BPS | 6/9/21 Work Session

0012021 um june 9th educational support committee meeting and today we have a couple of things that we we're looking to address far as far as on things that's going on in the district and buffalo public school but first today i would like to say uh um to recognize um pride month so uh for those individuals that that celebrate pride month and uh and celebrate you know who you are i'd like to say um you know this is your month and anything that you know we can do uh to help support you know we're always here uh second thing um yeah dr uh david russ is on the call right now and david russ is going to give us a update for today's um for the stomach food program um for buffalo the same yes summer

002school program for the senior hospital so um i know david and dr cab that is working extensively to provide summer school for our children um throughout the copic you know it was a challenge to get kids back into classrooms but they took some time to uh work some great summer school programs for for children of needs and children that's in our district and uh right now uh mr david russ will fit on other summer school programs so i'll turn it over i could if i could meet in uh mr hurd i'd appreciate that oh yes yes that's right so um dr cash um is there anything you'd like to start off projecting about um anything summer school program or our outlook for the summer thank you dr cash thank you mr hurt uh good afternoon

003colleagues uh of members of the board members of the community it is our pleasure this afternoon to present a robust and exciting array of summer programming for our students in the buffalo public schools we're pleased as always with our partnership probably our leading edge top partnership in the country between private organization and a large school district and that's our partnership with say yes dave rust and his team presented to me and to our staff a few a few weeks ago probably two months ago actually now and asked what what could we do to continue to uh complement what our children need uh coming out of kovic this summer and david and i said dave i want you to be a uh bright patch or bright patches in our quilt that we are building for our

004young people this summer because there's a large need a diverse need and we need to attend to not only the academic uh growth of our young people but also the social emotional physical and psychological needs of our young people as well so david and his team have added 2.0 what we call bps summer programs uh 2.0 we having a total of almost 20 distinct summer programs that we're offering for children pre-k through 12 this summer and so we're happy to lead off with david and his team david will introduce his team and it's just going to be a wonderful array of opportunities for our young people uh this summer so please listen up and stay engaged thank you david thank you so much for all that you do we really appreciate you well thank you

005dr cash appreciate the confidence you have on us and in this best-in-class partnership uh i completely agree with you and mr heard thank you for inviting us this evening as well too i will just reiterate a lot of what doc said is we've got a an important part in the quilt this summer it's the biggest summer camp we've ever run the district has made a significant investment in live summer camp for students we are aiming to bring the right students into the camps so that we can catch students up who may have experienced learning loss over the past year it's a great opportunity to do so and again we're really grateful for the investment that the district has put forward in this is we feel it's going to be more important than ever coming out

006of the pandemic for live summer camp we've got compelling results we've built over the last few years under the leadership of our director of extended learning time and quality improvement dan cross viola and our senior director for community schools tonya staples where i've got a deck prepared and a really thorough quality presentation to lead so dan and tanya i will turn it to you again a big thank you to the full board for your leadership and your support of important summer work for young people thank you dave i'll share my screen well thank you all so much for for having us here today um my name is dan cross biola director of extended learning at i say yes as dave mentioned and thank you so much dr cash for that um introduction we we definitely

007wanted to really play up the fact this is a quilt this year and we're about a part of that quilt and bps is just really demonstrated some strong leadership this year to put together a lot of different robust offerings for students and it's gonna be a great summer for students across the board that's what we're doing but what the addition as a whole is doing look forward to hearing uh from aaron and next about the other bps so to give folks a a little bit of a background on this we've been doing a citywide uh partnership with dps since 2015 and it's been for pre-k through sixth grade students serving an average of 1400 students a year at 31 sites each year and the goals have really been threefold first and foremost is about academic

008we know that summer can be a time when students can and should continue learning and and applying what they learned in the school year so that they can hit next school year uh with their feet on the ground and good to go but we know that doesn't often happen and so we want to make sure that we can put some things in place to keep that economic growth moving in our direction secondly it's about health and wellness we we think very um especially about social emotional learning and uh physical health at these camps and thirdly it's about safety we know that uh it's important for children have a safe place to go over the summer months where they can be preparing adults so those are the the three top of mind goals first initiative and

009it is collaborative as i mentioned it's not just bps and sales are on the table it's also the city of the county parent organizations the various community and faith-based organizations that we work with to run the sites is also um and also the philanthropic community local dr cash uh alluded to we turned the page in summer camp what we're calling summer camp 2.0 and when we first started we had a month to throw together the first year summer camp which did not yield obviously the most intentional model so in 2018 we got a chance to take a step back look at best practices from across the country think about what we could do here in buffalo to make our initiative better and we settled on a few different things uh the first was we wanted

010to lengthen the program today from a three hour or four hour day to a seven hour day double the amount of time for academics to three hours a day double the amount of time of enrichment to two hours a day ensure that all of our students are doing robust evidence-based ela and math curriculum and have paid planning and training time for all the site staff so we could make sure that program time was time on task and not time where where people were playing catch up trying to get ready we were able to pilot this in 2019 at four sites and really promising student outcomes we saw that the reading and math skills these students at these pilot sites were much more likely than their uh peers at other campsites to maintain and or improve

011their their skills over the summer months and despite the fact these students were doing twice as much academics they liked camp more they're more likely to say that camp was fun more likely to say that the enjoy the academic content we're definitely on to something with that that pilot so this year we are pivoting fully to that 2.0 model as far as what the the nuts and bolts will be this year we have a six-week program going from july 12th to august 20th it'll operate monday through friday and our sites this year will have a variable start time depending on the site they'll start either at 8 8 30 or 9 a.m and then of our 32 sites 19 will be seven hour day sites these will serve 950 students with three hours a day

012of academics two hours days enrichment breakfast lunch and snack and the other 13 cents will be four hour day sites serving 500 students and basically this will be just cut in half 90 minutes of academics a day 60 minutes a day of enrichment and breakfast and lunch very important note is that all the academics and all the sites regardless of how long the day is will have the evidence-based curriculum and it will be led by certified teachers and then all sites will have enrichment which must include social emotional learning and physical activity as well all sites will adhere to staffing ratios there's an overall 2-15 staff to student ratio which includes a 1-25 teacher-to-student ratio and then there is also a site coordinator which is not counted in the ratios that needs to be there

013as well so to give an example it looks like on the ground for a site that has 50 students there's one site coordinator there are two teachers to get to that one to 25 ratio there's five other support staff to have seven total staff that meets that two to fifteen ratio as far as the sites where they are and who's running them we have 22 partners running the 32 sites this year you can see the list of who all them are right there most of these are books that we've been working with for a long time a few new faces but mostly uh um tried and true partners of ours and then the map there shows a spread of where they are the blue sites are our seven hour day sites and the green sites

014are the four hour day sites we are still in a pandemic even though we appear to be turning the corner here and we are taking health and safety very seriously still we'll have very strict health and safety protocols in place these are based off of guidance and regulations from cdc department of health and often child and family services and it's also informed by the camp count study that the american camp association put together after uh 2020 summer camp they looked at programs that operated across the country in person last year looked at the non-therapeutic interventions that they used those sites to mitigate covaid and found the things that were the most effective we've definitely relied on that a bit as well as as well as our own experience with the virtual learning support centers and

015where i'm happy to say that we didn't have a single known uh case of transmission of copper in those centers when we were operating them this last fall and so a few things that are accounted for these these protocols emergency communications arrival dismissal how daily health checks are done healthy hygiene and it's important to mention that all of our staff and students will be wearing masks even though that the guidance from the cdc and the doh has relaxed uh mass requirements for vaccines death we're gonna have all of our staff still wearing masks to be modeling that for the children site ventilation is a very important we're encouraging sites to be outside as often as possible but also if they are indoors keep windows open have filters going all that social distancing cleaning and disinfecting

016a respiratory store room is in place in case a child becomes symptomatic uh of uh you know whippy things over symptoms uh and needs to be uh isolated room is there until a uh um one of their adults can come pick them up and also of course contingency plans in place for uh any uh confirmed cases also important to know is that all of our sites will be permitted through the department of health or through school-aged child care which requires them to do a bulk of other health and safety pieces in addition to the programming that will happen during the program at the hours itself we do provide a lot of behind the scenes support to families uh some of us basic needs some of this is helping to make linkages to things like mental

017health care or behavior support services some of it is also monitoring for abuse and neglect all of our folks are mandated reporters there are a few key partnerships that i want to highlight one is one that bps has had for years with b north new york just like in many of your schools have the backpack program where students can go home with food bags over the weekend 16 of our slices here will have the same program in place so while the students will have healthy meals they'll be able to access throughout the week at the campsite over the weekend family's going to enroll to have a food bank go home for that child to have access to other healthy food over the weekend to develop a second partnership with this new this year is with

018neighborhood health services the mobile health unit which they operate in conjunction with say yes we'll be visiting some of our west side locations to be providing primary uh care to some of the students the students will get um immunizations uh physicals done well child visits things that will help them be ready to go uh in the fall for the upcoming year and a third partnership is one that we've just been doing for years now internally at say yes but we know that a lot of times these sites will encounter uh needs from families that they themselves are not equipped to handle and so when that happens they are able to refer that family to one of our family support specialists that say yes who can pick up where the site leaves off and link that

019family externally to things like food um food pantries supports uh mental health clinics um case management services whatever that family might need that family support can help get that family two other uh important partnerships to of uh worth mentioning is breaking barriers the boys and men are of color initiative within say yes we will be partnering with them this year to raise the racial equity themed programming like some of the young men in the program or sixth graders and so we'll be looking at the history of racial injustice in our country what the current state of racial injustice is in our country how we move past a more equitable society all those things will be wrapped up into a two modules for these students um and that will be piloted up to 20 sites this

020year and then the other partnership is with the urban teacher academy as many of you probably are aware dr harristig is very involved in this initiative uh partnering mckinley high school with buffalo state uh through which high school students take education course work and then matriculate onto the buff statement to education program and so new this year so many students will be placed in our summer camp sites to assist the certified teachers with implementing the academic curriculum we'll be acting as like a teacher aides in effect at these sites they won't count towards the staffing ratios of the sites but they will be an extra set of hands and we'll certainly be adding value for sites while they themselves are gaining valuable work experience so we are about a month away a month out from

021the start of camp now and i want to give you a little bit of a look under the hood of what's going on in our summer camp machine right now summer uh student role obviously is top of mind we have 1500 plus students enrolled already if you're doing the math there's more students in a row than we have slots so most of our sites actually have waiting lists right now and the the four remaining sites that aren't full yet will probably be full very soon um but we are nearing the finish line with enrollment we are also uh have all the curriculum in-house for for our sites we've processed it and gotten it ready and it's actually going out the door to sites this week and next week and we're also spending this time making

022sure that all of our site staff are ready to go so professional development sessions and everything from implementing the curriculum to multilingual considerations safety protocols behavior support all kinds of topics we're covering with them to make sure that this can be the best year summer camp yet before we uh before i turn it over i just want to say a special thank you to dr cash and bodytalian and all of you on the board for everything that you all have done this last year it's been a very difficult year we've demonstrated great leadership and vision and i think the decisiveness which you all have moved for prioritizing summer learning this year and the quilt that is putting together is second to none and we're just very excited to be a part of it and very

023excited to be able to help advance the digital priorities so thank you so much for your time and i'm happy to take any questions thank you well done dan um thank you mr crayola um is um um mr tiny staples gonna present now or excuse me no dan did an awesome job there's nothing left to be said thank you that concludes the um presentation right now we open up a q a if any board members or anyone have any questions about the beautiful summer program that's been put together through these um very very trying times i do have a hand raised um sharon belton cabin thank you say yes um for your continual continuous excellence you guys just never you never stop thank you so much for your devotion and for everything that you do

024i have two questions one to you are our students being paid that are participating at your sites our urban um teacher academy students will they be paid to participate yeah they're actually doing it in partnership with the city for mayor summer youth so they're being paid through their time okay great the other thing dr cash is it possible to allow this activity to be counted uh toward our students community credits that's required toward graduation i think that's a good question i like it um i don't know if it will count as experiential credit something like that and botticelli do you have any thoughts about that i know we i don't know any that we've looked into that or we've made that a part of their curriculum uh and do you have any thoughts or tariffs

025uh do you have any thoughts about it mrs belton cottman are you referring to what sometimes happens with seniors for civics yes okay um so that's actually not a state regulation and so a lot of the schools have taken it um as a local initiative we can discuss that with the different buildings and um and talk to them about what requirements they've given the students so as a as a district we don't have a concise set of guidelines each school is allowed to come up with their own i'm confused with that answer so it's it's something that a a district or a school could adopt but it's not part of the state regulation um so it hasn't been a standard process but that is definitely something that we can look into if that's the board's

026will absolutely the reason that i'm bringing that up is that i feel that there's a need to get our children involved as early as possible in doing civic activities and um you know i think it's just uh uh i think it's it just makes sense that if we have children that are uh doing things inside the community that we might start talking about um maybe even i'm expanding it and i've also even said i'd like to see it start at grades age seven when most of our kids are being recruited for gang activities if we could start putting them in some civic activities we might be able to direct them in a different way but thank you for that thank you again david and i appreciate you guys miss kathy on that train of thought

027there is a new seal of civic readiness but something that we could wrap into the new pilot program that we're starting next year let's see engagement good i'd like to know more about it thank you so much i just want to make sure that we grab our children as early as possible and if the activities that they get that they are rewarded and that they understand that this is not just an opportunity to make some additional money this is an opportunity to give back to your community as well and i'd like to start feeding uh breeding it as early as possible thank you okay thank you um um this is brother copman uh next we have a couple of hands raised inside of city hall um so that'd be um larry uh mr mr larry

028scott thank you mr heard um just first i i wanna echo what uh president cotman said thanking say yes buffalo and their partnership um was incredibly essential during this pandemic i don't know where some of our students and families would be without your partnership your support your services so thank you and and also want to take this opportunity to thank say yes buffalo and the staff um for your role in organizing our virtual learning centers and then in december extending those for the rest of the year um that was just incredible i was recently talking to a partner in erie county um who helped with facilitating those virtual learning centers and it seems like that's something that was not done anywhere else in this state so i i commend say yes and everybody who was

029involved in those virtual learning centers because that was just significant for so many students and families um my one question has to do with the masks i think dan you mentioned that there will be a protocol for staff to wear masks and students to wear masks and i'm just wondering um if there's going to be any if there's potential for that to be relaxed if the cdc and new york state department of health relaxes some of their policy on mask wearing and i raise that raise this now because these past few days have been quite hot and we're hearing quite a bit from teachers and from students parents about having to wear masks in this heat thank you for that question and certainly we're going to be revisiting the protocols um with the most recent

030guidance that came out just around being outside um as folks may know the cdc and and doa have recently said that if you have outdoor activity and you're you're adhering to social distancing you don't actually need to wear a mask so our health director is actually a school nurse will be starting with us next week and one of the first things on her list will be reviewing our protocols and with the recent guidance has come out and uh recommending any sort of changes but the the masking is one that we'll be looking at i think the outdoor is probably where we would see changes i don't know that would be looking to make changes indoor but um i'm not the medical expert i i will i would refer to our health director on on [Music]

