that and we embrace that and i believe that we have a cabinet we have principles we have assistant principles we have a team that is built for this work we are all committed to ensuring that none of our children get left behind
103so what i'm asking during this presentation is that in this moment in space we all model grace patience compassion as we all work to adjust and embrace this new reality that we find ourselves in our superintendent dr cash works hard with his leadership team we're not always easy but he worked hard with work to keep us focused on four cornerstone facets that this board supports and those are access equity opportunity and quality and you all know better than most that the work is not easy it's not easy for the parents it's not easy for you and so we're all working collectively to ensure that at the school levels that's the work of student support student support is always going to be a challenge because we focus on the most needy populations of children so it
104will always be a challenge we embrace it but we work really hard to make sure that where the rubber hits the road in our schools that there are few to no gaps and if there should be a gap my expectation is that we are doing everything that we can to swiftly fill that gap so it's not perfect it's not perfect but we work hard every day 24 hours a day seven days a week i'm accessible and so is my team so what you're going to see tonight is going to be a collective presentation it's going to come from myself from several of my colleagues and it's deliberate on how we work together to address the needs of our children and families so with that being said at mayor if you can go to the next
105slide this is um a visual of how the presentation for tonight will roll out you've already heard from our community partners say yes you're now going to hear from me on some of our district initiated supports you will then hear from miss toya wilson because we're drilling down we started with our community partners we are going to the district you're going to hear from ms toya wilson on what she sees actually happening in our schools she's in our schools every day as are the other associate superintendents of school leadership you will hear from them what social emotional supports they're witnessing every day what they're hearing on the front lines and then you're going to hear from miss kassan dr cassandra wright and she's going to share for that very top level of student with really
106high intense needs some of the things that she's doing in her role and finally you will hear from ebony bullock who's going to share our data and it will share i think it will share how the narrative that you've heard from all of us aligns with what the data is saying next slide please so i have here for you kind of a pictograph of some of the district initiated supports that we have and that are initiated under many of our departments so it's not just student support as you hear me talk through them you're going to hear me mention several different departments and divisions that i work collectively with to address the needs of our students so at the very top in that first circular bubble you see um inside of it it states addressing
107the range of needs of students and other members of the learning community this is critical and so what we knew we needed to do was to have a tool that would measure specifically where our students are socially and emotionally so we measure academic achievement all the time we benchmark data we go back to the drawing board we modify how instruction happens in order to ensure that we're meeting the needs of our students socially and emotionally we needed to do the very same thing especially at this time and so our team is working very closely with and botticelli's team and special education specifically to identify a tool that's going to be culturally responsive and developmental so one tool couldn't be a one-size-fits-all because we cannot possibly test and ask questions of children who may be in
108first grade the same questions that we would ask of children who may be in 11th or 12th grade and so we needed a tool that's going to be developmental in nature we're just about there um and so i anticipate that within the next few weeks we're going to have a tool that we can measure where our students are all of our children socially and emotionally and it will allow our school counselors and our social workers to do the very same things that the academic team does to get that data to take a look at it to know who we need to target what supports are needed and to continuously measure throughout the year how we're progressing so i'm really excited about that through our um esser funds you know there's been money that's been set
109aside to support that uh we're able to do that the yrbs the youth at risk behavior survey um is something that is developed by the cdc you all are aware of it this is that year where we again um survey our children who are in grades 6 through 12. and the good thing about it for this year is that we're going to be able to compare two years ago when children took the test right before covet hit now well we're still in the throes of covid and we'll be able to compare you know where things were then and you know how things are going now uh our director of social emotional wellness my when has been out and training our principles so that they're aware for their schools what the 2019 survey results um discussed
110where were the highs where were the lows specifically for their schools she's also working with our wellness team to make sure that our community partners know you know if you're working in a school you should know where the needs are in that school so we are ramping up now to start for our 2021 at the same time that she's training on the 2019 results we're ramping up to start our 2021 surveying of students um we still are continuing with our collective cafe i know one of the questions that was asked a couple of board meetings ago was what are we doing for our parents you know what's what's going on for our parents and what's going on for our staff and so we are running um small group supports my when under her leadership for
111teachers this is this is a challenging time for some of our staff and so we wanted to create a safe space sometimes before school sometimes after school where they are able to talk about things that they're experiencing during this time sometimes personal sometimes professional and where it's facilitated by someone who's trained to respond to some of the concerns that they share so it's kind of a circle time for staff parents are also able to participate and so the ideal circle group size would be about 12 to 15 folks and really it's just a safe space for them to share with one another some of the things that they are experiencing so moving to the next bubble of providing ongoing culturally relevant professional development the common thread i won't read through all of the professional development
112trainings that student support services is involved in you can read that but the common essential questions or the common thread for each of them that we want to make sure that we're answering affirmatively is am i safe yes you are safe and what can i do to maintain my safety and so in every training that we're participating in these are the areas that we focus on with staff whether it's with inner high and our student leaders if it's with parent leaders those are the two essential questions that's a common thread in the trainings that we're providing we support trainings that are led by other divisions such as the clri trainings that are run by dr morrell several of my staff have been trained by her to support and go out and do train the trainings
113um with jamie warren with human resources you know we work with them to come in and train her staff um and so you know it really is a collective effort um with respect to implementing the tiers of student support services you all are pretty familiar with the triangles that exist in all of our schools and you know that the green triangle you know the green section means that it's universal they're supports that we provide for all of our children whether it is from mask wearing for all of our children uh signages through the buildings um whatever it is that is happening in all buildings um positive messages character counts those kinds of things that are done for all of our students and in most cases um it provides um a great support for the children
114but in some of our cases some of our children need a little more even though we're doing these things for all children we're doing um you know providing sst support to any student that needs it but there's some children that present with the need to move a little higher and that takes us into our yellow zone and so we do things within that area like the check-in checkout small group counseling you're going to hear a little more about that from one of my colleagues some of the specifics on what they're seeing and then even with those supports there are some students that rise to a level three and we call that our tertiary level and in the past that was pretty much the highest level of need that students were presenting at and we were
115able at that level to utilize the mental health clinics that say yes talked about that they provide if we needed to refer students to supports outside of the district for evaluations if they needed crisis team support it would have been at that level i will share with you you're going to hear today we've had to expand from that level up to a tier 4 level and my colleague dr wright is going to talk about you know what that entails what what happens at that level and so um in all of our schools all of our counselors all of our social workers all of our school psychologists know and understand the three levels all of our attendance teachers know um how to intervene at that tier one tier two and tier three level i've listed for
116you in the fourth bubble um some of our partners some of our partners are newer to the table with us and we are really excited to welcome them i believe dr cash mentioned earlier pastor simmons has become a very strong partner um and you know i heard board member heard ask a question about you know when parents separate you know what what kinds of supports do we have our counselors are trained in a banana splits group but we have some men that stand in the gap for um students who may have you know experienced whether it's fatherlessness or you know separation or divorce and the mad dads is one of those groups that does that work this year we are also working closely with the erie county district attorney's office i got involved with that
117along with dr wright through uh chairman um larry scott and co-chair hope j and we meet regularly and we're talking about some serious issues serious issues children who have experienced um not just exposure to gun violence but have actually been shot and how we are supporting these children and their families and sometimes it's academic and sometimes it's about trying to help them to move to a different neighborhood you know so there's a whole range of supports that we talk about and that we are implementing and that we are supporting these children with wrapping our arms around them we have five schools this year that the community foundation is funding the erie county restorative justice project to not only talk about and train staff on restorative justice but to take it to the next step and
118ensure that implementation plans are created for these five schools and that support is provided to make sure that it's being implemented with fidelity and so those schools are east community burger school number 131 lydia t wright and the charles drew science magnet school and so there are a host of other um [Music] partners that you see the erie county department of health is working with us to ensure that we are offering vaccinations during the school day at sporting events we did an mbk clinic um and now we're ramping up this saturday at school number 74. this will make you happy board member cotman at school number 74 we will be vaccinating those babies from 5 to 11 years old that are able to be vaccinated or that parents consent for them to be vaccinated so
119they have been partners at the table our medical director team meets with us weekly sometimes two and three times a week to provide us with guidance on what we need to do as far as testing protocols masking protocols signage health screeners scanners all of that they really help to guide the work that we're doing and finally we at the start of the year and over the summer implemented a social emotional learning curriculum we worked with dr morrell's team to make sure that it was culturally and linguistically responsive to the needs of our children we offered it to all children in grades k through 12 and we received awesome feedback um the teachers were appreciative we do circle times we've continued to do circle times in the mornings because that relationship piece is huge establishing relationships
120for the adults with our children is huge and so this is kind of a quick overview but it's a lot of work that's happening um in the division of student support services and how we're working with schools on a multi-tiered framework for our students and so at this time i'm going to turn things over to my colleague toya wilson who's going to talk about boots on the ground what she's seeing in schools as far as student supports thank you good evening next bye please go back one um oh there you go good evening board members good evening dr cash colleagues tonight i'm going to be digging into sharing some of the examples of strategies that will be found uh pre-k12 to support all of our students as they navigate this new normal while still also
121dealing with the difficulties of the pandemic what i want you to notice is how much you hear words like relationships student voice community school-wide systems the reason why i want you to focus in on those keywords is because research says that the best way to support students who are dealing with challenging situations is to make connections in those areas so i just want you to take notice i'm going to dig into several strategies here starting with comprehensive advisory programs this is a strategy that is grade specific and it is small groups designed to build relationships to peer and with students to adults this is a time that school counselors may join in and there is social emotional curriculum and current issues that can be addressed schools have used advisory to unpack situations that may have
122happened recently such as things that may have happened at dismissal from the previous day for example this was a strategy that was used at mst to support students after an incident at dismissal the students unpacked their feelings and they began the healing process the healing process they needed to get back to that feeling of community targeted incentives pbis which is positive behavior interventions and supports this is a school-wide system here school used daily schools use daily weekly and monthly incentive opportunities to celebrate student success students voice is used to identify rewards expectations of behaviors are explicitly taught and displayed and really at the center of all this work it is an opportunity for schools to pair school core values with positive student behavior what you might see is an example as student is students unilearning
123or earning dojo points certificates or having an invite to a student developed event you heard this mention check in check out it's a huge strategy it is a goal setting strategy that is specifically designed to meet the needs of each student students check in first thing in the morning with their and they review their goals teachers provide feedback throughout the day and then the student meets again with their check-in checkout mentor at the end of the day to assess their goals so it's always a focus on looking at improving and setting goals and and and really looking at the positive behaviors students earn incentives based on their progress towards goals and this information is also communicated with parents so they can also see their students success getting to know you initiative this may also be
124called all about me what you'll see here is students complete activities about themselves and then these are posted in hallways or classes you'll also see this expanded to the adults because it's important to build those relationships and everyone get to know each other so this is another way to make connections again build those relationships peer-to-peer and staff to staff students to staff all kinds of connections positive spotlight or shout outs you see this used pretty regularly now you'll see the range of activities some are big and some are small but they all matter this is one that matters a lot to students students are announced on the pa system or over social media for exhibiting character traits of the day or showing improvements i've even seen schools do shout outs about the number of assignments
125that are being completed and someone who was a superstar who really improved and they had a highlight of that student scanned for success also known as the color code lanyard system and you'll see this play out in many of the high schools this strategy promotes positive behaviors in school for example every friday um students may be chosen from the scan list and receive a five dollar gift card from this to the school store students are scanned into the building to promote positive relations relationships responsibility pride and grade level because the lanyards are set up by grade level and color code in different colors and organized in a way that they support school organization in the hallways at lunches arrivals and dismissals so it's another way to show school school pride but also help everyone in
126managing the the some of the challenging situations that might happen at different times student-led grade level orientations this is an opportunity for leadership and we know that every time you pull in leadership for our students it helps to amplify their voice and this is a way that that that happens repeatedly you'll see students actually leading grade level meetings or even school-wide meetings at times when the school is able to have a town hall students families and staff surveys this strategy involves the use of online platforms to collect feedback and provide stakeholders with um input so this is input from students and from families so you hear voice coming from multiple levels here staff connections this is a strategy every s where every student is connected to an adult to ensure that there is a person
127that has connected with each student and their families these contacts are entered into our district information system and currently there are 5636 pages not contacts pages of data in our system that outlines this information district-wide morning circles with the student support team this is similar to restorative circles the school psychologist the social worker and the counselor work as a team to support that first check-in of the day which we know is critical to helping students get a healthy and good start to the day sst referral supports for parents this is another way an extension to connect with parents many schools use a link that is set up for parents to complete and request support so they may be struggling with something at home as they're helping their students with homework and this is another way
128for them to reach out this provides that continued connection for parents and families restorative circles and community building circles embedded into the day this allows for the thought of the day or focus on a current issue this is the time for students to process their thoughts and feelings this strategy helps students build relationships with peers and adults to restore the community for example this is scheduled as part of a lunch in some schools or at the beginning of a day next slide please you've heard erie county restorative justice coalition in schools um with dr williams presentation but you've i'm hoping that you have seen all the connections to what she presented and i i must say that we just had two principal meetings this week elementary and high school there were principal and assistant principals
129meetings and the erie county restorative justice coalition presented at our principal's meetings and they have on on occasion been at our meetings and we're hoping to continue to bring them back so that is a repeated event to help continue to grow in that area the ecrjc provides the juvenile justice works program in which they look at disproportionate suspension data to develop a multi-year plan with schools to implement a restorative environment they currently work closely with five puff buffalo public schools but they have also expanded as i said earlier to work with all leaders in buffalo public schools to support the focus or to provide a focus on repairing harm and building relationships and community the second step in social emotional lens this is a pre-k through eight character education program designed to provide curriculum for
