001thank you and we are good good to go yes sir all right welcome everybody to the first educational support committee meeting for this 2021-22 school year larry scott member at large co-chair of the education support committee just want to give some background information before i turn it over to our presenters we passed the board of education passed a resolution on gun violence in august and it really recognized that gun violence is a political governmental economic and community-based problem that goes far beyond the walls of our schools and impact so many of our students and families it seems like every week we're hearing about school being locked down because of an active shooter in the neighborhood last year we had students experience or witness a shooting at jfk park it's certainly a prevalent problem that's that's
002escalated this past summer seems to be decreasing with time but something that deserves a lot of attention and one of the reasons this resolution was drafted that i drafted this resolution was inspired by a email from mvp um the parent group and in honor and influence of the late neil dobbins and i want to just announce the public that there's a a march that's being held in honor of neil dobbins and to raise awareness of addressing gun violence specifically the t heart amendment which hinders tracking and pursuing illegal gun trafficking this is being held the march is being held september 25th at 1 45 p.m on this coming saturday starting at the corner of east ferry and fillmore and then ending at mlk park there will be remarks made from 3 o'clock to 3 30
003at mlk park i also want to recognize a board member north district board member hope j who was instrumental in starting the relationship with our presenters tonight from the erie county district attorney's office and began panels on gun violence in our schools then we were hit with the pandemic and the work was interrupted and miss jay re-established that relationship with the district attorney's office and that brings us to today also want to thank dr tanja williams who is spearheading this work with the district and coordinating with our partners with the district attorney's office and beyond um i don't see dr cash on yet if he is um stop me um i was going to have him give some opening remarks but we'll when he logs on we'll give him that opportunity um so right now
004i'm going to turn it over to district attorney john flynn and chief for the district attorney's office um danielle d abadi mr flynn welcome well thank you mr scott i appreciate it i i want to thank you for you and the school board members for for all that you do for you know not only the uh the children of the city of buffalo but for all the residents of the city of buffalo as you correctly stated you know gun violence um is a major problem uh in our city uh quite frankly um as my job as the yuri county district attorney um if you had to like ask me what was my number one problem that i am facing each and every day um i would say gun violence um immediately and without hesitation there
005is no close second um it is by far the the biggest problem uh that we have in terms of public safety um in our area in our city and uh it obviously needs more than just the attention of this office uh it needs the attention of everyone in the community uh including um the buffalo public school district and um and and you members of the board because what we are seeing is uh extremely troubling we are seeing not only um defendants you know the actual perpetrators of gun violence getting younger and younger we are seeing the victims of gun violence getting younger and younger and on on monday i had the opportunity to be in washington dc um at the department of justice and i attended a meeting with the attorney general united states and
006the deputy attorney general united states along with some of my colleagues from the national d's association and some attorney generals from uh across the country state attorney generals across the country and there are about 10 15 of us in a room with it with the attorney general and we all talked about the rise in gun violence and the rise in the number of juveniles who again are not only victims of gun violence but uh defendants and perpetrators of gun violence and this is not just happening in buffalo this is happening across the country uh this is happening in every big city every state um in our area and this is something that uh you know needs to be addressed you you are correct uh uh mr scott in the sense that um uh you know
007the numbers have been going down a little bit over the course of the past two months uh that that is that is good but you have to put that into perspective of the number of homicides in the city of buffalo and the number of non-fatal shootings in the city of buffalo went up a hundred percent in 2020 over 2019 and then for the first six months of 2021 from january to june they went up another almost 100 percent over 2020 which was again 100 up over 2019 so in in the first six months of 2021 we had seen an almost 200 percent increase in the number of homicides and a number of non-fatal shootings in the city of buffalo now again the good news is that normally the the biggest months of gun violence in
008the city of buffalo and nationwide quite frankly are in the summer months in june july and august all right so in july and august particularly um uh the numbers have gone down um and there and now they're only up like 30 uh from where they were before so they've gone from being up 100 to being up 30 okay but again being up 30 is not good all right i mean it's better than 100 double increase but it's still obviously not good and we we still need to continue what we're doing so that that that that is like you said the genesis of uh inviting me um you know i know that uh you know hope jay obviously is very active in this working with my office and and so is sharon uh you know sharon
009and i had a conversation a few months ago about what we can do um and so you know i i want to thank all the members of the school board uh for um your concern uh and your interest and i i know that you know there obviously is um a concern about you know the narrative of a pipeline from schools to prison uh and and again i i i i truly do not want to be part of that pipeline okay that that's a pipeline that i don't like um i i i i'm not sure that that statement you know that there is a pipeline in buffalo is true um i don't think there is quite frankly all right but i i know that that's a narrative that's out there um it's a narrative that's not
010only here in buffalo but nationwide and i i respect that narrative don't get me wrong i don't believe it's a hundred percent true but but i i i do i do respect the narrative and i certainly do not want to be part of that narrative however uh you have to understand that when a 16 year old or a 15 year old or 17 year old or 18 year old whatever okay um commits a shooting and takes the life of another human being that he's going to prison okay i'm telling you that right now okay i mean he's going to prison um you know so i i i have to i have to do my job and i have to hold people accountable for their actions um so you know everyone's got to understand that um
011but again i don't like putting a 15 year old or a 16 year old or 17 year old in prison for murder but you know sometimes it i mean it not not sometimes all times it has to be done um um so again i i i respect that you know there's a concern about what i do and um you know what what what what occurs and so let let me start off um by just kind of giving you a a a general idea about what i do okay um just for your own edification and knowledge okay about what my office does and what i do and then i'll specifically talk about um juveniles um and the legislation that was passed a number of years ago that um affects the prosecution of juveniles um and then
012thirdly i'll open up any questions that you may have um and i'll be more than happy to uh to engage in a conversation about your concerns and again any question that you have so um if you do me a favor and click on on the next slide and then hit one more okay so again so let let me let me start off i'll start by saying here you know about you know what my office does um you know the specialized bureaus that i have which one of them is going to be um a community prosecution bureau that handles all the juvenile cases um and then i'll talk about you know um the outreach here uh not only with you uh as a board of education but the community in general to see what we can
013do about stemming the tide of uh of gun violence uh you know generally and amongst our youth uh next slide please all right so what do i do next slide all right so as the um as district attorney um you know some of you may not realize this but i am the chief law enforcement officer in erie county um not the sheriff not the buffalo police commissioner um i am the chief law enforcement officer by statute um in erie county so um you know my role as the chief law enforcement officer um obviously is not to um uh employ members of my staff to make arrests and to be out on the street that obviously is for the buffalo police department um my job is the second phase of the criminal justice system which is
014the prosecution um and i'm responsible for the prosecution um i i make a note the just prosecution um because again we're we're not just trying to rack up numbers here okay and how many people i prosecute how many people are put in jail those don't concern me all right what concerns me is that justice is being done um so the the just prosecution of every crime in erie county um is uh in my purview and i am responsible for um this number is pre-covered so pre-covert we have about 35 000 cases annually in erie county now just so you know that number went down dramatically during covert okay um and it's still down today so when i when i talk about the increase in gun violence fatal and non-fatal shootings while those have increased dramatically
015the number of other overall crime in erie county um and in the city of buffalo has gone down dramatically okay um obviously you know we were shut down for six months okay there were no bars and restaurants open as such dwis went down like to nothing okay i mean you know um there were no there were no dwis for months okay um because there were no bars open no restaurants open um uh so i mean that that's just one example um of you know why crimes have gone down is because people were locked in people were in their homes nothing was open um i have a sense that domestic violence cases were on the rise okay for people being being homebound and you know um you know but but the problem with domestic violence i'm
016getting a tangible bit here you know is that you know there was no one report them because they weren't going to work or they weren't going to school or they weren't going out so people couldn't see their bruises so you know a lot of cases may have had may have happened in the homes that we just don't know about because again we were shut down for six months uh and and again you know obviously the covert variant is still around um we're not out of covert yet as such we're having the zoom meeting here instead of being there in person um and so you know um the numbers overall crime has still gone down but pre-covered about 35 000 annually um they they just say no they they break out about 50 50 suburbs and
017city so of the 35 000 annually like 17 five in the city and 17 5 are in the suburbs combined okay um uh that's kind of how it breaks out um i have exactly 94 attorneys in the office i have uh 14 investigators which are mainly retired buffalo police officers um who are now full-time investors on my staff and then i have 64 support staff that that serve um you know the the residents here of erie county as you know we have a number of different courts here in erie county every town and village has their own court the city of buffalo has their own court buffalo city court we have all the felony courts um here in my building at 25 delaware the county court the supreme court we have specialized courts we have
018opioid court we have drug court we got veterans court we got a human trafficking court we have a number of specialty courts here in the city of buffalo and in erie county one of those courts is the youth court the youth park court which i'll talk about here in a minute which again affects um you know your students all right and then obviously we have our erie county grand jury um and then we have a an appellate section too where we handle all our appeals uh next slide please you know duties in my office um obviously we advise and work with the police to investigate criminal matters um just so you know unlike new york city uh we do not arrest or file any charges um in 99 of the cases okay um here in
019buffalo the police in anterior county the police make all of the arrests um a dwi a bar fight a burglary a robbery whatever it may be the police are going to go out they're going to investigate they're going to solve the crime they're going to make the arrest and file the paperwork we then get the case after they file the paperwork the only time that does not happen are it won in homicides okay they do not buffalo police department does not make any arrests in a homicide unless i sign off on it okay so i i make all the arrests along with the buffalo police department you know um in the homicides um normally in rape investigations and rape charges we normally again work together with them as well and we you know finalize the
020charges for for rapes as well um and for white-collar crimes uh for the white-collar crimes um you know usually the buffalo police department or the local agency uh whether it be hamburg police or east aurora they're not really involved in a high level like um white-collar crime where you know an embezzler from m t bank uh something of that nature we normally work on them with um our federal partners like the secret service uh the fbi um but then if the state charge will then uh file the charges ourselves and those type of white-collar crimes but beside those everything else bpd in the buffalo police department uh they file the charges and make the arrest again to see no in new york city the da's office they approve every charge um i don't have that
021manpower they have the manhattan d.a has 500 das the bronx d.a has 500 das same with queens same with brooklyn okay i mean the whole city of itself probably has like 3 000 das okay um i've got 90. all right so i i don't i can't do that i don't have the manpower to do that um uh nor do i quite frankly want to do that all right um so uh that that's not going to happen here in buffalo um uh obviously we you know we conduct special investigations we um conduct the grand jury presentments and then we do the trials and the appeals uh of all our cases uh next slide please all right now we have a number of specialized bureaus in the office here okay you know again i'm going to talk
022about our our main felony bureaus but remember we have um you know my newer attorneys um who are only in the office for three or four years i've got 10 or 15 of them who do nothing but handle all the misdemeanors in buffalo city court and then i have 10 or 15 of them who are scattered throughout the suburbs and handle all the misdemeanors in evans aurora amherst all the suburbs okay so that that's like 25 of my people right there who do nothing but misdemeanors our buffalo city court and all the suburbs the rest of my attorneys work in my building right here doing all the felonies and i have a tactical prosecution unit that handles all the non-fatal shootings all the gun cases i have you know five of my senior level attorneys
023doing that um i have a felony trials bureau that handles nothing but the miscellaneous felonies the burglaries assaults the robberies whatever it may be um i have a group of lawyers who do nothing but that um i have lawyers that do nothing but domestic violence and sex crimes um uh you know they they handle all those special um investigations involving uh sexual assault and domestic violence uh next slide i have a cr i have a bureau that handles nothing but felony dwis uh my nuclear crimes unit handles just felony dwis and any time that a uh a motor vehicle was involved in a fatality that bureau handles that as well i i have a narcotics unit that handles nothing but the high level uh drug cases that occur here in erie county i have an
024animal cruelty unit that handles all crimes against animals um as an owner of two dogs and a cat um i am not a fan of people who commit violence against animals so i take that very seriously and i have a special unit that handles those crimes i have a special investigations and public integrity unit that handle the large-scale financial crimes uh elder abuse uh and public corruption um so i have a unit that that just just those types of crimes right there next slide please again my special unit my special victims unit is combined with my domestic violence unit and they handle all domestic violence child abuse uh sexual assault uh all those type of crimes um i have a uh obviously a homicide unit um i have my i have four of my best
025lawyers my most senior lawyers quite frankly um who do nothing but the homicides that occur um you know in erie county um i i established when i became d.a a conviction integrity unit um and that conviction integrity unit is when someone is wrongfully convicted in the past and i if those cases are brought to my attention um i review those cases and um and and and do my best to verify whether or not someone was wrongfully convicted um i believe that we live in a society where it is much worse for an innocent person to be in jail than it is for a guilty person to go free i believe that we should all feel that way some of us don't but i do um and so don't get me wrong i don't want guilty
026people going free but i certainly don't want innocent people in jail and so um i established this unit when i became da four years ago um and i and since then i have uh exonerated uh three individuals um who were serving um uh life sentences um and uh and and they were found to be um wrongfully convicted and let out of jail next slide please all right now i come to your part um again i just want to kind of give you an overview there what i do and what what goes on here um but now now i'll get in the weeds and talk to you about uh about what you want me to talk about here um we we have a youth part um here in erie county and the youth part is actually
027a part of our court system it is it is also part of my office in the sense that again when i became d.a four years ago i created a community prosecution bureau and the purpose of my community prosecution bureau was to build better relations with the community um because i believe that is important that there is trust in the community about what i do um it's very important that there's trust in the community with law enforcement and our police but again if we all recognize that at the end of the day um i'm the chief law enforcement officer and at the end of the day i'm the one who is um dishing out justice here um and prosecuting the cases and putting people um um on a pathway to prison and so um i believe
028as i did four years ago when i took over that it was very important that i established trust in the community and that is why i created the community prosecution bureau and it just so happened that a few years later new york state changed the laws on juveniles and so it just kind of worked out hand in hand that the lawyers who i assigned to my community prosecution bureau now are responsible for handling uh all of the prosecutions of juveniles um and so um that just kind of worked out um based upon the legislation and so that's what we're going to talk about here okay um now before we we know before we you know drill down here okay when when i say i'm using the word juveniles kind of as a generic statement here
029okay under the law there are two groups of young people let's use young people instead of juveniles all right there are two groups there are aos and jails as you're going to see on the screen here okay the aos stand for adolescent offenders the j.o.s stand for juvenile offenders all right so adolescent offenders and juvenile offenders aos and jails so just keep them keep those two in in in your mind here um as we go through this and then when we're done going through that we'll talk about specifically some of the outreach efforts that i'm making here the gun violence panel the high risk youth team and the youth restorative justice pilot all right next slide all right so let's break down what an ao is and what a jail is okay all right so
030and a under under the raise the age law which was passed in and it became effective in 2018 in part one and part two 2019 okay so when they passed the razy age law in they created these two groups of young people aos and jails the aos the adolescent offenders are 16 and 17 year olds the jos are 13 and 15 year olds okay so keep that in your mind aos are 16 17 jos are 13 14 and 15. anyone 12 and under i don't deal with by law okay anyone 12 and under all of those are handled in family court the county attorney's office handle those cases i don't handle them at all even for a 12 year old who commits a murder or a rape or anything bad okay murderer rape's the two
031worst okay twelve-year-old i don't handle i only handle 16 or okay that's it and again they break them up into 1617 and then 13 14 15 okay now again the youth court that we have established here okay is actually a part of our court system the youth court only handles j o's and aoes they don't handle any adults at all okay and again adult is 18 and above so the youth part they have exclusive jurisdiction over 13 to 17 year olds next next slide now again all right so here's how it got broken down all right the legislature in albany and the governor signed it in 2017. i'm sorry 2018 in in in this in the spring of 18 okay it took effect first part on october 1st of 18 which applied for all 16
032year olds and then 17 year olds they brought them in on october 1st 2019 okay um now again i only handle the felonies any misdemeanor automatically is prosecuted in family court and i don't go to family court none of my office none of my no one in my office goes to family court um they are prosecuted by the lawyers from the county attorney's office all right the county attorney is part of the polling cars administration all right uh the polling cars administration they appoints the county attorney and then he has a staff of lawyers who mainly handle the lawsuits against the county but he also has a couple lawyers who handle all the criminal prosecutions in family court they are not in my office i have no control over them they are all under the
033control of the county attorney in the wrath building all right um i only handle the felonies and again certain felonies for 13 14 15 and then the 16 and 17 year olds so just so you know as of october 1st 2018 all misdemeanors and violations went to family court for 16 year olds and then in october 1st 2019 all 17 year olds join the 16 year olds and all the misdemeanors and violations a violation you know a traffic ticket um you know a harassment a disorderly conduct but those are all non-criminal violations okay again those all what the family court on those dates right there next slide all right so let's talk about juveniles okay jo's here again a juvenile offender under the statute is anyone 13 14 or 15. okay remember 12 year old
034and below and below i can't touch it all a 12 year old could walk into one of your schools god forbid ever happens but a 12 year old could walk into one of your schools and shoot 50 people and i would have no jurisdiction over at all none um if a 13 year old did it then i would a 14 15 as well so again the only 13 14 and 15 year old cases that i can handle are these two right here murder and a sexually motivated felony which could be a number of different things rape charges sexual assault but there are a number under that category right there okay um but basically a sexually motivated crime or murder those are the only two cases for a 13 14 15 year old that i can
035handle next slide everything else is going to family court all right now for again that those two were mainly for 13 year olds okay for 14 and 15 year olds i got a few more okay um i can do a manslaughter i can do a kidnapping i can do arson i can do a burglary first these right here i can do for a 14 and 15 year old i can't do for a 13 year old now the last one's important for you all cpw second stands for criminal possession of a weapon so if someone brings a weapon into school and they have it on their person or in their backpack or in their locker or in their waistband whatever okay um i can prosecute that for a 14 and 15 year old for a 13
036year old i cannot and as i came for a 12 year old and below either okay but for 14 and 15 i can along with these crimes right here next slide all right now even for a 16 and 17 year old or for a 13 14 15 year old for those crimes right there anyone basically between 13 and 17 okay now for 16 and 17 i can theoretically handle all felonies okay for 16 and 17. i can 16 year old 17 year old theoretically i can handle all felonies all right in reality i can't but theoretically i can there is a presumption automatically that i lose every 17 and below case and it goes to family court all right there is that presumption in the law automatically that they they want every one of these