031we'll get information about that out to families but i have heard from several families already contacting us saying hey we know that um cdc and doa should relax a little bit you still want to have masks in place there definitely are families that want that so we're trying to walk that line of making sure that we are um keeping everybody safe and keeping everything uncomfortable as best possible recognizing that it can be hot and all that as well so we'll we'll do the best we can to walk that line um but uh safety will be top of mind and make that'll be the ultimate priority thank you dude you're muted mr herr uh thank you um board member larry scott very very good questions about mass i know we have a lot of concerns about

032mass and and uh and the coronavirus um and we don't know what it's going to do this summer or what role is going to take or how it keeps trying to uh to re develop itself uh right now i would like to say there's no more hands raised from any board members so i just have a couple of questions myself um first of all i would like to thank say yes for all the work that you do in our district uh um uh countless hours goes into planning along with the district to find means for our children and um giving them a great opportunity for a safe and value education and mentoring counseling and um i have never seen a program that surpassed you know the work that you guys do um mr rust and

033tommy staples and also um dan cross and a great presentation there was so much information in that one presentation and so many things that you know that we dig into i'm not going to hold everybody along tonight with this but um one thing about um you mentioned about um crucial supports and what they have concerns about the food um how is the summer program is going to adapt to the needs for our children with food and i know that's one of the things that you talk about is food shelter and family access to resources so uh is there going to be a breakfast and a lunch that'll be set aside for the children or or how will this work with our partners so there will be breakfast and lunch and snack at our seven hour

034day sites and then breakfast and lunch at the four hour day sites and that'll be done in partnership with eps food service and then there's that the backpack program partnership with feedmore to send food bags home with uh students over the weekend as well okay and um i like for our some school programs how was this how was this actually partnered with our summer school programs uh for children who might need um extra classes you know to either graduate or or to um pass classes that they took we know that kobek had a huge impact on children's attendance and and children grade levels and participation in class so how was this um work together uh so we'll actually know we'll be hearing from from tara and or and or ann uh next about the bps

035in school offerings but um to answer the question we are comparing enrollment across the two sides to ensure there's no duplication if there is duplication we are encouraging families to to uh go the bps in-school route since those programs really tailored uh more specifically to those students needs and we we haven't really figured out the exact logistics for doing that just yet we're going to be uh doing that very soon um but we make sure that uh we're we're working together and and being a real quilt and not duplicating each other's uh efforts okay so um one question that that reverted from uh sharon bella cottman's question was that um that uh if a child is actually have to go to a summer school program can they still um and they fail to class or

036did poorly in the class and here uh dr cass he was big throughout you know two years i've been on the board about enrichment programs so are they able to uh still do work study and get paid for it and take enrichment classes that will go towards their grades this is set up that way if anybody can um answer that mr heard this is ambode okay um i think you're talking about some of our older students i don't know that they would be eligible for the say yes summer camp um but the students in our program can work with the mayor's summer youth and we're going to talk a little bit about some students who might need um more classes than than they might have traditionally had and some of the opportunities for those students

037okay okay i'll hold off and wait for that presentation thank you um so right now i'd like to say uh well this can this will conclude the presentation from the say yes to education program and um there's no other hands raised so uh i'd like to thank you for all the work that you do along with our superintendent and our administrative staff to put a program like this together we know that um working with all different angles with other programs it's very difficult and we really really um appreciate um this presentation and work that you're doing so uh i'm sure we're gonna take a ton of questions from parents over the next couple of weeks about these summer programs and um and thank you i know you guys got your hands full thank you all

038thank you okay thank you next part of the presentation we will go to dr kevin eberle from mst high school he'll be talking about social emotional mental health and a couple of great programs that he established there msd buffalo public schools summer programs haven't been presented yet oh i'm sorry oh dr cash club please no unless you want to take us out of turn because if kevin has to be somewhere then i'm fine with that i just didn't want you to forget that we have uh all of the buffalo public schools programs to be to be presented summer school i apologize i apologize i sent the email i don't know if you re if you all have a chance to read it or not but um dr kevin i really have have people that's going

039to speak today and they are on the on time deadline right now so we'd like to uh dr ed leon right now and then we can go back to the buffalo public schools if it's okay with you all right thank you sir uh dr eberly you know good evening uh ladies and gentlemen thank you mr herd dr cash uh great support from our board president uh miss belton cottman and all board members we we thank you for your support through these most difficult times we've been having this year but uh as a collective team and a family we have at the mst group in all schools across the district i i think we're really showing our our real stuff here as far as how we're getting all our students and families through this real difficult

040time so we appreciate the opportunity to uh come in front of you this evening unfortunately i have i have a presentation i i'm i'm really here uh to present uh one of our ideas we had from a tragic event that occurred uh a few months back with our loss of a a great senior uh lanisha johnson and i i want to go in a little bit of what we're doing with her uh as far as uh talking about awareness and talking about action we we we always talk about awareness and we we have a lot of events there's a lot of uh telethons and all kinds of things that we go on to with a lot of things that uh try to assist in every event but it really is about awareness and what action

041we can do and we think we have something here at mst to really represent not only the students and faculty of math science technology but the whole entire buffalo school system and our district of what we're all made of but what i'd like to do right now is we're we're partnering uh let me just tell you just a a small uh snippet from the tragic loss of our student last month uh the articles came out about her life and and a lot of things that came up i was a little as a principal this is my 27th year as a building administrator and i've been in the schools almost 20 years buffalo schools i i i was a little uh a miffed at the point that uh our our student lanisha uh was just deemed

042as a black female uh who dies in mlk park and with no name and i i've been dealing with a lot of tragedy through my whole career as being a former police officer counselor teacher we've all seen a lot of tragedy through our lives and i i was really upset with that thinking that this was just another statistic in the city of buffalo and we said we're not going to stand for it miss belton cotman and uh ourselves we all had a uh a balloon uh release uh for lala uh just a few days after it was just an incredible turnout between mvp uh all our associates in the east side and it really was an outpour of our community which really shows what we're all about as a city of buffalo buffalo public schools

043what i have from the articles from the the newspaper in the few days we were all sort of sort of in in conjunction with each other we were actually thinking of each other i read the one article of the family justice center of buffalo was actually responding to the different letters and the different elements that were going on with tragedies throughout this district and we've lost so many students through the years and we said you know what we we have to team up so i i made a cold contact to the family justice center and i met a woman ava thomas who we have on screen today who was absolutely an incredible remarkable woman that is the operations manager director of uh our family center or justice center and uh miss murphy mary murphy was

044the ceo unfortunately she was going to be on today but it was tied up to tell a little story about the family center so i wanted to introduce ava thomas who is going to say a little bit about this center and i'll come back on and talk to you a little bit about what we're doing to uh really uh to reflect on lala's life and what we're going to do for the buffalo public schools and in the name of mst in buffalo schools so ava thomas please if you will thanks for being here yeah absolutely thank you um so i am as dr eberly stated my name is ava thomas i am the operations manager of the family justice center and sometimes we get a little bit of family justice center what is that we

045realize our name which you know came before a lot of us came on is can be a little bit confusing but we help anybody male or female lgbtqi plus it does not matter um we help anybody that is facing difficulties in their relationship whether they feel and what we like to say is unsafe so domestic violence abusive relationships can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people one of the main things that we find as an underlying factor is that feeling of safety so anybody that feels unsafe in their relationship either physically or emotionally we have a plethora of services and supports put in place to help that person it can take seven or eight attempts for someone minimum to try and leave their relationship their abusive relationship we understand that

046we get that we sometimes see people seven eight nine ten times that is okay um we also help members in the community in particular we especially during covet we saw a lot of teachers we helped them with students that they thought you know hey they're exhibiting some warning signs what can we do so we can help give you that verbiage help you you know link them with us which is the ultimate goal is we want everyone linked with us that is in an abusive relationship we are able to help draft family offense petitions we have cultivated a relationship with family court if those family fence petitions are granted by a judge we we help them with emergency hearings that will turn into an order of protection and so we're able to help with that we

047do safety planning and that's a big part of what we do especially if someone's not ready to really move forward and take the take all these different steps needed they just want to talk to someone that's absolutely fine but we do safety planning and that's individualized and tailored to that person's situation and we can do that every day if someone needs to call us every day and we need a safety plan with them every day we can absolutely do that we also link people with different services in the community if someone needs emergency shelter we have haven house on speed dial if someone is having difficulties a lot of times some of our clients their citizenship is threatened because they are in their unabusive relationship so we make sure that they are linked with the

048proper channels they have the proper supports to help keep them safe really any barrier that's any anybody's facing they need you know toiletries food anything to keep them comfortable we absolutely can help them with that another unique service that we have is a forensic medical unit we have a nurse on staff we are the only forensic medical unit in new york state solely dedicated to domestic violence so we are able to body map injuries take pictures of injuries strangulation assessments or if someone a lot of times when you've been in an abusive relationship for a really long time there's some physical and emotional aspects that happen after that she's able to work with that person and help them see if that's what's happening we also have on-site buffalo police officer in the city of buffalo

049in order to file charges domestic violence charges against someone you you do have to be linked with us that's a requirement in buffalo so we have an on-site officer trained 100 in domestic violence we also understand that there's a lot of people who have a mistrust in police that's what we're here for we we can help them with that piece of it sometimes it's not always necessary to file charges they're never forced to do anything everything is always that person's choice and we really try to take whatever barrier someone's facing and help them through that we have non-denominational spiritual support um really just a lot of different things some things that we don't even know that we have yet we develop right then and there if it's necessary our co is fantastic at whatever barrier

050someone faces if we think oh hey we need this then we implement that um so we're welcome to any suggestions all the time we have a direct referral link with which i can make sure that you know you guys have if you want where if there's a student that you're concerned about and then you get consent from that student it allows us to reach out to that person um but otherwise due to safety concerns we have to have someone reach out to us first um so that's really kind of the big picture of what we do yeah in a nutshell you you did in probably an hour that we were together you gave it in a 10 minute piece it was it was beautiful as the overview but i i want to continue on with

051with uh ava without giving up too much if we have another time in a different place uh to actually hear her real story uh it's a remarkable remarkable woman uh that is speaking right now um i was very moved by her meeting her uh and what her work is uh myself our whole administrative team went over to the center and it was just a remarkable uh day for us to actually talk and hear the stories of women have been who've been survivors and what they're doing their work is remarkable they the inspiration that we had with lala and taking a tragedy and turning it into action is what our next step is and we're going to be teaming uh with the family justice center uh and we have an idea we're naming it uh letters

052for lala uh which is very appropriate we're thinking of all the unknown voices or the unheard voices of young ladies or or men that are in uh really uh difficult situations or relationships we want to have a venue uh and a mechanism where with uh our support uh actually have a venue where they can actually uh be supported by our social workers and the the family center uh to uh give them support immediately so we're starting a campaign where we're we're going to have a portrait of la la with a mailbox and we're going to have the symbolic piece of the mailbox with letters of lala and have a qr where literally students in a confidential way can actually use their cell phones or actually go into confidence with a small piece of paper with

053a letter going into the mailbox to actually state that i do need help the qr code will actually go directly to the family center and directly to our social workers at msp we believe that this is the first start in the foundation we think we should be the parent of this foundation we think this could actually go national uh for a campaign for domestic violence especially with young ladies and men who are in these uh situations and bring more than just uh awareness but bring action to this and we can bring assistance in with this organization and with our social workers and the support of our entire uh faculty uh i i'm fortunate to have one of the greatest administrative teams in the city miss womack and miss uh cosbo ms cosgrove was talking about

054uh the whole uh mailbox idea and it just more morphed into just this massive idea so we're in the infancy part to this to partner with uh the family justice center and ava and mary murphy love the idea so we want to continue on with this story and keep you abreast we have domestic violence month as octobers of each year we are absolutely going to bring this into the next school year take it in the month we have a whole campaign that we're going to have an actual symposium where they'll be coming and presenting and actually showing us what to do and helping us and uh helping most importantly our students get through the most most difficult times in their lives especially after this past year so it's just a remarkable program so we're really

055excited about it and we appreciate you having given us the opportunity to explain to us where we are in our our plan and our path uh for success for our students and our student body we thank you thank you mr herd thank you dr eberle and thank you uh mrs ava thomas for the work that you do right now i'm gonna um open up the floor to any board members or staff members that would like to ask any questions uh pertaining to um this presentation and as i look currently i don't have any i do have one hand raised is um president sharon belton commons the other floor thank you uh board member heard uh dr eberly and um and ava thomas and um and your staff i really appreciate you guys uh taking uh

056something uh tragic and making something positive out of it dr cash i had not spoken to you yet but there is a um a domestic violence walk and uh kevin uh dr everly i hadn't spoken to you that's gonna be on june the 26th and i was hoping to talk with you about seeing if maybe some of our students would walk um this particular uh is this the first one and it's for domestic violence um this particular woman was killed a year ago uh uh under in a domestic violence situation i am amazed at how many young people are being abused um how many young women are being abused and if you remember that date when i had the opportunity to speak i said to the fathers in the group you know stop putting your

057hands on your daughters they're interpreting that to mean that you love them and people hit who hit them their fathers hit them and all of a sudden they think that their somebody loves them and so domestic violence is up in our teenagers and the numbers are staggering so if possible dr cash when we get a chance to talk maybe on friday we can talk more about this and um and uh dr everly to see if any of your students would like to walk i was thinking about walking in this particular um uh uh walk because um i can remember as a child things that happened um around me in my family as well as the women who were abused around me and i would like to you know make a statement and stand with uh

058people against domestic violence so we'll talk more about that but uh thank you for taking something um so tragic and and making something positive out of it my only other question um at the um balloon release uh there was talk about having a memorial for her do you know if that had been planned yet oil for lala they did they did have a funeral on memorial day they thought it was going to go later but they uh did have one a week after they did have one oh it's okay because i thought she said it wouldn't be until yeah it didn't look like it was but we did have a memorial i was we were at the funeral home and and it was it was very nice ceremony uh they did a very nice job

059okay do you know if any of the men in the community have reached out to her to her brother i was concerned for him well it's interesting to say that because when we're with each other all day with neil dobbins people approach beyond that from that from neil's funeral so uh there are elements in the work that they're trying to right now but they're sort of fragmented a little bit so we are still trying to regroup with that with with her brother and her sister her twin you know she had a twin sister so compared to her can i do a sidebar here in avoc if you just say one thing of a negative event a tragic event ava can you let everybody know the percentage of phone calls that came in the day after

060and that week after allah's death of what actually came into the center you talk about awareness and reaction what what the percentage was like off the charts as far as how many started calling into the center immediately from that event yeah we we actually when we go back through our records there were 23 individuals that reached out in in direct relation to hearing that story and those were adults and teens and teachers as well so uh our calls were increased that week in general our calls are up 74 since covet it has not stopped since even though we're kind of coming out the other side of that our numbers are still extremely high but there's a total of 23 people within the 10 days of her death that received services and got help and that's

061i i mean that's just remarkable yeah okay thank you thank you thank you for watching and i'm interested in helping you in any way that i can thank you okay thank you um president dalton cottman and i don't see any of the hands raising his hand he's raised i'm looking now i'm looking at okay dr cash sir you have the floor dr cash there's a board member that i did that you didn't see them i'll wait till the board members have a chance i was looking but um larry popped off the screen okay so mr larry scott my hand's not raised okay all right okay full insurance dr cash okay so colleagues dr eberly and miss thomas thank you so much for that compelling uh presentation as we are building the scaffolding for our work