130character attributes that we want to see in our students and grow in our students character counts is found in many schools this is a pre-k through 12 program it's currently in several schools the program focuses on trustworthiness respect responsibility fairness caring and citizenship each pillar helps to build a safe environment for students and the community counseling services through the community agencies so you've heard that connection to say yes agencies such as say yes and the sisters hospital clinic are examples of some of the agencies that offer counseling to our students and families to provide an extension of the social emotional support that's offered by school staff we continue to try to wrap around our students we have many agencies that work with us after school and club activities this is another opportunity to build relationships
131we have found that clubs have significantly increased the number of students who are choosing to participate so for example this is all driven by student voice the clubs are designed by st are driven by student voice and you'll find examples of k-pop clubs gsa yearbook outdoor clubs newspapers and arts clubs and many many more we know that when students are connected to school there are more positive relationships that they have they build and then they have more positive interactions at school community school saturday's academies we currently have 24 community schools with burggard and mikowski as you heard being the newest this is a cross section of community agencies and and school support staff providing engaging opportunities to the community surrounding each community school and we try to all get out to them it's all they're
132always amazing things happening at these events and you see the connection to the entire neighborhood clri example themed months so schools identify a theme of the month for example a focus on equity the clri lessons are embedded in the curriculum and are used throughout the school year and you're going to hear a little bit more about this today but this helps to drive all of these different strategies which is the data dashboard it's a look into grades attendance suspensions graduation tracking you name it data from every angle you will hear more about this later but the the school data that is used to drive all of the work around these activities is pulled right from that data dashboard and it's important that this our principals our school leaders have this data right at their fingertips
133and they use it on a daily basis to make decisions and to come up with different strategies and things to support students now i said this is just a list of examples and we want to continue to give you more of that narrative of the positive things that are really going on in our schools to help our students as they navigate as we said this new normal i think of two of my favorite quotes when i really make this connection here with this work and we have been really um this has been a new normal for all of us um the trauma and experience that we've all faced is is a challenge that many of us would have never guessed that we would be living today right but what i see in our bps schools
134is that our schools are focused on consistent and persistent support for our students as they work through this challenging time so it makes me think about that my favorite quote one of my favorite quotes from frederick douglass without struggle there is no progress we will not stop we will continue to chip away at this we will continue to look at research we will continue to seek out strategies and we will continue to focus on that progress and then i transition my thinking to another one of my favorites which is is easier to build strong children than to prepare broken men together in this community what i see happening is our our schools are focused on building strong children and really putting that strength in place for them so they have that foundation if we continue
135this focus as a community the buffalo community as a whole and we continue to face this challenge i believe that we will have those strong children going forward in the future so i'm going to transition right now to my colleague dr dr cassandra right who's going to talk to you about um an extension of strategies thank you toya good evening everyone oh admira could you go to the next slide please so toya i'm with you i absolutely believe that together we will build strong children who will in turn become strong contributing members of our society i think that right now i should absolutely announce my bias i am so proud to work on the superintendent's cabinet for the board of education there is no place i would rather be we have heard over and over
136and over again what we are doing collectively in partnerships with strong entities like say yes in order to provide wrap-around support for our children although you've heard quite a bit i have to tell you tanja didn't tell you everything there's so much more toya did not tell you everything there is so much more and with all that being said there are still a [Music] very small population of children for whom all of those supports are not making a difference so we have children who are beyond tier three with our children all of them it's about access equity opportunity quality we haven't turned our backs on children because they're responding to triggers and stresses and ways are sometimes surreal what we have done is to make sure that we go beyond tier three and provide supports
137that are more directly related to what they need this tiny group of children need in order to stop the chaos that's going on in their minds and in their lives but before i go into detail my slides it's absolutely necessary to build a foundation for what we are seeing in the city of buffalo we are a district that prides itself in the emancipation curriculum that was ignited by dr cash and impeccably led by dr morrell mbps what we do we evaluate the world around us to understand this inextricable connection to the microcosm of school so there's a national and regional context for what's going on in the city of buffalo when we're talking about my children so i want to be clear that like any mother who is referring to their children they see hope
138promise aspiration despite the fact they may be doing things that are violent that violate our social wars and create hazards to themselves and others that being said they still deserve access equity opportunity quality in a way that is designed just for them so we know that criminologists see that the nation not just buffalo the nation is in the grip of a general spike of violence probably due to the pandemic the best guess is that those trends are trickling down exorbitantly and tragically to our k-12 students when you have children who are witnessing time and time and time again disruptive and violent behavior you have to expect that they're going to replicate that for our purposes let's just consider what happened to our children and their families starting march 13 2020. buffalo public schools dr cash
139alongside the board of education made an announcement that we would have to close our doors and children would need to learn from home we were afraid for their lives march 13th rihanna taylor was shot and killed at her home may 25th george floyd was gunned down black lives matter millions of people nationally and around the world engaged and listened to this peaceful protest but what the children and family saw over and over and over again was a barrage of negative images wherein adults were engaging in violent behavior we saw that here downtown in the city of buffalo there weren't many images of the peaceful protests but what people our children saw over and over and over again without the context of an organized instruct and structured socratic circle to discuss what they were saying they
140were just seeing violence and not understanding it and those images can't help but penetrate a soul january 6th we all know what happened then our white house was attacked people were murdered our children saw that they're seeing what you should do when you don't like something they're not seeing sitting down having an educative debate they're saying let's get together masses and storm places that's how we get what we want that's part of how they were educated they saw fights in airports they saw fights in airplanes did you all see what happened at the concert recently no one has been immune to this rural districts suburban districts urban districts our neighboring districts just just pause on that alone [Music] people with the deepest resources we're committing suicide we're in desperate need of psychiatric care consider our
141children many of whom live in abject poverty and dr burrell they live in racism and the intergenerational trauma that it causes dr williams mckinney bento those numbers have gone up and board members and anyone who may be listening we can't tell you the number of cps calls that are being made because of physical sexual psychological abuse of children by people that are supposed to love and protect them we're seeing an increase in depression anxiety hopelessness team our children were socialized by the pandemic in other surreal circumstances dr cash seeing this tasked us to intentionally insensitively create systems and evaluate supports for children who are motivated by hurt and rage or who may respond to triggers in ways that are extreme and unusual these are our beyond tier three children and i want to talk to
142you about the protocols interventions and supports that we rapidly put into place for them our children are living in a twin endemic and i have to tell you the vast majority of them the vast majority of 31 000 children are growing and prospering they are less than one percent literally 272 students for a total of 285 long-term suspensions are deeply and tragically struggling beyond tier 3 category who of these kids they tend to be our 9th through 12th graders they tend to be housed in about seven of our schools and listen to this most of them are bright and most of them historically have not had significant issues that part is critical because i have to tell you like i said these are my babies i get enraged by the narrative that i hear out
143there concerning our children my babies who are simply responding in a way that they have witnessed time and time again adults responding and then to add insult to injury we have certain community leaders who would like to just sit on the sideline and hurl this corners stone but under dr cash's leadership we have taken an absolutely sensitive and proactive approach to head on engage with our children who are quite intense in ways that do not criminalize them but mitigate the crisis situations that they are in and that they are causing in order for this us to do this he first tested me to make sure that there were clear communication protocols these these communication protocols must be recursive reiterative comprehensive yet concise so in a day we may get five crisis situations five is five
144too many but let's be clear when we have over 31 000 children and we have single number incidences that we have to address you let the community know that our children are not out of control our children are hurting and they are only responding to that hurt in the way that yes it's unacceptable it's just what they know for now because of the level of crisis that our children are in we've set up protocols with a b and c our principles inform their associates about issues that may be going on in the schools so any other year children engage in some physical resolutions for their conflicts now this year though what we're noticing that is that that brush up during the school day it doesn't satisfy their resolution so they'll go to class and then
145meet up after school so now what people are seeing though are four or five kids generally speaking brushing up but 50 to 75 children watching so please let people know there aren't a hundred children fighting what we see unfortunately i'm not condoning we're seeing two three and four children fighting but spectators kids doing what kids do principals inform their associates their associates inform fred and i i inform key cabinet members when those issues arise to a level wherein the greater community needs to be notified dr cash along with elena create a communication that goes out to board members and cabinets so that everyone is always kept in the loop about what's going on so that we could be preventative and proactive we quickly realized that as bps we could not do this ourselves so without
146the cash's blessings i reached out to buffalo police and the niagara frontier transportation nfta i cannot praise chief young lieutenant craig captain gas excuse me chief gast captain holiday enough for how well they have been working with us utilizing a model that respects our children as children there are times when a child may need an escalated approach and you find them in the back seat of a car but i have to tell you what ends up happening is that those officers drive those children home sit down have a conversation with their parents if we all can work together buffalo public schools school resource officers nfta i know the community can come out and support sensitively we also want to work closely with our legal teams the police and the nfta officers so that we can
147rebuild a relationship between law enforcement and students we are planning sophomore freshman orientations by nfta detectives sros are in our schools chatting with the kids checking up on them making home visits we've even as dr williams said earlier developed relationship with the da's office who we are now extending it to the probation of office officers so that collectively we can work to maintain positive relationships with children who are behaving in amazingly disappointing ways i'm really proud of how we embrace our children all of them through access equity opportunity and quality i don't want to hear out there that people want our children arrested and jailed i don't want to hear it what i want to hear is what are we going to do to eradicate unjust systems what are we going to do to eradicate
148racism what are we going to do to eradicate bigotry homophobism let's talk about those things because those are the issues that are driving many of our children to behave the way that they are the buffalo police commissioned by commissioner lockwood and mayor brown are creating more patrols around our highly active schools they have promised two units at fountain plaza to create a crowd calming presence so i want you to be very attentive to the way that i'm talking about our officers of the law and how they're interacting with our students they are not policing them they are guiding them in response to some of the congestion that we've seen at fountain plaza we've staggered dismissals david hills worked very closely with his downtown principles to create a dismissal structure that will lessen the congestion please
149don't forget the tr the systems are down there there's a lot of construction going on and so those issues have had an impact as well with the congestion but after speaking with nfta they increased the amount of cars so that our kids wouldn't be standing around they would be able to get on the trains and then go home and to date that dismissal process has been working quite quite nicely i have to give a shout out to the downtown principals so to mrs marquette to mrs stokes to mrs schuda those wonderful women have been absolutely powerfully and lovingly vigilant about our children thank you yes pardon me if you could get in there and i go i gotta go wipe my tears uh these ladies are fabulous outstanding they see our children they love our
150children ms bullet go right into the dashboard so that we can get the board engaged in the discussion after you present the dashboard and particularly focusing back on suspensions for this session absolutely so admir amir is going to take the presentation down and put it in the hands of my wonderful and extremely competent assistant superintendent laura somalski peters who's going to be driving a dashboard but while we're doing that colleague if we can just take a deep breath we specifically position the data after the context because i want to be sure that while i'm giving you the data that it is mediated through those lenses that you understand that you bring back what uh dr williams said that we're viewing the data through the lens of compassion and understanding exactly where we are where we
151were when we left in person in march of 2020 and where we are now um we've been slow we've been intentional with rolling out the dashboard and we've been you know purposefully putting that context before you see the data so you know what the story is before you see the data so laura let's go to the landing page and what you're going to see here is we're going to bring you to our landing page what i want you to know is that when you um go to the dashboard the dashboard is going to be based on roles and so this is a role this is a view of what a principal or a teacher might see and as you see there's various buttons here laura's gonna go in to a couple buttons and then we're
152gonna dip back and drill deeply into uh suspensions okay laura are you ready oh abner do you want to mute your mic because we can hear you okay go ahead laura you're muted sweetheart what you see right here is the landing page that um all of our administrators see when they log into the dashboard so this would be our central office administrators are building principles all everything in the dashboard is built off of um role level security so the teachers also see these buttons but the data behind it is different based on who they teach they only see the data for their students so we're going to go into a couple of these um different buttons i'm going to start off with enrollment i click on the enrollment button it will take me to our
153district enrollment page and i'm going to close this side just so you can see it a little bit bigger um so in all of our our views we have a district view and then we go to a school view this is a district view of enrollment you can see all of our schools listed right here in the middle and you can see their total enrollment listed on the end we also have these buttons up here that tell us our total enrollment our students non-census census and we have some filters that you can use to filter some of these views if you would like we also have a enrollment by grade and then in all of our views you will see that we have subgroup breakdowns so we have our enrollment by enl status special education
154status economically disadvantaged gender and race and ethnicity then if i wanted to go into a school view i could see the same information but for the school we have a grade breakdown we have the same subgroup grape breakdown and this happens to be a high school so they also have a cohort breakdown so they can see how many students are enrolled in each of their cohorts so i will return to my landing page and um jump into um in our attendance view which we're going to look at later we have some different categories that we can look at i'm not going to open these right now we're gonna talk about that later in the evening but i'm gonna go and look at this grades button over here this is a new feature that we've built
155into the dashboards that the principals are very excited about so in this view and i'll make it a little bigger for you we have the ability to see in real time what grades have been entered for our quarter one progress reports for the five week reports and then in a couple of weeks when our final grades are in for quarter one there will be a button here that will allow us to see a high level overview of all of the grades that have been entered for the quarter so this is at a district level view but you can see that i have the count of grades by all of our grade levels i drill down into content areas and see what the grades look like by content area and i can also drill down a
156specific teacher and see what the teacher's grades look like how many students they had at each level this view over here is exactly the same except it gives me a percent instead of a number of students but it works the same way i can drill right down to a teacher level see what i can actually go down to a course team if i click again i can see the course that teacher teaches and how the students in that course performed based on their progress report if i look down below we also have a count cohort so for the high schools specifically if they want to see how students are doing based on their court they have that view here and then down on the bottom i have a score distribution graphic shows me the percent
157of students who are receiving a c or higher which we are calling proficient so a c or higher is in green orange is a d and then red would be students who received a failing grade on their progress report and for this one i also have some filters on the side so if i really only wanted to look at say my special education children i could use this filter here to select my special ed students and then it would change all of these numbers and graphics to only show the special education students again this is a high level view based on just the district but of course we have the ability to look at each individual school so if i were the principal of say school 30 i could choose that school and i could