037cases they being the legislature um i'm not sure society does but you know we'll talk about that for a different day okay but but the legislature certainly passed it okay and created the automatic not automatic but the presumptive removal of these cases the family court okay and i have to overcome that presumption um now the the presumption doesn't affect a sex offense a crime that causes significant physical injury or a crime where a gun is either displayed or used all right those three categories right there i don't have to meet that presumption i get to keep it automatically okay but for everything else there's a presumption that i'm gonna lose it okay and that includes a possession of a weapon all right again a possession a kid bringing a gun in a school okay as
038long as he doesn't display it or use it god forbid okay if he just puts it in his backpack or puts it in his waistband or whatever okay and walks into school i have to overcome this presumption i don't get to automatically keep that case all right now again we can debate whether or not that's good or bad okay i don't want to do that now obviously but um i'm just letting you know that's the rule okay um i have to make number four in order to keep that case for a kid bringing a gun in school just bringing it in if i want to keep that case all right and treat this you know severely all right um i've got to make a motion i've got number four here i've got to file what
039they call an extraordinary circumstance motion in order to convince the judge that i should keep the case that this kid needs some adult supervision he needs um he needs me to to handle his case all right and not just give the family court and let them handle over there all right um that this kid needs a little um a little tough love okay um and so um the um [Music] uh you know that that that that is um you know i gotta make that motion okay um if i if i make the motion and i lose okay which i do most of the time quite frankly um it goes to family court all right next slide all right so um now again remember that presumption only applies to the 16 and 17 year olds okay
040um the 13 14 and 15 year olds for those enumerated charges that i listed okay i get them automatically okay so the 13 14 and 15 year olds and that list that i showed you a couple of slides ago i don't got to make i don't kind of worry about that presumption okay i get them automatically all right that presumption only applies to the 16 and 17 year olds um uh on on the cases that don't involve sex um display or use of a gun or or significantly hurting someone okay all right so that that in essence is how the raise the age statute works um that's how my office is governed um and that's kind of frankly what i'm working under okay all right now let me talk little about my outreach efforts now
041as mr scott mentioned above um uh you know hope j um and my office we started these gun violence panels uh before a coveted hit um in the spring of 2019 we had a gun violence panel at bennett high school that included um um you know um for a formerly incarcerated individual a parent who lost a child of gun violence uh and a member of the buffalo police department and members of my office and we all had a panel we had a great turnout at bennett high school um and um you know we talked to kids about the dangers of guns and gangs okay uh the goal obviously is to address the impact of gun and gang violence uh in middle and school-aged children uh and to identify strategies to avoid entanglement in the criminal
042justice system because again remember here i want everyone to remember okay that especially me being a father of five okay i get no pleasure out of putting a 15 year old in jail i don't want to do that all right i recognize again as a father of five i'm an expert in kids okay trust me all right i'm an expert all right and and you know my kids now range from 17 to 30 okay so i put all five through high school put four through college um i know more about kids than any child psychologist you can bring this zoom meeting believe me all right i've seen it all okay so um i i know a little bit about kids okay and i know that the mind of a child a 15 year old is
043not the same as the mind of an adult i know that believe me firsthand okay and so um i recognize that and i don't want to put a kid in jail okay so i want to do whatever i can to keep a kid out of jail and more importantly i want to do whatever i can to save a kid's life all right that's first and foremost all right i don't want a 15 year old getting shot and killed so whatever i can do to avoid that i do and so we establish these gun violence panels here okay um to um to help stem the tide of that and to be proactive um we had four before covert hit like i said we had one we had one at ben high school in the spring of
0442019 we had two of them at the east ferry detention facility which is the facility that houses um uh our juveniles okay we had two of them in the summer 19 um and then what middle school was it did you find that out i forgot one we we we did it at a middle school too i forgot which one it was maybe hope knows um we we we did at a middle school um in um before covert hit as well and then now we're gonna get them back going again okay um we're gonna get them back up and running i think they're very impactful uh next slide all right here's some here are some pictures from that gun violence panel we had back at bennett high school in 2019 uh it was well attended and
045i i thought it was very good and i i i'd love to have more at every high school in the city of buffalo quite frankly next slide all right we also had um uh during the middle covid um i was part of a buffalo strong virtual presentation and i want to thank the buffalo school district you know we we did this virtual presentation and then we we gave it to you guys and then you disseminate it out to all the students um in the city of buffalo okay and i want to thank you for that it was basically a pep talk um you know it was a message of hope it was it's in here we're in the middle of cover this was back like literally in the middle of it like during like may
046of 2020 okay uh june of 2020. um um you know it was a message by me and other community leaders here um to give the kids hope that you know yeah we're in a pandemic here yeah i know you're home you're not at school but you know don't give up um it's gonna get better um and i know i i just want to kind of give a pep talk um uh to to to the students of the city of buffalo uh to not have them lose hope um and i you know i i hope it made an impact um and again um i thought it was important to do uh back in the middle of covert next slide all right we just rolled this out last week okay um this is our high youth risk
047team pilot project okay um uh you know dr wright um and dr williams um join me here in my office uh along with our community partners um to uh announce this program uh last week um which you know i want again want to thank the buffalo school district here for um being a part of this um the purpose is to address the trauma caused by gun and gang violence and to prevent future harm and involvement in the court system um again that's what we all want we we don't want our kids getting involved with guns and gangs and more importantly we don't want our kids shot and killed um our focus is on 12 to 17 year olds who are at risk of being the next victim or perpetrator of gun violence um we have
048identified uh eight individuals um who are part of the program um we want a maximum of ten we think that ten is probably the right amount for right now for the pilot program so um do we have two more yet so we got eight right now so um we're looking for two more um who want to join the program um seven of the eight have all been shot okay okay just so you know seven of our eight participants so par so far um are victims of being shot okay the the eighth one um brought some ammunition to a school okay i'm not gonna tell you where school was but it was a buffalo public school but um our uh the eighth person we signed up just last week did not get shot but he brought
049some ammunition to school and got caught um so we brought him in the program as well um none of these kids have been arrested far as i know they haven't committed a crime they just been shot it's not it's not a crime to get shot okay so um none of them have committed a crime or are charged a crime they are just eight kids who got shot seven and one kid who brought a mag brought some ammunition to school um and what we're doing is that we're going to um get these kids hooked up with um counselors mentors um you know if they have mental health issues if they have substance abuse issues if they need trauma informed care um they're gonna get mentors we're going to help them find jobs we're going to help
050get back to school get a ged um we're going to do whatever we can to create a game plan with them for a year and get them hopefully um on the right path and not get either arrested or shot again um that that's our goal um and again i can't thank you enough uh uh just so you know our buffalo police school resource officers um are our main identifiers for who these kids are all right i mean with other you know with other community you know leaders and and and groups um but uh the buffalo police department school resource officers are instrumental in identifying hey this kid is good for this program so again um we have two more spots open up um i want to max it at 10 but we got two more
051open up and so um um if you know of a child who would fit this program um please let me know okay next slide all right this last program right here really doesn't incorporate um the school board here at all but it actually affects you because we're dealing with kids okay so a couple months ago we started a similar program when we saw an increase in the number of juveniles who were stealing cars so over the spring and summer we had a rash of car thefts and they involved young kids who were stealing cars so these kids were all arrested all right so these kids were arrested they had car theft charges pending okay and now what we do ours we get them in this program right here and they kind of go they go
052through uh it's not a year long it's it's free steps it can be done in a few months okay uh the first step is that they meet with the victim the guy who owned the car uh or a proxy and they get the victim perspective on what it meant to have their car stolen they couldn't go to work that day they they they lost their job or whatever it may be okay i mean you know um the you know they you know these kids sit down with the victims here and the victim tells them hey you know you really messed up my day okay um you know and here's why all right so they they have that interaction all right the second step is that they meet with law enforcement and community members they get
053this perspective of how their actions affect law enforcement the police and how their actions affect the community as a whole all right and then the third step is that we provide them with mentors again the same thing we're doing for uh the high risk team okay you know we we we give them a mentor we give them counseling we try to find out what they need just so you know we had how many in this program we had four right you have seven total they had seven total so far in this program again they were all arrested they were 16 17 year olds for car theft um one of these seven was homeless and he was stealing a car to get in the car to sleep now you can imagine how i felt when i
054heard that okay um i do not want to punish that child obviously okay um i i need to teach that child that what he did was wrong okay obviously but but um if i'm 16 years old quite frankly and i'm homeless um i'm going to sleep wherever i can you know i i i probably done the same thing um so i can't no um my heart was broken when i heard that um and so um if these kids go through this program i will dismiss all their charges and have i dismissed any yet i've dismissed free so far so three to seven have gone through the program and i have dismissed all their charges so they have no record now they have nothing all right it's all gone um and i'll do the same with
055the next four when they make it through the program is that the last slide any more slides all right that's it so i had an hour here um i just made it good job thank you mr flynn um yes we are at almost six o'clock and i wanna inform and remind everyone that we have another committee um to focus on student achievement that is expected to begin at six o'clock so i asked board members to keep your comments and questions brief so that we uh don't run late too late into our next committee meeting but before i get to that i just uh superintendent criner dr chrono crash is on with us i want to give him an opportunity to just give some remarks and then i'll let board members ask questions dr cash thank
056you co-chair scott and good evening colleagues good evening district attorney flynn i appreciate you being here i wasn't able to hear from the very beginning but i do know what connects our work here and where we are all thoughtfully concerned about trying to do something to address kind of what we're certainly seeing at the beginning of the school year this year and what may have been brewing for some time for whatever reason you probably know better but what is converging is this issue of a violent crime and you know i heard you speak a little bit about the fact that during the shutdown because of kovitt crime was down for for clear aligned related reasons but what the board and i have sort of formed this renewed interest in addressing violent crime in our community
057and then particularly as it may be like relate to youth uh and gun violence in particular is i didn't hear you say anything respectfully district attorney flint in your specialized unit or specialized bureaus i believe you called them about gang violence and gang reduction from our experience adjacent to the issue not directly involved in the issue we know that there are thousands of members both adult and youth associated with between 40 and 53 55 i don't know i know some of the gangs by name because i i we deal with some of their leaders and we're concerned that we don't want that to burgeon we don't want that to grow we want an effective constructive treatment of that issue which is long-standing which is long-standing the gang issue now i like what i heard when
058you went through your slides about what you are doing and what you what you are concerned about we we we applaud you for that um but i've got nine-year-olds with loaded guns inside schools i've got gang members both afraid to come to school or gang to come because of the the beef that are going on and then of course i've got issues outside and around school uh almost daily i can't say they're all gang related but they are happening and i would i would love to join you with a specific specialized bureau on gangs and gang reduction uh youth violence reduction uh things like that and i i did see some of your strategy but i would like to see if we can't out of all of this do more on that specific issue of
059gangs because again the the the violence the violent crime statistic for buffalo pound for pound pound for pound is is as violent as anywhere i've even seen or heard of this is the number one violent city in in new york state it's the is number two in the northeast and it's number 11 in the country uh so so at least and that's recent statistics so i just we want to be partners in how to reduce that because that affects kids development that affects kids social emotional uh in all aspects of their development and i just think respectfully stated we've got to do more we've got to do more and that's why we're here to see what part we can partner with you on and start to take a bigger bite out of this issue before
060it hemorrhages beyond our ability to really control it but we do commend all of your efforts and your team's efforts and what you have been doing and we thank you for your for your partnership thank you sir and just real quickly here the the um my my tactical prosecution unit um uh that i had was like i think the first unit on my slide there um um you know that that unit right there handles our gangs okay so i i i don't call it a gang unit but the the tactical prosecution unit um they they they handle um uh the gang violence so i i do have a unit that you know focuses on uh the the guns and gang uh uh issue um and again i i am just as concerned about it as
061you are um and you know the superintendent the answer is not easy answers here my friend i mean the the um you know unfortunately um a lot of times uh the the especially when a gang member or somebody's kids pulls the trigger um you know the answer is is that person that has to be removed from the streets and removed from the gang um and remove them means going to jail um and so again i i don't like that answer um you know i i don't like doing that um but you know we we know that a small group of individuals are committing the majority of the crimes so the all the statistics that lead us number one in new york state you know number two in northeast number 11 nationwide okay those those figures
062that you gave are numbers okay and those numbers are being driven up by a small group of people okay um and we know who these people are okay we relatively know who this small group is and the question becomes what do we do with this small group people what do we do with them when they're 13 14 years old and they shoot someone or have a gun um those are the tough questions that that that we all gotta put our wrap our heads around and answer is that what's driving those statistics mayor uh d.a flynn is your number one number two and number 11 because of what 13 and 14 year olds are doing no but they're part of it no no no no no definitely definitely not um but as i said i i
063think i started my remarks you know before he got on is that we are seeing over the course of the past two years a significant increase in the lowering of the age of both perpetrators and victims um and that that's what concerns me all right thank you yes all right uh board member pratrucy has a our president petrucci has a question board members that are virtual if you could if you have a question click the raise your hand icon so i can call on you uh thank you very much dave flynn for your very informative presentation this was great uh my question was just the relationship between the district accounting district attorney and the county attorney do you guys discuss these cases how does that process work when uh when one of these crimes occurs
064uh if we transfer it over to them yes we have the discussion okay i mean so any case that um initially starts out in my office um and then is removed to family court um um we obviously have a turnover of the file okay and we would then turn the file over uh to the attorney in the wrath building in the county attorney's office um and then we would have you know a discussion about the facts of the case but quite frankly uh lou after it's turned over though um we're kind of out of the picture you know and we know we don't weigh in then um and so um the the the discussions um come about in the transfer of file process thank you john yes sir uh miss felton cotman thank you d.a
065flynn i want to go on record to say i will be forever grateful to you for uh on behalf of latifah lewis and her family uh that 13 year old murder that you saw and you uh got her that murderer convicted and i'm loyal to you from moving forward forever because you took a burden off of my heart my question is the youth restorative justice pilot does it have an educational component attached to it you're muted uh yes um it has an educational component attached to it um where the mentors from the erie county restorative justice program okay they so the erie county restorative justice program um they um have a list of mentors and again these mentors um look at what this kid needs okay um you know this kid you know a kid
066stealing a car you know he may be going to school every day no he may be not truant going to school um doing the right thing by that regard but he may have problems at home okay so the mentor will address that um if he's not going to school if he's dropped out or whatever okay then the mentor will do whatever they can to either get him back in school or or help him him or her get a ged so um it all depends on what the kid needs um as part of their game plan and that will it would be included in there absolutely okay good thank you just wanted to make sure the other thing is is that one of the things um that i'm curious um to know is is there an
067ownership piece um it's an ownership piece from these young people in regards to acknowledging their responsibility moving forward to the community yes okay absolutely that they have to have that in order to successfully complete the program okay so yeah they they they they have you know in that in the in the um the youth restorative justice piece of it okay you know they got a three-step process and their their ownership and their um their accountability is inherent in all three steps um from the risk team remember now okay that um none of those kids have been charged with crime okay they're all no arrests made okay um but let's be honest they none of these kids were randomly shot okay none of them were innocent bystanders okay um um you know well i'm sorry i
068say that one was okay um but the majority of them were not okay the majority of them were purposefully in the wrong place at the wrong time okay and so they need to realize who they're hanging out with okay um they need to realize you know what groups they're hanging out with and what they're doing is putting them in a position to get shot okay you know it's not a good position to be in and so they need to they got a whole year to learn that lesson sharon okay good thank you and and thank you for your efforts and i appreciate i really know that you are committed to this um i feel it i feel it in your spirit and i appreciate that looking forward to growing some programs within our community as
069well with you thank you thank you mrs belton common any other questions from board members miss hope j yeah i don't necessarily have a question i just have a comment uh i wanted to acknowledge uh the hard work of danielle giabatti i know she's behind you jenna and um and frankly i mean danielle and i met um in the ao part when i was representing uh our kids as a defense attorney and she was prosecuting the kids and she and i struck up a friendship there and i was very impressed um with her work as you know i'm a former prosecutor myself and i was very impressed with how devoted she is to seeing a just result for these kids and how committed she is to helping them she goes above and beyond and i
070just wanted to acknowledge that i'm also working with her on the high risk youth team i'm on that committee i've been in the meetings everybody involved is is committed to the to this process and you know i really would be interested and i know we don't have time to do this now but i think we need to come up with a plan to the the panel that that danielle pulled together the gun violence panel with the the the panel from last year i don't know if it's still the same presenters but i want i wanted to develop a plan to uh get get get them back into the schools um you know we did like you you mentioned earlier we had we had them come in for a couple a cup do a couple of
071presentations and then covet hit but we had originally had danielle come and present to our principals and there was a sign up list and i think everyone was you know chomping at the bit to get to get her into the schools so i would like to you know figure out how we're going to do that uh because i think i think it's a really important program and i'd like to see uh at the very least you know that that's something that we can do and begin collaborating on immediately i think dr williams is on i think there has been some progress in at least setting up a meeting with principals i don't know if that's occurred yet dr williams october 12th so on october 12th i'm going to do a same virtual meeting here to
072all the principals and assistant principals and i'm going to tell them you know who again who i am and what i'm all about and so we can definitely get that going absolutely i'm uh i'm fully vaccinated so i'll go anywhere all right anything else to add dr williams oh i just want to say that you know i'm also very pleased it's an innovative program uh we're looking for some good outcomes we've been meeting regularly and um you know i just wanna again reiterate what dr cash has reiterated that the buffalo public schools we're at the table we're supporting the efforts and we're looking forward again to some really good outcomes for these students that we're working with all right thank you everyone thank you d.a flynn uh danielle diaboti i also want to just recognize