062with the esser funds coming in begin to climb out of kobe help our young people one of the major five top five big buckets and then those break down into a lot of sub objectives and sub categories but one of the top top five is strategic investments in student support services including students who've been affected by trauma anxiety mental health issues depression relationship abuse domestic abuse eating disorders so forth and so on so the whole category of emerging data that has gotten even more post coding i was already there for many of our young people before kobe but it's becoming more acute post trophies so what we've committed to and what we've been talking about is legitimate strong community partners that have a special focus on these kinds of issues for our young people we

063want to partner with you we want to partner with you everybody we won't partner with but those that that is the mission and the vision for their work that aligns to what our young people need based on data we want to have a very strong partnership with you so that's that's that's what i'm saying to you in short i look forward to working and talking more with kevin and we want to build something not only for mst but for the whole for the whole district uh in this particular area of strategic investment and you may be one of many uh partners because the issue is so large is so big affects so many of our kids too many of our kids and families but i'm glad to learn about you i didn't know about you

064before tonight so just know that we will be reaching out and working with you as well as the family court and other partners that we already have a partnership with but welcome to the fold and keep up the great work that you do on behalf of young people thank you and i'm sorry just really quickly they don't have to come in we're doing everything remote it's very helpful if you just say you know you can just have a conversation with with an advocate and that's as far as it can go we find that really helpful it's very scary this stuff is scary for adults it's very scary and intimidating for children um so you know they just reaching out to us does not mean it it offsets a whole bunch of other things it's just

065a conversation so thank you thank you for having us dr cass thank you thank you thank you dr cash and um we do have another hand raised um it's our board member um hope jay okay you have the floor hi i just wanted to say hello to ava um ava and i have worked together because we've had opportunity to have our careers overlap i'm not sure if everybody realizes this but domestic violence is also my career is focused on specifically working with victims of domestic violence um and recently in the last year have uh founded a non-profit that works exclusively with uh victims of narcissistic abuse which is a little bit of a niche area um we don't do the exact same thing that the family justice center does we kind of complement one another

066but we also have many resources i have fantastic providers who work with me people who are well-versed who have a ton of experience in the field of domestic violence and uh between myself i've been a prosecutor in the domestic violence unit i have worked in the field of domestic violence as a social worker and as an attorney my entire career which has been 25 years so i i'm kind of you know a little sad that i wasn't asked to present tonight or asked or pulled into this particular topic because this is my area of expertise i speak about this all the time i'm constantly being asked to speak i'm on podcasts i do videos i put out tons of information um for center for hope of western new york and i'd be more than happy

067to work with uh the board the district or in conjunction with the fjc uh and bring some of our providers in as well specifically to talk about and i think ava i i got kicked off the call for a while so i didn't get to hear a lot of what you said but i don't know whether or not there was a discussion about covert abuse and a lot of the uh you know particularly with adolescents they don't recognize when they are being victims of covert abuse a lot of it is psychological it's mental it's emotional there's a tons of signs that happen early on in relationships it's power and control dynamic that happens particularly with teenagers in the beginning they don't see it as abuse and i think before there's even episodes of physical violence

068um if kids are able to uh you know are educated on what to look for in in the signs of these types of relationships as they're developing i think that they would be have the language they'd be more able to be able to seek help to be able to go to somebody and reach out oftentimes uh people adults adult women don't realize that they're in abusive relationships until and unless uh there's physical violence and oftentimes physical violence is not happening in the early stages of these relationships so i just wanted to put that out there i missed a lot of what ava said i apologize i got kicked off the call okay um thank you thank you for being okay i'll do uh before we i do would like to say uh i am i

069do apologize okay i did reach out to you i did reach out to you last month and we spoke about all speaking on behavior and domestic violence and uh i i did uh slip my mind this month to actually so i do apologize and i know that this is something that is entrenched in you and that this is uh something have dedicated your life to so um at this time i'd like to move on to another board member who has a hand raised and that's uh dr kathy evans brown hey thank you again my son sent are the same as dr cash and hope j hope hit it on the nail um we need to educate young people particularly girls earlier on just the other day i had a conversation well i overheard a conversation

070with my grandchildren i have a granddaughter who's 11 and i have four grandsons four and under and so they had this conversation the four-year-old there are boys four boys and they were having this conversation about not to hit brianna don't hit brianna hard now brianna's 11 year old and so one said well we can hit her just a little hard and so brianna looked at him and said how about not hitting girls at all and so it was it was funny in that sense because she's aware that it's inappropriate for boys to hit girls and so when we talk about uh educating young people we really have to start as young as four years old believe it or not um and so that's my two cents i think it's important um and someone mentioned this

071and it's true in our community um young people don't even realize what's a good touch the signs you know etc so it's important that we continue this conversation thank you so much thank you dr um evans brown and there's no the hand raised so first of all i would like to start by saying um thank you dr kev eberly for having the mindset to reach out to organization like the family justice center and reflection to the violence that goes on within your building in your schools and that just shows the your character and the love you have for our children and i really honor respect that you um reach out for services to help your children and just know that our children are you know i respected to go to school take exams do good

072grades and they're going through different patterns in their life and different type of abuses um physically mentally and and and also peer pressures that that comes on to our students and we expect them to after going through all these different things and for children inner city in poverty to come to class take exam to get good grades come to school every day and perform well without any incidents and that's something that as a district as a person um we take a strong stand on and get the understanding of the needs for our children that's why i'm really happy with dr cash and some of the programs that this administration put together to try to address these needs and thank you for your work uh mrs thomas for for dedicating your life to something that you

073i see that you're so passionate about and have a a great great um attachment to uh some of these things that that we see that this is very serious matters and our children are being affected our teachers are being affected um us and our families have i'm sure everybody have seen some type of violence um that stem from mental illness uh drug use um or just behavior behavior issues and one thing that this district has done with the uh look at the youth risk behavior surveillance model and the survey that's being done and um and we right now like i said uh previously that we're looking for the end of our um yrbs reporting to see what what needs most children have and this all stem from violence that's um may become that may be

074triggered tobacco use alcohol drug usage um sexual misconduct behaviors uh dietary and dr castellator physical activity obesity overweight all these things are side effects of being abused and and how to see and identify these things um abusive relationships mental illness is is a very very common thing if you look at our police departments and reports and arrests and um i myself was a um said as a liaison in the court that you know took please over 40 000 felony cases um in the state of georgia and a lot of those cases stem from violent violent acts um i do have a question um i do really love the um letters for la la in the mailbox i know that dr uh everly said that he has um uh working with the school district and other

075districts around city of buffalo with that now um are we also equipped to address bullying and anti-gang limitations with these letters uh how would how can we get those disseminated to the right places so that we can help students because i'm sure that more letters will be dropped in than just domestic violence into these mailboxes yeah i do that that's why we're looking at it starting off with msc and starting off with our school district we were going to start off literally having a mailbox in every high school and really bring it through uh to all our schools and spreading it out into western new york from there but absolutely we're thinking there'll be an offshoot to that that it'll be more you know beyond just the domestic violence but uh send a message to

076any violence and any issues the anti-bullying campaigns and the bullying campaign certainly are a mainstay that we have to we have to address also and that can go hand in hand with the domestic violence absolutely thank you thank you and also like i know that eric county has a hotline um for um for uh mental health or or domestic issues or incidents and i also know you can call 9-1-1 um i would love to see how our district utilize those tools and work with every county uh to help with those and also programs like like the family justice and things that hope j worked with another joche is very very a humble person but she will she was also out there with myself at mst when he did the balloon release for lala so i

077like to you know also thank hope jay you know for for being here also and and you know continuing her time you know for something that's so serious um at this time we don't have any more questions so um i would like to go ahead and um turn it back over to dr cash thank you thank you again yes thank you colleagues very compelling very well done we look forward to the work ahead so summer programming uh continues and i'm very pleased to introduce to you tonight colleague someone you don't see often but i can tell you she is a titan she does yeoman's work she's she's an irreplaceable i've known her now for four or five years we elevated her to the role she's currently in and she is a go-getter workforce and we

078really love uh her work on behalf of our children so miss tara sims uh along with miss ann botticelli will share some of the other parts of the quilt that we have designed for this summer for our students much more of a both robust program than ever before in the buffalo public schools and we're going to be studying it and assessing the effectiveness of these programs and then continuing to build on into the fall in our elt program our extended learning time program which tara sims is the executive director for so literally you're going to see programming coming out of the summer that is after school at least five days a week two hours per day you're gonna see programming for four hours on saturday and from about nine to one in some schools and

079ten to one in other schools very important work and again much of that is in collaboration with our partners say yes so we'll give the lord the sabbath day and we won't ask students to be in programs but they will have to study that evening to catch up so i do expect two hours of study on sunday uh after after their faith services faith-based services whatever that might be so tara and ann you take it away on the summer programming that bps will be the lead for cash admire can you pull up our presentation please well good evening uh board members uh i'm going to talk to you a little bit to set the framework for our summer learning programs and then i'm going to turn it over to tara to give you some more

080intimate details or some of the other programming so next slide please as always we connect all of our work back to the education bargain um the most obvious uh idea here would be extended learning time right so tara and her team oversee our summer programming as well as our extended learning time after school during the school year but this year especially we want to make sure that everyone sees the connection between our summer programming and our rigorous early elementary education our strong community schools our innovative high schools services for our media students and families as well as the relationship with our teachers because it's all interconnected um throughout this year and especially during the summer time because we want to make sure that we're jump starting the acceleration for our students next slide please so

081you know you've seen our student success plan before but we just highlighted a few areas that are really directly tied to summer programming the most obvious is for you increasing opportunities for student success because that directly relates to the after school programs and the summer programs but also please note that academic achievement and universal access these are directly tied to the work we're going to do this summer next slide please so a brief overview of our pre-k 6 program um so it will be full day and it'll begin on july 12th we have several several hub sites one of which does combination of in-person and virtual opportunities for students our programmatic focus is acceleration enrichment and social emotional needs of students so our curriculum and our instruction is really going to target the most essential

082components of the math and reading curriculum for that particular grade level so a student who's finishing second grade will be working with the most essential components during the summer program for second grade to make sure that they're ready to jump start the school year we're going to focus very very tightly on the foundational skills that are necessary for success at different grade levels so that would include phonemic awareness phonics writing vocabulary strategies building the background knowledge that students need and obviously our numeracy skills in the math program we will also make sure that there are social emotional supports for our students we have social workers in the program we will have speech pathologists supporting the program we'll have ot and pt opportunities for students and those will be infused into regular class time we definitely

083can't lose sight of our clri initiative so that will be embedded in the program as well and there'll be various enrichment activities such as art and phys ed because we know we want to capture the kids attention there's going to be a strong focus on academics and we're going to make sure that we're serving the needs of our students but we also want them to be engaged beyond the traditional academics so tara's got some great things going on with um with art and different programs that are going to support the kids needs some stem opportunities so we're very excited for the enrichment components as well those kids have been identified for participation based on multiple factors at the school level but families can still contact their school or tara's department if they want additional information

084maybe they haven't been contacted by the school but they think their child would benefit from the program so those those opportunities are still available and on the one of the final slides you'll see we've posted the contact information for the department of extended learning and the link to our website that shows the different programs we'll be offering this summer next slide please so our grades 7 and eight program is a blend of half or full day sessions depending upon the needs of the particular student um so again we have some hub sites um and we do have a virtual option um the programmatic focus is really on the essential content for the four core areas so depending on the student they may be taking an english class or a math class a science or a

085social studies class maybe multiple classes but we're going to make sure that they focus on the essential content for those courses and that they're able to recover their incomplete learning students are going to be directly identified by schools and contacted by the school to enroll in the program so the pre-k six program they've been enrolling for the past couple weeks this program have recently started to send enrollment forms home so again we're still working with the families to make sure that they register their students next slide please the grade 9 to 12 program is unique this year um traditionally this has been a hubbed program but this year we're bringing it to the school level so each high school will be running a unique program to meet the needs of their own students um so

086at every district high school we'll make sure kids have the bus pass that they need it um again depending on how long they're there they're getting breakfast they're getting lunch they're getting snacks at the elementary our programmatic focus here is to help kids recover the credits that they need to be successful in school and to graduate on time so we have two strands they might be recovering a credit if they have incomplete learning or if they are behind and um don't need to recover a credit they may be able to take an accrual course to help them get back on track toward graduating with their cohort so the high schools are creating their own schedules um so be a little bit different at every building but they will be notifying directly of the courses that

087they the student will be asked to participate in this summer and then um dr cash and um the mayor summer youth program have collaborated so that certain students are going to be eligible to earn while they learn so in some cases a student may have to recover a number of classes and won't be able to work the mayor's summer youth in the traditional way so we're going to make sure that that student is still compensated fairly for the work that they do which would be in this case attending summer school so that's a really fantastic opportunity and i know dr cash may want to speak a little bit more to that later um but most if they only need to recover a couple credits they could still participate in the traditional program or if they

088don't need to attend summer school at all they obviously could still participate in the traditional mayor summer youth program this is a new um a new take on that opportunity now i'm going to turn it over to tara who's going to talk to you about some of our more specialized programs and um so for those of you who don't know me my name is tara sims and i am the director of the extended learning department um and we are you know fiercely planning this summer program that i think all students will benefit from and we're just really excited to roll it out soon um and your next slide so the multilingual i'm sorry the special eye department will oversee the extended school year program and this program will run from july 6 to august 13th

089and there will be hubs throughout the bill um throughout the city um really the focus of esy is to prevent on substantial regression of students and students who are eligible for this program are determined by the special ed committee students who are who do not take the new york state alternative assessment will partake in the curriculum that we offer for our regular program um whether it be for pre-k through six seven eight or nine through twelve next slide the next specialty program um will be the ce lavanta program and the jumpstart program these programs are overseen by the multilingual multilingual department both programs will run for five weeks and be housed at school 45 although they are at the same building the programs are very different say lavanta is for students in grades k-3 and

090this program uh really focuses on the developing academic language for spanish and also they will complete projects in spanish and english to be a part of this program you must be enrolled in a dual language program and then the jumpstart program they will focus on the individual small group instruction and work collaboratively on special projects um for this program it is offered k through 12 and there's multiple factors um i guess variations where a student could be enrolled in this program one being if the student arrived during or after july 1 2019 if they're scoring if they score to entering or emerge emerging on the nisa towel or if they were recommended by their school staff next slide please so our arts enrichment program is back so michelle augusto will be overseeing our mural mania

091program and vote words both of these programs will be for um from july 19th to august 13th uh 9 a.m until 12 and house at school 18. so mural mania i'm sure you've seen it before um it is show-stopping but it is a mosaic type mural um and this year it is going to be at the foot of the ferry street bridge and the mural really is based on the history of project park's culture and then woke words um it's a really unique program that takes into account writing and theatrical performances so students would be including rhythm rhyme or expression uh both of these programs will be unveiled uh at a family fun night at broderick park in september um so that will be uh two really great unveilings and great programs for our students