158do all of that same drilling down into my specific data over to my landing page and um we're going to take a quick look at graduation tracker this is a very exciting view that we worked very hard on with um mrs wilson and mr hills so as you know we do want to know where our students are on the path to graduation so right here i have and it's a little overwhelming and small at first but i'll take you through what each of these things mean this is for our cohort 2018. these are the students who are scheduled to graduate this june so in june of 2020 i have in this gray bar right here the number and percent of all of the students that are in each of these different colored um graphics and
159i'll explain what they are in a minute and under here i can see each school that contributes to our graduation rate and where their number of students fall on this graphic so i'm going to start with purple purple shows me the number and percent of our students in that cohort who have already met their graduation requirement right now we have 1.2 of our students in cohort 2018 who have met their graduation requirement and would be eligible for graduation when i moved down to the dark blue this is on the percent of students who have 17 plus credits and three passing regents exams so right now for this co-work that's 68 percent of our students um if i move down to the light blue that is students who are um have 17 plus credits moving down
160to the dark green 16 credits and three passing regents exams and that is 71 percent of our cohort moving down to the lighter green that's um 16 credits only doesn't factor in the region's exams that's 72 percent of our cohort the yellow is three passing regents exams that's it and doesn't take the credits into account that's 84 percent of our cohort pink are students who need additional support they only have 11 through 16 credits and that's 11 of our cohort and then this light lighter a little bit darker of a red students with 5.5 to 11 credits that's 8 and then the intensive category are students with less than 5.5 credits and that's 10 percent of our cohort this is our high level district view but we also have a school view and i'm going
161to take you into one specific school this happens to be olmsted 156 i can see their overall past graduation for court 2019 and there's a reason why i chose this school in this cohort you'll see it in a minute so the reason i did this though is because when i go into a specific school view i can see a list of every student in that court and where they fall on this continuum and i chose this cohort because there's a young lady in this cohort named brooklyn bullock she's the daughter of my colleague colleague ebony bullock who gave me permission to show her daughter's information during this um presentation and the reason we wanted to choose brooklyn is because i can see where she falls on the continuum but if i were her principal and
162i really wanted to do deep into brooklyn and everything about brooklyn i could click this little button next to her name and it will take me into her student profile page which will give me any information i could possibly want about miss brooklyn so when i'm looking at this i have all of brooklyn's demographic information in the first box when i scroll down i can see any enrollment brooklyn has ever had in the buffalo public schools going back to when she started kindergarten even pre-k if i scroll down even further i can see all of her attendance information going back any time she was in a buffalo public school down further i can see any assessment she has taken in the buffalo public schools and i can see her scores a little further i could
163see if she had any um offenses that were suspended she was suspended for as you can see miss brooklyn has not been suspended so kudos to miss brooklyn and last i can see her report card grades so if i was looking at that graduation tracker and i saw that brooklyn needed four more credits to graduate i might want to bounce over here and check and make sure she's passing her courses and that she's going to actually be able to achieve those credits she needs to graduate this same student profile page is also available to us right excuse me right on the main page so if i ch if i click the student profile page it would take me to that same view and in if i go through this button there's a search function that
164allows me to search for any buffalo public school student even if they've already left the buffalo public schools they're in here so we go back about 20 years with that data um another thing i'd like to show you quickly is that we have a staff page we are planning to add some additional information to this but for right now i can see our total number of staff i see um location they're breakdown by race and ethnicity they're breakdown by gender and the breakdown by um bargaining units i can see if they're administrators if they're teachers or if they work in the service center all of that information is on this page i can also come up here if i want this information about a specific year that teachers were hired and want to know how
165what what did the demographics look about the you know that year when we hired i can always select one specific here and look at those teachers i could also look for people who became enacted during those years to see if they're you know maybe we wanted some data on t people who are leading the district to find out why so uh we are going to look at these two a little bit later but i do want to go into our behavior tab right now and take a little bit deeper of a look at some of our suspension data which goes along with what we've been talking about when i click on the behavior button i have two choices i can go in and look at suspensions or i can look at office discipline referrals tonight
166we're going to take a look at suspension page pages so the first one that opens up is the district view of short-term suspension so far this school year so right here i have a line that shows that our district's unsuspended rate is 96.81 that means 96.81 percent of our students have not been suspended this school year our suspended rate is 3.19 that's that orange piece of the bar over here over here i'm showing that the 3.19 of students who have been suspended and these are short-term suspensions so this means five or less days that total count is 1022 students who have been suspended in the short term so far this year and then this graphic here is showing me that actually 774 of those students have been suspended one time so they're not repeat offenders
167they they made a bad choice maybe once and they've been suspended once then you can see um two suspensions goes to 177. three suspensions goes to 49 and it goes down just like all of our other views i have down the middle here the view of all of the schools in our district and you can see their unsuspended rate in green and in the orange piece you can see what percent was suspended some of the orange pieces are a little small so they don't have the number written in there but if i hover over it it will bring up a box that shows me the detailed information as i scroll down i can see that i have a grade breakdown of suspension so i can see which grades are being suspended i have enl non-enl
168versus enl students special ed and non-special ed i have economically disadvantaged gender race and ethnicity we have all of our subgroup information here and then their suspended numbers suspended um this is a tally of short-term suspensions per month november is listed here but we're still in the middle of november so this is going to keep moving and changing as things are entered into infinite campus our lag time for updating this information is one day so every night whatever was put in infant infinite campus gets re-uploaded into this dashboard and then in the morning we have refreshed data every single day the duration of suspensions is right here the incident location in the school and we have an annual unsuspended rate so this right here i know it's hard to see is this school year and
169this goes back in time so you can see the unsuspended rate going back about seven years we have this exact same so for short-term suspensions we also have a school level view i happen to have school 30 that must have been the last place i was looking um and you can see that on the middle we have their grade level suspensions and by the way at the school level they can drill this down to specific children so if you wanted to click on who these students are they could click on this bar and they could uh pull up an excel file of who all of those students are so they could provide some interventions so when i look at the school specifically i get all of the same information i can see all of the
170subgroup information i can also double filter so if i wanted to say okay so i want to know who these special ed students are that are getting suspended when i click on that bar it changes everything else that was probably a bad example let me go to female this is a little bigger it's easier to grab it changes all of these other bars so now i'm just looking at female students and it shows me per grade level and per all of the other subgroups what percent of those students were unsuspended females or suspended females into all of these double filters so in the school view they also have the suspensions per month the duration of suspensions over here they have a list of the staff that entered the office discipline referral that resulted in a
171suspension so they can look to see if there's patterns there and at the high school level they also have um at every level they have a context where you know where the where it happened what the incident was and again an unsuspended rate if this were a high school it would also have suspensions by cohort this is the district view for long-term suspension so some of this data you just heard from dr right we have 272 students who have been suspended long term one time so far this year we can see the long term suspensions by school by grade subgroup again by month we have the incident locations and then the annual rate going back in time and i'm also able to look at this from a school view like we just did with the
172short term so if i click the school view i have school 30 up again that just happened to be what i'm looking at but it's the same i can look at my suspensions by grade level i have my subgroups over here i have the number per month the staff entering the odrs my incident location my contacts and my annual unsuspended rate so again these last couple of buttons up here attendance and assessments we're going to look at in a few minutes but for right now i'm going to turn it back over to ms bullock uh thank you so much laura i really appreciate you going through that um board members what i want you to know again is we sort of flip back and forth between what a principal and a teacher could see the
173teacher and the principals will be able to drill down to the individual teacher or student level but our community members will stay high at the aggregate level we did a phenomenal training these past two days with our secondary principles and then we hit our elementary principles and over the next few weeks we're going to be pushing this down into teacher training we're going to help them use the dashboard not as another thing but how it is interwoven in our already established ddi process in the individual grade level meetings we're going to dig into some other um views that you'll be able to see in dr evans work session so with that i'm going to pass it back over to dr cash and we can't wait to show you a little bit more in just a
174few minutes all right colleagues uh mr heard um i'm going to turn it back to you uh for yourself and certainly uh look forward to responding to any questions or comments that the board may may have but thank you colleagues for that excellent work throughout this session and uh we now turn it over to mr heard thank you yes thank you dr cash and thank you for this presentation now the work that you have done i believe that uh laura simeski peters and ebony bullock you gotta be two of the smartest people in the world to put that dashboard together thank you so much we've been asking for quite a long time for the district to have this tool available you know for the teachers administrative staff and the board and i just congratulate you
175on this work because it's phenomenal so at this time i like to um vaccinate board members um because of time just to raise your hand if you have any questions and um about the dashboard or or maybe the presentation that uh dr wilson gave or the uh great presentation that dr cassandra wright gave also um maureen ford so as a right now i see a hand raised by by lawrence scott mr scott be at the floor thank you mr herd so first of all we've had some very comprehensive and thoughtful presentations in these work sessions this all of this has just been very very powerful very informational very insightful so thank you to all the staff that have put this together and presented tonight the dashboard of data i have never seen such data real-time
176data like that that that it's it's amazing um to see all of that and the way you can break it down um analyze it and do it so efficiently um is really to me remarkable [Music] praise to all of you that have put that together laura um miss bullock um what i'm wondering about the data and then i have a comment that i want to make about narrative and our story um is this something that's publicly available or is it something that board members can access and if so where is it where do we access it we don't quite have it yet it will be available to you on friday will be public facing on friday but this is our official rollout to you and the community i think you should qualify that a little
177bit ebony there's a there's another cover page that the public and the board will see uh at any time anywhere they can see it then there's four major buttons there but there are the pieces that are forward-facing and then they're facing and as you said yeah this data will be available for the board and the public going forward forever and it'll continuously be updated the the other data because of the sensitivity to children and to individual staff and teachers we have different um groups populations that can see different data so maybe if you could explain that ebony and or lara that would help mr scott and the rest of the board that's an important question that he's asking so we've got to answer it uh correctly dr cash you hit it right out of the
178park so this will be the four buttons that the board and our public can see this is our public facing dashboard and it will be refreshed overnight you will see these data as real time as overnight but with these views um you will not be able to drill down to teacher level or school level you'll stay high at the aggregate district level type data um laura did you want to clarify that for us just wanted to open it up and show that it looks exactly the same as the other as what we see in these sections you just wouldn't be able to click on it and get student names but look is exactly for these four sections the look is the same this just has a little bit different of the functionality and i do
179think you'll get school data i think board members should get school data they will have school data yeah okay so so that answers my second question i was concerned about confidentiality and names being public so okay thank you um so in the quick view of the data that i saw it appears as if at this point our suspension rate continues to trend down for short-term suspensions and long-term suspensions which is also remarkable given the year that we are returning to um so before i editorialize a little bit um can you just confirm it sounds like yuri county restorative justice coalition has a contract with us and is doing work in our schools contract that is funded through the community foundation of buffalo to do work in our schools yes okay i'm just going to say
180because you know dr cash and some of the cabinet members spoke say yes staff spoke so well about the promise of our children the good work of this district and i was disappointed to see them post on october 21st data from a unreliable source um a report that was done back in 2018 i believe and it was referencing data from 2016-17 um and essentially uh targeting buffalo public schools and our suspension rates on this very outdated data and i raised this with them and they didn't seem to in my opinion it was exploitive the way it was presented and so i i was disappointed and i raised this with them and they didn't seem to be concerned with my concern over this and to me i think they do good work they've they've proven to
181do good work in schools with families with commun in the community and they could have simply used that highlight that work that they're doing um the experiences that they're having in our schools with our students with our families all the good work that we just talked about tonight and instead they took something from 2016-17 and really manipulated it to to make us sound as if we're not doing good work here and that things are quite different from 2016-2017 so i just wanted that known um the last thing i want to say too um and i think some people maybe on the other end are going to get upset with me in saying this but we we need to partner with law enforcement at times and we need to recognize that and we need to recognize
182that there are good people in law enforcement and there are extreme situations where we're going to need law enforcement and their help and if we are have ongoing communication and partnership like dr wright mentioned with them we are more likely to have that law enforcement treat our children in a fair and just way and be supportive to us because we know we know firsthand we're seeing it elsewhere other than buffalo public schools that there are there's violence there's attack physical attacks confrontations that are occurring and we need law enforcement at times in some of these serious situations to keep staff students and families and our community safe so that's all for me thank you mr herd and thank you everybody for the the wonderful presentations and i look forward to really nerding out on all
183that data when it becomes publicly available thank you mr scott for your sentiments um is anyone else that have any questions please raise your hand um right now um let's go to uh lulu since he raised his hands to first uh president petrucci you can go to captain first i'll defer to county kathy you have the floor kathy evans bro i you you men are very kind thank you um thank you every one of the presenters who did a phenomenal job we certainly know we have a complex school system with many many people um and i really applaud the kids who do come to school we have a number of students more than not that do come to school and as you know we uh our kids do um experience dysfunction in their homes so
184i had an incident earlier maybe yesterday and so one of my staff um purchased some headlights a headlights kit for three siblings and these children age age and range from about 14 to 18 are not going to school and have not been in school because they have head lice and it really sickened me because we're talking what twenty one dollars maybe thirty dollars a kit um so of course you know we we did that for them um so i guess my question is well let me back up i think this is our school system is trauma informed and i like that we have to be but my question is what are we doing and you may have answered it this and i've overlooked it with those kids like i just described what are we doing
185with them to get them back in school so children who have head lice are not to be excluded from school for the issue of head lice we have information on our website that's available to all that shares that that is not the way that we handle it so i i would be interested maybe after the board meeting to find out what schools so that we can work to support to make sure that that's not happening because headlights are not a reason to exclude children from school thank you thank you um dr um kathy evans brown are you finished with your questioning thank you so much so the next hand that we have raised uh let's go to luke um president patricia at this time thank you coach uh my first question actually is for dr
186williams it was about part of your earlier presentation i just didn't have the opportunity to ask a question when you were mentioning the vaccine program that was going on i know that governor hochul announced a new scholarship program with these for children that get vaccinated that their name goes into a lottery and they have a chance to win a full four year scholarship to a senior cuny program would these children be available to participate in that program they absolutely would so for the program that some upcoming this week though this is for our babies from 5 to 11 years old but yes our older students absolutely and we're having a lot of success with getting children vaccinated we've been partnering with the community health worker group and uh they do a lot of work prior