073that we had a meeting with the hope jay was there dr williams and i also was very impressed with the work that danielle is doing with our youth and i like what i saw tonight in regards to the restorative justice and restorative practice work it's truly i think being implemented with fidelity and it's something that needs to be sustained and something that we need to grow so i i highly appreciate those efforts um that concludes this work session and thank you again to our presenters and let's continue this partnership as we move forward thank you thank you d.a thank you god bless all right dr kathy evans brown you're up thank you board member scott that was a robust discussion about gun violence in our community so we're switching out to student achievement committee so
074as we know buffalo public schools has been in person learning for the last three weeks this is our third week um this is certainly after uh at least 18 months of remote learning and buffalo and other districts across this country has been similar in terms of remote learning and reported learning loss of course um and likewise parents wanting to know what what where their children are where where they are academically socially and emotionally so with that said the topics for the student achievement committee meeting tonight will be the district's theory of action for increasing student achievement with arp and esser funds and i'm going to pass it down to dr cash who will uh go in deep with the conversation and presentation dr cash good evening colleagues um i would like to ask admire to
075put the agenda up for all of you to see i have a couple of little slides that i will share everybody needs to put their microphone on you i would like staff to come on in person so that we can see you colleagues this this is rarely where the rubber meets the mold the road where the rubber meets the road this is the work and what we're going to share with you this evening is something that was rarely talked about in board meetings and that is what is your theory of action what guides the work how do you know what to stay focused on how do you know that what you're doing is effective how do you keep from becoming distracted by all the things that are possible to be distracted by in the kind
076of work that we do and so in this session i want to thank dr kathy evan brown for allowing us permitting us to take this time and set the stage set the foundation because without a good theory of action that then is aligned to the division work that then is aligned to the schools you'll be like alice in wonderland you can take any road and it'll get you there and for too long we just kind of do and do and do and haven't had i've always operated off a theory of action but boards don't usually do it and that's part of this work that i know you're trying to get into this this year but to me this is one of the first things first so i'll start and then we have seven major divisions
077that will share their theory of action and the significant high impact strategies that will bring the theory of action to fruition i chose this quote for us to think about because at the end of the day it's all about the child the beauty and the preciousness in every one of our children i saw the angel in the marble and i carved until i set it free that's what you do every child has infinite potential every child is born precious and what we have to do is carve carve until we set that child free on his or her path that his or her god-given talent and potential demands that's our work so today you'll hear about these theories of action and you'll get a sense of the selected strategies strategic investments that we are making as
078part of our arp esser application and work in order to continue to transform this district in order to safely reopen schools as you know all of us are trying to do for all students right now in order to effectively address pre-imposed pandemic instructional learning time loss in order to build lasting equitable systems of teaching and learning and of course in order to upgrade our information technology systems and our digital resources those are just some of the things we're doing right now but the theory of action sets the tone for all of what we do every day every week every month for the many years that we're together and if you want to change a theory of action that should be something that's discussed that should be something that is shared in public so that everybody
079knows that you made a change or that you're going in a different direction as sometimes we say but you gotta first have that discussion and first anchor around the work all right admir is the board able to see that full agenda there okay colleagues after i take two minutes to provide the district theory of action for your consideration and you will recognize the elements then miss botticelli and her team will prevent present the curriculum assessment and instruction theory of action and related high impact strategies information technology will follow the office of school leadership will follow student support services family and community engagement the office of culture and linguistically responsive initiatives equity and diversity and then the office of shared accountability anne's team because of the expansiveness of the work in our teaching and learning core
080will take 20 to 25 minutes to do that piece and then information technology and the other divisions have two slides each and they will take five to seven minutes each and then at the end you see community input analysis item and i would like dr will caresses to just share very briefly how we have synthesized the input and the recommendations that have come in from the community and they include board input as all of this does and tell you where we are with that and how we have crosswalk those recommendations and they are embedded and integrated in the main in the main into this theory of action and into the work of our total district and divisional programs work next slide edmer so colleagues i had miss linda mercado send to you all of these
081slides and all of this work should be on your email should be with you at this time so you can follow that way if you can't see clearly all of the print that's on the screen here theory of action colleagues is essentially a if then statement it's an if then statement very thoughtfully considered it's evidence-based research based and it's a vision it's a aspirational look of where you want things to be because of what you put in and what you do and as a result of that you will create the outcome that is expressed usually in the then part of the statement and you'll see that as we go it's rarely operationalized but it is an excellent piece of work that all districts should take time to develop and refine these are meant to be
082developmental for your consideration as we go forward now in this new chapter egg bargain 2.0 and so it's a foundational column if you will it's a brick so it's the base for all of what we do so if we provide greater access equity opportunity and quality for all our students and we accelerate the academic performance of all students and we establish a holistic accountability system that evaluates the academic operational fiscal performance of the school district and we create a school commit community that listens to student input and promotes student leadership and healthy youth development and we maintain a positive safe and respectful environment for all staff and students and we create a school community that is sensitive and responsive to the needs of an increasingly diverse population and we build and strengthen family and community
083partnerships to support the academic and character development of all students then we will have built the foundation for a world-class education system and created the opportunity for all students to succeed in school college and the world of work my colleagues those and statements are the goals that are reflected in this document the six strategic goals that we've been talking about now for for several years and so the high impact strategies of those that i've shared with you almost annually that are written and listed and identified and described underneath each of those goals so we don't need to recount those here but with this new infusion of money and resources we need to continue this work deep in this work expand this work so that it is impactful for more and more students and that's how
084it's set up this is the district-wide look at it this is what drives our work every day this is why we are excited to come to school and come to work every day and why no day is the same and why it's not a job because we love what we do it's a calling colleagues to continue to edify the public and the community that is listening in good evening to all and for you colleagues ms sam botticelli will now go through a dozen or so slides that describe the theory of action and the high impact strategies very exciting work very important work for the curriculum assessment and instruction division certainly you can i would recommend that we let the division present and then you ask questions of the division as we go along so at
085the end of each of the presentations of the division then that would be an opportunity for you to ask questions relative to that division mr poticelli are you all set i am all set colleagues in this presentation you will hear from miss anne botticelli miss kim holscher and dr nadia nasheer and and admire if you can take the next slide so i'm going to speak to the theory of action for the curriculum instruction and assessment division we believe that if we improve teacher capacity by providing teachers with deep content-rich professional development pedagogical understanding scientifically based reading research and mathematics in our focus areas and by providing embedded coaching support and literacy instruction and mentoring for our new staff by providing training to implement our culturally and linguistically responsive instruction initiative restorative practices and trauma-informed care
086sel and the things the supports that we know our teachers and students need by holding a district-wide dialogue about equitable grading practices continuing to enhance professional development in general admir next slide and we enhance instruction by providing a high quality rigorous um really whole child focused pre-k program for our students by providing grade level appropriate rigorous standards aligned curricula in all our subject areas by increasing access to cultural culturally responsive lessons text and other materials by monitoring and supporting implementation of our instructional priorities by using data that we collect from screening measures various diagnostic measures benchmark assessments interim assessments to inform and differentiate our practice by providing necessary interventions both social emotional and academic by providing engaging tools to convey content and assess our students progress by using a learning management system to house our
087curriculum to organize our instructional practices to promote communication with family members and students and by providing meaningful appropriately challenging homework assignments admire and accelerating student learning by helping to bridge the transition to college offering dual credit courses in partnership with local institutions and specifically i'm going to talk a little bit about our work with ecc and hilbert increasing access to and support for advanced placement courses increasing credit bearing opportunities for students in grade eight and engaging students through enriching opportunities by offering an early childhood enrichment program in our primary grades expanding our course offerings in the in art and music expanding our really innovative musical theater program into high school this year infusing steam opportunities into our curricula and our various enrichment opportunities excuse me programming admire and if we extend learning time for students
088by providing enriching summer programming and opportunities to recover their academic standing providing after school opportunities at the elementary level to address academic enrichment positive youth development health and wellness providing secondary after school opportunities so kids can stay on track toward graduation then we will improve graduate excuse me graduation rates and academic outcomes for all our students next slide please i'm gonna turn over to kim area of action for special education we believe that if we improve teacher capacity to support our students by providing training in a structured literacy instruction to assist students who have reading needs including dyslexia by using specialists to help teachers address the many behavioral needs of our students and to provide training and coaching for teachers who work with our students with autism and monitor and support the implementation of specially
089designed instruction in our classroom and by addressing the social emotional needs of our student by expanding the district implementation of mtss in conjunction with the office of student support by using a curriculum for our social workers second step to help in counseling our students to increase the social worker staffing to support the needs of our students in schools and by tracking our behavior intervention plans making sure that we're progress monitoring and updating the plans as needed admire if we increase student voice so that our students are able to self-advocate self-regulate and have self-determination we will do that by implementing student-led iep meetings in grades four to twelve provide resources for our students to help with that self-regulation we are going to have a peer-to-peer mentoring program to help students develop that self-advocacy and self-confidence and
090also create a plan for parent education on the cse process and all of the many different transitions that happen during a student's career in special education and finally if we improve transition into post-secondary options by expanding the cte options available to our students who are in 611 and 811 settings and by partnering with cte to provide a transition curriculum for all our special class students in grades 7 to 12 then we will be able to move students into less restrictive environments and improve life outcomes for our children and i would i would just say kim that in that theory we want to also improve and increase student achievement for all of our students so we want to be clear about that in addition to the other points that you make there agreed okay nadia we
091improve teacher capacity to support students by providing professional development to support language learning and literacy provide programmatic and content-rich professional development sharing information about the diverse cultural and language groups we serve and enhance instruction and evidence high expectations for student performance by engaging more multilingual learners in grades 9 through 12 through accelerated coursework provide access to engaging enriching resources supplementing the curriculum if it lacks the representation of our students heritage offering a bilingual program with fidelity to language allocation policies and ensuring cultural and racial representation in classroom environments and libraries and extend learning time for students by providing five-week full-day summer school program with an emphasis on literacy numeracy and the arts for newly arrived multilingual and dual language students offering saturday heritage academies to supplement and support bilingualism and engage multilingual families by providing
092tools for communication in their preferred language and mode connecting them with community-based organizations that can provide intensive individualized support in the language and mode of their choice then we will be able to help students do more achieve more and graduate college and career ready as biliterate and bilingual global citizens and back to you yes so i'm going to speak to some of our high leverage strategies um that will help us achieve this vision this theory of action admire if you could go to the next slide please so some of our high impact strategies for curriculum instruction and assessment first we want we said that we want to enhance our instructional practice so i just want to speak briefly about part of our theory which is accelerate don't remediate so there have been recent studies by
093some of our partners that have shown that um during covid teachers were more successful with their student achievement if they accelerated instruction as opposed to remediating so i'll just give you a quick um clarification on what i mean when i say that so when a teacher spent last year maybe for the first month of school first couple months of school remediating the students performed did not perform as well as teachers who spent that year accelerating instruction so when i say remediate what i mean is perhaps i'm the third grade teacher and what i did was revisit the second grade skills for the first couple months of school so instead of moving forward with my grade level content i actually spent time remediating previous instruction so kids who experienced that did not perform as well as
094students whose teachers accelerated learning to accelerate what we mean is we teach grade level content so from the first day of school the kids are receiving content at the appropriate level of rigor and aligned to standards and the teacher may use data and prioritize particular skills that are necessary for her grade level and spiral in extra practice based on that data so if a student was missing some of the second grade skills the teacher would strategically embed some of that practice throughout the course of her grade level instruction teachers also let students access rti or ais when they needed intervention that was a little bit below grade level so our theory of action asks us to accelerate instruction we want to provide grade level instruction for our students while we spiral in strategically certain skills
095that they might need bolstering and we also make use of ais and rti time we have a lot of online programs that also support that work for example ixl for a moby max media learning um to work with literacy so there's a lot of opportunities for students to receive targeted intervention while the teacher continues to accelerate their coursework part of the rationale for that is that when a student loses a lot of time through remediation right so that below grade level instruction it's very difficult for them to ever catch up so as the year goes on they're further and further behind and as their academic career goes on they're further and further behind because they've been receiving below grade level instruction so it's really important for us through our theory of action that we continue
096to accelerate learning for our kids to keep them on track while we strategically intervene some of the things that we're doing to continue to enhance instruction a couple years down the road we'll be purchasing new pre-k and reading programs we're going to provide supplemental materials for both our mathematics and our reading classrooms we're looking at a middle school vocabulary program because we know that many students who struggle with literacy actually struggle because their vocabulary might not be strong enough so we're looking for a program based in solid reading research behind morphology so helping kids attack word parts prefixes suffixes roots so that they can use that knowledge of latin and greek to put together words and recognize them when they encounter them in text we're also enriching our seventh and eighth grade cte curriculum with
097a lot of stem opportunities and we're pretty excited about this this year we were able to use arp money to purchase um the 3d printing program to to embed in the curriculum and then over the course of the next couple years we'll also be adding robotics and drones into the cte technology course so we're very excited about that we're also going to be offering some alternative regions level math courses to diversify our offerings so one will be computer programming through the ti inspire calculators that we also purchased using sr money and another course will be data science for mathematics we're providing an online algebra intervention for students who might need some of that extra time to catch up obviously we provided a lot of programming this summer and we will continue to offer credit recovery
098to students who might need additional time to make up some of their lost coursework we're also looking to purchase a new benchmark assessment grades k-12 in literacy and mathematics so we can make sure that we have an accurate sense of where our students are and what their needs are in terms of academics admire if you can go to the next slide please we also know that we need to enrich and can continue to advance our instructional practice so we're purchasing the raising a reader program for our pre-k classrooms so this is actually this program is um a monthly supply of books that the students take home to their families and families receive instruction on various strategies they can use to engage their young students in a love of reading so they're very diverse books and
099it's a wonderful opportunity for families to bond over literature we're also purchasing steam materials to supplement um in our early childhood programs so we're looking at robotics for the pre-k classrooms and different types of stem materials to enhance our instruction in our k in one because during rti the kids who are on grade level or above have the opportunity to do some project-based work and then we're also buying some materials that'll go straight into core instruction to continue enhancing we're purchasing junior great books which is a method of shared inquiry and very advanced for grades three to five so that the students can continue to practice their literacy and their um comprehension we're we offered art camp this summer we're going to continue to do that and we're adding band camp this summer so we're
100very excited and you know that we had sports camps we're going to expand our accelerated algebra offerings at grade 8. so we'll be infusing that that 678 algebra spiral into more schools over the course of the next three years we continue to expand our very successful musical theater program so i think you know that under the direction of michelle augusto that we launched the after school opportunities for kids to participate in shows like theater musical productions and this year we're expanding it to high school so we have a number of high schools that have signed on we're offering new music programming over the next few years so this year we have a pilot music technology course at iprep and mst and students are learning the the business of music what does it mean to record
101and we're providing them with the advanced equipment that they need to be successful in these classes and that will eventually be a three three credit sequence we are offering american popular music and we're building a world music course and you know that at our early childhood centers we're beginning to provide instrumental instruction so we purchased musical instruments to support the eccs but also for our 512 band and orchestra programs and we're going to get that recording equipment that we need to make our tech classes successful in the next couple years we will be taking a lot of cultural field trips so we're very excited to reinvigorate that program we had started prior to covid but now we're going to have set experiences for our students from grades k up through eight and then various high
102school classes visiting with the darwin martin house you know that we've been advancing our advanced placement program over the past few years and we continue to grow that program we're going to continue to provide training to teachers over the next few summers so that we can increase the pool of teachers and the pool of courses that we can offer at our schools we're also doing a lot of additional dual enrollment this year so we're really excited to talk about this we're we're partnering with ecc we have been offering um ecc courses through our cte curricula but now we're also going to be offering african-american literature and african-american history we're piloting it this year and hope to expand it next year the wonderful thing about this partnership with ecc is that these courses are offered to
103the students at no cost so students who are successful in these dual credit courses will actually get three free college credits that will transfer to other institutions likewise we're partnering with hillbert college this year and this is our first time doing this work with them but they have identified six of our ap classes and students who successfully pass those ap courses and enroll in hilbert's program will also receive three free credits for those courses and that again is free to our students so hilbert will be assuming the cost not the buffalo public school students we again continue our partnership and we expand our partnership with equal opportunities schools so eos comes to our buildings and works with our staff to sort of help a mind shift a paradigm shift at the building level about how