092that once the unveilings we get the dates we'll be sure to share those next slide so the athletics department will be offering summer camps um force grade seven eight and also a strength and conditioning program for grade seven eight um the dates are july 12 through august 20th and as you see the times are 12 30 to 3 30 p.m the times were strategically picked um because we wanted to make sure that students who needed one or two courses still had an opportunity to recover those classes and then also attend the sports camp um and locations are throughout the city we've um cecily and her team pick these locations so they were easily accessed um you know we have at all high stadium city honors hutch tech johnny b wiley mckinley riverside and south park

093um so getting out of summer school at 11 40 for the seventh and eighth graders they can grab their lunch if they want and go and then be to the sports camp by 30. and these programs really focus on the fundamentals um and just having fun so they'll be offering flag football swimming at city honors chair dance track at johnny b wiley basketball soccer and volleyball the nine through 12 program um is going to focus on strength and conditioning and i know visiting the after school programs uh the older kids like to go to um the strength and conditioning workout rooms um and also uh you know really talk with their friends but with this thought it was really planned so students can prepare for the upcoming fall season um and it's a great opportunity

094that you know we wanted to catch these students during summer because we know during the pandemic um there was a lot of um i could say that you know students lost maybe some of their physical activity so this is just an added effort for students in grade 9 through 12 um to have a place to go the dates of this program will be july 12 through august 20th at multiple high schools across the district next slide please my brother's keeper um so dr fatima morale and her team are very excited to have this program back um and it'll be in person at mckinley the dates of this program will be july 26 through august 7th from 9 9 a.m to 3 p.m uh in the theme this year for mbk is stancofa and that means

095learning from past and building the future um so with that said they will have multiple opportunities uh during this program for mentoring they will be going on field trips and also have leaders skip shows leadership skills development enrollment of this program is from the schools below and you must be a rising seventh or eighth grader to attend and this program does continue um from the months of october to march uh during the regular school year on saturdays um and in some of our after-school programs at these schools next slide please so the next programs i'll be speaking about um are cte programs so the two programs you see here are housed at the bennett campus um the first one is the middle early college program this is in conjunction with buffalo state college and during

096this program ninth and tenth grade students have the opportunity to take um physical education to take that um and get the credit by taking physical education during the summer this allows students to um earn the credit and during by their senior year they would have more time on the college campus for 11th grade students they are afforded the opportunity to take two college classes so that is the potential of six college credits um and then that also equates to one high school history for credit um that would be towards their college graduation or the high school graduation and then to qualify you just have to be a current 9 through 11 student the research lab um their program is in conjunction with the university at buffalo um and angela collins are very excited um this

097year that she'll be in be able to invite uh ninth graders from last year because of the pandemic they did not have the program so the enrollment for this upcoming year will include the incoming uh ninth graders and the current ninth graders this gives the opportunity for incoming ninth graders to really see what her program offers on the school programs offers um that focuses on re research community partnerships and project based learning next slide please okay the next four programs are our cte programs for all of these programs um to be eligible you must have applied for the mayor's summer youth internship program the programming must also align with their cte coursework and the hours that they work at the specialty programs will go towards the their cte um they need 54 hours as a

098requirement those hours will count so our first program is the buffalo school of culinary arts and hospitality management um and that will run from july 6 to august 20th students will be able to work um in the culinary field so yes they get the experience of culinary but they also get the soft skills of you know communicating with customers running a restaurant so i think that's really important as well we're giving the students the opportunity to actually be in the workforce and the next program is similar which is the underscore emerson school of hospitality um which really hit is the same alignment the kids are getting the same experiences for culinary but also getting that um you know work experience that goes a long way next slide please the northland program is actually run at

099that campus and that will run from july 12 to august 20th this program is divided into five modules representing the programs offered um which is uh electrical machine tool technology uh and welding again to be enrolled in this program you need to um and muscle line with your cte coursework the next program is the amp program also known as the advanced manufacturing program and this is in collaboration with alfred state students in the morning will receive academic enrichment and math and then in the afternoon that's when mechanics comes into play um machine tool operating and welding next slide and lastly um you know this is this the summer school planning is really a labor of love there's a lot of departments that we're working with on a regular basis and we can't see enough about

100the it department food service transportation and the student support team and that's where we are working on our health health and safety protocols um with this said right now we know that we are addressed on the most up-to-date information so as of right now these are just um some of the protocols that we have in place and we're still developing them as summer school gets closer so we will continue um for our uh daily protocols for cleaning will remain in effect we will have a nurse at each school um we think that this is is is very important and necessary to run successful summer school and the medical team will continue to monitor the poverty data um and have students and staff who have consented we will have the isolation or cares room at each

101school so we just want to make sure that you know the student is contact with covet or is symptomatic um that they have a place to go and we keep everyone safe daily um students and staff who report to the buildings will be screened and we will continue uh to wear masks indoors dr cash today has sent a updated um guidance on this and within the next two weeks we you know we we determined that we will update the summer school protocols and lastly um we're just going to really monitor and update the guidance as needed um as just stated next slide and on the slide is an email so that email at summerschool at buffaloschools.org we answer an email um that's just related to summer school like we think that gives families easy access

102and is easy to remember um in addition there is a phone number um that is the extended learning time department phone number and then at the bottom is the website that gives information on all the programs for vps that we're offering during summer and campus time thanks very much um we're going to open up to questioning but i just want to double check um correct me if i'm wrong but the the specialty programs you referenced at certain high schools only students at the schools are eligible for those programs correct that's correct thank you thank you colleagues well done thank you mr herd thank you um at this time i'll open up to um for questions and answers i'm sure that um it might be a couple of questions already and i have a hand raise

103from uh mrs jennifer mccosey hi everybody um i do have a question and unless i missed it in the presentation i noticed that any athletic sports related um strengthening conditioning is only geared towards seventh grade students to 12. i'm wondering what's available if anything unless it's available during the learning in our pre-k through sixth grade you know for their health and wellness as well um again everybody has been kind of cooped up in the house and we do have you know folks that really need to get back out and about um and it's hard right now with little leagues not being able to form due to the covet and different things that our students are really used to so i'm wondering how are we you know addressing the uh you know you mentioned fun and

104all these different activities and cheering and all that like that applies all the way down the line so i'm just really curious as to the offerings of that and thank you miss plum and because i really was wondering you know some of those schools that particularly middle college when it said that it was just those folks that were enrolled because i know they can only take on so many students at a time and you know that's actually what they do it's why they are who they are is that ninth and tenth graders you know do most of their physical activity and what not in the first two years to open that up so i didn't see that as a a summer enrichment program that's actually the curriculum and the and the how middle college works

105so i i was confused as to why that was you know listed as a summer program okay um well to answer your question briefly um there is a physical education component to our pre-k6 program because we recognize and we've heard feedback that you know kids have been um they haven't been as engaged as they might have been in physical activity in the past so we wanted to make sure we addressed that during the pre-k 6 program so those opportunities will be provided to kids and i'm just going to ask tara briefly talk about a couple of the other things that they've added for enrichment in pre-k6 because i know she's really been busy bringing on partners to support us yeah um so for enrichment um we will be focusing on we actually have fun theme

106weeks planned um for the kids so we want them to be engaged coming to school um so the first week um that we have is going to be the race to reading and that's where we want to incorporate the mayor's summer reading challenge um and then we have different enrichment plans throughout the week and on friday we're having um the plan is to have kids come dressed up against their favorite character um so throughout the week they'll be building community throughout the theme week so the first week will be the race to reading um the second week will be a steam week uh we know that uh kids love to be hands-on doing coding um so the science department has taken on that uh curriculum to create um and they are running with it doing

107a great job uh the third week that we plan to offer is called around the world um so this gives kids an opportunity um you knew to build community within their uh classroom telling them about themselves and learning about each other and then the fourth week will be called citizenship um so that will give an opportunity for students to always be doing the right thing sharing with how they contribute to their community um so those are just some of the theme weeks that we have um in addition to um when we're speaking about encores um we really are i'm a sports person i i believe that you know really um the competitiveness the the the teamwork that's involved um so we are offering pe that will be at least two times a week um in

108addition we're going to have world languages which we plan to offer spanish um we'll also be incorporating art weekly and music so we didn't want to lose sight of the encore subjects um and we are having acceleration but those things are important as well and we do recognize that i just wanted to follow up those those theme weeks are amazing and i can see how that would definitely enrich who my son will be attending and i'm excited about that but i also because he's in um virtual learning right now i've noticed within his school in many schools that uh now because it's hard to do virtual learning for physical education and for those teachers to be able to address the in-person students and now the virtual learners don't log in they basically are just given

109assignments to kind of do it so i just i'm really concerned about making sure that the physical education if it's only a couple days a week that it's as robust as it would be for the athletic programs that we're offering the seven to twelve-year-olds and however that happens i understand it's all work in progress and like just putting that concern out there because oh alex can definitely use some uh some more physical education in his life thank you thank you okay thank you uh miss mccosy i do have another hand raised at city hall the mr larry scott thank you mr hurd um i just want to first say i think what you presented tonight is just really a wonderful array of programs for our students um to choose from um and i i think

110it's certainly necessary given what we've been through the past year so i commend you on on all of the the options and programs that have been uh created and my i think my question couple questions um as far as registration for summer school goes with bps some parents have re received the registration forms and have sent them in and i've seen some i'm wondering when they're going to hear back about you know whether that that registration has been accepted and similar to um what board member mccosey um expressed in the past we did have um sports camps and some art camps for younger students and i know some parents have reached out inquiring about whether those would be options with younger children um so just want to express that i think there is that need

111for just sports and art for the younger students um so i'll tackle your first question mr scott um so we are sending letters directly to families after they register and it's been accepted um that will come from tara is that coming directly from your department yes that's correct it'll just give them information about um the the exact details about you know boss and that type of thing so they should be receiving confirmation they may not have received yet though because we've still been accepting um the applications they're still in process and 9 to 12 is just going out so they would not have received those yet so forthcoming then i'll let parents know um and then i think the other question i had last question you have many more programs added to what was initially

112shared with us and what's on the website will those be added is there somewhere else that for example the sports camps if a parent wants to now register for that sports camp are those going to be added to what we currently have yes so as things are finalized the links are going up on the website okay that is all for me thank you thank you okay um thank you uh the next hand who have raised is um sharon belton common thank you uh staff for your presentation and your thorough job with our summer school i am interested in knowing what is going to be presented in september to us after we have had summer schools schools what type of uh student outcome are you going to be able to provide to show that there has

113been growth amongst our students so i guess what i'm asking is are you testing the children when they come in or how are you going to be able to do this because one of the first things out of the gate is that i hope that this board will be in september is about student focus outcomes moving forward if we are serious about changing this district and so i'm curious to know what will what what will it look like um in september well let me i agree let me say something about that so first of all we're going to talk about the students that enroll and participate fully right so it's a it's again as we said from the beginning it's a bargain this is what the district is going to provide and do and this

114is what the parent needs to do and what the child needs to do and if they do that then the bargain is met and we'll see progress and we will have ways to measure and assess that problem free and post but it's not acceptable to enroll and then not participate in the six weeks or participate for one week and then skip a week and then come another time and then maybe that this day and then that day another day so you know when i when i was gonna you you get involved in something my parents said you don't quit you stay with it if you're gonna enroll you're gonna be part of it you're gonna be on a team then you don't quit you stay with it and so that's one of the expectations i

115expect as part of the bargain from our parents from our students that summer programming will only be as effective for you to the extent that you stay with it and that you study and participate and get what is intended from it and then i think it'll be very rewarding uh now having said that uh mrs cottman's question is a good one and every year we provide some kind of assessment about who was enrolled where they were before they enrolled and what they were able to achieve and grow after the six-week four-week program what are your plans on the evaluation of our summer programs that's what's being asked here how will we evaluate it and how will we present and report out about it so preconceived there's a pre and post test in place for english

116and math uh the i have to double check say levanta but i know for sure jumpstart also has a pre and post test um the esy program is is part of their um uh their csv work their iep so that is they measure that work consistently um the seven and eight and nine to twelve programs will be looking to see which students successfully complete the program and nine to twelve specifically they would be earning the credit so that would be very important for us again we'd be looking at participation attendance that type of thing for all the programs and we'll look to see if students who are there longer are more successful than other students well the arts programs there's not necessarily a measure that we're using so much as the product so the kids

117will be doing a performance or they'll be creating the mural um so every program is a little bit different but it's important to us that we are looking for success thank you um so uh in regards to what dr cash was saying uh do you think it might be uh wise uh or or um to provide a some sort of a contract between the parent and the students and the school district that sets the expectations of what we are expecting to do in some sort of a commitment that was done some time ago and um uh i think that it allows the parents to understand what is expected of them and what we're going to do and what the requirements are and i'm wondering if um that um that initially if we if we go

118do that extra step if we might not have higher x uh higher completion and higher expectations because oftentimes what we see with our summer program is that we have a robust start and then toward the end we see that it it it fades and i want parents to understand that exactly what you said dr cash that it's a bargain and if we do this and you do that then we should be able to come out with some with some great results but if you don't do this don't expect the same you know outcomes so how you know that's just something i'm throwing out there that if it's you know there's not a contract or at least some expectations that are uh guidelines or things that are put in place up front so that people can

119understand what's going on here that what's your your piece of this commitment what your piece of this pie is yeah i wonder what you think about that i like that i i think colleagues and president common that contracts have been around for a long time and i don't know if you've used them before but i like them uh they sort of set out a um an agreement if you will pretty clearly written it's not very long four or five bullets and then you sign you sign the student signs and the parent signs um so i like contracts i think you should consider that tara and and and then number two i like incentives as well i like incentives um i heard tara say that each week there will be sort of a theme that would

120be an enrichment theme uh in the camps and so you could have an incentive for each week you know attendance uh participation uh you know other other variables and at the end a wide number of students will get in incentives whether it be uh computer peripherals you know headphones and uh applicate learning applications that they can put onto their uh device um and then at the end maybe even a new computer uh can be an incentive for the for the family or for the child fully loaded with educational materials and books uh online and you know so that it just keeps you engaged it keeps you motivated incentives are good i don't want you sneakers or you know clothing and things like that but educational related things uh are really really um kids like it

121and they like to to compete for it pizza parties uh things like that so there are a lot of things you can do to keep kids engaged and miss commons right start with the contract incentivize along the way and then at least as a district we would have done everything we could do to try to keep the children uh involved and engaged thank you those are all great um i do also want to just share with you that we changed our process this year a little bit more in line with what mrs cottman is saying so in the past we allowed schools to register students and we sometimes found that the school would assume the student was coming but the student hadn't necessarily committed this year we asked families to register their students so the

122school sent the forms home and asked for the schools the students to commit to the program so we're hopeful that that will give us a little bit more along what you're talking about mrs cottman with that that sense of commitment because you've registered your student but we can definitely look at some of the other ideas you shared yeah i'd like you to do that thank you so much you're getting a double request there uh and you can imagine which one don't matter most to you okay thank you um uh great great answers we still have another hand raise of dr anne rivera do you have the floor this is very quick because actually miss cottman and dr cash you just answered my question which is how are we going to address educational fatigue and i