187to the vaccination and so they're making phone calls they're visiting homes because what we know we have sometimes is a community that is vaccine hesitant and so they have questions they're looking for you know education about the vaccine and they're doing that and they're doing it very well we just had a a vaccination clinic at south park and i'm told that we had upwards of 45 staff students and family members that took advantage of that opportunity and got vaccinated i'm glad to hear before i retired and overused health workers got to be uh at the front line to help uh smooth things out or to uh be the forward phase for many of our initiatives on the behalf of my former department it worked out very well so i'm glad to hear um i do
188have a couple of questions about the dashboard um one thing would be uh i see that you have those four general categories that would be public facing in that uh will there be links if someone wanted additional information so let's say you clicked on the behavior you had suspension if someone wanted uh more information about suspension of the process or how to appeal or you know to the suspect or to um or to the district website dealing with those very suspension issues exactly built into the website and also were to be links to narratives as well because oftentimes you have this data but the narrative helps shape and to offer what the district's interpretation what that data is going to be or how the data is interpreted uh president petrucci the short answer is we
189are working on that so our dashboard is nimble enough that we can do everything that you've said and um that's the great thing about talking to you and talking to the asls and the and the principals the more folks ask us hey ebony and laura can the dashboard do this our answer is always going to be it's burger king we'll we will do it your way you can have it your way we will make it and we are working on that well thank you i'm very excited about the dashboard you know this is going to make it so much easier for all of us because many of us had drilled down the desk you would go to multiple websites and this is kind of this this compilation of all the data and once it particularly
190i mean we use power bi for a variety of different things but the ability to place filters and to desegregate the data by what your interest or what your need is it's very very powerful i do have one kind of question so why did you choose to put unsuspected as opposed to suspended it seems kind of counterintuitive when i look at the dashboard i'm just going to be curious well let me help you with that sure again suspension is a contra indicator so we call a contra indicator and when you have contra indicators you don't want to amplify that with a large student population you know they first had unsuspended in orange i told them if you under suspended you put that in green and then you put the contraindicator in orange because that's the
191that's the facts that's the actual picture of it see it's like a fiscal report when you say uh your financial external audit had it was unqualified or it had qualified see unqualified is good qualified is not and it's counterintuitive but it's the way you you present it so when you see that green unsuspended data that right there is your narrative that's your narrative you see don't go out talking about all these suspensions and all of this and this and and why did he die and doo doo doo doo and reading that report and reading that report that is all just trying to bash the buffalo public because it has another agenda but when you see it the data the way it is it shows you what it is whether it's achievement data when we're going
192to show you in a little bit where how kids start off it's mostly red but as they go along and we intervene and start to teach the children then those colors start to move toward yellow and green and so forth so we're transparent about the data all the time but you never show in all of my years of this work and this is my work uh in prior life and i give direction to these staff on these issues is that contra indicators are usually a minority uh data point so it's like attendance attendance is not where we want to be but you show attendance as those that are attending you don't show who's not att you show it but you don't show that as the main thing is who's not attending you work on improve
193improving attendance and you show a goal to where attendance should be and you'll see that when we get into attendance so unsuspended is really the term of the field it's educational jargon uh but it also tells you that where where most of the kids are 3 100 kids most of them by far only one percent aren't are unsuspended all right i appreciate the explanation dr cash i just it just seemed a little counter-intuitive so that's why i asked um last the last question i have and i know that we've um i've encountered this as a parent i'm just worried about the the input at the teacher classroom level making sure that so i know as apparent oftentimes there was that lag time in the data that occurred at the classroom level uh which you know
194made for some uncomfortable conversations with my children uh so i'm just wondering what you kind of built in to make sure that principals and our assistant principles would have that data in a timely manner at the classroom level so again president perducci the the over it's the overnight refresh and and we are going back to um train refine the way that principals use these data and so again um monday and or today is wednesday the last two days tuesday and this morning we met with principals and we reintroduced them to this tool we used to provide it to them on a static just a spreadsheet and so now they can they can be monitoring it every day and so with the help of the asl um this is now the practice of our principles right
195this is what they're doing and and and we're going to soon bring teachers along in this practice so um that is what we're doing and and principles it was like fire in the in the principal meetings yesterday and this morning so it is now this is their practice to be looking at it it's just it makes it um easier for them to grasp is what we did by putting it on the dashboard i think it's a wonderful you know kudos for all of you i think it's a wonderful tool i think we're going to see a much more positive results it gives uh teachers and administrators the ability to uh do a to provide support at the appropriate juncture and many of our to identify patterns all those things i mean it really is a
196powerful tool and it's going to be very simple uh to use again congratulations and uh on all the hard work this is very impressive okay uh thank you um i'm president patrowski is there any other other board members that have any questions or is that okay i have a hand raised by um um jennifer mccosey jim and cozy you have the floor thank you um i do want to say that i had questions around the vaccinations and and i did get my answers based on your question president petrucci but i also want to comment um a couple things one i want to thank everybody for not responding in the kind of the kind of way i've been wanting to respond to a lot of the you know narratives and negativity that's been happening and being
197spewed at the district like pretty much daily and waiting to bring this to the table there is absolutely no arguing what you've presented what you will continually present now that it's going to be public facing a lot of this narrative and the the kind of junk that's been spewed um there there's it now you can see you you can see you can counteract it all it is is just go look at the data here's the website you don't have to say you don't have to fight i appreciate this district for not jumping the gun and and losing it each and every time we would be more than more than legit to be real negative right back at folks and i just want to say over and over again and want to bring all of this
198back to the district you know hold meetings if we need to to like bring this to the community on the level that's not just at our work sessions but you know thank you congratulations thank you from me because you know us as board members we're facing these same concerns so now i could stop being red-faced and tasting my own dna from drinking the blood and biting my tongue every time i have to deal with some of this and just tell them to go to the website yeah i i'm i'm so impressed and i just thank you for you know biding your time and doing it like this thank you uh miss mccosy um next first we have is um paulette woods miss woods yes uh i respect the dashboard i love that we will be
199able to go and look at it and my question is the reality of what do i say to parents who just called me about two students getting stabbed on the nfta watching us on the news and i want to say things are okay the we don't really have a a problem of of of students reacting to trauma it's not it's not that big um it's only 285 long-term suspensions i i i love having the dashboard but i guess what i'm at a loss and would like to hear an explanation of what you what we say to parents who are looking at the reality of incidences down at my schools emerson um i had parents calling me about the situation last week earlier up two weeks ago near riot i mean i'm i can't tell them
200this didn't happen and i'm i don't know if i'm supposed to say it's part of the 285 suspensions or what am i what am i supposed to say i did look at your dashboard and it did i did see emerson and drew magnet to my school set up high instance of short-term suspension and i'm thankful for the dashboard because i want to look at those schools and see what's going on why they have those higher level suspension but given the data and i guess this is only the data for this year right so what am i supposed to say to the parents watching the tv and to the parents who are aware of all these incidences that will put such a positive context to it that's that's that's what my question is yes let me
201let me help you mrs woods that's right i'm gonna let dr wright respond to that because she's been in the in the thick of this for for weeks now uh certainly i'm engaged we have a eight-member team that's engaged uh but i would like her to lead with the response to that and then i may have a word or two uh dr wright because it's not about what are you supposed to say to try to spend something that's horrific uh into something positive we're not saying that we we're very clear about that we embrace the data we embrace the challenges and the trauma and we're right there beside these children we follow them to the hospital uh we kanji immediately gets in hold of family members and reaches out to the victims as well as
202the perpetrators um so we we're working on this all the time i spoke with the mayor today twice uh and how we can address this issue in that chippewa corridor where there's five high schools or four high schools and uh you know this business community is concerned right down there near urban league and and the banks are concerned and so forth so we're we're into this work and we're not wanting to spend anything uh it is what it is it is an increase in my am i mistaken because i mean it is different an increase in this first half of the year absolutely over any other year we often we wouldn't have this many incidents like we're talking about in a whole year historically and we're only what 10 weeks in so this is something
203that you say to parents say parents make sure you sweep in front of your own doorstep make sure your your step is clean and then if you're part of this come get it come be in this come help with this because parents are in this too parents some parents are jumping on kids beating up kids okay it's it's it's heavy what's going on it's not any blame but it's it's enough accountability for everybody to step up and get and get involved some of the most egregious case that happened you know someone was advocating for the for that parent and that student it was outrageous what was going on on the video and what had happened and it's been going on for three weeks so we got to get into these gangs we got to get
204into this this social media world we got to get into uh what's been going on trailing from the summer and from last year and that's what you heard in those presentations by dr williams and by toyah wilson and by dr wright dr kim i heard that nfta was addressing this putting more buses etc up not more trains or whatever but i get parents calling me today today two kids stabbed five times i'm so i'm i'm i'm trying to inform you about that we informed you about that the child the child both children are are alive and they're in hole but it was horrific they were stabbed in the face and in the arms and in the neck yeah so so everyone has to step up but dr dr and i'm not one to say because
205of the pandemic therefore no behavior is behavior behavior at some point if you have parents and you have adults you have to be responsible for the behavior of your children we're gonna our job is to keep the school safe our job is to keep staff safe students safe and to teach you different ways to respond to the challenges that you're dealing with we're big on working along those lines but that takes time and that what we're seeing this year it needs help we need help this isn't all on this at the doorstep of the schools believe me it isn't now when we see what's going on in the community now what we see was going on on streets and see so so cassandra without you know going too far on this and then i'll end
206with a with a point about suspension that i am concerned with say what you want to say to miss wood so you can help her a little bit with dialogue she's having with her constituents i think that's the question so mrs woods i absolutely understand your anguish as you are listening to a mother tell you that her child was stabbed i want you to also know that there are other people who are also in anguish the principles of those children and to be frank with you the parents of the children who perpetrated the crime there are victims all around and i really challenge you by your assertion that we're trying to make all things look positive when i began by saying that these children that i am referring to are doing things that are absolutely
207beyond what we have ever seen to the point of it being surreal so there's no sugar coating their behavior not at all what we are saying is children are behaving in ways that right now are quite frankly unexplainable and we are working hand in glove with parents organizations mentoring groups who want to do that work for free who have been doing the work for free pastors many people who are joining in because they recognize as a community this is too big for just one school system to handle we all have to get involved in this and to dr cash's point when we have these incidences and i heard you refer to them as riots i gotta tell you some of the mothers are fighting alongside with their daughters some of the fathers and uncles are
208in there fighting alongside of the of their sons so it's not just the children and so when you are getting these phone calls say what you feel i am sorry this is complex there is nothing i'm going to be able to say to you to take your pain away but what i can assure you is as a board member me my colleagues the superintendent his cabinet and the entire administrative team and teachers are working day and night to bring this to resolve you tell them that because that's the truth thank you so of the opinion that the suspensions have gone down because there's a lot of information going around about suspensions and it doesn't sound like the suspensions are going well no one said the suspensions are going down and if we did we apologize
209okay the suspensions are two types short-term and long-term okay and then there's odis there's office discipline referrals and a lot of kids are getting written up so it's another form of discipline what we're saying is that you now have data that you can track that you can look at that we're certainly looking at right down to the level of the student and because we have partners like say yes and because we have all of the talented staff that we have that that are devoted and dedicated to helping these children and because we're going to expand our parent outreach in our program and theory of action under dr reynolds and under a number of other initiatives that we're doing and all these other things we've been talking about we believe we're going to get it back
210under uh numbers that that are below what what they are now way below that they're below standard they actually start to become best in class but we're not there and nowhere in the country is there and what what i'm proud of is that we're transparent about it you show me dashboards like this now and i've been working at this my whole career and this is the best i've ever seen and what i'm saying is i'm concerned still about this i'm concerned that most of these kids and and this is the point you can take it as that or you can take it as that's the opportunity that's where we've got to go focus most of these are black children most of these are black males who also have a set a special uh special ed
211is disproportionate see the the ethnicity is disproportionate the poverty indicator is disproportionate and in some cases the gender i already said that the gender is disproportionate so that's what you track you look at that to make sure that that doesn't just continue unabated and so then we need and that's why we're bringing the gender schools the boys school the girls schools because in those schools those schools have tremendous track record and research on the kids are happy the kids come to school motivated kids have student voice the kids are are energized and and are treated with respect uh in terms of who they are and it's and the staff work on that and and do all of the research around that and they have special kinds of staffing in there well we're learning from that
212research and trying to bring that to all the schools as we speak but certain schools you know they're they're they're a hot spot and until we get the right strategies and the tier four supports now in there for these schools they'll continue to be hot spots because it goes beyond the school let's be honest and this data helps us see exactly where those hot spots are and exactly where where we need to give additional supports or what i call strategic targeted supports to to those kids and to those families and and and to the school staff that's that's what will just just a couple quick questions dr cash because one of my schools is emerson and i'm concerned and i know the principal is doing everything she can god help her god bless our principals
213and our staff but my one of my questions is simply if you send a group of students to a very respectable respected school and their interest is not in cooking or whatever then do you think that mismatch of having children who are not really interested in focus in that area could be causing some of the problem and then the other quick question is simply we've said you have to teach to and reach the whole child so could it be that the children who music and arts might have helped and and phys ed might have given them an outlet for their aggression and and after school programs and and things that might have made a difference are just not there and maybe that is another reason why these children don't have an outlet for this this
214this trauma that's a thought yeah i just want to leave you know what i want to leave you guys i just want to leave it with her i'm not going to i don't have a long answer for that um i'm sorry dr cash uh yeah i'd like to i'd like to say that from my time in teaching and i know that um dr kathy evans brown taught also as a substitute teacher here in the buffalo public school system is that the student voice is very important and and our students once they trust in you believe you they actually talk to the teachers and they relate to the teachers and they tell them about situations like this which i heard hundreds of times about potential potential fights that will break out of potential altercations that's going
215to happen and and and the teachers are very important it's also about giving this information to the proper uh through the chain of command to the principal and then from maybe possibly uh uh school security and then go on to the authorities if needed um we need to really pay attention to the student voice and many times just like you said that uh we had parents that come out in front of school buildings and and pull out weapons also you know fight along with the kids so it's the same type of mentality that this district is dealing with so yes let's pay more closer attention to these incidents uh pay closer attention to our students and listen to what they're going through and what they say um we really have to speak out about this
216as board members also and as a board member i would like to also you know be at these meetings when we talk about violence with our kids or working with the police department the mayor and also uh community members and leaders we also need to include our uh our churches also and leaders in our churches in our community also to uh try to rectify the situation and one of the programs you said bringing men into the schools you know that'd be another way we could alleviate some of these problems the issue um over at that corridor there is a sleuth of high schools you know that's using the exact same trains exact same bus so maybe we should look into possibly be routing a couple of buses so that the kids are going a different