104to enroll kids in these courses to make sure that our typically underserved students access ap so they survey the students they find out what potential barriers exist they find out who the trusted adults are for each child and they work with the school to create a program that lets kids access advanced level courses between ap dual enrollment but getting more and more students each year into the courses and helping the schools schedule the courses that the kids actually want to take we continue to waive exam fees we're covering those on behalf of any student who enrolls in an ap course and we're providing obviously textbooks for our ap courses and our dual enrollment courses so students have access to those higher level texts this year we're also offering a college transition course so in partnership
105with some of the local universities and under dr baudo's leadership we crafted a college transition course that's a one semester course that's offered to seniors and it bridges that that gap for them from leaving high school to entering college and then if they go to one of the schools that is offering that partner with us they also get the second part of that course we also know how important professional development is we need to keep keep ongoing training to support the work of our teachers so we're doing a lot with mathematics this year um similar to our letters initiative we now have a numbers initiative so our k-6 teachers are going to get training in the content and rich rich pedagogy of mathematics and you heard last week that we actually received were part of
106the gates grant so our sixth grade teachers at identified schools will be getting additional professional development in mathematics we continue to offer literacy training which mainly right now is letters but we're expanding that and moving it up to fourth grade and making sure that we get all of the enl teachers into that class we're going to do a lot of work with equitable grading practices this year so in partnership with um with ebony's team we're developing a course based around a book study about what it looks like if you grade with equity so we want to this first year work with school leadership teams and then the following year roll it out to the staff across the district so it's really important to us that we have those opportunities to discuss what it looks like
107if you're really grading with the student in mind and making sure that they learn to mastery we're going to be doing a lot of special education training this year so i'll leave that to kim holster to talk about and i think i mentioned that we're going to continue doing advanced placement training so we can bolster that course offering admire if you can go the next slide please so we have many high impact strategies for special education that we're very excited to implement this year um several of our students and the lion chair of our students in special ed may suffer some um challenges with reading and writing and spelling so we are training the reading support teachers in the district the reading coaches our special ed coaches and our special ed teachers on orton gillingham
108which is a more explicit um direct explicit literacy intervention that we will be able to use with our students to address those reading needs we have several initiatives to support our classrooms for students with autism that is by far our fastest growing population of students and we know we need to address their unique needs so we are bringing in uh gaming college to support us with applied behavioral analysis they will work directly in our classrooms with students who are have more challenging behaviors and needs in grades pre-k to 12 they will actually go in the classrooms and provide coaching to the teachers they will help with interventions and will also assist with professional development we'll actually have a professional development library from them that our teachers can access we are also partnering with canisius college
109they have a school called a program called school maps they will work with our teachers in grades k-8 classrooms with students who are higher functioning on the autism spectrum they will address the very unique cognitive and social skills behavioral needs of that population of students we will also be putting behavioral specialists in our classrooms to begin with we are looking to have them address the needs of our students in our 811 classes students in those classrooms have behavior that significantly interferes with their learning but have so much potential and we know that if we can provide the interventions that address those behavioral challenges that students have then those students have every opportunity will have every opportunity to achieve academically we are also going to put calming calming corners and sensory kits in our special classes
110are classes for students with autism as well as our six one ones eight and ones twelves and fifteens that will allow students who may need um a little bit of time away something to self-regulate help them calm down and get their behaviors under control we will have all the resources in the classroom to help them with that we are also partnering with dr tanja williams office to screen students for behavioral disorders so that we can address those early on and make sure that we are touching it before it really starts to interfere with the students learning we are putting into place a new curriculum for our social workers to deliver when they are doing iep counseling so many of our students with disabilities have iep or counseling on their ieps and we want to make
111sure that we have a curriculum that will address all of their needs we are hiring additional social workers again knowing that there are many needs with our students right now we're seeing it more than ever with the effects of um kovid so there will be an increase in the number of social workers to work directly with students but to also help with counseling that students need one of our most exciting initiatives is our eye to eye mentoring initiative which is working with our students in our 15 to 1 classes our students specifically with learning disabilities to really help them see their learning disability as a strength and to begin to learn how to advocate for themselves in this program it's a peer mentoring program where they work on projects together our students in high school
112right now it's students in mckinley working with our middle school students at 79 to kind of show them the ropes and teach them how to self-advocate and to really capitalize on their strengths our student voice initiative has two prongs to it right now the first is having high school choice meetings with our special class students so that they are aware of all the differentiated cte options available to them in high school so that when they are filling out the applications they actually know what programs they can choose we've had in the past students not really be aware of the opportunities available to them so we want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to increase that awareness they're also increasing the number of differentiated programs that we have a differentiated cte is very
113popular with our students but we have not had those opportunities for our 611 students and our 811 students so we are working over the course of the next few years to increase those opportunities so all of our special class students are able to access a program and finally is a large part of transition for students with disabilities in grades 7 to 12 we prepare them for post-secondary outcomes so we would like to purchase the curriculum and we're in the process right now of identifying exactly what that will be there's several good ones out there and that will really help students with those self-advocacy skills self-determination skills will help them determine what their strengths are and what fields they may want to go into post-secondary so we're very excited about all these and and know that
114this will help our students realize their potential admire oh i'm sorry you know what i did forget i apologize just one quick thing i'm sorry to interrupt your presentation nadia um the second prom of the student voice initiative is crc which is very exciting our student-led iep meetings we want our students to become more and more involved in their cse meetings and really have more say of what goes on in those meetings so we're starting that in grades 4 to 12 in 20 schools this year where students will fill out surveys ahead of time on their strengths their areas of need what works best with them and we will incorporate that information into their cse meeting by the students actually presenting themselves perhaps doing a powerpoint or just verbally presenting for some of our students
115who would rather not do that we certainly will have a staff member who will make sure that their voice is heard in the meeting but we are looking to increase the um opportunities and the amount of participation that our students have in our csc meetings okay now it's really you nadia okay kim that's wonderful um we are really excited about the upcoming um well the school year uh i think the esser um funds will allow us to um expand on things that are working um and in some instances do something completely um different that we might have not been able to based on you know our normal budget so we are able to provide our students a supplemental online program as many of you are aware multilingual learners need time so they this online program
116can be accessed from home they could go on it during their enl standalone time it's adaptive which means that um the the software will realize what the child is struggling with and provide them more practice it's self-paced and it provides teachers um real-time data that will then help them provide more targeted instructional support for each student we're offering the same um program for our our dual language students again for them to practice spanish um increase their uh language acquisition and um development in in spanish um i'm not quite sure how many of you are aware but we started i want to say last superintendent conference day and now we're able to enhance it we've been providing a series of our uh it's called cultural considerations um so we've been focusing on specific cultures and being
117able to provide teachers with background knowledge about their students as you all know the better you know your students the better you'll be able to teach them and reach them we're really excited about our opportunity to double our academic coaches currently we have a contract with journey's end and the state where we have um academic coaches that look and sound like our students they're able to go into the buildings they work side by side with students teachers love it principals love it families love it so we're going we're going to be able to double um the size of our academic coaching team um allegro latino latino achievement has been um something on our wish list for a very long time um we all know that our hispanic students um have the lowest graduation rate the
118highest dropout rate we will be able to contract with a community-based organization to provide parents with culturally and linguistically support to help them navigate the school system also to be empower one another we've already seen some success we we started this program um a year ago i'm sorry two years ago before the pandemic and this will allow us to really implement our full vision of what will happen when the community based organization works with a school partner you know shoulder by shoulder and help a cohort of students realize what they need to graduate on time and to go on to college and for those are off track what we can do to keep them on track and and and keep on going and then lastly um we're really excited to work with dr botto and
119um miss ambatocelli um i will now be part of the eos um meetings we will uh focus on l enrollment in advanced placement courses and my team and with our funding we would be able to provide them additional support so after school support saturday support because we want them to uh feel confident and have the skills that they need to complete the ap course but more importantly pass the ap courses thank you admir so colleagues board colleagues um this gives you i believe a an excellent sampling sampling of what we're working on in the division of curriculum assessment and instruction and if you have questions or comments at this point certainly we will be happy to to hear them these next divisions i will say only have two pages they only have two pages each
120so we can stop now for comments and questions or we can proceed and then of course take a robust discussion at the end what is your pleasure dr kathy evans and board members i don't see any hands so far so it looks like we can move on up here's one and dr amrivir has a question has a question and my computer's a little slow right now mostly i just wanted to commend all of these a lot of these changes particularly grading equity um the transitional curriculum arts and music dual enrollment horton gillingham behavioral specialist transition there's so much here that i think is really going to benefit our students the aloha latino these are all wonderful things and um i think it's going to really impact our student population and also impact our families i
121just have um three questions very brief ones that don't need to be answered now one is about middle school access to um transitional curriculums in in other words um students start thinking about college as early as middle school and when they're able to have access to some of that planning it kind of pushes them along through some of those hard parts in middle school and then through high school and it would just be i'd be interested if there's any interest in moving forward with that after getting through the piece that you're implementing now and also for our students with special needs in our families for students particularly students with high functioning autism if there's any interest in exploring home max which is a part of dr tormur's work that we had approved as a part
122of supporting our individuals with high functioning autism i believe the curriculum is free and it can help with behavioral interventions for parents at home it might be a useful thing for our parents who often feel very isolated and not as supported by not necessarily by bps but just in the community at large so and dr rivera we always appreciate your comments uh and your expertise in this area i think what i like to do is let those uh certainly ann and kim if you if you want to respond uh do so if you captured that but i think they stand dr rivera's comments stand as a his commentary more than a uh you know question and answer kind of thing we'll certainly do it colleagues i would like to interject just one thing and i
123don't want to get off uh because it's not time and i don't want to certainly jinx it but about three minutes ago uh cheryl kennedy just uh texted me and said that buses are clear now what i can tell you is that that is an hour difference from what it was a week and a half ago one hour it's still not where we want it to be but it is hopefully a directional indicator that we can continue to improve on and i know when we do get these other strategies implemented that we're working on as we speak that that will continue to uh to improve so ann and kim do you have any comments for dr rivera i just want to say thank you for i'm sharing that dr vera and i will be sure
124to talk to dr tamir to discuss that home maps because we certainly are excited to explore anything that would help parents at home so i would definitely be calling him within the next day or two to explore that thank you thank you dr kathy evans brown back to you yes thank you there's another question from board member sharon belton common on this particular theory doc my question dr cash is just asking a question of you i would like to know um and i've asked dr caresses to follow up with this when will school bus number 242 start picking children up it has not picked up one child in the evenings and i am asking that question because i have a parent today who threatened to pull her child out of buffalo public schools and i
125don't want to lose any children and i certainly don't want to lose any parents that want to work with our school district and who are our advocators so that's my question i asked him to get me that answer he said that things are getting better at the school that's my question is this bus has not picked up dismissal since school started when will it start so i'm going on record formally to ask you parents are coming to uh get them okay dr kathy evans brown back to you okay i don't see any other comments or questions president patricia has a question okay sorry president patucci go ahead well thank you dr kathy evans brown i was just wondering if you could offer some examples of the languages that will be or the cultures that will
126be studied at our saturday heritage academies yeah that's a great question thank you for that lou um dr nashir i believe that's under you absolutely that is a great question um we for the first time will be able to offer um indigenous language for example seneca will be able to offer arabic bengali i forget one more but um this will allow our children to um keep their home language and value bilingualism it is a very popular um initiative we started it pretty pandemic but with the esser funds we're going to be able to expand it and it is very popular among our families you've made me a very happy board member thank you very much i always try to do that all right oh i'm sorry no i was saying the extra dollars are working
127pilot woods have aim uh has a question paulette uh yes um i just want to know what um dollars have been devoted to expanding the the culturally relevant training area and what community agencies are any of you partner partnering with to use these monies to bring more community involvement what any agency have you talked to agencies uh what expansion into the community has uh resulted from this uh american rescue act funds thank you so certainly we have dr fatima morrell that will will give you a again an insight and a good sample of of the first question on the second question i have uh at the end of the agenda if you will recall dr will caresses has put together a formidable list but a very helpful list along with jamie cohen to share the
128input that we have taken uh into consideration in all of this work so we'll respond uh that way at the end of the at the end of this particular uh agenda because he has that answer for you all right anything else uh board members before i move on to information technology theory of action um you know what i do have a question unless i missed it i didn't hear anything about our suspended students what we're providing for them our students who are on home study or the ones that are in our ed program under this um uh yeah keep in mind that that while we work interdisciplinary um we still have dr williams uh ready to to talk in a few in a few moments okay i'll address that under her under her report okay
129thank you all right and did you say fatima where i was going to speak to the other question yes all right colleagues let's move on you still have some good good substance up ahead and i want the board to be as excited as they were about the curriculum and instruction report and let's hit let's let them hear it so myra in your own inimitable way please handle your two substantive slides at this time certainly uh good evening board members dr cash and colleagues um so uh i will present the information technology theory of action uh which basically states if we substantially improve and enhance technology equipment and support for instruction and operations by offering best-in-class solutions that promote visibility and empower leaders with tools to support student engagement learning and safety and by supporting enterprise
130modernization for finance and human resources and by establishing a secure robust and optimally performing technology infrastructure then the buffalo public schools will realize a strong best-in-class technology foundation to support a culture of continued improvement and innovation so essentially this theory of action conveys that we believe if staff and students have current computer technology student performance and operational efficiencies will improve further we believe tools that deliver real-time evidence about application utilization student engagement and the cost and return on investment of those uh instructional applications we can help determine the effectiveness of the software that supports student engagement we also believe that by leveraging the enterprise resource planning system functionality which is munis we can eliminate manual processes for both finance and hr and in turn develop efficiencies and increase accuracies in processes that support the business
131operations of the district and last but certainly not least we believe that a network and data center that performs optimally will enhance reliability improve response times and improve the end user experience for those who use those interactive applications and databases so with obviously high impact strategies to accomplish those goals we believe that the buffalo public schools technology environment will be uh best in class and position for continued improvement and innovation next slide atmer so i want to start by saying that this slide does not in at all represent all of the work that we have envisioned and we actually currently have in progress to support the theory of action uh here we have selected some high key impact strategies um to share and as mentioned previously performance of computers contributes to student performance performance and
132operational productivity so one of our strategies is to provide access to up-to-date computer devices for staff and students we also want to be sure that teachers and students have access to innovative instructional technology tools and applications we want to provide tools that deliver data analytics and visibility into utilization um understand its impact on student engagement and and again that return on investment for those applications based on its utilization we want to provide modern solutions that manage and monitor student devices by using tools that provide a more granular level content filtering to prevent student access to inappropriate sites and then also to have a tool that identifies and provides student safety alerts on those devices something that's really near and dear to my heart is project management so we want to establish a project management office
133and use the software development life cycle of planning design development testing training and then implementation uh to deliver leading edge initiatives with fidelity and quality that support enterprise modernization in our key business operational areas which are finance and human resources and then we want to establish a hardened and secure network that maintains 99.99 percent uptime up time reliability to support our population of students and staff we will do this by redefining and reconfiguring and redesigning our network using our microsoft licensing to effectively support and protect the use of office 365 which is our district's uh main collaboration tool we will build a security framework that provides a comprehensive governance and incident response model for potential security vulnerabilities and threats and then we will implement a more modern cloud and on-premise data solution model to support
134our theory of action and that concludes my presentation for information technology thank you myra our colleagues before we go on to the next presentation two pages are there any questions of this particular division and miss burden there are two hands raised i see paulette han is raised go ahead paulette you're first can you give us an update on where we are right now as far as i'm hearing that students are having serious problems that 3k pre-k to see that three that their tablets they have not received their tablets that they're you're asking the pre-k students uh and one grade one students that they have to enter a pass code to get their tablets they're not able to so they didn't get their tablets and tablets when we returned somewhere and the parents are trying to
135get them can you give me an update on what is going on with our students actually receiving their tablets what's the problem with the pre-k the first grade and i'm also hearing serious problems as far as computers are not cleaned or fixed and they are coming back to the students some not even working can you can can you address what what's the status with the computers right now so we have um completed approximately at the close of the business today 26 schools we started with the high schools so we were just wrapping up the high schools we have not uh gotten deep into the elementary schools they will start rolling out uh the latter part of this week and on through next week there is an initial login that is required that information is on
136a sheet that is provided at the time the student is handed the device and there is staff as well as a school-based uh point of contact who is there to try to assist with that initial login so um the ipads for the students will be rolling out and by the end of next week we will have completed the first round of distribution if a student did not return a device they are not immediately given a device because we have to take that device and push it through the sanitization and preparation process once we complete this first round of initial distribution we will go back and schedule and coordinate makeup days for distribution as for the cleanliness of the devices um there were a lot of devices that came through um or we had in the