123think i just want a second that i like the idea of contracts i like learning contracts a lot as well as incentives i think that's going to help and that giving parents that support about how to work with their students too to keep them moving forward is a really great thing it's nice to see moving in that direction thank you that's a great suggestion dr rivera thank you and we still we have another question by dr kathy evans brown yeah yes thank you i just have an observation i know i used to run a reading program what was one of the first um initiatives under the say yes initiative years ago and what i found was that the parents we had the contract and the and we had the incentives because every friday we had

124a field trip but what i found was parents like the idea of an extended summer so say for example if you start at 8 o'clock to 12 then we got funding from erie county to do a 12 to 5. so it was an all day program and we didn't have a problem with absenteeism and so i like the idea and that you presented that there's an after uh a 12 30 program that start so if kids are in the 9 to 12 program they can also participate in the um athletic component whatever that was i think was a sports related program from 12 30 to 3 30 and so you know the parents need to be accommodated also throughout the day a 9-12 is great but they also um like that all day kind of

125thing because they're working and kids will come understood thank you um dr kathy evans brown i have another hand raised once again by sharon belton cottman thank you so i wanted to go back to and i'm pleased to see that the high schools have have all high schools are opening uh to summer school this year that's my understanding of what i saw my concern however um is that with the amount of money that we received why aren't we opening the the schools to the children for each school to start in the summer to start moving their children forward to september this to me looks like what we normally would receive um uh during a year where we did not have uh an extra or an abundance of money and what i'm thinking about is is

126that if the parents or the teachers are allowed to work with the children over the summer how powerful that is going to be when september rolls around and because we have the ex funds i don't understand why we did not open up the the uh theater schools as well do you understand what i'm saying i mean do you understand where i'm coming from with this because this typically is how we would normally do it in a year where we did not have an abundance of funding yeah but we talked about that yeah let me say i'm particularly concerned about the schools that i have the higher higher needs uh need students and who have been underperforming taking them out of their environment and moving them into different environments i'm really concerned about that we did

127not uh do a um a more aggressive approach to our uh um our um up to our sixth graders i'm just you know i really am really uh the money that came into this district we did not expand that exposure my money is tricky it's not just about money you you we have to sign we still haven't signed an agreement with btf they they have to sign off on this one with the high school so that we can have the high school teachers teaching in their high school and that's innovative from what we've done before so that was designed to take advantage of what you're talking about with keeping kids on track to graduation keeping them on track with the credits and so forth so that's high school i asked the asls for elementary whether

128that would be something that we should do for for uh elementary schools and there became some logistical issues there became some fatigue issues quite frankly uh as dr rivera brought up you know staff are also tired and a lot of staff principals principal teams teachers they're looking for the first time in more than a year of trying to spend time with their family trying to get some rest and refresh and so forth so it would it would be a a lot of folk that would have to agree to do it at every school for the number of students that are going to be involved so that those considerations were hashed out and talked about extensively at cabinet um not very much frankly that we don't really think about and think about deeply so and if

129you have any further comments and asl you're on the line if you want to respond for your elementary colleagues let me know and i would just add that um we do our best when we staff to make sure that if a teacher works at a particular building that they try to get assigned there for the summer and we would also they would be with many of their own students for example at 97 um the program is housed there we would try to assign teachers who applied from 97 to that building but we would probably run into some staffing issues um if we housed it at every single uh of the 40 elementaries i'm not sure if we would have enough um teaching staff able to well we're pretty sure our principles were clear about it

130the asls were clear about it so that was a big challenge big issue uh another issue though that doesn't have to be a negative because it's not how many teachers are teaching the kids at every school because if you had the same teacher in summer that it wasn't effective with you during the year then you don't want that one of the questions and uh strategies that i asked the staff to look into was uh getting some of our uh most effective trying to recruit uh some of our most effective teachers in say seventh grade math uh eighth grade english fourth grade uh writing in ela to do it at a hub where then the kids could be virtual and in person and you you would you could still get get that good teacher you know

131that top performing teacher in terms of making uh progress with kids in a year and that's some of the mou pieces that we were trying to work out so you guys it's it's more to it than just uh you know having having everybody all on deck i want i want the best people on deck that can move students quickly in a short amount of time and that's what the high school principals are going to try to do they're going to go and try to get their best teachers to to teach in the summer school uh to help kids catch up and make up ground uh for their credit so that that's what's important to consider here colleague okay so how many children are we planning on servicing um in these pro in our programs do

132we have a breakdown of that so i don't have a number is it rolled how many 2700 are enrolled so far across the spectrum uh and we're and we're gonna have a rolling fluid uh enrollment until everyone understands what's available uh we still have a make sure we translate into all the languages at least the top seven and could continue to get deeper with our communication about exactly what's open so we'll be having those uh rolling enrollments right up through july one so what is your capacity what is the capacity so we have 2 700 right now in the pre-k6 program but we can handle more students if additional families choose to enroll so we can add classrooms at the schools that exist and if we needed to we could add an additional hub um

133remember they're still enrolling at the seven to twelve so i don't have numbers for that yet what what are you doing and then i'm gonna let tara try to answer that one but then the issue with 7 to 12 is kids are still they don't have their final grades yet so there were just some projections we don't have solid numbers at this point there's also the say yes summer camp over a thousand students there as well at the pre at the k-6 levels so when we look at it in its entirety we're actually serving a lot of students a lot i want a percentage because here's what my concern is okay when i looked at this program i looked to see was ferry district did we have any any um schools opening in my district

134uh for the uh pre-k through six okay the answer was no okay and so um you know i see the ellicott i see south district i see north district i see east district i don't see ferry district okay and so when we start talking about equity and providing resources for children and we don't make sure that all of our districts have an opportunity to be represented that's a concern for me as a ferry district representative and as i went through the second list trying to see was very represented again for the grades seven through eight okay the answer was no theory is not listed in there now that may be just a coincidence or whatever but if we're gonna start being fair and start making sure that we start doing things in an equitable way

135those are questions in my opinion that should be able to be addressed okay and should be addressed before it comes before the board and so that's what my concern is is that my district okay does not have any pre-k through six programs or grades seven through eight doctor cash okay i agree if that's not the case if that's the case then let's answer that that needs to get answered so straighten that out for if there's an asl on the line uh terror who you've been working with and by the family talk okay so um to ann's point we started with schools that had air conditioning however we did not stop there what we are doing now is we are continuing to collect the uh enrollment documents from families and we've already discussed the fact that

136we may be opening up a couple more hubs we just have to make sure that we have the teachers who are available to teach in those spots we already have principles lined up people ready to go and i and and i have to assure you miss cotton one of those schools is absolutely in the ferry district at least one of them so um yeah so to your point we do see that there is a challenge there however one of the bigger issues is that particularly because of the pandemic and keeping the children in the building during this heat we wanted to make sure that we were we placed our babies in buildings that had air conditioning first but as we get overflow we will open up more buildings and at least one of them is

137in the ferry district well i certainly need to make sure that when you guys are planning that you plan equitably for all districts and in fairness and moving forward i and you know i have been this this is nothing new for me dr wright i have always talked about this from day one and you know when i see things like this being done i have to really wonder if i have to keep my guys up okay on a regular basis when i feel that we put our equity resolution in place and that somewhere along the line there should be equitable access for all children and in the district absolutely well stated okay um hold on hold on how did we get it's just a question sharon you were you were here how did we get

138no schools in the ferry district that were at that were air conditioned guess what that's what got to finish when we when we had an opportunity to do one the first school that was supposed to be done the decision was made to do the child's juice school okay and so they they could move the resources or over to um uh charles drew that was supposed to go into the ferry district it's not a coincidence that ferry has always been slighted when i first came on the board the record will reflect that dr uh williams stated that that every high school in theory was supposed to be closed and that we had the lowest performing teachers who in in in the ferry district so you know this overlook if you take a look at what has

139happened with ferry we had at school 89 we had high performing special ed classes all of those classes were removed and put in the north and south buffalo there's been a pattern here and this is why i'm looking forward to be able to sit back as a board member and start advocating for my district and not have to be the face of this board okay i'm looking forward to that because in fairness to ferry okay if we hadn't if i had not been uh uh on my soapbox and fighting we would not have gotten the innovative high schools that we ended up with over the years because they were sheltered all those schools were shut to close that's the first thing the superintendent told me when i sat down with them okay yeah but i

140i made sure that they didn't go tonight so i'm saying we appreciate you bringing it up um i don't uh want to see any district not have at least a hub in the element for the for an elementary school at least one we only have what six seven districts uh in the in the city so so let's make sure that everyone has at least one summer school that's going to be open and if we don't have air condition get get the fans and get all these things that we need but there were some considerations dr rice write that we didn't want kids uh in the heat or in some of these schools that is it's already becoming that's a good point it's already become oppressive that's a good point that's a good point yeah so

141we're going to give you some extra money maybe we can get some fans this year hallelujah let's go buy them right now before they all off the shelf we don't get air conditioned thank you dr cass all right um thank you um i believe that i can speak for myself that uh i am in agreement with uh sharon bill and cotton and um addressing those needs and um and see equity in our in our district uh we do have one more hand raised um are you still you are still raised on paulo miss woods uh yes i just wanted to know if school 17 was under consideration for a summer program um or is is that a problem because it doesn't have air conditioning or whatever yeah um there were multiple factors that we looked

142at and we tried when we could not to use a pre-k-4 building um because there were fifth and sixth graders in some cases we did have to but that was one of the things that we did think about okay because i'm getting texas i'm getting tested i'm sorry but i'm getting texts from constituents asking about that so what what are the what are the considerations that um ruled out 17 you're saying um and then just another consideration um we took into account school size um so already when we were putting schools um you know hugging them we already had to move one school to another site just to make sure because of cobit that we're not um over capacity so another consideration was the size of the building for um summer school well certainly mrs

143woods you have quite a few schools in your district that i opened up so 17. i i have six i have school six and i have school ninety-nine but yeah listen i really love the open discussion we're way over time so i would like to just um um ask a couple of quick questions so that we can get through um one question i have a concern is about transportation how does transportation be handled to uh to go into the schools for uh i guess um from pre-k all the way to twelfth grade pre-k six there's yellow bus service and then i believe the seven to twelve programs all have nfta transportation okay thank you so much thanks so much and i do really um appreciate appreciate you guys for uh holding off to the end

144to present and allowing for the family justice center and uh and uh dr um everly to um to uh present because they have because of time restraints um last thing is um i would love to really pay attention to the mbk program and student voice throughout the summer and just listen to those voices because the students tell a lot and they have a great understanding of you know what's needed in their district and their schools and we shall also just take time to listen to the students throughout this um now through the summer program are we receiving tablets or pads for our students for our social learning needs they will be keeping the devices that they currently use during the school year other students are having this collected back but if you're enrolling in one

145of our summer programs you'll be keeping your device until the end of the program okay and will libraries be accessible to students during this time period um i'm going to let tara answer that but i believe so yes we'll be accessible um and then we also plan to use mayan when we're inside the classroom the digital platform okay thank you thank you thank you i know a lot of our programs are generate uh having our kids read out of books now they want kids to read from books and that's been a way that things been going across the country now but for always looking at you know uh a port where kids that give stigma to us stigmas and their eyes from looking at the tablets for so long yet you know every single day

146and getting that doctor and said what about fatigue and mr hurd we are having the bookmobile um is going to be visiting our pre-k through six sites um so we do have a date for all of our sites for the bookmobile oh that's wonderful that's wonderful thank you and i'll also like to pay attention to the art program also are we are we um looking at musical instruments in our program with students this summer are we practicing that any kind of way i thought i saw some end of program theatrical performances or something that michelle augusto was planning anybody have any want to expand on that it depends it depends on the program uh at the high school level some kids might be recovering a credit in music um at the elementary level there is

147music as part of the enrichment component michelle's program is a performance i believe for woke words um so it would just it's a little different for everything programs different different we can have some type of um um information sent to us about the about the music program i've received a lot of messages about music and uh how it's going to be illustrated throughout the district and how we can get more kids at this time we normally don't have a music program in these schools to um be introduced to music or to a musical instrument or something like that and how we can propel that that initiative so uh so those are my questions and my thoughts um i i know that you guys been in a number of meetings over the last two months and

148and getting ready for this and also working with the um say yes program and their uh summers program uh i just like to say thank you to the administrative staff members that so digitally put this together under caches leadership and um and actually to have the insight to um to look at all these different programs and and apply these programs and actually make them work and make them happen so i'm grateful for that and i'm sure the city of buffalo is going to convince you guys for the work that you're doing i don't think that nobody other schools here that can push the type of um uh education that that we're pushing right now thank you thank you we appreciate it that concludes the educational support committee meeting um particularly about an hour and a

149half over uh but um i'd like to turn it right now over to our kathy edmunds brown thank you board member heard so under the student achievement component this evening our focus is special education and we also have a representative from cpac lisa watson will follow the special ed presentation dr cash yes thank you i want to release tara i know she's done a great job but she doesn't have to stay on so enjoy the evening tara and thank you so much again thank you for your hard work thank you okay um colleagues tonight we have an important topic as always to talk about whenever we talk about our special education program um i've i've always sort of thought that the term was was outdated uh i think that all of our programs should be

150about about special education every child is special but having said that we are moving toward a becoming a diverse equity diversity equity and inclusion a dei district dei district and so the mindset around students with disabilities and special education needs to continue to be advanced and be progressive state-of-the-art language languaging and then of course programming now to that end we know that we always have work to do there's always more improvement to make improvement is a way of life in education but we have some really excellent people in this area of special education and so kim holcer in her inimitable way is going to only present a few slides with a few words on them but she will have a trove of information to share so she's going to be voicing over a lot of

151these slides and then of course when board members have questions or comments she'll be able to take those and go into great depth but we just didn't want to put everything that she could share with you all into slides so as as is our custom now we have about five or six slides we'll go through those and then we will open up for questions but we also have a young lady dr kathy evan brown who i believe you asked to come and share with us who is the i believe she's the chairman woman of the cpac and so we're glad to have her with us this evening um and so you may want to make a decision uh for her about the order in which you'd like us to present we're fine if you'd like

152to have a cpac presentation first uh and then we can come with a with our special education program as a courtesy to our guest your call uh dr er ruthier what do you think she and dr rivera and i put this together i think um this was my opinion i think the district should go first kim um followed by cpac because that's the office i guess the offspring so to speak of um parent uh committee what do you think okay the parent association oh parents parents okay dr rivera what are your thoughts as long as i would like to consult with ms watson i want to be respectful of her time i'm fine with that as long as she has time to stay with us through the presentation i would ask though if we could

153have if we choose to do that if ms watson is fine with that we have the district presentation and then she follows up right after and we'll take questions afterwards ms watson my thoughts if you if i could my thoughts are that miss watson go first give her presentation and then miss holster can in her presentation uh maybe address or amplify or build upon or um you know lift up as uh some of you say miss watson's uh work so i would i would like to see miss watson first and then the district ms swanson are you prepared i am prepared okay so you have the floor not sure we can hear you yeah you're breaking up for some reason all right is that better that's better okay so we just have two uh brief