217direction so the kids will be bottled up at one central point there's a couple of different things that we probably can look into but these incidents is uh is going to happen they're always going to be some altercation between children because that that's what happened but uh i received some exact same phone calls that miss woods received and it's very disconcerting when you're talking to a parent or a community member and they talk about you know these type of situations uh it does give our district a bad name but long as our district is trying to do the best that we can i'm very satisfied with that and all the efforts that you took to try to prevent these things and working with the school district and working with the teachers principals uh the mayor
218and buffalo police i'm satisfied with that also but uh the board also myself personally i would say i'd like to also have some reports on that so we can know what's going on so we can get that report back to our stakeholder constituents and the parents so they can understand so we kept understanding what to tell them understand uh miss ward's concerns about you know what to tell the parent how to react to him because it seems like there's a void information that she reached that she did not receive you know to how to relate back to that person so this uh i know we was communicated about the incident and when you see the phone calls you know people are very distressed they're they're traumatized and my main concern is about students returning back
219to school uh what about the students that witnessed this there are students that you know use that same bus line you know where they come to school tomorrow uh are we reaching out to those families and those students so there's a lot of concerns that's happening here so uh let's please you know work on this together and and try to prevent these things in the future yeah absolutely of course we are that's what this whole session is about so thank you for those comments uh colleagues and uh i believe that we should move on because we have another whole session so i will say before we go there is that i'm in the planning phases now for a series of town hall meetings with the community writ large in different sections of town uh and
220so uh the mayor has said if he'd like he could he could join me sometimes he might other times i just stand with you you come join me and we'll talk to parents we'll talk to whoever wants to show up whoever wants to show up because i'm interested in hearing what the community's ideas are and i mean the the big writ large community uh about these issues uh i'm i'm okay with them coming up to a mic and and saying whatever they're calling you about let's let's talk about it let's talk about it because we can help we can help us wage and and provide comfort where we can but provide information where we can as well and say we're working on it we're working and we can work on it together but the great
221majority of students are coming to school uh colleagues we are open five days a week every day uh which is an accomplishment in and of itself uh we're open on saturdays as well and the great majority of children are doing what they're supposed to do and i believe they're overall happy in school i i do from the reports that i'm getting are there challenges are they working through is everybody working to get back on track uh the answer to that is yes everybody uh but i'm sorry that we can break through what i do not what i lose sleep about at night i worry that we're gonna have the horrific thing happen in school that's my worry that i can't sleep uh and i've seen i've seen that happen in my lifetime and in my
222prior districts and and and there's no explaining that uh so that's why we have to work together we have to pray together and we have to be on this thing we have to be on it 24 7 like dr rice says i'm awake all the time i get i start early in the morning with cassandra and she probably won't provide summations fully for the eight incidents that happened today until after this meeting and then i'll get the summation for the day uh and then and that's how we go so your idea four members we we welcome them and if we can add them into the stitching uh they're and they're helpful then we absolutely will so thank you dr cash the only thing i'd like to see is to make sure that um that no
223other board nor other students out of fear bring any weapons to school tomorrow so we can get a handle on that and also any children that don't report to school tomorrow that may have witnessed or may be afraid you know that we reach out to those families right away and make sure that we touch bases with that child or those needs that's part of our protocol mr we get it we really do this is a fluid situation it's not over it's never over when you have situation like this because then you get the next retaliation and then the next retaliation so we're in we're in it we're in it we're fully aware of it dr tanja williams has her team dr wright has her team fred wagstaff is is on the case with his sros
224uh i mean his uh security team so we're doing our very best we're doing our very best and uh we're still looking for even more help more partnerships and more solutions all right okay thank you so much you have the hand raised by um by serving common yeah so i have a question um typically everyone in this district gets paid a function they get paid for the work that they do and my concern is is that uh there are expectations that the community should volunteer certain organizations should volunteer and not get paid and i have a concern about that because without paying people there's no way to hold them accountable okay and so i'm concerned about uh some of this money uh this issue associated with what's going on in this district that it gets
225trickled into the community and that by so you will be able to hold people accountable for the work that we are expecting them to do it's time out for the poor people volunteering and everybody else getting paid in this equation we are at a point right now that we need to be able to hold everyone accountable who is in this equation and the only way you can do that is if they're receiving money and getting paid for what they're doing and i feel that there's enough money in this district to move forward and do that and that's the least we can do because my questions are very different and maybe we can do it at another meeting but my questions are what are we doing for the 272 children that have these incidents how do
226we uh get them to be upright and correct moving forward that they can be model citizens and not children that will go back in as a bad apple and spoil the whole bunch again so i have different questions that this time we don't have to answer them but it certainly needs to be addressed because i believe in being proactive okay i i feel that you know we had enough we had a plan going on this summer you're giving approval to get teacher a i mean to get sros additional sros in the building we knew from the information that was happening in the streets from the cops that it was going to be a very difficult environment this year with these children because of what was going on in the streets and and so my concern
227is making sure that people who do the work get paid for it okay and and i really feel that there's a problem when people in this community is expected to volunteer their services while everyone else gets paid and leaves out of the city at the end of the day with their money and these people are not so i'm just going to be frank about that i have a problem if that's not happening or that conversation is not happening it's not going to it doesn't feel good to me and i believe that some people will volunteer but i think this part problem is crucial enough at this point that we need people on point who can make them can make a change in these children lives and it's not gonna happen by willy-nilly it's gonna happen
228by uh people doing it in a concise way thank you yeah yeah we'll have to take up the payment issue of everybody in another time um i'm not saying that people uh we shouldn't partner with folks um but i want to know what people can do to help and i want to know what their accountability is uh in their life anyway if you're a parent i'm not sure you get paid to make sure your child is disciplined okay and i want to make sure that we're we've got a clear uh conversation about about getting money out into the community to help with with whatever for example i'm i'm good with what what what is it sarah jessica walker she she now is is in the game she's she's working on things that she's always talked
229about and she's helping with this vaccination roll out and she's informing uh people first about vaccinations and why it's important and why you should not have the fear because here's what it's about and so she's leading and bringing people to the vaccination table that's a great partnership and you bring these partnerships like that then then i'm interested in it i have a lot of partnerships like that dr cash out there my father that's involving um community partners that take ownership of kids from the problem kids these 272 would be there would be men assigned to these children and make sure that they're walking and doing what they're supposed to do well there are programs out there that are being uh done the niagara falls is doing a phenomenal job and quite a few things that
230they're doing but my concern again is to make sure that uh the community benefits from from this yeah absolutely i agree with that i agree with that that's why i'm talking to pastor kenny that's why i'm talking to a number of people trying to get these things going all right colleagues uh dr cash uh i will be ready to move on uh to our next subject uh i just want to make make wait one comment uh i appreciate the work that's being done on the dashboard that has been done i showed transparency to our community and to the board members and um i believe they can go a long ways and try to resolve some issues that we have uh you can answer this question in the email but i'm only concerned about what how
231much data that's compacted on the dashboard that we put extra security measures um up by the district so that we can make sure that that information stays safe more than just what we're doing right now so if we can somehow discuss that at a future date that make sure we put extra security measures on that dashboard so that our information stays safe in the future because we know we have issues across the country in this county and the city and with our district in the past so thank you thank you uh if there are no other hands at this time uh we're really really gone over uh a lot so i would like to turn this over to dr kathy evans brown for student achievement and um if there's no more comments about you from
232you dr cash okay i'm with kathy evans first so i'll defer to her then i'll say a few things and we'll get right into it and i can even figure out how to um abbreviate it a little bit for you uh this evening but go ahead dr kathy evan brown okay good evening do we need to take a stretch it's too late who said it's too late cash anybody else want to break besides cash cash don't want to break you guys want to take a five-minute break i wanted one i said it's too late yeah i think we should five minutes isn't your diaper full you gotta be careful you gonna lose folks all right five minutes five minutes all right maybe 8 47 yeah 853 but we will return and can we get the
233chain uh time corrected on these computers because we are two minutes behind everybody else all right staff i mean colleagues um i've talked to staff and we've made an adjustment uh for your consideration and we're ready to go so dr kathy evans brown whenever you ready okay so we're refreshed after that five minute break um good evening so we as a board we're really excited about um the fact that we are policy makers for the district and this is refreshing to continue to focus in on student achievement and it's interwoven in a lot of our committee so that's exciting and dr cash delivered because we talked earlier about um obtaining data and you guys talked about how you were working on a dashboard so you delivered that so we're pleased um and so we want
234to be able to combat or confront negative data and use it as a basis to support you know the teaching and learning and so with that um i'm going to slide it over to you dr cass so you can introduce what we're about to speak all right so colleagues tonight um there's a lot of student achievement data that as you saw from the dashboard we can begin to report out on or you can ask for reports before meeting you don't have to have it at a meeting you can ask for it and uh the osa team will will put it together and we can we can get it out to you via email so that that's the really great news about an active live dashboard now tonight attendance is certainly a portion or a piece
235of uh the academic journey it's an old saying if you don't come to school you'll be learning something but you're not gonna be learning what's in school so we want students in school every day all day and attendance is an important indicator of that and we really for our children again in this time because we anticipated some of these rough spots we want to make sure kids aren't in that chronic and severe category and more in that satisfactory uh category so we're going to show you that again we embrace the data we try to drill down and figure out what who's not coming to school and why who's not coming to school and why so you'll have a presentation by osa on that and then we'll go miss i asked miss botticelli she'll step up
236and come in with what we call eye station um i ireti and and dibble's data eye station is for the younger children uh pre-k children uh how how prepared they are i ready is mathematics data and the devil's data is is language arts and together you get a picture of our kids uh in this first part of the school year so that's what we'll present to you tonight and what i recommend is we stop after attendance and have a conversation and then we stop after ann's presentation and have a conversation all right with that again miss bullock and miss laura somalski peters attendance data student attendance data and by the way in their slides colleague they are going to say a word about staff attendance because i wanted them to look that up and give
237us a picture of that because it's important i believe for us to track as well that'll be on the dashboard uh data we'll have going forward so start with your preliminary slides miss bullet and then get into that live part again with attendance writ large okay absolutely admire if you could put up the next slide deck it's the one that's titled revised november 10th thank you and you can go right to the next slide so colleagues just as dr cash said we are open five days a week and what we do know by our um staff attendance and right now this is static we will be pulling this over into the dashboard for you to see but what we know by and large our staff they're getting they're getting to our schools they're they're willing
238to serve our students and to teach them and to really implement that high quality instruction and so if our staff are there we are going to continue to endeavor to make sure that our students get there so if you go to the next slide admir i just want to do a quick reminder of what ada is remember we saw this the last time we were before you talking about what ada ada is and how it is calculated so as of november 8th our ada is 83.22 and it is climbing um we're doing every thing that dr williams and asl um toyah wilson said to get our kids feeling like they belong and feeling welcome and to get to school and so our ada is rising next slide admir we went over some of these last
239time we know that parents are still hesitant to send their children in for a number of reasons we know that some of our children have been in and out because of covet quarantines and actually other illnesses at this point we are fully in flu season um new york state immunization exclusions that actually should be crossed out we are that number shrinking and shrinking and shrinking because of all the great work coming out of dr williams uh department where we're having mobile um vaccination clinics at football games at saturday academies wherever we can pull up that bus and vaccinate folks that's exactly what we're doing um but one of the things that we know as we said earlier this evening that continues to sort of um be a draw on our resources but we're continuing to
240work against this is this intergenerational racial trauma and scl instability and i i'm borrowing that from you know our wonderful colleague dr fatima morrell that we we have to keep letting our community know that we know that our children and our families they're hurting in so many different kinds of ways and everything we're doing to address it to make sure that they get to school but it is a compounding factor on our ada transportation is shrinking cheryl again kennedy is doing phenomenal with cutting down those bus times getting kids to and from school on time and and we're cutting down on those issues it's there but we're cutting down it's shrinking it's shrinking and shrinking so what we want to do is go straight right into the dashboard again admir you can close this out
241and we're going to go right into the dashboard admire oh there you go thanks and so laura if you could take us to again the public-facing um dashboard real quick again so we can remind our colleagues what that looks like so again this is the public-facing dashboard so um in just a few shortly you'll be able to click on attendance that attendance button and laura's going to show you what you'll be able to see when you click on the attendance button okay so in the attendance button we have three different categories we have attendance attendance by category and then previous day attendance so i click on my attendance button i will come to the district page i'm going to close these down so it's a little bigger for you right here in this box you
242can see that our ada as of yesterday was 82.85 percent on the middle i have well up on top i have our district uh broken down into attendance categories over here i have a little reminder of what those categories are but if you can't see them i'll let you know that green is satisfactory attendance those are students who have been absent less than five percent of the days they that school is in session at risk is blue that's absent between five and ten percent of the days chronic orange is between 10 and 20 and then severe is red and that's over 20 percent of the days so for the district you can see the breakdown of categories up here we also have our schools going down the middle with uh broken up into the the
243attendance categories also have grade level attendance for the entire district we have our subgroup attendance we have our um race and ethnicity and then our ada by month if i went into um and just like all of the other ones we can filter it for different subgroups if i go into one specific school so this happens to be a high school uh school leonardo da vinci you can see that i have my grade breakdown so for each grade in the school i can see uh the percent of students in each category i also have overall school categories um their race and ethnicity enl special ed economically disadvantaged gender and then for all of our high schools we also have this cohort box down on the bottom that shows us attendance by cohort one of the
244things that we're working to add within the next couple of days is a day of the week count so that we can see what our attendance looks like for each day of the week so we can start to uh put some interventions in place based on day of the week that's a high school view i'm just going to go into one of our elementary schools quickly so you can see it's the same thing we have it broken down by grade level we have the overall school attendance their their specific ada raised in ethnicity enl special ed economically disadvantaged gender and then ada by month if i were to look at the other categories that are in here if i go back to my landing page if i wanted to see attendance by category it looks
245very similar to what you just saw but we also included ada for every school so i can see every school's ada on the middle and i can see ada by grade and ada by every subgroup so it's similar it's just a little bit different of a people look and we also have this um category next to it you can make a side-by-side comparison the last attendance view that we have for you in here is a previous debut so some principals are very interested in knowing what their attendance looked like just yesterday which they wouldn't get from their ada calculations if we were to look at yesterday's attendance we have it for the entire district we also have it for each individual school so for the entire district i can see this light blue is the