137center this um this summer we made every attempt and we're confident that we had gotten through cleaning all of the devices and through with the help of our summer technology leadership program participants with the number of devices that um were in that in that building and everyone that we had to touch you know margin of error and just you know human nature some of them probably got missed or um kind of meshed in with ones that were already cleansed and um had gone through the process so to remedy that we have provided wipes to all of the distribution teams and they will be cleaning the devices whether they've already been cleaned or not but those devices will be wiped down again before they are given to the student thank you for that so students of
138students who have problems with devices that they receive that are not working that are not clean that they have problems they need to return them back to you for because it was as you say it's human error they were missed or whatever so who do they give them back to to get it done right and the pre-k's are supposed to have a piece of paper and and and they ask their teacher i guess to help them log on so that they think they're they can get the tablets at the time they are given the device they are supposed to log in at the point that they were given the device and their login information is on that on our records and in our paper um that shows that student is cleared to get a price
139so we're keeping an inventory of everybody who has returned a device and that produces a piece of paper so that our distribution teams know that that student should be getting a device and their login information is also on that piece of paper so at the time they are given a device they are to be asked to log in at the distribution site and so um with regard to any devices that have issues they shouldn't maybe let their teacher or principal know and then we have an email address that the principal can email to let us know that a student has an issue with the device and that is bps inventory at buffaloschools.org we will coordinate to remedy that device yes i'm not understanding why a device would be turned back not sanitized that's part of
140what i heard miss wood say yeah right they were they were all sanitized at least according to the process that we had put in place but we are finding that some you know still do have um some level of debris on them and in order to remedy that we have you know distributed uh wipes to all of the team teams to double clean those but you had indicated before that it wasn't just about or wasn't just a matter of wiping them down there was some kind of it's almost like you baked them you know you put them through a much more rigorous um process and we did we did do that for all of them we absolutely did do that for all of them but then what what happened that they would be going back
141to anyone and already have debris on them or anything else the baking is not going to get rid of the surface debris that's not what that was for no it's a both ant you you bake it you you scrape it you you paint it you you clean it you put it every you do all of it all of it so that they get back sanitized to the very highest standard i don't understand this complaint about from some that are saying they don't have a sanitized computer that was the whole purpose of doing it and to my knowledge we did that or made every attempt to do that for everyone okay but then we should check just like i tell staff check your work before you give it to me because i don't want to correct
142your work we and we did we touched every one of those devices we had to in order to image them um so all right i'm just trying to explain to the board where something might have gone uh straight on it i'm not i'm not blaming you or or your team i'm just saying what do you think happened here well i mean there were over ten 000 ipads and over 9 000 laptops so nearly 20 000 devices in that one center that our um tech team our third party vendor as well as our student technology leadership program participants tried to take through a cleansing and sanitization process we did all of that over the summer for probably about three months but with the number of devices that came through that center and and all of the
143busyness you know just natural human error maybe some got missed and maybe some got pushed in through and just got got overlooked saying to you all i'm because it's not all done yet we're just starting the rollout process we're just starting that so i want to correct now whatever it is so that all of the ones going forward now they're going to be clean see this isn't we all they're all back out and now we're finding a few that weren't clean i don't understand that we bring them back we clean them but we're just rolling them out so what are we going to do to ensure that they are clean and we are not going to do that so as i mentioned earlier we are providing the wipes for the distribution teams and they will
144be wiping them down before they hand them to the student those devices are packed up in cardboard boxes and delivered almost a week in advance of their distribution date to the schools in order to make sure the devices um don't get disturbed before we can actually hand them out to the student they're sealed so from the point that they're packed up which at this point most of them are probably packed up and ready to go or they've already been delivered to the schools they're sealed so we don't touch them again until they come out of that sealed cardboard box and they're ready to be distributed to the student so in order to do just an extra quality assurance check as it relates to cleanliness we've provided tubs of wipes to all of the distribution teams
145to wipe the computer down again before it is given to the student all right that's clear that's helpful thank you for that and at this point i'll turn it back to the board members and if you hear about anything or you've got a specific case let us know so we can go and deal with that one one case but at this point uh that process seems uh seems secure and fair and complete in my mind all right thank you miss burton for that thank you uh there's a couple more hands raised i see uh board member sharon belt tim cotman and i believe it might be someone in in the city hall i'm not sure but sharon will have okay thank you so my question is about the rollout process my understanding i was talk
146to two parents um who said that their child was not in school on the day that it was delivered to their high school and they went over to south park to pick it up pick up the computer and they were sent back home without a computer they had turned in their computer so it wasn't a situation where they had not my question is in the past we had those secure computer boxes that you could put 20 30 or classroom set of computers in it why aren't computers being left at the building so that the principals can disperse them to these students so that they can be about being getting back to learning as quickly as possible particularly since parents two parents that i'm aware and i'm sure there are more that went out to south
147park all the way out there remember where you are because this is a customer service we should be a little bit more customer service friendly i don't know why we don't have different distribution sites in each district or at least in four quads of the city but the fact that you came into the school with say 300 computers you dispersed 250 there are 50 left and then you take them all out the door and the kid comes in the next day and doesn't have anything to work on i don't get that process i don't get it at all it's not it's not customer friendly and that's what my concern is with this process so we have to have the computers come back to the distribution site for inventory management purposes we've got to account for
148all of them especially because we have a shortage so um that's why i said earlier we have to get them get through this distribution cycle bring them back in and then we will go back through and prioritize because they're they're also schools and kids that were at the beginning of the distribution cycle that are um that need their computers so you came into school with the amount of computers that the school was going to get you had them there so you had identified in advance that this school was going to get 300 computers this particular day you only gave out 250 okay and then still the computers for the 50 kids was not left in the building we've always had a mechanism in place that we that that staff could be held accountable principles could
149be held accountable for these computers why is it that we are not customer friendly it's one thing for us to send people all the way to south buffalo it's a whole nother thing for a parent to take off from work being late to getting to work to run over there to get her kids computer so her kid can start working that day we know our children are already behind the gun there's a problem with that for me i'm sorry i have to voice it dr cash i'm sorry if i'm being critical i'm sorry no it's fine we're big boys and girls just you know long as we're doing it uh you know not to blame anybody we just kind of correct the correct the situation so um we talked about it being an inventory issue
150i think it is a good point about why principals couldn't pick up the slack on the inventory issue and uh just be able to say i've got these 50 that still haven't been picked up and i'll keep you posted between the asl and the principal we keep we keep the idea uh informed on how to remain and get dispersed the remaining 50 and do it school by school i don't know i don't i don't want to get down in the operational weeds of it but that does seem if it's to try to figure out a way to expedite getting the devices to the kids um but but one of the biggest problems is being able to track what student has what device and there is a scanning process that happens or needs to happen in
151order to tie that specific device back to the student and if that process is not followed with fidelity we're not going to be able to understand who has what device dr cash's time is of the essence we're in the third week of the school year okay we're just giving computers out these kids are already not coming to school let's face it we got problems with attendance right about now and then parents are getting frustrated personally i've never taken so many calls in my history on this board as i've taken this this month and i'm and that's the truth i've taken calls every single day two three four or five coins yeah i'm just trying to advocate for my my constituents if they text me what they call me us all i'm trying to do is
152to say these decisions are made we know that we have lock boxes in these schools that we have for years had computers that moved around to class to class before children had individual computers and we had no problem with them disappearing then okay so there ought to be a mechanism in place that we can do it this is 2021 a computer age and i can use my cell phone and scan and buy anything i want in america right now all right let's let's wrap this part up we understand the concern do you have any other thing to add to it miss burton so we can close this part and go to other questions um i'll just say that you know we'll make the commitment to try to expedite the divide getting the devices to the
153students as i mentioned earlier and um you know but we do have an inventory shortage and we're trying to manage to the quantity of devices that we have right that's right are you saying your staff is going to be more mobile now that parents are not going to have to run all the way out to south park to get their kids computers and what's the expectation we talk a lot about things today but i didn't see any expectations is it realistic to expect that if a kid misses the the rollout that within a week they will get their computer is that realistic is it 10 days that they would get their computer what's realistic so we can set some expectations for our parents that's all i'm trying to get to today well i can set
154expectations based on the resource availability that we have and that's going to take some planning resources are constrained with regard to trying to get over 20 000 devices distributed to students in a record amount of time and we have all of the resources fully allocated to get the devices distributed on a school by school uh location basis and that's what we're in the middle of doing now the board supported that initiative by giving us a third-party vendor to help us with that and they are fully saturated doing that what is those resources become available we can try to expedite and turn the devices around i can set expectations based on resource availability let me ask something because we seem to be stuck on this one just a question uh myra it's not a it's not
155a question just like we go to vote right we go to vote and then still go by manual they ask me what my name is i show them my my driver's license and they check me off they cross my name as i've come in to vote so another criner cash can't go in and say i'm crying or care because they've already checked my name why wouldn't there be a sheet that just a simple sheet that a principal could have that says either the remaining 50 students who did not pick up a computer today as principal i will check their name give them a computer give them whatever code number a sign that you want me to assign them with and cross that name off so you know that john got computer number 267 i don't
156know i'm just trying to understand because it that the problem i do towards and being on track towards uh graduation so we we need to get these into the hands if we have the computers and they're ready to be distributed we got to get them into their hands and so i'm gonna take some of this off of you i'm going to talk to the air cells now asl open up onto this onto this thing you got it you got to get myra's team some help if they come to the school why can't the principal say i got it from here i got it from here good point what's the problem with that why can't you do that with your principles so that the kids can get these computers sooner than later dr cash it's not
157the principle and it's not them not hoping a lot of it has to do with the shortage of the devices and we've got to reconcile that so i will work with the team tomorrow exactly what you described is what we started having conversation about earlier today if we've got the name of the students and they have been cleared for a device why can't we allocate that device and notify the principal hey we've got these safety devices ready for you and come pick them up i get it we had i had the conversation come pick up myra you already gave it to them from what miss common is saying you're frozen what is it mike morris let's say mike morris got 300 computers because his seniors needed them and we're giving them out seniors by senior
158school by school mike got 300 corp computers 250 the kids you know came and got them one kid didn't get there in time or didn't get there to the next day and now the computers are back at 28. what what i'm saying is why wouldn't mike be able to have the 50 and then be able to go ahead and and uh distribute them as the kids come in to school the next day instead of waiting and and i don't know i'm just talking here so i can seal this off because it seems like a reasonable conversation we're not fussing we're not arguing we're trying to help solve a problem but but every day matters every day matters with with our kids it absolutely matters and that's why i started with the older kids um because
159they're more independent and they can and they can get going on their coursework and their catch-up work and all the things they need to do to graduate can we can we huddle about this and solve this david toya work together all right absolutely all right thank you there's another question um board member scott thank you dr evans brown so on this issue um i i've been hearing that some of the devices and and miss woods also mentioned this that have been delivered to schools um are not operational several of them so if if a student got a device that was assigned to them and it's not operational it was taken back and now there's no remedy i i have this is my personal preference i have no problem with my third grader being delayed and
160giving a device but when i'm getting emails from high school parents with kids that are in ap courses they need these devices their classmates classmates may have access to the device but because the device that was assigned to them was not operational so that there is another um challenge that needs to be remedied and do we have a remedy for that what are we communicating to parents whose child comes home and says they gave me a device but it wasn't working and they took it back and now i don't have a device um i think it's still the same issue with trying to reconcile and get make sure that we have enough devices in-house to support the exchange so while we try to work out this um issue as it relates to kids that are
161absent we will also try to remedy those kids that don't have a device that's working hold on hold on i've got here it says number of students cleared to receive a device number of devices distributed once they're distributed haven't they gone through all of the checks to be able to drive off the lot you don't send the cars to the to the dealer if it can't go off the lot they are when they give the device to the student at the distribution site as i said before they're supposed to open that device and log in but if the kids are asked to move through and go back to the classroom you know i don't know what happens after that but our process is that when they get that device they're supposed to log in at
162the point at the site location in the building where they are given the device but if it doesn't work why would it not work like the screen might um you know black out i think there were some reports about the screen you know a few of them the screens are blacking out and you know it's hard to troubleshoot from an email that's that's what i've been told all right well we gotta do better we gotta do better pres president petrucci has a question to you all right uh thank you very much meyer i just wanted a little bit more clarity when you say that you're uh supporting the enterprise modernization for finance and human resources is that hardware software business practices one of three two three three of three uh what aspect of the enterprise
163modernization are you guys supporting so i think just really all of the above but one of the major um things that i think is an opportunity for improvement is the fact that there are a lot of manual processes that exist within our business areas um you know leveraging the development of forms versus leveraging the functionality of a system so quite frequently we get a request to develop a form versus exploring if the functionality already exists in the application and then how do we understand how that particular functionality works and how it can support that business requirement and then use the system that already has interoperability built in to try to eliminate the development or creation of a form that has to constantly be maintained or supporting a manual or paper process where there's always a
164higher increase or risk or probability if you will for user error so i think in doing that you're also going to redefine the business process itself and you know streamline that so that you can reduce the time it takes to get from input to output of whatever that process might be so i think it's all of the above thank you barbara you're welcome any other question for members on uh it for myra okay paulette woods you she raised her hand again come on paula you're on no i just i just have a quick question for for uh for myra um when this modernization i know those computers have crashed and everything and you're trying to get this fixed but do you have any idea at what point we will be able just to press the
165button or get get a regenerated report on mbe dollars going out the door so i can refute whether the buffalo public schools is only giving one percent of its contracts to mbes i'm i'm trying to be able to get that kind of information and report on a quarterly basis as per the policy the board put out and and i understand everything's crashed but any kind of timeline on when we might be able to get something so but but i don't know if that's myra's uh i don't know if that's my research it's a software issue i mean i'm coming from a county with a 1.4 billion dollar budget when i ask for eeo report i get name product dollars i i mean and and and i guess at some point we were getting close to
166being able to give this kind of information to the board but now we don't have it and it's it's it's like three years step one we do have it i've been asking for it i'll amplify or add on whatever you're gonna say go ahead and say so i was gonna say that um you know the the the cyber attack really um at this point doesn't have any impact um to what miss woods is asking for because munis is is up and running what i believe you know needs to happen and i don't know if it actually is in the system is you know if if a vendor is defined as a mwbe there should be some kind of label or indicator that indic that suggests or identifies that particular vendor as an mwbe uh vendor
167and then if we are utilizing that vendor then we should be able to create and or generate a report that gives you know the amount of how much a purchase order is and how much you know we've liquidated against that purchase order to pay that vendor so i think that there is you know an opportunity to do that it would require me to converse with uh jeff and rick fanton to understand where they are in the whole mwbe development process and do they have you know a database or bank of identified mwbe vendors are they able to be indicated in such a way in munich you know that they are that and then how do we build a report most erp systems do support um mwbe um processes yeah i think we can get that
168for it yeah we'll get that for you colleagues all right we're getting we still have we're only halfway through not even so we got to keep going kathy evans brown yes let's move on um dr cash too and i don't see any more hands let me go on to the next presentation uh remember we're on the theory of action piece colleagues and then the strategies that support that okay next is the office of student leadership and mayor if you could prepare that office of school leadership theory of action and toya wilson our leading dad now jessanowski will present thank you um next slide there you go thank you good evening board members dr cash and my colleagues in the office of school leadership we developed our theory of action around the following areas support students
169academically building school leadership and identifying innovative strategies grounded in instructional reform so our theory of action is if we address the learning needs of students 8-12 by expanding our academic offerings and providing targeted data-based supports to schools and students by strategically identifying and supporting students academic needs and by providing robust leadership development experiences to support great teachers and leaders and by increasing innovative strategies grounded in instructional reform and higher standards to support learning acceleration and by providing equitable allocation to schools based on what students need to excel then we will improve student achievement and increase important measurable student outcomes across all eps schools [Music] and here if you can go to the next slide my colleague associate toyah wilson will explain our high impact strategies to achieve our theory of action good evening evening board
170members dr cash colleagues the office of school leadership collaborates across all of the divisions to implement all of the theories of actions so you will see many of the components that are essential to our work in the office of school leadership implemented and talked about throughout the other departments we are excited today to share with you a few highlights of the high level strategies that are specific to the office of school leadership in the office of school leadership we plan to build leadership capacity and this will come in the form of professional learning communities that would be teacher leaders school leaders and district leaders learning side by side using school data and district data to identify national pd and best practice you will see partnerships with the new york city new york city leadership academy
171nikola and sam's the school administrator manager system we are extremely excited to announce the increase of the innovative high school offerings by opening the young women's leadership school of buffalo this program is exciting because it will attract families and compete with charters we work we are going to bring those students back and provide a unique environment for the young girls of buffalo this school is projected to be a 5 through 12 school when it is fully grown out it will be about 400 students is projected to open in the year of 2022. we are also looking to offer comprehend a comprehensive and fully integrated steam program that will be developed at two elementary schools over the three years and this is coupled with the work that miss botticelli rolled out with her department this will