154points that we wanted to share just in terms of the perspective of parents and how it fits into special education um we do work hand in hand with um kim holster that whole team and um we just wanted to give our thoughts within these two brief points one being um the need to build trust for families for sped families and then the second being um open communication so i'll just start off by uh saying that you know the need to build trust for our families is um paramount uh one of the um one of the concerns that parents do have is that because of the sensitive nature of the information that is shared within a group setting because of the communication that happens between parents and uh school staff and so forth we're looking for

155a level of sensitivity that's not necessarily um doesn't necessarily have to be present with um you know other students with general education students so our circumstances involve sensitive information um sometimes embarrassing circumstances because of the behaviors of our children and so forth and um information has to be shared with the school that's not even shared with some of our own other family members and so because of that we just need uh the the district as a whole to understand that this is an emotional process for us and and while we know that we're in school to learn um that is the the primary reason that we're there but um parents need assurances that that their children are being taught as well as care for with regard to their personal needs not just the the needs

156and consideration of policies and procedures and so forth but we're just um adamant about the need to build trust and relationships with the entire team um it's important that everyone involved everyone who has contact with our children are aware that our needs are indeed um just as described that they're special and this means everyone from the bus aides to the custodians to the teachers everyone that's involved so um any any uh anything that can be done i should say to uh make sure that uh training for understanding the needs of our children on an individual basis is very important to us and um we just need to make sure that there's that there is no um breakdown in communication that there is um no disconnect with um what goes on in our families on a

157very personal level and it's important that uh that the schools understand that for our students it's not always academics first and because of the emotional needs um we just would like that to be recognized and then secondly in terms of communication i'll just say that um cpac members have expressed that we are um satisfied for the most part in in the fact that communication has improved um we feel that there have been some improvements with regard to the way uh we've received information um we especially noticed that the um code of conduct was um updated um some of our members expressing a facebook live uh session where that was covered and those types of things are obviously appreciated and we'd like to see more of that but ideally because we are in a virtual world

158we feel like we need more um virtual updates we need them to be more timely um we need them to be more clear we need more clarity on what each school offers if we can go to the website of a school and see the changes that have been made so that we can make better informed decisions for our children particularly make decisions so that our children are in a best fit situation that we're not just being placed in a school that might not work for one child's needs over another uh i know that um from from what we understand you know a school might have a 611 or 8-1-1 program one year and not have that same program another year so if that information can be um disseminated to us in a way where we

159can make an informed decision understand uh that process how it works understand what um teachers are going to be involved with caring for our children their background because again this is all about building trust and building relationships and so we feel that we need a strong relationship and that means being able to um trust each other to be able to partner uh with the school and with the teams and you know every every person that's on that team so um parents need to stay informed um we um definitely want to be able to um have a strong and open communication with everyone that's on the team um timely updates for on these websites would be paramount for us with more defined information about who's involved and um just ultimately the understanding that um because we

160have sensitive information and needs that are considered special we would appreciate just being able to build those relationships um in a more positive way and of course in connection um with the school with the board with everyone that is involved thank you thank you miss watson yeah that was excellent very well articulated and uh we greatly appreciate that we greatly appreciate that miss dr evan brown um would you like us to to segue into that i think and then have a good discussion at the end i think that'll work well i agree okay so again thank you miss watson those those are very uh excellent um aims or goals to to to improve upon all right so kim with and you supporting uh certainly you heard those and you can build them into uh the

161presentation that i know you've already developed and i think that can be a helpful discussion afterwards kim great thanks dr cash and thank you lisa i appreciate all of those that feedback and um good evening to all the board members and to everyone on the call tonight um i appreciate the opportunity to be here presenting with you and discussing discussing special ed which is my passion so i'm very excited to be here with you um if we could have the special ed presentation up admir and board members we did send these slides to you to your personal email so you should have those as well thank you so um obviously tonight is our presentation on special education next slide please i don't know if i'm able to change the slides at all i don't think

162i am kim the idea here is that special education uh is across the board it relates to all of our work so we didn't put a circle around any one button here we see it as part of all of our high level strategies here that you see here thank you definitely we want to make sure our work is aligned to all of this my my screen didn't change at first for some reason so i apologize for that um yes we want to make sure all of our work is aligned to all of this next slide please so um we have highlighted many areas that align with on the student success plan in our work certainly enhancing programming for special education students is paramount for us but so are things like um developing and supporting the

163delivery of instruction and programming that meets the needs of all students because our work does really affect gen ed students as well as specialized students because we do have the desire to to get students and meet their needs where they're at so that we can provide interventions and actually have less referrals to special education because we're meeting the needs of students in general education settings next slide please so tonight i thought what i would do as i'm discussing the regulations that drive special education is really talk about the cse process through the eyes of a parent i know that cpac is here tonight and that there may be parents who are watching so i thought it would be helpful if we use that lens to present um in to one of lisa's points one of

164the things i'm very excited about is i know that parents do need to hear from us a little bit more and um would just like more opportunities to see what is going on in schools and with the special ed process so to that end we are developing a video library that will be available to parents it will probably take us you know through the course of this upcoming school year as well as into the next to get it all done but we are looking at having short videos about the cse process in all the situations that are really unique to special ed so those short video clips can be watched by parents at any time as well as staff members at any time i had brought this up to a reopening committee yesterday and they're

165also helping with providing some suggestions of what some of those topics may be and who may be some presenters we may have students present some of these videos parents principals so we can lend a lot of perspective to this so i'm going to talk a little bit about the regulations and what the process is if a student is referred to special ed so the initial eligibility for a student is when a parent or a special ed administrator makes a referral to special education those are the only people in our district who are allowed to make that direct referral is a parent or a special ed administrator anyone else a teacher a school sometimes we get doctors who write letters can make a request for that referral when a referral is requested the school is required

166to submit a student intervention record or what we call a sur packet to the cse and that gives the cse or the committee on special education the opportunity to consider all the response to intervention data to determine if this referral to special education really meets the criteria for a referral to special ed according to the regulations has to state the reasons for the referral including test results records reports any data based upon which the referral is made it has to describe in writing the interventions in programs or instructional methodologies used to remediate student performance prior to that referral ever happening and must also discuss the extent of parental contact or involvement prior to referral so if we get a request for referral we make sure that all those things are in place before we actually

167move it on to a referral if a parent makes a referral the process is very similar but it is already considered a referral and the process begins however we still require the school to fill out that same surpacket so that we have intervention data on all tiered interventions as for academics as well as behavior so that we can determine if there was a behavior support plan in place if needed and that we have a minimum of six to eight weeks of data to go on so we look at background information academic progress information and we consider all of that and use that data as part of our csc referral and meeting when the referral is made and we initiate the process we have 10 school days from that receipt of referral to actually call the

168parent and discuss the availability of interventions that we may want to put in place in gen ed first so we don't necessarily move every referral on directly to the committee before we have that conversation because many times there are things we can do in gen ed first to meet the needs of the students that we may not have tried yet parents often oftentimes have wonderful input into what might work for their student we want to consider all of that before we move on to the referral at that point after that conversation with the parent if the parent wants to go on with the referral we do that if not we would draw that referral letting the parent know that we certainly can come back to the table and refer that child at any time in

169the future if the referral is not withdrawn the cse chair collaborates with the student support team and they did and the staff in the school the students teacher to determine what is going to be done with that evaluation uh what types of evaluations will be done do we need to do an evaluation for speech or related services do we need a counseling evaluation that is all that information is provided in a pwn or a prior written notice that informs the parent of all the actions that the district is going to propose to take we always have to do a physical exam as part of an initial evaluation a psychological eval except in some cases it may be determined that that's unnecessary we have to do a social history observe the student in the students learning

170environment and then any other appropriate assessments such as a related service evaluation we have a timeline that we have to follow to accomplish this it must be completed within 60 calendar days from the date that the parent consents to these evaluations there's a delineation in a lot of the regulations for special education between calendar days and school days so in this case we have 60 calendar days from the date we receive consent from the parent to complete those evaluations we then have 60 school days from that same date of receipt of consent to hold that meeting and to arrange for services for the child when we look at eligibility for special education we will not find a student eligible for services if the main factor with the students challenges are a lack of appropriate instruction

171in reading a lack of appropriate instruction in math or that they're limited english proficient if those factors enter in we cannot find a student eligible we would need to remediate in gen ed making sure they have the appropriate instruction that they need so that's kind of in a nutshell what happens with the initial referral process there's certainly a lot more um forms and different pieces that go with that but that kind of capsulates for you encapsulates for you what happens we also have annual reviews the cse must meet annually to reviews and to revise that iep and that has to be held within one year of the previous meeting at times we've held the end of review but amendments need to be made to a document that was when we would hold an amendment meeting

172and that simply changes something it could be something as simple as um a student was receiving services in ela for 60 minutes and we are changing that to 90 minutes or to 30 minutes so it's small things that need to change in that document without going into a a full-blown meeting and finally we have re-evaluations the student must be re-evaluated at least every three years according to the regs and at that time updated testing is completed as necessary that reevaluation requires parental consent but unlike an initial referral where we have to have a signed consent from the parent we can document attempts to get that consent from a parent and if the parent doesn't respond after several documented attempts usually three we can move ahead with that reevaluation we also have to complete a re-evaluation

173prior to declassifying a student and then we hold the meeting because those results must be discussed at a reevaluation meeting the continuum of services offered in the um district and i have to say we offer everything that is on that continuum i know in some of our surrounding districts that are smaller they are not able to offer what buffalo is able to offer but we offer everything that is on the continuum and we base our student groupings on similarity of need so we look at what is the least restrictive environment for that child is it consultant teacher where we provide indirect or direct services to students with disabilities who are in a regular ed classroom it may be related services where we know that a student has speech needs ot or pt needs counseling needs

174and we provide those some students require resource room resource room services have to supplement what is happening in regular or special education classrooms it cannot supplant that it has to be in addition to we offer integrated co-teaching which is the only thing on the continuum of services that is not required of a district but is strongly encouraged that a district offers we do firmly believe in integrated co-teaching we want students to remain in that gen ed environment whenever possible the difference between integrated co-teaching and consultant teacher services is that with integrated co-teaching it's actually a group of students working together with that special ed teacher and the gen ed teacher who are students with disabilities as well as students who are their non-disabled peers so with consultant teacher the group is only special ed with

175integrated co-teaching it's a mix of students with disabilities in their non-disabled peers and then we move on to special class and here the composition of the class is based on similarity of need we look at their academic and educational achievement their learning characteristics social development physical development and their management needs we have 15 to 1 classes where the students have academic needs where they need specialized instruction that can't be met in the gen ed environment 12-1 classes where their management needs both academic and behavioral interfere with the instructional process 811 classes where those management needs are more intensive so require a more significant degree of individualized attention and intervention than we can provide in other classes a six one one class where management needs are highly intensive requiring a high degree of individualized attention and

176then we have our 12 to one plus three to one classes those are the classes you see at school 84 where these students have severe multiple disabilities one of those being an intellectual disability there we have the teacher in the room and for every three students in that classroom we have another aid and we have our 1212 classes which are for our medically fragile students next slide please so in the division of special education we have two um arms so to speak the cse and program our cse arm has several different committees we have our school-based committee there are currently 6523 students with disabilities in the district we have 45 chairs who are grouped into teams and then assigned to schools to complete all of the cse actions for those schools as part of that

177team we also have five bilingual psychologists two bilingual social workers two speech coordinators nine speech evaluators a related service coordinator physical therapist occupational therapists all of whom are able to complete evaluations during that process our chairs talk with parents on the evaluators talk with parents all of the different evaluators the psychologists the social workers to speak to lisa's point that we really want to make sure we are addressing family needs and and considering with compassion all of the issues that a student may have and how emotional this may be for the parent and the family so we want to make sure that we're always addressing that in this process and the team really works hard to get parental input and to have those conversations with parents we i support you 100 percent lisa in that

178fact that communication is so important in this process we also have our agency team we um currently have 774 students in agency settings so we have a team of three chairs and two psychologists who have all the placement responsibilities and cse action responsibilities for these students we're responsible for non-district students and agencies as well if they attend a residential facility so we have three residential facilities that are located in our district baker gateway and connors so even if a student is from a surrounding district but is placed in one of those residential facilities we are responsible for the cse actions of those students so we service them as well our district committee has two chairs and one psychologist and one speech therapist the role of this committee is to work closely with our legal department

179and parents to resolve any issues that parents have with our process we typically average about 15 to 20 due process cases a year very few of our cases go to hearings in the past four years we have only had one case that has gone to a hearing all of the others we are able to resolve through resolution sessions just having cse meetings and discussions with the parent again the key to this part of our success with solving these cases is communication we talk with teachers we talk with the schools with outside agencies advocates and certainly parents and students are the most important people in this process that we talk to so that we're able to resolve any um complaints that the parent has any appeals that the parents have after um a cse meeting so

180we want to make sure that parents have that opportunity to have their voice made heard and that we can solve any issues they may have if a parent wants to request an appeal after a meeting they have 30 days after the cse meeting to request that appeal but it has to happen before the child accesses the recommended program that's for the regulatory piece the other piece of that is if a parent has issues and they miss those regulatory deadlines we still have an open line of communication and want to work with parents to address any concerns that they have so that we can meet their needs as well as the needs of their child our charter numpub office services the 1094 students with disabilities in charter schools as well as the 211 students who have

181disabilities who are in our non-pubs so we have six chairs and three psychologists and two social workers in this department that handle all the cse responsibilities there we currently have 1034 preschoolers with a disability unlike school age special education services where there are 13 different classification categories there is only one for preschoolers all preschoolers who need special education services are classified as preschoolers with a disability this program is a little bit different because the county is responsible for running the programs but it is the district who has cse responsibility we have seven chairs a psychologist a social worker who support all of these cse responsibilities so each student who receives these services has to also have a meeting um before their third birthday if they're in early intervening services so that we can refer them

182to the three and four-year-old programs so we hold all of those meetings as well placement um we have three coordinators there and part of the responsibility of placement is to place students when they have a change in programming via integrated co-teaching or special class or if a parent requests a transfer and is approved for that transfer into a different special class in a different school so there again when a student is offered a placement we try to give the parents as many choices as possible our placement coordinators work hard and diligently to reach those parents so that they can tell the parent what schools a particular program is offered in only if we cannot reach the parent do we make a decision of where we're going to place without parental input in that case we

183would then place the student in the school closest to the home where the student's needs can best be met but we do work diligently to make sure that we're communicating with parents and offer them choices whenever possible we also have some other services it's part of the cse division there is a coordinator of parent services vanessa guerra who takes parent concerns and works with them works with advocates um addresses any of the needs she can with parents will talk to me on a regular basis and bring any concerns oftentimes i will get involved in talking to the parents because we want to make sure we are reaching all the needs we have a coordinator in our department that addresses 504 needs we have a research aid because we know that data is so important in

184meeting the needs of the students and we also have um two psychologists in the chair who run our manifestation determination team which is the um committee that handles suspensions for students with disabilities next slide please the program division of special education focuses a lot on specially designed instruction which is really what the whole special education department is about providing instruction for students that meets their unique set of of learning concerns their unique learning needs it's really the unique set of supports provided to a student to make sure we are neat meeting and addressing all of their disability needs excuse me so we want to make sure we're removing any barriers that may result from a student's disabilities so it's it sounds very much like um differentiated instruction and it's very similar the difference between this