246percent of students that were present yesterday so this was yesterday tuesday the 9th the blue is the percent of students who are absent and then this orange on the end is the percent of students that were suspended we also have a countdown here for the district and then we have it by all of our subgroups by grade level enl special education gender race and cohort that's the district overview and then just like the other views if i were to open one specific school here i'll go to school 74 i can see my grade level breakdown of attendance for yesterday you can see the overall attendance yesterday's um subgroup information is all right here and of course the cohort box disappeared because it's not a high school so those are the three views we have for
247attendance we also if you want to click on this assessment tab have lots of assessment pieces in here these are still under construction so when um mrs botticelli presents she'll go over some of this data in a static manner for you but it will be visible in the live da in the live dashboard in the next few days thank you laura i just want to underscore laura you can go back to the district ada that page so i just want to bring this back up to underscore um you know the narrative again has to be that our ada is climbing that is the narrative that is the story our ada is climbing we are doing everything to go and get kids and get them into school and provide them with the quality instruction that we
248know our teachers and leaders um are up to the job to do and so we wanted to make sure that this dashboard gives you a real up-to-date real-time look at who's coming and and again you can you can filter it down and look at students by their subgroup um category but so this is something board members you can come and you can point your constituents to to show that our students are coming every day we have more and more students coming and we will continue to do all of those tier one tier two tier three and if we need to tier four into five interventions to make sure that they're in our building so that they can take advantage of all of the wonderful instruction that we um are providing for them and so again
249because that assessment tab is not fully loaded just yet um although our work our it folks are working day and night to get those data in there mrs biochelly will talk to you about some of our eye station and i ready data so dr cash i hand it back over to you yeah colleagues i think that if you have any questions about this that or want to see uh anything in specific this is a time to ask about attendance we'll be happy to show you whatever you whatever you'd like to see okay so we'll take questions now sharon i see your hand up and your first on my list thank you i'd like to know um specifically i'm concerned about uh the african-american uh high school students um what their data looks like um in
250relationship to what other uh groups data look like we can look at that lara okay we have this box right here that lets me choose secondary schools so i'm only going to have high school information here and if i go yep high school if i go over to my race and ethnicity tab i can see this it may be too small but this bar right here is my african-american subgroup and you can see how that looks in comparison to the others say what the first one the first one is asian this one is black or african-american this one is hispanic wow fourth one is um native american multi-racial pacific islander and then the last is white and what is the ratio for african-american male i mean african-american students and does this is this is break
251it down by male and female i can break it down by male and female so i would have to click um if i wanted to get male i would gender this gender and then because there's the four categories if i hold on my control key and click on each of them separately it will get all of my mail students and then when this filters these um ones that are not like pale like not grayed out that's the male students within each of those categories okay so i see hispanic and african americans are expected is what i expected what is this uh for a one two three four five six column over what is that that one yeah pacific islander and actually um yeah so what happens sometimes with pacific islander subgroup is that the numbers
252are so small that you have a couple of kids who are are absent quite frequently it it makes the percentage look a little high okay all right okay are we are we also uh uh charting covet incidents in our schools are we did that up in the dashboard so one of the some will it also show this the classrooms that are quarantined are we traces are we tracking that data the classrooms that are quarantined in each building dr williams uh we're certainly tracking that data osa is tracking we do track it i don't know if it's integrated in here in that way uh it may be showing up in the data is it showing up in the data um ebony laura can you switch over lord can we switch over to the kova tracker so
253we have a separate coded dashboard it's not directly in there it's in a separate location live on our website so when we're on the main page if i were to click on this copied preparedness okay button and then to this yellow button okay we have this tracker that's going to pop up here and i can make it full screen but doesn't go down to the classroom level it goes to the school level and we show our tested numbers right but does it show quarantine build uh classrooms not on this tracker no okay but are we tracking that oh yeah yeah okay because the report that we're getting daily that's being sent over does not have that on there and that's the reason why i was asking thank you well that's because that's common we we
254haven't closed very many classrooms i think today is just my fourth classroom or so that i've had to close i think i closed two today uh at 54. um but before that i only closed a couple at 27. no seven i'm sorry 72 72. so yeah that's okay good all right that hasn't been any uh other closures okay all right okay and what does that mean when you close a classroom quarantine a classroom that means the kids don't come back or they're they have to stay in the room altogether now we got it we got to close it and quarantine contact trace and clean uh hospital level cleaning for that classroom for at least two days uh wanna you wanna say more about it okay good sure yeah so we meet with the medical team
255um when we've had two at least two cases in a classroom and um they talk with our nurse practitioners who talk with our principals to find out for those two or more cases you know were the kids more than three feet apart from one another was one of the cases a teacher was the room ventilated there are all kinds of questions that they ask and then we have to get a recommendation from the county it's a recommendation for dr cash to then evaluate and decide that you know it looks like it's a cluster spread in the classroom and then the classroom is closed for 10 days actually um to get cleaning uh for the kids who you know may have been exposed to have an opportunity to get tested and get their results and um
256and elena then works with the principal to get communication out um from dr cash okay thank you for sharing that with me because um i was a little confused i'm not sure if you saw the numbers that are coming out of suburbia today uh it was posted on the website uh wb uh wkbw had it posted no no uh what was it 97 whatever had it posted today that the suburbs had over 900 cases and i'm concerned since the majority of our teachers are not located in the city of buffalo i'm very concerned about um the spread and so i'm wondering if they are uh are they vaccinated and if they're being checked um if they're not that's what i i'd like that question and i'm sorry to divert from this but i think it's
257important enough to ask that question because there's no way if our teachers are are not vaccinated and they're coming in our buildings or whatever and that amount of spread is out there we're in trouble and that's what i'm concerned about so yeah i think i think i shared that i talked to dr crowe today and we're at well over 223 cases per um for 100 000 which is in deep into the red red zone and it is largely in the suburbs right now and you know we still it's a challenge we we we can't make people get vaccinated i mean that's the board wants to go down that road you know we'd have to probably get some mousse i haven't been willing to do it to date but certainly if we if we get to
258a point where where we're seeing this kind of spread because that's definitely definitely affecting attendance colleagues affecting attendance in a big way yeah and for staff yeah that number is is very very high and people are still dying uh from it so it's a good question and sometimes if you could say a little more about the testing the other challenge we have colleagues is the testing consent form is so complex that many parents aren't even able to wage through way uh wade through it um and then we're having a lot of non-consent uh in this issue so we're testing but we're running into some challenges so so tanda could you just say a few words about what we're doing now to try to wrap that up and make sure that these unvaccinated people are getting
259tested at least weekly that's gotta happen it's gotta happen all right thank you doctor yes so this year last year as you all know we used a rapid test um dr cash led us getting our own license and it was a fairly um easy non-invasive test however there was a higher probability of false positives with that test and so this year we went with a group that the erie county department of health endorsed as well as our medical advisory team because it's a pcr test and it's much more reliable than what we had in the past and so it's a group that's called affinity they have trained our nurses on how to do the test it's not extremely invasive it's not the test that some people have heard about where the swab goes quite far
260into the nasal cavity but it goes further than the rapid test uh swab did and um they you know we're utilizing that test now with affinity because they are the owners of the test they have their own consent form that we had to abide by and it's it's quite extensive it's very scholarly there's a lot of medical language on there and so you know we're working through it our principles are working diligently to try to get as many consent as possible because we can only test those students or staff who have consented to be tested and so we did get the form translated so it is translated into um you know other languages but it is very complex and it's an uphill climb every week though we're getting more and more concerned and what we've
261asked for families to do is to complete the consent form electronically and we know that also is a little bit difficult but it helps because they can then go into the portal and get their results almost you know right within a day or two so with us uh beginning our testing now of non-vaccinated staff we know that that's going to certainly increase our numbers and that's a requirement from new york state so staff who have not proven that they are vaccinated will now have to abide by getting uh weekly testing okay thank you doctor um when we when reach academy came before us they said that they had set up their own testing uh testing that they were doing themselves um inside of their school uh um if i get a chance i'll reach out
262to them and see exactly what they're doing but uh it appears as if they're self-sufficient in that area so our nurses are the group that's doing it we're doing the testing also um our nurses are doing it but affinity owns the test they come out and they pick up we do pool testing so we have to have at least five people in a building who have consented to test in order to do it and the nurse facilitates so for our babies up through age 12 the nurses actually do it but for anyone that's 12 or old that's 13 or older they can self-administer the test themselves but the nurse of course has to guide that and then they you know package up the swab and um you know they have to go into uh the
263computer system and input the information put the label on it package it up for fedex call fedex out to come and pick it up and then um you know families can go on and get their results electronically within a day or two okay all right thank you i'm sorry to go off the path but i just thought that since we had this opportunity we need to at least let people know what's going on with that testing piece and particularly since those numbers are so high in the suburbs at this point i'm very concerned about the impact on our school district thank you you're welcome thank you thank you sharon yeah that is that was worth the time to deter um thank you clarence heard uh it's me kathy it's lou patrici well i'm trying to
264go by alphabetical order well parents have a question oh okay thank you thank you kathy um you know what um i don't i'm not gonna refer any questions at this time i'll leave the floor to the next board member okay thank you okay i don't see jay hope i'll just hear from her jennifer mccoosey you're up so i don't have any questions i think um actually sharon really uh hit the nail on the head with the questions that i had around you know vaccinations and what's going on so i'm good okay thank you all right uh louis patucci thank you very much dr evans brown um i was wondering if you guys if if there's been any conversation with the state about maybe uh changing the methodology at which they calculate ada during covid because
265because of the quarantining and children missing so much time related to covid um that it really impacts our numbers i was just wondering if there's been any discussions along that line not that i'm a well ebony remember last year when they were asking about that attendance and we got that report there was a struggle all year long last year to get consistency about about how you calculate ada so i do think you should say something about that and where we are okay so um the struggle was that uh nice set changed the attendance-taking attendance collection protocols midway through the year last year and so we had to now report not just simply whether a student was present or absent if they were present we also had to report whether they were present virtual which mean
266either remote learning 100 at home learning or we also had some students that were virtual learners but they were in their building but being their class was split because of social distancing so we had all these little loops in and out that we had to report like all other districts and so that was the struggle um however in my you know contacts with nyset i don't know right now today if they're trying to recalculate that ada it is something that you know we can we continually ask when we're meeting with them um monthly and they have not they're just scratching their head like we are um so to answer your your question concisely president petrucci not that i'm aware of as of yet but it is on my list um for dr cash to ask
267every time i'm in front of nyset why are we collecting attendance that way when um are you going to be looking at a different way to calculate ada so that um it is student and family friendly and when and if i get that answer you know dr cash will be the first one to know um so we ask consistently we we um go ahead well thank you very much no i i appreciate i know that's been a struggle not only for the city of buffalo but other districts as well that's why i asked the question um because it is it is an unusual year it's a year and we have all these different uh methods of teaching and students in different locations and different learning methods so and you know different requirements with children being
268exposed or not exposed in addition to the general seasonal ailments that many of our students have as well so it's a very um that that's again the basis for my my inquiry but i appreciate all of your efforts um mr hurd president producer can i just follow up with one little point i do want to um emphasize and i should have said this initially is that um under the leadership of dr williams we have and dr wright we have some of the pro most pro-student attendance uh policies around so you know if a child is at home on quarantine and they complete work whether they virtually log on because some of our students will log on if they're quarantining or if they complete a packet of work a writing assignment some math work and they
269get it to the school we count that as what we call substantial contact and we can go back and give students positive credit for attendance we will count that as them being present so um we are forward thinking innovative in our thinking about how we collect attendance while staying under you know what scd says we ought to do and that is allowable and we will do that if a child has an issue on a bus and they're later or something like that they miss the bus and a high school has to catch the next bus afterwards again they come in they come into the office they sign in they say you know principal cash i i missed that first bus it was full i had to catch the next bus so i was late that
270child is not penalized the child is marked as present so we within what we can do at the school level we are definitely making sure that um uh we take attendance and we collect it in a way that is um supportive of the students thank you very much uh dr evans brown i believe mr heard has a question as well okay mr heard go ahead yes uh thank you dr um my question is um about our children who's actually um being sent home or being quarantined um and due to our eucharist behavior survey from the cdc that we have here it shows that we have a very high property level in the city of buffalo um those children that are being sent home i'm concerned about the health and wellness um i don't know for
271a fact those children may be receiving some type of um interaction fighter prize medical and secondly um and are we actually you know looking to see if those children need food in those homes or can we address that issue to say that in school eating lunch or breakfast at the time dr williams yeah i am um as far as the medical piece not all of the children who are quarantined necessarily the parents don't always stand to be tested but they do have to be out of school for their quarantine period and not display excuse me any symptom and so for that piece as far as the medical um you know piece do require you know that they um get the vaccine or be tested they have to be out for 10 days and um they
272have to not um display any symptoms or be symptomatic or anything in order to return as far as uh what was the second question that you had mr hurt i'm very sorry um the wellness of making sure that these children if the families need it they're receiving that breakfast okay so i can tell you i can tell you that i've been contacted by principles principles really inform us they work with dr reynolds when that kind of support is needed and i've had principals that have arranged staff members whether it's social workers or secu who you know whoever it is that they designate to ensure that families are receiving lunch and breakfast if they request they work with that principal's work with dr reynolds on that every school is receiving this opportunity i'm sorry can you
273repeat this i'm sorry so so so so read statement every school is being reached out to and every for every family you have this opportunity in every building i'm not really sure the process that principals use i just know that you know they likely between the principal and the sst team knows the families and knows if there's a need for something like that because i know i've been um you know it's been principals have reached out to me on a few occasions and requested that and dr reynolds has worked with bridget o'brien wood to make sure that that was set up okay thank you thank you mr hurt um free scott didn't call it what i don't have anything dr evans bro thank you okay all right thank you paul it was uh yes i
274i just had a a few questions the slide that you showed on attendance uh if you'd be kind enough to put it back up because i'm trying to read it and i i don't quite understand it but what i'm looking at um i thought the side the slide head a notation that said green was satisfactory attendance and what i thought i saw on there was a number of schools with 20 green areas and i was looking to see if it was my schools or what is that small green area if if green meant satisfaction because then my question was if you're saying your ada is 83 and i'm looking at these little green areas and they don't look like not even 30 percent um i was trying to try to get so how do you
275get an 83 percent ada if this green is is what is indicated as satisfactory and blue is saying they're at wrist and over and then the rest of that stuff which appears to be more than 50 percent is chronic severe i'm i i guess i i didn't understand the chart so i was hoping you could clarify that for me what am i looking at if if the green is not that big of a sector and that's what satisfactory is yeah yeah either laura take a step it's it's not the same variable that you're talking about start up here um lar with the overall district that looks like us about half and half with the so explain this overall and then go to a school okay so so the this is two different metrics ada and