172provide students with a strong foundation in steam through the eighth grade the college bound initiative is another initiative that we are extremely proud of and excited about this initiative provides two levels of service to the buffalo public schools to continue to foster the college going environment the two levels include a district capacity building level which over four years will be rolled out and will impact grades six through twelve so there's a focus on creating a college growing culture starting in grade six and i know uh dr rivera who asked about that so i was excited um that to um to unveil that tonight we also have the school level this idea comes with two lab schools that will be used to help implementation across the district over four years there will be an increase to
173six schools of the college bound initiative and these schools will continue to support other schools growing in that area of creating that college going culture we want to continue to engage our students all throughout the school year we have come up with the idea of vacation school academic intervention services so this will roll out during the weeks that we have breaks so it would be the winter break the february break and our spring break we want to engage our students who still many times want to come to school and continue learning and so at the elementary level what that will look like is a focus on literacy and numeracy this will support performance in grades three through eight on the new york state assessment as well as academic achievement overall and at the high school
174there will be a focus around credit recovery and helping students make up work for an untimed graduation we are excited about these opportunities again these are just a few we do have a number of different initiatives that we are working to implement in the office of school leadership thanks again this is just a sampling but some of the more uh ones that we're really excited about and we think that make a big difference for our kids any questions on the office of school leadership theory of action and strategic investments if not i do see one hand um board member sharon cotman but before i say that before you talk sharon i just want to say i am so excited about this initiative kudos to buffalo public school system um okay go ahead and sharon thank
175you dr kathy evans brown so i i i'm curious to know and i always think about this when roswell and all that medical center is downtown what are we doing to prepare our children for those jobs okay in the future and i see we're doing a lot with steam i don't see the same uh initiative being done with stem okay and i'm curious to know with this windfall that we received um if there is the desire or the understanding that we need to be preparing our children to take these jobs downtown because there are not many of us in those jobs if you ever visit those centers and so when i see that you're talking about two elementary schools only two providing steam in there or and i don't see anything associated with stem i'm
176getting concerned that we're missing an opportunity to provide our children prepare our children for the future with only two schools over a three year period it just doesn't seem that it's uh is um vigorous enough for me and i'm trying to get the understanding of why so little of our schools are being targeted for this well that's not accurate but i hear what your concern might be we have talked about it we have feeder patterns now that are going to be stem focused so and if you can talk a little bit about that that would be helpful and also you know that's already uh been uh bid out and and it's gonna be very exciting talk about the the the how will we you know bring in this even in year three something with robotics
177to talk about the younger kids goes all the way down to kindergarten let's just talk more about that um so we've been using steam and stem intermediately can you i'm sorry can you hear me yeah yeah okay we've been thinking and stem interchangeably um so when i referenced them and she said about the team we really are speaking to the same thing um so in our classrooms we're purchasing here again we didn't hear you what what grades so k and one we've been purchasing robotic robotics kids and we're going to continue to increase that by doing drones and other types of things at the lower grades we're doing an animation um we're doing an animation program a lego program um those are for k n1 and then we're incorporating more stem activities as we go
178up through the grades and then i think i talked about seventh and eighth grade where we're completely revamping the tech course and using drones robotics and 3d printing and then rob will be working to expand the differentiated cpe programs at the high school level in partnership with special ed and we're going to continue to enhance our um cpe programs across the district okay great so that means that all the parents who are listening uh from uh people who ran to uh charter schools can come back home now because they offer something that we don't have absolutely we have more than one at this point thank you right and we'll talk more about that i have uh and put together a little uh email that describes that a little bit more in depth for you uh
179it's really exciting thank you thank you i appreciate that i really do i do i believe you do thank you miss cop kathy i don't see any more hands on this particular theory uh you can move on okay dr williams student support services all right admir if you could advance the slide please good evening everyone um the theory of action for the office of student support services is as follows if we strategically improve wellness measures socially emotionally mentally and physically especially during this time when we are experiencing an unprecedented global health pandemic and we enhance tiered levels of support designed to meet the health and wellness needs of all students and move past a review of symptoms to understand root causes in order to apply evidenced based remedies and establish authentic customer-based coordinated systems of
180support rather than fragmented services then we improve graduation rates academic achievement and social emotional wellness outcomes for all students and we also set up students for post-secondary success that's the theory of action for the office of student support services admir please advance now you'll notice that our template looks a little different because we're student support services and student support services we really believe that it takes a village in order for us to ensure the success of our students and our families so on this graphic that you see you'll see in the center under buffalo bps student supports you'll see dr criner our superintendent and there's an arrow pointing to a quote that he shared he didn't know i would pick it up but he shared a quote in one of our cabinet meetings that said
181priority number one is to keep everyone safe that's the first priority that we have during this unprecedented time because just when we thought that the worst was over we're now in a situation where we have to confront this new variant strand and so we have to make sure at the end of the day that we're keeping everyone safe now what you see at the top surrounding dr cash are some circles and inside of those circles you see building leaders you all our board of education members our central office leaders the community which includes our faith-based partners our churches we need them you see school staff and you see our parents and caregivers and you are all working to insulate all of the work that we're doing in student support services it truly is going to
182take a village for all of us to come together and for us to experience the success i'm going to be sharing with you some of our high impact strategies and in order for these strategies to be successful for all of our students it's going to take the work of all of us supporting one another so i'm going to start i've got quite a few listed here but not as many as i could dr cash told me to you know not list every single thing that we do student support does a lot of work we do a lot of work just like all of my colleagues departments but our work requires that we're working really closely with everyone else so i'm going to try to get through these within about 10 minutes as i share with
183you some of the high impact strategies uh with regard to the safety protocols i felt we had to give some due diligence because of the time that we're in to the safety protocols that's really important and then to talk about our programming and support side so i'm going to start with some of our wellness strategies that focus on health because if we're talking about student support services and high leverage strategies there's no way during a global pandemic that we cannot spend some time talking about health and what we're doing to make sure remember that arrow that we're keeping everyone safe so before school started this year um dr cash convened a small team of folks and he worked with the asl's to just randomly select a few schools all different you know some larger some
184smaller early childhood some high schools and he convened a small team to go out to the schools before the start of the school year to do walk-throughs to meet with the principals to take a look at the classrooms what were the cafeteria layouts was there signage in the hallways reminding students about safety protocols what did the entryway look like what would be there we estimated the time frames it would take for students to enter the building we didn't want to get a bottleneck there you know did they have temperature scanners what was the ventilation like um you know did the school have ppe supplies that they needed and so that small team that he convened included dr dennis quo who is one of our lead medical advisors and we had i think a very robust
185conversation with each of the schools that we visited dr cuo was able to weigh in and share some of his recommendations we had the associate of school leadership we had dr cassandra wright who also accompanied us and so we were able to have good conversations and based on the conversations and what we saw in some cases it was just a thumbs up and in some places there were areas of growth that we were able to come back to a cabinet meeting share with all of the asls and then they were able to work with their schools to make sure that all of our schools were ready um to open uh september 8th so that's one of the things that's a strategy i believe that's a best practice and we did that prior to the start
186of school now for testing we're excited because we're working with a new group this year it's called affinity empowered and they have what they call operation expanded testing and that is a program that is supported through the u.s department of health it came to our attention through the erie county department of health it does not cost us a penny to have um testing done this year we will be testing our students in grades k through 12 utilizing a pcr test which is more reliable than the rapid test that we use last year uh the materials have arrived in the schools so we will be ready for testing uh this coming monday we will be testing approximately 30 to 40 percent of our students and staff as well as all unvaccinated adults in the building um
187so let's see just want to make sure i'm not leaving anything out um the results from the pcr test will come back within 24 to 48 hours all of our school nurses have been trained um to provide the testing the students who are 12 years old and older are able to self-administer although there will be a nurse that will be there to guide them this is a test that's not really invasive and so the students who are 12 years old and older are able to self-administer and the students who are 13 years and i'm sorry 11 years old and younger the nurse will be conducting their tests for them so the vaccination clinics in schools we're really excited about that we've been meeting a lot with the community health worker group it's a collaborative group
188of community folks and they're very excited to support us doing these vaccination clinics in schools dr reynolds is a part of that we've been working with our office of school leadership on identifying schools as well as our supplemental partners and what we're most excited about with respect to the vaccination clinics is that we have multiple modes of operation on how we're going to be hosting these clinics so for instance lafayette high school and school number 45 this saturday um what will happen is that the community health workers will be in the neighborhood on the west side going door-to-door informing doing lit drops on the vaccination clinic that will be held on october 2nd so there's some work that's done before the clinic comes up um to give parents the opportunity to ask questions to get
189you know um reputable you know answer they're working with the erie county health department and they're actually going door-to-door to provide this work so on saturday october 2nd at one of our saturday academies at lafayette high school we will be hosting a uh vaccination clinic we also on this coming tuesday september 28th we'll be doing a clinic at emerson there are three schools located there the hospitality school the culinary and otc so we've been working closely with our principals to make sure that during these clinics in the school that there will be counseling for students and families if they need it because we're extending the clinic the vaccinations i'm sorry to family members also and to staff that would like to get uh vaccinated so there will be snacks um we'll be providing education and
190they will be at emerson high school for three hours providing the first round of vaccinations for those folks again this coming tuesday one thing i'm really excited about is that we're working with the athletic department because we're also looking at possibly at a football game providing vaccinations to folks who are there and so we're looking at doing something something like that around uh october 9th so that's really an innovative piece we'll have the community there we'll have erie county's health department they'll have the mobile unit and we may be at one of the ba at one of the football games october 9th i'm able to provide vaccinations to folks that come they would go to get their second vaccine from a place that's in the community so we're excited about that piece the health screenings
191um that's a multi-layered uh piece and one of the things that we want to continue doing that's you know a high leverage piece is making sure that we continue to have scanners that are working at the entry points in schools we want to make sure we work very closely with the health department to create a health screener tool that is specific to buffalo specific to our needs and it's really just two questions and it's asking you know the general question about how you're feeling and the second question asks have you been vaccinated and so our schools are able to collect from those that disclose if they've been vaccinated and so if a student identifies that they're not feeling well there are systems in place in schools for the student to report immediately to the cares
192room and then we contact families if it's an adult then they would leave the building if they're presenting with some symptoms um all of our schools have masks we know that it is required um by our governor that any child two years old or older that is in a school setting must wear a mask and on buses they must also be masked and so it was really refreshing when we went around to some of the schools the social distancing piece and to see at the early childhood school how they have primary little colors um in the hallway little circles to make sure that their students when they're in the hallways are socially distanced so schools have really taken it and um you know been very creative with you know how it looks and i think
193for some of our students this is just a way of life for them so um with respect to medical exemptions when we look at the circle that says keep everyone safe we know that you know of course the academic needs of our children you've heard a lot tonight about meeting the instructional needs of our children but we also know that while we're doing that we have to adhere to the governor's executive order we are in a time of high transmission we are in a red zone and so we have to do that and so it's not always easy because it's difficult to make everyone happy when you begin talking about mask exemptions and medical exemptions but our primary concern is keeping everyone safe and so i got some numbers today to find out where we
194were with requests for medical exemptions we've had 86 requests for medical exemptions we've had 34 requests for mask exemptions and so at what we're able to do to make sure that we're providing an accommodation for those uh children that are truly unable to wear a mask and that may have chronic or terminal illnesses is that we're able to provide them with all day instruction remotely so they are able to access their instruction remotely if they do not have their laptops were able to provide packets school have principals have worked with their teachers to make sure that the students have work packets until they do get those items so that's what we're doing with respect to medical exemptions we work with our medical advisory team every exemption request that we get we take it really really
195seriously and as much as we can we try to honor the requests that are coming in um we have a bps medical advisory team this was put in place by dr cash it's interesting you know that when we first went into the pandemic uh we didn't know that it would be this big this huge we didn't realize that i don't think or that it would last this long and he had the foresight back then to put together this team of doctors that would provide us with advisement during this time and i gotta say i mean it really is a remarkable team we meet every week sometimes too or they're thirteen we have nurse practitioners which are the higher level of nurses we have the erie county health department that joins us oftentimes and then we
196have our supplemental health partners that oversee the school nurses that also are right there at the table with us and it feels very collaborative we discuss they do research uh they stay up on what you know what the regulations are and they keep us well informed so all of the medical decisions that we make are guided by the work from our um exemplary medical team um today is you know the day that our new york state immunization law goes into effect it will affect some of our students we do have some students that may not be immunized at this time and as a part of that law if they don't have a medical exemption they do have to be excluded from school but i will share this um we are not at the place that
197we were last year at this time it's been a lot of work that's been happening since july to make sure that that didn't happen we've worked very closely with nadia nasheer's team um we've met with principals in small groups like a small group of central office folks to brainstorm and see what the needs for their particular schools are and how we can support them principles began doing um pa announcements like the first week of school um our nurses are deeply involved right now in pulling records from our nicest system so if a child goes to a pediatric office and gets an immunization but can't get back in or the office is unable to provide them with proof of it right away our nurses can go into a system and they can find those records and
198so they're constantly doing that and i have to say i can't say enough about our say yes partner and the mobile health unit because um they have been full this year with making sure that they're providing immunization opportunities for many many of our students so they have immunized i want to say hundreds um amanda paul has said that you know she's taking up to 200 phone calls a day just to make sure that every opportunity is given to make sure that you know folks are able to get immunized so we're doing a lot surrounding this and we're going to continue to do that dr williams you're doing great online this work but you got to pick it up because okay we're way behind on our pacing okay okay so quarantining i won't say a whole
199lot about that i will just say that we have an a to z process um from the time that a case is identified to the time they're quarantined to the time they return to school we close the circle so we do have a process in place and it is aligned to erie county department of health 100 of our schools have school nurses um right now so we're real excited about that so that include that um that's really all that i have to say about the safety protocol piece and i will i promise go very quickly through our programming and support so we have something that we call collective cafes i remember um it was at an earlier board meeting that someone asked what are we doing for our staff um we are doing a lot
200to support our staff we have something called collective cafes because we do care about our staff and so the purpose of this group or this this uh platform is to help staff to refill their cups to connect with one another create an environment where they are not alone where they know that they're not alone so we have some dates set aside in november uh where they're able to get onto a platform it's facilitated by our wellness coaches and some of our administrators and they're just able to talk about some of the things that they're going through in addition we have of course eap available through hr and jamie warren's uh department our school enrollment i'm pleased to say is you know um i mean they're working really really really hard and this year so far
201since july from july to now they have enrolled four thousand they've moved four thousand three hundred students last year for the entire year they enrolled four thousand five hundred and thirty one so in two months they've almost done what last year was done so that's a lot of work that they're doing over there and they don't often get the accolades that they should but they are working really really really hard over their placement um with respect to restorative programming i don't need to talk a whole lot about it we've trained 502 of our staff this year so far we've got a program that we're implementing with the community foundation and the erie county department of restorative justice with five of our schools we worked with the haywood haywood burns institute for a year to identify
202schools and basically what they're doing is all the folks have been trained already now it's time to get some implementation plans and teams in place at these schools and we'll be watching the data um there's value of course in making sure that we're educating our staff we will continue to do that we will expand upon it in trauma because we know our children have been traumatized um you've already heard about the gun violence piece so i won't go a whole lot into that i just want to thank board members um scott and um hope jay uh for you know offering the opportunity to myself and to uh dr wright to participate to be you know really um kind of leads on it um it's a great team and we're gonna have some good outcomes um
203i won't go into a lot for our crisis team um just know that they are excellent it's a small group of folks they work real real real hard we have had some crises and they step up every single time we have them um with respect to the code of conduct i heard uh president bill cottman asked about what are we going to be doing for our short-term suspended students and our long-term suspended students um we will be providing uh remote instruction for our short term and our long-term suspended students um i think we're at a place where this year we want to collect some data and see are the students accessing their instruction um how we can do a little more as far as providing counseling and support for those children especially for those long-term
204suspended children but we will be providing support remotely for our short-term and long-term suspended students um attendance i do need to say a little bit about that this is attendance can be tricky it's a two-fold thing dr cash has kind of redesigned how attendance is looking and so i'm sharing the role of attendance with um chief bullock because first we have to make sure that there's an understanding that we understand what nysed's expectations are on attendance we have to make sure that our systems have codes in it that align to what nysed is looking for and then we have to have ongoing training monitoring and support for attendance and chief bullock's office is really handling a lot of that left now once we do that then that's where my team comes in and we provide