185and differentiated instruction is that we are targeting individual students in making sure we are addressing every one of their individual needs our program division focuses a lot of time and energy on professional development any pd that we've offered in person in the past actually was converted to asynchronous training in nearpod this year so that we could continue all of those trainings we did training on concurrent instructional strategies in a co-teaching classroom one of the trainings we developed was for all of our teachers on supporting skills development again putting some of our focus on pre-referral intervention so that we can meet the needs of our students before they are put in a special ed environment we have training on sdi especially designed instruction which i just spoke about on behavioral strategies because we know a lot

186of our students have behavioral needs on the implementation of behavior support plans high leveraged practices in special ed secondary transition services diploma credentials so we offer these trainings on these topics that are so important for teachers to understand so that we can meet the needs of our students we also have two special education coaches who support any teachers who need behavior with assistance with behavior or academics this year they did a lot of that support virtually certainly but um we also have in the past and will continue to and have started again going into classrooms to make sure we are actually in that room with embedded coaching in the classroom to make sure the students have this for the staff has the support they need to meet the students needs we are looking to hire

187two behavioral specialists in the department as well because we know that there are significant needs and will be more significant needs with our students returning from a very very challenging year so we want to make sure we're addressing that by hiring two behavioral specialists who can go into classrooms special classrooms where some of our behavior or our focus is behavior and assist those teachers in meeting the needs and also again before a student is referred to special ed if there's behavioral concerns working with the teachers so we can address those behavioral concerns pre-referral we also have a trans an autism task force which is a group of people that is made up of administrators teachers parents and outside organizations to discuss any concerns and issues around servicing our students with autism we brainstorm ways on

188that committee to improve the delivery of instruction for students with autism we develop pd and we're always looking at ways we can improve the program that is probably the area where we are growing the fastest is in our need for classes for students with autism we also have a transition committee we have quarterly meetings with this committee that we talk about all of the pieces of the iep and the program that relate to transition for students with disabilities to ensure that students are accessing all of our differentiated cte programs we have wonderful programs for our students in our 15 to one and twelve on one classes and are working to offer those supports to our students in six one one and eight one ones in the next couple of years we also realized that there

189was a need to make sure that our students that we place in agencies are graduating the agencies do not always have the same requirements or do not always consider the same classes as valuable classes i guess you could say for our students with disabilities that are housed there so we worked in conjunction with our guidance department to early on in the placement and agency of our 9th grade to 12th grade students having them send the transcripts and the guidance department works with the special education department to review all of the transcripts and credits of students and agencies to make sure they're on track to graduate and the classes that the agencies are providing are actually meeting their needs to earn credits by doing that we have greatly increased the number of students who are eligible

190for a diploma in an agency setting and finally staffing we have one katie wilbur who is um in charge of our um i'm sorry i'm gonna step away one second i just have to plug in my computer my apologies okay i'm sorry about that who works diligently to make sure that we have certified teachers in every special education classroom in ict positions which is no small task she works night and day to make sure that our classes are well staffed and works with hr closely to make sure we have paraprofessionals in place as well next slide please so over the course of covid we wanted to make sure we were still responding to the needs of our special ed students and still providing for a free oppo appropriate public education so to that end we

191developed district distance learning plans which were plans that we had teachers create to make sure that they were delivering specially designed instruction to students during the remote environment we provided a short asynchronous pd for teachers developed a checklist that included frequently asked questions and gave them forms with step-by-step directions so they would know how to create these distance learning plans as well as upload them into a child's folder to that end we were able to track during all of closure the distance learning plans of every teacher and to make sure that specially designed instruction was delivered for our students with disabilities we also had our psychologists and social workers create these distance learning plans or dlps to ensure that services were provided social emotionally as well we made sure they were doing counseling that they

192still did check and connect which is one of our tier 2 supports they checked in with students made sure that they were okay they did wellness checks they um still had some small group interventions with students who may have had some emotional concerns we also um documented on that form anything that they did for iep meetings evaluations they did social histories and we documented all of our parental contact as well we were also able to provide virtual therapy for our students during remote learning um i do have some data to share with you on that as well over the course of this year even though we were remote for a large part of it we still delivered 120 speech sessions 100 i'm sorry 120 000 speech sessions over 55 000 sessions of ot and almost

19315 000 sessions of pt so our virtual therapy really did continue throughout this whole process we developed reopening protocols to help schools with any concerns they had bringing students back or during remote learning this was also shared with parents at a cpap meeting and we did have on our website reopening protocols for parents as well our reopening subcommittee met many times 18 times to be exact over the course of closure and we discuss things such as the reopening protocols in-person related services remote meetings cfc meetings and the virtual library which i referenced earlier we were able to still provide assistive technology to our students as per their iep that assistive technology was actually things we delivered to the home or in some cases alternatives to that so for example if a student had a calculator

194on their iep as part of their assistive technology we were able to show them how to access a calculator on their computer we provided social emotional support i referenced most of that just a minute ago when i talked about the dlps for psychologists and social workers but they did call families they had office hours they provided counseling and in many cases they pushed into some of our encore classes to do social emotional groups they delivered food and supplies so we we really put a heightened awareness and sensitivity around meeting the social emotional needs of our students and families and finally we held virtual cse meetings all of our ars in our rehab that we did not need to do evaluations for were held and held in compliance throughout the whole process for our initial referrals

195we were able to speak with parents and in almost every case we were able to extend the timelines for these evaluations to take place so that we could do them as soon as we returned to in person we also developed and have used a collaboration portal where we were able to send all meeting notices iep consents any documents that we needed to get to parents through this collaboration portal parents were able to sign documents and return them and another way that we were able to communicate with our families and the next slide please so we have several new initiatives going on in our division the first one that i am so excited about is our student voice initiative in the fall we held meetings with our eighth grade 15 to one and twelve on one

196students virtual meetings and we discussed with them all of the options that were available to them in high schools for differentiated cte so programs like automotive or theater maintenance all of the different programs that we have at our high schools after those meetings those students really shared with us if they felt much more prepared to make decisions about high school and through that procedure we were also able to get more students in their first choice high schools because they were really more aware of where they wanted to go and what programs were available to them we then in the winter months held those meetings with seventh graders so that they can anticipate a year ahead of time what will be available to them in um in high school we're going to continue these meetings next

197year we will be increasing the program options for students so we will be able to increase that in our 811 classes as well we're going to increase student voice and this is this is something i'm just thrilled about by eventually having student-led iep meetings but how we're going to start that is with schools piloting a program where we use a form of questions that our students will have to fill out elementary and high school about their strengths where they see at their areas that they need more help what really works for them in schools what are their interests how do they learn best just a bunch of questions that really relate to that individual student and they will be asked then to present that information at their iep meeting we were looking to open that

198up to two schools next year to pilot in but actually once we presented it to schools we had 20 schools who wanted to start piloting that immediately so that will begin in 20 schools in the fall and the following year will be implemented in the rest of our schools at that point we'll take the original 20 schools and we'll get more in-depth student-led iep meetings we have opened preschool special classes in our district over the course of the past couple years adding several more last year during closure which um at the start of the year was okay but um it was a little bit more challenging once um kovit hit and uh and and families weren't necessarily wanting the remote learning in preschool but we are getting them filled now parents are very excited about

199the fact that they don't have to send their students out of district to get special classes so we have open classes at school 32 school 54 61 and 99 so at 54 those classes are special class environments where we are students with significant behaviors at 32 their preschool classes for students with autism at 61 it is for students with more global delays and then at 99 we have integrated classrooms that are very comparable to our school age ict settings and there we have students with more mild delays and mild behaviors integrated in with their non-disabled peers we are starting an eye to eye mentoring program piloting this between mckinley high school and school 79 this is another really exciting program it is targeted for our students with learning disabilities the students at mckinley will work

200with our students at school 79 in a project-based program it's 18 weeks in length and while they're doing these projects they'll be discussing and having really meaningful conversation around self-advocacy and self-confidence and how their disability could actually be seen as a strength so we're going to create through this program a greater sense of positive identity for our students with a learning disability and hopefully them will be able to put that in additional schools in the following year and finally we are looking at implementing orton gillingham a structured reading program we are going to identify staff who would be trained in that we recognize that there is a strong need to provide a structured literacy program for our students who have dyslexia and other learning disabilities so we are going to put bring orton gillingham to

201the district to meet that need again as several of the things i talked about earlier we will also be using that with students pre-referral so that we may put those interventions in place before we need to um make that referral to special education so those are some of the initiatives i i could go on forever about the exciting things we're doing and about regulations and placement knows but um i'll stop there and see if there's any question and answers and provide some answers for any questions you may have i told you yeah thank you cam that was such an extensive robust presentation i i was overwhelmed with the information that you provided so we're just going to show that buffalo is truly a public educational institution um would you say that roughly 20 percent of

202our students in buffalo schools are in special ed that's about right um it's a little higher if you consider a speech um in language disorder as one of what you're counting we don't always count that um so it's probably about 20 without speech impaired and a little higher if you include speech impaired okay thank you so much and um answer this for me uh pre-k did i hear you say at 1 000 there's 1 000 and 34 pre-k students with special needs mm-hmm i was on them they're not all serviced by the district but as far as in our schools they're serviced in um some get itinerant services in the home some are in agency settings some are in head start some are in our bps but that's the number of students that we have

203cse responsibility for okay all right so i have i see some other hands here terence i saw his hand go up first parents yes um thank you dr um brown first like to say thank great presentation miss watson you have some um uh great momentum with cpac and um i really um listen to your words that you said and uh and things you've seen that need to be improved on so uh thank you for that and um you know um i love this this um working with groups that that's working with our families and our children so thank you again mr stella a great presentation i know you said you're not finished yet so i just want to ask a couple of questions quickly um is there any way we can address the issue about

204kids that come to the buffalo public schools that have behavioral issues that's sent over from charter schools is there like a fast track of something that can be developed that we can target those children that be removed from charter schools so they can maybe be tested for iep um or work with the parents to get consent to be tested or possibly um or just possibly put them in a building or a program until they can get tested and then move into a different school because i get so many complaints from teachers administrative staff members that um these children come into the classroom and disrupt their classrooms you know they uh when teachers you know students get to know understand their teachers in their classroom and someone comes in from the outside and become totally perspective

205and and disrupt that learning environment how can we address that or is there some way we can identify those children um sure so there's a there's a couple pieces to that um answer so first we have noticed um somewhat of a trend where some of our students in a special class environment in buffalo will move to a charter school where they don't have special class environments and um so their ieps are then changed to reflect the placement that the parent has chosen for their child and to reflect the supports that can be put in place in that charter school but what does happen is that then the students come back because the charter schools can't really meet their needs so if that happens within the same school year so we are then able to move

206that student back into the special class that they were in in buffalo so let's say they start the year in buffalo and in 811 because of behavioral concerns and the parent moves them to a charter and two months later they come back from that charter school and now their iep reads ict we can immediately convert that iep back to the 811 setting that they were in in buffalo so if a parent you know is moving in and out of buffalo in between the charter and buffalo we have that avenue but as far as when they come in with behaviors from a charter we do ask that our psychologists and social workers work with the students and put a behavior support plan in place first so that is very similar to the behavior plan that we

207have for our students with disabilities but it's a plan for our gen ed students because we really do want to work diligently to meet the needs of the student in the gen ed environment and try to put interventions in place before they're referred to special ed so that student can stay in the gen ed environment access the gen ed curriculum and and get their behavior issues met while still in gen ed before a special ed referral so before we would just move to that special ed referral we are going to put interventions in place uh i was saying that because i was i would like to see maybe a school that kids can be transferred to until they can be evaluated to be placed in a general education setting without disrupting that classroom or bringing

208you know havoc to that teacher or or teacher is actually have to lay back because kind of catch that kid up with the work um that that class is on track for so um is there any way that's possible dr cash or any way we can look into maybe a a placement setting for kids that transfer back into the buffalo public school and then place them into a program can we take the slides down please that's better yeah i'm not sure that's an educationally sound idea i mean i think it's it's got a good spirit i think that your intention is good i'm not sure i'm going to transition into sort of a uh it's like a step down thing over to and back i think we've gotta gotta try to keep kids into it

209in an inclusive environment as much as possible uh would be my thoughts about it i understand what you're saying um but i do think that i don't want to segregate uh kids and make that a practice uh unwittingly uh venue and then and then i've seen it becomes more and more a career and then and then you get whole schools developing like that i've seen i've seen that in oakland for example where they're upside down with special education and it's because of a crete they've accreted what was a thought to be a helpful practice to the regular or gen ed population and teachers but they over accreted uh what turned out to be bad educational practices and and it now is is uh really really upside down so i hear you uh kim what are

210your thoughts on that and yeah so i i do agree that they should um we certainly need to meet their needs um but i do feel like we should be putting them in a school and meeting their needs there in a in a regular in the regular way that any student would come in you know we place them somewhere and then we put the supports in place that they need rather than segregate them i think integration is really what we're looking for we want to be as inclusive as possible we want to provide that equity and i think really the only way to do it is to when the kids come back we meet them where they're at okay thank you i wouldn't have said that because over 700 kids being transferred back into the

211buffalo public schools this year or even children who uh maybe come from out of state um you don't know where they at and i just get so many complaints from teachers that that it's hard to um um and in time it takes to get an iep um evaluation is um seems to be like a little longer than they expected or gonna get a child evaluated they said the process takes a little longer and they and and and i just really want to look at the prison pipeline and not having that child suspended or being being out of suspension for that time period yeah i think that that's a different question and i think that can be addressed and looked at um but you know that's that's the challenge of this of this revolving door sometimes

212uh with with the charters so we should have a workshop maybe just devoted to that and come up with some strategies and thoughts about it uh even working collaboratively with charter schools around this maybe charter schools need more resources to to deal with uh the a multiple mixed population you know it's it's a very different very different set of statistics from most charter schools here in the district than the buffalo public schools we're equipped we are experienced and have staffing to address the complex needs we even have schools from outside the district that send children to our programs and we welcome that and we have great programs for that but the design is always on inclusion and on uh growing students from where they are and getting them in integrated quickly into into a uh

213you know population full population of students so that that's our goal but the other issue you know that that's another discussion another time okay my last question is um uh parent counseling um and training to understand you know the need what's going on with their child um parents you know have may have behavior issues um you know lashing out to a child that they don't understand or understand that there may be a problem or or an issue uh the district working with those parents also to help identify the children and help identify their needs sure so we work really closely with parent network to make sure that um we they get calls from parents sometimes who have concerns around their students behavior so we work really closely with them um to make sure we are

214providing training that they need we're offering parent sessions on managing behavior at home um we get calls as a department often around that and we put as many supports as we can in places while we have our coaches talk to parents we um we refer parents to whatever organizations we know may be of value to them we talk about ways we can help address that students needs in school the social workers get involved and talk about wrap-around services and supports that may be available so we try to hit it from all avenues to support that family yeah kim's to that point uh i heard lisa say that was something that would be helpful uh to the parent of the cpac more training more parent education and support around some of the issues that uh parents