276and the severe and category the severe and at-risk category so um ada is based on how uh it's it's like takes into consideration all of the days of school and it's a percentage of how many students were supposed to be in school that day we we take the number of kids who were in school each day divided by the number of kids who were supposed to be but you add it all up so each next day you would add more to the numerator in the denominator and that gives us ada that's like district overall over here we're talking about um the percent of days that students are absent so it's a different percentage so we're saying there were a hundred days of school which there wasn't but if there were once you get to 20
277days absent you fall into the red if you were between 10 and any you would fall into the orange and so on it's i think i said that backwards but not the same percentage we've been in about 50 some days if you're 10 days or higher you're into severe steps yeah so so it's based on how many days we've been in school so far okay so a lot of kids have missed a lot of days that's that's what it's telling oh okay so this i'm i'm i am reading this this chart the green is looking like it's not 30 of our kids are satisfactory right now yeah that means zero to four days um anywhere and there is satisfaction and for the district overall it's around yeah actually because we're at 50 days it's probably
278two or three days if you miss two or three days you're probably satisfactory start getting over that you're at risk and then you're into the to the orange and the red after that and that's what we mean when we start talking about transportation is challenges when we start adding in uh the health issues we start adding in miss dave because of coving covet on and on and on you can easily get into that chronic and and severe category with what we're seeing in some schools you get into these fights and get suspended there goes your attendance uh chart starts getting into the red and the yeah and the orange but overall you want to be you want to be green you want to be green and blue at a large percentage of the picture okay
279so this is very transparent and i i thank you for being very transparent but i didn't i didn't think i was reading it right i thought maybe i was supposed to take the 31 and then add something to it to to to flip this to say that our kids are more of our kids are actually satisfactory but it is what it is okay of the children are are satisfactory um yeah yeah okay okay my my other question is this is counting children um you're saying that who are supposed to come to school well based on at home yeah based on okay okay so that's children who enrolled so my question is what happened to the children and how do we capture the children we lost who've stopped coming who have disappeared that should be in
280school anyway how do we go back and and grab those kids and where they counted because they're not in here this is this is not counting the the children who i don't know got a job whatever just gave up i i mean do we have anything that where do we capture those children that's the question yeah we are go ahead laura we're working with go ahead okay so some of these numbers do reflect the children that didn't come back to school up until beds day but to answer your question i go back to this enrollment screen um the children who didn't come back as soon as this pops up are these census kids and i actually have them filtered out because i was looking at something else but if i wanted to i could just
281choose what we call census kids and that tells me i have 943 of them and i have these we have these um students we rece so my team sends me lists of them every day we're working on searching for them we have a plan with the attendance teachers to find them we're going out to homes we're calling homes and in our office we have some data clerks who are taking their state ids and running them through the state system to see if maybe we can pick them up in a different school district somewhere in the state of new york so slowly but surely this number was up at about it was about maybe 700 higher than it is now a couple weeks ago we've slowly but surely been getting kids locating these kids who are
282missing and we're getting them back in some of them come back in but some of them have moved but we found them in another district and they're they're no longer counting in our roles because they're enrolled somewhere else okay that's that's that's good to know that's that's the effort that is important to me because we've had 18 months of very trying situations but i don't want to lose any child so i appreciate that you're saying it's come down by 700 and that we're going to pursue this so that our children are accounted for and getting an education if at all possible yes absolutely that's correct absolutely and they got this what the other thing is now go ahead you finish your point i was gonna say and miss woods to your point i want to
283just really circle back and really hit home with laura saying um laura and i we meet weekly with dr williams dr brown and the attendance teachers and we meet weekly for about two and a half three hours initially it was like four hours and we're discussing every child um where are they do we have enough information not to just we're not gonna move kids off our rolls if we know that they are enrolled in another district regionally or or another state then yes we take them off but we're drilling down this same training that we have i've gone with our principals and our assistant principals that we're going over with you we've been doing this since the first day of school with attendance teachers weekly and i mean we go write down kid and family
284where are they you know you may or may not know this we've even had um we hired a a pi over the spring to find some of our kids so it's about cleaning cohorts but also finding kids who you know they're on our rolls but we haven't seen them so we're we're we're not stopping at anything um to find these kids and these are and we will stay with these weekly meetings until we we we resolve some of this you know and that's that part of it so that answers mrs wood's primary question but the other part of the equation colleagues is is all the strategies under arp esser or esther 2 and esther 3 that we have undertaken to to to draw kids back to our district see so we're not only looking for
285kids that we may have lost more importantly we're working uh very systematically to bring back kids into our district who may have gone to uh different schools uh for whatever reason so so that's what i'm really excited about and you'll hear me you'll hear more about that in the weeks ahead thank you um miss woods anything else now that was very good news because i those are the children the missing children i'm i'm kind of worried about and i'm glad we have never been forgotten and i think the effort of the district to be transparent is uh very good because you're right that's that would be most of our uh interests as board members we want to find those children and bring them back as much as possible anything else i don't see anybody else's
286hand i went through the alphabet do i need to go back as it pertains to attendance if not dr cash we can move on to the next section all right colleagues thank you dr evans brown uh miss botticelli uh is prepared with maybe seven or eight slides uh to show us and explain to us what what many uh often don't understand is the other kinds of uh data that we collect about achievement that aren't the state tests so this will focus on the eye station information the i ready to new adaptations that we purchased for the district principals like the data we like the data that it that it yields uh and then of course the dibble's data so ms botticelli has talked to you about what the data is looking like so far in
287the year and what we are doing to accelerate and improve those uh data points ms botticelli thank you dr cash good evening everyone um admire can you pull that up for me thank you so i'm gonna spend some time um and i promise i will be as brief as possible but you can feel free to ask questions i'm gonna talk a little bit about our screening data so through rti regulation at the state we are required to screen our students and that entails universal screening which means we screen all students in grades k to four but as a district we've elected to go beyond that basic requirement and so we've extended our dibble screening up through grade six and our math screening up through grade eight so if you can go to the next slide
288admire i'll just talk a little bit about our assessments so screening means that we are giving short brief efficient assessments of basic skills in literacy and mathematics to all of our pre-k-4 students yes pre-k4 and actually for dibbles we go up to grade six as i said and the math screener we're going up to grade eight so screening assessment tells us um students who are on track toward proficiency for their grade level so by the end of the year they're on track to be to achieve proficiency or it tells us students who might be at risk of not being proficient in their subject area by the end of the year so we use i station for both literacy and mathematics in pre-k i station is an adaptive online assessment so it gives us really really
289valuable data so when i say that it is adaptive i mean that when a student is not performing or answering questions correctly the assessment is so sensitive that it can lower the level of questioning for that student to determine where that student truly is in terms of their understanding of the skills if a student is answering proficiently it's sensitive enough that the next round of questions will be a little more complex so that if the um data we receive will tell okay it went out for a second sorry so that is our eye station screener we use the same tool for both literacy and mathematics again it's an adaptive assessment iready is our new screener for mathematics and that is also an online adaptive assessment so it's similar to eye station the tool is sensitive
290enough that as it's giving questions to students if the students are performing well or answering correctly it gets a little more complex so that we can tell us the nuance if a student is slightly above grade level and if a student is struggling to respond correctly it's going to lower the level of questioning so that we can tell if a student is below grade level dibbles eight is a newer updated version of the dibbles platform that we have been using and so we use that to measure basic literacy skills so dibble stands for dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills and so at the lower grades it's measuring letter naming fluency so it will student will be shown a letter and then asked to name that letter and they get a score based on how
291many letters they can name correctly in a set amount of time they'll also be asked to identify the first sound in a word they'll be asked to decode certain nonsense words meaning um if they know how to decode or to sound out words we can give them a fake word and they can apply their understanding to that fake word and tell us how it should be pronounced so if i gave the student p-o-k they would say poc because they understand the sounds that each of those letters makes as the students go up through the grade levels it also measures their fluency and it'll measure their comprehension so again it'll measure all those foundational skills of literacy we also can go to a diagnostic level with i ready so the first measure i said was a
292screening measure it tells us students who may be at risk of not achieving proficiency but because i ready is diagnostic it will act excuse me because it's adaptive it will also give us more diagnostic data so it'll tell us more detail about what particular skills the student is struggling with in literacy we can administer the past or the phonological awareness screening test to dive deeper into a student's phonological skills to see if that might be what is causing the student to struggle with reading we also have new assessments through orton gillingham that will do something similar for phonics so those particular assessments will give us deeper data on the student so it will allow us to figure out specifically what might be causing the student to struggle with reading and i'm excited to say that
293we are in the process of identifying a new interim assessment for literacy and mathematics which will give us more predictive data toward how students might perform on state assessments so that is in the rfp process right now next slide please admire thank you so this is our um pre-k data from i station so b-o-y stands for beginning of year we administer this this assessment three times throughout the course of the year so boi is the beginning middle of year is mly and end of year is eoi so we can assess how well students are progressing throughout the course of the year so this is our beginning of your data so it's obviously very preliminary this is how where students scored when they first took this assessment with minimal days of instruction prior to taking the
294assessment so basically when they walked in the door as pre-k students so if a student scored a level three four or five they're considered on track to be proficient um and ready for kindergarten but to be officially ready for kindergarten they had to score levels three four five on both assessments so a student who scored a level three four or five the green would be considered kindergarten ready so those students are ready all at the beginning of the year are already on track for kindergarten when you look at the yellow and the red it means those students are not quite on track and so we need to intervene with those students to make sure that they show progress during the middle of year assessment and the and by the end of year they have gotten
295closer to proficiency so our reading assessment for pre-k looks at listening comprehension letter knowledge and vocabulary knowledge by the end of the year it's going to add measures for phonemic awareness because we know that at the end of pre-k beginning of k we want students to be able to recognize the sounds in words for mathematics it looks at foundational skills such as number sense shapes geometry and sequencing those are some basic skills that it would assess at the beginning of year for mathematics next slide please add me so i want to provide some context for our conversation regarding dibbles and regarding um ireti so this slide is actually from a national report that um m class conducted using dibel's 8 data so they had around i'm sorry i want to say around 3 million students
296but that might be the math but what you're looking at here is students who scored in 1920 who were below grade level so that first if you're looking at kindergarten 28 of the kindergartners in 1920 the year that we first went out for covet in the middle of the year had scored below grade level proficiency you can see that last year in the middle of the year that number had shot up to 47 so due to covid and the situations um that we are dealing with across the country you can see that students were dramatically affected in terms of their proficiency so again this is a national um report it's based on a comparison between the 1920 data and the 2021 data and you can see the effects of the pandemic when you look at
297this data because the number of students that are off track toward proficiency or at risk has really gone up kindergarten is a prime example you can also note that the main grade levels that were the most affected by the pandemic are the primary grades so k1 and 2. the effects of the pandemic are a little bit less when you look at grades three four and five so again this is middle of year data with a national sample so the source schools that are represented here were approximately 17 percent black or african american 53 percent hispanic and 22 percent white so it was a larger mix than we might have in our own schools but this is the national sample and again middle of year data so we're going to look at next at our own
298data from the beginning of this year so admire if you can go to the next slide okay so you can see our scores from grades k to grade six they're they're similar to what you were seeing in the national sample but remember this is beginning of year data what we looked at for the national sample was middle of year which means that we anticipate the amount of red that you see on the screen will decrease by the time we get to the middle of this year so the work that we do with our students to get them on track for proficiency is going to reduce the amount of students at risk and increase the amount of students in the green and blue which represents on grade level or above so by the middle of year
299you should see a decrease in the red and an increase in the other colors you can also see that similar to the national sample our grades k12 were the most affected by the pandemic if you think about it our second graders were the students who were in kindergarten the year that we went out for covet in the beginning you can go to the next slide please admire so here are some of the things that we are doing to make sure we're supporting our students and accelerating their learning first we're focused on our instructional priorities so i know you've heard me talk about them before we use a coaching tool with our teachers we monitor classrooms but we're looking for some very specific things that are aligned to student success first we want to make sure
300that teachers and students are using our vetted curriculum materials because we know that they are rigorous and on grade level we also want to make sure that all students are reading and when we say reading we mean independently because we know that students need that opportunity to become better readers they have to practice reading themselves so i've talked to dr cash about this it would be when a student doesn't get the opportunity to practice reading independently it would be like going to basketball practice and your coach models a layup for you and then models another layup for you and then models another layout for you but never lets you touch the ball so what we want to do is make sure kids get that opportunity to read independently because that's how you become a better
301reader but that has to be monitored so teachers have to give feedback to the students the students have accountable tasks to do while they read so the teacher can tell if they understand the text we also want to make sure that students have daily opportunities to write about the text that they are reading so it's really important that they are processing their learning through writing so we have a very strong writing initiative with our step up to writing program we've trained all of our teachers k-12 across the subjects and we continue to reinforce the importance of writing instruction in the schools and then finally we want to make sure teachers are differentiating instruction which is kind of a fancy education way of saying they need to meet the needs of each student wherever that student
302is so even though they may be teaching a lesson to the whole class they might need to make some modifications for certain students so some students may need a graphic organizer that other students don't need some students maybe they're not proficient in english yet they might need help with sentence starters to get the conversation going or to get their writing started but there's different tools teachers can use they can deliver explicit instruction meaning they provide a lot of modeling and think alouds and a lot of feedback to students so they can improve but we expect teachers to differentiate their instruction to meet the needs of the kids in front of them so we have a very very intensive push for the instructional priorities and again our principals are trained and we are going out and
303looking at classroom instruction and making sure that we see those things and if we don't see the priorities in action we provide supports to teachers to make sure that those priorities are met so that's why we have coaching initiatives in our schools we have staff from central office that can support administrators at the building level are trained to support teachers can go visit other classrooms where something might be in effect and would be beneficial for them to see and we have a lot of professional development around solid reading instruction so along those lines we also offer letters training and we expanded it to grade four this year and i think you've heard me talk about orton gillingham which is our new tier three intervention um so students all special education teachers grades k-8 will be
304trained as well as all reading teachers and literacy coaches so they'll be able to work with the students to support anyone who is really struggling to learn to decode in terms of our curriculum you've heard me talk about acceleration so we have provided acceleration guides for grades two to six in reading so that teachers can see these are the skills from the previous year that you need to reinforce they're the priority skills these are the priority skills for your current grade level and here are some suggestions for how you can weave in some of these skills from the previous year to support student learning while still staying on track with grade level skills we've also purchased hegerty phonemic awareness which is a very very highly recommended program for phonemic awareness skills and so all of