205intervention strategies like ready freddy counseling home visits courts all of that so she and i have been working along with laura somoski peters and sharon brown really close to get all of this work done and finally of course we continue with providing tiered and targeted counseling and support for all of our students and we just believe that once we do all of these things that what we want to see happen which is improving graduation rates academic achievement and social emotional wellness outcomes for all students will help to set them up for post-secondary success thank you dr williams dr cassie evan brown thank you dr williams um that was very intensive and and satisfying i know the the parents are pleased with all the robust things that the the district is offering i don't see any
206hands um any in the city hall president pertussi okay none all right so you you were very thorough so no questions we can move on dr cash okay yes um dr williams does have just a really really big uh body of work it's closely close in size as miss botticelli but she only scratched the surface of what she does so i recommend a future board work session where she can go into depth around all of the the work of this important office because as you know during this pandemic academics and social emotional health of our students are equally important so thank you for your attention and again dr williams thank you for what you did address uh this evening okay the next person up and i really really want you to be to that five
207minute limit ramona reynolds you you've got to do it and this is where a good teacher good educator comes in you make adjustments to your lesson plan but you do have two important slides and we'd like you to share them with the board at this time dr reynolds thank you board president petrucci board members dr cash and colleagues if you would advance the slide please and while he's advancing his thanks for the opportunity to share the family and community engagement theory of action as well as a few high impact strategies um so we posit that if we improve school and district staff capacity to support families by strengthening two-way communication with families expanding family support at parent centers and community schools timely and effectively responding to community family engagement barriers engaging families and enriching learning
208and bonding experiences supporting parents helping parents initiatives then parents and caregivers will be better equipped to support their children in ways that result and improve student outcomes improve schools and advancing the shared accountability of the education bargain advance the slide please and so during the last board session i alluded to an rfp that was soon post and this is it this initiative the family comm and community mobile mobilization and student success rfp has posted and will provide the opportunity for bps to partner with organizations to create cross-role community outreach teams intended to reengage students and families with their schools share information provide critical resources and these teams will be made up of people respected persons of the community who will share listen and respond to the needs of families their approaches will be personalized they'll
209go door-to-door use virtual platforms provide teleservices engaging community events the selected organizations will also train parents and caregivers to serve as coaches and mentors another strategy and is the development of the bps online information portal as well as additional communication enhancements this portal i think i i alluded to it during the last board work session it's intended for easy navigation and access for parents to submit questions when they're unsure of point of contact additional communication enhancements will include increased utilization of social media and radio shows we will our team will work closely with ellen o'calla we'll continue marketing communication branding strategies that will include promoting our community schools utilizing the community schools bulletin boards and we certainly want to thank say yes for their support with those um we'll also continue marketing and branch strategy
210efforts of district-wide events by way of social media and small community newspapers i am pleased to share that the bps parent center for in-person programming i'm also pleased to announce the development of the bps parent center's digital catalog that will soon go live and so i thank uh team member james barnes he's our department lead for this project he's worked very closely with say yes team members jillian smallwood and jamel cruz to finalize the details the digital catalog will allow for easy access to view upcoming programs they're able to send direct messages to team members if they have questions and they're able to register for programs that are aligned to the seven parent center strands that you see listed i won't read those but just keep in mind that our office the office of parent
211family engagement the say yes team we continue to diligently coordinate comprehensive programming that is responsive to the request of families and this year we are excited to offer an array of programs to assist families with supporting the academic needs of their children we're offering family support groups financial wellness job readiness the say yes know your rights virtual legal clinics will return will offer sewing classes horticulture cosmetology fitness toddler zone activities we'll conduct a vendor orientation uh we'll continue with parent facilitated sessions like the when parents ask for help sickle cell support group that's led by one of our appearance center liaison cynthia collins next week we'll begin a series in partnership with the jewish family services entitled raising children in america where the uh tigrinha dari and burmese families will engage in a 14-week series
212using the research and evidence-based incredible years program and i'd add that these sessions will be conducted in the family's native languages and just this afternoon the office of parent and family engagement in collaboration with social emotional and wellness supports director my when solidified a partnership with the ub department of pediatrics under the social emotional learning and wellness strand we will offer medical medical series in person and virtually with doctors who will share and discuss various topics some topics may include of course vaccinations vaping sexual health depression and families will have the opportunity to ask questions so these are just a few important investments for which we will embark to enhance communication and engagement opportunities to benefit families and ultimately to help students heal progress in excel thank you very well adjusted dr reynolds that was
213excellent and i know our esteemed dr morrell will do do the same getting ready to tee her up next we do have one we do have one board member and uh board member paulette wood just a quick question you you always do so so much uh dr reynolds um for someone like um dr gelsie who still pushes and promotes homicide prevention especially in this time of so many young people killing each other how does who does he contact and how does him and any other group that wants to provide programming on the saturdays or the after-school programs who does he contact because i'm always looking for access to community members with important programs so you know can can you tell me how how he can get in get involved um would you please provide him
214my contact information uh miss woods and what we'll do is because there are opportunities for other organizations groups and individuals to be able to provide sessions through the parent centers and potentially the community schools so we will begin promoting that as well so that the community um is aware but you can certainly provide him my contact information thank you we did we did have a session here roster years ago tried to show uh the community how they could do respond to our fees and and get involved and provide training i really appreciate your your work on that behalf thank you i appreciate that thank you thank you all right i don't see any more hands dr cash so your next presenter all right dr morrell five minutes next slide a mirror thank you edmir greetings
215uh president petrucci esteemed board of education members superintendent cash thank you for the opportunity to present the theory of action for the office of culturally and linguistically responsive initiatives if we improve teacher administrator parent and staff capacity to motivate and inspire our scholars and enhance instructional access equity quality and opportunity to diverse curriculum content and elevate scholar voice while engaging scholars in high leverage culturally and linguistically responsive enrichment programming then and only then will we be able to level the playing field for all of our scholars specifically those from historically marginalized backgrounds to provide equitable access to high quality education which is every child's civil right next slide and so i would like to talk a little bit about the high impact strategic investments that the esser art funds allows the office of clri to
216do in regards to access equity quality opportunity and high achievement for all scholars in our district so um this is of course not an exhaustive list or all-inclusive of all the programming that we have in store over this next year and over the next three years but uh it is a tidbit of some of the high impact strategic investments so a guardian of equity at every school uh by um placing a guardian of equity with incentivized pay to uh implement um delineated roles and responsibilities related to equity serving as a liaison from the office of clri to the schools and calling out injustices when they see them we will have a high leverage impact for equity in our schools we plan to implement the hub school model at three schools currently community school number 53
217the dr blackman school number 54 and the claude and wheda clap school number 74 will be model clri schools serving uh these populations um and they will be serving our entire district as laboratory sites where other teachers and administrators will be able to visit to see what it is to be a fully inclusive culturally and linguistically responsive school classroom and what those practices look like and we're ready to launch that uh immediately we will expand our clri in any races pd opportunities to include more stakeholders in our trainings and so while last year we um we focused in on our high school stakeholders training over 3 000 teachers and administrators as an extra dosage of training we will now expand down to our elementary schools to ensure that anti-racist training racial implicit bias understanding and
218prevention uh is part of the very fabric and fiber of our school district our new learning walk model will contin will include a monitoring and support model of all the resources that will be newly adopted and added to all of our buildings to ensure that they're not just collecting dust on a shelf but they're actually in the hands of our students in the hands of our teachers and they are being implemented with a reset research-based lens and with fidelity and that all of our children are taking advantage of those of those supports we plan to include our instructional coaches our supervisors and directors to support schools and then to also monitor their implementation as our superintendent talks about uh many of the programs in office of clri he says we need to expand the boat
219well these this this esser funding actually gives us an opportunity to include more schools in many of our programs which focus on equity and social justice connections to raise scholar voice so we would see more program more schools uh hosting the scholars for social justice program the our story project program the big sister little sister mentoring program the mbk fellows high school new york state recognized component the mbk mel academy uh seventh and eighth grade component at moore schools uh the global scholars program extended to even more schools and we are so proud that we are a pilot district for the 1619 project new literature series and we actually have copies of these books that have not been released to anyone else publicly and we will be piloting initially in about four or five schools
220our hub schools will see born on the water which is a new release from the cole hannah jones and renee watson that really talks about the legacy of enslavement in our country and you you you smile in the beginning you cry in the middle and you're full of pride and joy at the end and the 1619 project at the high school the new origin story will hit the streets in november and will hit our schools in october as we pilot in various high schools many of the articles that are included in the original 1619 magazine but have been expanded and also many many new articles and historical documents and primary source documents poems and literature that will be exposed to our ninth through twelfth grade students and we want to make sure that we put
221it in each of their hands additionally we will um finally after many many years of hoping and dreaming launched the new mbk mel academy school at grade 7 through 12 and looking at our national models such as the chicago urban prep high school as well as the uh eagle academy for young men we will be engaging our scholars and rigorous college prep curriculum extended school day and year programming strong literacy and stem focused science technology engineering arts and math additionally athletics uh high impact community service requirements engaging with our partners and having our our parents and having our parents being engaged with us in this school positive school culture for boys and young men allowing young men to be young men in attuning attending to their developmental needs as young men and providing ongoing professional
222development for district for uh teachers in the schools as well as the administrator choosing the principal who will leave this school and finding that high quality professional uh administrator that wants to do this work at a high level and it'll finally be the dream uh to have a feeder school that our current seventh and eighth grade male academy uh after school and extended day program can feed into uh one of the big high leverage strategies that we are in great engaged in um with the with this this this uh historical funding are inserting diverse classroom libraries in every classroom in our district we turn our eye to rising voices at grades k-5 which focus on black and latino males and girls in steam primarily but then we will have also books that we will include
223from the emancipation curriculum that are aligned to the emancipation curriculum and we know that right now all of that is digital but there's nothing like having a book in your hand um when you are a young a young child and a growing adolescent so we want to provide these classroom libraries and book resources to all of our teachers with the rising voices series there is built-in professional development and professional learning and so we will ensure that all of that is occurring before those books are released to the schools and through the uh hard work of myra burden and her department um we have collaborated together and we have received the 600 000 learning technology grant that will also be supported by this new uh esser funding and where scholars will have opportunities to digitally digitally
224document clri enrichment experiences so when we're taking our trips and our excursions over to the harriet tubman house for example or even if we're going to the forest lawn cemetery to study the life and works of mary talbert or shirley chisholm we would be able to have our young people uh document digitally through the learning technology grant supported by esser funding all that there is to learn about the history of these here great heroines and martyrs that lived that lived and died right here in our own city or even national field trips or international field trips when those can occur again so we're very excited about that and building that into this entire uh program and also um our clri student-led social justice newsletter will become a part of our lives uh uh in in
225the upcoming months as well as a student-led podcast where we'll be talking about social justice issues across the airwaves as well as reading and writing about those issues in our newsletter and also too um scholar paid internships we um already started that effort would say yes this year we want to continue that model um in in the uh coming year um and also we're partnering with northland workforce training center and these are also paid internships are also part of the attributes of the new mbk mail academy as well so we want to um again incentivize our students but we know that we ask our students to do a lot of after school work but we also want to expose them to high leverage people in the business community and the industry uh health and uh
226hospital industry hotel industry and and business and banks and so we want to do that and be able to pay them appropriately so that they understand the uh connection between hard work and profit and so those are just a few uh of the height impact strategies that we will have uh using this this uh esr funding that is so historic and we're so happy that dr cash is allowing us to uh dig deep around how we actually spend this money not just to spend but to really have a powerful impact that will last long after all of us are gone thank you excellent as always dr morrell i'm certainly excited i know the board members are so colleagues um we have one more after this but at this time does anyone have any and it's
227just one one page this next one we'll finish with osa does anybody have any questions for this particular um presentation by dr morell i thought it was pretty straightforward it was and i don't see any hands from warp members so it seems like everyone's so excited yeah about yes we are just excited out of sight i'm telling you mrs that that was the first question you had asked back a while ago and i wanted dr morrell's presentation to answer that first question for you did it it was impressive all right my colleagues last night ebony bullock just has a one-page slide that includes both her theory of action and her high level strategic investments that we know will be a difference maker because we've needed to improve this area for a long time as well
228and she'll get the tools she has the people and we'll go to best in class ebony bullock dr cash and esteem board i promise not to keep you too much longer but it is my it is my um my great joy to present the theory of action for um the office of shared accountability if the office of shared accountability provides relevant real-time and accurate data to the district and community stakeholders via accurate and reliable dashboards that include but are not limited to school and student level academic behavior and demographic data accurate and reliable early warning dashboards that include data to be used to identify as early as possible students who are acutely or chronically most dependent on the buffalo public school system to provide essential services to ensure their progress and achievement timely and regular
229compliance based monitoring and reporting of school and district level accountability data timely and regular program and testing evaluation timely and regular monitoring and status reporting of key performance indicators of school and district performance and enhanced district leaders school leaders and teachers ability to make data informed and data informed and driven decisions regarding effective ways to implement assess and adjust their practice then the buffalo public schools will ensure optimized and positive whole child outcomes are realized for all of our students and families and so in a nutshell it's very simple osa is going to provide this wonderful school community with a wonderful data lake that will hold all of our data so in order for my colleagues to run all of the programming that they are going to bring to this wonderful district we have to
230have a way to hold all of that data to clean that data and then provide ways of assessing it through key performance indicators every department will have a set of key indicators that we're going to be looking at to measure their progress to measure our progress in terms of what the state is asking us to measure um for arp and esser that's what our data lake will do it will roll up to our beautiful data warehouse which will make sure that when anyone wants a report it is clean and it's reliable and dependable and we can make better decisions we can hold all of us accountable we can hold our community partners accountable and we are going to make sure that that data lake and that data warehouse holds holds both quantitative and qualitative data
231and with that we will make sure that all of our decisions are driven through the right data so we can make the best decisions for our school community and that's it i think i did that in under two minutes dr ken you did well you did well young lady colleagues again this was a lot uh to bite off and chew tonight but i did want you to get a flavor of how we approach our work it's a very scholarly approach it's evidence based and it has a theory and practice uh elements in it and that's what good good work leads to so if there are any questions uh at this time we're prepared to conclude uh our our work at this time we have a couple of questions from board members board member paulette woods
232and board member uh president batucci okay uh pilot you can go on uh my question that was a very lovely a wonderful presentation it sounds like all the things the board members have been asking for to feedback on the schools the data etc is there a time frame for any of this becoming reality oh yeah it's underway it's underway um all of it is underway we have year one year two and year three uh expenditures like once we put all this together which we're hustling to do then we think at our next finance and ops for a work session you should get a full um spreadsheet of all of the expenditures and investments that these slivers these are just samples uh represent uh in this in this rpasser work um and we will be ready
233for that for you at that time now i'm more um i understand the finance and ops part but i'm really more interested in being able to monitor student achievement get data make database decisions all of that is exactly what i want to hear and what did you say the time frame is again well on that kind of work i'd have to defer to miss bullock um earlier that it would be this year at least a good piece of it once we go out to bid we have to go out to bed with some of this work uh and by the telly and her team have put out to bid the formative assessment work and so that'll be that'll be uh here presently and and then you begin to get more data points before the high
234stakes test what you've never had and what we've always needed was to have two or three reports before we get to april and may about how our kids are doing and so this was with these additional resources we we've invested in formative assessments for that purpose and those are underway uh through the bid process and so it sounds like before this year is out some definitive dashboard they put the semesters out i think we can provide you with something okay perfect for the answer here i go four times okay thank you uh paula did that answer your question in theory yes i'll just have to wait to see what reality is okay that's fair enough uh president pertussi followed by sharon cotman board member sharon cotman uh thank you very much emily that's a great
235presentation something i know we've all been asking for for a long time i think it will help us to make informed decisions as we go forward my question is just kind of rather high level when you have this uh data link will there be camp reports or well board members you'll do customizable reports or a combination thereof a combination of thereof we're going to make sure that um we have some really sophisticated queries um written so that there's a bunch of ad hoc canned but as you as need be you know we will be able to be nimble enough to pull certain things but we know there are certain reports that that the board asks for there's certain reports that my cabinet colleagues need and so we will build that so that it's regular but
236be again nimble enough that we can be responsive all right thank you very much that's a great answer thank you uh sharon cotman so i'm just curious um are you required to provide uh reports to the state on a regular basis for certain things as far as academics are concerned or attendance things like that does the state require that you report out every x three months every six months or something like that on any uh any data not that regularly we do um annual reporting on the big data sets okay for them so i've seen this information in the past just sit and not be used um by schools or or principals or whatever dr cash how are we guaranteeing that this work is going to be uh of this data is going to be
237utilized uh by our uh staff and our um since our our constituents we're not our constituents but our staff members our asls yeah i think that's fair there's variability in staff's ability to take data and translate it into good strategy so there will be a need for continuing uh training of our staff particularly at the building level uh we we went through a period there to share with what we call ddi a lot of data-driven instruction but then we found that a lot of principles had a lot of data but some some didn't always know okay how does that translate into doing developing strategies to improve achievement for kids right that's the that's the gap in the past that i want to close uh this time and and certainly i have that set and how