215are going through so i think that while you do it let's just make a note that let's see if we can amplify or continue to build uh that aspect of our of our work i think it's very important it's a good question definitely if terence asked about that definitely i wrote it down thank you dr cathy evans bro okay you're done yeah and you know as we know many of these kids are living in households other than their own they're living with kinship families and grandparents who are now parenting young people and they have grown children so that's another conversation as well dr revere you had your hand up and then followed by board member larry scott thank you very much so i'd like to start with commending the movement that the special education department

216is doing under ms holsher and his body jelly towards self advocacy for our students and our families and our caregivers one of the things that's really really critical that dr cash referenced in the beginning is that if we are going to have equity if we're going to be a diversity and equity instruction district that includes students with disabilities i feel very strongly about this as you can probably tell and i think that working the more that you can work with students to self-advocate for their needs the better quality of schooling they will have and the better outcomes they will have and both student voice and iep and iui are critical pieces of that i think what ms watson was talking about as well and i want to thank her also for appearing and also expressing

217these the issues and the the perspective that parents have through this process as you can probably hear from ms holsher's presentation special education tends to be very legally oriented it's the nature of the process it does not necessarily reflect the people who are involved in it but one of the things that can happen with parents is they do need their voices to be heard and in order to have that kind of equity all of these initiatives need to start happening and i i just i had a few questions along those lines um particularly with how we might be able to increase student and caregiver familiarity with the options available to students with disabilities especially as they move into middle school high school because in the spirit of equity and the spirit of self-advocacy having students

218be able to choose some of their own options that would fit their needs and their interests just as their peers in general education would i think that would make a critical difference and it will also help with everything that was laid out after about behaviors about supports that students need and about some of the difficulty that that families can find themselves in the need for support it has been shown over and over again that students with disabilities can be very successful with the right kinds of supports and self-advocating for themselves about what those supports are rather than us on the outside saying oh you have x diagnosis or you have x behaviors we're going to do this i think that's a really critical piece of it is there is there a way that we might

219be able to do that high school preview something similar for our students with disabilities so yes i couldn't agree with you more and which is why um we we started the student voice program why we're looking for programs like eye to eye and the mentoring program um i i do think that this the meetings helped a lot that we held this year but it is not where we want to stop at all um i think that actually even in the elementary buildings when parents are offered a special class um we could look into some video snippets of this is what is available at this school or this is what an 8-1-1 really looks at so that's one of the things we're hoping to create in that video library and and dr rivera i would love

220your input on that um as to some of the topics that you think are important because we really want to develop a comprehensive library for parents to access and say oh this is this is exactly the topic i needed information on and then update those frequently and make sure that part of what's included there is what is available to parents in the schools i'd like to i'd be happy to be involved in that i'm always happy to be a part of this i'd also like to recommend though that perhaps we can do some parent focus groups as well about what they want to see my experience i have a 22 year old my experience is a little old now and so i'd like to see if we can capture some parent voices as well i

221think that'd be really wonderful um definitely i appreciate that and then finally just a comment about inclusivity um i'm really passionate about that we want to make sure that we don't overly identify or too quickly identify students and we meet their needs and i really like the term meeting students where they're at i think that's a big part of equity it's really really critical i hear the concerns that mr heard is expressing about behaviors um however i think it's it's as dr cash pointed out it's a slippery slope to put students separately based on behaviors because um they're they're challenging in some ways we need our students to be together and i think the more that we put them together the better outcomes we're going to see both for our special education our general education

222students because they're all our students absolutely i couldn't agree more thank you dr revere uh board member larry scott followed by president cotman thank you dr evans brown i i actually put my hand down because dr cash and now dr rivera um sort of uh answered or said what i was going to say but i'll just add putting my school psychologist hat on i understand mr heard the concern with behaviors but the dilemma with charters is not the fault of those students that are coming to us and we can't presume that they have a disability if they haven't already been identified and refer them to the committee identify them and put them in a program there's a process that needs to be followed and it's required by the state regulations so that's that's all i

223wanted to add thank you okay thank you president cottman thank you for your uh presentation it was very informative i just have a couple of questions is there a report that identifies which classes by demographic and type that is a report that exists that demonstrates by demographics as well as the type of services that are being provided for each school so when you say demographics do you mean like the classroom type the special class type special class as well as who's in those classes with children which what what what's what what subgroups are in those classes so we do have we keep reports um actually of like a three-year progression so we could see what was in the class in the building last year what's in it this year what's going to be in it

224next year as far as special classes um i could certainly run a report of the demographics of the students in each of those classes i don't have that um on hand right now the other report you know we keep updating every day basically but um but we certainly could run a report like that okay so my reason for asking that question is when i look at the way the budgeting is currently being done um there's no way for me as a board member to understand what uh what if i'm looking at a school and it has 11 special ed classes i don't know what those classes are okay i look at a school that has five or whatever and so when trying to figure out um as i as i move forward with working equity

225a little bit more i'm trying to figure out i'm just curious to know the placement of children and what in in what parts of town what what what districts what schools i'm curious to know that okay and i think it's legitimate concern because since i've been here and i've seen you know classes move out of certain areas and moves into other areas and i'm just curious to know because if you are making decisions on placing or establishing classrooms and you have 11 special ed classrooms in one building and then when i asked the question four years ago why um are certain schools not being improved or increased with their special eds i was told because they didn't have the room but then i watched you carve out space in certain schools so i'm just curious

226to know you know how that is decided how do you decide that you're going to take a classroom and put it in this school and provide this type of classroom in another so i just would like to look at the report i don't expect an answer on that okay i really would like to look at the report because i would like to see what's going on with special ed as far as districts are concerned and as far as as classrooms are concerned i'm just curious to know that okay sure i'll get that together for you thank you so i had asked a question a while back without dr cash i made the statement that um when new children are coming to our buildings who have never been part of the buffalo public school family that

227according to the commissioner's regulation 117.1 that they are supposed to be checked to see if they're gifted and talented they're supposed to be checked to see if they have disability they're supposed to be checked to see what level they are literate in their language and things like that i was told not by dr cash but by someone else that this process could take as long as three years in our system is that true no we screen we have four district screeners who do a screening um they start with pre-k and kindergarten students so in kindergarten they don't re-screen if they were screened in pre-k but they start with pre-k and k um they are usually done with that they start in september they're typically done by december 1st to december 15th screening all of the

228pre-k and k and then um we also start at that point start new entrants in other grades so it's a pretty quick process we have four staff members who are um designated to complete that and they do every student that comes into this district new student they do new entrants in high schools they do the new yes for for um monolingual and i think ann could speak to what happens with the bilingual students um students who come in potentially speaking another language go through a pretty rigorous process at central registration um and i think we we had shared some information about part 117 and how the district implements that but they do go through the home language questionnaire they have an interview they have an orientation they take the there's a there's a pretty rigorous

229process to identify a student who might be speaking another language and need those supports okay so the gifted and talented children and when are they checked because according to this our children are supposed to be checked to see if they are yes so kim's team is testing the students who speak english um as their language they are looking for that through their testing what we are moving toward uh next year is that we'll have a spanish language version of that assessment and that will be working with translations for students who um may be identified as speaking another language but need that further piece of testing okay so the gifted and talented piece are children checked or does an application have to be requested by a parent to get that i think there's two different processes

230um so kim's team would automatically test any student and determine whether they had the potential for giftedness it doesn't mean that they are necessarily gifted and then a letter would go home to those families advising them of that but then there's also the gt test that kids take through a different process at registration okay so every child in this district is being checked to see if they have gt uh potential every new entrant is being checked right now if the english and we're moving in next year we'll have been able to test all bilingual students as well okay so every new child is being checked okay so the gt process happens within the same nine month period or what so so the test kim is referring to is usually completed by december but if a

231student arrives after that obviously we'd be testing them later that then there's a separate type of test if you're thinking of kids who might be trying to get into um specific schools like 64 or 156 or city honors that's separate from the work that kim's team is doing okay all right so okay all right i understand that okay so the only other question i have in regards to the the special ed piece is that um have we moved are we moving from uh six uh eight one ones i mean six one ones to eight one ones as a district is there is there a uh flow that's happening where we're eliminating six one ones no it's two different um we meet the needs differently in those classrooms our eight one ones are students who are

232academically on benchmark except for the fact that their behavior interferes so much with their learning in our 611 classes it's for students who academically and behaviorally have more significant and highly intensive needs okay so as a district we need to move children from six one one into eight one one tim was there some movement at the high school level oh at the high school level um it was for our nicer classes are for our students with alternate assessment so as they get older when they go to high school those classes will change from six to eight those can be really serviced at any level of service some districts service their nicer students in twelve on one some service them in fifteen um so when we get to the high school level we service our students

233who are nicer new york state alternative assessment in eight one ones instead of supplements like they are in younger grades oh okay even though their behavior does not represent that they should be moved it's not moving them it's just that we service more kids in the classroom when they're in high school a lot of those students are going out to work experiences um they're they're going for their credentials so they are um at different job sites and things so there's rarely all of the students in the classroom at the same time they're out in the community a lot so we have eight kids in there so when the kids who are behind left behind on the day other kids are in the work groups um they have more students in the classroom it's a more

234authentic experience for the students we're able to service them a little more effectively with eight students in the room and these are these are students and so do we provide the parents with parents with any resources during this transition because that uh was just uh because i i've taken several calls over over the past year about this issue i've talked to several principals about it and they were able to resolve it so you know i always typically try to send the parent back to the school start with the principal okay don't start with me and if the principal has a problem then the principal can move it to the next level and so what one of the parents said to me was is that these changes were made with my child but no one no

235one provided me with the information i needed or the support that i needed to move him to the next level do you understand like she didn't understand she was fearful that because he was coming going into an 8-1-1 from being in a 6-1-1 that he was not going to be able to cope and that she and that she didn't know how to help him and so i'm wondering if we're providing any resources for the parents when those transitions are happening uh following up with what uh uh mrs watson was talking about earlier with the communication piece and thank you mrs watson for being on our phone our meeting today and the work that you're doing in our district we appreciate you so while when that occurred the change was made from the 6-1 to 8-1-1

236we called every parent there may have been a couple parents who we didn't reach who were not available but we called every parent and explained the process explained why that was occurring uh talk to them about school choice so we did reach out to every parent during that transition and we really give them any paperwork uh kim is what i'm saying do you give them something that they could they can hold that's tangible to them that they can read because you know a lot of times things are go over our heads okay she caught me on a date where i'm dealing with 20 things and i'm i'm just okay okay and then now i realize it's i smacked up against my face that i i got a situation i'm just trying to look for more

237supports for the parents yeah i can look to put something like that in place nothing really changed about the classroom the program itself did not change at all it's simply the number of kids in the room everything else remained the same the community experiences they have so nothing about the program changed it was just the number of students that we are servicing um in those classrooms and we also had to have cse meetings to make those changes so we did hold amendment meetings and you know obviously the parents were invited and attended those as well and we sent home the updated iep is but you know i i hear you that we have to you know hit this several ways so um we can look to to increasing our support around that thank you thank

238you for all the work that you've been doing over the years i appreciate you as well and youtube and you're and i appreciate you too anne don't think i don't no she does so i don't see any other hands any other hands miss okay so uh doctor i like board members okay to speak but i do have uh something uh rather elephant in the room that i want to say before we conclude tonight okay so the last i don't see any other board members but miss watson you have the last minute observations that you would like to express after that robust presentation by kim agreed that it was a robust presentation um just thank you for allowing me to speak on behalf of um cpac we we take the work seriously you know we're all

239volunteers we're all parents um we're parents and we're a lot of us have uh children who have already gone through the public school system so we're there to support the new parents and um we just appreciate you know the support and the partnerships that are available we just want to keep the lines of communication open at all times so thank you for having me tonight and thank you let me ask you a question how did you get new parents involved in cpap i'm sorry i didn't how do you go about getting new recruits new parents and involved in cpap because i think it's critical that they know about you number one and number two that is available remember feedback is we're we're actually on somewhat of a marketing campaign right now so we we need

240to get the word out um people are familiar with us uh through the um through the uh department of special education through parent network who we partner with um by word of mouth we're on facebook so um we're just trying to get the word out it it would be so helpful if you know team members in the schools would let people know that we exist if if flyers are up or um any type of information we have brochures that you know we would love for the schools or whoever is available to let parents know because we are here to support each other so if the teams could join us in any fashion on a marketing campaign as we call it to um allow you know our membership to expand that would be greatly appreciated miss

241watson that's a great idea we can um definitely distribute things at our meetings and at the school level thank you great all right dr cash yes colleagues um again great presentation one of the things we're going to do with esser bps 2.0 is start to have some very in-depth conversations on what i call 10 major challenges that are affecting children's academic success in school that are non-school related and uh that's coming and i've done a lot of research on it but i'm just at the tip of it and so one of the things that we talk about a little bit but i don't want it to just keep swirling and then we don't really get down and stop it from happening and affecting more children so let me give you the three things lead poisoning

242uh brown fields and the toxins associated with that and then you have a nuclear plant that you're going to be taking down and trying to take down with very little controls or oversight is just 35 miles from here and that affects everybody's health possibly but i know what lead poisoning does to children and in nine of our districts zip codes they're the highest risk of our city where most of our children particularly children of color live and buffalo itself has one of the highest rates of lead poisoning in children in the country not just about 150 houses okay and i'm very concerned about the uh impact of lead poisoning on the um cognitive development the behavioral development of of our children and so how do we know for sure what is affecting and how it

243is affecting our children who live in houses for example that are prior to uh there's a lot of asbestos there's a lot of paint uh there's a lot of water typing issues here and i just want us when we start having these partnerships and everybody reaching out to their constituents and people that they know we got to get this to the table that's one of them that's just one of 10 things that we're going to be talking about but when you when you add up the concentric circle of some of these challenges that are all impacting disproportionately some of my zip codes and some of our families it is one heck of a gauntlet that parents have to go through and so yeah i'm very empathetic uh to to to our parents and to our

244families uh but some of it is preventable some of it preventable what i call alterable variables versus inultable variables and wherever there's an alterable variable that something could have been done or should be done we got to bring that out in this next in this next round of our work so wanted to just say that stay tuned uh 107 brownfields in buffalo in in erie county 107 and uh 40 some 49 are in buffalo and when the wind blows like it does here it brings all kinds of harmful toxins into the air and so if our children are exposed to lead they're exposed to brown fields i've gone all over the city and driven and there are a lot of buildings that are crumbling or that are uh abandoned and and there's things in the

245soil there's things sitting right there and i i just want us to to start to raise awareness and then as i said where we can put pressure and influence on policy and decision makers who make policy at the federal state and local level then that ought to be a part of our work education doesn't occur in a vacuum it occurs and is impacted by a lot of different uh things we in and education is one piece of this work so i look forward to the discussions um but but but let's let's grow our awareness and be research driven on on some of these persistent problems but thank you to everyone tonight i think it was it was a very helpful discussion and i want to also add my appreciation to ms watson i haven't met

246you before but welcome and we look forward to continuing to build that trust and those relationships that you talked about very very important so thank you okay thank you dr rivera for inviting miss watson um so on that note it is 8 42 33 8 43 that concludes suit student achievement um have a good night good night thank you good night thank you all good night you