305our teachers k-2 have access to that and they use it instructionally with our students we've created our own letters-based phonics lessons to replace what was in the reading program so these are much more explicit and they're based on the learning our teachers have received at letters training and we're in the process of purchasing additional decodable texts and toolkits to support those lessons you've heard me talk in the past about our higher order thinking items but those questions are still available to our teachers and they support writing instruction as well as comprehension instruction and they're aligned to state assessments we're in the process of rfping for a new vocabulary program for grades five to eight they'll be focused on morphemic analysis so our kids will learn about prefixes suffixes and roots in latin and greek which
306are the two most common languages for mathematical and scientific vocabulary so that will help the students as they get into the more complex text in the middle and upper grades we've purchased some additional supplemental resources so osmo for pre-k is a really really wonderful app that comes with hands-on manipulatives so students can learn mathematics or learn literacy skills using the hands-on tools while the app guides them through the process we're purchasing raising a reader which the board approved for us recently so all of our pre-k students will be taking home backpacks full of books um to share with their families and then they'll return those each month and get new books to take home the next month and there's training that goes with that to support the families in this initiative we also continue to
307use my on um and working with dr morell in the clri department we've increased the amount of diverse text that is available through own and then we continue to provide intervention and enrichment so you know that we had a very successful summer we had a lot of students come and participate in our programming in terms of intervention we have tier three interventions called corrective reading and reading mastery so after core instruction we have 30 minutes of intervention every day grades k-6 and students walk to the teacher who provide them with the appropriate level of intervention so they may walk to a teacher who will provide them with enrichment junior great books because that student is already on grade level or above but they may walk to a teacher who's going to provide them with a
308very intensive level of intervention a tier three intervention using either lexia corrective reading or reading mastery excuse me and now we're adding orton gillingham excuse me to that tier and the multilingual department has just purchased a new online program for their entering and emerging students to increase their access to the foundational skills to reinforce their learning and they are in the process of selecting a similar program for the bilingual program the bilingual schools so all of these things are are sort of a snapshot of some of the work we're doing to make sure that our teachers are prepared and that our students have the tools they need so that within the next year or two we see our double scores not only go back to pre-pandemic levels but improve beyond that because our goal is
309that we'll have a hundred percent of our students reading on grade level next slide please admire so this is a national snapshot from the iready data so i ready is our new assessment tool for mathematics they have done a national study they looked at the average of about 3 million 3.4 million students who had scores in the fall so the beginning of year from 2017 18 and 19 and they compared that to the fall of 2021 data so you can see um the percentage of students who are on grade level is not yet reaching pre-pandemic levels right so the student's performance is lower during the pandemic than it was pre-pandemic but to be fair it wasn't as high as anyone would like to see even pre-pandemic the historical inequities across the nation um were amplified
310and exacerbated during the pandemic so you can see that in the first group a school that had 50 or more black students pre pandemic would have started the year at a proficiency level of nine percent and during the pandemic was at a four percent proficiency level um so these historical inequities were amplified during the pandemic and so we know that we have to put some serious interventions in place nationwide not just in buffalo to really remedy the situation admire if you can go to the next slide please so this is the bps beginning of your data from iready um just for your understanding the green means that student is already at grade level the yellow is where you would anticipate a student would start the year and the red means that they are behind grade
311level so you can see kindergarten obviously the students haven't really had instruction yet so those students are where you would anticipate that they would be at the start of the year but you can see by as you go through the other grades that metric changes the difference in math performance could be attributed to the content standards so in the in the primary grades it's much more focused on number sense and fluency and then as you go up through the grades you're really focused on problem solving and algebraic thinking which is obviously a much more complex text which is why our data similar to the nationwide data shows that discrepancy in the upper grades but again we are putting steps into place to make sure we're accelerating student learning so andrea if you can go to
312the next slide please thank you um so again we have instructional priorities for mathematics just like we do for literacy so the mathematics and literacy both share the priority of differentiation and using district curriculum but for mathematics we also talk about rigorous grade level independent work as well as all students explaining their thinking so what we mean is we want to see students have the opportunity just like in reading we want them to have the opportunity to practice the math that they learn so it's really important that teachers provide those independent opportunities that they use precise vocabulary with the students so the students learn and internalize that vocabulary and that the students are exposed to that level of rigor it's also really important that just like when a student writes about text we want them
313to write about mathematics and to talk about mathematics because that's the way that a student processes their learning so it's really important for us that kids get the opportunities to have dialogue about math to critique one another's thinking and to analyze their own problem-solving skills and try to justify why they chose a particular strategy or how they came to a particular answer so those are two of the things we focus on a lot in mathematics and i will say one of the ones we need to do more with is the conversation about math so we want to work with teachers to embed more opportunities during class to have those conversations for professional development we are going with numbers this year so our k-2 teachers and our instructional coaches and math coaches this year will be
314receiving numbers training which is a parallel to letters but for mathematic pedagogy and content knowledge we know that when you get certified to be a teacher in new york state you get the bare minimum of training in mathematics so we know that our teachers want more content knowledge and more content training in that subject area so that they feel very confident with their um the work that they do with their students so we are focusing on that this year to make sure that they have that solid pedagogical knowledge and then we also talked about the gates grant because grade six in particular is the transition year um right before students right before teachers have that certification of pure math like the content area math and sixth grade is the pivotal year for a lot of
315our teachers so we're bolstering and supporting them through the gates grant in terms of our curriculum we've made adjustments to provide additional practice opportunities and more time for small group supports within our curriculum we embedded think tanks which are um challenge items so every day the student should should have a challenge item before they start class and then we've purchased cern and i think i've talked about it with you before but cern is created with the modules in mind so it parallels every lesson in the modules and gives a refresher so a little mini teaching less video based on that module and then it gives students practice opportunities with feedback and then a test so teachers get a lot of data from the zearn opportunity when they assign it and we've embedded it in the
316curriculum so that it's part of the instructional day again we purchased osmo which i talked about before it's good for both mathematics and literacy and this year the math department has provided a couple other opportunities one is number of the day so there are tools and strategies to use to help kids become more fluent with number sense and then i'm going to email you tonight the mathematics minutes calendar developed by the math department but for every day of the school year there are different opportunities with challenge problems mathematical facts inspiring quotes things that schools can use to engage students in that thinking about math to start the day in terms of rti intervention and enrichment again we did provide a really rich summer school experience for our students we have moby max which can be
317used both as an intervention and as an on-grade level tool so it gives a diagnostic placement test to the students when they first log in and then assigns them practice opportunities automatically based on that data but teachers can also choose to assign on grade level work so they can reinforce the lesson that they've been working on with the students finish line is another intervention we provide to our seventh and eighth grade students and this year for the first time we purchased ixl for all of our algebra students to reinforce the skills that they need practice with in the algebra content but also like moby max it will go down lower and give students additional practice if they have a gap in their understanding from a lower grade level and i would be remiss if i
318did not talk about some of our steam opportunities i know it's not pure mathematics but i think it's really exciting and i think it will really engage our students in learning so this year for for our early childhood enrichment program are pull out classes we are purchasing engineering tools animation tools additional osmo sets specific to those grade levels and generation genius which is a series of videos and activities for mathematics and science so our students will be exposed to things like robotics and learning how to okay i can see mrs calvin is excited um but they build toward things like drones and the types of work we're going to do in the upper grades so again our cte classes this year in 7th and 8th started with 3d printing and by next year we'll be
319infusing drones and robotics into those classes as well so again i haven't touched on every single thing we've done in the district there are some very school specific activities that they are working on but i wanted to give you a sense of the work that's going in to develop our teaching staff and to support our students and i disagree you touched on every single thing we're doing in the district you did a great job and i really do appreciate your sharpness so late in the evening uh it was excellent thank you um mr dr dr evans brown we turn it back to you but for the ladies tonight this was ladies night and they were outstanding every single one they were i just i just uh i don't know how much we can add to
320it but you go ahead let's turn it back to you i'm telling you okay so and thank you for such a robust girl detailed presentation we are doing some great things in this history especially with the little baby um so i'm gonna start with uh i'm just gonna do one quick round uh for those who have questions i'm gonna start with some board member sharon hoffman you have any questions comments i don't have any questions i'm i'm very pleased um i am excited about uh what's going on in our i'm you know i'm a math person so i love the math approach that you have and i'm just excited thank you so much uh for being thorough with that um i just had one question so i'm thinking about years ago my child was at
321olmstead how his his report had his opening scores on it you know beginning of the year and then it also showed where he was when i came to open house midway through the year well back then we had open house twice a year and it showed me that dude do are we able to produce reports like that for parents they can see where their child started out at and where they end up at yes i think mr scott asked the same question last time so i spoke to our teams we do have that data available right now it's just the beginning of the year so it's sort of that um entry point because kids haven't had enough solid instruction to show any game right by the middle of the year um you'll be able to
322see the improvement over time and then again we'd have the end of year so we would have three data points to show um to families and then here's a plug here's one other okay so with the lack or the lag in learning is there a need for teacher aides or teacher assistants in those classrooms to help those teachers move those children to the next level i mean a big shot in the arm you know for something like that because we've got to do something uh to help these teachers because they're stressing out too nationally i'm saying i'm reading a report that the teachers are stressing out across the board and dr cash uh i think it was last year we gave uh an extra day and one of those breaks to our staff or whatever
323we might want to think think about considering that this year and summers in some aspect either between thanksgiving or christmas because our teachers are are also going through a traumatic time and so i'm just asking do you think that if we could get more help in the classrooms and i'm even thinking about maybe um maybe with the teaching colleges as well and things like that that we can give it extra assists to the teachers might help us also move those numbers too just an idea um i i would probably defer to jamie warren on this one the availability of additional staff but i do know that we have student teachers in a lot of our schools who are supportive of the work that's happening in the classroom ub has been providing us with internship opportunities
324for students so there are many schools that have had that extra reinforcement so thank you so much for the great work that's been done thank you yeah and i've already thought about this colleagues about wednesday giving wednesday off i've asked staff to look into that and see what that would mean they say basically it's a calendar adjustment and then bring it to the board um so i'm okay i'm in favor of it but i do want to be cautious of um not too much more than that because of the bus situation we're gonna have to the the best recommendation coming out of that transportation committee so far to me and i'll be bringing it to you is that we may have to have a early release we just have to watch the number of days
325that we make sure we fit into the calendar for for the state purposes but i'm all for giving next wednesday off for self-care i think the staff not just the teachers but the staff writ large uh they're having some you know they're having uh stress issues as well ms cottman so i think thank you for bringing it up but we'll have a discussion with it and i may have it on your agenda for vote next wednesday after i talked to legal and talked to the state about it okay thanks for that recommendation um mr heard more remember her you're up next any questions comments um and that's that was a wonderful presentation uh i really don't know how you do all that keep all that information in in your mind especially at this late in
326the hour that you can just so so uh leisurely just go over every every um program that we're using especially with our math and i really love that drone program with the cte program at the end and anyway that adapt to our kids also because that will really really capture a lot of our kids you know especially ones who may be um you know having problems in school you know just to take them away from learning for a minute and and bring them back so so that's just a thought that's just a thought if we can you know love the private program like that and dr cash i missed that part what did you say you specifically i would love to be part of a program like that you know we can work with our
327children also some of the after-school programs would move in that direction and i know that every seventh and eighth grade teacher will have our student will have access to it great great great doing wonderful work and uh this district surely needs you thank you so much uh dr kashmi i did receive a couple of two teachers that responded about that um wednesday off so i was talking about that a little while ago so um you know i think that'd be a great thing no they called you know last week about possibly getting a day off last week about that yes so i will take some back maybe you might have some good news okay thank you all right thank you thank you i don't have any questions for the i think it was just so
328succinct and thorough and i just appreciate it um i appreciate you being so astute this late as well so thank you so much i feel like we have such an overload of kind of great data and things we can use to counteract some negative narratives and that's what i'm taking from tonight thank you everyone uh thank you very much bro for the opportunity and thank you for the excellent presentation they're all excellent presentations tonight i have no further questions at this point okay thank you dr ann rivera requesting comments just a quick a very quick comment i want to add my thank you as well and also just to reinforce how much i appreciate that you're focusing on accelerating learning and not remediation i think it really works i think you have a really clear
329and coherent plan and i look forward to the you results um lauren scott any questions comment um just quickly and another great presentation with a wealth of information i knew that data was out there so it's good to see it collected and presented in a concise way um anecdotally just want to share that my youngest son is now in third grade so he was in first grade when this pandemic began and you know it was an adjustment for him to to be in this third grade year and we saw some resistance in him some struggles and we're starting to see signs of him adjusting to the change and seeing improvement in his reading and you know just last night to see him go to his book bag on his own and grab his homework out
330after we ate dinner and sit down and start doing it without one of us saying anything was just you know a sign that we're starting to adjust and to the to the change and so so thank you for everything and that's all for me thank you um that's pretty cute and then lastly uh war member pilot woods well i agree it was a very impressive impressive presentation with a lot of uh clear explanations of what the tools you're going to use to bring our kids to close this gap and my um only other question on here is now that we have this um uh dashboard will the actual data for our schools be on the dashboard where you you showed a very excellent report that said yes it can be measured 219 to 20. 28
331of the children were not ready not uh at level and 20 21 47 so that's that's that loss learning and um it's in the national level and and i'd like to see if you could put that on the dashboard so we the board know what the challenge is and where we're at um since you said you can't measure it yep i know that ebony and laura are working to get that data into the dashboard not the national data but definitely our own bps internal data both for well for all three i believe i station i ready and dibbles and i see ebony shaking her head okay that's that's that's perfect because that's what we're asking for clear information measurement and transparency so you get double ways for me thank you okay anybody else um kudos
332to all of you that's a lot of hard work that was presented tonight um so dr cash would you like to have a last word before we close no colleagues i think you know you've made good points yeah we appreciate your thoughtful uh comments and attentiveness uh because this was a long night and it had a lot of meat in it so it was a good night it was a good meeting and uh i just appreciate you appreciating how hard the staff work and you know you can mix the narrative out there you can say yes we have data that we absolutely have to improve and work on but be assured that the staff and the in the district have have clear strategies they have uh they they work relentlessly on this and then we're
333not going to quit until we become we become best in class so with your support and with you helping us get the word out and keep giving us ways to improve i know we'll get there sooner than later i want to see the improvement this year this year get our kids back happy back rolling and heading on to great things in their lives so thank you again for all that you do to support us tonight