238the data i have on my dashboard that i'm asking for about 21 main queries and data points we'll you will use that to drive achievement down into the schools and there'll be some some academic achievement data some behavioral data attendance data suspension data that kind of thing all on the big dashboard uh and then we go to work with what's much of what you heard tonight we do have i think enough strategy we'll get a few more staff in here to build for the capacity part of it and then i think we you'll see a better connection between what you've always asked for which is uh how do we use data how do we use data to make to make decisions and to drive improvement um and i want to make that uh connection much
239clearer for the board uh as in the very near future so we have some people that some principals that do it well some that don't do it at all i'm going to do a little bit of piece of it are you going to also put in place a uh across-the-board guideline and procedures that all all people are we're on an even base with this because okay all right so if that's the case then you know part of what we're what i hope to see this board do um this year is to spend more time focused on student outcomes okay right um and um instead of operationals i would say today was an operational board meeting for the most part we went over what was going on uh you gave us a a preview of uh
240from your managerial perspective what you're expecting to do etc etc and so um in trying to move forward to at least making sure that we are starting to use the data in this district to move our children to the next level there are already reports out there that we can already use that we don't have to reinvent the will on a lot of these things that would be very informative to the board if we could just have access to them and let me know i think that's what i think you know while she's working on her her data database or whatever we can also use the things that have already been used in the past um to help move move our district forward i want to share with the board that what i found out
241through the council of great city schools is that at first or staff as well at first it's it's a little bit difficult when you start airing your dirty laundry but as time goes on it improves and um there's a accountability piece um that happens and it it it starts from the board down so i just wanted to say that but in moving forward i i would like to see more teeth um in things as far as how this is impacting our student population because uh the ownership of the data i think is uh is where we're how we're going to grow this district to the next level that's all well i appreciate that but i do think i want you to be clear this was this was not uh just an operational meeting this was
242actually designed to be a theory of action meeting and if you look closely at what the council of racism school talks about they do mention and talk about this girls again student academic achievement and that that has to be set first and then you go and get the data that you need to give you indicators of how you progress how you're doing and what are you going to do about it so it all it's at both end it's from both end and we're going to do it all together so i hope that some of you did appreciate uh what we were trying to accomplish uh today but thank you for those comments thank you for the work that you're doing thank you all right there's my diaper it's full again so uh anytime now i'd
243be happy yeah i believe i don't see any more questions what is this community input analysis what's that oh that's that's correct we've been you ready to do it you want to do that board all right let me go i'll go to the bathroom will you go ahead and take care of that okay all right thank you all right well you ron thank you dr cash good evening board members and my colleagues um let me give you just a moment to find this document in linda's email which is entitled coded esser feedback and admir i know is going to try to get that up for us just so you can see what we're uh what we're talking about thank you edmure i want to first thank jamie cohen director jamie cullen thank and commend her
244for just outstanding work uh and being kind of facilitating not only our public meetings but all of our focus groups all of the ongoing work we're doing to develop this document and just just really an outstanding uh partner in this work so jamie uh cohen just uh kudos to her and all of the work she's done with this what you have is a document that has collected hundreds of examples of feedback from stakeholder groups the stakeholders are identified either as individuals or from the groups they represented at our various meetings this also represents uh some reflection on actual documents that these groups uh submitted to us so we were able to kind of take their recommendations and incorporate uh them here so this is not too different as far as the substance from what's in
245the original esser plan but what's been updated is that now everything is coded to be aligned and categorized with the various components in the esser plan and this is going to be extremely useful um for the district as we begin launching initiatives and projects under esser they're now going to be able to be coded with the actual feedback that supports that project or initiative so by way of example if you just look at this first one when a cabinet member indicates on a board item or an initiative that one g was used to support that initiative that's revisiting curriculum and programming for native american students and on and on and on so what we have now is a complete alignment of everything that has been recommended to us with the initiatives that the superintendent and
246the board ultimately are going to be considering and you can see the evidence of that community feedback the other thing that's really valuable in this document is uh the survey results thousands of people participated in the surveys as you flip through this document you'll see those survey results if you go on the website uh to the particular page you're also going to able to you're going to be able to see survey results by board district that was something that we added in there so that you can actually see what your local constituents have said in response to our survey so there's a wealth of data here it's all now completely aligned with the esser plan and it's an opportunity again to demonstrate to the public that in the creation of this plan and in the
247launching of esser related initiatives their feedback was really valuable and important i think the wrong slide was up no that's it that's that's right yeah that's the first page of a pdf that you all received which is called coded coded us or feedback okay gotcha all right sounds good any questions board members thank you dr carestas you're welcome we're clarifying that any questions board members i i have one question finn's hand has happened didn't sharon i just wanted to comment on how just this whole entire evening was so full of information it's definitely been a lot of work done and um i really appreciate how this feedback was was garnered and how we um are looking toward and with uh strategizing with our community and how to move forward i i feel like it's something
248that we've all been screaming that needs to happen and and we're making great strides so i just appreciate this piece in particular thank you jennifer that that means a lot thank you okay board member sharon belton so i i'm con i i'd like to know the plans in the very near future on how to expand parent and and engagement in our community um we have uh a few parent groups but i think is i've asked staff in the past to try to expand our parent engagement to it bring more parent groups on so that we can have more of a balanced um a a a balanced group okay uh uh in our in our um district and i and i and i really feel dr cash that this initiative needs to go all the way
249down to the school's levels you know many i'm not sure how many principals have even put their parent facilitators in place at this point um but i feel that until we on a um school by school basis build up our parent engagement we're never going to be the strong school district that that we could we should be um and i really would like to uh see that expanded um i had uh suggested in the past that we have a um uh uh a frequently asked question um initiative or start uh inviting parent groups to or parents to attend and learn more about the current parent groups and things like that but we cannot build this school district into what it needs to be without having the parent engagement at the level and and my my
250my school uh schools i feel my parent engagement is very uh weak but i don't feel it's a priority that the asl's have made for the principals uh either okay so that that's all i wanted to just say thank you okay i don't i don't i disagree that you know we can improve in this area i am excited and pleased with uh dr ramona reynolds uh theory of action and her uh high-impact strategies and those were just a few that she shared tonight i think she's the right person to make those additional connections and and partnerships with our parents uh we've said since we've come here sharon and we we used to talk about it you know we need five thousand ten thousand parents no on any given occasion we have a list served or
251we have a robo out and if we need to mobilize those parents we we can mobilize them or we can have conversations with them an ongoing dialogue so that's still a goal that's still a vision um and i think if you heard some of the things that were uh talked about i think with dr reynolds you're you're on your way to hearing those concerns certainly you have a relationship with this common you you can continue to hear those ideas and build it and build that program of work right but i want to be clear i want to be clear that in fairness to dr reynolds if it is if it is driven from the top down if it is driven from you it would make her life easier because the principles would be you know
252you would hold your asl's accountable and and that principles would be held accountable and then it would make it easier for her to do what she has to do because as she sits there she really doesn't have the power to really require the principles to do anything and they do it whenever they get ready to do it versus it being driven top down and that's what i'm really trying to say it's not a reflection on dr reynolds i really feel the shield yeah yeah it needs to be a priority yeah your priority in every school yes if you make a priority it will get done here that's what i'm trying to say and i i have dr cassandra wright charged with the uh principal committees and the making sure that that outreach for principles and
253partnerships for principal work uh continues to grow so i i hear you as another pathway another highway should come through uh asl's uh dr wright's work with principals directly uh and so forth and really all of us really really all of us so so we'll we'll keep our working on that i we understand thank you for that yeah it's important for for parents uh to be to to become more involved and we talk about we're gonna continue to talk about that jennifer you're up next followed by someone in the in city no paulette followed by paulette was go ahead jennifer so i just wanted to point out and for the public um there are strategies that i'm kind of putting together as the appointed community liaison from the board to the community i'm touching with
254both parents and caregivers teachers students administration business districts i'll be bringing that to the executive committee soon where would take a whole month to kind of do some back and forth with um you know different topics that we just that we bring to the table questions and answers that kind of come back from the community i'm just giving you kind of a highlight of what i'm going to be presenting it'll be more formal soon but this is something that um i'm taking very serious i appreciate with everything i have uh president petrucci and putting me in this position and myself and and gonna you know bring to paulette to board member woods as she and i are working on according to the assignments we're working on this together um just more of an engagement strategy
255in order to help support you know dr reynolds and the district but then also just based off of the event that was held last month or earlier in the month it their home people are hungry to engage it's just how do we go about it so i'm really going to be looking to board members to really expand in their districts and maybe we can come up with strategies in order to hold more kind of town hall meetings uh zoom calls things like this in order to be able to engage folks without putting so much pressure um on the district of course all of these you know just heads up all of these kind of strategies and meetings i would like to have uh i would love to have district involved so that they're able to
256garner you know the information that's coming in and it's not so much me just regurgitating to people so you know just stay tuned but i i totally hear you um president or uh sharon and president emeritus yes it's still okay you know i got used to it but you know again like i i appreciate it i appreciate the now president patricia putting me in this position and i take it very seriously i'm 100 ready and and saying this publicly so if anyone has any suggestions as to how a board member or the board members can really engage folks involve the district so there isn't so many layers and we can do this cohesively that would be amazing but just stay tuned i'm looking for the month of october to be pretty and thank you thank
257you would you would you uh reach out to miss mccosy and uh put a little team together of people that can help her with that objective that she has there we'll do but can i interject here i am talking about the liaisons okay including them in this this situation too and i don't and i don't believe i don't will be they all will be everybody who's supposed to be engaged in community in some way i mean you have we have assignments as board members to parent congress to whoever so this isn't just like just me i understand i'm trying to make a point here about liaisons is what i'm trying to make a point we are always to the beginning of this month and the principles have not put their liaisons in place yet this
258has nothing to do with the work that the board is going to do this has to do with what's going on in the district so if the principles have not initiated the effort i need some help from city hall to get to get them lighter fire under them so that we can have the our liaisons up and running so that we can be in the position to try to move the schools etc etc this is what i'm going on with this i'm concerned i'm glad that you're going to be doing that work but what i'm concerned about is is that the the laid backness the lack of daisy illness about another one picking those parents by now is an important thing okay you have all year to pick them facilitators in the schools for the
259schools yes yes yes that's all i'm asking for is the principles we working on that dr ramona reynolds was working with the liaisons have some good ideas about i said why can't can we see a report on who has put them in place and who is wrong teams are put to have have to work with that so they're doing what they have to do we're about what we're not even at the end of september yet doctor cash dr david we're doing networking changing you knew back in june you needed them eight minutes is november to get parents up and running we can't give that thing every time to say something about what's messed up and what's messed up that's kind of how you do things okay i get that and when you do that then
260you get attention for that and then here we go here we go that's one thing and then one thing and then one thing and then one thing this is not we have one okay it's time to move on guys all right what have you you have the last question of the night it is 9 7 18 actually so pilate please so we can close down okay um the we we will i see you did a lot of work coordinating the information in the package but we it wasn't actually sent out until 6 30 7 o'clock so uh i haven't had a chance to go through it but what i'm hoping that you're going to say the next step is that we're going to send out irf peace requests for proposals we've got a grand plan
261and we're going to get community involvement community groups who deliver services and partner with the district i my whole goal behind this and i believe the president's intention for the american rescue act is to expand services to build a bridge between the community and the school to deliver services that will lift our children that means we have to put our money where our mouth is if the priorities are set where is the money show me the money that i want to know are we going to start doing our fees and will this liaison working with some of our esteemed colleagues and jennifer and etc will we actually get dollars to community groups who are most effective in delivering mental health services and we're helping our kids and emotional services etc i just want to see
262us expand and help kids so well it would be illegal to design rfps and target them towards the types of feedback that particular groups gave so the answer is you know a clear no to that we're not going to do that but to the extent that groups want to compete for rfps that the district publishes on a regular basis that's that's something that happens all the time and but we're not going to use the feedback that we've called from the community and then design rfps to to target you know the particular uh uh you know particular contract with a group so that that the district will not do and can't do but we phrase that rephrase that please you have a goal you have a service you want delivered and i want every person who
263pays taxes who have an opportunity to bid on delivering those services right i want them to know about him i want outreach and community communication and transparency to this community when everybody gets an equitable seat at the table now that doesn't violate any laws and that is our directive so you know i'm not gonna get emotional we are going to deliver to this community partner with the community and expand our outreach and it's not illegal yeah your your question was in relation to the feedback that i i believe i presented tonight you know is the next step publishing rfps presumably correlated or having some relation to that feedback and the answer is no we're not going to do that because that would be illegal to do that we cannot take someone's feedback and then custom
264design an rfp now what we can do to your point which i think is the point you're trying to make is how do we get the community comfortable educated and knowledgeable about the district initiative so that if they are able to participate and compete in that bidding process that they're able to do it competently and i think as dr cash has always said we always want to educate and support potential lenders or community groups that are able to compete so i think we're saying the same thing it's just i guess be careful how you phrase it we're not going to be designing rfps to target someone's particular recommendation but that doesn't mean that their scope of work isn't valuable to the district and could be successful in a future bid one more time i didn't
265say target to a particular person i didn't say you gotta fund dr kelsey i didn't name anybody i said if you have these requests and a plan and a vision for a broad scope of services how do you reach out to the community and and have everyone get an opportunity to participate and sub and and participate in delivering those services i don't have any favorites but i am saying again equity transparency expanded outreach nbewe and partnership with the community well i can make it happen i can give you an example of how i just made that happen so two board meetings ago there was a speaker who has a scope of services that he wants the district to be aware of uh dr cash had directed that i take a meeting with the individual just
266to make sure they understood our system and had access etc i had a very productive meeting with that individual and he now receives every published rfp that the district produces and staff and myself are available to him anytime that he wants to answer his questions either about the bidding process or uh to be guided to the right person who has the expertise on a particular rfp so what what you're doing is our basic work we do that all the time or what you're saying uh is is our basic work we do that well i hate to disappoint you but that individual had a meeting had a meeting scheduled to explain his services that is an mbe and not connected with that individual the meeting was canceled he received no meeting no avenue to to get
267an opportunity to present his services or to show that he could be a us and i gave it to you that that was not a positive reason so we need to move forward what did i tell you that he should do he should call me so that i can properly facilitate a professional meeting between him and the right staff that's what i told you to do and he still hasn't called me so i put myself out there because i'm able to do that as a person who can facilitate connections with the school district and my expectation is that when i give you this good advice you'll share it with this individual and he should call me because i'll help him i spent two hours with him and i was happy to do it because he's
268an individual that has a scope of services that may be valuable to our school system but if he runs into any type of complication or issues with any part of the school district as i told him and as i told you to tell him again just have him call me so i can help that's what i do i help people every day well we are a team and i don't discuss failures in a public meeting so uh we'll have to discuss this not in a public meeting because the connection has not been made and that's not a good example okay so all right so i think you two need to meet uh privately and get that resolved in the meantime the question i guess i got from what paul mentioned dr cress caresses is with
269the additional esther dollars are there going to be uh our rfps you may not can answer this now are there going to be rfps posted um for the needs that were capitalized i guess from uh the community responses because there's always that's how we develop our fees are from concerns maybe filling gaps that this district can't do for example um are we there yet are we do we need um community partners to fill gaps and if so our rfp is going to be available at some point so that community can um access those rfps i know dr reynolds has mentioned it before but that's i guess that's the blanket question yeah i mean i can answer the question this way there will be initiatives that will use esser funding that reflect the community feedback that
270we were able to receive and for which perhaps it's possible that groups who even gave the feedback are eligible to compete uh for you know and put in a bid for those rfps so absolutely that cross alignment is definitely possible and will likely happen okay thank you for that um any other questions i don't see any more hands oh i'm sorry president producing city hall just a quick comment before we move forward i just want to let every know that uh terence has to be excused tonight uh his mother is not doing well so for those of you who are religious please include terence's family in particular his mother and your prayers this evening thank you wow and please announce that on saturday the march honoring neil dobbins and uh trying to actually make a
271difference in gun control and get the guns out of our community and pass the laws that will facilitate that that marches on saturday at 2 p.m so let's be real about our community involvement where is it at paulette um let's see it i got it on my it's that ferry and phil mornis 145 is registration okay thank you sharon okay fairy and fillmore 1 45 p.m is registration that is a saturday any other questions if not i just want to conclude student achievement with this it was a very you guys did a wonderful job a lot of work was put into this work um and i'm looking forward we are looking forward as a board to implementing uh these results for increased student achievement i'm looking forward to the dashboard we're looking forward to um
272the various uh innovative schools and like sharon said to recapture some of our kids who went on the charter schools etc private schools um and so this is a complicated school district it is huge and for what is worth compared to some of the other districts we are bad and so let's keep it up i mean you know we can agree to disagree but respectfully and i think that you know we have uh personal kinds of issues that are not being addressed here we can always pick up the phone and call each other right all right with that good night have a good night night night okay be blessed everyone be blessed be safe